Then let’s say that at that point you were considering ignoring the bounce rate and leaving your site as it was. You had just begun the process of building a new $100,000+ site to replace the existing one. Then a team of Internet professionals convinced you make a big difference by making small tweaks to the site.

Let’s just say that the numbers you’d be looking at for January 2011 would be much brighter: 288,000 visits, with 112,000 bouncing.

That’s an increase of 3,000 visitors and a decrease of 27% in the bounce rate. That’s engaging 115,000 more people this January than last January.

Now let’s say that this isn’t a hypothetical situation. It’s a brand-new success story for a YDOP client.

A little insight from our team goes a long way. We’re proud of that, and thrilled for our client.

Steve and I will address pressing issues that business leaders face as they transition their marketing, communications, and development into a Web-centric culture.

• How can highly regulated industries use social media?
• What are the roles of the “social media manager” in your organization, and how should you hire for or train an existing employee for this new role?
• How do you equip and train the rest of your staff?
• What internal social media guidelines, policies and monitoring protocols need to be in place to reduce risk in your organization?

You’ll walk away with actionable insights, strategies, and tactics for more effectively managing their organizations as they continue to transition into the digital world.

Attendance is free for Chamber members. The event will be held at Southern Market Center, one block south of Central Market in Lancaster. Please register online or by calling Sarah Stevens at 397-3531/x172.

At YDOP, the front-end web developer:

• Works with our graphic designer to turn design files (typically Photoshop) into websites and Facebook page tabs
• Provides our programmer with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files ready for use in dynamic (database-driven) websites
• Communicates with clients during the pre-launch phase of website development, making final changes and adjustments
• Sets up and conducts A/B testing and heatmap/click tracking for conversion optimization
• Stays up-to-date on the latest developments in front-end web development (for example, adoption of the @font-face rule and progress on the HTML 5 specification) and keeps the rest of the team aware of these developments

We’re an agency that provides broad service to strong clients on an ongoing (retainer) basis. We don’t crank out websites; we build and launch beautiful, effective sites over realistic timelines, and then closely monitor the sites’ performance and adjust to improve conversion, search optimization, and user pathways. Every site has a CMS, so the front-end web developer’s role includes only a very little bit of updating text and information on websites.

This is a full-time position, but we will consider a part-time arrangement for the right person. Remote candidates and remote working situations are not being considered.

If you’re interested in learning more about this job opening, please e-mail your resume (please do not call) with a cover e-mail to contact@ydop.com.

July is a time for skeleton crews, as vacations take over the calendar. With Steve in California, Jeff off in a tent somewhere, and Jonathan working on-site with a client, it was down to Astrid, Mike, and me. We still had fun learning and sharing. Here’s what we deemed important to teach this week.

Social Networking Behavior and Search Engine Innovations

Mike Newswanger, Lead Programmer

Social Networking

This week I shared some recent articles with the team that serve as good reminders about the fundamentals of social media. With increasing popularity in social networking, questions about what is appropriate and what is not are coming up more often than ever before.  Bragging about yourself, your company, or your friends and family is very common on social platforms, but when does it get to be too much?

Advertising through social media can be an effective way to reach people.  It gives a personal touch to your product or service, and it builds rapport, but if you only praise yourself and your company, many will become disinterested and ignore or “unfollow” you.

The articles’ authors suggested this approach:  Ask yourself, what am I (or what is my company) contributing to this network through my posts?  If the answer is nothing, then you have no value for potential clients to link up with you in this avenue.  A great way to achieve value in your posts is to aim for a 1:1 ratio of praise about your company and achievements to praise and relationship-building comments regarding others.

Part 2: Search Engines

A Google employee recently revealed to the public where he believes search engines are headed.  While some of his suggestions would make search engines more invasive in our lives, there were other areas that would benefit the population.  The two biggest areas of needed improvement:

• Rather than just searching text, search engines are currently making their way toward being able to search other media types, including images and video.  This allows a more complete result set through a search, which can provide excellent information; after all, a picture is worth a thousand words.
• Search engines should provide a more semantic interface (i.e. provide meaning to the search query).  When trying to track down side-skirts for my car, the “smart” advertisements continuously provided clothing banner ads.  Side-skirts are not skirts, but the search engines of today are not intelligent enough to point this out.

