Taste of Technology Small Business series kicks off its sessions with cloud computing

Posted in Business, Social Media with tags , , , , , , , , , on May 28, 2010 by pdebois

This week in New York I had the pleasure of sitting in one of several Taste of Technology session. Held at the Samsung Experience retail store in the Time Warner building and hosted by Small Biz Technology editor Ramon Ray, the Taste of Technology sessions are meant to showcase new tools to help small business and the discussions based on those tools.

The May session panel consisted of Jonathan Rochelle, Group Product Manager for Google; John Conklin, Business Productivity Solutions Specialist for Microsoft; and Steve Greenwood, Head of Products for start up DropIO.
Each covers how their products rely on the cloud to deliver quality service. Highlights included a review of Google Apps, discussion on the upcoming SkyDrive for Office Live (my personal favorite, it is additional storage and free features with Office 2010), and an explanation of DropIO, a new online storage service in which uploaded files & video which can be shared regardless of file format. Given the Apple-Adobe battle over Flash (A reminder was announced today as NBC and TBS declined to place their content on the iPad: see the Marketwatch article), DropIO gives a means to share video without concern about the format available to the user, although DropIO is used privately and meant for a few user,  as opposed to video sharing sites like YouTube.

Much of the discussion turned to browser usage, with many questions from the audience regarding reverse compatibility and how much that reverse compatibility — browser, internet capability — may hold back some segment of internet users.  Security of course came up as well.

There are other Taste of Technology Small Business sessions planned through the year, in New York City and soon to be announced locations. For more information, take a look at the Smallbiztechnology site for details.  Ramon is a great guy and excellent host, having attended the Small Biz Technology Summit earlier this year, which featured Seth Godin and a wide range of speakers.

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iPad ushering e-zine version of Car and Driver; How analytics on content, reader engagement may follow

Posted in Analytics, Business with tags , , , , , , , , on May 12, 2010 by pdebois

Car and Driver on iPad (Image Source: Autoblog)

Car and Driver has just released an e-zine version for the iPad according to Autoblog.  This is part of the start of the e-zine movement, though C and D’s publisher is not alone (see the Zimana blog post on the foray by Bonnier/Popular Science into electronic magazine content ).

The Autoblog gang was a bit underwhelmed with the e-zine Car and Driver, considering the offering as just a transfer of the magazine with no significant features that take advantage of the new format.  That’s a missed opportunity to create renewed interest in the magazine, particularly as now there are so many sources that break car news instantly, such as … er…Autoblog.

That’s okay for now.  The discussion of content — and how to best measure its effects on readers — continues unabated.  The best that these and other organizations can do is to use as much analytics tagging as technologically possible to learn how people use the content and provide better services for all.

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How to determine your most valuable customers: Customer Lifetime Value, inferred from analytics data spots the best segments for profits

Posted in Analytics, Business, Web Analytics with tags , , , , , , , , , on May 6, 2010 by pdebois

Avinash Kaushik has always been a great evangelist for the Google Analytics solution, with useful tips at the Occam’s Razor blog, along with having written two books on the business of web analytics (see the Small Business Trends’ book review on his book Web Analytics 2.0). There are great examples of how to extract value from analytics data. This post on customer lifetime value shows the influence of analytics data to determine your most profitable customer segment.

Explained by David Hughes of E-mail academy , the concept answers three questions regarding the value of an acquired customer base:

  • Did you pay enough to acquire customers from each marketing channel?
  • Did you acquire the best kind of customers?
  • How much could you spend on keeping them sweet with email and social media?

This concept, along with inference of the analytics data, can guide businesses to understand which segments of website traffic are worth the marketing effort.  Remember, your analytics data is more than just examining keywords.  You can examine your online presence, and infer some answers, as well as guidance for others.  I love this post from Avinash because it gets into the meat and potatoes of value.  This is not entirely new; Annastatia Holdren  gave great comments during her Adwords training about monitoring the value of your keywords so that you are not paying more for traffic (you can read more on the value of clicks here)

Key takeaways relevant for business owners looking to review their analytics.

