by Brian LaFrance on September 15, 2011
It’s no secret that I’m not a fan of Target’s new site. We have had quite a bit of attention on that post about Target’s failure of a new site and people from all over the world have read it. There have been a few instances where someone comes to the defense of Target and due to logs and tracking that we use, we have been able to find out that those people were at least partially involved in the project.
Logging Visitors with Loggly.com
A couple days ago, we saw a large number of visits coming through IP addresses we didn’t recognize. Checking the logs and doing an IP lookup tied allowed us to tie those to Target Corporation in Minnesota. Without having Loggly to do some of the analysis automatically, we may not have noticed. Sure, the data is available through Google Analytics too, but how many people dig down to that level?
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by Dawn Wentzell on September 6, 2011
You’re likely seeing a dramatic increase in the use of QR codes in marketing materials lately. Despite being around for quite some time, they’re really beginning to be recognized by marketers as a great way to integrate online and offline marketing efforts. And it makes sense; smartphone use continues to rise – Comscore reports that 82.2 million Americans have one now. Comscore also reports that 14 million Americans scanned a QR code in June 2011 alone. The demographics tend to skew towards young, affluent males, so if that is your target audience QR codes can be of immense benefit to your campaign.
The huge benefit of using QR codes is in how many ways they can be implemented. A QR code can be placed almost anywhere; on print materials such as flyers, posters, and product packaging, or even displayed on websites. The single most common place I’ve seen them is in advertising in restaurant bathrooms. The bar codes that are created can display a phone number, email address or plain text message. The most common use is to direct the user to a URL.
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by Brian LaFrance on September 1, 2011
Well, the time has come to crown the winner of our We Suck at Running Contests, Contest. I know there were a lot of people that wanted Mike Halvorsen to win. Heck, we even had people here at AuthorityLabs pulling for him, but the mustache just didn’t cut it. Fortunately, we had quite a few good anonymous celebrity judges that weren’t being bribed or threatened like we were. This ticket was apparently a hot commodity. Looking at the agenda for BlueGlass TPA, who wouldn’t want to go?
Soooo…without further ado, the winner is…
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by Brian LaFrance on August 31, 2011
I don’t even know where to start with this. Target launched a new site last week. I guess they’re pretty proud of it, but they’ve managed to completely fail in so many ways.
The Backstory
In 2001, Target elected to partner with Amazon in order to leverage Amazon’s e-commerce technology. This may have made sense at the time, but Target should have started to move toward being off of Amazon by the time the 5 year deal was done. Instead, it has been renewed a couple times and was extended through 2011. The last renewal was announced 2 years ago and Target knew at the time that they were going to move off of Amazon. That means they’ve had at least 2 years to get this right. That’s a LONG time.
The Good
Honestly, I haven’t found a lot that’s good about their new site. It’s possible that getting away from Amazon’s technology will benefit them in the long run and that would be a good thing.
The Bad
There is a lot wrong with this site. It’s definitely not ready for prime time and was either rushed out to meet a deadline or there is a big team of idiots behind it. Maybe both. A quick run through the site exposed a lot of basic items that are being handled poorly. I could probably spend days picking this piece of junk apart, but here are a few things you guys can learn from:
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by Brian LaFrance on August 30, 2011
A couple weeks ago, we were seeing everyone jumping on the 20 year birthday of the public internet. That got us thinking about what’s really happened over the past 20 years and how the internet evolved into what we see today. It really is impressive to think that a Cold War relic like DARPA that was essentially for used for government spying has come all this way to become this amazing tool for government spying.
WTF??? Really? That’s it? Just 20 years of the evolution of spying? Not really. There have been some pretty sweet advancements in how we organize and retrieve information and all kinds of new ways to break up a marriage.
We decided to have our friend Jeremie at Big Red Ape throw together an illustration that summarizes the evolution of the internet over the past 20 years. We think he did an amazing job. Click the image to see the full size version.
So what do you think? Are we missing anything important? What do you think is the most important innovation in the first 20 years of the internet?
by Brian LaFrance on August 29, 2011
We’ve decided on the list of finalists for the We Suck at Running Contests, Contest. There were quite a few good entries and we’d like to thank Arienne for stirring the pot and poaching writers helping us to prod things along.
We will now be handing this list of finalists to our anonymous panel of celebrity judges. Their names are being witheld to avoid bribery, blackmail, and other funny business that Mike Halvorsen the finalists may attempt. So, without further ado, here are the finalists (in no particular order), their entries, and a quick explanation of why we picked them:
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