Google has also recently filed a patent for pointer tracking, which will determine where on the screen a mouse pointer is located, and for how long it has been there.  It’s anyone’s guess if and how this will be implemented in the future, but this could lead to some interesting changes to how the search engine behaves.  There are a few big drawbacks with this  For one, with touchscreens becoming more popular, pointer movements are not as common as with a mouse.  Many people will follow along with a mouse while they are reading, but with a touch-screen based computer, this may not occur. One thing is for sure, search engines never stay the same.

Facebook Pages: Interaction Leading to Sales

Astrid Salim, Creative Director

Today, I continued the topic I had last week. Again, we looked at the Facebook pages from some well-known brands.

First, we looked at the Mark Meyer Photography page. I like how they integrate a slideshow of the photos into the page. I also like the Bodum USA page because viewers can browse, buy and pay for the products they want without leaving Facebook. However, I’m not a big fan of clicking on the logo in a “click to enter” fashion. The team thought it was probably this “entering” that allows them to include a “like” button and count on the next page. Eco-Artware.com also makes their page look like an online store catalog. Unlike Bodum, however, you need to go to their website to buy and pay. This is unfortunate since I really like the idea of doing everything (browse and buy) in one Facebook page.

As I stated last week, I like Facebook pages that make the users interact with them. Living Proof page guides their Facebook users to find a perfect product for them by making them do some kind of quiz. The users have to answer 4 questions regarding their hair, and at the end, Living Proof finds the best-matched product based on the answers. This is very clever since they make the users interact with the product. It also directs the potential customers to easily buy the recommended  product, even though the customers’ initial thought is just to browse.

A Marketing Manifesto from Brian Solis

Daniel Klotz, Social Media Strategist

Brian Solis, author of Engage, is one of the bloggers I look to as a thought leader in my field. He spent this week laying out a manifesto about the future of marketing, advertising, and communications in a three-part document he calls The Hybrid Theory Manifesto.

The manifesto, to me, is an articulation of ideas I already embrace and act upon. At the same time, when I read Brian’s words, it strikes me how radical they are in the history of mass communication and marketing. Things are changing, Solis says, and the rise of social media, or the “living web,” is mostly to blame. Because companies and constituents co-create content and ideas, they therefore co-own and co-controls that content and those ideas. That’s new, and it means we can no longer think of the traditional marketing mix (product, price, place, promotion) without also thinking of a fifth element of the mix, people. Creating a product, pricing it, positioning it, and promoting has always involved people. But today, the people who used to be faceless middlemen or voiceless consumers now are sometimes very influential.

Some have looked at this state of affairs and concluded that paid media (advertising) is dying. Not the case, says Solis. Advertising is still relevant, it just needs to be rejoined with the rest of marketing (PR particularly) and address the new marketing mix element, people. Advertising that is more personal, immersive, and empowering can be placed in contexts where it resonates with many people who see it. It’s not just enough to count eyeballs or clicks today; what’s important is to measure the ratio of people who see the advertisement to the number of them who find the advertisement resonates with their interests, needs, and values.

Advertising that moves in this direction will go from being part of a series of ad campaigns to an advertising continuum, as Solis calls it. With an ad campaign ten years ago, doubling your media buy would result in double the results. If you suddenly stopped advertising, you would suddenly lose all that business. That’s a series of ad campaigns. An advertising continuum resonates with people and then empowers them to engage as a co-creator and co-owner of the brand’s meaning. That means that advertisements bring people into the fold, and then active communication keeps them there and engaged. An ad campaign sustains a customer base; an ad continuum grows a customer base. At the end of the day, you lose all the people you haven’t engaged. Traditional advertising doesn’t engage. It only targets.

What Solis calls for then is a “hybrid theory” of marketing, advertising, and communications. Rather than thinking of PR, advertising, product development, social networking, and so on as “separate but equal,” we must think of them as one, as a hybrid. Doing so takes skilled professionals who can connect all those pieces in a comprehensive way. As such, I find the manifesto encouraging: It’s what we as a team do at YDOP.

