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sâmbătă, 23 mai 2015

Seth's Blog : But do you want to get better?

But do you want to get better?

It seems like a stupid question. Of course we want our organization, our work and our health to improve.

But often, we don't.

Better means change and change means risk and risk means fear.

So the organization is filled with people who have been punished when they try to make things better, because the boss is afraid.

And so the patient gets the prescription but doesn't actually take all the meds.

And the bureaucrat feigns helplessness because it's easier to shrug than it is to care.

There are countless ways to listen, to engage with users, to learn and to improve, but before you or your organization waste time on any of them, first the question must be answered, "do we want to get better?"

Really? We can tell.

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vineri, 22 mai 2015

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Yellen Yap: Point by Point Rebuttal

Posted: 22 May 2015 11:33 AM PDT

Inquiring minds are reading Fed Chair Janet Yellen's Outlook for the Economy speech, delivered today at the Providence, Rhode Island Chamber of Commerce.

Here are a few snips from what I believe to believe is a way over-optimistic assessment. I provide rebuttals following each statement.

Yellen: The U.S. economy seems well positioned for continued growth. Households are seeing the benefits of the improving jobs situation, and consumer confidence has been solid.

Mish: The economy is not positioned for much, if any, growth. Consumer confidence is not solid, and consumer spending plans have been sinking like a rock. See Consumer Confidence Plunges Below Any Economist's Estimate; Consumers Shock Economists.

Yellen: The drop in oil prices amounts to a sizable boost in household purchasing power. The annual savings in gasoline costs has been estimated at about $700 per household, on average, and savings on heating costs--especially here in the Northeast, where it was so cold this winter--are also large. Given these energy savings on top of the job gains, real disposable income has risen almost 4 percent nationally over the past four quarters. Households and businesses also are benefiting from favorable financial conditions. Borrowing costs are low, supported by the Fed's accommodative monetary policies. And credit availability to both households and small businesses has improved.

Mish: Any savings on energy went up in smoke on rental increases and rising health care costs. See CPI Shows Sharply Rising Medical Costs; Huge Obamacare Hikes Planned.

Yellen: In recent months, as I noted earlier, there has been some softness in the economic data. Recent indicators of both household spending and business investment have slowed, and industrial output has declined. The Commerce Department's initial estimate was that real gross domestic product was nearly flat in the first quarter of 2015. If confirmed by further estimates, my guess is that this apparent slowdown was largely the result of a variety of transitory factors that occurred at the same time, including the unusually cold and snowy winter and the labor disputes at ports on the West Coast, both of which likely disrupted some economic activity. And some of this apparent weakness may just be statistical noise. I therefore expect the economic data to strengthen.

Mish: In a shock to economists, consumers are doing exactly what they said they would do, not what economist's models predicted consumers would do.

For what consumers said they would do, please see Household Spending Growth Expectations Plunge; Recession Already Started?

For what consumers actually did, please see Dismal Retail Sales Numbers Suggest Recession Likely Underway.

Yellen: Putting it all together, the economic projections of most members of the FOMC call for growth in real gross domestic product of roughly 2-1/2 percent per year over the next couple of years, a little faster than the pace of the recovery thus far, with the unemployment rate continuing to move down to near 5 percent by the end of this year. And for inflation, as I noted earlier, my colleagues and I expect inflation to move up toward our objective of 2 percent as the economy strengthens further and as transitory influences wane.

Mish: The economic projections of the Fed have been and remain laughable.

Here is an amusing chart of the Fed's own pathetic performance from Honey I Shrunk the Kids.

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Yellen: Given this economic outlook and the attendant uncertainty, how is monetary policy likely to evolve over the next few years? Because of the substantial lags in the effects of monetary policy on the economy, we must make policy in a forward-looking manner. Delaying action to tighten monetary policy until employment and inflation are already back to our objectives would risk overheating the economy.

Mish: The Fed is far too late. The obvious bubbles in equities and junk bonds are proof enough. The Fed has never once in history tightened in a forward-looking manner. Panic reactions are the norm.

Yellen: If the economy continues to improve as I expect, I think it will be appropriate at some point this year to take the initial step to raise the federal funds rate target and begin the process of normalizing monetary policy. To support taking this step, however, I will need to see continued improvement in labor market conditions, and I will need to be reasonably confident that inflation will move back to 2 percent over the medium term.

Mish: The idea that consumer price deflation is damaging is downright idiotic. Even the BIS recognizes that fact. For discussion, please see Historical Perspective on CPI Deflations: How Damaging are They?

Fed Consistently Wrong

The Fed has been consistently wrong as discussed in Why Are Economists' Predictions So Damn Awful?

