Social Media: More Features! Easier To Use! Just Like the Other Guys!

Daniel Klotz, Social Media Strategist

The big stories in social media this week were big and obvious:

Metrics: Makes Your Sites Run Faster!

Jeff Burkholder, Inbound Marketing Analyst

Google has a habit of not only playing April Fool’s Jokes, but also pushing out real products on April Fool’s Day (For instance, Gmail was launched on 4/1/2004). And they’ve continued that trend with the launch of Page Speed, from their Labs division. Basically, this tool allows you to enter the URL of a website, and it returns a prioritized list of suggestions you could implement to decrease the length of time it takes for your page to load. There are a number of existent browser plugins that perform the same function, but this is a simple online page that does the same thing.

Design: Keeps Your Colors Bright!

Astrid Salim, Creative Director

Today, I talked about the color problem when saving images to the web. Sometimes when an image is uploaded to the web, the colors tend to be different and washed out. One simple solution that I found is to make Photoshop display the web colors instead of the full RGB range. You can do that by going to View menu, choose Proof Setup, and check “Monitor RGB”. This doesn’t actually change the color of your images, but only changes how the color is perceived. The color you see now should represent web colors more closely. The next step is to enhance the colors manually here. Once you’re done, just save it for web. It is recommended to uncheck “convert to sRGB” option in the Save for Web dialog. Upload your image to the web, and voila, no more washed out colors!

Social Media: Editing Wikipedia and You

Daniel Klotz, Social Media Strategist

Since Wikipedia’s popularity isn’t losing any steam, the information found on the site is becoming more important. This week I’ve been diving in deeper to the world of Wikipedia editors, acquainting myself with the conventions, expectations, and expectations that make Wikipedia the amazing compendium of knowledge that it is. Today I shared some of what I’ve learned with the team–including how WikiProjects make the enormous maintenance work of the site more manageable, and how opportunities for collaboration create incentives and lead to better experiences. I also discussed Wikipedia’s conflict of interest policies and what they mean for us as an agency.

Leadership: Understanding the Intricate Digital Behaviors of Young Customers

Steve Wolgemuth, Principal

Working off of a recent publication from Forrester Research, I presented some illuminating facts about the online behaviors and attitudes of 12-17 year olds (i.e., high school-aged) and 18-24 year olds (i.e., college-aged). Since YDOP serves two colleges, this is very important information we need to consider. While there was much to glean from this research, one huge summary point is that these age groups don’t want brands to be friends with them. While the older group is slightly more tolerant (12% college age vs 6% of high school age), both groups feel that social networks are for socializing with friends, not for getting any marketing messages, even friendly ones.

The take-away lessons from this extensive research would suggest strongly that brands should monitor and listen intently as their first and primary role. They should be poised and ready to participate in conversations at every opportunity (when the young participant starts the conversation) and be ready to answer questions from the voice of a real person. Posting information on social platforms may not be the best idea as this audience doesn’t deem it to be reliable. While this group feels it is inappropriate to be drawn into a conversation by a brand (especially if it is done by a brand representative rather than a person connection who is associated with a brand) it may be a reasonable idea for a company to ask for feedback or opinions, especially if they are sincere and authentic about seeking this information. This is especially true as a young audience is very prone to write opinions about products and services on social platforms (rather than review sites) and to give opinions peer to peer.

Programming: Return of the Web Browser Wars

Mike Newswanger, Lead Programmer

Internet Explorer released version 9, with Firefox 4 on its heels with a launch scheduled for next week. IE9 updates include a more minimalistic interface, enhanced hardware acceleration for displaying websites, better support for HTML5 and faster JavaScript execution. Also, IE9 continues moving toward web standards, making it more developer friendly. Firefox 4 makes many of the same moves IE9 made, and it has also added built-in support for tabbing by allowing searching through tabs and grouping tabs.

Metrics: Be Intelligent With Your Analytics

Jeff Burkholder, Inbound Marketing Analyst

Following some advice I read in an article by Rebecca Lehmann at SEOMoz, I shared with the team that I recently instituted some custom alerts in Google Analytics for our clients. It’s relatively simple to build an alert in the Intelligence section in “My Customizations” to have Google email you if, for instance, Analytics data has flatlined, there’s a sudden traffic spike or drop, or any number of other situations that you should have a good handle on.

