Imagine you’re a used car salesman.  I know, you’re disgusted and feel like taking a shower now, but humor me.   A customer who has been searching for a Toyota Camry comes to your car lot because he saw your flashing sign for just that – a great deal on a Toyota Camry.   You tell him, “Sure!” and point him in the direction of the entire car lot.  “Find it yourself!”  Do you think you’ll close that sale?

How about imagine he walks through the lot with your Toyota deal in his mind, but you have salesmen calling him over trying to sell him BMW’s, Honda’s, KIA’s, etc.  Not only is your customer now annoyed that you made him search for the deal himself, you’re team is bugging him with promotions he’s really not thinking about or interested in.

Let’s say after that, your now annoyed customer sees a car lot next door, and ALL they sell are low priced Camry’s.  Who’s going to get that sale?

This is how you should be thinking about your site and competitors.    In particular, basic web usability theory says the internet make things so easy and convenient for us, that it’s trained us to be…well…lazy.  If you don’t make things as easy as possible for your visitors, your competitor will, and there is no penalty or price for your visitor pressing the “back” button and then clicking on your competitor.

10 Tips for Building Effective Landing Pages

The beauty of the internet now is that you can create targeted custom landing pages focused on closing one product or service without any distractions.  Landing pages are focused, eliminating confusion, putting your prospects into a “track” that hopefully will result in a lead or close.

In this post, I’d like to talk list some best practices on how to do that right.

1 ) Simplicity = Clarity.  This is a key point that not only web design and other media is based on in general,  but most of the landing page best-practices are based on this.   There is definitely a balance that needs to happen – all important information needs to be included – however, it’s important that information is succinct and that also there is no other fluff on the page that will distract the visitor from closing.  Hubspot (a great authority on internet marketing) calls this the “blink-test” – meaning it should be clear on the page (any web subpage) what the page is about within the first 5 seconds (before you blink).  How do you do this?  With clear headings, images, calls-to-actions and reducing all other distractions.

2 ) Maintain the Scent.  In many cases, your paid ads/email ads will be targeted and a landing page will be best to serve them, since the landing page can be focused specifically on what your ad/mail is talking about.  Like our Camry analogy, there’s nothing more annoying than coming to a page that says “Free Kindle!” but then all it says (and in fact is yelling), “Here’s a bunch of information that has nothing to do with that.”

3 ) Headline.  In many cases, this is the first thing a visitor will see.  Make sure it maintains the scent of your ad if it’s from paid traffic.    Also, make sure it conveys what the page is about, whether it’s the name of your product, why they should purchase it, a promo you are offering, etc.   Again, internet surfers like to think as little as possible, if they scan your headings and don’t find what they’re looking for, there’s no penalty for them bouncing.

4 ) Salespoints.  Sounds obvious, but too many times we’ve come to a page and they dance around the main reasons why we should buy their product or contact them.  Understand your prospects, what they are looking for, what possible hesitations may stop them from taking advantage of your product/services.  Outline that then make sure it’s all included in your landing page.  Only thing to keep in mind is when you put them there, you don’t want to write a novel as to why visitors should buy.   Minimal, succinct words and phrases that best convey your ideas.

5 ) Clear Calls-To-Action.  Another one that sounds obvious.  Your design should clearly distinguish it’s call(s)-to-action.  It’s image should contrast (a bright button on a muted surface) or the link should be bright and big.  If there is only one clear button, and that’s the only place they can go, it increases their chances of them going there.   Also, minimize your calls-to-action and keep them above-the-fold (meaning it shouldn’t be at the bottom of the page where visitors have to scroll down to find it).  If your conversion element or call-to-action is a form, make sure it’s nice and big, stands out, and is above the fold.

6 ) No Escapes.    I want them to look at the rest of my site!  I want them to see what other services I provide!  I want them to see my Facebook page!  By them leaving this page that nurtures the lead, you are significantly risking them losing the sale.  Remove all escape elements from the page – no navigation, no social networks, no other offers.  In the case where they may want more information on your company, you may provide one hidden escape to again minimize the chance of them getting distracted an you losing the lead (maybe link your logo to your homepage), but make sure to open this page in another tab/window so the original offer/landing page is not lost.  If you want them to see your certifications, high-profile clients you’ve served, etc – include that in the actual landing page design and layout.

7 ) Reduce Distractions.  Aside from actual link “escapes”, design can get in the way too.  Too many images, background patterns, textures, rotating information, etc – can distract a visitor from your main “track”.  You may need to include some of these things, but minimize it.  Simple backgrounds, simple images, simple colors.   You can still be simple and be aesthetically chic.

8 ) Credibility Badges.  Any certifications, testimonials, client logos, authority certifications of your business will help legitimize you and could refute apprehension by your visitors to convert on your landing page.  The nice thing is now that your landing page is simple, it has space for this information.

9 ) Test! In design, it’s always important to understand – best practices are just that – “best practices”.  They are not written in stone and may not always apply, or a tweak to them may further optimize them.   It’s great to have hypotheses of how your visitors will act on the page based on their marketing personas and to also follow best practices – this is a great starting point.  However, you wont truly know how your page will perform until it goes live, and you wont know if it’s doing the best it can do till you test different strategies, layouts, designs. You can have different landing pages under different campaigns to test, conduct user-testing, or you can try A/B testing services such as the Google Website Optimizer.

10 ) Thank You Page UPSELL!  This is something everyone neglects (even until recently, so did we!) .  You just closed a lead!  You can place a plain thank you message, or further your business by putting a promotion on the thank you page, upsell other products you have, or even better, add a social “share” link so that your happy lead can share this info with their friends.  Word-of-mouth sales close significantly greater than cold leads.

This particular webinar was similar to the last webinar, but gave a little more detail on optimizing your Facebook Ad campaigns using their insights and reports features.

Here are some summary notes:

1) Optimizing the Creative of your ad

• Try to think about what engages your target audience.
• Adding questions is usually engaging – “Are you up for it?”  “Want the best football boots?”
• Keep the body copy of your ad as concise as possible, but try to include as many key selling points as you can.   The more fluff or words you use, the less space you’ll have for key selling points..
• Urgency often increases click-through -”Offer ends…”
• Offers/Discounts help -  “Free” “Promotional”
• Image – Logos don’t really work unless it’s a well known brand.  Use really attractive images.

2) Target and Segment Campaigns Clearly

• Your ads are broken down into campaigns.  Make sure to set up campaigns and set them up correctly – segment them by gender, age, geography, etc.  Ex.  Female, UK, 13-30 yrs old.
• They suggested a maximum of 3 -4 ads per campaign – it makes it easier to dissect data
• Make sure your landing page or custom Facebook landing tabs have relevant info. As they say “maintains the scent”.  If you say there’s a free download, that landing page/tab better clearly deliver.

3) Utilize reports

• Facebook ads interface is able to generate detailed reports.
• Every few days, look at all creative and see what works.  From there, PAUSE ads that arent working.  That way, they dont compete with each other – only the best one is running.
• Look at frequency and reach of the ad.
• Launch new campaigns after people have seen the ads a couple times.  Refresh the creative so ads look fresh and people aren’t seeing the same ole ads.

Evaluating Performance

Facebook Ads General Dashboard

You can view the:

• Size of your target audience or “Reach” – unique users that have seen your ads.
• Social Reach – The beauty of this is many people will see that their friends that like an ad.  This carries a rapport or “word of mouth” value.
• Look over past couple days, note if you see peaks (Ex. maybe they are clicking more on the weekends, so you want to focus ads at that time).
• You can break it down by ads.  Monitor the Click-Through-Rate, Cost-Per-Click, etc.

Responder Demographics Report

Seeing the demographics can be valuable insight, because then you can further segments to further optimize then refocus your budget.   Ex. This age group might be working better or this Gender, so you can tailor some ads to those specific demographics.

Facebook Page Insights

• Facebook pages themselves (vs. ads) have great insights built in.
• You can see if your friends are fans or if non friends are fans of your page
• You can monitor your Total Reach.
• A new insight added are “People talking about you.”  Basically, this is the # of people who have liked your page, liked a post, posted on your page, shared a link about your brand, etc.  It’s a good indicator of how engaging and popular your page is.  While you may have x amount of followers, if no one is talking about your page, what’s the point?!
• By viewing these insights you can optimize your page posting strategy!
• See when people are responding best and post at that time
• Gain insights at what types of posts people are responding to and increase those types of posts.

