I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how to manage my time and all the information that comes at me every day. I know a lot of you do too. Many of us run our own companies, are working on cool projects that absorb all of our attention, and are constantly trying to find balance.

In that light, then, the premise of Clay Shirky’s new book Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age seems a bit out of left field. The idea is that we have so much free time we just don’t know what to do with ourselves, so in leiu of any better ideas, we watch a lot of TV. And if watched even slightly less TV, we’d have time to do things that actually mattered. Like edit Wikipedia. Or create lolcats. Or at least, that’s the premise on the face of it, which for me made the book difficult to read. Because I don’t watch a lot of TV. Nor does anyone I know. And anyway, what’s the  difference  between relaxing and recharging by watching a bit of TV vs. reading a book? Or enjoying the sunset. Or taking a nap.

More on all of that in a bit, but first, here are some thoughts I did get from the book that weren’t necessarily related to the implied premise,  but that I found way more interesting.

The rise of “citizen journalism”

Shirky points to many examples where the ability of regular citizens to become reporters of the world around them has led to amazing things. And it’s true. Iranians can tweet about the elections to let the world know what’s happening there. The Sudanese can text incident information to help organizations map out needs. These uses of technology are awesome, but I don’t know that they’re the result of a cognitive surplus. They didn’t come about because the Iranians and the Sudanese were watching too much television and found new uses of their time by way of technology. They came about because people had a new mechanism to capture and broadcast what was happening in their lives. Anne Frank didn’t have Twitter, so she used pen and paper.

The surplus here isn’t the time we spend watching TV. It’s increased access to technology. Shirky notes that “the chance that anyone with a camera will come across an event of global significance is simply the number of witnesses of the event times the percentage of them that have cameras.”

So much content: what to consume?

This idea of citizen journalism isn’t universally embraced. I was at an event a few weeks ago and listened in on a conversation about how blog content isn’t vetted and can’t really be relied upon in the same way that traditional journalism can. Shirky does address this, quoting what the novelist Harvey Swados said in 1951 of the advent of paperbacks:

“Whether this revolution in the reading habits of the American public means that we are being inundated by a flood of trash which will debase farther the popular taste, or that we shall now have available cheap editions of an ever-increasing list of classics, is a question of basic importance to our social and cultural development.”

Shirky notes we didn’t have to choose. We could have both. As it stands today with what’s available to us on the internet, be it vetted material from professionals, or ad-hoc creations from amateurs. In either case (and it’s really more of abroad spectrum than either/or), the same as with books or TV or any other type of information, it’s up to us to be careful consumers. Clay Johnson says we need to consciously consume. He asserts that our abundance isn’t with time, but with information. I know that’s certainly my situation. Time is the most precious possession I have, and I never seem to have enough of it. But information? I’ve got that in spades. It threatens to bury me alive.

In Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace, David Lipsky recounts David Foster Wallace describing this back in 1996, even before we had Twitter and YouTube competing for our attention:

“I received five hundred thousand discrete bits of information today, of which maybe twenty-five are important. And how am I going to sort those you, you know? …I think a lot of people feel — not overhwelmed by the amount of stuff they have to do. But overwhelmed by the number of choices they have, and by the number of discrete, different things that come at them… the number of small insistent tugs on them, from a number of different systems and directions.”

As we are provided with more ways to create, we have more to sort through to consume.

Fail a lot in order to succeed

I first started thinking about the idea of valuing failure when reading the The Geography of Bliss: One Grump’s Search for the Happiest Places in the World. In it, the author Eric Weiner describes how in Iceland, practically everyone is a painter or a poet at least in part because the Iclandic culture doesn’t have the same view of success and failure as the American one does. You don’t have to be a good painter to be a painter. Just paint! When you aren’t constrained by success metrics, you feel freer to try more things. Weiner writes “If you are free to fail, you are free to try.”

Shirky is advocating this idea as well. The act of creation is what’s important, even if it’s bad Charmed fan fiction. And while I certainly think anyone who wants to write poetry should go for it, I also find the notion of failing a lot in order to succeed to be interesting. We tend to fear failure.  Shirky describes how failure helps us succeed using a book metaphor: “If there was an easy formula for writing something that would become prized for decades or centuries, we wouldn’t need experimentation, but there isn’t, so we do.”

