jonbishop

Yeah. Said he downloaded it from a site that I don't remember.

Would adding Mensa to your resume really help you get a job? I talked to a hiring manager friend about this a while ago and he felt adding things like that don't make sense unless you have some achievement related to Mensa. One caveat - he wasn't in the tech industry.

The problem you're describing is well known in digital marketing. It's called "last touch attribution" - basically giving the last touch point your customer had with your company all the credit for the sale when there often are multiple touch points (story in techcrunch, blog post on site, mention on twitter, then finally a click on a banner ad when the customer is ready to buy). Here's a blog post on hacking Google Analytics to help: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-get-past-last-touch-attrib....

A google search for "last touch attribution" will give you other resources. Agreed on it being a very difficult (and valuable) problem to solve, though. The privacy issues with tracking a person's every touch point with your brand makes it even harder.

Wish you were in San Francisco!

I'm working with a SaaS company whose highest conversion rate and signup numbers are through PR (by far). It really surprised me based on my previous experience.

I think that "which you should probably consider investing more in if its working for you." is key here, though. I've done marketing for businesses where PR was one of the weakest channels.

Good content is a key part of SEO

I don't think posting or tweeting is addictive, but I do think reading other people's content can be. Myspace was still popular when I was in college and it seemed like half the computer lab I did work in was always on Myspace.

"Do not rely on SEO to market your product" Couldn't agree more. A good marketing strategy requires diversity of channels. Naturally, unless you have a full-time person working on marketing, you will have to make sacrifices, but relying on just one channel is really going to hurt your business.

"Add a free feature which is accessible, useful, and spreads virally. It can create a stream of links and mentions that quickly replaces an ad budget."

Aaron Wall makes a great point here. Creating the feature or resource is often a lot of work upfront, but over time it will turn into a better investment than churning out blog posts (that doesn't mean you shouldn't be blogging or creating content in some other form, though).

It depends where you're located, but in San Francisco, Yelp.com has a lot of reviews for recruiters. http://www.yelp.com/search?find_desc=recruiter&ns=1&...

I would read every review though. Similar to @neworbit's comment about recommending specific recruiters vs. services, I had an great experience with a recruiter (he also helped my friend get a fantastic job), but since he left, the agency he worked for has gotten some really nasty reviews.

You should check out a domain auction site like Sedo.com to see if you can find similar domains and what they are selling for.

That's quite the depressing chart. From their site:

"Want more? Register now for FREE!

We offer our readers two articles, columns, photos or videos per month, but you can get three more by completing our free registration."

It's not even a complete paywall - they're giving a couple pages away for free and with free registration, three more. What a rough industry to be in.

Cool, thanks for letting me know. I've heard similar things before and I'm trying to make it a mantra.

She's got a great quote in there about luck: "I really believe that luck is preparation meeting opportunity"

The Huffingpost a/b tests their titles: http://www.niemanlab.org/2009/10/how-the-huffington-post-use...

A quick suggestion: add retweet and facebook like buttons to the pinata buster page to make it easier to share.

"Can you convince your best friend to work on your 4th idea, when the previous 3 failed?"

Any business/idea guy worth his/her salt will have more than one great idea. This is why I am learning how to code; so I don't have to go through all the trouble to get a technical cofounder every time I come up with an idea I really like. This way I can build a prototype and be a lot more credible when I approach people to work with me.

It depends on how compelling the content is; if a user is really engrossed, they'll be happy to scroll down pages of content. If they're not, keeping everything above the fold won't be enough.

Naturally there are limits to how much a person will scroll no matter how compelling the content. With 37signals, they probably feel their copy is engaging enough and the design offers enough varying contrast as a person scrolls down that having someone scroll that far isn't an issue.

Melissa, there are a ton of SEO resources on the web. SEOmoz's Ranking Factors is a great place to start: http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors

SEOmoz.org(and seobook.com) also has free tools and other resources.

What kills me is that when the ATT spokesman mentions the subscriber percentages in the NYT article (quote and link below), he says "smartphone" and not "iphone".

They have a lot of smartphones (http://www.wireless.att.com/cell-phone-service/cell-phones/p...) to average the usage numbers over and push the percentages up. I wonder what the iphone percentages are.

"He said 65 percent of the company’s smartphone customers tend to use less than 200 megabytes a month, and 98 percent averaged less than 2 gigabytes." http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/03/technology/03phone.html?sc...

Same here; sent them an email and this is the response I got back:

Greetings,

Thank you for contacting O'Reilly Media Customer Service. Today we had a very heavy volume of orders due to our "ebook deal of the day" promotion. This is affecting the delivery and accessing of electronic media. We have verified that your ebooks are in your account. Please be patient and keep checking your account. We apologize for the inconvenience and appreciate your patience.

Best Regards, O'Reilly Media Customer Service

Feel the same way about the trademark symbols for linkedin - really breaks up the flow for me. While getting rid of (or reducing) the trademark symbols would help, I would also suggest trying to mention Linkedin less. For example, under benefits, your mention of Linkedin in the first line is sufficient - it doesn't need to be repeated in the bullet points.