Questions from the Audience

How does system decides how much my ads costs?

This is based on CPC (cost-per-click) or CPM (cost-per-1000 impressions).   When a user visits an ad page, an auction takes place with the ads.   It takes into account:

• Your bid, so to better your chances, bid slightly above the range.  This is not how much you necessarily will pay, but it’s the max and allows you to compete.
• Historical performance of your ad – how well was your ad doing?  CTR, etc.
• How are users interacting with your ad?  Are they liking them, or hiding them?

Do you have details on optimizing my Facebook page?

• Figure out when you are going to post.  Best thing is to have a strategy – preferably a post calendar (to avoid spamming).
• Post engaging items – photos, videos.
• Insights – use it to figure out how many people are engaging and what posts.

Can you give further details on “# talking about this” stat on FB pages?

Anyone who commented on your page, tags your page in comments, likes your posts, etc.  It gives you a picture of how many people are interacting with your page (more importantly, engaging).

How often do you suggest we refresh creative?

No hard rule about it.  Monitor your ads for a couple days so you can see how its performing.  Then you can determine if you want to optimize them – generally 7-10 days.  You’ll see impressions declining, reach will decline – so that’s when you refresh.

When should I use “likes and interest” targeting vs “broad” targeting?

Depends on your target.  If you want all sports, say you have a sports store, then you use broad.  If you want something accurate, like people playing golf – then you use precise interest targeting.

Do you find differences between ads that lead to Facebook or external websites?

Depends, but Facebook objects tend to do better because they allow for social targeting.

Can you explain “Social Reach”?

Your ad reaching friends of friends and shows that their friends like your ad.  This is better, as it builds rapport if “friends” like a brand.

How often should I review reports?

Everyday.  Check where your impressions are going.  For example, if you see some demographics are getting an ad, you may do another ad to focus on another segment of age.

Sponsored Stories vs. Ads?

Ad you control the text and creative.  Sponsored stories – something that is within the newsfeed and you can promote that.  Say if someone likes the page, or a post on your page that had a great response.  Gives posts a boost.

Ads performance has declined, what should I do?

Figure out which ads have declined and do your best to figure out why.  Then refresh creative.    But it will be normal to see that after awhile, an ad will naturally will become stale and decline.

Is it a good idea to target an ad to only your fans?

It is, you can get them to interact more with your page and posts.  You are generating virality.  Keep in mind only 5-20% of your fans will see a post.  Whereas an ad targeted to them, 100% will see it.

Kipp opened the webinar with a yell that jolted me a little (he was really excited .  He confessed that he is a giant marketing dork (his words, not mine), and that while normally, experts paint a fluffy picture of social media, he wanted to do something different.

He started by pointing out a problem – a study that angered him:  73% of CEOs say that they don’t believe marketers drive revenue or demand to their business!  “They thinks were just arts and crafts!”  He argued the good news here is the only way to go is up.

Bottom line is, as marketers, the measurement of success in social media should be it’s ability to generate leads.   When we can demonstrate that Social Media does generate leads, we can prove that 73% wrong.

Here are some summary notes:

• This is the best time EVER to be a marketer.
• Leads is the metric to rely on.  Its a proxy for sales.
• Social Marketing that doesnt drive sales wont last.

Examples of how social lead happens:

• Tweet > Landing Page > Form > Lead
• Friend “Likes” a Facebook post > You read the Blog Post > There’s a Call-To-Action > Landing Page.
• +1 on Google > Brings you to a product page > Call-To-Action > Landing Page

Best way to generate leads with Social Media?

Kipp spent 2011 doing in depth research on what works.

1) Get the “basics” right

• Build your reach! This is a HUGE step.  If no one is there, it doesn’t matter what you share.
• Follow, Friend, and CONNECT.  This is the simplest step, but at the same time hardest -  a lot of marketers think reactions are just going to happen by themselves.  NOPE.  You need to search and seek out the conversation.  For example, follow industry people on Twitter, then they’ll follow you back.   That’s how you start.  Get out there, talk, connect, friend.
• Share lots of links!  People are looking to news and info more than ever before.  Dan Zarrella found a correlation that those who share links have more followers.
• Post often and consistently! Bit.ly (the link shortener website) released data on their clicks- the shelf life of a social media link is only 3 hrs!!!!!  That means you need to post something engaging and post often cause chances are after awhile, that link will disappear.
• Automatic Sharing.  Use some automatic sharing applications to minimize your admin time.  Set up connections between twitter feed, blog posts feed, etc.  There are plenty of services like tweetdeck, hootsuite, etc, that will do this for you.
• Leverage your existing base of contacts to join your social networks.  They can start as early members.  They may also be advocates that share your info, thus building your reach.  Email marketing is a huge opportunity to build social network.  Include social links in your emails, explicitly ask existing subscribers to join.
• If you have a Facebook page, USE A “LIKE GATE”!!!!  These are landing tabs that force visitors to “like” the page to see hidden content, which is usually a promo or something free your company can offer to entice them to join.  “Like this page to get….”  IT WORKS.

2) Maximize Content Discovery

• We need to get people excited to read and share content.
• First, you need to create or have fresh regular content.  So people will know to come to you for information.
• Second, you need to share that content.
• Next, we have to do dedicated monitoring.  Who’s talking and responding to your posts?  Who’s sharing?  Of those people, who do we engage with so they can continue to support you and advocate for you?
• COMMIT to a CONTENT CALENDAR.  A lot of companies wing it, and you will find yourself struggling to come up with content everyday.  Take the time to sit down and build this calendar so you just put the time in once a week/month, then everything else is like clockwork.
• BUILD Social thank you pages.  This was a great piece of advice I hadnt heard before.  Put links on thank you pages to share.  When a visitor likes your page thank them and explicitly ask them to share your page.  To make it easier for them, provide a “share” link (many plugins or widgets are provided by facebook/twitter themselves).
  
• Time-box  – too many people spend too much time monitoring their social networks (or they dont spend enough time).  Start out with 15 minutes a day, post and respond.  Scale up as needed.

3) Create Conversion Ubiquity – Calls to action all over the web

• Place Calls-To-Actions everywhere!!!!  If you’re not catching them, your missing opportunity.  It doesn’t have to be in everyone’s face, but make it available.

4) Test and Fail fast.

• FAILURE SUCKS!!!!  But, invaluable part of marketing.  Allow us to improve and iterate.
• Set qualitative objectives.  If you can’t measure your progress, then you cant know if you failed and how to improve.
• Set a methodology how to gather data.  You need to figure out how you will measure everything.  There are plenty of built in insight tools as well as 3rd party tools to measure social media.
• Finally, conduct and experiment.  Set action items following up experiment.
•  If something works, you double down, if it doesn’t, change.

5) Optimize for Maximum leads

• Social media converts best vs. most other traffic.  The rapport from word of mouth or that is just built from interacting with your brand is invaluable.
• Keep in mind though, not all platforms are right for all businesses.  If your “Visits” to “Leads” are low for x platform, change your strategy and try a platform that works.
• Conduct RADICAL tests.  Landing page, web design, social media campaign.  Test 2 radically different ideas, and most likely, you will end up with a hybrid of working parts from both tests.

Here are some notes on how to use Facebook Ads to effectively market your business or Facebook Fan pages:

Use Facebook ads to drive fans to your page and even more than that, use them to reach friends of those fans.

-800 Million active users on Facebook – scale of TV, precision of direct marketing, as well as ability to harness power of connections between friends.

-There are 4 ad formats:

• Standard Ads
• Application Ads (app)
• Like Ads (FB Pages)
• Event Ads

-The last 3 include a powerful tool – social context (meaning they can display “[Your Friend] likes this”, which is more likely to inspire “trust” and thus, better chances at click-through).

Important Steps:

1) Make sure you’re targeting efficiently.

Understand your audience. Ex. Are you a brick-and-mortar store? Then a good question would be “Where is my audience located?”

Other things to consider: Demographic targeting?  Does a specific gender come to my store?  What’s their education?

More precise targeting: Likes and interest?  Ex. Are you a restaurant?  Then try touch people who like a certain type of food.

2) Design an engaging ad.

