Let’s look at 3 tips to improve your email marketing open rates:

1. Brand Reputation, More Importantly Email Brand Reputation

Do you think your email recipients are actually excited when they see your email in their inbox? Why or why not? Companies have a hard time understanding that they develop an email reputation that can make or break open rates.

Break it: If you email too often, only try to sell them (buy! buy! buy!), write near novels, or never establish yourself as a valuable reference, you are going to suffer with each additional email.

Make it: You deliver timely, valuable content that your users associate with your brand so that they look forward to hearing from you. You educate, inform and help, benefitting the recipient more than your company.

Personally, I have about 5 companies that I get a monthly email from that I’m actually excited to open.  I have about 20 that I pass over just about every time.

If you do one thing after reading this post, evaluate your email brand reputation and work to start improving it right now. You can slowly turn long time subscribers into frequent openers and deliver a substantial first impression to your new subscribers.

2. A/B Test Your Subject Lines

I’m always amazed at how subject lines are ignored as a key contributor to your email marketing success. Creating multiple email subject lines and testing them against each other in a A/B test is just plain smart.

The email marketing platform we use allows our campaigns to test two subject lines with the first 50% of the email list. Afterward it automatically sends the second half of the list the email with the winning subject line. This A/B test helps produce an increase in opens just about every time out.

The example above illustrates that for this A/B test, Version A was the winner and helped produce an estimated 96 more opens than if Version B’s subject line was used. This resulted in a 19% increase for delivery of the winning subject line to the second half balance of the email list.

To take it a step further, this A/B test was the only one done by this client in a 6 month period and it returned a higher open rate then the other 5 email campaigns. (Note: The client manages their own campaign sends, but Spyder Trap initiated the A/B test to illustrate to them the value of A/B testing subject lines.)

The September campaign with the A/B test saw an open rate of 25.35%, almost a full 4% higher than the 6 month average, and out performed all of the other campaigns. Even November’s campaign, with 400 more subscribers in the list saw 105 fewer opens.

If you don’t currently use an email platform that enables A/B Testing, we can help.

3. Mobile Email Awareness Is A Must

So, you already know that people engage with email on their smartphones more than any other platform (desktop client, webmail, etc.). Today’s email marketer in any industry needs to make their emails mobile friendly in all aspects.

Step one is to be aware just how many of your email subscribers are opening your email marketing via mobile. The example below shows you that IOS devices iPhone and iPad dominate how this company’s email marketing is opened and read, especially the iPhone. (Over 1/3 of their readers!)

Step two is to understand how your subject line differs on mobile devices. You will have less characters in the subject line depending on what device it is viewed on. For example, an iPhone 4s can display as little as just 33 characters. Also pay attention to what message/text appears in the content teaser below the subject line. If you start your email with a graphic header, that teaser might just be visible HTML code and not even the content of the e-newsletter.

Step three for your mobile awareness is to start building your emails using responsive design. This allows your email to change its shape and size when it’s opened on a smartphone compared to a desktop email client. Just as responsive web design is solving many companies challenge of a great mobile experience, email shouldn’t be left out.

Email is Still the ROI Leader

Even though we have a lot more to think about over the last decade for online marketing, and so many more exciting options to consider, email is still the ROI leader. Take into account these 3 tips to improve your email marketing and open rates and it can be an even stronger performer for your organization.

If you need an expert email partner or a better email marketing platform to help improve your email marketing efforts, we’re here to discuss what can be done.

CULTURE

At Spyder Trap, we know the value of our employees. We believe it is important to recognize this through great benefits like full health insurance, flexible schedules, learning/development opportunities and a creative atmosphere. In fact, to accommodate our growing team, we recently made the move to the Loring Corners building, and we’re undergoing construction to make the space work for everyone (including collaborative work areas with a coffee shop vibe). We take pride in a culture that encourages our close-knit group of 40 employees to make coming to work fun and rewarding! We definitely enjoy our Dog Fridays!

