Mike's Definition 6 Blog

Taming the Social Media Beast

Friday, October 2, 2009 by Mike Reese

Despite recent articles claiming the decline of adoption for social networks like Facebook and Twitter, social networking is an ever-growing, ever-expanding beast. Consider for a moment, that MySpace and Facebook really just got the whole thing started. Now there are networks popping up everywhere, corporate networks like Yammer, entrepreneurial networks like ParnterUp and advanced social aggregation tools like the promise of Google Wave.

Slowly but surely, even traditional companies, with traditional practices and traditional mindsets, are realizing the importance of social. Don't believe me? Here's a real world example: 2 months ago I felt like the last person on earth that hadn't engaged in some form of social media. My friends, my wife, my family and my coworkers all had MySpace pages, Facebook pages and Twitter accounts. I was proud, a renegade, a leader, not a follower! Now look at me, as I write this blog, I'm monitoring Yammer communications from Definition 6, Tweets from my favorite people, I've checked my Facebook page twice and I just submitted a request to Google to be a beta tester for Google Wave even though I know I'm too late. Believe me, social media is relevant!

Okay, now what? Well, before you go building out your social media strategy and corporate policy, take some time to understand what impact social is currently having on your online presence and your brand. My suggestion: start simple, work with your website analytics team and develop a baseline. What volume of traffic comes from social networks? What is the bounce rate of those visits? What is the conversion rate of those visits? What is the retained visit conversion rate? (thank you Brandt, awesome article about meaningful conversion metrics!) And, if at all possible, monetize clicks from social. Odds are, there will be some form of expenditure for your social media strategy, baseline these metrics before you begin or you may never know if you're succeeding.

Don't rely on website analytics alone! Imagine this scenario. Scott, Jeremy, Jack and Mitch are looking for the best Vegas dinner destination prior to Frank's bachelor party festivities. Jack gets a promotional email from your restaurant describing the best Saturday night drink deals in town. Scott has been watching Twitter for "Vegas Restaurant" tweets hoping to get an indication of the best spot. Jeremy has been on a dozen restaurant review sites. They all come together in Google Wave to discuss. They invite other friends and family to chime in on their last Vegas experience. They finally decide on your place because of the drink deal (good choice). Mitch calls in the reservation and the Vegas plans are set. In all, across numerous networking sites, there were 21 mentions of your brand, 14 people commented about your restaurant, 13 other people hadn't even heard of your restaurant before conversation "Wave". And a $500 dinner was booked at your restaurant...all without anyone ever going to your website!

Hard to measure the impact of social media if you're just looking at website analytics. You've succeeded at integrated online marketing, but you may never know it. Work with an interactive agency capable of measuring, baselining current social impact (website and elsewhere), as well as the capability to develop a social media strategy that meets your objectives and expected ROI.

Believe The Hype: Open Source Web CMS

Friday, July 10, 2009 by Mike Reese

If you were involved in a CMS (or WCM - Web Content Management) purchase decision 5 years ago, you likely heard about the "open source" phenomenon. And, you probably cringed at the thought of supporting your revenue-producing, lead-generation website with low cost alternative to the Interwoven and Vignette giants. Cringe no more, open source solutions not only provide very similar features, the good ones are now fully supported as well.

Here's a recent article written by JT Smith on Website Magazine. (Choosing An Open Source Web Content Management System) He successfully details the differences between closed and open source systems (without bashing the Big Guys). Ultimately, every company has their own decision to make, their own contstraints, processes and budget concerns. A WCMS solution has to adhere to these points, so open source may not be for everyone. But it's certainly worth taking a look at some of JT's points:

As your business grows, your needs will change. The open source model provides a mechanism for adapting to that change without relying on proprietary software to catch up to evolving trends and new technologies.

Budget...Budget. If budget is a concern, and likely it is these days, open source makes sense. Period. Save the budget for your other interactive marketing strategies.

Fully supported. Lack of support used to be a pitfall of open source solutions. That has changed. You'll find that well established, reputable solutions offer not only support, but also a vast community of developers and end users.

Somewhere in between. Open source CMS does not necesitate custom application development. Nor does it necesitate costly professional services contracts. It really falls in the middle. The benefit of open source becomes the ability to lean in either direction.

I love JT's quote: "Using closed source CMS can be likened to buying a new car with the hood welded shut, the wheels permanently attached, and your only maintenance option is a visit to the dealership."

Give open source a look. At Definition 6, we utilize one of the "good ones", Umbraco. We've been through several (> 20), successful implementations for a variety of clients. Including websites in the travel, telecommunications and online retail industries. I'm proud to say that we're also the first certified solutions developer in North America.

Benchmark For Success

Friday, June 19, 2009 by Mike Reese

In my previous post regarding the need to include auto-generated emails within a email marketing strategy, I reflected on the lack of love given to emails automatically generated through end-user website activity. It's time to give benchmarking some love too!

The promise of a new web project or marketing initiative leaves stakeholders dreaming of online success, higher conversion rates, higher traffic volumes and positive bottom line results. Quite often, the strategy for measuring success gets lost in the shuffle.

Some of you reading this might be thinking, "Why waste the time? Higher conversion equals success." In some cases you may be right on track with that thought, but most of you probably know it's more than that. Success can be measured in many ways, I'll get into that in second. But understand that it's worth a deeper dive into the metrics that are important to you, your company or your industry, before you start on a new initiative. Ask yourself what data you'll be reviewing a week after a website launch to determine if you're on your way towards a positive ROI. It might be PPC reporting, website analytics, email marketing, CRM comparison or another set of metrics that is specific to your industry. I've seen it before, 2 months after redesign and stakeholders are trying to figure out what to measure. By that point, you're probably not going to have the baseline data needed to show a comparison. Solution? Benchmark. And do it early. The strategy and planning phase of any project is the perfect time to start thinking about it.