User-generated content: are we giving something up for free or getting something for free?

Shirky writes about services like YouTube and Flickr, “it can seem unfair for amateurs to be contributing their work for free to people who are making money from aggregating and sharing that work.” He notes Nicholas Carr’s use of the term “digital sharecropping” to describe how content creators are being potentially ripped off. But are they?  Shirky concludes that (amateur) content creators don’t mind because they are creating for love and not for money.

I dunno. I think that at least in some cases content creators don’t mind because they don’t look at it as “digital sharecropping” — giving away their labor to others who profit. They look at it as a fair exchange of services. The content creators get a place to host their work, the tools to share it with others, and wide visibility — for free! This is something was difficult, if not impossible, before the web, and something that we tended to pay fairly hefty prices for in the early days of the web. And this (mostly free) opportunity is what makes much of what Shirky celebrates in his book possible.

Why we share

Shirky references a 2006 NYU paper called “Commons-Based Peer Production and Virtue” that describes what motivates us to voluntarily contribute to groups. In addition to personal motivations such as autonomy and competence, the paper describes social motivations around connectedness and sharing/generosity. Yahoo’s recently released reputation model addresses the personal motivations, but not the social ones. And the social ones can certainly be motivating. Shirky calls this, in part, “go[ing]  public to find people who think like you.” He says to ask of users:

• Are their desires for autonomy or competence being rewarded?
• Are their desires to feel connected or generous being rewarded?

He asks these questions to answer the question of why people would share, create, and build  communities, but I think they are also create questions to ask when building a new community and attempting to encourage user participation.

We don’t want things for the sake of those things; we want what those things provide

I think this is an important idea for anyone making any content available, building any product, appealing to any audience. Shirky brings this up to explain why older people would adopt email. It’s not that they wanted to try out the latest technology. They wanted what all of us want: to communicate with others. He writes “no one wants e-mail for itself, any more than anyone wants electricity for itself; rather, we want the things that electricity enables.”

But this notion goes well beyond his point. No one cares about your features or that you’ve worked really hard on your product or about all the data you’ve just made available as an XML file. They care about solving their problems, doing things that make them happy, making their lives better. Focus on how you can help your audience do those things and you’ve got their attention. (I talked about this during my 60 seconds as part of the Influencer Project.)

The value of combinability

Shirky writes “if you have a stick, and someone gives you another one, you have two sticks. If you have a piece of knowledge — that rubbing two sticks together in a certain way can make fire — you can do something of value you couldn’t do before.” And here too is another new surplus the culture of the web gives us. By sharing knowledge, tools, failures, successes, ideas, we can better combine them for sums much greater than the parts. He notes that the  community size has to be big enough, sharing has to be easy, there should be a common format or way of understanding the information, and then, there’s the last component, the one that technology can’t solve — people. Can we work well together? Do we understand each other, trust each other, want others to make what we do better?

Build rules as you need them

Don’t spend time creating a solution to a problem until you have a problem. I think this holds true of online communities, ways of iterating online products, and even building startups. When I started my company a couple of years ago, I didn’t set up any processes at all. I’m building them out now as I find I need them, based on experience of what’s been working and not. If I had set everything up in advance, I’d still be spending just as much time now adjusting it.

What about TV?

I think that if Shirky had relied less on the idea of using TV time for more productive things, the book would have been stronger. I clearly found much of what he wrote about interesting, but I got distracted every time he’d bring the point back to how dang much we watch television.

Shirky and I really aren’t so far apart on how we think about human behavior. He writes that “human motivations change little over the years, but the opportunity can change a little or a lot, depending on the social environment.” But then we diverge: “the raw material of this change is the free time available to us.” In truth, the stats point at televison viewing at an all time high over the same period that Shirky notes the explosion of creation and sharing online. We aren’t watching less TV in order to upload cute videos of our cat to YouTube. We’re doing both.

Do we really watch that much TV a day?

This was the first point that distracted me. I started wondering what those stats really mean. Most people I know who do watch TV tend to do it while they are getting ready for work in the morning, and eating breakfast, and writing their college essays. How much of that time is really spent solely in front of the TV? Because you can’t really make a lolcat in leiu of watching TV while you’re ironing your clothes.

