Related?

How are these videos related???



Looks like Google/YouTube needs to do a little more work on this...

YouTube - Googel Developers Day US - Testing Distributed Systems

Writing online copy

Check out my post on the Bplans Blog today about writing & testing online marketing copy.

Who do you trust?

It turns out that Verisign can charge a HUGE price premium for their SSL certificates simply because their security badge is better designed than any of the "budget" SSL providers. The kicker is this: almost all SLL certificates are made equal! Your end users get the same security regardless of the provider.

That said, users probably trust some brands more than others or, more likely, trust some graphic design more than others. Looking at them images above, it's easy to figure out which providers are the budget ones and which might be more expensive. Which would you trust?

So, if I ran GoDaddy, wouldn't I want to invest $1,000 or $2,000 to get a really good security badge? After all, as a certificate provider, you're not really selling security, you're selling the image of security. Online marketers that run shopping carts will buy the certificate that looks the best, even at a price premium. So... Thawte, GoDaddy, go buy some good graphic design talent and win not only on price but on consumer trust.

What did you fix?

Joel Spolsky has a great post about problem solving over on his blog. The post is a fun read for geeks but no normal person will get through the first few paragraphs. This is unfortunate as the real salient advice comes towards the end of his post. To solve his problem,

...we borrowed an idea from Sakichi Toyoda, the founder of Toyota. He calls it Five Whys. When something goes wrong, you ask why, again and again, until you ferret out the root cause. Then you fix the root cause, not the symptoms.

This is fantastic advice for any business. How often do we only work on solving the symptoms of a real problem? How often do we only ask why once when we are trying to figure out customer behavior?

All businesses should ask why more often when they are looking to fix problems - not just problems with hardware or software, but problems with marketing strategy, business partnerships, and sales pipeline issues.

Did you ask why today?

Local Business Marketing

I just posted over on the Bplans Blog about shopping, buying, and marketing locally. Check it out.

Too many blogs? Let your friends do the work.

If you read your blogs using Google Reader, they have a great feature that can help you A) get more out of the blogosphere, and B) filter your reading to only the best posts out there as selected by your friends.

Reading your friends or co-workers shared feeds is like having a big filter on the blogosphere. Assuming your friends "share" only interesting or useful posts that they find, your aggregated "shared items" feed will be a best-of all the blogs that your friends read. This is a great way to keep up on blogs that you might not read very often or subject areas where you don't need to keep up with day-to-day postings.

Here at Palo Alto Software we have been doing this for quite some time but through the more cumbersome method of aggregating our shared feeds through a 3rd party service called xFruits. While this works, it's difficult to add new shared feeds.

Adding your friends' shared item feeds to Google Reader is unfortunately not easy. You have to go to Gmail or Google Talk to invite people. There is not mechanism in Google Reader to invite friends directly. Hopefully Google will add this feature soon.

Amazon Search Sucks (or how to make millions with a simple change)

Why is it that the search function at Amazon.com is so bad? I can't count the number of times I have mistyped or misspelled when searching at Amazon and had them deliver ZERO results. That's right. None. Nothing. This is a huge revenue opportunity just sitting there and to be honest I'm shocked that Amazon hasn't taken care of this issue long ago.

The kicker is that Amazon actually owns a search engine! All they would have to do is point failed searches at their own search engine and actually give users some results. I guarantee that this will increase Amazon revenue.

Current Amazon.com failed search with links to products that are not relevant at all to my search:

A9.com search results for the same search:


The second option gives me relevant products that I can actually buy (from Amazon.com, no less)

Are you leaving money on the table with your own site search?