Once you’ve built up a social media network, tapping into it for help can be especially effective.  Just look at Team Detroit in the SXSW Chevy Roadtrip challenge.  Because Dave Murray, Brandon Chesnutt, Henry Balanon and Audrey Walker had already built up their social media community, they were able to ask them for help in order to win the challenge (which resulted in The Epic Tweetup this past August). Similarly, Dave Peckens has built up his social media community and had a successful launch of MichiganDads with Matt Eder. Now Dave is up to be the next Crackberry Idol and he needs the help of his social media community (that’s you!).

Crackberry is a nickname most of us have heard of referring to the addictive nature of the smartphone BlackBerry. If anyone knows about BlackBerries, it’s Dave, who has been a technology support specialist for 15 years, handling BlackBerry smartphones since 2002. While it may have started out as a personal interest in the device and a desire to help friends, Dave has evolved into a BlackBerryologist.  He trains large groups (like professional organizations), does individual consultations and offers tips, reviews and answers questions via blog posts and tweets to hundreds of followers.

To be in the running for CrackBerry Idol, Dave’s audition video was selected from more than 50 entries.  Next, the CrackBerry.com community voted on his application review which sent him to the semifinals.  Voters again sent him to the next round as one of five finalists on the strength of his accessory review. Dave’s review of the BlackBerry Torch was just posted and voting for the Crackberry Idol will start tomorrow (September 4) and ends Tuesday evening.

Dave’s run for Crackberry Idol is a great example of what you can do once you’ve built up a social media community.  Help Dave out by voting for him to be Crackberry Idol.  Just go here, find his name (Dave Peckens) and click the vote button next to his name. Vote from different devices & locations and tell your friends. Thanks!

Let’s create another social media success story!

(photo by Becky Johns)

If you’re just getting started with social media, it can be very frustrating if you’re not getting a lot of interaction. You may feel like you’re putting a lot of effort into creating great content and no one is responding. Unfortunately there isn’t a magic wand that can make you instantly Internet popular, but here are some tips for improving your interaction and getting on the right path.

1. Be Consistent – No one is going to read your blog or follow you on Twitter if you post a bunch one week and then disappear for several weeks. If social media is important to your online strategy, then add it to your daily to-do list just like anything else.
2. Create a Content Calendar – If you have a hard time figuring out what to write when you do have time, take some time to figure out what topics you want to cover and then brainstorm some post ideas.  Take your list and divide it out onto your calendar.  It’ll be much easier to post consistently if you don’t have to take time to figure out what to post as well.
3. Read & Respond – While you’re drinking your morning coffee or during lunch, take time to read what others in your industry are writing. Respond to their posts by commenting, sharing or creating a post with your own thoughts (this can be a great source of post ideas).
4. Share, Share & Share some More – When you’re reading other blogs, if you find something your target audience would be interested in, share it! Post it to Twitter, Facebook, Stumbleupon, etc. You’re not only providing great content to build up your own audience, you’ll start to get noticed by those whose content you’re sharing.
5. Chat it Up! – No one is going to talk to you if you don’t ever talk to anyone else.  It’s the classic wall flower scenario.  You’re sitting along the wall of the gym watching everyone else have fun dancing and wish you could join.  Well, don’t wait! Start trying to chat with people in your industry.
6. Distribute Your Content - It’s awesome when your readers submit your work to social networks, but that requires that you actually have readers.  Until you’ve grown your audience, distribute your content out through your various social networks and share it anywhere it makes sense.  Just be aware of any community-specific guidelines.  Some sites may frown upon submitting your own content.
7. Connect online and off – One of the best ways to connect with people online is to meet with people offline.  When you go to conferences or networking events, collect social media profiles along with business cards.  Followup online by sending them a message.
8. Ask for Help – When you do have a few people connected to you, ask them directly to comment on or share your latest post.  Most of the time people are willing to help you out if you just ask.

