Monthly Archives: March 2010

Good News, I’m Using Buzz. Bad News, It’s a Complete Mess

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Don’t knock it until you try it. Right?

So I learned a week ago how to “hide” people I follow in Buzz from my Google Reader, which up until that point was the reason I refused to use Buzz.

A week in, there are more frustrations. It’s a huge mess.

First, manually hiding in Reader everyone I follow in Buzz is a nuisance. It’s necessary because otherwise, Buzz and Reader are duplicates and the noise is maddening.

Today I learned that all of my shared Reader items that got posted to Buzz had commenting turned off. That’s because you have to manually allow others to comment. You have to allow each and every person you follow in Buzz to this list. Ok, my first issue with Buzz is a preference (sort of, although it should be an OPTION). But this issue is a flaw. Major flaw. I won’t maintain this. Too much work. Instead there needs to be a “allow anyone to comment” option.

I apologize to everyone who can’t comment on my wonderful Reader shared items. Please mail your complaints to:
Matt Soreco
c/o Google Buzz Complaint Team
Mountain View, CA

My other frustrations:

  • When I’m typing a reply, sometimes the window is bumped down as I’m typing. I assume it’s because something new above was added.
  • The (new) count is useless. It’s hard to distinguish what’s new once you click on it.
  • I can’t figure out the @ reply feature. This might be user error. :-) Although I see others having the same difficulties.
  • All of the people I follow in Buzz are now in my contacts. Which is ok, but now my Android phone contact list is out of control. I know you can filter by contact with phone number, but you can’t by contacts with phone number and/or e-mail address (which is what I want).
  • I hate that it’s tied to Gmail. I hate that my sent items becomes cluttered with Buzz stuff.

The list is growing. I wrote about Resistance and Productivity before. I see Buzz as having a lot of nuisances that cause resistance. For me, these have to get worked out. I’ll bail. Like I did on other Google social media efforts.

What I’ve Been Working On, Part II

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Being in online marketing (and some web development) for over 10 years, I decided to take a little bit of my knowledge and try to sell it. I see a big opportunity for small local businesses. To this day, there are too many horribly created websites out there. If they have a site at all! Costs have also come down too. I can only imagine that a lot of local small business owners are intimidated by the “interwebs.” I can also imagine a lot of companies charge an arm and a leg for services I can provide for very little cost.

I bought the domain and launched a coming soon page for my new endeavor over a year ago:
Target Local Web

It’s time to get my side business underway! I already have business cards printed up.

I made it a habit to check online for websites of local businesses that I frequent. Like I said before, 99% either stink or don’t exist.

The site still needs some design work. I’ve found working on WordPress and buying a developer’s licence to the Thesis Theme helpful in getting me over the one obstacle I need help with–design. I’m still tweaking and learning. I want to master both before taking on clients.

I know html and some css and everything else needed to know about how to put a website together. From hosting to domains to the pages to the seo to the architecture, etc. And beyond that– analytics, site submissions, etc. I also think I have a good set of low to no cost tools to make it all come together.

Venturing into WordPress was pretty painless. Prior I had been maintaining pages that were strictly html, like http://nycbbb.com/, which I built from scratch in 2002.

Converting nycbbb.com to WordPress is not worth the effort. I have a pretty efficient system down to update the site. And nothing’s necessarily wrong with it. I did, however put NYCBBB’s blog on WordPress - http://nycbbb.com/blog/ - again, design to come soon.

I was also able to successfully transfer NYCBBB’s blog over to WordPress, which had been hosted on Blogger. I wanted to see what was involved. I had pointed blogger to a subdomain a few months ago. After the transfer, I brought the subdomain back “inhouse” and 301 redirected all the old urls to the new with a rewrite rule. I have some inner geekdom that comes out. But it’s really not too geeky when you find all the answers on “the Google.”

On top of it all, I put my own personal site, http://mattsoreco.com/, on WordPress too. I need to get my money’s worth on the Thesis purchase before I start getting some clients! Plus it’s another site to test things out on. I’m debating folding this blog into WordPress and put it on http://mattsoreco.com/ fully. But like NYCBBB, is it worth the effort? I’d rather focus on Target Local Web. Decisions, decisions…

I’m glad I ventured into WordPress. I’m glad I bought the Thesis Theme to make it easy to customize. Static HTML sites are a pain in the neck to maintain since changes don’t cascade, not to mention having to FTP the files and keep them in sync.

