brand digital home - scott

Seattle Interactive Conference – SIC 2011 – Day One

November 3, 2011 By 2 Comments

I attended the Seattle Interactive Conference today (#sic2011) and wanted to share my notes. There were lots of great sessions, but I could only attend four. Best session I attended was the first – Sean O’Driscoll from Ant’s Eye View and his stages of social media program – “the journey”. I really liked how he laid out the five steps of the journey to a fully engaged social media program.

Conference thoughts: The place was packed with people but the space is not laid out very well – especially the registration. Before 9am there was an hour long wait for passes – the ops team blew that piece. I was there a bit early so missed the mass lines, but many folks missed the opening sessions.

I really enjoyed the range of topics: SEO, Social (lots), Mobile, Design, UX, Cloud – very cool

Sessions I attended with notes below:

  • Sean O’Driscoll – Ant’s Eye View – Practitioner’s Guide to the Social Engagement Journey
  • Vanessa Fox – Getting Out of the SEO Silo
  • Dan Gerber – Pop – Camping Out – Setting the Foundation for Interactive Design
  • Panel – Beyond the Hype: Social Media and Business 101 > social features to the enterprise
  • Ben Elowitz – Wet Paint -  The Social Operating System

Sean O’Driscoll – Ant’s Eye View – Practitioner’s Guide to the Social Engagement Journey

  • Educate large brands on how to integrate conversations into their workflow > how to be nice to your customers
  • Where should you post your status graph – find
  • Business strategy vs a twitter strategy or social media strategy or facebook strategy
    • It’s not about being “on” or “off” the social web
    • Are you a “fully engaged” enterprise > it is a journey defined by stages of operational maturity
  • Five stages of the journey
    • Traditional – listening to what people are saying, not engaged, conversation passing you by
    • Experimental “the arrival of the mavericks” – someone reaches out to do something, entrepreneurial ins spirit
    • Operational – someone is given budget and authority to create strategy, materials, hire > more in an influence role as a lot of contacts happen outside of the “marketing” group. Frustration about metrics starts to bubble up, what does an engagement metric look like? What does it look like?
    • Measurable – start to track business impact, broken through functional silo’s, defined success/influencers identification/engagement strategy and approach. Strong orchestration.
    • Fully Engaged – Everybody has the opportunity to take action in a clear way, with process and clear roles
  • Pathways to the Engaged Enterprise
    • People and Process – what is the strategy? Is it written down? Clear business objectives? Measurable goals against timeline, set initiatives, tactics – costs, timeline (one page – plan on page)
    • Education – policy and guidelines are necessary, but not sufficient. Need to know and share the “how” and not just the “what”. Use a series of playbooks “how to do a Facebook contest” At Dell > only one way to do a Facebook contest and here are the two vendors -  prescriptive guidance is important as you pass education through the organization.
    • Channels & Technology – balance the needs of the business, resourcing realities, and platform independencies. Do your tools just take a pulse (listening and monitoring) or are you effectively distributing the use and competency across the organization. Do you want more data or more insight. Insight > connect information to outcomes and routing to people that can do something about it.
    • Insights and Analytics – How are your metrics comparative? I’ve got 200 likes – is that good? Contextualize your outputs based on your business, size, industry and competitors
    • Activation and  Execution -  Start with an  insight, not an idea. Businesses that win build relationships Begin with advocates. Using the Agile Marketing Approach process to identify customer stories, tech/activities to solve, sprints to get there.  Working across teams in scrums.
  • Tips from Sean
    • Start with a customer need
    • Executive buy-in is key
    • Real results lie “between the seams” – between operational and organizational functions
    • Look for early wins, set expectations
    • Measure for impact
    • Kotter: look for a case for urgency + create a coalition of resources that can support and execute
    • Google+ is like a third sock. It may be a great sock, but I only have two legs. Kick ass on the legs you have.

