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/email-marketing-the-cow-udder-of-marketing/ http://www.monkeyswithhandguns.com/email-marketing-the-cow-udder-of-marketing/#comments Mon, 24 Aug 2009 00:28:12 +0000 JT http://www.monkeyswithhandguns.com/?p=276 A couple of weeks ago, I blogged about the criteria essential for an email marketer to possess. These were in addition to criteria any manager should possess (the ability to read your company’s balance sheet and income statement AND know what it means, have ability to think strategically, blah blah).  A majority of those requirements were technical in nature- write code for an email, explain tracking, stuff like that. Two of the five points dealt with data: first, retrieving data (SQL and Access) and second, reading data (pivot tables).

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.

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.