Today we’re initiating a new series of posts to the YDOP blog that we’re really excited to share with you. Earlier this year, we began carving out a one-hour block once a week for what we call “Resource Friday.” We grab a couple pizzas and then sit down as a complete team to share professional development resources with each other. Here are the expectations:

• Limit per person is ten minutes (we use a countdown timer)
• Talk about discoveries you’ve made in the past week—technology developments, tools, ideas, articles, books, etc.
• Find a theme to follow over the course of at least five weeks at a time, and focus your reading and learning on that

Resource Fridays inspire and push us as a team, and hold each individual accountable for constantly learning and growing. Now we’d like to share brief recaps of the resources we share with you. We’ll be posting these each week.

Object-Oriented Programming Fundamentals

Jonathan Arndt, Programmer

Today I talked briefly about inheritance and polymorphism. These are big words, and programmers use them all the time. But they are not complicated ideas.

Inheritance is the idea that when you build an object, you can extend it. The extension will have the same attributes as the main object, unless you specify otherwise. Polymorphism is the idea that you are indeed able to specify otherwise, so that the extension will have some different behavior than the main object.

Jonathan also shared this gem from a Web page he visited while researching Perl modules for a client” “Write the documentation for a module first, before writing any code. Discuss the module with other people first, before writing any code. Plan the module first, before writing any code. It’s easy to come up with a solution to a problem. It takes planning to come up with a good solution. Remember: the documentation, not the code, defines what a module does.”

Lancaster SEO Meetup Recap

Jeff Burkholder, Analyst

I relayed some of the information presented by Dan Meyer of ProspectMX at the Lancaster SEO Group Meetup (which YDOP is proud to sponsor) earlier this week. Dan started out by looking at some of the major trends for 2010 in internet marketing:

• Your Digital Footprint/Reputation Management – Paying attention to your company’s image in all forms of media by monitoring what people are saying about you on Facebook/Twitter/message boards/blogs/etc.
• Social Media Marketing Enhanced (see below)
• Video, Video, Video – Dan sees the trend of “viral” videos as continuing and increasing
• Mobile Everything - The mobile market is the largest growing segment of internet use. Also, customers are becoming more savvy; when they’re out shopping, they can now price-check on the spot. Their savvy also extends to Internet searches: 40% of search terms in Google have never been specifically searched for before. That is, customers are getting more and more specific about what they’re precisely looking for.

Dan also noted that in the marketing world, Internet media is the only one that’s really measurable. There’s no way to tell with any amount of certainty how much business is generated by a billboard or a television advertisement, but you can tell how many times an Internet ad has been seen, clicked on, and often how many of those clicks have led directly to sales. In regards to social media marketing, Dan brought up the fact that Facebook is huge. In fact, 95% of people who participate in social media have a Facebook page, and in the past year, there’s been a 48% increase in women who have some sort of social media profile. All of this points to the fact that businesses that are afraid of using the word “social” in relation to business are increasingly going to be left behind.

Taking conversion optimization from good to great

Steve Wolgemuth, Principal

Having moved on from bludgeoning my team with lists of characteristics of a great company (Good to Great, Jim Collins), I’ve began the tedious journey of understanding how to have good to great conversion results on client websites.  I’m loving it, and loving Jeffrey and Bryan Eisenberg’s book, Call To Action, which was the source of my contribution this week. I shared how a conversion is typically made up of many steps, which can be demonstrated on a decision/navigation flowchart, but the persuasive aspects of keeping visitors motivated enough to take next steps through your flowchart is—well—complicated.  I was left with the emotion that I had in my first year of marriage, my first month of cockatiel ownership and the other weekend figuring out my Verizon bill.  It’s complicated.

But, as with spouses, exotic birds and website visitors, understanding is key. (You may notice I’ve dropped the Verizon example at this point).  What motivates them?  What are their fears/concerns? What do they value and what is their mood and mindset?  It is important to keep interest at each step through polite enticement, and careful consideration of what has motivated their last action.  As Eisenberg wisely points out, empathy is the best guide, and the reality of your website’s offering/value is solely in the mind of its users. Plan a great experience for them through every click.

Spawning worker scripts in HTML 5

David DeCarmine, Lead Programmer

With the ever-increasing demands of emerging Web apps, concurrency is becoming a hot issue. This week I brought the team through a particular development in the upcoming HTML5 standard termed Web Workers (http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-workers/current-work/). Currently a draft recommendation, Web Workers allow you to spawn background scripts that run parallel to your main page (similar to spawning threads in a desktop application).

