Field Notes Inside an Integrated Communications Agency

I attended the Internet Summit ‘09 here in Raleigh last Thursday. The lineup of speakers was quite impressive and the topics were definitely timely. However, the one panel that was stuck in my mind was ‘Mobile Strategies.' The speakers - Andrew Lacy (Tapulous), Sam Matheny (News Over Wireless), Douglas Miller (Evryx Technologies), Barg Upender (Mobomo) and Jud Bowman (PocketGear and Motricity) - really understood the need to integrate mobile applications into all aspects of marketing: branding, acquisition and retention.

The speakers discussed the latest trends and the needs that businesses today face and drove home the idea that we have to engage our customers better than we have in the past. To that end, Barg emphasized that "technology is what is driving demand. Users want relevancy and accessibility" and it is up to us as marketers to meet this demand.

The question for a businesses to include mobile marketing into their programs is not an ‘if' but a ‘how' - what SMS program or what iPhone/BlackBerry/Android application they should invest in. The necessity to reach consumers through multiple, relevant touch points is clear. As consumers become more and more comfortable with mobile technology, they will seek out businesses that suit their abilities best. If mobile is not part of a business's strategy the result will be the risk of losing customers to competitors who have these efforts in place.

The main challenge businesses face when entering the mobile marketing world is the lack of consistency. The way campaigns are launched and tracked is not consistent across vendors and neither is the device users' use. A user's experience is dependent on what they view, how and on what medium they used. With over 1,700 different mobile phones currently in use, it appears to be impossible to get a consistent look and feel on the user end, thus not enabling control of the user experience. How do we make sure that users' have a good experience? How do we ensure that what they see is what we want them to see? There are always barriers to reaching your audience with any new form of advertising. Stay tuned as mobile marketing strategy unfolds.

My first post on the Capstrat blog!

Not sure what life this will take on but I hope to write a lot more often than I do with my current blog Diary of a Madman, which is as often as Halley's comet passes the earth. It's possible that I keep this blog more closely aligned with what I do professionally and the Diary will end up being a hodge-podge of randomness such as what I had for lunch. We'll see. On the Diary I tend to write on the wonderful world of web analytics and will probably transition those sort of posts here as well as occasionally veer into web marketing. Adjust bookmarks accordingly!

My first entry here focuses on my impressions of the Internet Summit that took place in Raleigh last week. Keep in mind these are my impressions and not those of Capstrat (unless we share a collective brain). I don't tend to go to many of these kinds of events other than the annual Omniture rock concert/Summit in Utah, so I don't have a lot to compare this to but I think overall I was a little underwhelmed by the Internet Summit.

From my perspective it was a little too high level for my liking. That doesn't mean it didn't have some value as there are definitely attendees with varying levels of experience and knowledge in this space. If you've never heard of Twitter then this might have been a very educational experience. If you are looking for pointers on strategy, examples of tactics that companies have deployed, or deep knowledge in areas than you probably came away slightly disappointed. I found most of the topics to be a broad overview of what people are doing on the Internet, but nothing tangible that I can use for myself. 

Because of the limitations of time and place I didn't get to see all the speakers, but here are the sessions I saw and my take on them:

Keynotes:

I found John Kosner from ESPN to be fairly entertaining and knowledgable and the fact that he's Bill Simmons boss didn't hurt him, as I am a huge Simmons fan. Especially interesting is ESPN's decision to be pipe-agnostic which is a key take-away from his speech. Being pipe-agnostic means that you as a company don't care how people get your content whether its on the web, print, tv, mobile, etc. As long as you check out ESPN's content, they don't really concern themselves with how you do it. That is a escpecially important as it allows your company to be everywhere and mass-consumed. Companies that ultimately wall themselves off and limit how you get content or products are going to stifle their growth because customers want freedom to choose how they receive it. Think of Netflix. By having multiple approaches for how you watch movies they are able to touch more people. Same concept here, let the customers pick. Something the record industry probably should have thought of.

The next keynote I saw was from the CEO of Technorati and it was sort of pedestrian with a lot of data thrown in. A lot of folks I chatted with were not terribly impressed. The one sort of surprising thing was the rising amount of professional bloggers of which I guess I am sort of one now.

Onto the sessions....