CORE VALUES

Want to know what it takes to make such an excellent team? We recently identified five core values.

1) Passion

On paper, many people have the skills to complete a job; we look for something more, something intangible.
Truly innovative work is built with passion—a quality you can’t teach. We are a passionate, digital-minded team of writers, singers, painters, gamers, athletes, photographers, chefs, sports fans, runners and cyclists. Our creativity is driven by our collective digital devotion—and our differences.

2) Excellence

Results are built from the details up.
We stand behind every step of our process—from discovery and ideation to production and its end delivery. Delivering excellence means a Spyder Trap client receives the best service and experience through the combination of customer service, product quality and results.

3) Authenticity

You want to be you; we want you to be you, too.
We know the best digital work is produced in a positive, fun atmosphere. The Spyder Trap culture thrives in an honest, open work environment where new ideas and constructive feedback can be shared, exchanged and improved.

4) Curiosity

Learning begins with asking “Why?”
We are explorers—observant, fascinated and innovative. We’re invested in developing and sharing knowledge with each other.

To find the answers, we scour our research: following blogs, taking and teaching classes, attending conferences and seminars, testing new solutions and collaborating into infinity.

5) Agility

The digital landscape changes quickly and often—so must we.
Our company is leading the changing digital scene. An agile team like ours requires an ongoing commitment to flexibility and adaptation. We are always receptive and responsive to the needs of both our clients and each other.

JOIN THE TEAM

Like what you hear? If you want to work for one of the 100 best MN companies, check out our job openings at www.spydertrap.com/talent. Current open positions include Account Executive and Backend Developer, with recurring openings in project management, creative design, search marketing and social media. To take a better look at our culture, visit our Tumblr site.

I want to look at three areas that I see as big contributors to your next website and it’s success. I know it took time, convincing and budget to get this redesign green lighted. Now, how can you ensure it’s the change you need?

Looking past the basics of a new design and content management system, I believe the following three areas are additional and important considerations in your website redesign. Failing to include these you might make your redesign efforts ineffective.

1.  Better Data

While the web is buzzing with big data, what I see many organizations falling short with is better data. Companies have had a hard time progressing past just installing Google Analytics and looking at basic (and often meaningless) metrics like pages viewed and referral sources.

Put a focus on tracking outcomes over beginnings. Over-hyping referral sources and keywords only gives you entrance points and intent.  Those help but the ability to understand what types of traffic are accomplishing an outcome your website is more valuable.

Establishing and tracking goals and setting up event tracking and other outcomes on your website is truly “better data.” Goal tracking in Google Analytics is one way to put the focus on the outcome and start understanding what is the right kind of traffic to attract.

Below are a few goals that just about any website can track and measure:

• Completion of a contact form or RFQ form
• Email address acquisition
• Download of a whitepaper
• Access or registration for a webinar, event or video

2. Mobile

You knew it would be one of the three, but yet it’s still maybe not part of your redesign? The biggest factor for most organizations to become mobile friendly with their website is the technical configuration or development.

Every stat across mobile is in a growth or explosion mode. Email is consumed on mobile more than desktop or webmail, “mobile first” internet users are rising. In fact, mobile search is set to eclipse desktop searches in under two years, and the list goes on.

Responsive web design has caught on as the right mobile solution for many, giving you one website that adapts to the device you access it on.  Google and Bing have given RWD their blessing for mobile search structure of a website adding to its benefits.

That said, sometimes your website and user are better off with a parallel mobile site or a dynamic mobile site. Responsive is not the only solution for mobile, but for most the benefits can be the answer they’re looking for.

I’d recommend you force the issue of mobile now.  Especially if your company’s trend has been to redesign every three to five years, waiting that long to have a mobile friendly website might put you light years behind your competition.

3. Content That Matters

While a new web design is shiny and a new CMS can alleviate headaches, not putting quality content as your top priority in your redesign can be costly.