David Foster Wallace talked about our excessive TV watching way back in 1990 in his essay “E Unibus Pluram: Television and US Fiction“. In that essay, he describes a 1985 book called Life After Television: The Coming Transformation of Media and American Life. This book paints a picture of a future world where TVs will not just feed what the broadcaster wants passively, but will be an “interactive net” of everyone’s TVs and we’ll go from “passive dependence” to everyone being “their own harried guy with earphones and clipboard”. The author, George Gilder writes, “we will, in short, be able to engineer our own dreams.”

The book’s portrait of how we would do that are different than what’s come to be, but the general idea isn’t so far off.

Is community engagement and creation really better than and a reasonable alternative to TV?

Shirky asserts that creation — any creation — is better than mere consumption. But is that true? Is creating a lolcat and sharing it really better than relaxing to an episode of 30 Rock? And what about the percentage of those hours we spend watching the news (or possibly The Daily Show) to learn about the world? I know that in my case, I watch TV when my brain is unable to do anything else. I’ve been working for 16 hours, I can’t even process words in books very well, and I need to distract my brain so that I can get some sleep. In those instances, I find TV useful in ways that editing Wikipedia couldn’t be.

Shirky notes, “the stupidest possible creative act is still a creative act.” Implying that a creative act always trumps acts of other kinds, I suppose. Explaining why it’s better to play World of Warcraft (acknowledging that some may think of this as “grown men and women sitting in their basements pretending to be elves”) than watch TV, he says “at least they’re doing something… however pathetic it is to sit in your basement pretending to be an elf, I can tell you from personal experience: it’s worse to sit in your basement trying to decide whether Ginger or Mary Ann is cuter.”

Maybe for Shirky it is. Not that I’m a TV apologist, but one could say the same of reading: it’s a solitary activity (generally more so than TV), you aren’t creating anything or doing anything as you read. Or as you sit on a bench and watch the water. As I wrote at the beginning, it’s the insistence in the book to always bring everything back to the time we waste on TV that I find fault with. I’m not at all saying that creating and sharing and being social are bad things.

And certainly too much TV is probably not great. Going back to Wallace again, who rather famously had a love/hate relationship with TV, likened television to candy.

“What if you ate it all the time? Real pleasurable, but it dudn’t have any calories in it. There’s something really vital about food that candy’s missing… There’s nothing sinister, the thing that’s sinister about it is the pleasure that it gives you to make up for what it’s missing is a kind of… addictive, self-consuming pleasure.”

And at least in part, he agreed with what Shirky would later focus on in this book, as well perhaps agree with me:

“It gives you a certain kind of pleasure that I would argue is fairly passive. There’s not a whole lot of thought involved, the thought is often fantasy like, ‘I am this guy, I’m having this adventure.” And it’s a way to take a vacation from myself for a while. And that’s fine — I think sort of the same way candy is fine.”

And perhaps Wallace also would agree with Clay Johnson’s assertion that our problems with information overload are around what and how we choose to consume. Wallace noted that his book Infinite Jest wasn’t an indictment of entertainment, but was about our relationship to it.

“Why am I getting 75 percent of my calories from candy? I mean that’s something that a little tiny child would do, and that would be all right. But we’re postpubescent, right? Somewhere along the line, we’re supposed to have grown up.”

Shirky also maintains that we are shifting from strictly consumption around TV to “opportunities to comment on the material, share it with friends… and discuss it with other viewers”. I’d argue that we’ve always done that, we simply didn’t do it so publicly and we did it with our friends and coworkers rather than strangers around the world. Sure, it’s easier to share fanfiction now than it was on the 70s when we had to mimeograph ’zines and send them through the mail, but is Shirky really saying fanfiction is how we should spend our supposed “cognitive surplus”? (Particularly since writing fanfiction about TV shows (and commenting on them, labeling them, and so forth), at least, has a prerequisite of watching the shows in question on TV.)

Those who want to create and share and be communal are and always have been. Those who want to watch TV will. And many of us will do both.