Blogging: New Media and Personal Branding:

This session was probably the highlight for me as the speakers were pretty good with Andy Beal (Marketing Pilgrim) and Rick Klau (Blogger/Google) being the standouts. I thought they had good ideas for how to generate more traffic, followers, etc., such as writing a lot and getting linkages. I wish they would have spent more time on measuring social media. It's one of the dirtiest things to measure, success on social media, but I would have liked to hear tangible things they've done to measure ROI or change perception based on companies actively participating in this space. I know a lot of people would cringe about trying to tie social media to objectives but I think at the end of the day you need to have some sort of measure as to whether or not you are doing this well. A lot of folks have mentioning tracking # of comments, followers, subscribers, and rankings as a way to measure but wondered if there is something more.

I suppose that if you have a measure of success such as moving from 10 followers to 100 followers then that is success. But I'd rather measure it against changes in perception (via surveys) or cost avoidance (such as reducing customer attrition or reducing customer support calls). Like the panelists said, it all depends on your goal. So the key take-away...if your company is getting into social media, have a purpose. Don't do it just because it's the 'in' thing to do or just to say you're doing social media. Have a reason and measure against that goal. 

As a side-note to social media measurement, I know Avinash Kaushik has a chapter on it in his new book, Web Analytics 2.0. I just haven't gotten to that chapter to absorb his teachings, but you should definitely go buy it here. I need to become an affiliate for Avinash as I tell everyone I know to go get his book. I should at least try to profit it from it.

For personal blogging I think there are more interesting goals. Quite honestly, the more you write and the more passionate you are about particular subjects, significant doors can be opened. Personally, I know my meager blog doesn't get a ton of traffic, but it gets the right kind of traffic, especially in the web analytics space. I've had companies contact me about job opportunities and I've had closer communication with Omniture because of my blog. If I was actually serious about it I could probably get speaking engagements and book/movie deals (I mean wouldn't you want to see a movie about this?). Klau mentioned he blogged so people would perceive him differently and not pigeonhole him. Additionally, someone on the panel mentioned that quantity is not as important as the quality of the people reading your content. Are the right people reading? So the take-away....blogging and blogging well with a purpose can help build your personal brand and get you places such as being viewed as a thought-leader or even a job.

Analytics:

Next on the agenda was the Analytics panel. Obviously, that was of keen interest to me. What was awesome to see is that it was one of the most heavily attended sessions, standing room only.  This is important for a couple of reasons...1) the continued interest keeps me employed which is of paramount value 2) shows that companies are starting to grasp the importance of measuring their online presence. Unfortunately, I think we are still in the infancy of web analytics, where a very few companies are actively measuring and, more importantly, reacting to it. Intuition and HIPPOs (Highest-Paid Person's Opinions) still run a vast majority of decision making, but that is going to change rapidly as smart companies view analytics as a competitive advantage. 

As for the panel itself, I didn't get the sense that the participants were that knowledgable in this space. That's not to say they aren't, I just didn't hear much that led me to believe it besides Ron Garmon at VueLogic (he was good). As I mentioned before, it seemed like the theme was that you need to measure stuff and test. Basic stuff, but surprisingly few companies are doing it. Why is that? 

My take is multi-pronged:

1) Companies think web analytics is hard or you need a PhD in stats to do this which is completely incorrect. The tools are getting easier to use, all you need is curiosity and a will to learn. 

2) The implementation of tools is complex and difficult. It definitely can be, as tools like Omniture aren't for the faint of heart, but that is starting to erode or at least has the potential to, see Adobe buying Omniture (more on that in my next post).

3) As mentioned, intuition still reigns supreme despite evidence to the contrary. People want to believe they are right or don't want to hear their baby is ugly. Often companies view their content or website as if it was their child and don't want anyone to tell them it's not the greatest site ever. As a side story, I heard a VP at Ford mention one time they used to internally bet on which banner would get the best results. They were wrong every single time. Lesson is that we look at things with our own inherent bias, instead of how customers view us.

4) Lack of staff with experience or expertise. It really is difficult to find anyone that has any sort of long-term experience in this space and even more surprising is the lack of higher-education programs in web analytics. North Carolina State has the Advanced Analytics program and the Univesity of British Columbia has the Award of Achievement in Analytics, but other than that I can't think of a program that exists. There aren't any teachers to teach essentially. As a side-note, this would be a great opportunity to embed these kinds of courses in an undergrad marketing degree or an MBA. 

