netactr

I’ve added the Disqus comments and UserVoice feedback widgets after some research into what’s being curently offered. GetSatisfaction and UserVoice were in the running for the feedback features. I eventually chose UserVoice because of their “AVIS” situation (”we are second, so we work harder”). UserVoice pricing seemed quite appropriate for startups and the like. Disqus [...]

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Anil Batra and Loren Bast shared their insights at the STS meetup yesterday.

Profiles are great for separating traffic from development/testing and production sites. Setup one profile to hold ALL data, in case you make a mistake, and then create a “Production” profile that has a filter on your dev and test machines (IPs, subdomains or [...]

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As I am planning our next steps at CueSense, I am heavily relying on Bryan Starbuck’s (CEO of TalentSpring) ideas from his December STS talk and this deck. Bryan’s 10x philosophy has already caused me to sharpen our mission. Although CueSense addresses many user needs, one must find needs urgent enough to make users jump through hoops and give your service a try. The social [...]

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Selling your car? Can’t decide between the $55 Premium Package from cars.com and the $69 Deluxe Package from autotrader.com? Web analytics can help you making the right investment.
Autotrader gets more uniques than Cars.com: 6.5M vs 5.2M in February 2008.

On that basis you are paying exactly the same amount of $10.6 per 1M uniques. 
However, Autotrader users make more [...]

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Jason Calacanis, the beleaguered founder of Mahalo, gave the best keynote at the SES New York. Mahalo is a start-up search engine which tries to reinvent what Yahoo pioneered in the 90’s – a directory for internet maintained by humans. Mahalo pays $15+ to anyone who is willing to build a wiki-like page with links [...]

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Mohan Sawhney, Kellogg marketing professor, keynoted the Microsoft Marketing Symposium in Seattle. Mohan’s submission was that marketing has remained marketing even if new digital and interactive technologies expanded our toolbox. He referred to the 1998 buzzword of the year – e-commerce – and compared it to today’s trends of paid search, social marketing etc.
Mohan’s making [...]

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Mich Mathews, Microsoft marketing SVP, spoke at the Microsoft Marketing Symposium to a crowd of some thousands. One of her comments was a bit personal (keep reading). She spoke of the traditional marketing funnel of awareness going to trial going to repeat purchases and how there used to be a long lag between the time [...]

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More and more service providers and technology vendors develop javascript codelets or server-side technology enriching web pages by automatically adding icons or underlining links or keywords. Examples: Yahoo Shortcuts, Snap, Surfcanyon, Kontera … the list goes on and on. Why care? My prediction is that this technology will be used more and more for marketing purposes, but the tech and [...]

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If you are looking for ways to better engage your audience, check out Microsoft’s Left vs Right. This site hosts two fictional characters representing the spectrum of political opinions. Visitors use the chat metaphor to initiate searches on Live Search and watch short skits that are loosely based on submitted queries. Left vs Right builds [...]

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Snap is an interesting gadget for spicing up your web content and earning ad revenue in the process. After you integrate a 3-line java script into your home page - I just created a title-less text widget on my WordPress blog and copied the code over there - all your links will be “snappable”. Snap [...]

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