WebDriven

Improve your web site's performance with WebDriven's Site Audit

2009-10-28T16:43:40Z

2010 is fast approaching. At this time of year, clients routinely ask us to review their web sites and provide recommendations on how to improve the user experience and increase traffic. For a relatively small investment, the WebDriven team will perform a comprehensive audit that includes looking at your site traffic, social media opportunities and design elements. Once the audit is completed, WebDriven will provide a report outlining specific tasks for improving the site.

Step One: Kickoff

The Site Audit will begin with some basic questions about your organization and the role of the site in reaching key audiences and contributing to communications, marketing, outreach and sales goals.

Step Two: Review of site traffic, audience and goals

WebDriven will review responses to our questionnaire and review recent site analytics, audience and goals.

Step Three: Review of current web site

WebDriven will review your current web site for usability, performance, adherence to stated goals and other key factors.

Step Four: Review of social media presence

We will take a look at your brand/message presence on top social media networks.

Step Five: Findings & Recommendations

Following our review, the WebDriven team will provide you with a summary of our findings from the audit and provide several key recommendations we believe will help improve your site's overall contribution to stated goals. An optional budget can be provided if desired.

Why a Site Audit?

Glad you asked. There are a number of important benefits of the site audit to consider including:

Better management of web project dollars - Before investing significant resources in a redesign of your site (or a new site from scratch), our Site Audit gives you deeper insight into how to best use project dollars to maximize impact.
Annual check-up - Let's face it, the web is an organic place and it's hard to keep up with emerging trends. An annual Site Audit helps you identify opportunities for improvement and can be scheduled to sync with your budgeting process.

**LIMITED TIME OFFER**

Prices for a Site Audit range for 875-1500 depending on the size of your web site and the goals for the audit. For a LIMITED TIME, WebDriven will be offering the Site Audit service for just $750. Orders must be placed by November 30, 3009 to qualify.

Drop us a line today to take advantage of this offer

More iPhone Apps from Microsoft Could be a Good Idea

2009-09-30T22:36:13Z

Silicon Alley Insider's Dan Frommer makes a good point in a recent article that Microsoft should be working on iPhone apps as a hedge bet if nothing else to a) have a more substantial brand presence on fastest growing mobile software platform and b) grow its mobile ad platform...not to mention the fact that they still rule the Office space and mini apps would support the millions who use them.

Frommer outlines possible Microsoft iPhone apps which include:

* Office micro apps, so the millions of people who still read and create Word, Excel, and PowerPoint docs can do this from their iPhone. This should sync to Microsoft's new online Office. (And what about the Apple tablet? Won't that need Word, too?)
    * Zune music subscription player.
    * Bing. Why not? Google has a search app.
    * Games, like an iPhone version of Halo and throwback favorites like Minesweeper and SkiFree.

I for one would love to see a Bing, Halo or mini Word iPhone app.

Tell us which ones you'd like to see in comments.

Google Docs soon to be publicly searchable

2009-09-23T11:19:23Z

According to a Google blog post last week, the company will soon enable public search access to 'public' Google Docs. Good idea, right?

Presumably if users mark documents as public, one would guess this move would be a welcome one. There is a snag though as C|Net's Zoë Slocum points out:

While it may well be obvious to most users how publicly available their Google documents are--and many of those published documents may well be intended to be as publicly available as possible--this seems to be another area where Google needs to find the right balance between transparency and data accessibility.

It seems like it would be a better move for Google to provide some clear, straightforward manner of determining whether documents have/will be indexed, or are indexable.

A service aimed at transparency and comprehensive access is only of benefit to your community if everyone clearly understands the ground rules.

Internet Usage Study Confirms Shift Toward Content over Communication

2009-09-21T12:55:34Z

Back in 2003, email communications took up about 50% of the time users spent online each month. Content consumption is now moving close to that 50% mark as email slides downward.

