Joey Barton is a premiership footballer & is a well-known/controversial celebrity (if you’re reading this, you’ve probably heard of him).

During the last day of the premiership his name trended on Twitter for a while in the UK after he ‘seemed to’ attempt to headbutt & kick a couple of opposing players.

But this is a note about his twitter use, rather than his life as a footballer.

Here’s a screengrab of his timeline:

The odd thing you may notice there is the orange ‘Promoted Tweet’ icon underneath the top tweet. Here’s a close-up:

You’ll see there the line reads ‘Promoted by Joseph Barton’ – ie. Joey Barton seems to have ‘promoted’ the tweet himself.

‘Promoted Tweets’ are very common among advertisers, but are pretty much unheard of for individuals. Here’s what it means to promote a tweet:

In other words: Twitter says Joey Barton is promoting his tweets. Twitter says that promoted tweets are paid for. Therefore it looks like Joey Barton is paying to promote his tweets in order to reach a wider audience.

Strange, & quite clever. What do you think?

Can you spot the numeric trick Amazon is using in the image below? It tricked Techdirt  into saying “books increased between about 4,000% and 6,500%. Yes, that’s multi-thousands of percent increases”.

Amazon have gained masses of PR & links as a result of this simple little trick over the years, and authors (like Paulo Coelho) have benefited from its misleading nature. Gizmodo, The Metro, Huffington Post, The Guardian, The Mirror, and many others all fell for this same trick around the time of the London Riots, reporting a 5,000% rise in Baseball Bat sales.

The trick is that the % numbers are nothing to do with an increase in actual sales. They’re actually a somewhat meaningless number used to describe the increase in ‘Amazon Sales Rank’.

The maths is:

((Old Sales Rank / New Sales Rank) * 100) – 100

So, for example, if we look at number 3 on the list up there, “The Devil & Miss Prym” was in position 9,760 in Amazon’s sales rank (ie there were 9759 books selling more copies). Now it’s at position 202 (there are just 201 books selling more copies). The formula is:

((9760 / 202) * 100) – 100 = 4,731

Amazon report that using an up arrow and ’4,731%’ and we naturally jump to the conclusion that means the book’s unit sales have increased 4,731%. In reality, we still have no idea of the actual change in unit sales.

As a simple example: If we follow the idea of ‘the long tail’, a book at position ’220′ in Amazon’s charts may not sell a whole lot more than a book at position ’9760′. It may simply be that the book sold 30 copies last week (in position 9,760) and sold 60 copies this week (in position 220). That would simply mean a 100% increase in sales, rather than 4,731%.

In fact – though unlikely in this case – it’s possible for products to increase in ‘sales rank’ even when they sell less units.

Amazon use lots of clever pricing, ranking & user interface tricks like this – it’s worth keeping an eye out for others.

I’ve helped a few companies buy ‘their’ domain names from other owners over the last few years. Usually it’s either ‘very easy and expensive’, ‘hard but cheaper’, or just ‘totally impossible’.

Here’s a very quick post showing some dotcoms who likely fit into the ‘impossible’ category, plus a few where companies likely just haven’t tried hard enough. Big, big companies who – very surprisingly – don’t own their own dotcom domains. (Number 10 is probably most surprising).

If you know of any other interesting ones, do drop them in the comments.

1. Nissan.com

Here’s a very surprising one – one of the world’s largest car manufacturers – yet they don’t own their dotcom domain. It’s an interesting case, and if you look at the site the ‘lawsuit’ link is worth a read. Here’s Nissan.com:

2. Paul Smith

Google claims there are over 300,000 exact match searches for ‘paul smith’ each month, and the brand has a very mature ecommerce site. Yet here’s paulsmith.com:

3. Compass Group

Ever heard of Compass Group? They’re a FTSE 100 food company, brought in revenue of £15.8 billion in 2011, and employ almost half a million staff. Yet they don’t own ‘compass.com’ or ’compassgroup.com’ - here’s what sits there instead:

4. ABBA

A bit of a cheat this one, as I’m not sure ABBA even have a website, but here’s the current homepage at abba.com:

5. Tate

Tate Online has over 65,000 works of art, they have 4 immensely famous art galleries (the oldest stretching back to 1897). Here’s Tate.com:

6. Fairy

Proctor and Gamble brought in $82 billion of revenue in 2011. One of their most famous UK brands – fairy – has to settle for ‘fairynonbio.co.uk’. Here’s the current Fairy.com:

