Alex Hardy

How time flies: it’s been a full year since I released simpleContact 1.0. Quite a bit has happened since then, so here are the highlights for me…

Progress

As you can see from my downloads page, work has continued on the application. simpleContact currently stands at version 1.2, which I released in December 2007. The details of each version can be found in the release notes.

I’ve tweaked the design of the downloads page and the site in general, and I’m keeping a visual log of those changes in my Flickr account. When I release the “Pro” version it will be re-branded simpleContact “Lite”.

I added a support forum to this website. It’s very early days, but I hope to build a valuable resource. Publishing an application (even a vigorously tested one) is rather like releasing a domesticated animal into the wild – you have no idea where it will find itself and how well it will fare. It seems to be coping well in the big bad world of unpredictable server configurations and usage scenarios.

I’ve also made a personal discovery. To focus on something that’s your own, improving it bit by bit appeals to the perfectionist in me. I find it very satisfying.

Reception

The response from users has been overwhelmingly positive. I don’t mind revealing that I currently average 180 downloads a month, so you don’t need to be a maths whizz to know that I am getting close to a milestone that I will comment on soon.

In version 1.1 I added a rating form to the log out page to help users express their opinions and to promote the application on The PHP Resource Index, a leading script directory. The reaction was great, and it has a solid front-page position in its category. With the release of ‘Pro the attack on its rivals really begins!

Users have been generous, with comments such as these:

“I’m always looking for ways to make my clients’ projects useful and sophisticated, but still affordable. simpleContact makes it easy to deliver an advanced product easily.” Kim D.

“Being a web developer/designer but not a script author, this is an asset. This application, in my opinion, rivals most of the ones designed by other companies that charge a premium.” Alan J.

There’s still a long way to go. I’ve had lots of requests, some of which I definitely plan to include in future releases. “Subject” and “US state” fields in particular have been in demand. I hope to satisfy the need for bespoke options with ‘Pro.

Promotion

I’ve not engaged in any advertising so far, although that will come. I’ve relied solely on word of mouth, directory listings and links in relevant places. Thanks to Andy Prevost, the PHPMailer website in particular has been a strong source of visitors.

I’ll write my first newsletter in a couple of months. A fringe benefit of this project has been that it constantly yields new opportunities to learn and interact with people. To write better, more compatible code, manage versions, user expectations and support requests, stats analysis, PPC, email marketing – all things that you learn best on the job.

I can’t wait to see what I have to say in May 2009!

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

A little bit of Friday fun. Tom Dickinson of Will It Blend? takes the metaphor of Seth Godin’s book Meatball Sundae (which I’m currently reading) a bit literally. Delicious.

The Apple Store went down this morning. Nothing unusual about that; they have routinely taken the store down every Tuesday this year so far to introduce updated iPods, MacBooks, Time Capsule etc. Today was apparently just maintenance.

It isn’t common practice however to take down an online store to add new products. Imagine if Amazon did the same. It has been claimed by people on the inside that it is actually an architectural limitation of the store itself. It has to be re-published in its entirety – a requirement you could justifiably call poor design.

Apple’s relationship with the web conflicts with its image. They provide tools to write a blog but notoriously forbid their own employees from doing so. They are secretive and openly hostile to rumour sites (Think Secret the latest casualty). Bizarrely, their management of the store seems to be an exception.

A company with Apple’s resources could easily build a new store, but they choose to persevere with the old one. Why? It can only be the excitement and speculation that spreads through the mac websites like wildfire the moment that little “We’ll be back soon” post-it note appears on the page.

Call it PR, call it the Reality Distortion Field at work. Only Apple could spin a flaw in their service into a social marketing campaign. If I was a conspiracy theorist I might imagine Phil Schiller sat at his desk, leaking “rumours” to the web…

Spurred on by an article called Google Analytics Tagging Demystified by Ian Lurie of Portent Interactive, I decided to start tagging links to help track the relative success of my promotional activities. I ran into a problem almost straight away though!

The value of adding tags to a link (for meta information such as which marketing campaign it was part of) is indisputable. As Lurie puts it:

Tags are your most powerful, flexible analytics tool. With them, your analytics software delivers statistics on every ad buy, keyword, ad version and campaign. Without them, your analytics software is stuck in 1996.

Google URL Builder provides an easy form to construct the URL for you.

