Snip/Shot by Toddy Mladenov

Does your blog content suck and why?

Last week I was going through my RSS feeds (the ones described in one of my previous posts Using Yahoo Pipes and Google Reader to Read Only the Important Stuff) and saw the following lame post (NOFOLLOW still used despite the PageRank sculpting changes:)). My short and unconstructive critique is: LAME. My long and “a little bit” constructive (but sarcastic) critique could be something like this:

• Dude, check the language first! I am not a native English speaker (to be honest I have never being taught English) but I am pretty sure the Queen of England will look quite confused if she reads your post.
• One sentence != one paragraph! Make them at least two in a paragraph – people should be able to take a breath every 10 secs or so.
• Related to the previous one - period in English Grammar doesn’t denote the end of paragraph but the end of sentence. I see you know what comma is! Now is time to read the next lesson from English Grammar for Dummies.
• And last but maybe the only one people will care about. Why the hell are you increasing the carbon footprint of the planet with your useless post? What is the added value of your words and why should people read them? What is your point? Google is great and Microsoft is evil? Yeah, like we’ve never heard of that one before. Didn’t you hear that we moved to the phase where both companies are evil?

 

Anticipating people’s reaction I will say that deterioration of content quality is old news. Allowing everybody to do what previously only professionals were able to do (like blogging and journalism) is reason for the worsened content quality - old news again. But we as bloggers are responsible for that content and should make sure that more than one person (me, myself and I) benefit from our content.

 

Here are couple of reasons why I think lot of bloggers publish content that sucks:

• They publish content almost every day. It is true that search engines like “fresh” content but bloggers should ask themselves what “fresh” means. Is it, “fresh” by date or “fresh” by perspective?
• They write for SEO and not for humans. Their posts have no flow and no story, and are published because they want to get traffic for certain keywords. Yeah! I think this is the way blogs are abused. But the books teach us that we should have blog to direct traffic to our sites.
• They are not passionate about the topic. They HAVE to write something in order to have “fresh” (by date) content, and choose topics that are already covered, or they are not so interested in, or don’t understand deeply enough, or… or… or… The point is that if you are not passionate about the topic your write, you will produce poor content.
• They hurry to publish “something” about the latest news. There are few bloggers who get the information first hand. The rest of us are either under NDA and cannot spread the news or just hear the news from somebody else. Every day I see in my RSS feeds tens and even hundreds of posts  that repeat the same information.
• Their language is poor. I cannot give better example than the post above. But blog post doesn’t need to be so horrible to be considered poor by your English teacher. Using simple words and sentences; not making your point clear; not engaging with the reader – all this makes your content boring.
• They blast their new post on every social networking tool they know. social networking became like the email spam – Facebook has 200M users so lets send to all of them my new blog post! It is annoying when you go to targeted community or niche social site and you get irrelevant content. Take for example Sphinn – there is so much spam that the moderators can’t keep with it. (BTW, here is a link to the Sphinn submission of the post above – I am wondering why Sphinn moderators still keep this one active).

 

Few questions we should ask ourselves before writing a new post (and I am warning you – this is already written on the web, and “yes” I am most probably repeating somebody’s words, but… I’ll do it anyway:)):

• Is the post you want to submit something people care about? Don’t understand this one wrong – to care about something doesn’t mean to be the latest news that everybody is talking about. Blogging is not always about the news and I see it more as tool to help and educate others than the vehicle to submit the latest celebrity news.
• Are you adding value with your post? Sure, you can express your opinion about everything on the Web but… Is your opinion something that others will appreciate? Or question? Or trigger conversation? Or just educate somebody? 
• Are you spending enough time researching your new topic? You cannot always write your posts on the fly (or maybe you can but you are exception). In order to get depth and breath in your post you need to spend some time in researching. Try to find out what other people think about the topic; link to their posts and start conversation.
• What is the best place to promote your post and engage with your target audience? Depending on the topic there are different communities you can engage with. Target the right one and don’t blast your post randomly.

 

And here are few we should ask ourselves after we write the post BUT BEFORE we hit Publish. The best way to do it is to save a draft, go to sleep and re-read the post on the next morning.

• When you read your post again, do you still think it should be published? After thinking for some time you may decide that your post is irrelevant, or not written well, not interesting enough, or just too… hmm… you. Well, if this is the case either delete it or rework it.
• Try to imagine your readers and their reaction. Anticipate their comments. Do you expect comments at all? Prepare yourself to answer their questions or reply to their comments. Is your point solid or weak?

