Alex Schultz

Author: Alex Schultz

  • Free Gifts – Another Viral Facebook App

    I am really enjoying the phenomenon of Facebook apps and totally loving the way they have exploded from zero to infinity and beyond so quickly! The arguement that facebook just added a quarter of a billion dollars of RnD to their platform is looking more and more realistic to me.

    The apps I like the best are the ones that have exploded without the help of the directory and hardly surprisingly these have exploded because of interpersonal activity. The latest great app I wanted to show case is Free Gifts. The Facebook Gifts product is really cool and not too dissimilar to the ze frank concept of gimme some candy. The 2 mistakes I feel facebook made was making all gifts the same value (since surely if there were expensive and cheap gifts you’d give your girl/boyfriend a more expensive one) and not expiring the gifts after a given time (i.e. flowers might last a week, a teddy for a month etc…). Differentiation is key in many things.

    Well the app above is giving away gifts for free and when you send a gift to someone they have to add the app to display it… how perfectly viral I really love it!

    The image above shows the current user base and all without the use of the facebook directory, pretty incredible stuff, keep it up Zachary. I am excited to see how far this one goes!

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  • The Best Viral Facebook App

    I have been working pretty hard on my own facebook app now for a week. It is all about cocktail recipes (surprise surprise right!) and it’s pretty decent in my opinion and getting better but facebook isn’t approving apps into their directory v. frequently right now and I haven’t made it very viral (d’oh), am working on that.

    That being said I browse the developer boards on facebook a lot and stumbled onto the following post by Aryeh Goldsmith.

    His application simply let’s you send anyone on facebook a “secret admirer” notification telling them that they have a secret admirer but not who from. He has a “hot list” of all the most admired people (who are of course all gorgeous girls) and I believe you find out who the secret admirer is if you add yourself as a secret admirer of that person (but am not sure of that). Given how the facebook platform works this is an amazingly simple, low weight application with massive viral potential and it has chalked up 100,000 users without even entering the facebook directory. That TRULY shows the viral potential of facebook apps and the amazing distribution that the f8 platform has exposed. I hope facebook doesn’t become myspace, I love facebook too much but with the restrictions of their network and the similarity of my friends to me I really don’t see that happening. A REALLY clever roll out and facebook deserve lots of plaudits.

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  • Getting called a Guru Rocks

    One of the fun things about my blog is I get to meet awesome people all the time and one of those people is Will Wynne (another is Pete Flint which makes sense if you read the link below). Will was a colleague when I worked in the eBay UK office who has set up an amazing flower delivery startup in the UK called Arena Flowers and has just set up a blog to go with it as well.

    A year ago when Will was thinking about starting out he and a partner came out here and spent some time talking to me about SEO and how to get to the top of search engine rankings. Lo and behold they really listened to me and did far more reading awesome blogs on the topic and digging deep into the webmasterworld and digital point forums.

    The result was they gained a tonne of traffic really quickly and although I guess now SEO isn’t so important to them as they have tonnes of repeat satisfied customers, great press and really seem to have nailed their SEM marketing it’s really cool that Will took the time to blog about our little meeting last year.

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  • Awesome use of eBay by Alan

    A good friend of mine Alan lewis (technical evangelist at eBay) has produced a fantastic use of eBay to promote his project San Dimas by auctioning the first BETA place on the project through eBay. This auction is dubbed “for the alpha geek who has everything” and is well worth a bid:

    http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=110131261193

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  • A Beautiful Internet Marketing Experience

    This has to be one of the most beautiful graphic integrations I have seen. Smirnoff Black Cherry on Pandora. It really set me longing for a smirnoff black cherry and coke which I will be having this evening in the bar. Very cool indeed and I can only hope that I will be able to produce a calibre of IM similar to this as I progress in my career!

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  • The Cocktail Recommendation Engine is Live

    Finally with a month of data under my belt I launched an AB test on the cocktail recommendation engine on Friday. The cocktail recipe the test group will see is shown below. Early indications are great with initiall navigation for visitors entering the site on these pages clearly influenced by the cocktail relationships shown. I will give more details of how to produce an accurate AB test via Google Analytics in another post (cos I am still figuring out a few of the kinks).

