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While I was at SxSW, I couldn’t help but notice how cool and trendy all of us WebGeeks were, with our Macbooks and Twitter accounts and smartphones. We were discussing alternate-reality games, privacy in social networks, use of blogs and podcasting during war time, building strong virtual communities, lead generation on the web (cough), and Second Life.

I got the sense that the world of the web has increasingly become extremely bifurcated between those who practice all this stuff and those who buy these services. I thought a lot about the marketing directors and VPs (and business owners!) I rub shoulders with every day, and I don’t think many of them have quite the handle on these issues that we geeks think they have.

In fact, the more I thought about it, the more I became convinced that most of the folks who hire the Triple Dogs of the world really don’t care about all these cool little techno-issues. They care about their businesses, and about dominating a marketplace, or about disseminating a message to the right audience.

So I figured, “Hey, that’s a nice thought, why don’t you ask the community and see what happens?” So I did. A few nights after SxSW I posted the following question onto LinkedIn:

What are the top 3 online issues/problems you face as marketer/business owner?

Let’s face it–web experts live in a pretty rarefied atmosphere. We tweet, blog, and attend virtual conferences. We’re familiar with CSS, content management, and analytics. It’s easy to forget how strange this world is to an outsider looking in. I’m trying to get a sense of what marketing managers and business owners really face out there.

What are the top 3 (or more!) issues, problems, questions, or challenges you face in the online world?

I received about a dozen replies, all of them long, thoughtful, and pretty much hard to summarize in a pithy report. In fact, I won’t even try to summarize them all, nor will I mention them all. I will try to convey to you the sense that I got from them, because they each offered a compelling look inside our collective headspace.

Right away, one particular response (from Shanker Achari) made me pause. It begins:

I think that the biggest separator between marketers and their IT expert colleagues is the perception of what is driving the business. The issues are not usually technological, though it might seem like that. It is important not to lose focus and to only address those online services that will add value to the firm - not to jump onto each and every web-based bandwagon that crosses your doorstep.

I definitely understand what he’s saying here. After 15 years in this business, I’ve definitely crossed some kind of threshold. I’m constantly looking for the WHY instead of just the what and the how. Why is this project important? Why are we doing it? Why aren’t we doing this other thing? Why are we doing it now?

Others, like David Pedragon and Greg Kilgore get down to even brassier tacks: how do we drive traffic to our online sites? Do I have enough bandwidth and resources to handle the traffic? Can I continue to make improvements in content, usability, and other areas to increase response rates? Can I filter out the fluff/noise/chaff to focus on real opportunities? Can someone please add several more hours to each day so we can get everything done? (This sentiment also echoed by many others!)

Angela Brutsche brought up a good point: “Determining when/if to let go of traditional communication mediums.” It’s a scary thing, venturing out into this brave new world, where a storm of tweets at a conference can erase a whole bunch of expensively created brand good will.

Rene Craft hit it on the head when she mused:

Getting used to the new technologies constantly popping up and trying to figure out which ones are useful for business vs. just for kids (ie, anyone under 30).

I remember when I was one of those hotshots under 30, but of course, back then, having a tables-compliant browser was the cool thing. I’m just kidding.

All in all, the sense I’m getting from all these responses is that it’s high time to focus on value. Become really good at a few things within the Web world, and pursue your goals with a passion. Help companies make money with all this stuff instead of bouncing them from one faddish technology to another. Help them start and deepen conversations with their customers with great tools, good usability, and great content, and the rest becomes easy.

In this, as in all things Web, we all have a place at the table–whether we’re copywriters, back-end developers, Ajax scripters, designers, or PHP nerds.

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Okay, line up to smack me. I’ve joined Twitter once again, and this time I’m going to stay on it by ruthlessly following only those people I think have the highest chance of saying something un-inane. You can follow me too if you like. I’ll keep my cynical, caustic, and useful tweets down to 5 a day maximum, I promise.

Why the change of heart? Am I not the “Die Twitter Die” guy? Well, it’s mostly because of what I witnessed at SxSW 2008 (the Zuckerberg-Lacey fiasco). Plus it is kind of irresistible to a snarkatron such as myself.

I still maintain that what Twitter needs is some kind of tag-based filtration system. In other words, I do want to follow you, but I only want to know if you’ve invented warp drive (or stumbled upon world peace) and not when you’re taking your kid to the park. Or, perhaps, I only want to hear from you during certain times of the day, or only on the weekends, or on Leap Days. Furthermore, there may be some use for some kind of broad categorizations, like rants, political content, or when something has a link in it (invariably to a web page trying to sell me something).

The on/off binary switch is just a bit too crude, but for now, I will use it with glee. Feel free to turn me off if I’m just too painful to endure. Particularly on days like today, as we stumble around in post-SXSW stupor.

