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• Ain’t Gonna Pay for It

  Mashable alerted the online marketing world this week to a study by USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism’s 2010 Digital Future Study that found ZERO PERCENT(!) of users would be willing to pay for Twitter or a similar service.

  A direct quote from the article:  ” ‘Such an extreme finding that produced a zero response underscores the difficulty of getting Internet users to pay for anything that they already receive for free,’ says Jeffrey I. Cole, the Annenberg School’s director of the Center for the Digital Future.”

  This does not bode well for social media startups whose business model relies on subscription fees, or any other sort of fee for that matter.

  Only time will tell how this eventually plays out for users and developers alike, but let’s hope someone somewhere at the top of the social media stratosphere takes a cue from the music industry’s colossal failure to accept that users have grown accustomed to obtaining certain things for free.

  Posted by Nick Lindauer
  Comment(s): Leave a comment Category: Social Media | Tagged facebook, twitter
  30 JUL 2010

• IA testing tips for SEO professionals

  Great article today on Search Engine Land by Shari Thurow - I’ve seen Shari speak at multiple SES conventions over the years and always enjoy her insights and ability to keep things very basic and simple for the crowds.

  Here is a short list of tips when determining effective website information architectures:

  1. With both the open and closed card sort tests, it is imperative that SEO professionals resist the urge to put words in users’ mouths. The point of usability tests for information architecture is to listen to users, and to objectively observe their behaviors and actions. You want to determine the best labels based on user/searcher mental models, not your own.
  2. The content that you put on the index cards (whether it’s physical index cards or the online version) is critical to the success of both usability tests. If you find that you cannot be objective in using keywords, then hire an information architect to come up with the item names.
  3. Sometimes, a navigation label is clear without a keyword. Resist the urge to add one for ranking reasons when the label is clear. Do not listen to the SEO Borg and think, “resistance is futile.” There are other important places on a web page that you can implement keywords… and the page can still get search engine visibility and conversions.
  4. Don’t imitate competitor architectures and site navigation because it makes sense to you and the competitor site ranks well. Kim Krause-Berg warned against this in her excellent article, It’s A Fatal Mistake To Copy Successful Websites. Sure it makes sense to you. And it appears to make sense to a commercial web search engine because it ranks. But it doesn’t make sense to users, and they are the ones who will ultimately purchase your products and services.
  5. Take off your search (querying) blinders. People who work in a “search” environment often see the “search” part of searcher behavior and not the “browse” part. Web searchers browse. They do not just type a keyword, click on a search listing, view a web page, and convert on the exact landing page. If their information scent is validated on the landing page, searchers will continue to browse a site to complete their tasks. As I said in Information Architects Are From Venus, SEOs Are From Mars , browsing and retrieval (searching) are equally important finding behaviors.
  Posted by Nick Lindauer
  Comment(s): Leave a comment Category: Natural Search Optimization | Tagged architecture, seo, site design, usability
  30 JUL 2010

• Google Display Network and Gmail

  AdAge recently reported that Google will be expanding its advertising capabilities beyond search keywords and the already existent Google Content Network, which places display ads on various sites within the Google Content Network. At a press briefing last week VP Neal Mohan announced the Google Display Network which will allow display ads to be present in YouTube and other Google Properties including Google Finance and Gmail.

  Gmail currently shows ads to the right of email messages. These ads work similarly to Google search ads. Google pulls keywords from the email and uses those to pull relevant ads to the right of an email. The Google Display Network will allow display ads to be served based on contextually relevant keywords in emails. The benefit of display ads served through the Google Content Network has been relevance. Google will now be bringing these capabilities to Google properties such as Gmail.

  Google has not gone into detail as to what these ads would look like or how many would be served at a time, but we can be sure the ads will be relevant to terms found within our emails. This new network will be a new place for advertisers to venture to without leaving the comfort of Google’s search marketing tools.

  Source: http://adage.com/digital/article?article_id=144798

  Posted by Lindsy Signet
  Comment(s): Leave a comment Category: Digital Media, Search Engines | Tagged gmail, google
  23 JUL 2010
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