Here is a link to the Pong landing page (you’ll see) and the actual game of Pong.

Here is my (slightly edited) letter.

Why not. I appreciate crits too, hopefully you take mine for whatever they are.

All in the spirit of love, as I saw some of your guys’ work, and love it. (Specifically Crop Hair Boutique from Design Work Life).

In my opinion:

3 column layout on the web is too much. I’ve never seen a 3 column layout that was working as well as it should (Apple Store, Amazon, all of them could be better if they only had 2 columns IMO)..

Two sidebars means there isn’t a good editor to rip out the content you don’t need.

Enter the content mantras: less is more, clutter is the enemy.

If the average user spends seconds on any given page, this is not telling me anything about you in that amount of time. Showcase sexy work that I get at a glance, big type, lots o hierarchy, something cool, more concentrated area of focus.

Beefy margins and the stark nature of the home page create a lot of visual tension, and only one area to focus on (the radio video), which doesn’t have anything to say off the bat.

A lot o fuzzy and pixelated images.

• Every image on the homepage looks fuzzy.
• Grass bg on Our story is pixelated and a little fuzzy, as well as the image on the top
• All logos on Case Studies are fuzzy. These could all be PNG8s, there’s no good reason for these to be fuzzy
• There are probably more but I’ll leave it at that

The Work gallery is nice. Arrows on project page could be more obvious, as well as the buttons in the top right. All of the white space and small buttons make for important elements that I have to look for, instead of them being obvious.

Also, about the Work gallery, the initial page with the thumbnails, I think it needs to be proportionately more image heavy in the view. The text size is fine, but the thumbs should be bigger, and more eye-grabbing.

How to get a job is cool. Feels like it should be a blog though, and not a part of your professional “we want clients” site

Love the Job Openings clip look. Simple, witty and purty.

Under Fun, there’s only one item in that menu, why have a drop down menu for it? Just put Pong in the top menu

A Simple Use Case: The Journey to the Almighty Pong

On the Pong Landing Page

• Love the animation on the page, but it is a little distracting if you actually wanted me to read that text.
• Secondly, I don’t want to read that text. I was promised sweet sweet pong. The four paragraphs of text here is not a well used opportunity for branding, it’s an extra click and will likely never be read.
• “Play now” should be bigger and or more obvious
• The animation should be clickable
• My final point on this page, why does this page exist? Why doesn’t the Pong link in the menu take me directly to Pong?

The actual Pong

• Tooooo small!! Why isn’t it 100% by 100% and keep the scale mode proportional (don’t remember the actual parameter or value)
• ALL of the buttons on the opening Pong page are TERRIBLE. I have to click the stroke of the type that makes up the button. Let me repeat, the stroke of the type is the hit area.
• When I can hover over the play click area and play, I would expect that my mouse would disappear and i’d instantly be controlling the paddle no matter where my mouse was or what the state of the buttons are (nothing, hover, click, release)On second thought, click (anywhere since the mouse is invisible) could be pause.A simple listener and the smallest bit of math can make this happen. If you want it even sexier, the paddle could have a bit of a delay on it, rub on a polynomial equation of funk for this effect.

I feel robbed of the sweet promise of pong.

That’s it.

Again, love your work, hope you don’t think I’m trying to be a dick, congrats on the new site, and the awesome work

- Wes

]]> http://www.monkeyswithhandguns.com/a-letter-to-a-webmaster/feed/ 0 http://www.monkeyswithhandguns.com/cell-phones-kill-bees-but-i-love-my-iphone-or-data-ecosystems/ http://www.monkeyswithhandguns.com/cell-phones-kill-bees-but-i-love-my-iphone-or-data-ecosystems/#comments Mon, 05 Oct 2009 20:18:57 +0000 JT http://www.monkeyswithhandguns.com/?p=337 I work for a largish international company focused on B2B sales with offices in North America, 16* European countries, and 8 countries in the Asia-Pacific region. In the U.S., the company is divided into 6 autonomous Business Units and smaller offices focused on regional, partner, and public sector marketing and sales. Then throw in the fact that we pull all data from the same 9 pools and that contacts can have interests in multiple product areas and everyone wants to send email.

