But that discussion highlighted another struggle we have - internally and with our clients. How do you measure blog interaction and engagement now? It's no longer as easy as the number of comments made on the post.

The way people interact with blogs has changed. Readers can now share the post with a comment in their RSS reader, tweet or re-tweet a comment and a link (with or without visiting the site), share the link or comment on a shared Facebook link. This means the conversation can be fractured and needs to be addressed in multiple places.

Some sites are currently debating the usefulness of comments - Engadget recently turned off their comments temporarily and Web Worker Daily is asking Are Blog Comments Worth It?

As you're thinking about interaction with your readers, remember the conversation happens where they are, not just where you are. And what they're saying there could be much more interesting than the comments they leave on your site. You may find it helpful to use a social media monitoring tool like Social Scan or a paid service like Radian6 to monitor and follow up on these multiple conversation threads.

Our Creative Director, Matthew Snyder, was in attendance and reports, "At first it was strange to see everyone walking in the same direction, but there was a great energy. Everyone was having lots of fun, running and throwing snowballs."  Many attendees headed over to the Hotel Dupont's snow bar after the fight.

Get the t-shirt commemorating the Dupont Circle Snowball fight.

Google is updating the features on mobile ads again - this time introducing click-to-call phone numbers in mobile ads. I can see this as a definitely helpful feature instead of trying to remember a number and dial.

Like Post-its for Analytics

Google Analytics has now made their annotations feature available to everyone. If you run a special promotion or your site is featured somewhere, you can create an annotation to note the event and help track traffic, conversions, etc. or just remember that it happened six months later when someone asks about the spike in traffic.

Social Sharing

Delicious changes the way you can view links which gives it a more StumbleUpon feel. You can see Google's take called Fast Flip in the Google Labs.

Checking in

The Frugal Traveler gives us an interesting approach to the benefits of Foursquare. Being mayor can be more than ceremonial when it leads to discounts or inside info on a venue. I finally broke down and installed Foursquare on my phone.

A tale of two social media sites

The New York Times reviews The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook, A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius, and Betrayal and Stealing MySpace: The Battle to Control the Most Popular Website in America. Sounds like a soap opera.

“PR manager sought to execute association media campaign. Duties will include: contacting at least 7 radio stations per week (between 10 am and noon); purchasing banner ads on sites selected by PR director; launching a print ad campaign with the tagline “Building a Better Future”; pitching stories to the press (scripts will be provided). . . . . and other tasks as dictated by PR Director. Office hours are 8 – 5 pm; lateness will not be tolerated. For consideration, send cover letter, resume, five writing samples, six letters of reference, certified college transcripts, and Social Security Number.”

Would you respond? My guess is probably not. Not even in this lousy economy.

A job ad is the beginning of a dialogue between the employer and the eventual employee. This ad opens the conversation with a tone of micromanagement and mistrust, and eliminates any promise of autonomy. Most talented candidates wouldn’t bother to reply,

Think of your RFP as a want ad for a vendor. It’s an opportunity for you to outline your needs, identify your challenges, and articulate your goals. It should give potential vendors a solid understanding of what you want to achieve with the project and what their role will be. Here are a few tips on what to do, and what not to do the next time you sit down to write an RFP.

The RFP that Ate Manhattan, and Other Horror Stories

Too often, people fall into a trap when writing RFPs. Something that starts as a simple document balloons into an opaque, convoluted mass, like a creature from a 1950s horror movie (The RFP that Ate Manhattan!)

Length isn’t necessarily the problem; some projects require it. The trouble happens when you stop defining your objectives (“to increase the number and frequency of repeat visitors to the site”) and start dictating a solution (“integrate a YouTube channel to support a monthly video greeting from the CEO”).

Usually, it’s a well-intentioned effort on the client’s part to think the things through and clarify scope. But this kind of prescriptive detail actually stunts the project before it starts. Once you’ve decided on a course of action, you’ve eliminated the most crucial part of the vendor’s participation—proposing creative (and cost-effective) solutions.

Just as every individual approaches a task with a different techniques and talents, each vendor brings a unique skill set and perspective into the mix. When you approach potential vendors as a partner, you take advantage of their experience and their expertise

But when you mandate a narrow course of action you not only demote the vendor from collaborator to hired hand, but you also back yourself into a corner. You give the vendor no freedom to present solutions that will meet your needs more effectively—and often for less money.