Monthly content consumption has increased on average from 3.75 hours to 7 -- according to a six-year analysis of the Internet Activity Index (IAI) conducted by the Online Publishers Association. While some categories like search increased signficantly, its share of overall time was only a two percent increase.

The OPA press release explains:

IAI’s share of time helps to provide further context. For example, Content consumption, as a share of online time, surpasses Communications as the leading way online audiences spend their time. Furthermore, although time spent with Search doubled, its share of time is very small and has only increased by two percentage points. Monthly time spent with Communications decreased by less than half an hour, but declined by 41 percent as a share of a consumer’s online time.

The OPA's study also confirms what many observers have asserted already -- that community sites like LinkedIn, Facebook and others have displaced email and IM as the primary means of online communication.

3 Questions: Using Twitter to Raise Money & Awareness for Charities

2009-07-29T14:50:48Z

There was an interesting piece in Tech Crunch earlier this month on how charities can leverage Twitter to raise awareness and money. Twestival which raised $250k for charity:water was featured as was Blame Drew's Cancer and others.

The bigger question is how non-profit organizations -- many of whom struggle to maintain a website and/or a blog -- best integrate Twitter and tools like it.

Here are three basic questions to consider:

1) Where is my audience today?

Are your core audiences using Twitter? Which social networks do they use? The reality is that even if your audiences are not currently on Twitter, launching a well-designed campaign on social networks including Twitter can help you identify new groups of supporters.

Turning tweets into advocates and donors can be tricky though so thought has to be given to how you a) convert folks coming in via social media and b) creating opportunities for folks who may not "join" but are still interested in helping you.

2) What level of resources and effort are required to maintain our social media presence, including Twitter?

We get this question a lot. Be careful not to underestimate the amount of time and effort it takes to maintain a meaningful social media presence. Also it will be important to find a style and updating schedule that fits your organizational rhythm.

3) What do I need to get started?

Develop an action plan which defines:

a) goals of your social media presence (be specific),
b) time per day/week invested in maintaining your presence
c) team members responsible for presence
d) process for approving content
e) metrics for evaluating effort

Then test-run your action plan for 1-2 weeks and evaluate. It will probably need some tweaking.

Conclusion

When it comes to social media, walk before you run. It can be tempting to leap at every new and hot social media network but simply having a presence is not in itself good strategy. Know what you want to accomplish so that you can measure value to the organization for the effort you invest.

TechCrunch article:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/05/tweetraising-the-potential-for-charities-on-twitter/

Facebook More Popular than Twitter and Email for Sharing Content

2009-07-22T13:02:28Z

So, which platform is the most popular for sharing content? We gave you a bit of a head start with our title but here's another tip -- it's not email.

According to AddtoAny, which makes a popular "Share This" widget, Facebook takes the cake with nearly a quarter of all content sharing (24%) with Yahoo-dom coming in second with 14% (includes Yahoo, delicious, Yahoo Bookmarks, Yahoo Buzz, Yahoo Messenger).

Other mentionables include: Twitter's third place finish with a little under 11% (10.8% to be precise). MySpace's plummet continues; they accounted for only 5% of sharing traffic. Email hangs in there though squeaking past Twitter at 11.1%.

What do these numbers mean? While relative rankings among various platforms may be somewhat fluid, the larger trend of social media supplanting email as the primary means of sharing content seems to be firmly in place. It also confirms that link sharing platforms such as digg and delicious don't quite have the potency they once had in the social media world.

It's been a good week for Facebook; they just announced they are serving 1 billion video views a month which while not matching YouTube (they serve more than that each *day*), it's still speaks to the growth of their platform for sharing and consuming content.

4 Keys to Developing a Manageable Social Media Plan

2009-07-14T15:00:00Z

Clients regularly ask us for help in creating a social media approach. "Twitter. Facebook. Blogs." "Where do I start?" We get that. And if we're honest, we have to admit that navigating the various social networks and trying to stay current can be a bit overwhelming.

Not to mention figuring out how to assess and measure the business value of your efforts while at the same time setting boundaries on time dedicating to tweeting, blogging and Facebook updates.

