When it comes to analyzing what is happening on your web site and how well your marketing is doing there is an incredible amount of information available to you even if you do not have the money to pay for a analytics program.  Google offers what I think is an excellent analytics program and you cannot beat the cost, it’s free and fairly easy to install.

Now depending on what kind of web site you have, you will have different success metrics.  For an e-commerce site, you want users to buy; a lead generation site, you want users to fill out a form and for a content site, you want users to hang out and read your content.  Though no matter what kind of web site you have, I believe there are a couple of key areas that everyone should initially pay attention to when analyzing your web traffic.  I am going to start simply and focus on just one.

Bounce Rates - A bounce rate defined by Google is the percentage of single-page visits (i.e. visits in which the person left your site from the entrance page).  Simply put, a bounce rate measures how many users landed on one page of your site (not necessarily your home page) and immediately left your site without clicking on any other link on your web site. They saw and hopefully looked at one page and then left by either clicking back on their browser, clicking on a bookmark, typing in a new URL or closing the browser window.

No matter if your web site is big or small, you want every page of that site to drive users to do that single goal we discussed earlier.  Bounce rates have always shown me whether my web site is accomplishing that single goal I am striving for.  When I come across a web site of my own or a clients with a high bounce rate, it is telling me that I am not doing a good enough job selling the value of this web site.  If I am seeing a bounce rate of over 85%, I immediately want to take a look at which specific pages on the site have the highest bounce rates and find ways on how I can decrease that number.

The first three things that I look at is the web sites look and feel,  navigation and content.  Is my look and feel appealing to my target market?  Do I look credible?  Do I have sound navigation that users can easily find what they are looking for and does my content speak appropriately to the market I am looking to reach?

I would love to hear from you on what you have done to combat high bounce rates and what has worked and not worked for you, let me know.

Technorati Tags: analytics, Online Media 101, online marketing, analytics program, success metrics, e-commerce, web traffic, Bounce Rates, bounce rate

I have been a customer of yours for over eight years. For the last five years, I have owned several Blackberry’s which I use for both work as well as personal use. I believe that I have the most expensive plan you guys have totally unlimited minutes for both phone and data because of the huge time I spend on my phone. My bill is automatically paid through my credit card each month and before yesterday I don’t think I have ever contacted your customer service . I guess what I am trying to say is that I believe I am one of those customers that you want to keep.

The Blackberry I presently own is about a year and half old but it is already starting to show some wear and tear because pretty much I am the greatest product tester in the world. No matter how good a product is, I will find a way to destroy it in one way or the other. Since my phone is on its last legs, I have begun looking at a new Blackberry to purchase. Unfortunately, recently Verizon you guys have been getting your butts kicked by your fellow wireless competitors on phones. First obviously enough the iPhone and now AT&T has come out with the Blackberry Curve and all you got is the World Edition Blackberry which pretty much is exactly identical to the phone I have now except a wee bit thinner, no thank you. Oh and by the way, it is ugly as sin.

I have begun to think that maybe I should look to change providers who can offer me the kind selection I am looking for. Though before I do that, I decided to start looking online to see when and if you guys are going to come out with the Curve or other Blackberry’s. You know what I discovered, there are a number of blogs and discussion boards that are taking guesses when and if Verizon will come out with new phones, but there is absolutely no news or conversation coming from you! Why is that? Why wouldn’t you want to keep your customers informed of what is happening and what kind of new products and services are coming out in the future? I don’t know if you guys of heard about this internet thing, but there are a lot of companies that have this crazy thing called a corporate blog.

Last night I was on your website, verizonwireless.com and I saw you had a web chat feature that you could speak with someone at Verizon and I decided to give that a shot. Here is the conversation I had:

You are chatting with Greg

Greg will be right with you (Mind you I waited 6 minutes for Greg)

Greg: Thanks for contacting Verizon Wireless, how may I help you?

Cord: Yes, I was wondering if Verizon is coming out with any new Blackberry’s?

Greg: Yes they are!

Cord: Great, when will that be happening?

Greg: I do not have a date on that.