 

Hitting Publish is just the beginning. Your blog post can die immediately (as most of our posts do), can live for awhile, or can become sticky. Of course we all want the last one but most of us are still looking for a way to get there. When the time passes you should ask yourself – Did my post bring me closer to my goal (whatever your goal is)?

Now I will go back to the beginning. You may be wondering why I linked to my post about Yahoo Pipes. My goal when creating those was to filter content I am not interested in. It seems now I am back to zero – after using them for few months I am still getting posts like the one above. It is time to start the next round from the battle against content overload.

IIS Search Engine Optimization Toolkit Beta - Hard to Find but Maybe Useful

IIS SEO Toolkit Beta is part of Microsoft Web Platform Installer Beta and as Lauren Cooney and Ann Smarty from Search Engine Journal reported it was released on June 3rd. However the link from Lauren Cooney’s post send you to an older version of the installer so you better use the Search Engine Journal one, which points to the SEO Toolkit’s Web Page on IIS Web Site.

How to Install and Run It

Starting the download presents you with a cluttered UI where you can select bunch of things. Initially I wasn’t able to spot the toolkit option and had to click on the tabs and read every entry but when it seems What’s New tab proved to be the right place anyway (see the picture below). Download is only 0.5 MB and the installation is quite fast.

If you expected to have stand alone application then you will be… heh, surprised, disappointed or whatever feeling you find appropriate. I was just frustrated because I couldn’t get to it immediately and had to read the IIS SEO Toolkit documentation. The tool is part of IIS Manager However I found the IIS Site Analysis - Video Walkthrough quite useful.

Running the Site Analysis tool on my blog spitted out the following results:

First Impressions

At first I was shocked to see that I have 15 broken links (of course I started with the red line items:)) on the site but after some digging into the report I found out that the tool considers the beacons (1px GIFs) as broken links (those are coming from the Amazon affiliate links). A little bit annoying because lot of sites still use the beacons for affiliate links. It may become tedious tasks to sort out all those “broken” links from the real ones.

I was also quite confused with the number of errors and warnings I received but after careful analysis it came out that all those were valid.

It was disappointing that the Robots Exclusion and Sitemap and Site Indexes tools from the toolkit work only on sites living on the local machine. It would be useful to get those available for any web site.

The Useful Features

In just a few minutes I was able to identify quite two-three things I had to fix on my blog:

• It seems I had a broken link in one of my posts that generated lot of noise in the report. Most of the errors and warnings were reported because this broken link. My suggestion would be to keep track of the broken links and not use those pages in the other reports.
• It seems I have to remove few directories from the crawling list to avoid multiple canonical formats issues.

The Site Analysis tool provides good statistics and information about:

• HTTP Headers
• Page title
• Page description
• Page keywords (outdated concept for SEO though)
• Page headings
• Page information like encoding, content type, last modified etc.
• Performance information like size and time to download
• Word analysis like words counts (total and unique), 2 word phrases, 3 word phrases (something useful would be keyword density and prominence)
• Link analysis like inbound links, outbound links, link paths etc. as well as link text information

In general the tool is a good start and can be a base for something very useful. It is only Beta 1 and according to the announcement made by CarlosAg from IIS Product Team there will be more features coming. People dealing with SEO have a long list of features they would like to see in such a tool and hopefully they will not get disappointed.

The Use…lessness of Analytics Teams

Here is the question – how often do you ask your Analytics (or BI) team to provide you with data in order to make decision or plan something in your job? When you have this answered, here is one more – how often this team can provide you with the data within (ok, let’s be realistic) 24h? For those of you who answered the second one with: “Every time I ask.”, I can only say: “Waw! You are the luckiest people on the Earth!”. For the rest of us there are two options:

• Never ask again (and most probably therefore most of us answered the first question with: “Once in a lifetime”)
• Continue working with the BI team and hope someday you will get the answer in reasonable time if at all

 

There is a high chance I will offend somebody with this post, but please don’t take it personally – it’s all business, and you should know it the best.

 

Recently I had to collect some data for a web site usage that was intended to help us do capacity planning for our servers. I’ve asked our Analytics team for the following:

• Number of page views worldwide for the last X months. I wanted to know about any peaks so I needed the data by day or ideally by hour.

 

OK! How long do you think should take for the Analytics team to collect this information? A day? A week? A month? Never? I am more leaning towards the last.

