thinks

“You can observe a lot just by watching.” - Yogi Berra

In his new book, “In Pursuit of Elegance: Why the Best Ideas Have Something Missing”, author Matthew May offers a prescriptive any business can use to unlock their creativity and their potential. By focusing on 4 elements he finds in common among elegant solutions - symmetry, seduction, sustainability and subtraction - May illustrates how businesses can solve problems in new ways.

Much like Malcolm Gladwell, May ties together disparate cases where companies, governments and managers found elegant solutions to look for the common thread among them. He then looks at how your business can apply these same lessons. And much like those of us here at thinks Central, , May is clearly a fan of kaizen - the Japanese philosophy of continuous improvement. To that end, May highlights how companies have used kaizen - and particularly its emphasis on observation - to solve problems at their root instead of simply on the surface. While May sometimes wanders a bit far afield, he continually cycles back to this core theme, and ties his observations to practical advice useful in any business. May did this so well, in fact, that I bought a copy for every member of my team to read, too. You should pick up a copy, too

Why?

Because when all is said and done, May recognizes in “In Pursuit of Elegance” that elegant solutions are less about “thinking outside the box,” and more about putting the box to good use, too.

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Can 2009 really be half over already? We’ve accomplished lots here at thinks Central so far this year, reaching new records in visitors and page views, growing our subscriber count and increasing Twitter friends. But half over?!? Sheesh.

Well, before we move forward to the second half of 2009, now seems like a good time to take a look back at what you all loved so far this year. These posts are the ones you seemed to enjoy the most based on traffic, bounce rate, time spent and comments. And if you’re new to thinks, these should get you started on the right path here.

Enjoy!

1. Many businesses - especially in service industries - don’t yet have a handle on their online strategy. Which is what led us to ask the following question: Is your business still invisible? Why?
2. We all want more customers and search engines like Google continue to work for most companies. That’s probably why these two posts get so much attention:
   • Top 5 SEO best practices.
   • Screw Google, or Why I Hate SEO.
3. Even for companies more comfortable with online, the rise of the social web is causing many to rethink their strategy. Want to know more about how to apply a strategy to social media? This review of the POST Study by Forrester Research - part of our Book Review of the Week-ish series - seems to be helping many answer that question.
4. Assuming you have a social media strategy, many still struggle with Twitter. For most, its key identifying traits are the amount of media attention Twitter gets and the perceived difficulty in using the tool to make money. So it should come as no surprise that four separate posts got lots of love from you this year. In no particular order, these are:
   • Can you find new business using Twitter?
   • How Twitter can save your life as well as your business.
   • Twitter is a fad. So why does your business need to be there?
   • Yet another reason smart companies use Twitter.
5. Finding useful tools takes time and energy. So it’s no surprise that our posts comparing Jimdo to SiteKreator, Webnode, Weebly and Wordpress and Jimdo adds social features get a lot of love.
6. Of course, getting customers and keeping customers are two different things. Maybe that’s why articles on how to keep customers, like I heart Zappo’s: The best customer service story you’ll ever hear continue to get so much attention.

Finding customers. Connecting with customers. Keeping customers. Yep. That’s how we roll here at Tim Peter thinks. Stay tuned for the next 6 months for more of the same. Only, y’know, better.

Miss one of your favorites? Or is there something you’d like to see us do better? Tell us all about it in the comments.

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Everybody wants to do better by their customers. But what’s the best way to do that? Check out these tips and you’ll find it’s not as hard as you might think:

• Before you can improve your customer’s experience, you’ve got to know who your customer is. Mining your internal data gives one type of valuable customer view, while personas offer another. John Quarto-vonTivadar at GrokDotCom provided an excellent overview of how personas work that’s worth checking out.
• Once you know who you’re trying to talk to, the next step is to get ‘em to your site. And it’s no secret search engines play a big role in making that happen for most online businesses. But how to put search engines to work for you is a bit of a secret. Fortunately, SEOmoz’s new SEO best practices unravels some of the mystery to ranking well, while Search Engine Land unmasks a cool tactic for finding link opportunities .
• Of course, getting people to your site is one thing. But if they don’t stick around, what good is it? Assuming that your site is fast enough to keep customers around, you’ve still got to convince them you’re the right place for them. Your reputation remains one of the top reasons customers choose to buy online. How can you convince customers you’re the right place? Well, Linda Bustos offers an excellent overview of how to communicate your reputation to customers online.
• Finally, it’s a good idea to make sure you’re taking care of all your customers. Linda Bustos returns with a strong overview of accessibility and its importance to your business (think “taking care of your customers” because it’s the right thing to do and “avoiding lawsuits,” if nothing else). Following standards offers many benefits, including accessibility, SEO, a faster site, and lower costs. And that just might be the best way to improve your customer experience.

