I’ve been meaning to change the name of my blog for a while – not a big change but substantial enough that I’m sure any Google goodness I had will be gone. The reason for the change? I wanted our company blog name to be similar to our company name. Basic branding 101. Same content – slightly different name. Welcome to: Applying the Web!
Last week Nielsen//Netratings accounced that they were changing the metrics they use in their NetView (website analytics/metrics) service (View Press Release – PDF). They are going to look at the time users spend on a website, versus the number of pages viewed to measure a website’s audience/traffic. They cite AJAX interfaces (which don’t create a traditional request to deliver new content) and streaming applications like Flash based video players (think YouTube) as the reasons for the switch.
This change in metrics highlights a great point about website metrics in general – a metric that is helpful in trending user experience on one website may be useless for tracking user experience on another. There is a great article on this in eWeek (The More We’re Told, the Less We Know ).
This point that Evan Schuman makes in his article is that before you can sort out what metrics have meaning for your website, you need to understand your audience. Once you know what your audience is looking for in your website, then you can start tracking the corresponding metrics to that kind of user experience.
I also think that an intimate knowledge of how your website works is also essential for understanding what website metrics are telling you.
The most important thing to remember about website metrics is that they aren’t hard and clear truths about what is happening on your website. It is best to think in terms of trends and fluidity – otherwise your view of what you are doing on the web can easily become myopic. It is always best to talk to a group of live customers and clients (if you can) instead of relying solely on website statistics.
Any good strategic plan for your website must have a way to measure changes. You will get the best results from your website strategy and marketing efforts if you get as specific with your metrics as you do with your goals and objectives.
The Pew Internet & American Life Project recently published their latest study on Internet usage (view report) – this one focuses on internet users, how they connect to information, and how they feel about that connectivity. It is great resource for businesses that are on the web (or thinking about a web presence).
What makes this survey really useful is that they do away with just considering North American internet usage data and focus on the broader concept of electronic information and the devices we use to share and disseminate that information. In the report they talk about the idea of new technoloy (example: cell phones) and new information (example: blogs) as ‘Information and Communication Technology’ (ICT). Another thing that I really like is that the Pew survey asked how people feel about having access to all that information all the time.
Almost half (49%) of the people surveyed fit into the ‘Few Technology Assests’ category – new technology and information is at the periphery of their daily lives. I think this statisic is telling for two reasons: 1) A lot of potential exists out there for connectivity providers to expand (providing they find the most comfortable way to connect to this audience) and 2) We need to consider our information in more than one dimension.
What do I mean? Publishing your information on the web is publishing in one dimension and it’s easy to forget about print, tv, radio, mail, etc. If your business provides goods and services to that 49% it would behoove you to think in multiple dimensions, and to think about all your channels sending the same message, and about how your electronic channels (web, email, IM) can be automated to feed some of your more traditional media channels and vice versa.
The next report I want the Pew Internet & American Life Project to do would be a survey that tries to tract indirect usage of new technology. What percentage of the ‘Few Technology Assets’ group are actually using new information technology indirectly through their children or family or co-workers who fall into the ‘Elite Technology Users’ (31%) and the ‘Middle-of-the-Road Techonolgy Users’ (20%)?
For example my 84 year old grandmother-in-law is firmly in the ‘Off the Network’ (15%) category – but my wife and I advertised her recent garage sale on Craigslist and connected with some of her neighbors via email to co-ordinate sales. I think this indirect usage is probably a lot bigger than people think. Thinking about this information food chain might possibly be very beneficial to business.
The Pew Internet & American Life Project has a cool quiz on their website that will tell you what kind of technology user you are. I’m an Omnivore (8%). What are you? What is your family or social group? Most importantly – what category are your customers or potential customers?
I’d like to give a huge thank you to the Pew Charitable Trusts for doing this type of research and providing it free to the public.
The everything-in-one-bucket approach to website or internet marketing.
In this approach, everything you do with your website is driven by Internet Marketing. Ideally, everything you do on your website (blog, email, MySpace, etc.) does hopefully build your overall Internet Marketing strategy –but thinking about each step as as equally important limits your ability to build your content and strategy in an effective manner. If everything is equal, then what comes first?
The heirarchical approach to website or internet marketing.
Category 1 – The website strategy.
This category is the most important – it should be defined before your first web design meeting, before your web developer creates his first template, before you send your first email. It is the roadmap that tells you how all the other categories work together. This portion has goals and objectives or milestones. Don’t worry if you don’t have this part and you are six months into your website/email/blog – you can still create one and change what you are doing over time, incrementally – every day is a new day. Your keyword research and optimized content also falls into this category.
