The Garmin 305 was the first GPS/HRM tool I used in conjunction with a web-based UI; Garmin Connect.  Connect is a wonderful tool for tracking your progress, recording milestones, and logging goals but it offers zero social-functionality.  I’ve written about the social shortfalls of Garmin before.  To fill the void I turned to DailyMile.com which has a gorgeous UI.  I’m connected to more of my friends via DailyMile than any other exercise tool, which does add a lot of value.  There are, however, a lot of shortfalls to DailyMile.  It’s buggy, events are dated, interactions are limited, and, in general, it seems to be falling behind in the race to track races.  As a member for nearly two years I have seen very little progress toward product revisions.  Enter Strava.

I don’t recall how I initially found out about Strava but I’m quickly becoming hooked.  Yes, it’s still buggy (it doesn’t always handle Garmin data inputs well), they don’t allow tagging rides (no way to track how many miles I log with Cooper) and the user base (among my circles) is still quite small, but the biggest advantage is that they’re USING the data that’s uploaded.  The coolest feature of Strava, in my opinion, is the “segments”.  Strava uses all of their data points to identify popular hills, sprint zones, and other competitive areas to rank performances.  You win badges for your performance and the #1 spots maintain the “King (or Queen) of the Mountain” badge.  For the competitive spirits, this is very intriguing and motivating.  My brother and I are currently competing for the KOM title on a local ride we both grew up riding a lot.

I’m currently uploading my events to Garmin Connect, Strava, and DailyMile.  I’ve set some 2012 goals in DailyMile that I haven’t been able to replicate in Strava (tag-based) and DailyMile was very generous in gifting me permenant “Pro” status for free after I reported a bug, but for 2013 I think I’ll be strictly limited to Garmin Connect and Strava.  Hopefully Garmin Connect listens to my wishlist and buys Strava for top-end centralized site [they've apparently already partnered within their store].

A few features I wish Strava enabled;

• Tagging routes.  DailyMile lets you tag routes to be used as a filter in reporting.  I love tracking the miles I log with my dog.  Normally I’d label her as a piece of running equipment, which you can do, but you can’t use more than one tag at a time.
• Better data handling – While the data seems solid, the mapping seems to break quite frequently.  Sections of the ride are missing from the map or it ends early.
• Improved Privacy – I like that you can block out a mile around multiple addresses but limiting more data to just friends would make me feel much better about sharing events that leave from my house.

MCA was always the subtle, subdued personality among the three.  He always seemed overly stoic and appreciative.  After MCA’s passing Coldplay released this beautiful and classy tribute, embedded after the break below.

Just hours after learning of Yauch’s tragic passing, the rockers performed a sentimental version of the rap group’s hit song, “(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (to Party)” during their concert at the Hollywood Bowl Friday, with frontman Chris Martin singing (not rapping) the lyrics as he played the piano. (via EOL)

A few other nice sources of information include Time’s photo gallery of MCA.  My other favorite band, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, also released a Beastie-specific set with a version on YouTube.

Social Media Optimization (SMO) has become a crucial component in Internet marketing. Shea Bennett talked about social media statistics in a blog post on Mediabistro that, until December of 2011, Facebook already has more than 800 million active users. Of those users, 200 million were added last year alone. Twitter owns 100 million active users, and LinkedIn 64 million, respectively. As search marketing and advertising professionals, it is critical that we hone our skills to leverage such channel ahead of competitors. A few more reasons why online marketers should never overlook Social Media Marketing include;

1. Customer reviews and peer recommendations improve conversion of your ads when someone likes, follows, or comments on your social media page.
2. It is an inevitable risk to counter negative comments on your company brand or products by online visitors in SEM but manageable with real time trouble-shooting on social media.
3. Social media advertising is picking up its pace with SEM quickly! Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, StumbleUpon, LinkedIn Ads, Foursquare, WordPress/Blogger are great channels to manage Social Media Marketing.

I focus on Facebook to start because it’s still dominating social media market share and more than 3.5 billion pieces of content are shared each week on Facebook. According to Social Media Statistics, an average Facebook user has 130 friends and likes 80 pages, and 56% of consumers are more likely to recommend a brand after becoming a fan. If 100 people like your fan page promotion, luckily 12,000 others will see the promotion. Imagine how much coverage your promotion can get if 20% of the 12,000 new visitors become customers and 56% of the 2,400 new fans recommend your brand. That’s a lot of traffic to your site!

Here I want to share some tricks that I used to manage Facebook Ads:

Choose CPC over CPM – Ad blindness is a common phenomenon in social media where users tend to ignore banner-like information that contains advertising messages. CPC method gives you a better control on your ad spending which is triggered only when people click on your ads.

Run granular campaigns – When creating a specific Facebook campaign you have options to segment potential audience based on age, education, occupation, location, and interests. Don’t waste these great features and make sure you test all possible segmentations on your campaigns. For example, test age between 35-45 with Masters or higher degree, occupation at the management level, interests involve purchasing luxurious goods or services, location in Manhattan Downtown if your product is targeting at customers with greater purchase power. The more specific segmentation you apply to campaigns, the more sophisticated data you can generate from users and apply the valuable information to your other search engine activities. And don’t forget to include ‘Friends of Connections’ who already are connected to your page.

Rotate your ads – Unlike search engine marketing, Facebook Ads requires more focus on creating demands than responses. Ads older than a week on Facebook are barely alive because users are looking for fresh information and old message only catches their fatigue, not attention. So, do rotate your ads with different image, text, or landing page.

Thumbnail image – Be creative to defeat ‘banner-blindness’. Use eye-catching image for your ads.  Try, or example, thumbnail pictures of an often-used document format icon, such as PDF and Word, if your ads require users to download e-book or brochure. Apply this trick along with your branded logo and you will be amazed by how well it works.