Too often we've seen a social media plan become little more than an inventory of required social media presence “points” detached from careful consideration of time or opportunity costs and candid assessment of the value to the organization.

Here are four keys to developing a manageable social media plan:

1. Assess what you hope to achieve and how you'll measure progress

Goals
Objectives by network
Metrics & Conversion

2. Determine which networks are popular with your audiences (e.g., current, new, etc)

Evaluate where your customers and stakeholders are today
Try to make distinctions between priority networks and nice-to-haves

3. Match your message to the audience and network

Look. Listen. Learn. (repeat)... participate in these networks like you get it
Target message and activities to the culture of the network

4. Evaluate time commitment, level of resources and support.

Track time for a week and monitor
Who will blog? Draft tweets? Approve, etc?
Consider a phased approach

If planned and managed wisely, social media can be an asset to PR, communications, marketing, customer support and business development rather than a time-consuming burden.

This barely scratches the surface on this important topic, so look for some follow-on posts on social media planning in coming months.

Socialtext Appliance Brings Twitter-like Microblogging to the Enterprise

2009-07-14T14:09:53Z

Private Twitter-like services - also known as microblogging - are now available for the enterprise in a new offering from Socialtext.

For those organizations that would like to offer these types of services to their users but wish to keep them behind the firewall, Socialtext offers a hosted (your rack or theirs) appliance option. The service costs $1 per user per month in addition to a monthly fee for the hardware (~$1k/mth).

According to the Socialtext website, the turn-key solution offers optional features for an additional fee like personal homepages and SocialCalc which offers dynamic, distributed 'social' spreadsheets. All accounts offer in-depth analytics and a fairly comprehensive set of integration options including: LDAP, Sharepoint, Lotus and REST API.

While there are other services like Yammer which offer similar enterprise-level services, they as of yet do not offer the level of control and flexibility that a rack-mounted appliance would for corporate IT environments.

It will be interesting to see how substantial the market is for the Socialtext approach of bundling hardware and software as a service versus the other purely service plays. Will the convenience of security and control overcome the cost differential as compared with less-expensive options?

If you've had an experience with Socialtext or with Yammer, please post your comments. We'd love to hear from you about this.

3 Questions to Ponder on Google Chrome OS

2009-07-13T20:15:32Z

Last week's Google Chrome OS announcement solicited a lot of virtual ink and had many in the blogosphere wondering aloud if Microsoft (or any other OS like Apple) should begin evacuating their headquarters for higher ground.

Hey, we're the first to admit we're always a little intrigued by news from the Googleplex. Still, these predictions notwithstanding, it seems there is value in looking at a few questions to determine what the Chrome OS announcement could mean.

To cut through the hype and hysteria, here are three questions to consider:

Is Chrome really an OS?
So, is Google Chrome really an operating system? Well, yes and no. It will leverage resources from Linux so in the purest sense of the word it isn't and doesn't present much technical risk for Google. But, Chrome will help stitch together the amalgam of web-based applications Google has launched (e.g. mail, docs, etc) -- along with those developed to run on the new OS -- targeted at a growing group of users who do the majority of their working and interacting online. More importantly for these kinds of users, Chrome represents a shift away from the overhead and expense of desktop operating systems (and applications like Office) to more mobile, cloud/web-based computing.
Does Chrome OS represent a direct threat to Microsoft?
At the risk of lowering the level of tension here, I don't think so. While there may be classes of users within the enterprise for whom Chrome on a netbook will make sense, it doesn't seem logical to presume many enterprise Microsoft users will drop these OS platforms for Chrome. In the world of multi-boot computing with users supporting multiple OSes on one machine however, it may make sense to run Chrome when you are online - checking email, uploading a video or updating Facebook. Or even a separate netbook which runs Chrome for your online self.
What would be the advantages of Chrome OS?
In short, speed, security and simplicity if all goes as billed for Google Chrome. By eliminating the overhead of running applications locally and relying instead on web-based resources, machines running Chrome should run faster and be easier to maintain and secure.