As for the panel, things tended to stay on the generic side and maybe that was fine for everyone in the room but I wanted someone to get into strategies to solve some of the big problems with web analytics such as campaign attribution, how to pick revelant KPI, or how to measure offline world influencing the online world (and vice-versa). It's possible that the panel setting wasn't the best way to do this and maybe case studies or someone talking about the new developments in the analytics space would have been what I was looking for.

Social Media: Engage:

Quite honestly I missed most of this session because I decided to take a walk down Fayetteville St and get a bite to eat because I am crazy about what I eat and couldn't dine on the food provided. I wish I would have seen more of it because I do think its fascinating about the phenomena around people sharing things with each other. Of course, I love to measure the effect of that behavior as well. Smart companies are making it easier for people to share stories, content, links, etc in a multitude of ways such as Digg, Facebook, Del.icio.us, Google reader, etc. The key to that is not just enabling the ability to do so, but actually creating something that someone would want to share. I really believe companies (and people) lose sight of the fact that, in order for things to be shared, there actually has to be something interesting/important to share. Sounds simple, but it's often overlooked. 

Online Advertising Strategies:

This to me was one of the more disappointing sessions as there was no strategy to be found. It literally was an overview, and a fairly shallow one at that. I should have taken more notes, but literally it was basic tactics like Paid Search. I would have loved to hear how a company like Expedia looked at how all their tactics work together to generate sales on Expedia. For example, how do they evaluate where to spend money in advertising in a media-mix? Do they understand the effect of banner ads on their paid search? Those are the kinds of strategies I wanted to hear discussed, not that companies need to do Paid Search and then banners and so on down the interactive marketing food-chain. Even with banner ads, what kinds of things are they doing such as multivariate testing with different creative approaches or retargeting? Just needed more depth instead of the basic "here are things to drive traffic to your site".

Online Video Discussion:

Stepped out of my area of experience and ventured over to hear about video. I don't know much about this space but thought the speakers were entertaining, especially Max Haot from Livestream. Again to rehash a point, being able to distribute media across multiple outlets is more important than walling off where people view the content. 

Twitter/Real time:

Its very possible I missed some valuable insights by this point in the day as it was getting late and my caffeine buzz was deminishing. Nothing terribly revolutionary here but somewhat informative to learn of some new business ventures using Twitter as a platform such as Twitpay and Spitter. What I can't figure out is how those ventures are going to make any money. More importantly with Twitter is whether or not the real-time search stuff eventually screws the Google search monopoly. Twitter has a crazy amount of traffic and searches, wait until they start monetizing it. I am not a huge user of Twitter but I do use it for finding out whether or not people have the same problem I have with software vendors or other products. Example, if I create a support ticket for Omniture, it might get answered in a week. Do the same thing in Twitter and I have a response from either Omniture or another user in like an hour. The ability to have problems or issues amplified and searchable is going to completely change the nature of customer support. Companies that are listening and reacting build up trust and credibility as well as learning insights about their customers. 

Coda:

Its very possible that I don't understand the intent of the conference. Maybe it is designed to just give an overview and not get into specifics. Maybe it's just a place for vendors to showcase, job seekers to meet people, or an excuse to hang out at the new convention center all day (which is fine as well), but I was looking for things I can take back to my company or clients and use. I wanted to hear of something I hadn't considered or can easily read about. My suggestion is to potentially have less panels and more demonstration on what companies are actually doing on the web and get underneath the overview and dig into strategy. Sometimes seeing is the best education, I just didn't see much that caused me to write down something to check out later. I know this conference is in its embryonic stages, but I hope to see the topics explored a little deeper next time. I think the Internet Summit can become a really valuable event, it just needs a little fine-tuning. 

If anyone has other insights or take-aways from the session, especially the ones I didn't post about, please feel free to add in the comments. Or call me an idiot for anything I've written above. But if you are going to call me an idiot, please have proof.

Looking forward to posting more soon.........

A maelstrom of sorts, the Internet has risen to dominate culture and society in less than a decade. Its power comes from being able to hold so much information and to provide that information in record-breaking time. Today, it seems all-powerful. It's definitely a force to be reckoned with...and followed.

In my opinion, the Internet has become something that we NEED. We need it to stay connected not only to each other, but to vital information. So, who in this world could bring down this force that has been guiding our lives for years now? Bill Gates? Ben Cope? Ken Eudy? The Transformers? God?

