Category: ABT Culture

What a Private Cloud Can Deliver Today and Tomorrow

@dgiambruno David Giambruno Senior Vice President & CIO, Revlon

Notes:

Their virtualization strategy allows them to access all of their data and sling it to any device and they did it in two days.  His simple mission is to allow the business to do whatever they want when they want to do it.

It took them 5 years to enable their virtulization strategy.  One(ness) is their mantra, one server image, one desktop image, etc.

They are moving to streaming all their applications.  They are even streaming Adobe…they have one copy that they patch and then all their users get it automatically.

The new active vectors are the SAN and mobile devices especially 4G enabled devices.  This changes the paradigm of Application Delivery and it will change the nature of compliance with government regulations.

Management and Orchestration of Virtualized Infrastructure: The Next Battleground in the Converged Stack Market

@jdooley_clt Jeramiah Dooley vArchitect, VCE

Notes:

Infrastructure is boring, but Virtualization is not boring.  Because there is competition what will come out of there is innovation.  Watching VMWare andMicrosoft go at it is interesting, but the key is that innovation is occurring rapidly.

An Intel Processor is sitting inside every major storage provider.  One answer as to why is cost.  Intel makes them by the billions and can distribute them and performance is usually great.

The User Experience is Your Brand

@drewdiskin Drew Diskin, M.S. Digital Engagement Strategist, Inertia

Commentary:

I think Drew had a powerful story to tell, using this story of John Hopkins and showing more specific examples of HOW they turned around their results, HOW he got C-Level buy in would have made this a much more powerful story.  All in all a good presentation.

Notes:

How do you translate real world experiences into a digital one? Drew worked at Hopkins Hospital & Health System.  There was a culture that was beyond anything you could describe in some ways about how amazing they performed.  But they had severe digital woes.  They had a 62% bounce rate, 75,000 pages, 350+ websites.  The reality was that their brand sucked on-line.

The took on a smaller subset of pages and put them out in a few months and put it out there fast so they could figure out how they were doing.  Their CMS was an old Cold Fusion product that was inhibited fast turnaround.  How do you speak to people not at them when all the patient cares about is that their cough has been persistent for two years because they worked in coal mines?

Be present where your customers are at in their lifestyle and how to change to make it more relevant to them.

Obvious UX – Analytics can be used to get a baseline, UX Testing and Prototyping, Focus Groups, Online Surveys, Informal Conversations with Internal and External Customers are a MUST now, they are necessary to do business.  The challenge is convincing the C-Level executives that this is worth spending money on.

Not Obvious – Are people returning?  Are they sharing? Are they converting? Are they completing the tasks that you have? Can you access the site via mobile? Are you trending? Do you have a Facebook presence? Where else were your users before and after they were at your site?

Measure, Recource, Prototype, and Measure again – was part of the Hopkins rescue mission for UX.  Drew helped create a Digital Engagement Strategy that creates and experience for users not just a website.

Traffic findings were a success: Find a Doctor was up 187%, Apply to the School of Medicine was up 200%.

How to mitigate the performance risk of 3rd party web components

@compuware Dennis Gullotti, Senior Product Marketing Manager

Commentary:

The chief takeaway for me was as we add more and more service calls to our sites, make sure you monitor and load test all your 3rd party calls.  If you increase your load time by 2 seconds you will increase your abandonment rate by 8%. When testing capture your hard data so you can show you business people the impact of adding social media hook-ins to your sites.

Notes:

3rd part components can help you drive traffic like Twitter feeds, Facebook feeds, RSS all of this should be to drive traffic to your site and increase your conversions.  CDN’s can also be used to increase performance like EC2 storage, but outside of North America and Europe the performance isn’t great so add a CDN on top and it will scream.

Your performance because of 3rd party presents other challenges in getting speed because of size and customer satisfaction.  Anything above 8 seconds is not good.  Excellent load times need to be 2 seconds.  All of that testing should be done from user desktops because that is real.

Set your business and performance goals: Is my audience using it? Does the vendor guarantee performance? How much revenue is it generating?  Do some due diligence on the component provider?  How does it impact mobile?

Forrester research claims that in 2009 that a page should load in 2 seconds so think about how you are going to impact that load time when adding a 3rd party component.