 

Here is how it went:

• If you work for a big company your first problem is finding the right person in the right Analytics team in the right organization who can help you. In majority of the cases you will not be able to get all those questions answered by one person or even one team. It may take you days or even weeks until you identify the right people you need to work with.
• Once you get over your first obstacle you face the challenge with the analysts’ schedule. They are busy people, you know, and who the heck are you to ask them to spend from their precious time to find answers on your silly questions.
• If you are very lucky (I emphasize VERY lucky) you may receive occasional reply with a hint for the data. Don’t even dare to ask clarifying questions – either you get the data or not but… it is like the lottery – this was your “once in a lifetime” chance to get a reply from Business Analyst. You should print the reply, frame it and put it on your wall.
• And if you are the luckiest amongst the VERY lucky ones you may start conversation, which… takes weeks until you get the data you really need. And the reason for that is that they never have it in a consumable format (Yes, you are right! Even the page views I requested above).

 

Just to compare the experience, I requested the following information from two engineers in our team:

• Server hits for the last two weeks broken down per service, and (of course) per hour.
• Number of page views worldwide for the last X months. I wanted to know about any peaks so I needed the data by day or ideally by hour. (You read it right – this is the same information I asked the Analytics team. However the colleague I asked didn’t have access to all properties so he was able to provide me with information for only one of them.)

 

Can you guess how fast I got the information in the second case?… Give it another try!… 2 hours! “Why so slow?”, will you ask. Yeah, because I requested it 1/2h before lunch, else I could have gotten it faster. Yes, this is the way our Engineering team works – we have the data and monitor it every day. Here is my question:

• IF as engineer I am solely responsible for instrumenting the Web site to log the necessary metrics; and IF as consumer of those metrics I am responsible to look in the analytics tools and find the data I need by myself; THEN why the heck companies need Analytics teams?

 

I will let you answer this question for yourself but here is my advice to the managers of Business Analytics teams as well as their reports:

• Lot of Business Analytics teams have proven to be reactive teams; the only data they have readily available is the one reported on the scorecards for upper management. Also (similar to accounting?!?!), they need almost a month to scramble it and present it in consumable form. If those teams want to be successful they should be pro-active and anticipate not only the questions from upper managers but also those coming from peer teams (including development).
• Key to success for the Analytics teams is their close relationship with Development teams responsible for  implementation. Quite often analytics instrumentation is at the bottom of the priority list just because Analytics teams don’t make the effort to justify their asks. Good implementation requires good requirements and if Analytics teams are not able to communicate those clearly then the implementation will suck and become useless.
• Another key to success for Analytics teams is their close relationship with peer teams. They should exchange data, ork closely on requirements and scorecards, and evangelize the need of analytics.
• Business Analytics (or its twin brother Business Intelligence) should serve the whole company and not only upper management. I know that kissing up is important for analysts but this is not “business” analytics – I call this (politely) “reporting” to management.
• You guys work with numbers and having in mind that most of use have good understanding how much is 2+2 don’t try to convince us that 2+2=5 or send us data that says 2+2=3. What I want to say with that is get your data straight and if some numbers don’t match provide good explanation.
• Business Analytics teams should also provide insights of the data. For example if there is a change month over month they should be able to provide explanation why this happened and what measures can be taken to correct it in the future.
• The last one (but not the least important) is that Analytics teams should be available and provide transparency of the data. Monthly emails are not enough (keep in mind – people have email rules for those) - go out and socialize your findings. And tailor your message to different audiences because different people want to know different things.

 

It is really important how Analytics teams position themselves in the company. I am true believer in the analytics data and I don’t think any company can be successful without analyzing it and making decisions based on it. More and more companies rely on the Analytics teams to drive their business and soon we will learn which of those are strong and which not.

 

Now, if you ask me whether I believe in the Analytics teams… Yeah, I am about to see one that is useful.

Twitter's Business Model - My Take

For a while I was hearing people say: “Twitter has no business model!”, or “Twitter cannot monetize their service!” but it seems that something changed lately. All started with the rumors that Google will buy Twitter few months ago; then talks that Microsoft tries to estimate the value of Twitter; and now – Twitter is trying to get into the search business.

Surprise! Twitter tries to make money by himself. Jackie Huba posted Twitter & advertizing, part 2 almost two months ago and her post is inline with what I was thinking about Twitter and how they can make their service profitable. The part that I don’t like too much is that every online business (including myself with this blog:)) tries to make money from advertisement. There is nothing tangible behind the advertisement! There is no value for the user, or customer who sees the ad! Unless… the ad is relevant to what the user is doing at the moment.