Early in the book, Shirky writes, “this book is about the novel resource that has appeared as the world’s cumulative free time is addressed in aggregate.” But once you forget about the free time and TV aspects of the book and focus on the rest, it seems that what’s he’s really saying is that our human tendencies to create and share that we’ve always felt regardless of the free time we have available can now be done globally and at scale, and there’s real value to be harnessed from that.

Last week, I gave a workshop about local search at O’Reilly’s Where 2.0 conference. (I also did a short video on the topic.) One of the things I talked about was how important it is for local businesses to be visible in web search and map search results. After all, over 90% of us online use search engines to find information, and generally, those search engines are the major ones, rather than specific verticals. Microsoft research has found that 86% of searchers start at a major search engine when shopping online.Even when consumers plan to purchase offline, they often go online first. 42% of retail sales in 2009 were online or “web-influenced” ($917 billion in US sales were “web-influenced”). And more specific to local business, 63% of consumers use the internet to find local businesses, but only 44% of local businesses have a web site. That same study also found that 50% of us turn to search engines first for local business information, vs. 24% who turn to the Yellow Pages first.

After the Where 2.0 session, an attendee came up to me and ask me about restaurants. Is search really important, he wondered. Surely social media is where restaurants should concentrate efforts. After all, a new restaurant needs to raise hyperlocal awareness and no one is going to search for the restaurant name they’ve never heard of it. He suggested a Facebook campaign that engages 100 consumers from the local neighborhood might be the best way to promote a new restaurant.

An “And” Strategy, Not an “Or” Strategy

First, I recounted what Avinash Kaushik noted at the SMX keynote panel that he and I were both on a few weeks ago. Social media hasn’t replaced search.  The question isn’t search or social media. The question is where are your customers. Certainly for a business such as a restaurant, social media may be a great place to reach new customers, but those same customers are likely searching as well. Overall search volume was up 46% in 2009, so it’s definitely not something that’s going away. (You can see Avinash and I talk more about this.)

Think about who you’re trying to reach. Initially, you want to raise overall awareness. Social media is great for this (as you’ll see in a minute). But what about this scenario?

A woman is reading Twitter and sees that a new restaurant has opened up nearby. Later, when she and her husband are trying to decide (yet again!) what to have for dinner, she remembers the new restaurant. Finally, a new idea! She suggests it. Her husband says great, but what’s on the menu? Will I like it? The woman does a quick search on Google for the name of the restaurant to see if the web site has the menu. Huh. The restaurant doesn’t come up. She goes back to Twitter and starts scrolling back through the tweets, trying to find the right one. In the background, her husband is getting hungry. And after waiting a few minutes, he picks up the phone and orders a pizza.

And as a restaurant owner, you want to be discoverable long term. Your potential customers (locals and visitors) might be searching for [mexican restaurant seattle]. Or even [best mexican restaurants in seattle]. Social media is great for recommendations from friends, but it’s not always searchable and you can’t always get the immediate answers you need when your husband has the phone in hand to order pizza again.

A Holistic Search and Social Media Strategy

You don’t have to choose an “or” strategy, because an “and” strategy is not that much more effort. You have a web site; you are engaging in social media. The only thing left is to make sure you understand how to be found in search, which primarily consists of:

• Understanding what your potential audience is searching for
• Claiming your maps listings on the major search engines
• Ensuring your web site is search-friendly
• Leveraging social media to improve search visibility

The awesome thing is that all of this is free.

A Local Example: West Seattle Heartland Cafe

A couple of months ago, I found out about a new restaurant near me from the local neighborhood blog.  This was great use of social media (engaging with local bloggers who already have the attention of the target audience) and a great example of why engaging this way can be important. The restaurant is not only near me, but it’s directly next door to my bank, grocery store, and drugstore. The building is covered with HUGE “Heartland Cafe coming soon” signs. Yet I didn’t notice it until I read about it on the West Seattle blog.

I then learned that it was finally open by reading a tweet from @westseattleblog. The restaurant has a Twitter account! and a web site! These are all great things. But remember the “and” strategy. Can the Heartland Cafe be found in search? Sadly not.

So what should they do? Let’s go through the bullets I listed above.

