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I have a new rule. Not a new idea, just new to me as a "rule".

Don't ask me for things on the signup form unless you're going to do something with that information. Don't make me fill out fields just because it's what a sign-up form is "supposed" to look like.

Today's target is "How did you hear about us?". Seems fair, but it's 99% useless.

If the user is going to enter anything useful to you - that is, something actionable or meaningful to your marketing efforts - then it's already in your server logs. If it's not in your server logs, then the answer is something like "newspaper", "from a friend", "radio". Reasonable, but are you REALLY going to do anything with that information?

Are you going to get together in a management meeting this month and say "3 percent of our users clicked "radio", we should spend 3% of our budget on radio. Good lawd I hope not. For two reasons;

1. Spend your money on marketing that's getting more than 3%! In fact, spend all of your budget plus more on whatever is getting you 80% of your traffic and just eliminate the rest. Brand Awareness is not a thing anymore. It's just not.
2. If you're spending your money on anything that doesn't show up in your server logs, it's barely actionable. What radio ad? What time of day? What station? A response of "Radio" does nothing for you. And if it's barely actionable, you can't improve it. You can keep spending 3% on Radio if you want, I don't care, but your competition is going to cut radio and spend that 3% on something they can continuously improve and tune (like social media or targeted online ads).

Back to my point. If it's not trackable, you shouldn't be doing it. If it is trackable, your server logs already have the information, so don't put it on your signup form. You are the fancy website, I'm just a user with a short attention span. You figure it out.

There's one caveat to this, and that is tracking lead source by phone number. Using different numbers for different sources. There's several companies who offer these services, plus analytics and more. That's actionable and trackable. But, that doesn't involve your website, so get rid of the field anyway.

Back to my other, other point. Get rid of everything on your sign-up form that isn't useful to you as a business. Then, get rid of everything on your signup form that you could gather in the background without input from the user. Then get rid of anything that's somewhat useful to you, but takes more than 3 seconds for the user to enter. Then make damn sure if you're making users enter information like how they heard about you, you're using it for something. Don't waste my time.

If I actually tell you what friend told me about your site, are you going to give them a cookie? If not, what do you care? Google Analytics tells you 12% of your traffic is direct traffic, so we can deduce that "from a friend", "radio", "newspaper" and "other" make up 12% of your traffic. Meeting adjourned.

I went to your website with the intention to sign-up. Don't change my mind by making me fill out things you don't need, or worse still, things you do need, but won't ever actually do anything with.

Justyn

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My Childhood friend Greg left Boeing to do good and help with African farming mechanization. You're a good man!

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See the full gallery on Posterous

What we're building instead is very exciting. More news in a week or so.

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Robert Scoble raised an interesting point last week regarding the unintentional transparency that Twitter’s new List feature will create. Specifically, that as individuals find themselves on company specific lists, the collective “feel” of the organization becomes public, whether the company likes it or not.

Let’s say someone create a list for your company. Useful right? You might think so, until you realize that your company just got shoved into a very crowded room, naked. All of the individuals, with their individual tastes, opinions, weird hobbies, etc. now collectively represent your public face. For companies like Mashable (one of the first lists created), no big deal – their writers live in public and are well versed in the ways of social media. But what would Carol Bartz think about the thousands of Yahoo’s coming into the spotlight?

Or imagine you're the owner of the Houston Oilers?

We’ll see a lot more company policies and a lot more censorship in what used to be a personal media. Like it or not, we’re on the clock 24x7 and Twitter is going to get a little more bland. Maybe you’ve already caught on to the fact that Twitter is a very public place where censorship must be considered. Or maybe you’ve created another account for your personal rants, but count on the fact that it WILL be tied to your company or brand.

Lists are awesome, don’t get me wrong. Long-time Twitter users knew it was a forgone conclusion as our following lists got too big to be useful. Either be very selective about who you follow or get really good at filtering noise. My point is, this is a big move in transparency and you need to be aware of it.

Good companies who hire good people will be OK. People will become acceptant of the fact that we’re all just people and not cast collective judgment due to a few peculiar tweets from an employee – but expect to see many more stories about people getting into hot water over their personal web space as it becomes easier to see employees as groups.