In all the cases Twitter can monetize their service. Even with the old technique called “buy me because I am cool”. We’ve seen big companies doing that a lot while the economy was booming. Soon this time will come back and Twitter will be in good position.

Until then I bet that Twitter is going to follow the ads model with their recent investment in search but here are my advises for them.

• If Twitter goes with the ad model then I would like to have the ads non-intrusive and relevant to what I tweet about. Also, their ads should follow the tweets model – no more than 140 chars (or even less), and no more than 1 ad per tweet. If this will be the way to keep the service free I think lot of people will be fine with it.
  
• This one though I like more: Twitter has the power of information – news, trends, opinions… everything you can imagine is discussed there. This is what Jackie means in her post above. But there is more to it!
  
  What about surveys? Right now the influencers run free surveys among their followers. Twitter’s own account has more than 1 million followers – this is much bigger representative sample than most of the surveys done by the research companies.
  
  Trends is another one. Products and companies are always discussed offline and online, and Twitter is one place where this happens a lot. If companies plan to run for example marketing campaign they can partner with Twitter and monitor the reaction from the beginning till the end – what people’s perception is? Do they accept it? Do they reject it? Etc.
  
  News. Great example is Mike Wilson who tweeted during Continental Airlines crash in Denver (for some reason US news sites are not among the tope ten results for this search:)). Twitter can be the new CNN – they can create news channel (and of course serve adds there:)) and serve the news before everybody else. Also, keep in mind that more and more news are created and recorded by normal people and not journalists (9/11 video recording, Concorde crash etc.)
  
  Product reviews. If Twitter is able to get a sense for the sentiment for particular product they can provide this information back to companies or create review channels people can subscribe to.

I can go on and on with even more ideas but you get my point. Information is powerful – you just need to find good way to deal with it. Google became successful because they found a way to index the information on the Web. Right now Twitter is big bucket where everybody throws information and the first one who finds a way to organize it will become profitable.

But Twitter needs to be also careful. Twitter is great platform that allows third parties to build on top of it. Whatever monetization model they build they need to make sure it propagates to those third party applications – else, what’s the point? How many of you go and update your status from Web? And how many from TweetDeck?

P.S. And if Twitter takes one of my ideas above I hope they will remember where they read about it :)

Using Yahoo Pipes and Google Reader to Read Only the Important Stuff

If you are one of those people who get overwhelmed with information then you may try using technology for pre-sorting it for you. I certainly am such a person – I like getting more information but so far I couldn’t find good way to keep track on the latest and greatest. Having in mind that I have full time job and quite busy life, I am still looking for the perfect technology that will deliver the right content to me at the right time. Unfortunately I have to deal with the current state and use whatever is available.

 

For me RSS feeds are not enough. I like the bloggers but (I hope they will forgive me) I don’t want to read every piece of crap they put in front of me through their RSS feeds (the same way I don’t expect you to read every piece of crap I write:)). There are a bunch of feeds filtering web sites where you can go and filter your RSS feeds using keywords (you can read about some in Josh Catone’s post 6 Ways to Filter Your RSS Feeds). I took those as a starting point and here is what I came up with.

Blog Aggregation Pipe

Using Yahoo Pipes I created a giant pipe where I dumped the RSS feeds from blogs I currently try to follow - a bit over 30. This became my Blog Aggregation Pipe.

 

You do that by just adding Fetch Feed Source and typing the RSS URL in the available input box. The benefit of having pipe like that is that you can easily add additional RSS feeds by just adding one more entry to the source.

Topic Funnels

After that I created few other pipes each one of which filters the content for specific topic. Everyone of those pipes uses the Blog Aggregation Pipe as input. Those pipes I use as Topic Funnels – for example this is the Analytics Funnel.

You create this funnel by using the Blog Aggregation Pipe as a source and passing the output from it through a Filter Operator. Here is how the configuration looks like:

I went with the basic approach – filtering only the title for particular keywords. Going forward I will try to improve the filters based on the posts I read and the keywords I see in those posts but for now I think this is enough. 

One thing you need to be aware is that browsers cache the content of the pipe and if you test you changes in the same window you may start seeing the same results again again – either use Ctrl+Shift+F5 or just open new window when you run your pipe.

Time to Go and Read

Once you have all the funnels configured you can click on the conveniently located Add to Google button after you run the pipe. The neat things about Google Reader are that it marks certain posts as Read once you read them as well as it allows you to add notes to the posts (something I always wanted Outlook to do:)).

 

Now I think I am all set to read only things I am interested in and don’t spend time on random posts.