The issue I had was peculiar to my situation. One approach I’ve used to create awareness and traffic for my simpleContact application has been to list it on script directories such as Hot Scripts. This has worked very well, but when I entered a suitably tagged URL it exceeded the maximum length allowed by the site.

Enter TinyURL. Popular among Twitter users, TinyURL does what it says on the tin. It takes a long URL and generates a (very) short redirect link. Problem solved.

I look forward to using tagging more extensively – it is clearly a killer feature.

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.

I’ve just finished reading Purple Cow by renowned marketer Seth Godin. The way I devoured it in days is a testament to how fascinated I was, because I usually take some time to finish a book. I’ll relate the general gist, and some of my thoughts:

Purple what?!?

In this modern world where consumers are constantly bombarded with marketing messages, we have developed a capacity for ignoring 99% of the noise around us, simply in order to function.

It is becoming less viable to interrupt our lives to remind us that a product exists. TV advertising in particular is in decline, as people pay little attention to the expensive campaigns. With DVRs and video on demand services becoming more widespread it can’t be guaranteed that ads are watched at all.

This is a blow to marketing in the traditional sense, which has always been based around trying to convince us to buy a product, irrespective of whether it has any real merit. We are “post-consumption consumers” in the sense that we already have pretty much everything we need. We are unlikely to seek better solutions and when we do, we are far more likely to seek the advice of people we trust (family, friends, independent reviewers etc) than brand owners.

Safe is risky

When most products in a market are similar, Godin argues that the only safe option is to be risky. To stand out from the herd, as it were. To be a purple cow. Not simply in the sense of outdoing your competitors, but by innovating. To be remarkable in the truest sense of the word – worthy of being remarked upon. The one that people tell their friends, their blog readers or anyone who will listen is the only choice.

You don’t achieve this by aiming to create a mass-market product. You can’t please everyone, and most people are not early adopters, not risk takers. They will buy your product when it seems like a safe choice. Indentify the evangelists, the otaku, and create a product that appeals to their thirst for the new, the surprising, the best. Then you get out of the way and let them spread the word.

This is something that the Internet makes it easier than ever to do.

Not everyone can do this. Samsung may think that their F700 is a rival to iPhone, but it’s not – it’s a pale imitation. Noone will queue to see it. Noone will tell their friends. Newpapers won’t dedicate pages to it. Noone will name it invention of the year.

That was not a love note to Apple, just simple fact. To be remarkable is the key to success and you can’t get there by copying, and shouting about your mediocre product across print and screen because noone cares.

No “Ten Easy Steps”

The book is not a manual. It doesn’t tell you how to create a purple cow but it should motivate you to try, because there isn’t much else left to do. Its parting shot is that if you can create such a thing, you should maximise it without becoming complacent. Many companies have become great from one innovation, but declined because they failed to move on.

If any of this sounds interesting to you, I suggest you point your RSS reader at Seth Godin’s blog and check out his Squidoo lens where he has some worthwhile eBooks available for free.

A new website has been set up called The Blog Council. In the words of the site:

The Blog Council is the community for large companies’ blogs. It is a private group for this unique group of bloggers to share best practices and new ideas.

The response has been mixed. Greg Storey is right to question the wisdom of discussing an inherently public medium in private, but I think it’s a positive step.

If you blog about your cat that’s fine, but speaking on a professional level makes matters more complicated. You should maintain a dignified and constructive tone even if you only represent yourself. It’s not beneficial to rubbish others. It’s downright foolish to say disparaging things about your colleagues or company if you wish to remain employed now and in future.

I don’t speak for the Foundry, but I have a responsibility to them. As I show their work in my portfolio I am obliged to present it in an appropriate way. I should answer or refer questions, criticisms or employment inquiries that come to me. I should promote their work and activities in an honest way.

Working for a company whose sole preoccupation is the building of brands, I cannot ignore the marketing implications. The only thing more frightening to companies than being seen as behind the times would be to embarrass themselves. Sony have been busted time and again for trying to create artificial buzz around their products. Instead of improving your image, you earn widespread ridicule.

The internet alters the consumer’s relationship with the brand. The aspirational values (e.g. youth, cool, affluence, sexiness etc) that money and time have been spent to cultivate meet the reality of what people think of the company behind it.

