Lesson #1: Social media is a good way to stay on your customers’ minds when they might not otherwise be thinking about you.

With more than 800 million people on Facebook and another 300 million on Twitter, it makes sense for athletic departments to adopt it as a communications tool. It gives

Lesson #2: Branding is a long game. Social media is a good way to extent your brand, so don’t seek immediate gratification all the time.recruits and fans the ability to build relationships with the coaches and athletes on a more intimate level. With increased media attention in college sports already, an effective social media campaign will give people an inside glance at what other outlets can’t provide and give the consumer an effective way to talk to the brand.

For teams that are not “top-tier” programs, who have to try harder than bigger programs, social media is an inexpensive and direct way to market to and engage the fan base. Most universities discovered that fans wanted more content and the social media channels were a way of distributing it to them.

Lesson #3: Have you seen the cost to produce and air a TV commercial? A good social media program is cheap, no matter how you slice it. You just have to work to make it effective.

According to Mario Mercurio, Director of Basketball Operations at Xavier University, “Using social media in partnership thru television and radio is so imperative. It’s what everyone is moving towards and you have to be where your fans are. You have to be easily accessible.” This is really imperative for schools that don’t have big media budgets or are lesser known. It’s a way of leveling out the playing field with the bigger boys in college athletics.

Lesson #4: Integrate your marketing. It’s always greater than the sum of its parts.

Facebook and Twitter are revolutionizing the way coaches recruit players, too. Most players have Facebook and Twitter accounts, and coaches are using the social media giants as avenues to stay up-to-date with what is going on in a recruit’s daily life. It also saves athletic departments money in travel and phone costs. Basically, if you’re not using these tools, then you are a step behind in the recruiting world.

Lesson #5: Social media is a two-way medium. You can talk and listen. And, it can be personal.

However, the NCAA is trying to mandate what coaches can and can’t do in the social media world. One rule prevents a coach and school from directly mentioning a recruit’s name publicly, but they can send direct messages to the recruit through the platforms. One coach went so far as to offer multiple recruits scholarships through his Twitter feed, which is a potential violation since the coach sent it as a public Tweet.

Lesson #6: Your words are public, weigh them carefully.

The final message is clear: Social media in college athletics – and business – is here to stay.

What Can We Learn from Colleges Athletics’ Use of Social Media for Recruiting and Marketing?

If you’re ready to reverse that, we’ve figured it out. We’re talking positive returns from social media here, not Las Vegas. We’re still working on that. What we do know is how to track ROI of social media using Google Analytics.

Your company may want to dive into social media, or maybe you’re already using it. Undoubtedly, you’ve been asked, “What’s the ROI of this? Where is my money going?” Lots of people struggle to find an answer. You may have 800 followers on Twitter, but do they actually buy your products or services? It was said that 2011 would be the year of social media ROI, but yet again many people missed the boat. If you’re already using Google Analytics, you’re more than halfway to finally unearthing your social media ROI.

When you check out the Google Analytics dashboard, you can see all kind of traffic data. You may already look at the Traffic Sources. It shows you where your visitors are coming from. As you can see from the screenshot below, that includes the usual social media suspects, as well as some aggregator sites. But, the Traffic Sources data only shows visitor quantity. We must go deeper to find quality – those who convert.

To really get the data we want, we need to use Advanced Segments. These allow you to chop up segments of visitor data however you please. Click Advanced Segments on the left on the dashboard, then you’ll need to click Create New Segment.

Now, this is the important part. You obviously want to track more sites than just Twitter. So, underneath the parameter you just made, add an Or statement, not an And statement. If you make it an And statement, Google Analytics will think a visitor must have come from Twitter.com AND Facebook for them to count as one visitor. That is obviously impossible, which is why you need an Or statement.

Drag the source box back over, and add Facebook.com or whatever source you please. Keep going until you’ve added every source you think you need to track. When you’re done, it should look like the image below.  Sift through your traffic sources data to find sites you may not think you receive a lot of traffic from.

Pro Tip: Remember, not everyone uses Twitter.com to use Twitter. Add sites like Hootsuite.com, as well. And, don’t forget separate domains for one source, such as t.co for Twitter. Then there are mobile sites…

Now, click the Test button. It should calculate at least some visitors. If it comes up with zero, either you added something wrong – or your social media program isn’t doing so hot.