  • Focus on discovering the actions of a segment, not just an individual – analytics is about understanding a group of given traffic.
  • Being at the top of a given SERP may be costly in some instances.  There are many ways to drive customers to your site without going head to head on a keyword which may be expensive to use in an Adword or CPC campaign.  That expense becomes particularly costly if there are few visitors converting from use of that keyword.
  • Even if your business attempt to gain a SERP advantage via a focus on keywords, an overfocus on certain keywords can eliminate choices of other keywords and phrase which has lower traffic volume but potentially better odds of conversion – more sales, more sign ups, etc.
  • Business owners should be open for other means for customers to discover their site — even a well constructed print ad that links to a great landing page can general the right traffic if the ad is exposed to the right audience.  Foursquare, Twitter, Yelp, and social networking sites have provided new means of discovery.

To read the full explanation of the Customer Lifetime Value process, see the post at Occam’s Razor.

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Crain article on digital sites geared for women shows segmentation is essential for savvy business online

Posted in Business, Marketing, Social Media, Web Analytics with tags , , , , , , , , , , on May 5, 2010 by pdebois

Today many online communities court women for lifestyle and consumer interests

Crain’s New York had a great recent article on online media properties and the increase competition among online women communities. The article focused on the relaunch or iVillage — NBC is attempting to make a portfolio of brands — as well as Glam Media’s continued dominance.  From the article:

“Magazine publishers are also getting better at identifying audiences across their networks of sites and delivering them in big numbers, media buyers say. Hearst Digital Media’s network had 17.6 million visitors in February, comScore reports, and Conde Nast Digital had 15.3 million”

These are just the opening salvos — Glam Media has the largest number of unique visitors at 78.0 million (comScore figure).  All hail from the “fragmentation of audiences and the way people now use search engines to travel around the Web.”    You can read more at Crain’s New York (Site has a thing or 2 for Women)

Takeaways for small businesses:

  • Business owners must pay attention to the different sites/properties available to their business, and see if there is an audience that rings true to their goals — to strengthen its position in a market or even extend its audience (long tail).
  • In paying attention, businesses should decide what services and features to focus on the most — the fragmentation that is occurring has made being a jack-of-all-trades a very expensive proposition to maintain.  The cost for marketing to as much traffic as possible may exceed the revenue generated.   See the Zimana blog articles on segmentation and the Orient express as well as the post on the Lexus LF-A launch for examples of how large organizations deal (or not deal) with segmentation.
  • In focusing on a segment, the marketing dollars and effort will be better focus and can yield better results for campaigns and attracting the right visitors who will convert.

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What Kick-Ass Teaches Small Businesses About Targeting the Right Market

Posted in Business, Marketing with tags , , , , , , on April 18, 2010 by pdebois
Kick Ass The Movie

A product can gain buzz, like the movie Kick Ass did initially... but is the buzz coming from the right audience?

USA Today posted an article on the movie box office. Not usual. In it, the article mentions the anticipation built for the movie Kick-Ass, even with comparison to another comic book turned movie 300. Not usual either. What was unusual was the relatively low box office. Yes there was online buzz. What’s not kicking ass here?

Well, buzz  does help for exposure.  But the movie had a risk — The main characters were kids, yet the movie had an R rating.

Takeaway for small businesses:

  • Any ol’ buzz is not equivalent to sales — if the audience talking about the product the most can not use/see/purchase it, then the buzz is worthless. Which means….
  • The target consumers really need to be the ones doing the buzzing to make an event/product launch a success. Otherwise…
  • The benefit of what is being offered is not of value to the intended consumer. In this case, the tough sell was getting adults who could see an R-rated movie interested in seeing an action movie with children as main characters.

The last point is not a light subject in movie making. Even Star Wars creator George Lucas, who admits he likes the R2-D2 character the most, was concerned that A New Hope (first Star Wars movie) may not appeal to moviegoers because the earliest scenes had no humans onscreen between the attack on Princess Leia’s ship and when audience first meet Luke.