Cord: Well, will it be happening in the next 3,6 or 12 months?

Greg: I do not have a date on that.

Cord: Do you know what Blackberry phones Verizon will be supporting?

Greg: I do not have that information.

Cord: Ok, do you have any information that you can share with me other than that sometime before I die Verizon will be coming out with a new Blackberry?

Greg will be right with you

Greg will be right with you

Greg will be right with you

This is when I was put on chat hold I guess and after several minutes of waiting, I finally just hung up.

Verizon, it is time that you start communicating with your customers better. Your contract cancellation fee is not going to stop your top customers from leaving if they do not believe that you are meeting and exceeding their expectations.

I am wiling to place significant odds that no-one from Verizon is bothering to monitor what is being discussed about them online and no-one from the company will contact me from this post. Anyone wanna place a wager?

Technorati Tags: Verizon Wireless, Blackberry’s, customer service, Blackberry, Verizon, Blackberry Curve

I watched in horror as this speaker proceeded to literally scare the living hell out of these attendants going through absolutely nightmarish scenarios of what could happen to their companies if they did not start monitoring these online conversations immediately. I was really wondering if this type of mortal death scenario really worked as a sales pitch for this speaker? And more importantly, I was wondering what was the worst thing that could happen to me if I stood up and smacked this guy in the back of the head with the fire extinguisher hanging on the wall behind him?

When this guy finally finished his 45 minute what I have aptly named “Holocaust” speech, he asked for questions and you know what, not one single person raised their hand. Why? Because this speaker who I have nicknamed Adolf did absolutely nothing for these people. These attendees paid money to come and hopefully learn something and all that Adolf did was scare them to death and overwhelm them on a subject they were already confused about in the first place.

What I have learned recently with a lot of the work we have done is that online monitoring and reputation management is absolutely important, but not for the reasons Adolf was proposing. The value online monitoring delivers is that companies have the ability to truly listen to both customers and perspective customers. They get to hear first hand what their target market is thinking, both good and bad. If they listen well enough, they can learn from this feedback and once they reach a point of comfortability, they can reach out and engage with these people; integrate themselves into the conversations.

Every company will have a crisis, but these are few and far between. Yes, when something bad happens or is said, you want to know about as quickly as possible so you can act accordingly. Though more often then not, what this type of engagement allows is for good and not for bad. It allows companies to reach out to new customers, continue communicating with existing ones and most importantly, turn a regular customer into a company evangelist because the company showed them they were willing to go the extra mile.

Technorati Tags: online monitoring, online conversations, online monitoring, reputation management

Topic: Influencers

Definition: Many people believe that an influencer is already a customer and that an influencer is the same thing as an evangelist. That is actually not always the case. An influencer is someone who can influence your customers and influence your market. An influencer does not have to be a customer to have great influence on the market that you are targeting. Wikipedia defines an influencer as, “An individual that have influence over potential buyers, and marketers orientates marketing activities around these influencers.”

Example: Before we go into further detail, let’s give a basic example. Let’s say that you are a technology company of some kind. One example of an influencer in your industry would be the blog TechCrunch. If you could get a favorable post in TechCrunch talking about your company or product you would see an immediate and huge increase in traffic to your web site and hopefully in sales. TechCrunch is an incredibly popular technology blog that has great influence on its huge readership. Because of the large audience TechCrunch brings in each and everyday as well as prestige Michael Arrington the blog’s author has, TechCrunch is absolutely an influencer when it comes to the tech industry.

Why is this important?

Depending on the popularity of the keywords you have chosen, you could be faced with a HUGE amount of links and information you have pulled together. Many of these links will be coming from people and places that have very little influence on your target market. It is your job to be able to quickly go through all this information and be able to determine which of the links are coming from influencers and who are not.

Did you ever watch the TV show M*A*S*H? If you didn’t, it was a show based in Korea during the war and the unit was a medical unit where they would bring wounded soldiers in to be operated on from their wounds the received during fighting. Each time a bunch of wounded came in, the first thing they did was go through each one of them to determine who was the worst off and needed immediate medical attention. I believe recognizing influencers from non-influencers is that same kind of triage.