Those are just a few ideas for increasing your social media interactions. Ask other people in your industry what works for them and do a little experimentation.

What’s worked to increase interaction for you?

(photo by Vincent Teuwen)

A while back I purchased a Kindle from Woot.com, the online store and community which offers a deal on just one item per day (which was recently acquired by Amazon). To inspire me to purchase from them again, they sent me a hilarious email (see below) with a link to a deal on a Kindle cover with a book light. Far from your normal followup marketing email, Woot.com’s email was well written and funny enough that I read it all the way through (plus it got forwarded and blogged). As I’ve said before, a bit of humor can be good for business (also shown by Sharpie) and can inspire, not only repeat business, but customer loyalty and evangelism.

From email titled, “Re-Kindle the passion with Woot”

Hey there,

Woot here. How ya doin’? How’s that Kindle you picked up treatin’ you? Nice, right? Well, not that you asked, but we’re doin’ pretty well too. Big things going on, lots of moving and shaking, y’know. Busy busy busy, that’s us. Yep.

Okay, look; we’re sorry about that “not that you asked” part. That’s not how we wanted to start this. It’s just that, well, things aren’t really the same between us. Don’t look at us like that. We know you feel it too. The distance. The walls we’ve both put up. What happened? We used to spend hours at night just talking. We would look into your eyes and you would look upon our daily deals and things just CLICKED.

This is coming out all wrong. Sorry, sorry. Look, just forget we said anything. No, really. It’s our issue and it’s wrong to pin it on you. In fact, to make up for this, come on by right now and we’ll give you a great deal on a Franklin Kindle Cover with Book Light. It’s the least we can do.

We’re sorry we lashed out like that. You make an effort to just ask us how our day was more often and we’ll make an effort to be more understanding that you work hard all day and you don’t always need us starved for attention when you come home at the end of the day.

Love,

Woot

Will I purchase the Kindle cover from them? Probably not since I’ve already purchased a cover (maybe if it had been closer to the original purchase). But the email did put them Top of Mind again, which can be a challenge in these days of email spamming.

How do you use humor or fun in your business?

Badges. Points. Achievements. As shown by Mafia Wars, Farmville, and Foursquare, just to name a few, gaming can be both fun and addicting. Long before our current social networks, gamers spent hours racking up achievements in virtual worlds. Games on social networks have increased time spent and interactions within networks, but what impact is gaming having on these social networks?

Replacing other forms of Entertainment?

Gaming online used to be the domain of Gamers. These days just about everyone places some sort of online game, even if it’s just Farmville on Facebook. People are increasingly spending more time online and more of that time is in some sort of game:

Social gaming, as a category, has grown incredibly quickly, becoming one of the dominant drivers of usage on Facebook, and an increasingly core component of people’s entertainment. This growth represents a real threat to other forms of entertainment… -Why the Social Gaming Biz is Just Heating Up – Mashable

Gaming Increases Engagement

Do you play Foursquare? Or Farmville? Or some other online game? Why? Probably because you enjoy achieving something — getting more points or a badge or whatever. Just like contests are popular because people like to win. Online games are popular because people enjoy the escape of mindless stockpiling of points.

Even Google is Getting in the Game

Google just added another gaming site to it’s portfolio:

As we know through the acquisitions of Slide and Jambool, and investment in social gaming giant Zynga, Google is getting serious about the launch of Google Games. While we still don’t know the details of the platform, SocialDeck’s mobile technology seems to be a part of the plan. – Google’s Social Buying Spree Continues With Mobile Gaming Developer SocialDeck – TechCrunch

Will Gaming Increase Socializing?

Just because there’s more gaming going on, doesn’t mean people are being more social. Many (like me) find the game spam on Facebook to be annoying (even though I play other online games). Does playing games online increase or decrease socialization?

What do you think?

Special thanks to Andy Kraft for the post idea. You can find Andy on Twitter @roadblock.