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It’s been called a “train wreck” by journalists, attendees, and bloggers.

What am I talking about? Sarah Lacy’s keynote interview with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg on Sunday.

Part of the problem was Sarah Lacy, or at least her reputation. It’s a bit troubling for a journalist to be well known for pulchritude as well as professional snaps (with one magazine breathlessly calling her “the hottest reporter in technology”).

Part of the problem was Mark Zuckerberg, who for all intents and purposes resembled a painfully shy 8th grader instead of a billionaire founder of the planet’s most successful social networking site. I don’t think any reporter could have gotten him to open up on anything of substance.

The biggest part of the problem was the audience, and most importantly, their unwillingness to continue consuming an irrelevant discussion.

There they all were, with all their technological prowess, many of them sending Tweets out about how boring and off-track the keynote was. Those tweets not only bounced around the Internet, but were of course consumed by many people in the room.

Others who were liveblogging the event as it happened, with their Macbooks perched on their laps, added to the pressure cooker. Soon you had a virtual echo chamber: all the tweets and liveblogs collided with everyone reading the tweets and blog posts, and pretty soon you had a bunch of people already frustrated by the presentation rise up in rebellion.

To the casual observer, it looked like there was one presentation happening on stage, but an audience paying attention to an entirely different event at the same time.

Okay, check that. That’s precisely what was happening. Of course, interviewer and interviewee were unplugged and had no idea what was happening, except for a dawning realization that something was off kilter.

Eventually, the room hit some kind of tipping point (and boy do I hate these squishy terms, but they seem appropriate) and the virtual wall was breached. People in the crowd started to grumble, and then one person shouted “Talk about something interesting!” to everyone’s laughter.

Then came time for Q&A. All that pent up hostility just came out. Sarah, perturbed by the antics, said “Well, send me an email if you think I’m doing such a bad job!” which prompted the guy at the microphone to say, “What’s your email address?”

More laughter. More heckling. It finally wound down with a whimper and we all moved on to other sessions, but I could see others continuing the conversation via cellphone, Twitter, and liveblogging.

All of this stuff was eventually picked up on Digg, and then someone at Wired blogged about it, and then the story crashed into the Technology Press at large.

The event had become a media firestorm (albeit in a small niche) in the time it took to walk 100 yards to the nearest restroom and back.

Not to put the fear of God in you, oh marketers, but this is just the tip of the iceberg. This is what the new generation out there is doing all the time.

They buy your stuff, talk about it, blog about it, tweet about it. Some of them aren’t even waiting to buy it. I’ve seen them tweet and moblog (mobile blog) about stuff while they’re in stores. Taking pictures with their cameraphones, uploading mobile video, liveblogging.

Whereas earlier Internet users planted a firewall between events and their online discussion of same, that era’s over. For this new group, it’s all one big hairball, with the virtual discussion often overshadowing the real world event they are covering.

Why is this so important to you? Imagine a world in which journalists from all spectrums of the media universe focused not on politics or the marketplace or human events, but on their reactions to the same.

Cogent coverage of the news item itself would diminish in favor of an ever-growing palimpsest of thoughts, feelings, echos, and tagents based on the news item. Clear thinking on any given subject would become a Gordian Knot of cultural dimensions that only the most savvy could interpret.

How do you as a marketer navigate this kind of world? RELEVANCE. That was the single biggest lesson of the Zuckerberg-Lacy fiasco. Lack of relevance caused a lot of rebellion.

These people had paid a lot of money to attend SxSW, and they wanted to hear Zuckerberg’s thoughts on privacy, tools, and social networking. And they were gravely disappointed.

Some might say (as I did right after the event occured) that these young ‘uns need to learn some manners–after all, not many of them would think to take a cell phone call in the middle of the event (okay, maybe some would). Nor would many of them have the guts to just walk out, or jump up on the stage and yell out “WTF! OMG, U R so l4m3″ or whatever the equivalent is.

But really, in the long run, the audience is right. They came expecting one thing, got something else, and didn’t lie down and just live with it. They knew they had an empowering technology at hand, and they wielded it to turn the tables on the whole power dynamic.

In sharp contrast to all this was the earlier session by Jared Spool. He spoke on using magic and illusion to help design great user experiences on the Web.

He peppered his talk with humor, some magic tricks, lots of great details, and a clean slide presentation that drove home important points. No 38 bullet points per slide. No kitschy backgrounds. No stupid transitions or zooming animations.

In the end, he tied the magic tricks in with the idea that web sites must have “delight generators” because that is what takes an experience over the top.

He got a standing ovation at the end, and about 100 people lined up to offer up their business cards so they could be signed up for his user experience newsletter.

Thus endeth the lesson.

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Recently, I was working on a CodeIgniter site for a customer. They wanted to go live with the site’s domain, but they wanted to hide everything on the site behind a very simple password that only the site owners would know. That way only the development team and a few internal stakeholders would have access.

