Smallbrain Solutions

Saw this in the NYT today…

It is democracy, but in a distinctly Iraqi style. This country is in the final days of a campaign that is at once more ruthless and more sophisticated than anything yet seen here.

Slick television spots run throughout the day, showing candidates who soberly promise to defeat terrorism and revive the economy. Cellphone users routinely get unexpected text messages advertising one candidate or another. Thousands of posters decorate the capital’s gray blast walls, including one that shows a split face - half Saddam Hussein, half Ayad Allawi - in a blunt effort to smear Mr. Allawi, the former prime minister, and his secular coalition.

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SEOmoz has a great beginners guide for optimizing your site for Search Engines.

Check it out here.

If you aren’t interested in actually reading it, here are some key tips:

a) Always use ALT tags in your images - especially images that link to pages.

b) Spiders can’t follow links that are in “drop-down” menus - so make sure that there are other ways to get there…

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Since I have been posting a lot about mobile phones lately, I wanted to direct you towards a post from last year by Mark Blumenthal, aka Mystery Pollster. If you are interested in polling/statistics at all you should check him out regularly… Anyway, a lot of people have been wondering about the effect that wireless-only households will have on the accuracy of public opinion polling and Blumenthal weighs in with this:

We could calculate the “coverage error” that results from excluding wireless-only adults from political polls if we knew two things: (1) How the vote preferences of wireless only adults differ from those with working landlines and (2) the percentage of all likely voters with only wireless service. Unfortunately, both numbers are unknown.

Still, assume for the sake of argument that wireless adults are 5% of the electorate, that a survey of wired households shows a 48%-48% tie and that the missing wireless-only voters prefer John Kerry by a 20-point margin (58% to 38% - a pure but plausible guess based on the numbers for renters, low income, etc). If we were able to include the wireless only adults, it would change the overall preference by only one point - Kerry would lead 48.5% to 47.5%.

[snip]

Of course, that’s this year [2004]. Things could be very different next time. A recent study by the market research firm In-Stat/MDR estimates wireless only households growing to 30% in 2008. If that estimate holds, telephone polls will face enormous challenges in the very near future.

Seriously, go read the whole thing. And maybe this post too…

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SmartMobs points to a Reuters story on U2 using text messaging at their shows to influence policy (or get signups… depending on how cynical you feel).

Then the band launches into the song “One,” and Bono encourages the audience to use their phones to send a text message to the one.org Web site, a sort of digital petition voicing support for poverty relief in Africa. Later, during the encore, the names of all who did so are scrolled on the same screen, and each receive a message of thanks from Bono on their phones.

It has all the important pieces - a celebrity request, a good goal, collective action (peer-pressure), and recognition…

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I decided that I would start a weekly post that steals advice from other folks in the industry, since I learn a lot from them. I suspect that if you are reading this, you will probably also find them interesting. So, enjoy - it was either this or “Friday Jade Plant Blogging”… take your pick.

The inaugural edition is a couple of posts from Chris Baggott’s blog. Mr. Baggott works for Exact Target a firm out of Indiana that offers email software for permission-based email marketers.

He deals with A TON of email, so I tend to listen when he offers advice (through his blog - i have never met him or anything). Anyway, here are some posts you might get some insight from:

+ Email is not an Aquistion Tool

+ 13 Email Marketing Trends Explained: #9. Transactional Email

+ Whitepaper on Segmentation, Targeting and Personalization to Deliver Relevant E-Mail
(this isn’t actually a blog post, but a whitepaper that you have to register for. I did - and haven’t gotten a drop of spam or anything from them, so don’t worry about the registration…)

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