Jens Ode

What’s Wrong With This Picture? (SEO And Google Images)

Jens Ode — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 11:40:30 +0000

Today I stumbled upon an interesting situation when I used Google Image Search. I searched for the term ”Norrgavel stol”, where ”Norrgavel” is a swedish furniture brand and ”stol” is swedish for chair. The result unfortunately confirmed someting I discovered a while back – furniture stores are horribly bad at search engine optimization. Take a look at the screen capture from the search result screen and specifically look at two things:

1. What’s there.
2. What’s not there.

What’s There

Well, I can give myself some credit. At place 1, 4, 8 and 14 we see results from designfavoriter.se, which is a web site I run. It actually shows all the posts about Norrgavel I have on the site, which means that I managed to dominate the search results. Good for me, especially when designfavoriter.se is only a couple of months old. What else do we see? Mainly all sources displayed are from blogs or larger interior design sites such as Sköna Hem and StyleRoom.

What’s Not There

Moving on to the more important question – what’s not there? Norrgavel is a swedish brand specialized in high quality and environment-friendly furniture. They only sell their products through their own set of stores and they have a web site which has been up and running for a long time, http://www.norrgavel.se. Where are the images from norrgavel.se?

Norrgavel should be very interested in driving traffic to their own site, especially since they don’t rely on resellers, in which case it would make sence to let the resellers get the traffic. Page after page is filled with images from blogs (even the logo image from designfavoriter.se appears), but there’s no sign of any images from norrgavel.se.

Does It Matter?

Yes, it really does. Traffic from the image search engines are actually quite large. To quote SavvyAuntie.com (large community site) ”I have more traffic referrals from images.google.com than Facebook and Twitter. [..]”. It is even more important for a design brand to have a strong presence in the image search results, since it is a very visual product.

What To Do?

Remember that every piece of content on your web site is a valuable asset. Make sure to give your images correct names and to use the Alt and Title tags correctly. If in doubt, read this article about using Alt and Title tags.

Note To Norrgavel

Somehow I don’t believe that Norrgavel has any alerts on when the brand name is used online, but if you do and find this, feel free to contact me and I’ll be glad to give you some hints on what you should do with your web site. Love your products, but your web site really does not live up to your standards.

A screen shot of the search result screen is displayed below.

Four Lessons From A Social Media Project – Alice In Twitterland

Jens Ode — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 21:18:08 +0000

Alice in Twitterland - Twitter Seen Through The Lens Of Alice
Two weeks ago a friend and I discussed crowdsourcing (harnessing the power of the general public) online. During breakfast the following day, while reading an article in the morning paper Sydsvenskan, something hit me:

The public is capable of so much more than it actually knows. For example, doesn’t the online community reproduce (albeit randomly) the works of great authors every day without even knowing it? How long would it actually take for, let’s say Tweeters around the world, to (re)write a famous novel?

I emailed my friend asking: ”Wouldn’t it be interesting to link (every word of) a book to excerpts of people’s discussions and watch the book evolve ”live” on a web site? We quickly agreed to go with the idea. The world wide release of Tim Burton’s remake of the movie Alice in Wonderland created the perfect back drop for the experiment. We decided that we would let the Twitter community write Lewis Carroll’s old master piece.

Step By Step 
We got the text to Alice in Wonderland from Project Guthenberg and split it up into single words. The original idea was to move through the text word by word and search the global Twitter stream to find messages (tweets) that contained the words of the book. Through the course of the project our approach had to be tweaked a few times which created some valuable lessons.

Lesson 1: Time Is Relative 
At first the idea was to move sequentially through the information stream, that is, every tweet had to be time stamped later than the previous one. The purpose was to make sure that the text was as close to real time as possible. The way to do this was simply to check the time stamp of a message and compare it to the one previously used. A later time stamp would indicate a more up to date message. Well, that is unfortunately not true. If two messages are submitted simultaneously, one in Sweden and one in New York, there will be a time stamp difference of 6 hours since the time indicated is local rather than from a global time line.

Lesson 2: Twitter API Is Limited 
Twitter has applied a limit on how often you may call it. In the original approach we wanted to move through the text word by word, and thus needed to query each word one by one. However, Twitter only allows 150 calls per hour if you’re not whitelisted (which requires going through a manual application process which may take weeks). When making a search through the API you can get away with a higher amount of calls (Twitter won’t say how many), but due to this limitations we had to scrap the idea. Instead of moving word by word it had to be sentence by sentence to make due with fewer searches and instead cache the result and replay it through the web site.

