Chris "The Brain" Hoyt

I love when companies like Constant Contact and Mail Chimp come out with these charts and stats…it is a great tool for business owners to use as a comparison. That said, you can always do better, but you have to have a plan, test and measuring it each step of the way….so, how do your email efforts fare?
Email Marketing Benchmarks

Great job by the PPC Blog team on this diagram…check it out! http://ppcblog.com/how-google-works/

The Good

I am a big supporter of Net Neutrality. The Internet has ushered in an amazing era of growth for humanity. It has created a “gold rush” of fresh new ideas, start up businesses, and ingenuity. Business models that were not possible before, now are. Smaller “Mom and Pop” businesses are able to overcome their Wal-Mart induced blight of being drowned out in their own neighborhoods by being able to expand their market to the whole world. It has been very exciting.

This wonderland of the modern age has become inevitably threatened by big business and big governments. Those in power hate when us peasants gain any kind of independence. China and other fascist governmental establishments are continuously seeking ways to control and censor the Internet. Big businesses are, likewise, seeking ways to corner off parts of the Internet as “their property” so they can profit by making us pay more to access “their” Internet.

Net Neutrality is a movement against all forms of Internet possession. Simply put, KEEP YOUR DIRTY HAND OFF OUR INTERNET. Geeks, like me, who are passionate about Net Neutrality simply want to insure that the Internet remains the open-to-everyone public resource for information, commerce, and communication. We don’t want anyone to turn the Internet into property or some kind of rationed commodity. Currently, Net Neutrality is under attack from all sides, so I want to set the record straight here.

The Bad

Again, stating I am a BIG supporter of Net Neutrality, let’s talk about about justifying the ideal of Net Neutrality with the reality that the Internet costs money, time, and resources to keep going. Businesses, like Comcast, who provide Internet to millions of people want to, and should, be able to make a profit by doing so. There have been two contentious methods of making profit with the Internet that has caught the attention of us Net Neutrality activists:

1) Internet providers want to be able to show favoritism toward webpages that pay them fees. In other words, they would lower the bandwidth available for the web and offer higher “premium” bandwidth for sites paying a fee. It is a ways of double-dipping the Internet; consumers pay for Internet on one end and business pay to show up on the other.

2) Internet providers have discovered that a large percentage of bandwidth is used by illegal (or at least questionable) file sharing services such as BitTorrent. In order to lower costs, Internet providers wish to be able to limit bandwidth, or charge more, for Internet services that consume a disproportionate amount of resources. See Comcast vs. FCC here -> http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/06/AR2010040600742.html

Item #1 is horrible, but #2 is understandable. However, the recent fight between the FCC and Comcast over item #2 has given big-business-friendly politicians an emotional cause to support item #1. Now many Republicans in congress are fighting to end Net Neutrality based on the valid problem #2 presents, but also allows for #1. The Republican bill allowing scenarios #1 and #2 is ironically called the “Internet Freedom Act” (http://www.reuters.com/article/idUS348124681720091022). I believe, most of these Republicans don’t even understand what they are really asking for, they just know their contributors are whining.

The Ugly

The political-right in this country isn’t the only threat to Net Neutrality either. While Conservatives are starting war to end one kind of Net Neutrality, Liberals are pushing back with a weird anti-Net Neutrality bill of their own…. which they still call “Net Neutrality”. Take a look at what Cass Sunstein the new head the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) thinks about the Internet in his book Republic.com:

“A system of limitless individual choices, with respect to communications, is not necessarily in the interest of citizenship and self-government. Democratic efforts to reduce the resulting problems ought not be rejected in freedom’s name.”

Pretty scary, huh? In other words, he doesn’t like the fact that the Internet gives us so many different options and opinions. At one point he believed that:

“…that government should consider fairness-doctrine-type mandates on Web sites. It suggested that it’s reasonable for government to think about creating the equivalent of linking obligations and pop-ups, so that you’d be on one site — say, a conservative site — and there’d be a pop-up from a liberal site.”

While he later states, “I now the believe that the government should not consider that…”, it shows where he is coming from. I never understand people who claim that websites should be “fair”. No one makes you go to the sites, no one makes you stay, and since search engines are still neutral, everyone can find all sorts of opposing views on any topic. Besides, “fair” is such an ambiguous term, it is impossible enforce.

You can’t claim “fairness” just by posting a view that opposed yours on a website. What if the view you posted was chosen because it was so poorly supported? What if there are many opposing views? What if the opposing view is from a bogus or proxy source? Such claims of “fairness” can only possibly do more to limited freedom of speech on the web.