I think another advantage of Google's move is that it leverages their leadership and market position to create "seed capital" in the space and should encourage (push?) other players in the industry to improve their products. Their forward pressure in the search area has lead to interesting innovations like Bing and many improvement at Yahoo (not to mention vertical search); though admittedly few have truly challenged their dominance in that arena. Still there will undoubtedly be innovations in the space by virtue of Google putting their hat in the ring.

Conclusion
While I think the release of Google Chrome OS will keep some executives at Microsoft up at night no one needs to begin packing offices just yet. There have been similar plays at a web-only computer which have failed miserably.

Google fairs a better chance than some of Sun's Java-based efforts in part because of the popularity of its online cloud-based application suite (over a million businesses use Google Apps) and the general perception that at least for the moment they are the good guys. Being in the OS business though will certainly place Google under that microscope more often.

Feeling Job Crunch, Teenagers Turn to the Web for Work

2009-07-06T14:03:13Z

"...When Faith Borden, 16, of Metuchen, N.J., applied for a job in March to be a counselor at a summer day camp, she looked around and saw "all these 30- and 40-year-olds," she said. "Usually it's just teenagers..."

A recent New York Times article "Teenagers Are Building Their Own Job Engine" highlights Faith's story and others like Laura Durst who developed her own home-based jobs site for teens called WorkInMyRoom.com.

"...These kids are concerned that the world their parents grew up in no longer exists and the notion of taking control and owning your own future is really appealing," said Amy Rosen..." (Ms. Rosen is chief executive of the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship, a nonprofit group that provides entrepreneurship education in low-income communities)

Read the full Times article

Clay Shirky: Impact of Social Media on Politics (Video)

2009-06-20T04:26:06Z

In a recent TED Talk, Clay Shirky suggests that the social web's impact on how information travels among groups, individuals and media formats has -- among other things -- fundamentally changed the way politics works. Shirky points out that the genie is out of the bottle, especially for those restrictive or even repressive regimes around the world. Or in providing oversight and accountability for any political process.

While one can take issue with some of the points Shirky makes, many of his observations seem particularly insightful in light of the role social media networks have played in providing details on the emerging crisis in Iran.

Did YouTube and NetFlix Kill TV?

2009-06-13T02:22:42Z

Did YouTube and NetFlix kill TV? Henry Blodget thinks they've helped. In today's Silicon Alley Insider, he suggests that not only is the TV industry in real trouble, it's seriously in denial about its' perilous position.

Blodget argues that the TV industry hasn't fully grasped the significant impact the availability of video content via the Internet (or Netflix, etc.) has had in drawing eyeballs away from traditional television programming. Their solution? By and large, the industry has put barriers in place to control access to programming already struggling to compete with online video outlets and Netflix even harder to access (example - download of popular episode expires after 24 hours). In short, conducting business in a rather un-social Web kinda way and further isolating potential viewers.

So where is this heading? Blodget says the future is device-independent, all you need is a web connection:

"...You won't have 5 channels, or 50 channels, or 500 channels. You'll have millions of channels. You'll be able to watch anything you want, live or taped. You'll be able to watch it wherever you want--TV, computer, mobile device. You won't have to sorry about "slinging" video content around or programming your DVR. You'll just plug a pipe (Internet) into a box (device) and watch.
This is where the future is going. That's obvious. The only question is how long it takes us to get there--and who gets killed along the way..."

Blodget makes an interesting case. It resonates with those of us frustrated with paying our cable provider every month for 997 channels when there are only 20 channels worth watching.

But who gets killed? While I think the endgame Blodget outlines is quite probable, it seems reasonable to expect there will be some hybrid incarnations along the way. With many of these media companies owning both pipe (Internet and cable) and content, it is hard to see them disappearing in the foreseeable future. There are also certain kinds of programming particularly sports and to some degree, special interest (history, nature, etc.) which will likely help cable and TV retain viewers over the near-term.