Lesson 3: User Generated Content = Body Count 
As soon as you try to harness user generated content, you run the risk of getting explicit content (and we’re not just talking the occasional mentioning of boobs…). This project is no exception. Already in the first test run of only ten messages there was content from the ”red light district”. Still it was decided to forge ahead without any filters, since the experiment is a snapshot in time, and these kind of messages are the reality of the online world today. However, if you plan to run a site with user generated comments be prepared to monitor it, because you will end up with inappropriate content.

Lesson 4: Leave An Opening 
One of the features of this project is that there are words that probably aren’t mentioned too often (like the names of some of the characters). If we stepped through the text and only displayed the result world for word, no one would be able to foresee upcoming words and (hopefully) include them in tweets to move the process forward. To remedy this we display one page of the book at the time and show the progress by highlighting every tweeted word. This is not in line with the original idea, we believe it will make it more visually interesting.

Final Thoughts 
This experiment is meant to capture a moment in time. The Alice in Wonderland-text will only be run once and when we reach the end the ”gathering of words” is over. We then have a static version of Alice in Wonderland expressed through thousands of twitter messages posted globally during the time of the experiment. It will be a snapshot of dialogues, expressions, ideas and mumbo jumbo seen through the lens of Alice.

Hopefully the experiment works, otherwise failure is always an option. Visit http://www.aliceintwitterland.com to follow (and perhaps participate in) the process.

Press release (swedish):
http://www.mynewsdesk.com/se/pressroom/wannaplay/pressrelease/view/twitter-anvandare-valrden-over-skriver-om-alice-i-underlandet-klart-paa-24-timmar-379945

Kindle Beta Developer Program Opened

Jens Ode — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 10:12:46 +0000

Amazon has opened the beta program for developing Kindle content. Kindle, the Amazon e-book reader most known for being a book reading device, now pushes forward to be converted into a more versatile tool. The timing is perfect with the upcoming shipping of the Apple iPad. A lot of development focus will be targeted towards the iPad, leaving an interesting area open getting apps through the Amazon store instead of the overcrowded Apple App store. Well, at least for the US content providers, since the Kindle probably won’t kick off internationally until Amazon opens up the entire catalogue outside the US.

Behind The Scenes With Designfavoriter.se

Jens Ode — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 12:19:57 +0000

There is a lot to be said when it comes to implementing a web site. Due to client confidentiality I can never really explain the bits and pieces of this using real examples. So, this christmas holiday I decided to create my own real world example to use as a platform for getting behind the scenes.

I give you http://www.designfavoriter.se!

In a series of articles I will explain the strategies behind the creation of the site, the tools and technologies and all the bits and pieces I can come to think of. The article series is not meant to be a dive into technical stuff, but rather an overall view suitable for everybody working with online communication. The article series will deal with all the things that are important to think of such as content strategies, user generated content, spam protection, SEO etc etc.

The Article Series

The first article will be Content Strategies or How To Get 61 Pages From 13 Articles. This will be followed by an article on Getting Jiggy With Mashups or How To Use Yahoo Pipes. In all in I have planned for about eight articles, including a Wordpress-dedicated article stepping through the inside configuration of the site.

Designfavoriter.se is connected to SIS-index, a swedish service that publishes visitor statistics , in order for you to be able to follow the progress of the site, http://www.sis-index.se.

If you want to follow the article series without the hassle of going here every day, make sure to add my RSS feed by clicking this link: http://jensode.se/blog/feed

And A Little Tip

If you are interested in design furniture or run an interior decoration blog, please feel free to register your blog on the blog index on the site: http://www.designfavoriter.se/ny-blogg/.

And if you know any design stores in Sweden that you would like to recommend, please feel free to add them to the store index (you will get a free link to your own site for every store you recommend): http://www.designfavoriter.se/ny-butik/.

On Cloud One With Dropbox

Jens Ode — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 12:54:04 +0000

Today I got myself a new Netbook. In the old days, a new computer meant a lot of hassle getting files transferred back and forth. Luckily, these are the new days. No more USB sticks, burnt CD’s, floppy discs or magnetic tapes. To get all my important files in place I did only one thing. I installed Dropbox.

