Susan Weinshenck, Ph.D. in Psychology and Chief of Technical Staff at Human Factors International, is launching a blog and about to publish a book.

I have heard Susan speak a few times, at World Usability Day and at Internet User Experience conferences, and she is a terrific speaker, thoughtful and animated. Recently I have heard her talk about persuasion – what makes a website or advertising persuasive and user experience designers can improve websites and application experiences with this knowledge.

I’m always happy to learn from what Susan has to say, and I’m excited to subscribe to her blog. I’m sure it will get me thinking. I’ll let you decide for yourself, here are some recent posts:

• How do people decide? The Order Effect
• Undecided Voters? Not Really.
• Plot by Apple to convert PC users?

Here’s info on her upcoming book: Neuro Web Design: What makes them click? (Voices that Matter), available to pre-order now from Amazon.com.

I’m a fan of LinkedIn. Its helped me keep track of folks I value, and it lets me admire their paths as they move, advance, and change. Yet, now that most social networking sites are allowing me to aggregate my own feeds from elsewhere (think jaiku, friendfeed, being able to syndicate your blog as notes into Facebook, Plaxo Pulse), why should I or you bother aggregating feeds within LinkedIn?

I consider LinkedIn to be my primary professional profile online (due respect to all the others…it’s the leader in my book). The opportunity to enrich it was too good to pass up. As Chris Brogan blogged yesterday Drop everything run to LinkedIn now. What are you waiting for? Read More

This evening Barack Obama is going to spend about four to five million dollars to air a thirty minute ad on three major networks nationwide. Not since Ross Perot in 1992 has a candidate spent so much money to reach so many people at the same time.

But, in fact, Barack Obama has reached the equivalent of ten times that many people over the last year, and his campaign has essentially done it for free. How? YouTube.

This wonderful post by Salon’s Cyrus Farivar ties together a number of threads about the influence YouTube had on the 2008 election cycle. Citing a number of different sources, he comes to the conclusion that the total number of hours of YouTube videos with pro-Obama political content was over fourteen MILLION HOURS.

To put that another way, Obama got the equivalent of fourteen hours of viewing time for entire city of Denver through YouTube.

McCain was a distant second, with only about half a million hours of viewing. This massive deficit is striking for two reasons. First, it means that Obama supporters are posting a lot more videos. Secondly, and more importantly, a lot more people are watching them. If engagement is a measure of a brand, Obama’s brand is solidly in the lead on YouTube.

How much would this exposure be worth in terms of television? Well, using media buyer price points, Micah Sifry calculated that the value of the advertising would be around $46,893,000.

Taking one more step back, even though Obama’s campaign is currently taking in jaw-dropping amounts of campaign contributions, that is more than the campaign received in eight of the last twelve months. To put it another way, Obama’s presence on YouTube was worth a month’s worth of fundraising.

These kind of social media multipliers are the kind of thing that internet marketing is supposed to promise, and Obama’s campaign has found a way to make it deliver. So, even though tonight’s message will potentially be seen by nearly a hundred million Americans, you can be sure that far more will end up watching it on YouTube–at not a penny of additional cost for Barack Obama’s campaign.

I’ve been having so many problems with Yahoo! Search Marketing lately, that I thought it’s time to post some of these. YSM is generally a decent program to work with, but they need to start doing some things and stop doing others if they want a product that’s competitive with Google AdWords. Consider this post a plea for Yahoo to continue to improve the organization supporting their search marketing.

Here are the problems I’ve had with Yahoo!:

1. YSM editors will rewrite ads for your account and upload them. They do their own optimization without asking. Supposedly, I should have received a notification that this was happening, but come on? Editing ads without express approval from the owner of the account?

2. A Yahoo! “leak” onto the content network. Last month, paused campaigns started showing ads. A Yahoo! Rep described it as a “leak in their back-end.” The “leak in their back-end” wasted money (they’re doing the right thing and refunding it), causing the account to hit budget limits and shut off early in the day, preventing productive ads from showing. Besides the direct costs of the paused campaigns showing ads, there was the opportunity cost from the good ads not showing.

As far as I’m concerned, YSM owes me big time for setting a reasonable budget to limit the insanity, otherwise they would have had to refund a lot more money than what they’re refunding now. This mistake in their system probably could have cost somewhere in the 10′s of thousands for them just for this account if I wasn’t experienced with using their system.

3. I can’t wait for a YSM desktop editor…with clearly articulated account limits.

Poorly defined limits on bulk uploads and downloads through their console. After making a few changes through the Yahoo! console it sometimes freezes up, not allowing me to download or upload changes because I’ve hit my limit for the day. Without a lot of advanced planning, extended roll outs, or use of an API (which also has limits), Yahoo effectively makes it impossible to edit large accounts. YSM reps say they can’t help with this one.