Vanessa Fox – Getting Out of the SEO Silo

  • Showed an example of Hasbah Tamadot website is all images > basic SEO tactics
  • Getting the basics right important for big brands
  • Search terms and researching happens from a lot of different angles and stages
  • Who is your audience?
    • What audiences search for
    • What audiences talk about
    • Market research, email open rates, on-site behavior, etc.
  • How do you solve their problems?
    • What information/content type will satisfy the general need
  • The Personal Lifecyle – book for usability
  • Business Objectives
    • What is project goal?  What does success look like?
    • What is brand objective? What lasting impression?
    • What is value proposition? What makes you different?
    • What are conversion events and engagement events? What makes you money?
    • Who are key audiences?
    • What motivates them?
  • How do we solve peoples problems?
    • Google correlate > correlated terms
    • Discussion link > what are people talking about?
  • Pick an event or audience > what are their key questions?
    • What time does the SuperBowl site? Key audience in local market. Should be important text in the TV website
  • Client impact ideas
    • Review title tags, meta descriptions and destination pages for alignment of copy to expectations to website
    • Persona’s – how can we grow this element of our services

Dan Gerber – Pop – Camping Out – Setting the Foundation for Interactive Design

  • Camping is group and individual
  • Camping is a process: packing, getting there, setup – camping = fun – take down, blue tarp for rain,
  • Interactive designers – strive to create meaningful relationships between users and design
    • More than wire frames
  • IxD shoud be:
    • Data-driven
    • User-driven
    • Goal-driven
    • Idea-driven
  • Step One – Embrace Discovery
    • More than: order taking, check-box checking, creative brief (need more, need to dig in deep)
    • Should explore: User motivations, behaviors + context, user empathy
    • Is best with: success goals, experience KPIs, strategic concept + direction
  • Step Two – Expand the Role
    • Own the problem: build on data, tackle business goals with user goals, define success on and off the device > drill in to true user research and understanding
    • Experience strategy: user research, behaviors + motivations + emotions +  propensities, UX discovery tools (analysis,  personas, journeys)
  • Step Three – Own the Concept
    • Strategy + Design: UX at core of the concept, concepting before + beyond the visual, strategy big + small
  • Even some of our industry best practices ASSUME too much
    • Different approaches are great, but need to dial in to project
  • Example – Defining a mobile app concept – Seattle Sounders
    • Challenge – design a club app, not a league app for mobile
    • The team is important, but so is the experience at the game and what it means to be a sounders fan vs a specific player fan
  • So how do we get to a concept?
  • Concept Setup
    • Adaptable research: internal brainstorming, 300 fan comments on facebook, fan survey, flickr audit, literary review, stadium shadowing, global app review, group audience interviews
  • How do you know when you have enough to design something great?
    • Driven by time/schedule?
  • Sounders  PULSE – maintain pulse of fans throughout the engagement
    • Fans wanted an app to drive engagement between the games
      • Fans can follow the emotional state of the match and team – authentically
      • “scarves up vs scarves down” poll result
      • Contant, quick social connections to community + team
      • Balance between club app v. fan app
      • Use cases that play to fan contexts
      • Streaming audio – stream games if not there – connect with those who can’t be there – 40 countries using streaming app
      • Red card/yellow card – easter eggs, take advantage of emotion – shake app to make screen go yellow > swipe to go red
  • When UX is involved in concepting, UX can guard the strategy throughout execution and delivery
  • Challenges
    • Multiple concept owners: some tension good/some is not, creating idea advocates – not consensus
    • Keeps IxD’s away from prototyping: Builds other strengths, increases user empathy, tracks business goals
    • New skills: stretches thinking from tactics to strategy, beyond comfort zone
  • You comfort zone (happy place), where magic happens (outside of comfort zone)
    • “setting up camp” can keep you away from wireframes but the results will be worth it!