The Write Stuff

Your RFP has the potential to become a valuable launching pad for your project. To get the most out of it, keep these points in mind:

Focus on the end—not the means.
You know your organization. You have a deep understanding of its needs and challenges—that’s what you should be communicating in the RFP. What are you trying to accomplish you’re your project? How will it improve your business? Armed with your insight, prospective vendors will approach the project with informed intelligence.

State your goals simply.
Having trouble getting users to register for events online? Just say so. Don’t get bogged down with dense language and jargon. (“Vendor will implement revisions to the existing information architecture’s hierarchy and nomenclature to emphasize event registration.”) Use words that clarify, not confound.

Start a conversation; not a confrontation.
If you’ve had a difficult relationship with a vendor in the past, you might be gun shy about working with a third party. Resist the tendency to make your RFP an adversarial document. Remember, you’ll be able to meet the vendors in person, check their references and portfolio, and evaluate whether they’d make a good partner.

R-E-S-P-E-C-T
It all comes down to respect. Write your RFP for an audience of competent, talented professionals, and that’s who will respond. Vendors are just like any job seeker—they’re looking for an opportunity to apply their creativity and energy to projects that excite them. Entice them with your RFP, and you’ll set the stage for success.

What are your rules of thumb when writing an RFP?

Eventually, he realizes he can learn from what he does wrong. The next time the same thing happens, he adjusts with much more positive results. Only by improving himself can he break out of his déjà vu.

All too often, though, company web sites are forced to live through Groundhog Day over and over again. Pages with high bounce rates or poor converting landing pages are never optimized. Every day, the site continues to drive away visitors or lose sales. And new pages with the same exact weaknesses are added.

So how do you keep your site from suffering Bill Murray’s fate? 

See Your Shadow

Peek into your site analytics. Look at your sales or membership database numbers. Are visitors leaving your product pages in droves without ever adding anything to the cart? How many people start your membership signup form? How many people finish it?

Identify a couple of these sad little shadow pages. Now go in and fix them!

Re-optimize that landing page based on the keywords visitors are actually using to find it. Take a hard look at that registration process; can you make it easier?

Even better, try a couple of different solutions and use a tool like Google’s Website Optimizer to run an A/B test of those solutions. Go with the one that yields the greatest improvement.

End The Deja Vu

Identify what you did to improve your pages. The next time you create a similar type of page, incorporate these lessons and start from this better foundation.

And once you’ve optimized everything you can, go back and do it all again in 6 weeks or 6 months.

Do Some Spring Cleaning

Next Groundhog Day, you’ll have a lot more to be happy about.

Your Turn

• What have you done to improve your site?
• How do you keep from repeating mistakes?
• Why do they wake poor Punxsatawney Phil up so early?

CDG Interactive can help your organization review its site to identify opportunities for optimization, from sales conversions to visitor engagement. We’ll help you put those improvements in place, too. Contact us to learn more about how we can help you.

I haven't found much that Bing is better for - or maybe Google is just a habit. But this feature could be seriously helpful. Bing has added a recipe search that might help you decide what's for dinner.

Assigning authority to the Twitterati

In indexing Tweets, are re-tweets more important? Does it depend on who said it initially? Or who passed it on? Apparently so, according to Technology Review. Google is working to identify "reputed followers" which will presumably work like inbound links and PageRank to give higher authority to certain information on Twitter.

No RSS feed? No problem!

You can now use Google Reader to keep up with changes on any webpage. So if there's a product you've been keeping an eye on and want to know if the price or description has changes, Google Reader can now create a feed for that page and let you know when content on the page has updated. I tried it out and it's incredibly easy to use.

Content is King

The Online Marketing Blog offers 10 Tips for Content Marketing Success, and they have some thought provoking statistics. 900,000 blog posts are published every 24 hours and 20 hours of video are uploaded every minute to YouTube, so creating compelling content is essential.

Facebook Privacy Changes

We've written extensively about Facebook privacy settings in the past, but some new changes were made recently and it's important that you understand the changes and why you shouldn't automatically accept the Facebook defaults. Here are 3 Facebook Settings you should check now, from the New York Times. (More to come on this topic.)