What Sucks? Challenging your Website Visitors To Maximize Engagement

Over at Merlin Mann's 43 Folders website - he has a great page called simply called HowTo: (http://www.43folders.com/howto) whose purpose is to challenge its visitors by asking why they have visited his site today. The subtext being to help you A) decide if you really needed to visit this site; B) what do you actually want, no really, what do you want!

The tone of voice used is that of an impatient, ever-so-important, person who immediately wants to know if you are serious or not; a straight-talking, no bull, cut-to-the-chase kind of person. Allow me to give you an example, the website opens with a very bold statement to frame the page's intent: [this page is]  "A very simple guide to leaving here quickly so you can get back to making something awesome."

This almost irked me, but it didn't, because as I scanned down the page I was presented with a question: What Sucks? This question made me stop, in my tracks, and really think before progressing. This put me in the right frame of mind to 

This is just brilliant, he is really asking ME what sucks today, with the promise of answers - I was hooked - and now I am thinking how we can adopt this and by using our own tone of use this for our own website and those of our clients. 

Thing about it how could you pose a simple question, with a personal set of possible answers that relates to your business, brand, service... Could, In fact, you the what sucks question? Here is my initial thinking for i-KOS's (a digital agency) under the banner 'What Sucks?' to thus direct views to the "answer"

• My website sucks
• My CMS sucks
• My marketing sucks
• My SEO sucks
• My branding sucks
• My colleagues really suck and we need new ideas fast
• My e-mail marketing is non-existent and this sucks
• My understanding of analytics sucks
• Our PPC campaign sucks so much we concluded it doesn't work 

As you could tell I started getting into this towards the end of the list. Anyhow I will update this post as we develop this kernel of an idea and inspiration into our own website which we hope inspires others. 

You should follow Myles on Twitter (www.twitter.com/mylesdavidson) to carry on the conversation and you can add to this blog by posting comments, asking questions or challenging my thinking. 

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Top Ten Techie Things I liked in 2009

This being the season for Top Ten's 

1. Drupal
2. Tweetdeck
3. Posterous
4. Audioboo 
5. Dropbox
6. Mag.ma
7. Prezzi
8. Ustream 
9. Tumblr
10. Tweetie2 

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Memories of Bromley Cricket with Rob Ferley

via AudioBoo

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Asda cuts Tiger's price - at a stroke (sorry couldn't resist)

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Does the fact that your tweets get indexed by Google make you think twice before tweeting?

via AudioBoo

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Does the fact that your tweets get indexed by Google make you think twice before tweeting?

Vote now:

Context:

Last week, Google rolled out real time search integrated into its main results. It’s a dynamic, scrolling display of the latest tweets and other content that matches what you’re searching for.

Google search results that are scrolling? Think about that. Four years ago, Google quite famously said there would be no “crazy, flashy, graphical doodads flying and popping up all over the Google site. Ever.” I don’t know about you, but a dynamic scrolling box of results is pretty flashy and graphical to me.

Fast-forward 12 years to today, and if I want a top ranking on Google for 'anything', it’s easy. I just tweet something about it and moments later, It's there. 

Now consider you are thinking about employing someone (we all know the troubles peoples Facebook profile have caused) I think it likely you might checkout their Linked-in profile and Google them too.

Here is the results on Google when searching on my name (purely for researching this post; not for vanity reasons you understand); as it happens these last two tweets are quotes from or links to a topic I am interested in and not likely to offend anyone. However because Twitter is so fast and informal people tend to tweet a blend of information, links ('informer') or stuff about themselves ('meformer') as indeed I do. This results screen could have just as easily reveled how I was feeling, sitting in a kids party with a hundred screaming kids, after a rather heavy night out.

It was this very tweet that made me stop, for a second, before hitting the send button. This small hesitation has, at some level, shifted my thinking about my Twitter use. 

Further reading on the Pros & Cons Of Real Time Integration can be read in this considered article: http://searchengineland.com/search-real-time-madness-31668

Please do share or comment and if you are not doing so already why not follow me @mylesdavidson

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WIN A NEW LIFE - Dude gives away £1.1 million house (Video)

via youtube.com

As many of you know we (i-KOS) built the website and the Flash game that allows people to take a £20 punt and try to win his £1.1million pound sales. The competition for only another few days (closes on the 15th December) and following the celebrity bash last have produced this viral video.

