BradPace.com

I heard about a new web service called Evernote.com on one of my favorite podcasts (this week in tech or TWIT).  The site is still in beta but I wanted to try it out.  I signed up for the beta and within a few hours had an invite in my inbox.  The idea behind evernote is that it is a place to store your “brain” on the internet and then go back and search it later. Their tagline is to remember everything! Upload anything you want to store for later reference.  Images, snipits of text from webpages or emails, text notes, and even audio can be stored on evernote.  One think that made evernote interesting to me is their multiple client strategy.  They have both PC and Mac clients.  As well as a nice pure web interface and firefox plugin. They are also working on blackberry and iphone clients that are coming soon.  This is important because often time you want to access this data from strange places.

The coolest thing about this service is their ability to scan and index all the data that you add as notes.  So if you upload a digital photo of a receipt you can later automatically search for the text in the image and evernote will highlight it on the image.  I am sure there are other online OCR apps but this is the first I have seen that does it well.

My first thought was that this would be a great place to store family history and genealogical data online.  I immediately uploaded a bunch of family history pages I recently scanned at my Grandmother’s home.  This included photos with names, newsletter articles, and pedigree sheets.  About 60 high res images.  I uploaded the images using their PC client and it took about 30 minutes to not only upload the images to the website but to also OCR all the text on the pages.  If I had all my genealogy on this site I could easily search for any person, place or date and Evernote would show me all the documents I have that relate to this person (assuming there is some text associates with the photos).  You can also manually tag images.  Here is a few screenshots of a search I did for my grandfather Elwin (Pace).

Here is a pedigree file where I searched for James Pace. (Yes I do have second cousins in my tree! Paces on 2 sides.)

Here is a photo that shows it does pick up hand written text as well (searched for Paul). (Yes that is me on the right with my oh so hip 70s pants.  I don’t think I was invited to be in the photo).

Now this is in beta, but here are the drawbacks. I did not that the OCR is only about 50-60% accurate.  Surely not good enough for what we do on WVR. There are many places that I thought it should have picked up “Elwin” when I did the search (like the pedigree).  Also it is hard to flip through the results.  They just list every note in order that has your search results.

Next their tagging feature is very week.  Facebook does that best at tagging photos (selecting an area on the photo to tie a tag to) and Evernote just does it at the noto (or photo) level.  Lame!  Also because some of the OCR is not correct I wish I could see how their software sees all the text and be able to fix it or add the text to anything they missed.  So I could know for sure that everything was indexed correctly.  This is a major drawback to this system.

All in all I think this site/software is very cool and as it improves should be very useful.  Just the mobile aspects of this are amazing.  Think about doing price comparisons at the store by just taking photos with your phone and mailing them to Evernote.  Then going back and comparing all the prices and features.  But I think it needs to have better OCR and indexing and a few more features before it is ready to be a serious tool (especially a genealogy tool).

This is a live blog from the FamilySearch developers conference.  The keynote is given by Ranson Love who is the director of strategic partnerships at FamilySearch.

There is a huge groundswell of genealogy interest in the world and this interest is just in the beginning stages.   The Lord has prepared the world for this work including the open source movement.  Hardware and opens source tools are key to the success of the spread of genealogy on the web.  Also great sets of complex data like wikipedia and google provide solutions to problems that could never have been solved in the past.  Social networking will also be a big boon to the genealogy community.

There is a universal human need for family history.  Everyone wants to know who we are.  Once someone knows that they want to share that information. He mentioned our we’re related success as an example.

What is the killer platform for genealogy?  Open and collaborateive technology.  Open and collaborative. Includes social networking.

There are many challenges to this work.  First the need is worldwide and many of these people do not have technology.  He estimates that there are 70 billion records in the world.  Currently FamilySearch has 6 Billion records and 12 Billion names.  Over half of all children born in the world today have no official record of their existence!  This statistic is getting worse because of the distribution of births in the world. Another problem is that the data in the vault is not owned but governed by 9000 contracts.