Presto, my Netbook is now filled with all those ever-so important documents, files and other stuff that otherwise would be stuck in some other computer. And this is not the best part. The best part is that whenever I change anything in any of those files it is automatically syndicated to my four other computers that I use on daily basis. If one hard disc fails, the files are available on-the-fly from another computer. And when I move from one computer to the other the files are in place and updated.

This cloud service grabs the spot as number one this year. If you haven’t done it yet – get a Dropbox account! As they say, they best things in life are free. And this one will save you a lot of time and headache.

http://www.dropbox.com

The Kids Are Alright

Jens Ode — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 21:26:29 +0000

Designing with your heart is often required to achieve a good result. There is especially one type of projects where you really need to put your heart and emotions into the project and that is designing for kids. The great reward is also there – that is the only time when you can really bring out those vivid colors and funny ideas. But it is not all technicolor-fantasies-with-oompa-loompas, there are a lot of things to keep in mind. I’ve done my fair share of kids projects, ranging from 3D animated movies, DVD games, web sites, micro sites, digital magazines and cartoon movies. The hardest projects have been those where the target audience is both the kid and the parent. How do you successfully make a movie/game that makes a three-year-old happy and keeps the parent (who buys and reviews the product) satisfied. The kid loves to watch the movie fifty-five times in a row, the parent gets bored the second time. You may bewilder your target audience (the kid) but you push away your buyer (the parent).

A while back ago I was involved in a project based on one of the worlds greatest storytellers and children book authors – Astrid Lindgren. In a project like that you really try to push yourself to create something that honors her beliefs and world of stories – not something that appeals to a market segment. It’s more important to find the heart of the stories than to find the best call to action, if you get what I mean.

This actually applies to most kids design, because kids are very good at spotting what’s ”constructed” and what’s ”created”. If you put your heart into the project, use your humor and intuition, odds are that you will end up with something that kids will enjoy. You will also probably have a lot of fun doing it. However, there are also a lot of things you need to keep in mind.

- First off – the legal stuff. Marketing for kids is, thank god, very restricted and you need to know what to do and what not to do.

- Secondly – kids need the same level of good navigation as grown-ups. Kids will not be able to use a crappy navigation system just because the buttons are bright red and blinking – they need a good system.

- Thirdly - click areas should be large and call to actions easy to spot (as always).

- Fourthly – combine text and icons. Younger kids can’t read (duh).

- Fifth – bright lights – big city. Think vivid colors and large and easily spotted shapes.

- Sixth – follow your heart, Luke.

One of the greatest compilations of kid sites available today with a lot of good pointers has been compiled by Smashing Magazine. Check it out for inspiration and ideas!

Sweet Sunday, Sweet Web

Jens Ode — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 21:28:28 +0000

If you haven’t discovered it yet (and you speak swedish), this one is for you. Björn Falkevik, Mattias Östmar and Joakim Nyström produces and broadcasts Sweet Sunday Web Crunch on, well, sundays. SSWCrunch is a live video-broadcasted discussion on web related marketing topics with invited guests.

If you have any interest whatsoever in these topics and you haven’t watched the series before – here is an early christmas present for you. All previous broadcasts are available on the site. Go. Now!

You think you know, but you (should) have no idea

Jens Ode — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 12:49:33 +0000

Are you up for a quick experiment? Good! Do you remember the oh-so-great song Zombie from 1994 by The Cranberries? If not, or if you just want to enjoy it again, listen to it here. Run along now and listen to it, I’ll be waiting here for you. No no, don’t cheat, off you go!

Good. Now, replay the song in your head. Do you have the chorus in your head (yes, pun intended)? Repeat it to yourself a few times:

In your head, in your head,
Zombie, zombie, zombie,
Hey, hey, hey. What’s in your head

Good, you are getting the rythm. Now, start tapping the song with your fingers while you play it over and over again in your head. Dum-dum-dum-dumdumdidum-dum. You may look a bit stupid, but hey, you’re grooving.

Now stop playing the song in your head, but keep hitting that desk with your fingers. Does the rythm you hear while tapping actually make any sense to you now? Or is it just a random thumping sound with no meaning whatsoever? If the answer is ”random thumping sound” – then excellent, lesson learned! (If not, keep on reading, you’ll need it.) You have been struck by the curse of knowledge. While you played the song in your head the tapping sound made perfect sense, you had the knowledge and expertise on what those sounds actually meant. When you ”remove” the song from your head, it’s just a stream of jibberish and actually quite annoying to hear. Don’t look, but your neighbour colleague is probably thinking about smacking you on the head right now.

