Privacy Features and Web Analytics

Last fall, Google began shielding logged-in users’ search terms from analytics. Plenty of sites found that their top keyword became “not provided.” Though it didn’t prompt a wholesale shift to Clicky or Bing’s Webmaster Center, many of us are wondering what that change did to our level of accuracy.

You don’t hear so much about Internet Explorer’s InPrivate browsing, but it does much the same thing. Users of IE8 and up can choose to browse privately without leaving any traces. So can Chrome, Safari, and Firefox, though only Safari seems to have many users of their version of private mode (one source claims that 14% of Safari users say they use private mode). Google also has an opt-out add-on for any browser that lets people avoid leaving any trace, and of course any machine without Java enabled won’t be tracked for Google analytics.

The big question is: does this affect the value of your web analytics?

Your analytics give you lots of useful information about who visits your site and how they behave once they arrive. You can find out where your visitors are geographically, how they found your website, what links they clicked to arrive at your site, which pages they visits, what keywords they used to find you, and much, much more. This helps you with usability issues for your site, gives you valuable information about the effectiveness of your marketing, and lets you know something about who you’re reaching.

If you have a fair amount of traffic, this probably doesn’t matter. It removes some of your sample, but not necessarily any particular group. For example, the typical visitor to our lab site is using a commercial, school, or government network and comes from an English-speaking country. If it were the case that thousands of people from German speaking countries and using corporate networks all chose privacy options, we’d have a false idea of our typical visitor. However, we think it’s likely that our private visitors are similar to the ones we can see.

When might that not be the case? Well, researchers say that 8% of people visiting porn sites use private browsing. If yours is an adult content site, you are very likely not getting accurate analytics. You may also be getting more visits from what How-to Geek calls “tin foil hat types.” This could be significant if you have a political site, or even an ecommerce site for some types of products.If you’re running a website for privacy advocates, you probably don’t use analytics anyway, but there may be related issues that would be affected.

If you have a small amount of traffic, it’s more of a problem. Small amounts of data are less accurate than larger amounts in any case, and they can easily be skewed. I’ve read that 90% of all websites get fewer than 10 visits a day. If your site has a handful of visits, losing data on any visitors might make the information you have much less accurate.

On the other hand, if you have just a few visitors, you probably aren’t making good use of your analytics anyway.

If you’re concerned that your analytics are being thrown off by privacy features, you could ask your visitors for information. Explain why you want to know and set up a poll asking them to check off some harmless data such as what browser they’re using. You could also offer them a white paper or something in exchange for information you can see in analytics — that’s the only way to get email addresses now, so you could ask for your visitors’ zip codes at the same time and compare that data with your analytics to check . Unfortunately, this is self-selecting: people choose whether to share their information with you, so you may only discover that visitors from Orem love whitepapers. In other words, you’re back to the same problem.

To my mind, any data is better than no data. We know that a lot of the information we work with is imprecise, but we are usually watching for changes over time, so “pretty close” can still provide actionable insights.

10 Quick Linkbuilding Ideas

Search engines know that they can’t make judgements about quality of websites as well as humans can on some levels. Bing doesn’t know how beautiful your pictures are, Google can’t gauge the lyricism of your writing or the accuracy of your information. Because of this, the major search engines use links as part of their ranking systems. Each link given to your website by a human being is a vote of confidence, showing that your website is valuable. Links can also drive traffic to your website.

If your site is excellent and useful, people will give you links. Eventually, your company can expect to receive links naturally, as people link to your website in the course of communicating with their readers.

Eventually, your company can also expect to gain customers through sheer unrequested word of mouth. Are you willing to wait for that to take place, or are you doing a little bit of marketing?

Just so, a little bit of linkbuilding is wise. There are people who won’t see your site unless you tell them about it, even though they would happily give you a link if they knew you existed. There are sites that rely on your taking the initiative to share your information in the form of a link. There’s nothing wrong with communicating with these people.

