First – a little back story. I have this terrible habit of working late into the night… or morning… depending on how you look at it. After working past midnight a few times, getting up in the morning becomes a bit harder, so you sleep an extra hour to make up for the one that you worked through the night before. Now that you get up an hour later, you don’t get tired and go to bed when you used to and you have to wait an extra hour before you can go to sleep. Follow this path for a while and pretty soon you work until 3 or 4 in the morning and get up at 10:00.  This has been my life off and on for the past few years. This caused me to not eat breakfast anymore because after getting showered, dressed and ready for the day it was nearly lunch time. On days when I had meetings in the mornings and had to get up at a normal time I still couldn’t eat breakfast because it would make me feel ill, so I hadn’t had breakfast in years.

Recently I have been working to switch my waking hours back to a schedule that more closely resembles normal human times. Now, after being awake for a few hours, its breakfast time, not lunch time. This has presented me with the joy of breakfast food shopping and tasting, which has probably been way more fun than it really should have been. So now, after about a month of testing I have decided that English Muffins are better than bagels. Why? The nooks and crannies.

The crumb of an English Muffin are airy and full of little pockets that hold flavor. Every bite is a bit different as some of the little pockets are filled with butter, and others with raspberry jam. A bagel with cream cheese pretty much tastes the same in each bite, but an English Muffin is just a bit different. Bagels don’t have nooks and crannies. The crumb of a bagel is pretty smooth, which makes it more like most other breads. You can make interesting sandwiches with a bagel, but you can make all the same sandwiches with any other bread. The biggest difference between the English Muffin and just about all other breads you would eat for breakfast is the pocket filled crumb. This key differentiator not only makes the English Muffin a unique looking morning snack, but it also makes the taste and experience of the Muffin a unique one with the butter or jam that fills up the pockets. The point is that the English Muffin is not just about the English Muffin, but is part of my morning experience that works in concert with other factors to bring me satisfaction. When brands can stand back and see how their products and services fit into the bigger picture of their customers lives they can see how their unique features stretch beyond themselves and influence the user. With this data, the brand can start to see a bigger picture, and thats when the ideas for what kind of conversation to have with their market start to perk up like a pot of fresh coffee.

This isn’t just a blogging problem, but a problem for all social media channels. The early theory of social media was that anyone could publish and we as a community could produce content just as good as the broadcast media, if not better. The best part of social media channels is that you don’t have to interact with concepts, topics or brands that you don’t want to interact with. When you watch TV, you have to watch whatever commercial comes on, but on social media channels, you can pick and choose what is most relevant to you. This is where the problem starts. In order to participate you have to be able to find what is most relevant to you. With new blogs being started everyday, the supply side of equation is exploding.

Let’s say you are really into pig farming. You can stay up to date on the industry of pork farming by reading blogs that cover that market. If there are only a few blogs, then great, you can stay up on the times pretty easily. Now imagine that there are over 1,000 blogs on pork farming. You can’t read them all—you’ve got pigs to farm. So what do you read and what don’t you read? And what about all the podcasts, Facebook groups and Ning sites? You can’t keep up, and trying to becomes a time-consuming pain. Staying on top of the industry is harder now with all of the choices.

When there was one blog on the subject, it was very valuable.  There wasn’t any pain involved in keeping up when it was simple. But now if there are 100 or 1,000 blogs, you can’t read them all, so you pick a few and stick with them. Now if you read four, then each of them is only a quarter of the value that the first one was. The tragic part is that the first blog on the subject is probably still as relevant as ever. Blogging is hard work, but the value is diminished by each new entrant regardless of how hard the first blogger works.

To have a successful blog, podcast, or personal brand you have to have a reputation for providing value to your community. This hasn’t changed and never will, but now you have to work harder just to be as valuable as you were before. This becomes even more true if you are just starting out now. Building a reputation for value in a sea of competition is harder than fighting a value recession. Perhaps its time to think about that blog or podcast you’ve been meaning to start.

Advertising, and marketing communications are generally viewed as an unwanted intruder. If you get it in your mail box it’s called junk mail. If you get it in your email it’ s spam. This view is not based on marketing communications being inherently bad, but rather it has come about from years of marketers and communication professionals sending irrelevant messages to us. If it’s irrelevant it becomes irritating. Basically, as marketers we have done this to ourselves. Most often I don’t think this was done intentionally and certainly not maliciously, but rather because we had mass media, so we got used to (and rewarded) for getting the message out to as many people as possible. The industry got too focused on quantity over quality.

