Instigator Blog

My good friend Warren Wilansky runs a great web design/dev shop in Montreal called Plank Multimedia, Inc. Warren’s very much a “for the people” kind of guy, so I know he’s particularly excited about one of Plank’s latest projects — Citizen Voices.

Citizen Voices is a site run by the Governor General of Canada, Michaelle Jean. On the site you’ll find blogs, forums and other content related to her work. The goal of the site is to create dialogue with Canadians, and I suspect in large part, to target younger Canadians.

Breaking Down Solitudes

That’s a pretty cool tagline…and while many of us are jaded and suspicious of our governments (and there’s merit there too), it’s nice to see projects like this that seem to be truly open, honest and about reaching out.

It just launched today (and Warren’s even in Ottawa for a press conference!) so we’ll have to see where it goes, what the content looks like and how interesting/active the dialogue is, but I’m happy for Warren and interested in keeping track of it all.

There is a live chat today if you’re interested, targeting young Canadians. Am I still a young Canadian? *sigh* I won’t be able to join the live chat today, but I wish the Governor General best of luck with the new project!

And I think we’ll see an opportunity here for more government officials, agencies, etc. to reach out to people via the Web. I’ve heard of several US politicians using Second Life as a way of reaching into the virtual world. Of course, some will use it as another platform for their “Charlie Brown parent talk” and others will use it properly, for grassroots causes, dialogue and making real connections.

So check out Citizen Voices and participate in the discussion!

[tags]michaelle jean, canada, government, politics, governor general, citizen voices[/tags]

Technorati ignores us. MarketingSherpa isn’t much better.

But what about Crazy Egg?

Yesterday, I wrote a fairly positive review about Crazy Egg, the site that allows you to track clicks on pages via a heat map.

A friend of mine, Joe Hauckes, responded with his own thoughts. Joe experienced some setup problems, and some errors; resulting in not the best of first impressions.

Joe linked to my review from his own blog, which led me there, and led me to start a discussion about Crazy Egg. In my first comment, I wrote (in part):

Let’s see how quickly they find your post and respond — if they’re on the ball it should be quick…if they’re like Technorati, you’re doomed.

Joe and I continued the discussion on his blog. We even had a great idea for Crazy Egg (or someone) to build a WordPress plugin for the application. (Anyone?)

Lo and behold…by comment #5 Hiten Shah of Crazy Egg was posting! That didn’t take long at all.

Crazy Egg Is Listening

Hiten has commented twice on Joe’s post, and I’ve left a couple more questions there - we’ll see if the dialogue continues. It should.

Kudos to Crazy Egg for LISTENING TO THE BLOGOSPHERE.

We’re out there, we’re talking, and we’re influencing people. Even though Joe’s experience was sketchy at best, the fact that Hiten responded so quickly is most certainly going to leave a positive impression with Joe and other readers of his blog. I know it left a positive impression with me.

[tags]crazy egg, blogosphere, blogging, blogs, community, customer service[/tags]

Entrepreneur.com has their list of 10 myths on starting a business but they’ve missed 2 important ones.

There’s no question the myths they’ve listed are true. And by debunking the myths with some real facts (particularly related to funding) they’re not just ranting and raving about the difficulties of being an entrepreneur.

The truth is, lots of entrepreneurs fall into the traps of these myths and survive to tell about it. But knowing the pitfalls beforehand is bound to help even more.

Here are 2 additional myths about starting a business that belong on Entrepreneur.com’s list:

1. It’s all about doing what you love and doing what’s fun. It should start out being about what you love. That’s why so many people look to take a hobby and turn it into a business (which I think is a great approach.) But once the honeymoon is over and it’s time to get to work, you may be facing a cold splash of water on the face.

   Setting up a business and running one has a lot to do with a lot of things that don’t involve what you love. (Assuming you don’t actually love any of the things I’ll mention right now…) Examples include: Incorporating (dealing with lawyers), accounting, chasing clients for money, cold calling, paying bills, unhappy customers, slow vendors, etc. The list goes on and on.

   When you’re starting a business there are a million-and-one ducks you need to put in a row. And as soon as you turn away for a second, one of those quackers is waddling off on you. That’s not to say the core of what you do can’t be fun…and yes, it should be! But if I was going to bust one myth it would be this one: it ain’t all a song and dance.