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Without web traffic data, most online marketers feel like they are flying blind. Tools like Google Analytics make it fast and convenient to monitor page views, goals, and even information on ad spend and customer acquisition. However, if you stop there, you’re not flying blind, but you are keeping one eye closed.

Too many businesses, especially small businesses, overlook the most valuable source of information they have: the back-end database. Virtually every ecommerce site, social network, SaaS web application, widget, ad network, online game, and most other websites have a database. It is the workhorse that stores messages, logins, profiles, transactions, relationships, behavior, preferences, and everything else that is necessary to run an online business. The database is the historical record, for every user and customer you have ever had.

If you are not yet convinced that the database is a critical tool for online marketers, then think about this question: What is the maximum you would pay to acquire a customer? Your web traffic analytics tool might tell you what you are paying now, or what you have paid in the past, but it cannot address the question of the most you should be willing to pay. The answer to that question is your expected customer lifetime value (CLV). There is more than one way to calculate CLV, but each requires an analysis of the historical record of your customers’ activity.

Sure the database stores all this great information, but what do you do with it? The number of analyses you can run is endless, and they vary based on business model and data set. Some of the more interesting ones include customer lifetime value, repeat purchase probability and cohort analysis. All these metrics can be segmented by referral source, initial activities (i.e. characteristics of first the transaction or free trial), geography, and demographic information. The number of potential permutations can seem overwhelming, but you can narrow down the analyses if you think carefully about the questions you want to answer. [thinks editor’s note: For more information on how to do that, check out these 7 keys to successful web metrics for one approach and our series on how to build the right metric for your marketing for another. Back to you, Jake.]

So how do you actually get the data and run the analysis? If you or a member of your team knows SQL (Structured Query Language, the lingua franca of databases), then you can use it to extract data for analysis. From there, most people use a spreadsheet like Excel to do the nitty-gritty work. However, if you have a large data set, want your analyses to be continually updated, or just don’t want to commit the time, energy, and expertise to do it in house, then it might make sense to use a specialized tool to extract and analyze the data. After all, you’re not tracking your page views by reading server logs, are you?

Here are five tips that will help you get the most out of your database:

1. Store the source: When a new user or customer registers on your website, store the associated referrer, coupon code, and/or campaign in your database. This allows you to calculate how much revenue, including repeat purchases, is generated by different sources. Plus, it’s easy to add this to the database (our site, www.rjmetrics.com, does it with less than 10 lines of php code).
2. Don’t overwrite data: It’s tempting to store information that changes often in a table that tracks the current state of the world (is the user logged in right now? Yes or No) but you lose data on historical activity if you don’t keep a record of each action. As Yogi Berra could have said, “Once you lose data, it’s gone.”
3. Don’t slow down your site: If you are going to run complicated database queries, do it on a backup or dedicated statistics server so you don’t slow down your site. Servers are easy to replace, disappointed customers are not.
4. Use your database for deeper testing: Readers of thinks know that testing is important for optimizing online performance, but tests can be about much more than “Did they buy today?” The most valuable customers are the ones that come back again and again, and you can use your database to analyze who comes back and why.
5. Some analysis is better than none: If you’re stuck on which database analytics are right for your business, don’t sweat it. Start with something simple, like segmenting your sales data by a category or two and go from there. Even if you are not yet a database pro, a little bit of insight is better than none at all.

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Image credit: quinn.anya via Flickr using Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic.

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It goes without saying that search engine optimization - SEO - is a Good Thing. You want your customers to find you when searching. And there are lots of individuals out there willing to tell you what constitutes best practices, what’s “white hat” and “black hat” (i.e., techniques that play closer to - and further away from - Google’s rules, respectively). But all this back and forth on tactics and techniques begs the question: Can you have too much of a good thing? How much SEO is too much?

In case you’re worried this is just a theoretical exercise, take a look at the recent back and forth on sculpting PageRank with nofollow - or not, as the case may be. I don’t usually go into the gory, technical details of SEO and you’re about to see why. But bear with me for just a moment or two and I’ll try to keep this from being too painful. I think you’ll find it worth the wait.

Google recently reversed itself on whether sculpting PageRank with nofollow - a fairly technical solution used by some SEO firms - is a good practice, now stating that it’s not. As Google web spam guru Matt Cutts recently said:

“…[nofollow] isn’t the most effective way to utilize your PageRank. In general, I would let PageRank flow freely within your site. The notion of “PageRank sculpting” has always been a second- or third-order recommendation for us.”