FamilySearch can not do it all alone and they need help from partners. They estimate that there are over 10 million genealogists in the world today.  Their vision is they need a global community and free flow of data into open repositories.  Also linked to commercial and non-profit services and richer content is key to their success.  They want partners to succeed because they can reach users who the church cant.  This requires some paridigm shifts.  Moving away from aquiring content but getting access to data.  Also they will not build products any more but  are building platforms.  Moving away from collecting information to sharing information.  Moving away from just a church workforce to a community.  Also they want to develope standards to help the industry.

Key technology components.    New family search creates a collaboration of users and data. In 7 generations that is 127 direct ancestors and 8,319 ancestors of ralated children.  In 10 generations there are 525,311 related ancestors!  Trees provide context to data that many people are interested in. The new family search has increased family history work by 10x in the districts where it has been released.

They have made many advancements in scanning.  Can now digitize an entire roll of film in 20 minutes of processing.  This used to take a live person over 2 hours to complete.  Indexing is then done with double blind entries and then they compare both versions.  This produces quality results.  The farther back in time the harder it is to index because the data is not as organized.  In 2005 they had 800 indexers.  Now they have 160,00 stakes in the US, UK and Germany and includes 120k users and can produce 1.7 million names a day.  They want 300k users in the next 2 years.  They have 3 programs and ways to partner with them:  record access program, web services program, and family history center affiliates.

They are seeing a big change in the attitudes of record custodians over the last few years.  A few years ago they did not want anything to do with digital.  Now they undestand that their data needs to be digital to remain viable and to preserve their records.  FamilySearch is attempting to fill this need and supply what these record custodians need.  They try and do it with no cost to them.

FamilySearch web services contains 2 major areas.  Framily tree and records search.  Both include APIs to collaborate with partners. Need to be able to search any repository and must be able to do a selective copy of relevant data.  Must be able to past the data into desired repository through some type of app.  Must have a persistent link to source to ensure accuracy of the data and lead generation.

They want to build a genealogy ecosystem that includes archives, customers, familysearch, desktop and web app providers and genealogy societies.  All these individual parts need to contribute data into the tree.

Presented by Rodney Rumford from facereviews.com. Users spend an average of 20 minutes per visit! Facebook changes the way people communicate and interact. The question is how do companies leverage this new type of communication. Frictionless word of mouth marketing. Facebook marketing opportunities include Lead gen, brand extension, commerce, customer engagement, traffic, fan pages, frictionless woma, groups, applications, advertising targeted, sponsored groups (min 100k ad spend).

8 facebook marketing options

1. applications – A new way to micro-touch and communicate. Scrapulus is the new golf. 580k daily. Useful apps can get sponsorships. Like Where I’ve been. Orbits sponsors them and 65K daily users. This provides a way for brands to engage users.
2. groups – hundreds of groups
3. paid groups
4. targeted ads – very targeted demographics. We tested this with ads from World Vital Records with little success. We are continuing to see how this will work for us.
5. news feed ad buys – Social ads are getting better and provide a type of advertising that google ad words cant do. 100k minimum to buy this space. There are also great 3rd party companies to display ads. Cubics, lookery, social media, appsaholic, Zynga, SGN.
6. pages – Pages are getting better. There is a question as to what is the difference between groups and pages. Jeep is a good example of a good page.
7. beacon
8. guerilla
9. execute with a cohesive strategy

Define success in your marketing campaigns. What are your metrics. Use a multipronged approach. Reach a target market. Measure marketing performance. Also measure engagement and the viral multiplier, frequency of return and conversion rate. How are people interacting and understand that.

6 steps to success

1. start at the end
2. defined business opportunities and objectives
3. simplified and engaging application 10k foot
4. application strategy 1k food, viral turning
5. Embrace multiple marketing vehicles. Measure ROI
6. Continue to change and evolve.

Cool greating cards app used forced invites. When they removed this their growth was still about the same. So you don’t need forced invites.

Presented by BJ Fogg. Sharing some secrets that have never been shared before. At stanford they had a class where teams built facebooks. They had 5 apps that got over 1 million users and had 10 apps get over 100k users. This was a big success. They started the class and did not know what they where doing. They expected 20-40 users and ended up with over 120 the first day. Ended up with 7 teachers and 80 students. They got some great press coverage. Students started meeting outside of class and still get together. $500k-$1Million in revenue at least 3 companies where formed. At least 2 companies where acquired.

