Who Likes What and Celebrating Relationships – The (not at all romantic) Monday Feb 14th Roundup

It’s Valentine’s day, and in celebration we have a roundup coloured… no, actually I’m not changing the colour of the roundup. That’s waaay too cheesy. But we do have a packed roundup this week, with a number of links to (very) loosely Valentine related articles, such as “who likes what (in social media)”, “celebrating (analytics) relationships” and “the psychology of color (and how you can use this to manipulate people)”.

Internet Marketing and SEO

I pray to Venus that the NYT doesn’t pay wall this. last week they published a scathing review of J.C. Penny’s SEO. Yes, NYT did an SEO review of J.C. Penny. Their review?J.C. Penny has been using linkspam and buying low quality links to boost their rankings for HUGE keywords (home decor, skinny jeans, etc.). Google’s search quality department responded with “what did the four finger’s say to the face?” and now J.C. is out of the rankings.
Just in time for Valentine’s day: who likes what (social media). Did you know that the largest age segment on Facebook is 45-54? Not that those people are actually using Facebook (I’m willing to bet that the tiny 18-24 segment produces far more page views than the comparatively huge 45-54).

Technology

A List Apart has a great article on creating cross platform scalable vector graphics (SVG), along with a fairly detailed discussion of modern SVG implementation through Canvas, and svgweb.
Next up, Christian Heilmann’s call to take back HTML 5 from marketers, complete with a pretty good slideshare.

Web Analytics

Sparksheet has a pretty cool addition to your Web Analytics know how: looking at data on “digital consumers” (am I the only one who hates that term?) they note 6 “types” (not sure how these different from Personas… maybe they don’t?) and how to target them.
And in time for Valentine’s day, Analytics Talk has celebrating out (analytics) relationships, looking at how we relate data to business, and thus how we interpret our data.

User Experience

Inspired Mag has another one of those “psychology of color” posts that I’m always wary of. For instance, if we were to take a group of non-Americans (and I’m not talking Canadian’s here. Canadian’s don’t count) and do these experiments, would they see green as “money”? Who knows, maybe that’s been done.
UX matters has a discussion on user centered design using expert reviews, ethnographies and the like.

Miscellaneous links of the week:

You are not so smart has an article on deindividualization, or how people can get caught up in groups and do things that would otherwise go against their moral compass.
Next up: the Zeigarnik Effect. (Yes, I’m including this just for the awesome name) In short, this is our love of cliffhangers, and how we want to continue doing things once they’ve started.