Design: CAPTCHA Alternatives

Astrid Salim, Creative Director

A traditional CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing Tests to Tell Computers and Humans Apart), which usually requires you to decipher an image of skewed random text, can become a barrier between companies and their customers. The solution is to make CAPTCHA easier and more accessible by humans. An article from SmashingMagazine talks about some alternative CAPTCHAs. Those CAPTCHAs that are made of distorted text are now slowly being replaced by logic questions, image recognitions, visitor interactions, and more. Facebook recently began using a friend recognition CAPTCHA which requires you to identify your friends’ in photos they show. All these alternatives may not be the best solutions, but they can serve better compared to traditional CAPTCHA.

Metrics: A Better Picture

Jeff Burkholder, Inbound Marketing Analyst

I introduced the team to a new way of looking at some of our clients’ metrics: using a rolling total/average over time to see where things really stand. For a number of clients, web traffic is very cyclical, whether on a weekly, monthly, or even a yearly basis. Looking at the data cumulatively over the period of the last year helps you really identify if things have taken off, or belly-flopped.

Design: Eye of the Beholder

Astrid Salim, Creative Director

In an article written by Steven Bradley, he claims that the 3 popular layout patterns (Gutenberg, Z-pattern, F-pattern layout) tend to be followed blindly. In reality, those patterns are tested for heavy-text content with a simple design. Therefore, they can’t be just applied to any design. I absolutely agree with Bradley that it is unnecessary to design your web page on these patterns. Lead your visitor’s eye flow by creating design focal points (font sizes, images, contrasts, etc) instead. But be careful not to make the page too cluttered.

Social Media: Getting a Better Handle on the Social Web

Daniel Klotz, Social Media Strategist

Content is more important than ever in 2011, but as the number of conversational platforms increases, it is becoming harder to track how people are engaging with that content. That’s why I shared PostRank with the team this week. PostRank is a suite of tools and services, with a flagship service providing publishers (and today, that’s every company that hopes to be competitive) with deep analytics about how people across the social web are engaging with their content. I’m getting a lot of value out of PostRank already for developing content ideas and for monitoring what types of content various audiences enjoy most.

I also gave a brief walkthrough of the upgrades in WordPress 3.1, all of which are useful. One new feature makes it easier for admins to edit the site from the front end (while looking at the site like a normal user), and another makes it easier to add internal links, which are critical for SEO efforts. We’ve also settled on a blank theme we’ll use in most cases when we develop sites on WordPress.

Programming: CMS

Mike Newswanger, Lead Programmer

Mike led us all in a lively discussion in what aspects of Content Management Systems (e.g., WordPress and platforms like that) we like, and what aspects we don’t.

Metrics: The Google/Bing Smackdown

Jeff Burkholder, Inbound Marketing Analyst

I brought attention to the story this week about Bing adding Google’s data to their index. In a nutshell, Google ran a sting operation, where they discovered that Microsoft was using a combination of Internet Explorer and the Bing search bar to catch users’ searches and clicks on Google’s site. That data would then be incorporated into Bing’s search engine results. This is neither surprising, nor really all that noteworthy. Unfortunately, Microsoft instead chose to respond to the allegations with what amounts to a petulant “Nuh-uh!” Even more regrettably, Google in turn responded with an equally schoolyard-esque, “Yuh-huh!” The two have been sniping at each other all week, on official blogs and Twitter accounts.

For Internet marketing firms such as ourselves, it should remain a topic of interest that Bing apparently can be “gamed” into adding results. It remains to be seen whether or not this would help search engine rankings.

Design: Keep Your Eye on the Ball

Astrid Salim, Creative Director

Today I shared an article with the team about the correlation between eye tracking and mouse tracking. GazeHawk’s article reveals that eye movement on a web page has a high correlation (around 84% to 88%) with mouse movement. Therefore, because of this high correlation and also the high cost of an eye-tracking experiment, it would be easier for a company to just conduct a mouse tracking test. Eye tracking may be a perfect tool to see what the most eye-catching part of your website, but mouse tracking is a better tool to measure the website visitors’ actions.

