First: The previous version had whined that it wasn’t compatible with Firefox, so I had always had to open QuickBooks in Safari. This time, when I went to open it, suddenly, Safari was all wrong. “Your version of Safari is too new! You need to use some other, lamer browser.”

Then: When I wanted to print checks – and bear in mind that printing is something I am able to do from Firefox quite readily now – QuickBooks snapped back “you can’t print from QB in Firefox without a plugin, fool.”

And then: When I located the PDF plugin needed to print, the Mozilla add-on site protested: “Your version of Firefox is too old! You need to use a newer, better version.”

The entire process took almost an hour. Logging into QuickBooks Online and printing checks usually takes me less than 10 minutes. That difference isn’t going to break my business, but it was a pain in the ass on a day when I really didn’t have the extra 50 minutes to spare, and more to the point, it was an unnecessary waste of time. That’s no way to treat paying customers, Intuit.

And here’s the lesson for the rest of us: it’s no way for us to treat our customers, either. Why not take a few minutes to examine our practices and make sure we’re not making our clients and customers jump through hoops just to keep doing business with us.

The name for this technique in art is pointillism. By creating many small dots of color, the artist can create the overall impression of an image in our perception. We have to be willing to allow ourselves to focus at the right level of detail in order to see it.

There’s a lot more. Have a look and come back and let us know what you think in the comments.

As he says in the accompanying post, the “waterfall” approach is a terrible fit for web project management:

We couldn’t predict all of the potential issues when we first wrote a brief. So, requirements would inevitably change and we’d uncover issues too late to do anything about them. We would then either stubbornly hold to our original plan or scrap a lot of hard work to start parts of the process over.

Waterfall development also stifled great ideas that came mid-stream. It clamped down on “feature creep” to the expense of creating more remarkable innovation.

That’s not to say that no effort should be made to capture requirements up-front. Certainly there are guiding principles that are understood about many web projects from the beginning, but those are often business requirements and/or user requirements, not functional requirements. Trying to dictate functional requirements too early in the process often leads to a product that misses the mark entirely with features no one uses and a gap where the killer features ought to be.

The relevance this has to marketing optimization is that this is the scenario we frequently encounter when we meet with new clients and prospects: their web site and all of its associated marketing programs have been created under a waterfall-like approach that has its basis in an outdated understanding of requirements. Most aren’t testing, and those that are aren’t often processing the findings from their tests at a strategic business level.

And believe me, I say this not to dog our clients. I have the utmost respect for our clients: they’ve recognized the need to do something more progressive than redesign and rebuild, and thus start the whole vicious cycle over again.

It’s the businesses who don’t recognize the need for change that most need it. Take that waterfall diagram, and think about your last few web projects. What if you could correct your course along the way? What if you could find the parts of your web presence and your marketing strategy that aren’t working as they should, WITHOUT having to redo everything? What if, when you do decide to redo everything, you could base your decisions on results from what you’d already put to the test?

This is the reality of optimization, and it just makes sense. Any change you make today is a change you could be testing, and by testing, you can know the good you’ve done in objective terms, or, if the change proves ineffective, know in an equally quantifiable way the harm you avoided by not making a sweeping change and wondering why you missed your targets for the year.

Not to say that there are no risks in testing, and no trade-offs: certainly the process can feel unnecessarily cumbersome and slow if you’re used to having carte blanche freedom to make changes to your marketing and your web site. This can be especially frustrating if your title has a “C” and an “O” in it, and/or you’re used to being the de facto creative director on all campaigns. Data can feel a little intrusive in those cases. But the dark side of making decisions based on HPPO (highest paid person’s opinion) is that you get held accountable (whether by your CEO, your board, your shareholders, or your customers) for data-driven results anyway, so why wouldn’t you use data in your decision-making?

Happy Monday. May your data be accessible and your findings be insightful.

From an SEO perspective, that’s very interesting. But from a marketing optimization perspective, it’s kind of a yawner.

Because the algorithm is really only a small part of the battle.

