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• Wed, May 2 at 6:30p: (Reading Optional) Business Book Club: Peak – How Great Companies Get Their Mojo from Maslow. Held at Tekserve, 119 W. 23rd Street, NYC. Free. Join us on Meetup.
• May 8-11 at the Apple Specialist Conference: In-Store Payment Fraud Prevention, Phone & Web Order Payment Fraud Prevention, 9 Things You Need To Fix On Your Website NOW, Email Marketing Best Practices Panel, Create a Sustainable Blogging Strategy With 52 Post Ideas. $800 for entire conference, or pro-rated for selected sessions, registration link.
• Tue, May 15 at 2p: Create a Sustainable Business Blogging Strategy With 52 Post Ideas. Held at Tekserve, 119 W. 23rd Street, NYC, during Internet Week New York. Free registration required.
• Wed, May 16 at Noon: Social Media for Managers: The Very Basics. Held at Tekserve, 119 W. 23rd Street, NYC, during Internet Week New York. Free registration required.
• Wed, May 23 at 6p: How To Write Blog Posts That Drive More Site Traffic. Held at Tekserve, 119 W. 23rd Street, NYC. Free registration required.

Photo by Leonid Mamchenkov

Pretty Code Don’t Matter

Code that validates perfectly sounds like a great idea but if you run code validation tests on the most popular websites you’ll see errors all over the place. Search engines don’t care if your code is perfect, they care an audience wants it.

The Basics

All these steps must be done in order.

1. Crawling – Google must find the site
2. Indexation – Google must index the site
3. How The Results Are Presented
4. What You Do With The Traffic

You Can’t Control Rankings, Control Your Traffic

Rankings depend on many factors, many of which are outside your control, instead:

• Increase the number of pages that are driving search traffic to your website or
• Keep the same number of pages but increase how much traffic each page drives

Easy & Fast: Improve How Google Shows Your Search Listing

• Use Google Adwords to figure out what the best marketing message is for your audience
• Change target landing pages to match those marketing message
• Test the updated pages against your previous click-through-rate, roll-back any negative changes
• Write descriptive titles and meta description, make them read like ads, and incorporate keywords intelligently

Rankings

You can cheat the rankings temporarily with black hat tactics but they only work for so long. Instead focus on keyword battles you can win. Target keywords that will drive the right users instead of generic keywords or overly generic keywords.

Indexation

The more pages your site has, and the more pages you get indexed, the more traffic you’ll receive. You can get an estimate of how many pages Google is indexing by searching for “site:yoursitename.com” in Google. The more reliable method is to submit an XML site map to Google. To improve your indexing…

• Consolidate duplicate content: search engines will try to ignore it
• Address canonicalization issues: make sure to permanently redirect your traffic to either www or not (doesn’t match which, just be consistent)
• Make sure each page has unique and useful content
• Interlink intelligently by finding pages that don’t have many links to them and create a blog entry that references them (since your blog gets more links to it, it can spread the link love to less-indexed pages)

Crawling

• To see if a page has been crawled, type into Google “cache:www.yourpageURL” to measure when the individual page is crawled. If the site hasn’t been crawled for a long time, it may be that Google is penalizing you.
• Analyze your traffic logs to see how often the search bots are hitting each page and any errors they are hitting
• Make sure to create a comprehensive XML site map with all your UNIQUE content
• Use text based site navigation to assist the crawlers
• Try to avoid dynamic URLs (avoid javascript-based site navigation)
• Avoid pages with only images and flash content, if you have a video include a text transcript of the video

Importing HTML into Google Spreadsheets (This tip was worth the cost of the class!)

• In a cell type =ImportHTML("http://www.anyurl.com", "table", "#")The number is which table is it on the page. So if it’s the 6th table on the page, enter 6.
• This data will live update with the page, that’s awesome except if they take down the page. So it’s best to copy it and use Paste Values into a new sheet if you’d like to continue using the data.

Creating Pivot Tables

Pivot tables allow you to view data sets with multiple attributes in different ways. It’s a great tool when you’re trying to figure out if disparate data correlates in a meaningful way. Just remember correlation doesn’t equal causation.

