5 Tips on Crowdsourcing Content for Marketing

Content is an essential vehicle for corporate storytelling, attracting and engaging customers to buy, Lee Odden blogs. Organizations are beginning to get that, but struggle with content sourcing and how to scale. Besides hiring an editorial staff complete with corporate journalists, one of the most valuable sources of content for online marketing comes from your brand’s community.

Tapping in to what customers care about related to your products /services and what your brand stands for can be a gold mine of meaningful content. Here are 5 of those tips with some additional commentary based on discussions with audience members at a recent SES San Francisco conference:

Interviews. Raising questions is one of the most basic ways to crowdsource content. The method to employ depends on the desired outcome. Asking the community for suggestions of whom to interview and what questions to ask is a great way to get people involved. Interviewing industry thought leaders provides the brand’s audience with unique content and creates a positive association between the “brandividual” and the company.
Example: Tapping multiple industry thought leaders for their definition of “content curation” for a blog post that received substantial distribution and return visits.

Social Q&A. Yahoo Answers, LinkedIn, and sites like Quora can provide very useful platforms to present questions and attract answers from a variety of people. Of course, your intent needs to be clear and permission for reuse should be obtained before republishing. Those familiar with the Q&A communities can word questions to attract replies from specific influentials who might not otherwise respond to a content participation pitch via email.
Example: Posting a question to LinkedIn related to the “shift in direct marketing budgets to digital“, that received great quality responses and over 30 comments on the post.

Contests Resulting in Content. Examples of contests in which consumers produce their own videos and share images abound on the social web. Search engines love any kind of content, especially text.
Example: In the past, Marketing Pilgrim ran a great contest for a search marketing scholarship. The articles written by contestants drive traffic to Andy’s website and also become content on it. To top it off, the articles were compiled into an e-book.

Comment Feedback Loop. One of the most meaningful ways for a community to engage with a brand is through comments on a company blog. Asking readers to participate in a dialogue by commenting can result in content that is better than the original blog post. Brands can then recognize blog commenters by drawing attention to the “best of” comments through a separate blog post or in a newsletter.
Example: See TopRank’s Online Marketing Newsletter for an example of this in action, where comments are curated into a section called, “What the Online Marketing Blog Community Has to Say”.

Book Authoring by Community. Reaching out to industry experts to share their insights as part of a larger project, such as a book in print or an eBook can be very effective.
Example: Author Michael Miller did this with Online Marketing Heroes, of which I was a part. He interviewed 25 successful marketers; the results of those interviews became the book published by Wiley. Numerous companies have connected with industry thought leaders for content and compiled the responses into an eBook. A good example is Jay Baer’s – Staggering Social Media Insights: The Best of the Twitter 20 eBook.

This is really just the tip of the iceberg for creative content crowdsourcing ideas. Each industry and community is different and with quality analysis and creative ideas, organizations can accomplish content creation objectives as well as better engaging and growing their social networks.

Have you overcome content creation and scaling issues by crowdsourcing? What creative content sourcing ideas have you implemented? Let us know by leaving a comment.

Netflix Teaches a Valuable Lesson in Social Media Marketing

If you are a successful online movie streaming service with a DVD rental wing, are facing incredible pressures from competition and changing technologies and need to increase your prices and differentiate your service then it’s only natural that you will be using social media marketing with every breath, right? Well, umm…maybe not. This is a lesson Netflix simply forgot to take into account says online strategist David Amerland.

When Netflix decided to change its name to Qwikster not only did it lay itself open to just about every joke you can imagine concerning the company’s literacy but it also, it seems, forgot to trademark the name and did not check to see if the name was available in social media. The result of the oversight is nothing less than disastrous. Qwikster, is a handle already owned by a Twitter user who has a joint-smoking Elmo (the Sesame Street character) as his avatar. The account belongs to a student by the name of Jason Castillo, whose Tweets around recreational drugs, sex, games and music have a surreal, hypnotic quality all of their own and are a world apart from the mundane concerns surrounding the renting of DVDs or the streaming of movies.

Without a trademark on the name and with Jason Castillo actively posting, Twitter can do nothing to make him close his account or hand it over. Amusement aside, this illustrates first, that even a company like Netflix, which in many ways ‘gets’ the web, has not yet made social media marketing part of its DNA. Second, that the moment you take your eye off the ball and forget that we live in an age where social media is pervasive and capable of creating a massive boost or being an unforeseen hurdle, that’s when you are most likely to stumble.

Reed Hastings, Netflix’s CEO recently had to use Google’s social network, Google+ to apologize to Netflix users for the rise in Netflix prices and also explain why it was necessary and why the company had no option but to do it. He also posted an apologetic note on the Netflix blog. His opening confessional tone aside, it is clear that had there actually been thought put into social media as a valid means of communication from the very beginning, Netflix would now not be in hot water with its users nor would it be the butt of jokes concerning the pot-smoking Elmo’s Tweets.

