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.

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.

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.

Dumping the directories

Jeff Burkholder, Inbound Marketing Analyst

I relayed news on directories on two fronts. First, the venerable phone book (132 years old at this writing) is rapidly fading away. In the past month, New York, Florida, and Pennsylvania have all approved a request from Verizon to dump requirements for white pages. Usage of the directory fell from 25% in 2005 to just 11% in 2008, and that was two years ago, now. So, what are people using in place of yellow pages and white pages? Internet directories! …right?

Turns out, not so much. According to news out today, owners of one of the highest-quality directories out there on the net, Business.com, are shutting it down. In addition, Yahoo! has been in the process of shuttering some of its international directory portals. Turns out that those “link-wells” just aren’t doing it for most people, either.

Picture pages

Astrid Salim, Creative Director

Today I showed the team some great uses of photos in web design, as compiled by Six Revisions. Some of these websites have successfully used photographs to increase impact while conveying the essence of their business. Some websites use big photographs as their background, like Solegiallo and Alley Pfannekuchen. Some websites use the photographs as a portion of their background, not filling out the whole screen. For example, Island Dentistry and Because It’s There use photos for their upper portion of their background. Other websites don’t use the photograph as the background, but instead exaggerate the size of the photos. Some examples are Mission First and Duchy Originals. So when you need a visual impact on your website, consider using and exaggerating the photographs.

Controlling cumbersome Cake

Mike Newswanger, Lead Programmer

CakePHP is a very powerful framework with support for ACLs (Access Control Lists), but the ACLs are stored by default in a database and the request requirements in the controller file. This means that the requirements are static, and the control lists are dynamic. While this works in a perfect scenario, many times clients request that a new group be created with certain permissions. In this event, the static control lists become very cumbersome as many controller files have to be edited to achieve the desired result. By dynamically storing the request permissions in a database, adding a new control group is simple and can be done on the fly through the back-end of the site, majorly reducing the required time and limiting accessibility errors due to the sheer volume of changes needed.

Today’s Resource Friday gave each of the team members a chance to shine in their respective fields of expertise. Read on for more from all!

Mobile-izing app development

Mike Newswanger, Lead Programmer

AppMobi services provides an XDK to develop applications for mobile devices including Android devices, iPhone and iPad. The service is low-cost and enables the applications to be developed through JavaScript, CSS, and HTML, which is then compiled into a mobile application, which can be run on a mobile device without the need for an internet connection. The XDK provides a JavaScript library used for communicating with the device’s sensors and input methods. The application can then be tested locally on any mobile devices you choose, then it can be published and submitted to the Apple AppStore and Android Market for dispersion. This allows for quick development and deployment without the need to rewrite code for all devices you are developing for.

Making sure cream rises to the top

Steve Wolgemuth, Principal

What determines if your great idea survives and goes on to be accepted and implemented? You may have an important role to play in making it happen, and that may be more difficult if you’re not a natural salesperson (and even then, it may not be easy). This week during Resource Friday we talked about an interesting article shared with me by a friend, Marita Skacel, from True Edge Performance Solutions. One of my most important roles at YDOP is to foster a culture of innovation, and I believe that a vital skill for my team is knowing how to promote their good ideas. Great ideas are nearly always collaborative or have evolved through a process of discovery, typically from more than one person and often over time. Often, great ideas are knocked down before they are ever really understood or considered. So to help beat that tendency, we implemented a rule at YDOP that new ideas can’t be criticized or eliminated until they are praised or validated first. While this isn’t foolproof, it does protect the idea for a longer period of time, so people can give it more thought.

The great article Marita sent me (“How to Save Good Ideas – An Interview with John P. Kotter”, by Jeff Kehoe from Harvard Business Review) listed 24 typical negative reactions your great idea might receive and gives practical succinct advice on how you might best prepare for each outcome. We plan to file this and refer to it from time to time in the future.

Content: The once and future king?

Jeff Burkholder, Inbound Marketing Analyst

I shared an article I ran across on SEO. In “SEO Is Dead, and the New King Is ‘SMO’”, writer Ben Elowitz argues that the recent partnership between Facebook and Bing “marks the beginning of the end of SEO”, as people are increasingly discovering information via Facebook, rather than searching for it on Google. This led to an interesting conversation within the team about whether or not this heralded a return to websites focusing more on creating good content, rather than just stuffing webpages with keywords and SEO hacks.

Looking at web design in a new dimension

Astrid Salim, Creative Director

A boring flat web design can be transformed into a more interesting one when a touch of 3D elements are added. The 3D effect can be achieved by realistic photographs, highlight and shadow, visual illusion, and more. This effect imitates objects in real life, and therefore can make a website on a flat monitor screen stand out. Six Revisions has compiled some really nice 3D elements in websites which I shared with the team. Philipp Doms, for example, uses drop shadow behind his picture thumbnails, making it stand out. The shadows adds a layer of depth that the website would look flat otherwise. However, it is easy to get carried away with using 3D effect everywhere. 3D elements work the best when they are subtle.

