Dooley Online

Marketing in Real Life

The Verizon Guy is well known to most of us in the United States due to his frequent appearance in television commercials which aim to convince us that wherever we are, we've got the verizon network behind us.

Here is how it translates to real life. Enjoy. I sure did.

Twitter won't create boring people, but it may help tear down walls

Kevin Maney ponders now that Twitter is taking off, it threatens to create boring people (or at least, boring posts).

His argument is that we are going to be so overwhelmed by the technology --  that we are going to have to manage and update a plethora of online tools so they end up squeezing the very life out of us.

As someone who manages twitter, facebook, typepad, technorati, youtube, flickr, slideshare, digg, delicious, linkedin, friendfeed, etc. on a regularly basis, I can understand Kevin's point.

But, I disagree.

I believe different people get information in different ways. Some people love twitter. Others prefer a newspaper. Some like television. Others prefer to google their news. Some people (gasp!) prefer sit down meetings.

In order to reach a variety of people, you must reach out using a variety of information channels, tools and media.

In keeping with the focus on twitter, let's look at the two twitter accounts I manage:

• http://twitter.com/worldresources. This account, updated by several staff, is used to share news of interest to and about my organization. The tweets aren't just about what WRI is doing, it serves as an aggregator of news we are interested in. And we strategically follow tweets that can help us in our work, so while we are posting, we are also listening.

• http://twitter.com/lldoolj2. My personal twitter account is used to follow online marketing, web analytics, and social media tweets as well as some environmental and personal twitter accounts. I also post more personal tweets, but always with an audience in mind that is broader than just my  family and friends.

• Depending on the nature of the tweet, these twitter accounts feed into friendfeed, facebook, websites, my cell phone, tweetburner, google, etc. And some twitterfolk run their rss feeds and twitpics through twitter. All of this collaboration with the twitter framework makes the tweet even more valuable as a source of information about me or my organization. Plus, with a 140 character limit, you don't have to think hard about how you are going to craft the post like you do when you write a longer blog post. Simple and succinct and you've got an information tweet.

Having worked with this media on a regular basis I see we are quickly approaching a tipping point in maintaining our online spaces -- soon we will find that many of the currently separate, individualized tools we use  online are going to be integrated into a few key tools that can be accessed through an individual desktop.

While some have tried to create desktops in the past, they have been confined to a certain architecture and information space. I have accounts with Google and Yahoo and Earthlink which try to pull together a set of tools into a desktop, but none of these pull together ALL the tools I use.

Creating a successful individual desktop requires a built-in flexibility for the individual to access and create links to an infinite combination of tools unique to their own needs.

Which leads to the questions:

• How do we support such an infrastructure recognizing that in some cases we may need to maintain walls around proprietary, organizational, and private information (while still providing access to the verified user)?

• As information walls fall down, so do institutional walls. How to we successfully navigate this landscape?

As followup to the second question, I leave you with the 2005 TED Talk by Clay Shirky, author of "Here Comes Everybody: The Power Of Organizing Without Organizations" (February 2008). While the presentation is dated, it is the foundation for this book with themes just as relevant today as in 2005.

Is Facebook still SECOND most-trafficked social media site in the world?

Facebook's stats page claims "Facebook is the 2nd most-trafficked social media site in the world (comScore)".

FACEBOOK/COMSCORE - UPDATE YOUR STATS!

If Google Trends is viable as an indicator, and if the online trends highlighted last month on TechCrunch are accurate, Facebook has surpassed and continues to dominate MySpace in daily unique views.

Since facebook opened up it's user base, the demographics have been changing. iStrategyLabs has some great facebook statistics from October 2007 and June 2008  that you view and download -- here are two charts which I generated for my own reference based on that data.

 

But there is more to the story that is not shown here -- iStrategy has three key takeaways based on the downloadable data they collected:

• Insight #1: Facebook experienced 32% growth in US users in 10 months.

• Insight #2: Facebook is experiencing explosive growth in the 25-34, 35-54 and 55+ age groups. The 35-54 year old segment grew 172.9% in 10 months - the other two mentioned are growing at a rate of 97%+.