Learnings from the class. #1. It is never to late to create a winning app. #2 the simple apps won. Apps need to be simple and easy. #3 speed and flexibility in launch and iterations. #4 community cooperation leads to success. Students helped others #5 individual opinions about apps are worthless. dont be swayed by one persons opinion. #6 Copying success is a cheap fast way to succeed. Novelty inst the best approach to apps. $7 metrics do matter, but todays tools are too weak. Instrument your apps to track success #10 mass interpersonal persuasion is finally here. Persuasion, social network, observable impact, fast cycle, easy to do, automated.

I was a bit disappointed by this presentation. I was already familiar with what they did there. They did not talk about the psychology behind the apps much. They went over their learnings very quickly. We built out app at this same time and achieved 2 million users in 10 weeks for our we’re related app. But our app is a real app and not a toy like these students created. And our app continues to grow.

Presented by Benjamin Link from Facebook. They are trying to create the frictionless platform.

User objective: help users communicate ad share information more efficiently, generating more meaningful activity, providing valuable information to users, increasing value to the users. Value to users means value to developers of facebook apps. This creates a more seamless level of activity.

Enhanced site experience. Expanded and interactive wall where users can generate their own content, friends can write posts. Additional tabs on the profile where users can add their favorite apps. This will be a great ui enhancement.

Seeing an increase in app usage. 99% of all users have used at least one app. Most have 6 or more apps installed. Long term value to developers and businesses.

Sharing proven technology, tools and architecture. Licensing their technology to partners like beebo. They claim that this makes their platform open. I don’t think this makes it open. They have launched the platform developers marketplace. Match developers to major brands. They are working on mass distribution via localization. They used their users to translate the site and then got feedback from users. Now you can get facebook in spanish. This will greatly expand their market. They say these same language translation tools will be available to facebook app devlopers. This will launch “very very shortly”.

Providing core infrastructure and resources. Applications should use the social graph and then leverage the social graph. Timing is less important when interacting online. Interact when you can. Timing of communication is very important and helps the communication be more efficient. Facebook photos is the largest online photos app in the world because it is plugged into the social graph. Facebook wants world class apps that leverage the social graph. Some of the top apps now are entertainment. New apps are more about productivity and more useful applications. They are building commerce functionality into the system. Build native support for accepting credit cards into the developer apis. That will be awesome! He says this will launch very soon (later this year).

Enabling viral distribution to over 66 million active users. Create the best user experience available. Jacking users around has been a big problem on facebook. Like forced invites. Facebook is putting control of these types of poorly designed apps in the hands of the users. Users can report poor experience. Facebook wants apps with a long term view of the world and that put the user first. Facebook now monitors activities like invites and accepted invites. Apps that create good content and functionality get more privlages on the system. Personally I think this is the only way that they can keep a good user experience on Facebook. Our app can now send more invites per user because we have a good conversion rate.

Last Tuesday I was able to fly to San Francisco to attend the Snap Chat at Hi5 Labs.  Patrick Chanezon who is the Google API evangelist spoke.  He did a great job and it was easy to tell he is a major player in planning and implementing OpenSocial.  He spoke on high level non-technical issues all the way down to coding and specifics on the spec.  Google currently has 40 APIs available with their suite of products.  The 2 major APIs Google is focused on right now are Android (for cell phones) and OpenSocial.

In any new product there is a cycle that it goes through.  First there is a peak of inflated expectations then a trough of disillusionment.  After that there is a slope of enlightenment and finally a plateau of productivity.  Patrick was very clear that OpenSocial had a high peak of inflated expectations at the beginning and then hit a trough of disillusionment.  He hopes that now they are on the uphill slope of enlightenment.  But still have a long way to go before it is ready for real customers and business.

OpenSocial is not intended to make it so you can write your app once and have it work everywhere.  OpenSocial allows us to LEARN ONCE (one system) and write everywhere.  Each app will need to be re-written for each social network.  Each network has a different audience and different features and different data that will be available.  But the point of OpenSocial is that it will be very easy to deploy the same app (with some customization) to many networks in a short amount of time.

