I was briefly registered at Randstad in Belfast when I was looking for work, so I wasn’t surprised when I got this email today in my Gmail inbox:

Nothing wrong with that message, right? A mass mailing to their whole email database, that sounds like a good idea on the surface. What better way to get a good response than to blast it out to all your contacts?

But look a little closer…. That link at the top saying ’show details’, where in Gmail you can see to what email addresses the message was sent….

Surely a professional organisation like Randstad wouldn’t just put all email addresses of a mass mailing in the To: field? Surely they’d use BCC or an email marketing system?

Wrong:

All addresses were put in the To: field. The image above is just a tiny sample. There are no less than 1273 email addresses right there, visible for all recipients.

One of those 1200 recipients, someone greedy and web savvy, could easily sell that list to spammers for a few bucks. Or if any of those 1200 recipients has a virus or malware program running on their PC that harvests email addresses for spammers, all those addresses are going to end up on spam lists around the world in no time.

So what have we learned today, kids? That’s right, never use the To: field when sending out mass emails.

P.S. anyone want to buy a good list of 1200 email addresses?

Apparently Facebook wants to challenge Google for the title of World Champion of Teh Interwebs. A new Wired magazine piece explains how Facebook thinks it can beat Google by using people, instead of algorithms, to fuel search:

Facebook encourages its 200 million members to use Microsoft’s search engine, which it installed on its homepage late last year as part of the deal struck between the two companies. At press time, it was also planning to launch Facebook Search, allowing users to scour one another’s feeds. Want to see what some anonymous schmuck thought about the Battlestar Galactica finale? Check out Google. Want to see what your friends had to say? Try Facebook Search. And it will not only be for searching within Facebook. Because Facebook friends post links to outside sites, you will be able to use it as a gateway to the Web—making it a direct threat to Google.

… In December, Facebook launched Connect, a network of more than 10,000 independent sites that lets users access their Facebook relationships without logging in to Facebook .com.

… In April, Facebook announced its Open Stream API, allowing developers to create mashups using Facebook’s constantly updated stream of user activity.

… Connect and Open Stream don’t just allow users to access their Facebook networks from anywhere online. They also help realize Facebook’s longtime vision of giving users a unique, Web-wide online profile.

But where Google tries to maintain an image of transparency and trustworthiness (”Don’t be evil“), Facebook is an obvious corporate enterprise with profit on its mind, even at the expense of its users:

In November 2007, Facebook launched Beacon, a ham-fisted attempt to inject advertising into News Feeds. Users felt violated; after a month of protest, Zuckerberg publicly apologized and effectively shut Beacon down. Then, in February 2009, Facebook quietly changed its terms of service, appearing to give itself perpetual ownership of anything posted on the site, even after members closed their accounts. Users complained so vociferously—millions joined Facebook groups and signed online petitions protesting the change—that the company was forced to backtrack. The event left many people fearful of the amount of personal information they were ceding to a private, profit-hungry enterprise.

I’m not sure Facebook packs the punch to knock out Google’s 800-pound Gorilla.

There’s a fascinating article up on the Times website about how credit card companies are handling the recession. Not only are they doing the smart thing by refocusing on customers who can actually pay their debts, they’re also using psychology to get the most out of defaulting cardholders.

“It’s really hard to get clean insights of a cardholder’s state of mind,” said Andy Jennings, the head of research and development at FICO, one of the biggest and oldest analytic firms. “The more subtle the insight, the more cleverness finding it requires. If someone pays for a big cable television package each month with their card, are they rich? Or does it signal they don’t have the sense to avoid products they can’t afford? If they check their balance three times a day, are they worried or uptight? We may look at 300 different characteristics just to predict their delinquency risk.”

If a credit-card company detects unsettling patterns, it might start cutting credit lines, raising interest rates or accelerating repayment schedules. (Companies are expected to withdraw $2.7 trillion of credit by the end of 2010, according to a March report from the Meredith Whitney Advisory Group, a banking-analyst firm.) But the most useful information the card companies are deriving from their data are the insights that help them deepen their relationships with customers, particularly when a cardholder is going through a rough time. One of the strongest conclusions of the psychological studies is that cardholders are most likely to pay the bills of those companies with which they have an emotional connection.

I don’t like credit cards for a multitude of reasons, and this article leads me to include another one: I don’t want to be psycho-analysed out of my money.

(Via BoingBoing)

More cool stuff from Wired: a superb article on Googlenomics, the auction-based economy Google runs on. An excerpt:

“Varian is an expert on what may be the most successful business idea in history: AdWords, Google’s unique method for selling online advertising. AdWords analyzes every Google search to determine which advertisers get each of up to 11 “sponsored links” on every results page. It’s the world’s biggest, fastest auction, a never-ending, automated, self-service version of Tokyo’s boisterous Tsukiji fish market, and it takes place, Varian says, “every time you search.” He never mentions how much revenue advertising brings in. But Google is a public company, so anyone can find the number: It was $21 billion last year.”