• Insight #3: Major metropolitan areas are beating Facebook’s average user growth rate, and Houston is growing the fastest at a 170.3% clip.

It would be interesting if we could access and download specific data on facebook's international appeal. Some of that research has been done and according to Michael Arrington, facebook is no longer the second largest social network:

Source: Michael Arrington, TechCrunch, June 2008.

I look forward to seeing facebook take credit on their site for their new niche in the social networking space.

Related links:

• Facebook No Longer The Second Largest Social Network (TechCrunch, June 12, 2008)
• Facebook Blows Past MySpace In Global Visitors For May (TechCrunch; June 20, 2008)
• Facebook Demographics 2008 Update - It’s Getting Older In There (iStrategy Labs, June 20, 2008)

Website Grader: Does it (and our Website) Make the Grade?

In Chris Brogan's post "50 Ways Marketers Can use Social Media to Improve Their Marketing" (reblogged by Jeremiah Owyang), one of the recommendations was:

Make WebsiteGrader.com your first stop for understanding the technical quality of a website.

So, I thought I'd try it.

According to the blurb posted on the it's welcome page, Hubspot's Website Grader is a free seo tool that measures the marketing effectiveness of a website. It provides a score that incorporates things like website traffic, SEO, social popularity and other technical factors. It also provides some basic advice on how the website can be improved from a marketing perspective.

HubSpot's vision is to provide a (killer) marketing application and provide great advice to small businesses so they can "get found" by more people and turn them into customers.

Specifically, Website Grader currently reports on:

1. On-Page Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
2. Off-Page SEO
3. Blogosphere
4. Social Mediasphere
5. Converting Qualified Visitors to Leads
6. Competitive Intelligence

I plugged in the URL for World Resources Institute - www.wri.org. For this first go-around I did not include any competing sites. After a short pause while the Website Grader logo bug gyrated on the screen, I got my result.

92 out of 100.

Pretty good, huh?

But then I read the evaluation and discovered some discrepancies.

WEBSITE GRADER RESULTS

On-Page Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

• PageTitle. Deemed too long. We were encouraged to cut it back to 70 characters. 

• Metatags. We were chastised for not adding the meta description and meta keywords). I remembered debates several years back that indicated that since metatags weren't useful for SEO, they were virtually obsolete. SEO Logic has a good post about the importance of metatags, which they believe are still useful. [Unfortunately, the page isn't dated, so I don't know how old this post is.]

• Images. WRI got an okay rating on this, except for concern about our image use. WebsiteGrader felt we used too many images so the user might have to wait longer (to allow the images to download) to view our page. Oh, yes. And we need to make sure all our images have ALT tags.

Off-Page SEO

• WRI came out okay there with some cool information about our Google Rank and the ability to find our site in Yahoo, DMOZ, and ZoomInfo.

Blogosphere

• Not so good. But that was mainly because Website Grader couldn't find WRI's listing in Technorati. Yes, we are in Technorati and have been for some time. WRI has authority and a rank (which changes every so often).

Social Mediasphere

• WRI came out okay in this arena as Website Grader was able to find us in del.icio.us and digg. Assuming these were the only social media spaces checked, it would be good if WebGrader could expand its social media sphere to include facebook, flickr, friendfeed, slideshare, twitter, youtube, etc.

Converting Qualified Visitors to Leads

• WebGrader searched for RSS feeds and forms to calculate ability to convert visitors to leads. They found at least one form, but had a hard time finding WRI's RSS feeds. In fact, while WRI has 8 feeds worth of information you can access in the address bar of our website on every page, Website Grader came back with a report that "RSS Feed: Not Found".

Competitive Intelligence

• Since I didn't select any competing websites for my initial test run of Website Grader, there wasn't a great deal of information available here. I did go back and plugin a couple of other URLs, but my overall ranking didn't change. Maybe it will change as they work out the kinks in during this BETA testing phase.

CONCLUSION

Okay, so Website Grader is in BETA. We all need to remember that. And because WebsiteGrader.com is still in BETA, they are interested in any feedback they can get.

But here are my initial thoughts.

• As with all apps in BETA, things are going to change. But Website Grader provides some good information and areas to improve upon. Some of the problem areas are clearly BETA programming difficulties while others are areas WRI can easily address.

