All posts tagged Web Strategy

15 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!”

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

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.

July 31, 2009 · Business & Entrepreneurship, Social Media

Actions Speak Louder Than Advertising

Razorfish released a report this month that’s worth spending some time with. The report has some valuable insights on how social influence marketing is shifting the advertising game on the web. A survey with 1,000 consumers plus six months worth of conversational data serve as the backbone of the findings. The sections are digestible, easy to scan and each contain an “implications for brands” bulleted summary that contain quite a few noteworthy nuggets. Many thanks to my friend Vada for seeing the value in this and and sending it along…

What The Fluent Report Covers:

The importance of social media in making purchasing decisions, and how brands need to develop a credible voice, socialize with customers and provide a return on emotion (ROE?) to their customers.
How traditional top-down branding will become increasingly impotent as social media grows
How (and what types of) Influencers Drive brand affinity
How influencers impact the marketing funnel, and what type of influencers matter most at different stages
How “herding” around top social networks and the emerging choices of people to focus on a few social networks (instead of spreading themselves thin on many networks) is leading to consolidation and heavy clustering around “winning” social media hubs
How social features are becoming integrated into online display advertising.
How social media is becoming both a paid and unpaid distribution mechanism for advertising content
How tools like Facebook Connect are moving the social graph out onto the Web
10 Ways to Make Twitter Work For Your Brand

Fluent: The Razorfish Social Influence Marketing Report

Download A Copy Of The Full Report Here

This report touches on how Social Influence Marketing encompasses every part of marketing and every dimension of an organization. A survey with 1,000 consumers plus six months worth of conversational data serve as the backbone of the findings in this report. We also introduce the SIM score, a simple but groundbreaking index for the social web.

March 24, 2009 · Community, Cyberculture, Social Media, Top Posts, Web Strategy

Status Culture – Public vs Private and Why It Matters

[tweetmeme]I recently made the decision to stop feeding my Twitter posts into Facebook. The reason is simple – I continually get negative feedback from my non-Twittering Facebook friends on how I update my status. Some hated how often I updated, some didn’t get what “@” and “RT” was, some didn’t like that they couldn’t join in on conversations that weren’t actually taking place inside Facebook’s walls, and some people didn’t like how “impersonal” most of my updates were (I use Twitter like a shared feed reader a lot).

Not all the feedback was bad, of course – I don’t mean to exaggerate. I’ve gotten quite a few Facebook friends into Twitter because they noticed the difference in how it’s used and saw the value. No, my choice was because there’s a significant difference in status culture between the two platforms, and, because I’m a heavy Twitter user, I would continue to violate social rules inside of Facebook (and piss off my friends).

Recognizing the emerging differences in status culture is an important step to understanding how people behave on either platform and how we can shape interaction with good design. In this post I’ll offer some insights into the differences between Twitter and Facebook, how they change people’s behavior, and argue that the differences in public-ness and prive-ness cause fundamental and important shifts in how people interact and use each platform.

Friends vs. Followers: How We Group Contacts And Establish Relationships Matters

How we establish and organize our relationships makes a difference to how we interact on any platform. The design of the connection mechanism drives who we (can) connect with, how we connect, and how we display our (implied) relationships (and social responsibility to others). Makes intuitive sense, right?

March 4, 2009 · Community, Design, Social Media, Technology, Web Strategy

Designing Remarkable, Viral Widgets

Image Credit: http://opengardensblog.futuretext.com

As the popularity of blogging, social media and open source development continue to explode, widgets are taking root as a mainstay of the online social experience. The interdependency of self-publishing, social media and open source platforms are ensuring that widgets, those bits of code that allow us to aggregate, publish and share a wide variety of different content/information in one place, are here to stay. In fact, the rapid growth in online cultural trends like lifestreaming, microblogging and social browsing is creating increased demand for ways users can pull information from a diverse array of profiles and information sources, aggregate them and publish them quickly and easily. Said simply, widgets help us glue the web together, and as online social ecosystems become more complex, and as web sites and web based applications rely on more underlying services, widgets will prove to be a core component of the self-publishing culture and infrastructure.

For all of these reasons, we can estimate that companies will continue to throw a lot of time, money and energy at creating widgets and widget-like applications that online goers want to use. That said, not all widgets are created equal, and only the very best widgets spread (which is the whole idea). In this post I want to explore what makes a remarkable viral widget and offer developers some design tips…

#1 It’s Not About You.