One factor which Blodget doesn't touch on is hardware. There are still lots of television sets in TVLand. Also, TV's are increasingly becoming more sophisticated in their ability to process and integrate web-based information. This trend could provide content providers with opportunities to stay in the game with viewers who still like their big screens if only for movies and certain kinds of programming, such as sports.

But the question is will the industry take advantage of these opportunities in time?

FURTHER READING:
You might also like our piece "Three Things Susan Boyle Taught Me about Monetizing Popular Content"

Three Things Susan Boyle Taught Me about Monetizing Popular Content

2009-06-05T12:05:28Z

It is the dream for most of us in the social media world -- creating something which takes the web by storm -- generating millions of eyeballs, crossing over into the mainstream media. Fame and fortune are there for the taking or so the story goes.

By most any measure the Susan Boyle phenomenon on the show "Britain's Got Talent" was a viral media-maker's dream. The video of Ms. Boyle belting out the popular track from the musical "Les Miserables" has been viewed more than 220 million times worldwide.

And yet according to a New York Times article, the show's producers and YouTube were not able to reach agreement on how to split advertising revenues.

With anywhere from hundreds of thousands to millions in potential revenue at stake in those early days, why couldn't parties come to terms more quickly? Below are three factors which seem to have played a role in the breakdown:

1) Clarity of content ownership
As the Times article points out, there are 3-4 parties involved in producing the show which complicates ownership and thus, complicates the disbursement of revenue not to mention the complexity of having all those players at the table. Providers also have differing priorities - making revenue vs. simply generating buzz.

2) Operate in social media 'mode'
When video (or other content) explodes, content owners have to react quickly before the tide ebbs and the opportunity gets away. If this situation is any indicator, content producers need to consider developing quick-response capability before the viral tsunami hits. Many of the content producers haven't made the jump completely to social media mode.

3) Embrace social media outlets as potential financial and promotional partners rather than threats
Content providers often see social media outlets as careless tramplers of their digital rights. In response (and in part to protect themselves), popular sites like YouTube are implementing systems to help ensure that content owners receive credit -- and ad dollars where possible -- for their content even if they aren't responsible for posting it. Apart from ad revenue, outlets like YouTube, Facebook and Viddler, etc. also help drive valuable buzz potentially boosting the popularity and viewership of the particular product or property. Until these protections are in place though, some content providers may be hesitant to view the YouTubes of the world as friends just yet.

As with anything, there are nuances here and the high-level observations above don't apply across the board. Some content providers have gone so far as to create their own platform for delivering content. Hulu (FOX, NBC Universal, etc.) comes to mind. Others have been leveraging YouTube and other outlets for quite some time using teasers and other techniques designed to convert web viewers to TV viewers.

There are other factors -- some producers are frustrated about the limited options for displaying ads or getting stuck with standard terms & conditions in a "non-standard" situation, among others.

This season of "Britain's Got Talent" is over and to the certain disappointment of millions of her fans, Susan Boyle has placed and not won. But will her meteoric rise (and that of her video) spell changes in the ways content providers and social media outlets approach these kinds of opportunities?

Time will tell.

Google Apps and Virgin America Team Up for Cloud-Computing Scavenger Hunt

2009-06-04T16:14:49Z

On June 14th, you can compete in an online scavenger hunt which boasts some pretty cool prizes -- among them, 1 terabyte of Google storage, an HP netbook or fly free on Virgin America for a year with complimentary wifi-- for the top point getters.

Sponsored by Google Apps and the almost-too-hip U.S. airline Virgin America, the contest will provide a series of online puzzles and questions for 'scavengers' to solve. Contestants can compete on board a Virgin America flight or on terra firma. All that's needed is a Google Apps account.

According to the Day on the Cloud site, test questions will be available shortly.

To learn more, visit Day in the Cloud

New WebDriven Website Coming in June

2009-05-30T03:37:55Z

A sparkling new WebDriven website will be launching soon - stay tuned.