Facebook publishes performance statistics for their APIs.

71% of mobile phone uses expect a site to load just as fast on their phone.  The takeaway here is to make sure you are limiting 3rd party content calls, limit the number of requests, keep sizes smalls and use a Content Delivery Network.

Make sure that you LOAD Test, especially if you have 3rd party calls.  When doing this type of testing try to do it from the end users point of view: mobile, outside the firewall, etc.

Half-Hearted User Adoption

@navigationarts Don Bruns – Director of Application Design, Navigation Arts

Commentary:

Don moved really fast through a lot of his notes.  He had some great content, the chief takeaway was to make sure you are creating experiences that accomplish their 10 most common tasks.  Overall this was a high level speed overview of how adoption is the only metric that matters.

Notes:

User adoption is not binary, it is the core success metric of your application.  Halfhearted adoption can kill your ROI.

Causes of this: No benefit to the end users, lack of business case, system doesn’t reflect how users behave, poor system performance, failure to manage change.

Change management is overcoming the points of resistance for your users, not “because I said so.”

What are the symptoms of half-hearted user adoption?  Do you find yourself bribing your employees to use the system or share information on-line? Are you penalizing non-use or even inventing reasons for use? Are you creating a scavenger hunt?  What you should be doing is creating a killer app that transforms the way that you work.

Get developers to take the User-Centered Design approach with everything you create to make sure you are creating applications that users really want to use.

Designing for Touch: Are We Ready?

@scottgunterux Scott Gunter Vice President of User Experience, Usability Sciences

Summary/Commentary:

Not everyone is ready for touch screen devices, but if you are going to roll one out make sure you do meaningful testing.

Notes:

The iPhone and the iPad have changed the whole dynamic of how we create applications.  Are we ready for it because it has changed our behaviors?  Are consumers ready for more touch screen devices?

Good example of touch screen devices in our lives:  There are over 400,000 ATMs in the US – source Wired Magazine 2009.  This device was not accepted early, but over time has become a standard.  There are now 28,000 kiosk locations nationwide for Redbox – this simple design is a recipe for success.

More choices create more decisions and that typically is bad for a User Experience.  (author note, thinking of Windows Vista here)

Distracted driving accounts for 16% of all care fatalities in 2009, most of these experiences were because of in-car entertainment systems?

Many grocery stores are getting rid of self service checkout. Big Y Foods due to their research decided to bag self service checkout.

“The most valuable asset of a successful design team is the information they about their users.” – Jared Spool

One of the best ways you can do this is buy doing a field study of observing your users.  What do you want to learn?  What do you plan to do with the results?  List out your assumptions and validate them.  This will allow you rollup your data in a meaningful way.

One of the biggest mistakes you can make in research is rushing to conclusions before you complete your research.  Try to observe users in their natural environment.

Before you do your testing, conduct a pilot session, arrive early, then stay out of the way of your uses, don’t be afraid to adjust your plans on the fly, and capture all the data you can.

When you analyze your data make sure you test out your assumptions, go back to your objectives and leverage visuals, but above all let your data drive your analysis.

Embracing Universal Search

@lindzie Lindsay Wassell Partner and Consultant, KeyPhraseSEOlogy

Commentary:

Notes:

Create great news content and you can compete with main stream news media if you have expertise in that space.  It is easier to rank a video as opposed to entering a simple web page.

Images get great rankings, make sure you have a file name, alt tag and text around the image.  Use images in News articles, places pages, and use Panoramio.  Look for any opportunity to add rich media types as they will increase your rankings.

Google Local – if you have brick and mortar locations you absolutely must in local listings and encourage and manage reviews.  Local Places page you can add photos, videos, description, categories and address.

David Mihm’s Local Search Ranking Factors is a great resource for using Google Local.

Microdata = Rich Snippets – all the search engines got together and set standards for classifying information.  Microdata (the date about data) is really important for rankings.  Check out Schema.org for examples of this.  Music microdata can be used to have links in search results directly to songs.

Products can be tagged using microdata to make them show up in a different way so it shows the reviews.

Info on Rich Snippet resources can be viewed on http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/topic.py?topic=21997.