Widgets that are perceived as ads rather than tools lose, plain and simple. Widget design should always be about the publisher/user and their content. Developers can put a small trademark on it, a link back to their service and a “grab this (for yourself)” button, but that better not be the focus. Subtlety in marketing is critical. It’s easy for developers to get excited about building an “ultra viral” widget that promotes the heck out of their service and brand, and it’s natural to want to put their mark in a prominent place that steals the show. Big mistake. Widgets that win put the user’s content front and center. Self-publishing isn’t like fashion. There are no label whores. Users want to highlight their stuff, not yours. The moment a reader sees a widget, interacts with it and THEN thinks “can I get one of these and do this myself?” is the point that they’ll start looking for a trademark. That moment should be the first time they notice your marketing. Viral is about the utility of the tool, not the marketing.

#2 One Size Fits Few

If you think you can make a popular one-size-fits-all widget these days, you’re dead wrong. The one-widget-for-all model is dead. More and more amateurs are diving into code and are customizing their blogs and social profiles in all kinds of different ways. People know that creating a unique web site design is key to blogging and online-social success. Radical individualism IS the norm when it comes to web design. For that reason, users want widgets that fit in a variety of spaces to fit THEIR unique design, so make it easy for them to get what they want. Developers should consider designing an easy to understand installation wizard that allows users to easily create a widget of any size they chose TO THE PIXEL, no matter how wacky. Flexibility will win out over standardization. Maybe even offer a few shape-formatting options. Help them look good and they will love you for it. You’ll be sewing the seeds of evangelism.

#3 Make It Customizable & Reflective of The User’s Personality

Personalization and being different is everything on the web. Widgets need to fit that trend. Give the publisher every facility you can to personalize the widget so their instance of it is different than any other user’s instance. This could be as simple as letting them select a fixed color scheme OR as complicated as pulling the user’s account data in from other services (for example, FriendFeed’s feed widget pulls delicious tags, twitter updates, Flickr photos etc all into one feed).

#4 Dynamic, User-Created Content Increases Engagement

Giving people tools to make their site(s) more engaging should be a primary goal of every widget developer. A lot of developers out there seem to forget this, which baffles me. Good widgets are useful tools for the user FIRST and branding for the developer a distant second. Users should see an obvious value proposition when they ask themselves “How can I use this to enhance MY brand/message/content mix?”. On the flip-side, readers who engage a user’s widget are asking “What does the information this widget delivers say about the author?” If the answer is “nothing”, reader engagement completely vanishes and wont return. You only really get one chance to convince a reader that your widget is something they should pay attention to (and might want for themselves). If they decide that it’s not, readers will simply remember that the widget is there, and that they should ignore it and skip to primary content. Ad blindness works the same way. It’s the developers job to turn a widget into a node of interaction, and the way to do that is to allow widget users to create and display THEIR content with it. When readers see fresh streams of dynamic, user-created content in a widget, they’ll remember it, return to it and interact more.

#5 Make It Simple Stupid and Easy To Maintain

Simplicity of installation is just one part of the challenge. Making a widget easy to maintain is the other. To keep a widget engaging, a user needs to keep creating dynamic content, which is not easy these days given the complex array of things we do online in any given day. Developers need to be sensitive to the fact that most people who blog and use social media are dying for simplicity – many have too many accounts and use to many services to manage it all consistently…the time and effort required to add yet ANOTHER widget (and new behaviors) that they need to manage will (in most cases) lead a user to decide against joining your widget community at all. Widgets that win will allow users to create content by doing the things they already do. For example, a widget that showed the most recent items in my Netflix queue would update automatically as I updated my queue in Netflix, and not require any additional work on my part. AdaptiveBlue’s widgets are a great example of this.

#6 Individualization and Community

One last point before I wrap up. Widgets often represent a user in a greater community – sometimes they act like a badge that identifies the individual as part of a tribe (think mybloglog). Although I’ve discussed above how making a widget personal and customizable is important, developers should also remember that if a widget is about community building, allowing users to highlight their affiliation and status within that community is also very important. People don’t want to just stand out from a crowd, they want to belong to your community. Let them show that affiliation proudly.

In short, the above are just some thoughts I have on building great widgets based on my experiences and observations. What are yours?