The main uses for these workers is to be able to execute tasks without stalling the main application. An example might be to pull in and parse traffic information for an online map while the user is still navigating around it.

Worker scripts are relatively safe as they can only receive data through the postMessage() method and don’t have any access to the main application data. They are contained within their own JavaScript files and are created by instantiating a new Worker object and passing in the URI to its script.

Some examples of Web Workers can be found on the WHATWG site (http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-workers/current-work/#tutorial) and the Mozilla Developer Center also has a nice little tutorial on getting started with Web Workers (https://developer.mozilla.org/En/Using_web_workers).

Five Categories of Social Media Uses

Daniel Klotz, Social Media Strategist

I shared a dense and brilliant blog entry by Jay Baer on what would happen “if we stopped lumping everything under the term ‘social media,’ and instead focused more on the specific outcomes that socialization of business can produce.” Baer suggests five categories of social media uses:

• Social PR & Influencer Outreach
• Social Campaigns & Apps (social media marketing)
• Content Marketing & Thought Leadership
• Brand Communities
• Social CRM

As a team we discussed which categories of social media usage YDOP currently focuses on, and where we would like to build our capacity.

It’s easy to do. When you perform a search, simply click “Show Options”:

In the options that appear, specify that you only want recent results:

When are people most likely to use this? When they’re conducting searches for information that is likely to change on a regular basis. Consider just one example. Suppose I’m doing a college-related search about how much it’s going to cost me. Knowing tuition costs from last year (let alone three years ago) does me no good. I only want up-to-date information. Look what happens when I search for “maryland tuition” without a time restriction, versus when I search the same term with a restriction that the information must have been updated within the past year:

The results are completely different. The University of Maryland doesn’t simply lose its number one spot, it gets bumped out of the results altogether.

Optimizing a college website is an ongoing effort, not a once-and-done deliverable. Prospective students today are savvy searchers. They expect accurate, up-to-date information, and they know how to get it. Make sure you’re offering it.

Google Wave

At last night’s Central PA New Tech Meetup, I had the pleasure of facilitating a conversation about Google’s latest product with the brain trust of techies in the room, along with the meetup’s organizer, John Caddell. My goal was to get a feel from this group of fellow early adopters about what they like/dislike about Wave so far, and about what they see as the future implications of the technology.

Here are my takeaways on the question, Will Google Wave affect the way business is done?

Google Wave will change project management. It’s clear that Wave is superbly suited for small project teams who need to collaborate on projects, often in real-time.

Google Wave will change how we think about documents. Right now the paradigm within business is that a document is a document is a document. An after-action review, a set of product specs, an informal memo, and a legal contract are created, versioned, and stored in similar ways. The current way of thinking about, creating, and storing documents makes sense for things like contracts and records that are meant to become static. But that way of thinking is inadequate for documents about things like best practices, bios and CVs, and marketing research. Wave will prompt business to differentiate between “static documents” and “living documents.”

Google wave is the wiki for the rest of us. Enterprises currently attempt to create “living documents” (and a management/storage system for them) by setting up internal wikis. The problem is, getting a wiki up and running—and more importantly, getting people to actually use it—is difficult at best. Compared to a wiki, Google Wave is fun. Even if Wave is not completely intuitive and simple, it’s more intuitive and simple than a wiki. The impact of Google Wave on knowledge management should not be underestimated.

Google Wave reinvents the message board. Message boards, forums, and BBs have been falling out of favor throughout the past decade. They’re most alive in the tech community, but adoption within other sectors has fallen off. The similarity of a wave to a message board thread is close enough that Google Wave may make a good modern-day replacement for phpBB and other forum software.

Google Wave makes messages more social. Including someone new in a wave is easy and doesn’t require introductions, unlike adding someone to a conversation taking place between multiple people via e-mail. Wave also allows newcomers to the conversation to catch up by watching how the wave evolved over time, using the (really cool) “playback” feature. What’s more, if you find yourself in a wave with a participant you weren’t connected with before, adding them to your contacts (and thus, to your personal network) is a breeze.

What do you think? Are these predictions pie in the sky? Are there other ways you see Wave impacting business processes in the near future?