Here are ten quick ways to add a backlink to your site, next time you take a coffee break.

1. Update your site with some linkworthy content. Can you add a blog post, a news report, a photo of a new product, or an article from your last company newsletter? Great content may take you longer than a coffee break to create, but you might have some lying around the office, or that ten minutes might be long enough to let you shoot a suggestion off to your web content writer.
2. Add an honest review at a review site. There are hundreds of review sites out there. You can’t review your own company, of course, but you might be able to review a product that you use in your business, an item that you sell, software you use, or even something you’ve chosen not to use. You can also go to review sites and identify people who post well written, sincere reviews, and send them a sample or invite them to try out your service. Requesting a review si something you can probably fit into your coffee break time.
3. Make a social media profile. Having an inactive Twitter account is worse than having no Twitter account at all, but there are plenty of social media sites out there where you can build a profile, get a link, and leave the page, as you might make a directory page. Link to your website.
4. Google your company. If you don’t keep up with your linkbuilding on a regular basis, there are probably some places where your company is listed without a link to your website. Correct a couple of those while you sip your caffeine delivery system of choice.
5. Google your top customer question. Chances are good that someone in some forum or answer site has asked that question. Go be helpful and answer it. You may have to do that a few times before you get a chance to drop a link, but webmasters don’t grudge helpful people an occasional link, so watch for that chance to say, “You can find more information about this at…” and give a link to that useful page on the website.
6. Check your competitors’ backlinks. Use a service like Blekko to check out backlinks. A search for “URL/inbound” will give you a look at a percentage of any websites inlinks — not all or even most, but more than Google or Bing will show you. Find a website that links to sites like yours but hasn’t yet linked to your site, and ask ‘em for that link.
7. Think of your vendors or partners. If you sell products, the companies that make those products should have links to your website at their websites. Identify someone who doesn’t and ask for a link.
8. Find citations and ask for a link. If someone has talked about you without linking to you, that’s a citation. It’s good for your site to have citations. However, it’s better to have links. Thank the webmaster for the citation and ask if they’d be willing to make it into a link.
9. Look for lists. They may not be directories, but many websites have lists. Libraries may have a list of good sites for information on your subject, blogs may have lists of companies like yours or shops in your neighborhood — there are lots out there. Find one where you think you ought to be, and ask for inclusion on the list.
10. Build a lens or hubpage. You can’t write a Wikipedia page for your own company, but Squidoo wants every company to have a lens. You get a link, too. This may take you more than one coffee break, but the sooner you start, the sooner you’ll finish.

Frankly, these things aren’t quick for everyone. We recently tried out several different linkbuilders for a few hours each, and we found that some people achieve only one or two quality links an hour, not the four or five we do. Part of that is experience and skills, part is having the right tools and the right databases. If these things take you longer than a coffee break, then you might be wiser to hire someone like us to do it for you. Contact Rosie at info@HadenInteractive.com to get started.

Creative Navigation

In general, your website’s navigation is not the place to show off your creativity and ability to think outside the box. I always think it’s like an elevator. You step into the elevator and find a cool slideshow on the wall, or a quilted and beaded interior, or a dropped ceiling with interesting lights and you’ll be wowed by the creativity of the designer. You step in and have to hunt for the buttons and you’ll be irritated.

Just so, the navigation of your site is not generally the place to impress people with your flair. It’s the place to anticipate where people’s eyes and hands will naturally head for the information they want. Anticipating your visitors’ desires and meeting them without requiring much effort from them — that’s the way you want your navigation to go.

That doesn’t mean that you can’t do interesting things with your navigation, within those limits. Here are some examples from websites we’re currently working on.

Here’s a classic navigation bar, but the buttons turn red when you hover over them.

Another classic nav bar, but the drop down menu creates a nice little box with a bit of a shadow.