Will the Real “Net Neutrality” Please Stand Up?

When we talk about Net Neutrality, we need to clear that it is an objective, enforceable, and unbiased ideal. Keeping the Internet open, free, and neutral just means that no Internet provider can limit or withhold bandwidth for any website, and no one can tell what to do with your website. Businesses can’t own or section off part of the Internet as “premium” and governments can’t tell people what to put on their sites when they are not performing illegal activities.

Keep it simple, and keep up the fight. Don’t let the Internet become property.

I.E. 6 Takes It’s Last Breath

Internet Explorer 6’s market share dropped below 5% for the first time in the US since it debuted in 2001 (almost 10 years ago!). Back then, It was widely adopted by the majority of internet users but was plagued with security holes, bugs and overall development issues.

IE6 is so old, here are a few of the things that have happened since it made it’s start in 2001

• Myspace was created, became the most popular social networking site in the world and then was promptly taken over by hookers, spammers and creepy old men looking for the aforementioned characters.
• XBOX & Gamecube were invented, became popular and died out. PS3, Xbox 360 and the Wii became the next big things.
• Napster was still cool & the iPod hadn’t been born yet.
• If you said the word wifi, people thought you were asking a question.
• Social Media, Facebook & Twitter weren’t everyday terms and the Web was still 1.0

As a web development company, we’re glad to say goodbye to I.E. 6. It caused countless headaches and annoyances and was difficult for both us and our clients. We’re glad to see web standards progressing and web browsers emerging that support those standards.

If you’re one of those 5% that still are running I.E. 6 don’t be caught using something so out of date. It’s bad for you, your computer, and the web in general. We recommend downloading the latest version of Firefox here.

Ok, so I am not the illustrious writer I wish I was, but I love to rant in short outburst about totally unrelated topics..so here goes.

Twitter Outages – Really? How many outages can a company have on a website on any given day? It’s not like they are passing on photos or files…it is 140 characters!

Facebook – Privacy is a big issue and these guys have dropped the ball. Their CEO has said in the past that people are dumb to give him that much info…have you changed your privacy settings yet?

The iPad – What a great device! I love watching Netflix, playing games, surfing the web, checking email etc on mine. My COO uses his to work on…really work. His favorite apps are omnigraffle, imockups and iwork suite. Good battery life and quick start ups are a plus as well. Will it take over the laptop? As it sits today…no. Give it till the 3rd generation and then lets’ talk.

LinkedIn – A mid-year prediction for everyone. Salesforce.com will buy LinkedIn and solidify itself even further as ‘the’ CRM of choice.

Trends – Did anyone see the news? For the first time, Facebook overtook Google as the number one US website for a week (roughly 7% of all website hits). With over 400 million users and growing, this company is on the move.

Search – We did a graph for a client yesterday showing that their #1 keyword/phrase wnet form 80K searches a day in 2004 to now under 40K searches per day, while during that same time span, Internet usage has more than doubled from 800 million users to over 1.8 billion.

What does Apple get that Sony, HP, Microsoft, Dell, Samsung, and LG don’t?…. Usability in software. All these other geeks out there making hardware love packing on “specs”, stuffing big numbers like RAM, gigahertz, and hard drive space into small or cool looking gadgets. It all looks good on paper, but after you use one of their gadgets for more than a few weeks, you just want to throw it out a window. Thousands of new gadgets released every year all using the same-old crappy unfriendly, unintuitive, unattractive software. It’s no wonder so many are flocking to Apple when we can just pickup one of their simplistic products, start taping and swiping our fingers, and lo and behold… it just does what we want it to do. Of course, it isn’t easy, or cheap, to make software this user friendly, which is why everyone is having such a hard time keeping up.

As a software developer, I hear the phrase “I just want it to…”. Which, as any experienced software developer knows, is the most expensive phrase we ever hear. People have software needs all the time, which may require vast complicated effort to achieve, but they want it to hide all that complication behind a simple and user-friendly interface. What most people don’t know is that making software do just about anything doesn’t cost nearly as much as making it easy and intuitive for them to use. This lack of cost awareness is what ruins so many “brilliant” product ideas.

Sony is, in my opinion, the worst offender. In the past decade, I have seen Sony release cutting-edge gadgets to the market before anyone else. The PSP was an amazing gadget when it came out, in theory. It played music, videos, viewed photos, surfed the web, and of course, played games. The problem was that, excluding the last feature, it didn’t do any of them well. In fact, all the claimed features were so hard to use that almost no one could figure it out. Then, even more idiotically, Sony received reports that users were not using the extra features and stopped improving them! Sony could have been the what the iPod Touch is today, but lost the chance with bad software.