Everyone who’s ever done any Adwords should read this piece.

“Googlenomics actually comes in two flavors: macro and micro. The macroeconomic side involves some of the company’s seemingly altruistic behavior, which often baffles observers. Why does Google give away products like its browser, its apps, and the Android operating system for mobile phones? Anything that increases Internet use ultimately enriches Google, Varian says. And since using the Web without using Google is like dining at In-N-Out without ordering a hamburger, more eyeballs on the Web lead inexorably to more ad sales for Google.

The microeconomics of Google is more complicated. Selling ads doesn’t generate only profits; it also generates torrents of data about users’ tastes and habits, data that Google then sifts and processes in order to predict future consumer behavior, find ways to improve its products, and sell more ads. This is the heart and soul of Googlenomics. It’s a system of constant self-analysis: a data-fueled feedback loop that defines not only Google’s future but the future of anyone who does business online.”

Actually, everyone that’s ever done a Google search and clicked on a sponsored result should read it too.

Ryanair is now going to charge customers to check in online. If customers fail to check in online, they’re charged a ridiculously high fee they call a “boarding card re-issue fee”.

This once again proves that Ryanair is not an actual airline. Their business model isn’t flying passengers from A to B. No, they have a business model very similar to that of organized crime.

You see, Ryanair’s business model is to lure customers in by advertising very cheap tickets. Then, when the customer has been snared, the real business starts: the business of extorting customers for every penny they’ve got. Mandatory fees for everything begin to heap on top of one another: fees for checking in, fees for luggage any bigger than a sandwich bag, even fees for paying your fees!

Ryanair is a company that doesn’t deserve to exist. It’s a blight on the airline industry as a whole and deserves to die a quick, gruesome and hopefully painful death. I will never fly with Ryanair again, ever. I’d rather give my hard-earned money to a proper airline or a discount airline like Easyjet that at least tries to treat its passengers like human beings.

In case you haven’t seen this, the best and simplest explanation I’ve seen yet of the ridiculously complicated steaming pile of excrement that’s called the Credit Crisis:

Wired Magazine has published an interesting article about Real Money Trading (RTM - using real money to buy virtual money and goods in games like EverQuest, World of Warcraft and EVE Online). As an occasional customer of RTM traders I found it a fascinating exposé.

Soon enough, amid the daily grind of his obsession, he would see in the game itself a way out of the bleak hole he had fallen into. He would take a clear-eyed, calculating look at what he and his fellow players had been doing all those months—at the countless hours they’d given over to the pursuit of purely virtual but implacably scarce commodities—and he would recognize it not just for the underexploited form of productivity it was but for the highly profitable commercial enterprise it might sustain. He would spend the next half decade bringing that business to life. And though some people would hate what he was building, and others would want to take it all away from him, there would come a day when Pierce, eight years older, could look back on an accomplishment that was bigger than he had ever envisioned—and stranger than he would ever comprehend.

While the article sheds an interesting light on the somewhat shady world of RTM, I get the impression the author has an axe to grind with the RTM-scene as a whole and the topics of his article specifically. The article’s author wrote a book about his own experiences in the RTM world (and doesn’t neglect to plug it) and seems to go out of his way in the article to put some people in a particularly nasty spotlight. But he’s subtle enough about it that Wired’s editors seem to have let it slide.

Mary Meeker from Morgan Stanley gives an annual presentation about the state of the internet at the Web 2..0 Summit. While I often think that big corporate analysts tend to be out of touch with what’s really going on, I felt that this presentation gives a good overview of what’s going on and where we’re headed.

Following the advice of an inspiring man I decided to start a new blog where I can write about things I care about (and perhaps in the process solidify my professional reputation):

GreatWebsitesBlog.com - a blog about making great websites

In this new blog I will write about many different aspects of building and maintaining a good website.

Its target audience is mostly small business owners that don’t know how to make a good, effective website. It’s not for programmers nor web savants, but for the great masses of clueless web users that want some plain, simple advice on how to make stuff work right.

Meanwhile, this blog right here will continue to host irrelevant brainfarts whenever they may occur.

I recently attended the Design for Conversion conference that was held on the light boat in Amsterdam. The venue was small and had a bar/nightclub feel to it, which promoted an informal atmosphere and made it easier to start conversations with total strangers.

The attendees were divided into seven groups of each about 12 - 14 members, with two or three team captains. Each group was assigned a case to work on in between the keynote sessions, and at the end of the day every team had to give a short 3-minute presentation about the ideas they had to improve the conversion rate of their case subject.