7. London

The city of London threatened to set up a ‘.london’ generic top level domain, yet the city doesn’t even own its own dotcom. The ‘official’ website is at visitlondon.com, meanwhile the main dotcom houses this:

8. Guardian

Guardian.co.uk gets over 4 million daily visitors. I’d bet guardian.com gets quite a lot of accidental typo traffic. Here’s its current incarnation:

9. Greggs

With 1,500 shops, 400,000 ‘likes’ on Facebook and almost 20,000 employees, Greggs Bakers is both a large company and quite committed to the web. As a result, it’s quite surprising that this currently sits at Greggs.com:

10. Argos

Argos passed the ‘£1 billion online’ barrier way back in 2008, yet years later they still haven’t managed to claim the Argos.com domain. Amazing, eh?

11. Distilled

While not as large as some of the others here (at least not yet!), Distilled will be known to lots of domainers and search marketers. Despite specialising in search & online reputation, even they haven’t managed to get hold of distilled.com. (Big thanks to the brilliant @carlhendy for this & the next one). Here’s the current distilled.com site:

12. Skoda

Another from the car industry is Skoda – one of the biggest brand rejuvenations in recent history after their purchase by Volkswagen, yet here is the content of Skoda.com:

Any more?

Do drop a note in the comments if you know of any other really interesting/surprising ones.

In situations where there is a chain of events, very small improvements within the chain can yield big end results. Most digital marketing/website user journeys are like this.

As a silly example, the chart below shows how a brand could increase their ‘email revenue’ from £391,500 to £500,772, simply by improving performance at each step of a user journey by 1 percentage point.

In the example, an ecommerce brand is sending a single email to a list of 1.5 million addresses. The average order value in each scenario is £145.

Take a look at scenario A and compare the ‘actual’ results at each stage to scenario B:

This is a simple, very crude example, but a nice reminder of a pattern that appears in almost every single user journey.

Last year, Google made a change that meant lots of keyword data was suddenly stolen away from website owners. Thankfully for UK & other international sites, they only rolled this out on Google.com.

‘(Not Provided)’ – The International Rollout

The bad news is, they’ve now rolled out this change to several other international Google sites, meaning you will now lose far more search query data.

Whereas in the past you would see all of the actual search terms bringing traffic from Google, now you get a large lump of data categorised under the anonymous phrase ‘(not provided)’.

Here’s a graph from a UK site showing the increase in the amount of data Google have hidden today vs the same period last week.:

How to View This for Your Own Sites

To view the above graph for your own sites, do the following:

1. Add this ‘advanced segment’ to Google Analytics: http://bit.ly/hiddendata
2. Go to the ‘audience overview’ report (‘Audience’ in the left-hand navigation, then ‘Overview’).
3. In the graph, set the time format to ‘hourly’. (above the right-hand side of the graph)
4. At the top-right of the screen, set the date range to today; then tick ‘compare to past’, and choose the same day last week as your comparison.
5. Finally, select the Advanced Segment you set up in step 1 by clicking ‘Advanced Segments’ toward the top left of the screen, and choosing ‘Not Provided – Organic Search’ in the right-hand ‘Custom Segments’ box.

More Background

Here’s a post from Econsultancy talking about the impact of the original rollout. There is also a blog post over there containing a ‘hack’ to work around this to a very small extent.

If you’ve managed to gather any data on this so far for your site, do leave a note on the comment. And do share this via Twitter if you think it would help others.

 
Andy Barr & the team over at 10 Yetis released the 2nd version of their “top 100 journalists on Twitter” list.

Their very useful top 100 uses a complex ranking algorithm, summed up by this line:

“Obviously, the nicer journos are to PRs, the higher up they are likely to appear.”

In order to add some pseudo-pseudo-science to the list, I put together this version using PeerIndex, which attempts to rank the top 100 using data around their twitter ‘Authority’, ‘Activity’ & ‘Audience’.

Take a look! Follow them! Share it on Twitter if it’s useful, and be sure to check out 10 Yetis’ original post

The Top 100, Pseudo-Scientifically Ranked:

Here’s an infographic based on the results of a survey of 81 UK agencies & consultancies who provide SEO services.

The background on it is that SEOMoz recently conducted a global SEO pricing survey. The survey covered 500+ agencies & consultancies providing SEO services in various countries across the world. They very kindly released the raw data, so I’ve compiled the results from the 81 UK responses into the below Infographic. (leaning more toward ‘info’ than ‘graphic’).