Here are some lessons taught by Netflix’ social marketing faux pas:

1. Use the social media channel correctly. Social media is a communication channel first and foremost. Marketing on it is incidental and incremental, requiring a lot of effort for relatively little appreciable return. Communication however is instant.

2. Make communication with your public a core activity. Do not treat social media communication as something you bolt on as an afterthought. Social media is about creating transparency and a two-way conversation. Try to use it as a new form of Press Release and it is likely to explode in your face.

3. Create a dialogue. Does any company have a 100% grasp on its customers? They all work with a marketing persona in mind, yes they all have a certain demographic profile they operate with and yes, again, every company has some idea of the age-range and income of its core customers, but all of these figures make sense only when viewed from a distance. You’d be pressed to find a single person who precisely fits any demographic, marketing persona or even age-range income combination (though, it has to be said the latter is usually the ones which come closer because of their built-in imprecision). To suddenly have the ability to really talk to customers on a daily basis about what they like and dislike concerning your products and services is something which last century we could only dream about.

4. Be enthusiastic. Communicating like there is a gun being held to your head hardly makes for successful online communication in any channel. This is the real-time web! There are great opportunities to utilize social media correctly. Do it like you really care.

5. Respond to feedback. There is no point in saying you are listening if your behavior shows you are prepared to do nothing about it. You have to show what you are prepared to do and why when you take no action that is the right thing to do.

6. Show you are human. You may be corporate. You might be a one-man operation. You might, even, be part of a large conglomerate worth over $7 billion a year. If you are not prepared to put a human face to your communications, admit mistakes, explain faults and give well-reasoned arguments for everything, the only thing you’ll do is manage to alienate your customers.

Social media is still new. Communicating with customers is not. However, the latter has always been governed by what has been possible to communicate through the channels. We should expect many more mistakes to be made in the near future but as we learn from each one, the excuses for us getting our social media strategy wrong will at some point begin to wear a little thin.

People love a good anecdote. From hieroglyphics to song lyrics to a favorite novel, the well-crafted story is arguably the most effective means of communication to motivate change and pass along history. If an individual can tell a good tale, they have the ability to command the attention of others. Same goes for a business, says Scott Esmond, Director of Business Development at Red Door Interactive.

However, the modern expression of this ancient art is far more complicated than the days of pen and paper. The present digital age means individuals can Tweet, Skype, blog, Facebook and IM at any moment of the day from almost any platform. In a marketplace filled with competing and often confusing messages from companies and products, one of the only remaining ways to truly stand out is through one cohesive voice.

A cohesive content strategy is an effective tool to facilitate and simplify storytelling on the web. It’s the delivery of fresh and relevant information to a specific group so they can be actionable. In today’s world, content covers everything from a press release to video to a website; essentially anything you can produce that’s consumed. The practice, previously reserved for web designers and usability testers, is fairly novel and gaining momentum among marketers and mainstream business because it’s just that efficient and targeted.

With effective content strategies, companies large and small can be rewarded with increased customer loyalty, increased brand equity and a perception of leadership in their market. So when launching a content strategy for your online presence, make sure that you follow these seven steps to make sure your story is both heard and appreciated.

Do a content audit of the business. Every company has a voice – whether they work at it or not -and managing it starts from the inside. Identify what type of content is available and what should be updated. Look beyond just your website and include any off-site content (user reviews, organic search listings, social profiles and posts) as well as marketing, sales and PR content. Begin gathering opinions from your own staff, then reach out to the public to reveal any discrepancies between perception and reality. It can be a daunting task, but agencies like ours can help guide you through the process.

Designate a content strategy leader. Put one central person in charge of managing the process. This individual is responsible for keeping the content up-to-date, managing editorial calendars and delegating tasks. It’s essential that a skilled, trusted employee is the point person for company information every day. If your leader is not already an expert, some good learning sources include Junta42.com and copyblogger.com.

Be timely and relevant. This quote sums up the importance of timeliness; “Good content capitalizes on an opportunity in the life of the content’s consumer.” Such information is fed by what’s going on with a company’s brand, what’s going on with the media and what’s relevant to the customer. Try and gain information from the audience, ask them directly what type of content they want, and then follow through and provide what’s applicable to their lifestyle. Much like a relationship, it’s important not to just talk about the company all the time.

Assign contributors. Once the state of environment, audience, and content has been identified, it's time to write. This is when companies task their most talented and creative staff to help deliver to the consumer what they want. Ask that good storyteller to be the voice of the brand.

Make it easy for customers to share. The quickest way companies can allow their customers to share content is putting links to Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Foursquare and other social media channels on their own website. Consider content your most important design element. It's imperative for companies to pay attention to content placement and ensure its consumable, not hidden or lost to a lot of scrolling. Also identify the piece as yours, for example, a title card with your company name before a video gets set to go viral on the web.

