I will be moving over some of the more popular posts from here (and deleting them off 23Musings. Sadly WordPress.com doesn’t offer a redirection option.

Thanks for reading 23musings over the years, I hope you’ll read my musings over on my new site.

Google themselves (yep those folks you keep moaning about) have kindly provided a really easy way for you to get your content out of their search index, and you can just block the news search crawler if you want now too! It couldn’t be easier. Let’s take a fictional website www.rupert4google.com. In the very first directory where the website files are stored (the root) you’ll find a text file called robots.txt (so that file lives at www.rupert4google.com/robots.txt). All you need to do is find that file, open it up in Notepad (or a text editor of your choosing), and add the two lines of text below to it. Save it and your Google problems are over (if this all proves a bit tricky, get one of your lovely web developers to help you (while you’re at it why not ask them if they think it’s a good idea too?).

User-agent: Googlebot

Disallow: /

Job done, give it a couple of weeks and none of your pages will be in Googles index anymore. That troublesome traffic will be no more. Satisfied?

Now come on, thats not the answer is it? Here’s an idea for you. Why not devote your time, energies, finances and skilled personnel into coming up with a new model to make all this free traffic and advertising work for you? Rather than moan about it, find a way to make it work for you. It’s about time someone made some advances in the world of online display advertising and I’d have thought that with all your web properties you’d be just the man/organisation to do so. The possibilities are endless, start to tap into the rich data you can glean from the tracks your web visitors leave each time they visit. Learn from it, find ways to encourage repeat visitors and new channels to monetise them through. Of course you may want to reconsider my earlier recommendation first, otherwise you won’t have enough traffic to benefit from any improvement to your advertising and other revenue streams.

If you can design experiences that encourage visitors to become loyal users of your content maybe you could even sell them something? Maybe (just maybe) if you make your sites engaging enough some might even subscribe! There are so many ways you could make more revenue from so much traffic. I’ll be available in July 2010 to help if you haven’t worked it out by that time…

What are you going to do? Just block the traffic, alienate potentially loyal users and try and get people to pay for your content? Or move forwards proactively, embrace the fact you get so much traffic to your sites (it’s a good thing, honest) and work out a really viable model to monetise it properly.

Personally, I’d go with the latter (with so many pages, so much content and so much traffic you have endless possibilities). The former just strikes me as the reactionary moves of an industry with so much promise in the digital world that gives off an impression of being on it’s last legs.

So, how a user experiences your brand online can have positive or negative bearings on how they feel about you. This is going on even if you don’t have a website, don’t do social media or don’t actively do any online PR or advertising. Your potential customers are still having experiences that are linked to your brand in their own conversations and online journey whether you are actively involved or not. Wouldn’t it be better to establish your own presence so you can increase the positive sentiment and work to address the negative?

Now the above is a powerful chart! If 97% of web users could have their purchase decisions positively (or negatively) influenced by your online presence doesn’t that make it something worth investing in?

Again, the above is hugely powerful. If an online experience can turn someone into a new customer then why aren’t you working your digital assets to your advantage?

As I said I aim this at those industries and brands who seem to lag behind the adoption curve when it comes to the web (I’m thinking of a lot of the financial services industry, a surprising amount of the FMCG sector and some service industries). The general message here is that you have a lot to gain by improving your presence on the internet, making it easy to interact with, useful to those you’re trying to attract and engaging so people want to interact.

Suggest you read the report which is available online here.

The main problem facing the news media industry right now is how to keep their coffers full when their advertising revenue has slipped considerably and print circulation has dropped. So you’d think that they’d be trying to engage users, keep them on their websites for as long as they can to get as many eyeballs (and clicks) on their adverts as possible? So that would mean having a site which is heavily user centric, easy to use, engaging and provides a great experience that makes people want to stick around, right?

Wrong I’m afraid. This article from the Guardian demonstrates just how broken the news industries approach to the online experience is. It seems that news websites are guilty of something the big portals used to suffer from (going back 7 or 8 years here and thinking of Yahoo, Excite and Lycos in particular), linkitis (an overwhelming urge to shoe-horn as many self-referencing links as possible into your homepage). News sites average 450 links on their homepage and some have as many as 5,447 words (The Daily Mail) on this single page. The worst offender it seems in the Mirror which has 94% of the total words on its homepage (1,182) as part of a link. That’s utterly ridiculous!

