Sometimes we make assumptions that lead us in the wrong direction. I’ve made plenty, and I’ll continue to make them for as long as I’m alive. And sometimes, we’re inadvertently responsible for wrong assumptions made by others. When that’s the case (and we notice it), there’s an obligation to correct the misunderstanding. I recently encountered
Startups Cannot Afford to Have Indispensable Employees (and not for the reason you think)
By “Become indispenable to your employer.” That’s the advice I see from job training and professional coaches all the time. And I can empathize with why it exists. Many employers are not supporters of their teams, and treat human resources as, well, resources that just happen to be human. That fleshy cognition thus imbues them with
The Most Followed Twitter Users with “SEO” in Their Bio
By I was playing around on Followerwonk tonight (man that tool is awesome) and was puzzled by the bio search results for “SEO.” Have a look: Danny Sullivan’s Twitter profile certainly makes sense, but the ones above him are curious. I’ve never heard of any of these folks (which certainly could be my fault for being
The Uncomfortable Balance
By Every CEO, founder, manager, and probably most all of us at some point in our professional lives have asked these two questions: Am I pushing the people on my team too hard? Am I not pushing the people on my team hard enough? These two nag at me all the time. There are days when
The Mathematics of Core Values
By Over the holiday weekend, Geraldine took me to see Lincoln. I’d watched a clip aired during the Daily Show last week that had me excited to see the film, and Fred Wilson’s post sealed the deal. That clip contained the following quote: Euclid’s first common notion is this: ‘Things which are equal to the same
Is There a Long Tail to Referral Traffic?
By I was recently chatting with my friend Matthew Brown of AudienceWise about the distribution of the web’s traffic, and we both wondered – do referrals from external domains follow a “long tail” distribution pattern? I surmised that only ~20% of the referrals that the average website receives comes from the tail of the distribution curve,
Broadening Our Thinking on the Practice of Conversion Rate Optimization
By Many times when businesses invest in improving online conversion rates, the practice goes something like this: Brainstorm a list of things that can be changed in the conversion process or on the landing page Determine which are easy to build/test Create a set of A/B or multivariate tests to run through them Allow winning changes
7 Ways We Try to Make Internal Emails Better
By Email is a tough communication medium. Conveying tone, voice, attitude and disposition are all stymied by the the format. Efficiency is a good thing over email, but it can lead to suspicion of dismisiveness or even contempt by a reader. And the cycle of misinterpreted emails leading to bad blood between people is something we’ve
Where Does Creativity Come From?
By I love discovering that long-held wisdom or cultural beliefs are mythology. Ideas are so often what hold people back from achieving greater potential – and freedom from the prison of those ideas can create revolutions that make us all better, stronger, and wiser. This weekend I watched some videos on the site Everything Is A
The Evolution of My Public Presentations
By This week at Distilled’s Searchlove conference in Boston (which, BTW, is probably the best marketing content I’ve seen at an event, period, including Mozcon – yes, I’m a little jealous), I presented the slide deck below on earning marketing love: Can’t Buy Me Love from Rand Fishkin For those of you who’ve seen me present