81 UK Agencies/Consultancies & How they Price SEO Services

 

(click the graphic for larger version)

Use the Infographic Yourself

 
Feel free to reuse the graphic. Please do link back to the original SEOMoz post (and to me either here or as @danbarker on twitter).

Here’s some code to embed it on your site if useful:
<a href="http://bit.ly/seoprices"><img src="http://barker.dj/seoprice.gif" alt="UK SEO Prices" width="600" /></a><br />All data by <a href="http://mz.cm/worldseoprices">SEOMoz</a>, Graphic by <a href="http://www.barker.dj">Dan Barker</a>

Caveats?

There are lots of caveats to this data: We don’t know who the respondents were, the original price questions were all in US dollars, though I’ve converted to pounds (often asking in dollars means UK people either guess at the exchange rate, or simply reply as if the question were in pounds), the pool of data is fairly small, questions are paraphrased here, etc.

But there’s valuable stuff there both for SEO companies & for anyone buying SEO services. Take a look at the original post on SEOMoz for more details, and to download the data yourself. (I have no affiliation with SEOMoz – I just liked that they’d put out the raw data, and they agreed I could reuse it if I linked back).

Thanks

Thanks for reading. Drop me a note on twitter (@danbarker) or leave a comment here with any questions, and do feel free to share this on twitter if you found it useful.

Now that Google are hiding lots of interesting search data behind an anonymous ‘(not provided)’ line, I’ve posted a  little tutorial over on Econsultancy on how to make a little Google Analytics tweak I’ve been using to make SEO analysis a little bit easier.

Here’s the post: “How to steal some ‘(not provided)’ data back from Google”

And here’s a summary of the hack, if you’re already savvy with GA filters:

Something interesting I spotted as a result:

• All of the feedback on Twitter / via email is really positive.
• On the post itself though, 4 of the 22 comments essentially say “I don’t get it?

Where the comments are “I don’t get it?” I think I could have avoided that by including an extra screengrab showing the hack in context. I’ve included one showing it in action, but not in context.

Here’s a post containing 14 photos of Google’s first ever retail outlet, ‘The Chromezone’. (actually, 13 photos, plus one of Apple’s equivalent for comparison).

There were a couple of articles about this over the weekend, but none with photos. I happened to be on Tottenham Court Road (London), so thought I’d take a look and take a few pictures.

The first thing I found was, it is not an actual store, it’s a concession in a larger PC World store. The second thing I found was, when I asked if I could take a few photos, the Google staff said “fine with us”; the PC World staff said “we’ll sue you if you take any photos”.

I asked “if I come back later & I don’t ask, can I take photos?” and they said “we’ll find you and we’ll sue you”.

Anyway, I dropped the lovely Anina – Dixons’ head of PR – an email, waited 2 days, & she very kindly sorted things out.

So here are 9 facts I picked up from the staff, followed by the photos:

1. It only really sells one product. You can buy accessories, but really they’re just selling the Samsung Chromebook.
2. This is actually the third phase in trialling the concept. The first phases were a hotel where you could ‘check out’ chromebooks, and Virgin Atlantic at O’Hare airport where you could pick one up for the flight.
3. This is the first real ‘retail store’. Google are now in the process of setting up a second location in Essex.
4. The guy in charge (Jonny) had been flown over from the states to set things up.
5. The staff are Google employees. They’re all really nice, very friendly, and know the products back-to-front.
6. They’ve sold out of their stock of Chromebooks already. Wouldn’t tell me how many, but said “it’s a lot”.
7. They’re only selling one model at the moment (the samsung), in ’3G’ & ‘wifi’ versions.
8. An Acer model – available in the US – will hit the UK early next year.
9. The plan is to trial these ‘soft launches’, and scale up if they work well. As this one’s already sold out of their product, the chances seem good of this continuing.

The Photos

Much prettier eh? Compare the 2 photos: they’ve out-Appled Apple.

That’s it. What do you think? Will they scale these up to full stores? Will they die a rapid death? Feel free to leave a comment at the bottom of the page.

Thanks a lot for reading. Do share this if you found it useful/interesting. Do complain in the comments if not!

Ling Valentine runs the mighty LingsCars.com , a site that’s been on Dragon’s Den, won various business awards, and is – quite regularly – criticised for being ‘ugly’ among other things.

Here she very kindly answers 5 questions about her experience around SEO, using videos to boost traffic, and how she moved £35m of cars in 2008.

1. How much of the work you do on the site is ‘gut instinct’ & how much do you & the team think about and analyse? Do you do any testing and optimisation of things?