1. Understand what your potential audience is searching for
You always want to be found for branded searches. In this case, that would be queries such as [heartland cafe] and [heartland cafe west seattle]. This restaurant probably also wants to be found for things like comfort food, breakfast, brunch, and bar. It’s important to know how consumers search, and for restaurant related searches, the Google AdWords Keyword Tool (that you don’t need an AdWords account to use) tells us that searchers look for [breakfast] three times as often as [brunch] and that we often search for [breakfast restaurants].

We look for restaurants more than bars and cafes and we’re often looking for menus and reviews.

There’s lots to be learned from search data, but at a quick glance, it seems like Heartland Cafe should talk up its breakfast and provide an online menu.

2. Claim your maps listing
All of the search engines provide this service, but let’s use Google as an example. It’s important to claim your maps listing for many reasons, but two of the best are that people often search directly on the maps page (particularly on mobile devices) and that if search engines determines that a matching map result would be relevant to a web search, they’ll show it directly in the web search results. Say I’m driving with some friends and decide to check out this new Heartland Cafe but I don’t remember exactly where it is. I open up Google Maps and see… a Toyota dealership.

Not awesome.

How can the Heartland Cafe fix this? They just need to go into Google’s Local Business Center and claim their listing. It’s free and easy. It’s important to put the business into the right categories and provide complete information. The major search engines get local business data from third parties, so it’s likely that most businesses already have a listing (the Heartland Cafe doesn’t because it’s so new). If the maps list your business already, you can claim ownership, and then complete the listing so that it’s compelling for your target audience. And as you can see, new businesses should definitely add their listings so they show up right away.

Google now has place pages that pull in a great deal of information from the web (such as images and reviews) and enable business owners to provide substantial detail.

You can see with this Coldwell Banker listing that the owner can provide a description, images, a web site, and more.

Once the Heartland Cafe has created a robust Google Maps listing and has started getting good reviews, they may be able to show up in the local business results for a search such as this one:

3. Ensure your web site is search friendly
Obviously, the first step here is to have a web site, which the Heartland Cafe has. Great! Unfortunately, it’s not showing up in search results, even for searches for the restaurant name and location. Not great. What’s going wrong?

It’s beyond the scope of this post to dive into ensuring that you’re providing compelling information that engages your audience, but key to this is ensuring your meeting the needs of searchers. Remember step 1 when we found that searchers are looking for menus? The Heartland Cafe’s web site doesn’t have one. That will not only limit search visibility, but it won’t answer one of the primary questions visitors to the site have. And if visitors can’t see the menu in advance, they may not decide to stop in and try the food.

However, the Heartland Cafe does have some great information on the site (address, including city and state — key to being seen as relevant for local searches, hours, details on the type of food). So why doesn’t any of it show up? The primary issues appear to be technical ones.

The individual pages don’t have corresponding unique URLs. All content loads on a single URL — www.heartlandcafeseattle.com. This means that search engines can’t index the content as they don’t have URLs to associate with that content. In addition, the content can’t be shared on social media. The site has an events calendar, but if I saw a cool event there and I wanted to post on Facebook about it and invite my friends, I’d have to tell them to go to the home page, then click events in the sidebar, then click…  Why is this? Well, the site is entirely in Flash. It absolutely doesn’t need to be in Flash. The site could keep the exact look and feel it currently has and be in HTML. In fact, Wordpress would be a quick and easy way to replicate the layout.

Normally when I see Flash sites, I recommend ways to combine Flash and HTML or point to ways of building search-friendly Flash sites, but in this case, the Flash doesn’t appear to be providing any benefits and is only detracting from the usability and searchability of the site.

Even with this problem, however, search engines should index the home page. Even though they won’t be able to extract any content from the pages, they can at least index the information in the title tag and meta description tag. The title tag in this case is “Heartland Cafe Seattle”, which is pretty good actually, although it could include a descriptor such as “classic midwestern comfort food”. But the meta description tag is missing entirely. A good meta description for this page might be “West Seattle’s best midwestern comfort food in the heart of the Admiral district for breakfast, dinner, late nights, and delicious cocktails.”

They can at least let search engines know the site exists by submitting a Sitemap file. This file can be as simple as a text file that lists the URLs of the site. (This step will be more useful once they associate individual URLs with each page on the site.)

There are lots of other technical and content-focused things this business can do, but none of them will make much difference until the pages of the site have their own URLs.

