This is a really, really interesting article:

Fifth of U.S. TV viewers watching online: survey

“This is the first study to show there are a significant amount of people watching primetime shows online who are not watching some portion of those shows on television,” Amanda Welsh, head of research for IMMI, said in a statement.

I wondered when we would begin seeing this trend. This is just another case of the consumer now having the tools to control the transaction. I wonder how many of the networks hold onto their old ways as this plays out?

To all of you in business out there - please do us consumers a favor. I have had three instances over the last three days where I went to a website to look up the hours for a business. Guess what - they were wrong.

In one case my oldest son was sick and I went to three different walk-in clinics to get him some help. I checked out the local Minute Clinic at the CVS and their site said they’d be open from 8:00am until 8:00pm - granted this was on Christmas Eve and I figured that it wouldn’t be the case - but I went anyway. Sure enough there was the little sign - we’re open from 10:00am until 2:00pm on Christmas Eve. So we came back - mainly because the other walk-in clinics weren’t open. They didn’t even update their auto-attendant on their phone systems.

Then today I desperately needed a hair cut and called the place where I go - nothing on the message - nothing on their website about holiday hours.

 C’mon people this is simple stuff to keep from frustrating your customers. Think a little, would ‘ya.

Here’s an interesting tool from the folks over at FutureNow - the “Customer Focus Calculator“.

This tool counts certain words on your site and pairs that against how many times your name or company name is mentioned. Research suggests that talking in a customer-centric voice will greatly impact your conversions and website effectiveness.

Give it a try and see how you score. I ran the calculator on my company’s homepage and here are my results:

These are the Customer Focus Calculator results:

For the url: http://www.linearmill.com

Your Customer Focus Rate: 43.48%
You have 10 instances of customer-focused words.

Your Self Focus Rate: 56.52%
You have 10 instances of self-focused words.
You have 3 instances of the Company Name.

You speak about yourself almost as often as you speak about your customers.
Might you improve that?

Original length of Page (including all HTML)= 5,037 bytes
Content length after stripping HTML = 2,587 bytes
Total word count: 360

Looks like I have a little tweaking to do myself.

Look, there are really only 3 things someone can do while they’re on a page on your website. I didn’t really think of it like this until I was having a conversation yesterday with a colleague. So, here’s the list:

1. Stay on the page.
2. Go to the next page.
3. Go to the previous page - aka hit the “back” button.

Now, the secret is completely understanding why each thing happens - there are probably several at each step. Plus, you need to be focused on those visitors that aren’t doing what you would like them to do. Things like staying on your page or moving forward to checkout and others.

This is a fabulous article: How to Launch a Successful Blogger-Outreach Program in One Day

It expands on my observation that I wrote about yesterday: Tagging: The New Killer App. It also demonstrates that something like Technorati is the online version of a traditional clipping service. If people are discussing you or your company and they are tagging that content - then it’s gonna show up on Technorati. So, you need to throw this into your bag of tricks when it comes to marketing. And, the above article is a great example of how to get the Blogging world on your side.

I believe that we have entered into a new realm around the Internet. It seems like we can finally - I don’t want to use the word “trust” … but something close - come to terms with the fact that the tagging of content is working the way it’s supposed to.

If you’re not familiar with this idea, check out this article: Wikipedia: Tag (metadata)

Traditionally we have relied on things like search engines to scan the web and make a determination as to what it was ingesting - and that still happens. But, there is now a concerted effort for user generated tags for every kind of content out there. Check out the bottom of this post and you’ll see a set of links next to “Technorati” - those are tags. I have determined that there are some keywords that I would like to have associated with this article - by listing them I have “tagged” my content.

Here’s a great example of a best practice for tagging. At BarCamp Nashville, one of the first things that they asked everyone to do was tag there content with the phrase “barcampnashville”. Now when everyone submitted their content to thinks like Technorati, Flickr, Twitter, Wordpress and others - those tags would all show up and everyone would have access to content from that event. Just look at Technorati and see how much content is there with this tag: barcampnashville.

Now why would this be a killer app?

I think that’s easy to answer. Traditionally we all have been subject to metatag spam from websites all over the net. You’ve, I’m sure, searched for a phrase over at Google and it returned a bunch of irrelevant junk. In the early days of the net website operators used a bunch of covert techniques to make this happen. I believe that this phase of the web is nearly over, mainly because of tagging. Users are passively policing content and making the web better for all of us.