Well, believe it or not...it was Michael Jackson. Yes, the King of Pop.

As Michael Jackson's living reign came to a close on June 25, he brought down some of the Internet with him. According to CNN.com, for almost two hours Google had trouble pulling up search results for Jackson-related queries. Blogs (such as TMZ and Perez Hilton, which first broke the news) had several outages and AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) was down for approximately 40 minutes. With an astounding 30% of tweets related to the incident, it's not surprising the crash-prone Twitter-verse sputtered out.

Google Trends rated the Jackson story as "volcanic" as web teams tried frantically to overcome the unprecedented amount of traffic. Wikipedia had close to 500 edits to Michael Jackson's entry in less than 24 hours, causing a "temporary overload."

Not only was this social media/Internet overload unprecedented, it was a milestone for mobile Internet traffic. Because it was mid-afternoon on a Thursday, many used their cell phones to figure out what was going on. It was a news "feeding frenzy." Busy twitterers sent Michael Jackson-related terms to the top of the site's Trending Topics list while news networks were clamoring to be the first to get any tidbit of information. People feel a need (or hunger) for such information. Many have recognized that being involved in social media is becoming more of a necessity than a personal preference.

So, when did you find out what happened? For those not connected to the social media world, the information may come much later. I realized this as I spoke with a family friend who was shocked when I broke the news to her that night. I was shocked, too. The world was a-buzz with the news but she had heard nothing about it. She revealed to me that she prided herself on not watching the news because she was tired of hearing "depressing crime stories." She refused to get on Facebook or any other social media site because she didn't want to make herself accessible in that way.

Now, this may be far-reaching but compare Michael Jackson to a natural phenomenon such as a hurricane, tornado, flood, snowstorm, etc. (in my opinion he was just as big ). Following a natural disaster, people who don't get the story in time could be in grave danger. Those who knew what was coming would quickly evacuate, leaving those "living under a rock" behind.

The digital divide is becoming wider and more polarizing everyday as the world becomes smaller and more connected. Social media has created a grade school-esque milieu. Those not connected are like the playground loners who wonder what everyone else is whispering about.

The digerati should focus on helping to connect people that are not able to be connected (those in remote areas and developing communities). The unconnected should help themselves by embracing social media to listen in on what everyone is talking about.

I attended an interesting panel at SXSW09 on what teens want in a web site. Unfortunately there were not many tangible strategies offered that audience members could take home and implement from this panel.  However, it was interesting to hear teens talk freely about how they use the web in general.  Since there wasn't an abundance of specific leaning to take back with me, a few interesting comments are paraphrased below for your knowledge and/or enjoyment.

1. "It's funny to see my teachers on Facebook; it shows you that they are really people too."
2. "Me and all my friends use MySpace and not Facebook, its way cooler."
3. "Us high school kids have so much drama in our lives.  It's like, why am I not in your top 20 friends on MySpace? That's rough."
4. "I use Wikipedia most of the time for my research papers."
5. "Internet explorer?  Ew please, I only use Firefox." 
   
6. "Me and my friends all just looooove Facebook Mafia Wars! (Cough, Cord.)"
7. "Wait, an RSS what?  What happened?"

Making sites accessible for disabled users has always been an afterthought. Right now, making sites usable for low-vision and blind users is a cobbled together assortment of best practices and hacks. Image alt tags, semantic markup, and "skip to content" links are a few of the techniques we use to address the problem.

The problem is that these were added after the fact--and that they were designed for the static Web. It comes with it a number of problems.

• Custom components are common. You can make a thumb-slider out of a set of DIVs and some images, for example. But the only elements that are natively navigable through the keyboard are links and form elements.
• In-page state changes, such as AJAX updates are also common. To assistive technology users, however, it can be difficult or impossible to determine what has changed on a page.
  

 

Enter WAI-ARIA

Web Accessibility Initiative’s Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA) is a  specification designed to provide better hooks for assistive technology (AT) devices. To Web developers, it's a set of attributes that bolt on to the HTML elements you know and love.