I agree as well on the too much writing. People don't like to read that much. I think you should reduce your copy on this page to a few (in my experience people tend to like groups of 3) of the highest priority issues and then link off to another page for each section should the prospect want more information.

"Before you get all 'ugh, you are mocking a homeless man' on me, realize this... This experiment improved this bums ROI"

I got the same feeling. It's because he doesn't treat the guy like a person; he never calls the homeless man by his name, Keith, but keeps referring to him as a bum.

The $100 mentioned is the minimum cost to get an ad on Google TV, not what Slate spent (though that doesn't mean the $1300 doesn't include the cost of the ad).

Not sure if you read the section below that where I talked about the part of the pitch that I feel is responsible for these issues. I don't rule out that a Account Exec wouldn't say something like that, but from my experience, Yelp is very serious about such instances and will most likely fire somebody who does that immediately. I say most likely because even with their exceptional training, people do make mistakes and that person might be able to convince Yelp it was unintentional - then again, I wouldn't be surprised if Yelp is at the point where they would fire somebody even if it were accidental.

There very easily could be an exception, especially with the number of Account execs they have right now, but it's clear from the very start of training to making actual calls that such actions will not be tolerated.

From the techcrunch article: "in which the company’s employees call businesses demanding monthly payments in the guise of advertising contracts, in exchange for removing or modifying negative reviews."

Yelp doesn't remove reviews and reviews themselves aren't modified; simply one positive review is moved to the top. You could argue that by moving the positive review to the top, that in turn modifies the order of other reviews (positive and negative), but seems like very shaky ground for the case to stand on. Of course, I'm no lawyer, so take this all with a grain of salt.

Or are you pointing out the loose quote I posted ("the first review your customers see will always be a positive one") is what will give the case legs?

I should add that while a lot could have changed since I left, I still speak to people there occasionally and strongly believe that not much has changed (especially with regard to Account Executives' ability to remove reviews and the spam algorithm).

I am a former Yelp Account Executive; I was one of the people that would call these businesses. I have both positive and negative feelings about Yelp. It was a short stint (November 07 to March 08) because I wasn't very good at the job as I hated the work (though the company itself is fantastic) and didn't believe in the product we were selling.

Account Executives (and pretty sure everyone in the sales division all the way up to the VP of Sales) had no direct way of removing reviews (and I strongly believe this has not changed). When I was there, the only way for an Account Executive to have a review removed was to email customer service and provide a solid explanation as to why it violated the review guidelines. And I can tell you that many times it wasn't easy; customer service had strict guidelines to follow and I (and my friends) had plenty of arguments that went nowhere. Theoretically, an Account executive could make friends with a customer service rep or someone on the development team and try to persuade them to remove a review, but this is highly unlikely because if found out, everyone involved would be fired (so there's a huge risk) and I can tell you from personal experience, removing a few reviews is not going to make or break a sale (so it's not worth the risk).

While it was a (sometimes extremely) frustrating process, I feel it speaks to how the executives of Yelp really do believe in the integrity of their review guidelines.

As for reviews being deleted, I can tell you that in many of those instances, the review has been put in a "purgatory" where the system waits until it receives a signal that the review is not actually spam to let it surface back up to users. This happens to both positive and negative reviews; there is no scam going on here to hide negative reviews for businesses that pay and positive reviews for businesses that don't.

Why isn't Yelp more transparent about this process and their algorithm? For the same reason Google isn't transparent about their algorithm - to prevent gaming the system.

With the frequently repeated story of business owners being told that their negative reviews will be removed, I believe it comes down to a misunderstanding of the sales pitch (the majority of the time). One of the key points of the sales pitch involved moving a positive review to the top of the review order where a positive review would stay for the duration of the contract. This was especially effective for completing a sale if there was a negative review on top ("the first review your customers see will always be a positive one"). So if a business became a Yelp advertiser, the review order would change, but only with that one review that was moved to the very top. No reviews were deleted or otherwise manipulated.

Why do I believe it's a misunderstanding on the business owner's part far more often than a mistaken or even purposeful effort by the Account Executive? For one, Yelp is pretty damn serious about their rep and will fire anyone caught doing this on purpose right away. Also, Yelp's training was good when I was there and has become phenomenal since I left so I don't see many mistakes happening. Finally, and I'm not going to butter this up, there are a LOT of business owners out there who don't understand the web and plenty who are just plain dumb (Just because you own a business, doesn't mean you should). the majority of businesses we called are one off restaurants/bars (just look at the majority of restaurant websites), little retail stores or one man service shops.

Yelp is about the customer first and businesses second; because of this, there are always going to be business owners who feel screwed. With all that said, though, I feel that this latest lawsuit speaks to a huge problem that is only going to get bigger for Yelp as it gets closer to an IPO unless they significantly change their business pitch.