Study, Study, Study. When it comes to content strategy, businesses should spend a good portion of time in the virtual "library." Now companies can see where visitors went before and after coming to their website and referral URLs, where people share your content. This information is readily available through Google Analytics, Facebook metrics for fan pages, and social media monitoring tools including (from free to far from free) SocialMention, PeopleBrowsr, Radian 6, and TNS Cymfony. It's also fairly easy to set up on-site surveys.

Let go of the fear. Conversations about the company's content are going to happen regardless. That's why it's helpful to provide consumers a conversational platform and engage them on your space. Should they be more active on review sites like Yelp, you should still engage and learn. Leading review sites also provide statistics that can help inform your strategy.

There are certainly a handful of companies that are grasping the concept of content strategy. REI incorporated an "expert advice" section for customers interested in rock climbing and provides them with a list of important items to pack for their trips. Dove's Campaign for Real Beauty has done an exceptional job reaching out to teen girls, presenting content that's relevant and not simply trying to sell their products.

Lastly, Vail Resorts mobilized their loyal skiers and riders to produce user generated content in their Snow Squad competition to become part of next year's on mountain social media team. The takeaway is that effective content strategy leads to effective storytelling in the digital age.

Online Reputation Management

Good news travels fast; bad news travels faster, says Shell Harris, founding partner of Big Oak Studios, a SEO company. Recent spurt in cases of rampant, and sometimes baseless, negative online publicity has affected brand image of many companies. In 2005, a single post by a blogger criticizing Dell's support services pulled down the company's reputation by a couple of notches. The corporate world is waking up to the necessity of playing an active role in online reputation management.

Online Reputation Management involves not only analyzing all that is being written about your brand online but also repairing any damage found and constructing a positive image. A successful ORM campaign should involve public relations and search engine marketing. You have to ensure that good things are being said about you on various websites and these websites get top search engine rankings.

How to Monitor/Track your Online Reputation

Regular monitoring of online media will help you keep tabs on your public perception. It will also alert you in cases of copyright violations, competitor smear campaigns, domain squatting, etc. There are many online tools you can use to keep one step ahead and take immediate action. Google Alerts is the most popular monitoring tools that will track and inform you if your brand name comes up in news, feeds, videos, blogs and web results. There are blog-specific search tools like Technorati and Feedster. Twitter Search and Social Mention can also help you catch the buzz about you in social networking sites.

How to Repair your Online Reputation

With the growth of user-generated media like blogs, Tweets and Yelps, the chances of creating negative publicity have also increased. The first step towards tackling negative comments is to create your real presence in popular consumer-generated websites. Responding to your critics on these sites will build trust around your brand. In cases of inaccurate projections, you can request the comment authors to pull down their posts by giving substantial evidence.

Press releases can be posted on popular press release submission sites. Expert articles pertaining to your industry can be submitted to reputed sites with back-link to your website.
You can also buy domains with your brand name (for example if your company is called blush, blush.com, blush.net or blushsucks.com are some domain names you can book) to prevent people with malicious intent misusing them against you.

Not to keep picking on Dell, but here is a negative site that could have been snagged to prevent bad publicity: http://www.ihatedell.net/.
Sometimes, repair can be a long-drawn exhaustive process. Companies often use search engine optimization techniques to push down negative websites and increase the visibility of websites with positive content.

How to Improve your Online Reputation

With the growth of user-generated media like blogs, Tweets and Yelps, the chances of creating negative publicity have also increased. The first step towards tackling negative comments is to create your real presence in popular consumer-generated websites. Responding to your critics on these sites will build trust around your brand. In cases of inaccurate projections, you can request the comment authors to pull down their posts by giving substantial evidence.

Have you had to do emergency repair on your online reputation? Tell us about your experience by leaving a comment.

Blog Networks are Attracting More Ad Dollars

Kathy Crosett reports in Marketing Forecast that when blogs first arrived on the digital scene several years back, few bloggers imagined they could make their living from ad revenue generated because of consumer visits to their sites. But consumers are spending more time online and they often read blog site content. Meanwhile, the blog industry has matured enough to offer marketers efficient ways to advertise on these sites. Blog networks, conglomerations of blogs devoted to specific topics, are springing up and shaping a central control for the flow of ad money.

A New York Times article recently highlighted one of these networks, Sugar Inc., which boasts of “12 blogs, 11 million readers a months and advertisers like Chanel and Sony.” Sugar is expecting to double its ad revenue this year and another blog network, Gawker Media, is also looking for a significant revenue increase in 2009.

The success of blog networks is connected to their ability to narrowly target audiences when it comes to ad revenues. For example, the blogs under Sugar’s umbrella are “edited and designed with 28-year-old women in mind.” By updating content frequently and competing for exclusive content, blogs ensure a constant audience, historically an audience that read fashion and shelter magazines.