4. YSM’s minimum bidding system is causing less relevant ads to show for a major keyword for the account.

I manage an account with very similar ads and keywords. Basically, they run the same ads across ad groups except for small changes in titles. One ad group doesn’t have a high enough bid to show ads for a particular keyword, but a bunch of other ad groups will show ads for that very same keyword through advanced match, even though bids are set at 1/2 what the minimum bid is listed to be for this keyword.

Worse yet, these ads are sometimes specialized to a particular state and the keyword is not state-specific. I consider it a flaw in their system that it will show advanced matched ads for a keyword that’s listed as inactive in the ad group that is bidding on it directly.

So there you go. That’s one week of problems with Yahoo!! (two exclamations, one for Yahoo!, one for the end of the sentence).

The browser back button is both a blessing and a curse. It is a welcome sight when navigating a poorly-designed site – imagine, for example, if every time you walked into a room, only to remember you’d forgotten to bring something important in with you before you’d taken even a full step, you had to pivot, re-orient yourself to the door (checking above it for that Exit sign to be sure) and then take proceed back from where you came from. Not so efficient. The back button saves us from futilely seeking poorly labeled or non-existent links.

But the back button is often the opposite of efficient for analysts – if you’re relying on logfile analysis and haven’t controlled caching on your site through HTTP headers in the server’s configuration, you won’t be able to find those areas of your site that have visitors looping til their heads spin.

(btw, I have to thank Jeremiah Owyang for his post that models search engines using dogs, which, given that I’m a huge dog lover, inspired me to continue to build the presence of dogs in search engine marketing with this post).

Most script-bug analytics programs negate the effects of browser caching, allowing you to get a sense of where these problem areas are in a site. But there’s a catch – these programs, like Google Analytics, make it difficult to quickly download the entire set of navigation patterns for your site. The Google Analytics navigation summary gives the percentages of visitors to a page who came to and continued to specific other pages in the site, but each page must be examined separately. This isn’t really a surprise. For a site with hundreds of pages, displaying the comprehensive range of navigation summaries for the site would be a long page indeed.

Thus for some questions, turning to the actual logfiles can be easier, assuming you’ve had caching turned off for a long enough period of time. If you’re like me, this isn’t such a bad thing after all. After all, the fun of web analytics lies in inferring the relative strengths and weaknesses of a site, as well as the feelings of users about the site, from data on a session basis.

Looping can be inferred by looking for just that – loops in the structure of the graphed navigation patterns. Statistics then identify which pairs of pages have higher than would be expected occurrences of loops, if you assumed that occasional back buttoning is a natural part of navigation.

When I started in pay per click marketing in 2005 the first thing I wondered was “who are these people clicks on sponsored links because I sure the heck don’t.” Often when I explain to people what I do at my job they react in the same way that I did, “people actually click on the paid ads?” The short answer is yes, a lot of people DO click on sponsored/paid advertisements. I am the type of person that is pretty good at tuning out commercials on TV, so when the internet got popular I thought I could apply those same skills, only now I need to block out banner ads and paid ads. Many friends and co-workers say that they are exactly like me, but if this is the case then who are all of these people clicking paid ads?

My hypothesis is that we only think we are avoiding PPC advertisements but a majority of us are actually ingesting them. One of the reasons I believe this is because of the heat-map study done by Marketing Sherpa. As you can see to the left, it is natural for a majority of people to catch some of those first 3 paid advertisements that appear above the organic search results. You can see that very few people look at the PPC advertisements along the right hand side so maybe these are the ads people think they are avoiding?

Another reason why I know people are not avoiding PPC ads as much as they think is because of the shear amount of clicks we see in our PPC accounts. For most of my accounts the only limit to the amount of clicks a client can receive depends on their budget and which words they want to bid on.

Another interesting discovery I found while examining the heat map image was the heavy amount of focus on the number one organic listing. The orange/reddish areas represent the heavy eye tracked areas and they fall on the number one spot. It’s no wonder why everyone wants to be number one for all the search terms that represent their company, but we know it’s not possible to be number one on a lot of terms (especially with wikipedia.) For terms where it’s impossible to reach the number one organic spot a strategy might be to rank in the top 3 paid results. Actually if you believe that most people skip those first 3 paid ads you might use a strategy of targeting the number 3 spot because it is so close to the first organic listing. This could possibly explain why many paid search specialists like me try to achieve 2-4 ranking on many keywords and we see great ROI in that position.

So, whether you examine a heat-map or an actual paid search account you will see that many people do click on paid search advertising and as long as search engines dominate the internet, paid advertising will be a huge business. As far as who exactly is clicking on those paid search ads, I don’t know, it may be you.