What’s content that matters you ask? Imagine that a bookshelf is the website redesign and the content are books. If you don’t know the size, shape and weight of the books, you can’t build the shelf that will hold them. In the same way, a website redesign should consider content first.

Remember, it’s content that is valuable for your user. Content that answers their questions, builds trust in your offering and guides them to an outcome they desire and understand. In the past, we’ve talked about content built on marketing fluff and how you need to address your website users needs, not the company ego.

A great example of content that matters for me is what REI does with Snowshoeing (and many other products).  Many e-commerce enabled sites focus only on product display and sales.  REI has used content focused on education to help you make a smarter and more trusted purchase.  Their site offers content that helps you get the “why” of the product, the product types, expert advice, techniques and more.

They also use various forms of content to educate as text, graphics, photos and video all contribute to the users education.  If your website was a customer service rep, REI’s is poised to answer valuable questions and educate. Many of their competitors would only answer “Add to Cart” or “View Price in Cart”.

Summary: Maximize Your Website Redesign

Good luck with your website redesign and nailing these three important elements that will make your website even more valuable to your organization. Look past the refresh of your design and pay attention to the more valuable decisions you can make with your redesign project. Of course, we’d love to be part of making it happen, just tell us about your needs.

You don’t need to be an SEO pro to be able to leverage various SEO techniques and best practices. As Spyder Trap’s Content Specialist, I want to make my clients’ content do as much work for them as possible. Learning how SEO can influence content—and leverage it—is a valuable tool!

Using SEO strategies like keyword research, internal linking or logical structure, writing strong headers and metadata is just the beginning to giving your content visibility with Google or Bing.

Intro to SEO

Part 1 of this course was an introduction to Search Engine Optimization (SEO). The class was structured to teach attendees how to create or optimize a site to perform well in search engines and generate organic leads.

Following Daniel’s guidance, the class learned how to identify the most potent keywords, how search engines crawl and rank your site, and how to create the most visible and trusted online presence without paid search advertising, only organic search rankings.

Among those who attended the class were Spyder Trap Project Manager Alissa Burg and myself. “As a Project Manager at Spyder Trap, I am always looking for new opportunities to expand my knowledge of our industry,” Alissa said. “Staying on top of the digital trends allows me to compile the latest information and techniques to better leverage these ideas for my clients.”

Register for SEO Class Part 2

Daniel will be teaching Part 2 of the SEO seminar this Wednesday, March 27 from 1-5 p.m. This class will cover more advanced tactics. There are still available seats open if you would like to join him (and it’s not required that you attended Part 1)! To learn more about Part 1 you can visit DemandQuest’s blog post, or to register for Part 2, visit the registration page.

Let’s take a look at a few things you can measure your website against to ensure that you’ve got the right foundation to start on.

1. Clear and Concise Content

First things first, always start with the content evaluation. A flaw in many businesses is worrying too much about the art and visual framework and written content gets push to the side or is focused on last. You may have heard content is king, but if you’re not working off a content strategy then you’re living in a fantasy.

Problem: Too much marketing fluff, not enough real answers

A lot of websites are publishing too much or most often too little content without evaluating the effect of the user experience. If you publish too much content, your site begins to be cluttered and you begin to ask more time of your users to invest in sifting through it all to find the right answer.

On the other hand, not enough content leaves the user feeling like their questions haven’t been answered and they tend to look elsewhere for the right answer. This can send the user off your site into a world where you don’t control the conversation. They are then subject to customer reviews, rants and raves, and competitive analysis.

Solution: Put yourself in your customer’s shoes

Find the balance between providing the right information and too much information, also, keep in mind the context of the user when they are hitting your site. How do you do this? Know your audience. Use analytics, customer interviews, UX strategies and SEO tactics to ensure that quality content is in the right place. Invest in your content!

Remember, it’s representing you and the voice of your company in your absence.