The Fed has been so wrong, so many times, and in so many ways. Why anyone bothers to listen to such speeches other than to poke fun at them remains a mystery.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com

CPI Shows Sharply Rising Medical Costs; Huge Obamacare Hikes Planned

Posted: 22 May 2015 09:43 AM PDT

The CPI came in exactly in line with the Bloomberg Consensus option today.

It's the details, not the overall number that is worrying. Medical care and rents have been rising rapidly.

The Fed likes to ignore food and energy costs. They have their chance to prove it.

From Bloomberg ...

Pull forward that rate hike is what some of the hawks are thinking after reading today's consumer price report where a benign looking headline, up only 0.1 percent in April, masks rising pressure through many components.

Excluding food and energy, core prices rose 0.3 percent which doesn't seem that much but is outside Econoday's high-end forecast for 0.2 percent. It is also the highest since January 2013. The year-on-year rate for the core is plus 1.8 percent which, after dipping to 1.6 percent earlier in the year, is closing in on the Fed's general inflation target of 2.0 percent.

Readings showing pressure are outside energy including medical costs (up a very steep 0.7 percent in the month) and education costs (up 0.5 percent). Shelter costs, reflecting rising rents, came in at plus 0.3 percent for the 3rd time in 4 months which is the hottest streak for this reading since way back in late 2006 and early 2007. Also standing out are gains in furniture (up 1.3 percent) and used cars (up 0.6 percent).

Oil prices have been on the rise but not energy costs, at least in the April report which fell a heavy 1.3 percent. Gasoline fell 1.7 percent in the month. Two other readings also showed downward pressure: airfares (minus 1.3 percent) and apparel (minus 0.3 percent). Food costs were flat.

The headline CPI is down 0.2 percent year-on-year which looks downright deflationary. But the lack of pressure is due entirely to energy which is down a very deflationary 19.4 percent year-on-year. Energy prices are bound to firm given the recent move in oil from the high $40s for WTI to $60. That and emerging price pressures through the bulk of the consumer economy raise the risk that inflation may be brewing after all.

The CPI Seasonally Adjusted Numbers from the BLS look even worse.

Seasonally Adjusted

All Items Less Food and Energy rose 0.3% (following a rise of 0.2% in March and 0.2% in February)
Medical Care jumped 0.9% in April (following a rise of 0.4% in March).
Used Cars jumped 0.6% (following a rise of 1.2% in March and 1.0% in February).
Shelter rose 0.3% (following a rise of 0.3% in March and 0.2% in February)

Supposedly energy prices declined 1.3%. Gasoline led the way with a 1.7% decline. Does that seem believable?

Health Insurers Seek Hefty Rate Boosts

Worse yet, planned Obamacare premiums are about to explode, setting the stage for debate over federal health law's impact.

The Wall Street Journal reports Health Insurers Seek Hefty Rate Boosts.

Major insurers in some states are proposing hefty rate boosts for plans sold under the federal health law, setting the stage for an intense debate this summer over the law's impact.

In New Mexico, market leader Health Care Service Corp. is asking for an average jump of 51.6% in premiums for 2016. The biggest insurer in Tennessee, BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee, has requested an average 36.3% increase. In Maryland, market leader CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield wants to raise rates 30.4% across its products. Moda Health, the largest insurer on the Oregon health exchange, seeks an average boost of around 25%.

All of them cite high medical costs incurred by people newly enrolled under the Affordable Care Act.

"This year, health plans have a full year of claims data to understand the health needs of the [health insurance] exchange population, and these enrollees are generally older and often managing multiple chronic conditions," said Clare Krusing, a spokeswoman for America's Health Insurance Plans, an industry group. "Premiums reflect the rising cost of providing care to individuals and families, and the explosion in prescription and specialty drug prices is a significant factor."

Poor Retail Sales Explained

Economists have been struggling to explain poor retail sales and the slump in consumer attitudes. All their models suggested consumers would increase retail spending thanks to the decline in gasoline prices.

The economists all forgot to factor in the Obamacare effect and rising rents. This is just round one.

For further discussion please see ...

To wrap it up, please consider Why Are Economists' Predictions So Damn Awful?

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com

Damn Cool Pics

This Museum Is Like A Nightmare Come To Life

Posted: 22 May 2015 07:08 PM PDT

The Mutter Museum in downtown Philadelphia specializes in showing off unique medical experiments. From the looks of things it also specializes in creating nightmares too.

A Closer Look At The Motorcycles From Mad Max: Fury Road

Posted: 22 May 2015 06:36 PM PDT

"Mad Max: Fury Road" is seeing a lot of success at the box office and there's a big buzz around the film. One of the things people are talking about is how cool the vehicles look in the film, especially the motorcycles.

