Date Archive: August 2007

Shop.org’s Annual Summit is approaching: Vegas, September 17 through 19. This show is the online retailing event of the year.

The American Catalog Mailers Association, a new trade group for catalogers, launched in May.

On the social media sites it isn’t just what you know, but who you know.

“Do people enjoy it? Do they get a sense of speed and purpose?” If you think these questions are worth asking about your site, read on.

My interview with FreshAddress’s Bill Kaplan got picked up by Stumbleupon (the poker angle, no doubt); visits spike seven-fold.

J.Crew offers an interesting option on their email opt-out page: “keep me on your list, but email me less frequently.”

Interesting post from Mike Wagner on the perspective into customer service gained from days in a cardiac rehab unit.

MSN and Atlas released a study suggesting that half of search budgets are wasted on brand search…whose campaigns are these guys looking at?!?

Google’s AdWords Preview Tool allows you to see your PPC ads displayed as others see them.

Yahoo squeaks ahead of Google in the American Consumer Satisfaction Index.

From SEL, eight observations on pay-per-click ad copy.

Excellent Alertbox from Jakob Nielsen on banner blindness. To whit: people effectively no longer see graphical banner ads.

Saw my first ad in a TSA security bin last week.

Five interesting resources on setting up top-notch 404 “Page Not Found” pages.

The best book on mathematical modeling is “How to Model It: Problem Solving for the Computer Age” by Starfield, Smith, and Bleloch.

“When will I get my stuff?” In our experience, that’s what’s top of mind for the customer perusing shipping options on your website’s Checkout. How well does your site answer the question?

Google says the change is designed to improve the quality of ad results. We see the change as a medium-sized plus, coupled with a potentially frightening minus.

Best to avoid making mistakes as much as possible, but when errors inevitably occur, over-the-top service recovery makes customers smile. Nice job, Staples.

Bill Kaplan of FreshAddress talks about the future of email marketing, ECOA, misplacing $125,000 in cash, and hanging out with Kevin Spacey.

See how Google and Yahoo’s syndicate partners compare in traffic volume and quality to their parent sites.

Congrats to all our clients who made the 2007 IR 500 list.

Ebay launches Kijiji in the US. Errr… how many “j”s was that?

From Mashable, an encyclopedic list of online resources for images, video, and sound. Excellent quality content, and highly effective linkbait.

Steve Bosley joins RKG as our new VP Marketing, and Larry Becker transitions to VP, Web Effectiveness.

My shower sprung a leak. Google hands me a scarily perfect search result. AI is just very large scale computation, Larry Page predicts.