This is not always the best example for a good customer experience.

The data structure for a company of this size and complexity is very fragile. Every office wants to send to their “base,” not realizing that their base actually coincides in many cases with the other offices’ bases and sales. It’s a big Venn diagram (I can’t believe I actually referenced a Venn diagram) and acts like a big data ecosystem- when one section does something bad, it effects everything, like plankton in the ocean or when bees die because of everyone needing to check Facebook or Twitter every 5 seconds on their iPhones.

If business units/different offices/any entities with different goals and incentives share a database, a higher potential for DB exhaustion exists than in an environment where only one interest is focused upon. “No kidding,” you may say. To combat exhaustion and generally pissing off contacts, the users of a shared database must observe and respect recency and content relevancy. If not, contacts can receive multiple offers from different sources within the same company without the company even realizing. However, the contact notices and will let you know (HINT: this is bad).

For some companies, specifically those focused on B2C, email frequency doesn’t seem to matter. I get at least 1 Banana Republic/Gap/Piperlime/Old Navy email per day, sometimes 2 or 3. Same with Tiger Direct and Amazon. Some B2C companies are able to send frequently from different divisions to the same database (I’ve never signed up for Piperlime emails) because they are sending coupons and deal offers. I never unsubscribe, just always glance and delete- someday they may have a good deal.

B2B doesn’t have that kind of leeway; most sales decisions require more than a knee-jerk reaction that B2C businesses try to invoke. If the B2B marketer emails the same person more than 1 time in a week (or day), no matter if it is from a different division, expect a nasty email (best case), an unsubscribe (not terrible, but not optimal), or a spam complaint (oh shit). Once any of these scenarios occur in one division, it affects the entire company, from IP/domain reputation to contacts unsubscribing from all emails.

In this type of data ecosystem, it is important for the email marketing team (or whatever team is responsible for list pulls and segmentation) to completely understand any and all of the data they are required to obtain on behalf of requestors. In short, list generators must be proactive, not reactive, and given to the tools uphold standardized rules (such as recency) and the ability to make suggestions to optimize lists. And content must- MUST!- be relevant to each receiver.

In turn, email list developers must show the ability to add value to the list pulls by citing in-company testing and have knowledge of best practices for email as a whole, the industry, the company’s own database (this is accomplished through running statistically relevant tests to show the value of segmentation and cross-promotion, experience, and probably a little luck).

* In his book Jailbird, Kurt Vonnegut specifically uses the number form for every numerical reference. Either because I enjoy that book immensely or because I am too lazy to remember back to my AP Style class to figure out when to use the number or spell it out, I will do the same. I have better things to do, like play Scrabble on Facebook.

Monolithical Failure

We point this out because it is in the “ingenious” section and has been there for over a month.

Hint: Pivot tables are marketing GOLD, and no one knows how to use them.

Data is the Force of marketing- anyone who can retrieve the data AND understand the data and trends it provides becomes both valuable and important to their company. Why? Because there are a lot of people who can do one or the other, but the ability to execute both of these skills allows one to see the company’s big picture.

Email managers are in a unique position to be close to both the data and results, and the ability to retrieve and decipher both gives way to the opportunity to be at the forefront of knowing the data and deciphering results, allowing strategic thinking and insights before anyone else. This assumes the email manager doesn’t have to go through someone else to get it (which is what a majority of the email managers currently do- which explains to proliferation of consultants and outsourcing of email services when companies already employ an email or internet manager).

To better explain, look at this cow:

Bessie, the Marketing Cow

Dairy cows are gigantic animals whose value to humanity comes down to their teats. That 1200 pound, 4 stomach-having, methane/ozone-killing fart-producing, blank-staring stupid animal’s value comes down to its 4-6 little openings on its nipples because that is where the milk comes from. And as beverage, you can drink your soy, your wine, your expensive acai juice, but as a beverage, you don’t much cheaper per ounce with more benefit than milk.

There is a point to this. Stay with me, friends.