(photo by Mykl Roventine)

One challenge with social media is keeping track of all the conversations and times that your name or company name is mentioned. SocialSeek provides real-time results for news, topics, brands or keywords in a specific location or anywhere from either a desktop or mobile application. Search by keyword and location, or just one or the other. Save searches and view updated results automatically every 30 minutes. SocialSeek makes it easy to keep track of what’s being said about your company and brand.

Birds-eye View

SocialSeek provides a great overview of mentions of your brand or keywords in blogs, Twitter, video, images, and events, either based on a location or in general. The desktop application automatically refreshes the search every 30 minutes so you can regular updates. Plus see what’s going on overall, or just in blogs, Twitter, video, images, events or add your own feeds.  You can also filter the results to look for specific people or keywords.

Trends & Charts

Also available are trends and charts on the social search, where you can see activity for your search results over the past 2 weeks (broken out by type), as well as Twitter trends and keyword cloud. While these are a nice addition, they’re not as indepth or useful as charts provided by other tools. It looks like you’re supposed to be able to compare two keywords within the charts, but I couldn’t get that to work — that could be handy for competitive analysis.

An overview of the overall activity of the search for the least few days:

Twitter Trends for the search:

Twitter cloud:

Overall: A Free & Useful Social Media Monitoring Tool

I’ve been using the SocialSeek desktop application on my Mac for the past couple of days.  When it does an update every 30 mins, it’ll send a notification to Growl if there are any updates (which brings up a window with a short update on whatever screen I’m working on). I’ve been able to easily keep track of mentions for sazbean without having to check on other tools, which has been very handy.  The charts are nice, but not as useful as provided by other tools. SocialSeek will save searches so you can easily switch between them, but it only reports on one search a time, which means it’s not as useful if you’re monitoring multiple brands or keywords. But, it’s free, so it’s definitely another useful tool for getting a snapshot of what’s going on for your brand in social media.

Have you used SocialSeek? What do you think?

Everyone gets caught up in how many fans, followers, visitors, commenters, etc. they have for their brand.  What do these numbers actually mean? Are businesses getting caught up in a numbers game instead of understanding what their customers need and want?  Some thoughts from Brian Solis & Chris Beck.

What do you think?

Ahh, social media.  The golden ticket to increased profits and a life time of wealth. All you have to do is setup a Twitter and Facebook profile and start sending updates and magically people will start following and responding to you.

If you believe this, you’ve been lead down the wrong path. While social media may cost less than other marketing methods, it still requires planning, time and patience. If you just jump in without knowing what you’re doing and what you’re trying to accomplish, you may not get the results you expected, leading you to believe it’s all a huge waste of time.

Step Back from Social Media

I probably sound like a broken record, but before you start with any social media, you really need to understand what you’re trying to accomplish.  That means understanding your business: who your customers are, what benefits you provide to them, and what your business goal or objective is.  Once you understand your business — what you’re trying to accomplish and who you’re trying to reach — it’ll be much easier to figure out what tactics and tools to reach those objectives.

Find the Right Tools

Everyone jumps on the Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn bandwagon. Sure, those are probably the most popular social networks, but that doesn’t mean they’re the right ones for your business and who you’re trying to connect with.  You need to do a bit of research to find out where your customers are currently hanging out online.  It may be industry blogs or discussion boards or there may be a specific social network that’s a better fit.  Find your customers online first to decide what types of social media or online tactics will work best to connect with them.

Provide the Right Message & Information

If you want people to respond to you, you need to be providing useful information and the right message.  Learn what types of questions your audience has and work on providing answers. Follow industry trends and provide useful news and tips. Have conversations and share other people’s work. Be a giver. Social media will never work for you if you just use it as another marketing channel.

Share & Distribute

Don’t be obnoxious, but it’s ok to cross-distribute your content to several places online.  If you blog, post a link to your other social networks as well.  Look for social networks where you can share your content to help your message get out to a larger audience.  Remember to look for places that target the people you want to reach.