Name it and save it, then head back to the dashboard. At the top of the dashboard, you want to apply your new Social Media custom segment. Click it, apply and voila! You can now see how much of your site’s traffic is coming from social media. If you left All Traffic selected, it will show the data in comparison to traffic as a whole.

Now, we’re not in the money yet. If you’ve set up goal tracking (which is highly, highly recommended), you can then go the Goals Overview section and find out exactly how many of your goals are being completed by visitors who came in through social channels.

Keep in mind what you have defined as your goals, whether it’s a contact form, newsletter signup, or any number of other goals. This is quantifiable, hard data for how your social media plan is performing. This will take you beyond followers or Likes, and show how many social connections become customers.

Next time someone demands to know the ROI of your social media efforts, you have the answer. Here’s hoping it’s a good one!

Measuring Social Media ROI with Google Analytics

It’s been a little over a month since Google launched their hybrid “Search Plus Your World” (SPYW) search and social feature. So far, aside from the one or two mentioned in news articles about the feature, no one really knows what searches are causing SPYW to show up for logged out users. So I set out and started typing to find as many search queries as I could that would show me the SPYW box on the right hand side (since as of this posting I am still holding out joining Google+).

As you’ll see in the list below the queries are all head terms. I wasn’t able to get anything longtail to pull up the SPYW just yet. Several brand names pulled up the feature including Google itself, YouTube, Android, Blogger, Huffington Post, CNN, CNBC, MSNBC, Apple, and Microsoft. Facebook and Twitter searches did not.

Another interesting note. I had expressed my concerns about advertisers losing money in positions #4+ in AdWords PPC as those ads were appearing below the SPYW highlight box. My concern was that this would fuel a bidding war on the high traffic terms causing a spike in PPC costs, however, while searching for queries to write this blog post I noticed that every time SPYW appeared there were no ads below it. If that sticks then kudos to Google for being a little less evil.

The list:

• actor
• actors
• actress
• actresses
• adobe
• analytics
• android
• androids
• apple
• apples
• art
• artist
• artists
• astronomy
• author
• authors
• baseball
• basketball
• blog
• blogger
• breaking news
• business
• car
• cars
• cartoonist
• cartoonists
• celebrity
• ceo
• cnbc
• cnn
• comedian
• comedians
• comedy
• comic
• comic artist
• comics
• cooking
• cricket
• earth
• education
• educator
• entertainment
• football
• games
• gaming
• google
• huffington post
• internet
• marketing
• media
• microsoft
• msnbc
• movie
• movies
• music
• musician
• musicians
• nascar
• nba
• network
• new
• news
• nfl
• php
• planets
• politican
• politicians
• politics
• programmers
• programming
• rap
• real estate
• science
• scientist
• scientists
• scifi
• seo
• singers
• social media
• software
• space
• sports
• star
• stars
• technology
• venture capital
• video games
• web
• world news
• writer
• writers
• youtube

92 Searches That Trigger Search Plus Your World

There are a number of tools available that track conversion rates, bounce rates, and other conversion rate optimization (CRO) metrics – but Lucky Orange stands out from the others. What makes this tool great is its depth of data combined with the immediacy of tracking visitors.

Lucky Orange produces video recordings of users interacting with your website, and it also includes heat-map visualization, live chat, real-time visitor analysis, visitor polling, and additional features. We began using Lucky Orange for a client three weeks ago, and the insights we’ve gained are worth much more than the $7 we pay per month. We love it so much that we’ve written a feature-by-feature breakdown and our opinions of each – just for you!

Video Recording

The video recording feature is the primary reason we were excited to try Lucky Orange. This feature captures the viewport of users on your site, showing their mouse movements, clicks, and time spent idle/reading. These recordings are saved in the system with metrics such as time spent on website, number of pages viewed, browser/OS information, and other metrics that you can see below.

Using these metrics, combined with the recordings themselves, we have been able to gather more specific and targeted data about our users’ interactions, as well as the shortcomings of certain pages on our site. For a page designed to convert customers, it is extremely valuable to watch the actions of users who failed to convert. We had a general understanding where in the conversion funnel a user was lost prior, but with Lucky Orange we can see exactly how far into a specific step a user got before leaving the page.

