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How a Local Bakery Grew Its Mailing List from 3 to 300
May 8th
Despite claims to the contrary, email is not dead. According to a February 2012 survey from ExactTarget, 91 percent of U.S. consumers report checking their email at least once per day, compared to 57 percent for Facebook, and 14 percent for Twitter. When asked the more pointed question of which channel they prefer for receiving [...]
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Time To Reap What You’ve Sown From Keyword Seeds
May 8th
If you’ve been following the series on Keyword Seeds and Keyword Research over the last couple of months, I’ve been writing about how to perform really good keyword research through a series of tactics that I call the “Keyword Seed Method”. Don’t bother to go look that up in Google, as I think I’m…
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Consider Removing the Share Buttons from Your Email Newsletters
May 7th
Disclaimer: I am not an email marketing expert. This post was inspired by observations with my own email marketing campaign. If your email newsletter uses your blog post content, then consider testing this! What I am going to suggest might go against every tenet of social email marketing anyone has every suggested—what if you took [...]
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3 Lessons Paid Search Can Learn From SEO
May 7th
There’s no denying the synergy between SEO and paid search marketing, and paid search marketers would do well to take away a lesson or two from the world of organic search engine optimization to improve their campaigns. 1. Keywords! Keywords! Sherlock Holmes exclaimed, “Data! Data! …I can’t…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
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SEO Company From India, Profit By Search Announces Its Summer Internship Program – Virtual-Strategy Magazine
May 6th
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SEO Company From India, Profit By Search Announces Its Summer Internship Program
Virtual-Strategy Magazine India SEO Company, Profit By Search, a full service internet marketing company, is proud to announce the start of its summer internship program. With over 40 interns in the past four years, PBS, Profit By Search has built a very prestigious and … |
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6 Startup Lessons From the Complexity of Cell Phones
May 6th
Back when we first started using PCs, we all wished that they would become as easy to use as a telephone. Well, we got our wish, not because computers got easier to use but because phones are now so darn complicated. If we examine the process and story by which phones became so complex, we can uncover a variety of lessons that startups can learn – and hopefully avoid.
The Phone’s Transformation
First, the landline is becoming extinct. As we moved to cell phones, it became easier and more convenient for everyone to have their own number. This is true for both home and office lines: I gave up both a long time ago.
Minutes became ultra cheap, thanks to voice over IP telephony. Remember when you had to think about calling someone “long distance?” Now toll calls are pretty much a thing of the past. And the whole notion of area codes also got more complex. Forget traveling; cell phone users often keep their original area codes when they move to another city, so you can’t tell where you are calling anymore. For example, I still have a Los Angeles “310″ area code even though I have lived in the Midwest for several years now. In some countries, cell phones have their own area code, so all you can tell is that you are calling a mobile phone.
Then cell phones became more than just phones: About half of us now use them for surfing the Web or running apps, and navigating the typical cell plan now requires a degree in accounting. When we get a new plan, we have to figure out prices for our data and texting plans, and how many actual voice minutes we’ll need – that is, if we still use phones to make actual phone calls.
And then, of course, there’s the task of finding the right phone to purchase. Computers now seem a lot easier by comparison.
Lessons for Startups
So what, you say? Modern life is complex; deal with it.
But startups can take away some important lessons from this thought experiment:
- Don’t assume that technology is understandable by everyone. Consider the context in which an item is going to be used, and its intended audience. This is Marketing 101, but still. Just because brilliant engineers from Stanford or MIT design your product doesn’t mean that everyone who will actually use it has that kind of training.
- Simplify your pricing and eliminate degrees of freedom. I once had a client in the network storage business. Its pricing sheet comprised not one but a series of Excel spreadsheets. Since pricing had six different metrics, it could take the better part of an hour to come up with a final price for customers. It shouldn’t be that hard. Take Thoreau’s maxim (“Simplify, simplify, simplify!”) to heart, and make your pricing easier to understand.
- Align your product with your domain name. How often do companies start with one name and end up having to change it because their major brand got more popular than the name of their company?
