What bores me about The Oscars is the very predictable acceptance speeches.  The event would be far more entertaining and educational if they only allowed the losers to speak as well.

“The script was terrible,” we might hear. “The first act created no suspense and by the third act a crackhead would be asleep.  The only good acting was by the main character’s dog, and the sound track tried too hard to create suspense and instead sounded so out of place we became aware of how boring the film actually was.”

Similarly, one of the most dangerous traps a marketer can fall into with LPO is disproportionate concern with the winner. If you pay attention to the losers, they’ll tell you what went wrong with them so you can avoid those mistakes as well.

SEM’s look to the winners for page elements or themes that boost performance, while not simultaneously looking to these pages for what may decrease results.  This oversight, and many others, can be overcome by a story-line, incremental test plan.

What do I mean by that?

I think of the HBO series, “The Wire”, for which Wikipedia has six notations citing it as the greatest television series of  all time, for it’s spectacular long-arch, chaotic yet coherent storyline.

LPO can also sustain an impressive run of valuable tests if the test planner understands the fundamental page elements at play, the messaging and aesthetic themes that may play them out, the precise production requirements to pull it all off, and the end audience’s anticipated processing of all the work.

Incremental knowledge gain is not a hot run on a craps table.  A well-designed test plan builds evolutionary paths that are both flexible and coherent.

The global trend towards digital socialization is around the corner and will make quite an impact on digital culture in 2010.

In 2009, we saw data portability (more simply described as logging onto “other” sites with your “Faebook” login.  We also saw people begin to understand what Twitter is good for.

We’re in a time now when countries such as India and China are quickly getting on board with social media.  Facebook’s explosive growth in the last few years was driven largely by non-US members.

What this means is that an unprecedented opportunity to globally extend communities is arriving.

The challenge will be bridging offline cultural gaps online, and the businesses that can enable this osmosis to the benefit of their brand will be the largest winners.

Another powerful social media trend will be around eReaders.  We are about to see an explosion in the adoption of eReaders that might very well outpace the iPod’s.  And as people replace their source of information from paper to digital, the advantages of digital will arrive as well.  There will be eReader apps, communities, and networks swirling around our sources of information in ways we have never seen.

And with game-changing changes in social media, we will also see businesses struggle to keep their social media policies up to date, flexible, yet risk-adverse.  As the global communities extend further, and digital reading begins quickly burning paper, the potential upside and downside will be a challenge for businesses to navigate.

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With so much excitement about the iPhone amongst both consumers and consumers, and the vertical market share growth charted by the device (from 5 to 10% between 2008 and 2009), it’s puzzling to see a recent Gartner Inc. report predict that Google’s Android, currently at 2% market share, will leapfrog to 14.5% by 2012, making it the second-largest mobile platform at the great expense of the iPhone’s market share.

The Gartner report predicts that the iPhone’s growth will become stagnant, growing a few points to a whopping 12% by 2012. Why such a slow-down for the iPhone? And what does this mean for marketers who are just now catching onto the surge of client interest and investment?

Most of the projected growth is attributed to Google’s own ability and efforts to promote the Android, as well as its own apps and the large number of manufacturers making the open source device, which will make it a cheaper option than the iPhone. Additionally, the iPhone, not being open source, has limitations, whereas an open platform allows developers to implement functionality the platform provider haven’t gotten around to yet, are not good at, or simply put: other people could do it better

What should marketers be doing?
• Follow Android’s market share growth and start talking to your clients or in-house teams about the emergence of Android so they are comfortable with the change if and when it happens
• Study the mobile apps already on Android, and what your competitors are doing on the platform
• Get your technical teams up to speed on Android by downloading the SDK:
http://developer.android.com/guide/index.html
• Create your demo project long before anyone else does!

The open source  world has a lot to do with where I am now.  The first company I started was running on a shoe-string budget out of my band’s rehearsal space.  That was 11 years ago, and since then I have grown a fond admiration for open source developers, products, and the collective movement that is wide open to that one great idea someone might have.

That person can build their idea into the conjucation and contribute to the product’s evolution.

I wish The Onion were that way, but sadly, they have an odd closed door policy of no article submissions from writers.

While The Onion is consistently good, I believe it could be consistently great if it were to allow a piece to be submitted from that lone person who just had a great idea at 3 AM.

Even The New Yorker, with their stolid, intellectually elite, cultural epicenter perspective allows contributions.

About once a week something happens to me that could make for a good, perhaps great depending on the writing, Onion article.  I think of The Onion because this type of humor is on my mind.  When my parents go shopping, my father follows my mother around as though she’s his seeing eye dog, becoming increasingly bored and fidgety until he drifts into a dream-state.

That’s when you see him by the make-up counter in Macy’s practicing his golf swing.  The man thinks of golf, and his mind goes there instinctually.

My mind goes to the ironic, crass humor that The Onion has baked into their DNA.

Today an email slipped through our company’s spam filter, spoofed as an authentic Pfizer email regarding Viagra.  The first thing I thought of was, “I wonder how Pfizer’s spam filter deals with the billions of emails about Viagra?”