The .5 version of the OpenSocial spec had no security at all (or user authentication).  The .6 spec came out at the end of December and had many enhancements and included security and user controls.  The OpenSocial spec is really just an extension of the google gadget API.  They have agreed to use Atom as a standard format for files.  The .7 version of the spec will come out by the end of January and should be ready for actual end users to test.  There will be a .8 version in February that will be ready for production or beta use.

The API can be broken down into 3 main parts:

1)      Access to friends

2)      Activities stream (feeds and invites for virality)

3)      A simple hash map (creates a persistence layer for the apps)

If you want to play with OpenSocial the best way to get started is to use a sandbox to run your code on.  Plaxo, Ning, Hi5, and Orkut all have sandboxes.

Ning and Google have created an Apache open source project called Shindig.  There has been some confusion as to what Shindig is.  Simply put Shindig is a container and back end server components for hosting Open Social apps.  Think of it as plumbing to expose your data.  Google is working on the Java version and Ning is working on the PHP version.  They hope that other companies will do other versions like .net (MySpace?) and ruby(Zing?).

Patrick’s prediction was that MySpace would make a big impact this year.  They did not do much in 2007. They are going to be launching a developer outreach program and will be providing some very cool tools for their system.  MySpace is not done yet and we should see some exciting stuff from them over the next few months.

He also hinted that there will be some OpenSocial development tools coming soon.  Maybe even from Google.  He keeps track of all the cool OpenSocial links at http://del.icio.us/chanezon.

The overall take away from the meeting is that OpenSocial is progressing well and will be ready for some serious development and possibly betas in a month or so.  Plus you have to have the networks implement the most recent version of the spec to actually use it. But he acted like the 4-5 major OpenSocial networks are implementing the versions quickly. But it should be ready for production in March.  Start filling those sandboxes now because OpenSocial will be here sooner than we think.

Here is my outline of a short presentation I did at the last Rocky Mountain Affiliate Marketing Association last week.

First you have to get yourself in an “Outsourced Mindset”. (Don’t outsource your mind!) Effectively using outsourced resources can change everything from profitability to how much you can pay for a customer.

50s, 60s, and 70s was all about building large all-in-one corporations. The 80s and 90s was about cutting costs using outsourcing. The 2000s will be about partnering with the companies that have the best specialties and the fastest growing knowledge and skill sets.

The books “The world is flat”, “the Only Sustainable Edge”, and “The 4 hour work week” are great books on outsourcing.

What can be outsourced. 2 rules + 1

1) Tasks can be clearly defined and easily communicated

2) Tasks that are time consuming and can be easily broken up

3) Also, have fun with it!

Things to think about

· Do you have short term, unrelated tasks or do you want a trained team with long term projects?

· Do you have someone to manage the tasks and provide direction? You must have good management. This is where most companies fail.

· What form of communication do you need from them (email, phone, written docs)?

· There will be frustrations!

Outsourcing- don’t forget US opportunities

• Part time specialized help (genealogists in specific area), bloggers, PR, IT, content creation, SEO, affiliate recruiting.
• Setup an “advisory panel”.
• Use customers, LinkedIn, social networks, affiliates, etc.
• Find people who are excited about what you do.
• Just ask!

Finding a company to work with

• Ask the right questions and lots of them.
• Types of skilled workers they already have. Specialties?
• Office setup and work environment. Internet connection, utilities, public transit, even health conditions can make a big difference in productivity. Ask for photos.
• Team organization and communication channels
• How are workers compensated? Understand their benefit package. Employee retention rate.
• Times outsources employees will work.
• Who will you interface with? A US manager, overseas manager, or direct with employees?
• Can you interview your workers? Is there a trial period you can use?
• Have them help you understand the differences between overseas workers and US workers.

Outsourcing tools

• Google docs – Best tools ever!
• VOIP and IM
• Source control for developers – cvs, source vault, source safe
• Bug/Task tracking systems. Used bugzilla in the past. Use OnTime now (awesome!)
• 37signals.com products (basecamp and backpack) and many open source solutions
• Amazon’s Mechanical Turk system to outsource tasks to thousands of independent workers.