Make sure to get the “creative” right!  This could be the difference between someone clicking on your ad, or not.

Succinct copy!  Be short and clear, but compelling.

Use an image that is eye-popping.

Make sure to have engaging content – Promos (“Free Download!”).  Questions (“Do you like pizza?”)

Your ad should be action-oriented – explicitly tell them what you want them to do.  ” ‘LIKE’ our page!”

3) Setting correct budget and bid – you can only reach certain people with a certain budget.

Lower bids get lower chances of ad’s being run.  Bid a good number and if your ad is doing well, bid on the high end.

4) Analyzing and Optimizing

Test multiple versions. Multiple text, headers, images, etc.  Choose the most optimized.

“Page Post Ads” – if you have a good post with good comments – you can create ads out of those to reach people it normally wouldnt.   Links, events, questions, photos, videos, etc.   Target posts.

Define strategy.  Do you want to drive sales? Or get more fans?

More best practices to drive traffic to your page:

Select to run a “Page Post Ad” – sometimes you have a great post on your page and you want more than just your fans to see it.   Facebook Ads allows you to run this.

Choose a image that’s engaging – human interactions are usually more successful.

Ad copy needs to be engaging – asking a question, promoting a discount

Create a sense of URGENCY – let them know when promo is ending.

Questions from the Audience:

I set up campaign, but I have very few impressions?  What do I do?

Make sure to set bid high so it’s competitive.

Can I give access to someone else to manage my ads without giving them access to my profile?

Go to Ads manager and you can add verified users to see ads.

How often should you check the results of your ads?

Every couple days.  Make changes based on results of engagement.

A good indicator that your ad is working is if you hit your budget everyday.  If not, you may have to up your bid.

What does “Targeting by broad category” mean?

Broad category are common categories.  Ex.  Broad category are “pets”.  Precise interest are “dogs”.

Is it better to have broad or precise targeting? 

Depends on your own goals.  If you want people with likes or interest similar, go with broad targeting.  But if you’re advertising a product that is specific, then go with precise interest.  You may want to add several price interests.

If I don’t bid high enough, possible my ad wont show?

Yes.  You need to bid high enough.

How long would you run an ad before adjusting it?

Every couple days.  At least every 10 to 12 days to make sure your ad isn’t going stale.

Technorati Tags: channel segmentation, facebook, pay per click, social marketing, social media, social networking

Here are some summary notes:

Our lives our made of connections to things we care about: people, songs, hobbies, sports, places – this makes us who we are.

Technology (such as Facebook) brings us closer – transforms how we connect and share our lives – on an ongoing basis.

Benefits to businesses?  They can connect to friends’ friends – through word of mouth.

Stats:

• Word of mouth is twice as likely to cause engagement, 4 times as likely to cause purchase.
• 800 Million on Facebook
• 350 use mobile
• 2 billion posts/day
• 500 million log in
• 250 million photos uploaded

Conversations and sharing are happening in a way never done before

It’s up to you to build essential connections – not just count clicks.  Our job to spark conversations, inspire sharing.

How to Grow Your Business

Pages

• Upload photos and info to express your business
• Engage – this is how you let people know and communicate with your audience – ask questions, exclusive offers.
• FB recommends to connecting to at least 10% of your base – statistically, these are your influencers.
• Updates, photos, events, etc – posts go to their newsfeeds

Ads

• Simple to reach your fans and their friends per ads.
• Utilize Facebook Ads, sponsored stories.  Granular targeting – by interests, local reach.

Sponsored Stories – shows your target audience how their friends interact with businesses.

• Take actions already happening with your page and make it visible by friends’ friends.
• Ads manager – you can turn on sponsored stories
• You want them to always be running – you can boost your reach

Social Plug-ins

• Simple line of code and you can integrate your site with Facebook and its social capabilities
• Have to ask yourself though, “Is it good for my kind of site”
• American Eagle added a “like” button so people can share with their friends.

1-800-Flowers – make sure everything they do is social.  Contests, promos, etc.  Starts every campaign with the question “Is it Social?”

It allows you to communicate with customers on a consistent basis.  Facebook page allows you to blast message to fans already interested.

Increase Facebook fan base by “marrying” offline and online together – in store signs, receipts, etc.  Add “Facebook” info to your offline literature.

Success Stories

How consistent should we post?  There’s no exact science, it’s on a page by page basis.    But there are a couple rules of thumb:

• Post at least once a week
• Set up a post calendar – post certain types of content on certain days to keep users engaged.
• Most effective? It will vary between business to business, but mix it up.
• Put questions in your posts to get feedback.
• Utilize photo/video to grab attention.
• Over time, you will see what kinds of posts gets you the most amount of feedback.

Technorati Tags: channel segmentation, facebook, pay per click, social marketing, social media, social networking

• 68% more likely to remember an ad with social context. 2x more likely to remember ads messages. 4x more likely to purchaseYour establishing connections to your customers, multiple times, and their friends, but its your job to keep them engaged
• Strike balance – not too much bad content, good content
• Talk “with” not “at” – just like your profile, put things up you think your friends will like.
• It’s iterative – we can see what works. Put it out, see what works, then evolve
• Drive convos with ads – connect ads back to Facebook page
• Sponsored stories – make sure more people can see what your fans say about you
• This is how you light your brand up
• People tell friends about products, thats what sells products – WORD OF MOUTH
• Dont go in set from the beginning – Monitor, Adapt, Leverage
• Social needs to be the fundamental ingredient from the beginning- can’t just “sprinkle” social
• Dont get rid of other ads – TV, print – create a cohesive campaign that connect.
• Reach customers AND THEIR FRIENDS!
• Link to social graphs – make everything the basis for on-going connection
• Engage customer, write back to them so they keep coming back. This is how you get messages to go viral.
• Inspire. Be creative. Put out experiences.  Get them to put their experiences, their childrens.  Great messages, videos, pics – these things get twice as much engagement.
• The web has gone social, marketing can go social too.
• Ex. Barista put out an ad with curse words.  Outcry on Facebook page.  They apologized, put up a new cut, and they got a great response for taking responsibility and listening to their audience.
• First time you can have a comprehensive conversation with brands themselves.  Go iterate, get started.

Terminology

Before we begin looking at these reports it is important to understand what we are looking at.  Each flow page will have nodes.  The node is simply a segment of visitors.  These nodes represent some feature of the visitors, such as traffic sources, new visitors, browsers, etc. The connections represent the number of visitors that went from one node to another. Red connections are those who left the site.  The size of the nodes and the connections are proportional mean smaller numbers will have smaller numbers and larger numbers will appear larger. This makes it extremely easy to see these flows. The image in the next section illustrates the nodes and the connections.

Goal Flow and Control Panel Overview

The first new flow report, the "Goal Flow" report will be a welcome addition to the Conversion section in Google Analytics. The image below shows this report, I highlighted the connections, nodes and segmentation capabilities.  The first dropdown in the purple box, will allow you to select which goal you would like to be presented.  The "Select a segment" works just like the "Advanced Segments" feature. You can pick any of the pre-existing segments, such as returning visitors, or you can create your own segment such as branded keywords. The flow reports by default only show significant sources of connections, but you can show more by dragging the connections slider, which is in the purple box. You can also change "source" which is the default view, to a variety of other dimensions, including city, keyword, browser, and more.

For this "Goal Flow" report, I have shown a purchase funnel.  We can see the sources on the left side and each step in the funnel following on the right.  For each dimension, the report will show the top five and then group the rest in a sixth entry. The steps in the "Goal Flow" all come from the goal funnel you define in the profile settings. Only URL destination goals are supported at this time, not event goals. The table at the bottom of the graph shows the numbers of visitors that make it to each step. This is extremely useful as you can use this to address issues. For example if you use the browser dimension, you might see a huge decrease in mobile users that reach the purchase page.  This would suggest that your site might need some mobile optimization. The best part is if you don’t have a goal or goal funnel setup, you can create one and it will use your data to populate the report as if it had been there all along.

Visits Flow

Next up is the new "Visits Flow" report. This looks very similar to the "Goals Flow" report. The image below shows this report with purple boxes calling out important information. This report can be accessed by clicking the home button icon in the main toolbar from any area in Google Analytics. Below is the default view for this report.

