The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog. [WordPress’s words, not mine, but kind of hilarious so I’m keeping them.]
Here’s an excerpt:
600 people reached the top of Mt. Everest in 2012. This blog got about 2,000 views in 2012. If every person who reached the top of Mt. Everest viewed this blog, it would have taken 3 years to get that many views.
I’m on Klout, which purports to assess a company’s or individual’s “social capital” by the networks they belong to and the interactions they generate in those networks. You may be there, too. It’s a pretty good platform and I like the way it incorporates elements of other networks, such as importing the lists I’ve created on Twitter. Yet a new social media friend, Nate Riggs (@nateriggs), has shown how Klout can be gamed to artificially inflate one’s score. More broadly, right now Klout only lets one connect a handful of social networks (currently 12)–including some that are of marginal importance, and I can only guess are on the roster due to relationships between principals and organizations. So while there is no doubt it has some use as a social media indicator, I question its ability to fully assess and quantify one’s social capital. Continue reading
It was probably a dozen years ago when I first added a company logo to an email signature. More recently we all started receiving emails with an ever-more-impressive lineup of logos in signatures linking you to the senders’ company websites, LinkedIN and Twitter pages and more. When it became clear that vast stretches of the business world had been conquered by PDA, most of us took the hint and migrated our mindset to the small screen. We dropped the logos in favor of links…and more links…until some email signatures including my own, plus ads, TV spots, web listings, resumes and more began to resemble a runaway train of link largesse.
Something had to be done. Now someone has done it. Several someones, in fact.
Axel Schultze, Rob Stevenson, Marita Roebkes and the team at Xeequa, who earlier brought us the Social Media Academy, have launched a new service called XeeSM. If you haven’t already heard, XeeSM is a place—one place, a single URL—where you can post links to all of your own social media pages and sites. To see it in action, check out http://xeesm.com/JEFF/.
Two MarketBLOG entries ago we presented a company that, despite our best efforts, remains intent on not optimizing its website to drive revenue generation and retention, let alone use social media in pursuit of those business-building (or -saving) goals. The next took responsibility for being unable to book it on the oceangoing voyage many perceive social media to be. Today’s entry shows how when we succeed in moving companies to the third stage of AIDA [remember?]—desire, in this case the desire for a better site—they are actually primed to set sail.
How? Well, the journey begins with the larger question of structure and getting down to core essentials: Which pages and content should even appear on your site? Continue reading
Let’s just say we recently concluded a contract with a tiny company in a niche market that claimed it wanted us to help it take its business to the next level. “We’re tired of trading dollars, winning just enough new business every year to offset the accounts we lose. We want you put us on track to grow from $2 million a year to about $7 million.” Let’s just say the firm’s founder, CEO, grand poobah and big kahuna (all the same person) claimed to want to grow his “baby” from a minuscule unknown to a big or at least bigger hitter. Yet none of it is going to happen because he and the firm didn’t really want to change.
Let’s just say.
SWOT on demand: Company believes it is the “sole source supplier” to its niche. It’s not. It faces 15 competitors including publishing giant Thompson. Continue reading
Open letter to Che Anderson at Avant Force, makers of Avant and Orca browsers:You have a serious image problem! I operate my own self-built website, and every time I make any change I bench-test the site on the most popular browsers:
Avant is the only one, and I mean the ONLY one, that captures every detail of every single page perfectly, identically to Internet Explorer. The difference is, Avant is light-years faster (OK, hyperbole but I’m using it to make a point) and easier to use. Continue reading
It Was Just a Thought™ 