The other attractive piece of the puzzle for marketers is that online ad space is much less expensive than in traditional magazines. The big question is whether this financial imbalance can continue. As consumers continue to read online, blog networks may grab more advertising dollars but industry experts also note that staying profitable has required these companies to partially rely on other revenue streams such as from e-commerce.

How to Master the 3 Key Elements of an Effective Email

In football lingo, a "triple threat" is a player who can run, pass and kick with equal skill. In entertainment, the term refers to an individual proficient in acting, singing and dancing. And in the world of marketing, it's reserved for those possibly perfect individuals who can write brilliant copy, design eye-catching layouts and increase ROI without breaking a sweat. Fortunately, you don't have to be Shakespeare with the pen or Picasso with the brush to create effective emails. You just need to master a three-pronged approach--relevant topic, informative content and attention-getting creative--that's guaranteed to engage subscribers and boost conversions. Here's a guide to nailing the email trifecta by Brian Brown, Director of Product Strategy at Silverpop:

I. Focus on Relevant Topics

As email volume continues to rise, it's essential that your marketing messages increase in relevancy to stand apart from the noise. To help achieve this objective, approach your email program with the goal of speaking to each person as an individual, covering topics that will create a deeper level of engagement. Three tools to get you rolling:

• Dynamic content: Collect prospect and customer information through preference centers, forms and surveys, and then use this info to automatically replace entire sections of your messages based on each recipient's unique requirements, interests and needs.

• Web tracking: Let customer and prospect actions on your website inform subsequent emails. For example, try assigning new subscribers to different communication tracks based on the Web pages they browsed before opting in.

• Triggered messaging: Emails triggered by behaviors such as purchases, downloads or event attendance typically deliver several times the conversion rates of standard broadcast emails. So, sprinkle satisfaction surveys, review requests, cross-sell emails, anniversary incentives and other trigger-based messages into your overall mix.

II. Provide Informative Content

Today's customers and prospects are more knowledgeable and more connected than at any time in history. As a result, interruptive advertising and product-centric marketing messages are more likely to get tuned out. The trick, then, is to create messages that are eagerly anticipated by your audience. Here's how:

• Make it educational: Instead of focusing solely on sales- or promotion-related content, provide educational content (e.g. recipes and baking tips, retirement-planning calculators, best practice white papers, etc.) that aligns with recipient interests.

• Address their pain points: Monitor social media, industry blogs, online communities, etc. to improve your understanding of what customers and prospects are talking about, and use these insights to deliver content that helps address these pain points.

• Match content to buying cycle: Segment campaigns by relationship stage, specifically targeting different email messages and offers based on both explicit and implicit indicators of your customer's readiness to purchase (interested, engaged, lapsed, etc).

III. Deliver Eye-Pleasing Content

By creating aesthetically pleasing messages in which design, layout and creative elements complement the text, you'll engage customers and prospects more strongly, resulting in increased opens, click-throughs and conversions. Instantly improve your email creative by:

• Minimizing clutter: In the overloaded inbox, less is more. So, leave room for white space, which increases readability, and use strong borders and color accents to provide a visual structure that can survive images being blocked.

• Building for mobile and tablets: More people are checking email on the go, so ensure a positive experience by using alt tags and strategic pre-header text, including key messaging in the top-left corner, and incorporating clickable content blocks that are at least a fingertip's width apart .

•  Designing around the sharing concept: If you have shareworthy content, build a short, focused email centered on a single subject and include both graphical icons and text encouraging recipients to share content. Test different link placement to see what works best.

Will Google, Apple and Amazon Fuel Newspaper, Magazine Subscriptions?

While a lot of people in the media industry spent the past couple of years figuring out how to make old media business models work online, and media critics droned on about the death of newspapers and magazines, technology innovators focused on fixing the problem. What problem? Getting consumers to want to pay for digital content.


The New Newspaper, Magazine

Newspapers (in print form) may be “dying” in terms of subscription declines and upside down business models, but devices like Amazon’s Kindle and Apple’s iPad are breathing fresh life into publishing for newspapers, magazines and anything else in print.
Nobody knows for sure how many Kindles have been sold to date, but there are plenty of guesses out there that suggest there are at least 5 million out there. Of course, that’s nothing compared to the iPad. Apple moved 7.33 million iPads in Q4 – more than 3 million than the previous quarter.
That’s enough devices to think about, but there are also tons of new tablets running Google’s Android platform – and the new Blackberry Playbook tablet will be a hit.
All this adds up to a lot of mobile devices in the marketplace – new devices built for a world of digital media. Instead of throwing your slippers on and marching down the driveway to get your paper, you can just turn on your reader.