2. Overall Design

It’s important when looking at the design of your site or app that you keep things simple, accessible and usable.

Problem: Visual Clutter

Whenever the designer introduces another border, background, alignment of content, text, imagery, or any other content into the interface the visual cognitive load is increased. This is not to say you can’t bring in visual branding elements that enhance the product, experience and emotions of your visitors, but the important thing to keep in mind is the simplest conversation is usually the most effective. The visual expectations will vary depending on project and client, think cnn.com versus mashable.com.

Solution: Simplify the Conversation

Only communicate the most important content by grouping thoughts, actions and ideas together. When necessary, add visual elements that will facilitate the information architecture.

3. Easy-to-find calls to action

Should we stay above the fold? Do users scroll? What color should the add-to-cart button be? How many form fields is too many? All too often these and other questions like them can hold up projects and keep marketing directors up all night.

Problem: Making decisions based on industry myths

Many times decisions are made about the content and design based upon what you may have heard or assumed the web to be. Think for a minute about some of the “web rules” you may have encountered over time.

Solution: Usability testing

Put your customer’s journey into context. Remember, your customers have a different need and question when they reach your site than say when they visit apple.com or cnn.com. Are there best practices? Of course there are, but to really be successful in increasing your conversion rate usability testing can be a very effective way of ensuring the content and calls-to-action are in the right place.

Other methods such as A/B testing can be an effective way of serving up different content to try out what works best.

4. The homepage is not as important as you think

Search engines, social media, email marketing, video, web ads and blogging have changed the way we enter a website. The search engines have done a great job of indexing our content in way that we no longer land on the homepage the way we used to.

Problem: Wrong directions

I’ve seen it many times over, a company invests in an ad campaign either offline or online and they direct all traffic to their homepage thinking that these users will figure it out once they get there. Only to find that their bounce rate increases greatly because the expectation of that click was not met.

Solution: Map your customer’s journey

Ask yourself a simple question when creating a campaign, “Does the page I am pointing to directly relate to the context of the ad I am creating?” Sometimes your customer doesn’t care about you as a company, they just want the product and to be on their way.

Don’t disrupt the journey of your customer by adding a roadblock of content that is out of context of the action they are anticipating. If your potential customers want to find more, they will do so by their own initiative.

Put these conversion tips to work

Briefly we’ve touched upon a few tips to help you increase your conversion rate. We didn’t have time to get into great detail, but it’s a good start for you to begin asking some of these questions, whether it be for your existing site, your next campaign or website redesign.

Remember, your website should never be considered complete, it’s a living, breathing tool that you should always iterate.

This same structural dichotomy is also where we find ourselves in social media marketing. The zoo metaphor struck me while listening to Tumblr Marketing Executive Rick Webb speaking at a recent MIMA event. Like zoos, brand marketing on social media is a constant balance of controlled and uncontrolled factors, and understanding that balance is more important than ever.

Transitioning from Traditional to Online

As more marketing efforts and greater ad budgets have shifted from traditional media to online channels, some of the traditional philosophies transferred, too. A focus on consistency and data-driven campaigns, hallmarks of traditional public relations and advertising practices, have all found a home in online marketing.

There are several social media channels where those traditional philosophies thrive. Social networks like Facebook and Twitter are incredibly popular with brands. Part of that marketing appeal is because of how many tools exist for crafting and scheduling posts, as well as the amount of user data available.

In short, although Facebook is by no means the same as traditional media channels, there are enough controllable features on sites like Facebook and Twitter to make it easier for brands to embrace social media.

The Other Side of Social

Any social network will naturally have its unpredictable moments. However, the structured environment that Facebook, Twitter and even Pinterest provide is enough to outweigh the risks for most companies.

If the controlled chaos of Facebook and Twitter are the social media marketing gold standard, then Tumblr should be a nightmare for brand marketers. Tumblr’s intentional lack of user data, page insights and targeted advertising options can, and have, kept many brands from trying to establish a presence there.

