Read the full article at The Results People blog.

“You can’t cure stupid.”

Read the original post on MediaPost.

Read the full article at MediaPost.

Reusable storage

The first great thing about USB drives is that they provide reusable storage. Anyone remember the pre-compact disc (CD) days when 3 1/2 floppy discs where the way of storing and transferring files? Before then, in the 80′s, we dealt with Super Pets’ and Commodore 64′s 5¼-inch floppies. Floppies enabled us to save files onto discs and then pop them into any other computer to access them again. Well, they didn’t work on all computers due to the great division between PC and Mac platforms. As a result, you had to have discs formatted to the respective platform in order for computers to read them.

After the emergence of CDs, floppy discs got dropped as they weren’t able to store as much data, (digital music and movies are far more size-intensive formats) but the challenge with CDs was that they were a one-time use storage device. Yes, there were re-writable CDs but let’s be honest, they took so long to swipe and reformat that most people only used them once. It was this one-time use feature that had supplied my bachelor day apartment collection of coasters.

Portable Apps

This is the awesomeness of USB drives! People seem to get the idea of saving files (.docs, .xls, .jpg), but haven’t made the leap to saving apps. On your USB drive you can have your web browser with all your key bookmarks and settings or even one for emails. Apple’s App Store, which recently passed one billion downloads, crossed that chasm with the general public by connecting apps with cell phones (smartphones). Prior to the App Store there were a few of us out there already taking advantage of portable apps, thanks to USB drives. By having these compact versions of regular apps stored on a USB drive you are able to sit in front of any computer, plug in your USB drive and bingo – not only do you have all your files, but you have all the apps you need to open, modify and communicate right there; no more issues of computers not having the right programs, no more time lost having to search the Net to download and then install the app you need.

My introduction to portable apps and USB drives was a result of spending time as a “road warrior” working remotely and commuting around the province of British Columbia. This was back before high speed WiFi in coffee shops, before hotels even had high speed internet, back when dial-up was commonplace. Having to send reports and images back to head office and make updates to websites via dial-up was an exercise in patience. I quickly learnt that libraries, photocopy/print shops and computer stores were my best places for accessing high speed Internet. There was little encryption or firewalls in the early days of the internet so any computer with access to high speed internet was an open target for me. So what did I do? I would place these compact apps and working files on my trusty USB drive and I was good to go. I would plug my USB drive into any computer, open my apps, work on my files, save back to my USB drive, send, upload, then un-plug and done. A great combination of portable apps and portable storage!

Listed below are the portable apps that I use, but there are lots more. Portableapps.com is a good place to start if you are interested in adding an app or two to the USB drive you carry around. If anyone has any other apps that they want to rank as awesome or lacking in awesomeness, post it below.

Portable Apps that I have used:
OpenOffice.org Portable – word processor, spreadsheet, presentations with Microsoft compatibility

GIMP Portable – Photo and Image Editor

FileZilla Portable – the full-featured FTP client

Nvu Portable & KompoZer Portable – The easy-to-use Nvu web editor

About the author
Timothy Lynch is a Marketing Coordinator at Mediative

Red shirt, no real purpose = death.

Granted, in Star Trek, including an alien battle makes the episode more exciting. But the story line is developed by the main characters, not that ensign you see for 6 seconds before he gets killed. The aliens didn’t have time to deal with insignificant, pointless Away Team members.

Think about sinking resources and screen real estate into a part of your site that’s got no real purpose. Your visitors don’t need distractions like that flashy red button over there that doesn’t have any impact on the story you’re trying to tell.

Data and human emotions just do not mesh.

Data always struggled trying to understand human emotions. Even with an emotion chip, he still couldn’t quite grasp them properly.

Analytics are great – they tell you what visitors did on your site, how long they did it for, where they came from, where they went, how much money they spent… but they don’t tell you why visitors did something. There is no substitute (emotion chip, etc.) for true human emotions. You need to talk to real people to find out what they’re experiencing on your site.

I’m a doctor, Jim, not a…

Poor Bones. Kirk just kept throwing stuff at him that he wasn’t familiar with. You need to take the time to understand your visitors, so that you’re presenting them with information and tasks that they can understand and complete without getting frustrated with you.

Our neural pathways have become accustomed to your sensory input patterns.

Ok, I’m taking this one out of context a bit (in case you’re wondering, this is Riker commenting on the crew’s friendship with Data), but the point here is that there are lots of tools out there now that let you monitor one specific visitor’s behaviors, and then present them with content that is uniquely applicable to them. By building up that database of their inputs, you can effectively target your message to them.

In that particular moment, I was reconfiguring the warp field parameters, analyzing the collected works of Charles Dickens, calculating the maximum pressure I could safely apply to your lips, considering a new food supplement for Spot…

Data was extremely good at multitasking, even when “romantically” engaged with Jenna. Understanding what else is going on while your visitors are engaged with you through ethnography or similar types of research can give you an idea of how much attention visitors are really giving to you.

Believing oneself to be perfect is often the sign of a delusional mind.

No matter what you think, there is always room for improvement. Getting into A/B and multivariate testing is pretty easy these days, so I suggest you give it a try. Take all of the work you’ve now done to understand your visitors and use it to start tweaking your designs to optimize conversions. If you need some ideas on what to test or how to optimize parts of your site, check out user experience best practices, form best practices, landing page testing ideas, call to action best practices, and some of our other online experience articles.

Act, and you shall have dinner; wait, and you shall be dinner.

This Klingon proverb summarizes the current digital marketing landscape pretty well. It’s not enough to throw up any old website any more – you have to understand your customers and what their needs and pains are, and act on giving them what they need to solve their problems. And you have to be constantly monitoring this and adapting to their changing needs. Sit still, and you risk giving up business to your competitors who aren’t sitting still.

Make it so.

So get out there, boldly go where none of your competitors have gone before, and start getting to know your buyer better. It’ll pay off.

Engage.

Still not sure what you should to understand your buyers or to optimize your website? We can help.

How people access content, and how relevant and current that content is, will be the constant factors in this evolution. But can we actually see into the future by learning from the past?

Teach Me, Mr. TV Executive
According to the viewership numbers from Nielsen, U.S. Television grew both in numbers of viewers and time spent per viewer over the past few years. This growth occurred in spite of the fact that time-shifted television viewing, Internet video viewing and mobile video viewing all grew as well.

But the historical leaders in viewership, the old guard of TV networks, have seen a decline in viewership. How can the leaders be failing but the industry thriving?
Television’s audience problem is one of fragmentation. More people may be watching more TV, but they are watching many, many more channels and more vertically specialized programs than they used to. The pie may be bigger, but the slices of that pie are much smaller.

The Fragmentation of Search
The way we consume media and content has changed, and continues to change. Some of the old business models for how content is distributed are failing and failing fast.

What Yahoo!, Google, and Microsoft were able to initially provide was the organization of the world’s content. This created the formation of the major network providers of search. Google, Yahoo!, and Bing are now the ABC, CBS, and NBC of the 1970’s Television era.

I believe it was not the technology platform that changed people’s behavior to want more specialized TV, but it was their natural intent. Those specialty providers (Food Network, OWN) that rose to provide a portal to better match intent with content succeeded.

But will people always go to Google or Bing to find this content? Or will the development of more direct access points, and quicker paths to content, fragment the search landscape? Will specialty App’s, vertical search engines and social portals each take a slice of the pie? And if so, what will this do to your lead gen, online revenue and marketing strategies?

In Part 2, we will look at what a marketer can do to position themselves to keep pace with search’s evolution.