We just finished our webinar on what we think the top website design trends for 2011 will be, and hopefully you all found it useful and informative.

As usual, here’s the recap from the webinar for those of you who didn’t get your questions answered because we ran out of time, and for everyone who couldn’t make it today.

1. What is more important: website design or SEO? Both of these web tools are extremely important, and they should work together to help your website reach its optimal ROI. If you have a beautiful website, but it doesn’t get found online, then it’s not effective. If you have a website that gets found, but is visually unappealing, then it won’t be as useful as it could be. What you need to do is design a website that supports your SEO goals and vice versa to ensure that your website is attractive to visitors and helps you achieve your traffic targets.
2. Where does a CMS fit into a website redesign? A content management system (CMS) is, in our opinion, an essential part of a redesign. If your organization doesn’t currently have a CMS, then we suggest implementing one during the redesign process, and if you are already using one, then you need to make sure your new website is built in such a way that it complements the capabilities of your CMS. Your CMS is meant to help make your website management and updates easier, and if your website isn’t designed to be used easily with your CMS, then you’re not doing yourself any favors. 
3. What aspect of a website design do you give the most priority to? Usability. At Marqui our website redesign process has a huge focus on website usability requirements. While eye-catching design is a good way to draw your target audience in, if your visitors find your site difficult to use, then your design won’t matter because they will get frustrated and click away to a site that meets their requirements more quickly and easily. 
4. How do I figure out the best website trend for my organization? Every website has different goal and different requirements. Establishing what the needs of your organization are will help you to determine which website trends will help you meet them. For instance, if you have a website with lots of content that you’d like to highlight and get on your homepage, then an editorial-style (grid) layout may be for you, because it allows space for a great deal of content that is updated frequently.
5. We are creating a new website but working with a separate SEO company, separate designer and separate website development company, any tips? Normally, this is one of the things we warn against when a company is starting a redesign, because there is so much room for poor communication between the different elements. Our best recommendation is to make sure that all of the different companies your working with are communicating with each other, and make sure that your own marketing department is aware of the progress to make sure that every aspect of your redesign is working to meet your online goals.
6. Can you elaborate how using typography can help with your SEO?  In the past to get attractive fonts many organizations used images for text which was bad for SEO because search engines couldn't read the text within the image. Using typography as a design element, and using newer techniques like SiFR and Cufon, as well as tools like HTML5 can give you text that is both visually appealing, communicates your message, improves website usability AND is readable by search engines.
7. Can you give us an example of a website in higher education with a mega menu? Two education sites that have nice examples of mega menus are BCIT and University of Southern California's School of Pharmacy

Our next webinar is our, “Definitive Guide to a Website Redesign,” and it will we taking place on December 16th at 10:30 am Pacific. You can register for that event here. Everyone who registers for that webinar will receive our website redesign toolkit (not yet available to the public) with our newest e-book, a whitepaper and checklist to help you with your next redesign.

If you'd like to view a recording of today's webinar, you see it, and our previous web marketing webinars on-demand in our resource section

Recently, Ketchum, an international public relations agency, released a study in conjunction with FedEx to help benchmark best practices in social media. The study, which is called, “Leading Brands and the Modern Social Media Landscape,” highlights several key findings that can help organizations benchmark their social media efforts to get a better idea of the success of their efforts.

The key findings include:

• 50% of organizations plan to redesign their intranets in the next one to two years to include greater social media capabilities
• While many organizations take part in social media only 10% are considered to be “leaders” in the social media space, while 75% are considered to be merely participants
• Social media leaders are organizations that: ingrain social media in every aspect of their communication, identify and integrate new social media tools on an ongoing basis, employ in-house teams of three or more social media specialists, while participants: ingrain social media in some aspects of communication and hire one specialist or expand responsibilities of communicators to include social media competence
• 100% of the organizations surveyed reported some degree of social media engagement regardless of their industry
• The majority of companies recognized that social media is distinct from traditional channels in its interactivity, transparency and embrace of informality
• Participants repeatedly stressed the necessity for transparency and authenticity in every social media program, no matter its simplicity or sophistication

The study doesn’t give as many benchmark statistics as I would have liked, but it definitely provides some useful insights into how many large organizations are using social media today, and their perception of how it should be used effectively. If you’d like to take a look at the study yourself, you can download a free (no form fill required) copy here.

This week's web marketing digest post is all about the newest web marketing charts. We have a char on blogger, one on how marketers make decisions and one on mobile marketing.

This chart is actually from a post written by Ann Handley on the MarketingProfs Daily Fix Blog. The chart shows consumer attitudes towards mobile, and the post (which is very useful) discusses the importance of mobile marketing in today's marketing economy. The post emphasizes the fact that there are currently 3.4 billion people using mobile devices currently on the planet and says that mobile marketing is most definitely not a "one-ff" marketing trend.

This report from Econsultancy describes how, "marketers across all business sectors are affected by trends which are shaping the foundations of marketing strategy and planning." In other words, the report looks at the marketing budget development process and how that relates to systems and technology. Sound pretty heavy? It is, but it's also filled with great information on marketing budgets and trends, information that is almost invaluable with the year drawing to a close.