I've gotten to know Andrew really well these past few months and I really hope the competition finishes with a flurry.

Please do watch and pass on - who knows someone I know might WIN (as I cannot enter - dooogh)

Best

Myles

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Five fast email productivity tips - Help I am drowning in a sea of communication

There’s been a lot of great discussions about email productivity going around on sites I enjoy, so I thought I’d throw in five no-brainers that I’ve seen help a lot of folks.

1. Shut off auto-check - Either turn off automatic checking completely, or set it to something reasonable, like every 20 minutes or so. If you’re doing anything with new email more than every few minutes, you might want to rethink your approach. I’m sure that some of you working in North Korean missile silos need real-time email updates, but I encourage the rest of you to consider ganging your email activity into focused (maybe even timed) activity every hour or three. Process, tag, respond to the urgent ones, then get the hell back to work. (See also, NYT: You There, at the Computer: Pay Attention)
2. Pick off easy ones - If you can retire an email with a 1-2 line response (< 2 minutes; pref. 30 seconds), do it now. Remember: this is about action, not about cogitating and filing. Get it off your plate, and get back to work. On the other hand, don’t permit yourself to get caught up in composing an unnecessary 45-minute epistle (see next item).
3. Write less - Stop imagining that all your emails need to be epic literature; get better at just keeping the conversation moving by responding quickly and with short actions in the reply. Ask for more information, pose a question, or just say “I don’t know.” Stop trying to be Victor Hugo Marcel Proust, and just smack it over the net—especially if fear of writing a long reply is what slows your response time. N.B.: This does not mean that you should write elliptically or bypass standard grammar, capitalization, and punctuation (unless you want to look 12 years old); just that your well-written message can and should be as concise as possible. That saves everyone time.
4. Cheat - Use something like MailTemplate to help manage answers to frequent email subjects. Templates let you create and use boilerplate responses to the questions and requests to which you usually find yourself drafting identical replies over and over from scratch. At least use a template as a basis for your response, and then customize it for that person or situation. Don’t worry—you can still let your sparkling prose and winning wit shine through, just without having to invent the wheel 10 times each day.
5. Be honest - If you know in your heart that you’re never going to respond to an email, get it out of sight, archive it, or just delete it. Guilt will not make you more responsive two months from now, otherwise, you’d just do it now, right? Trust your instincts, listen to them, and stop trying to be perfect.

Update 2005-10-18 07:33:45

Yep, you read it right: in the eightish months since I posted this, I’ve set my email to check every hour. The result? I ain’t missing much. A lot of stuff that can wait, a lot that resolves itself, and a huge mass of items that previously would have sent me on a 50-yard-dash to nothing.

Friends: stop letting your email poke you with a stick. It’s just not worth it.

via 43folders.com

I think it is time to admit that I have a massive problem with my e-mail. At the time of writing there are 9062 messages in my inbox.

OK so that last time I manually archived my INBOX was almost a year ago; but considering I delete more e-mails than not, and have folders and rules to manage others - means that I probably receive as many as 2000 e-mails per month; 500 per week and almost 100 per day.

Firstly I reckon there are only 20 e-mails per 5 working days that are meaningful (need a response or action) - the rest a combination of junk, and stuff I am cc'd in on.

So today, Sunday, I decided to revisit Merlin Mann's website 43 signals - who has lots of advice for e-mail junkies who, like me, seek out his advice to try and solve e-mail overload.

I am writing this post to publicly state that 'I Myles Davidson, have a problem; I am addicted to my e-mail'. There I've said it - phew... I really do feel better.

So as with all self-help programs I must take the first step. To this end I have just changed my auto-check to ONE HOUR. This itself, I kid you not, almost turned me into a quivering wreck. It was set, probably by default, to 5 minutes. The temptation was to go for 15 or 30 minutes but I figure I should go for an hour.

I will let you know how this turns unfolds and now I am going to start deleting (ok archiving) about 9000 e-mails. I know for some, in box 'zero' is the mantra and may this is what I secretly desire but one step at a time, right?

Please do let me know your suggestions of help, and do follow my progress via twitter (@mylesdavidson)

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