Panel – Beyond the Hype: Social Media and Business 101 > social features to the enterprise

  • Myth #1 – Build it and they will come
    • If not solving a problem – won’t be adopted
    • If not part of normal workflow – big effort to change behavior > facebook, email, search, webpages are current workflows
    • Apply game theory to activities > I get the Outlook badge when certified on something > creates centers of expertise and is aspirational
  • Myth #2 – Social Media is Facebook for the Enterprise
    • You can’t just turn on a community and expect it to work
    • TheLoop > slowly and selectively build communities
    • Internal corporate social networks are much different than public networks like Facebook
    • Colleagues vs friends > connect, collaborate, communicate
    • Allow for profile creation, pictures, expertise
  • Myth #3 – User Experience Does Matter
    • If you have to do extensive communication on what this thing is and how to use it > it’s not useful
    • SharePoint  > documents go there to die. Training for two years on how to use SharePoint, IT Learning Center at Eli Lilly is adopted much more quickly
  • Myth #4 – Social Business is more efficient
    • How can it be more efficient than email
    • Can be more efficient under the right circumstances
  • Myth #5 – Social business moves info faster
    • The coming assault of activities feeds – Salesforce Chatter
    • Must be relevant and not stashed into a folder
  • Myth #6 – It’s all about the cloud
    • Control via governance > what kind of information can be outside of firewall
    • Permissions are critical > high, medium and low business impact > each level has it’s own governance impact

Ben Elowitz – Wet Paint -  The Social Operating System

  • FatRain (1st startup), BlueNile (2nd startup), Wetpaint (3rd startup)
  • Wetpaint – all media is becoming social – wiki service gets ~600million visitors per month (really?)
  • Wetpaint  Entertainment – Fully Social
    • 1.1 million fans > they see them on avg 30 times per month
  • The consumer has changed
    • 20% increase in media consumption
    • The technology is with us all of the time
    • We have changed in terms of how we
    • 69% growth in time on Facebook in last year
    • Rest of websites – down by 9% in last year
    • Google is transactional, Facebook is long term relationship with your fans
  • The big benefits of the social operating system (Social OS)/Social Networks
    • For Consumers – Bring all of my data to me
      • Relevance
      • Personalization
      • Accessibility
      • Now
    • For Publishers
      • Audience data
      • Virality
      • Relationships
      • Ongoing
  • How to Win on the Social OS – 5 Steps to Know and Serve Your Audience
    • Determine what it takes to win > what do WE get out of it
      • Just having a bunch of facebook fans in and of themselves doesn’t help > we make the most money when people  come to my site and we serve advertising againt that impression.
      • We get the most value when we get referrals (transfer now) and continuous relationships (transfer forever)
      • We know that a comments is worth 2x to us than a Like
    • Create a social laboratory
      • Keep tinkering, keep testing, keep trying new things
      • Co-founder lays out 100′s of ideas
      • 700 data points per week on what is working or not
    • Segment your audience
      • 1.1 million fans > each one thinks of themselves as the most important person
      • Wetpaint covers 25 different TV show channels > what content resonates with which segment the best
    • Create Great Content
      • Every post is part of a test: format, poll, statement, video, headlines, etc.
      • How do you measure what the audience think about that?
    • Test & Measure Everything
      • Through testing and measuring > seeing audiences 30 times per month – up from 10 per month
      • Add the wins to the playbook
  • Facebook page is less powerful than the Facebook news feed
  • Facebook traffic performs 1.9x better than traffic from Google
    • True for content and Wetpaint
  • Creation and Distribution of Content
    • Editors need a ton of data to create great content
    • Social media people need to be in charge of distributing it
    • Separate the two functions
  • Social TV
    • 75% of activity happens on the 6 days outside of the show day
    • Connecting to other people about the show, not to the show itself

 

 

 

Filed Under: Events, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Social Media, Strategy & Leadership

Promoting a Local Restaurant Online – Step One – Establish Your Metrics

October 13, 2011 By 2 Comments

Wild Sage Bistro - One of the Best Restaurants in SeattleI’m helping my friend Tom Sciortino promote Wild Sage Bistro online.  Wild Sage is one of the best restaurants in Spokane serving an American Bistro fare that is fantastic. The reviews, awards and social chatter support how great the restaurant is, but Tom wants to improve his website and amount of business he gets through his online presence.

I’m going to chronicle the research, steps and results of our program. This post outlines the strategy and game plan for a local, independent restaurant using the internet and mobile to improve online visibility.

