Q&A: Posterous co-founder Sachin Agarwal
Sachin Agarwal is a co-founder of Posterous, the microblogging service that makes publishing content online (literally) as easy as sending an email. It’s a gem of a web app and I for one love it.
I interviewed Sachin recently to find out about progress, plans and Pro accounts (which are coming later this year).
The 37 things I want to see on a product page
I’ve been working on a new community-orientated startup lately, which also has an e-commerce / marketplace element to it. As such it needs some beautiful product pages.
Product pages are absolutely crucial to the success of your website. They often double up as a landing page, and they must tick all of the right boxes to boost conversions (and reduce bounce rates).
However, product pages on a community-powered websites need to go the extra mile. They must help convert visitors into customers, but they must also engage and drive interaction. I want to encourage buying (a 'hard' goal) as well as rating, reviewing, bookmarking and sharing products (a 'soft' goal).
For my new site the thinking is very much along the lines of 80% community / 20% marketplace, and I believe that viral functionality (and related information) on product pages is essential. But there is now a surfeit of options from which to choose, which leaves us in a bit of a dilemma. What to leave out?
Social media ROI: is it worth waiting for?
Last week I published an article called ‘The 27 varieties of tweet used by retailers’ to show the breadth of topics covered on Twitter by retail firms. It also allowed me to answer the ‘but what will we tweet about?’ question sometimes posed by Twitter newcomers.
To be clear, my position on social media is that it is helpful to businesses of all shapes and sizes, and that it can improve lots of key business metrics (sales, but more importantly profits, retention, customer satisfaction, etc).
Read that back: it can help all businesses, of all shapes and sizes. The trouble is that is going to be harder for the larger companies to implement social media, compared to smaller, more agile businesses. And is this effort likely to pay off? It's rather hard to say for sure... there's definitely a gamble involved here, and a real need to avoid the hype and bandwagon jumping that surrounds the social media space.
Peter Cutler left a comment on my ’27 tweets’ post that raises this precise issue: "This is good. But where's the ROI? And time is money. So where's the Return On Investment?"
Where indeed?
The 27 varieties of tweet used by retailers
I had a conversation the other day with a retailer who was interested in social media, but who didn’t know what to make of Twitter. It went a little bit like this:
She: “Isn’t it just another way of pushing out offers?”
Me: “Yes.”
She: "What else can we tweet about?"
Me: "You'd be surprised..."
So by way of a more detailed answer I thought I'd compile a list of the different types of tweet posted by retailers. There is a lot more to Twitter than simply firing out offers. Retailers use Twitter in lots of different ways, rather than simply tweeting about product promotions and hoping for the best.
I’ll outline the various types of tweet in this article, but first, a word to the wise…
Q&A: Duncan Riley on the evolution of blogging
Duncan Riley is founder and editor of The Inquisitr, a popular blog that has grown to around 3m page impressions in little more than a year. He also founded The Blog Herald back in 2002, and was a co-founder of the b5media blog network. He has also written for Techcrunch.
As such he knows a thing or two about blogging and I thought I'd catch up with him to find out how he thinks the blogosphere has evolved in the past few years, and where things might be heading in the future.
Yelp embeds augmented reality into iPhone app
Yelp's has cunningly added augmented reality functionality as a hidden feature in its existing iPhone app, for iPhone 3Gs users.
The Easter egg can be unearthed by simply shaking the app a few times (actually, to the amusement of my colleagues, I shook my phone for about five minutes before it decided to work). It's only available for the newer version of the iPhone because it needs to use the compass.
Q&A: Matthew Don on Flash and SEO
I'm not exactly a Flash fanboy, largely on the grounds that many Flash-based sites suffer from Rubbish User Experience Syndrome (RUES) and all too often they don't play by Google's rules.
I can never understand why a web-based business would choose to ignore the fundamentals of SEO, or why some agencies push Flash towards their clients knowing that it isn't an especially Google-friendly technology. All style and no substance. But Flash has its place, especially for campaign-based sites, and recent improvements to the way search engines make sense of Flash-based websites have made it more acceptable than it used to be.
I've been talking to Skive technical director Matthew Don, who explains why he thinks Flash and SEO can be happy bedfellows, as opposed to mortal enemies.
Spotify and the problem with customer ratings and reviews
We all know that customer reviews can boost trust and credibility, and
as such they can drive serious improvements to conversion rates and
search rankings.
But Houston, we have a problem. The problem with customer reviews is this: the lack of proper customers.
The launch of the Spotify iPhone app demonstrates this issue quite clearly. Non-paying customers are giving one-star ratings to the app on the basis that they are non-paying customers!
10 free tools to help you create online presentations
Many Econsultancy members are in the business of regularly pitching for new business, or trying to grow existing accounts. Travelling and meeting people is part and parcel of winning work, but there are also various ways of using the internet to help you pitch to existing and prospective clients.
As such, I thought it would be a good idea to show you a bunch of tools that can be used to create and coordinate online presentations. They can be used for individual client work, or more publicly, to share your presentations with the wider world to increase exposure.
I believe that all of these tools are free, with the option to ‘upgrade to Pro’. There are others, but these are standout apps, and they're all worth checking out if you're not yet using them.
I hope they help you to win more business!
Google’s universal search results hit Adwords
More than two years after first unleashing the video plus box on search listings, Google has started to push the video unit into Adwords.
The video plus unit was first introduced to organic search results in early-2007, as part of its universal search results.
Now, entertainment companies including Miramax, Discovery and EA have recently been offered to use the video player to bolster their plain text Adwords ads.
Social media: the best and worst of 2009
Email marketing: six steps to improving customer engagement in 2010
Web 2.0
Graham Charlton
Strategy & Planning