When you first open this up it may appear to be a bit overwhelming. It is quite easy to start digging for insights. You can click on any of the nodes under the dimensions ("Source" is show in the image above) and show only connections from that node. You could do analysis coming from any of the dimensions. You can also click on any of the pages nodes and select either traffic from or through the node. The image below shows traffic through one of our blog pages. You can see the pages they came from and went to and add steps to previous or next pages that most of your visitors came from or went to.

The “Navigation Flow” report lets you group pages by regular expression.  You could group all pages that contain a common word as an example, which is extremely useful for websites that are promoting different products.  Let’s say you sell Apple and PC products, you could group them separately and compare common dimensions that bring them to the site or group them together and also understand how they view your site as a group.

Final Thoughts

Path Analysis has not been easy to do and gaining insights can be a painful process. Google Analytics has clearly spent a lot of time on these reports and it has shown. Flow Visualization makes seeing common trends and gaining insights significantly easier. The “Goal Flow” report is my favorite, and the segmentation combined with the running table at the bottom makes it painless to see what is going on with a variety of metrics. This is what differentiates it from all other competitor’s offerings.  Google is truly making it easier to visualize visitor data, which gives us a whole new view called Flow Visualization.

Interestingly, they had a different strategy than the traditional one, and it actually made a lot of sense.  Normally, you might try to build your page fan base as large as possible, then use that free stream of connection to push your product/services, either through updates on your wall (that will appear your members’ news feeds) or through message “updates” that appear in your members’ inboxes.

However, changes to the Facebook’s newsfeed algorithm (called EdgeRank) threw a little bit of a wrench in that – most of your posts actually aren’t seen by your page members.  Also, “updates” show up in an unnoticeable “other” box that may be ignored.

Webtrends’ strategy takes this into account and apply a different approach – engage your visitors to build heavy rapport, then reach them through paid ads.

—

EdgeRank !

EdgeRank actually suppresses 95% of posts! The EdgeRank algorithm uses Engagement of the post,  Affinity of a user to your page, and Decay to determine whether an update makes it to a member’s feed.   Facebook hopes to provide as relevant content as possible to you (since it’s impossible to feed everything).  That means if people aren’t interacting with your post (engagement), a member doesn’t really visit your page often (affinity), and/or a post is old (decay), the chances of your members or friends seeing it in their feed is pretty slim.

Engage

Webtrends stresses the importance of social engagement.  That’s the intended nature of social networks – to start a conversation.  Build rapport with your members and get them to consistently engage with your page through fun and simple posts rather than simply using your page to push your own products and promotions.  Promotional posts statistically do not generate as much engagement as “fun”, simple, conversational posts.

Some key points:

• “Emotional stories” and “sports wins” get great engagement.
• Simple and easy questions are the most successful in engaging users.  Example, Lane Bryant’s posts with maximum engagement were “Like this is you are a curvy women” and “Fill in the blank: My favorite color is:_____________”
• Promotional posts don’t get as much engagement as simple, social questions.  A good ratio of promotional posts to other posts is one in every 10.
• Keep a close eye on posts and respond – the more responses and the quicker the reply, the more likely a conversation will break out, which will higher the EdgeRank score of that post.

Monetize (Using Ads)

Once you have enough “reach” (your membership is large) and your existing members are engaged, use Facebook’s targeted ads to target your own page members for products/promotion.  Since you have built rapport and you now have a strong bond with them, they are more likely to pay attention, click through, and convert (assuming you have an optimized conversion page/process).

To reach this goal, marketers need a guide to help build the marketing accountability that analytics, and smart people, bring to the table.

I hope to provide this guide and structure in my 7-Step Analytics Reporting Framework whitepaper. This framework will help marketers navigate through seas of data and reports and leverage insights to impact their business.

You can download the full whitepaper here.

And for those of you on the go, here’s a quick outline of what to expect:

1- Define your requirements

Clearly identify what you need to measure and extract key data to measure your performance. This is the foundation for all following steps.

2- Know your channels

Pageviews alone won’t cut it anymore.  Different media platforms require different measurement approaches and techniques. Understand the characteristics of your channels and how to track each of them.

3- Trim your metrics

When it comes to reporting, apply this strategy: “less is more”. Just because you have a lot of data doesn’t mean you need it all.

4- Segment for context

Absolute numbers and aggregates hide a wealth of insight and can be very misleading. . Segment and allow “context” to give your data meaning.

5- Put intelligence at your service

Let computers crunch the numbers. Let reports detect and flag significant changes in your key performance indicators automatically. (If you are not a Google Analytics user, it’s time to jump on the bandwagon and leverage its powerful Intelligence engine.)

6- Integrate reporting

Data from your website offer just few pieces of the puzzle. Incorporate data from mobile, social, offline, competitive, etc. and look at the big picture.

7- Automate

Tired of manual reporting? Automate your reports. This gives you more time to do proper analysis.

Bonus Step

Channel Attribution & Multi-Channel Funnels

Download the full whitepaper here. Feel free to comment and share.

Technorati Tags: analytics framework, analytics requirements, channel segmentation, digital marketing, google analytics, marketing optimization, report automation

What was great about this webinar was that while Social Media workshops give you the typical tips (referred to as “Rainbows” & “Unicorns” by Dan) like “engage your members” or “love your fans”,  Dan actually had data supporting his claims and recommendations and data even disproving some common myths.  While he does bring up a lot of “correlations” and not so much “causations” (so we cant really say that implementing his tips will directly result in, say, more exposure or reach) they are still important points to consider.

Some Key Points:

• Myth: Ideas spread because they are good.  Some ideas are bad and they spread (Rebecca Black’s “Friday” being an example) and some are good but go no where (can’t think of any examples here ).  There are other factors involved in spreading an idea, which he gets into later when he talks about “contagiousness”.
• Myth: Viral growth is an exponential pyramid.  According to Dan’s data on examples of viral growth, an idea may start slow, but there are usually key moments where an idea is exposed by the right people or “influencers”, resulting in it going viral.  Then, the idea eventually dies out.   This is opposed to the typical “first day one person shares to 2 people, second day those people share” pyramid.
• Contagiousness.  In order for an idea to be contagious, the following 3 pillars need to be established:  EXPOSURE + ATTENTION + MOTIVATION

EXPOSURE

It’s really important to have as much exposure as possible, a large REACH – followers, email subscribers, Facebook likes, etc.  If you don’t, it’s important to do your best to connect with an influencer who does (but here’s an instance of chicken and egg, because he states to increase your chances of getting an influencer to follow you, you need to increase your followers).

• Myth: Engaging in the conversation builds reach.  He’s not saying engagement isn’t important – this builds rapport, customer loyalty, etc.  However, it doesn’t directly increase reach.   According to his data, twitter accounts with over 1 million followers were less conversational than accounts with less.  (I would question if these accounts were conversational before they got too big to respond to their followers, or even feel the need to respond).
• Valuable content!  According to his data, accounts that pushed valuable content and links had more followers than conversational accounts.
• Myth: Don’t call yourself a guru.  While it may seem pretentious, there is a correlation between accounts that make claims authoritative claims and having more followers.  He recommends to use authoritative titles like “Official”, “Expert”, “Author”, “Founder”, etc.  I have to admit, when I read a Twitter bio, I am usually duped by titles like this, only to be surprised when I found the “CEO and founder of x company” has only 10 followers.  While the pretentiousness here correlates with having more followers,  constantly emphasizing your authority in your content may result in the opposite.
• Positivity.  Positive users have more followers than those that are always negative.  People come on Social Networks to be happy.

AWARENESS

The human brain takes in so much information per second but can only process so much.   Thus, it is wired to filter what’s important to it.  That’s how a lot of advertising or ideas get ignored.  You need to have an idea or service that triggers followers to put you in the “relevant” category and avoid being filtered.

• More tweets per hour = lower CTR.  Don’t crowd yourself out.  Tweet maybe once an hour, give it time to breathe and allow people to read it.  If you tweet too much too close together, that’s one way to get ignored.
• Myth: Friday, Sat, Sunday are bad days to publish.  Since less people are publishing these days, theres less garbage to filter from.  Emails have higher CTRs on Sat and Sun.  Facebook sharing have more shares on Sat/Sun.
• Experiment. Don’t take anyone’s word for it – always experiment to see what works for you.