In short terms the benefit of a product may not be of value to a consumer.  In the case of Kick-Ass, the buzz may have been a distortion to whether the movie was marketed to the right audience. But there is some financial hope for Lionsgate (see this article on the box office for Kick-Ass in the LA Times).

What do you think?

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Want more conversions for your website? Webtrends shows how through web optimization road show

Posted in Analytics, Marketing with tags , , , on April 16, 2010 by pdebois

Webtrends is sending their Optimize experts to four cities to discuss how to conduct website optimization. San Francisco, New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles will be the host cities for the Webtends’ presentation. The goal of the presentation is to show attendees how to increase conversions at a website or more sales, downloads, or more visitor activity.

You can learn more about Webtrend’s web optimization road show and register at the Webtrends blog site.

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50% of US population have a social media profile (from WebProNews)

Posted in Marketing, Social Media with tags , on April 15, 2010 by pdebois

This is a from a tweet sent via PRWire:

Here is a preview of the information:

A new study released today shows that consumer use of social networking web sites is not a youth phenomenon. Apparently now at least half of those living in the United States have social media profiles. While nearly eight in ten teens (78 percent) and 18 to 24s (77 percent) have personal profile pages, almost two-thirds of 25 to 34s (65 percent) and half of 35 to 44s (51 percent) also now have personal profile pages

There are also comments on how interest in online radio programs have spurred interest, particularly with the 18 to 24 segment.  You can learn about more about the article at WebProNews – http://ow.ly/1y0SP

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From Omniture CMO: Why a drop in search traffic is not always bad news

Posted in Marketing with tags , on April 14, 2010 by pdebois

This is a retweet from Omniture’s CMO site – Why a drop in search traffic isn’t always bad news.  The post is a lead to a iMedia Connection post — the idea is to correlate search traffic for a given company to what is happening within said company’s industry for search.  You can learn more about the post here (with graphs at the iMedia Connection site) here: http://om.ly/iCRz

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Think Analytics is for auditing SEO? Use it for its true intent, to guide your online presence

Posted in Analytics, Business, Marketing, Web Analytics with tags , , , , , on April 13, 2010 by pdebois

There are many small businesses that believe that web analytics is linked entirely to PPC and keyword campaigns.  It can be. But analytics solutions can do so much more by inferring your customers wants and desires from a number of marketing channels.  Small businesses are bombarded with new means to market themselves, so as a business adds a new marketing tool — both online and offline — the new tools increases the attention needed.  Remember your business can market itself through:

  • Powerpoint presentations uploaded online
  • Video uploaded and advertised through YouTube, Vimeo, AdMogul, etc.
  • Magazine and Billboard ads with URLs to a landing page
  • Twitter
  • e-Mail (like MailChimps site analytics)
  • Facebook (which requires a different approach to a keyword search….more later!)
  • Profiles on sites such as Linked In, OPEN Forum, Biznik
  • Local or specialty associations like the Web Analytics Association and the New York Entrepreneurship
  • Customer responses via Yelp and Mr Tweet.
  • Blogs

Plus, there are additional analytics for some of these, sources such as MailChimp’s Site Analytics (see a previous post on the subject here).

So the point is to use your analytics solutions as an anchor for understanding your marketing and managing your costs.

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Demographic Magazine! Finally a magazine for analytics fanatics (The Onion)

Posted in Uncategorized on April 13, 2010 by pdebois

Finally a magazine for analytics fanatics who love demographic segmentation — The Onion has a very funny 30 sec psuedo-news radio segment (The anchor’s voice is just perfect for this humor). The following link is for one of their segments — given the analytics nature of this site, I felt it was pretty relevent as well as knee-slapping hilarious.  You can check out the “Demographic Magazine”  session at the following URL below:

http://www.theonion.com/content/radio_news/demography-today-magazine-targets-demographer-demo

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