Don’t Do User Experience? Actually, You Do.

You have a user experience whether you like it or not, and regardless of whether you’re doing anything to optimize it. From the first exposure a potential customer has to your products or services – whether that’s on a billboard, through direct mail, by word of mouth, or on a search engine – you are providing that customer with an experience around your brand.
In the age of technology, and for most of the people reading this, you ultimately want people to end up on your website – this is where you can really sell yourself, because you’re not constrained to [...]

Steve Ballmer and the Future of Search Revenues

Steve Ballmer is an enthusiastic guy. As he climbed on stage with Danny Sullivan at SMX West, everyone was wondering how long it would be before he cranked up the volume and slipped into his typical Ballmeresque bombastic delivery. Steve didn’t disappoint. A few minutes into the interview, with Sullivan probing about Microsoft’s aspirations around search, Ballmer was yelling “Sell..Danny, Don’t Yell!” (ironic in the extreme) and roughhousing with poor Danny like a good natured football coach having a little fun with the class math geek. I half expected Steve to give Sullivan a noogie.
I suspect there will be [...]

Google to Crack Down on Spammy User Generated Content?

Original article featured at Marketing Jive: User Generated Content: Google to Crack Down on Spammy UGC
User Generated Content (UGC) can provide great value for your web properties.  In fact, Bazaarvoice reported that 80% of consumers are now seeking user generated content and reviews to guide purchase decisions.  (For the record, Bazaarvoice recently served up its 100 billionth piece of UGC).  However with the good comes the bad and user generated content can be easily exploited if not monitored.
If you are a large e-commerce site, or any site for that matter, that features substantial pieces of user generated content, you will [...]

Are you sure you’re targeting the right people?

Making a sale relies a lot on knowing who your potential customer is and what they need. That means that you have to do your research.
We got a call yesterday from a gentleman who noticed that Enquiro “is a sponsored link on Google” and was sure we’re “paying good money to be there”. He was calling because his company has “the ability to take clients’ websites and put them on page one of Google, organically, in 90 days or less.”
He did his research a little too late. About 30 seconds into the voicemail, he suddenly realized that search engine [...]

Buy & Sell Slaves on eBay…or dynamic keyword insertion gone wild

eBay and Google have been getting some attention lately after someone in the UK noticed that a search on Google for “African slaves” served up a search results page that included an ad from eBay for “African slaves”. Is this a case of eBay and Google being evil? No, it’s a case of sloppy dynamic keyword insertion (DKI). And eBay doesn’t restrict its poor ad management to just Google. Take, for example, this screenshot from a search originating in Canada for “slaves” on Bing, taken this morning. Apparently eBay has “Fantastic prices on Slaves. Buy & Sell today”. OK, even [...]

Less Pain, More Gain. Understanding the BuyerSphere Project, Part 1.

Since the publication a few months ago of “The BuyerSphere Project” by Enquiro’s CEO, Gord Hotchkiss, we’ve been working hard to integrate the concepts from the book into everything we do. For example, see Charlotte Bourne’s article on using BuyerSphere insights to inform your content development strategy. As we learn from this experience, I’ll share the journey in this blog, and I look forward to hearing your ideas and experience with applying the ideas.
If you haven’t read the book yet, The BuyerSphere Project investigates how business buys from business in a digital marketplace. Maybe that doesn’t sound like a [...]

Models of Information Seeking: The Standard Model vs. The Tetris Model

The standard model of information seeking, developed through observation, is one that outlines the basic actions involved in finding information. Variations of the standard information seeking model has been developed through work by Salton and Ennis, Shneiderman, and Broder, among others. The most developed model from Marchionini and White describes the information seeking process as:

Recognizing a need for information
Accepting the challenge to take action to fulfill the need
Formulating the problem
Expressing the information need in a search system
Examination of the results
Reformulation of the problem and its expression, and
Use of the results

(Marchionini and White in [...]

Interlinking Tips: Establishing an Interlinking Process for your Web Properties

Original post on establishing an interlinking process found on Marketing Jive.
Developing an interlinking strategy is a key piece of optimizing your web properties. Quite often many site owners do not take the time to properly plan their interlinking strategy. The process outlined below is designed to provide some insight as to how you should proceed when establishing your interlinking strategy.  While this process can be modified according to how advanced your current interlinking strategy is, if anything else, establishing a process will at least ensure that interlinking is a line item as part of [...]

Search User Interfaces

If you’re interested in the academic side of search, chances are you’ve come across the work of Marti Heart, a professor at Berkeley’s School of Information. Her work covers everything from search engines, search interfaces, social technology, information visualization and web usability. Her book, Search User Interfaces, came out late last year and is a great resource for anyone interested in the information seeking process and how users interact with search and search results. Better yet, the text of the entire book is available free online.
If you are interested in usability, the chapters on the design, presentation, and evaluation of search [...]

Search and Decisiveness

The last two columns (column 1 | column 2) explored decisiveness within a very defined scope: college students picking courses. I did that through an interesting study conducted by Wesleyan University, which used eye tracking to capture the eye movements of decisive and indecisive people.
In reading the study, my mind went back seven years to one of the first research studies Enquiro ever did (and still our most popular download) – Inside the Mind of the Searcher. In it, we observed the behaviors of 24 individuals as they used search engines to carry out tasks. It was the first qualitative [...]