Why Good Unique Content Needs to Die - Whiteboard Friday - Moz Blog

Why Good Unique Content Needs to Die - Whiteboard Friday

Posted on: Friday 22 May 2015 — 02:17

Posted by randfish

We all know by now that not just any old content is going to help us rank in competitive SERPs. We often hear people talking about how it takes "good, unique content." That's the wrong bar. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand talks about where we should be aiming, and how to get there.

For reference, here's a still of this week's whiteboard. Click on it to open a high resolution image in a new tab!

Video transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're going to chat about something that I really have a problem with in the SEO world, and that is the phrase "good, unique content." I'll tell you why this troubles me so much. It's because I get so many emails, I hear so many times at conferences and events with people I meet, with folks I talk to in the industry saying, "Hey, we created some good, unique content, but we don't seem to be performing well in search." My answer back to that is always that is not the bar for entry into SEO. That is not the bar for ranking.

The content quality scale

So I made this content quality scale to help illustrate what I'm talking about here. You can see that it starts all the way up at 10x, and down here I've got Panda Invasion. So quality, like Google Panda is coming for your site, it's going to knock you out of the rankings. It's going to penalize you, like your content is thin and largely useless.

Then you go up a little bit, and it's like, well four out of five searchers find it pretty bad. They clicked the Back button. Maybe one out of five is thinking, "Well, this is all right. This solves my most basic problems."

Then you get one level higher than that, and you have good, unique content, which I think many folks think of as where they need to get to. It's essentially, hey, it's useful enough. It answers the searcher's query. It's unique from any other content on the Web. If you read it, you wouldn't vomit. It's good enough, right? Good, unique content.

Problem is almost everyone can get here. They really can. It's not a high bar, a high barrier to entry to say you need good, unique content. In fact, it can scale. So what I see lots of folks doing is they look at a search result or a set of search results in their industry. Say you're in travel and vacations, and you look at these different countries and you're going to look at the hotels or recommendations in those countries and then see all the articles there. You go, "Yeah, you know what, I think we could do something as good as what's up there or almost." Well, okay, that puts you in the range. That's good, unique content.

But in my opinion, the minimum bar today for modern SEO is a step higher, and that is as good as the best in the search results on the search results page. If you can't consistently say, "We're the best result that a searcher could find in the search results," well then, guess what? You're not going to have an opportunity to rank. It's much, much harder to get into those top 10 positions, page 1, page 2 positions than it was in the past because there are so many ranking signals that so many of these websites have already built up over the last 5, 10, 15 years that you need to go above and beyond.

Really, where I want folks to go and where I always expect content from Moz to go is here, and that is 10x, 10 times better than anything I can find in the search results today. If I don't think I can do that, then I'm not going to try and rank for those keywords. I'm just not going to pursue it. I'm going to pursue content in areas where I believe I can create something 10 times better than the best result out there.

What changed?

Why is this? What changed? Well, a bunch of things actually.

User experience became a much bigger element in the ranking algorithms, and that's direct influences, things that we've talked about here on Whiteboard Friday before like pogo-sticking, and lots of indirect ones like the links that you earn based on the user experience that you provide and Google rendering pages, Google caring about load speed and device rendering, mobile friendliness, all these kinds of things.
Earning links overtook link building. It used to be you put out a page and you built a bunch of links to it. Now that doesn't so much work anymore because Google is very picky about the links that it's going to consider. If you can't earn links naturally, not only can you not get links fast enough and not get good ones, but you also are probably earning links that Google doesn't even want to count or may even penalize you for. It's nearly impossible to earn links with just good, unique content. If there's something better out there on page one of the search results, why would they even bother to link to you? Someone's going to do a search, and they're going to find something else to link to, something better.

Third, the rise of content marketing over the last five, six years has meant that there's just a lot more competition. This field is a lot more crowded than it used to be, with many people trying to get to a higher and higher quality bar.
Finally, as a result of many of these things, user expectations have gone crazy. Users expect pages to load insanely fast, even on mobile devices, even when their connection's slow. They expect it to look great. They expect to be provided with an answer almost instantaneously. The quality of results that Google has delivered and the quality of experience that sites like Facebook, which everyone is familiar with, are delivering means that our brains have rewired themselves to expect very fast, very high quality results consistently.

How do we create "10x" content?

So, because of all these changes, we need a process. We need a process to choose, to figure out how we can get to 10x content, not good, unique content, 10x content. A process that I often like to use -- this probably is not the only one, but you're welcome to use it if you find it valuable -- is to go, "All right, you know what? I'm going to perform some of these search queries."

By the way, I would probably perform the search query in two places. One is in Google and their search results, and the other is actually in BuzzSumo, which I think is a great tool for this, where I can see the content that has been most shared. So if you haven't already, check out BuzzSumo.com.

I might search for something like Costa Rica ecolodges, which I might be considering a Costa Rica vacation at some point in the future. I look at these top ranking results, probably the whole top 10 as well as the most shared content on social media.