The group I was put in had the KPNvandaag.nl portal as our case topic. The objective of the case was to promote usage of the portal, find a way to integrate KPN commercial messages in the portal, and how to gain valuable user insights from usage of the portal.

The team captains of our group were Lotte Zwijnenburg (info.nl), Boris van Beek (ikki.nl) and Reinout Wolfert (webanalisten.nl). Some of the more active participants were people from small agencies, IT companies, freelancers and insurance companies. The final 3-minute presentation for our group was given by me (no one else volunteered).

Our ideas for the KPNvandaag.nl case:

• More openness in the portal to allow for more customization, more news sources for users to add, and more widget functionality (calendars, email overview, etc).
• Integration of KPN services into the portal. Examples: SMS/phone history, personalized phonebook, sending SMS messages direct from the portal, overview of your phone activity, remotely program your digital TV DVR to record a TV show, watch TV, subscribe to digital TV channels, etc.
• Integrate relevant commercial messages into the widgets on the portal in a subtle way.

_____
Keynote 1
Andrew Chak - Getting the Next Click

Andrew Chak wrote a book a few years ago called Submit Now. He spoke about the core tenets of conversion optimization and divided them into three principles:

1) Start with the user and where your users are
Find the sites your users are active on (also search engines), and advertise on those sites.
Create different landing pages or microsites based on the needs of your users. Specify your message to different types of users and their specific needs.
Users only see what they are looking for, so be specific to that user type and use their own words.

2) Don’t sell, help them buy it
Help them find the basic information they need to make an informed decision.
Help them choose, be clear about your offer.
Influence the choice with highlighting, scarcity, user ratings, recommendations, etc.
Help them evaluate the different choices (feature table).
Help them see the result of their actions.
Be honest, authentic and complete.

3) Remove the barriers
No upfront registration, give (partial) content before you ask for user details.
Remove ALL unnecessary fields in your forms.
Remove uneducated choices.
Add persuasion elements (recommendations, scarcity, special offers).

_____
Keynote 2
Steve Jackson - Combining 4 techniques to improve your conversion rate

Steve Jackson has been a conversion optimizer since 1999, and he’s been writing a book about conversion optimization and web analytics which will appear in April 2009. He has created a model for conversion optimization called the insight model and explained it with a high-level view in his keynote.

The Insight model

There are 4 elements to conversion optimization in this model:

1) Persona - create a persona that is somewhat typical for our userbase, and view your website through the eyes of this persona. Be detailed in creating this persona and be honest to the choices this persona would make.

2) Competitive data - what works for your competitors? What sites are good sites with good conversions? Don’t be afraid to steal ideas from your competitors.

3) Clickstream data - use web analytics to gather information about what your users do on your website. What pages do they click through to, what pages have a high bounce rate, what pages are exit pages? Find the troublespots and correct them.

4) Experience data - you know from your own experience as a user and a professional what works and what doesn’t. Apply this knowledge to your optimization.

Steve also mentioned some other quick ideas:

• Use error pages to your advantage. You can turn a 404-error page into a better experience for the user. You can for example add a site search engine to your 404 error page, as well as quick links to the major pages in your site.
• The REAN model: Reach, Engage, Activate, Nurture.

_____
Keynote 3
BJ Fogg - The Elements of Behavior Change

BJ Fogg is a professor at Stanford university in California. He has written several books and does classes on human behavior, how to influence it, and how to apply this knowledge to the online realm.

BJ sees three main elements to human behavior that need to be present:
1. Motivation - people need to want to do something
2. Ability - people need to be able to do something
3. Trigger - people need to be triggered to do something

Motivation

There are three core motivators that you can use to create motivation for an action:
- Pleasure / Pain
- Hope / Fear
- Acceptance / Rejection

Use the lightest touch that works. Avoid over-motivation.

Ability

Users need to be able to do what you are asking. Increase the ability factor by simplifying the action, not by training your users. Make your conversion action as simple as you possibly can.
Reduce behavior to one click, one step, one action.

Simplicity has six elements: time, money, physical effort, brain cycles, social deviance, non-routine.

Triggers

There are three types of triggers, tying in to the three elements of behavior change:
1) Facilitator - makes behavior easier
2) Spark - motivates behavior
3) Signal - indicates behavior

Learn what already works for your target behavior and apply it to your own situation.
Often enough the motivation element already exists. Focus on facilitation (ability) and triggers.

_____

Conclusion

It was a good and informative conference with an informal atmosphere that made it easy to talk to other attendees. The case studies could’ve been better, but for a first-time conference it was very well organized. I’ll seriously consider attending the next one.