Email is a great example. Email is so easy and inexpensive to use that spam has gotten out of control. When you are judged by the size of your list it becomes more important to blast out to 5 million than it is to blast to the 5 thousand that should get it.  As it stands, email is a fantastic medium. Social media is the new hot thing, but you don’t always want to talk about doing business in the middle of the party. Look at email as “Private Media”, the corner of the room where you and your buddy go to get away from the rest of the party just for a few seconds to really engage with each other. Email can be powerful, but not if its just a conduit for spam. Here is how to make sure you do it right.

Clean your list

Forget quantity. Go for quality. Look at your open rates and systematically cut out the bottom 10%. If they aren’t opening your emails then sending it to them makes no sense. Its a good idea to send them a plain text only email first, making sure they still want to be on the list. If they don’t, or don’t respond, remove them.

Segment your list

Not all your customers are the same. There are groups in your list that  have different interests. Segmenting your lists, and then sending different emails to each group that has more of the types of content they want will make your email more valuable to them. When the information is valuable, then its not considered spam. This is easiest, and most overlooked part of good email marketing, but it can make all the difference in the world.

On my old windows mobile phone I could browse the real web, but it couldn’t handle the display of it very well, making most of the web pages useless and unusable. I have been able to browse the web from my phone for about 3 years now, but it wasn’t until now that it has become usable, and that makes me use it even more. Apparently, I’m not the only one who thinks so, there are now more iPhones in use than Windows Mobile phones.

The iPhone isn’t the only phone that browses the real web, most new smart phones are doing the same. This has some pretty big implications for the web, but it also has a really big one for brands. The web has just gotten more important because people can go see a website about a company they are considering doing business with from their phone right before a purchase. There are a few minor points related to this, like make sure that your website looks better than your competitors, and your website should still be usable on a small screen, but as the apps available on the iPhone remind us, the real point is to make sure your website is worth going to. Make sure it does something. There needs to be a reason for people to go to your website, and reading corporate speak isn’t a good reason.

So many businesses don’t even have a good digital strategy much less a good mobile one. With these new versions of smart phones and other mobile devices that can browse the web (ebook readers, ipods … cars) the webs importance will only grow greater. Give coupons, special content, up to the minute news or an experience that is worth the effort, and make sure it looks good on a small screen.

NOTE: As I was finishing this post, I had to go look for the ReadWriteWeb post I read yesterday to make the above car link point to the right place. As I was going through my Google Reader account to find the post, I ran across a post from Mitch Joel entitled What A Website Will Be… And Never Be that talks about the mobile web. It’s definitely worth the read.

The skills that it takes to make a good TV campaign and a good digital (web) campaign are very different. With TV you have writers, directors, production crews and a whole slew of technical knowledge on how to operate a camera, capture good audio and the best way to frame a shot that can take many years to learn and become effective at. In digital you have the same scenario with specialized knowledge about user experience, human computer interaction, markup and programming that isn’t found in other mediums. Because of these vast difference in technical knowledge its easy to see why there aren’t many professional service firms that can offer world class solutions in every medium. Even if you could find one, the overhead of that business would be huge just from employing such a vast labor pool that their fee structure would be out of reach for most business owners.

In years past, the concept of who should be the “lead” agency has seen a fair share of heated debate. Some say it should be the advertising guys because of their knowledge of consumers and generating the “Big Idea”. Some say it should be the PR folks because they understand how to communicate best. There has even been speculation from some of the largest advertising trade magazines that it should be the digital agencies because they have the audience and ability to track behavior better than any other discipline. At the end of the day its still not clear who the winner of this debate should be, or that there ever should or could be a clear winner. This argument does illustrate that, if nothing else, there is no agreed upon right answer.

Somewhere in the combination of the widely varying difference in skill sets from one media to another and the murky uncertainty as to who is best suited to try and work it all out, this makes creating a successful fully integrated campaign a problem of organization just as much as it is strategy. The responsibility of creating a successful endeavor falls upon the client. Over the next few years expect to see more movement as the disrupted industries of marketing and communication learn to deal with  the new digital world. It seems that on top of everything else that a client side marketing manager or CMO has on their plate a whole new level of technical complexity will now be required. This will result in either larger in house marketing staff on the client side, new planning positions on the client side to offset the need for a lead agency or a change in the agency world to take into account the new required disciplines.