A recent article from eMarketer looks at the "trendiness" of mobile apps and explains why developing one, just for the sake of having one, may not be the best plan for your organization. The article cites a survey performed by interface design agency EffectiveUI which found that despite the fact that most consumers consider apps to be a must (more than three-quarters expect all brand name companies to have one) but it also found that almost seven out of ten app users also said that a poorly developed app would affect their perception of a brand in general.

A recent report released by the Altimeter Group called, “Career Path of the Corporate Social Media Strategist,” analyzes the role of social media influencers in enterprise-level organizations around the world. The study, which gives quantitative and qualitative data on the state of social media usage today, as well as key suggestions for leveraging social media in large organizations, also gives some powerful insight into the challenges facing social media strategists today.

In the report, the author, Jeremiah Owyang,  points out the six major issues that the research showed social media strategies face including: friction from internal culture and lack of education which thwart progress, providing real ROI, difficulties of serving entire enterprises with few resources and the struggle to keep up with ever-changing technologies. We’re sure that most social media users have faced problems like this in the past, and the report, one of the first on this subject matter that we’ve seen, gives some good suggestions on how to deal with these issues and work past them.

Many of the points in the report won’t be a surprise to those of us who actually use social media in a business setting regularly, but, having some factual evidence that those problems exist and viewing some real statistics on the situation can help you to frame up your social media strategies in your own business. It’s worth taking a look at if you’re facing any of the problems that Owyang mentions in the report, especially if you’re having difficulties expressing the issues and the need for further support/resources to your management team. If not, and you’re one of the luck few who has significant social media support within your organization and a management team who just “get it,” then the report won’t have as much to offer you.

Earlier today I read an interesting post on Erik Askin’s website, discussing the ways in which designers can discourage user behavior by developing designs that annoy the user or make usability difficult. The post uses the example of a cigarette carton and shows how by designing the carton away from its usable rectangle shape it might actually discourage users from smoking in general by making their lives more difficult. The post is looking at the design for the package of a consumer product, but the post got me thinking about how designing for or against user behavior can help or hinder design for the web.

Now, I’m not a web designer, and I’m by no means an expert on the subject, but I am a marketer, and because of that, I have experience using behavioral models to try and influence users to take action on a website.  As Joshua Porter says in a recent blog post, “One of the guiding principles of interaction design is to support existing behavior. This means to figure out what is already happening, what activities, tasks and interactions people are already doing and to build support for them into software.”

Humans are logical creatures and they make logical connections and decisions when they’re on a website that lead to action, just like in any other aspect of their lives. If the website a user arrives at discourages certain behaviors by say, having poor usability, then most users are going to logically decide against interacting with the website or taking the actions that the organization would like them to take on the site.

For a website design to be effective it needs to meet the needs of your audience and if it doesn’t, then it discourages them from returning or interacting with it in the first place. These needs are often several fundamental expectations that a user expects to find when they arrive on a website including being able to browse and navigate efficiently, to find the website in the first place, to interact and access information easily and to return without difficulty.

The way that a user interacts with your website will be motivated by different triggers and influencers that they come across on your website. According to a recent paper by BJ Fogg, a Stanford Researcher, understanding your target audience’s triggers and incorporating them into your web design is important if you’re trying to target specific user behavior, like filling out a form for instance. If you want a user to take an action, they need to feel motivated and encouraged to do so and this can be influenced by design.  A website designer can help this process by focusing on usability and behavior models to help influence your users to take the action you’d like them to take. Is it simple for your users to find your content and fill in forms? Is it easy for them to find your contact information and submit queries? According to Fogg, “The implication for designers is clear: Increasing motivation is not always the solution. Often increasing ability (making behavior simpler) is the path for increasing behavior performance.”

People are lazy, and they want you to make their lives easy. By ensuring that you have a web design that supports their behaviors and motivates them to take action you can increase your conversion rates on the actions you want them to take. Having what Fogg refers to as, “poorly timed triggers” (pop-ups for example) don’t generally influence users to take action and often discourage them from continuing to explore your website because it’s not providing something that meets their wants or needs, or makes it easy for them to interact with your website.

So, the big question is, have you designed your website to help or hinder your users’ behavior? If you’re not sure if your website is make it easy for your users to take action then it probably isn’t optimized for conversion rates or usability, which can have negative effects on your overall website ROI.

Image by Zawezome on Flickr.

Recently Facebook announced their new messaging system to the world, and while it won’t be made available in Canada yet, if your business has an international scope it will affect your marketing, especially your email marketing strategy.

According to Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO, there are currently 4 billion messages sent through Facebook on a daily basis and because of that, Facebook feels that a “modern messaging” system will be a “seamless, informal, immediate, personal, simple and minimal,” solution, but he also wants to make it very clear that, “it’s not email,” (despite the fact that Facebook is offering facebook.com email addresses to all of its users).

Facebook has said that the messaging system is split into three sections: Seamless Messaging, Conversation History and the Social Inbox and is designed so that the user can, “decide how [they] want to talk to [their] friends: via SMS, chat, email or Messages.”

How does Facebook Messages work?
We’ve heard this new system called everything from “simple,” to calling it the new Google Wave or the more dire title of, “Gmail killer,” but how does it actually work? And what is it going to do to the way you approach email in your marketing?

