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We started The Bivings Report back in 2001.  In its first iteration it focused exclusively on online marketing, and was written primarily by a former employee named Andrew Dimock.  Andrew did a great job in those early years of building an audience without much writing support from the rest of us. 

In late 2005, we launched a new version of The Bivings Report that had a broader focus.  We started writing about the work we do and how we do it, and more generally about the things that get us excited.  We also invited everyone in the firm to contribute. 

Expanding the scope of the blog was a pivotal moment for us.  The blog has built a solid readership and is an important part of our marketing efforts.  More importantly, I think the process of writing the blog has made us smarter and better at what we do.

We put up our 1,000th post the other day, so I figured it was a good time to go through the archive and highlight some of our most popular posts and favorites.  Here goes:

• Redesigning USA Today - Our design team took a shot at redesigning USA Today.  Even though the design is three years old, it is still better than the current USA Today and most newspaper site, in my opinion.
• Wordpress vs. Drupal - This post comparing the two platforms still gets hundreds of visitors a day due links and search engines.  It is our most read post. 
• Comcast and Twitter - Now it seems like every other day someone goes in and mines Twitter for  customer service trends.  Back fifteen months ago when we did this analysis, it was still a new thing and this post got a lot of attention.
• 9 Ways Newspapers Can Improve Their Web Sites - This was our first truly viral post, and spawned a brief period when I was obsessed with list posts.  I could relapse at any time. 
• Five Technologies that Will Impact the 2008 Elections -  Another post that went viral during our list post phase.  This was also the first post from our blog to make the Digg homepage.
• John Edward’s 2: The Campaign Site -  I pretty much loved all of head designer’s, Tom McCormick, campaign website reviews (Clinton, Edwards 1, Obama 1, Obama 2,  McCain 1, McCain 2, McCain 3, and Rudy).  But this one is my favorite because it led to hate mail from a few Edwards supporters who don’t get Tom’s sense of humor.

Anyone that has been to a tech conference the last few years knows that there is a huge amount of back channel communication that occurs on Twitter.   People provide live coverage of the talks they go to.  People organize dinner plans.  People stage revolts against panelists.  The conversation is constant, unfiltered and takes place in real time.

The preeminent poli-tech conference, Personal Democracy Forum, takes place next Monday and Tuesday in New York City.  Since we are a sponsor and partner of the Personal Democracy Forum, we decided to launch a tool that will aggregate conversation around the conference.  Check out Twitterslurp for #pdf2009.

We are finishing up details, but here is a list of Twitterslurp’s key features:

• The site will ingest any posts tagged as “#pdf09″, “#pdf2009″ or “Personal Democracy Forum” onto our main page in real time.  We can expand the words we track if other phrases/tags are used.  This will allow us to ingest the entire conversation, and not limit us to only pulling in mentions of a single hashtag.
• Twitterslurp features a leaderboard listing the top Twitter users at the conference based on volume.  Later today, we are going to expand this to feature a fuller leaderboard.  Our hope is that this directory of people tweeting about the conference will make it easy for people to make connections with others at the conference.
• Twitterslurp features a stats page that analyzes the volume of tweets that are coming in.
• We’ll be able to use our backend system to filter out spammers.  At the end of the conference, we’ll also have a database of all the relevant tweets which will allow us to do a full analysis of the conversation post-conference.

Most importantly, we’ll be releasing the code behind Twitterslurp to the open source community next week so that other conferences/organizations can use the tool.

Check out Twitterslurp, and follow @bivings for the latest about the release of the tool.

I’ve been doing web work for over ten years, so I’m sort of jaded about new websites and online initiatives.  I’m not easily impressed.  It gives me great joy when I run into something truly new and novel, as I did last night.

I happened on the website www.fixoutlook.org, which is an effort to lobby Microsoft into supporting CSS and other design standards in Outlook 2010.  The site essentially functions as a Twitter petition.  Twitter users can sign on to the effort simply by sending out a tweet that includes the words fixoutlook.org.  The site then displays all the tweets in a constantly updated wall of Twitter avatars.

The difference between good and great is always in the details, and www.fixoutlook.org gets the details right:

• Having the wall update in real time and including the avatar is a powerful incentive to send the tweet.  Maybe I’m simple, but I wanted to send out a tweet about it just so I could watch my picture show up on the screen.  And once I sent that tweet, all my followers know about the effort, causing the message to spread via word of mouth.
• The site has a counter showing how many people have sent tweets so far.  This will lead to people coming back to the site to check on progress.  Over 13,000 people have sent tweets so far.
• It is smart to have people tweet the URL of the site instead of a hashtag.  This ensures the URL of the site is in every tweet, driving people back to the mother ship.