Key Takeaways:

1. Expand your view of Search Marketing
2. Explore new content types and find ways to expand
3. Identify your content with microdata to help it shine in the SERPs.
4. Think beyond the web page

Next Generation SEO: Beyond Best Practices

@michaelmarshall Michael Marshall SEO Guru

Commentary:  The brunt of this one and its discussion of the Power Law did go over my head, but it was interesting from how this is used to generate traffic.  Personally I think he had too much content in his slides and moved too quickly so it was difficult to digest and get any true takeaways from the session.

Notes:

This is important because traffic leads to sales.

On-page Optimization has to do with Title Tags, Meta tags, ALT tags, Header tags, URL structure, anchor text, Keyword proximity is more important than Keyword density.

The Key to navigating through all of the methodology is MATH.

The Key benefit is to get the data so that you connect it to a mathematical model to create understanding.

More often than not your competitors have changed something that improved their rankings.  Don’t change too much at once on your site when it comes to SEO so you can track what you have changed.

StatistiXL is a great product for evaluating your SEO performance to do the work using Math as opposed to trial and error you will save money over time.

Make Your CMS Work for Your SEO, Not Against You

@markusrenstrom Markus Renstrom, Head of SEO Yahoo!

Commentary: The big take away here for me that the SEO team of your company needs to own how new pages are created to make sure they conform to a template that can be re-used to save money.

Notes:

It makes sense to have quality over quantity and you need to focus on your platform that you are going to use to get good SEO rankings.

Concept #1 – Expectations – If you work in search you need to educate your company on what they can expect from the results.  Markus spent time talking about what SEO is not.  SEO takes time, strategy and investment and not more links.

SEO is a long term Content Strategy.  50% of people are using 3 or more keywords to search now.  You also need to make that content accessible to everyone.  Search engines disable all of the javascript so that it can search through the content.

Think about who is the top user to your site?  Is the search engine your top user because they will actually look at everyone one of your pages.  SEO is about User Focused content.

Concept #2 Ownership – ownership created agility, enables standardization and automation, and it saves time and resources. If you create standards to tags and Urls it gets faster to create content.

Duplication is your enemy.  Your one article should not exist in more than one category. Dynamic URLs are scary from a search perspective.

The importance of tagging cannot be underestimated especially around the coverage of titles and well formed anchor tags.

Yahoo’s traffic is up even though they have reduced the number of pages by 40%.

Yahoo has its own content management system.

Next Level SEO: Social Media Integration

@bill_slawski Bill Slawski, President CEO, SEO by the Sea

Commentary: You should be teaching your clients about relevance of social in search results because they are the subject matter experts.

Notes:

Google has reacted to the advent of social media to show fresher more relevant content.

Bill brought up several sites that failed fast and hard like Dodgeball.com, Google Answers, Google opensocial, Googlevark, Google hotpot was integrated into Google places, Google SearchWiki, Google Wave, Google Buzz.  All of these have been shed and some parts are now being incorporated into Google Plus.

Real Time Search is what is changing.  The recent earthquake is great example of this.  Address recency-sensitive queries are starting to drive results from social media.  The results cannot be ranked the same way that normal web pages are ranked.  When you interact with Google Plus you are building a type of ranking system that will help results with your +1 activity.

Google Plus of course is now showing up in search results.  Authorship markup standards are now published by Google that will show your Google+ posts and your author picture to have richer content.  Authorship markup is difficult but uses the aforementioned mircodata from schema.org.  All Blogspot and YouTube contributions automatically incorporate authorship markup.  Google is using a contribution score to control how the markup is displayed in results.

Why Google+?  Well we should be using it because of the access to all the collateral data that they have access to.  Teach our clients on how to social network instead of networking for them.

As I burst into the morning Internet Summit lobby, with my trusted lawyer at my side the wonderful people at check-in could not find my registration.  I had to hold back Dr. Gonzo, but thankfully I was allowed to proceed up the long escalator to find the American Tech Dream.

I entered the grand ballroom and my first thought was, “is this Vegas?”  Fortunately for me it wasn’t Vegas and I found a comfortable spot to take notes on the first session. (note to all speakers:  I did my best to regurgitate your notes, don’t hold it against me)

Christian Sullivan (@differentwalk) “Creating a World Class Social Media Campaign”.

