Google: Popups Will be Penalized

If you value SEO, remove popups from your website.

Google doesn't love them anymore.

This January, its bots began to penalize sites that include them.

“Pages that show intrusive interstitials provide a poorer experience to users than other pages where content is immediately accessible,” Google's engineers proclaim.

Your site is toast if it displays a popup that covers content after the user lands on a page, or that appears while he's viewing it. 

You get doubly burned if the user has to kill the popup to view the content.

The only allowances Google makes are for helpful popups, like those seeking age verification or informing visitors about cookies.

Price of Freedom

The phrase "the price of freedom" used to be reserved for reference to war dead.

Bill O'Reilly has co-opted it for a new purpose.

America has lost its way.

The Under Toad

This post originally appeared December 19, 2012. My opinion has only grown stronger in the intervening five years. 

I met Gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson at a conference once.

It was 1972. The country was deep in the throes of a Presidential election.

Four months earlier, segregationist and gun-loving Alabama Governor George Wallace had lost his bid for the Presidency thanks to a would-be assassin.

I asked Dr. Thompson whether he thought Wallace might change his stance on gun control after being shot five times in the chest and stomach.

"I don't know," Thompson snarled. "But I do know this. Everyone should carry a gun. We all should carry guns. The streets would be a lot safer. America would be a better place."

Thirty-three years later, depressed and deathly ill, Hunter Thompson blew off the top of his head with a shotgun.

I don't understand the pleasure of gun ownership. I don't understand the thrill of hunting animals. But a lot of people I know and admire enjoy both those things.

As a parent, however, I understand how fear and loathing due to the loss of a child could exceed any imaginable sorrow.

In his novel The World According to Garp, John Irving famously described the brutal workings of the "Under Toad," code-words for "the forces that disrupt human life and sometimes destroy it." The life of a child, in particular.

The Under Toad visited Newtown, Connecticut, last week.

Several parents will never feel sorrow-less again.

Should You Worry about GDPR?

The roll-out of the General Data Protection Regulation in Europe next May will be spotty.

Like most government crackdowns, GDPR—mandating that marketers protect consumers' privacy and data—will be rigorously enforced in northern nations, lazily enforced in southern ones.

But if you do a lot of business up north, you should take steps now to comply. Experts recommend you:

• Appoint a "data czar" to police your marketing activities
• Get a third-party checkup of your data's health
• Segregate lists affected by GDPR, so you can treat them differently
• Confirm your suppliers will be compliant by May
• Sign up for "ready-made" solutions, if you're still worried

Unlike many current consumer protection laws, GDPR is tough. 

Screw up, and you could face fines in the millions.

GDPR disallows, for example, "soft" opt-ins, so you'll have to dump lists that aren't rigidly permission-based. It also grants the "Right to Be Forgotten," so you'll have to delete old web posts anyone could reasonably claim are inaccurate or defamatory. And it punishes marketers who make it at all troublesome for consumers to opt out of their lists.

How to Name Your Event

My business partner and I are at work on a new name for an event. The conference has outgrown its birth name (as every conference should). It's time for something different.

My standards for a good event name are few:

• It should be descriptive ("The Builder's Show") or evocative ("Magic"), or both ("Dreamforce")
• It should be short ("CES")
• It should be enunciable ("TED")

Event marketer Tony Patete has more complex standards:

• It should be straightforward ("The Startup Conference")
• It should be a keyword ("INBOUND")
• If an acronym, it should not spell anything unseemly ("TURD")
• It should avoid braggadocio ("The Best Conference Ever")
• It can be a portmanteau ("ComicCon")
• It can both evoke and amuse ("Brand Camp")
• It should not already be in use ("Apple")

Naming or renaming an event need not be hard. I once renamed a puny conference with the laughable name SCUC (Satellite Communications Users Conference) using only my delete key. Today "Satellite" attracts over 13,000 attendees.

When your event's name doesn't cut it, a tagline can help. While no cheerleader for taglines, B2B marketer Gary Slack agrees:

• A tagline can help explain what is new, unknown, or poorly named
• A tagline can help communicate purpose, difference and value
• A tagline can foster esprit de corps

Slack has his own simple set of standards for a tagline:

• It should be necessary in the first place; otherwise, it's clutter
• It should clearly communicate a strong promise
• It should avoid corporate speak and pedestrian "happy words"

One of the better taglines I ever wrote was for CES: "What the World's Coming To."

Although lots of folks liked the slogan, it lasted only a year.

A newly appointed marketing director killed it, telling me, "Taglines are stupid."

He lasted much less than a year. But the tagline never resurfaced.