One site did get hacked, which makes me nervous. I read up on security, and patched everything up (I think, I hope). I haven’t had WordPress more than a week and it was hacked in a matter of days…

Enough for now. Now I got some real work to do!

Google Bookmarks Update

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Twice I wrote about the untapped potential of Google Bookmarks, and the limitations:
http://mattsoreco.com/2008/10/my-google-wishlist.html
http://mattsoreco.com/2008/10/bookmark-site-id-like-to-see.html

For the longest time, it seemed to have been built but left dormant. I love it, but wished they’d develop it more.

They updated the service today. Now you can create lists and share them.

It seems they worked on the social angle. I still want them to work on the ubiquity angle. I want my Chrome bookmarks, Android browser bookmarks, and Google bookmarks all to be the same. I want to be able to add a bookmark via e-mail, text, or Android app. How’s about it?

At least I know they haven’t forgotten about Bookmarks. I can continue dreaming.

What I’ve Been Working On, What I’ve Been Doing and Learning

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Besides my very first post, I haven’t blogged much about work. So here goes.

I have a passion for online marketing. I kind of fell into it back when I worked at The Foundation Center. They needed someone to manage a lot of the nuts and bolts of the online marketing program, which was ramping up in parallel with a new e-commerce enabled website. Prior to that I worked on coordinating the direct mail program, which I liked, but I saw the new opportunity and jumped on it. I’m glad I did! The online marketing program was built, with my help, from scratch. I mean scratch. Imagine that… I became addicted to the immediate results you can see when marketing online. Although we didn’t have the best analytics and tracking (or any at all), it was obvious where sales were coming from following an e-mail or newsletter ad.

I plan on writing more about my online marketing travels in future posts. I just wanted a quick intro to frame this post because most of my time since, has been on retention marketing (upselling, e-mail marketing, merchandising, etc). And of course analytics.

I got 8 years into my career and realized I by and large was working on half of the internet marketing puzzle. I needed acquisition experience!

That’s what made my current position so appealing. I was able to leverage my experience in retention and apply it solely on acquisition. I’m now responsible for SEO, SEM, and other initiatives like partnerships, social media, content creation, etc. It’s a challenge, but I love it.

On the social media front, I’ve launched a blog, Twitter account, and Facebook page. And even some other pages like YouTube and LinkedIn. There is still a lot of work to be done to maximize those!

As I go, I hone my craft so to speak. The biggest area, analytics. I’m currently reading Web Analytics 2.0 by Avinash Kaushik. While reading, there were some ah-ha moments, but far more reassuring moments. I like to have my suspicions, thoughts, and theories backed by “experts.” The biggest takeaway so far is to focus on the analytics that matter most and what’s most actionable. Looking at too much data can be more of a distraction. It’s helped me so far. And it’s helped my company too.

We recently launched some new features on the site, and careful attention needed to be put on the effects. Careful planning was done before (to make sure we knew what we had to measure) and after (to make sure what we were seeing is valid). It’s always nerve wracking to launch big new projects, but it’s reassuring to know you have all the bases covered to measure and take action if something isn’t giving you the desired results.

One area that I’m focusing a lot of attention on is funnel metrics. In e-commerce, there are a lot of steps customers go through before they ultimately order. If you can improve each step, even a little, the results follow. A lot can be improved with improving usability. Sometimes there are technical and resource limitations, or other priorities, that stand in the way. I’ve been given the green light to test some alternate pages hosted separately from our main site. This gives me the control to make changes quickly and easily. The goal is to target the first part of the funnel with laser like precision. Meaning a customer is looking for something, show it to them right away instead of requiring them to navigate through an entire site.

So far the traffic those sites have received are converting pretty well. They are highly targeted, so it’s no surprise. Whether or not the orders are incremental remains to be seen. Either way, the learning is valuable.

Wow, that was a really long winded answer to what I’ve been working on. I promise to post shorter posts on specific content areas soon. I finally feel I’ve touched on all areas on online marketing, so I can hopefully share some of my expeience in each area. Hmmm, maybe I’ll map out an outline later today…