Be Patient

Social media can be frustrating if you start using it and don’t get any response. Unfortunately, the reality is that you have to work at being found.  You have to have conversations with people and you have to be consistent in your posting schedule. If you blog only once in awhile, you’re never going to get enough traction for people to discover you.

Ask for Help

If you’re not getting anywhere with your social media endeavors, try talking to people who have had some luck using social media in your industry.  Ask them what worked for them and where they’ve found success.  Also, ask them how long it took them to really get any traction. You may be surprised to find similar circumstances and some tactics you hadn’t thought of.

How have you made social media work for you?

(photo by fdecomite)

Ever gone to a business website and wonder exactly what it is they do? It happens far too often. As a business owner you may be spending time, resources and money on advertising and promoting your business and website. If people come to your website (and they often do to get more information), but can’t tell what you do, that’s a huge problem.  It means you’re wasting all the advertising and promotions that you’re doing. People aren’t going to buy from you if they don’t understand what you do (and what’s in it for them).

Describing What You Do

Remember your elevator pitch? How do you describe what you do to someone who has no idea? Take a look at your website and see if it’s clear what you do. Better yet, get someone who doesn’t know what you do to look at the website and tell you what they think you do. That’s usually a big eye-opener.

Be Consistent

Once you’ve worked out what you do (from the customer’s viewpoint), make sure you’re consistent with that description across your entire website, as well as any other marketing and promotions you’re doing. People remember via repetition so having the same message in multiple places is useful for having people remember what you do.

More than the About page

What you do should be clear on every page of your site, even if it’s just a descriptive tagline.  Remember, people don’t always enter your site from your home page — they may enter on any page.  And they may or may not get to the point of bothering with your About page. Make it as easy as possible for people to understand what you do.

What’s Next?

If people do understand what you do, do they know what to do next? Should they call you, email you or fill out a form? That information may be on your site, but make it clear what the next step is. Be very specific and obvious.  For example, “Have questions? Call 555-555-555″ or “Want a quote? Click here.”  A specific call to action with a specific action they should take.

Thoughts?

(photo by Nina Matthews Photography)

You may be doing a great job with social media for your company — creating great content, having conversations and really engaging with your customers.  But, if your customer service doesn’t align with the expectations set by your social media interactions, your success will only be short term.  Eventually customers will experience your customer service and if it doesn’t align with expectations built by social media, all your hard work will be for naught.

Augie Ray, from Forrester, recently had the following experience at the mall:

• Retailer One:  I spent 15 minutes trying to find someone to offer assistance.  The only employees to be found were behind checkout counters with long lines. I left frustrated.
• Retailer Two: I walked into a fitting room to try on shirts and found it looking like Hell’s storage room (or an average teen’s bedroom) with deep piles of clothes. I left disgusted.
• Retailer Three:  I entered Nordstrom and found a store that was clean and staffed.  I got attention and helpful assistance from an employee.  And I spent $250.

Do You Want To Succeed at Social Media or Social Media Marketing? – Forrester Blog

Apparently Retailer One and Two have spent a great deal of time and resources on social media, but not much on their customer service.  The expectations they’ve set with social media don’t match the actual customer experience in their stores, and according to Augie, their sales have suffered because of it:

I don’t think it is any coincidence that since the recession began in December 2007, Nordstrom’s stock (JWN) is down just 10 percent while the stock of the other two retailers is down between 30 and 50 percent.  And while Nordstrom has fewer Facebook fans than the other two retailers, it has more fans-per-location based on it 193 stores.

If you haven’t had a chance to shop at Nordstrom, give it a try sometime.  Even if you don’t buy anything, their customer service really is what every company should strive for. Nordstrom has a social media presence, but its their exceptional customer service that drives their continued success.

What do you think?