4. Leverage social media to improve search visibility
Not only does social media help you engage with audiences, but it increases your search visibility. In this case, the web site has some real problems it needs to fix before it can be found in search. But in the meantime the business owners can take better advantage of social media. Add the web site address to the Twitter profile. Add a Facebook fan page. As you can see from the earlier screenshot of the search results for a search for a restaurant name, the business is only visible at all because of social media. Address the reviews on Yelp so potential customers know that you care. The Yelp page is, after all, the third result in searches for the restaurant name.

Does being found in search engines really matter for a local business such as a restaurant? We may not need to go farther than the search results themselves for an answer:

Yesterday on Search Engine Land, I scored the search presence of select Superbowl advertisers. Most had some presence, but not necessarily for what people were searching for, and in many cases, the search results display was abysmal.

Two big problems I saw were:

• Overuse of microsites
• Failure to check (and fix) the search results display

Below are some examples of what things looked like yesterday. This week, I’ll dive more into the details of some particular ads.

Microsites

Microsites caused several problems, notably confusion in the results (which site is right?) and lack of visibility for the query sparked by the ad.

Hyundai
In my Search Engine Land article, I listed all of the various sites I found for Hyundai. Based on Google Hot Trends data, people seemed particularly interested in the Hyundai Genesis Coupe. The domain Hyundai flashed for the coupe was edityourown.com. This caused a flurry of searches for [edit you own].

However, since edityourown.com redirects to hyundaigenesis.com/coupe, the domain is nowhere to be found for those searchers.

The words “edit your own” are on the hyundaigenesis.com site in Flash:

The page only seems to show up if you do a site restrict search for the query.

Sobe
Hyundai wasn’t the only brand having trouble with redirecting microsites. Sobe advertised their Lifeworks drink with the domain sobelieve.com. But again, when you search for that exact term? The site is nowhere to be found.

That’s because (you guessed it), sobelieve.com redirects to sobeworld.com. And searchers are left confused.

Results display

It’s also good practice to check not only how your brand ranks in search, but what that result looks like. And you definitely should give things a quick look before launching a huge awareness campaign like a Superbowl ad. Let’s take a look.

Sprint
Spring had some trouble, at least partially caused by Flash. Flash issues seemed to be recurring theme with display issues this year. In this case, the snippet is missing entirely.

And here, the text that compels searchers to click is from an Atlas tracking code.

Verizon
But Sprint wasn’t the only wireless provider with issues. Verizon didn’t provide a super compelling result either:

Miller Highlife
Miller has snippet issues, title issues, and multiple site confusion, but it does have great universal results with its YouTube videos! (If only Miller had uploaded themselves, they could have branded them with a URL in the descriptions and at the end of the videos.)

Monster.com
Monster.com is advertising “the best job in the NFL”, and they’ve got a great paid search result. Unfortunately, while they also have the number one organic spot, it’s a little, ahem, loud.

It’s not enough to rank well. Does the well-ranked result really compel searchers to click?

I noticed on Techmeme today that a chiropractor has sued an ex-patient for posting a negative review of his practice on Yelp. Much of the commentary has been around whether it’s risky for people online to post things that are negative. You might get sued if you’re not careful. Will this case set a precedent for amateur reviewers everywhere?

It’s a good concern, and certainly as we live our lives more online, we (and the law) will have to sort these things out. But I think the real story is this, buried in cnet’s rundown of events:

Biegel [the chiropractor who is suing], who was a “sponsored” advertiser on Yelp and encouraged customers to write reviews on the site, received about as many referrals per month from Yelp while the review was up as before, but fewer after the lawsuit was filed, Blacksburg said, citing Yelp documents.

So, this is a business that thought it understood how to engage with customers on the web, but hasn’t yet learned the core rule: you can’t control the message; you can only control your participation. The most visible company to have learned this lesson may have been Dell, when it issued a takedown request to Consumerist, only to later realize the takedown notice was causing them much more negative backlash than what they were trying to get taken down and later apologize on their blog.