Every day there are countless blog posts, Twitter tweets, and whatnot promoting a new article or list of tips for how to get your site to rank #1 in Google.

But what few of these articles, posts, tweets, lists, or what-have-you spend much time talking about is how to optimize a web presence in terms of a business strategy; how to follow through on the clicks that come in the door from search and ensure that the visitor intent is understood and the promise delivered upon.

Doing well in search is about knowing your brand. And your brand is largely about what your customers experience when they interact with you in any format. So by extension, search is about customer experience.

Customer experience is measurable, and when understood, it has underpinnings throughout a company’s strategy. A company’s annual and quarterly goals, both developmentally and financially, should be relatable to customer experience. The metrics a company uses to measure each of its departments, even the non-customer-facing ones, should be relatable to customer experience. And certainly a company’s marketing strategy and efforts should be entrenched in customer experience.

There’s no way that SEO should be let off the hook just because it so often isn’t understood by non-SEOs. Ideally, and in our approach, SEO is one part of a virtuous cycle — marketing optimization — that improves and informs itself to find new gains as the process matures. Cutting it out of that loop means forcing it to be measured in an arbitrary and almost inevitably short-sighted way.

We recently had the opportunity to pitch a big company — let’s call them Company X — on our SEO services. We definitely didn’t walk away with the gig, and I doubt they were even taking our pitch very seriously. But that’s OK, because we learned a lot from the experience.

One of the things that we learned was that even if we had managed to convince Company X that we were the right agency for their SEO work, we really weren’t. What I mean by that is that we excel when we are brought in to partner with our clients to help read the maps, set the ship’s course and provide running input as the ship sails that helps correct course and get them where they’re going faster and with less effort. That’s why our service set isn’t just SEO: it’s acquisition through search and social, it’s analytics, and it’s on-site conversion optimization through A/B and multivariate testing.

What Company X wants from their SEO agency is for someone to row the boat.

Don’t get me wrong: we know how to row, and we’re good at it. We practically make rowing look like an art form, we’re so good at it. But on its own, it’s not a service we’re particularly excited about offering. To stretch this whole ‘boat’ analogy even further, it makes most sense to us when we’re allowed to dine at the Captain’s table as well as providing some of the muscle that moves the ship.

What are your thoughts on SEO as a part of or separate from holistic marketing optimization? Let me know in the comments.

So we’re looking to hire what many agencies might call an “account manager” or a “project manager” or a “traffic cop.” We’re just calling the role “client happiness manager” because we want it to be extremely obvious — to you, to our clients, and to us — what you’re here to do.

We want you to be excited about making [meta]marketer better, so we also want you to have some ideas about developing processes that ensure nothing falls through the cracks. We’d also ask for you to help with some of the day-to-day at [meta]marketer, and you’d help with things like scheduling appointments, following up on phone calls and emails with clients and prospects, and just generally pitching in where needed. You know: just like the CEO does.

Some of the other things you might be doing:

• nagging project teams for status updates, deliverables, explanations to be used in client communications, etc.
• nagging staff and freelancers about submitting hours to our time tracking service
• juggling a lot of different clients, team members, seemingly conflicting priorities, and tasks
• managing reports on a variety of projects for a variety of clients

In other words, you kind of have to love working in a little bit of craziness; it’s best if you’re someone who naturally thrives by bringing order to chaos.

It’s also going to help if you speak at least a little of the language of SEO, marketing analytics, Web optimization, and so on. You should know your way around Google Analytics at least in passing, and you should be able to talk about some of the fundamentals of the Web, like HTML and CSS, with relative ease. We do want to hear about the blog you set up by yourself, and we’re curious about your thoughts on social media. In other words, you should be genuinely curious about and kind of obsessed with the Web.

This is a full-time salaried position, and we’re not gonna lie: the pay may not be all that great and the workload is probably going to be pretty demanding at first. We’re a start-up, after all. But you’ll be able to get a firm footing in a company that’s in the right place at the right time for a lot of growth and excitement. Long-term, between the experience you’ll get working with us and the opportunity for advancement and greater pay, you’ll do really well if you’ve got the right attitude and you help us achieve great results.