First, it’s important for us to say again that Facebook Messages isn’t going to be available for everyone for quite a while, especially those of us over here in Canada, but, if you’re one of the lucky users who’ve managed to get an invite to try out the service, it will have the following features:

1. The social inbox will be split into three separate folders: Messages, other and junk. The first two folders will contain messages sorted either by, “friends,” “friends of friends,” or “everything else,” (including newsletters, promotional emails etc). The nice thing about this is that regardless of who you give that email address to, you don’t actually have to address any emails from anyone you don’t personally know or have as a friend if you choose not to.
2. Messages that you send from Facebook will be received through, “whatever medium or device is convenient for [the recipient] and you can both have a conversation in real-time.” That saves users from segmenting their lists based on different user preferences for communication. 
3. Messages can be configured to bounce emails that aren’t exclusively sent from users on your friend list. That means that if someone chooses to adopt a facebook.com email address and move away from other email service providers, it may be almost impossible for you to contact them in the future. 
4. The messages system will have a joint inbox for messages sent via chat, email or SMS so you can get your entire conversation history with your contacts, no matter where the conversation occurred all in one place.

What does this mean for marketers?

Social media are becoming more dynamic and integrated channels and, because of this, it is becoming more important than ever to ensure that your marketing messages are consistent and appropriate across multiple mediums and communication platforms.

1. Designing interactive messages. Social media are currently built around the idea of immediate interaction and real-time communication. With the advent of tools like Facebook Messages, it will be important that all of your communications are more interactive as well. You’ll want to make sure that you have a response system in place whether you are sending email, chat or SMS marketing messages.
2. Improve your communication skills. Are you communication skills up to the task of dealing with a service like this? It’s no longer viable to communicate differently to different audience through email and social media. Your messages now need to be relevant and consistent to your entire audience. 
3. Higher spam filters will require increased consumer trust. If your emails are now blocked more effectively your audience will need to have a high degree of trust in your organization to choose to accept communications from you. 
4. Immediate and future list hygiene issues. With user@facebook.com email addresses now being made available to all Facebook users are your email lists still going to be accurate? Deliverability issues may be caused because your recipients are switching their new Facebook email addresses. You can try to avoid this by sending out some re-engagement campaigns targeted at encouraging users who are considered switching their email addresses to re-subscribe with their new information.

It will take some time to see the full effects that Facebook Messages has on email marketing. With the rollout being so gradual it will be difficult to see the repercussions of this new technology immediately and it’s entirely possible that the platform won’t be as popular with users as Facebook is hoping. Do we think that Facebook Messages will kill email? No. Will it change the way that we market using email? Possibly. We’ll have to just wait and see. In the mean time, if any of you have tried the platform we’d love to hear your opinions and reviews!

Lead generation is generally considered to be the responsibility of a company’s marketing team, but that doesn’t mean that sales teams can’t help out. If sales gets involved in the lead generation process it actually makes it easier for many organizations to streamline and optimize their lead management strategies. Sales and marketing teams are trying to reach the same goals, so why can’t they just work together?  We’ve talked about this before when we’ve discussed the importance of sales and marketing alignment, and one of the key areas where sales and marketing teams can coordinate is lead generation.

1. Develop a universal lead definition. Having sales and marketing teams work together to develop an agreed upon definition of a quality lead can help to ensure that sales is getting the leads that they want and helps give marketing a better idea of where they should be focusing their demand generation efforts. If your organization doesn’t have a strong idea of what a quality lead looks like then it will be difficult to optimize your lead generation strategies to help you get them.
2. Keep communication lines open.  For any joint marketing and sales initiative it’s important that both teams are communicating with each other openly. Having regularly scheduled weekly meetings can help to minimize friction and ensure that everyone is on the same page and allows an open forum for feedback and discussion about current lead generation initiatives, the success that sales has had following up with current leads, sales thoughts on the lead generation process and helps marketing to see which types of leads were the most successful for sales.
3. Use social media. Using social networks for lead generation can definitely be a collaborative effort between sales and marketing. There are many different ways you can do this: sales reps can have their own social media accounts or you can organize separate sales accounts and profiles on social networks so that your sales team can collaborate on one account.  Regardless of how you choose to go about this, it’s important to make sure that you have a social media plan in place to help regulate social media usage. As long as you have that then you can have your sales teams about helping by generating their own quality leads. 
4. Help with content creation. One of the best ways that sales can help with lead generation is to take part in the content development process. By doing things like writing guest blog posts, giving feedback on current collateral and helping marketing by telling them about customers’ or leads’ opinions on content marketing can help to optimize their demand generation strategy since effective content plays a huge role in this.

This week’s post has an infographic on B2B social media marketing, a presentation on designing for usability and a video explaining Facebook’s new messaging system.

This infographic from Mashable shows some facts on the state of  B2B social media marketing today.  It goes over how B2B companies use social media compared to B2C as well as looking at budgeting and tools used.



This presentation on “Designing Outcomes for Usability”  by Marko Hurst is an excellent resource for designers, and marketers who deal with the design process to take a look at.

I’m sure you’ve all heard that Facebook has overhauled its messaging system. This video from Facebook’s official YouTube channel does a good job of explaining the theory behind the new product and how it’s going to work compared to their old product and email in general. If you use Facebook and are interested in their new message service it’s definitely worth taking a look at, it’s got some pretty interesting features!