Social: Potpourri for $200

Daniel Klotz, Social Media Strategist

It was a Resource Friday mashup from me today, covering several topics:

• A service for identifying missed opportunities in local search
• Common SEO mistakes in URL structures and how to resolve them
• Advanced social plugins from Facebook for websites
• The need for social media backup services, as highlighted by Flickr’s recent accidental deletion of 4,000 photos of one of its paying users
• The poor performance of Facebook ads, and tips for making them more effective
• Minimal WordPress themes that can serve as a good foundation for custom themes
• The rise of Path as a new social network, and its relation to Facebook and Instagram

Programming: The Big Picture

Mike Newswanger, Lead Programmer

This week, I showed the group a jQuery plugin called Jcrop. With the increase in image-based applications, and the need for users of websites to be able to crop or edit their avatars, this plugin makes things like that really easy to implement.

Metrics: Off With Their Heads! Well, off to the side, really.

Jeff Burkholder, Inbound Marketing Analyst

This week, the tech world saw two important shifts in leadership among high profile companies. First, sandwiched between the massive amounts of hype involving the Verizon iPhone and an astronomically stellar earnings report, Apple CEO Steve Jobs has announced that he’s taking another medical leave. Conventional wisdom is that Apple could not have handled this situation better, with Jobs still retaining the title of CEO and pledging continued involvement, but letting COO Tim Cook keep things running on a day-to-day basis. Investors are satisfied, the technorati are excited, and all wish Jobs well through his downtime.

The other big shift was in Google’s leadership. For years, the triumvirate of Eric Schmidt, Larry Page, and Sergey Brin have been ruling Google since 2001 (when cofounders Page and Brin brought veteran Schmidt in to help guide the then-nascent company). Amidst a similarly stellar earnings report, though, Schmidt announced he was stepping down as CEO, and handing that title over to Page. Schmidt remains Chairman of the Board, and Brin, with the official title of “Co-Founder”, will continue to focus on new product ideas.

In neither case is the man-in-charge walking away from their massively successful and profitable company; instead, they’re both stepping a bit to the side to let someone else take the reins for a time; Jobs on a temporary basis, Schmidt in a more permanent setting. Apple’s been through this before and weathered things quite well; Google’s change may be more substantive, but it hardly seems that it will be disruptive to its practices, either.

In the midst of this, Google today renewed their commitment to fighting spammy entries in their search results. Whether this reflects a significant change in their algorithms (which may or may not include more user-generated reviews?), or is merely a PR stunt to respond to recent allegations that spam has increased in results, remains to be seen.

Design: Back To School

Astrid Salim, Creative Director

Design Shack gathered and showcased 50 of the best and worst university website designs, which I shared with the team today. Some of my favorites are: Washington State University for their bold, aesthetically pleasing layout, University of Alabama for their nice use of photo galleries, and University of North Carolina for their attention to details. Unfortunately, some other university websites are not so hot. So it is important to consider updating your website, since it’s the face of the company online.

Leadership: Crisis and Competition

Steve Wolgemuth, Principal

Since Resource Friday is intended to be a time for sharing with the team what we’ve learned that week, I talked about Jack Welch’s book, Winning, as it relates to handling a crisis and how to react to competition. With regard to crisis management, it isn’t likely that YDOP will get involved in any trouble soon, but it is a safe bet that some of our clients will, and perhaps within the next year. Welch details the importance of gathering facts immediately and ruthlessly (my words). This is a key role that our company will likely play for our clients, particularly using our social media monitoring tools and capabilities.

Regarding competition, Welch brings a strong reminder to not become complacent with any market position that your company may hold. He warns that it is tempting to believe that other brands aren’t able to evolve, learn, hire and change. Fortunately, in our industry of Internet consulting and services, the demand is growing at a tremendous rate as businesses are feeling the need to participate effectively online, and as they are pulling monies from print media and branding budgets.

Social: Updates for WordPress, Flickr, and Facebook.

Daniel Klotz, Social Media Strategist

“Ultralight” blogging platforms like Tumblr and Posterous have captured my interest and imagination lately, as our review of success stories shows that building good websites must be a thorough and even tedious process, while creating timely content must be dead simple. Today I shared with the team a WordPress framework that makes it super simple for a team of people to keep a short-attention-span-friendly blog alive and active. It would only be appropriate for about five percent of blogging situations, but it’s a great option to have in our tool belt.