Slide:ology or How to Make Impact with Your Presentation

slide:ology: The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentationsby Nancy Duarte should be on every presenter's shelf. The book is full of practical advices starting from how to generate ideas for your presentation, going through how to structure it and present the data to what colors and pictures to choose. It is true that every one of us has been in boring presentations – I would say majority of the presentations I’ve been to have been boring, and this book will help you stand out and be “The One Presenter” and not just “One Of the Others”.

Here are the big ideas I took away from the book:

• Presentations are about the audience not about the presenter.
• Every presentation should have an engaging story.
• The slides are helping the presenter make his or her point and should not distract the audience.
• Presentations are not documents – use visuals not text.
• The best presentations are result of collective effort and not individual achievement.

Normally I would take the best parts of the book and keep them on my blog for reference however the book itself is A reference – therefore I have it on my shelf and plan to use it every time I prepare presentation. Though here is what you can read in the book:

• Questionnaire that helps you define your audience.
• Different methods for brainstorming and generating ideas.
• Extensive list of diagrams that you can use in your presentations; explaining also when to use them.
• Practical examples how to present the data.
• How to arrange the elements on your slides and what the meaning of the elements and their position is?
• How to use different visual elements like background, color and text?
• How to use images?
• How and when to use animations?
• How to use templates?
• The constraints you need to deal with when creating your presentation.

At the time I was reading the book my team and I had to prepare a presentation for an offsite. The goal of the offsite was to present broader group of colleagues and partners with our plans for the future. Applying the principles in the book we decided to change the template and although we kept the points from the original one we created presentation that stand-out from the rest. Changing the background and the colors, placing the right pictures at the right times and adding story to the presentation allowed us to really make people think about the area we will be working on. Here is how we approached the presentation (and you can read about this approach in the book):

• I scheduled regular meetings with my team to work on the presentation. We had about 5 to 6 one-hour-sessions for the whole team where we brainstormed and generated ideas for the presentation. We came up not only with a story for it but also with two good diagrams that we plan to use as our model.
• Once we knew what we want to present we started creating the slides. We were supposed to have a checkpoint with our manager and the rest of the presenting teams few days (actually one working day and the weekend) before the event – at the time from all four presentations ours was the worst :) We all had good idea what we wanted to present but we weren’t ready to put the slides yet. It took us another 4-5 hours to have them created.
• Once we had the draft created we worked over email (because it was the weekend already) to finally polish those.
• My colleague who did the actual presentation also rehearsed for few additional hours with another member of my team.
• The actual presentation was a hit. My colleague did great job telling the story and inspiring the people in the room and the slides we created gave additional weight on the points she made.

After the presentation I received lot of feedback from people saying that this was the best presentation from all – they really liked it and it made lot of impact on them. My manager also stopped by and congratulated us – he was amazed how we emerged from the chaotic and unclear slides we presented on the checkpoint. Of course I don’t want to take all the credit for the presentation – my team did great job creating it and my report did great job presenting – it was a team success.

Are Your Customers Really Being Difficult?

In today’s blog post on her blog Valeria Maltoni lists the “Top 10 Reasons Why Your Customers are Being Difficult” and on my comment that I prefer to look at the “customers” more like “client” she replied something that provoked my post. This is what Valeria wrote:

“@Toddy - however, interestingly, many businesses are set up to have transactions, keep moving people through the funnel or pipeline. This might be fodder for another post as things are changing rapidly especially in types of businesses that are evolving.”

This brought up the question how may businesses are set up to have transactions or keep moving people through the pipeline? And is this the right business model? The only one I can think of is the grocery business and even that one can lose customers if it just uses the conveyor model.

Let me give you an example. Imagine you have few choices of grocery stores to go – let’s say Whole Foods, Safeway, QFC and Trader Joe’s. How do you choose which one to go to? Here are few criteria you most probably use:

• Closest location
• Assortment
• Quality (Organic food:))
• Price
• Brand preference

Let’s say that you are a snob and the brand preference is the most important for you. Than the financial crisis comes and you cannot pay anymore the triple price for organic food in Whole Foods and you settle on the low price (for the same organic product) in Trader Joe’s. Once the crisis passes then you go back to Whole Foods and everybody is happy – you saved money during crisis, Whole Foods got you back and Trader Joe’s made few transactions with you. This is typical for pipeline businesses – they don’t care who comes in and who goes out as long as they can sell you something. As Valeria wrote, many businesses are set up that way – they consider their success by the number of transactions, and this is the most important for them.