Hopefully you all find these links informative! Have a great weekend!

Too often marketers get so caught up in marketing strategy that they forget about the importance of customer experience. If a customer has a bad experience interacting with your organization online, then they are less likely to return for further interactions.

A new study from Econsultancy in conjunction with Foviance called the “Mult-Channel Customer Experience Report” examines how well organizations are working towards an improved customer experience and the components necessary to optimize it.

Some highlights from the report include:

• 49% of survey respondents say that a multi-channel customer experience is important to their organization
• 68% of the organizations surveyed recognized a strong link between long-term business performance and customer experience
• Unfortunately 9% of the respondents say that they still have no strategy in place for improving the customer experience
• 61% of companies said that their most dominant competitive strategy was product differentiation rather than customer experience improvement despite the fact that 86% stated that their company makes some attempt to differentiate their brand through superior customer experience
• Despite the “almost universal consensus” around the important of customer experience, only 22% of companies say that they have a well-developed strategy

Are you spending enough time on your customer experience? Or are you ignoring it in favor of tactics like product or service differentiation? Is the fact that your products or services are unique going to get you very far if people hate their experiences with your company? Probably not.  If you’re not already working on improving your customer experience, maybe it’s time to begin planning a comprehensive strategy.

We just finished another webinar, and, as usual, we didn't have time to get to all the great questions we received. So, without further ado, here are the answers to the questions we didn't have time to answer.

What social media is best for baby boomers?

While social media tend to be viewed as a "young" medium, a large number of the users are actually part of the "baby boomer" generation. This study from the Pew Internet and American Life Project shows that social media in general is extremely popular with users of all ages. Having said that, we have found that many older users tend to gravitate towards more professional social media like LinkedIn.

What do you think is the best strategy to implement social media in a B2B environment?

When a company is getting started with social media, the first thing that we always suggest doing is establishing a strong social media strategy based on industry research. If you'd like help establishing a strategy try reading our blog post, "The Definitive Guide to Creating a Social Media Strategy"  which walks you through creating a sustainable and effective social media strategy.

Do you think that a 90 day test period is a safe expectation for quality feedback and adjustments for a company's intro into social media?

Social media is a very flexible medium, and because of that results will vary largely from organization to organization. The results you get from social media will tend to be directly relate to your approach. If you have a strong strategy in place, you have a good idea of what you'd like to measure and you're actively working to develop a strong social media presence, then you will start to see results relatively quickly, however, it's important to remember that the goal of social media use shouldn't be immediate results, but the development of long-term, relevant relationships with customers and prospects.

We hope you all enjoyed the webinar. You can register for the next session in our webinar series, "Top Website Design Trends for 2011" here.

Image by Tim Caynes on Flickr.

Recently, a well-known higher education blogger, Karine Joly, posted on her Higher Ed Analytics Blog an interview that she had with Avinash Kaushik on the state of Higher Education Websites and Web Analytics.

The interview itself is full of information that is extremely relevant to higher education marketers and some of the highlights include:

• In Avinash’s opinion, many higher education websites are still taking part in several negative marketing techniques: offline marketing (also using offline techniques and transferring them to their website so that many websites are “brochureware” sites), outdated marketing (many higher education institutions have websites that haven’t been updated in the last 5 years), “shout” marketing (non-interactive websites that push the school’s agenda with little or no user insight).
• Avinash recommends that higher education institutions can improve their websites with web analytics by taking advantage of initiatives like surveys, testing and usability best practices.

We think that both of these points are important, especially in higher educational institutions which many times tend to be behind the curve when it comes to innovative web marketing. While we agree with Avinash, we also have some tips that we think can help higher education institutions make the most out of their web analytics.

What are some of the important things that higher education institutions can be tracking with web analytics?

1. Applications to the school and the navigation paths a user used to get there
2. Conversions rate on different calls-to-action (schedule a campus visit, download the course calendar, request school information etc). 
3. Top content (who’s reading your blog? What pages do new visitors find most useful?)

What metrics are important for higher education institutions to be tracking?

• Visitors - number of visitors, unique versus returning visitors, number of page views, visitor's geographical location (you can choose this as an advanced filter). 
• Traffic Sources -  direct, referral, search engine
• Content (Site Interactions) - top content, entry and exit pages, navigation paths
• Goals (Outcomes) - conversion rates, conversion values, conversion paths, funnel analysis

What can help you to be more successful with your analytics?

1. Segment! You don’t always want everything and too much information can actually be more detrimental than not enough information.
2. Tag URLs to help you determine the success of initiatives like email and pay-per-click campaigns. 
3. Make sure you’re tracking goals and conversions so you understand how effective your campaigns are (goals could be campus visits scheduled, number of course schedules downloaded etc). 
4. Use social media to monitor your online identity, brand awareness and brand sentiment (remember, the younger, more web-savvy students are taking part in social media, this can be an invaluable source of information!)
5. Set up a reporting schedule to track your key metrics (be an analytics advocate in your institution and share these reports with website stakeholders).