Write relevant ads in accordance to each segmentation – Leverage keyword tools you are currently using to generate a list of recommended keywords and apply to your Facebook Ads. Keywords that weren’t champs in search engines might drive your Facebook Ads conversion sky high.

Optimize fan page and landing page – Design ads to drive audience to multiple landing pages in your Facebook Fan Page and to your official website, which can nurture your brand awareness and loyalty. In addition, putting up an easy link to checkout section of your website around Facebook promotions or embedding lead capture form to your Fan Page provides a shortcut from intention to conversion.

Include multiple data ratio in analysis – Click-through-rate (CTR), cost-per-click (CPC), coverage, average bid may tell different stories when tracking conversion rate. Include multiple ratio in analysis will give you a better understanding on how your Facebook Ads actually performed.

Go for mobile – Along with the advance of technology, people spend more time on mobile phone doing what they used to do on computer. Therefore, always test your ads at mobile audience.

I’d love to hear if you found my tips helpful, both from the Facebook Ads rookies and veterans alike!

This is a guest post from Aaron Huang.  Aaron is a fellow Babson College alumni and also an expert on SEO and paid online marketing.  You can contact Aaron on LinkedIn.

Read about how the new HTC smartphone differs with iPhone 4S in design, UI, and camera performance in this PhoneArena article: “HTC One S vs Apple iPhone 4S“. [Image from Huffington Post]

Video review: HTC One S Review, embedded below;

Getting noticed by the search engines.

Compared to the paid options (ie. Google AdWords), organic search results appeal to users as more trustworthy sources of information. It is, therefore, the top priority of every site owner to optimize their websites to rank well in the search engines for relevant search criteria.

Going forward our discussion of step-to-step approach to achieve your Search Engine Optimization, it can be summarized in three major phases:

Phase 1 – On Page SEO
Phase 2 – Internal Off-Site SEO
Phase 3 – External Off-Site SEO

 See how simple Common Craft explains “What is SEO” in Search Engine Land’s video, embedded below:

This is a guest post from Aaron Huang.  Aaron is a fellow Babson College alumni and also an expert on SEO and paid online marketing.  You can contact Aaron on LinkedIn.

Some examples of the towns foolishness;

1. Banning the sale of bottled water [Turned over by Attorney General]
2. Ignorant comments and positions on hunting and environmental issues
3. Proposing a ban to gas-powered leaf blowers
4. Proposing a leash law for cats
5. …and now, banning the sale of bottled water.  Again.

Want one of your own?  Get your orders in here by Sunday, April 8th!

Look for them “in the wild” this spring.

I’ll skip over some of the technical complaints (like site or product bugs – search Amazon reviews for those) and just give a high level wish list where I think Garmin could really capture a lot more stickiness with users and, eventually, gain much more market share.  Of course, this is strictly in regards to their exercise equipment and not their automobile GPS units, although some of the ideas could probably apply to both.

1. Social – This should be so basic in 2012.  I want to follow friends routes, share with Facebook, compare stats against friends… all the data is available, it’s just not being capitalized.  There is a reason why “gamification” is such a huge buzzword right now, since social is driving user behavior.  Garmin has potential for this, too.  You could create virtual races with your friends or cycling groups.  It would allow people to participate in virtual race courses, preset with a Garmin course, that they can ride anytime they like to compare to others results.  This would also help address privacy options.  It’s terrible that routes are limited to two privacy settings: Private, or Public.  Even a third option, accessible via URL only, would be a huge improvement.  Buying a site like DailyMile or Strava, with their gorgeous UI layer, could be an easy add-on.
2. Integration with iPhone – If the iPhone could be recognized as a device (via Blue Tooth) you could have live Garmin data feed to Facebook.  This would allow in-exercise cheers (similar to what Nike+ GPS does today) as well as allow safety check ins (similar to what SPOT does today).  Both are features I’d love to use for meeting up with people or just letting my family know where I am.
3. Joint Mapping Ability – this might fall under the social bullet, but it’s something specific I’ve been looking to do recently with friends.  We’re trying to string together some nice rides where everyone knows different areas of roads.  It would be nice if we could crowdsource the map creation among the 4-5 of us so we all have joint edit ability.
4. Ability to rate sections of roads or trails thumbs up or down, a la Tivo.  Tivo has made a huge business model off this simplicity.  Image how much more valuable courses would be if there was a data overlay of ratings?  Huge.
5. A heat map of ALL your exercises – how awesome would it be to be able to see heat maps of the road you’ve ridden recently, in the past year, or all time?  I could see the areas of eastern-Mass that I have yet to uncover.  Combined with a social layer, I could see the most popular roads my friends ride, too.  Example below (via @CrosbyCJ)
6. More Data – year over year analysis to start with, but more data to determine how my performance is doing over time.  Heart rate v. speed, date v. miles logged, etc.

As an owner of the Garmin Forerunner 305 and Garmin Edge 800 I have a few product requests, too, but for the most part I think Garmin stands the most to benefit from their core web-integration.  Making these few improvements would not only set they above their competitors like Polar (and increasingly the iPhone and smart phones) but make it drastically more difficult for people to leave their products.

There are two reasons I’m interested in testing it. First, I like the potential to embed into a blog post, which would allow us to put the video in front of our most frequent readers. Second, the type-as-you-go makes it interesting to test for use in a help topics setting. I’m not sure if either of these benefits outweigh the use of Visible Gains or YouTube, but it’s always worth a test.

Pardon the static screen, I haven’t uploaded a profile video yet but I’d love to get some content posted so please ask away (everything is fair game) –