Planning an Event? Great. I’m sorry to say I can’t help you much with the event itself. What I perhaps can help you with is avoiding some major mistakes with your online presence. During a recent project, I’ve had occasion to look at a lot of events sites. And I’ve come to realize that there’s way too many folks out there damaging their prospects. Starting with the obvious; make sure to communicate the What/When/Where asap! Amazingly, many just don’t do this. [Read more…]
Product Manufacturer Marketing via Digital – Challenges & Practices
In some of my past work, I’ve help lead product teams or design sites for various types of direct selling of products. And a few past posts discuss some aspects of ecommerce. But you know what? Ecommerce in some ways just isn’t that hard. Yes, it has its many complexities and there’s all kinds of technology coming out all the time to help from the top of the funnel through the bottom and ongoing support, etc. Still, what you’re left with – when you get done with multi-channel attribution, multivariate testings of every element on a detail page, etc. – is a fairly simple binary thing: A prospective customer bought from you or not. And you should have the data to know that. Also, ideally, some direct and inferential knowledge as to where in the sales funnel you’ve lost shoppers along the way. [Read more…]
Finding Web Page Publish Dates When Not Displayed-Part-2
Welcome to Part 2 of Finding Web Page Publish Dates when they’re not displayed on a page. Why would you care? Well, you have your reasons. Please see Part 1 of this topic to get a sense of why we’re bothering to look at this stuff.
In any case, continuing then…
- See if images have a date stamp.
- Click on an image or right click and open in a new window. See if the URL has a date stamp on it.
- A more extreme option might be to look at image info to see if there’s EXIF data in the image with a date. This doesn’t necessarily tell you much as the image could have been taken any time. Maybe it’s years old stock photography.
- Try Google’s Structured Data Tool.
- The tool is to help web site creators validate data within their pages. But it can also be used for discovery.
Finding Web Page Publish Dates When Not Displayed Part 1
In an earlier post, I expressed by own annoyance when certain types of sites choose to not display publish dates on their web pages. And how this is especially annoying when it’s an article that presumes to be talking about current statistics or other aspects where knowing the date context is useful. My goal in that post was to convince any publishers who might happen across the article as to the value of including the date. (Here’s the link to: Should You Put Dates on Blog Posts and Articles?)
This blog is mostly geared towards the Product/Business side of things. But today, it’s more for end users, whom of course may be business users with the need or just desire to find publish dates of content. I’d like to try to offer web users, surfers, researchers, whatever your self-identifying characteristic may be, some techniques to try to find content publish dates when they’re not clearly provided. These methods are not necessarily accurate, precise, or at all reliable. But they may be all you’ve got.
Why does this matter? Well, it might not. The assumption here is that there are certain types of content, (business research for example), where knowing the date is important enough to warrant the effort to look into the publish date, and possibly the last modified date. [Read more…]
Should You Put Dates on Blog Posts and Articles?
This is an old argument. Which I had hoped was mostly coming down on the side of keeping dates in, even though there are allegedly still potentially SEO benefits to leaving them out due to Google’s “Freshness Algorithm.” Supposedly, this was adjusted sometime around 2015 to fix this problem. (The problem being people playing SEO games with content publish dates regardless of impact on end user value.) One recent research task I was performing landed me on a variety of blog and lower end news sites that had chosen to not put visible publish dates on their articles. (We’ll leave aside the old issue of just what is ‘blog’ vs. ‘news’ site.) So I looked into this a bit and it seems there’s still info out there suggesting lack of dates is a good idea. Maybe it is in some special cases. But I think mostly not; at least from a user perspective.
This is a User Experience issue that screams, “I don’t care about users’ needs.” If you’re a Product person or Publisher that’s running a site where you’ve chosen to not display the publish date, please take moment to consider the following… [Read more…]
Any Useful Tech from the Advertising Industry’s Toilet Bowl of Fraud?
Right, wrong or otherwise, online technology innovations were – and are – sometimes driven by pornography, (See PORN: The Hidden Engine That Drives Innovation In Tech), gambling (See VR is a smart bet for the future of gambling), and crime in general.