Brand perception can no longer be just pushed at the audience through advertising channels when a bad review can sabotage a purchasing decision. This puts pressure on companies to be less aloof. You can’t silence public opinion, but you can change it by listening and improving your products, services and message.

If you blog directly on your company’s behalf, your responsibility is crucially important. You are an ambassador for your company. There are already good examples to be found: The IEBlog is candid, constructive and has engaged with high profile community members such as Molly Holzschlag.

I would hope that these private sessions will be few, and part of a first stage where the members of this new community compare notes before they open themselves out. Some things you can only learn how to do by doing them.

When I saw this quote by Steve Jobs at this week’s London event I had a flashback:

The [iPhone] camera is great. More megapixels don’t make a better camera, the iPhone is actually a great camera especially with great lighting.

Oh good I thought… It’s back to the PowerPC vs x86 days and the megahertz myth. Here’s the problem: I concede the above remark is true, if evasive. All the pixels in the world evidently don’t help most camera phones take a decent picture when the subject is in motion or poor light.

… But it’s not about what a few know, is it? It’s about what most people believe, and the MHz argument pretty much fell on deaf ears in 2001. Simply put, people expect that the numbers marketed to them mean something, and bigger = better.

What’s more, when I had a play with an iPhone recently I thought the camera was poor. Laggy, awkward to use (because of the software trigger on the touch screen). No flash (so “great lighting” might be hard to find – forget about taking it to a gig).

What it needs is a campaign of proving its quality by direct comparison, and upgrade the sensor to satisfy the uneducated consumer. iPhone is expensive compared to a Nokia N95 (£360 dearer over 18 months), and only looks tempting if you consider it a worthy replacement for your phone, iPod and digital camera.

At the moment, it’s two out of three at best.

Ian and I attended a seminar by Blue Skies at Dukes 92 in Manchester last week. Dubbed “the impact of social networking”, the event was summed up like so:

Socialised media such as blogs, wikis and photo-sharing sites have moved far beyond simply a meeting place for techies or a posting board for complaints. It is now a way of reaching key demographics… This brave new world will impact all businesses. Topics will include:

• What the new online universe looks like
• Spheres of influence and shifts in trust
• Changing communication channels
• Future opportunities

Interesting stuff on paper. It must be said however that the presentation wasn’t what we hoped. We expected case studies of how brands had successfully engaged with individuals and communities like MySpace and Facebook to improve their public image and inform product development. Those answers were not forthcoming.

We got a wandering history of how social networking sites have appeared and the potential impact on (the assumed audience) the PR professional. An impact which they went on to say, we may all simply choose to ignore.

The more things change, the more they stay the same?

The essential message was that it’s all business-as-usual for PR agencies. Their job is still to target their messages to a core of “opinion leaders”. The only difference is who those people may be. The position of trust held by political leaders, celebrities and journalists is being encroached on by the blogger, the Amazon reviewer etc.

I agreed that monitoring discussion on the web and reporting is a PR function. It’s comparable to the current practice of gathering press cuttings. I don’t agree with their definition of “community marketing”. This is a term that I have heard before, and what it means seems to depend on who you ask.

The seminar would have it mean marketing to communities, but I think it should mean being a member of communities, inhabiting and supporting the markets you wish to serve. In the hope of generating sales of course, but also to create an enduring relationship with your customers.

I can produce a case in point from my own site. When Photoshop Product Manager John Nack commented on a post of mine I was both surprised and impressed. I was pleased that an ambassador of a huge company had taken the trouble to personally address my questions. This did more to raise my opinion of Adobe than anything they’ve done for many years.

Truth is, it’s absurd to think that you can manufacture community. People make a community. You can build it, but they will not necessarily come. If you censor it, or assault people with sales messages your efforts will fail.

Seek your customers out where they are. Break down the walls between the product makers and users. Allow your people to talk frankly (under disclaimer if you must). Take criticism on the chin, rather than denying it exists. Answer questions. Listen to requests, even if you don’t act on them. Use this to drive your product development. Rinse. Repeat.

This isn’t PR, this is customer service

This is how you benefit from the Internet, which was always one big social network. This isn’t PR, this is customer service. In this day and age, I think most would agree that personal service is the weakest link. I’m in the habit of Googling a company before I enter into any kind of long term commitment. The difference can be startling.

It will be amusing to see whether Blue Skies respond to this post