These attributes help you provide instructions to AT devices, such as:
 

• Describe what objects are, using Roles. For example, you can define how one set of DIVs is a section vs. another set of DIVs, which represents a progress bar. This helps navigability of the page by providing much-needed context.
• Describe the States of objects, like "this progress bar is at 34%."
• Make any element keyboard focusable -- or not. This overrides the tabindex attribute and allows it to be applied to any visible element. Users can tab more effectively though the areas of your page.
• Designate places on a page to receive updates and changes with Live Regions. This is kind of analogous to the yellow fade technique, which is commonly used to visually indicate a state change on an AJAX-y page.

Support Today

Support for ARIA is strong and building, with Firefox 3, Opera, WebKit / Safari, and IE 8 actively implementing this spec. Freedom Scientific's JAWS screenreader is also building in support.

Adding ARIA attributes won't break current pages , or obsolete old browsers from your site. It only makes inaccessible widgets more accessible. It will, however, make your pages invalid XHTML or HTML. This is because those namespaces do not acknowledge these new attributes. HTML 5 is expected to include these, whenever it comes out. Nonetheless, the idea of avoiding ARIA because it doesn't validate is a weak argument.

If you're designing a site that you expect will receive traffic from visually impaired users, it makes sense to check out ARIA.

Microsoft is feeling the heat in the browser arena. Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) is in development and they are planning to robustly support RSS, CSS 2 and Javascript. No way?! IE 8 might almost be as good as Firefox 2!

After putting the last nail in Netscape's coffin in 2001, Microsoft rested on its laurels and enjoyed the spoils of the browser war. Since then Firefox has taken a quarter of the browser market by winning people over with it's standards support, tight security and an easy add-on framework. After waiting five years, Microsoft finally released Internet Explorer 7. But their loss of market share is driving them to immediately jump into full development of Internet Explorer 8.

But regardless of motive, this is fantastic news. It seems that browser competition is once again driving innovation in the browser business. It really speaks to the maturity of the open source movement that Mozilla is spurring Microsoft to once again take browser innovation seriously.

Read more about IE 8 here.

I have decided to raise a point of order with the English language, based on evidence which has recently come to bear. I would like to formally request the immediate and unconditional abolishment of the word 'podcast.'

I have a mondo affinity for words, don't get me wrong. I can write 'mondo' and 'affinity' next to one another in a sentence, and most of you get my meaning. But sometimes, certain junk words can be gummy enough to stick to our regular-usage muscle. Once Merriam-Webster writes them into law, such words can wreak havoc in contexts worldwide for generations.

Sitting around Innovation Station this morning, I was privy to an internal discussion of a client's expectations, as they pertained to a podcast. After several minutes of furious debate, it became clear that 'podcast' brought absolutely no clarity to the scope of the project. In fact, I contend that attaching that handle muddied the waters.

The term podcast was coined in 2004 with the splash of Apple's iPod. The ensuing cultural revolution of handheld entertainment and communication solidified the 'i-' prefix, and '-pod' as the suffix of the compartmentally-hip. At it's inception, the iPod was an mp3 player, designed for portable audio. The term became synonymous with portable, streamable audio cross-media, and soon the podcast was born, a portmanteau of 'iPod' and 'broadcast.' Used to describe organized audio presented over the Web, the podcast separated itself in that one could subscribe to a podcast feed and have installments pulled down to their device automatically. Well that was all great, but in just a couple of rabbit-speed gestational periods, the iPod gave birth to the video iPod, which gave birth to the iPhone...and now you have rich media for nearly all of the senses at your fingertips. And who hasn't heard of RSS by now? You can practically get your groceries via RSS these days. Bloggers everywhere found themselves stumbling over the clunkiness of describing the New Hotness as video podcasts, or rich media podcasts, or vlogs, or...or...

Merriam-Webster gleans the list of words we use every 10 years or so, adding and striking thousands upon thousands of words based on their popularity or obsolescence. The last major revision came in 2003. So you see, folks...WE STILL HAVE TIME. According to M-W (we're tight like that), they receive thousands of letters every year formally petitioning the addition or deletion of all types of words - but they are quick to add that there is no tangible way to directly sway the jury. I would very much like to meet one of these verbal illuminati and invite them to dinner, but that is beside the point. As frustrating as democracy itself, the only way to truly affect change is to encourage others to support you. So today, I implore you. Walk with me. Help our clients understand the Beast. Help us understand our clients. There just is no podcast anymore. There is only the webcast. There is only the blog. Both are the gryphons of our wired world, and no content is off limits. Just add adjectives to describe the nature of your content, and we will build it to perfection.