Here are the highlights:

• Gap’s use of Groupon sold 400,000 coupons worth 11 million
• Moutain Dew’s “Dewmocracy” campaign gained 800,000 Facebook fans
• Sam-e’s Good Mood Gig campaign used contents to generate buzz
• Ford’s new car reveal actually connected fans by driving customers to their site throughout the day of the reveal
• Levi’s created a “Like” store which placed the Facebook “Like” button on all their products, it created more referrals to their site than any other source.  It also created trust amongst their consumers because their friends recommended their products.

One of her overall messages was to remember that the consumer is in control, so let them have control because the consumers want to participate in their experience.

Todd Moy @toddmoy : “The Secret World of Usability”

Todd gave a great talk about how usability permeates all function in life and not just applications.  He discussed some really key concepts which I will spit out in note format and give some good examples.

The Shaping of Perceptions

• When people are given a gift they immediately think the products they were were working with are more usable.
• As consumers we are strongly encouraged by feedback as you move through the product – we want to take an action and then see what the reward is taking that action.  Good example of this turntable.fm – your virtual friends’ avatar’s will head-bob when they dig your tunes.
• “We when we feel good we overlook design faults.” – Norman – This can also apply to how we interact with our significant others!
• The timing of the reward is important, when it is given.  Try to make the reward not long after the interaction.  I immediately thought of RunKeeper and how they send me an email when I reach a goal or logged my 100th activity.
• Amazon found out that they significantly increased revenue by offering free shipping at $75.  People were given an incentive to spend more.

Matthew Munoz @matthewmunoz : Web Design as a Strategic Tool

Matthew gave a great presentation with trying to answer to the question, “How do we make the designer a catalyst?”  In this crazy world of scarce attention, how to we dedicate the time an energy to show abstract concepts?  The challenges that he put out there were ones we face everyday in this industry. How do you design a visual argument?  How do you design a story that breaks down complexity?

Great example here of Dan Roam’s Napkin Design for Health Care reform. The point here was how do you take a 2000 page bill and come up with a way to show visually what is it all about?  How do you tell a visual story that breaks down the complexity?  How do we create meaning or a process for creating options?

Matthew’s manifesto is as follows – his prescription for solving those confounding problems.  Some of my notes are mixed in here as well:

1. Use Metaphors
2. When you use scenarios things feel less risky
3. –missed this one Dr. Gonzo was sabotaging lunch–
4. tell stories – Tom’s One for One
5. Ask Why 5 times – continue to ask this question until you get to the root meaning of what you are doing
6. inspire action with openness, create an architecture of participation, contribution and participation (I thought of crowd sourcing and social media)
7. every project is chance to find common ground – he positioned his team as Sherpa.
8. break your project into sprints and workshops and have your clients participate
9. imperfection breeds participation – get people to be involved even if you work isn’t done
10. release early and release often
11. design with, and for
12. design the system
13. everyone is a designer – great point here about how everyone can give you feedback, they just might not be able to move elements on a page, but they can tell you WHY they like or dislike
14. build your reputation as a problem solver and opportunity finder and doors will open for you, and yes like Sally Field, people will like you, they really will.

That is all for now, I have to run because Dr. Gonzo is trying to make his way to take over the podium for the key note, heaven help us all.  I just hope I can find my turkey sandwich.

My trusty lawyer Oscar Zeta Acosta and I will be blogging live tomorrow from the http://www.internetsummit.com/ on these very crisp pages.  I haven’t brought out my lawyer to a conference in quite some time.  He promised to monitor my tweets as well.

Check out @darylhemeon #ISum11 as well as I will be using my newfangled Google machine to do some tweeting as well.

Wish me luck as I chase down the new American Dream.

Braced and ready you watch your average visits decrease. Life is scary and exciting in a unique Internet marketing way, a very fast way. Average visits the number of visits before traffic to your ecommerce site converts (does what you want them to do), count down. In the summer your e-commerce web site might have an average of 4 or even 6 visits before conversion. Thanks to the most magical deadline, December 25 (December 20th online due to shipping); conversions are coming every 2 visits now. Soon you site will convert every 1.5 visits. At this time of year LLBean.com is starting to sell a million dollars of merchandise in an hour. Amazon’s hundred million dollars days are around the corner. Ecommerce is crazy, cool and happening NOW.