Leaving aside moral judgements on those industries, they’re generally considered on the seedier side of business in general even if they’ve become more mainstream. I recall early in the digital business, (around mid 1990s), there were some companies that just didn’t want business from such industries more due to a higher incidence of fraud and such more so than any other reasons. Over time, of course, ad fraud has become more prevalent everywhere. It seems everyday there’s something about ad fraud in at least on of my industry news feeds. I’m starting to wonder what – if any – spinoff benefits there might be from AdWars. Pick a study, any study, and you’ll find ad fraud to be in the billions of dollars. Here’s just a small sample…
- SlideShare – State of digital ad fraud 2017 by Augustine Fou
- Businesses could lose $16.4 billion to online advertising fraud in 2017: Report
- The Bot Baseline: Fraud in Digital Advertising 2017 Report
- Adweek’s Ad Fraud Section
- ‘Biggest Ad Fraud Ever’: Hackers Make $5M A Day By Faking 300M Video Views
Amazon Eats Whole Foods
So if you’re a Digital Product 
Manager and you’re looking at that Amazon purchase of Whole Foods, are you asking some questions? Such as…
- “What’s Amazon’s strategic imperative here?”
- “How might this affect my business and do I need to do anything differently?”
- “Even if this move doesn’t appear to directly impact my business, will there be cascade effects through the marketplace that will eventually change something to which I’ll need to respond?
I’ve seen a lot of digital ink spilled on the whys of the Amazon/Whole Foods deal. It makes sense for anyone working in digital to be looking at this and considering the strategic implications. And while we don’t know exactly what’s on Jeff Bezos’ mind, this article Amazon’s Whole Foods Strategy: It’s Not What You Think from Forbe’s Jason Bloomberg is the best survey of possible strategic imperatives I’ve seen yet.
There just a couple items Jason doesn’t cover that I’d add: [Read more…]
Website Speed is a Feature
Your login functionality is a feature. Your social sharing buttons are
features. Your core product offering itself has who-knows-how-many features. But what about your website’s speed? Given that research has shown slow website speed, (whatever slow might mean to some users), can hurt you in terms of abandonment and lost sales when there’s any sales involved, shouldn’t speed be considered a feature? That is, maybe website load time shouldn’t be just a “tech thing” that kind of gets done as a matter of course. Rather, it should be a core measurement given that it’s demonstrably a driver of other Key Performance Indicators. (KPIs.)
How bad is the problem?
Following are a couple versions of a chat about Speed I put together for a Udemy.com course I built for Digital Product Management. The ideas are so important though, I’ve extracted these as free segments because the more people that spread this word the better.
IoT Safety – For Consumers & Makers
In a prior post, I poked a bit of fun at some IoT fails. Some might not be so funny. And so far, I’m not aware of anything resulting in a great deal of personal injury or death. So far. But here’s the thing… we’re getting ahead of ourselves here. The rush to market and possibly the industry mantra of Minimal Viable Product (MVP) is going to dump some more bad products on the market. Unfortunately, security is still very poor across the IoT marketplace. There’s a lot of reasons for this. Not the least of which is there’s not a lot of value to building it in; just costs. The sad reality is that security costs are often a so-called “negative externality.” That is, any impact is suffered by a third party. This will likely change once some more lawsuit hungry lawyers get more deeply involved.
So what can you do for now? That very much matters whether you’re a Consumer or a Maker of such items. As a Consumer, I’ve got a bunch of this stuff rattling about. As a Product Manager, I’ve only worked briefly on one effort, so hardly an expert. But here you go… [Read more…]
Self-Driving Vehicles – Cascade Consequences & Product Opportunities
Things. And the Relationships Among Them
Many years ago I’d read a discussion about a few early science fiction writers. One thing that particularly struck me was thoughts about how it was one thing to imagine a few potential possibilities for technology or products, but quite another to brainstorm all of the side impacts of such things, both obvious and non-obvious. Those writers who thought of flying cars well before their time may have been prescient. But the ones who thought about how that might require new air traffic patterns, accident management, skyborne fast food pickup windows and more, they were even more visionary. They thought through what a lot of the cascade side effects might be; both for adjacent technologies and systems, and sociologically.