With that in mind, Tumblr has one major advantage over most of the social media world: Volume. Tumblr now gets over 20 billion pageviews each month and is the number one social network for Americans under 25.

The end result is that despite the massive amount of activity and traffic on Tumblr, many brands are not leveraging it because of the lack of available data. In fact, Tumblr CEO David Karp recently acknowledged that a lot of brands just don’t get Tumblr.

Next Steps For Brands

As with any social media channel, Tumblr won’t be the right decision for every company. Tumblr’s content is dependent on visually-intensive imagery, much like an Instagram or Pinterest. If the resources to create that type of content isn’t there, then Tumblr may not be a good fit.

The other decision companies have to make before jumping in to Tumblr concerns reporting and analytics. Tumblr doesn’t allow you to access user data, or even see how your users’ number of followers. Furthermore, the page insights that social media marketers are so accustomed to won’t be available and this makes the traditional form of reporting incredibly difficult. While this shouldn’t be a deal breaker, it’s an important factor to consider.

So, who is Tumblr right for? Companies who are willing to prioritize being involved in the users’ conversation and the potential brand equity over the lack of data and statistics.

To revisit the zoo metaphor, Tumblr is the wild animal in the exhibit, unpredictable and difficult to control. On the other hand, it’s those same traits that make it interesting and appealing to an audience.

In an ever-expanding digital universe, Tumblr is the perfect example of a social media channel built to keep brands out. However, if a company understands that and develops a content strategy that plays into a user-focused mentality, it can potentially harness a largely untapped resource.

We were lucky enough to paired with River Valley Riders, a local non-profit that provides therapeutic horseback riding for children and adults with disabilities. Kathy Jo, Susan, and Jonathan were great to work with, and we were excited to put our expertise and knowledge towards helping them!

River Valley Riders wanted a a greater connection to their donors, volunteers, and participants, but their old website was difficult to navigate and didn’t match their brochures and other documents. Needless to say, our work was cutout for us!

In just 24 hours, we were able to build River Valley Riders a new website that was more intuitive, responsive, and matched perfectly with their print materials. More importantly, we built a new electronic scheduling dashboard to help coordinate their volunteers and riders. The team from River Valley Riders was very happy with the end result!

But the River Valley Riders revamp didn’t stop there! The non-profit already had a Facebook page, but we gave them new visuals to implement on their page. Also, we set them up with a new Twitter account and YouTube channel, as well as a new Google account to help manage their newly expanded social media presence. Lastly, I spent some time with Kathy Jo to help educate her on Twitter best practices and answer any of her social media questions.

While there is still some work to do before the full launch, we’re well on our way to completing a functional website with a great design. But the competition is over quite yet, and we need your help.

Head on over to the Nerdery’s Overnight Website Challenge photo album on Facebook, and like our River Valley Riders design! Voting is open until April 2, and we thank you for your support!

Hour 1

Shortly after we arrived the event began at 9 a.m. we found out that our team was paired with local non-profit River Valley Riders (RVR), a therapeutic horseback-riding program. Our charitable, do-goody, make-things-bettery team of Spydermen and Spyderwomen is excited to put our expertise and knowledge towards a great cause!

After introductions with RVR representatives Kathy and Susan, our team dove right in with a discovery meeting to learn as much as we could about their organization, current site and what they envision for their new site. Next step, a deeper dive into brand voice and design of RVR.

Hour 2

After Learning more about River Valley Riders (and they’re a pretty amazing group!), the developers branched off to work their magic while a few of us continued to chat with Kathy and Susan. Together we have already locked down a revised and revamped site map for the new website!

Even better, I had an opportunity to sit down with Kathy and Susan and learn more about the voice of their brand, what makes their organization special and the positive influence they are having on the lives of those involved with the program. I can’t wait to see how these stories influence the website copy I’ll be writing and the designs of the site.

Time to write.