Black Friday Online Ecommerce
Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, is about hype in the brick and mortar store world. How many people slept in Target’s parking lot? Who is going to get this year’s Elmo? The economy may be down, but Black Friday madness will never die. Black Friday shopping madness isn’t about economy or presents for the holidays. Black Friday is dinosaur brain, Darwinian survival of the fittest stuff, the kind of ancient genetic stuff that doesn’t go away.

We are humans. We shop therefor we are, and we shop on Black Friday in to tell ancient Hunter / Gather stories. Our Black Friday shopping stories highlight challenge, obstacles, creativity and triumph. “I’m alive,” these survival stories say, “I WON” Black Friday shoppers declare.

Here are five tips to increase your Black Friday sales (though if you are reading this and your email campaigns, site and product pages aren’t tuned nothing is likely to save you):

Black Friday Ecommerce Tip 1: WOOT-ize Your Ecommerce Site
Woot sells one thing daily. They start at midnight and go until they don’t have anymore (typically around noon, this time of year by much earlier depending on what is being sold and how good the discount). Woot knows the old direct mail adage – best deals, best time of year. They don’t kid around during the holidays.

On Black Friday your ecommerce site needs to create competition and a sense of scarcity. Scarcity, real or manufactured, heightens competition. Your ecommerce site has an advantage over Woot.com. You sell more than one thing. Selling more than one thing means your average cart may include lost leaders and very profitable products. Lost leaders are products sold below costs to create buzz and help sell everything else. Manage to profitable averages online remembering a little piece of a large number is a large number. Network dynamics favor the brave.

What is your most popular product? What is your cost? Cut your cost in half and sell your most popular product for one day only, in limited supply on a clearly stated FIRST COME FIRST GETS DEAL, at some amazing price. Be open and honest about what you’re up to. You are making headlines, you are breaking records, and you are going a little crazy for one day and only for a few hours. Starting shouting this idea NOW in teasers like, “Are we crazy? Meet here Black Friday (11.25) and you tell us.”

You can afford to be more fearless on 11.25 than you think. Every Free Shipping trigger we ever set was exceeded by at least 30%. If we set a buy $50 get free shipping trigger this time of year we bested by $50. Free shipping is the cost of poker. No one talks about “winning free shipping”, but without it you don’t get to have the other conversation – the, “OMG I got such a great deal on Black Friday at Martins.com, I got X for –Y”.

Black Friday was the day brick and mortar retailers traditionally moved from red ink to black (losing to making money), but ecommerce is different. Online LOSE as much money as you can on Black Friday. I say this comfortable knowing you WON’T LOSE MONEY if you play the game even half right because the PR and cart profitable combinations will make more money than playing it safe. Win Black Friday, win the season, win the season and win the year is how Internet marketers think, that simple and very complex progression defines all content network marketing.

Black Friday Ecommerce Tip 2: Social
The days when your team could take Friday off to shop with the family are gone. Your team must monitor your offer’s social reception now. Watch Search.Twitter.com, Topsy and Google Alerts. If you have the money hire a real time web watcher like Radian6, watch Facebook and your emails like hawks on wires watching a field for dinner (a favorite analogy).

If you have an ecommerce site you must be engaged in the conversations on Black Friday. Digest turkey, respond to Tweets, post great comments on your Facebook page and push what is happening NOW out to your site (as much as possible using feeds or snippets) to increase buzz, competition and sales. Almost out of that GREAT DEAL? Good since you are losing your shirt, but Tweet it, post it to Facebook and email it. Create an infinite number of second prizes. Say, “Missed the most crazy deal ever, but you are in luck because….”

Black Friday Ecommerce Tip 3: Lions, Tigers and Bears…Oh My
I HATE count downs, blinking anything and SCREAMING headlines 363 days a year. On Black Friday and Cyber Monday design is not even in the car. Designers please cover your ears. Use any blinking anything that gets and convert attention so you can wrap and pack a record breaking ecommerce sales season.

By-the-way, if you didn’t test blinking objects, motion, video, large Call-To-Actions and RED in your buttons before 11.25 DON’T TEST THEM NOW. You can’t afford to try untried things now. If you know RED BUTTONS work then make the red button on 11.25 25% bigger than normal (50% if you are brave and are making a CRAZY offer).