That’s an astounding amount of linkage. I have no idea how humans are supposed to comprehend or make use of that level of information overload. Visually it looks a mess, hierarchically it makes little sense and usability wise it’s plain madness. How on earth is a user supposed to find what they are looking for in that maze of links and references? Perhaps they’re not. Maybe the people who run these websites believe that by populating pages with self-referential (internal) links they are helping entice (trick) users into clicking just one more page and thus increasing the chances of getting more ad revenue. The value to a user of some of these links is questionable.

Roll on engagement ads. The sooner we get away from page-view and click metrics and start to make publishers accept being paid on engagement (or at least more meaningful metrics) the sooner these sites will have to address their user experience and stop practices such as this. Swamping a page with links helps nobody. It lowers engagement in your site, dilutes traffic down routes you maybe don’t even really want them to go, cheapens your content and destroys the user experience. Stop eating yourself news and start thinking about your users and what they might actually want! Otherwise you’re going to end up losing more of those valuable eyeballs as your users increasingly prefer consuming news through other methods (readers, desktop apps, social networks).

Financial services companies such as banks, analysts, brokers, traders and insurers all have a duty under various laws to keep copies of all communications with clients, customers and counterparties (particularly when it comes to discussions giving advice). This paper trail is required to ensure there’s no bias, insider dealing, dodgy advice or plain lying going on. The problem is, social networks like Twitter and Facebook don’t allow these companies to archive and store their communications making it very difficult for them to become meaningfully involved in actual two-way conversations.

This is a recognised issue now in the industry and even regulators recognise the potential benefits of being able to properly engage online. FINRA (the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority) in the U.S. has set up a Social Networking Task Force (discussed at their annual meeting recently) to explore how regulation can embrace these of technological advancements rather than hinder their adoption.

Now, while I can understand the need for due diligence, archiving, transparency and regulation around financial services, surely the industry needs to grow up and realise it’s time to ease these shackles and allow the conversation to flow. The conversation is happening anyway; in phone calls, cafes, restaurants and bars financial industry execs meet with clients, colleagues and competitors and discuss exactly the kind of issues that generally should be on the record (this has been happening for ever). At least if these types of conversations happen online they will be archived by Google if nothing else. Surely the regulators need to accept that their industry will be dragged kicking and screaming into the sociable world of online media whether they like it or not? Time to adapt in order to adopt modern methods of social business communication! The benefits of allowing the conversation to happen far outweigh the negatives.

Of course the other way this could play out is that Twitter and Facebook provide a way for these types of companies to engage through special accounts which allow for archiving and provide regulatory compliance. Personally I don’t think that would be a good thing as it would place restrictions on their interactions and mould financial services use of social media rather than letting it grow and adapt organically. I’ve had many conversations with people from financial services on just this topic and they agree, they don’t want to be restricted and want to use social media as any other business would.

It’s difficult for anyone to know whether this will have any impact on their search rankings. I’ve measured over a hundred links to one of my sites from different GeoCities sites so I’ll be keeping an eye on it and hoping those site owners move their pages elsewhere. Of course, many GeoCities sites won’t be resurrected elsewhere as they are often dead and haven’t been updated in ages so from tomorrow those links are gone. What impact all this will have on SEO and search engine rankings will play out over the coming weeks as Google and co. re-index sites and take into account the missing links.

More importantly than any inbound links though is the fact that a piece of internet history is dying. Jeremy Keith sums it up well so I suggest you read his post on the subject.

What they watch isn’t so interesting to me. I’d rather hear about how their watching habits differ between TV and online, whether the knowledge that their internet was now being monitored changed their habits (maybe moving them to watch more TV on the web and thus biasing Nielsen’s data) or whether it’s the younger or older viewer who likes to watch TV online. That kind of demographic data on user behavior is much more interesting than what soap opera they watch… Still at least they aren’t measuring their internet usage and they still do that at ISP level where you get broader, more representative results (of course depending on the ISP’s selected), at least I hope they aren’t.