A Variety of Heat Maps

Another helpful feature is the creation of various kinds of heatmaps. We found the scroll depth heatmap to be especially helpful in understanding the general effectiveness of a page’s content. It shows what percentage of users viewed different parts of a page, with 100% of users viewing above the fold (depending on screen resolution) and sometimes nobody having viewed the footer.

This data is an indicator of how engaging your content is and how well a specific page is structured. Placing a call to action underneath your content doesn’t do you any good if only a small percentage of your users even see it.

Live Dashboard

Live Dashboard gives you an overview of top countries, top regions, top pages, top keywords and top sources of visitors. It’s great for a snapshot of what is happening on your website in real time.  As you spend time within the project, you will notice things like Top Keywords will change and adjust based on the users that are on your site at the moment.  Another great feature of this dashboard is the Related Tweets section. This is particularly helpful if you recently published new content and want to see the Twitter pick up.

Live Chat Feature

When you log into Lucky Orange, you can click the “available to chat” button within the Chat tab. Then users can chat with you if they so desire. You may also initiate a chat with a visitor to gain insight. For example, if someone spent significant time on a product page and did not convert before exiting the page, you can initiate a chat to find out why and potentially make improvements to increase CRO.

As SEOs, we have ideas, resources and techniques for improving CRO, but clients are often personally attached to their sites and hesitant to change design elements.  A product like Lucky Orange provides hard data to support your recommendations. The interface is easy to navigate and simple to show even a novice client at navigating WordPress.  With the insights we gathered from Lucky Orange, we were able to provide the client with specific improvements to the site’s user experience.

Stay tuned for our next installment of our CRO journey with Lucky Orange.

We Review Lucky Orange: A CRO Tool We Love

Hundreds of people attending the TEDxSMU Disruption conference on Dec. 3, 2011, turned their attention to the artistic installation of an ice sculpture garden outside the Wyly Theatre in Dallas.

TEDxSMU commissioned award-winning Dallas artist, Shane Pennington, to create the art he named “Transcendence” in The Dallas Arts District. Pennington received his inspiration for the project from the traditional Karesansui Japanese rock garden.

Pennington carved bigger-than-life human figures and other sculptures out of huge blocks of ice weighing the equivalent of a subcompact car. The blocks arrived a few days before the conference from a Belgian manufacturer that produces the only clear, bubble-free ice available in the world, according to Pennington. It took six weeks to freeze the blocks.

frontpagetv, a sister company of WrightIMC, set up two small HD cameras to capture time-lapse images of the interaction of light from the city skyline reflecting off the sculptures.

This video shows the scale of the garden after it was unveiled.

Pennington embedded native rocks from his hometown in Texas inside the ice during the freezing process. The rocks represent the human heart in the finished forms.  As the ice of the human body sculpture melted, Pennington envisioned the rocks inside slowly returning to the garden to symbolize the relationship between environment and humanity.

The artist planned to take time-lapse pictures of the sculpture garden to document the entire transformation of the melting ice sculptures. However, high wind caused the pole that the camera was mounted on to vibrate, which ruined the images.

This following video, taken six days after installation, captures images of the altered shape of the large human form. We planted our cameras at ground level to record a 10-hour sequence. The resulting play of lights from downtown skyscrapers shining through the sculptures delighted Pennington.

frontpagetv also produced a “TEDxSMU Behind the Scenes” documentary underwritten by WrightIMC for the event. You can view it by clicking here.

Time-Lapse Videos of TEDxSMU’s Commissioned Ice Sculpture Art Installation

I was the kid in high school who doodled through math class, paying attention only enough to keep my GPA up for college scholarships.

“I’ll ever need this,” I argued, “I’m going to be a designer. Designers don’t need science, and they certainly don’t need math.”

I was so wrong. After just a few years working as a designer, I know the truth – math and science matter.

Leonardo da Vinci said, “Study the science of art, and the art of science.” Five hundred years later, I find da Vinci’s words define one of the most important emerging fields in web design – conversion optimization.