If you have a classic navigation bar, you can do something interesting with the secondary navigation without threatening usability. In this mock up, designer Tom Hapgood has added callouts for sections that are especially important to the site owners. Once the site is built, the blue banners at the bottom will respond to mouseover and draw attention to additional sections of the site.

Another example of interesting secondary navigation is seen often enough now that it’s on its way to becoming a classic means of secondary navigation. Designer Darren Moore of TitusD has the main navigation across the top, but puts spotlight boxes under the header to bring visitors to key areas.

In none of these cases is the navigation intrusive, in no case does it lessen the usability of the site, and in no case will it be a problem if some visitors fail to use mouseover. These jazzed up navigation designs do not, in other words, make people track down the elevator buttons behind a sliding ceiling panel.

If you want something out of the ordinary for your site’s navigation, consider usability as well as snazziness.

McDonald’s Should Have Seen It Coming

McDonald’s, purveyors of cheeseburgers to billions, is most famous online today for their error in judgement on Twitter. They invited people to share their “McDstories” and were inundated with negative tweets. The #McDstories hashtag was actually intended for McDonald’s suppliers, who were supposed to weigh in with touching tales of the pride they take in the potatoes they grow (the only actual example I’ve seen) and stuff like that.

Instead, they got stories about fingernails in the food and attacks on the wholesomeness of their goods.

I’m not a McDonald’s customer myself, but I wasn’t surprised.  If you Google “McDonald’s stories -Twitter” to filter out the current brouhaha, you’ll find things like “McDonald’s Horror Stories” and news reports of food poisoning at the top of the SERPs. I asked my college class if they had any McDonald’s stories. Many of them were drinking soda at their desks at 8:00 a.m., so we’re not talking about a bunch of health food devotees. They told me how McDonald’s food looks the same after three weeks in a car as on the day it was served, about the amount of petroleum products in the food, and — after checking the data on a smartphone — exactly how many grams of saturated fat you get in a Big Mac.

As I say, I wasn’t surprised. So how could McDonald’s have failed to foresee this? They pulled the campaign (yes, it was a promoted campaign, not a casual tweet on someone’s lunch break) after an hour and have replaced it with one asking people to list “little things” that make them happy. That’s going better, but they’re still a chapter in social media history.

We may be tempted to think that the message is this: If your company has been the subject of more than one tell-all expose or blistering documentary, don’t openly ask people for their opinions about you.

I think most of us could figure that out on our own. Instead, let me offer a few take-aways:

• Consider your company’s reputation when you plan your social media. You know what people say about you behind your back, right? If your company is small enough that nobody says anything behind your back, okay. Otherwise, think about possible backfire when you do your planning. I’m imagining the meeting where the #McDstories was dreamed up, and finding it hard to believe that nobody said, “Hey, do you think there might be some negative stories out there about McDonald’s?” Some level of self-awareness is needed.
• Phrase your questions carefully. We met with a car dealer client the other day and Rosie suggested asking customers if we could tweet pictures of their new cars. That’s manageable. “Little things that bring you joy” is manageable. Any random test of the phrase “McDonald’s stories” would have quickly shown that it was completely unmanageable.
• Have a contingency plan. McDonald’s did, and they were able to contain things pretty quickly. Those of us working in social media know all about it, but most of their customers probably missed it. Every company has experienced some negative social media interaction (read about ours) and it’s not the end of the world. As Rosie says, it shows that you’re interacting with real people and not setting up something fake. Just let forewarned be forearmed.

McDonald’s has almost 300,000 followers on Twitter and people who still eat there after Super Size Me won’t be turned away by an hour’s worth of snarky tweets. But they should certainly have seen it coming.

The Future of Retail — Online

Deloitte has a new report on retail out, and it’s all about the internet. “Stores are now becoming just one part of a larger, more connected customer experience,” says Deloitte.

Pointing out that nearly half of consumers surveyed used their smartphones in stores as part of their shopping trip — to check prices at a competing shop, for example, or to read online reviews of a product before buying — Deloitte recommends that retailers bring the online experience into their stores.