How do we start?

First off, you need to be using the Firefox browser. If you are still using Internet Explorer, please immediately hit yourself in the head with a hammer several times. When you regain consciousness, please go and download Firefox, it is free. After you have downloaded and installed Firefox, please install a Firefox add-on called SearchStatus. After installing, restart Firefox and you should now see on the bottom right hand side of your browser the following:

SearchStatus shows you a couple of different things. The first thing it shows is a web pages Google PageRank. Google gives each and every page that it reads and indexes a page ranking of between 0 to10. The higher the page rank, the higher visibility that page gets in Google natural search results. I will do a 101 post about SEO in the future, for now consider the numbers for Google PageRank as follows:

• Anything ranked 0 to 4 - The web site has little visibility in the search engines.
• 5 to 7 - Some decent visibility
• 8 + - Rocking, stud!

So in other words, the higher number the better.

The second bar you see is the web sites Alexa ranking. An Alexa ranking estimates how much traffic the web site gets on a daily basis and then ranks it against all the other web sites it is tracking. For example, this web site, Marketing Hipster has an Alexa ranking of 157,230 which means by Alexa, this web site is the 157,230 most trafficked web site on the web. In contract, YouTube has an Alexa ranking of 3. So unlike the Google Page Rank, the lower the number a web site has for its Alexa ranking the better.

Before I get comments, I will tell you that you need to take Alexa rankings with a POUND of salt. Alexa determines these rankings through anyone who has installed the Alexa toolbar to their browser. This is a very small percentage of users and many of the anti-virus software on the market today actually consider Alexa to be a virus or spyware. This is far from an exact science, but it does serve a purpose when it comes to quickly identifying web sites that need to be looked at further and others which need to be kicked to the curb.

This post is getting to be rather long so I am going to be break this up into two different posts. For now, here is what you can do. Take that spreadsheet that you captured all those URL’s when searching for your keywords and begin going to some of these URL’s with your new searchstatus plugin running on your browser. Start taking a look at what the web site rankings are and start marking down on your spreadsheet which sites have the higher and better rankings.

In the meantime, I will catch you on our next post, Online Marketing 101: Influencer vs. Non-Influencer Part II.

Technorati Tags: Online Marketing 101, influencers, non-influencers, evangelist, TechCrunch, Michael Arrington, Firefox, Internet Explorer, SearchStatus, Google PageRank, Alexa

Here is how I think we will proceed. If you are interested in participating, just shoot me an email at cord AT marketinghipster.com and let me know what the subject of your 101 article is and whether you would like to publish it on your own blog or like it published here. If you could also please include a date of when you think you can write your post and when you would like to publish it. I would like to stagger the posts so each blogger gets a day that their post goes up and we can all promote each blog with their article.

Overall, you can write about any subject you would like when it comes to online marketing.  Though you need to make sure that it is written for users who may not have the experience you do.  I like to call it a foundation article.  Other than that, the sky is the limit.

I am going to do this on a first come, first serve basis. Please let me know if you have any questions and thanks again for your interest.

I am going to start this experiment by discussing Social Media.

Topic: Social Media

Definition: In simplest terms, social media is when conversations take place online.

Where: These conversations can be taking place all over. This includes the following:

• Dynamic web sites - Amazon.com - Customers can comment and rate a product they have purchased, but other users then can rate the commenter on whether their comment was helpful or not.
• Blogs - Marketinghipster.com - I post an article in which I give my opinion. Users can and are encouraged to comment on what I wrote and express their own opinions and thoughts. I can then choose to follow up their comments with a comment of my own as well even post a new article based on feedback from my readers. Finally, users who read my post can go back to their own blog and post an article discussing my post and their specific thoughts on it.
• Discussion boards/Chat rooms - There are so many of these types of web sites where people can chat in real time or post comments and wait for follow up posts. A couple of examples include Ebay. They have discussion boards for anything and everything in regard to Ebay that both sellers and buyers can discuss anything under the sun. Yahoo Message Boards are pretty much a one stop shop for anything that people have interests in and want to discuss. They run the gamut from discussing finances and stocks to chat rooms for finding love.
• Social Networks - When I log into my Facebook account, I can see everything that my friends have done within Facebook. Whether that is joining a new group, uploading pictures or videos, recommending a movie or a book or just what they are presently up to. I can then follow up with them via email. Other social networks like MySpace have their own blog where users can write about anything they like and choose who gets to see what they have written and who does not.

