Jason Bedell - Interactive Marketing & Technology Blog

Xmarks The Spot

A couple months ago I was faced with once again wiping my Windows system. As an experienced "systems guy", this is one of the more frustrating propositions, relatively speaking. As I'm sure most Windows users are familiar, perhaps as much as once or more per year, I believe most people have grown accustomed to the non-permanence of their browser bookmarks. I finally decided to invest the time to finally find a solution.

Xmarks, at the time called Foxmarks and renamed within weeks, is the web bookmarking solution I had been looking for.

Not to be confused with the myriad of social bookmarking solutions out there Xmarks fills a different need. Xmarks integrates seamlessly with the existing bookmarking feature of your browser (or Favorites if you are an Internet Explorer user). It synchronizes, and centralizes, your bookmarks on their servers. You can then load your bookmarks on any system or browser, even a newly wiped one. I can load Xmarks on my Firefox browser on my primary system and Internet Explorer on my test system. I can access my bookmarks from my Windows, Linux, or newly aquired Mac system. If I bookmark a page on my work computer, it is instally available on my personal computer and visa verse.

Different from social bookmarking services, Xmarks provides me with backup and portability of all my bookmarks. The result is the return of the value of bookmarks.

I gave up long ago on relying on my bookmarks as a persistant library of personaly valued information. I had stopped bookmarking or taking the time to organize or categorize bookmarks only knowing any effort would be for not within months.

Xmarks does have social bookmarking/shareing features such as Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon, etc. (which I am a big fan of) which is a bonus, but it is not, in my opinion, its strong suit. If Xmarks does hit critinal mass, its impact in this area will definately be something to watch. But for the mean time, it has resurected the value of the browser/web bookmark entirely.

Loyalty Programs and Communities

As businesses start to embrace Web 2.0 they are wise to recognize that they already have a community in place to tap into, their existing loyalty program. However, there are some big differences between the traditional loyalty program you incubated on the web and what most people are referring to when they talk about Web 2.0 and the social web. 

Today, most social communities are organic, self organizing groups of individuals that share a common interest. Just like a local church group, PTA, or the cool kids clique in high school, these communities have their own language, rituals and social norms. These groups are free to decide these ideals for themselves and are typically resistant to outsiders telling them what they should be doing, how they should be acting, or what they should care about. The same goes for self-organized communities online.

When it comes to your loyalty program, this is more often than not, a community built around your brand. You organize it, you set the rules, and you determine how communication takes place. In  exchange, you provide something of value back to the community such as proprietary content or monetized offers.

While this approach has been tremendously successful for many brands, it is not for all. If you are not a Purple Cow or you don't have tremendous brand enthusiasts out there, you may be heading for a headache. You may be better off reaching out to existing communities that are relevant to your verticle or contain high concentrations of your target audience.

An Exercise in Information Architecture

One of the most challenging activities I see web professionals work through is coming up with the right  Information Architecture. The process ranges from pulling navigation out of thin air (the process I think most commonly used) to incredibly ellaborate and expensive studies with plenty of Ph.d.'s and one-way glass.

The following process is one I have found strikes the delicate balance between simple and arduous. This is best used as a brainstorming exercise with key stakeholders to ensure the business and marketing requirements lead the discussion.

It all startes with identifing your audiences. This usually includes consumers but could also include dealers, distributors, and media professionals. Each of these audiences will have specific needs and thought processes.

Once we find our audience, its time to identify user missions for each audience. So for instance, a consumer's missions may include trying to find a product, getting copies of past invoices, or locating a dealer. A dealer may want to download sales collatoral, learn about upcoming marketing campaigns, or access technical product specifications. If you have the time and resources, you can even find individuals that represent each audience and straight ask them what they are looking for and what they would find value in (careful here, many times they don't really know, so don't take their responses as definitive).

Now that we understand their missions, its time to break down what functionality and peices of content are needed to accomplish them. The functionality will help drive your software development requirements or a product selection if you are planing on using a content mangement system. The content identified will become your content inventory.

This inventory will need to be organized, usually into something resembling a heirarchial structure. This is where your sitemaps and navigation schemes will fall out.

