Alex Hardy

This is my first “official” book review! I recently bought a copy of Conversation Marketing by Ian Lurie. Lurie is the founder and president of Seattle-based Portent Interactive and writes a blog, which is also called Conversation Marketing.

He dispenses advice on SEO, internet marketing and analytics and occasionally has some fun exposing the charlatans of his profession (of which there are many).

Here are some of my favourite posts:

• 59 Things You Should Be Doing But Probably Aren’t
• 49 Things You Probably Are Doing But Shouldn’t
• Internet Marketing Is About Discoverability (Not Yelling)
• Google Analytics Tagging Demystified
• 3 Signs The Pitch is Slimey

This book is also available to read in a free HTML version. Why buy something you can read for free you might ask… In my opinion, the best efforts of new technology still haven’t delivered us a way to read that is more convenient and pleasurable than a simple book. I bought the book on the basis that I regularly read the blog.

Lurie was helpful enough to personally send me a copy by international post, in exchange for a review. Before I stand accused of advertorial, I’ll quote his email:

I’ll send it to you for postage […] You can give a bad review if you hate it

My impressions

I should point out that this is not a book on SEO. Lurie takes a more holistic view and covers design, development and communication. An endless cycle of observation and adjustment is the core of his argument that a site must serve its user’s needs, not the ego or presumptions of the website owner.

The book covers six rules, that are analogous to the human interactions you might engage in at a party or business networking event. A fictional custom bicycle shop is the vehicle (no pun intended) for his explanations of these rules:

1) Know the room

This chapter covers user personas, workflows (anticipated paths through a site) and calls to action. You have to know your audience, not just accumulate pageviews.

2) Dress appropriately

An overview of web design considerations. Professionals might roll their eyes at the simplistic advice, but this is not about teaching design. Rather, the goal is to impart a degree of appreciation to the would-be site owner. It wouldn’t do a professional any harm to think about the criteria others use to judge their work…

3) Sound smart

The technical angle. This chapter is more detailed than the previous one (I sense Lurie is more comfortable with code than colour theory). He writes about site maps, the case for standards compliant code and best of all, contingency design.

I was pleased to see browser testing and help messages treated as fundamentals rather than after-thoughts. Some advice on content writing and image preparation rounds off a useful chapter.

4) Make a connection

Once you have a user’s interest, what can you do to keep a relationship alive? Email marketing best practice, and a mention of RSS and podcasting for the uninitiated in this brief chapter.

5) Brag modestly

This chapter may be the most immediately interesting to readers. An introduction to natural rankings and PPC advertisements in search engines. It also contains some words of advice for how to spot the SEO cowboys.

It has always seemed to me that there’s no magic shortcut to search engine visibility. Remember that search engines exist for the user’s benefit, not yours. Provide relevant, up-to-date content and users will seek you out. Leave the tricks to people who can’t create an offering of value.

6) Observe and adjust

This chapter was of particular interest to me: The basics of web traffic analysis. Definitions of common terms are backed up by some insightful words on tracking conversion rates. This book was published in 2006 and two years is a long time on the Internet. The references to specific tools are somewhat out of date, but the principles remain sound.

Conclusion

You may have noticed that this review has been peppered with words like “basics” and “overview”. Quite so. This is a short book at 93 pages, but it achieves its goal.

With a friendly, informal tone it equips you to start work. You’ll go on to seek out weightier and more specific resources, but you’ll incorporate that knowledge into the right frame of mind that you’ll gain from this book.

The matter of availability

A minor criticism: I originally asked about overseas postage because I believed Conversation Marketing was unavailable outside the USA. I have since discovered that it is available on Amazon, but this remains a flaw in the book’s homepage.

I would also like to see a PDF version of the book, so that all bases are covered in a similar manner to Getting Real by 37signals. An HTML version is of little use when the reader is not online. Nor does it send any money in Portent’s direction. I would buy a downloadable eBook and hope to see this option added soon.

Other books of interest

• Meatball Sundae by Seth Godin
• Designing with Web Standards by Jeffrey Zeldman
• SEO Book (eBook, blog and tools) by Aaron Wall
• Building Findable Websites by Aarron Walter
• “Essential” series of free eBooks by Nixon Mcinnes

I thought I’d follow up my post about Seth Godin’s book Purple Cow (and conclude my recent spate of YouTube posts) by linking to this video. It touches upon many of the ideas covered in the book, and is well worth 19 minutes of your time.

I noted that Godin uses the more positive Western spin on the word “Otaku”, meaning expert or enthusiast. I have it on authority from a Japanese friend that it means nerd, but I agree with the principle that it is used to convey.

Via Jo:

A tribute in illustrations to legendary comic book creator Stan Lee. Very cool.

Via Iconfactory: A Flickr photoset by the very talented Linzie Hunter. Experiments with hand lettering in an ongoing series based on spam subject lines.

Update: Prints are available at Thumbtack Press.

At the risk of seeming horribly behind the times (because it isn’t new), I thought I’d link to an animation that I was sent today. Hey, it’s Friday afternoon!

Animator vs. Animation by Alan Becker.