If you want some additional resources on this topic we recommend:

This presentation on Google Analytics and Higher Education
The Trending Upward Blog written by Shelby Thayer

Are you tweeting actively but having difficulty getting your followers to ReTweet your posts? Don’t worry—you’re not alone.  Many twitterers, despite their popularity have problems getting their ideas and posts spread through the Twittersphere for various different reasons. While we can’t help you with all of them, we can pass on to you some great tips on how to get ReTweeted from social media expert Dan Zarella.

Recently, Dan released an e-book characterizing some basic facts about ReTweeting. By Researching ReTweets and random tweets over a 9 month period he was able to put together a book with some basic advice on how you can get your tweets disseminated more readily.
Here’s what we took away from his information book:

1. Keep your Tweets brief. but relevant. Dan found that while simplicity is great, when it comes to ReTweets it isn’t necessarily a deciding factor. In fact, most ReTweets contain longer, higher syllable count words (which tend to be more complex) than random tweets. The research also showed that while popular information is great, it isn’t as likely to get ReTweeted as unique information. The study established that in a random sample of un-ReTweeted posts, regardless of the topic, each word was found on average 89.19 other times in the sample, whereas in random sample of ReTweets, each word was located only 16.37 times.
2. Provide Links. Dan’s study showed that tweets containing links were much more likely to be ReTweeted than posts without them. According to his research, 18.96% of un-ReTweeted posts contained links whereas 56.69% of ReTweeted posts contained links. The message here is clear: Twitter has become a popular way to spread information from the rest of the web, and you are most likely to get ReTweeted as a reliable source if you provide a link to validate your tweet. 
3. Shorten your URLs. This directly relates to the previous two entries on our list. The shorter the URL, the briefer your post can be, and the easier it is to include a link. Enough said. 
4. Include a call to action. This is one of the bread and butter rules of content marketing. Regardless of what form your content is in, a blog post, a case study, a web page or a tweet, providing a call to action for your readers will entice them to be active. So? Dan’s research found that including words like “Please”, “You”, “ReTweet” and “Please ReTweet” were defining factors in whether or not a post was ReTweeted. 
5. Time of day matters. While tweeting takes place at all hours of the day—and night, Dan’s research established that most ReTweeting takes place between the hours of 3pm and midnight and that most tweeting and ReTweeting occurs during the business week rather than on weekends. 

Have any of you experienced success increasing your retweets with the above tactics? We've definitely found in our experience that we get more retweets at different times of the day. If you're like us, you probably don't often send out a tweet without a link (that's a pretty fundamental part of any of the tweets we've had retweeted) but keeping our tweets brief and shortening URLs have also been useful for us. We use tools like Hootsuite to send out our tweets because it allows you to shorten your URLs, send your tweets and track your retweets and mentions all in one place.

Image by Matt Hamm on Flickr.

This week's post has a video on the evolution of the worker, a blog post on the debate between the continuing relevance of email and the emerging importance of social media and an excerpt from the newest Marketing Sherpa benchmark report. 

This video on the (r)evolution of a worker, discusses how media and communication has changed the way that poeple work and function in society today. 

This post from Marketing Pilgrim gives another point of view on the ongoing debate about whether or not email is still a relevant marketing tool in the social web.

Marketing Sherpa's newest report, the 2011 Search Marketing Benchmark Report - SEO Edition is definitely worth taking a look at. It's full of useful statistics and information on the state of search marketing today.

Hopefully you all have a great weekend.

Early this week Jon Sobel from Technorati published their most recent “State of the Blogosphere”  report for 2010. The study, which according to the website, “follow[s] growth and trends in the blogosphere,” includes information on: which brands are embracing social media, traditional media vs. social media, brands working with bloggers etc.

Some highlights for the report include:

• Only 1% of bloggers blog full-time while 21% blog for their own company or organization
• 2/3 of bloggers are male and ¼ of bloggers have a household income of $100,000 or more
• Most bloggers update 2-3 times a week
• 42% of respondents say they blog about brands they love or hate (word of mouth marketing people!)
• 42% of bloggers use social media to follow brands (are you reaching those influencers?)
• 39% of respondents believe that more people will be getting their news and entertainment from blogs than traditional media in the next 5 years
• 72% of bloggers are using twitter to promote their blog content, while 62% use it to share links to interesting content

The most effective social media sites to promote your blog content are:

• Facebook (28%)
• Twitter (26%)
• LinkedIn (4%)
• StumbleUpon (3%)
• Flickr (2%)
• YouTube (2%)

The top ways that blogging has helped businesses are:

1. Greater industry visibility (64%)
2. Acquired new customers, made sales (58%)
3. Built thought leadership (54%)
4. Asked to speak at conferences (32%)
5. Helped recruit employees (17%)

The web has been responsible for many changes to the way companies do business since companies started using it actively as a business tool. Because it is so widely used there is a constant stream of web trends and innovations, some that stick and some that fade away like the thousands before them. Today however, we’d like to talk about a trend in B2B web marketing that will certainly be around for a while because of the significant benefits it can have for the way that companies do business online.

We’re talking about the increasing availability of real-time data and how this can impact a businesses’ online strategies. In this new business environment it’s all about how quickly you get data and act on it, how fast your respond to your customers, contact leads and address issues. As popular blogger, David Meerman Scott, pointed out, “…public discourse is no longer dictated by the mass media, size is no longer a decisive advantage. Speed and agility win.”