Flickr is now allowing users to sign in with their Facebook login, another instance of the trend of social networks consolidating and collaborating rather than splitting and propagating. What it means right now is that Flickr is easier to access for tons of users, and that it’s easier than ever for users to upload photos to Flickr (which has the better system for handling photos) and seamlessly share them with their Facebook friends.

Last night Facebook began rolling out out a new feature that allows page admins to see detailed, real-time stats about individual status updates: number of impressions, number of users who saw the update, how many “likes,” comments, and clicks the update received, and the overall click-through and engagement rates. This kind of feature is awesome, as it gives solid feedback in real time, essentially teaching all of us how to craft updates that are valuable to our customers and supporters.

Leadership: Mobile Marketing

Steve Wolgemuth, Principal

With Verizon’s announcement that it will be selling iPhone 4 in February, an expected 9 – 12 million users of new iPhones are expected to come on line in the next twelve months. This may open a new opportunity for local/moblie marketing for specific vendors, like restaurants and local service providers with real time, real place specials to be had. Coinciding with this anticipated mobile use and geo-mobile opportunity, Apple announced its own mobile advertising product, the iAd. Agencies like YDOP or any sophisticated “code it yourselfers” can make an ad and submit it to Apple for review, similarly to submitting an application to the Apple store. Mobile ad networks allow all types of targeting capabilities which, combined with the power of local, could prove to be an interesting way to reach out to customers (or just one more annoying interruption to Daniel Klotz’ iPhone crossword).

Metrics: Facts and Questions

Jeff Burkholder, Inbound Marketing Analyst

I shared with the crew a list of social media facts intended to blow minds. I think I succeeded in keeping the rest awake during this time.

I also talked about the new Q&A website, Quora. No, not Quorra, Quora, and we discussed how using a Q&A site could be beneficial to some of our clients.

Design: Eye of the Beholder

Astrid Salim, Creative Director

I shared Anne Holland’s Which Test Won, an interesting website that reports the results of A/B testing from various companies, with the group this week. Every week, this website posts two versions of a page that was A/B tested. The results are interesting to study because they show that your gut feeling about how your website perform is not always right. Therefore, it is important to always be testing.

I also shared an article about how visitors’ eyes move on a page of a website from Eyetrack III. Although this research was done for news websites, I believe our team can learn a lot from this result to make our clients’ websites better.

Qwiki: The Experience of Knowledge

Daniel Klotz, Social Media Strategist

Qwiki is exploring a way of aggregating information from sources across the Internet to shape it into an information experience, going beyond merely an information presentation. It’s still in its alpha stage, but it’s a way of getting information that feels flat-out futuristic. If you’d like to get in on the alpha, just let me know and I’ll send you an invite.

Facebook slipped up last week and launched a few features before they were ready. They only appeared for an hour or so, but among the changes were pages with a layout similar to the new personal profiles, as well as the ability for page admins to post to their pages as themselves, rather than as the official page, should they so choose.

Finally, I explained an SEO experiment we’re running on a site to test the effectiveness of adding the “rel=’nofollow’” tag to a particular kind of outbound links.

Heatmaps: Keeping an Eye on Your Visitors

Astrid Salim, Creative Director

This week I continued on covering online tools to track clicks and conversions. Mouse Eye Tracking, ClickDensity, and ClickHeat are some other heatmap and click tracking tools that I discussed. Mouse Eye Tracking even offers a service to measure mouse hovers. They seem easy enough to use and can be valuable tools to help companies/organizations achieve better conversions.

SocMed Ups and Downs: Social Media Monitoring and Delicious

Jeff Burkholder, Inbound Marketing Analyst

This week, I shared a couple of interesting tidbits from the social web. First off, Wildfire Interactive has released a new Social Media Monitor that appears to do for Twitter and Facebook what Compete does for general web traffic. You can quickly and easily compare the growth tracks of followers or likes, with good statistical data to back it up.