Somewhat reminiscent of the Xiao Xiao cartoons, here’s the artist’s description:

An animator faces his own animation in deadly combat. The battlefield? The Flash interface itself. A stick figure is created by an animator with the intent to torture. The stick figure drawn by the animator will be using everything he can find - the brush tool, the eraser tool - to get back at his tormentor … Who will win? You can find out yourself. This took three long months.. i think it’s worth it.

It really was.

I think between Flickr and COLOURlovers I have discovered a new addiction!

When you work as a developer full-time, it’s easy to feel that your design skills are wasting away. One reason I started this website was to give myself a creative outlet. I enjoy reading about what’s happening in web design on sites like Styleboost and Web Creme, but it’s more stimulating to be actively creative, even in a small way.

I found the COLOURlovers website over the weekend and joined it right away:

COLOURlovers™ is a resource that monitors and influences color trends. COLOURlovers gives the people who use color - whether for ad campaigns, product design, or in architectural specification - a place to check out a world of color, compare color palettes, submit news and comments, and read color related articles and interviews.

I’ve started out by visiting some of my favourite photographs and drawing inspiration from them. After all, the best palettes are in nature, no? I think the next design for my website will start here

Three articles from A List Apart on an often neglected aspect of communication on the web – the tone and words that you use. We could all benefit from learning how to be better writers because of one simple, rather unsexy truth:

All the Search Engine Optimisation in the world is futile if you’ve got nothing to say.

No one wants to read claims of market leadership in leveraging viral deliverables. They want to know what you can do for them, in the most straightforward way.

The articles:

Better Writing Through Design

How is it that the very foundation of the web, written text, has taken a strategic back seat to design? Bronwyn Jones argues that great web design is not possible without the design of words…

Reviving Anorexic Web Writing

Intelligent web content is the literature of our time. Amber Simmons argues that conventional approaches have starved the life out of web writing…

Attack of the Zombie Copy

The zombification progresses so gradually that you don’t realize it’s happening until your “About Us” page begins to smell bad and tries to bite your face…

It isn’t often these days that I’m impressed by a Flash site, but I found Universcale fascinating. It places items on a line of scale, from the sub-atomic to the far reaches of the universe. It’s enough to make you feel very small indeed.

This might seem like a strange thing to post under inspirational, but I stand by it. I’m probably not alone when I admit that I have a tendency to focus single-mindedly on something (such as the completion of a project or the achievement of a personal goal) to the exclusion and detriment of other things.

Ironically, this is not the best way to get something done. Lack of balance makes you weary and uninspired. One thing in particular that I’ve neglected this past few months has been my health. I’ve spent most of my time outside of my job either socialising or working on personal projects. As a consequence, I’ve gained a small (but nonetheless annoying) amount of weight which I’m now working hard to lose.

So I’ll suggest three things that have nothing whatsoever to do with work, that may help you to work better.

Physical exercise

You know that gym that you pay almost £50 a month to? What if you actually went? It’s amazing how a run on a treadmill or a swim after work can make you feel energised. If you’re going home to someone they benefit too, because you’ll be less disposed to grumble about your day since you’ve got your stresses out of your system.

Tiring yourself out through healthy exercise rather than staying up too late in front of the telly will also help you get a decent night’s sleep. Otherwise you roll into work tired the next day to go through the routine all over again.

A change of surroundings

Steph and I visited friends in Essex last weekend for a 30th birthday. We went to Adventure Island at South End and went on the go-karts and the rides. The sea air and chance to be big kids for an afternoon made me feel like I’d had a short holiday. Coming back, I felt relaxed and able to make progress with my current project.

Enjoy other activities

When I was younger I had many hobbies. These days my main one is playing cornet in an orchestra since I took music back up a couple of years ago. We rehearse once a week and Summer is our busiest season for concerts. I can’t overstate how valuable it is to have “extra-curricular” interests - without them I felt shallow and bored.

So there you go. It’s Spring, and the sun is shining. Go for a walk or a kickabout in the park. Have lunch outside. Get away from your desk. You’ll return with a clearer and more creative mind.

… is available as a webcast.

After a glowing introduction by GDC Executive Director Jamil Molidina, Miyamoto steps up to deliver “A Creative Vision”. It’s almost comical to see the audience cheering for this humble little man who honestly, could afford to dress more smartly. He greets the audience in English, before reverting to his native Japanese.

Miyamoto discusses Nintendo’s corporate vision, to take risks in the name of expanding the marketplace. To challenge the negative perception of gaming and gamers that exists.

He also discusses his own guiding vision and principles. His mental focus is on the imagined look of pleasure on a gamer’s face, rather than gameplay specifics. He describes his humourously dubbed “wife-o-meter” where he uses his wife’s interest level to gauge whether his games will have popular appeal.

Having never played games in the past, she is now warming to them since discovering games like Dr Kawashima’s Brain Training, Animal Crossing, Wii Sports and the Mii creation tools on Wii.

The Mii tools demonstrate another of his principles: tenacity. The concept has been a pet project through many failed implementations all the way back to the N.E.S disk system in Japan. So you might say he’s been working on it for twenty years.

He wraps up with the newly released footage of Super Mario Galaxy.

It’s a rare and fascinating opportunity to see a master of his art like Miyamoto talk at length about what drives him. His simple, honest approach to giving his audience pleasure and new experiences speaks to creative fields beyond his own.