What does that mean for your business? It means that public opinion and brand sentiment is no longer controlled by the large mass media conglomerates of the past. You no longer have to be the biggest to get people to listen to you. It’s all about acting fast and flexibly.

How can real-time data help your business?

Connect with your customers instantly. It’s not always easy to get a hold of your customers. We’ve all been there, people are busy, if your organization is international then some of your customers are in a different time zone, emails get lost or forgotten, things happen and customer-vendor relationships suffer. The real-time web can help change that. Using social media applications like Twitter, allows a constant stream of customer interaction with your social media representatives. Not only does this allow you to instantly communicate with your customers, but it allows you to instantly respond to questions, concerns or simple comments, helping to build and nurture your current relationships.

Address issues as they occur. It’s impossible to address an issue the instant that it happens, but, with real-time web, you can deal with problems a lot sooner than you were able to in the past. Immediate customer support and issue resolution is now possible almost immediately after a problem occurs and it has been shown in several instances that the faster a company addresses a glitch, the better it ends in the long run. No matter what the issue, your customers and fans like to know that a) you’re aware of the problem b) you’re doing your best to handle it quickly c) you care about their concerns.

Understand exactly what’s happening, as it happens. As mentioned in a recent Mashable post, “For a while, a big limitation of online optimization tools was their lack of real-time reporting. Google Analytics, the most popular analytics service out there, can easily take a full day before displaying your data. This was acceptable when the web was static, but as websites become more and more dynamic, the rate at which we analyze and iterate based on collected data has dramatically increased.” Thanks to new applications and awareness, many industries are taking advantage of newer real-time reporting tools. Using applications like Facebook’s “like” button and email software with real-time clickthrough and conversion tracking can help you to see exactly how effective your campaigns and initiatives are, as they’re occurring, so you can optimize your strategies on the go for better results and ROI.

Have a real conversation. Offline conversations don’t take place over a few hours, or a few days like they do often do in business settings via email or phone, and your online conversations shouldn’t either. Your customers want to feel like they’re talking to a real-person and using social media and other real-time tools is the best way to achieve this. Having a real conversation with a customer or lead is invaluable to your lead nurturing and demand generation strategies.

Be forced to optimize your web presence. This is one of the best things about real-time data. The fact is that if you’re website isn’t optimized with the most up-to-date analytics tools, if you’re not testing to see what works and what doesn’t and if you’re not integrating social media into your web presence, then you’re going to fall behind your competitors. It’s no longer acceptable to create a static website and let it sit there and hope that customers will come to you. The need to be constantly optimizing your website based on what’s happening, as it happens is now the strategy of best-in-class business websites, and it should be part of your strategy as well.

Image by n.zeissig on Flickr.

Ever heard of Software-as-a-Service? Well if you haven't you should make note, it is definitely one of the best options available for you when it comes to several different types of software including CRM systems (a popular example is Salesforce.com) and many CMS tools (like Marqui CMS).

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is basically software that is deployed over the internet. With SaaS a vendor licenses their software application to customers either by subscription, on-demand, in a pay-as-you-go model or for free.

There are many benefits to choosing a SaaS solution, and they include:

• Rapid deployment time.With no software to buy or install, implementation time for SaaS service products tends to be extremely fast in comparison with other software options.
• Ease of access.Because this type of software is deployed over the internet, users can access the software at anytime over any internet browser making it much more convenient for many businesses.
• Low cost of ownership.Everyone who's had experience with any type of software knows that after you purchase it there are often additional costs for maintenance and upgrades. That isn't the case with a SaaS solution. Since you haven't purchased software itself, the vendor is responsible for upkeep and upgrades to the application.
• Easy to customize.Because SaaS providers with a multi tenant architecture are able to customize their products capabilities to suit the needs of each of their customers, the products tend to be both extremely flexible and scalable. In addition, most SaaS providers have their own API for their product so it is easy to integrate with businesses' current software applications (like a CRM).

All of these benefits make SaaS CMS solutions a good choice for many organizations, but there is one benefit that outweighs them all in our opinion and that is SaaS vendors' dedication to customer success. The SaaS model itself requires vendors to take a keen interest in their customer service because since the solutions tend to be subscription based and easy to implement, they are also easy for customers to choose to switch away from. In a SaaS model, if a customer is unsuccessful with a vendor's product, often the only requirement for quitting a service is to call the vendor and say they are canceling after their next payment date. This very flexibility means that if a vendor isn't completely dedicated and highly motivated towards ensuring that each and every one of their customers are successful then they won't last very long in such a competitive space.

Image by gfpeck on Flickr.

This week’s post has a video spoof on iPhone apps, an interesting post on social media and politics, and another TED Talk video on using minimalism and negative space in design.

Lately there have been a whole host of spoofs on different marketing related videos from multiple humorous remakes of the Old Spice Guy advertisements and videos to over-the-top mock iPad commercials and this video (first seen on Mashable) featuring more of those adorable puppets from Sesame Street, focuses on a fictional toy, the “iPogo” which has an app for just about everything.