But what if?… What if for example Whole Foods finds a way to keep you as their customer during tough time. What if they provide you with some incentive so you receive part of your money back – whether it is a cashback, or discount coupons, or rewards card, or link to Upromise account. There are many options they can choose from. The key is they know what are you looking for.

I know that it is easier said than done. You may say: “How are they supposed to capture the feedback? Stick surveys to the apples?” Not really! But if you give me an apple I will be glad to fill in five-minute-survey for you:) Knowing me, and you, and the guy staying next to you in line they will know what they can do to keep us in their lines and not move to their competitors’. We call it “feedback loop” but the loop is not closed until the business reacts on the feedback.

I think the point here is not whether your customers have been difficult; the point is whether you know your customers and whether you adapt your business according to your customers’ needs. Here are the two questions you need to answer:

• Is your company transaction oriented or customer oriented?
• Which one will position you better in the long term?

How late is “late” to keep a customer loyal?

Today I received a phone call from Comcast representative responsible for our street (you know, those guys who knock on your door and offer you stuff:)). He told me that he received a list of people who are scheduled for disconnect and was interested to know whether I will reconsider my decision if he gives me discount on the rates and “more movies”. Too late!

I was Comcast customer for more than 3 years – started with basic TV and Internet and upgraded about year and a half ago to premium channels and DVR. Of course with the upgrade also my bill grew:) The only times I heard from Comcast for those 3 years where when I had problems with the service, and the only “offers” I got from them were from this type: “If you don’t want to pay for support on issues, you can pay few bucks more per month, else it will cost you $99 to get technician to your home.” At the time I thought: “OK, if I pay $2/month I will be covered for the next 4 years and I can call the technician every day:)”, and signed up. Don’t understand me wrong! It is not that I was unhappy with the service but at some point of time I got the feeling that I am not getting enough value for the money I am paying.

Few of my neighbors switched to Verison FiOS and sent mail to the neighborhood how happy they are. Few weeks ago Verison guy stopped at my house (you know, one of those guys who knock… you get it:)) and threw few numbers for the same service as Comcast + 1 more HD box + watching recordings in every room + more premium channels for the half of the price I was paying for the first 6 months and $20 less for the remaining of the year. In few words – he convinced me. Of course you should not forget the installation fee that will offset the $20 for the second half of the year but my saving was 1/4 of what I was currently paying and I got more goodies like premium channels and additional HD box.

When I called Comcast to cancel the existing service the lady was very friendly (I had problem with their callback service that really frustrated me but this on the side), and just asked me whether I will reconsider if she offers me same options for lower price. She wasn’t pushy which I liked, but she tried to keep me as customer as much as possible. Normally I am hard on my decisions and don’t look back and wonder “what if”, but after the call from Comcast today I asked myself: “What if I received a call after New Year, and Comcast offered me to upgrade my service and pay less money?” Would I consider Verison then? I don’t think so. Normally I don’t want to go through the troubles of having some cable guy at home, drilling my walls just to save few hundreds.

But the country is in financial crisis. My goal is to keep my standard of living but pay less money for it. Goal for businesses should be to keep their customers so they have uninterrupted stream of revenue. It may not be obvious but the solution is simple – if companies (or their employees) think proactively what their customers want, and act proactively to offer it, we, the customers will be happy and stay loyal. Isn’t it that what companies need – to keep existing customers and acquire new ones? In case of Camcast is really simple. If they gave me a call few weeks ago and offered me what they offered me today I wasn’t going to switch to Verison.

Here is what I would do if I was the guy who called me this morning:

1. Every January I would call every one of my customers to wish him or her New Year and chat about their experience in the past year. Why January? For two reasons:
   • After the shopping spree made during the holiday season, people start rethinking their finances, and
   • Tax season starts in January, and people start thinking about their finances even more
2. I will have handy all the promotions my company offers, and will go over those with my clients (yes, I would think of those people as clients and not just customers). We will work together to find a way to increase the value of the deal; for both sides. This doesn’t mean I have to give them money back. Can be rate discount, or free service for 3 or 6 months, or they may want to subscribe for more but just have no time to call our customer service. And it is not that companies don’t offer discounts – Comcast always has promotions for new subscribers, why don’t they extend those to the existing ones?
3. Two-three months after that I will call them to ask whether they are happy with the service and whether I can help with something else.

Next year I will do the same and the year after and the year after, as long as I work for this company. If the year is bad (think recession like now) then I will be even stricter. I will not wait to hear that my customer goes to the competition before I remember that he or she is MY customer.