But I don’t just write this to rant, I write this as a warning to other business owners and entrepreneurs out there. Developing software and technology is one thing, but making it user friendly is another. In fact, usability can consume up to 80% of a project’s time and resources. That is, if your actually going to make something people will want to use. You have to build it, review it, fix it, test it, fix it, beta release, fix it, get feedback, fix it, get more feedback, fix it… and maybe… just maybe… people will be able to actually use it.

This is why the only mobile platform even close to keeping up with Apple is Google’s Android. Google is the only one in the fight with the know-how and resources to keep up. Even RIM, makers if the Blackberry, can’t keep their mobile software up to par, they have to invest in starting from scratch or spending huge resources in fixing what they have.

If you or your company has a “great idea” for an application or gadget, just remember, once you price the development… multiply it a couple times for usability.

Portfolio.com has a great article on how Dunkin’ Donuts, and other businesses, uses Twitter to keep a pulse on their customer base as well as market (click here).  Twitter is probably the most misused and misunderstood of new social media fads.  Few businesses use Twitter, and even fewer use it correctly.  I tend to agree with those who feel Twitter is just too “spammy” and full of false connections, but there are some really smart uses of Twitter, and Dunkin’s Donuts found one of them.

Dunkin’ Donuts is a business that, when it is working well, becomes a part of a consumer’s day-to-day life.  As such, it finds itself appearing in the vast stream of consciousness of Twitter.  By being active on Twitter, Dunkin’ Donuts can keep a pulse on how they are being perceived by their target base.  They are able to converse with their customers, and have another FREE venue for announcing promotions and new products.

Almost any end-consumer business can benefit by this example.  While Twitter is still not a good way, in my opinion, to grow your base or reach a lot of new customers, it is a great way to connect with and cultivate your current base.

We found this amazingly well done illustration of popular social networks as people.  We think it’s hysterical and want to find the original artist!

Does anyone know who created this masterpiece?

(Click to view larger image)

I was waiting to write the follow up to my February SEO post, waiting for someone to point out that they looked on Google and couldn’t find us anywhere to be found for the keyword “Internet Marketing”. Of course we are not there. My point of taking a screen capture and highlighting it was to show that you can’t trust screen captures and companies that make erroneous claims of #1 placement on Google. ( I left the 2 visits and date there, maybe you caught that, but I could have easily edited that out)

To many businesses have been deceived into thinking that by paying $100 per month, $450 per month or the best one I recently saw $1,266 per month, that they will be number one for a competitive keyword. (I would love to sell that way, but have a pesky little thing called morals that holds me back) Now let me say this. Yes, SEO is real and yes, SEO works. But it isn’t a magic pill and it doesn’t work overnight AND you can’t guaranty #1 results.  I can show you plenty of client’s we have helped achieve page 1 rankings for competitive keywords, above the fold on some cases. But it took hard work, 6 to 12 months time and the client paid more than $100 per month.

Another thing to consider when wanting an SEO strategy is that search isn’t what it used to be. Sure Google is the biggest and best, but some argue that it usage has peaked and social media and other entertainment/news portals are gaining ground. Be that as it may, any marketing strategy based solely on one aspect, even SEO, is doomed for failure. At Fat Atom, we believe in helping our clients build a web presence, relying on multiple strategies, measuring all, testing all and analyzing what worked best. It seems logical and easy, but most companies don’t do it…..which is the name for my next post, and future book,  “Stop Check Mark Marketing”.

So here is what happened. We, Fat Atom Internet Marketing (fatatom.com), did a Facebook fan page for one of our clients. The site took off like a rocket, hit almost 50,000 fans, and then we wake up one day to find Facebook had taken the page down. They sent no warning, had already validated our page, and offered no explanation later. We sent support requests to Facebook for almost 2 weeks, everyday, afterward, and they have yet to get back with us. Thousands of dollars were spent on this campaign, and now they are all gone.

We think it is very irresponsible of Facebook, who is still young in the professional world, to treat paying customers like this. Facebook is a great place to grow your business online, but behavior like this is downright terrifying. Business need to have confidence that they are safe investing money in Facebook.

We created this video to express our frustration and confusion.

If you have had this happen to you, please leave a comment and help us spread this video around the web!

Fat Atom Internet Marketing
http://fatatom.com