Here are some tips and ideas on getting dynamic web sites indexed by the search engines.

1) Watch out for spider traps. Many dynamic web sites have multiple ways to access the exact same data. Also it is very easy to build infinite loops where the spiders get lost and give up. The search engines don’t ban you or anything because of this. Often that this just makes it so your best pages never get indexed. Monitor the spider activity using your analytics software or by looking at your log files. Also use tools such as Yahoo site explorer to see what is (and isn’t) indexed.

One way to fix this (or ensure you don’t have problems with this) is to use 301 redirects. Use your server to keep the spiders on the right path. Also use the robots.txt file to keep the spiders out of troubled areas. There was one example given where they blocked the spider from problem areas and within days their other ranking improved.

2) Watch out for form based navigation. This is where you select an option in a dropdown and must click a button to get there. Bots don’t submit forms and would never find your content if you use a form as your main type of navigation.

3) URL parameters are ok. For years it was thought that the spiders simply stopped at the “?” in a URL. That is where the parameters start. This is not true. Now days there is so much dynamic content that the spiders are smart enough to figure out most parameter strings. But this holds only to a point. Really long URLs will not be crawled (more than 200 characters). Never go over 10 variables in your url string! So keep them as short as possible. Also make sure you are not passing session ids or user variables in the url strings. These show up as different pages to the search engines and will give you duplicate content problems.

One interesting idea is to use a one parameter URL schema. This is where you basically use mod-rewrites to map one simple url parameter to get to a much longer url string. This masks your complicated urls with simple ones. I love this idea.

4) Remove the junk. Often dynamically generated pages have much more “junk” code in them than hand coded pages. Javascript, comments in the code, bloated CSS and even bad HTML. Make sure the outputed source code of your pages is clean and optimized.

5) Make sure your pages are optimized. Dynamic pages can be some of the easiest and most difficult to optimize for the search engines. Make sure each “page” on your site has a unique title tag and meta tags. This is a problem we are currently fixing on the WVR website. Also make sure you have good headlines, alt tags, and cross linking on your pages. If you do it correctly, you can easily improve thousands of pages (or millions in our case) with a few simple lines of code with page variables inserted.

6) One tip from Laura Thieme was to watch the results in MSN after you make site changes. She says that MSN will pick up the changes first and often Google will rank the pages very similarly after that.

7) Use a “test” spider to find problems. There is a great spider you can get and run against your site that will find problems. Check out the Xenu spider to do this.

And last and most important is to use xml datafeeds. All the major search engines will accept data feeds where you can tell the spider what pages you want them to crawl. Make sure you are maintaining your sitemap files. Also both the google and yahoo systems will tell you if you have errors in your sitemap file and when your site was last crawled.

One big theme of SES was getting user feedback on your site and doing usability studies. Before I get into optimizing landing pages I just want to note that it should actually be your site visitors that are designing your pages. The best page is not one the designer, marketing department or CEO likes best. It is the one that your site visitors like best. And they vote by becoming your customers.

First here are some mistakes to avoid when designing your landing pages.

1. Never ignore your baseline. You need to measure progress against something to know if you are making improvement. I have fallen into this trap before because I think I can remember when I make changes to the site and when I did it. But a week later I can’t remember where I started (or even what I am testing). So you need to keep some type of record. If you are using Google optimizer it will keep track of your baseline for you.
2. Not collecting enough data. Make sure you have a valid sample size to draw valid conclusions.
3. Forgetting about interactions. Interactions are how different elements of your page interact with each other. One headline may match up well with an image for example. And you need both to see the improvement. So don’t do multiple independent A/B tests on the same page. If you have more than one thing on a page to test do a multivariant test. This will test every combination and will tell you which is best taking into account all possible interactions.

Focus your optimization efforts above the fold. This is a mistake I often fall into because I love long sales pages. Long pages work well for single product-single page sites. But most commercial web sites have a much more complex decision making process. Conversions mirror eye tracking studies. So place your most important items where people’s eyes are naturally drawn.