Surely there must be a better way to measure television consumption in these digital days? Can’t they just measure TV through cable, digital and satellite channels at the provider end thus giving them a totally unbiased (depending on the provider) view of a large segment of the population’s television viewing? If decisions on quality/popularity of programming, who to place adverts with and who deserves a second series are being made by TV execs then surely the opinion of 600 homes in New England is not representative enough?

The best, most salient opinion piece on the Nielsen Families comes from one of my favourite authors Robert Anton Wilson have a read of page 59/60 below (just search for Nielsen in the Scribd doc) just for jokes

Here’s a prime example with my comments in red:

Hi Patrick, (my name’s not Patrick, it clearly says Steve on the sidebar)
Right on target with this post. Customer service/care will always be about hearing the customer, delivering, and learning for continuous growth. Doesn’t matter what size business — even the smallest setup — if you have an online presence it must be a good one! (A relevant comment to the post).

Nice to hear from you again. I am on Twitter as (katenasser). (I don’t know you and you even think my names Patrick). Check out my video on my website for humorous and inspirational customer servie talk. (What? Customer servie? Humorous video?)

All the best from this customer service fanatic… Kate.

I mean, thanks for the comment Kate, but at the least get my name right and it would be nice if you didn’t suppose to know me.

Kate titles her comment as ‘Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach’ and has an authentic looking web presence here katenasser.com but is she just looking for an inbound link and some free publicity? Where’s the value in her comment?

So come on Kate Nasser, get in touch and tell me why I should approve your comment (and why you think my name’s Patrick)?

When I use Google to search for something what I’m really looking for is the most relevant result I can find which will answer my query. To be honest, I often couldn’t care less how much I trust the source as long as it’s reputable (maybe rep is a better factor?).

Where I can see a trust (or rep) factor being useful is with weeding out spam search results who have got themselves a really good natural search ranking. Beyond that I’m not convinced it’s required for normal web search (except perhaps as an option or it would be useful in a search through social streams like Twitter, but here I’m referring to the kind of search you do through www.google.com).

You see, to some extent trust is in the eye of the beholder and a very difficult thing to turn into a scientific algorithm. A source could be trustworthy to one person and not at all to another depending on many factors. So to really put an accurate trust rating on web pages is going to be extremely difficult (I think).

Would Google’s time be better spent working on relevancy ranking and using trust sparingly as a factor to filter out spam results? Or do you think trust has a bigger place in the future of search algorithms (maybe trust/rep on news/blog search)? Interested to hear your thoughts…

In the past if you did screw up and disappoint a user or customer they’d generally talk to you about it through the usual channels of email or a phone call (if you’d been sensible enough to put a phone number on your website) where you could deal with the customer’s issue as best you could and at least half on your terms.

Now you’re more likely to get talked about in places where you have no control and possibly very little influence as customers vent their frustrations at a poor online experience on various social channels. A new survey by Tealeaf and Harris Interactive shows that the number of users who encounter an issue on a website and then share that experience on blogs and social networks has doubled from 6%-12% of the people they surveyed in the last year. While use of social networks as channels for letting off steam is increasing the same survey shows that the number of people who would try to contact a company through their website or call centre has dropped.

Help I hear you cry, does this mean we’re (brands) losing control of our relationship with our customers? It may well feel like it and any brand who’s experienced the power of crowd opinion on social networks when they screw up without being prepared will tell you it can be a scary experience. And preparation is what it’s all about.

Obviously you need to iron out the kinks in your web experience to try to stop complaints happening in the first place, optimise your customer care processes and make sure you have clear ways to contact you on your website.

If you really want to meet this new threat* head on and be ready to douse the flames before they get too hot, then the best way to prepare yourself for a situation like this happening is to embrace social media and make it a part of your business. Open up, interact and join the conversation so that you’re right at the hub of the discussion about your brand, ready to solve peoples problems, admit your failings and generally provide great customer service through social channels. It’s not just usability (as in making your website or product easier to use), it’s about social or brand usability (as in making your brand sociable, approachable, responsive and interactive).

*Of course this isn't a threat really. It's possibly the best opportunity you
have ever had to really generate loyalty and brand alignment amongst your users and customers.