As a brand, you can choose to participate in social media or not. But you can’t make the decision based on whether it’s important that you control what’s said about your brand. You can’t control it in either case. It’s quite likely that at some point someone won’t like you and will say so. You can either let it go or you can proactively address the situation, either by apologizing in response to the negative review that the person had a bad experience, or by explaining the circumstances (hopefully in a non-defensive way). (If you want to be proactive, you have lots of options for finding out what people are saying about you online.)

Lashing out and filing lawsuits in response to negative reviews is unlikely to help your business, even if you’re entirely in the right.

You don’t have to go any further than Tripadvisor to find examples of what works and what doesn’t. Being apologetic and intent on fixing issues might make potential customers feel as though you care and are appreciative for the feedback.

Being defensive just makes you sound like a jerk.

As I was logging into Facebook to check out the redesign, I noticed this little checkbox to “set Facebook as your home page”.

I don’t recall seeing that before. I am impressed that it’s not selected by default.

Once they get all those default home pages, they just need to expand their partnership with Microsoft to offer Live Search as part of the Facebook home page experience. Does Microsoft need Yahoo’s users if they can grab Facebook’s instead? How many people do you think will make the default home page switch?

Apparently, it’s magical.

Email marketers know that people tend not to open marketing mail that gets sent on the weekend. We spend Saturdays and Sundays maximizing our time in the sun and the breeze by watching TV and bad movies on cable, erm, I mean rollerblading and picnicking in the park. People also don’t open mail on Monday because they are trying to catch up from that weekend of TNT marathons and they don’t open anything on Fridays because they are too busy trying to decide whether the coming weekend should feature disaster movies or quality films starring California’s governor.

That leaves Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday for any serious email marketing effort. Some say Tuesday early afternoon is the best time for optimal open rates. People are ready to tackle the drudgery that is the inbox, and your mail is the first thing they see. Others say Wednesday, as perhaps people have conquered the worst of it and feel they deserve a reward such as idle email shopping. Choose either day, but make sure you send early afternoon.

Finally, testing and research have given us definitive answers for something and we never have to worry about it again. We now know not only the ideal days but the ideal time. Hooray!

Except I’ve found a potentially fatal flaw in this plan.

And that is that everyone is now sending marketing mail on Tuesday and Wednesday, early afternoon.

I don’t get much email marketing because I unsubscribe to just about everything as soon as the first piece of mail hits my inbox. Someone who declares email bankruptcy must become ruthless with incoming mail.

And yet there I was last Wednesday at around 1pm, and on came the mail. REI wanted me to know about their May events calendar. Alaska Airlines wanted to make sure I knew I could buy people flowers and earn miles at the same time. Microsoft Office Live Small Business thought I might want to know how to get my business online for free! Choice Hotels has my room ready! The mail just kept coming.

And I realized, all that research was going to have to start over with the addition of a new variable. Not only do marketers have to avoid sending mail when people are off for the weekend, they have to avoid sending mail at the same moment everyone else is sending mail. And so Thursday at 10am will become the new Tuesday at 1pm. At least until everyone adjusts their email schedule. And then it all will start over again.

Of course, rather than look at averages for “the” customer, you could look at the particulars of your customer. I was thinking about this last Wednesday at 1pm when my mail started filling up, but apparently I’m not the only one.

Last night on the plane, I was reading Fast Company and happened upon this article about how Barneys is personalizing mail based on individual behavior on the web site. Targeting mail seems like a much better approach than the old fashioned blast, although I’m not sure about their assertion this rosy new relationship with the customer means that people embrace getting up to five emails a week. They do say they’ve had a ten-fold rise in response rates, which totally makes sense. If you send a promo for hip new purses to your entire email list, you’re percentage of conversion is going to be lower than if you send the purse promo to teenage girls and the power tie promo to older men.

Although Barneys is getting better at segmentation, they seem to be hesitant to go the next step: stop sending mail to people who don’t respond. I have never shopped online at Barneys and haven’t been in a store in at least eight months. But that doesn’t stop them from sending me mail day in and day out. Mail, by the way, that I never open. (I finally opened one last week solely to click the unsubscribe button.) The incessant mail (10 messages during a 12 day period last month) actually made me less likely to shop at Barneys because I was so irritated that they continued to clog up my inbox.

Ryan Warren of Exact Target brought this up today at the eMetrics Industry Insights Day. He said that sometimes the best thing you can do is stop sending mail to people who don’t open it. Spend you energy on those who like getting your mail and take action on it.