How does this pertain to marketing & advertising?

For a very long time advertising, marketing and PR has been a one to many proposition. A company or organization wants to promote something, so they hire a marketer to try to get the word out to as many people within their target market as possible. One to many.

Social media is changing that dynamic. Social media focuses on a one to one model. Marketers now need to focus their marketing to an individual and if done correctly that individual will communicate that message to another and then the other person will pass that on to yet another and on and on it goes. This is not anything different than in years past other than that the internet has created a perfect platform for these one to one messages to be passed and spread at incredible speeds.

Why is this important?

We have seen in a multitude of studies done recently that consumers do not trust advertising. And more importantly, technology is enabling and empowering users to take control of who and what markets to them. The standard ways of marketing and advertising that has worked for years just is not working anymore, but our clients are still looking for us the marketers to communicate their message effectively as well as deliver them a return on their investment. Social media is one area that if done correctly can do just that.

How do we start?

The best way to begin is to better understand where your target market congregates online and what they are talking about. Begin by doing the following:

1. Develop a set of keywords that are most relevant to your client. They can include company, brand or product names, competitors, issues, questions, etc.
2. Once you have created this list of keywords, start doing searches with those keywords at sites like Technorati, Google Blog Search, Boardtracker and even through an ordinary search engine like Google.
3. Find links that look interesting, follow and read them.
4. Start a spreadsheet where can start capturing URL’s of interesting posts or discussions you find. Make notes on what was interesting and the main points for each.
5. Once you have captured enough of this information, you will begin to see patterns emerge and begin to discover certain themes that repeat themselves as well as specific areas throughout the web that your target market congregates.

This is the first step into truly understanding where your target market hangs out on the web, but also what is truly important to them. With this information, you will begin to understand what kind of messages will resonate with the people you covet most.

The next 101 post will be a quick checklist on how to recognize from all the information you have just gathered which people are truly influencers and who are not.

I hope this was helpful. I apologize if it was a bit long, but I wanted to try to get in as much as possible. I really welcome any and all thoughts on what you liked about this and what you did not so I can continually improve. I also want to invite anyone who would like to get involved with this to please do not hesitate to post an Online Marketing 101 on your own blog. I ask that you please provide a link back to my blog as I have added a new column to my sidebar where I will post links to anyone who posts an Online Marketing 101 article of their own. And if you do not have a blog, but would like to participate in this, please do not hesitate to contact me as I would welcome any guest writers to post right here on the Hipsters.

Oh yea, if you like the my Online Marketing 101 logo that I created on the top left hand side of this post, please feel free to use that as well.

Technorati Tags: Online Marketing 101, Social Media, Dynamic web sites, Blogs, Discussion boards, Chat rooms, Ebay, Social Networks, Facebook, advertising, marketing, PR, target market

I participated in a social media panel discussion with Jim Tobin and Nathan Gilliatt sponsored by Business Wire last week.  It was a great discussion as we pretty much just had an open Q&A with Jim, Nathan and I giving our thoughts and opinions on social media to what I thought was a pretty interested audience.

As I have been participating in more and more of these discussions and presentations, one thing is becoming abundantly clear to me.  As marketers, we are not doing a very good job when it comes to educating and explaining all this online mumbo jumbo that we do.  It continually amazes me the type of questions that I hear during these events.  They are usually incredibly basic, true “101″ online marketing questions.  And please do not get me wrong, I am not blaming the people who are asking these questions.  What I am trying to say is that I think we as online marketers need to realize that the people we are trying to reach, the marketing managers, directors and CMO’s of a great deal of companies are no-where close to truly understanding the basics of online marketing and we need to do a better job of educating them.

