mistakes

There's a lot of talk in the measurement community about best practices--accepted methods to measure and optimize a website.

The numerous list posts you see on the most common mistakes made by adwords beginners don’t get to the root of the problem. They focus on the use of adwords features like this:

Nobody ever wants to make a mistake. From the time we are children, we get corrected. We are told how to do better.

This is not an attempt to bash Google. However, you can sometimes learn what not to do from some very successful people and products.

I’m listening to Rich Karlgaard, publisher of Forbes talking to a group of the world’s top marketing executives in Cancun, Mexico. He’s running a panel on marketing ideas and strategies for big companies on the Internet. Also on the panel is the CMO of Siemens, the VP of Marketing for Symantec, the Director of Brand and Marketing Communications for DHL Express.

Listen. Can you hear it? All the buzz about social media marketing? What you might not know is that with all that sound there’s an awful lot of noise. That difficulty manifests itself in the form of basic misconceptions, blunders and flat out mistakes when trying to participate and market with social news and bookmarking sites.  

As part of a blog optimization panel I participated in during a recent conference in Australia, I decided to forgo the bulleted list of blog plugins and recommendations that you typically see on such sessions in favor of something more personal.

In no particular order here are a list of blogging mistakes I’ve made (and wished I didn’t) or have watched friends make (and secretly laughed at them wished they didn’t).