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  • % Returning Visitors

    This is such a cool metric and one which I truly love. How many of the visitors to my site are returning and how many are new visitors. Ideally I love to see the absolute number of returning visitors growing faster than the new visitors to the site simply because that shows the site is getting more sticky and people are enjoying it so much they are coming back of their own volition. As a site owner I feel this is a metric you should keep a close eye on.

    The left image shows 2006 April returning visitor rates for my cocktail making site and the right image shows 2007 April returning visitor rates for the same site. In that time I have tripled the site traffic but grown the returning visitor rates 50% faster. This is awesome news and I am really excited to see that the site is getting better and more sticky.

    The whole question is how to make that EVEN better and draw more people back to my site. Returning visitors are hugely valuable since they are free traffic and engaged. It’s worth investing time and money in increasing this metric even though it’s a really hard one to move.

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  • AdSense Dependant and Independant Variables

    Oh man this is a head screwer!

    For a while now I have been tracking two things which have a strong impact on my adsense earnings for any given adsense impression: How many pages a visitor has seen on my site and what site referred them to my site.

    Now I’ve been treating these variables as independant which means I have tracked them seperately assuming no interplay between the way these two variables impact my adsense clicks. This is moronic the variables couldn’t be more strongly tied together if the hypothesis I have for “why” google referred visitors have higher CTRs than non Google:

    If the first reason holds true then browsing through my site it is clear that the ads on the “paper blimp” page are v. different from the ads on the paper airplanes homepage. It would then also hold true that:

    If this holds true you would expect the drop off in the ctr for a google user to be far greater from the first page viewed to 4th page viewed than for a non google user. The good news is I can test this and see if these variables are independant and whether I should treat them as such but the bad news is I can’t kick this off until after eBay Live due to my commitments over the next month.

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  • Fire the AT&T Internet Marketing team

    Today I was on my site when I saw the following ad:

    It says get “AT&T Yahoo! High speed internet pro” and the animation leading up to this was about digital music streaming and noted that AT&T Yahoo! was the fastest broadband you could get at that price.

    The ad took 20secs to load which doesn’t really convey that message and on checking the file it was a poorly optimized banner which was hugely bloated and it could have done the same job faster in gif (but it was in flash… which is usually better for this stuff). On watching the loading I noted the URL it was coming from was an AT&T url (not Burstmedia *hug*) and this was where the delay was.

    I decided to dig into burstmedia (who served this particular campaign to my site) and take a look at how I was being paid on the ad. I found the stats pretty quickly (Burst have a great interface) and I have shown this advert 71,017 times for which AT&T have paid me $117.89 (thank you very much lol) and it has been clicked on 51 times a 0.07% CTR when banner ads in this placement on my site average 1.52% CTR… (that means my average earning per click on this campaign is >$2, LOVE IT). I wonder if there is someone in the marketing team at AT&T wondering why the CTR is so low or the performance of internet marketing so bad??? I think the total kicker on this one for me is that the campaign has been running for 51days!!!

    I hope whoever is running this campaign learns something and if they don’t that they never, ever work for me.

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  • Just. One. Word.

    Spotted in mr rayne’s notes… loved this!

    You. Can. Only. Type. One. Word.

    Not as easy as you might think.

    1. where is your cell phone? desk
    2. Your boyfriend/girlfriend? single
    3. Your hair? slick
    4. Your mother? hugs
    5. Your father? awesome
    6. Your favourite thing? mustang
    7. Your dream last night? none
    8. Your favourite drink? bushmills
    9. Your dream car?
    10. The room you’re in?
    12. Your fears? death
    13. What do you want to be in 10 years? happy
    14. Who did you hang out with last night? no-one
    15. What you’re not good at? love
    16. Muffins? blueberry
    17. One of your wish list items?
    18. Where you grew up? london
    19. The last thing you did? interview
    20. What are you wearing? pyjamas
    21. what aren’t you wearing? hat
    22. Your pet? computer
    23. Your computer? pet
    24. Your life? driven
    25. Your mood? chipper
    26. Missing?
    27. What are you thinking about right now?
    28. Your car?
    29. Your work? internet
    30. Your summer? travel
    31. Your relationship status? single
    32. Your favourite colour? red
    33. When is the last time you laughed? morning
    34. Last time you cried? march
    35. School? eltham

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