Leadership, website testing, viruses and more
Due to some client meetings, our Resource Friday schedule has been a bit haphazard, but we finally got together again on Friday, May 21. Here’s what we talked about.
Leadership Simulcast Recap
Steve Wolgemuth, Principal
This week at “Resource Friday” I served up something like one expects at a pot luck dinner – little of this, little of that. It was a sordid collection of relevant insights I gathered from a leadership simulcast I had attended a week earlier. The YDOP team acted interested as I rambled several dozen pearls of wisdom from famous names like Jim Collins, Mark Sanborn, Tony Dungy, Dr. Jim Goodnight, Chip Heath and what’s-his-name. Oh yeah, John Maxwell.
Saying smart things that smart people have said (and I wrote down to remember) makes me feel smart — especially when I hear myself saying them. It’s like singing in the shower, except others get to hear it and I get to see their expression. And today was my day to say things like, “walk slowly through the crowd.” (I paused and looked downward solemnly as I said it – sort of monk-like). Or (sorry J Maxwell for stealing this), “when you connect with people, you can influence them.” (With this one I pushed my eyebrows downward and stiffened my lips as I looked out over the crowd of 5 employees). My highlight was when I said “be clear about your stop-doing list.” This was Jim Collins’ contrast to our typical “TO DO” list. He suggested that an individual creates priorities for their time. He also recommended that we “start with the brutal facts” (about this time, Daniel signaled that I had spinach in my teeth) and we reflected how YDOP needs to always be honest about herself, about core competencies and her strengths/weaknesses, and to continue to focus primarily on being valuable and irreplaceable to the clients we serve.
Always Be Testing, Intro & Chapter 1
Jeff Burkholder, Analyst
As part of my professional development, I’m reading the above-mentioned book, by Bryan Eisenberg & John Quarto-vonTivadar with Lisa T. Davis, which is a background-info and how-to guide for Google’s Website Optimizer.
In 1923, Claude Hopkins, author of Scientific Advertising, wrote, “Almost any question can be answered cheaply, quickly, and finally, by a test campaign. And that’s the way to answer them–not by arguments around a table. Go to the court of last resort–buyers of your products.” Hopkins’ advice from nearly 90 years ago is just as valuable in today’s world of internet marketing.
The book talked about how’s there’s been 3 primary “waves” of analytics, which I likened to the dawn of literacy. At first, analytics consisted of IT guys looking at the basic webserver logs. This is akin to medieval monks and scribes; a relatively small, specialized group has control over the information, and are the only ones who can interpret or understand it. The second wave featured the growth of more sophisticated — and grossly expensive — web analytics tools. This is similar to the spread of literacy to the upper class, while the common man remained largely unable to afford — let alone interpret the information. Now, we’re in the midst of wave 3, in which the tools have become easier-to-use, largely free, and available to pretty much everyone who has a website. But while everyone can look at this data, the “winners” of this phase will largely be the marketing innovators and prolific testers who understand how to use this information. The book then went on to recommending a continual cycle of testing, measuring and optimizing, with the ultimate goal being to please your customers, however they react to your site. In fact, with this in mind, the book points out that it would be better to see your customers not just as Hopkins’ “court of last resort”, but as the first and only meaningful court of resort.
Color and Psychology
Astrid Salim, Creative Director
My first projects at YDOP have really made me think about colors and psychology. When I was researching about it, I found some interesting facts about how colors can affect us physically and mentally. For example, offices are usually painted blue to increase employees’ productivity. This was interesting to me because I don’t usually associate the color blue with productivity; blue is well-known for its calming properties. Yellow paint tends to evoke erratic behavior. And inmates in prison who act violently are put into a room with soft pink paint to subdue them. Hmm, I’m wondering if we should paint our office blue…
Facebook: Community Pages and 0.facebook.com
Daniel Klotz, Social Media Strategist
It seemed really important to bring the team up to speed on Facebook Community Pages and how they’re affecting YDOP clients. My two key points were that there don’t seem to be any good reasons to worry at this point, and that Community Pages should motivate our clients to continue improving their Wikipedia pages in the ways we have encouraged and coached them to do so. One of our clients has a Wikipedia page that is viewed around 1,700 times per month. With the creation of Community Pages, the number of people viewing that same information is likely to be significantly higher.
I also alerted the team to a trend of companies highjacking the Google Places listings of their competitors. The trend adds value to the service we already provide our clients of helping them verify their listings. [Update, 5/27: Google has now taken steps that make it harder for malicious individuals to change the Google Places information of another company.]
Last, I explained Facebook’s new site for cell phone users, 0.facebook.com, which I think will go far in bridging the digital divide in the social media world, since a near-majority of people from homes without Internet access do have cell phones.
Viruses and the Mobile Web
Jonathan Arndt, Programmer
Today, I talked briefly about virus and worm propagation on mobile devices. Most mobile carriers have an app store where users can go to purchase and run custom applications.
Although there are security checks, applications in the app store are not necessarily trustworthy. Compared to other ways of distributing software, using one of the popular app stores is a quick and easy way of getting a piece of infected software into the hands of a lot of people. Even if only a few dozen people download it, the time/payoff ratio is attractive to writers of virus-type software.
The source article for the discussion can be found here: http://threatpost.com/en_us/blogs/coming-wave-mobile-attacks-051710.