1. Select all the data you want to analyze (including the top column names).
2. Select Data > Pivot Table Report.
3. First add one or more rows.
4. Then add one or more values.
5. To split how the values are displayed you can by adding columns.

Inserting Charts

1. Select the data you want to display.
2. Click the Insert Chart button on the tool bar.
3. Google will default to chart suggestion, this is a live preview that you can play with.
4. If you chose a chart type that the data doesn’t support, Google will tell you why is doesn’t work.

Creating Maps

Another option for creating Maps is MapBox.

1. Your data must have the full state names or country names (no abbreviations) and you have to spell them right.
2. Click Insert Chart button on the tool bar.
3. Navigate to the Map chart. You’ll then have to customize the chart to just the portion of the world you’re examining.
4. You may want to change the colors of the Min and Max to create a heat map.

AIDS diagnoses in 2009 per 100,000 population

Getting Your Charts Out of Google Spreadsheets

• Click the pop-up menu on the chart and select Save Image.
• You can also copy it to your web clipboard and paste it into other Google documents.
• Click the pop-up menu on the chart and select Publish. You can copy the script into your site. If you update the Google doc, it should also update the chart.

Google Spreadsheet Tips

• Break things up into chunks: Keep less than 500 rows in each spreadsheet. Google slows down as you go over around 500 rows.
• If you need to reduce the file size to free up some memory. You can delete any of the columns not being used by your data.
• Try using Import to replace or add a sheet of data.

Photo by Kevin N. Murphy

Geri Stengel interviewed me about networking tips for women entrepreneurs in conjunction with my monthly Founder Friday events in New York City. I start many meetings reminding the 200 attendees to approach networking events in a thoughtful way designed to make the most of your time. Read the complete article about Networking Tips for Women on Inc.

…Connections open doors, doors to money, markets and qualified managers and employees.

1. Pick your venue. There are plenty to choose from. If you don’t like the vibe of one organization’s events, try another. You can choose gender-specific hosted events such as Women 2.0 Founder Friday or the National Association of Women Business Owners, industry specific organizations, such as Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers or general business groups such as Chambers of Commerce.
2. Know your elevator pitch. You are not here to make a sale, so you don’t need to close the deal. You do need to let people know who you are and what you do in a way that makes them want to hear more.
3. Ask questions. Women are great at building closeness and connections through conversation. By asking questions you’ll engage the person and really get to know what they do. Still not comfortable? Pretend you are interviewing people for an article about the event; get the who, what, and why. Make the task less personal.

Read the complete article about Networking Tips for Women on Inc.

Workshop Description

This workshop will cover the very basics of social media for managers. Bring your “stupid questions” because we’re starting from the very beginning in an environment where everyone feels just as lost as you do. More importantly, we’ll teach you about the types of Social Media so that even as the individual sites change you’ll have the knowledge to understand the new ones that come out.

• Have you been asked to talk to an employee based on what they Tweeted but you don’t understand Twitter?
• Have you been asked to promote your organization on social media but don’t understand where to start?

Topics Will Include:

• Twitter: From Tweets to Hash Tags
• Facebook: Pages, Privacy Controls, and Tagging. Should I be Facebook friends with my employees? What about my customers?
• Foursquare: Why Do These People Check-in?
• LinkedIn: Profile tips to Removing Ex-Employees From Your Business Page
• Reddit: The new Digg (even if you never knew what Digg was)

Start With Studying Your Users

iPad Adoption Rates for Kaplan's Customers

Before digitizing their first book, the first step Kaplan took was to study their existing customers. They knew they were the leading publisher in the space but had to study if their customers wanted digital books. They surveyed their students on which tablet they owned or were planning to purchase. They also started an ethnographic study of how students were using Kaplan’s paper books. In talking to students about their studying habits and taking photos of how students highlighted the print, they discovered what students did with their books.