(photo by Conor Ogle)

We all want our customers to be enthusiastic about our brands — to connect with us like we’re Apple or Nike.  But those brands aren’t just a logo, or even a set of products, they represent a complex set of emotional responses  – they tell a story that’s persuasive to their customers. Designing a good product and then understanding the benefits to customers helps Apple and Nike tell compelling stories that create enthusiasm for their brands.

Apple’s Story

Apple’s brand is about good design. When you buy an Apple product, you’re telling the world that good design is important to you (and that you’re cool). Apple’s story is about how much good design is important to them. They carefully design each product so it’s easy to use and it looks good. If you buy Apple, their story is compelling to you.

Telling a Story

Creating brand enthusiasm doesn’t happen just by telling any story.  You have to tell YOUR story.  And you need to tell the RIGHT story. You need to understand exactly who your customers are and why they should care about your products — what benefits do your products provide? Why should people believe you?  What reasons or proof do you have? What’s your voice (passionate, professional, geeky, etc.)? And what’s the main idea or niche that you want people to come away with?

Think in Terms of Ads

Great ads on TV are remembered because they’re funny or emotional, but mostly because they tell a story that people can relate to.  When you’re telling your story, think in terms of a great commercial. You only have a few moments to get across your main point and be compelling (but don’t be pushy, that’s just annoying).

Live the Story

A good story becomes part of your company.  Your company lives the story and continues to write new chapters. A story will only be compelling if it matches your company and your products. People can sense falseness miles away.  Make sure you live whatever story you’re telling.

Brand Enthusiasm

As people learn about your brand and experience your products and services, they will start to trust that your story matches your brand. As more people talk about your brand, more people will decide to experience it.  Enthusiasm grows from experience but starts with a compelling and persuasive story.

Thoughts?

(photo by Sarah Worsham)

Wondering how to get more speaking gigs? Chris Brogan shares some ideas and tips on what’s worked for him:

I’ve been using WordPress for several years now — I’m a big fan.  It makes it really easy to run a blog (or website) and it keeps getting better.  One of the advantages of WordPress is the ability to add your own plugins to improve the functionality of your site.  Here are some of my favorite WordPress plugins… (for now).

Disqus Comment System

Disqus replaces the WordPress comment system with it’s own, which allows readers to see their comments across all the sites that use Disqus, and it has good spam collection.

FD Feedburner Plugin

FD Feedburner is a WordPress plugin which redirects all the blog’s feeds to Feedburner to utilize Feedburner’s stats and additional feed functionality.

Google XML Sitemaps

Google XML Sitemaps generates a XML site map to help search engines properly index your site.

Lijit Search

Lijit Search lets readers search the content on your site — can also support ads for your site (search and content-related).

LinkWithin

LinkWithin WordPress plugin displays other recommended stories on each article to help increase the amount of time people spend on your site.

PostRank

PostRank provides some social network tracking as well as top posts.  I use it to track the PostRank of each post which is also a metric used by the AdAge 150.

Scribe

Scribe is a paid WordPress plugin (affiliate link) which quickly and easily provides recommendations to increase the search engine optimization for each post.  Requires a theme which supports it (I use the Thesis paid theme — affiliate link).

ShareThis

ShareThis provides links so your readers can share your content on various social networks.  Lets you control which social networks show up (and what order).  Provides stats for how many times that button is used.

TweetMeme Retweet

TweetMeme Retweet adds a button for each post so your readers can tweet a link to the article.  Counts the number of times the article has been tweeted (doesn’t always catch alternative ways to tweet the article).

Wibiya Toolbar

Wibiya Toolbar adds a bar at the bottom of your site which has links for sharing your content on social media, as well as a message (among other features).

WordPress Database Backup

WordPress Database Backup automates the backing up your blog’s database — can have it email a compressed copy or save to your server or computer.  Your theme along with your database are the key parts of your blog.  Having a backup of your database means you can recreate your blog if you have to.