This post was meant to be quick & glib, with a glimmer of of insightful commentary the future of advertising online, specifically in products like Second Life. However, I ran into some very thoughtful writing on the subject that’s way more interesting than what I had to say. So, I’d like to write about their writing…a metapost.

Google released Lively a couple months ago, and I’ve been meaning to write a post about it since July. Lively is a virtual world, like Second Life; users customize a character, or avatar that represents them, and rooms in which to interact with other users.

I found out about the launch from a Hitwise company blog post about Google’s next moves. Hitwise is one of the major competitive intelligence tools for the web. They provide information about web trends relevant to specific industries, and help companies understand how well they’re doing on the web relative to their competitors. They wrote a ‘how awesome are we post’ because six months earlier they predicted Google would launch products around health and entertainment, based on the interests of Google.com visitors.

So, the Hitwise prediction gave me the idea to write about ads in Lively and Second Life. Second Life got a lot of attention over the past few years in part because the “game” developed a vibrant economy involving the sale of real estate, clothing, and just about everything in between. Sensing opportunity, several businesses have established themselves in Second Life. [Link: NY Times] Google’s shrewd. They definitely want in on new opportunities to serve ads. Games? Heck yes! [Link: another NY Times piece]

I looked around to see if I could find any writing about ads in Second Life to springboard my post a bit. Cause, honestly, I never got into Second Life, despite liking Neal Stephenson’s Snowcrash…a lot. I hoped to get commentary from someone who really knew advertising and the Second Life community. As often happens on this great series of tubes, I found more than I was looking for.

Here’s Ilya Vedrashko’s 2006 post about American Apparel’s Second Life store. He also wrote his thesis on the subject, for his Master’s in Comparative Media Studies at MIT (cool program BTW). It’s called Advertising in Computer Games. Rather than comment further, I think I’ll read his thesis and revisit the subject in the future. Hey gamers! What’s been your most interesting encounter with advertising in a game?

Mashable had a post on Friday about Qwitter, a tool that sends you a notification when someone on Twitter unfollows you and lets you know which tweet (probably) caused them to unfollow you.

For personal use, I can see how this tool could be an interesting. I am not too worried about who is following me and who isn’t, but certainly someone concerned with their personal brand could benefit from knowing when he or she has upset people on Twitter.

That brand monitoring is, to me, the most interesting part of this tool. More companies are getting into Twitter, and Qwitter (or something like it) could be help these companies get an idea of what sort of tweets engage people and which do not.

On Twitter, as with any social medium, nobody wants to be your friend just because they think your company’s cool. For the most part, anyway. You have to provide content that interests people, and the nature of that content really depends on who you are and who you’re trying to reach out to.

A corporate Twitter account can’t simply be a blog feed. Someone has to pay attention to it, keep an eye on what followers are talking about, and keeping an eye on search results for new people tweeting about relevant subjects and responding to them.

As a corporate tweeter, you’re not going to be in the business of saying offensive things, but Qwitter can help you find out when people simply give up on you and unfollow you. It’s another way of getting feedback for your social media campaign.

Lastly, this Qwitter appears to be something from “Qwitter, a Twitter-powered social tool designed to help people quit smoking” which appeared in the Twitter blog back in February.

So, in early 2008 Yahoo bought IndexTools. Then, last week, Yahoo announced that they’re beginning to roll out the product born of that acquisition, Yahoo Web Analytics [press release]. It’s not public yet; the beta will expand to more groups over the next year.

No word on the details of the release schedule, but the word from product manager Jitendra Kavathekar is that like Google Analytics, the product will be FREE (as in beer), and “eventually all Yahoo! advertisers, publishers and developers will have access in one way or another.”

The buzz on this product so far?

The feature that people are really excited about is real time reporting. Google Analytics can take up to 24 hours. (Looking for reliable documentation on this.) GAAC’s who saw the index tools product demo say the delay is no more than a couple minutes.

I’m personally interested in the click path display, which looks pretty good. Google Analytics is pretty weak on this, and can actually be pretty confusing. (Ever wonder why your navigation summary shows your previous and next pages the same as the page you’re looking at? Yeah, me too. Explanation here.)

Tough to say when I’ll start using Yahoo Web Analytics on client accounts, but I think having more than one analytics account on a site isn’t a bad idea. Plus, features vary across products, and of course, these tools are just plain fun!

If you want a great combination of nuts-and-bolts advice, strategy, and perspectives on the industry, you can’t miss the following websites. Add them to your reader!

Search Engine Guide

Search Engine Watch

Forrester Research for Interactive Marketing Professionals

The Web Strategist

John Battell’s Blog

Seo Book

Occam’s Razor by Avinash Kaushik