I’m not sure how this will all work out, but perhaps a good idea is for both clients and agencies to ponder “what isn’t digital anymore.” Perhaps the digital agencies will go away as it becomes less of an ancillary discipline and is absorbed into business as usual, or perhaps the digital agencies will win out as they acquire the relevant knowledge traditional housed at the Advertising and PR firms. Can you hear it? Its the winds of change.

Always proceed with your best judgment, but then take the time to set up a feedback / improvement system to continually improve. Like many things on the web, getting this part right is usually done faster through quick test and improve cycles rather than months of contemplating the right move.

The key here is make sure that you are offering an experience for your user. Pay attention to not only what you are saying, but how your are saying it, and how it all looks. A good combination of content, presentation and interaction are the cornerstones of a good experience, so long as its unique.

Being unique is critical. With so much competition out there on the world wide web, it is easy to forget or get confused about who is who. Getting around this problem is the process of building a brand. Too often, however, people try to take a shortcut and end up shooting themselves in the foot.

Remember splash pages? Thankfully most of these monstrosities are now gone, but there was a time when the “splash page” was running rampant and out of control. Part of this tragedy can be linked to the early idea of the web being the new television, but a lot more of it had to do with trying to take an experience short cut. Instead of spending the time to make a compelling experience, these folks tried to throw so much sizzle at us in flashing, fast moving graphics hoping to blind us from the lack of steak.

While splash pages are now mostly gone, the tendency to take this short cut still exists. It is a good idea to try and be clever and push the envelop, but there is a line that shouldn’t be crossed. This line comes in the form of the “use your mouse to chase down the moving navigation elements” and other such ill-conceived ideas. The biggest problem is that it can be hard to know where this line is until you’ve crossed it. Getting the user to chase your page elements around is interactive and can even be fun the first time, but when the novelty wears off it becomes frustrating and a waste of time. Its kind of like a one night stand. It seems like a fun adventure, but it’s no way to build a long lasting solid relationship. No one wants to be with (or be) the guy who is a lot of fun for the first few minutes but then falls short after that. Don’t let your first impression online be that guy. Marriages are built with the consistent guy, not the party guy. Spend 10 minutes on your own site everyday for a few weeks and see if you can find where it falls short.

In the middle of the town is a common. If you are not familiar with commons its pretty much what it sounds like, common area used by all the towns folk to keep their livestock, plant gardens, etc. The commons is where the town gathered, worked and talked about the news of the day.  To be a successful business, it made sense to put your business on the land facing the commons. Location, Location, Location, right? The age old philosophy of “go where your customers are” was very important before yellow pages and search engines. So there you are, in your bakery on the edge of the commons, accessible to anyone in town who may want a loaf of wheat bread.

Relationships were the driver of business in this time. The people who chose to buy from a particular baker most likey did so because they  built a relationship with them day after day of talking in the commons or at the bakers shop. People liked to buy from people they know. To increase bread sales, the baker could go out into the commons after the morning rush and offer discounts to try his bread, or he could start an affinity program. The baker could also hire some local kids to sell his goods for a percentage of the profit, starting an early affiliate program. No matter what the plans where to keep the business going strong, it relied on personal relationships (at least personal as in “in person”).

It would be entirely possible for the baker to bake his goods at home, and then build a stand to sell out of in the commons. By doing this he wouldn’t actually need a storefront of his own, and he could just make his money from the stand he built. This works until the customers either leave the commons to go a new area, or the commons get purchased and his stand is longer allowed to be there. In either case, the work that he put into creating his stand, and making it accessible and comfortable to customers is all lost.

Fast forward a few hundred years to today. The commons are back. There called social networks. In much the same way as our earlier ancestors, businesses are realizing that building relationships with people can pay off. All the advantages ( and disadvantage) from back then are all back, and community is the new topic to pay attention to. With all the ways you can now reach out to your customers base, the question has been raised as to whether or not a company really needs a website anymore. There are so many new services out there like Facebook and Twitter that customers spend time on that it can seem like a companies website isn’t where the people are; however, what was true in 1805 is still true today.

