All posts in Web Strategy

27 Posts

February 24, 2011 · Web Strategy

A Smart Strategy For Quickly Building A User Base For Your Beta

This morning I started seeing a message repeatedly hit my Twitter stream from friends. “Just requested an invite to @Yobongo, a new way to chat with people nearby. Join me! [LINK]“. So I clicked through.

Genius.

I don’t even know what Yobongo is, and I already want to share it with 3 friends because it’ll get me an early invite faster (Yobongo knows it’s me sharing because it uses a personal trackable link). Apparently, I’m not alone. A quick search on Yobongo on Twitter shows pages of results for the automated Tweet that’s sent out when you click “post to Twitter”. I’ve never seen this done before, but it’s smart. It’s a perfect blend of immediacy, the chance for exclusivity and a simple call to action that spreads the word.

February 18, 2011 · Social Media, Web Strategy

Why Most Facebook Marketing Doesn’t Work

There’s a great article on ReadWriteWeb today titled Why Most Facebook Marketing Doesn’t Work by Peter Yared, who is the Vice President and General Manager of Webtrend Apps. In the article Peter explains why promotions and consistent, lightweight engagement works consistently, and more importantly, why the following strategies generally fail:

Lots of Apps in One Tab
Sweepstakes
Photo and video contests
Like Blocks (where a user has to “like” a Facebook page in order to access a feature)
Extended permissions (asking a user for a laundry list of access to their profile)
Unbranded Apps
Dedicated Facebook Storefronts (He says they work now, but won’t soon)

This section of the conclusion stood out, especially in the context of Peter’s extensive experience with a broad range of approaches:

“Make sure your fans get something in return for liking your page with promotions likes offers for fans that they can easily redeem. The more lucrative the deals offer, the more sharing with friends will happen. Fans want things like exclusive products/services, drastically discounted prices akin to Groupon type deals, and early notification and registration for upcoming events, ideally exclusive to fans. Promotions should make the fan feel like they are a brand insider, not just a standard consumer.

A big secret of Facebook marketing is that it is easy and cheap to drive promotions using ads targeted only at your fans that link to landing tabs that deliver the offer and encourage fans to share to their newsfeed.

A brand on Facebook should be like a casual friend or neighbor and not try to suck people into heavy levels of interaction. What do you do with a friend? Comment on their photos, like their status, vote on their outfit. These types of interactions take seconds, not minutes, and definitely not hours.

A brand on Facebook should offer their users regularly updated, simple to interact with engagement features. Each of the engagement apps should be fully branded, and run in a separate tab with traffic driven from wall posts, newsfeed and Facebook ad units to increase engagement. Start with a personality quiz. Then two weeks later put up a poll. Then try a trivia app. For special events, put up a gifting app for Valentine’s Day, or for the holiday season, a holiday song card.

Some brands, like media properties and well-known consumer brands, get an immediate fan base for this type of lightweight engagement. For the rest, building a fan base on Facebook is no different than building a mailing list in the previous generation of the Internet. It takes consistent engagement, and builds over time.

Methods to accelerate growth include tying Facebook ad campaigns with engagement apps and driving traffic from the homepage. The apps should still be lightweight and fun, with the conversion goal of getting the user to like the brand.

The point is to regularly put up new, fresh engagement features that are easy and fun for users to interact with, that they will want to post to their wall and share with their friends. Then users will interact with your brand just like they interact with their friends on Facebook!”

February 4, 2011 · Web Strategy

On Soliciting Links for Link Campaigns

When most people think about link campaigns, they have solicited links in mind. They have heard about the process of contacting strangers and wheedling and cajoling a link out of them. If it sounds like hard work, you’re right, but it can pay big dividends, both in terms of visitors following the links to your site and raising your search rankings.. Those benefits are yours, however, only through careful selection of the sites to link to yours. Here are the kinds of questions you’ve got to ask yourself before soliciting a link from another site:

January 31, 2011 · Web Strategy

Why Pay A Professional to Help You Build Your Business Online?

Note: The following article is a guest post I wrote for Rahvalor, an online creative agency in New Jersey that I work with on varied projects. The post takes 5-10 minutes to read and provides a detailed overview of the thought process any business owner should follow when evaluating their online strategy, and is designed to help them get a quick, broad awareness of the potential costs, effort and issues they need to consider before going digital.