2. You can do it alone. This is the second myth. Simply put, you can’t be successful alone. That doesn’t mean you need a 50 person consortium of partners (cause partners bring their own headaches), but you’re going to have to rely on others. In a recent episode of The Great Big Small Business Show we talked about delegating. In particular, Becky McCray talked about ways of delegating without hiring…forcing family to help you, for example (kidding!)

   I’m reminded of Leonardo DiCaprio’s words in Titanic, “I’m the king of the world!” Well…we all know how that ended up. Wanting to conquer the world is fine, but don’t assume you can do it alone. You’ll need a dedicated team of people to help you with a wide variety of things.

So there are two more myths about starting a business…adding to Entrepreneur.com’s list of 10.

Care to add some more?

Are you looking for tools to help manage your small business?

Do you run a virtual office with people located in different locations?

Do you want to improve the productivity and success of your small business?

YES?

Then check out Episode 7 of The Great Big Small Business Show — it’s all about online tools, services and resources to help the small business owner!

There’s some great segments in the episode, including:

• Jon Swanson’s philosophy on what makes a tool valuable.
• Becky McCray is all about getting smart and sharing those smarts with 2 recommendations.
• Chris Brogan tosses in 9 valuable online tools he uses for running Grasshopper New Media.
• Christopher Penn has a 40-second spot about his podcast, The Financial Aid Podcast. It’s a great resources for students and parents looking at the quagmire that is financial aid and student loans.
• Ted Demopoulos focuses on how to look at your own online presence (website, blog, etc.) as a key resource.
• Laura Allen looks at the #1 online resource we all use: email.

I’m in there somewhere too, with a look at 3 useful online tools:

1. StikiPad - an easy to use wiki tool.
2. WebCargo - a great tool for transferring huge files.
3. GotoMeeting - a web meeting tool.

I hope you’ll check out The Great Big Small Business Show and listen to what’s going on! And as always — provide us with your feedback!

Ever wonder what people are clicking on when they visit your website or blog?

You can get the answer from any number of stat packages available (I use Google Analytics) but they’re often a bit clumsy, and they’re usually loaded with a ton of stuff you don’t need.

Crazy Egg is a very new service that tries to answer the question, “What are people clicking on?” quickly and easily. They do a good job with it too, by providing a simple tool that’s easy to setup (all it requires is that you add a snippet of JavaScript code onto the pages you want to track.)

The heat map is pretty cool too. It shows you visually where people are clicking. Note: The heatmap does not show you where people are looking on the page. That’s a much more sophisticated technology (that uses heatmaps for analysis), but that’s beyond the scope of Crazy Egg.

Incidentally, this heat map shows you very little clicking (*sigh*) and no clicking on the Google ads running…

Regardless, Crazy Egg is a neat tool. It’s early though, and there’s some features I’d like to see (without overly complicating things):

• Date Ranges — It’d be great if we could select a date range for the results, so we could compare changes we make and analyze clicks over time.
• Print/Export — I would like to be able to print or preferrably export the results (XML format is fine) so I could run additional analysis, prepare reports.
• Exclude My Clicking — It would be helpful if I could exclude certain IP addresses or perhaps domain names, so the results wouldn’t include my own clicks.

Crazy Egg has a free option for smaller sites/blogs, and that’ll suit many people just fine. They’ve also got “for pay” plans that increase the number of pages you can track, and snapshots you can take. But generally speaking, the “for pay” plans don’t have a huge amount of additional functionality (yet).

I think Crazy Egg is a good tool. We’ll have to see what else they add to make it really stand out; and I wonder how they’ll ultimately compete against something like Google Analytics, which is much more complex but also free.

In Google Analytics I can fairly easily see where people have clicked by viewing the Site Overlay under the Dashboards. There’s no heatmap, but the basic information is there. And I can track by date range, exclude my own clicking and track every page of my site.

PS. I did learn something after only a couple weeks of experimenting with Crazy Egg — people are clicking images more than links inside posts.

In a post about The Great Big Small Business Show where the podcast’s logo is prominently displayed, 4 times as many people clicked the logo versus the link. So make your images clickable!

I’d love to hear from others to see if they’ve seen similar results…

[tags]crazy egg, web analytics, stat tracking, websites, blogs, google, google analytics, website traffic, heatmaps[/tags]