So what metrics should you benchmark? There is no perfect answer. Sally, who manages an online retail business will have different success factors than Frank, the owner of a property management services company. Sally cares about online sales and revenue generation, but Frank wants to see an increase in online lead generation. It can be a daunting task, so here are a few good places to start:

Website analytics - If your initiative includes the enhancement or redesign of a website, start the project with an examination of your existing analytics data. If you don't have any, stop reading this and go get it. Figure out what will be important to you later. It may be as simple as traffic volume, visit duration, cost per ad spend or conversion rates. But you may find a need to collect custom data as well. Almost every analytics package out there has that capability.
External data - In this context, external data is performance data obtained through your CRM package or 3rd party sources. Call center volumes or in-store data would fall into this category. You need an adequate way to access it and you need historical references.
Email marketing - If your initiative includes modifications to email marketing programs, make sure your provider is collecting meaningful data on open and click-through rates. And make sure you'll have access to historical data to create a trending analysis.

There are plenty of other data sources to benchmark against to determine success. The main goal is to ensure you have the data you'll need to measure success after you've spent time and money to get there. And do it early. Your ROI calculation will depend on it.

Auto-Generated Emails Need Love Too

Friday, June 12, 2009 by Mike Reese

As an interactive marketing agency, we deal in both the email marketing and the application development arena. Most of the time these two items go hand-in-hand. A company builds or enhances their website while marketing that website through emails, offering special deals, newsletters, subscription services and a variety of other services and products to its users. The combination of these can show impactfull and bottom-line results. But what often gets lost is auto-generated emails from the website or application. Marketing departments tend to create silos of activities, there's email marketing, and then there's website creation and management. Time and money is spent on creating an effective email marketing program that supports online activities. Auto-generated email should fall into this category as well.

There are various reasons this important form of communication get overlooked, but why are they important in the first place:

Branding - Any email generated from your domain represents your brand. Guess what, users aren't always left with an impression of your brand based on their website visit, they're often left with a confirmation, newsletter or subscription email based on their website activities. Why let that confirmation email negatively impact how you're perceived? It's just as important as that promotion email you're gearing up to send them next week.

Call-to-action - Auto-generated emails are often utilized to seek verification or ask users to continue the process started at the website.

Communication - If a user feels strongly enough about your website or your company in general, they're going to seek more information and allow you to keep in touch with them through automated emails. Keep them enganged and thinking about your products or services.

So where do most companies fall short? The biggest thing that we see is that auto-generated emails simply are not given much thought during the website enhancement or build process. As an afterthought, it will never be an adequate means of communication or engagment with your customers. Spend some time with the design. You spent time reviewing comps and making adjustments for various ESP's for standard email marketing initiatives, do the same for your auto-generated emails. ExactTarget provides a great reference for do's and don'ts conerning email marketing. Spend some time and follow as many best practices as possible. Make your calls-to-action precise and easy to comprehend (even 2 months later). Represent your brand, make sure your emails maintain company branding standards.

People tend to hold onto emails. Why not? Storage capacity is longer an issue at most ESP or client programs. If they're going to hold onto something that represents your business, make it worthwhile for them when they open it again 2 months later. It is still a representation or your company and they can still act on something you wanted them to previously. Don't be afraid to give auto-generated emails some love.

Consider a Content Delivery Network to meet website performance needs

Friday, May 29, 2009 by Mike Reese

If you've heard of Content Delivery Networks (CDN) then you probably either work for one or you've had issues with website performance. Or maybe you believe that there is a potential concern with increasing website traffic and how your application will handle it. First of all, if you're facing the fear of an expanding user base, you've obviously done something right. So how do you avoid being the one left holding the bag while end-users fall off your site in droves? Maybe a CDN is the right way to go...but maybe not.

As a Technical Project Manager for Definition 6, I've had the opportunity to work with clients and projects that require, at least, an initial discussion regarding performance, and others who simply do not. Let me focus on those companies first. If you own a lead generation website that leverages alternatives means for producing sales and receives 2,000 - 5,000 unique visits daily, odds are, you're not going to need advanced performance capabilities. If you are noticing issues, then take a look at your production configuration. Are you on a shared solution? Are you serving up heavy, rich media content? Are your servers out-of-date and unmanaged. Take a closer look and you might find that the potentially expensive CDN solution isn't necessary.

But for website owners that are out of capitol to invest in peformance increasing devices for a struggling system, or for those that wish to provide enhanced, rich media content to users, then look at a CDN as a possible solution to your problems. I recently read a post on www.websitemagazine.com by Peter Prestipino in which he introduced TinyCDN (www.tinycdn.com). If you've researched CDN's, you know how expensive it can be, depending on the size of your content and frequency of delivery. TinyCDN is a good example of a feasible solution from a complexity standpoint and budget concerns.

If you're considering one of these options, hopefully you've taken the time to discover what is causing your website's slow performance. What you don't want to do is spend your budget on improving usability and find out after implementation of those changes that users are experiencing the same degraded performance. Take the time to baseline your performance metrics, from an application and server standpoint. There are numerous tools available that can provide these key metrics. Take a look at your analtyics package as well, what is it telling you? Application can't keep up with continuous requests? Or maybe you've had a dramatic increase in requests to view your new product video. If you're in a pinch, give something like TinyCDN a try. A band-aid solution might not be so bad if it's reasonably priced and avoids the loss of users.