My Barber Got a Website

Two months ago my barber finally broke down and got a web site. Really just two pages of information and a link to directions with Google maps.

American Tobacco Barbershop

Now I love my barber. I've been going to her for over 20 years. She has worked solo most of that time and by appointment only. Last year she rented out her extra chair and starting taking walk-ins.

She isn't cheap - no SuperCuts pricing, but she is significantly less than the $400 our neighbor John Edwards apparently spends just a few miles away.

Her haircuts are very good, very consistent.

It is SEO'ed OK - not great. But it comes up first in local search because they did lots of things right. They listed the business in Google Local Business, Yelp, etc.

I did not ask what it cost. I could have done it for about $200.00 but I don't do this kind of thing.

It is not at all interactive and doesn't list prices.

So how much do you think it has made a difference?

In just two months 30% of new customers are finding them through the website. That is a 50% increase in new customers. How much would that be worth to your business?

Congratulations Joyce. Please add a scheduling calendar.

If Rip Van Winkle Awoke Today

One of my favorite blogs is Confused in Calcutta. Recently he posted an article titled If Rip Van Winkle Had Slept 20 Years and Woken Up Today.

What a great post. Take the time to go see it.

A few - very few - highlights...

Access to the Internet - then USENET, now high speed mobile web

Personal computer - the Tandy 5000 for $8500., now $50 netbooks

What will it be next?

Measuring Twitter Content

ReadWriteWeb has a very interesting post about what type of messages are actually sent using Twitter.

Here is the chart from that posting...

It reminds me of a post I read about early telephone usage. Apparently some argued that phone time - even cell phone time - was too valuable to be wasted on just anything. But think about the "content" of telephone traffic. It is truly mostly about what you had for lunch and where you are or are going.

I think this is also what most web content is now. I think this is only going to become a larger and larger percentage of Twitter - and all other - web traffic.

It's about communications between real people.

I read a lot last month about how the mobile phone industry is going to be collecting all this data about us as we use our phones.

Pretending for the moment that we don't care at all about our privacy - and that is what all these plans about mobile phone use pretend - why is this not the way the land line phone industry has evolved? The answer to that will lead you to the questions about this mobile phone dream.

Personally, if my mobile phone is constantly trying to push ads at me, I will be looking for old fashioned public phone booths in a hurry. I Tivo televisions to get rid of interruption based advertising. I pay for satellite radio.

Every company thinks they can be the next Google based on advertising. The difference is Google makes money on search based advertising not on interruption based advertising. When I am searching for something I welcome ads. At all other times I hate ads.

If the content is not search but people talking to people like we do now on the phone, then businesses are making decisions based on what they want to believe, not on reality.

Twitter and Facebook and all the rest will survive as technologies we have found useful. No one will love them or stay with them - see MySpace - when they fill our idle time with unwanted ad spam.