Retailers, the consulting giant says, should offer wi-fi to enhance those internet-assisted shopping experiences, tablet kiosks with virtual shopping elements like lookbooks and ecommerce opportunities, sales associates who interact with customers in social media, and online communication. Why shouldn’t you be able to use a hashtag to tweet your need for a different color of that sweater from the changing room?

Deloitte doesn’t think that brick and mortar stores are going away, but they predict that in the next five years, “providing customers with a compelling brand experience will become a primary role of the store, eclipsing traditional shopping.” Traditional shopping has been increasing by just 3% a year this century, while ecommerce has increased by 20% annually. Clearly, people don’t need stores if they just want to buy things.

Deloitte was looking at major retailers. Their respondents took in $50 million to $10 billion a year. Most of them knew the changes were going on, but few were responding. Only 12% had websites that worked well on mobile devices. The majority don’t have wi-fi in their stores, let alone interactive online experiences set up for their customers. They don’t include social media savvy in hiring or training of sales associates.

Looks like an opportunity to me.

Your smaller shop, having the agility of a smaller business, can take the lead here. Some questions to ask yourself:

• Is my website set up for the plugged-in shopper? Of course, it has to be mobile device friendly. But have you looked at your website thinking about the visitors who are actually in your store when they access it? You might add a map of the store to your page with the map to the store. You can certainly offer the chance to post reviews and questions, as well as plenty of information on the products you have on your shelves. Walk through your shop with your site in view and see whether it enriches your shopping experience.
• Am I taking advantage of social media opportunities? Use your store’s name as a hashtag at Twitter and G+, communicate with shoppers on their way, in the store, and after they’ve shopped, and prepare to be surprised by how much your visitors use this means of communication. Livetweet from the store as you’re putting out new merchandise. Share pictures on Facebook and welcome people who check in with Foursquare.
• Is my company website the best source of information for my products? Now that you know your shoppers are looking up products online, wouldn’t you like them to be looking at your website? Train your sales associates to go to your website when they help customers in the shop, comparing the specs on the stereos they’re considering or finding a recipe for the pan you’re selling them. Looking at the site together encourages customers to return to it when they’re on their own. Of course, the information has to be there. If you’re looking up the data on Amazon, your customers may decide to buy at Amazon.

Major retailers are dragging their feet when it comes to integrating their stores with their online presence. It’s hard, as the classic metaphor says, to turn an ocean liner around. If your retail company is still a zippy little catamaran, you can beat them to it.

Your Online Marketing Calendar

Al Lautenslager wrote about Developing Your Marketing Calendar over at Entrepreneur, explaining that it’s not too late to prepare your marketing calendar for this year. The best time, he explains in this and other articles, is before now, and the next best time is now. If you have a marketing calendar, your online marketing should also be on that calendar.

You can list the promotions your company plans and then note before they arise that you’ll want to blog, tweet, and otherwise share the news about them. You can schedule out your online press releases and linkbuilding pushes. You can even draft and preschedule posts you know you’ll want to make.

There are two really important parts here. The first is to plan ahead so you won’t be announcing your sale too late for your customers to make it — or too late for others to retweet it. Tweeting is very immediate, and there’s certainly nothing wrong with tweeting as an event takes place.

But it’s also good to help people get things on their calendars. You know that you need to talk about things a number of times before you can expect people to take action. Starting early and planning it out lets you talk about your promotion, initiative, or announcements the optimum number of times without squishing all the mentions together into an obnoxious overkill blast.

The second big thing a marketing calendar does for your online marketing is to help keep it happening on a routine basis. Clients often assure us that they blog regularly or tweet frequently when it has been several months. This is because life keeps going on even when you’re too busy to get your press releases or blog posts done. You put it off till things get a bit quieter, and before you know it you have an inactive account.