I’m not going to debate whether “…PageRank sculpting has always been a second- or third-order recommendation.” I don’t think that’s why you come here. But, it is a fact that the dangers of nofollow PageRank sculpting were already well known to many solid SEO practioners. Still, the SEO industry immediately leapt into action following this recent shift, with some suggesting Google is “criminalizing” SEO and others looking for practical solutions to “…plug the nofollow leak.”

The point being, you can waste a lot of time on technical arcana, when you should be investing your time in creating great marketing, offering your customers products and services that solve their problems. I like to call it Customer Experience Optimization. When the topic of PageRank sculpting through nofollow first started making waves, I referenced and expanded on Search Engine Roundtable’s advice, stating :

“…Search Engine Roundtable has the best approach: “why not [do it], if you have exhausted everything else you could have done on your site” (emphasis mine). Most small business websites have far bigger search engine optimization - and customer experience optimization - issues than this. In other words, know the basics of SEO. But once you get too deep into that rabbit hole, leave it to the rabbits.”

Bryan Eisenberg of GrokDotCom echoes this point, stating:

” I recommend that you do great marketing primarily. Then focus on making sure you publish the best content for the person doing a search. When that person has a list of options to choose from in their search engine results page, your content provides them with the best experience.“

To illustrate the point, Amazon.com has over 200 links on its home page - itself a “violation” of SEO best practices - and only 10 of them use nofollow. Clearly, they’re giving the topic some though -but not too much. Yet they rank well, don’t they? More important, their customers use them, talk about them, recommend them. And isn’t that what you’re really going for?

Great marketing, such as described in this recent post by Marketing Headhunter.com’s Harry Joiner shows what I mean. Joiner clearly benefits from search - and has a well-optimized site. But he benefits most when his marketing resonates with his target customer first. And so will you.

As long as Google and its competitors focus on providing the best result to searchers, we’ll continue to have an arms race between the search engines and SEO marketers. And that’s OK. It’s absolutely important to do a good job at SEO. But always sremember you’re playing by the search engines’ rules. In practice, the best way to win at marketing is to define your own set of rules.

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Image credit: husin.sani via Flickr using Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic.

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How savvy are your customers? Are they sophisticated in using the Internet? While I always want to give people the benefit of the doubt, it’s important to remember that most people - no matter how much they use the Internet - don’t spend much time thinking about the Internet.

For a perfect example, take a look at this Google video asking people in Times Square what a browser is:

So, if your customers aren’t that savvy on the web, should you avoid awesome Flash widget-ry and new, improved Web 2.0 crunchy goodness on your site? Well, it depends. You see, that’s not the right question. The right question is: what do your customers need? And if you don’t know, how can you find out? Here’s how:

1. You can observe a lot just by watching. Yogi Berra said it best. When you watch your customers use your product, service or website, you’ll see things you’d never imagined. Some may shock you. Some may seem silly. But your customer isn’t wrong when they can’t figure out what to do next on your site. Your site is. I once watched a customer use a site repeatedly click on an image that wasn’t clickable. It didn’t show up in analytics, because no tool I know of will track actions that don’t do something. But in just 10 minutes of observing the customer, we were able to improve usability - and the conversion rate we were looking for - dramatically. Tools like UserTesting.com can show you exactly what your customers are doing to help you make things right. (And, yes, I know I talked about them last week, too. It’s that cool a tool).
2. Keep it simple. Customers come to your site with a problem to solve. Anything that doesn’t help them solve the problem - any distraction, pop-up, extra step, upsell, what-have-you - can stop your customer cold. They don’t need anything that doesn’t contribute to solving their problem. So don’t do that. Earlier this week, B.L. Ochman offered a great example of “keep it simple…” tactics in practice that ought to be required reading. So go read it.
3. Don’t reinvent the wheel. As Steve Krug writes in “Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability”
   - his legendary book - “Innovate when you know you have a better idea… but take advantage of conventions when you don’t.” I’d add, “and then test to be sure.” There’s a reason the gas pedal is on the right and the brake on the left in every car: because if you switched them, people would die. Look at how others have solved the problem and work from there.
4. Apply these tips everywhere. You can apply these same lessons to tools like Facebook and Twitter, too. For instance, RADSMARTS looks at the habits of highly effective Tweeters, finding they, too, focus on low friction, high value communication. And, really, that’s what it’s all about, isn’t it?
5. Lather. Rinse. Repeat. If improving your customers’ experience is a one-time event, don’t be surprised if your business only has a one-time gain. You’ve got to embed continuous improvement into your company’s DNA. As Bryan Eisenberg recently noted, “Good online marketers come in many sizes and shapes, but all have at least one trait in common: They are never satisfied with their results.” I think you could remove the word “online” - and for that matter, “marketer” - and describe every successful business person I’ve ever known.

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