While the process of organizing this information is beyond this entry, a very common approach is to use a 'card sort'. This is where you logically group pieces of content and feature is into intuitive collections. There are several online tools that will help you through this process include Websort.

The user experience of your website has every bit of an impact on your brand as cranky call center rep.

Using User Generated Code To Deliver Your Message

Some people say its not the tech that matters, its the message. And that is true, to a degree.

Web sites today commonly resemble full-blown web applications in sophistication and complexity. Anyone who is charged with the maintenance and development of new features and functionality understands that the underlying technology certainly plays a significant role in how responsive you can be to market demands and how expensive it is to respond and maintain.

So, when it comes to choosing a technology to deliver your message, I put my faith in open source.

To a developer, open source is the ultimate user generated content (UGC), or should I say user generated code. Just as we see the Internet being enriched and becoming a living, breathing thing, open source provides the same breath of fresh air to the global software development community.

Looking for a rock solid security framework? So have hundreds of thousands of others in the community, many of which are more specialized in security than anyone on your team. Odds are "they" have built something and offered it up to the community, free, for you to download and customize to your needs.

Looking for a presentation framework to deliver engaging interfaces that act predictably with performance. Yep, someone else in the world has too. And if you choose the right one, you will receive free updates and enhancements from the community, free.

Looking for a rock solid operating system? Well, we know how that story goes... ;)

Don't get me wrong. I deliver solutions for my clients built on the technology that makes the most since for them. If someone has a team of Microsoft .NET developers and Microsoft infrastructure, it absolutely makes since to use technology that will leverage their existing investments in equipment and people. But if the slate is relatively clean, and there is no significant investment in a technology strategy, I embrace the community in open source.

 

Bring Focus and Priority To Your Planning Process

Part of our job as marketers is to provide leadership when it comes to making smart decisions with your marketing/ad budgets. I've always been a big proponent of a strategic planning process. Start with your business objectives (which should be attainable, measurable, and time definite), define clear strategies to achieve those objectives, and finally derive tactics to execute those strategies.

What usually falls out of this process is a long list of tactics that can appear daunting. By prioritizing those tactics, you can help maintain focus and direction as you turn them into action items. This ultimately helps allocate your limited resources and budget to what will pay-off the most.

Assigning priority can be a tricky practice. There is usually differing views and subjective weighting applied and many times to fulfill personal agendas. Its no wonder that users, your customers, get lost in the banter. By applying a process to the practice, we can reduce the subjectivity.

I use a tool we call the Prioritization Matrix and it originated at Adaptive Path as far as I can tell. It has you rank tactics in two ways across four key categories.

• Importance: What is the potential payoff for executing the tactic. This is broken down in terms of importance to the business and importance to the user. Pretty straight forward.
• Feasibility: What investment will the tactic require.This is broken down into technical feasibility and resource feasibility. These usually take a little more explanation.
• Technical Feasibility: I look at this as level of effort (LOE). This is not about technology but more about the logistics of getting the job done.
• Resource Feasibility: This is a reflection of you having the right people with the right skill sets to execute.

The scores in these four categories will plot the tactic in one of four quadrants classified as 'Do First', 'Consider', 'Maybe Later', 'Don't Bother'.

While not sexy, and certainly not over complicated, this dispassionate approach to prioritization has proved invaluable. It can break through analysis paralysis and bring focus to planning sessions in disarray.

You can download the one I use here or the original one at Adaptive Path. Good luck!

Developing A Good Information Architecture

Nothing drives me (or your users) more crazy than a crappy navigation. A good navigation, or information architecture, can definitely make or break any site or online business. A bad one will result in a high bounce rate and horrible conversions. A good one will keep your competitors scratching their heads.

I borrowed our approach from Louis Rosenfeld & Peter Morville in their book Information Architecture for the World Wide Web and it is about striking a balance between the context, content, and users (I don't believe in user-centric design, I think it can be too compromising).