Mixing up a Batch of sCRM

Daniel Klotz, Social Media Strategist

Social technologies have the power to transform your business, not just your marketing. One way we’re encouraging that continued transformation here at YDOP is by moving to a social CRM (or sCRM) system for managing our projects, staying in touch with our clients, and sharing information internally. Today marked the moment we ditched our various address books, our outmoded project management software, and our habit of cc’ing each other on every single e-mail, by implementing a social contact management system. Our tool of choice is BatchBook, and today we walked through its functionality, the way we’ll be using it at YDOP, and what it requires to stay updated and accurate. We haven’t discovered a way to bring “social” to our accounting system yet, but that’s the only part of our business processes that isn’t now deeply social.

In our ever-expanding quest to redefine exactly what “Friday” means — well, that and the fact that part of our team isn’t going to be around tomorrow — we decided to hold our Resource Friday on Thursday this week. Outside, it was raining hard enough that we saw the horses begin to pair themselves up, two by two. But inside, we munched on turkey barbecue sandwiches from Hitz’s Farm Market and talked about all things internet-related.

Motivating to continue the process

Steve Wolgemuth, Principal

When a web visitor finds your site and learns about your product or service for the first time, how can you motivate them to take the next move? How can you get more booking, more completed check-outs, more sign ups? According to Chip and Dan Heath in their fascinating book, Switch, one important technique is to show progress. We listened (via iPhone and speaker) to a case study involving rewards cards. When participants were given cards that already had two wholes punched out of their ten required beverage purchases, they were far more likely to come back for the eight more cups of coffee than if they received a card with eight, all yet un-punched. People are motivated when they feel they’ve already made progress and that they are making progress.

That’s why it is so important to have great design for check out processes, online surveys and long forms. People need to understand that they’ve already made progress and are successfully finishing a task. It may not be enough to have a status bar – you may need one that is tainted with encouragement. Users need to feel that they have made progress very early in the game, that they are making great progress, and that they can enjoy finishing. It is a powerful motivator; not to be ignored.

Google Instant and SEO

Jeff Burkholder, Inbound Marketing Analyst

I shared with the group an article I ran across on HubSpot about SEO in regards to Google’s new Instant feature. The long and short of it? Nobody really knows the full impact Google Instant is going to have on search engine optimization tactics, but there are a few notes to keep in mind.

• More important than ever is making sure your results are within the top three results on Google. People aren’t going to scroll through all the results anymore; they’re just going to look at the first page and keep refining their search until they find what they’re looking for right at the top.
• Page titles and meta descriptions are vital in capturing the user’s attention.
• Keyword research is key (heh) in not only making sure that people find you, but that the right people find you.

The article goes into even more detail on this, and we at YDOP will be looking to see how we can use this information to better serve our clients.

Rest your eyes on these better contacts (pages)

Astrid Salim, Creative Director

Today, I shared this nice compilation of creative contact forms from Web Designer Depot with the team. There are some things to consider when designing your contact form:

• Make your contact form not intimidating. Lionways is using a realistic looking postcard as its contact form. It is fun and easy to use.
• Keep your target audience in mind. If your target audience is an older demographic, make your contact form as clear as possible. For example, guiding the users on what or where to fill the info, like Electric Pulp does, is great for older audiences. Or something fun like Vince Mazza’s contact form is very appropriate for a young and hip demographic.
• Stay true to your branding. Give your contact form a personality by carrying out some element from your branding, like Il Frutteto.

And remember, it’s all about the user’s experience.

Quick hits on social media

Daniel Klotz, Social Media Strategist

LinkedIn announced a new major featured, called Signal, that is currently in limited beta testing. Signal looks similar to the Facebook news feed or Twitter search results, with the addition of simple and powerful filtering tools, so users can get to the status updates they’re looking for. By the looks of it, it won’t intrude on the current LinkedIn experience. Instead, it will be a supplemental way of viewing and navigating information shared on the site.

Lawyer Cris Hoel spoke at Podcamp Pittsburgh earlier this month on key points bloggers should keep in mind. While many were more relevant for political or news bloggers than business bloggers, I shared some points that we should keep in mind as we set up blogs for businesses and consult with them.

(How) are you being served?

Mike Newswanger, Lead Programmer

Continuing with mobile development…

Most change for development on a mobile platform has to do with design, but creating a new design template needs a way to determine whether a user is accessing the page via a mobile or full-size browser. The $_SERVER[HTTP_USER_AGENT] variable in PHP allows you to check what browser the user is using, which can then be combined with other PHP code to redirect the user to a mobile-based site.