There has been a lot of talk in the social sphere lately about social media’s impact on political campaigns. This post from davefleet.com discusses “5 Take-Aways on Social Media and Politics”.

We’re big fans of TED talks and this new video from an independently organized even in Boulder, Colorado, features Grant Blakeman discussing the importance of minimalism and negative space in design.

Have a great weekend everyone!


Image by jtstrathdee on Flickr.

Most of the time when we write posts regarding social media, we’re talking about its ability to act as a word of mouth marketing tool to help businesses make connections with their target audience, and we’ve also written about the ways that other organizations, like higher education institutions can use social media as a way to build communities and strengthen understanding. Sadly, because of these very reasons, there are also some darker aspects of social media and the effects that it can have on people’s lives, both personal and public.

We’re sure that you’ve all heard any one of the multiple news stories about cyber-bullying and horrible and sometimes fatal, effects it has had on the lives of many young people across the world. The very things that make social media such a powerful tool in the hands of businesses, fundraisers, political campaigners and other social activists are the same things that can make it a powerful weapon in the hands of those out to hurt other people.

A search on Google for “Facebook and Cyberbullying” reveals hundreds of results from news-related horror stories of suicide, bullying and harassment to articles about the struggles that teachers and parents are having protecting youth from the negative results of using social media.



A recent Facebook application developed by SafetyWeb a leading web-based mentoring company, called Find Help is hoping to change all that.  After installing the app, teens will find it extremely easy and quick to get the help they need, from the right channels, to help stop abusive behavior on Facebook. The app allows its users to report bullying, harassment or any other issues directly to Facebook officials, and, in addition to connecting these victims with counselors and professionals that can help, it also gives them access to organizations like suicide prevention hotlines and other help centers.

Why tools like this are important

I’m not going to list all the incidences of reported teen abuse over the last year which show up in Google search results, although that evidence does speak for itself. Instead I’d like to focus on the ways in which a tool like this makes the social web a safer place for all users in our inter-connected society.

Social media is a great place for connecting with the rest of the world, whether for business or personal reasons, but it is often too easy to forget that a huge portion of the internet user population is made up of young adults who need protection from bullying whether over the internet or in person.

The new app is a huge step towards both creating awareness for the issue and helping teens work who have been abused work towards a solution.

We’ve talked many times before about the struggles that many companies have between their sales and marketing teams. The general opinion among marketers is that they’re doing their job, but sales isn’t pulling their weight. Often marketers feel that they generate lots of leads to hand-off to sales, but sales teams just don’t follow up properly and opportunities are lost. Well that may be true for some organizations, but it certainly isn’t true for all of them, and there are some things that marketing teams can do to help streamline this process and minimize clashes between teams.

One of the first things that a marketing team can do to help to shorten the sales cycle is to try and understand how their sales team feels about the leads they are being given by marketing. Often, while marketing may feel like they're giving sales the right leads, sales teams feel that they are being handed leads based on quantity over quality.

Marketing’s perspective:

• Sales team isn’t closing a large enough percentage of leads
• Sales team is taking too long to close deals 
• Sales teams don’t work hard enough to connect with leads
• Sales teams are complaining about lead quality
• Sales’ lead follow-up is hit or miss

Sales’ Perspective:

• Marketing doesn’t provide enough leads
• The leads that marketing provides aren’t good quality
• Marketing keeps provide the same old leads

The different perceptions above are quite common in most organizations but there are things marketers can do to help change Sales’ perspective and improve the sales cycle.

1. Qualify leads based on a universal lead definition. Having a common definition of what a qualified lead is ensures that marketing is pass on the right leads to sales, and that sales is receiving leads that are ready to buy.
2. Define a standard follow-up process. Do you have a follow-up process in place for each type of lead? Having a clear, standard cycle in place for following up and nurturing a lead can help push a lead through the sales cycle much more quickly. 
3. Ensure that your CMS integrates with your CRM. Having these two systems integrate seamlessly helps to ensure that no leads are lost, and can ensure that both marketing and sales have a clear view of where a lead is in the sales cycle.  

Image by mars_discovery_district on Flickr.

A few weeks ago we wrote about Gap’s branding misfire when they tried to launch a new logo, and the horrible backlash they received on the web. After trying unsuccessfully to get their audience on board with the change, Gap finally gave into the pressure and reverted to their old logo. The attempted switch was just about as problematic as it could have been for the company and was surround by a lot of negativity and ill will from their fans. We think it’s pretty safe to say that after the snafu, the popularity and sentiment towards the Gap as a brand was lowered significantly.

That’s why after reading about Lululemon’s reaction to the issue we were disappointed to see another brand kicking the Gap while it was down (so to speak).

We were first alerted to the situation by a post on the Canadian Marketing Blog, where we were told that Lululemon, in an attempt to mock the Gap’s poor decision by making a fake Lululemon logo that was clearly a replication of the Gap’s suggested logo replacement. Lululemon post the logo on their Twitter page as well as their corporate site’s homepage (see the screenshots below from the Canadian Marketing Blog post).