January 28, 2009 · Business & Entrepreneurship, Cyberculture, Design, Technology, Top Posts, Web Strategy

Emergence: What Developers and Entrepreneurs Can Learn From The Evolution Of The Retweet

[tweetmeme]All you systems theory buffs out there are probably familiar with the concept of “emergence”. For the rest of you, here’s a quick and dirty definition: Emergence describes the way that complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions. The idea of emergence, although it might sound complicated, is important when thinking about social media because it helps us understand how cyberculture has developed and how our rules and rituals that we use when we interact online continue to evolve. When social scientists who study cyberculture find a new pattern of behavior or ritual that is unique to the online world, they often call it “an emergent behavior”, which is a fancy name for a social rule that a lot of people follow that no one person mandated. I’d like to talk a little bit about this in the context of a platform we all know well: Twitter.

The Evolution Of The Retweet

Since it’s launch in July 2006, Twitter has grown to over a million users. According to TechCrunch, as of March last year, Twitter users were firing off around 3 million tweets a DAY. Chew on that for a second. There’s a community out there of over a million people generating millions of tiny messages daily from a variety of different devices and applications (web, mobile, desktop clients etc). What’s important to realize (for the purposes of this discussion) is that the creators of Twitter never published a list of social rules for its users, and said “GO”. No one ever told us how to use the platform. We just did. We figured it out as we went along. We watched others. We copied. Those of us who were innovators tried new ways to “tweet” and other people noticed and copied us. Over a year and a half after Twitter’s launch, over a million of us that use Twitter know that it has social rules and etiquette – these are the patterns that emergence describes. We reinforce those rituals every time we use Twitter by following the rules we’ve made for ourselves (and by reprimanding those that don’t).

Retweeting is a perfect example of one of these emergent, ritualistic behaviors in Twitter culture. Retweeting has rules associated with it, and the behavior has evolved over time. I remember when it was common for people to full-on write “Retweeting @username” in front of a tweet, burning up their 140 characters just to give another person credit. Necessity for brevity, of course, has resulted in “RT” being the universally understood indicator over time, but there was no rule that said they had to give another person credit at all… but they figured out a simple way to do it because they wanted to. Because it’s the right thing to do. Within months, everyone was doing it. Now it’s a mainstay of Twitter culture…at least until someone else comes up with a better, briefer way to re-broadcast someone else’s message while giving credit. Who knows…maybe it’ll end up being just R @username. Culture and social rules are always evolving.

Why Entrepreneurs & Developers Should Care About Emergent Culture:

Since Twitter opened up it’s API, countless numbers of entrepreneurial-minded developers have released applications and services that integrate with and build on Twitter (my favorites include apps and add-ons like Adaptive Blue’s Glue, Tweetdeck, and Tweetsville for the iPhone). Here’s the problem – because of Twitter’s growth and popularity, there are A LOT of people developing apps that don’t really do anything different! Some of them look neat, and the UI is pretty, but the fundamental functionality across many apps is the same, which is BORING. There is nothing remarkable about something that takes what everyone does already and repackages it into something that just looks prettier. What a waste of creative energy. A shiny new UI that does the same thing still makes it difficult for consumers to decide what to use. The applications that DO stand out, however, are ones that have taken into account new, emergent behaviors and built them into their design.

Tweetdeck and Tweetsville are perfect examples of apps that stand out for this very reason. They were some of the first to incorporate cultural trends and add automated “Retweet” functionality into their UI. The developers saw an opporuntity to take an emergent behavior that was cumbersome (cutting and pasting someone elses message and adding “RT @username” to the message) and automate it. Brilliant. THIS IS DIFFERENT. It adds value. In all the noise, these were apps that got noticed and talked about because they were fundamentally more useful because the developers were in tune with the culture.

Some Insights for Developers and Entrepreneurs:

So what can we learn from this example? Here are some quick insights for entrepreneurial-minded developers that want to pack a punch in the market…