Same Old, Same Old

Some skeptics might argue new devices don’t change the problem. Publishers have been delivering online content for years and few have been able to drive significant profits from it. True, but these new devices dramatically change consumption habits. People may be much more likely to subscribe to content on a Kindle or an iPad because it’s cool. It’s a new format and it’s convenient.
One major factor that has limited the growth of online subscriptions for publishers is the media industry’s payment infrastructure. Most media conglomerates would like to control distribution and payments, limiting users’ ability to buy subscriptions from competitors. Some businesses have tried to organize publishers through partnership, but the models have failed to gain traction. Amazon, Apple and Google each now have a payment platform that simplifies digital content subscriptions for publishers and consumers alike… at a price of course.

New Payments Platforms

Both Apple and Google have launched services that allow publishers to control billing for digital content subscriptions distributed in apps – turning up the heat on competitor Amazon.
Apple’s subscription billing service lets publishers of magazines, newspapers, music and video set terms This essentially lets consumers buy content for any Apple device they have (not just limited to the iPad). By comparison, Google’s One Pass subscription publishing service makes digital content available across tablets, smartphones and websites – great news for the growing audience of Android users (the second most popular smartphone platform).
All this adds up to more options and flexibility for getting your favorite content. No longer do consumers have to subscribe from each publication’s website. Now they can get all their subscriptions on one platform (or three if you will).

The Downside

Apple takes its standard 30% cut of revenues from App Store purchases. Google OnePass also takes 30%. This may sound like a lot, until you realize that Amazon.com has charged publishers upwards of 70% in the past. It’s a good thing to have all three in the game, since it should drive the split down. There are concerns about the cable/satellite TV problem, where you might only be able to get one type of content on a particular platform. If publishers can keep pushing their content to all three, consumers will be much happier.
Of course, any of these revenue splits will make it difficult to generate significant profits – then again, when you consider the volume of devices in the market place already, and the limited selection of titles that have converted to the new format, there could be some meaningful short-term revenue gains for publishers if they convert their content to the new devices today (for example, you can’t get Men’s Health on a Kindle – you might be more likely to switch to a magazine you can get in digital form).
This is a much better deal for smaller publishers looking to build an audience. Google, Amazon and Apple deliver the audience for those that publish great content. Arguably a new wave of start-up magazines that opt to go all-digital will spring in the near future. Who will be the Angry Birds of digital magazines or newspapers?

For now, consumers are more likely to pay for content they can get on their Kindle, iPad or other tablet or reader – and that’s good news for publishers, Apple, Amazon and Google alike.
What do you think? Do these new devices and platforms create more opportunities for publishers? Do you think consumers are more willing to pay for content on these devices than online content or print subscriptions?

What Does Web Design Say About Your Small Business?

This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, about leveraging social media and technology in small business.

If you've ever been horrified by the design of a small or local business website, you're not alone. There are so many aesthetic travesties out there, and worse, many small businesses still don't even have a website. One recent study concluded that a paltry 54% of small businesses maintain a home on the web.
Your business doesn't need an elaborate multimedia site, but you do need an eye-pleasing and informative destination. After all, you wouldn't (purposefully) hang an ugly sign on your storefront or office. Why would you present an ugly website to your prospects?
With this in mind, we spoke to some professional web designers about their favorite small business websites. They explained why these sites make sense for each company and why the design is an asset to their business.

Make Business Personal at First Click

Jacob Gube, a web developer and the founder/chief editor of Six Revisions, looks at North Carolina real estate firm Go Realty's website as a way to personalize a sometimes impersonal industry.
"They put a great deal of emphasis towards humanizing the process of buying a home," said Gube. "To most real estate companies, you're customer record ID #67343, budget range $200,000 to $225,200, but to Go Realty, you're the Johnsons with a baby girl named Amy. They convey this personality through their site design."
Gube notes Go Realty's very welcoming website that puts people first and properties second.
"The home page has a beautiful image slider that flips through photos of the people they've dealt with, with short descriptions of their stories. They have a Fan Mail section that flips through messages from happy clients," said Gube. "When you see all that, as a prospective home buyer and client, you'd think, 'Wow, these guys will take care of me.' "
When it comes to something as personal as purchasing a home, this is a smart design choice. While it may be the inclination of many companies to put products front and center, a page of property listings can be less inviting than a satisfied customer.
"I think for a real estate company, they have a truly unique angle and they have a web design that manages to convey their core message," Gube noted.

Accentuate Your Products With Complementary Design

Shopping carts and product galleries have become staples of the e-commerce landscape, but that doesn't mean they have to look stale. If you sell attractive products, make sure they live on an attractive website.
Tim Van Damme, a freelance web developer based in Belgium who knows a thing or two about web aesthetics, cites online retailer Hardgraft as a case study in minimalism and product display.
"Their website is beautifully designed, featuring just a couple of products with large, beautiful photographs. They're clearly targeting the more fashion-aware web nerds this way," said Van Damme.
The site sells cases and sleeves for electronics, as well as handbags and wallets. The sleek modern products sit nicely on a clean, modern website. The presentation is complementary, and there's nothing to distract the eye from the merchandise. A site like this expresses organization and straightforwardness -- qualities your customers are always after.
"Their products are pretty expensive, yet every conference I go to I see multiple of them in the audience," Van Damme noted.

