“The word website
is becoming a misnomer.”

-Ed Illig, Brainstorm

The Importance of a User-friendly Website

Brainstorm’s Ed Illig spoke on the importance of a user-friendly website at a recent Linking Indiana winter event.

He cited three very different market sector website case studies: Anderson University, a higher education site; Lumina Foundation, a non-profit; and RCA, a commerce site.

Using these examples, he described what user-friendly means in different spaces and where he sees things heading in terms of usability, user engagement, brand, metrics, and more.

You can view the talk on Blip.tv in full here:
The Importance of a User-friendly Website [32:21]

Or in three bite-size, lunch-ready segments here:
(Part 1 of 3) The Importance of a User-friendly Website [12:40]
(Part 2 of 3) The Importance of a User-friendly Website [11:45]
(Part 3 of 3) The Importance of a User-friendly Website [8:47]

“Ah, a sea bass repast.â€?

A Tasty Tweet

This spring I broadcast a Tweet expressing my unmitigated joy over a delectable dish of fish – sea bass to be exact. Moved to the point of illustration, I added a hieroglyph depicting my meal – a fish graphic fashioned from alphanumeric characters:

Turns out Paul Ocepek (@paulocepek), founder of ShirtPizza.com (@shirtpizza), was fishing in my Twitter stream just then.

An Unexpected Treat

Paul Tweeted a hint that he might add the typographic fish to the ShirtPizza product line. When he did so, he sent me a sample tee. The above video clip captures the Brainstorm “unboxing” of the unexpected gift.

A Takeaway

One-to-one relational marketing concepts are still a wise play for today’s brand marketers, but fortify them with WOM (word of mouth), Search, feeds, and a voice in the online community to bring one-to-many reach to what was once a private exchange.

In developing and launching a community-inspired product, ShirtPizza broadened not only their product line and their reach, but their customer base as well. We’ve been fishing around the ShirtPizza site, now maybe you will, too.

Our copy of Web Analytics: An Hour a Day, already on its way to a good dog-earing.

Serious about marketing your brand online? This book will teach you what you need to know about web analytics.

Published by Wiley’s Sybex brand, Web Analytics: An Hour a Day, by Avinash Kaushik, the Analytics Evangelist for Google, and author of the widely-read Occam’s Razor blog, is a must-have resource for online marketers.

About the Book

The book went beyond what we were expecting, i.e., how to better read analytics dashboards. What we found was a sophisticated and marketing-oriented book that teaches how to use the available data to create a clear picture of return on investment in the online world. This is more than your typical programming book, this is a marketing book.

Kaushik does a great job with the format. As with any subject you’re committed to knowing, reading the information and applying it in small pieces is the best way to learn. Most of the content is arranged by subject and is segmented into daily readings, allowing you to focus and build upon the knowledge one piece at a time.

A Worthwhile Library Addition

The book is easy to read, full of practical application, and one that will be tattered, bookmarked, and referenced often here at Brainstorm.

Best of all, Kaushik has committed every dollar earned from the book to charitable causes.

Order a copy on Amazon now.

Address

Brainstorm Principal Bart Caylor will be making a presentation on Web 2.0—how the Internet has evolved and what it means to business leaders now and for the future—at the Main Street Institute’s 2007 Web Marketing event on August 24th.

The Main Street Institute, a partnership of the Greater Indianapolis Chamber of Commerce and Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business, is a year-round series of educational programs focused on the latest developments in sales, marketing, customer relations and growth management.

This Friday’s program at the IUPUI School of Informatics also includes presentations on:

• Integrating technology into current marketing plans
• Search engine optimization
• Converting web traffic to customers
• Industry trending

To register contact Alane Summers at 317.464.2213 or go to indychamber.com.

Ah, to Be Aggregated

Being assimilated into someone else’s Collective is not generally desirable. But many happily relinquish control when Google decides to acquire their enterprise.

If you logged into media distribution and RSS feed provider FeedBurner earlier this summer, you saw legal copy indicating you had 14 days to opt out before the rights to your data were transfered to Google.

Two striking thoughts:

1) Google has assimilated yet another service.
2) The rights to your data now belong to Google.

Mapping It All Out

For a quick overview of their reach, check out our Mindjet map of Google’s growing empire. Since the map is meant to show only the extent of their services, items on the map are unweighted and appear in random order.

While probably far from complete, it shows Google’s ever-widening breadth of assets representing easily accessible public information points. They have our email—both corporate and private, our search data, our website data through analytics, and much, much more.

May We Have Some Privacy?

Privacy concerns continue to be raised about the search giant. Privacy International put Google at the bottom of its first-ever privacy rankings and tussled with the search giant over allegations that Google conducted a preemptive smear campaign against them to discredit the about-to-be-released results.

Love ‘em or hate ‘em, if information is king, Google most certainly represents the new information-laden Rome. Important to keep in mind as you seek to connect and protect your brand in their growing online landscape.

Downloads

Privacy International’s Rankings Report | 96 KB .pdf

Google Empire Mindjet Map | 37 KB .mmap

Google Empire PDF | 104 KB .pdf

Image: Checco