This is a really well done initiative.  Check it out.

In my last post we talked about this thing called Social Medianess and the responsibility those of us in the digital landscape carry to help others understand how it works.

Today I’d like to dive into the essence of social media and clarify exactly what that is.

People equate technology with social media. I can see why this easily happens, however, technology has nothing to do with social media.

There are two words in social media. Take out the “media”, and that leaves you “social”.

What do we do when we are social?

• We talk
• Communicate
• Share ideas
• Give advice
• Help
• Listen
• Swap recipes
• Share sports scores
• Tell stories

Simply, we engage with one another. And, if we are doing this in the true essence of being social, then we do so unselfishly. That’s important:

Social Media thrives on the unselfish communication and sharing of ideas and information.

We’ve been doing this since the dawn of time and we will continue to do so regardless of the medium. It’s easy to get caught up on the tools, but the tools are only that – tools. They are not what make social media work. People and the people behind the tools make social media work.

Technology has simply enabled the platform to open to those who have been doing social media before it was called that. This has changed things.

People now have the “power” to request a new way of communication from the brands and businesses they’ve done business with. On the flip side, companies and organizations have the opportunity to communicate with their customers on a level that wasn’t available before.

This creates tremendous opportunities, and the people and organizations who follow the general principals of being social will find the social media pool not as intimidating.

How would you define unselfish communication?

I wrote a post a few weeks back that looked at how Facebook and Twitter compare as traffic drivers.  What I didn’t mention in my post is that over the course of the last six to twelve months the amount of traffic driven by both sites has grown exponentially. 

Last week at the 140 Conference, venture capitalist Fred Wilson gave a talk in which he shared some observations from the referral logs of his portfolio companies.  He found traffic from Twitter and Facebook has been increasing at a rate of 30-40 percent per month for the last year.  If this trend continues, this means that social media (lead by Twitter and Facebook) will surpass Google as a traffic source for many sites sometime in the next year. 

I have a couple of quick observations about this, based on the site stats I have access to, which are a mix of sites for non-profits, advocacy organizations and companies:

• Traffic from Twitter and Facebook is increasing by 20-30% per month on the sites I manage that (1) produce content on a consistent basis and (2) are working to promote themselves on these platforms.  These types of sites lend themselves to Twitter and Facebook, and thus are getting lots of traffic.
• Twitter and Facebook do not drive much traffic at all to sites that don’t produce consistent content and which aren’t actively engaged in the platforms.  Google is far and way the dominate traffic source for this type of site.

This is probably an obvious point, but you really have to earn your social media traffic by producing good content and working to promote it.

A video of Wilson’s talk is embedded below. 

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My daughter's math class needed to find examples of periodic behavior and estimate a sine curve to fit the data, both manually and by using a TI-83 calculator.  Obvious examples of periodic behavior are average city monthly temperatures and low/high tides.  My daughter wanted something a bit more unusual; her teacher suggested looking at data for live births by month in the U.S. prior to the introduction of contraceptives.

 So off to Google we went.  She typed in "live births by month in the U.S., 1954" and got this search result page.  We clicked on several of the links, ending up at this page about the US census.  Data is yearly, we needed monthly.  But there is a URL at the bottom of the page that we followed to the Center for Disease Control.  And with a few more clicks, we found what we were looking for, Yearly Vital Statistics Reports.

We downloaded various PDFs, found the monthly numbers, and my daughter used Excel to plot the graphs, fiddled with the constants to come up with a good approximation, and used her calculator to get the best sine curve fit possible.  About an hour and a half in work.

While she was finishing up, an advertisement for Bing was running on the TV.  So I gave it a try, and typed in exactly the same thing:"live births by month in the U.S., 1954."  I didn't know what to expect, but here's the page, and look at the fourth result.  Bing-o! Not only the data, but various graphs and explanations for the seasonal variation in live births.  All in two clicks.

This is only one anecdote.  I don't know yet if Bing is a decision engine, but in this case it was a powerful discovery engine that beat Google hands-down.

Search engines meet social networks in Hunch.com , while Bing.com delivers fewer search results with higher relevance – welcome to decision engines.

Flickr creator Caterina Fake Monday launched Hunch.com, a search engine guiding users to their ideal sites and products for searches on business, travel, shopping and even life advice.

Type in a question like “Am I in the Friend Zone?” and Hunch will lead you through a series of questions about your personal relationships and to your answer.

Outside of being an exaggerated version of a Cosmopolitan quiz, Hunch offers quite a bit more analysis and learns about you the more you – and others – use it. The system blends social media advice and internet data to get users to answer other users’ questions as the system builds.