Developers, when you build a completely new application or service and release it into the world, people will use it in unexpected, unanticipated ways. Watch the crowd. Notice the patterns. They are tell-tales for what your next design steps should be. Never stop tweaking.
Entrepreneurs, if you’re building on top of an already-popular platform, you need to be keenly aware of the existing culture and tailor your service or app not only to what people are expected to do, but to incorporate emerging behaviors into design decisions. Repackaging existing functionality into something that looks good isn’t enough and won’t get you noticed. Culture is always evolving. Finding emerging behaviors that create needs that haven’t been addressed yet by others is a golden opportunity ripe for exploitation.
Every platform has it’s own culture, social rules and etiquette, but many online social rules are common across platforms. Take these common patterns into account. These are your staples that should never be ignored.
Heavy Users who are very popular on a social service act like beacons that guide the behavior of large followings. Watch them for patterns. They are the ones that will pick up on new and useful behaviors and broadcast them to the rest. They are people who turn early patterns into mainstays of culture.
When a service forces people to interact in new ways, new patterns are born. Innovators aren’t always the people who are heavy users from the beginning. They are just the creative ones that see and exploit opportunities to use a service in new ways, sometimes unintentionally. Because these people aren’t necessarily popular, you’ll have to work hard to identify them and engage them for feedback. Make giving feedback easy. Contact people directly who are doing new things with what you’ve built. Ask them why. The answers you get might floor you.

Credit Where Credit is due:

Tim O’Reilly was the very first person I ever saw “Retweet” someone else’s message (it must have been some time around ETech 08, because that’s when I found out about Twitter) so I just wanted to offer him an “innovator” shout-out. I remember seeing that word “Retweet” and thinking “huh, a twitter-footnote! How honorable and transparent!” From then on I did the same. Tim, if you’re reading this, do you remember who the first person you ever Retweeted was?

September 17, 2008 · Blogging and Writing, Web Strategy

The Win-Win Of Good Linking Etiquette

I link, you link, we all link. So why not do it the right way? Following a few simple rules when you create links helps search engines, helps your site rank, and boosts your credibility as a blogger. If you’re still creating links that look like this – “You can read more about linking by clicking HERE“ – you’re going to look like a noob, insult the intelligence of your readers, confuse search engines and lose any SEO benefit you might have gotten from creating a quality link. Bottom line, how you link is just as important as what you link to. Here’s a few quick tips for good linking etiquette:

Search Engines Are Dumb. Help Them Out.

Fortunately, Google’s systems haven’t become self-aware yet, and while spiders can recognize and assign relevance scores to your links based on the words you use, they aren’t smart enough to derive meaning from language the way a reader can.

Let’s say you’ve just written a life-changing post about how hot Margaret Thatcher is. To add value for your readers, you decide to link out to Margaret Thatcher’s Wikipedia page (so that people can see her photo and instantly agree with you). If you link like this…”Check out Margaret Thatcher’s smoldering pic here“, web crawlers see this -

<a href=”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_thatcher“> here</a>

Any human can tell you that the relevance of the keyword “here” is ZIP, but the search engine’s can’t. So instead, you want the robot crawling your site to gobble up a nice keyword-rich link by using the most relevant keyword for what you’re pointing to like this -

“Check out this super-hot photo of Margaret Thatcher!”

Now the crawler sees this…

<a href=”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_thatcher“> Margaret Thatcher</a>

Kudos to you. You just made the search engines a bit brighter by pointing them in the right direction. Same work, relevance = 100%.

Boost Your Rankings

If you link correctly, the quality and relevance of the links in your site can have a positive effect on SEO rankings. Search engines use algorithms to determine a site’s relevance and popularity in relation to what people are searching for. One of the factors affecting the site’s ranking for any given search term is how many relevant links are contained within the site.

There are two types of links – internal and external. Internal links are those which link one page of your site to another. Internal links show search engines the breadth and density of your site and highlight important sections for search terms people use. External links, by contrast, are those where your site links to another site, or when another site links to yours. Both types of links are important to search engines, but with rankings, relevant external links (both in-coming and out-going) matter more. In-coming links, of course, matter most, but relevant keyword-rich linking out definitely helps.

Readers Appreciate Good Linking Habits

Whenever I find a person using the phrase “click here” for a link, I cringe a little. Not only is it just a little too early 90′s, it insults my intelligence as a reader. Everyone gets how linking works. There’s no need to explicitly point a person to the link with your words. We all know what links look like. We all use them. Besides, when you change the flow of your sentences to include calls to action like “click here”, the whole thing just doesn’t flow as well.

Aside from not having their intelligence challenged, readers also appreciate being able to scan your posts for keywords. While it might be shocking to bloggers who are a liiiiittle bit too enamored with their own writing skills, not everyone reads every word. In fact, studies have shown that most people don’t read at all – they scan (I know, right? How dare they! pfff) – so making relevant keywords pop out of the text is a good thing because it allows visitors on your site to skip reading every word and find what they’re looking for fast.

Ok, netizens…go forth and link with style and purpose!

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