The point of a company having a website is to control its online domain – the space that is theirs. Thats why they are called Domain Names. Companies could spend all day on Facebook just like our baker could have spent all day in the commons, but if the commons ever became unavailable, he was out of luck. Today, the online equivalent is actually even worse. Facebook wasn’t the first social network, and may not be the last. At some point someone will create a new social network that people think is better and they will jump ship and move to that one. Facebook did it to MySpace, and MySpace did it to Friendster before that. When that day comes, then all the hard work that was poored into Facebook will be gone. I don’t mean to pick on Facebook, pick any social networking platform you want, its the same deal. 200,000 Twitter followers won’t do you much good when Twitter shuts down.

The point here is to go ahead and go out into the social media world and explore. Experiment and learn. Leverage its technology to build community and its power to build your business. Do as much as you can, but always maintain your home turf. Maintain your website. Use it to give your customers an experience that Facebook doesn’t provide them. Make it the center of your universe, just like the bread store on the edge of the commons.

Every business, organization and person has a slightly different idea of what success is. For some people, their primary reason online is to provide information and sway opinions. For others the goals is sell products or attract new sales leads. For each case, there is a different set of KPI’s (Key Performance Indicators). You can spend hours digging through numbers and never find insight if you don’t know what to look for. So regardless of what your goals are, or if your new to the game are 3 metrics you can’t afford to ignore. These metrics are not the be-all-end-all, but they are a really good place to start and refer back to from time to time to monitor general health.

1. Is anybody listening?

No matter what your goals are, your website or online presence isn’t doing any good if no one hears it. Yep this means traffic, but before you go looking for your monthly “hits” report lets talk about your metrics options. Hits are about the worst option you have. A “hit” is a request sent the web server. This means when you type www.google.com into your web browser, a request is sent to Google’s server asking for the home page. That’s a hit. Then to load the Google logo on that page the web browser sends a request to Google’s server again asking for that image. That’s another hit. Suffice to say, Hits don’t measure people, it measures request to the server. If your home page has 20 images and two css (cascading style sheets) files, then one person loading your home page once will result in 23 hits. Not a good metric really.

The best metric to use for gauging traffic is unique visitors. Most web analytic programs have this metric built in, so it won’t take much to find the number, just look. Unique visitors will show you actual people, not server requests. It is a much more accurate number and one that is essential to keep track of. Keep in mind that you are not necessarily looking for a big number, your job is make that number grow. If you have 10 hits a month, then make it 20. This is about growth, not volume.

2. Does Anyone Care?

While traffic is good, its not the whole story. Not only do you need an audience to send your message to, you also need to know if that message is working and relevant to the audience. Engagement is what we are looking for.  Measuring engagement is hard and can be done in many ways, but the simple and quick way to start to find insight is by looking at time on site.  This metric can be substituted with time on page, but both get at the same point. Time on site (or page), as its name implies, is how long someone stayed on your site. The longer they were on your site, the more engaged they were with your content. If your website is boring or too hard to use, the user will give up and go away, so a long time on site usually means that your are doing a good job of engaging your visitors. Beware, sometimes a long time on site is the result of people going around in circles looking for content. This means that your website isn’t so frustrating that they give up right way, but the content they want to find is hard for them to get to.  Look at other metrics like returning visitors and click paths to try and get a better idea of what your time on site stats are telling you.

3. Is it doing anything for me?

The granddaddy of them all – conversion. If you have an action that you want a visitor on your website to perform, and they perform it, you have a conversion. If you are trying to sell online, then every sale is a conversion. If you want people to sign up for a newsletter, then when they do its a conversion. These are real tangible results we’re talking about here. Most web analytic programs have a way of setting goals to track conversion, but at its crudest level you can calculate a conversion rate by taking the number of people who took the specified action and divide it by the number of visitors you got in the same time period. If you had 3 people out of 200 sign up to your newsletter in a week, then your conversion rate would be 1.5%.

Wheres the insight?

The real insights you can gain from these metrics are what they tell you all together. Each one tells a fact, but together they can tell a story. If you have a low unique visitor number, then you have an awareness problem. Your solution is in marketing. If you have a high unique visitor number, but your time on site number is low that means either: A) people are finding what they want to know on your site right away, or B) people think that your website is not the one they want to deal with for this subject matter. If your conversion rate is high, then the most likely scenario from the previous sentence is A and your doing great. If your conversion rate is low, then the answer is more likely B, and you need to work on your website.

These three metrics can go a long way in helping you steer your online efforts in the right direction. The name of the game is continual improvement, so see where you are now, try some things and keep what brings up your numbers.

