Connecting old friends, thanks to Google

My passion for the Internet is fueled by my belief in its amazing ability to connect people who might not be connected otherwise -- and to keep them connected. Now and then something happens to reinforce my belief and fuel my passion again.

I lived in Nebraska for a few early-elementary-school years. I had a best friend named Tracy who attended the same Catholic school I did. We were nearly inseparable, athough we lived in separate towns. We were like Rose Red and Snow White-- a story I loved when I was a child. We moved to Colorado and eventually I lost track of her.

Over the years I've often wondered what happened to the cute, spunky blonde I used to play Barbies with and sing Beatles songs with (we actually sang "Lady Madonna" for the nuns in 2nd or 3rd grade). So on a whim a couple of weeks ago I decided to go looking for her. No, I didn't use one of those reunion sites, like classmates.com or reunion.com. I Googled her brother.

Why her brother? I figured that if she had gotten married she might have changed her last name, but her brother wouldn't have. Plus, her brother has an unusual nickname and I knew a little of his history -- like he was a football star in college and played a little pro ball.

I found a few references to someone with his name in the area of his college town. I was happy to find a couple sites with contact information for him, including an email address. So I sent him an email asking if he was Tracy's brother and giving a little information about me and why I was asking.

I was so excited when, a few days later, I received a reply telling me that I was in the right place and giving me her email address!

Now my childhood best friend and I are getting to know each other all over again through email. We haven't talked on the phone or met face-to-face yet, but I'm sure that's coming.

Thanks Google!

SEO for Newbies

I was thrilled to read this post by Lee Odden. Finally, someone else embraces the holistic approach to business and the web and the power of integration. It's always seemed obvious to me that everything needs to work together, and a challenge to segregate all the little pieces. I'm just a big picture person, I guess.

http://www.toprankblog.com/2007/01/seo-for-newbies/

Quantity vs. Quality Web Traffic

Seth's Blog: Different kinds of traffic

So many discussions of the issue of quantity vs. quality, whether it's time spent with children, money spent on clothing or shoes, reading romance novels or War and Peace, or hours in front of the television. Now here's another one for you: web site traffic.

We in the web marketing world talk about unique visitors, page views, and conversion. As Seth Godin illustrates here, it doesn't necessarily matter how much traffic you get to your site, but whether or not you're getting the right traffic.

I worked with a client who had signed a longterm contract with a company who promised to drive traffic to her web site where she was selling an audio CD. I have to admit that they did exactly that. Her site got lots of traffic, but no one bought her CD -- not one!

Now you may think that the problem was with her product, which wasn't the case. Her CD was professionally produced with quality information. You may say that the problem was with her web site, which was partly true. There were definately some improvements to be made that would promote her CD more effectively and allow for a more simple method of purchasing it.

But even if she had a horrible web site and a horrible product, you'd think that with the millions of visitors sent by the company, she would have sold at least one CD from her web site to an anonymous visitor. But no, the CDs she did sell were to people she met on her own or who were referred to her site by associates. Despite the imense quantity of traffic the big and expensive company sent to her site, the quality of traffic was seriously lacking.

Keep that in mind the next time someone tells you how many hits their site gets. First thing to ask is how that translates to unique visitors (since "hits" are pretty meaningless for marketing). Then ask what sort of results they're getting from all those visitors. Are they converting those visits into sales, referrals, phone calls, etc. They may not even know for sure.

As Dr. Phil would say, "How's that workin' for ya?"