Website Marketing Turnoffs

13 things not to do when adapting your product to an online model.

Here's a compilation of 13 silly and even stupid ways some companies are hindering adoption of their products and services. So if you are doing any of them, don't.

1. Forcing immediate registration: Requiring a new user to register is a reasonable request—after you've sucked him in. The sites that require registration as the first step are putting a barrier in front of adoption.

2. The long URL: Say a site generates a URL that's 70 characters long or more. When you copy, paste and e-mail this URL, a line break is added. Then, people can't click on the link or it only links to the first part of the URL.

3. Windows that don't generate URLs: Have you ever wanted to point people to a page, but the page has no URL? Did the company decide it didn't want referrals, links and additional traffic?

4. The unsearchable website: Some sites don't offer a search option. If your site goes deeper than one level, it needs a search box.

5. Sites without Delicious, Digg and Fark bookmarks: There's no reason why a company wouldn't want its fans to bookmark its pages. When my blog hits the front page of Digg, page views typically increase six or seven times.

6. Limiting contact to e-mail: Don't get me wrong; I live and die by e-mail. But sometimes I want to call or even snail-mail a company. Many companies only let you send an e-mail via their "Contact Us" page. Why can't companies be honest and just call it "Don't Contact Us"?

7. Lack of feeds and e-mail lists: Make getting information about your products and services easy by providing e-mail and RSS feeds for content and PR newsletters.

8. Making users retype e-mail addresses: How about the patent-pending, curve-jumping Web 2.0 company that wants you to share content but requires you to retype your friends' e-mail addresses? I have 7,703 e-mail addresses in Microsoft Entourage. I'm not going to retype them into some done-as-an-afterthought address book.

9. No e-mail addresses as usernames: I'm a member of hundreds of sites. I can't remember my usernames, but I can remember my e-mail address. So why not let me use that?

10. Case-sensitive usernames and passwords: I know; these are more secure. But then I'm more likely to type in my user name and password incorrectly.

11. Friction-full commenting: "Moderated comments" is an oxymoron. If your company is trying to be a hip, myth-busting, hypocrisy-outing joint, it should let anyone comment. Also, many times I've started to leave a comment on a blog but stopped when I realized I'd have to register.

12. Unreadable confirmation codes: A visual confirmation graphic system is a good thing, but many are too difficult to read. All you have to prove is that you're not a robot. So if the code is "ghj1lK," entering "ghj11K" should be good enough.

13. E-mails without signatures: Communication would be so much easier if everyone included a complete e-mail signature with their name, company, address, phone and e-mail address.

Three Ways to Make Conferences Better

The meetings and conference business has taken hits from the economy and Joe Biden telling everyone he wants his family to stay off airplanes.

But, much like the overall economy, the business is slowly turning around, or at least slowing its decline. So this is a good time to take a moment to consider the conference business in general.

What could it do better when it comes roaring back in 2010? Following are three radical suggestions for improving meetings and conferences;

1. Conferences and meetings should tell unique stories. Think about how conferences and meetings are typically planned. A committee picks a theme. Then someone finds a keynote speaker to open, and maybe one to close. Then the committee divides the rest of the time up into 60-minute slots and fills them with 'breakouts', panels, workshop leaders, and so on. The result? From the conference-goer's point of view, it's like a regular workday, only worse. You've got back-to-back meetings to attend, a day or days you don't get to schedule, and uncomfortable seating. The only choice you get to exercise is not to take part in some or all of the sessions. Then you feel guilty for sneaking off to the gym, or your hotel room, or the bar.

It's a dreary prospect, because it could be so much better. A conference should tell a story, one that unfolds and builds from the initial moments to the close. Like any good story, there should be moments of high excitement, followed by moments of relative calm. That's different from panic and boredom in ceaseless alternation. A good meeting should make linear sense from start to finish, in a way that allows attendees to retain what they see and hear rather than just feeling overwhelmed by the information.

2. Conferences should be for, by, and about the attendees. A meeting or conference should feel participative, and you, the meeting attendee, should have some significant part in it beyond being a warm body. Attendees should react, critique, judge, schedule, and vote for what they like and don't like. And that's just for starters. There are many ways to give attendees a larger role in meetings and conferences, from making them part of panel discussions to creating discussion groups to having them manage Questions and Answers.

Every meeting should have a master of ceremony, or M.C.s, and they should do more than just point out the bathrooms and introduce the next speaker. They should integrate, challenge, pull together, combine, disrupt, and generally function as the representative of the attendees, making sense of it all and demanding more from the speakers and other leaders.

3. Conferences should be about more than just eating and sitting. We live more and more of our lives in the splendid isolation of the Internet, with all the faux connectors like Facebook, Twitter, email, and the rest. Getting together is an increasingly rare and important privilege. Meetings and conferences should be constructed to take advantage of the gathered group. Every meeting or conference should use the power of the group to give something back to the community in which the meeting is held. Help a local charity, fix a local problem, champion a local hero, start a new movement. There are many ways one could imagine making use of the combined energies of the people assembled. It's a crime to waste that gathered power.

To be sure, some meetings and conferences do some of these things now, but not enough, and few, if any, get them all done. Meetings take their toll on the environment, the workplace, and the families of the attendees. It's time to raise the conference stakes and make them serve us better.

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