If the farmer can both feed and milk the cow without help, the milk is cheaper. If the milk is bad, they can find the problem and fix it. If the email manager can both retrieve data AND decipher the data, using other resources isn’t necessary and email becomes VERY cheap (or the ROI increases). Who reaps the benefit of cheaper products and increased ROI? The farmer and (hopefully) the email manager.

More and more frequently, especially in today’s economic environment, companies are relying on their in-house databases and email as their main outreach vehicle to prospects and customers. Yes, budget money is still being spread around to paid search, ad buys, list buys and all that jazz, but email is relied upon to keep reaching contacts and move them through marketing and sales cycles. It’s cheap, it’s effective, and it has trackable results. Henceforth, e-mail is the teat of marketing.

If the email manager can do neither, then they’re just the people person who uses buzzwords, gets boners over new products like ICQ, Friendster, Twitter, or Google Wave replacing email so they can catch up, and outsources everything. They are no cow teat. In fact, push them enough and they are Toms:

This is easier said than done. Getting writers to write in a common voice is a tricky thing. Several companies I’ve worked for have had extensive voice guideline documents. These guidelines attempted to lay out as many examples as possible for spelling, words to use, phrases to avoid and other tips and tricks for adhering to the brand voice. But in the end, these guidelines are more like a laundry list than a training manual. It’s hard to glean the gestalt (academic alliteration FTW!) from the individual parts.

So how do you train people to speak (or write) with one voice?

The answer is to create a persona for your web site’s narrator. The narrator is the person whose voice is “reading” the site’s content to the user. This isn’t as simple as it may sound on the surface. It’s quite a lot of work to do it well.

This subject probably deserves a book chapter more than a blog post. I’d love to be able to write a book some day, but until then you can console yourself in the words of folks like the Eisenberg brothers or the original, bald evil genius of Internet Marketing, Seth Godin. I’m just planting the seed for you to consider. If something sprouts, I’ve done my job.

So how do we get the chorus to speak with one voice? The choice of the word “chorus” is deliberate, because I believe there are examples for us to draw upon that range back as far as the classical age of Greek literature and drama. Show business is a wonderfully fertile field to draw from for the creatively inclined Internet Marketer (IM).

Jay Leno is going to host a new show, five days a week at 10pm ET on NBC (begins Sept. 14th 2009 – check your local listings as they say).  He only held his old job for 17 years. The guy he replaced (Johnny Carson…you might have heard of him, kids) held the job for 30 years. The iconic portion of the Tonight Show for more than 40 years has been the opening monologue. It’s a pop culture touchstone that America has returned to again and again.

Although the audience feels as though the host is talking off the cuff or presenting a variant of a stand up routine, there is a veritable army of writers who script most of the words that are spoken. This is a situation that is very similar to the challenge faced by those of us who work in Internet Marketing for corporate America (whether it be B2B or B2C or some other acronym). Your web site is your “Tonight Show.” What many sites are missing is the host.

Unlike the TV host, the web site host is unseen. He resides only in the mental voice of the site’s readers. So how do you get your army of writers to project that same host into the minds of your site’s visitors? The same way the Tonight Show writers do it for Johnny Carson, Jay Leno and Conan O’Brien. The writers know who they are writing for. They don’t write jokes that they themselves would tell well. They write jokes that Conan will tell well. They know what works for Conan. Your web site authors need to do the same thing.

“But I can’t hire Hollywood talent to represent my brand!” you may exclaim in frustration.  Settle down, Beavis. I’ll s’plain.

By using the same techniques that are used to develop customer personas, you can create a narrator persona for your web site. But there are some differences that I’d like to point out. Instead of coming up with a specific model to represent an important segment of your web site audience, you need to come up with a very specific, credible “character” to represent a single voice. I say “character” because I believe you can use well-known fictional characters as viable stand-ins for narrator personas.

The key is that whomever you choose needs to be very familiar to your web writers. Celebrities, well-known fictional characters, or pop culture icons can all work. You just need to select one that allows you to represent your brand online. Is your brand more like  Sam Waterston from the TD Ameritrade ads or more like Bugs Bunny?

Inarguably, the best Bugs Bunny Cartoon. Ever.