 Why Students Liked Paper Books

• Need for tangibility & token of ownership: If it is physically in my life, I’m more likely to study.
• Make markings/highlights to sustain attention: Some students highlighted almost the entire book.
• Make markings as proof to self of completion: Even if they didn’t read it throughly, they liked to mark the sections they had read through.
• Keep markings as future study aid: Occasionally students would reference sections they’ve highlighted but much less often then Kaplan thought.
• Make visual memory of content on page: Some students with a visual memory needed the colored highlight to remember materials (“that section was in blue”).

“Everything You Can Do On Paper And More”

Kaplan decided that their goal was to take everything students could do with the print edition and surpass it on mobile devices. This included:

• Multi-colored highlighting
• Take Quizzes With Instant Feedback on Answers
• Add Written Notes
• Record Audio Notes
• Sophisticated Search
• Video of Professors Teaching Sections

Kaplan’s First iPhone App Release

Kaplan outsourced book conversion and licensed a reader from Bluefire, which was compatible with Adobe software. They learned that their books were incredibly complex to convert and are bringing that process in house. They used technology from MarkLogic for distribution and data collection.

Textbooks Versus iPad By Weight

The reaction to the original iPod touch/iPhone App (released before the iPad came out) was not overwhelmingly positive. By asking their users for feedback, they learned a lot about the strengths and weaknesses of their assumptions. They decided to scale back their goals to the competitive advantage of eBooks, which was books are heavy. Their MCAT book set weighs 10.5 pounds whereas the iPad weighs only 1.3 pounds.

Study Your Users Even More

Kaplan moved to an agile development method. They gave away the digital book with the print edition so they could collect a lot of usage data and quickly iterate development. As of today, Kaplan is iPad only and hasn’t gone back to the iPhone App format since their first release.

According to Kaplan’s survey, 70% of the students had not used electronic textbooks in their high school and college coursework. Of the ones who had used digital textbooks, only 15% of early adopters had an excellent experience. More students have taken an online course (46%) than used electronic textbooks. When you ask students if they want analog or digital study aids, about half say they want some digital and some paper materials.

Data Drives Better Learning Outcomes

Traditional print books aren’t able to “phone home” and tell you how their being used. Kaplan is now able to quantify and analyze how often students do the following actions:

Informative Metrics for eBooks

• Opening book
• Going to table of contents
• Navigating to a chapter
• Annotations (highlights) made
• Flipping pages to find something you’re looking for
• Turning the page/how fast pages are read
• Which pages are referenced most
• Going to the glossary to see the definition of a word

In the same way that other businesses have used data analysis to improve business outcomes, Kaplan is using their studying statistics to improve their content and change learning outcomes. They are able to ponder the learning implications of informative metrics for eBooks (click graphic for larger view of slide).

Are we heading to a future where professors can actually tell that you do the reading? 

Will they be able to tell you did it quickly in the fifteen minutes before class? Kaplan plans to share student reading data with their instructors. Instructors will be able to see which sections their students are spending more time on and perhaps need additional converge in the classroom.

If you are in the business of developing products and you have this information, “it’ll change your life.” They had to reorganize into agile development teams to respond to the data. “There is no point in collecting this data” if you’re not ready to implement changes around it.

Challenges for Digital Learning Development

• Data vs. intuition: What are the things data won’t tell us? What can’t you measure.
• Managing the fire hours of data: What are the metrics that really matter? Otherwise you will overwhelm your team with data that doesn’t help them develop better products.
• How will this change the reading experience?

1. Curate to Dominate

“If you can separate art from junk, there’s money to be made.” Sports Blog Nation found the best sports bloggers on the web and curated them into a network by team and gave them a method to monetize their content. Sports Blog Nation is now one of the top 10 sports websites. Curation can be a business. MSNBC bought the twitter handle “@BreakingNews” and they curate news from around the world. Tumblr just hired a editorial team to report on what Tumblr users are reporting.

2. Data Mine and Time

“The media understands math.” StoryFold finds the people on Twitter that are closest to a story, roll their tweets into dashboards and sell the feed to news organizations. Social Flow helps publishers time their social media messages to get the best response from their audience. Steve’s firm tracks trust each year and media was the only institution to see a trust increase in 2012. He cites the increased use of sourcing and data as helping to increase trust.