Is checking the junk folder a regular part of a Pfizer’s employees’ day?  How do they know whether the incoming email from Helen Moore at a hotmail address with Viagra keywords is spam or a woman concerned that her husband has had an erection for 8 hours?

I can imagine an Onion article title:

Pfizer IT Finds 2,987,548 Customer Service Emails in Spam Filter

Ok, another thing I hear marketers at the conventions I have been attending talk about with great obsession is conversion analysis, and rightly so.

But we do so to the point that we limit our analysis to the conversion zone at the expense of overlooking an equally common cause: usability.

If you reflect on your personal experiences with websites you have abandoned for reasons other than irrelevant content, you’ll probably agree with me that the #1 (or #2) reason you did so had to do with usability.

You couldn’t find something.  The site was too busy and difficult to scan.  The look and feel just kind of annoyed you.

These are the “first touch” reasons that will send most users away from your site before they get to point of considering your value proposition.

And so I have found myself increasingly interjecting, “you don’t have a conversion problem, you have a usability problem”.

The take-away is that scrutiny of landing pages and “conversion” pages should be complemented with studies on usability.

I am in Toronto now for SMX Analytics, largely moderated by Danny Sullivan and Vanessa Fox.

I am so surprised to hear the consistent references to high bounce rate as problems.  This seems irresponsible and short-sighted, as though a user who only accesses one page on your site is a failure of some kind.

Consider Google’s “I’m Feeling Lucky” Button

This search option is there for when you think you know exactly the destination in mind, or just want to add a bit of chance to the search.  Regardless, I would argue that at least 25% of searches are users just looking for one page that has all the information they want.

One Page Visits That Should Not Be More

• “Definition” searches.  This is a common motive (see my 10 Motives of Search).
• Contact info - no reason for two pages here.  I’m feeling lucky!
• Wikipedia searches.  The pages on that site tell a story from A - Z on one massive scrolling page.
• “First Touch” comparison, research searches.  If you are price comparing, or skimming through options in order to round up a bunch of sites to consider for a purchase, you are less likely to go deep on the first touch.  A bounce here just means you were considered.

The fact is that people want to get where they are going fast, and leave fast, unless you have the unique privilege of running a site like Facebook or ESPN that has a valid reason to engage people.  I am not saying bounce rate has no value as a data source.  I am saying it can be worse than no value, it can give you entirely the wrong picture.  Be careful with bounce.

Measure Impact, Not Bounce

Instead of bounce, consider:

• Time on site
• Referring keyword (was it a “one night stand” keyword?  Maybe they found what they were looking for and have no more reason to come back)
• Return visits - maybe the bounce was a first touch and the user is coming back.

Tomorrow I am speaking at SMX West tomorrow. I am going to present my “Motive Analysis”, which is a process I created to identify thematic motive disconnects” between what a visitor is looking for, and how you are messaging to them (this is a very simplistic explanation).

Anyway, in order to comprehend what a Motive Analysis is, it’s important to be familiar with my “10 Motives of Search”.

The “10  Motives” is a list of recurring search motives.

You can download the PDF of the slide I will present tomorrow that has my 10 Motives of Search.

We’ve all heard about the many cost-cutting measures companies are taking to survive in what I call “The Post-Bush Economy”.

One measure we haven’t heard enough about is analytics tuning.

We hear about budgets being re-allocated or slashed. Traditional is moving online, viral and buzz are being questioned, RFP’s are going out in hopes of finding less expensive vendors, and so on.

But can an organization truly optimize its channels if it hasn’t made the most of its web analytics data?

As our analytics guru Micah Fisher-Kirshner said in a recent newsletter, “Ironically, most of the large companies we have worked with have such nascent analytics practices that their requirements barely scratch the surface of even GA’s capabilities.”

This leads to the question: how can a company know what to cut, and by how much, unless they have a highly optimized analytics practice?

The first step in budget re-allocationis investing in the enhancement of your analytics practice.

If you are reading this and thinking that your analytics practice is probably not what it should be, contact us, we’ll give you an “analytics check-up” that will ensure your organization can make wise budget decisions to survive in the Post-Bush economy.

This will be an interesting year for paid search.

Last year there was about $10B spent in paid - this year could be as much as $12B.

You don’t hear as much talk about viral and buzz campaigns.  Too risky?

I began doing SEO in late 1999.  It took me about 18 months to really get the hang of it, as back then there was very little information on SEO.

I was solely responsible for the marketing of my small company (eight people).

The economic collapse hit in 2001, just as the great revenue gains I was generating were kicking in.  And as the economy got worse, my SEO achievements accelerated.  I built many different websites so that each of the four salesmen could operate their own brand.  By doing so, the company would have not just a number one rank for our keywords, but often four.

Our revenue grew and grew, seemingly immune from the economic downturn.  As the overall market decreased for our industry, our market share increased faster.

An article in today’s NY Times describes a merchant who is doing the same, but with paid search.

The merchant has increased  his revenue by doubling his conversion rate, his bid, and his marketing budget.

Think of all the companies out there spending significant amounts on brand campaigns, yet are budget constrained in paid search.

The right move for these marketers is to drastically cut, or eliminate, their under performing non-search campaigns and maximizing their investments in search.