Clicks & Notes

clikz.com - Behavioral Marketing 101: Defining the Terminology

Behavioral marketing targets consumers based on their behavior on Web sites, rather than purely by the content of pages they visit. Behavioral marketers target consumers by serving ads to predefined segments or categories. These are built with data compiled from clickstream data and IP information.

Contextual marketing is when marketers target users with ads that are served based on a given Web page’s content. Ads bought through Google’s AdSense or Overture’s Content Match are a great example. Both place text ads on contextually relevant Web pages.

Cutting Through - 10 ways to use blogs for managing projects:

1. Communicating with project stakeholders
2. Replacing paper
3. Building issue logs
4. Capturing information snippets
5. Publicising the project progress
6. Reducing email overload
7. Capturing requirements
8. Circulating screenshots
9. Keeping team members up-to-date
10. Provide an automatic audit trail

Cutting Through - Four ways to use wikis for project management:

1. Planning meeting agendas
2. Real-time minute taking
3. Brainstorming presentations
4. Keep documents up-to-date

See also Enhancing Internal Communications with Blogs, Wikis, and More (presentation by Nick Finck, Mary Hodder, and Biz Stone) for specific examples of how blogs and wikis can be used in organizations.

Digital Web Magazine - A-Z Indexes to Enhance Site Searching:

• using an internal search engine to find information on a site often produces poor results; however, you can customize a search engine to search metatags based on keywords that you create for each page
• A-Z indexes provide an easy, browsable way to search a site; readers are familiar with them from using such indexes in books
• A-Z indexes work best with “medium-sized Web sites or intranets of between 30 to 300 pages", where pages are not constantly changing
• you can either hire a profesional to create an index for you, or do it yourself; there are some automated tools that can assist in index creation

Asterisk - Thinking Differently About Site Mapping and Navigation:

I’m really questioning the traditional “home down” way a site map is presented and how that hierarchical visualization (and often times the groupings themselves) drives our design, content and navigation. The concept of “home” is a valid one, although the idea that it’s first, or “at the top” isn’t really accurate in many cases. It make more sense to visualize it at the center, as kind of a “hub”.

Alternatives to a “traditional” site map and navigation include:

• proper meta data (particularly labels and page titles) for search relevancy
• related item grouping and linking
• Indexes
• links within content
• faceted classification and corresponding navigation
• folksonomies
• personalized taxonomies
• a homepage that acts less like a landing page and more like an information hub (or site map - oh the irony)

GUUUI - Navigation blindness:

Two of the world’s most well-respected usability experts Jakob Nielsen and Mark Hurst agree on at least one area: Users tend to ignore navigation and don’t care where they are in a site structure. They are highly goal-driven and follow a very simple click-link-or-hit-back-button strategy when navigating websites.

To compensate:

• Use trigger words and phrases in links that direct a user towards the next step in their goal
• Use the “seducible moment” – the moment after which a user has achieved their goal and as immediately receptive to having their attention diverted elswhere – as the point in which to introduce links that encourage the user to explore the rest of the site

A few notes about the setup of this blog:

• I’m using WordPress as my blogging engine. It has a reputation for being very easy to set up, and it’s true – you really can have a functional blog up and running in as little as five minutes. Customizing and configuring it, of course, takes a bit longer…
• One of those customizations was putting together a new web stylesheet (the default one that’s supplied with WordPress isn’t particularly attractive). I started off with this alternative stylesheet and modified it to produce my own look.
• I’m using the WPBlacklist plugin to help fight off comment spam.
• The RSS feeds are being optimized with Feedburner for maximum compatibility with various newsreaders.

Fortunately, none of this was too difficult to set up. However, there’s always room for improvement, and you’ll likely see a few more tweaks implemented over time.

Hello, and welcome to my new blog.

One of the hazards of pursuing work that is information- and technology-centric is that there is always information about one’s work being produced that one likes to keep on top of. New developments in the field, new insights or observations, or just plain good advice about dealing with old problems.

Clicks & Notes is an attempt to capture some of what I’ve been reading online.