Most of LINGsCARS website content and layout is gut instinct. This is not rocket science. In fact I would say that people who spend a lot on “advice” from so-called “UX professionals” are the crazy ones, not me.

Look, it is obvious what people want on a website – they want entertaining. That’s it. Yet 90% of business websites spend their time trying to bore people to death with conventional bloody Helvetica text, colours, fonts (usually grey), spitty pictures and discrete simplified design. All that is completely uninspiring to me. Boring. In-out in 3 seconds.

…On a website, you are competing with You Tube, porn sites and Facebook. You are not trying to out-bore your local council website. So, open the energy taps, eat sugar and get on with something exciting. Split testing/focus groups etc, is just a fast road to the lowest common denominator, just as you see in politics; boring.

2. You use tons of different marketing tactics: A really frequently updated blog, a youtube channel with half a million views, social media, PR, you rank for some big search terms, and much more. Which of these do you find most successful? How do you decide which to keep spending time & money on and which to ditch?

It’s hard to say which is the most successful marketing or positioning I do with LINGsCARS. Certainly Google is the most valuable referrer I have, but everything you mention adds up to success on Google. I just decide what to do, stick at it and make it work.

For instance, the half-million YouTube views would cost a conventional business at least £100,000 if they had to buy them… yet I see very few businesses uploading anything worth watching to YouTube. To get views, a video has to be fun, inspire, entertain etc. No one wants “educating”. Again, YouTube is like a load of mini TV programmes, so watch a few high-traffic TV programmes and copy some of the formats. I’m aiming LINGsCARS partly at “Top Gear” on TV. Quick editing, fast soundtrack, no excess film and in your face shots, plus personality. Plus add fun and laughter!

You don’t have to be Steven Spielberg, I manage with a budget of £0!

As an example, here’s one of Ling’s videos:

3. The design of the site comes up time & time again. Lots of people say it’s ugly, but it seems to work very, very well for the business. Would you say it’s ‘ugly by design’? Is there a big idea behind it?

LINGsCARS is not “ugly” at all. That’s rubbish. It is a beautiful website. What these people who say “ugly” are moaning about is that my website is not like every other asinine light grey apple-mac minimalist yawn-site, most of which are usually dead, inactive, static and loss-making. Like that Gok Wan says, add some C-O-L-O-U-R, dummy.

I want a website that 100,000 people a month walk through clicking and playing with loads of stuff on their journey. I want profit of over £100,000 (like I just managed in 2010-2011). It is like an adventure park, and by the way… I supply new lease cars. Due to such a long, long renewal cycle for most cars (at least 2 or 3 years), I need to attract people in, grab them, addict them to loads of stuff, so they have to come back again and eventually they may take a car.

For me, 10, 20 or 30 customers a day are enough. That’s a tiny percentage of visitors. The rest is just playtime. I am not trying to allow people to slide in and out in 10 seconds without interacting on a boring website with a paragraph-per-page. I want commitment and enthusiasm and emotion from visitors. I poke them with a stick to see if they are alive, and what the “ugly” comments from some torpid idiots mean, is that I have woken them up and made them jump.

4. You’ve had some experience with the Dragons Den. What do you think of the Dragons’ knowledge and skills around the web, and around business in general?

Oh, I am sure the Dragons are very good at making money. They know far more than me, and make far more I guess. But, I always worry that they rarely say “I don’t know about that”. You have to worry when people have an “expert” opinion about everything, however much money they have. My other concern is that there are so many gullible idiots out there who believe they can worship every word the Dragons’ (or even worse, other “mentors” that don’t have two beans to rub together – I could name a few) say, and that it will change their lives for the better. It won’t. People need to get on for themselves and ignore the so-called experts with their books, advice, and networking or mentoring programmes.

5. If you were starting a new business based around a website, what do you think is the biggest thing to get right?

Assuming you can fulfil the service or goods supply that you offer, the biggest thing to get right is simply to emotionalise your offering. Force people to have to make a definite choice NOT to use you. That is similar to “LOVE” and “HATE” emotion. It’s no good at all being averagely acceptable. You must put massive effort in. Most businesses are not big or good or well-financed enough to hit the big centre ground, so for goodness sake take an edge, and then you’ll pick up many centre-ground customers, too.

That’s it. Thanks, Ling! If you’ve never seen the site before, Ling’s Cars is very much worth a look.
Do share this post if you’ve found any of it interesting/useful.