Having announcements in Outlook reminding you that you had planned to do an Adwords campaign or a newsletter, an alarm on your phone reminding you to blog, or a reminder from your CRM that you need to check what people are saying about you at Twitter can keep you on track painlessly.

Some tools to help get that planning done:

• Android marketing calendar app
• SMM calendar templates to download
• Brandeo’s 2012 template

Social Media Management Tools: 2012

Eric Huber and I were talking casually at Facebook yesterday, listing all the social media sites we had to keep up with and moaning about how little time it left for work. We were playing, since that’s what you do on Facebook, but there’s a grain of truth there.

For many companies now, the question isn’t whether to use social media (yes) or even how to use social media (responsibly and strategically), but how the heck to find the time how to do so efficiently.

I heard it phrased this way in a meeting yesterday: “We have the skills and we know it needs to be done, but we’re a small company, and we don’t have the resources.” In these cases, it often makes sense to hire someone like us to take care of it for you.

Social media management tools can be the answer for those who want to keep it in house. These tools let you check in at one dashboard even if your company has multiple accounts, often take care of things like shortening links and pushing your RSS feed to your social media, and provide some kind of tracking. They cut down on time spent signing in and out of accounts and going to multiple pages, and they allow you to schedule posts and tweets ahead for efficiency. Another handy thing about these tools is that they let multiple people work on one account — that can make it realistic for a company to share an account among many people so that no one person has to take much time for it. Most options allow you to assign accounts or tasks to different individuals, so you can have your sales manager in charge but let her pass the baton to a marketing rep when she’s heading out for a meeting. Most have some way of searching for content so you can watch for mentions of your company or find good things on your topic to retweet.

There’ve been a lot of changes in social media management tools recently, so here’s a look at some current options:

• CoTweet has been our go-to for handling multiple Twitter accounts. It was my favorite of the free platforms, offering a very simple interface and a quick way to search, create, and send messages. It will be phased out soon and replaced by a new product, SocialEngage. The company, ExactTarget, says, “It features everything you’ve grown to know and love about CoTweet, and much more — including features such as RSS integration, editorial workflow and Facebook management, just to name a few.” No word yet on price, but there will definitely be no free plan.
• Still-free alternatives include MarketMe, which covers Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, and TweetDeck, Josepha’s app of choice for Twitter only. These are nice, simple tools that will cover the needs of many companies. Some of the other tools discussed below have free options, so keep reading if that’s what you’re looking for.
• HootSuite lets you manage more different platforms from one dashboard than most other tools. Their free plan lets you work with five different social media accounts. Their premium plan is $5.99 a month, which can be a real bargain for one user compared with other options. However, with a $15 surcharge for each user, it mounts up when you want to use it with a team and becomes about the same as SproutSocial. I don’t like the interface, but HootSuite includes WordPress.com blogs and MySpace, unlike most social media management tools, and plans (rumor has it) to include Google Plus. If you find one of the less popular social media channels essential for your company, HootSuite may be the tool that includes it.
• MediaFunnel has a free plan allowing two users with two channels, or you can build your own plan at $1.00 a month for each user or for each channel, whichever is greater. So, if you have five people who want to be able to contribute to the company’s Twitter and Facebook accounts, plus an extra Facebook page for a community outreach initiative, you’d pay $5.00 a month. If you wanted to let all 32 staff members in your office monitor one Twitter account, you’d pay $32.00 a month. If you have Twitter accounts and Facebook pages for each of your seven brands (14 total) and you want to share the responsibility with your social media professional, you’d pay $14.00 a month. For most scenarios, this will be one of the least expensive options, and it offers Salesforce integration, anaonymous guest posting and tweeting, Zendesk integration, and a bunch of other stuff. They’re planning an upgrade this year and will include more platforms.
• SproutSocial has the nicest interface I’ve seen yet, and it allows you to integrate not just Facebook, Twitter, FourSquare, and LinkedIn, but Google Analytics as well. A main dashboard gives you an overview of metrics like how often you’re retweeted and how many new followers you have. Another nice set of dashboards lets you check messages, feeds, keywords, potential people to follow, and more. It’s going to be overkill for many businesses, but it’s great for us, and moderately priced.