• Given the number of freebie website ranking and comparison tools out there, adding another to our stockpile of analytics tools (Alexa, Compete, Google Trends, Technorati, BlogJuice) is useful. Especially when the tool can also offer suggestions for improvement.

• It will be interesting to see how Hubspot rolls this tool out once it is out of BETA. Will they charge for the services? Currently, it doesn't warrant this. One thing for sure, pulling in more data (and getting the current data right) from a broader range of resources is what will make this tool worthwhile in the long term.

So, WRI came out pretty good. A relatively solid site, based on the available data and, according to Website Grader,

A website grade of 92/100 for www.wri.org means that of the hundreds of thousands of websites that have previously been evaluated, our algorithm has calculated that this site scores higher than 92% of them in terms of its marketing effectiveness. The algorithm uses a proprietary blend of over 50 different variables, including search engine data, website structure, approximate traffic, site performance, and others.

The software is constantly being upgraded and the algorithm enhanced. The number of potential recommendations provided by the tool is also increasing frequently. Please check back often.

I think I will.

Congress and Social Media

When Jeremiah Owyang blogged about the American Red Cross' use of social media during the midwest floods, I found it ironic that the American Red Cross National Headquarters doesn't allow staff access to many of the internet's social media tools.

Now, it appears Congress is also concerned about access to social media by some of it's members.

Aaron Brazell on Technosailor has several posts on how the U.S. Congress is trying to keep members from using social media: Congress Trying to ban Twitter and Other Social Media Use by Representatives.

Here is a great video of Andrew Feinberg's interview with Rep. John Culberson (R-TX) on this issue.

Mark Hopkins is also following this story on Mashable: Congressional Democrats Aim to Censor Twitter and Qik.

If you're on twitter, you may want to check out Let Our Congress Tweet.

PowerPoint, Presentations, and Speechmaking

Seth Godin has a great post highlighting the three laws of great graphs in powerpoint presentations:

1. One Story
2. No Bar Charts
3. Motion

These are great guidelines.

Having said that, one of the best presentations I ever attended was done by Jeff McNeely of the IUCN at a Biodiversity Conference sometime in the 1990s.

After a long day of presentations by scientific and policy experts, Jeff strode up to the stage with a handful of overhead slides featuring cartoons (in the style of Gary Larson's The Far Side series) which he showed and briefly discussed.

This presentation remains my favorite because:

• the presentation employed humor and interaction,
• both the audience and the presenter were enthusiastic about and engaged with the subject matter,
• the visuals were directly related to the discussion (but he let the audience read them), and
• his presentation was probably the shortest one of the whole day.

Which brings me to another GREAT resource --  Andy Goodman published an excellent resource titled Why Bad Presentations Happen to Good Causes (currently available as a PDF download only).

Andy also offers a workshop which he presented at our offices last year.

It has completely changed the way we do our presentations.

Andy's research identified five fatal flaws of the average presentation (which, unfortunately includes most of the presentations we are forced to sit through on a regular basis):

1. Reading the slides
2. Too long, too much information
3. Lack of interaction
4. Lifeless presenters
5. Room/Technical problems

The things which make a presentation excellent include:

1. Interaction
2. Clarity
3. Enthusiasm

Building on his research, experience, and case studies, Andy then goes on to describe how to turn adequate presentations into excellent and inspirational messages.

Finally, if you make presentations a lot you should consider joining a Toastmasters International club in your area where you can practice and get evaluated on your presentation skills. The speaking skills you develop through Toastmasters truly provide an excellent foundation for all your presentations.

Twitter Camp

I've just gotten back from a week of camping in the middle of Pennsylvania with thousands of my closest friends at Creation Festival 2008.

Yes, we slept in tents.
Yes, we cooked our own food over an open fire or camp stove.
Yes, we used outhouse toilets.

We were there to experience rock/hip-hop/grunge/inspirational concerts and speakers on two giant outdoor stages.

And, for some reason, the organizers of this event contracted with my cell phone carrier to provide cell phone support. So I have 4 bars most of the time. Whoohoo!

As a result, I was able to twitter the camping experience.

See my twitpics (in reverse chronological order) here.