Conversion optimization focuses on how to turn prospects into clients. It depends on experimentation, correlations, and statistics (you know, that math and science stuff I’d never need) to determine which designs and content will result in users following through with a specific call-to-action.

In my first design job, I immediately realized that a terrible design with a high conversion rate is way more useful to a client than a beautiful site with poor conversion optimization. The goal of conversion optimization is to find the sweet spot where a page can be beautiful and convert the most leads possible.

So, how do we achieve that? We first have to quantify the actions that users take. Most of the time, conversion optimization experts look at the “bounce rate” and “click-through rate.” Bounce rate represents the percentage of users who leave a site from the first page they arrived at without moving on to another page on the same site. Click-Through Rates are a little more focused. They represent the number of times someone follows through with a call-to-action (a click-through) vs. the number of times the call-to-action is seen (an impression).

Now that we have all the vocabulary, let’s take a look at an example…

On the WrightIMC website, there is a contact form for prospective clients. Let’s say we want to find out what would happen to our conversion rate if we changed the “submit” button from blue to red.

We would implement a split test where some users would see a red button while others would continue to see a blue button. Then we’d track the bounce rate and click-through-rate for these two versions over a set amount of time. After our test has gathered enough data, the results for the different designs would be reviewed. Then we implement the button with the highest rate of conversions full-time, with confidence we’ve made the right decision based on scientific results.

Voila, the effectiveness of design has been quantified.

My graphic design is enhanced – made more useful to clients – by coupling it with science and math. In short, I’m glad I was wrong.

(Photo credits to Randy Glasbergen.)

Pairing Aesthetics with Statistics for Powerful Results

Kids who haven’t learned to read know to expect a 4-piece chicken nugget dinner when they see a bright yellow “M” on a cherry red background. Anyone who’s ever seen a computer knows what it means when they see the silhouette of an apple with a single leaf and a bite taken from the side. So, what makes these icons so widely recognizable? Did these logos play a part in the success of these companies’ branding campaigns? How can you effectively use imagery to build your brand?

I’m glad you asked.

The two main things that will help you incorporate imagery into your branding strategy are simplicity and intention. Let’s start with the latter.

Determining Purpose is Just the First Step

Granted, the first step is often the hardest, but once you make it, you have something you didn’t have before: momentum. The images you use don’t have to be perfect or even pretty, but they must recall your product, to an almost Pavlovian degree. Look at the original logos for the two corporate giants: McDonalds and Apple.

Depending on your generation, you might recognize SpeeDee from the early McDonald’s days, but the image on the right isn’t as widely recognizable – Apple’s original logo. The one thing these two logos have in common is that they are no longer used to represent their companies’ brands.

While the McDonald’s mascot represented its two main selling points (i.e. burgers and timeliness), the company realized that the two golden arches that served as support structures for the building’s architecture were more readily recognized by their customers. The logo was changed in 1962 to reflect this imagery, and that yellow “M” is now one of the most recognizable icons in the world.

Apple has a similar story. It was  inspired by the iconic apple that allegedly fell on Isaac Newton, sprouting an epiphany that changed the way the Western world understood the laws of physics. This logo lasted only one year before Steve Jobs commissioned a redesign in 1977 to something more modern. They focused on the one thing that actually mattered: the apple itself.

In both of these examples, the companies wanted to use imagery to promote their brands. But, before they could create any kind of imagery that would stick, they had to pour a great deal of thought and intent into those images. When they saw that their ideas didn’t represent the brand well, they responded and reevaluated, and the willingness to change in order to get it right was clearly effective.

Keep it Simple

At the end of the day, we’re talking about a yellow “M” and a silver apple. These aren’t complex graphics. The simpler the design, the more memorable the logo. Think about all the cultural icons that use (and own rights to) the simplest geometric shape: the circle.

And, this is only a handful. You probably know what company each of these represents, and you probably have at least some kind of emotional response to each one. Simplicity plays a huge part in what makes these images successful.

The Bottom Line is…

People respond to imagery. You determine whether they respond positively or negatively to your images. Determine who you’re trying to reach, research what imagery that audiences responds to positively, and then adopt it into your own branding campaign. Even if it means completely redoing your company logo… (If McDonald’s and Apple did it, it’s probably worth considering.)