Finding the right people to help manage your online business isn’t easy. In fact, it’s getting harder every day. To an uneducated consumer, a simple Google search for web design services can be overwhelming. Along with hundreds of services that offer cheap do-it-yourself packages, there are thousands of freelance designers, boutique agencies and large companies all competing for your business. It’s a competitive market, and it’s important to be able to know what to look for and how to separate the wheat from the chaff. In this post, we’ll discuss some of the things that consumers looking for these services need to be aware of before they go shopping for a professional. A little bit of information, and knowing the right questions to ask while shopping goes a long way, and can mean the difference between running a successful online business and struggling or failing.

Here are a few things we tell potential clients to be aware of when they call us with an inquiry…

Read The Full Article

April 19, 2010 · Social Media, Top Posts, Web Strategy

I’m On A Boat! – How To Use Foursquare To Get 231 People to Check In To Your Restaurant In 1 Day

A few weeks ago, Joe Sorge showed us how he used Foursquare to get a flash mob of 150+ people into his restaurant, AJ Bombers. This Friday, with a little help from Milwaukee’s online community, he pulled together the most successful Foursquare-based event run by a restaurant to date in a 24 hour period, and proved that his Foursquare formula truly works for restaurants, and that it’s repeatable. By the end of the day on Friday, 231 people had checked in at AJ Bombers’s “I’m On A Boat!” badge party, and Joe had done more business at lunch in one day than he ever had. In this post, we’ll share some media and stats from the gathering, discuss exactly what it takes to pull off one of these events, and Joe will share some lessons learned and tips for using Foursquare to drive business.

March 6, 2010 · Business & Entrepreneurship, Community, Social Media, Technology, Top Posts, Web Strategy

Case Study: How To Use Foursquare To Draw A Crowd Into Your Restaurant

[tweetmeme] Restaurant owners are quickly discovering how to use social media tools like Twitter, Facebook and Yelp to their advantage and drive customers to their tables, but there’s a guy in Wisconsin doing it better than almost anyone else.

Joe Sorge, who runs a burger joint in Milwaukee called AJ Bombers, shot me a tweet yesterday to tell me about a Foursquare party they had this week that brought a flash mob of 161 Foursquare users to his restaurant. My eyebrows shot up when I read that number. 161 check ins in one day?! How could that be? There are only about three or four hundred Foursquare users total in Milwaukee?! Over 150 of them were in the same place, on the same afternoon?

When I called him up, Joe explained. They came to earn the highly coveted and elusive Foursquare “Swarm Badge” – something you can only get when 50 or more Foursquare users check in at the same place at the same time. I hadn’t heard of it, but apparently the promise of this coveted Foursquare badge can really draw a crowd.

March 4, 2010 · Business & Entrepreneurship, Web Strategy

Your Customers Leave A Trail Of Breadcrumbs Online

If you sell online, pay attention to the data trail your customers leave. There are golden nuggets of information about what your customers are like and what they want everywhere; Some really good stuff can be found in customer reviews, automated “customers also bought” or “you might also like” recommendations (just to name a few). Paying attention to these details can lead to great insights about what your customers actually want, how they use your product and what their other interests are. If you’re an author, what other books are they buying when they purchase yours? If you’re selling electronics, what are customers bundling their purchases with? You’ve got to ask yourself these questions. It could tell you a lot about services you should be offering, where your product might be lacking or even what partnerships and opportunities you might seek for win-win promotions.

flipcam This (above) is just one example. I’ve talked about how tons of people are hacking their Flip cameras because the company isn’t listening and offering a wide-angle lens adapter. There are a ton of blog posts and YouTube videos about how to glue-on wide angle lens adapters to make the Flip more useful…and these lenses only cost 30 bucks. If the company was listening, they’d be partnering with a lens maker (or making their own) and offering a premium version of the Flip with an adapter included. The trail of breadcrumbs around the Flip already shows that people are willing to pay for the parts and go through the extra hassle to get the improved performance, so this is a no-brainer.

What’s the trail of breadcrumbs around your product telling you about your customers?