MOTIVATION

This is the difficult part.  While one may be interested in viewing your post, to be really contagious, your idea/post needs to be interesting enough to motivate it being shared.

• Information Voids.  Find out what people want or are looking for, and create content that answers those questions.  You can search for questions on twitter.
• New Information.  People want to share what’s interesting and new, not something that has been shared 1000 times and that everyone already knows.
• Simple language.  Write simply and plainly as not to lose readers.   Writing less and being more engaging is actually harder than writing more.
• Request explicitly to share.  Data suggests that actually asking readers to retweet, repost, or share makes your post 4 times more likely to be shared.  Sometimes, your readers may not actually think to share, and simply asking them will trigger that since they already have rapport with you.

Technorati Tags: facebook, social media, twitter

What’s New on Facebook

• Send Button – it’s a selective Like button. It counts in the Like total on your page as well, and can be delivered as a Facebook Message or on a group wall.
• Deals is still in test mode and is only available in 5 cities. But the point is that it will get groups of friends to discover the business by sending out deals with no upfront costs.

What benefits can I get from using iFrames on my page?

iFrames are frames that allow a visual HTML Browser window to be split into segments. Ultimately by introducing iFrames into Facebook pages, companies are now able to brand their pages.

• Now you can use styles on Facebook as you use it on your website, this is great for branding your company.
• You can also track page views using Google Analytics
• Google Website Optimizer – is now available to be used on the tab pages.
• Links can open within the iFrame as if you are on your website. For example, you can have a whole cart process within an iFrame and NOT leave Facebook at ALL.
• If you want to know how to set up an iFrame on your Facebook check out Hubspot’s blog post on “How to Set up a Facebook Custom iFrame Landing Page Application.” You can also download for FREE “The Facebook Marketing Update – Spring 2011” E-Book which includes a step by step process of setting up iFrames for your custom facebook pages.

Can you use photos and videos as marketing?

• Photos and videos are much more visible on the news feed because they take up space, so this would be a smart technique to attract attention from your fans.
• Also, keep in mind that videos are much more engaging than pictures because fans will more likely click play and tune in than Like an image.
• Tip: Turn images into Call to Actions to see what kind of interaction you may receive.
• And now with Google Website Optimizer, you can test videos and photos to see what interests people more.

What to do about Negative comments?

• Don’t ignore negative comments, that will only make things worse.
• Address the comment and take it offline.
• Suggestion: Have a customer care person who is not the same person updating the facebook page to address negative feedback to try to assess and fix the issue.

When is the best time to post?

• It depends on your audience, no one set rule for everyone, it just depends on the kind of site you have. Keep in mind, if they are across the world, they won’t necessarily see the post because of the time difference. By the time people get to the post it may be buried, so if your target base is in another country across the world, make sure to post in their waking hours.
• Keep involved but don’t over do it.

Which brand is doing Facebook advertising best?

• Audi – more engaging than Justin Bieber – they have 3.5 Million fans. This is because there is a lot of interaction and discussion. By answering comments and engaging users, they have gained a heavy fan base.
• Mail Chimp also has a lot of interaction and comments. They have a human element by commenting, it’s not just a faceless brand.
• Retail sites are hard to get engagements but Sephora does it well
  • Fans talk to each other about products and advice on which product works best.

The webinar was based off of the FREE HubSpot E-book, “The Facebook Marketing Update – Spring 2011”

Follow @HubSpot‘s hashtag #FB2011 to see what others are tweeting about today’s webinar!

Related Posts

• Farmers’ Market and Social Media
• Facebook Fan Page Marketing Tips
• Tracking Offline and Online Campaigns

Technorati Tags: facebook, facebook fan page, iFrame, social marketing, social media

Go ahead and ridicule me   I know my little twist on that infamous song sucks, but I mean well so I’m willing to swallow my pride for Planet Earth’s sake.  I had asked a more musically inclined colleague of mine to come up with an Earth Day tune, but he chose to defer to his SLA defined response times, and I wasn’t able to produce something cooler for you. 

Happy Earth Day everyone!  Planet Earth, stand up and take a bow.  You’ve earned it!   You’ve endured years and years of man’s heedlessness and exploitations.   Gandhi once said “Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s need, but not every man’s greed.” 

To be honest, I’m not really a big fan of "special days" – The values being promoted on Earth Day are priorities we should have in mind in our day to day lives, not just one day out of the year.  Every day should be Earth Day!  That being said I certainly understand and appreciate the need for awareness and encouraging involvement for the cause.

I started thinking about what I could do as an individual and what E-Nor could do as a company to "do our share." I googled and googled, but all I found were these boring and mundane  tips and suggestions.  What to do?  That’s when it dawned on me… There’s something to be said for simplicity isn’t there?  We’re so caught up in a world full of 3D ultra thin uber-gadgets that we often have a tendency to over-think things.  Our contribution doesn’t have to be complicated – the simple things sometimes make the biggest difference.  If all of us did a few simple things, we would undoubtedly initiate and affect positive change. 

All of us care very deeply about this cause, so here’s a list of some things that E-Nor and our staff will be doing.  Some of these are Earth day activities, but we will make a sincere effort to make them ongoing.  I’ll report back next Earth day and let you know how we did. 

Here’s our list:

• E-Nor will be matching (dollar for dollar) any donations made by our employees to their favorite "green causes"
• Stop and smell the roses – try not to get stung by a bee
• Grow vegetables & share the prolific fruit from the beautiful orchard remnants in the backyard
• Carpool/bike/walk instead of driving
• Recycle our electronics at recycling centers
• Start using environmentally friendly cups/plates/utensils at the office
• Read a book about living green
• Eat fruits and vegetables for snacks
• Wear a green shirt on Earth Day
• Use the A/C less in the car (anyone who knows me knows this is a huge struggle for me!)
• Use a clothesline to dry laundry instead of the dryer
• Attempt to build/setup a composting process at home
• Dim lights in the office and open window shades

As you can see, all the above are small contributions, but every little bit helps.  That’s our small contribution to Planet Earth.  What’s yours?  Share your tips in the commments.  Nothing like a little healthy competition

Technorati Tags: Earth Day

Marketing on Facebook – Effectively Building and Using your Facebook Page

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you probably know that Facebook is the number one social network out to date.   1 in every 13 people on this earth has a Facebook profile.   Many credit its innovative ways of communication as an instrumental tool in galvanizing the recent international revolutions.   Of course, like anything else gaining extreme popularity, it has attracted the attention of businesses looking to use it as a marketing tool.

It is now as common (and as necessary) for businesses to have a Facebook page as it is to have a website.  In fact, it has the potential to become more common:

• It’s free
• It requires no web development knowledge
• Similar to an email list, it keeps a steady connection between businesses and their “fans”
• The beauty of social network is “in-bound marketing” – meaning your market comes to you.   This rapport is less invasive than traditional outbound marketing – for example, hoping your market will catch an ad or flyer you put out.

So to the nitty gritty! How can you use Facebook page to effectively help your marketing?

Victoria Ransom had some great tips:

Her philosophy is built on 3 pillars…

• Grow
• Enagage
• Monetize

GROW

Facebook Ads

• Spend Ad Money. At the end of the day, a significant portion of fans come through Facebook ads.  Facebook ads are very targeted based on users’ interests (their ad system is growing and is slowly but surely gaining ground from Google Adwords).  Do set aside a portion of your budget for this – the fans you gain can potentially yield an easy return.
• Give your prospect a reason to click your ad. Rather than simply putting information about your business – promotions, incentives, and contests will give you a better click through rate.
• Don’t drive people out of Facebook (to an external site). You’ll increase your bounce rate.  They came to Facebook to be on Facebook.  Lead them to a customized landing tab on your Facebook page.  Get them to “like” – establish that connection so you can market to them later.
• Advertise to friends of Fans. Facebook allows you to do this, and it builds credibility if their friends like your page.
• A/B test your ads. It’s important to test ads and keep them fresh.  If users see the same ad consistently, they are more likely to ignore it.

Promotions/Contests/Giveaways

• Pages that employ incentives have twice as many fans as pages that don’t.
• Keep contests simple.  If fans have to join a thousand things, click here, go there, etc, the amount of energy it’s forcing them to spend will make them quit!
• Make it social by offering a prize for referrals – have fans bring fans!
• Keep your audience relevant by offering prizes related to your industry.  For example, offering an iPad will definitely get all types of participants, but may not be fans that are interested in your clothing store, for example.