If you’re a nonprofit organization that wants to raise money for a cause, incorporate a ribbon. If you’re promoting a green initiative, get people’s attention with rolling hills and windmills. Social media? Use modern typography and make everything look like a clickable button. That might be over-simplifying, but as I said before, images just work. The key is to make them work for you, and not against you. Put some thought into it and keep it simple, and you’ll be surprised how effective imagery can be in promoting your brand.

The Power of Imagery in Building Your Brand

What could a micro-chip, calculator, semiconductor company be doing with social media and blogging?

Shaking off the question and I answered myself and thought, “Oh yeah, exactly what the rest of us are trying to do.” But like the rest of the attendees today, I came to hear the how not the why. Representatives from Texas Instruments are Aimee Kalnoskas, Worldwide Manager, Community & Social Media and Forrest Lymburner, Worldwide Community Program Manager and they bring with them the knowledge of how to harness the power of the end user.

ROI. The dreaded three letter word that is on the tip of every project manager’s tongue.  ROI is an elusive dream for some and a disease that keeps social media out of the boardroom for others. So how exactly did Texas Instruments develop a sales strategy around a community?

Well we don’t have to wait long for an answer as the session starts promptly at 1:30.

Understand

Before they got started they needed to know who they were so they asked themselves these questions:

• How do we sell?
• What was the process?
• How are our sales forces organized?
• Where are the sales offices?
• Did we have any central sales? Support?
• What tools was our field using?
• Who were our largest customers?

How did TI answer these questions exactly? They began looking at the sales strategy and how customers were communicating with their salesforce. The result? Pages on pages of emails that contained what TI thought was a rich source of content, a lost treasure. But how were they going to put a program together to incorporate this new ontent.

First they had to get rid of their old way of thinking. They knew that they needed to emphasize that this was not just an additional thing to do but a part of the job. The goal was to become an integrated part of their sales processes but they knew if it became too much “extra work” the project would fail out of the gate.

Even the presenters admit that this is not an easy task and it’s a constant part of their strategy.

Integrate

Start with internal. Whenever you’re starting with a sales implementation, start behind doors and work out the kinks before putting it out in front of people. TI started first by focusing on field to factory support. They then launched a subsequent external pilot with a handful of product segments – more like willing test subjects. The third phase of their plan included a story. A way for them to embed this new way of thinking into their company culture. They reached out to everyone from upper management to the engineers to the customer base. The results?

• Social media is scary
• Solve a problem, use the gratitude
• Use the momentum
• Never stop selling

I’m sure you’re familiar with the first one but have you ever thought to build on the momentum of a solved problem?

Amplify

TI did and they added to the value of their community, Engineers2Engineers (E2E), as interest grew. They began rewarding participants with money, awards and recognition, even encouraging competition. Not only did it heighten involvement, it gave the community platform the air it needed to take off.

What They Implemented

The coordinators combined their internal and external sites into one. Solving the problem of the email masses and creating a single source on a URL.  The pilot was expanded to include all product offerings. It included their social media principles and conversation agent training to teach employees how to engage within the community.

TI decided to move globally with the platform but they quickly discovered, “if you build it they will come” didn’t work. The same platform that was adopted in the states lost its footing in China and after two weeks, it was scrapped. And its a good thing they did. They were on the verge of creating  dating site called Engineers Love Engineers. The number two in China is synonymous with love. While its good to promote a communal bond – love wasn’t exactly the idea.

They had to do a full evaluation of the cultural aspects that surrounded what they wanted to do. Leaving the cookie cutter’ed launch in the past, they created regional communities.

Where are they today? They realized field sales is different regionally. If you have a multi-regional business strategy, create a social platform to fit it.  But above all – if you’re going to do a social media strategy in another country – get there first.

This was one of the best presentations I attended at Blogwell. Check out the E2E community for more on how it fits into the TI strategy.

More Than Just Calculators: TI Defines Its Community

Before we answer the question in the headline, you probably want to know what, exactly, is retargeting? To put it simply, it is online search’s second chance. When users visit your site, they get cookied or identified with a specific piece of code. If you are running a retargeting campaign, you can use those cookies to show them ads relevant to your marketing initiatives if they leave your site without making a purchase or other conversion decision.

