“Here is one marshmallow. If you don’t eat it in 15 minutes I will give you another one and you can eat both.”

Thus begins a fascinating experiment in delayed gratification. Fascinating not only for the hysterical looks on the kids faces as they tried to not eat that first marshmallow (see below) but also because it was found to be a primary determiner of high school success. Kids who managed to not eat the first marshmallow were by a wide margin better at doing whatever they set their minds to in high school.

This reminds me of a more general quote, “People usually fail because they give up what they want most for what they want in the moment.” This works for so many things, but right now I am going to apply it to the business of web sites and draw just out a few simple points

• Don’t get so caught up in doing business that you forget to grow business
• Don’t stop blogging because you are “too busy” – how will your new customers find out what you are all about?
• Don’t hire the wrong person…ever. Even if the wrong person is the only one you can find right now. It’s almost never worth it. Some big companies know this: Why do you think it’s so hard to get into Google or Microsoft?
• And finally, Don’t stop exercising. Would you really be happy with a business, money and no health?
• 

Which key codes are which for flex? I wrote this tool in response to a stackoverflow question wondering if there was a way to group up/down/left/right and 8/4/6/2 together. I wasn’t able to see one, but I did create this handy tool for checking key and character codes in flex. Just click inside the box and type, and it will display the relevant information for you.

Joel Spolsky recently posted his talk from last year’s Business of Software conference where he gave lessons in mis attribution.  Mis-attribution is a term from psychology that basically refers to the fact that humans tend to associate all happy experiences together, whether or not the two are necessarily related.  This happens a lot in websites, some examples:

1. Aesthetics: Good design leads to improved user conception of your website.  If you sell shoes, good design does not make your shoes any better.  It doesn’t make them any softer or lighter or cheaper, but it will make your customers happier, and happier customers come back.
2. User Feedback: Well thought-out shopping cart software that gives your customers the feeling of control generally do all the same things as any other shopping cart software, but your customers are happier… because they feel in control, and again, happier customers come back.
3. Societal Convention: There’s nothing in particular that says that every corporate website in the world has to be some sort of gradient shade of blue.  Nothing works better, but it has been proven over and over again that IBM blue specifically makes corporate customers more likely to buy.  Being aware of these societal conventions and following them, even if it means spending more time and money on research and art design is crucial.

Flex Blogs

The question came up online which Flex blogs I follow, so I thought I’d just mention them here really quickly:

1. http://onflash.org/ted/index.php (about 40% of the time, this seems to have the answer to the question i googled.
2. Another 40% it’s the http://blog.flexexamples.com
3. http://sujitreddyg.wordpress.com/ (Flex evangelist who answered my forum question once – well and quickly I might add)
4. http://blogs.adobe.com/flashcatalyst/ – Flash Catalyst (good for rapid development flex info)
5. http://blog.digitalbackcountry.com/ (Flex evangelist, and a cool guy)
6. http://theresaneil.wordpress.com/ (UI and Flex)

Hope that helps!

Matt Cutts, Senior Google “Spam” Engineer gave a talk recently which you can find below. Some of his big points:

1. Use words in you blog postings that would expect your customers to be searching for.  This goes double for your titles.  On way to track down good keywords is the google keyword tool at: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
2. Don’t spam.  For most of you, this means don’t stuff your site with a bunch of keywords.  Don’t close a post or your page header with “make money fast free money britney spears” or the like.  Google hates this.  Just produce good content, directed precisely at your customers.
3. Include dates are your posts.  Posts on your website will live for years after you’ve forgotten about them.  If they are dated, this will help your readers contextualize.
4. www.yoursite.com, http://yoursite.com – pick one.  This helps for a number of reasons, but among them is that google won’t think that one of your site is an ill-advised, spammy copy of the other.
5. Linkbait – Be creative, get attention by being really genuinely interesting.  Obviously, it helps if it is related to your message somehow.  Matt had a lot of different examples, but one of my personal favorite is one that he didn’t mention: vimeo’s recruiting video (If you haven’t seen it, you will want to: http://www.vimeo.com/173714)
6. If someone is being evil and copying your blog, go to your google webmaster, and report them (https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/)
7. The black-hats are losing.  People who try to cheat Google, primarily by sending Google different search engine results than people – are losing, and starting to go out of business.  When you hire an SEO professional, go with the “good” guys.  (Yes, we and PainlessWebDesign are white-hat only SEOs)
8. There’s many more, and a good Q & A section at the end, so if you’re a business blogger, definitely check this video out!

Seth Godin is a new wave marketing guru perhaps best known for his book: All Marketers are Liars. He is a great resource for companies that haven’t yet moved from an old-world, mass-media way of thinking to the new-world, permission-mrketing world that we are moving towards (and in large part already live in).

He offers several great conferences throughout the year, and most of them go for about $1650/day and sell out immediately, so this is a great opportunity to watch ones of the best marketing thinkers of our time in action:

Interestingly, these are exactly the types of things that we usually advise people on and aid people in doing, so if watching this gets you inspired, Contact Us today – ESPECIALLY if your business resides in Greater Seattle.