Sell to the Right Consumer, Visually

If you're targeting a certain customer demographic, good web design can help.
Kelli Shaver, a web app developer who specializes in user interfaces and experiences, points to Gazel, Inc., purveyors of unique, organic bath towels and robes. Its website evokes a sense of luxury that befits the customers who can afford these products.
"Clearly the site is targeting environmentally conscious consumers with expendable incomes and sophisticated tastes," said Shaver, noting Gazel is not your typical e-commerce website. "The focus seems more on educating customers about the products than simply selling those products. The combined effect of the colors, typography, textures, and photography just feels expensive and high-quality."
In essence, the site "feels" like the products it's selling, and that goes a long way toward user experience, according to Shaver.
"Nearly everything about the site is inviting. Rich, warm colors and earth tones give the visitor a feeling of calm," she said. "The slide show on the landing page, in addition to showcasing some of the company's product, also brings in a lot of texture."
The takeaway here should be that if your customers feel at home on your website, they're more likely to browse and buy. That may seem obvious, but think about who your customers really are as you develop your web presence. Your web designer won't know this, so be sure to communicate it effectively. The branding payoff can be big.

Informational Sites Don't Have to Be Boring

If you thought some small business websites were rough, visit a government agency online sometime. They can be notorious for bad design, poor navigation, and a general disinterest in Web 2.0 functionality.
Not so with the Southwest Florida Water Management District, says Chris Coyier, a web designer and blogger at CSS-Tricks.
"The home page is OK, but the site actually gets better and more interesting the deeper you go," said Coyier, noting the exceptional layout of the recreation page, and the pages for individual locations administered by the department.
"The most important part they got right was thinking about what the mindset of an actual user of the site is like -- in this case, me," said Coyier. "It's easy to browse by featured locations, type of activity, and specific regions, all of which were of interest to me, so it was fun to click around."
This site could so easily have gone with black and white bullet lists, but instead went the extra mile to draw the user in with design.
"The aesthetics are totally appropriate for an outdoors kind of site -- tans and greens and browns with flourishes of plant life," said Coyier. "The location-specific pages are amazing. Everything I would want to see: photos, maps, specifics on what you can do, rules, etc. The visuals are great, but the information architecture is the best feature."

 

 

                                                                                                     

 

Getting Creative With Video

YouTube user canzona uploaded a video to the web, downloaded it, then re-uploaded it one thousand times, gradually eliminating “all human qualities” of his voice and image.
The final video in canzona’s series is a mess of distorted colors and sounds; you can recognize from the motion that the original featured a person talking into the camera, but all individual characters and specifics have been lost, replaced by artifacts created by YouTube’s video and audio compression algorithms.

All 1,000 steps of the process — which took a full year — are available on canzona’s YouTube profile. The project is titled “I Am Sitting in a Video Room,” and it’s inspired by an audio art project recorded by composer Alvin Lucier more than 40 years ago.

In 1969, avant-garde composer Lucier made an audio recording of a brief speech, then played the speech on the speakers and recorded that playback. He repeated this until the acoustics of the room caused some frequencies to overwhelm others more with each recording. The result was a recording that sounded more like a message from another dimension than a man’s voice.

Lucier’s work often focused on the natural, physical properties of sound instead of musical theory. YouTube’s canzona was inspired by Lucier’s work to create “I Am Sitting in a Video Room” — even the words that he speaks are similar to those in Lucier’s original work.

Each time you upload a video to YouTube, that video is compressed by YouTube’s servers so the file size becomes small enough to easily stream to web viewers. Image compression is achieved by recording only changes from one frame to another rather than all of the data in each frame, removing small differences in color that the human eye usually can’t detect while an image is in motion, and through other small modifications to the image. The idea is that these small changes will not result in any dramatic loss in quality to the untrained eye.

However, when you compress the same thing 1,000 times over, it’s like the old adage about making a copy of a copy — the changes pile on top of one another and the image is so corrupted that it becomes unrecognizable. The same goes for audio compression.

Shopping Behavior In 2010: Phoning It In

If retailers think the Internet permanently changed the way people research and ultimately shop, they haven't seen anything yet, says writer Steve Smith. If merchants want to get scared in a hurry, they should try downloading either the eBay app or the new Amazon Price Check mobile app (both for iPhone).  Each app lets you scan a UPC code on any package and not only call up product information, but even see better offers. The Amazon app lets you buy from a range of sources on the spot using your Amazon account. 