And one more thing: if Verison forgets about me by next year, I will switch back to Comcast… or somebody else, who knows :) We, the customers are the one who drive the economy, and should demand that companies pay attention what we want.

What is “typical” for web response time?

Very often I participate in discussions where web response times are discussed and I hear all kind of strange statements (called “crap”:)). While browsing the Web for the last 13 and so years, starting with slow (9.6Kbps) modem connection over analog telephone line and ending with quite satisfying (6Mbps) broadband one I can certainly say that I’ve build my own opinion. When I hear statement “typical page load time is 6 sec” I get really pissed off. I want to scream: “Are you nuts?!!!! 6 sec is ridicules time! Who is going to wait 6 seconds for your crappy page to load?”

I remember few years ago at SAP when we developed one of the first WebDynpro application and our prototype page loaded in… (hold on)… 20 mins. And I remember the time before SAP when colleagues of mine developed online PDF merger that presented the success page with link to the merged PDF after… (hold on again)… 20 mins (I don’t know what is so “typical” about the number 20 but they really responded after approximately 20 mins of time). Twenty minutes is totally unacceptable response time for any application (not only Web) and this examples triggered research I did years ago (SAP one is from 2003 and the PDF one from 2001) to understand what are the acceptable response times in Web space. After searching Google for the PDF scenario and reading the UX guidelines for the WebDynpro one, the number 3 stuck in my mind and I can’t get it out now.

3 seconds is the response time you should not exceed on the Web! That’s it!

Searching in Google today here is one of the top results you will receive The Psychology of Web Performance. I really like the following sentence from the post:

“Keep your page load times below tolerable attention thresholds, and users will experience less frustration (Ceaparu et al. 2004), lower blood pressure (Scheirer et al. 2002), deeper flow states (Novak, Hoffman, and Yung 2000), higher conversion rates (Akamai 2007), and lower bailout rates (Nielsen 2000).”

10 years ago when the modems ruled the world the goal was to create small pages that can be served fast via modem connection. Today we create huge pages that contains tons of images, videos, style sheets, JavaScripts, Flash and who knows what else. Some of these can exceed few hundred kilobytes. However users don’t care how big the pages are; they don’t care how many images there are on the page; they don’t care how many servers are in your web farm. Most of the users don’t understand the mechanics behind the page, and why should they? The only thing they care about is how fast your page is loaded via their 6Mbps broadband connection.

Here is my table for tolerable response times on the Web. It is based on the post above as well as on Response Times: The Three Important Limits.

Response Time	Analysis
<0.1 sec	I don’t think you can achieve this one on the Web (if you can, the the user’s browser will not be able to render it:)) but it is goal that you may want to pursue.
<1 sec	Your page load time is great. You can continue to improve your performance but only if you don’t have better things to do.
<3 sec	Your page load time is OK, however you need to keep an eye on it. You are on the border for broadband users. However if this is the load time over narrowband you should not be worrying too much.
<4 sec	This is the limit for broadband users. I certainly think you have a problem if your users need 4 secs to load your pages and I will suggest you spend some time improving your performance.
<6 sec	You are on the border for narrowband users. Performance should be one of the things you should be thinking already.
>6 sec	You are amateur:) Your web site may still be visited but you will lose visitors (approx. half of them including myself). If you don’t care keep going.

Few more things that you need to think about when you exceed the 1 sec threshold. The first one is that you need to provide feedback showing the user you are still working on the request. Modern browsers do provide progress bar although it is not useful all the times because it spins like the hourglass in Windows without giving you any indication when the result will appear. If you go above the 6 seconds threshold you must think of ways to change the workflow or even the architecture (we managed to solve the 20 mins issues above only through major changes in the architecture).

Although performance is not the only key it is one of the keys for your web site’s success. If you target the thresholds in your performance testing you will surely be screwed because you don’t account for the unknowns and you will surely exceed the threshold. What happens next – the user moves on.

How do you respond to your customers' requests?

When I started blogging several weeks ago I remember reading a post from David Meerman Scott talking about the blogging mistakes and the worst about pages. I should have thought more before I selected Blogger as my blogging platform. David, you were right! Free service comes with its "qualities". Right after setting up my blog I submitted two post - my About post and my first post about Staples... Voila! Google decided that I am spammer and blocked my blog. You know - I got the standard message telling me that I need to submit my blog for review by a real person and everything is fine they will unblock it. I did that and verified that I am person.