ENGAGE

• Engagement begets more engagement. Just because you post something to your wall doesn’t mean your 1000 fans will see it.  Facebook has an algorithm that decides if your post will be “fed”.  A big factor is engagement with that post, so it’s important your posts get interaction.
• Actually explicitly ask fans/friends to engage – Post “Like this!!!” or “Share This!”
• Pose open-ended questions to get fans to answer. “What are you going to do for Earth Day?”
• The quality of your post is more important than quantity of posts.  Posting 100 times a day could saturate your wall.  Choose quality posts over quantity.
• Build a calendar of posts around events.  For example – post Christmas related questions and promotions around Christmas.

MONETIZE

• Make your buying process social.  Not only include a cart in your store, but offer coupons/prizes to facebook fans.
  

Technorati Tags: facebook, facebook fan page, social marketing, social networking

Per Google, the goal of the new version is to enhance the underlying platform for major new functionality in the future, as well as design enhancements to make it easier and faster to work with data.  We’ll have more specifics and a detailed walkthrough soon, but here’s a quick highlight of what was released in the new version.

• Major upgrade to underlying platform
• Design revamp
• Ability to view multiple Advanced Segments, without having to include “All Visits”
• Multiple dashboards including a revamped dashboard interface!!  (finally!!!) 

That’s just a quick list.  We’ll post more details soon.  To expedite getting access to the new version, pay a visit to the beta sign up page.  You can use both versions concurrently and that should help with the learning curve

Also, here’s a sneak peak at the new UI:

Enjoy

Use this promo code smx100feras and save $100!

Who Should Attend?

• Marketing Managers
• Business owners
• CMOs
• Webmasters
• Agency staff

Why?

If you are struggling to go beyond basic web metrics of visitors and pageviews and want to move into actionable insights, this seminar will put you on the right track. You will learn how to improve your return on investment (ROI) on marketing campaigns and utilize analytics insights to optimize performance.

What will you learn about Google Analytics?

The two-part seminar will focus on:

Marketer/Business Focus – Strategy & Planning

• Web Analytics Strategy
• How It Works
• Master the User Interface
• Advanced Features Overview

Webmaster/Technical Focus – Implementation

• Accounts & Profiles, Filters & Goals
• External Campaign Tracking
• Reporting
• Advanced Segmentation & Custom Reports

We will have ample time for Q&A and I’ll be hanging around for additional hands-on analytics review and advanced analytics questions.

Again, the seminar is in San Jose, CA on Friday March 11^th, 2011. Register today and invest in learning!

I look forward to seeing you at SMX West San Jose and don’t forget to use this promo code smx100feras and save $100!

If you are still not convinced, maybe the following testimonials will persuade you

“E-Nor’s Google Analytics seminar provided me with the insight I need to provide our clients with actionable metrics” R.B., Managing Director

“I think you did a really good job presenting to an audience that had a wide range of Google Analytics experience. Glad I stayed the extra day to attend” C.S., Marketing Manager

“Feras clearly knows the intricacies of Google Analytics thoroughly. If our clients need advanced Google Analytics help, we wouldn’t hesitate to recommend Feras and the group at E-Nor.” R.L. Principal Consultant

“Very pleased with the Google Analytics workshop at SMX East in NYC. Feras was extremely helpful and knowledgeable in all aspects of GA. Highly recommend this course to all Google Analytics users”, M.W., Marketing Manager

Feel free to leave a comment or email me if you have any questions or comments.

Technorati Tags: feras alhlou, ga training, Google Analytics Seminar, google analytics workshop, smx west 2011

You know analytics will do the trick, but where and how can you get the proper training? Easy. Come and learn the tools of the trade at a full day hands-on Google Analytics training.

If you’re convinced and ready to register, do so before October 3. Feel free to use this code for a $100 dollar discount: smx100gaw (case sensitive). You can register here and enter the promo code or just click on this URL. But if you’re holding out and still need a bit more convincing, check out some (uncensored ) testimonials from previous training attendees.

The training will cover some basics, but will focus on much needed, yet underutilized, best practices. We will also explore various advanced topics and leave a lot of time for Q&A. You’ll be prepared for morning’s work with specific action items to implement on your own site (or your clients’ sites).

So whether you’re a marketing manager, a technical webmaster, or a consultant, and whether you’re working for a start-up or a Fortune 500, this workshop will help you leverage Google Analytics to the fullest.

Training agenda

Morning Session – Marketer/Business Focus – Google Analytics Strategy & Planning

• Web Analytics Strategy – approach, opportunities and limitations
• How It Works – overview, accuracy and privacy implications, integrating with other data
• Practical – understanding the user interface
• Advanced Features Overview – clever stuff you can do with Google Analytics

Afternoon Session – Webmaster/Technical Focus – Google Analytics Implementation

• Accounts & Profiles, Filters & Goals – structure your data properly
• External Campaign Tracking – measure performance of search, email, banner campaigns
• Reporting – dashboards & insights
• Advanced Segmentation & Custom Reports – powerful ways to find insights

Need more convincing? Here are some testimonials

“I wanted to thank you for the great work you’ve done in helping Blue Shield set up Google Analytics and taking us through the process of understanding the User Interface. We are enjoying the training sessions and the entire team feels very confident in your expertise. Thank you!”
-T. S., Online Member Acquisition, Blue Shield of California

“I think Feras did a really good job presenting to an audience that had a wide range of Google Analytics experience. Glad I stayed the extra day to attend.”
-C. S., Search Engine Marketing Expo

So why wait any more! Register today and don’t forget to use this promo code for $100 discount: smx100gaw (case sensitive) or simply use this URL.

If you have any questions about the Google Analytics training, don’t hesitate to email or call. For latest updates on the workshop and other (mainly) analytics tips, follow me on twitter. And above all stay in touch!

Technorati Tags: google analytics, smx east, training, web analytics, workshop

Why should you consider attending? Well, you get to hear from the analytics industry rock stars, participate in a number of networking opportunities, pick up few tips from practitioners and consultants and learn firsthand from the analytics vendors on their latest and greatest, including “what’s new with Google Analytics, by our friend Brett Crosby.

Here is the detailed agenda, but basically on Monday you have the pre-conference workshops (there were some on Sunday), the conference sessions are on Tuesday-Thursday including some awesome keynotes, and then more workshops on Friday-Saturday, and it’s all happening at the Fairmont San Jose.

You can register for the entire conference, or just for a workshop. If you are really busy this year and don’t have the time to attend the entire event then I recommend you at least sign up for the “Social Networking Pass” which will allow you to attend the morning/afternoon keynotes, evening reception, exhibit hall pass and get your own conference bag!

And don’t forget to attend the Web Analytics Wednesday event on Wednesday the 5th at 6pm.

Hope to see some of our clients, partners and industry friends. If you are coming from out of town and you need any help here in the Bay Area, let me know, I am happy to offer free local advice . Drop a comment here or email me directly. See you soon!

Thanks
Feras

Technorati Tags: emetrics, marketing optimization summit

The following excerpts and comments are in no particular order and in a way are fragmented. I just grouped them in terms of what I gathered as Buffett’s perspectives on business, his work ethics, some personal traits and views on philanthropy as well as interesting factoids.

If you want all the details and really want to enjoy the ride, buy the book and read it in its entirety. But meanwhile, check out these excerpts from The Oracle of Omaha, the professional investor that became one the richest men alive who spent his entire life accumulating wealth and then gave most of it to charity as he was convinced that “the one who dies rich, dies disgraced”.

