the official blog of matt gratt
From Crimeware to Credit Card Marketplaces to Crimesourcing, the world of organized crime has rapidly innovated than almost any other sector. This fascinating presentation goes through the world of online organized crime in 2011:
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Thanks for the beautiful, magical, wonderful things.
Thanks for inspiring so many of us.
Thanks for standing up for perfect.
Sincerely,
Matt
In Memoriam Steve Jobs, 1955-2011
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I wanted to use PayWithaTweet.
So I made a Google Analytics Cheat Sheet, and I put it on my agency’s blog with PayWithaTweet. I asked my boss to tweet it (because he is famous on the internet), and the cheat sheet went viral – more than 200 people tweeted it.
(You can see the bit.ly information page. Tweets go off bit.ly’s (BackType’s, technically) radar in 48 hours, so you’ll only see the most recent. I would’ve used RowFeedr for tracking if I did it again.)
Now I’ve written a case study about PayWithaTweet – specifically, the search engine effects, but there’s something in there for everyone – for YouMoz.
The interesting thing about PayWithATweet is that it influences search engines – so if you were clever, you could create an almost self-perpetuating viral loop, with the visitors arriving via search engine and Paying With a Tweet, only to raise search engine rank further. It’s definitely worth playing with. (And you can get tons of social traffic too.)
Even if you’re not an SEO, you’ll still like it. I hope.
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Patrick McKenzie, aka Patio11, is one of my favorite business/marketing authors. Patrick introduces himself as a “software engineer from central Japan” but he’s one of the savviest marketers and businessmen out there.
(In many ways, his introduction of himself as a “software engineer from Central Japan” enables him to build audiences that would never listen to him if he described himself as a “marketer/SEO/coder”. Remember, the best salespeople never appear to be salespeople.)
I’ve collected some of my favorite Patio11 quotes – hopefully this will introduce you to one of my favorite marketers in an easy-to-consume way.
The software didn’t get written about because software is fundamentally boring.
Google is a company that does what it does for its users – it makes its users sound intelligent.
Are you in the software business? No. That’s just the monetization engine for the emotion business.
What your customers value isn’t software, it’s a change in the life they are living.
Your software is boring. The customer is interesting, so show the customer on your website.
From his Interview with Gabriel Weinberg
I am totally OK with Matt Cutts looking at my sites… my site gives you exactly what you’re looking for.
(quote was slightly paraphrased to fit into 140 characters.)
You’ve heard this term “remnant inventory”. If Upton Sinclair were writing about the Internet, it is what he’d write about.
The first thing anyone learns in A/B testing is that everything you know is wrong.
Google Analytics treats everything as a page view. If you want to track anything else, you have to write a lot of Javascript.
(On the linkerati) People on Hacker News probably have an average of 6.2 blogs per person. They link out to things very frequently.
From Patio11’s Blog, Kalzumeus.com
There is a pernicious myth among startups that SEO is a black art aimed at perverting the purity of the search results.
SEO is, at competitive levels, mostly about link acquisition.
You should figure out exactly what you hope to get for from SEO. ”Rankings” is not an acceptable answer.
Display advertising is, essentially, search advertising’s less talented brother.
Nobody blogs “Hey guys, I saw an awesome sales letter today, check it out” and if they do you probably don’t want their attention
The first cut of your SEO strategy will be wrong, just like v1.0 of your product will be non-responsive to the needs of your users.
Make sure you check out Patrick’s companies –
Bingo Card Creator, which helps teachers create bingo cards
and
Appointment Reminder, which helps service providers keep their appointments.
If you enjoyed this post, please consider upvoting it on Hacker News.
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Facebook Advertising is the great untapped marketing medium of the current day. You can target users by almost any imaginable demographic or interest slice – if you want to target 45-year-old women in Indiana who like Victoria’s Secret, you can. (There are, in fact, 80 people you can reach with this targeting setting.)
The next huge direct marketing company will be based around this level of targeting. Just like QVC depended on cable and Quinnstreet depended on Google, the next direct marketing giant will be based on these facebook ads. Debatably, this has already happened with Groupon.
However, the average Facebook ad has a click-thru rate of .051 percent. The average CTR of a conventional banner ad is 0.09%. All this targeting, and no improvement over conventional banner ads?
This is pitiful. And this is because, frankly, marketers are doing it wrong.
Marty Weintraub is the Facebook Ads targeting expert. He runs an agency called AimClear, and recently presented at SMX Advanced about advanced Facebook targeting tactics. While I can’t post his presentation here, it was awesome.
Marty has found that you can get more than a 1% CTR with appropriate targeting:
Yes RT @trevorjgeorge: @aimclear have you ever gotten a 1.0+% CTR with fbook ads? Just curious…less than a minute ago via TweetDeck 
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Marty Weintraub
aimclear
@brianchappell Actually the 1% FB Ads CTR ad was picture of a burger, served to 45 year old males interested in AAless than a minute ago via TweetDeck Favorite Retweet ReplyMarty Weintraub
aimclear
That’s pretty amazing. Marty also says you can sell birth control to people who like “Drinking” or “Drunken Weekends”, and Jaguars to people who like Rolexes.
Marty Weintraub has a book coming out about Facebook Ads – I will definitely be picking up a copy.
Have you used FB Ads? What’s worked for you? What hasn’t?
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I’m always curious about the web capabilities of the visitors to my blog.
The most popular browsers in the last month were:
Most popular web browsers on Grattisfaction for May - June
- Internet Explorer is dramatically underrepresented, and Chrome, Firefox, and Safari are dramatically over-represented. I attribute this to the heavily technical crowd my blog draws.
(See Pingdom’s post on Browser market share here.)
- Rockmelt and Camino visitors come to the site. These browsers are so rare in the market today they are not represented in most browser market share statistics. Again, I attribute this to the technical/early adopter audience my blog draws.
- There is absolutely no need to support IE6 or other early browsers on my site.
- Conversely, technologies that only support later browsers (like HTML5) could be used quite successfully here.
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I love finding great blogs – especially blogs outside my area of focus. I believe marketers can learn a great deal from user experience researchers, behavioral economists, computer scientists, and many other academic disciplines. Broad knowledge can be a competitive advantage – having multiple ways to approach a problem will enable you to outthink your competition.
As the title suggests, this blog is the notes of Panos Ipeirotis, an associate professor at the Stern School of Business at NYU. He has a computer science background, rather than conventional business or operations research training. (The URL of his blog is behind-the-enemy-lines.blogspot.com, which is an interesting commentary itself.)
Professor Ipeirotis writes about crowdsourcing and applying economic theory to consumer science. He’s also done some really interesting research on the behavioral economics of product reviews.
Jerry Neumann is a New York City-based venture capitalist, focusing on advertising technology. The essays on Reaction Wheel are about advertising, technology, history, the venture industry, and philosophy. Anyone who can effortlessly connect David Ogilvy to FA Hayek to David Hume to architectural technology innovation is a must-read in my book.
I had the pleasure of listening to Tamara Adlin speak at the recent SMX Advanced conference, and I really enjoyed her “no holds barred” approach to usability and customer experience. It turns out she writes an awesome blog, complete with bad words and great insights.
Tamara writes about personas and user experience – UX to the initiated. Turns out she did usability and UX work at Amazon.com – which is so usable it seems to just suck money out of my pocket as if my magic.
Reading her blog gives you new tools to understand how customers interact with your site or product, and better yet, new goals to shoot for in customer experience. Highly recommended.
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