Then I'm going to ask myself these questions;

What questions are being asked and answered by these search results?
What sort of user experience is provided? I look at this in terms of speed, in terms of mobile friendliness, in terms of rendering, in terms of layout and design quality, in terms of what's required from the user to be able to get the information? Is it all right there, or do I need to click? Am I having trouble finding things?
What's the detail and thoroughness of the information that's actually provided? Is it lacking? Is it great?
What about use of visuals? Visual content can often take best in class all the way up to 10x if it's done right. So I might check out the use of visuals.
The quality of the writing.
I'm going to look at information and data elements. Where are they pulling from? What are their sources? What's the quality of that stuff? What types of information is there? What types of information is missing?

In fact, I like to ask, "What's missing?" a lot.

From this, I can determine like, hey, here are the strengths and weaknesses of who's getting all of the social shares and who's ranking well, and here's the delta between me and them today. This is the way that I can be 10 times better than the best results in there.

If you use this process or a process like this and you do this type of content auditing and you achieve this level of content quality, you have a real shot at rankings. One of the secret reasons for that is that the effort axis that I have here, like I go to Fiverr, I get Panda invasion. I make the intern write it. This is going to take a weekend to build versus there's no way to scale this content.

This is a super power. When your competitors or other folks in the field look and say, "Hey, there's no way that we can scale content quality like this. It's just too much effort. We can't keep producing it at this level," well, now you have a competitive advantage. You have something that puts you in a category by yourself and that's very hard for competitors to catch up to. It's a huge advantage in search, in social, on the Web as a whole.

All right everyone, hope you've enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard Friday, and we'll see you again next week. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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Your Daily SEO Fix

Posted on: Thursday 21 May 2015 — 13:29

Posted by Trevor-Klein

We at the Mozplex have noticed a recurring event. Somewhat regularly, one of our community members—sometimes even a Pro subscriber—will ask us if we know of any tools that'll do a good job solving for a particular use case. They've got a need and are looking for a solution. That solution, it turns out, is available in our own tools—they just never made the connection.

This week, we began a series of video tutorials we're calling the Moz Daily SEO Fix. The videos are shorter than two minutes each and are designed to offer you solutions to some of the most common problems faced by SEOs and online marketers of all stripes. A new video will be released every weekday for a month, and we'll post a weekly roundup on Thursday afternoons.

Whether you're a seasoned veteran of the old SEOmoz days or have never once used a Moz tool, we hope these videos will show you a way to make your marketing life a little easier. =)

Fix 1: How to reclaim links using Open Site Explorer

In today's Daily SEO Fix, David explains how to use the Open Site Explorer's top pages tab plus the filter for 4xx and 5xx errors to find the pages on your site with the most potential link equity that are broken and can be redirected. 301'ing these URLs to relevant pages on your site can give your rankings a serious boost.

Fix 2: How to build links using Fresh Web Explorer

In this Daily SEO Fix, Michael shows you how to set up an alert in Fresh Web Explorer for anyone who mentions (or links to) your two biggest competitors but not to you. Monitor your inbox for these alerts and you'll find new link building opportunities, ripe for the picking.

Fix 3: How to find the best times to tweet using Followerwonk

Finding the best time to tweet is unique for everyone and figuring out what times work best for you is key to maximizing your presence on Twitter. In this Daily SEO Fix, Ellie shows you how to use Followerwonk to find the best times to tweet so your followers don't miss out on your updates.

Don't have a Pro subscription? No problem. Everything we cover in these Daily SEO Fix videos is available with a free 30-day trial.

Sounds good. Sign me up!

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Seth's Blog : How to win an argument with a scientist

How to win an argument with a scientist

Make better science.

The act of being a scientist is the commitment to the scientific method, a series of hypotheses, tests and re-evaluations. When you make better science, the scientist's previous opinion doesn't matter, not if she's being a scientist.

On the other hand, if you want to win an argument with someone who refuses to act like a scientist, making better science isn't going to help you very much.

The person you're arguing with now (who might be a scientist during the day, even, but is merely being a person right now) is not going to be swayed from a firmly held opinion by your work to make better science. It's more likely that it will take cultural pressure, shame, passion, humor, connection and a host of unreliable levers to make your point.

This disconnect is why it's so frustrating to encounter people with deeply-held pseudo-scientific beliefs about things like whether or not to support your project. It certainly feels like better science and the relentless power of the scientific method would be sufficient to help them get things straight, but they fail because, in fact, there's no science happening here.

Anecdotes, non-falsifiable premises and most of all, a willingness to change tactics if it helps maintain the culturally-enforced norm are all hallmarks of a non-scientific point of view. In other words, the sort of thing humans do all the time.

The easy way to tell the two varieties of argument apart is to ask, "what evidence would you need to see to change your mind about this?"

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