WP Greet Box

WP Greet Box customize a message to your blog visitors depending on where they came from.  For example, ask visitors from Digg to Digg your post.

WP Minify

WP Minify WordPress plugin helps your blog run faster by combining and compressing javascript and CSS files to improve page load time.  I’ve seen a huge improvement since using this plugin.

WP Super Cache

WP Super Cache adds caching to your blog (which you can control) to make the pages load faster.  Site speed is now a consideration for Google’s PageRank.

What are your favorite WordPress plugins?

(photo by Sarah Worsham)

SEO (search engine optimization) is very important tactic for any website.  After all, most people use a search engine to find what they’re looking for online. However, there is such a thing as taking SEO too far and forgetting that it’s people, not computers who actually read your website and then make a purchase decision. The right amount of SEO will follow best practices and help search engines more effectively index and catalog your site without making the text (or site) unreadable by people.

Follow Best Practices

Best practices for SEO include things like using header tags (h1, h2, etc), having descriptive titles and descriptions and just the right amount of important keywords within the text.  If you follow best practices, your site will be more effectively indexed by search engines, but it should not overly affect the readability of your site.

Choose Only Important Keywords

Pick the top one or two keywords for each page and concentrate on using best practices to highlight them.  Don’t choose too many keywords or search engines will be confused as to which are important.  And people trying to read your content won’t have a clear understanding of what you’re trying to say.

Communicate Your Message

People are selfish.  They want to know what’s in it for them.  Your marketing messages need to communicate the benefits of your products or services to your potential customers.  These messages are vital for converting people into customers.  Make sure your marketing messages don’t get lost in your effort to optimize your site for search engines.

Give it the Human Test

To make sure your website still communicates your benefits and marketing messages after you’ve optimized it for search engines, have a few people who haven’t read it take a look at it.  Ask them what the major points are of the site and key pages.  Ask them if it’s comfortable to read and if it makes sense.  If not, fix it.

Strike the Right Balance

SEO is important for initially getting people to your site, but it’s even more vital that your site is readable by those people.  Find the right balance between SEO and readability so that you’re effectively communicating the information people are looking for as well as why people should by from you.

Thoughts?

(photo by Dannerzz)

Competitive analysis is important to any business strategy.  Knowing what your competitors are doing and how they’re pricing and marketing their products will help you figure out how to market your own products.  Luckily, there are many online tools that can help you get a look (or spy) on what your competitors are doing.

1. Google their company, brand and product names.
2. Google any keywords associated with their company, your company and your industry.
3. Use Twitter’s search for their company, brand and product names (also important keywords).
4. Search on Facebook for their company, brand and product names (and important keywords).
5. Search Alexa for their company websites to see some traffic stats (estimated).
6. Check out their site profile on Compete to see traffic (estimated).
7. Use Compete to compare their site to yours or to other competitor websites.
8. Run Website Grader on their site — can also compare yours to theirs.
9. Run Twitter Grader on their Twitter feed.
10. Run Blog Grader on their blog(s).
11. Check out their site(s) with WooRank.
12. Use Google Trends to check stats on their site and then compare with others.
13. Set up Google Alerts for competitor’s company, product and brand names to monitor for mentions.
14. Add feeds for company names, etc. into TweetDeck, HootSuite or Seesmic to monitor mentions on Twitter.

Do you spy on your competition? What tools and tactics do you use?

(photo by DaveFayram)

I’m often asked what KPIs (key performance indicators) are the most important for understanding how a business is doing online.  My answer is always “It depends.”  There’s not a set of KPIs that works for every business.  Choosing the right KPIs for your business means understanding your business, your goals and what you’re trying to do online. KPIs are the metrics which tell you whether you’re moving closer towards your goal and objectives (see KPIs vs Metrics for more details).