- Don’t penalize your best customers. When you run over your cellular airtime minutes allotment, you get hit with overage charges. It shouldn’t take an act of Congress to convince companies of the folly of this tactic. Stop trying to extract more money from your best customers, and instead, make it easier to do business with your company.
- There is nothing wrong with having subscription-based pricing, but make it clear how a customer can end a contract without paying a hefty penalty.
- Don’t make your product instantly obsolete. This issue is huge for cell phone makers right now, but every time you buy a laptop, the manufacturer instantly seems to introduce something lighter with a better screen.
As you can see, there is a lot that startups can learn from the saga of cellular phones’ growing complexity. It does make you long for those days when we could just pick up that black model and ask the operator to dial a number for us. As Lily Tomlin’s “Ernestine” would say, “I work for the phone company. It isn’t my job to think.”
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SEO Company From India, Profit By Search Announces Its Summer Internship Program – Albany Times Union
May 4th
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SEO Company From India, Profit By Search Announces Its Summer Internship Program
Albany Times Union India SEO Company, Profit By Search, a full service internet marketing company, is proud to announce the start of its summer internship program. With over 40 interns in the past four years, PBS, Profit By Search has built a very prestigious and … SEO Professionals Can Harm an Ecommerce Business |
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Using Google Analytics To Collect & Benefit From AdWords Position ROI
May 4th
As an agency, we talk a lot about client expectations and understanding. Reality and actuality sometimes don’t start off in the same place, or even the same hemisphere. When we talk about Google AdWords, clients sometimes expect a few hours of education on how the setup of a campaign works, and…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
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Reverse Engineering: Gautam Gupta Goes From VC to Entrepreneur
May 3rd
Gautam Gupta had it all. He was just 26 and a rising venture capitalist with a bright future and a big salary. An associate at General Catalyst Partners, he’d sourced six deals, deployed $65 million and had just opened General Catalyst’s Palo Alto office.
Then he threw it all away to launch a startup. And not some cool startup with a mobile-social app poised to be acquired for $1 billion. An e-commerce startup. Even his mother began to wonder.
“My mom’s first question was, ‘Are you sure about this?’” Gupta recalls.
Indeed, it was a surprising decision. Maybe not as surprising as Ben Horowitz’s decision to go public with his unironic and cringeworthy embrace of better management through gangster rap… but still.
Reverse Engineering
Most standout Silicon Valley careers track the other direction, from successful entrepreneur to venture capitalist (see: Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, etc.). Why did Gupta go the other way?
“I had never really done anything in my career outside venture capital,” he says. He joined General Catalyst straight out of Babson College. “So now I am 26 and I thought I should spend at least a few years of my life trying to build a business or do something on the operating side before I got too deep into VC and was not able to get out of it.”
Together with a college friend, he started a company called NatureBox, which sells healthy snacks online. He wasn’t completely starting over; General Catalyst provided a large piece of the new company’s seed financing.
Health food is familiar territory for Gupta. He weighed 210 pounds when he was 12 years old – he trimmed his 5-foot-6 frame to 145 pounds by improving his eating habits. E-commerce is also a good fit, since Gupta specialized in e-commerce investments while at General Catalyst. He knows it’s not the sexiest tech space these days, but he likes the challenge.
Solving Difficult Problems
“The first reaction to the food industry you get from VCs is, ‘Why would you want to start a food company? The margins are so low, it’s perishable,’ and on and on. But I like the idea of solving a difficult problem. You can still build an awesome business in the space – it has been done.”
Besides, it’s counterintuitive. Like Gupta.
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What Everyone Needs to Learn from the Data Journalism Handbook
May 3rd
It’s hard to pay attention to the business of journalism without hearing about data journalism or data-driven journalism. But despite all the discussion of the topic, there’s precious little documentation to guide practicing and future journalists in becoming proficient in it. The Data Journalism Handbook aims to fix that, albeit at a high level.
The Data Journalism Handbook effort started at a workshop at the London MozFest 2011 last November. From there, the handbook represents the work of “an international, collaborative effort involving dozens of data journalism’s leading advocates and best practitioners.” This includes folks from ProPublica, The Washington Post, the BBC, The New York Times and many others.