By the way, we’re all about equal opportunities, but we reserve the right to discriminate against people with negative attitudes. That’s about all.

What to do next: Email us at jobs@metamarketer.com with an explanation of why this sounds like it’s perfect for you, a link to your completed LinkedIn profile (or you can attach your resume, if you’re old school), and any other links you think we should see that help establish what you know about the Web: your Twitter, your blog, whatever.

Kate O’Neill from Nashville Entrepreneur Center on Vimeo.

When women throughout the country were advertising their bra colors for breast cancer awareness on Facebook last week, posting single-word status updates such as “yellow,” “chartreuse” and “none,” local marketing exec Kate O’Neill had this status update retort:

“Kate O’Neill doesn’t see the point of the bra color meme. But if you want to do something useful for cancer, donate a few bucks or see how you can get involved at the link below. I just did, and it only took a few seconds longer than it would have for me to type “black.”

That link was a donate button for Susan G. Komen for the Cure, and it inspired several of her friends to make donations.

“That was encouraging to me,” O’Neill said a few days later. “I didn’t expect anyone to take me at a word and make a donation. I was just trying to make a point. … Maybe it is the marketer in me, but if someone is going to have awareness of something, I want an action associated with it. I want them to know what’s next.”

There’s more at the link. It’s a good article. If you do any cause marketing at all, there are good tips from a variety of sources about using social networks to raise funds and awareness. And of course, even if your marketing is less for a cause and more for a company, many of the concepts still apply.

via Rob Cottingham.

Oh, I’ve totally done this.

Don’t be surprised if this is the next trend everyone can’t stop talking about.

Have you started thinking about your mobile strategy yet?

You can also access the handout I gave attendees to help them plan their social media presence:

Hope this is helpful to you!

See, I was a finalist alongside Rex Hammock of Hammock Inc. and SmallBusiness.com (don’t you wish you’d thought to register that domain?), who is a longtime blogger and who is simply @r on Twitter, and Dave Delaney of Griffin Technologies, who is also co-founder of BarCamp Nashville, founder of Nashville’s PodCamp, and the originator of Geek Breakfast.

Honestly, these guys are two incredible examples of why I am proud to call Nashville home. They’re super-smart, inventive, community-minded, and always hip to the latest and greatest social media trends. Besides that, they seem to be motivated by a desire to make Nashville an even better place, and to help us inhabit a larger area on the digital map.

And they’re also just good dudes. Here’s some of what Rex had to say on his blog today:

Therefore, I was happy to see that along with big corporate type awards like CIO of the Year and Technology Organization of the Year both won by HCA and “Green” innovator of the year Nissan USA, among the ten awards, there were categories for students won by Hank Carter, a student at Belmont University and startups won by CredenceHealth and, interestingly, for a blogger/social media person.

And, more interestingly still, the recipient was me. Two friends, Kate O’Neill of [meta]marketer and Dave Delaney, social media wrangler at Griffin Technology and creator of such things as Geek Breakfast were also finalists and either should have won.

I feel incredibly honored to win. But more than a little surprised.

Rex might have been surprised, but I don’t think either Dave or I really were. I have a tremendous amount of respect for both Rex and Dave, but given Rex’s tenure in the social media scene, it just felt right when the emcee called Rex’s name last night. Clearly, Dave felt that way too:

I had the thrill of being nominated as Nashville’s Social Media / Blogger of the year. I shared the honor of the nomination with Kate O’Neill of [meta]marketer and Rex Hammock of Hammock Inc., both people I really like and admire.

When Rex’s name was called I was so happy for him. Many people don’t realize that Rex has been blogging about news and social media, community and technology since before we called it blogging.

Congratulations, Rex, and kudos to the Nashville Technology Council for pulling off such a wonderful awards ceremony the first time out.