As this has been rattling around in my brain, I have come to the conclusion that one of the reasons why this might be happening is who we are writing for and reading ourselves.  Before I started writing this, I took a quick look through my RSS reader to see the feeds that I try to read everyday.  They consist of all top online marketers in one form or another.  I read these authors stuff and think that I need to write at this level because they are setting the bar at that level.  I also think I am writing at this level because a great deal of my readers are also at this same level.  Though arn’t we missing out on a huge audience of people who are just not there yet?

So here is what I am thinking.  I am going to start this week posting a few articles each week that are more basic and foundation posts than maybe what I have done in the past.  I am going to title each of them, Online Marketing 101 with what ever the post is about.  I want to see if some of these posts might strike a cord with people who may not be as inundated as I and others are in this world of online marketing.

We will see how it goes.  What do you think?

I think anyone who has been in this business knew that this was eventually coming from Facebook. Now the question is whether it is going to work? I think there are still a lot of unanswered questions. The first one of my list would be whether this is going to piss off Facebook users? Facebook has always been the anti-MySpace. While MySpace was the wild wild west and when you signed on you got thirty different flashing and totally annoying banners and pop-ups. While at Facebook, you logged in and got exactly what you were expecting, the run down on everything that your friends have been doing all nicely structured and controlled. How much of that will change?

Another important question and still an inherent problem with online advertising is that for Facebook advertising to be successful, users are going to have to leave their beloved Facebook and go somewhere else. So again, using the Amazon example I used earlier, if I see one of my friends purchased a book, I am going to have to leave Facebook and go over to Amazon to buy it as well. We have seen a multitude of data that people do not like leaving their cozy little social networks.

And my final question would be how is Facebook going to handle the high wire act between targeted advertising with their users privacy? Facebook members love Facebook and they trust Facebook. Now that Facebook is going to be mining this incredible wealth of data they are capturing each and everyday to better target users for advertising, will Facebook lose that all important trust factor with its users?

These are all important issues and in my opinion, Mark Zuckerberg has continually made the right calls so I think he is going to be successfully doing this as well. I still get a little dizzy when I think of him turning down 1 BILLION dollars from Yahoo many months ago, but look who is laughing now.

Technorati Tags: Facebook, targeted ads, Amazon, online advertising, privacy, Yahoo

This issue was really punctuated for me when I reading a post on Weblog Tools Collection. If you are not familiar with this site, it is an excellent site for anything and everything that has to do with WordPress which is what I use for this blog. I was checking out some new themes when I noticed a link that read “WordPress Blogger Wanted” under the job section on the web page. Just for the hell of it, I decided to click on it to check it out. I am not going to post a link directly to this job page, but this is what the job post said:

“We pay per post you make to one of our WordPress blogs and you can write about anything except porn, gambling, drugs, hate, it just has to be original writings and of course make sense. No links can be in the posts and all posts have to have a minimum 150 words. We will pay anywhere between 25 cents to $1 dollar per post.”

They will pay between a quarter to a dollar per each post?!?!?!? Earth calling person who does not have a clue, come in clueless. You have the audacity to pay someone a lousy quarter for 150 words?

So in other words, someone is going to take the time to sit down and using only this person’s intelligence and talent and write four 150 word articles and he or she might just be able to afford a Snickers bar? I understand that whomever placed this ad could never write a blog for himself as he has the intelligence of a door knob.

Do you have a clue what kind of not only talent, but absolute dedication it takes to make a successful blog? Look at the guys who are flourishing at their blogs. They dedicate hours upon hours of not only writing, but reading and researching so they have new and innovative posts day in and day out.

I was thinking if anyone is interested, a bunch of us could get together and write some of the worst posts we absolutely can come up with and submit it to this idiot and see what his reaction is. What do you think? Maybe we can come up with some titles of posts that we can write?

Here’s a couple of the top of my head.

1. My Laundry and Me - A Dirty Tale

2. Where does the Sun go at Night?

3. How to Spell Mississippi.

Give me some of your ideas of great titles.

Technorati Tags: social marketing, blogging, WordPress