Category 2 – The well-built website.
The well-built website has:
These items are in order of importance for me. They are all really good ideas, but if you only do a couple, then do them in order.
Category 3 – Subscription Publishing.
Every good website should have one item from this category. Subscription publishing is the medium in which you publish regularly scheduled, targeted content to a base of subscribers. Items in this category are email newsletters, blogs, press releases, forums, podcasts, product listings etc. Can you have more than one? Absolutely. Businesses with really advanced online presences combine two or three — the same content with the same message extending your brand and keeping you in front of your customers. I am NOT saying ‘go get a blog’ or ‘you gotta spam your client base’. Any publishing tool on your website that is updated on a schedule or has a clear plan for gradual expansion with a focused message qualifies under this category.
Category 4 – Public and other Relations (PR).
This is a hard one. Public relations, or “buzz” is not easy to create, and the effectiveness often depends on the medium you choose. Nothing beats old-fashioned real-world word of mouth, or events, or a profile in the local paper. But if you achieve these things, be sure to link them up to your website in a focused manner. Make a landing page specific to the event.
Other online PR tactics are contests, press rooms, MySpace pages, FaceBook, Squidoo, or Linkedin. Each has different gotchas and needs. Having a MySpace page that is negelected and without focus is worse than have nothing at all. Again, this is influenced heavily by category #1.
Understanding the four categories will help you build a more balanced strategy, budget more effectively, and set priorities in sync with your goals, growth and resources – plus, you might just get your agency to slow down and help you plan instead of panic.
I’ve been doing a lot of reading lately on website strategies. I’m being combing sites that I consider ‘leaders’ in the field (like Marketing Sherpa and Sally Falkow’s blog) to help me refine my process and I ran accross a link to a website for an Internet Marketing and PR company. The company seems to get it but I dislike their approach.
A little priortizing goes a long way.
I find that people talking about online publishing, PR, online marketing and website strategy often like to take the “shotgun approach” (closely related to, and often executed by the “panic button approach”.) They mix up all their ideas into a bucket of must-do action items – and if you don’t do or have all of these things, well, your website and business is just missing the boat.
I couldn’t disagree more. If you think of all the current online tools (blogs, social networking, website metrics, ADA access, etc.) as being pretty much equivalent when it come to PR and Marketing, you:
1) Don’t understand these components as well as you should.
2) Can’t utilize them as effectively as you should.
3) Will have an unbalanced overall presence.
The only way to consistently excel at everything online all the time is to have a comprehesive strategy, lots of time, and lots of cash. So what are the non-supermen and superwomen of the web to do when they want to make their web presence more effective? Easy – they understand the categories of a heirarchical website and they implement a few tactics at a time from each category.
Next Post: The categories of a heirarchical website…
Writing an RFP is more difficult than it seems. If its done right – you can save yourself and your business thousands of dollars. If its done poorly you can have a project destined to go awry - with hidden costs for you and your vendor.
Most RFPs I see make me want to not bid on a project because they are too vague, which means that the business hasn’t done the legwork of thinking about what they want in detail. Sometimes they ask for so much that I know the business isn’t serious about what they want built – they have a budget number in mind and want to see what they can get for it so they list all their wishes with no reguard for priority.
Not knowing what you want is okay – starting the web development process without figuring that out is not. Too often business have a rough idea of what they want but without essential specifics that define how what they want fits into their goals for the website.
I encourage all my clients to go through a project calrification and specification process. A process that ends with a formal document that defines (at its most basic):
These four things will create a better RFP, which will result in a better vendor relationship, and greater satisfaction overall. A clarification and specification process (no matter how brief) before web development begins will bring you to a better understanding of your future site and will help you think clearly about the next step of your website’s growth.
I was reading an article posted on an SEO (Search Engine Optimization) website called The Value of Offline Publicity (Warning: that site is so busy with information, buttons, ads, and banners you might become disoriented). I enjoyed the article for one main reason – it was not your usual SEO topic. The author talks about your website being an extension of you or your company and thus what you do can have profound impact on your site.
He has a point.
I felt his methods concentrated on making your business into a ‘cult of personality’ where the business is an extension of the person (his article makes the assumption that most sites are one person operations – and in the world of knowledge blogging that is the truth). I’ll admit that I think his ideas are very effective – I have promotional strategies very similar to several of his bullet points – but I think that his six tips are just the tip of the iceberg. What he is talking about with a couple examples is a whole paradigm of thinking. It’s the idea that your PR and marketing is all tied together. Each piece of your marketing feeds each other piece.