You have to remember that most people on the web have a “blink of the eye” mentality. You only have a precious few seconds to convey your message and draw the user into taking the next step. Leave them a “scent” they cant resist. Before you can convert a user you must first get their attention.

Jamie Roche the president of Offermatica gave some great points on using personalization to improve your conversion rate. I touched on this in my previous post on personalization. But if you know what a user searched for in the search engine, then re-enforce that on your landing page when they get to your site. “You searched for X and we have it in stock!” Here are easiest and best ways that Mr. Roche suggests you use to get started with personalization:

• Give new visitors a different message than return visitors. This is easy to do with a site cookie.
• Affinity – If they enter your site in a specific category then show them information on that same topic the next time they visit.
• Time/Day targeting. Visitors to your site who come during business hours may be very different than visitors coming to your site during the evening or on weekends. Tweek your site experience to best capture these different users.
• Geo targeting. This can be an easy way of providing a personalized message. For example on World Vital Records we should highlight data that is close to where the user is from.
• Paid vs direct. If your user came from a paid source they may need different messaging than if they came from organic search listing.

Mr Roche really enforced that you just need to pick a starting point. Don’t let it overwhelm you. Start small and work into a fully personalized site experience later. But even though you may start small you need to still think big. Have a big personalization strategy and work toward it.

There are several approaches you can take to optimizing your landing pages and your site messaging in general. You can do it in a evolutionary manner where you start with what you have now and make small changes over time. Or you can take a revolutionary approach and test something very different. This method has the largest chance to greatly improve your conversion rates but also has more risk that your test may tank hard. He likes the revolutionary method.

The overall point is that you need to optimize your landing pages with the user in mind. An optimized page means that your site visitors find it more compelling and more useful. The user experience is better and thus the conversion rate goes up. So don’t get lost in the numbers and in individual tests. Think about the user and making improvements for them. Show them what they want and conversion rates will follow.

I had the opportunity to hear Bryan Eisenburg speak on web site conversion. It just so happens that I am currently reading his book “Call to action”. Paul gave me the book about a week ago and I am about half way through with it. It is taking forever because every page is packed with great info. I have highlighted it and have been writing notes on almost every page. Anyway, it was a great opportunity to attend his presentation. He is one of those guys that you can tell really knows his stuff.

Here are my notes and thoughts on improving your web site conversion rate. Eisenberg promotes the idea of “persuasive architecture”. That means you need to architect your site in such a way that it persuades users (he hates the word user) to go down the paths they need to convert. To do this you must take into account the different types of visitors you have on your site. Then have a way to persuade each user down a path tailored to their specific needs.

There are 4 types of personalities to take into consideration
1. Competitives
2. Methodicals
3. Humanistics
4. Spontaneus

Define each personality and how they will relate to your product. Define each as a profile. Then decide which action (or actions) you need them to take to get to a conversion. Then come up with specific information that each profile needs to feel confident in their decision. The persuasive architecture is centered around the idea of helping as many users as possible feel confident and conformable becoming your customer.

There are 7 formulas for success in having a great conversion rate:

1. Product images tell a story. Make sure you have the right images that connect with your users.
2. Test headlines and hyperlinks. Small things can make a big difference. For example test fractions against percentages (50% off or ½ off). Test asking questions. Also test self focused messaging against customer focused messaging (You can _____ or We will _________).
3. Test various call to actions. Get them to click by telling them what they get. Instead of “learn more” use “Help me choose” or “download now” for example. Also use shading on your buttons (he says it helps)!
4. Point of action assurances. Make sure your visitors know they are on the right path. Make them feel good all along the way.
5. Make it obvious and expected. As you look at your pages, ask yourself if it is clear to your visitors what they should do.
6. Don’t make them wait. Site latency can kill your site conversion rate. Check out the yahoo firefox plugin Yslow that tells you what the problems are with your site. http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/
7. Does your site stink? You need to leave a relevant “scent” on your site. These are the hints that you place on your pages to lead users down the path they need to go. A scent is made up messages that convey motivation, persuasion and value. Keep them on the path using one of these techniques.

Much more to come on conversion rates. I will be running some A/B and multivariant tests on my site and will blog the results.