This is scary because American's retail shopping habits have changed and are changing even more radically in the next few years. A new study from Leo Burnett and Arc Worldwide demonstrates that the recession helped alter the mindset of consumers. They come to retail now fully armed with information. Retail will continue to have a role in the final purchase decisions, especially involving brands the consumer doesn't already know. Many shoppers now come into the store having already decided what they want and treat retail as a "final check" or simply a "pick-up station," the report says. They are ginned up on research and pity the sales assistant who doesn't know when to get out of the shopper's way.

Mobile takes that dynamic and accelerates it. In just about any aisle in a major retailer you will see people peering into their phones at something, and according to new research on mobile's influence on shopping behavior these folks aren't checking email. The Yahoo Mobile Framework Study performed with Nielsen shows that 9 out of 10 mobile users access the mobile Web in a store. And about half of all mobile Web activity in a store is related to shopping. In fact, mobile users are demonstrating behaviors that are already far ahead of the mobile ecosystem. Almost half of all of those using mobile phones in-store have sent phone camera images of a product to someone.

Only 16% of consumers use their phones for shopping research, but 57% of mobile internet users express interest in doing so in the coming year. And when it comes to having tried or being interested in different types of shopping-related activities, the mobile platform is almost on par with the PC. While 96% of PC users cited visiting a Web site, 91% of mobile users did as well. Down the line, from search to accessing user reviews, the number of people either actively performing an activity on mobile phones or interested in doing so is tracking only slightly below the Web. The upshot of this is that people seem ready to transfer a number of common online research behaviors to their phones. 

While retailers need to be aware of the ways in which mobile is poised to reshape consumer behaviors, the Leo Burnett/Arc Worldwide study offers a cautionary note. According to its survey of consumers, "Technologies appear often to be putting more distance between the shopper and the retailer by encouraging shoppers to work completely independently of retailers." While retail needs to get out in front of the mobile behaviors their shoppers already demonstrate, the long-term risk is that the technologies will undermine the need for the store even further. Understanding that shopping is an experience and that in-store mobile apps can enhance that shopping "journey" will be critical in bringing technology into the store in a creative rather than a destructive way.

For a company like Amazon, however, just imagine the behavioral data it can now collect on consumers who are bringing their apps into the field and other stores. From geolocation to retail vs online shopping habits, this kind of mobile extension adds layers of invaluable data to a users' profile and Amazon's understanding of how they fit within the shopping journey. The line between brick and mortar and online retail is about to get muddier.

7 Simple Ways to Turn Your Website into an Effective Sales Tool

Nowadays everyone is in a crazy hurry—especially on the Web, says marketer Stacy Karacostas. As a result, your Website
has less than one second to capture your visitors’ attention once they land on it. Plus maybe a couple more seconds to show them you have what they’re after.    
Then, even once they’re hooked, visitors have to be able to:   

• Find what they want quickly and easily
• Know exactly how to take action
• And have all the info they need to take action confidently

Fail to do any of these things and you know what happens next, right? They click away. Because there are millions of other sites they can go to instead.
Sadly, most small business Websites are still nothing more than electronic brochures. They might look nice, but they aren’t really designed to grab visitors by the eyeballs and convince them to call or buy.
If your Website isn’t growing your business, here are seven simple tips to amp up its sales-making power...

1. Banish Fancy Landing Pages

If you can’t navigate back to your opening page from the rest of your site, or it has an “enter here” or “skip intro” option, it clearly isn’t important. So dump it. Web designers love to build these, but most Web users hate them. Who has time to wait for them to load??? Besides, visitors should be able to find what they need within two clicks of your home page, and landing pages just add another click.

2. Don't Make 'Em Guess

Put a big, bold, benefits-oriented headline front and center that lets visitors know exactly what they can find on your site (“Welcome to our site” is NOT an effective headline). Also make sure your navigation is consistent on every page, and easy-as-pie to locate and understand. Get too creative here, and people won’t know why they should click or even that they should click at all.

3. Axe Snoozer Content

Advertising
great David Ogilvy once said “You can never bore someone into doing business with you.” Whether you sell B2B or B2C, your Web copy should sound like you’re having a friendly, informative conversation with one other person (i.e., your reader). So write like you speak and don’t be afraid to sound human.

4. It's Not About You

This might come as a shock, but site visitors don’t want to know all about you, what you do, and how you do it—at least not right away. First they want to know what you can do for them! Because if you don’t have what they need, they could care less about your experience, processes and so forth. Focus on the benefits of what you offer up front. The rest can come later.

5. Give 'Em What They Need

The more expensive your products and services, the more information people need to make a confident buying decision. If all you have are pictures, and/or less than 250 words of text per page, it’s not enough. Your site should answer all your prospects’ questions and deal with their objections right then and there. And always include your complete contact info (not just an email
form) so they know you’re a legit business.

6. Let 'Em Skim

Before they start reading on the Web, most people skim or scan to see if you have what they’re after. Few things are more difficult to skim than large blocks of text. So keep sentences short (ideally 20 words or less) and paragraphs less than five lines long. And use subheads and bullets whenever possible.