Step One – Establish Metrics for  Success and Where you are Now

One of the biggest mistakes I see small business owners make is not understanding their key metrics. At the end of the day, you have to have an idea of what works and what doesn’t when you spend resources and the only way to really understand that is to have some some basic measurement in place.

Key metrics that restaurants tend to care about from a marketing perspective include the number of people coming through the door and amount of revenue driven.  These are not metrics you can get from your website, however there are several important website metrics that indicate success that drives people to your restaurant and bar. Here are the critical ones to track – more info on how to do this next:

  1. Total visits – how many times people visit your site. The more times people visit, the more interest in your establishment, the more interest the more reservations.
  2. Total visits by source – critical for understanding which online sources: Google, Yelp, Facebook, Restaurant Associations, Emails, Paid Search campaigns, etc. drive traffic to your site. As you invest time and/or money in these channels, keeping an eye on how this traffic changes (hopefully improves) is a good indicator of success (or not).
  3. Total reservations or calls from the website – one tactic I really like is to have a unique phone number on the website and/or a form that generates and email that you can track back to the website.
  4. Track reservation source – have the front desk note the source of each reservation that comes in – this can be really simple – an then summarize in a spreadsheet by day (and by shift if you want). When a reservation is taken, a quick “we look forward to seeing you – and how did you hear about us?” will help tremendously.
  5. Total reviews of your restaurant – Positive/Negative/Neutral – word of mouth is critical to the success of independent restaurants. Creating a way to “listen” to what your customers are seeing online is important to managing and building your online reputation.
  6. Search Engine Rank for Critical Keywords – A high rank in Google for critical keywords such as “Best Restaurant in <your city>”, “<city> restaurants”, Thai Restaurants (or whatever your flavor is) drives site visits and visibility. Understanding where you rank is an important baseline metric.
  7. Rank in Social Review Sites – Where does your site rank in Trip Advisor for Restaurants in Spokane? Wild Sage is #4 and our goal is to get to #1. Trip Advisor, Urban Spoon, Yelp and CitySearch all have reviews and some form of rankings.

There are a ton more metrics you can track which will be covered in an advanced metrics post but these are the good ones to start with. In future posts, I’ll discuss specific tactics to improve those metrics.

Here are the resources to capture these metrics:

Google Analytics – a free web analytics program that is full featured and will give you more information than you thought possible. Create a Google Account with an email that you are comfortable using for a multitude of Google products including: Analytics, Webmaster Tools, Google Places, Adwords (pay per click search), Feedburner and more.

BrightLocal.com – you can get a free 30 day trial of local search engine checking for a small group of keywords.

Non-Personalized Search Results – When checking your own ranks in Google, Bing and Yahoo (in the town where your restaurant is) it’s important to de-personalize the search results as engines use your personal search history to fine tune results. So, using the Chrome browser, fire up an incognito session and do the search. In Firefox, start a private browsing session. In Explorer,  click on Safety and then InPrivate browsing.

Twitter.com – There are lots of social media tools set-up to help with “listening” for what people are saying about your brand. Using Twitter.com to search for you restaurant name is free and as good as any. Plus you can follow people who are talking about you.

So, there is the first part of this series. Please shoot me any updates, questions or clarifications.

Next Post in the Promoting Local Restaurants Online Series – Step Two – Tune Up Your Website

 

Filed Under: Local Marketing, Restaurants Tagged With: , , , , ,

Merging (combining) Pages on Facebook

October 2, 2011 By 6 Comments

Facebook Logo SmallFacebook is constantly changing and adding features as well as new page types. This has created a mess for people who adopted Facebook early as a business avenue as there are now several pages for many companies and brands.

The recent addition of pages for business (which is the best option for most businesses) created a situation in which you may have current pages – either a regular facebook page or a community page (one that Facebook created for your brand, but contains only data from Wikipedia) that has followers and likes that you want to transfer to the new business page.