Adding this kind of password protection is pretty easy in CodeIgniter. All you have to do is add a quick check in your main controller’s constructor to see if a session variable has been set. For example:

class Welcome extends Controller {

  function __construct(){
    parent::Controller();
    session_start();

    if ($_SESSION['loggedin'] != true){
      redirect('protect/preview','refresh');
    }
  }//end controller init

//rest of controller excised

}

Create a second controller called protect.php and set up a preview() function inside of it. The preview() function checks to see if a POST has been passed to it. If it has, simply check to see if the string from the password field matches the secret password. In this case, we are hard-coding the password right in the controller, but you could just as easily grab it from an XML file or database table.

If the password matches, set the session value for loggedin to true, then send them back to the original welcome controller. Otherwise, show the view.

Here’s the protect controller:

class Protect extends Controller {
  function __construct(){
    parent::Controller();
    session_start();
  }//end controller init

  function preview(){
    if ($_POST){
      if (strtolower($this->input->post('pw')) == "mypassword"){
          $_SESSION['loggedin'] = true;
          redirect('welcome/index','refresh');
      }else{
        $this->session->set_flashdata('warning',"Wrong Password!");
        redirect('protect/preview','refresh');
      }
    }else{
      $data['title'] = "No sneak peeks allowed!";
      $this->load->vars($data);
      $this->load->view('preview_template');
    }

  }

}//end class

Finally, create a very simple preview_template view to hold the form and display any warning messages that are stored in CodeIgniter 1.6’s new flashdata component:

  <h1><?php echo $title;?></h1>
  <p>You have to login to see the site! Sorry about that.
  <b style='color:red'>
  <?php echo $this->session->flashdata('warning');?>
  </b></p>

  <?php
  echo form_open('protect/preview');
  echo form_password('pw');
  echo form_submit('submit','get sneak peek');
?>

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I’ll be the first to admit that web developers, regardless of their coding platform, religious preference (microsoft or unix? mac or windows?), and personal hygiene standards have one thing in common:

They love computers, but they sometimes have a hard time dealing with the people part of the business.

In the spirit of this statement, I decided to compile a short list of things that you can do to make a web developer (actually, any programmer) stark raving mad:

• Be sure to confuse requirements with specifications. In other words, don’t tell a web developer that you want to track customers as they travel through your web site, spend lots of useless time telling us exactly what kind of fields to use in the cookie, when and where to dump that info into a database table, and while you’re at it, give us the fields in that database. Might as well tell us what colors and fonts you want to track in the cookie too, while you’re at it.
• Bring up at least two things you read in magazine articles (or heard at a conference) that directly conflict with each other. My favorite one came from an old friend working at big-firm-whose-name-is-withheld for obvious reasons. Said firm wanted to implement an Ajax application, but the application had to work with Javascript turned off. Hello! The j in Ajax stands for Javascript. It no workee without it! Somehow my friend stuck with it. He’s a better man than I.
• When reporting a bug, don’t provide any details. In no way would it be good if we knew the URL involved, the steps you took to get there, your browser, and your platform, or anything else that might impact the situation (such as hitting the page via a VPN that sucks the life right out of your available bandwidth). Please don’t mention if you’re in a hotel room going through a dialup connection, or if you’re using a never-before-heard-of browser on the Mongolian edition of Ubuntu linux loaded on a vintage 1993 IBM PC XT.
• When you talk to us, make sure that you do it in an ad-hoc way. We’ll remember everything you tell us as you bump into us in the hallway, or as we’re leaving work for the day. Don’t write it down, for heaven’s sake, not even on a whiteboard, nor give any thought to vetting what you say or prioritizing it. And if you do send us email, make sure that you send about 15 of them, each with a separate little snippet of information, all of it mixed up without a sense of flow. We analytic types love puzzles!
• Bring in a third-party vendor at the last minute and then have that vendor’s requirements impact the foundations of the project right before launch. Extra points if the third-party vendor is a viral marketing or SEO expert (or some other field that involves instinct and hunches). Make whatever they say binding, and force the web developer(s) in question to put in 10x the work to make it all work. Then blame the web developer for (a) being late or (b) not understanding the new requirements or (c) implementing it all to perfection such that the whole thing implodes.
• Hype whatever product the web developer is working on past all point of recognition, such that when it’s finally launched, no one understands what the big deal was. I call this the “moon launch” effect. There you are, happily working on an ecommerce site, but behind your back, the boss (and the boss’s boss) is going around giving slideshow presentations about how you’re building the next generation of social marketing commerce tools….what a slap in the face that’s going to be!
• If you give us a task, make sure that you omit a deadline. I have nothing else to do, so I’ll just jump on this right away! No deadline means no urgency. Plain and simple.

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