Personal Traits

• Buffett regarded rationality and honesty as the highest virtues
• He is very focused and always stays within his circle of competence
• There was nothing he hated more than selling people investments that lost them money, he couldn’t stand disappointing people.
• One of his friends, Peter Kiewit, another Buffett prototype, said: reputation is like fine china, expensive to acquire, and easily broken”. If you are not sure if something is right or wrong, consider whether you’d want it reported in the morning paper.
• He was bloodhound for anything free or cheap. He was known for his frugality and tightfistedness (once made a deal with a local newsstand to buy week-old magazines at a discount!). When he got a car, he only washed it when it was raining, so the rain could do the manual labor of rinsing
• He was an “Inner Scoreboard” type of person: he said “would you rather be the world’s greatest lover, but have everyone think you are the world’s worst lover? Or would you rather be the world’s worst liver but have everyone think you’re the world’s greatest lover? Warren’s father was 100% Inner Scoreboard person and “taught him how life should be lived”

Buffett’s Perspective on Business

• Buffett had a fascination with business as a puzzle worth spending a lifetime to solve
• He pondered the reasons for failure as a way of deducing the rules of success
• “It is always a mistake to pay too much for something you wanted. Impatience is the enemy“
• On investing in high tech: he had a long standing bias against technology companies (he felt they had no margin of safety)
• Ideal business? The one that earns very high returns on capital and that keeps using lots of capital at those high returns. That becomes a compounding machine.. there are very very very few businesses like that … we can move that money around from those businesses to buy more businesses
• He mastered the art of handicapping which is based on information. The key is to have more information that then other guy, then analyzing it right, then using it rationally
• He warned investors that trees don’t grow to the sky, but he never stopped from climbing as fast as he could
• Three roles interested him the most: the relentless collector, expanding his empire of money, people, and the influence. The second was the preacher, sprinkling idealism from the lectern. The third was the cop, foiling the bad guys
• “Cash combined with courage in a crisis is priceless”

Work Ethics

Philanthropy

• Buffett held strong views on specialization: when asked to donate, his first choice, always, was to donate ideas that would get other people to give money (never labored in volunteering directly for causes no matter how urgent and important). He could use his time more efficiently thinking of ideas and making more money to write bigger checks. He felt no inner conflict about how he spent his time.
• June 26, 2006: Buffett announced that he would give away 85% of his Berkshire Hathaway stocks, worth $37 Billions, to a group of foundations over a number of years 5 out of 6 shares would go to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (to reduce inequities and improve lives around the world in the areas of global health and education

Inheritance

• “A football player shouldn’t inherit the starting quarterback position from his father, a former start quarterback. Unearned position and inherited wealth drove Buffett crazy, offended his sense of justice, and disturbed his sense of the universe’s symmetry
• “Around country clubs, you hear people talking about the debilitating aspects of a welfare cycle (food stamps, etc.) and how we are perpetuating the cycle of dependency. These same people are leaving their kids with a lifetime supply of food stamps and beyond. Instead of welfare officer, they have a trust fund officer. You shouldnt’ consume more than you produce”
• “All along I felt money was just claim checks that should be back to society. I am not an enthusiast for dynastic wealth, particularly when th alternative is 6 Billion people we’ve got much poorer hands in life that we have , getting a chance to benefit from the money“

Interesting Facts

• As his father’s health declined, Warren asked his father to remove him from his will to increase the share left to others (amount of $180,000)
• Once asked by Bill Gates Sr. “what factor did people feel the most important in getting to where they’d gotten in life? And he said “focus“, and Bill Gates said the same thing (and they both shared the same intensity)
• “I follow very simple rule when it comes to food, if a 3-year old doesn’t eat it, I don’t eat it”
• When asked about the business of life: “if a genie appeared and gave you the car of choice (and you love cars), but there is a catch, the is the last care you get in your life. What will you do with it? You’ll read the manual five times, keep it in the grange, fix the least little dent, fixed right away, etc.. ” this is exactly the position you in concerning your mind and body. You only get one mind and one body, and it’s got to last a life time… it’s what you do right now that determines how your mind and body will operate ten, twenty, thirty years from you”
• On Taxes: “I’d have a higher tax at the higher levels of wealth. Passing wealth form generation to generation flies in the face of a meritocratic society”

So here you have it, go out and find some wet snow, a very long hill, and create your own snowball!!!

Technorati Tags: business ethics, warren buffett, work ethics

Also, thanks to Tim Ash, Nicolas Ward and Patrick Bennett for their great presentations at the conversion toolbox session. Check out this post that Nicholas wrote after the session, you gotta love the picture (Nicholas, can I be the one with the two swords? ).

For those of you who attended the Friday Google Analytics Seminar, thank you again and I hope you found the material helpful and I hope you put it to use right away (on Monday as you promised!! ).

Here are some additional references:

Technorati Tags: google analytics, SMX west, training, web analytics

For those of you attending SMX West, I’d love to meet and catch up. In addition to attending and taking notes at the various sessions, here is where I’ll definitely be networking or speaking:

• Monday 3/1, 6pm-7:30pm: Meet & Greet reception
• Tuesday 3/2, 5:45pm-7:00pm: Expo Hall Reception
• Thursday 3/4, 11:30am-12:30pm: Measuring How Search Ads Drive Offline Conversions – Q&A Moderator
• Thursday 3/4, 12:30pm-1:30pm: Birds-of-a-Feather Analytics Table (lunch)
• Thursday 3/4, 1:30pm-2:30pm: Analytics Action Plans For PPC & SEO – Q&A Moderator
• Thursday 3/4, 2:45pm-3:45pm: Conversion Ninja Toolbox – A Review of Tools & Technologies – Speaker
• Friday 3/5, 9am-5pm: Google Analytics Workshop – Presenter

To our clients: many of us at E-Nor will also participate in parts of the conference and we plan to absorb as much as we can, pick some golden nuggets here and there and take it all back and continue to enhance our processes and add more value for our clients.

Thanks,
Feras

Technorati Tags: google analytics, search engine marketing, search engine optimization, SMX west, web analytics, workshop

Didn’t take a lot of notes (I was mesmerized most of the time) but here are some takeaways:

• Data is available and relatively cheap but we still need humans to analyze and make sense of all these piles of data
• Check out this graph about the US recession, http://www.slate.com/id/2216238/, and I’m sure you’ll agree it is not a pretty picture!
• I really liked his comment, “if you torture the data long enough it’ll confess to anything.”
• If you haven’t already, check out this very cool and super useful tool, Google Search Insight. With this tool, one can assess patterns of search volume. you can select a specific region or categories, time frames, and properties. See seasonality impacts on keywords related to what you sell, compare search volumes, and more. Don’t forget to examine the “forecast data”.

The project initially started in December of 2007 as a conversion of their original pure HTML site to Dotnetnuke (open-source Content Management System), but ended up turning into a significant redesign and restructuring project.

The services we provided were:

• Basic online marketing consultation
• Creating a new, brighter aesthetic look.
• Implementing a different site-structure based on our understanding of their users flow.  (We also took some tips from their more successful and professional competitors, such as the commercial magazine www.parenting.com)
• Improving their SEO (Search Engine Optimization) by cleaning up their meta tags and recommending some content enhancements. Their site is now on the first page of Google for some keywords when previously it was nowhere to be found.
• Helping promote their videos on Youtube.
• Cleaning up their Google Analytics setup to properly track where visitors are coming from, which external sites they are going to, and which PDFs they are downloading.

Oh yah, I forgot to mention the project was done PRO BONO. We had a great working relationship with the client, in that any work we recommended, if they could find volunteers to implement, they did, which saved us time.  Any technical implementation we could throw in, we did, and they practically understood that since the work was pro bono, it would take priority accordingly with respect to our other projects.

E-Nor encourages our clients, partners, and blog readers to support non-profits.  Though altruism may already be inline with your corporate and personal values, a year’s worth of pro-bono work may scare even the most giving of companies and people.  However, here are some benefits you may not have considered (in no particular order):

1. Necessity is the mother of innovation. The nature of non-profits is that their revenue is limited yet they provide great services to the community. Thus, they may require strong functions for their site. You’ll be forced to learn valuable work-arounds when their budget may not cover high end modules or spending, giving you great ideas for options when you need to close a sale with those paying clients who are a little tighter with their money.
2. Practice makes perfect. Just like anything you do in life, the more you do it the better you will get. You can chalk this pro bono run as practice. For us, TLC being a year project, it strengthened and even expanded our research on techniques, functions, modules, etc, that we can now apply to all our sites!
3. A non-profit “word-of-mouth” could still lead to profit. We know that as technology evolves, so does marketing. If Google has taught us anything, free services and products actually go a long way in branding and exposure, and could result in lucrative opportunities in the future. Non-profits do have friends that could end up being your paying clients with the right referral. And because your existing relationship had no financial motives, the trust and rapport has already been built.
4. Had a bad day? They’ll pick you up. For all those clients who didn’t see the extra work you did for them and who complained instead of showing gratitude, you could expect the opposite for your non-profit pro bono clients. They can’t help but see the void you filled for them and be grateful for it.
5. Testimonials. Along the same lines as the above, a testimonial will virtually be an everyday occurrence if you’re doing your job right.
6. Pat yourself on the back.  You did a good deed! Because of the site you provided for a parenting non-profit or a domestic violence shelter, a lost parent now has a little bit of direction or a helpless victim is a little bit safer.
7. Experimentation (with the permission of the client). Since your client doesn’t have dollars riding on this project, they are more likely to allow you to do light experimentation on it, within reason of course. Not only are they more comfortable since no hard earned grant money is at risk, but that also means there’s a more flexible timeline for you to play with the site. For example, if you see a new module you wanted to try or your organization is new to analytics and you need a site to try it on, especially if the end result could possibly benefit your client, non-profit free sites may in fact welcome experimentation. Don’t forget to back up, though!