Types of Pages on Facebook:

  • Personal – you  know, for you and your affinity for stuffed animals (we’re not judging here)
  • Local Business or Place – great for restaurants, cleaners, local businesses
  • Company, Organization or Institution – for bigger companies, schools, etc with a broader presence
  • Brand or Product – big brands or products that have a significant social effort behind
  • Artist, Band or Public Figure – Includes political figures
  • Entertainment – TV shows, movies and the like
  • Cause or Community – niche communities like Breast Cancer survivors and specific cause related campaigns
  • Community pages – created by Facebook because they found your brand on Wikipedia and wanted to have you on Facebook

Here are the steps to merging the old pages into your new Business Page with caveats:

  • While logged in to your new business page as the admin for that page > select edit page > select resources > select merge  pages. This only works if the pages are the same name currently.
  • Here is a form for requesting the merge as well: http://www.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=page_migrations_external
  • We’ve had issues with the target merge page not being “authentic” > the best way we’ve found to solve this problem is to add a Facebook Badge, Like Button or Login Button on the domain.

Merging pages is not as simple as it should be but is worth the effort to consolidate likes and friends.

  • Contact Facebook with your issue – the more people contacting, the more they will try and fix: http://www.facebook.com/help/?page=220217228006012

I’ll keep looking for additional options on this as it is a topic growing in importance as Facebook becomes an extension of your personal and business brand. Please let me know if these tactics work for you!

Filed Under: Social Media Tagged With: , ,

10 Steps to Optimizing Paid Search Landing Pages

September 21, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Landing pages are a critical link between the click of a campaign advertisement and the conversion to a lead, subscriber or sign-up. Smaller companies with fewer paid search clicks should strive to put your best effort forward on your first landing pages and test from there. Larger companies with bigger budgets have the luxury of trying multiple landing pages out of the gate.

The ten steps below are culled from years of experience, lots of tests and review of available literature on testing and optimization. I hope you find it helpful.

The Ten Essential Steps to Optimizing Paid Search Landing Pages

The landing page for a paid search campaign is a special beast. The visitor to this page has a notion in mind, has given you a clue to that notion (the keyword phrase), and has responded to the clever bit of copy that you crafted. The real trick at this point is to reduce the friction between the click on the keyword copy and the primary action you want the visitor to take. It’s almost as if you want to get out of the way of the visitor as they barrel through the landing page to the sign-up or purchase you so desperately desire.

So, here are the 10 essential steps to optimizing the conversion performance of your paid search landing pages:

1 – Simplify the Page Layout

Too often I see landing pages with entirely the wrong approach. For example, I’ve seen more than my share of pages that have:

– 3, 4 or even 5 columns
– big blocks of paragraph formatted text
– calls to action below the fold
– images that take up most of the content space in the most critical region of the page.

All of these items create detours on the eye path on the page which means additional work for the eye which means confusion. Think about how to simplify a page to its core components in a 1- or 2-column format, use bullet points over paragraphs and build a straight top to bottom flow with support items on the right. Also, don’t use a colored page background. The best readability is dark text on a white background – don’t get cute and do reverse color text on the colored background – it hurts, not helps.

2- Work the Headline and Sub-Head

The number one job of the headline is to establish a contextual relevance for the landing page based on the keyword and copy used to generate the visit. You know which keyword and piece of copy was used to generate the click (if you don’t then you should). The headline and sub-head should support that keyword set as the first thing the visitor reads when they hit the page.

Example
Keyword > Green Egg Barbeque Grill
Google Copy > Sale on Green Egg BBQ’s. Large selection of Green Egg grills and accessories. Compare our prices. www.GreenEgg.com
Landing page headline SHOULD be something like this > Green Egg BBQ Grills on Sale
Landing page headline should NOT be something like this > Huge BBQ Grill Selection

You should repeat the keyword used in the headline of the landing page in a positive way. We’ve even gone so far as to test a headline that changes based upon the keyword that brought the user to the page (mis-spellings and all). In some cases this does improve conversion, but in other cases it does not. This approach is worth a test, but be wary of the type of mis-spellings you can get and if it is worth having the headline of the landing page mis-spelled just because the visitor mis-spelled it.