There’s an opportunity here also. I toyed with the idea of creating a quick tool to clean up your twitter stream. Load your entire history and allow for quick manicuring (already possible on twitter.com but a little cumbersome). Add some features for basic online reputation management and integrate a few Google Alerts and you’d have a popular and welcome tool. I’m currently wrapped up in a much bigger project, so I won’t be taking on the task – but if anyone is interested I may be willing to advise and provide the tidystream.com domain.

Here’s hoping the self-censoring doesn’t become an issue and Twitter remains spontaneous and fun!

Justyn

Follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/justyn

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I’ve been frustrated with the suggested users feature on Twitter for a while now, but that frustration has reached a new high with the addition of Kim, Khloe and Kourtney Kardashian (which @alicam pointed out). A few weeks ago @ev recognized the flaws in the system and asked for suggestions on making the service better. This is certainly not what any of us had in mind. These rich, famous-for-no-reason sisters are going to gain hundreds of thousands of followers – not because they are interesting, but because people usually just follow the default bucket of people Twitter suggests.

I implore the Twitter team to use the reach of this default setting for good! What about the people who are working hard every day to add value to their followers? The people who are helping develop your ecosystem with third party applications? The lesser-knowns who are doing good things for the community?

You might say, “so they get a bunch of followers, so what?” And I say, that’s what their PR people are for. Twitter is handing over what equates to millions of dollars of exposure to people who have (generally) nothing interesting to say. Sure, some of us might be interested in @souljaboy’s new tattoo, or Kim K’s gym schedule – but I assure you that’s not why Twitter has become what it is today. It’s become one of the most useful utilities on the web, and if all of the celebrities were removed tomorrow, it wouldn’t be any less useful.

Further, it sends the wrong idea to new users of what Twitter is about. It’s about everyone having a voice, and ideas spreading that might not otherwise. Twitter, I beg you, stop with the celeb coddling! There’s a whole channel on cable dedicated to the mind-numbing reality of these celebrities. What I really don’t understand is that there are hundreds of celebs and notable people in the world who are ACTUALLY interesting, and you’ve managed to add the most uninteresting of them. A quick rule of thumb – Time magazine, add them to the list. Star magazine, don’t add them to the list.

If you trusted your users to determine who the most valuable people are to follow, you can’t lose. If you continue to hold the keys to this magic list, people will revolt. Employ a simple (fair) algorithm that let’s the community decide. It can be done in a hundred lines of code tops. We want the suggestions (I discovered a few great non-celebs from the list and continue to follow and enjoy them). New users NEED the suggestions to get started. But we need your team to hand over the keys.

I try not to complain about things without having a solution. It might not be perfect, but here’s how I would fix this.

1. Move all celebrities to their own tab in the featured users list. The people who are interested in them will find them. You can’t very well remove them without pissing off some (confusingly) powerful people. This is a fair way to handle this.
2. Instead of the Twitter team hand-picking people to put on this list, trust your users and employ an algorithm.
3. Add a step to the suggested users process where I input a few keywords related to my interests. Or at the very least, let me choose some pre-defined categories. Users wanting to get on the list can select up to 3 categories to be considered for.
4. Factor in total number of new followers over a given period of time for everyone who does NOT appear on the list today. The result will be people who are busting their asses to add value to the stream and are doing a good job at it.
5. Factor in the number of Re-Tweets for these users, to confirm that people actually find value in what they have to say.
6. Brands can pay to be on the list, this is an open market. A tool as powerful as Twitter should be democratic and not favor any companies over others.
7. If a brand is doing something great for charity, or the environment, they get a pass.
8. After a few weeks, the featured users have amassed a huge following, it’s someone else’s turn.
9. Reserve 10% of the spots on the list to do with what you like. We understand that there are marketing implications and opportunities for you to make helpful business connections using this list.
10. Build in the necessary filters to eliminate ‘gaming’ of the system.
    

Spend the weekend building this functionality. There are no scaling issues with this, you can set some minimum criteria to cut down the query load on your servers. Launch it on Monday and bask in the overwhelming praise you get from your passionate and loyal community (but turn off your voicemail to avoid calls from PR people screaming at you).

Twitter is about giving the little guy a voice. We hear enough about the celebs already. And hell, if they’re that interesting, I bet the new suggested users will talk about them. My hat goes off to you guys, you’ve built something incredible. Don’t let the star-culture pollute it.

@Justyn

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