Can you use a real person from within your own company? Yes, but with some serious caveats. It’s hard to have an idealized and standardized vision of someone that people may interact with at various levels. Your writers’ experiences with the real person behind the persona may alter their perception of that persona’s voice. In addition, what will you do if that individual leaves the company, retires or, heaven forbid, dies? New people coming into the company won’t immediately understand the persona of someone they may have only recently just met. But if you use a fictional character, celebrity, or whatever (living or dead!), chances are you can get a new person up to speed very quickly.

Follow us @mwhg.

So far, I’d say we’re off to a great start. We’re contributing as much to the conversation as most everyone else does. I bet we have 50 followers by the end of the week.

I am Googlebot, and I am sad and awesome at the same time. /

1. Be able to code an email
2. Be able to write and run a SQL query to run advance queries, or at least create a relational database in Access
3. Be able to technically explain how an open is tracked, not just that is by allowing graphics in an email
4. Be able to explain how the clickthrough rate actually relates to the sales database and lead generation
5. Be able to create and manipulate a pivot table of results

After sending email for five years for many different companies and organizations of varying size and complexity from many different systems, I can confidently say that if you are an email manager that is unable to do all five of these things, you are extremely lucky to have a job.

Why? Because if you can’t complete these five little tasks, then you are having someone else do them, either other company resources or a consultant. That costs money, which makes that unbelievable ROI on email you are reporting to your boss a little less unbelievable. You better hope that they don’t catch on, or at least latch onto a new company before they do.

All the talk about spam, marketing automation, deliverability, and every other email marketing buzzword that is used in email marketing blogs is bullshit if you are unable to accomplish these five tasks *. Every single buzzword you use in your blog will cost your company more money, either in capital AND variable costs (because you couldn’t get the current/old email system to work up to its potential and purchased a new magic system) or in third party consultants to do the work for which you will take credit **.

“Well, this seems harsh. I can’t code my own email, but I know what DKIM stands for, I can log into Eloqua, and I write a blog” an email marketing manager may say in response. “My blog has so many links and trackbacks that I’m basically a search marketer. I even Twitter. In fact, I’m going to TwitterBlog how good I am at my job.”

I am biased because I am an email & database marketing manager who can do all of these things. Actually, I’m grateful that more email managers are unable to accomplish these tasks- it keeps me employed and provides enough low-hanging fruit that every normal thing I do makes me look like a genius. It also keeps my freelance work hopping.

So I’m an idiot for writing this- I’m giving away my competitive advantage. I take it all back- go back to writing your blog about your reaction to whatever the DMNews said the Gmail blog said they were doing yesterday *. Keep up the good work.

* 95% of all internet marketing blogs, not just email blogs, are completely worthless. They just refer to other blogs, who refer to other blogs, who refer to other blogs. In each IM discipline, there are probably legitimately five blogs that are actually writing real and useful information that aren’t opinion or trackbacks. This post is probably in that initial 95%.

** Don’t worry- they don’t care- you got that prestigious spot in DMNews. They got your budget money and you probably don’t know the cost per lead, but at least Ken Magill mentioned you.

I do actually like the DMNews blog and Ken Magill’s stuff.

I also appreciate it when I see clever research. And one of the most clever things I’ve seen recently is the Bing game: Page Hunt. Players are shown a series of web pages and asked to guess a keyword or words that can be used on the Bing search engine to make the site appear in the top 5 search results. Players are given 100 points for guessing a result that is in the #1 result slot, 90 points for #2 and so on. If the keyword(s) do not produce a top 5 result, you are given another chance. The game is timed (an interesting 2 minutes and 58 seconds) and there are a few interesting twists like bonuses for avoiding common terms. It’s an easy game and it’s already produced some interesting results. Why not play a round or two yourself?

According to Ars Technica, Page Hunt was developed by Microsoft Research Interns Chris Quirk and Raman Chandrasekar along with Hao Ma and Abhishek Gupta from The Chinese University of Hong Kong and Georgia Institute of Technology respectively. Before they unleashed the game on the unsuspecting and great unwashed of the web, they piloted the game internally. They found that the length of the page URL was negatively correlated to the ability of the player to correctly achieve a top 5 result. In other words, the shorter the URL, the easier it was to win.