A large mushroom pie and an equally large Hawaiian tantalized our taste buds while the scintillating conversation barraged our brains. Check out the topics talked about at this week’s Resource Friday!

Say ‘Goodbye’ to FBML

Mike Newswanger, Lead Programmer

Facebook is making some slight changes to their developer platform scheduled for implementation by the end of the year. A few changes include dropping a few rarely-used FBML tags, not allowing FBML to edit pages directly, and removing a few uncommon REST API function calls. The biggest change here would be the change for not allowing FBML on Pages, which means that any content published on your Facebook page will have to be hosted outside Facebook and pulled in through an iframe. Hopefully this will pull some server load off Facebook’s servers to allow for faster page loads.

Quick hits on social media

Daniel Klotz, Social Media Strategist

The launch of Facebook Places is the big news in the social media realm this week. With Places, Facebook is stepping into the territory pioneered by FourSquare, BrightKite, Gowalla, Loopt, and others. As currently implemented, Places causes a new rash of privacy concerns–by default, our “friends” are free to check you in anywhere and everywhere, even if you’re not actually there with them.

On the other end of the spectrum, a dead-simple service launched this week called OhLife. OhLife is essentially a Web 2.0 diary, where you’re e-mailed with a prompt (“How did your day go?”) each evening and can journal by simply hitting “reply.” There are no privacy settings, because it’s one hundred percent private.

Finally today, we discussed how the trifecta of owned, earned, and paid media has been joined by a category called shared media. An example of shared media would be when a customer uploads a photo to your Facebook page. The photo is theirs, yet the page is yours, so the media is shared. The rise of shared media as a fourth category leads to all sorts of changes in the marketing and PR world.

Jack Welch on team management

Steve Wolgemuth, Principal

Jack Welch is said to be one of the most studied CEO’s of the 20th Century with his 41 year track record with GE. Today, I brought some of Jack’s key leadership insights to the YDOP team. The first point is that whatever company has the best players wins the game. That’s true in sports and in business. I reminded the team that I believe that YDOP is fortunate to have an amazing team – each one of YDOP’s players. They’re all talented, innovative and positive people. I’m thrilled to have each of my irreplaceable members serving our clients at YDOP. Every day I go home, proud as can be of the amazing work I see coming out of our agency. I’m not just saying that – I really mean it.

Welch describes top people and the personality traits found in them. They have generous spirits, not envious or negative, and filled with energy. They love to see other people grow and participate in that as possible. Welch’s description made me think of our group around the meeting table doing just that: helping each other become more knowledgeable and inspired. That’s what we do for one another on resource Friday. Another key take-away from Welch is his emphasis on candor. Unless a company is brutally honest with itself, it won’t differentiate (the word that makes Jack’s approach controversial) between it’s top 20% employees, it’s necessary 70%, and the 10% which need to be fired or reassigned internally.

Waving the checkered flag

Astrid Salim, Creative Director

Today I showed the team a website called “Which Loads Faster?” This website compares the load speed of any two websites you want. When you arrive on this website, you can choose to compare some of the big-brand websites (like Google vs. Bing) or you can enter your choice of two websites. Whichloadsfaster.com then will show you the load speed of each website. Furthermore, if you click “more”, you can analyze each page in details. Whichloadsfaster.com can be very helpful to show you what it is that makes your page load slowly or what you can improve. The website itself is very user-friendly and very easy to use. So check it out!

SEO vs PPC: Apples and … slightly different apples

Jeff Burkholder, Engineer/Analyst

I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with infographics. I love how they can more easily illustrate a complex bit of statistical math and reasoning…but I hate the way that they throw out a lot of the subtlety of those original metrics in favor of being puffed-up and flashy. I believe there’s a relationship between the rise in their use throughout popular culture and the fall of good journalism; but, I digress. Reason I brought that up is because I shared an infographic with the team today, one that shows the relative strength and usefulness of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) versus Pay-Per-Click Advertising (PPC). Among the more interesting statistics it pulls out are:

• When someone is searching for something (as opposed to buying), they are most likely (42%) to click on the top-ranked organic result. Compare that with 23% clicking on a PPC link, or 8% clicking on the second-ranked SEO result.
• 62% of searchers click on a result on the first page. 23% click on a result on one of the following pages. 15% try a different search or search engine.
• According to Nielsen.com, there were 10.5 billion searches in July 2009 from people in the United States alone. This is up by about 106% from where things were in December 2005 (5.1 billion).

Overall, it shows that SEO usually has more of an impact and a better ROI than PPC, but with the increased prominence of PPC results in search engine results, one must not ignore them.