January 6, 2010 · Community, Social Media, Web Strategy

Hacking The Flip – A Quick Lesson In Community Building

I’ve been an Flip Camera owner for about a year now. I’m actually on my second one. I started with a 60 minute Flip Mino and then sold it and upgraded to a 120 minute Ultra HD a few months ago. The great thing about The Flip cameras is the simplicity. Fits in your pocket, simple interface, drag and drop video files, easy upload to the web. The simplicity in a few minor areas, though, is also a pain. The 2x zoom is limiting and when you hold it at arms length (which is exactly what you want to do when you want to be in the shot) and it crops tight on your mug. There’s no Flip Camera yet that allows you to attach a wide angle lens. Fortunately, people on the web are quickly finding their own solutions to the problem and helping each other out by uploading YouTube videos and writing blog posts etc about how to make the camera do what they want. Do a quick Google search for “Flip Wide Angle Lens” to see what I mean. There are tons of people out there who are happily duct taping and super gluing wide angle lenses on their cameras to get what they want.

Brian Shaler‘s come up with a particularly elegant solution using a cheap magnetic lens converter…

What strikes me as odd here is that Cisco hasn’t seemed to have caught on. They might be listening, but they certainly haven’t made changes to their product based on the huge volume of “hack your flip” YouTube videos out there that tell a consistent story about what people want from their cameras. Why the hell wouldn’t you just slap a cheap lens adapter attachment on the front of one of the higher priced models and sell cheap wide-angle lenses on your site?

There’s a great lesson here about listening to the web and building community around products the right way. Connecting with your customers and building strong, loyal communities starts with understanding how people are actually using your product, not about getting them to conform to the way you want them to use it. If people want your product to do something that it doesn’t already, they will find work-arounds and share them on the web, which expose the short comings of your design AND connect your users in places where you can’t control the conversation. If I were Cisco, I’d seriously consider creating social spaces online for their hacker community to share their content. There’s obviously a large segment of people who are so happy with their Flips that they’re willing to SUPER GLUE bits and pieces on the front and keep on shooting away. If you give those individuals a place to find each other, they all find the best hack, and they’ll be happier customers for it. And guess what…if Cisco joined in the conversation in these spaces and reached out to their hackers, empathized and told them that they’re working on the issue, they could direct those individuals to sign up for a free email notification list where they could find out about new product releases and Cisco would suddenly have a hyper targeted group of loyal customers to tap on launch days that they could easily please with special launch day offers etc etc.

Smart companies treat feedback groups (like the Flip Hackers) as an asset that can be nurtured, developed and used to their advantage. Strong, loyal communities don’t have to start out as die hard fans.

October 6, 2009 · Blogging and Writing, Business & Entrepreneurship, Web Strategy

Using New Media, New Marketing, and New Thinking to Create Bestselling Books

This lecture from Seth Godin is around 2 years old, but the ideas still resonate strongly, especially in the wake of recent discussions about Chris Anderson’s new book Free and the concepts of Freemium and Freeconomics. If you’re currently writing a book, or thinking of writing a book one day, you should get a lot out of this. The core concepts to keep in mind as you’re going through this are:

Books are souvenirs (give ideas away and people buy)
Permission is your only asset (relationships matter)
Conversations are (the best) marketing
Make words for readers, not readers for words (ideas that spread sell, so get the order right)
Blogs work (and continue to pay off over time), and
It’s not about selling books (it’s about spreading ideas)

September 17, 2009 · Design, Social Media, Web Strategy

Core Principals For Creating Robust and Vibrant Online Communities

In this presentation, Christina Wodtke (LinkedIn) shares some core principals for creating online communities, and discusses critical design decisions that help a community thrive. I flipped through it this morning and found it useful. It provides a good framework for learning about and discussing how to promote desired behaviors with interface design, and provides some good examples of who’s doing it right. Some notable principals that Christina highlights are:

Kollocks’ 4 Motivations for Contributing: Reciprocity, reputation, increased sense of efficacy and attachment to an need of a group
B=f(P+E) – Behavior is a function of a Person and his Environment
The importance of the esteem layer in Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs
The AOF Method – Defining your Activity, Identifying your Social Objects and Choosing your Features
Communicating Identity & Commanders Intent
The Power Law Of Participation

Designing the Social Web (for Web2.0 expo)

View more presentations from cwodtke.

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