Technorati Tags: dotnetnuke, search engine marketing, search engine optimization, web design

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This type of thinking forces you to balance giving enough information to cover any holes in your work while preventing you from putting too much extra fat that may bore or frustrate the reader.

Replace the word “reader” with “user” in the previous sentence, and I think you have an excellent philosophy for usability.

The internet is the fastest and most convenient way of getting information. In the small amount of time it’s existed, we’ve realized that the easier a site is to use – well…the more people will use it. In turn, as surfers we’re spoiled like this and now come to expect that a website will get your job done quick and dirty. So as surfers, we are on the hunt – frantically scanning pages. If we have to think too much – there’s no penalty for hitting that back button and moving on to the next search engine search result on the list – in hopes that maybe this next site “dumbed it down” enough.

It’s safe to assume that the user that stumbles upon your page is thinking just that, and that’s why it’s important that your site is as “dumbed-down as” possible – so even a smart Martian could use it…

Conventions

Continuing my reminiscing of high school (quick, someone pinch me with a 2 by 4 and get me out of this daydream nightmare), there were two mannerisms that I learned without being taught:

1) When walking down the hallway, there are two lanes – On-coming traffic and On-going traffic. When you want to go somewhere, you walk on the right side of the hallway in the On-going traffic lane.

2) When you open a door, you have to go that extra inch to swing it all the way open as an etiquette to the random student who may be following behind you coming through the doorway. This eventually is a reflex for everyone and is done in all instances, regardless of who’s behind you. In fact, after awhile it was so automatic you didn’t even check if anyone was behind you, you just swung that door wide open.

What the heck does this have to do with usability?

Well, Sociology 101 – a bunch of people doing something and consistently repeating it means everyone will end up doing it (almost naturally). No one explicitly instructed me to do these things. I just picked it up by copy-catting everyone else.

This is an important concept to take advantage of in Usability – standard conventions – understanding what EVERYONE has been trained to do and are doing.

The new laptop you bought is easy to use because it works just like all the hundreds of other laptops you’ve seen/used recently. The ‘on’ button is this circle at the top of your keyboard, there are a bunch of pretty lights indicating different things, you have external volume buttons on the outside, usually on the front bumper of your laptop, etc. In the back of your computer, most average Joe’s now know that, for my audio speakers, I plug the green plug into the green socket.

None of these conventions are mandatory – your laptop manufacturer could’ve put your ‘on’ button on the bottom of the laptop or your speaker plug could have been the color ‘orange’ – but the convention everyone uses is what makes it “natural” and thus, easy for everyone to figure out.

So unless you plan to be a trendsetter (“I’m going to wear my underwear on the outside of my pants until everyone copy’s me!!!!” – let’s see how far that one goes Superman), a good bet is that your website design will be usable when it copies conventions that everyone’s used to doing.

A good place to start, then, for design inspiration is looking at the big dawg’s websites that everyone uses which have now defined common usability conventions. For example, if you are planning to create a site that will be displaying a huge amount of videos, you may want to look at the video big dawg (we’ll call him “TouYube”) and design your layout that way – i.e. video display at the top left of the page, search at the top middle, “related videos” box on the right, etc. If you’re designing an email client or some sort of document creation user interface, the “compose”and “reply” are usually buttons at the top left. In your design, you may not want to have those as just hyper links in the top right corner then -use buttons and put them at the top left.

At this point, it’s unlikely you’d have to worry whether, “Hmmmmm…would the placement of these functions objectively be logical to the user?” They’ve already been trained to use this layout the millions of time they used the big dawg’s site. Your usability now has already been ingrained into the user’s skull by someone else.

If you insist on being original and innovative, at least consider the conventions big dawgs have defined, and make your site a combination of them or at least some sort of derivation based on them, as to still take advantage of the familiarity.

In conclusion, (large numbers of people) + (consistent repetition of an action) = a Social Standard. Take advantage of these standard conventions and apply common practices to the layouts of your website design.

Farid

Creative Director, E-Nor

Technorati Tags: usability

The event was well planned by NSHMBA organizers with a very impressive line of speakers:

Cisco – Guillermo Diaz, VP of Information Technology.
Oracle – Vince Casarez, VP of Product Management.
Google – Gonzalo Begazo Escobedo, US Controller.
Safeway.com – Michelle Marian, VP of Interactive Marketing.
Moderator: E-Nor – Feras Alhlou, President.

The panelist’s discussion was very insightful and offered some very practical advice to the audience. A few points that I really liked:

• Don’t be left behind! Even if you are in a non-technical field, embrace new technology and applications. Use them in your personal and professional life (blogs, social networking, wikis, etc.)
• Listen to the customer! Get end user input throughout your process. Don’t wait for your products/services to be “perfect” before you introduce them to the user. Gonzalo from Google pointed out how Google applies this a number of Google products that are released as “beta” to collect end user feedback/ideas/suggestions for improvements.
• Reach your customer where they are and again listen to their needs and wants.
• Use collaboration/connection technologies (hardware and software) to improve productivity and stay in touch with team members, especially those that work virtually in other offices or in different time zones.
• Mobile is big and will only be getting bigger… (this needs a separate post altogether!)

Actually this is a very common misconception. Business Edge builds URL’s that are virtual in nature and not representative of the underlying file structure. This is common amongst many Content Management Systems and doesn’t present any problems from a search engine perspective.

Whether you use the default friendly URL convention (static, but long and confusing) or the the much more elegant “human friendly” URL convention, the search engines should have no problem with virtual URL schemes.

Search engines see your Business Edge site (or any other site for that matter) in the same way that normal users see it – as a set of links and structured content – the rest is just presentation which the search engine doesn’t care about. The search engine has zero visibility into the underlying file structure and literally has no way of knowing whether the URL being shown to the search engine is real or virtual. It only cares that it works or doesn’t (in other words, is a page visible or not). Technically speaking, if a search engine gets back a status code of “200 OK” when it requests a page then the page is as real as a static html page.

In most cases though, you might have difficulty getting internal pages (pages that aren’t on the top level navigation menu) to be indexed by Google (or other search engines) for a couple of reasons:

• the top level pages are indexed because they are direct links from your home page. As search engines come to your site, they see these links on your home page and “crawls” to them, resulting in those pages being indexed.
• pages that exist in the site drop-down menu or what you refer to as “inside pages” aren’t being indexed because they aren’t main links off the home page. They are in the drop-down menu, but this menu is built using javascript which the search engine can’t interpret. Due to this, it is unable to navigate to those pages and thinks they don’t exist.

To get around this problem, there are a couple of possibilities:

• One very easy method is to create a SiteMap link on the home page. This allows the search engine to “see” the link to the sitemap on the home page, which in turn brings all the inside pages into the search engine’s view. We’ve done this on www.noblelimo.com (see the top right corner).
• Another method is to replace the out-of-box dropdown menu in Business Edge with a search engine friendly CSS based menu. A CSS menu will look and feel the same as a javascript menu, but is built using code that a search engine can parse and interpret, resulting in inside pages being visible. We are in the process of implementing this solution on several sites. Send me an email (shiraz at e-nor.com) and I’ll be happy to provide more information.

Hope that helps!    My thanks to Rehan Asif, one of my colleagues here at E-Nor, for the SEO knowledge that went into this post.

Technorati Tags: dotnetnuke, search engine optimization