Understand Your Business

This may seem simple, but truly understanding your business means knowing what benefits you offer to your customers.  Who are your customers and why should they care? Saying you’re a carpet cleaner is one thing.  But maybe what you really do is help housewives remove impossible stains so their carpets look like new.  Or help people who are selling their house get more value out of the sale.  Understanding who your customers are and the benefits to them is the first step towards choosing the right KPIs.

Know Your Goal

Unless you know exactly where you’re trying to go — what you’re trying to accomplish — it’s going to be almost impossible to craft a strategy that works with KPIs that tell you whether it’s working.  Choosing an easy-to-understand, specific, attainable and time delimited goal will help you choose KPIs that relate to that goal.

Choose Your KPIs

Now that you know what you do, who your customers are, what benefits you offer and what goal you’re trying to accomplish, you can start to think about how you can accomplish that goal online.  As you choose tools and tactics to help you with your strategy, take a look at what metrics are available for each.  Which metrics tell you whether you’re further along in reaching your goal?  (Those are your KPIs).

Thoughts?

(photo by Pink Sherbet Photography)

Exit Rate measures how many people left your website from a certain page. It would seem like it would show you where people are exiting from your site so you can fix problems with specific pages.  The problem is that everyone who comes to your website has to leave at some point.  What if they came, bought something and then left?  That’s what you want them to do.  Or what if you blog daily and people come to read your latest post and then leave.  While you may prefer they spend time on other pages, if they’re loyal readers, they’ve been keeping up with your posts. So is Exit Rate useful?  Yes and no.  Let’s look at it in more detail…

Defining Exit Rate

Exit Rate shows you what percentage of people who were on a particular page exited the site from that page.  It doesn’t show you how many pages they looked at before they got to that page.  They could have entered the site from anywhere. They may have even accomplished what they set out to do.  You don’t know.  You only know they exited your site from this particular page.

When Exit Rate is Useful

If you have a site where people have to go to more than one page to complete a task — say on an eCommerce site — Exit Rate can be very helpful for understanding where people are getting lost in the process.  Knowing where people get lost in the conversion process can help you fix those pages to increase conversion and decrease the exit rate on those pages.  Exit rate in this context is often called abandonment rate — or how often someone started the purchase process and then left.

When Exit Rate Isn’t Useful

When you’re looking at the exit rates for specific pages (other than those involved in a conversion or sale), exit rate just tells you what percentage of people left the site from that page — meaning that was the last page they looked at.  Those people could have entered the site from anywhere, looked at a bunch of pages and just decided to leave from this particular page.

Outside of the conversion/eCommerce example, what if someone came to your site looking for specific information, found it on that page and then left.  They found what they were looking for, which is what you want.  Again, you may be able to entice them to stay longer by providing links to additional pages on your site, but your goal of satisfying their need was completed.  What can you do with the exit rate?  Not really anything.  It doesn’t give you enough information to know what to improve.

An Alternative Metric — Bounce Rate

An alternative metric that’s more useful for the purpose of improving specific pages is Bounce Rate — or how many people who enter your site on that page never click anywhere else and leave without looking at any other pages.  Unless they happened to find exactly what they’re were looking for on the first page (you have really good SEO), a high bounce rate is an indicator of a problem on a specific page.

Use Bounce Rate to Improve Conversions

Even in the case of good SEO, you probably want people to go to more than one page on your site.  You want them to convert, which usually means more than one page.  Take a look at your top content report and top entry pages in your analytics package and look at the bounce rate for each page. Focus on improving the pages with high bounce rates to increase conversions.

Thoughts? How do you use exit rate and bounce rate?

(photo by Cellular Immunity)

Hi there!  I really appreciate your continued support and readership.

I’ve submitted a panel for the SXSW Interactive conference, which is Austin in March, along with Dave Murray, Betsy Weber and Beverly Cornell.

Our panel is “Have Fun to Increase Customer Engagement“.

I’d really appreciate if you vote for it, even if you’re not planning on attending.  30% of the decision about which panels are chosen is via voting by the community.