Second, the once-great internet portal Yahoo! appears to be continuing its long day’s journey into night, as a leaked document showed that it’s in the process of “sunsetting” (that is, shutting down or selling off) a number of properties, including social bookmark tool, Delicious. Nearly as soon as this news came out, dozens of blogs began publishing tutorials on how to migrate your bookmarks from Delicious to other similar tools. Later in the day, in an attempt at some damage control, Yahoo! announced that they’re actively looking for a buyer for Delicious, rather than planning to shut it down outright. Their reason for rolling it off? That it no longer fits into their corporate strategy. One can’t help but wonder just how well the popular photo-sharing site Flickr continues to fit in with that strategy at this point, too.

Mapping: New Ways of Looking at the World

Mike Newswanger, Lead Programmer

This week I talked about a few little things including Facebook’s graph of relationships between its users (which can be seen high-res here) and some changes to Google’s Maps application for Android. The changes don’t change functionality by much, but the images are now provided via Vector graphics rather than bitmapped graphics, which means the images will scale with no quality loss. The result is clearer, more fluid graphs while zooming in and out, with much less bandwidth being consumed. Because of the lower file sizes for the map downloads, the built-in navigation functionality now provides caching for routes, including possible re-routes, to make it even more threatening to the dedicated GPS devices on the market.

Leadership Keep the Customer Satisfied

Steve Wolgemuth, Principal

Steve shared with us tidbits from a number of sources on how to keep customers happy.

1. Understand what matters to them — and focus on that most often. Talk about it.
2. Call them before they call you. Discover problems on their site before they do. Identify if things aren’t working before they come to that conclusion and bring solutions.
3. Make them feel comfortable by overachieving, thinking about their problem when they’re not thinking about it, and letting them know when projects are off-track.
4. Keep up with your education/professional advancement. Make sure the clients know about it in one way or another.
5. Celebrate successes and milestones with clients whenever there is opportunity.
6. Once in a while, throw in something extra.

Achtung: Zeitgeist!

Jeff Burkholder, Inbound Marketing Analyst

For a statistics nut like me, Google’s annual Zeitgeist report is always a welcome Christmas present. This is where Google gives the lowdown on what people have been searching for over the past year — which terms have skyrocketed, and which ones have plummeted. This year’s report includes a new feature: a “2010 in Review” video. Naturally, as a for-profit company, Google uses this platform to advertise a lot of their products, but it’s still compelling viewing. Check it out in the video below:

Read of the Week: Jon Gordon’s Soup

Steve Wolgemuth, Principal

Today I reported to the team on insights gained from the cute little book, Soup, by Jon Gordon. We discussed, analyzed and concluded that YDOP’s culture could be described as follows: We genuinely care about what we do so we are very motivated to excel, and to maintain an authoritative knowledge base in our areas of expertise. We like being masters of our craft and using it for our client’s success (which matters to us for their sake and ours), we’re not competitive with one another, we care about each other personally (except we like to pick on Mike), we value being excellent in specific things, and we enjoy that we’re ahead of the competition in our service offerings (Social media strategy development, website conversion optimization development, social media monitoring and analysis, and overall campaign development and management).

Since my “read of the week” recommended that optimism is a very important ingredient, we did an optimism survey. Factoring in my vote of “10,” we scored well over “8″ in the question “Do you anticipate great things for YDOP in the next 12 months (10 = no doubt at all, 0 = fat chance). That is really how we feel and what we believe about our company. Rock on!

Website Design: You’re Getting Warmer

Astrid Salim, Creative Director

Helping websites get high conversion rates is one of YDOP’s goals. Today, we took a look at some online tools to measure conversion rates like AttentionWizard, CrazyEgg, and Clicktale. AttentionWizard mainly offers heatmap service where you can get instant results. A heatmap is visual data represented by colors that shows what your website’s focal points are (or what the users notice). CrazyEgg and Clicktale offer more than just heatmap service. CrazyEgg enables you to measure click confetti and click overlay, while Clicktale lets you watch exactly how people use your website. I’m sure that our clients would also enjoy seeing how their conversion rate goes up measured by these tools.

