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Yesterday I listened in on a Marketing Profs Seminar titled "Actionable Web Analytics: Unleash the Marketing Power of Your Web Data."  During this seminar Google Analytics evangelist Avinash Kaushik gave several straight forward tips on how to better harness web analytics data.

The tip that I liked the most is to look at the bounce rate data for referring pages. Of particular interest are the pages with the lowest bounce rates. A low bounce rate is a good indicator that traffic referred from this site is more likely to convert and accept the site's call to action.

Part of search engine optimization (SEO) is garnering high quality links on other sites that can help drive quality traffic to one's site, and using this bounce rate data is an easy way to identify some great sites to consider requesting more links from.  In fact, this strategy is not only accessible to analytics gurus, even those new to using web analytics programs can quickly find and analyze such data. 

The seminar costs money to view, but you still learn from Kaushik at his blog Occam's Razor.

Anti-drug, non-profit websites have a habit of being either dry or so ridiculously overdone that it can make even a seasoned web surfer's eyes bleed. (Don't get me started on the Sunny Side of Truth website…the left navigation bar still infuriates me.)

Today I have discovered a non-profit website that not only gets direct to the point, but utilizes creative Web 2.0 gimmicks.

Through an advertisement on YouTube's homepage, I found the Full Apologies site, dedicated to stopping drunk driving.  The ad cleverly asked me, "What would you do if you killed your best friend?" and invited me to view someone's apology for doing just that.  Admittedly curious, I clicked on the link. (more…)

A few days ago the John McCain campaign launched a new version of their social networking tool, McCainSpace.  Having written about McCainSpace critically before, I figured I’d share some quick thoughts on the tool:

(1) The new version is built using a white label social networking product called KickApps, and features your typical suite of socnet tools: user generated blogs, videos and photos, groups, user profiles, friends, etc.  Kickapps is a nice tool and McCainSpace is professionally done.  However, this is clearly an out of the box solution with generic tools that could be used to power a community of dog lovers or wine aficionados, for example.  There is really nothing about this social network that has anything to do with taking action and winning elections.

The secret of the success of Barack Obama’s social network is that at its heart it is really a social action center.  When you login to My.BarackObama, you are pushed to make phone calls to undecided voters, knock on doors and raise money for the campaign, not to produce content.  Sure, that functionality exists on the Barack Obama website but it isn’t the main point.  The main point of My.BarackObama is to help Obama get elected.  The same cannot be said for the much more nebulous McCainSpace.

Check out these screengrabs of the Obama and McCain tools to see the difference in emphasis.

(2) Even if you disagree with me and like the actual tool set of McCainSpace, I think it is too late in the game to be launching something like this.  Mike Turk summed it up pretty well during a conversation we had with Wesley Donehue on Twitter about the tool:

“Why, oh why? What possessed them to launch a new SocNet with 70 days left? No time to market and they should be beyond that stage.”

Exactly.  Communities take time to build.  This same exact tool launched a year ago might have made a real impact.  This late in the game it seems like too little too late to me.

(3) The McCain campaign’s commitment to their new toy seems pretty weak.  I found out about the new site via an email from the campaign.  However, when I go to the main website and click on the links to  McCainSpace, I’m taken to the old, extremely limited version of the tool people like William Beutler and Mike Turk have been rightly criticizing for the last year.    So there appear to be two versions of McCainSpace running concurrently.I can’t even find a link to the new McCainSpace on www.johmccain.com and there doesn’t appear to be any real integration between the new tool and the campaign website.  Given this, I think the new McCainSpace may  just be a case of the campaign throwing spaghetti against the wall to see what sticks, as opposed to a well thought out initiative like My.BarackObama.

What do you think?

Update: Since I wrote my post, the McCain team has updated their site to integrate McCainSpace in a much more cohesive manner.

I'm kind of disgruntled right now with the Obama VP e-mail and text message campaign.  It now seems like a bait and switch scheme to me. (more…)

Ok, maybe I'm a bad person who relies upon stereotypes too much, but one would think a site for geeks would actually have great features since geeks are so tech savvy.  Wrong.

While browsing through the magazine rack at Borders Books earlier this summer, I came across Geek Monthly with its cover girl, Tina Fey.  Either way, I read the article about her since I like her show 30 Rock and went home to check out the magazine's site.  I was expecting a great site that was graphically designed well with bells and whistles like easy to search sections, forums, great blogs, social media features, and great content.  I expected something like the beautiful site for Backpacker Magazine (since when did backpackers know so much about designing great websites?). However, as you can see in this image, like how the current cover boy (Rainn Wilson from NBC's The Office) is dressed, the site does not look pretty.

Either way, the Geek site has a rather distracting design, no clear navigation, seemingly no access to articles from past issues or from the current issue, no community features, etc.  It does have a blog, but not a great one.  You can also see an article from the current issue, but it pops up as a jpg…  What? 

So, I'm disappointed.  Were my expectations wrong in the first place?

The New York Times ran a story yesterday on the Barack Obama campaign’s aggressive use of text messaging this cycle.  I was interviewed for the article and a few of my quotes made the piece.   The reporter, Brian Stelter, interviewed me via email, so I figured I’d publish my responses in an effort to get an easy blog post out of the deal.  Questions and answers from the interview below.

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Recently, we released our 2008 study of the senatorial campaign websites, and there was a particular element that stood out.  Podcasts were being used by fewer candidates than the year before, despite the fact that it seemed to be a very "tech-y" and potentially useful way to get a candidate's message across.

When I inquired to my co-workers about the discovery, one of them replied that he rarely used podcasts, and he believed that they were a "dying Internet art."  At first, I thought that he was alone in his opinion, but the numbers from the Senate report don't lie.

I decided to do a very informal poll of co-workers and friends to see how often they use podcasts.  I simply emailed 50 of my contacts and asked them two questions: "Have you listened to/downloaded a podcast in the last six months?" and "If so, where did you get it?"  All of the people polled were between the ages of 18 and 40, with a balanced gender ratio.

Then, I compiled all the responses and calculated the results.  The graphs (made using ImpactWatch reporting and graphing tools) displaying the data are below.

It's interesting to note that it seems like my co-worker was correct; most people don't really use podcasts.  At least two of the people that I contacted did not even know what a podcast was.

Of those who listened to podcasts, a majority (nearly a 2/3 supermajority) used iTunes to download them.  Several people were unaware of other ways to procure them.  Are users just ignorant of podcasts?  Are they going out of style?  Or both?

I would venture that the rise in the popularity of blogs has killed the podcast.  Reading a blog is quicker than listening to a podcast, and blogs require a MUCH shorter attention span.  Graphs and the spreadsheet of the data follow:

UPDATE: Chuck pointed me towards this report by Universal McCann that displays on page 63 that podcasts in the US are used by 29.5% of users, which is consistent with my poll.

Excel Spreadsheet of Podcast Poll Data

A few weeks ago we unveiled our favorite WordPress plugins. Drupal is another popular CMS platform we utilize here at Bivings. Here's a list of favorite modules we've compiled for it as well. And as always, feel free to signup and contribute to our wiki. (more…)