Hour 3

Lunch arrived! Big thank you to Chow Girls for catering amazing sandwiches and cookies. With the countdown clock looming in front of us, the team made it a working lunch and continued to code, write and design. With a finalized site map in place, the new website is in full motion ahead.

Hour 4

While the development team is waiting for designs, they are creating electronic versions of River Valley Riders’ paper forms. Currently, RVR participants can only register for lessons using paper forms and sending them through the mail but, at the launch of the new website, program participants will be able easily access these forms online! This is a really exciting step for RVR to helps streamline the registration process and make the program more easily accessible.

Hour 5

Everyone got a few minutes away from the computer to enjoy the Zoomobile from the Minnesota Zoo. They brought owls, millipedes, and even a creepy crawly mascot for the Arachnyd Webslingers!

Hour 6

We’ve all been hard at work the past hour, especially the designers. Ben and Jeff have spent a lot of time completing wireframes for the site and designing the home page for the new site!

Steve and I have also been busy combing through the existing site content, auditing it and making sure everything is pulled before we take the old site down. There’s still a lot of work left to do, but we’re off to a great start!

Hour 7

With everybody working so hard on so many different projects, Rachel flexed her Project Manager muscle and arranged a quick recap meeting with everyone to make sure we were all on track. It was nice to touch base as a group, and we’re all really excited about where this project is heading!

Hour 8

I’ve been keeping my nose to the grindstone and my fingers typing away reworking content, and everyone else is staying just as busy. Ben and Jeff are almost done with the homepage design, just finishing up some last little tweaks before moving on to other pages. The developers have been surprisingly quiet as they continue to code away, while Steve has been setting up Twitter and YouTube profiles for River Valley Riders!

Fatigue is setting in a little bit, but dinner is almost here and that should help. Most importantly, everyone on the team is still in good spirits!

Hour 9

Dinner arrived, and not a moment too soon! Just as a few of us were slowing down, we had a great burrito bar catered by Qdoba. We had a little fiesta and chatted with Kathy some more, which was a nice break from our computer monitors!

Next up, we’ll be demoing the Concrete5 dashboard and the new River Valley Riders home page for Kathy!

Hour 10

The demo was a smashing success! Ben and Jeff did an amazing job designing the homepage of the website, while the Concrete5 user management system should do wonders for keeping track of all of the volunteers and riders that come through River Valley Riders.

Hour 11

Fresh off of the successful home page and content management demo, the team went right back to make more changes. Because the new site will implement Parallax scrolling and responsive design elements, there’s a lot more work yet to be done. However, the team is working hard and we’re really excited about the direction we’re headed!

Hour 12

We’ve reached the halfway point! While the team hasn’t started stressing quite yet, hitting the twelve-hour mark was definitely an eye opener for several members of the team. The next several should see all of us with our heads down and typing furiously, with a very important recap meeting coming up shortly.

Hour 13

River Valley Riders are now on Twitter, and you can find them @RVRiders! Steve set up the Twitter profile, while Ben designed the custom background and header image to match their new site. Kathy and Susan were both very interested in the potential for Twitter to help reach out to a new audience, so Steve will also be spending time teaching the RVR team about how to best use Twitter.

Hour 14

The team regrouped for our first status meeting since crossing the halfway point. The sense of urgency has started to grow, but we’re far from panicking. Because we decided to do some great things with this project, we had a feeling we’d be rushed!

Hour 15

Many of the design pieces for the new RVR website are coming together. Ben and Jeff have now created the mobile versions of the home page and navigation, as well as desktop and mobile versions of multiple interior pages.

Hour 16

As the minutes and hours tick away, we’re inching closer and closer to getting this River Valley Riders website off the ground. I’ve spent most of the past hour continuing to comb through more content and photos with Rachel and Steve. However, we’ve made a lot of progress and we’re almost in the home stretch!