Whenever you write copy, design a web site, make a presentation, create a user flow or actually do anything where you need to get a message across and your target audience is not experts on your level, be very aware of the curse of knowledge. As an expert, you have a wealth of references, jargons, ideas and cases that makes perfect sense to you and you are so used to communicate using the perfect terms and the correct acrynoms. To your web site visitor or audience, this may actually mean nothing at all. Your e-commerce stock system is internally probably very well defined and easy for you to understand, but to your customer it probably makes no sense why you keep a certain item in that very strangely named category. What will happen is that your customer won’t be able to to find the item or understand your shop and thus won’t buy anything.

Look at your communication, not as an expert, but as a customer. Try to step out of your world of knowledge and look at what you are presenting without your goggles. Does it make any sense anymore? If not, redesign, rewrite, rethink. It will pay off.

Next lesson is to think of another song, fire it up in your head and visit your colleague. Thump away on his/her desk, ask what song your playing and see for yourself what the curse of knowledge does to your message.

Dealing with bad comments

Jens Ode — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 10:35:16 +0000

One of the most challenging tasks for many companies when it comes to social media is how to deal with bad comments. You have launched your product or or service and when you start searching online you discover negative blog post and negative comments. How should you handle this?

Prepare your own backyard

First of all, check your own web site. How easy is it to search for information about your products? How many clicks away is your customer service or product manuals? When a blogger discovers news or face a problem with your product they often start at your web site to find out more. If you don’t even have a decent search engine how can you help your customer? If your customers can’t find information on your own web site the smallest issue they encounter will quickly escalate.

Be the customer

If you have decided to approach a blogger who has written a bad post on your product, be honest and credible in your response. Try to see the problem from the customer’s point of view. If there really is a problem with the product, be honest and credible, don’t try to ignore it or insult your customer. This leads back to my previous point, prepare your own backyard. If you discover a problem with a product, is your web site prepared so that you can release information (which can easily be found) to help customers to solve the issue. Take a look at Apple – everywhere you turn on the web site you will find lots of tutorial videos on how to accomplish different things with their products. This is an excellent solution and shows how important it is to provide good educational information.

Solve the problem, don’t advertise

When you approach a bad comment, solve the problem. Don’t ever try to advertise for a new product or service. Focus on the issue and solve it, that’s what your customer really wants. They don’t want to buy a new product from you at this stage, they want your honesty, respect and solution.

Don’t stick your head in the sand

If you get a lot of bad comments on a product, take a closer look at your product. Is it really ready for the market, or is it flawed? Have you created a misunderstanding about any functions which you can correct with updated manuals? Solve the issues, don’t stick your head in the sand.

Will your kids pay for online content?

Jens Ode — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 19:30:48 +0000

In Sweden we have a magazine for kids called “KamratPosten” (freely translated to “Buddy Magazine”). It’s been around for about 115 years and has been a magazine with a reputation of publishing high quality content for kids. Two years ago they took the next step into the digital era and launched a web site. It was a community-based site with quality content, games and supervised forums. This saturday they will take the next difficult step – getting payed for online content. November 1, 2009, KamratPosten will shut down for 48 hours to be relaunched as a paying visitors-only web site – it will be a gated community.

KamratPosten has listed a number of arguments for this, where the main argument is that they cannot afford to run a high-quality web site for free anymore. They have paid the web site using the profits from the paper magazine, and realized that this arrangement must come to an end. They also turned down the possibility to use ads, which was a logical decision. Advertising and kids is a legal jungle and you have to tread very careful to make it work. KamratPosten has also built a strong brand on trust and honesty and bringing in external advertisers would jeopardize their brand.

KamratPosten now makes a very interesting case for anyone looking at how to charge for online content, mainly because they bring a new dish to the table. The kids – your kids. You may not be willing to pay for news online, but are you willing to pay for a safe playground for your kids. Maybe you cannot charge for the content, but it will be interesting to see if you can charge for the safety.

The cost for a subscription will be equivalent to that of buying a large ice cream every month. How many ice creams are you prepared to sacrifice for high quality content and safe zones for your kids?

The original article can be found here (only in Swedish): http://kpwebben.se/artiklar/2009/snart-smaller-det/