Jumo: Getting Social About Causes

Daniel Klotz, Social Media Strategist

A new social network launched this morning. Jumo is focused on connecting people with other people and with organizations to make positive change happen in the world. It’s a little bit like a big collection of nonprofit organization Facebook pages, except more focused, more powerful, and more open. I’ve been keeping an eye on Jumo as it has been in development over the past year, ever since learning that it was the latest project of Chris Hughes, co-founder of Facebook and director of online organizing for Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign. The marketplace of social networks is getting crowded, and it’s hard for a new service to take off. But if there’s one right now that has a change and could provide real value, it’s Jumo. I encourage you to check out Jumo, and while you’re there follow LIVE Green, one of YDOP’s favorite Lancaster-based nonprofits.

Other items I shared at Resource Friday today was that Facebook has added a way for page administrators to send a mass fan invitation to its e-mail list, and an obscure Google search command, “allintitle:”, which was a big help to me on a project this week.

“Wait, *how* many people are still using IE 6?!”

Mike Newswanger, Lead Programmer

Have you ever wondered how many people still use old versions of IE or how Chrome is doing as far as market share? W3Schools shows records of browsers, operating systems, and screen resolutions used to browse the internet in percentages, and it breaks it down monthly and contains records all the way back to 2002. This not only shows the current usage statistics, but also trends as to how traffic sources are changing.

Gallery: Church Websites

Astrid Salim, Creative Director

Today I showed the team a showcase of church websites that is compiled by Vandelay Design. Clean and simple with a touch of grungy texture detail is a common trend that I saw throughout the list here. The target audience of these websites is likely to be younger generation. But be careful not to overuse the grunge texture because it can look cliche. I like how most of the websites look simple and clean, making them user friendly. I also like the use of WordPress for some of these websites. It encourages more interaction and strengthens the social aspect of the church, which works well for their target audience.

Boosting the Crowd

Jeff Burkholder, Inbound Marketing Analyst

I brought to items to the group this week. First was information about a new Twitter statistic site called Crowdbooster. Like Klout, this site takes a look at your tweets and tells you how influential you are. This version of that idea, though, is much more graphical in nature, and lets you see at a glance how many people have retweeted your tweets, and how many people have seen those retweeted tweets. The service is still in beta, so not everything is completely solid. There’s a feature called, “Follow Builder”, which helps you find others who could be interested in your tweets by entering keywords, but it’s a bit glitchy yet, and they’re currently soliciting comments for a reporting system down the road. Otherwise, it looks like a potentially useful tool.

I also talked to the team about how Google has revised their algorithm largely due to the actions of one man. Read more here and be sure to check out the NY Times article referenced as well.

When Faith Gets Social

Steve Wolgemuth, Principal

My participation in this week’s Resource Friday was very different from previous weeks, as I cited a very different type of source than I typically use (like books, online articles and blogs). I referenced a recent experience that has truly rocked my world. Three weeks ago when my wife was diagnosed with breast cancer, my awesome team at YDOP met behind my back and organized what would become an incredible blessing to my family. You guessed it – a blog: WeCareForLori.com. Because of my wife’s current and my past involvement in the dressage industry (an equestrian sport), a very popular website, Dressage Daily picked up the story, bringing exposure to the site from a lifetime of fellow equestrians from around the world. Meanwhile, churches wanting to support us pushed out the link and garnered more thoughts and prayers than we could have imagined. That’s where, to me, it got really interesting — when faith moved across social networking.

What is fascinating is that “church people” have language they’ve learned to use among themselves. Others who aren’t oriented this way or haven’t been raised in this type of culture may feel alienated or confused when they read this sort of thing. When faith goes social, I believe “religious folk” (who have ears to hear) have a new classroom to learn to communicate more carefully and sensitively.

At the same time, faith has a new opportunity to express it’s power — at least that’s what happened in our case. As friends, family and complete strangers came along on our horrible cancer journey via this blog, we saw honest expressions of faith in God from so many people. And, God obviously moved in so many people that we were overwhelmed. Cards, gifts, volunteers, meals, encouragement and more than 300 visits a day to the website were driven by a Force, whose power was best represented in a video of my wife the night before surgery. It was obvious that something more than human determination was behind all of this. I believe that a blog like WeCareForLori was like a magnifying glass is to the sun. It concentrated the love that comes from above through the hearts of so many people that came together — and focused it directly on our family at the worst of times. It demonstrated the power of when faith gets social.