Book: eMarketing Strategies for the Complex Sale

Ardath Albee has provided a comprehensive guide to help B2B marketers drive decisions to buy in their favor. It talks of how to differentiate your company with contagious content strategies that produce more sales opportunities and how to find out how to get the tangible proof you need to prove marketing effectiveness.

eMarketing Strategies for the Complex Sale shares methods to help you:

    * Create eMarketing strategies based on customer perspectives
    * Use a contagious content structure for competitive differentiation
    * Establish trusted relationships
    * Continuously measure, tune, and improve your effectiveness

Read more and order online.

Amazon's Kindle Reader Software Improvements

Amazon just announced a software update for Kindle. It now includes a built-in PDF Reader so the Kindle will now display PDF documents natively. In addition the screen can be manually rotated between portrait and landscape views. With the new lower prices, Kindle is makeing itself an essencial tool for business or personal use.

Highlights of the update are as follows.

Improved Battery Life
The software update has also improved the battery life for Kindle. You can now read for up to 1 week on a single charge with wireless on. Turn wireless off and read for up to 2 weeks.

Built-in PDF Reader
Native PDF support allows you to carry and read all of your personal and professional documents on the go. With the update your Kindle can display PDF documents without losing the formatting of the original file. Send PDF documents directly to your Kindle (via your @Kindle address) or drag and drop PDF files from your computer to your Kindle (when connected via USB). Or you can always convert PDF files to Kindle format so that they can reflow and to allow for annotations, Text-to-Speech, and zooming and panning.

Manual Screen Rotation
The Kindle screen can now manually rotate between portrait and landscape views so you can see the entire width of a Web page or magnify the page of a PDF file. The page-turn buttons work the same in either orientation, and the 5-way controller movements are switched to match the orientation.

Learn more or purchase a Kindle at Amzon.

Best Practices For Faster Web Sites

Before the Web I produced TV commercials. We would sometimes spend all night in the edit suite perfecting the sound mix. But we were not done until we tested the sound on a old TV set speaker. If it wasn't acceptable we would start over. We recognized that not all of our customers had the latest TV gear. We followed the principals of "user-centered-design."

I've produced Web sites for 15 years. In the "old days" it was routine to test new Web pages on a dial-up connection. Today few developers have access to dial-up for testing. Yes you can load test and calculate the time to render a page on different connections but you'll miss the look in the developers eyes while he stares at the screen waiting for a page to render. It's a good way to ensure that developers experience their work from the customers point-of-view, all customers.

So the next time you're told by a developer, "oh it doesn't matter, everyone has broadband" take away their broadband for a week and make then read this book while waiting for their pages to load.

Steve Souders, Web performance evangelist at Google and former Chief Performance Yahoo!, has just published a followup to his bestselling book, High Performance Web Sites: Essential Knowledge for Front-End Engineers.

In Even Faster Web Sites: Performance Best Practices for Web Developers, Souders and eight expert contributors provide "best practices and pragmatic advice for improving your site's performance in three critical categories: JavaScript-Get advice for understanding Ajax performance, writing efficient JavaScript, creating responsive applications, loading scripts without blocking other components, and more. Network-Learn to share resources across multiple domains, reduce image size without loss of quality, and use chunked encoding to render pages faster. Browser-Discover alternatives to iframes, how to simplify CSS selectors, and other techniques."

In addition, Google has started a "Let's make the Web faster" initiative. See their tutorials on the many ways to make Web sites run faster. They present performance best practices that the better Web professionals use routinely to improve the user experience for millions of users.

Marissa Mayer, vice president for search products and experience at Google recently revealed that Google's research team, experimented by adding artificial delays to their search results to see their effect on users. "They found that even a 400-ms delay would make the users conduct fewer searches by 0.2 percent to 0.6 percent." This of course could cost Google hundreds of millions of dollars. So what would a three second improvement in your page load time achieve? 5% more page views - 5% more revenue?

Not sure if your Web site was built to be accessible by all your customers? Are you building a new Web site and want to be sure that the business requirements include best practices for the best user experience? Contact me, I can help.

To Improve is to Change

Favorite quote of a quote from the new Sandy Carter book, The New Language of Marketing 2.0: How to Use ANGELS to Energize Your Market

"As Winston Churchill once remarked, 'To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.' Hence the most important challenge for today's marketer is how to keep pace with and take advantage of change."

Integrated Marketing Communications

The overall goal of integrated marketing communications is to drive new revenue growth and profits by maximizing the return on total marketing investments and resources while managing the overall brand experience thus building brand equity and future sales.

Many companies have separate online and offline marketing efforts, with distinct budgets. Some even treat online marketing as an IT expense rather than a communications expense.

Two recent books attempt to enlighten marketers on this situation. I highly recommend them.

Steve Woods in Digital Body Language says "Marketers who continue to pursue their mission with a disconnected set of communication tools and non-integrated data sets cannot gain the multi-perspective visibility into their prospects that is required to understand and leverage their digital body language."

Sandy Carter, an IBM vice president, describes the challenge in The New Language of Marketing 2.0: How to Use ANGELS to Energize Your Market as follows: "In an integrated campaign, marketers define the role of each channel. … The integrated campaign moves down a purchase funnel across a series of elements of the campaign. What is challenging is how to measure the success of that integrated campaign. … The way you measure the integrated impact of tactics is difficult, in particular, how the channels are synergistically working together is incredibly difficult."

Amazon to Release a Thinner, Faster, Kindle 2

While the first version of Amazon's wireless reading device was successful, it had many critics and complaints. But now the product is thinner (0.36 inches), weighs less than 10 ounces and features a five-way controller that Amazon promises will be easier to use than the original buttons.

While color is still not available, the 6-inch screen will display 16 shades of gray; the original Kindle had four. Page turning speed is 20% faster and the battery life has been extended by 25 percent. It has 2 GB of memory which holds the equivalent of 1,500 books verses 200 titles in the first Kindle.

UPDATED
The new Kindle is now on sale at the old price of US$359. Ouch! Kindle 2: Amazon's New Wireless Reading Device (Latest Generation)

Suggested reading...

Here are some suggested books I've found very good reads:

• Designing with Web Standards
• The Zen of CSS Design: Visual Enlightenment for the Web
• Beyond Borders: Web Globalization Strategies (good website here)
• Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability
• Web ReDesign 2.0: Workflow that Works

So brew a cup and finish off winter with these fine pubs!

Book: The Art of Simple Web Design

E-book features 10 chapters teaching professional "pixel-saving" skills, plus 22 worked example case studies.

View part of the the first chapter; "The Art of Simple Web Design." Key concepts include; "Enough, and no more", "getability", "Design the content not the box", "noticeability".