Although we’re not exactly an SEM agency we always get asked for feedback on our customer’s ads. They want to know why their PPC campaigns aren’t working. The ads are usually fine, but their landing pages are usually much too complicated. The thing is users don’t actually read anything except as a last resort. So it’s important that your site (or landing page) be as simple as possible, so that the user can get the gist of your site by reading only a few words.

I don’t want to say that I told you so, but, well, I did. Middle america continues to move online, content purchases have gone digital, and Walmart and Costco will keep undercutting Best Buy on pricing of high-volume items. For Best Buy to survive it needs to move upmarket in home electronics (helping consumers navigate the complexity of HD home theatre), focus on white goods (kicking Sears out of that market for good), and pray for a real-estate recovery.

So I’ve already posted about trendspottr; I love how it surfaces trending tweets about particular topics. It’s not perfect, but the throwaway nature of twitter means that it doesn’t have to be. And it’s helped me discover a lot of interesting stuff, quickly - I surf less, and know more. I’ve been using trendspottr with HootSuite for a couple weeks now, but I just had my “chocolate in my peanut butter” moment.

When I was a wee pup working on My Yahoo, this was a crime I committed more than once. We’d argue about how a particular feature should work, narrow things down to two contradictory options, and end up implementing both as a “configurable setting.” Users would then never find or use the setting, and we’d end up looking like idiots when we had to remove it in a future release.

Bank Accounts Are Hard To Close, And Even Harder To Keep Closed Catherine New, huffingtonpost.com Some cus­tomers who closed bank accounts at Bank of Amer­i­ca last fall recent­ly received an unwel­come sur­prise: Their accounts reopened. Per­haps even more per­plex­ing for these cus­tomers: It’s the bank’s pol­i­cy. Bank of Amer­i­ca will… How can this be possible. I close an account, the bank reopens it, and they start “charging” fees. Next up, billing the unborn.

The groundhog didn’t see his shadow yesterday - Spring is Coming! In the meantime, here’s a colorful tune to brighten up a grey winter morning. Tongue Tied by Grouplove Source: SoundCloud / Atlantic Records

trendspottr: We’re excited to announce the launch of our new TrendSpottr app for HootSuite. Available in the HootSuite App Directory, the TrendSpottr app is now a click away for HootSuite’s 3 million+ social media users. Featuring full integration with HootSuite’s social dashboard and a completely new… TrendSpottr Blog: Introducing TrendSpottr for HootSuite

One of my last jobs at Yahoo was to think about the future of the search box; thanks to the work of innovators like Tom Chi and David Watanabe, as well as countless hours of sitting behind a one-way mirror watching users search, I realized that people didn’t really think of a search box as a “search box.” Rather, they used it as a natural language text interface to the web.

If you want to see disruptive change in the textbook market, then, you’d need to identify both a potential supplier of the product with no stake in propitiating the incumbents, and a buyer of the product for whom the product solves a problem. My suspicion is that your best bet would be to have the supplier and the purchaser be, in some sense, the same entity. aka “a network”