(Gap logo image from Geekosystem.com)

The post strongly criticized Lululemon’s decision saying that, “One could say Lululemon were just being humorous. It was “light-hearted fun” after all. But aren’t there other ways to achieve that without it being at the expense of someone else’s misfortune? Surely that isn’t difficult for such a creative brand like Lululemon?”
Now, being based in Vancouver, we’re big fans of Canadian companies (especially ones founded here) that have had major local and international success like Lululemon. However, having said that, we were also surprised to see that they had made this choice, regardless of Gap’s position as a competitor to their company. While we don’t agree with Lululemon’s tactics, they are a competitor, and most likely the Gap’s mistake and the subsequent negative reaction has been beneficial for Lululemon and other retail stores that compete directly with the Gap. So is what Lululemon did (they’ve taken the logo down now) all in good fun, or was it a tasteless and negative marketing move?

Was it responsible for Lululemon to mock the Gap?

With the web being the social environment that it is today, it is much more volatile because it is controlled by brands’ audiences and brands should be more accountable for their actions because their customers are directly connected, and much more able to share their brand sentiments and opinions. While there were mixed reviews from Lululemon's fans (see below screenshot) being a fan of Lululemon doesn’t make everyone less put off by the fact that they’re mocking another brand when they’re down, if anything, it gives many people increased sympathy for  the Gap instead. It is certainly true that many people will see it as a funny joke, and many of Lululemon's fans will stand by the action, but is it worth losing the positive sentiments of the few who take it badly?



So—when it comes to your brand, and your brand’s actions, where should you draw the line?

1. Remember that your brand can’t magically protect you. It doesn’t matter who you are, or what brand you work for, if you do something that your fans don’t like, you’re going to hear about it (along with the rest of the social web). This happened to the Gap when their fans didn’t like their new logo, and it’s happening now to Lululemon because of their reaction (this post is a prime example).
2. Don’t let it get personal. It doesn’t matter how much you personally (or your company) dislikes another brand, or what’s happened in the past. All that matters is that once you take that battle to a public, social space (like Twitter for example) things are going to get ugly. Period. Whether it’s the other company’s fans, or your own, some people (and it’s unlikely it’s going to just be your competitor’s fans) are going to think that what you did is wrong. 
3. If you’re not sure, don’t do it. When it comes to having a strong brand, it’s all about having customers and fans that love you. Do you really want to risk that on a marketing initiative that you’re not sure of? If you’re even in a situation where you’re thinking about implementing a strategy that you’re not sure if your customers are going to like or not,  do some further research, as them what they think or just scrap the whole idea altogether, but don’t just jump in and hope that you’re right.

Smart marketers know that to be really successful with any of your marketing tactics, you need to be testing them. Testing allows your campaigns to be optimized based on what works and what doesn’t for your specific audience. Testing can help to improve the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns when done correctly and can help you to quickly see tangible results.

Why is email testing so important?

Optimizing your emails can help to improve your response and conversion rates and help to generate more leads and, hopefully create more opportunities and sales. Testing has been proven to help increase the effectiveness of your email campaigns and can help to turn your email initiatives into a lead conversion machine.

Fundamentals of testing

When it comes to email testing there are several different areas you can optimize for.  Today we’re going to focus mainly on improving conversions and response rates, but, before we move on to that, it is important to remember that testing to ensure that your emails make it past your recipients’ spam filters is an important first step. If your email never makes it to an inbox, then it is impossible for anyone to interact with it. To help ensure that your emails are getting to the inbox we suggest using tools like Spam Assassin which can help to show you some of the things you’re doing that may be getting you into a junk or spam folder.

When it comes to what you should be optimizing to increase your conversion and response rates, it depends on which areas you’re weakest in to begin with. This means that to reach the point where you know what to test, you need to fully understand your email campaigns from the time they land in your recipients’ inbox, to the time that they do or do not convert.

If you’ve been running your campaigns for a while now, then you probably already have a good idea of your weaknesses. If not, you can take a look at past campaigns and try to establish the areas that are working, and the ones that aren’t.

For instance, if your messages aren’t being opened in the first place, maybe you need to work on creating more compelling subject lines, or, if you find that people aren’t converting you can try optimizing your campaign with a different offer, developing more eye-catching copy or making your call-to-action more urgent.
If you don’t know whether your current metrics are strong or not, you can use resources like EmailStatCenter.com to find benchmark data on different aspects like click-through and open rates.

There are many different issues your emails can have at many different stages of the email cycle, and understanding these can help you with your optimization later on. Clearly measuring metrics like open and read rate, click-throughs and conversions can help you to figure out which areas need improvement, where you’re falling short, and where your current tactics are working.

How to test

The best way to test is to set up multiple version of one email by setting up variables related to the aspects you want to optimize. By testing variable elements on a single page (moving calls-to-action, modifying email copy etc) and then sending that single email out to different subscriber groups, changing the variable each time, you can get a good idea of which campaign achieves the results that you’re looking for from your campaigns. The variable you choose to test will depend on what you’re trying to optimize for. 

The easiest way to use this testing method is to segment your database into different subscriber groups and to then assign a different version of your email to each group. These results will tend to be fairly generalized, but they will help you to get a basic idea of which version of the campaign has the most success. If you have a large enough list, you can choose a small portion of it (10-20%) to perform tests on, and then, once you’ve learned which emails work the best, send the optimized campaign to the remaining percentage (80-90%) of your subscriber database.

Image by Fletcher Prince on Flickr.