My goal is not tell you that Blogger sucks but how companies interact with their customers. My request to Google went into black hole. Or at least this was my impression. My expectation was to receive e-mail (even automatic would help) confirming that my request is received and somebody will look at the issue in the next X hours... days... months. Nothing like that happened. I received no e-mail and had no idea whether my request was received, handled, denied or something else. On the next day I went back and submitted the request again... and again on the third day. Nothing. I just moved on. Blogger was not in my list of choices anymore. The feeling that my fate will be decided by the bits of a machine made me feel miserable. Will I be the lucky one who will be randomly chosen to live or will the Terminator erase any sign of my existence?

My next example is Sphinn. As part of the registration I was supposed to receive activation e-mail. For some reason I did not receive it on the e-mail I used for registration. I tried contacting Sphinn team through their Contact Us form using my registration e-mail as well as my Gmail. So far no response. However I really want to use the service and I registered with my Gmail account - surprisingly it worked.

My third example is from the offline world. I am looking for a new car and decided to check Audi Q7 from the local dealer Barrier. Everything was fine - the guy showed me the car, I did a test drive with him, we checked the inventories and so on. I had to leave and asked him to send me what is available as well as what APR they will give me. Two days after that he left me a voice mail asking me whether I need something more to make my decision. Dude, I told you what I need. Where is it? I called him back and left him also voice mail with the exactly same information. I got even a call from some girl in Barrier to ask me what was my experience and she promised to talk with the salesman and get back to me soon. I don't know what they understand with "soon" but it is almost 3 days and I still don't have what I need. And I like the car, and I want to buy it... and in this market where car manufacturer are facing bankruptcy I would expect that dealers will run after me to sell me the stupid car. Ooooh, I am just flying in the sky and thinking that "the customer is god". It seems nobody cares about the customer.

Time to stop complaining - here are my takeaways:

• If you own a web site make sure you have good feedback channel for your visitors. If somebody sends you a message try to respond within acceptable amount of time - for me this is 24h, but it is your own choice; you may want to respond to such inquiries once a week or once a month but are you sure this person will wait so long to hear back from you. The worst thing you can do is to never reply.
• Provide link to your feedback channel where you think people will be confused in your workflows. Perfect example for that are error pages (look at my post Staples found an easy way to lose money - AdSense) as well as product and check-out pages. Don't assume that people will go through your web site smoothly and without asking themselves "what the heck does this mean".
• Don't hide your contact information. Lot of corporations burry their contact information so deep that users get tired of clicking and just give up. It is all for "support cost savings", "deflection" and other stupid reasons. I know it costs money to reply to every message but people get frustrated when they can't find a way to send you a message. And it is even bigger nightmare with the phone numbers. For example I needed to click 2 times to find phone number for Google, while Shpinn's one I couldn't find at all.
• If you provide phone number (and better you do) make sure there is a option "Speak with customer support representative". In the spirit of "deflection" every company tries to hide the option for "customer representative". Normally this is the last option in the menu if at all mentioned; companies try to change the default 0 to 9 or 8 or #*723#2**# (try to remember that one:)). What happens after such tricks is that people learn and next time thy call they directly go and choose the "customer representative" option just because they are frustrated.
• Provide alternative feedback channels or ways to contact your company. Email and phone are the standard ones but you can add chat, forum, social web site where you participate or something else. Be creative.
• I want to iterate - respond promptly. Sending back automatic message when a user sends you request is mandatory. This is the first indication that your system works. In the message include your expected time to respond (or Service Level Agreement - SLA) and stick to it. In all three cases above my expectations were not met (apparently Google enabled my blog but month and a half after I submitted my request and not 20 days as they promised; I still don't know how long Barrier needs to get the list but 1 week I think is too long).
• When you respond to your customers try to be personal. Don't use case numbers, "madam" or "sir" (I really like the e-mails from Mr. Mumbaga from Zair who offers me $2M and addresses his mails with "Dear Sir"). Use your customer's name - this will make him or her feel much better. I really enjoyed my stay in the hotel in Tokyo not because the hotel was nice but because people there made the effort to say my last name (now try that:)).
• When you respond to customers give them your name. You can give them any other information that will be helpful for them to find you (unless you think you provided really crappy service:)). You will be surprised but somebody may want to call your manager to say "thank you" and not to complain about you.

Those are just few of the advises I can give you if you are committed to provide great customer support (online or offline). I will be honest and tell you that I broke some of them in certain occasions and I still feel bad about that - everybody makes mistakes but you should try to improve. Just ask yourself the question - what is more important for you? Spending 1h replying to your customer or losing your customer?