We just posted a video where we put a MemoryPress book in the dryer for 45 minutes. I am trying to decide what video serving option we should use to serve it to our website. Here are some options:
Bookbusters - MemoryPress Book Demolition 1 from MemoryPress and Vimeo.
I just found Jake Jarvis’ website Litesum.com. You type in a topic that you want to learn about and wait for results. A brief summary of the requested topic will appear instantly. I will be using it in the next few weeks to see if it sticks.
The first thing I typed in was “imemorybook” to see what it would do. Surprisingly it found iMemoryBook and pulled it up. It sourced wikipedia.
Today, I found the first funeral home I have ever seen with a blog! Good job Barkdull Funeral Home of Ohio.
I was doing research for the upcoming Ohio Funeral Home Convention this week. We find that those funeral homes that have websites are most inclined to love our family history books.
Here is what Barkdull said introducing the blog:
“Most people find the funeral business a little creepy but we’re going to try to educate the public about the importance of the funeral in the grieving process, help understand the growing trend towards cremation and the options families have with that type of disposition, and show that there are tools to help with the financial side of things.”
If this blog is done tastefully I think it will be a powerful way to help families.
I used to think Funeral Homes were creepy as well. We are now the family history company for the Death Industry. I am trying to make the adjustment.
Update: I just posted their blog on dig at the first funeral home in history to start a blog. It will be fun just to see what happens. Here is a link to go and digg it.Â
Today Yahoo! announced that they are going to be offering unlimited storage to their Email users. It makes sense. Recently have switched all my photos over to Yahoo Photos. I uploaded 300 photos from my laptop to their system. It is the best photo storing system I have seen, and trust me I have used a lot of photo sharing sites while doing research for FamilyLearn.
This announcement from Yahoo comes at a great time. I have filled 91% of my 2.5 year old Gmail account. I prefer Yahoos user interface. UI is about the only thing really holding Google back (if you can say that anything is holding them back). The only thing that could keep me with Google at this point is Google Docs. I use Docs daily. So do a bunch of my friends at school.
I always have to ask myself how long this free model will be able to sustain itself. In order for the ad model to work you have to have millions of users. Free is so common that it doesn’t have any buzz anymore. It will be interesting to see how new businesses innovate to compete with free.
I think I have turned into a geek. Two things indicate this to me. First, I use web 2.0 Google applications like Docs, and Gmail. Second I use FireFox and I load it on about every computer I touch.
Here is a very interesting interview with Yahoo!’s Jeff Bonforte. He explains that the primary reason Google is struggling with market adoption is that they are run by engineers and struggle with usability. I couldn’t agree more. Yahoo! mail has 270 million email users vs Google’s 70 million. Yahoo! messenger is second only to MSN messenger.
“Usability to consumers at the mass level is the most difficult problem to solve on the internet,” Jeff said. “There is lots of stuff that we can put out there for dorks and geeks like me, because we eat it up. But actually getting to something that is usable is extremely complex.”
Perhaps Google would take over the world if they would just take a little of their billions of dollars and put them into their user interfaces for applications.
As I have been heavily involved in designing the UI for iMemoryBook, I couldn’t agree with Jeff Bonfort more.
Dick Morris [a political commentator], looked at the four leading GOP presidential contenders in 2008 — John McCain, Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich and Rudy Giuliani — and noted, “The only one of these guys who hasn’t had multiple wives is the Mormon.”
With Mitt Romney running for president there is going to be a lot of discussion about Mormons (The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints). When I got this email I had to post it.
I just got this email. I am not sure what I think about the 2008 elections yet, but I had to post this on my blog:
The Democratic National Committee is currently polling Americans through the Internet to determine the electability of Hillary Clinton for the presidency of the United States in 2008.
If you would like to show your support for Hillary and encourage her to run for President of the United States in 2008 please click the link below:
My 13 year old sister sent me an email notifying me of the movie “Amazing Grace”. It is not an LDS (mormon) film, but LDS President Hinckley and the first presidency all watched it! Read this:
Here is a link to watch the trailer if you have not already seen it: Click here to watch the trailer.
So it comes out on the 23 of this month. As far as I can tell this is a grass roots marketing Campaign. I can tell you. Whoever was smart enough to get the leaders of the LDS church to watch this was brilliant. I am guessing that move alone will bring in a couple hundred thousand customers.
There I go, turning it into a marketing thing. The movie looks fantastic, I will be there on opening day.
I just read a good post by Guy Kawasaki. He gives 10 things to avoid when trying to promote your company online.
I decided that he must know what he is talking about because websites that make you re-type your email address, don’t let you use usernames with “@” symbols, give you unreadable confirmation codes, and don’t work unless you are on internet explorer DRIVE ME NUTS! If you are learning internet marketing you should read these.
Yet I don’t know if I agree with Guy on is his veryt “do not”: Enforced immediate registration. When we released iMemoryBook in November we started out with a very nice system that allowed you to dive into and create your book without registering. You could create an entire book and it was just saved in your cache. Yeah, we thought it was the greatest idea ever. An incredible 30% of traffic landing on beta.iMemoryBook.com were going right into the online bookmaking application! They would play around, even get started on a book, but then they would forget to click the red call to action: “Save this book” (after clicking “save this book” they would move into the registration process. Because iMemoryBook is so new, many people come to the site, love what they see and then say, “I will do one of these books later.”
Unsatisfied with the registration rates, Ben and I decided that we wanted to experiment with asking for their email before we let them in. PhotoBucket has been extremely successful with this technique and is now gaining 80,000 new visitors a day! The idea here is that when a potential customer comes in for a visit, “just taking a look at our system”, we can continue to keep in contact with them by Email until they are ready to create their iMemoryBook. We want an email list. We also decided that our email list is going to be fun and helpful. We will NEVER generate an automatic newsletter. Each one will be handcrafted to be exciting and interesting.
So to the dismay of Neal, Dwain, and Paul–who had spent an enormous amount of time creating the online bookmaking application so that you didn’t need to be registered to use it, we are now testing the “forced registration”. Thus far conversion rates have tripled! I think it is working well.
Other Possibilities:
I am still not certain we have done it just right. I sometime wonder if we should add an opt out option at the bottom of the registration that says: “No thanks… I just want to look” like Screenit.com? Here is a screen shot (screenit needs a makeover):
The funny thing is that I have never registered for Screenit, but I have used them dozens of times to learn if a movie meets my standards. Perhaps we should create something like zohowiki, a link that says “log in as a demo user”. Here is another screenshot:
Zoho once did this with ZohoWriter(like MS Word but online) and sheets but now it is gone. I wonder if the “demo” user wasn’t working. I thought that they must work, that is what got me to start.
What I like most
I lean to this option because it would give our potential customers the chance to see a book that is full of content. Currently when you start an iMemoryBook there are no photos and they are very generic. I like the idea of them being able to view, edit, and play in a book that has already been started. It might help them catch the vision.
Two Problems
I see two downfalls with the Zoho’s demo plan: 1) This option could possibly make it harder to get emails so that we can follow up. I can see myself, very interested in the service, but because I have now seen the system I don’t have any reason to register because I am not planning on making a book today. It is very important that we have an email to follow up with periodically. 2) Our demo books would have thousands of users on them at one time, I can see that causing a collaboration nightmare.
I am not sure how we will have our registration page in the end. It will take a lot of testing to learn which way is best. If you have any suggestions I would love to hear them.