I’m not listing enterprise level solutions here. For most of the companies we know, it makes more sense to hire someone than to use these solutions directly, especially if your goal is to save time.

We have found that these tools work together just fine. That is, we can have a client using HootSuite, Josepha using TweetDeck, and Rebecca using Sprout without any problems. If you want to be active in your social media accounts and easily monitor what your social media manager is doing, you can use a free tool for that without having to persuade your pro to use it, too.

Ethics, Strategy, and Social Media

Social media for business is an investment. Since it requires time, there is a cost, either in hiring social media pros or in opportunity costs for staff members who put paid time into it. Since it is an investment, it has to have a return. That means it has to be measured and there has to be a strategy.

Recently, we were discussing strategy for a new social media initiative for a client. I suggested that we identify the places our target readers hang out, and that we hang out there ourselves, joining in the conversations when we had something useful to offer and becoming part of the group in preparation for the launch of the initiative.

“And then,” said Jonathan, “we swoop down on stallions?”

The guy plays video games.

This comment has stayed in my mind, though, and has come back to me as I’ve read some discussions recently on ethical issues related to social media.

One of the topics has been the question of paid reviews, something most of us would agree is unethical. I write honest, unpaid reviews. When a researcher asked me recently about my motivation for doing so, I initially said I do it because I found other people’s reviews useful, so I wanted to be helpful in the same way. That’s true. But it’s also true that new clients find me through those reviews. And it’s true that I write reviews — honest reviews — on other blogs and on review sites during time clients pay for, whether in order to create interesting content for their customers or to create links for their websites. It’s even true that I get a lot of free stuff sent to me to review, which isn’t the same as a payment but is certainly a perk.

I get requests for link swaps and paid link placement, all of which I ignore. I’m not that kind of writer. I put a lot of effort and creativity into finding opportunities for links and reviews for my clients. I definitely am that kind of writer. That is, a strategic user of the myriad opportunities the web affords for spreading the word about something great.

So is strategic social media unethical?

To answer that question, let’s shift focus for a moment. Think back to the last time you ate in a restaurant. Someone prepared that food for you, and someone brought it to you. The people you spoke with probably talked with you in a reasonably friendly way (depending on the region you were in, of course) and gave every indication that they cared about you and your dining experience.

They got paid for that. They didn’t cook for you because they love you, or ask after your health because you had been on their minds. In the best case scenario, they took pride in their work and enjoyed creating a wonderful experience for you and the whole experience was satisfying for all parties, but the basic nature of that transaction is commercial. You probably weren’t offended by that fact.

Indeed, if you had to rely on sheer kindness to provide all your meals and coffee, you’d probably go hungry. If you had to rely on passionate amateurs to provide all the content on the web, you wouldn’t have nearly as much good stuff to read.

A company’s social media is no different from the other products they offer. Social media is a medium for customer service, marketing, community outreach, and networking — all of which are things working people routinely get paid to do.

The point is that there are ethical lines in social media, but that they aren’t based on the distinction between strategic professional social media and casual friendly social media. There is nothing wrong with a company providing content on a social media platform in order to please their customers. It’s more effective when it’s done strategically.

Draw the line at trampling people beneath your hooves.

Testing Sites for Older Users

I wrote about Planning Websites for Older Users a couple of years ago, and the subject has come up again. At that time, we had identified two areas of primary concern:

• Contrast level of text People over 55 or so have less ability to read text that doesn’t contrast well with the background. This is a physical change that happens in people’s eyes, and while I hear that it can be staved off with exercise and eating plenty of salmon, we have to just accept that older people’s eyes are different from younger people’s eyes.
• Clarity of navigation Older people who are less familiar with the internet are more likely to be confused by navigation. They’re less likely to use hover (mouseover) to gain additional information, less likely to recognize buttons that aren’t super obvious, and more likely to get mixed up. This really seems to be about online experience more than about age, but see it a lot in older web users, compared with younger ones.