Hour 17

Losing an hour to Daylight Savings Time was definitely disorienting. While most of the team met for one last status meeting before our final push, I finally succumbed to the sleep deprivation and dozed off long enough for Steve to snap this picture.

Hour 18

Everybody is starting slow down as we’ve all now been awake for over 20 hours. The developers are still hard at work ironing out a few programming wrinkles before the new site goes live!

Hour 19

This update will be short and sweet because we’re all working like crazy finishing everything up! It’s all coming together, though, so we shouldn’t have any trouble delivering a great final product.

Hour 20

We’re officially in the last leg of the competition, with the Arachnyd Webslingers set to present our work to the judges at 7:10am. We’re just finishing up the last couple few pieces of the website before Jeff and Travis show off our hard work!

Hour 21

The tough part is over for us, with Jeff and Travis having successfully presented some of what we’ve been able to accomplish the last 20+ hours. And while the site is close to completion, we’ve decided to hold off a full launch of the new site until it is completely where we’d like it to be.

Follow us along as we live-blog our experiences every hour or follow us on Twitter using the hashtag #SpyderTrap.

Whether it’s adjusting strategy during a Twitter campaign or developing a strategy for an entirely new social platform, the online marketing landscape is constantly being reformed and reshaped.

There is no better microcosm of this constant change than Facebook, which has once again updated one of its key components with an overhauled News Feed. To sum up, there are 5 key differences from the current version:

• The News Ticker has been removed
• Consistency between desktops and mobile devices
• Ability to drill down into content-specific sub-feeds
• Larger photos with more immersive photo albums
• Extended preview text on shared links

What does this mean?

To find out what these changes might mean for brands, I asked several Online Marketing team members for their insight:

Daniel Hollerung, Search Marketing Manager

“With the announced changes, you can imagine that Bing will use this opportunity to display relevant information from Facebook friends when you conduct a search. It will likely have the same layout and design elements in the search results as it does on Facebook, unifying the look and design.

This will be another indication that universal search results coupled  with attractive visual features reach a larger audience and improve conversation whether you’re on the desktop, tablet or mobile platform.”

Cory Vandenberghe, Social Media Manager

“On a personal level I’ve noticed some of the best content in my current news feed comes from Instagram, so larger images will be a great addition. On a downside, I’ve noticed more meme’s and viral videos and those will also be amplified. If only more people knew about Tumblr.

On a professional level brands will have to put an even greater emphasis on creating compelling content, especially compelling visual content. The larger brands like Red Bull, Oreos, Dr. Pepper etc. will continue to create fun, creative, visual content. I’m concerned the smaller brands or businesses that currently struggle producing content, are going to fall even further behind. Their content will begin to stand out (negatively) like the Canadian Tuxedo at a Black Tie affair.”

Nate Knox, Search Marketer

“The announcement conveniently avoided addressing the impact on ads, but after seeing the news and reading preliminary thoughts from others, the main curve ball I see is going to be handling the segmentation. While there should be greater relevancy for advertisers to reach very niche audiences (e.g. Activision will be able to reach Gamers even more granularly when reaching the new segment in the newsfeed), reaching people in their own newsfeed will probably grow more competitive and expensive.

Sure, users will be able to see ‘only friend updates’ or updates from brands/companies in another section, but despite the newsfeed revamp, ads will obviously not exclusively go anywhere else as they are the primary source of revenue. Should Facebook be foolish enough to exclude ads from the friends only newsfeed section, advertisers will pull out quickly.”

Where do we go from here?

Until these changes go into effect for all Facebook users, brands and marketers should continue to operate as they always have. However, all of these changes seem to point towards the common thread of content quality.

Brands will now have much more visual real estate to work with, allowing for more creativity with the imagery or link previews. More creative visuals will in turn provide more reason for users to pay attention to brand content in the new content-specific feeds.

For better or worse, the new News Feed is inevitable. And although the overall consensus seems to be mostly positive, this still means that it is up to brand marketers to adapt to the latest Facebook overhaul.

