EightBlack.

It still staggers me that people don’t get this.

Take this example. I received this today from my insurance brokers. If I offend them with this, then too bad. They need to be told. They’re cheap arse bastards.

I’ve been a client of theirs for 8+ years. I think they know who I am - that is, they know my name and obviously have my email address.

So this is what they sent. This is a pure extract.

“We  hope you enjoy reading our second newsletter for 2008, where we have covered the following interesting topics –
* The importance of insurance for women - only 20% of women are insured!
* Cash Offsetting – how it can work for you.
* Self Managed Super Funds – new rules.
* Wills and Superannuation – who inherits your nest egg?
Please click  http://www.lakesideconsultants.com.au/news/no16.pdf <blocked::http://www.lakesideconsultants.com.au/news/no16.pdf>   to download this quarter’s newsletter from our website.
For any queries or financial assistance please don’t hesitate to call our office on 0510 0788.
Kind regards,
GARY KENNEDY”

First mistake. It was all text.

Second, it was sent from someone called Ros Walsh. Never heard of the woman. But it was signed Gary Kennedy. Again, don’t know the man.

More importantly, the fools at Lakeside then wanted me to visit their website and download their freakin’ newsletter. As if. Why the hell should I?

To add insult to injury, they then admit that email marketing is way too hard because this is only the 2nd newsletter sent out this year. The first one I never received. It probably asked you to drive to their office and pick up a copy of it from reception. Or something like that.

They even made a mistake with their own phone number. Idiots.

My advice is simple. If you haven’t got the skills to do this - pay someone to do it for you. If you only email every 3 months or so and have a customer facing business with hundreds of clients (like Lakeside does) - then don’t do it all. Sending email once every 3 months is SPAM. What possible relationship could you have with such little frequency?

Get the basics right. Like spelling, grammar, accuracy of information presented. Make the content relevant to the recipient. And above all, make it easy for your clients to consume your content. Making someone go to your website to download the newsletter is rubbish. People won’t do it. Lakeside probably dont run analytics on their site so its no use probably asking them what their bounce rate is from this email. (they don’t - I just checked).

And to make matters worse, if I was a real narky prick, I could ping them hard for not adhering to the SPAM Act. In their actual newsletter (on the last page), the MD rambles on how Lakeside is in total compliance with the SPAM Act of 2004. Except for the fact that they aren’t.

You see, the email they sent (the text based one), needed to have the functional unsubscribe link in it (not the actual PDF).

There’s no excuse for lousy marketing. Companies like Lakeside are going to get blown into oblivion if they don’t embrace change. Companies like this are already turning the industry upside-down.

Hooray is all I say.

Not that any serious website owner should take note of it anymore, but PageRank is one of those “vanity” things. Reassurance to your own self that all your hard work has paid off (if you’re a blogger) or a webmaster.

That little green indicator at the top of your browser (which by the way you have to install) causes more arguments and blog posts in the blogosphere and forums than you’d care to count.

A high PageRank number alone has little to do with traffic, engagement and total content.

It’s also no indication, if you’re an advertiser, that you should pay more on a site with high PageRank.

Having said all that, I smiled just a little this morning when I discovered this humble blog growing by one more peg on Google’s radar.

Means nothing to you. And will mean nothing to me once I’ve had lunch and something alcoholic to drink.

The only numbers we should be looking at are the numbers that our web analytics interface shows us. Period.

Obviously the Westin has vision impaired people working for them. I think that’s the politically correct term for “blind” nowadays.

Anyway.

There we all were. All 300+ of us at the opening session of the Omniture Summit. Matt Belkin, the Head Of Omniture Consulting was struggling through his presentation waiting for the wireless in the ballroom to catch up to his requests.

It wasn’t like he was waiting for a YouTube clip to download or a Microsoft security patch.

Nope. All he was trying to do was demo some basic features of the new interface for SiteCatalyst - Omnitures’ core analytics platform.

It must jack the yanks off unbelievably when they come into town and then hit our archaic wireless infrastructure. You’d think that the Westin had just installed wireless and was sort of coming to terms with how much bandwith they might need.

Don’t you think by now the Head of Engineering for the hotel (any hotel) would just look at the order form on the wireless request and tick the box that said “warning, this capacity is not really recommended for private use. Typically only reserved for military installations, organisations wishing to conduct any sort of a jihad or suitable for a group of teenagers”.

Or something like that.

If it was me, I’d flood the joint with radio-waves. I’d make people sign a waiver when they came into the hotel saying that if they were pregnant or needed to operate heavy machinery later that day, then it was recommended that they shouldn’t enter. Or something like this.

When I was at Blogworld in Vegas, the organisers spent US$65k over the duration of the event on wireless base stations and more importantly, wireless capacity. They were in every session room, the hallways, the main lobby - just everywhere. There was no issue. And no presenter sat looking dumbfounded at their screen waiting for a page to load.

Now I know I have a.d.d. My 7 year old son gave it to me.

But in this day and age, hotels like the Westin (and the Hilton isn’t much better) need to pull their lazy ass fingers out and spend the money on the infrastructure they need.

Before we all go mad.

Apparently, the airlines (with the help of Boeing) have started to install wifi onboard. I just read a guy’s blog where he was on a Korean Airlines flight, and able to use GMail, normal web mail, VOiP and Video Streaming. All while hurtling through the air at 500+ miles an hour. And onboard Korean Airlines!

If you ask me, the only reason Korean Air has wifi antenna’s fitted to the rooftop of their planes is because they used to have a habit of crashing into the sides of mountains. Maybe wifi will help the rescue teams talk with the survivors via instant messenger.