While this is an interesting result, I seriously doubt that this is the real gold mine that is to be found in this research game. One of the things that has stuck with me from my graduate studies was the influential work of Karl Popper. Popper’s theories are a little domplex at times, but in a nutshell, he believed that an experimental result that contradicted a hypothesis was vastly more valuable than a result that confirmed the hypothesis. In other words, a single disconfirmation is worth a thousand confirmations.

What does this have to do with the price of tea in China (or Hong Kong for that matter)? Because I believe that the Page Hunt game’s core value is in using it for the results that players get wrong rather than the things they get right.

What is the value in having players guess a result that already appears in the top 5 results? Are you just confirming what is already working? Sure, it helps show that Bing is aligning well with player expectations. But again, these are all just confimatory results. What will be really interesting to mine are the results where there are clustered patterns of results produced by players that DO NOT appear in the top 5. What is it about a particular page that makes a player suggest a keyword they think best describes the page yet does not produce a top 5 result? That’s the real value here.

If you have ever effectively managed an internal search engine for a web site, this process is probably intuitively obvious to you. One of the best uses of internal search data is to look for keywords that users have entered that produce zero results (also referred to as null sets). Of course, this is typically only interesting if the web site in question actually has content that would be an appropriate “answer” for the null search query. The difference here is that the web site owner can typically “fix” this problem pretty directly. The search engine itself often has tools to allow the manual “promotion” of a page based on a specific query. But a search engine that indexes the entire web doesn’t have this luxury.

The Page Hunt game provides a crowd-sourced solution to this problem. Analyzing the keywords generated by players that do not produce a top 5 result could provide fertile ground for improving the Bing algorithm. It won’t be easy and it would certainly require Page Hunt/Bing to collect more page data than what is shown to players. It struck me that a similar game would be a useful tool for assessing the skills of SEO practitioners. If you allowed the person being tested to evaluate the page source, I believe that any SEO’er worth his or her salt should be able to deduce a top 5 search keyphrase at or above 80% of the time. It could be a more objective way to evaluate skill sets. Of course, the test itself would have to be normed first and it would require a large set of sites to avoid cheating. But it is still an interesting idea.

But I digress….

Using crowd-sourcing does carry some inherent risks. A motivated community could “game the game.” For example, let’s say the 4chan community decided to target the game and collectively distort the results of the pages that they are displayed during the game. They could all input the same irrelevant keyword for the same page. So, they could give the answer “Cleveland Steamer” for the page of a political candidate, for example. If enough of them provided the same keyword for the same page, it could carry some weight.

Of course, Microsoft isn’t likely to just automatically accept the results of the Page Hunt game. It’s just a research tool. It’s not a magic bullet answer to improving Bing’s algorithm. Human review is still a big part of the search engine industry. Remember the “miserable failure” Google bomb from a few years back? Ultimately, Google had to hand edit its results to eliminate the results of this prank. So I doubt there is any chance that we’ll see any “Cleveland Steamering” of Bing any time soon. But it would be amusing.

The only thing I can think of to improve the Page Hunt game is to increase the incentives to play. Right now, you can really only compete against yourself. A simple upgrade would be to have a community high scores page that encouraged players to compete against the community. Never under-estimate the human ego. Of course, they could up the odds with just a tiny prize incentive, like a t-shirt for high scorers. You wouldn’t believe the weird things people will do to win a cruddy little prize. Or maybe you would.

I don’t know whether to be offended or turned on. *grin*

But seriously, instead of showing people who look like models or soap opera actors, why not market straight at the disenfranchised geek subculture?

Most of the people that dating sites show in their ads look like they would have no problem attracting members of the opposite sex (of course, they could have hidden personality pathology that requires medication to control….like that one very attractive woman who has the crazy eyes…you know which one I’m talking about).

I’ve seen spoofs of ads featuring World of Warcraft characters and other geeky types. But why not market to these folks directly? It is a delicate balance to be sure. You have to understand the subculture well-enough to be able to gently rib without overtly offending.

I think this ad approaches that pretty well. And if anyone finds a better copy to link to, let me know.