Voting just requires signing up for a free account and verifying the account by clicking on a link in an email.  SXSW does not use the data for mailing lists and they don’t give out any information to other parties.

Here’s the link: http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/7401

I appreciate your vote.  Thank you.

Engaging customers is all the rage with businesses big or small. Companies are adding communities, comments and reviews to their websites to encourage feedback and conversations. This is all good.  However, if you ask for feedback from your customers, be ready to respond when they give it. Not responding is worse than never asking in the first place.

Requesting Feedback

While customers may already be talking about you online (via Twitter, Facebook, etc.), you can also request feedback just by asking or by implementing systems which allow customers to provide their opinions.  Systems such as comments, reviews and forums are fairly easy to implement for business websites and can be especially useful for eCommerce sites.

Expect the Negative

Unless you specifically ask people with positive experiences to leave their feedback, you may receive mostly negative comments.  People who have a negative experience are more likely to feel compelled to complain or leave their opinions than people who are satisfied (they’re usually hoping for some sort of resolution). If you’re asking for feedback or provide ways for people to leave it, be prepared for the negative and ask for the positive.

Be Ready to Respond

When you ask for feedback or provide ways for people to leave it, you need to be prepared to respond when it happens — for either positive or negative feedback.  Nothing is worse than a company that requests feedback and then doesn’t respond when it’s given.  This means someone needs to be responsible for monitoring feedback and responding to people.

What’s your experience been when you’ve given feedback? Do you have any examples of good response by a company?  How about bad?

(photo by Anna Majkowska)

Thinking about blogging for your business? Wondering about the effectiveness of taking the time to blog daily vs. blogging weekly (or whenever)? Established blogger Justin Kownacki, who was blogging daily, decided to try blogging weekly for a few months to see what effect it would have on his traffic.  That one post per week would be well-thought out instead of scrambling to post 5 times per week.  He found that blogging only once per week does not guarantee a high-impact read of the one post and also dropped his traffic considerably.

According to Google Analytics, I had:

• 7,500 page views in April
• 7,491 page views in May
• 3,583 page views in June
• 4,877 page views in July

Finally, my Alexa ranking hovered around 162,000 when this experiment began; it’s currently at 245,546 as I type this. – What I’ve Learned From Blogging Weekly Instead of Daily – Justin Kownacki

This is a guest post from James Mowery, a computer geek who writes about technology and related topics on his blog, led tv.

The design and overall layout of a company’s website is of utmost importance when it comes to attracting customers and encouraging them to use that company’s services. One of the very first things many people notice about a company’s website is the aesthetic appeal and whether or not it is pleasing to the eyes. The customer will note whether or not the website is easy to use, navigate, and search. If a company’s website is completely disorganized, has clashing colors, or content that is generally just out of place with other aspects of the website, the customer may be turned off from the company.

Professional Design

A company’s website that is professionally designed will entice the most customers. An ideal web design would have a smooth and professional interface composed of a color scheme that does not clash. A model web design would also consist of organized content on every page detailing exactly the message that the company wishes to convey without any extra wordage or unnecessary content.

Preparing a self designed website

A web design represents details about your business and contributes to its development. A good web design enhances the growth of your business; a bad one can even become a reason for its ruin. One can add a professional factor by taking guidance from following points:

Using templates

Use of template always aids the website design by guiding in its composition. These templates are available from many website hosts. Whether your business is small or big, these templates offer different options such as color schemes, patterns, experimentation with various color combos etc. Using these templates can even enable you to design your web page on your own with little help.

Getting help from tutorial sites

There are various tutorial websites providing knowledge about how to design on your own website. They also can help with how to put in content to the templates.

Help from a professional

Even with the help from templates and tutorial sites, nothing compares to a site designed by a professional. Hiring a professional designer will take your website design to the next level, especially if you want something completely custom.

(photo by Armando Maynez)