• Context: By context, I am usually referring to the business context. What are the goals and objectives of the website. Is it suppose to merely promote yourself and your product or actually get someone to buy something? How is the site's performance going to be measured? Does it needs to be indexable by search engines and support bookmarking?
• Content: Content refers to the information, functionality, documents, meta-data, etc. the site needs to deliver. Notice this is not just the static copy, but the graphics, forms, and unseen meta-tags.
• Users: Finally, you must understand the mind set of your target audience. What is their level of sophistication with technology and the web. What need is your site fulfilling for them (this is ultimately a question of what value you are providing)? What is their need-state? What vocabulary do they use for your product or services? How important is access from mobile devises?

Ultimately, information architecture is about understanding what content and functionality needs to be delivered and then delivering it in the most consumable way possible to your users.

Consider SOA For Your New Website

If you are beginning the process to rebuild your website or have an opportunity to rebuild parts of it, you may want to consider a service oriented architecture (SOA).

A common approach to website development is to build pages with all the graphics, content, and fields you would expect along with all the programming/logic to pull data from a database, access information from an external systrem, or calculate a number from user input. This is considered a monolithic architecture and has a number of drawbacks, specifically reuse.

Since logic is being programmed right into a page, when that logic needs to be used in another part of the website, it will need to be copied to the other pages. This causes a problem when it comes time to make changes to a specific logic. The logic now needs to be changed in several locations instead of just one. Multiply this for several hundred logics across a thousand pages and the problem gets out of hand quickly (we call this a scalability issue).

An SOA approach to website development is about separation of concerns and isolating business logic from application logic (not to be confused with separation of code from content which is also supremely important). This means the logic used to pull data from a database, make calls to an external system, and do calculations is separated out from the rest of the website in what is called a 'service layer'. Web pages, in what is called the 'application layer', make calls to the service layer to retrieve or process information.This isolation of logic, separate from the pages, allows for the reuse of the logic across many pages.

Now there are many other aspects that go into taking a service oriented architecture and their are several others ways to factor logic out of pages. What is important is that the discussion of software architecture is taking place with some degree of emphasis and sophistication and an SOA approach is a great place to start.

Speak With Them, Not At Them

I usually present this idea to clients in terms of 'At', 'To', and 'With'.

For years advertising has been dominated by the approach of crafting a mass communication (a 30-second spot) and delivering via mass media (network TV) to the masses (people watching M.A.S.H. or Three's Company). The message we sent was (is) static, direct, and to the point, "buy my product and your life won't suck (anymore)".

With direct, and ultimately interactive, we have the opportunity to talk to the consumer instead of at them. We can greet them by name. We know what their past purchases were. Where know where they live (or at least their zip, we don't have to be creepy about it). So we can deliver a message that doesn't just fit their age demographic, but is relevant to their buying behavior.

With social media we have the opportunity (or privilege as it should be treated) to speak with the consumer. This has various implications.

• Tone down the sales pitch and take a conversational tone
• Fight the urge to promote. You can simply agree with people who "get it" and contribute information where they don't.
• Use the vernacular of the community.
• Be clear and transparent regarding your connection to the brand or business

So why care? By joining the conversation, you have the opportunity to raise awareness of your brand (be careful here), shed light on questions and issues surrounding your brand, and identify and confront false rumor and conjecture. But most importantly, it is about incubating a forum of discussion with your consumers.

Three Rules of Viral

No one can guarantee you your "virual execution" will go virual. No one. That said, there are best practices that have come about that we can look to to increase our odds. My favorite is the 3 S's: simple, socialable, shareable.

Simple: Keep it simple stupid. How many times have you sent a cool gadget or website to your friend only to here, "I don't get it". The old saying in the Linux community is something to the effect of, "Linux will never experience wide spread distribution until my grandmother can figure out how to use it." If your target doesn't immediately understand what is going on with your execution in under 3 seconds, you are on the wrong track.

Socialable: This should also be thought of as (while we are making up words) 'personalizable'. You will increase your odds of going viral  by allowing the user(s) to personalize the experience. Nothing makes us laugh more than when you can turn 'it' into an inside joke, make it relevant to something funny that happened last night, or just straight up humiliate your friends in that pointed manner that only you can.

