Infographic by- GO-Gulf.com Web Design Company

In the meantime, if you are staying with gmail, here are a couple of alternatives. None of them were good enough to make me stay in the web interface though.

How to cope with the Gmail redesign.

Gmelius is a poly-browser extension that proposes a better and cleaner Gmail™ inbox. - Addon for most browsers

Cleaner Gmail - Extension for Chrome

pregnancy test - negative (Photo credit: slayerphoto)

How Companies Learn Your Secrets – NYTimes.com.

This is an absolutely fascinating article on how marketers in large companies figure out brilliant ways to target specific people at specific times in their lives. It is also an incredible insight into how we work as humans and for average marketers like us, it also gives us something to think about when we are releasing a new product and how we can best approach adoption of that product, by being where people already are in their daily habits.

The process within our brains that creates habits is a three-step loop. First, there is a cue, a trigger that tells your brain to go into automatic mode and which habit to use. Then there is the routine, which can be physical or mental or emotional. Finally, there is a reward, which helps your brain figure out if this particular loop is worth remembering for the future. Over time, this loop — cue, routine, reward; cue, routine, reward — becomes more and more automatic. The cue and reward become neurologically intertwined until a sense of craving emerges. What’s unique about cues and rewards, however, is how subtle they can be. Neurological studies like the ones in Graybiel’s lab have revealed that some cues span just milliseconds. And rewards can range from the obvious (like the sugar rush that a morning doughnut habit provides) to the infinitesimal (like the barely noticeable — but measurable — sense of relief the brain experiences after successfully navigating the driveway). Most cues and rewards, in fact, happen so quickly and are so slight that we are hardly aware of them at all. But our neural systems notice and use them to build automatic behaviors.

Habits aren’t destiny — they can be ignored, changed or replaced. But it’s also true that once the loop is established and a habit emerges, your brain stops fully participating in decision-making. So unless you deliberately fight a habit — unless you find new cues and rewards — the old pattern will unfold automatically.

Are you asking customers to change their habits without layering on top of their existing ones?

 In one project, 256 members of a health-insurance plan were invited to classes stressing the importance of exercise. Half the participants received an extra lesson on the theories of habit formation (the structure of the habit loop) and were asked to identify cues and rewards that might help them develop exercise routines.

The results were dramatic. Over the next four months, those participants who deliberately identified cues and rewards spent twice as much time exercising as their peers. Other studies have yielded similar results.

The most compelling thing about this article is how Target could find out when women were pregnant and when they were due, without looking at public records and without them saying anything about it.

Lots of people buy lotion, but one of Pole’s colleagues noticed that women on the baby registry were buying larger quantities of unscented lotion around the beginning of their second trimester. Another analyst noted that sometime in the first 20 weeks, pregnant women loaded up on supplements like calcium, magnesium and zinc. Many shoppers purchase soap and cotton balls, but when someone suddenly starts buying lots of scent-free soap and extra-big bags of cotton balls, in addition to hand sanitizers and washcloths, it signals they could be getting close to their delivery date.

As Pole’s computers crawled through the data, he was able to identify about 25 products that, when analyzed together, allowed him to assign each shopper a “pregnancy prediction” score. More important, he could also estimate her due date to within a small window, so Target could send coupons timed to very specific stages of her pregnancy.

Now go read the entire article, because I guarantee this one will really make you think.

This is the slide show for the most recent version of the class I teach at Florida International University’s MBA program called Building a Professional Personal Brand and Image. This isn’t your standard “personal brand” pitch though, but rather it’s more about how to identify who you  are, what you are really about, and to understand that all human interaction is about perceptions. It also contains practical tips for job hunting, resume production, networking, presentation, social media, and self marketing. Tried to film it, but had some technical issues that would present an opportunity for an app….

You can see it embedded below or you can watch it full screen here.

Building a Professional Image / Personal Brand

This is a great piece by Ron Johnson who built the Apple Stores. I don’t usually post things about retail, because it’s not my expertise, but this paragraph sums up everything that is changing about marketing, selling, relationships and more whether online or in retail. This is the future and strangely enough, it’s the past. We are returning to the days where you counted on your local merchant to help you, know you, and provide superior service. It will be the death knell of those that don’t get it.

I am an Apple Store customer on a regular basis, because they make it easy and helpful and I TRUST them. There are great lessons here that I try to impart to our Miami Internet marketing clients and the primary one is, no matter what you sell and how many you sell, you better be about the relationship and the value you can provide before, during, and after the sale. The benefit to you is huge, because it means you don’t have to work nearly as hard to get repeat sales and referrals and you gain loyalty.