His data supported Barneys’ direction. He said that only 11% of companies send targeted mail and only 7% leverage click stream data, but doing so can raise conversion rates from 1.1% to 3.9% (and can raise click through rates from 9.5% to 14%).

He talked about sending mail not on Tuesday afternoon at 1pm but based on when the customer was interacting with the site. For instance, if you have a travel site and someone puts a trip on hold, send them an email to remind them the hold is about to expire. Or if they were checking out a vacation package, let them know when the price drops. Or better yet, if you know they’re in Seattle and they were browsing trips to Mexico, email them when you see that the Seattle weather forecast calls for rain. (Although now that I think about it, you might need to tweak that last one, or you may end up with the Barneys mail sent every day dilemma.)

On Tuesday, I gave a webinar on how businesses can use social networking to learn about their customers, deepen their relationships with customers, and provide more effective and responsive customer service.

You can view the archived version of the webinar for free. When you click that link, it looks like it’s for registration of the event that already happened, but if you step through the registration process, it’ll bring you to the archived video.

In the webinar, I talked about how your customers are likely already online talking about your brand and your industry. The web is full of all kinds of community-driven sites where you can listen to what your customers are saying and can get involved. I talked a bit about setting up a social media program in your company, and some things to consider as you get started, as well as getting engaged in the conversation, improving customer relationships, and benefiting from the feedback.

Monitoring the conversation
In the comments to the previous post, someone asked what tools I recommend for tracking conversations about you online. That really depends on your situation. If you have a large brand and time is more valuable than money, you might consider hiring an agency to track and aggregate the conversations for you. A service such as TruCast compiles conversations, scores them, and, and provides workflow management for responses.

You can set up various searches and alerts or use a product like Andy Beal’s new Trackur to aggregate those searches for you.

Aaron Wall recently wrote an article for Search Engine Land about reputation monitoring tools that provides more details about setting up alerts.

Below are some ideas for a free, low-tech way to get started if you want to try setting things up yourself. You can set up all kinds of searches about your brand, your competitors, your industry — just about anything you want to track. Here are some places you might get started.

Google Alerts
Google Alerts tracks web search, Google Groups, Google News, Google Video, and Google Blogsearch.

Unfortunately, Google Alerts can only be sent to your email, and aren’t available via RSS. If you have the alerts sent to a Gmail address and you assign those emails a label using filtering, you should be able to then subscribe to the RSS feed of that label using an RSS aggregator that supports authenticated RSS (using the feed format https://mail.google.com/mail/feed/atom/labelname/), but I haven’t been able to get that to work.

You can also set up separate searches for each of these and with some of them, for instance, Google Blogsearch, you can set the search up as an RSS feed. For Google Blogsearch, just do the search, then click the Subscribe link you want on the left.

Google web search has some interesting advanced options. For instance, to get web search results for a topic that have appeared within the last 24 hours, you can choose Advanced Search from the Google home page, then expand the date options. Set up the parameters you want, then click the Advanced Search button.

Twitter
I normally suggest people track Twitter conversations with Terraminds, but it’s currently down and I’m not sure when it will be back up. You can set up tracking directly in Twitter, but Terraminds is nice because you can subscribe to the RSS feed of the searches and you don’t need a Twitter account. To track a search term on Twitter, simply sign up for Twitter, then send the message “track

At 10am pacific (about 45 minutes from now!), I’ll be giving a webinar on how companies can start having conversations with their customers online to learn more about them, create stronger relationships, and improve both their product offerings and customer loyalty.

Come check it out.

I’m pretty sure that link will also work once the webinar is archived so you can view it later. You probably won’t still be able to ask questions though. Although you can ask them in comments here for a slightly less-than-real time response.

When monitoring what people are saying about you and your brand online, you have two main choices. You can use Google Alerts as well as search a variety of social media and social networking sites manually, or you can pay a reputation management firm to do expensive monitoring for you.

Now you have a third choice. Andy Beal, who specializes in online reputation management, has launched a site called Trackur that enables you to set up monitoring across a variety of sites on a set of keywords at a much lower price than reputation management firms generally charge.

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