There has been a lot of buzz recently surrounding GWT, Google’s Widget toolkit, and Silverlight, Microsoft’s Flash killer (not yet). So which should you choose? I am going to make a very short and quick argument for Adobe Flex: Yes, GWT loads very quickly, and yes Silverlight has the full backing of Microsoft and it’s developer expertise which can be useful at times, but neither of Adobe’s competitors is ready for a prime time, customer facing, it has to look good, sort of role, and a blog post I read recently (by Google) drove this home to me. So without further ado, here is the new, fancy pure GWT charting SDK that was announced:

And Here’s Silverlight for comparison:

And finally, Adobe Flex:

With the explosion of Twitter, there are at last count 4,000,000,002 different apps and sites that purport to make your twitter experience smoother. Here’s my take on the most important ones.

1. Your Twitter Client: TweetDeck: The web based twitter interfaces gets very confusing very fast if you use twitter more than trivially and that has resulted in a great number of fantastic clients to help your organize the mess. TweetDeck stands out from the crowd with its ability to efficiently organizes different groups of users into different columns. Seesmic is another popular choice with an admittedly better looking interface and ability to treat your Facebook account like a twitter account. I don’t personally find the organization as easy to use as that of TweetDeck and I find the Facebook interface lacking as well, so I say stick with TweetDeck and do your Facebooking from within Facebook.

2. TwitterCounter: It’s like Alexa, but for Twitterers. See who the top Twitterers are, track stats, compare yourself if you like, but unless you have something to do with celebrities, it’s probably going to be depressing.

3. Twist for Flicker: Continuing the web tools copycat theme is Twist, which is essentially google trends for twitter. Very useful if you want to compare a variety of synonyms for maximum searchability: Are people in your industry talking about “ROI” or “Return on Investment” for example.

4. TwitPwr: A very key indicator of your influence on twitter is whether or not your followers actually click on the links that you post. Aside from links, it is very hard to tell if anyone is actually paying attention to your posts. TwitPwr uses web redirects to keep track of everything link you post, oh and it shortens your urls too. Double bonus. Essentially, this is as close as we can currently come to Google Analytics for Twitter.

5. TweetBeep: TweetBeep is like Google Alerts for twitter. Seriously, it says it right on the home page. Use TweetBeep to keep track of anyone who is talking about you or your particular niche. Look for customers, do customer support, just shoot the breeze about playing chess while on roller coasters, or whatever your niche might be.

6. TwitPic: Not only is TwitPic a great way to upload photos and quickly link to them with twitter, but the home page is often a source of great amusement with the interesting candid moments that people upload with their phone cameras.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Twitter recently – and reading Joel Comm’s book Twitter Power: How to Dominate Your Market One Tweet at a Time
and I’ve synthesized it to the top ten points that I think are key.

1. Twitter should be a conversation, not a podium. Conversations are what get people to follow you. Search for people discussing things in your area and answer their questions. I’m going to repeat this in point two, but it’s worth saying twice: Provide real value. Don’t reply to their tweet by saying, “Ah, if only you bought my product all your problems would be answer.” instead, provide some domain expertise, a wise word or two and then throw a tinyurl at the end of your post.

2. Provide real value. Twitter is absolutely dominated by small business announcing what they have just done. It reads like the classifieds section of the newspaper. No one wants to read the classifieds, so unless your advertising a serious sale or something similarly valuable to your potential reader, lay off the product announcements and give your clients something of real value. Prove your domain knowledge by offering some of it to them. If you’re offering something appropriately valuable, it will be easier for your customers to buy from you than for them to do it themselves, so don’t worry about giving away too much, just try to be helpful.

3. Distract everyone with pretty pictures (moving if possible). People like pictures, it seems we’re built this way. If you look at all the top internet sites they are primarily collections of pictures of ways to search for collections of pictures. Take advantage of this. Speaking of twitter specifically, I’d recommend using TwitPwr – it’s like TinyURL except that it gives you all kinds of stats for who clicked on what and when. It’s like Google Analytics (or FeedBurner if you prefer, but that’s a different post) for your Twitter links.

4. Create an Informative Background. Your profile is the only part of your twitter account that links you to the twitter you to the real you. Make it as informative as you can. Include your website, your blog, if you’re a business maybe a phone number. The trick is that it all has to be included in the image. Still, if you’re interesting enough people just might take the time to type in your web address into the browser themselves, and voila! – new business. If you don’t have your own personal web designer yet, just use a free service like the Free Twitter Designer.

5. Do Customer Service. Find out if people had a bad experience with you or your company and are talking about it, and then turn it into a positive experience. An example: If you own a small restaurant named “Uncle Ben’s BBQ”, sign up for alerts on “Uncle Ben’s BBQ” using a service such as TweetBeep. Then, when you see a customer who says “Uncle Ben’s BBQ sucks, I made a reservation there and they completely forgot about it” you can reply back, “So sorry about that, here’s a free coupon”. Turn the situation around. Now when someone searches for “Uncle Ben’s BBQ” on twitter they see that you might occasionally lose a reservation but you’re still doing everything you can in the area of customer service.

6. Occasionally give away free stuff. There is nothing more viral on the web than free. Nothing. So, if you start giving away free just about anything to your followers, I guarantee they’ll take notice. Just make sure you can afford it. There are more than a few stories of companies giving away free T-shirts or coupons online and being so completely overwhelmed by the response that they had to back out of it later

7. Don’t make every tweet the same. Variety is the spice of life. If all of your tweets are links to your site, or to amazon, or to cat pictures, it eventually all looks the same. Twitter is about making connections, so be yourself, say what’s on your mind, and as much as possible, Be Different.

And therefore best expressed through dancing. Enjoy!