What are your initial thoughts on the updated News Feed? Let us know in the comments below!

Spyder Trap developers Travis Manick, myself and Khoa Nguyen

Given that I am a primarily back-end developer I selected topics that I felt would enhance my capacity in that role.

In this article I will talk about my three favorite development sessions, providing some information about each and explaining why I felt they were really top notch.

Session Review: It’s Not Just About The Code

The first session I am going to talk about was the sleeper hit of the conference in my opinion.  The title of the talk was “Beyond PHP: it’s not (just) about the code” and it was given by the brilliant Wim Godden.  I wasn’t totally sure what to expect from this session but I was very pleasantly surprised by the subject matter.

Wim put together slides based on actual work he has done for clients (anonymized of course) and walked us through what the problem was and ultimately what the solution was that his company implemented.

We learned about a wide variety of things including database optimization, network topography, code optimization and even some server-level monitoring we can do as developers to ensure that our applications are running as well as they possibly can be.

His examples were really specific and he engaged the audience by asking people to contribute to the discussion and offer their ideas for how to solve the problems he was describing.  This approach worked really well and kept everybody on the edge of their seats.

Session Review: Building an Identity Extraction Engine in PHP

One of the talks that I was most excited to attend was “Building an Identity Extraction Engine in PHP”, primarily because the speaker (Jonathan LeBlanc) is someone I have engaged with quite heavily on Twitter for over 3 years.

It was extremely fun to walk into the session and have Jonathan instantly drop what he was doing to walk up and shake my hand.  We spoke for quite a bit about what we had been up to recently and how things were going in our professional lives; it was like catching up with an old friend.  Those people who say that you can’t create meaningful interactions / relationships online are just plain wrong.

At-any-rate, this talk did not disappoint!  Jonathan was an extremely talented speaker who not only brought a ton of knowledge to the table but also a tremendous amount of passion and energy.  I found his talk to be absolutely fascinating and I have already grabbed the source code he presented and started modifying it to extend some of the existing functionality.

Engaging talks with tangible takeaways like this are the reason why these types of conferences are so darn cool.

Session Review: Building Testable PHP Applications

The last session I attended was on Building Testable PHP Applications by Chris Hartjes (aka grumpy programmer) who is nothing short of an Internet celebrity.  He’s an international speaker and someone I have looked at for a long time as being the authority in TDD (test driven development).

This session was the most intense in terms of how he delivered his content and how deep the subject matter went.  At the end of his talk he mentioned that his second book was being released the next day.  I learned so much from this talk that I immediately purchased a copy of the book (The Grumpy Programmer’s PHPUnit Cookbook) when it became available and plan on reading it as quickly as possible.

Test driven development is something I strongly believe in and the more that we as developers follow that approach, the less we will have to worry about things breaking or having to stay late during deployments.

Outside of the sessions it was great to connect with other developers, talk about current projects, technologies, triumphs, etc, and get a feel for what others in the industry are doing.  The venue (U of M continuing education center) was excellent and I can say with certainty that the attendees all had a very good experience.

Spyder Trap’s other developers that attended, Khoa Nguyen and Travis Manick, both focused more on the front-end development talks.  Khoa and Travis agreed that the session on “Rocking Responsive Web Development” by Josh Broton was their favorite.

Great Networking

By the end of the weekend I had made several new friends, talked face-to-face with people that I had previously only engaged with on Twitter, taken over 15 typed pages of notes and had many new techniques that I could take back to work and immediately start implementing.

The quality of the talks were really top notch and it honestly wasn’t until I talked with the conference organizer, Jonathan Sundquist, that I realized this was the first year of this conference.  Everything ran really smoothly and I look forward to attending next year with the possibility of also being a presenter.

• Conference: http://midwestphp.com/
• Additional Info: https://joind.in/event/view/1090
• My comments on sessions: https://joind.in/user/view/20989