photo: taipei dragon
I don’t know if it’s just the Mother’s day effect, but the top 10 online retailers for May 2009 were dominated by flower shops. The top shop is converting almost 40% of their visitors to buyers, though the average is just over 5%. Tim, meanwhile, claims he’s lowered his bounce rate to just 10%.
If you remember Ask.com, you probably remember Jeeves. Now he’s back on the UK site. It turns out that people liked the old chap, and in this age of social media, it’s probably prudent to have a corporate avatar (it looks a lot better on Facebook, anyway). There’s more about the resurrection at Search Engine [...]
Japan’s The Ministry of Foreign Affairs English-language Web Japan is a bottomless trove of in-flight magazine-quality stories like ANTIBACTERIAL EPIDEMIC and J-culture-hyping love-fests like Honoring The World’s Manga Artists.
If American propaganda efforts are this bad, why do foreign governments even bother blocking them?
VA Linux founder Larry Augustin on OSS
In Augustin’s view open source development became a necessity in the 1990s when the cost of marketing a program came to exceed the cost of creating it. “My favorite is Salesforce.com. In 1995 they spent under $10 million in R&D and over $100 million in sales and marketing. That [...]
Competitive Intelligence: “a large fuzzy animal may be a bear.”
Marketing: “SAP can help you understand your fuzzy animals. With over 30 years in the fuzzy animal industry, we know if you are looking at a bear, a guy in a coat, or a large dog.”
Communications: “In today’s world of increasing challenges, It’s obvious fuzzy animals are what our customers care about.”
Sales: “Who cares what it is. Let’s kill it and eat it.”
I have mixed feelings about the value of advertising — it’s worth pointing out that according to John Battelle, Google never ran an ad anywhere prior to going public — but I still enjoy seeing things like this Wyoming Libraries campaign. Jill Stover quotes Wyoming Libraries’ Tina Lackey with the news that “Wyoming’s libraries are as expansive as the state, and as close as down the street.”
I’m just hoping that A, the horse is real; and B, they auction it off. See, I have these silly ideas about doing a cross-country road trip with it.
Ken forwarded me this podcast of Robert Cialdini speaking on his Six Weapons of Influence, which he lists as
Reciprocation
Commitment and consistency
Social proof
Authority
Liking
Scarcity
Cialdini’s book is in its fourth edition, and has apparently been adopted as a text for more than a few classes and the concepts have worked their way into everybody’s marketing seminars. Motivation speaker [...]
Lynne Puckett on the Web4Lib list pointed me to Web Pages That Suck and highlighted this quote from the site:
Nobody cares about you or your site. Really. What visitors care about is getting their problems solved. Most people visit a web site to solve one or more of the following three problems.
They want/need information
They want/need [...]
Matt and I have been talking about online role playing games lately. He’s more than interested in the new challenges they pose to our legal system, the new media opportunities they offer, the ways they’re altering culture. We got into a conversation about how companies are taking advantage of them in marketing campaigns, so I [...]
The Telecrapper 2000 is an improvised, homemade system that identifies telemarketing calls and leads the marketer through an artificial conversation that wastes the company’s time and money. The idea is to drive down productivity, and like so many other productivity sapping things, it can be quite funny. Check this Flash-animated recording: My Hip Hurts (mirror)
Rather [...]