Stromboli was on the table (both traditional and spinach-mushroom), and varied topics were in the air as we brought each other up to speed in our fields of expertise at this week’s Resource Friday. Read on for more!

Is There an App for Trustworthiness?

Jonathan Arndt, Programmer

Today, I brought the team up to date on a recent study of mobile apps (mostly for the Android phone). Of the 48,000 apps surveyed, a fifth exposed private data. At the root of the problem was not the available security permissions, but the poor decisions users made when they installed the apps. There seems to be an implicit trust when downloading from an app store, that the app is completely trustworthy and legitimate… as well as many people not taking the time to understand the implications of their choices.

All the links to the articles can be found at this link on Slashdot.

Putting the “Strateg-” Back Into “Strategist”

Daniel Klotz, Social Media Strategist

It’s easy to look past the “strategy” part of “social media strategy,” so this week I talked about business strategies in general. Typically a business strategy has a lot to do with position relative to competitors. Michael Porter considered strategy to be the creation of a unique and valuable position. Business strategy is commonly thought of as a triangle between customers, competitors, and company. There are new thinkers emerging, however, who replace “competitors” with “unmet needs.” Thinking about unmet needs is termed “blue ocean strategy.” There is a lot of blue ocen when it comes to how businesses employ social media.

As we map out or diagram strategies for our clients, it’s useful to bear in mind that two major categories of visual diagrams are those that focus on processes (like flow charts) and those that focus on structures (like concept maps). Process diagrams emphasize inputs and outputs, whereas structure diagrams emphasis relationships between things.

I also explained why I think the new iPhone OS4 will encourage people to download and use even more apps than they already do, how HootSuite’s latest version is really cool in its integration of Google Analytics, and what my new favorite backlink tool is, and when we might find occasion to use the new Web-based tool Notable. Last, I shared what I’ve learned about Facebook Apps by playing the silly game My Empire in my free time.

Wrong Again! and 10 Common SEO Mistakes

Jeff Burkholder, Engineer/Analyst

I started today launching off of Daniel’s closing comment about the new iPhone and mentioned how some people are looking at the new Retina Display and saying that it looks fake. This brought us into a brief discussion about how bad TV resolution (even so-called “HD TVs”) is in comparison to handheld devices like cell phones. Soap Operas are shot with cameras that have higher definition and clarity than most prime time TV shows, but the sharper image is often described as cheap or cheesy-looking. Once again, our intuition and perception doesn’t quite jive with reality.

I then talked through a list of 10 common SEO mistakes that I ran across in my internet travels. The one item that garnered the most interest from the group was to watch when your domain name is set to expire. Search engines tend to look more favorably on sites that aren’t set to expire for a long time. The longer the time span, the more it shows commitment on the part of the site owner, and the less likely it is to be a spam source.

The Right Tool for the Right Job

Astrid Salim, Creative Director

Have you ever felt frustrated trying to design a website using Photoshop? Well, maybe it’s time to use a better and proper application for designing a website: Adobe’s Fireworks. Why? Unlike Photoshop, Fireworks is specifically built for design. Remember, Photoshop is primarily for photo editing.

Fireworks has superior features over Photoshop when it comes to designing a website. When I design a website in Photoshop, and I decide to create a nice vector graphic, I have to go to other vector application (I use Illustrator) to do it. In Fireworks, you don’t have to change to other programs. You can do it all in one: Fireworks combines a bitmap tool and a vector tool in one application.

Fireworks can also create multiple pages of your website in one file, so you don’t have to have multiple Photoshop files just for one website. Fireworks also makes it easier to edit multiple pages. Change one thing on the master page; all the other pages will be automatically updated. Style sheet functionality is also available in this program. That means you can change your text format for many pages in seconds.

And one of the most important thing for a website is to be able to load quickly. With Fireworks’ better image compression, your website can load faster! And no worries about universality, Fireworks can export your file as a layered Photoshop file. The newest version, Fireworks CS5, also comes with more nice features. One of the features makes it easier to design for mobile devices.

That being said, Fireworks is still inferior to Photoshop when it comes to advanced photo editing. But by editing your photos in Photoshop and then importing it to Fireworks, the problem can be easily solved.

Wikis in the Office

Mike Newswanger, Lead Programmer

For collaboration and data storage, a wiki makes a great addition to a company’s intranet server.

By offering a wiki, users can contribute and collaborate both text and media for access within the company. Overall setup of a wiki is extremely quick and easy with web server experience; a simple PHP server and MySQL database are all that are required to get started with MediaWiki, for example.

The wiki can organize thoughts, share files and data, such as company policies and procedures that are public within the company, without spending a lot of time either up-front or in long-term maintenance.

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.