Shareable: If you can't share it, it can't be viral. Make it easy for them. Make sure there is a 'send-to-friend' feature. Make sure the links can be pasted into emails. Make sure the emails don't get trapped by spam filters (have your IT guys check his mail servers here).

The people at Oddcast get this to a 'T'. From Elf-Yourself to Age-o-Matic these guys exemplify the 3-S's perfectly. The most well known is probably Monk-e-Mail. It is as simple as 1-2-3-4-5. It is socialable: add your own message in Step 3. Finally, it's shareable: the send-to-a-friend feature is right there at Step 5.

If there was one last thing to add, it would be to make sure you have a seed strategy. You have got to raise awareness of your execution to a minimal level. IF it is going to go viral, it will only after it has hit a critical mass. If you have an email list, use it. You could also make some small media buys such as Google Adwords or Facebook Social Ads. You can also find some popular, on topic blog entries to comment on with a link.

Remember, no one can promise something will go viral but a good place to start is with the 3-S's and a good seed strategy.

Social Meda and PR

If you are thinking about making your foray into social media, you need to be thinking PR.

That's right. Just because its on the Internet doesn't mean its all up to your interactive team. Social media is first and foremost about talking directly to your consumer. And the person on your side of the conversation better be responsive, on topic, and conversational (that means not a sales guy). When's the last time you put a programmer in front of a customer?

And it's not a copywriter from your creative staff either. Don't get me wrong. I'm sure there are plenty of great creative copywriters out there that can do the job. But this is really about public relations.

We talk about Interactive Public Relations with respect to social media in terms of three steps that all build on top of each other: Monitor, Analyze, Engage.

There are many great monitoring tools to help you get an idea of what conversations are happening out there with respect to your brand or product. Google Alerts, while very basic, is a free and effective way to get started. For those who are ready to take the next step in monitoring, I would suggest taking a look at Radian6 (check out my past post on Radian6 here).

While monitoring is mostly going to be handled by an automated service, you will have to handle the analysis yourself. This is where you take a look at the conversations taking place and derive your insights. Who and where are the most vocal communities? What are they saying? Do they like you? Are they looking for different offerings you are not providing?

Finally, engagement is your opportunity to get in the game and where your PR team comes front and center. They will help you respond to these conversations that would otherwise happen without you. They can address false rumor and accusation, provide insight into products or services, enlighten an interested community, and ultimately be the live ambassador to your brand.

Domain Name Scams To the Next Level

Well, it finally happened. You may have heard, or been the target of, a very popular domain registration scam that has been going around for some time. It's the email you get that says, "so-and-so is about to register [insert some derivation of your legitimately registered domain here]. Act now and we will register it in your name for [insert absorbinant price here]."

It appears this scam has been lucrative enough to warrant taking it to the next level. We received a phone call  today from a real person running this exact scam. I couldn't believe it.

I guess I always assumed a big part of the email version of the scam was automated. Their close rate much be much higher than expected if they are going to start employing phone banks of people to run it.

If you receive one of these communication, stay calm, write down what domain names are in question, and quietly ask yourself, "do I really care if someone else owned these directed them at porn sites?" If the answer is yes, go ahead and register them as you usually would through GoDaddy, NetSol, etc. They are still available and you can purchase them yourself.

It is a good idea to protect your brand with some coverage that goes beyond your primary domain name. I would certainly buy other top level domains (TLDs) that match your primary domain. For instance my primary domain is jasonbedell.com but I also own jasonbedell.org, jasonbedell.net, jasonbedell.us, and jasonbedell.biz.

If you really want to be covered, you can register the most common misspellings of your primary domain. This site feels kind of spammy but you can try the Type Generator - Misspelled Domains tool to help identify what they are. You can also check out the FTC's position on the issue here.

In the end, they will always be able to find a derivation of your domain, that is not registered, to threaten you with. You have to draw a line somewhere in terms of far you want to go with covering your primary domain.

Anyways, watch out, out there. Fight the fear tactic. And good luck.

Tell me what I want to hear...