But if Apple products were the key to the Stores’ success, how do you explain the fact that people flock to the stores to buy Apple products at full price when Wal-Mart, Best-Buy, and Target carry most of them, often discounted in various ways, and Amazon carries them all — and doesn’t charge sales tax!

People come to the Apple Store for the experience — and they’re willing to pay a premium for that. There are lots of components to that experience, but maybe the most important — and this is something that can translate to any retailer — is that the staff isn’t focused on selling stuff, it’s focused on building relationships and trying to make people’s lives better. That may sound hokey, but it’s true. The staff is exceptionally well trained, and they’re not on commission, so it makes no difference to them if they sell you an expensive new computer or help you make your old one run better so you’re happy with it. Their job is to figure out what you need and help you get it, even if it’s a product Apple doesn’t carry. Compare that with other retailers where the emphasis is on cross-selling and upselling and, basically, encouraging customers to buy more, even if they don’t want or need it. That doesn’t enrich their lives, and it doesn’t deepen the retailer’s relationship with them. It just makes their wallets lighter.

via What I Learned Building the Apple Store – Ron Johnson – Harvard Business Review.

Related articles

• Sales – the Apple Way (laf.ee)
• The Apple Stores: A Playground For The Apple Geeks And So Much More (granniethegeek.com)
• Apple’s grandiose retail store in Grand Central Station set to open in next few days (edibleapple.com)

Two-thirds of online adults (66%) use social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, MySpace or LinkedIn. These internet users say that connections with family members and friends (both new and old) are a primary consideration in their adoption of social media tools.

via Why Americans use social media | Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project.

Subscribe to Ernan’s blog. He consistently posts the kinds of lessons all marketers should follow and does a great job explaining why things really work for other firms. If you want to stay on top of the best practices for marketing on the web, get on this list.

This article about Coke’s Facebook strategy is spot on for what we are always telling our web marketing clients here in Miami and that is that you have to open up to your customers and prospects, no matter what business you are in. The days of hiding behind a corporate veil are over. If you want to succeed for the long term, then let your customers into your business. Those that don’t usually don’t produce a quality product, so they fear the truth. If you fear the truth, then ask yourself if it’s really worth it to be in business.

Best Practice #3: Coke’s Driving Facebook Principle Is “Collaborate.” The page itself was founded by two Coke fans … and later embraced by the company! It is truly a shared undertaking with Coke fans who spend time on Facebook, not something imposed upon them from the outside.

The Takeaways for Marketers:

Conduct a comprehensive review of your branding and social media strategies. Develop strategies which enable you to answer “yes” to these questions:

Do you trust your brand enough to:

* trust your customers?

* give Facebook users an open forum?

* encourage and facilitate collaboration with your customers?

via Ernan’s Insights On Marketing Best Practices: Learn from Coke’s 3 Facebook Best Practices.

The click through rate for links posted to the news feed by Facebook Pages with over 100,000 fans is 0.14%, or 1 click per 715 impressions according to a new study shared with us by analytics provider EdgeRank Checker. Pages receive 0.00093 clicks per fan, or roughly 1 click per 1000 fans. These figures should give marketers an idea of how many Facebook fans they’ll need to accumulate to drive significant traffic to external websites, a core way of deriving return on investment from the social network.

Image via CrunchBase

via Links Posted By Big Facebook Pages Have A 0.14% CTR, 1 Click Per 1000 Fans | TechCrunch.

Related articles

• Facebook Ads vs Linked in Ads Part II (socialmediaobserver.wordpress.com)
• Creating a Facebook page for your business: FAQs (marketing.yell.com)
• The Brand Pages Faceoff: Google+ vs. Facebook (readwriteweb.com)
• Social Loyalty Platform PunchTab Raises $4.4 Million – TechCrunch (techcrunch.com)

You wouldn’t know it from my recent posts, but I really like Facebook and respect what they have created, but in recent weeks and twice today, they’ve made it abundantly clear, that when it comes to users and small businesses they just don’t get it. Frankly though, this won’t only impact small businesses, but will also impact anyone in marketing, that is trying to keep it fresh on their Facebook page via blog posts being fed in from their site. Now Facebook is removing the ability to have your blog posts feed into your Facebook page automatically. We don’t ever advocate to our web marketing clients that they only use a feed to post content to Facebook and we help them keep their social media presence fresh and interactive, but this change just stinks for already overburdened marketers and business owners. I get it, they want to up the direct interaction and OWN the web, but it’s a strategy that disconnects them from the millions of businesses that want to also keep their content up to date in an easy way when they post something to their blog.