3 – Judicious Use of Images and Hero Shots

Images are good to use on landing pages to give a visual representation of the product or service as long as the following rules are followed:

  • Don’t make the image too large. The purpose of the image is to add some visual candy to the page and help orient the visitor to the product and headline. If an image is too large and dominates the page, you lose the opportunity let the headline do the heavy lifting and you push other content below the fold.
  • Don’t make it to complex. Lots of thumbnails or multiple versions of the same item in different colors won’t help. Keep it simple and clean.
  • Make sure it is sized correctly and renders properly. A jagged image will reduce the perceived quality of the page while an image that is too large from a file size perspective will slow the page load. Both of which are bad.
  • Make the image clickable. People love to click on things, especially images. Make it go the same place as your buttons and call to action links.
  • Use a caption. After headlines, captions are the next most read pieces of text.
4 – Lose the Navigation

Having links on a landing page that DON’T lead to the primary conversion action goal is like dangling a ball of yarn that you don’t want the kitty to play with right in front of Sprinkles the Cat. Distractions hurt conversion. As much as you think you want someone to visit all the really great content you have on your site, you will lose focus and performance by allowing the visitor to be distracted. If you must have links that don’t go directly to a primary action, put them in the footer.

5 – Who Else Say’s Your Great?

Adding 3rd party reviews, logos, testimonials and objective support for your site/service/product always help conversion. The best display is based on a well known logo with a well chosen snippet of copy. Do you need to link to the rest of the review? No (see step 4), but the use of animated gifs or flash can add more quotes to a section of page thereby increasing the sound of thunderous applause for your site/product/service.

6 – Accentuate the Offer

The offer is a critical component of getting the sale so make a big deal out of it. Set the offer copy and corresponding call to action apart from the rest of the page to make it special. Use white space, a box around it, lines above a below and/or some sort of contrast to point out where the visitor needs to focus to get the item.

7 – Where’s the Fire? Add a Sense of Urgency

By including a countdown of number of items left, number of days left to get the deal, limited time offer copy or other time sensitive imperative – you will build on the sense of urgency the visitor may already have to get what they want and complete the sale.

8 – Use High Contrast Buttons that Say “Click Here”

As cliché as it may be, the use of the words “click here to….” on a well designed button that has a high contrast to the background of the page works. Yes, it is obvious. No, the brand folks won’t like it. But in test after test, this combo works the best to get people to the next step. It’s kind of like flashing a shiny lure in front of a hungry trout.

9 – Pump Up the Value at the Decision Point

The button is a key decision point – “do I click or don’t I?” so anything that you can do to minimize concern or pump up the value will help tip the visitor over the edge to clickville. Look at how Amazon handles their price blocks for example – a retail price with a strike through, our price and percent savings. Think about adding in money back guarantee, no obligation, free trial and other positive value copy around the button.

10 – Test Like Crazy

There are lots of other elements of a landing page that can be tested such as: the use of a demo, multiple pages linked by tabs, # and length of bullet points, approaches to copy (salesy, helpful, long, short, etc.), dynamic content, and so on.. The key to ongoing improvement is establishing a culture of testing and improvement. There are simple tools available for A/B testing and basic multivariate testing. More on this in a future newsletter.

Focus on the Landing Page as Much as The Copy, Keywords and Bid Levels.

The landing page for paid search campaigns is a critical step on the conversion funnel. By re-thinking the page as a speed bump in the conversion process versus a page that needs to explain everything, you will find that people move onto the next step with less friction.

As always, make sure you are measuring the right conversion action by managing to the money (where do you get the dollars and are you optimizing to that point?) and optimize, optimize, optimize!

Filed Under: Landing Pages, Paid Search Marketing Tagged With: ,

How Do Search Engines Work?

September 15, 2011 By Leave a Comment

This is a presentation for Elizabeth Stearns’ Direct Marketing class at the University of Washington. I’ve been presenting to the class for the last 5 years and love updating this deck with the latest insight into how search engines work. This is a good intro deck for non-techies to get a foundational knowledge for how to approach search engine marketing. Let me know what you think!

What is Search Engine Marketing (SEM)? An Overview…

Filed Under: Search Engine Marketing Tagged With: , , , ,
Newer Posts »