Too often businesses cut their website and online strategy off from the real world. In SEO circles this is especially true, SEO tends to gets really geeky – it likes to live completely in the head. Marketing needs to be a whole body – what you do online effects the real world and vice versa – and with a little planning you can nudge things in the right direction and sometimes get the perfect storm – buzz synergy that feeds on itself.
I always tell clients – what you talk about to your clients in person, you need to talk about online. What you do in your business you need to talk about online. What you are doing online you need to talk up to your clients. If you don’t want to do this – chances are something isn’t going well in the business or you are trying to be something you are not either in reality or virtual reality.
What good is a brochure without a web address on it? or a website that never talks about print publications? The idea is to have one voice – just because you cross into a different medium doesn’t mean your voice changes. How you say things will change – what you are saying won’t. If it does you have a dangerous disconnect that will disorient your customers.
Now by all means follow his advice – become famous – just remember that all your agents (print, pr, tv, radio, web) need to talk about what you are famous for – and they need to talk up each other as well.
I went to a presentation about blogging a couple months ago and I heard this statement, “Anyone can Blog – it’s easy!” This instantly caught the audience’s complete attention. Blogging’s easy? Blogging is hot! and blogging is the latest, greatest thing in online marketing! get yours today! Okay – the feel in the room wasn’t that frenzied, I’ll admit, but the spark of it was there.
I wish I agreed.
Blogging is hot. Its a great online marketing tool. If you are reading this then my point is proven. Blogging is easy -kind of. Blogging is easy to set up, its easy to get started, but it is really hard to do correctly, and even harder to maintain.
A blog isn’t any different than a website. A blog is an idea that is executed by various different types of code, products, vendors, etc. When you have a blog you have the idea of consistent portable content that people can respond to right now – that’s it. It’s not WordPress, its not Livejournal, its not Moveable Type – those are all mechanisms for executing your idea.
Those mechanisms are really easy to set up but harder to integrate into your traditional website effectively.
Most blogs have no value and fail faster than a small business. Why? They don’t have a plan.
Blogs needs regular content. They need a focused theme. The need a schedule for writers to post to.
Without focus, your business blog becomes just rambling and you don’t want to ramble to your clients to you? Your client doesn’t need to know about your dog, or your issues with in-laws, or how hard it is for you to deal with them. Blogs can be dangerous territory.
Without regular posting you blog withers and dies. There is no reason to revisit a blog whose content never changes – it’s like the business newsletter that always has the same three headlines – it becomes junk mail.
If you think a blog fits creatively into your business or your businesses’ marketing strategy then write up a mission statement, a growth plan, and a schedule of posting. Then sit down with your team – even if it is only you – and brainstorm the first dozen posts. Only then is it time to go look into WordPress or LiveJournal and get your blog set up.
I finally joined Technorati and FeedBurner today.
I used to be the webmaster for a large corporation. I was in charge of creating websites and web applications. I worked with internal departments to get their message and data published to the external website or the intranet. The company that I worked for had 50+ departments and over 3000 employees. Keeping up with the information and data of that many departmental clients took a lot of juggling.
Very quickly I learned that my job’s true purpose was to help people help themselves. I created tools and processes that allowed clients to control their information and manage their web presence themselves. Many clients were hungry for this, embraced it, and pushed the boundaries of what we did. I loved this. Some greeted me on our first meeting with “Oh I am so glad you are here, our area of the intranet is so out of date, I’m glad that you can finally get to it”. I would excitedly tell them – you don’t need me, you can do it yourselves. They would become confused and mumble something about it not being their job and they wanted me to update the content. I would agree to start them out on the right foot and ask them for what they wanted changed and would get a perplexed look.
This is an important difference of perception that highlights a danger for many small business owners.
My clients at the large corporation, who wanted me to do all their updates, didn’t really want me to do their updates. They wanted me to relieve them of the responsibility of managing their portion of the website.
I have found many clients (my own and others) who let their designer take control of the content and strategy portion of their website redesign. They are relieved that help is available and leave everything up to the professional. Which is fine if you are working with a professional who will bring an array of choices to you for important decisions – who will have a dialogue with you. Unfortunately, sometimes this attitude switches the goal from creating a website that reflects a business (that is unique) to just creating a website.
The point is — ultimately you control your website. You are responsible for its content and for updating it. You are responsible for the message it sends to your customers. You don’t have to build the site, or even figure out the best way to build the site – you just have to be involved and stay engaged with the process. Resist just being a passenger and navigate what you know best – what makes your business unlike any other.