These are the same issues that arose this time around. Tom Hapgood’s beautiful new design for the retreat at Sky Ridge started out with a soft gold on a deep, Maxfield Parrish blue.

After multiple efforts, it has ended up with almost black on beige.

In the course of the design work, there were repeated requests for elements to be larger or more obvious.

Older friends of the site owner who were asked for feedback toward the end of the design process also reported that “the button was there and then it disappeared,” an indication of confusion over the navigation.

The question is: why did this happen again, when we knew the clientele for this site includes a good proportion of older people and we knew what issues were likely to arise with this population? The answer is: we didn’t test it with older people.

It is very hard to imagine how something looks to someone whose vision is different from your own. Tom and I are not young sprigs, and we both know about the importance of contrast in text. But it wasn’t white on black and we didn’t have any trouble with it, so we failed to realize that the level of contrast wasn’t sufficient for older visitors.

Some things we can judge because of our level of experience. Some we can’t. This is one of the big reasons to test websites. Few web designers are over 55 right now, so most websites are built with no real knowledge of whether they’re accessible to older visitors or not. This problem will disappear an another decade or two when web designers’ eyes begin to get old. In the meantime, make a habit of including older people in your testing.

Tom sent his final version off to his dad, who gave it the thumbs up.

As Simple as Possible

Albert Einstein said, “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.”

When it comes to websites, simple is good — to a point.  That point should be where you can still branch out to greater complexity if you want to in the future.

I had a couple of meetings today. In one, my interlocutor told me, when I asked him what he envisioned for the future, that telling me that would go against his principles. He didn’t believe in trying to guess the future, he assured me, largely because its magnificence couldn’t be foretold and shouldn’t be limited.

In the other, we scaled down from a grand and elaborate website plan with a Learning Management System and multimedia to a plain five page website. One of the participants referred to his original plan for the site as “daydreams.”

In either case, the key to eventual success is simply planning ahead for the possibility that the magnificence of the future may be as great as your daydreams or even greater. Let your developer know what you might want to do in the future and make sure the possibility of growth is there.

In the case of the simplified website, we can build it on WordPress so we know that we can add more flourishes in the future. Then it will be as simple as possible — but no simpler.

The Google + Quandary

A recent flow chart showed paths for decision making on where to post information. “Do you want anyone to actually see it?” it asked. If the answer was “no,” then the correct social media platform was Google +.

Quite a few people over at G+ got miffed by this, but there’s an element of truth there. As we make decisions about how to allocate resources, social media is a tough area for decision making. It can take up a whole lot of time, and we want to make sure that the time we spend there is as valuable as possible. We’ve reached the point where you can expect that your customers and clients will look for you at Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, and possibly at a few other places that are basics in your field.

Should your company have a presence at Google+?

On the one hand, there aren’t as many people at G+ as at Twitter, the average number of followers is smaller, and the average number of posts is also smaller, suggesting that people visit less often. On the other hand, Google is running TV ads (with the Muppets, no less), including G+ results at the top of the SERPs for a lot of viewers, and — well, if Google doesn’t know how to drive traffic, who does?

So we say that everyone should probably get a page set up. We even set up pages for some of our clients, though we have no one who has gotten a real all-out effort. We therefore offer you the following data in the spirit of beginning the conversation (or conceivably as true confessions, since I’m about to admit how little we’ve done, because we haven’t specifically been hired by anyone to do G+).

At the G+ page for Haden Interactive, we posted new, unique content daily. We tweeted those posts occasionally, and posted from this blog once or twice a week. We shared stuff other people wrote now and then. We made no real effort to make friends there, I have to admit, but we did provide content.Visits from G+ since we set up the page amount to 1.26% of our traffic, compared with .89% from Facebook (where we make even less effort) and .26% from Twitter, where we do not have a company account — but where I have way more followers than at G+.