For example, Susie comes to your site and looks at several products in the same category: shoes. You have created a cookie that will tag her as interested in shoes. Susie leaves your site without buying anything and continues to surf the Internet. Your retargeting plan triggers that cookie when she lands on websites with advertisements served by the ad network you’ve chosen for retargeting. The network then shows Susie ads relevant to shoes and your brand on those other sites.

A light bulb should have gone off in your head at the end of that last sentence. There are some serious benefits to retargeting. As a marketer, you can tag users who have been to your site and remind them of your brand. With an effective retargeting campaign, you will see increased brand recognition and a lower cost per conversion since you are targeting users who you have are already qualified.

Retargeting is something that every ecommerce site should do, though there are some common errors to avoid. The first think you should avoid is showing ads to customers on every other site they visit. Like James Moore said at DFWSEM, “There is a fine line between creepy and magical.” You want to make sure that you have enough reach, but also that you are not showing up on every page. Susie is not going to be happy if she sees your ads for the next 30 days after she has been to the site. Frequency capping allows you to avoid the error.

Case in point:

Also consider how long you set your cookies. Google automatically will set them to last for 30 days. However, they should be the length of your sales cycle. As Moore said, “It is a continuation of a sales conversation,” – so keep it going until the conversation is finished.

It is important to have clear objectives when you are starting a retargeting campaign and to stay away from tagging all users that come to the site. Through the use of cookies, marketers can segment their users and target specific users with specific ads that will help them convert by being more accurate.

Don’t forget about your keywords. With an accurate keyword list, your retargeting vendors can discover the reach you can achieve with your budget. That allows you to set expectations and scale accordingly. You can then graduate to keyword recency data and see the correlation between search times and when customers converted. This will make your data more valuable for when you want to target that user in the future.

To sum up it all up more simply: keywords + recency + message + optimization will create an effective retargeting campaign that will act as a second chance to get a customers’ money through search.

Retargeting Potential Customers with Advertisements: Why Should You Do It?

The charitable take on these bills is that they are well-intentioned, but misguided, attempts to reduce the very real problems of stolen or pirated music and movies, as well as the online sale of counterfeited merchandise of all shapes, sizes and values. I’m not feeling terribly charitable today, though.

These bills are not well intentioned – they’re strong-arm tactics, written at the behest of music, movie and other industry lobbyists, that attempt to get search engines and other sites to police the web, rather than having law enforcement or the industries themselves do it.  And, the bills allow due process to be subverted while punishing sites where a user might post a link to a pirate site or content, instead of punishing the pirates.

There are enough laws in existence that pertain to intellectual property, which if properly enforced, can do what needs to be done. Rather than imposing new laws, law enforcement needs more resources and an expedited due process to allow the blocking and removal of stolen content – not to mention an international effort to punish thieves.

Here’s an analogy I’m all too familiar with from my American Airlines days: Prior to Sept. 11, 2001, there were plenty of laws to stop terrorism and punish those who committed it. But, the onus to enforce certain preventive steps was placed on airports and airlines – businesses that are good at moving passengers but bad at enforcing security laws. There was no lack of laws, but there was a lack of resources. With the creation of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and Homeland Security, clearly enough resources are in place to enforce security laws and even prevent terrorism – measured by our national security since then.

Perhaps the creation of an “IPSA” that could better enforce existing laws (funded by a tax on music, movies and goods manufacturers – like the tax airline passengers pay) is a better model for stopping online theft than trying to force Google and Facebook to become policemen. We know that won’t work.

Here’s how you might be able to help:

1)      If you download illegal copies of music and movies, you are a thief. If you buy a fake Gucci bag, you are a thief. Do not do these things. Do not try to justify it because of your financial situation compared to that of musicians or artists or designers. Quit stealing and pirates will lose their markets. Then crazy lobbyists will quit trying to make laws that harm your personal liberties.

2)      Tell Congress to find a better way to prevent intellectual property theft: https://www.google.com/landing/takeaction/

Here’s how WrightIMC helped – >a letter to Congress< that we helped write for the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO).  >Check it out<

I Want My Wikipedia Back: Or, What the Hell are SOPA and PIPA?