Black Friday is NOT a day to try new things.

“What about our brand,” I can hear the Tiffany brand manager saying. Seriously? Are you kidding? If your brand can’t stand a day of a little junky conversion then you are already junky and probably don’t convert. Tiffany can afford to be a tad less snotty on 11.25 if it means a 10% sales jump or probably something north of $10 million. I can be a LOT LESS snotty for $10m what aboutyou?  No matter what I tell you to do you will naturally self-select down so GO NASTY SHOUTING LARGE ON 11.25 and keep what works for Cyber Monday.

Black Friday Ecommerce Tip 3: The Three C’s
Ecommerce success depends on content, community and campaigns.

Black Friday seems to be all about campaigns and ecommerce conversion. Not the case. Community and Content are MORE important on Black Friday. Your campaigns are in the ground now, unchangeable, away from the dock. Social is the only way to change your ecommerce site’s needle now, so BE SOCIAL. If you haven’t built the right landing pages, told the right stories and made your offers special either by association or actual fact then Black Friday will be just another average retail day for your site.

The most important ecommerce idea is – THE RICH GET RICHER. Network marketing, and networks themselves, are set to heap a disproportionate reward on the few. What Venture Capitalist like to call an online “territory grab” is just a structure of what Notre Dame network researcher Albert-Laszlo Barabasi calls a “Scale Free” network in his book Linked:How Everything Is Connected To Everything Else.

Networks create hubs (the rich). Hubs get more traffic and links than any other nodes (web sites or clusters of sites). If your site is hub congratulation. I bet most reading this post aren’t Facebook, Twitter, Etsy.com or Amazon. If you aren’t one of these lucky few you must pay attention to Content, Community and Campaigns as if your online ecommerce life depends on them (because it does).

Black Friday Ecommerce Tip 4: Please No Testing on 11.25, Except….
May seem crazy to even THINK of testing on 11.25. Trust me, this statement is needed. Because you can test something doesn’t mean it is the right thing to do, a point often lost on my ecommerce brothers and sisters who get caught in an infinite testing loop. Q: What you should test on 11.25? A: NOTHING.

Play with the A team and test nothing on Black Friday or Cyber Monday. I write this knowing friends will call with reasons why tests they are dong are backend enough no one will see them anyway. Nope, that argument doesn’t hold because test, any test, is conditional and this is NOT the time of year to be conditional. Black Friday as a testing environment is so specialized what are you really learning anyway? Is next year’s Black Friday doing to be exactly like this one? Is Black Friday remotely like any other day?

One exception is testing offers for Cyber Monday. Cyber Monday, the Monday following Thanksgiving, can be as big as or bigger in online sales than Black Friday. Cyber Monday was created when work T1 high speed lines were more reliable than home dial up. Cyber Monday hangs around because we deal into it and who wants to be back at work on the Monday after Thanksgiving?

Black Friday Ecommerce Tip 5: Overload your Tech The Week Before
The week before Thanksgiving is slower than every day after. Use the week before to test your DNS server, your load balancer and a five other technical things I don’t understand. Get your Rich Kurnik’s (a friend who I would trust with my networked life) to create artificial demand, monitor response time and dress rehearse as much ecommerce as you can.

Every slow second at this time of year costs thousands or millions, so don’t be slow. Have more than enough technical horse power. Have horses sitting there waiting to run. Horsepower costs are going down as I write this. If you don’t or can’t get inside your technology “stack” find someone you trust to test everything as close to Black Friday and Cyber Monday as possible.

Last Black Friday Ecommerce Tip
Final Black Friday ecomerce tip is hang on, listen, respond and have fun.

You will look back on this year’s battle as the “good old days” no matter what happens on Black Friday in 2011 ecommerce sales. I used to give my team Friday off. Thanks to social those days are gone. Soon Thanksgiving will be a work day for ecommerce teams (if it isn’t already).

Q: Will the pace of ecommerce be slower or faster next year? “It can’t get faster,” you think and you are wrong, way off, not even close. Black Friday ecommerce is going to get much, much faster. Hope these tips help you make more money this Black Friday (or next).

Martin

—
Martin Smith
Marketing Director
Atlantic BT
Martin(dot)Smith(at)Atlanticbt(dot)com