3. Keep Stories Alive

Stories are being kept along for longer. The Guardian got a million additional page views in the month after turning on their Facebook integration. Every share on Facebook will earn you additional readers over a longer time span than a traditional paper.

4. Roll in the Deep

At the LA Times, Geoff Boucher launches a blog called the Hero Complex. It was high-interest vertical with no experts and an audience that wanted to be deeply involved. Media has mastered “spreadable media” which is shared through social media. However there is a long-term market for “drill-able media” aimed at consumers who want to go deep into a topic (and may not be served).

5. Covet They Superstars

From a star author or editor, your super stars have a following that moves with them. As long as your missions are compatible, you must protect and keep your stars.

Photo by Shutterhacks

Levar Burton opened the O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing Conference by reminding us that publishers are essentially story tellers (see the video at the bottom of this post). The stories we tell each other shape our future, regardless of how they are told. Levar challenged us to embrace the future of story telling, regardless of the technology behind it. To discuss the funding landscape for publishing startups, Sophie Rochester hosted a diverse panel of investors and founders including Christophe Maire (txtr), Thad McIlroy (The Future of Publishing), Brian Rich (Catalyst Investors), Valla Vakili (Small Demons), Henrik Werdelin (Prehype).

What Types of Publishing Startups Are Getting Funded?

Through The Future of Publishing, Thad is seeing a lot of disruption in the publishing industry but not a lot of opportunity for profitable growth. “You’re going to have to fight for the investment dollars and you may need to give up a lot more than you want to, to get that money” because investors aren’t running to fund publishing. Henrik argues that there are a lot of startups getting funded that publish but aren’t known as “publishers”. Henrik cites Instagram and Twitter as organizations that have gotten lots of funding but aren’t thought of as “publishers”.

What Are The Best Opportunities in Publishing For Startups?

Brian sees this as a one-time generational opportunity for brands to take market share as customers change from analog to digital consumption. Whether you are a new company or an existing brand that is re-inventing itself, now is the time to establish yourself in the digital publishing world. Although many big names are in this space (Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple) you still have the opportunity for secondary businesses that support their ecosystems. The big players will drive mass adoption of certain technologies and start-ups need to find a way to operate in a complimentary method like Zynga has been successful based on Facebook. Brian supports companies that will blend into a larger company’s ecosystem but will not fund business models that are setting themselves up to be competitors of big players like Facebook. Valla says that the presence of giants like Amazon actually make his work easier because he sets out to maneuver around them.

“We fail to differentiate between original content and remix,” said Thad. Although remixing content is well-known in other mediums, there is a lot of opportunity for publishers to use a “rich, algorithmic method” to explore existing content and present it in different forms. “Reader’s Digest was the original remixer of publishing” but many current publishers avoid unoriginal content. Valla’s company, Small Demons, digests original novels and comic books to pull out information and display it to users in new ways.

Amazon, Apple, or Google: Which Should You Base Your Business Around?

• “Good business can be made around all of them.” (Henrik Werdelin)
• “The world will not be totally dominated by Amazon.” (Christophe Maire)
• “Amazon has more experience making partnerships successful.” (Thad McIlroy)
• “Ultimately you have to do them all, it’s just a matter of which one you do first based on your potential market.” (Brian Rich)
• “We take inspiration from all of them.” (Valla Vakili)

“There is No Logic Behind These Investors at All.”

Henrik said that it is impossible to predict what an investor will fund because many of them use their personal preferences, like my “daughter likes to read so I’ll fund books,” to decide. He prefers companies that make people more creative than they actually are. “Instagram took people who were bad at taking photos and made them story tellers,” Henrik said. Valla revealed that his first investors were all personally connected to him. He found the Series A Round challenging because it required so many meetings but he found that “your success rate increases as your ability to answer all [potential investor's] questions increases.”

Get Inspired By Levar Burton On Story Telling