Anyway. Back to the hotels.

Enough with your silly turn down services, your coconut butter herbal shampoo, your heavenly beds, your goddam TV’s that I need to call my children at home to teach me how to use.

I want wireless. I don’t want to pay $24 bucks a day to use it (hide it in the room rate if you have to). And I want it to work everywhere.

Matt Belkin did a solid job. He laughed it off. He shouldn’t have. But he did.

There was a lot of digital folk today at the Summit. Some of Australia’s largest companies were represented. C’mon. Let’s get serious. It’s 2008. Figure this shit out already.

Am I being pedantic? I hope not.

We’re attending the Omniture Summit in Sydney today.

Omniture put on a slick show - it will be interesting to see how many attendees show up this year given that last year was free and this year general admission was $295 a ticket.

It never ceases to amaze me.

People will live in a house that clearly needs a paint, the spouting could do with a clean, there’s rubbish and crap piled up against the side, the garage is a mess, the kitchen tap leaks and whenever you use the downstairs toilet, the thing wont flush properly. Or at least it does in our house.

(It might have something to do with the fact that our 4 year old uses an entire roll of toilet paper whenever she sits down and does anything. But don’t get me started).

Anyway.

So, why then in the love of all that’s holy do people fret and fart around with aiming for perfection when they either build their first website or re-do the one they have.

Look, all I care about is traffic. And so should you. Park you ego at the door. Along with your freakin’ concern about the pantone colour of your logo.

Let me give you an example.

A week ago we launched this site. It’s nothing more than a fly-trap. A holding page whose sole purpose is to tell you we exist, to try and get you to engage with us by opt-ing in and sort of asking for forgiveness for the fact that the real site is still a little while away.

In the 7 days since we uploaded the site, we’ve received 10 physical enquiries and we’ve had one physical sales call (face to face) and multiple phone conversations.

We did nothing from an SEO perspective. Obviously, because of our “analytics” bent, we installed Google Analytics. On one page!

Now I’d rather have a single holding page than nothing at all. I don’t care if there’s a typo. Someone with a lot of time on their hands will probably email in and let us know. We’ll fix it later.

I see this all the time. People who are overly obsessed with the look and feel rather than whether or not they are on the money with their offer, product or service.

Our intent with the real TaguchiMail site is to dynamically optimise the content so that the people who actually end up visiting and using the site will be the ones who determine what the look and feel is. Same goes with email that we send. We’ll keep you up to date with which emails that we send work best - from an open rate, click thru rate and actual conversion rate.

And don’t tell this is too hard. Any web designer worth their meagre salary can design you 2 concepts for a home page. Your IT dudes will let you know “how difficult” it is to serve the 2 in rotation.

So next time you get into a bru-hah about what you need to do with your own website or your company’s online presence, just remember 2 things. Traffic and conversion. Read Avinahs’ book before you engage any designer. And insist on Google Analytics as part of any build.

We’ve got a client who basically said when their site was 80% ready, he’d launch the thing. His staff thought he was kidding. It was a big, heavy transactional site built in Microsoft.net. But he wasn’t joking. When it was at 80%, he kicked the training wheels off the thing and went live. Now his staff probably had to work like egyptian slaves to catch up - but the thing is because it was built in .net, 10 years later the thing still isn’t right.

But it has made a boot load of money since then and the site transacts a million bucks a day. Every day.

Everytime I run into someone waving their arms about their website look and feel or they’re hyperventilating over the design of their very first site (because they just know they’ll be flooded with traffic in the first hour), I always hark back to the story above.

Sorry about the sermon. Rant over.

This has taken some time to get off the ground. These things always do.

But I’m pleased to say we’ve done it. And now we’re happy to talk to people and to consider “beta” applications. Head over here to learn a little more.

Stay tuned.

I wish I could write as well as this.

From Avinash Kaushik, the world’s coolest web analytics practitioner. I was fortunate to meet Avinash early last year at Web 2.0. More fortunate that he replied to an email after his presentation. And eternally grateful for the 2 visits to Google and him saying yes to working with us.

Read his post twice. It’s all the brain food you need this week.

And if you’ve not witnessed Avinash’s passion before, there’s video of him throughout this blog. Just search for his name.

Sorry about that. Short blogging break. To be honest, I’ve lost a bit of my blogging “mojo” as we round the bend into Xmas. My RSS reader has just about exploded, my inbox is full and no I don’t know where to start reading.

Well, not quite.

Anyway, thought that this was an interesting site survey, which is being conducted on the AdNews site currently.

Is this what you would have said? What are your key concerns for 2008?

Click To Play

Here’s Avinash’s presentation at Blogworld Expo - with the the PDF of the presentation here as well. Anybody who has anything to do with a blog, or even a static website should watch this entire session.I regard Avinash as the world’s leading authority on web analytics. So does Google - hence the role he has there as “Analytics Evangelist”.Avinash is a pleasure to work with, a pleasure to watch and 110% pure energy, enthusiasm and content.

(For those of you who have noticed, I’ve moved all our feature length videos to Blip.tv). It seems to be working fine. I’d be keen to see how you rate the picture and audio quality.

I’ll let the video do the talking. I wish all guru’s were this passionate about their chosen field. And with Avinash, you know it’s genuine. No wonder Google are walking over broken glass trying to get him to come on board full time.

He’s the real deal. And one of a handful left.

Update: Here’s a hard copy of his presentation . I taped the session as well (54 minutes long), and worth every minute. It’ll be up on Google Video shortly. Make that Blip.tv