The result, so far, is an online book that’s just now in beta. Eventually it will also be published in dead tree and e-book form by O’Reilly. However, given the nature of the tome, it’s most useful online. As you’d expect from a title that was born at a Mozilla conference, the text is full of links to online resources. I suspect trying to read the title as an e-book – or especially on paper – would be a little frustrating.
Inside the Handbook
The handbook offers a glimpse into the practice of data journalism, with some guidance on how to get started. You’ll find a slew of case studies, along with sections on getting data, understanding data and delivering data to the public.
The handbook covers topics like open data, data use rights, scraping and crowd-sourcing data, and community engagement. You’ll also find some high-level discussion of tools to work with open data, and how to get that data.
Most importantly, the book offers a resounding case for data-driven journalism. The case studies demonstrate the utility of data-driven journalism and the service that it offers the public. For instance, the OpenSpending.org example should inspire any journalist that covers politics and public funds. The Price of Water case study shows not only the service to the public, but the service of the public in gathering data.
The handbook is not a comprehensive guide to all of the concepts and skills that a journalist needs to practice data journalism. It doesn’t teach the skills necessary for data literacy, though it does provide some links to resources. It also, of course, explains the importance of data literacy. But it certainly doesn’t try to teach journalists how to program and make use of APIs, or how to use tools to create data visualizations.
In short, it’s not Big Data for Journalists or even Programming 101 for Journalists, and more’s the pity. Programming and working with data sets is a skill set that many journalists would do well to have, but most don’t. To be fair, the handbook doesn’t necessarily advocate that journalists be programmers. It does emphasize being able to work well with programmers, but it would probably be a very good idea to have at least a fair grasp of basic programming.
Tips and Ideas
If you read just part of the handbook, I’d recommend skipping the case studies and going straight to the meat of the book. Specifically, the sections on getting data, understanding data and delivering data.
For example, “Become Data Literate in 3 Simple Steps.” This piece advises journalists, at a high level, how to approach data. Ask yourself how the data was collected and if it can be tested. Don’t assume that data handed to you by a source is going to be valid. (And if the data is not valid, it may be a story, or it may defeat the premise of the story.) Question the data, how it was gathered and whether it’s a reliable sample. You see, for instance, many “trend” stories about technology based on a single data set. You may not have a large enough sample size to rely on.
The section on visualizing data is also useful. The handbook recommends that reporters working with data find a way to visualize it, even if that’s just pulling numbers into a spreadsheet. Visualizing data allows you to find patterns that you might otherwise miss.
In the enthusiasm for working with data, scraping websites or gathering data in other ways, there’s also the small matter of legal restrictions. Whose data is it, and do you have the right to distribute it? The “Using and Sharing Data” section advises reporters to consider the ownership and licensing of data, and when “database rights” might mean that you can’t distribute a data set in its entirety. It also covers various open-data licenses and recommends that news organizations apply those when distributing homegrown data sets.
An Unevenly Distributed Future
What the handbook also does, sadly, is provide a tantalizing picture of what is, and what should be. As William Gibson said, “the future is already here – it’s just not very evenly distributed.” The same can be said for data journalism. We have marvelous tools for doing data journalism, and they’re getting better all the time. In some newsrooms, journalists are producing solid work with in-house or open-source tools, examining everything from public data sets to data curated in-house.
In most newsrooms, however, reporting has not yet been significatnly affected by data journalism. In an era of continual layoffs and cutbacks, there’s no budget for training or tools to help reporters get up to speed with the necessary tools and practices. Most of the case studies describe projects that take weeks or months, a depressing concept for journalists tasked with writing several stories per day.
There’s a deep need for the handbook, and a sequel or two that dive deep into the actual practice of data-driven journalism. (To my friends at O’Reilly, a “programming for journalists” book would be a nifty title.) It’s inspiring and educational material, if less focused on “how-to” than one might like.
Data-driven journalism is in its infancy right now, despite the amount of discussion it’s generating. I suspect that it’s going to be five to 10 years before we’ll see the practices in the handbook becoming mainstream.
Image from the Data Journalism Handbook, which is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0) in its entirety.
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