Here is what I saw when I logged in this morning. It might as well read – “we don’t care that you are overworked and stressed and we don’t care if this turns you off on how we feel about small businesses, because we have you and we can force you to do our bidding”.  Stupid.

Changes to How You Share Content in Notes

You currently automatically import content from your website or blog into your Facebook notes. Starting November 22nd, this feature will no longer be available, although you’ll still be able to write individual notes. The best way to share content from your website is to post links on your timeline. Learn more about notes.

Related articles

• Facebook Kills Notes Import (accesscomptech.wordpress.com)
• Be social: How can a blog help your small business? (marketing.yell.com)
• Everything We Learned about Sharing, We Forgot (digitalbrandmarketing.com)
• Can small businesses gain a competitive advantage through social media? (marketing.yell.com)

While the data below is interesting it also points out something I’ve been saying for weeks about the new Facebook news flow for users and that is that they are breaking the validation model that keeps users addicted to the service. Users post things about themselves, their family, friends, company, and interesting things they find to get their existence validated by their circle of friends, but the new model does not allow for friends to see everything you post, because Facebooks new algorithm decides for your what is important and you may not see any of your friends’ posts, if the model doesn’t deem they are popular or important enough to you and it doesn’t seem to factor in the people you interact with regularly. To see everything requires a change in your settings for every friend for whom you want to see everything they post. This means if you want your friends to see everything you post, you have to ask them to change the setting in their account.

I am seeing anecdotal data, that this is resulting in more emailing of photos  and information and more photo posts to Picasa than previously was being done, because users want to be sure something they post is being seen and that they get feedback about it. I am not saying that this change will kill Facebook, but the primary inherent value of the site to most users is being fundamentally violated and it will reduce what gets shared per user. We will see a steady decline over time as to this data and I could be proved wrong, but I don’t think so. Facebook made changes in the interest of brands and advertisers, that are impacting the value of the service for users and that is never a good thing. It opens the door just a wee bit for competitors to jump in and if people are posting more to Picasa, then the opportunity is there for Google +.

Plenty of changes have been made to Facebook that pissed users off, but I have never seen this level of angst continue for users as they become more and more frustrated with the service not giving them the “stroke” they need/want.

Facebook thinks they can break all the rules, because they are Facebook, but it’s that type of arrogance that can lead to a full on crash eventually.

Further to the data that they released, I’m not sure that the change is even that great for brands:

Facebook’s changes, announced at its F8 Developers Conference last month, appear to have boosted brands’ visibility among more of their fans but decreased the frequency with which a brand’s fans see its messages

Somewhere along my career in marketing and web marketing especially, I remember brand and message repetition being important, but somehow the folks at Pagelever think that because there are more people seeing, that repetition isn’t important. I don’t quite get that, but maybe I don’t know what I am doing.

PageLever found total fan views of brand updates fell modestly — 0.4% on average — per brand page among the 300 pages studied. Yet unique views, which factors in how many individuals saw brand news, rose a fairly dramatic 24%.

News from brands themselves appears to fare much better under the new Facebook regime than news from fans or their friends about brands. Total views of comments from fans or their friends about brand news plummeted 50% post F8 among the 300 pages studied by PageLever. Unique views of those stories created by fans fell 26%.

Both drops are surprising given that the actual number of stories or comments from fans or their friends surged 18% in the period after F8, part of a broader increase in Facebook user interaction with brands. In net, that suggests the revised EdgeRank algorithm gives such fan and friend interactions with brands little visibility in newsfeeds.

via Reach Beats Frequency in Facebook’s New Layout | Digital – Advertising Age.

Related articles

• How to Time Your Facebook Posts to Reach the Most Fans. (praeferens1.wordpress.com)
• Facebook Changes Allow Brands to Reach More People (blogworld.com)
• Facebook’s EdgeRank and 7 Ways to Influence It (epiphanysolutions.co.uk)
• YC-Funded PageLever Offers Deeper Insight Into Facebook Analytics (techcrunch.com)
• A Model for Evaluating Advertisers Facebook Presence (actionableinsights.covario.com)
• Facebook’s Hybrid News Feed May Be Helping Big Brands, Hurting Local Businesses (insidefacebook.com)
• 58% of Facebook Users Expect Exclusive Content From Business Pages [Data] (hubspot.com)
• Surprise! Less than 1 percent of your “Daily Active Users” on Facebook are engaging your content (thenextweb.com)
• 80% of Social Media Users Prefer Facebook for Connecting With Brands (hubspot.com)
• Ypulse Essentials: Facebook Advertising, Young Adults & Apps, Freshman 15 Fiction (ypulse.com)
• Big Brands Like Facebook, But They Don’t Like to Pay (allthingsd.com)