I filled in my profile information on Facebook the other day. I sign up on so many social networks that I want to see how they work and what they have to offer before I invest time in such things.

Anyways, it was worth it. I immediately noticed a change in the ads delivered to me. I almost exclusively get Ads from Sandles now, you know the beach resort people. I don't have 'travel' in my profile but I must fit their age category or education profile. Who knows, but I dig it.

I also get adds for Hampton Inns, Citi Bank, Monster.com, and Tivo.

We have been talking about targeting ads based on self-maintained user profiles for years. It is just nice to see it finally here and working. And, it really is almost all I'd hoped for.

I actually care now. Yes, I'm in the biz and probably not typical about these matters but I do find myself checking the ads out much more. They are relevant to ME. It's not about some keyword I'm searching Google for. It's not about some demo or pyschographic data Nielsen or comScore said depicts the "typical" visitor to the site. IT IS ACTUALLY ME!

I told Facebook what I'm in to and Facebook listened and is hooking me up with people promoting stuff that makes since and that I care about.

And you have got to check out Facebook Insights. You can setup a completely targeted campaign in literally two minutes.

Wiki Wompus

The mood on Wikipedia is mixed right now to say the least. But, I find it interesting that the only people I hear criticizing Wikipedia tend to be industry people. I've never heard a student, family member, or anyone other normal person looking for a simple yet fairly comprehensive answer to a simple question, do anything but sing praises for Wikipedia.

Yes, the nay sayers have some valid arguments. However, I think in general that most of them are just uncomfortable with yet another form of information democratization. If you are struggling with your own Wikipedia issue, here are some tips you may find useful before you go edit crazy.

The cardinal rule is to maintain a clear and open relationship between your connection to the content being edited and any commercial affiliations you may have. You are right for thinking that you need to be monitoring your Wikipedia entry for submissions of incorrect or biased information, but you cannot be the source of biased information yourself.

Here are some measures you may take to increase the odds of your edits being accepted:

1. Make small edits rather than sweeping changes. If just one word of your edit is found to be vandalism or bias then all changes submitted with that word will be reverted. In other words, it's all or nothing.
2. Site all sources used for claims made. These sources should reference other non-bias sources.
3. Make sure additions to content conform to their Notability requirements. The content has to be of significant, from a NPOV, and be encyclopedic in nature.

Deliver Services, Not Messages

It is the most frequent story. A client comes to me and says, "Build us a website so we can talk to our customers." Besides the fact that they usually have many existing web properties their customers are already ignoring, this one needs to be different. What usually needs to be different is the client's approach.

If you want to change someone else's behavior (your customers indifference), start by changing your own.

When getting excited about all the traffic that will be headed towards your new site and then deciding what messaging and branding to use, take a breath. Instead, start with asking yourself what services is your target audience interested in.

If you are a widget maker, your target may be looking for independent reviews of widgets, tips & tricks on how to use their widget, or they may be looking for a community of like-minded widget owners. Maybe they need a calculator to help them determine what size of widget they need, where the widget service providers are in their neighborhood, or even widget alternatives.

Only once you have filled this service need will your target find value in your website. Once you are providing them value, they may decide to listen to you. Now you just have to decide if the service should be branded or not.

Radian6 and UGC Monitoring

While at AdTech in New York a few weeks ago I came across a very interesting technology from a startup company by the name of Radian6. Their UGC/Social Network monitoring solution immediately struck me as both visually compelling and highly intuitive.

What it is...

Radian6 is all about topics. You start by creating what they call a "Topic Profile". These can be thought of as containers, and become your conceptual view of the world. Radian6 is continuously scouring the blogosphere and specific social networks (YouTube and Flickr today). You setup your topic profile, or container, by telling Radian6 what topics to key in on and place in it. Once you have something in the container, you can ask it questions. What topics are peopling talking about surrounding my brand? Who are they most influential individuals, bloggers, or content generators with respect to my brand? Are people talking about my service offering in a positive or negative light?

Brands are no longer controlled by advertisers. The brand is what consumers and the community decide it is. This tool helps you find those discussions and engage the community.