7. Tell 'Em What to Do

It’s not enough to put your contact info on your site then expect people to call. If you don’t tell prospects what to do next, there’s no telling what they might do. But chances are good it’ll involve clicking away from your site.
Want them to call you? Say so AND put the phone number right there. Want them to go to a specific page, sign up for a newsletter, or buy something? Tell them and include a super obvious link or big, bright button.

YouTube is Offering Video Editing Tool

Google's video site plans to release an editing tool aimed at those who know little about editing videos. The tool will have editing features that allow people to trim videos and remove background noise, replacing the hum or buzz with music. That's for starters.
The free YouTube Video Editor tool will not require people to download complex software. The tool becomes perfect for those who take a quick video, find the first five seconds jumbled up, and want to trim it off quickly.
Video Editor will use the Audio Swap library of tracks, so people can add them for free. Replacing the background noise with music will allow people to choose from a library of tunes that YouTube made available for free, too.
The ability to splice and remove a piece of the video and move it to another location in the clip is not available now, but YouTube Product Manager Josh Siegel, and Google and YouTube engineer Rushabh Doshi explain that could come in time based on member feedback. As a workaround, people can drag the same video twice into the timeline -- trimming the beginning of one and the end of another and slicing them together.
Although YouTube will target the tool at a segment of consumers that may not have heard or thought about video editing before, the tools will allow them to edit and render 1080p, which is full high definition. "The tool is based in the cloud and it's totally in line with Google's cloud computing strategy," Siegel says. "We're pushing it out as a bare-bones video editor, and as we improve the product in time based on user feedback, we can push out the new features in real time without requiring anyone to download them."
Marketers and advertisers have a heavy product department, but once they upload it to YouTube they might find portions don't fit the experience they want to capture, so they can trim them in the editor.
It's not clear whether YouTube will build different versions of the tool if the company decides to expand on the services. It's a product, marketing and engineering discussion that will require careful consideration, Siegel and Doshi agree.

Live Chat as a Business Tool

In 2009, Bold Software conducted research aimed at discovering the consumer’s perspective of live chat. That report concluded that live chat was extremely effective during the sales cycle and had a loyalty effect among those that had experienced the technology before. In 2010 another study was made that significantly expands both the scope and depth of the research effort by quadrupling the sample universe, making both demographic filtering and retailer-specific analysis possible. The 2010 edition also added questions related to one of live chat’s most talked about features – proactive chat invitations. Its report concludes that those that have chatted show more frequent shopping behavior – 26% are weekly shoppers versus 21% for the entire universe. Those that have engaged an online retailer in a chat session are bigger spenders as well – only 33% regularly spend less than $50 per transaction vs. 38% for the entire sample and 43% for non-chatters. The greatest amount ever spent in a single transaction is also telling. 53% of chatters have spent more than $500, while 43% of the entire sample and only 34% of non-chatters spent that much. This report doesn’t claim a causal relationship in this finding, only that chatters seem to exhibit different behaviors. In other words, it’s not that engaging in a live chat necessarily causes one to shop more and spend more – it is simply that those who have engaged an online merchant in a live chat interaction tend to be more frequent shoppers and to open their wallets a bit wider. The research shows, in general, that live chat influences purchase intent. But for Computer/Electronics, Hardware/Home Improvement, Office Supplies, and 5 other retailer types, it's even more influential. 77% of respondents who've had a live chat with a retailer reported that their most recent interaction positively influenced their attitude about the merchant. 82% of respondents who shop weekly said the same thing. If you are an online retailer, you may want to adopt the live chat technology to reach out to existing and prospect customers.

Diaspora : Protecting Your Privacy Online Is Going To Get Easier

Diaspora aims to be a distributed network, where totally separate computers connect to each other directly and let us connect without surrendering our privacy. These computers are called ‘seeds’. A seed is owned by you, hosted by you, or on a rented server. Once it has been set up, the seed will aggregate all of your information: your Facebook profile, tweets, anything. They are designing an easily extendable plugin framework for Diaspora, so that whenever newfangled content gets invented, it will be automatically integrated into every seed. Once you have your information in your seed, it will connect to every service you used to have for you. For example, your seed will keep pulling tweets and you will still be able to see your Facebook newsfeed. In fact, Diaspora will make those services better! Upload an image to Flickr and your seed can automatically generate a tweet from the caption and link. Social networking will just get better when you have control over your data. A seed will not just be all your existing networks put together, though. Decentralizing lets you reconstruct your “social graphs” so that they belong to you. Our real social lives do not have central managers, and our virtual lives do not need them. Friend another seed and the two of you can synchronize over a direct and secure connection instead of through a superfluous hub. Encryption (privacy nerds: they are using GPG) will ensure that no matter what kind of content is being transferred, you can share privately. Eventually, today’s hubs could be almost entirely replaced by a decentralized network of truly personal websites.