Its good to keep in mind that through all the innovation that have occurred in media, new media hasn’t killed old media. This seems to still hold true, at least according to the latest report on the 3 screens from Nielson. The report about the “3 screens” (1st screen – tv, 2nd screen – computer / internet, 3rd screen – mobile devices / phones) has a few nice tidbits of information that should have you stop and think before you call up your traditional media advertising agency and cancel your account.

While the report does show some growth for the digital channels (online video is up about 35%) and the new ( sort of ) time shifing technology (DVR usage is up about 21%) it also shows that 99% of video consumed in America was done on traditional TV.  The report also shows that the “older” demographics are increasing their consumption of all media types (I have a hard time classifying 35 year-olds as “older”). So basically you can reach nearly all demographics using online channels, but the kicker here is that you can still reach 99% of the video viewers on good old traditional un-time shifted TV.

Whats really going here is two trends that keep growing year over year: 1.) we are consuming more media, and 2.) we multi-task media. According to this report “Americans consume media at a record pace – 129 hrs of TV, 27 hrs of Internet, 3 hrs of mobile video each month”. According to these numbers, we spend just about as much time interacting with video content as we do sleeping every month. The growth numbers we see for the online and mobile channels are not coming out of people’s TV time, but are in addition too them. We are still a nation of TV watchers, but we also do it online and from our phones. This seems reasonable. When I got my iPhone I started to read my Google reader from it and checking my twitter feed resulting in my “usage” of those things to increase, but not at the expense of my other media habits.

The trend of multi-tasking media is not much of a surprise either. Working from home sometimes ( read  – all the time ) means digging through clients analytics looking for insight from the couch on my laptop while House is playing on TV. I just love his snarky humor. According to this report, its not just me.

Seth Goden called it out over a decade ago in “Permission Marketing” – while permission marketing is the goal, we will always have the need to interrupt people to get them to raise their hand to sign up.  The first part of any sales or marketing funnel is awareness, and that will always require the skills  we have learned over the years in traditional advertising. While the mediums may change, the ability to craft a relay a good story will always be needed. I predict that the future belongs to the agencies / groups / people who can add the skill sets of both the “old” and “new”. There may be a Revolution under foot… er, evolution.

For the most part, this client has great organic traffic for their core offerings, so their adwords campaigns are focused on targeting markets that could benefit from their services, but who are searching for different means to solve their problems. Not a bad strategy, overall.

The problem can arise that if you drive traffic to your website to show the user a different solution that what they we’re looking for the bounce rate can be very high. Many users will see that what they searched for is not exactly what is on the page and immediately hit the back button. In this case the clients fears were justified.

So whats the right course of action? Shut down or reduce the budget on the campaigns because they don’t produce a good conversion rate? That defiantly would reduce the advertising budget without  reducing the overall number of measurable conversions. Normally that sounds great, especially in this age of accountability, but there is an underlying problem here. Sometimes the conversions cycle is so long that you can’t track it.

When we asked this client about their users and how they come to start using the program the organization offers, the most common story is “I heard about you guys, but tried other means of reaching my goals. After they all fail and I realize that there is no magic bullet to solve my problems, then I remember you guys and get signed up.” The average time between first being exposed to this client and the end user signing up for their services is 3 to 5 years. If their initial exposure to the brand is online (which most often it is) and then it takes 3 to 5 years for a “conversion”, how do you measure that? Answer: You can’t.

This is very similar to the argument of direct advertising over brand advertising. Most often you can’t directly measure how well a branding campaign works. Good branding can influence behavior, but it happens over time. On the web we like to think that everything can be measured, and we can tie it all to ROI. If something isn’t performing in black and white numbers by the end of the month, we kill the program. Unfortunately, we can’t measure everything, and we can tie less to ROI that we wold like to believe. As in this case, with a cycle of 3 to 5 years, we can’t measure it accuratly, and definatly not by the end of the month.

If we look at their bounce rate and the cost it has on their conversion rate, we would cancel the program. That’s what the numbers tell us to do. But what the customers? The people who are behind all the numbers tell us if we stop the campaigns then that initial exposure won’t exists. Without that exposure, their unmeasurable conversion cycle could be disrupted, and we wouldn’t know it for 3 to 5 years.

Number are numbers. They don’t tell us to do anything. Its the interpretation of the numbers that has meaning. Make sure your brand story and customer perspectives are taken into account when “Reading the Numbers”.