These numbers may sound very small, but we usually see 2% or less of traffic from any single social media channel. Search is always the highest percentage, usually half or more, with direct and referred traffic sharing the remaining half. Hundreds of referring sites share the 1/3 or so we expect to see from referred traffic, so no single source typically sends more than a few percentage points. Sites in highly social markets like bridal products or travel may have 5% or so, and we’ve heard that famous news outlets can see 7%, but we’ve never seen that high a percentage with our own eyes.  In order to have a really high proportion of traffic from social media, you’d have to do pretty badly in search.

We have to conclude that G+ does well for us, as social media goes.

At the G+ page for Client #1, we posted several times a week for one month before the client decided to stop that effort. We talked with people and posted blog posts, worked on gradually building the circle, but didn’t post any unique content. Traffic from G+ amounted to .16% of their traffic from the launch of their G+ page till now. This was the largest social media result during that period.

At the G+ page for Clients #3 and 4, we set up the pages and posted enough to keep the pages from looking bald if someone came to visit. Each of these clients has had precisely zero visits from G+. The highest level of social media traffic in this group was .14% from Facebook for one of the clients.

This isn’t a proper scientific study, but we have two months of data for four pages, so it’s enough to think about. Here are our initial conclusions:

• Don’t ignore G+ just because it doesn’t have the population of a country. Make a G+ page for the future and post occasionally, even if you decide that G+ isn’t high priority for your company.
• Don’t expect this minimalist approach to do anything for your traffic. Unlike some other social media platforms, merely being present at G+ doesn’t do the job.
• You get out of it what you put into it. This is true for all social media, of course, and for much else in life, but the difference between the results with daily unique content and those with thrice-weekly reposts are striking. Having enough on the page to look good isn’t enough for results.

We’re tempted to conclude that the better results for our own company page might be the result of our being a tech company. G+ was, when it debuted, a tech enclave. We’ve seen it suggested (especially at G+) that Google Plus is somehow a more cerebral place, with more serious people in it than Facebook or LinkedIn. However, the first G+ page to find its way into over one million circles was that of Britney Spears, not obviously cerebral or techie. We’ve also seen some very active and well-done pages for consumer products and services, so we’re not prepared to make any decisions about the types of companies that ought to use G+ business pages. We think you should give it a shot.

Come over to G+ and make friends with us, okay?

Got Great Photos?

We’re working with designer Tom Hapgood to create a new site for a local cabin resort.

They have a lot of great photos, and Tom’s design showcases those images with slideshows (two on the homepage) and galleries and multiple images in the text.

I was talking with another photo-loving client today. Their main site is bedizened with pictures of celebrities, scantily clad women, and people having fun. He was questioning the need for a gallery at a new site they’re shooting off from their business.

Admittedly, the new business isn’t based around such photogenic things, but there is a connection. And all the people who go to the original site to look at the pictures of themselves, their friends, and the people they wish they were — I’m pretty confident that they’ll click on a Gallery tab at the offshoot site as well.

It’s like the tourist site I recently finished working on. People planning a vacation want to see pictures of the place they’re going to visit. Photos of the hotels are a must. If that means hiring a photographer, so be it. Some websites demand it.

So these are three situations in which you should focus on photos for your website:

• You have great photos of the goods and services you offer.
• Great photos are something your business is known for.
• People need the information photos will provide, in order to make purchasing decisions.

Once you have great photos on your website, here are some tips for making the most of them:

• Don’t skimp on text just because you have great photos. Search engines can’t see them, and neither can people using screen readers. Your design must include great text as well as great images.
• Use social media like Tumblr, Pinterest, and Instagram to share the photos and draw people back to your website.
• Change and add photos from time to time. People who come back to admire the new photos they see at your website will remember you when they need your goods and services.

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