Fake sees Hunch as a useful tool that will grow into an enormous resource.

“It might take five years for Hunch to reach maturity,” she said, according to SearchEngineLand.com. “Right now, it’s like Wikipedia circa 2002. To me, what makes social software great is that it improves over time.”

Also giving traditional search giant Google a run for its money is Bing.com, marketed as a “decision engine” and launched late last month as an answer to overwhelming search results on traditional engines.

Andy Beal of Marketing Pilgrim reported in May that 42 percent of internet users “are constantly unsatisfied with our initial search results.”

“Search engines do a decent job of helping people navigate the Web and find information, but they don’t do a very good job of enabling people to use the information they find,” Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said in a statement.

Like Google, Bing aggregates all types of content on a particular search term, but organizes it in a more useful way. Type in “Rome” and you’ll get searches organized by the city’s history, weather, events, travel deals, etc.

While it remains to be seen how big an impact systems like Hunch and Bing will have on traditional internet searching, it’s clear that innovative technologies focused on quality over quantity and a way to utilize community intellect cannot be ignored.

Like many, I logged on to Facebook at midnight Friday night/Saturday morning to grab my chosen Facebook URL and to reserve some vanity URLs for clients as a way of protecting their brands.  I wasn’t alone - within 24 hours of the launch more than 3 million vanity URLs had been claimed. 

Over the weekend, I entertained myself by typing in some interesting Facebook URLs to see who had reserved them.  That led to me typing in www.facebook.com/democrats and www.facebook.com/republicans to see if both parties had claimed their brand on Facebook.  As you’ll see if you click through, the DNC has claimed /democrats while the RNC does not yet control /republicans. 

This was baffling to me, as I can’t imagine anyone in the tech space not knowing about the vanity URL land grab, and I knew the RNC had a larger following on Facebook than the DNC (84,000 to 43,000, after looking it up).  So what’s going on?

I looked at it further this morning and solved this great mystery.  It turns out the RNC has invested their resources in building a group instead of a page.  Groups are not eligible for vanity URLs at this point. 

I’m sure the RNC made the decision to create a group instead of a page long ago, when it was unclear what the best practice was for companies and organizations.  Facebook launched new page functionality in February of 2009, and only at that point did it become clear that pages were the way to go.  The key advantage of pages over groups  is that as a page admin you can create status updates like regular users, which then appear in your fans news feeds.  If you are the RNC, these status updates can be a really powerful way to drive action.  With the launch of vanity URLs, the case for pages over groups is now even stronger.

This is sort of a bummer if you are the RNC.  They have outperformed the DNC on Facebook, but are handicapped by their decision to create a group instead of a page.  They have probably gone too far down the group path to switch at this point.  If I were them, I’d want a do over.

I was checking out my Facebook news feed today at lunch, and noticed two very different levels of reaction to status updates from two of the pages I am fans of.  One of the pages belongs to San Antonio Spurs basketball hero Manu Ginobili and the other is for online retailer Zappos.com.  As you can see below, Ginobili’s update quickly generated 61 likes and 39 comments, while the Zappos update only got two likes and comments.

This despite the fact that Zappos has 16,745 fans as compared to Ginobili’s 11,663, and the fact that Ginobili’s update is in Spanish and probably can’t be read by many of his fans.  If you go through the fan pages of Ginobili and Zappos, you’ll see that Manu’s updates consistently produce significantly more activity than Zappos updates.  Why?

Manu is a living, breathing person, so his updates fit in seamlessly with the news feed items produced by my friends and family.  It is written in the first person, and publicizes an upcoming charity event he is putting on.  It is actually the kind of update I’ve seen my actual friends write.

Even though I have chosen to be a fan of Zappos, its updates feel a bit like advertising when I see them in my Facebook feed.  They seem out of place and I tune them out.  In Zappos’ case, I tune them out despite the fact the company is doing a great job of making their updates compelling and providing a behind the scenes look at their brand. 

As I’ve written before, Facebook is still primarily about friends.  In this example, Ginobili’s fan page looks and act a lot more like my friends do than Zappos does.  So it drives more activity, and Ginobili’s fans are more engaged with his page than fans of Zappos.  It will be interesting to see if this changes as Facebook continues to grow. 

Around eight months ago we made the decision to start using Basecamp to manage nearly all our projects.  Prior to the move to Basecamp, we used a patch work of tools to manage our work.  We had an internal wiki we used for many of our task lists and project documentation.  We used a bug tracking system for some of our more intense programming projects.  We used Basecamp for some work.  And for some projects we relied on emails, Outlook task lists, whiteboards and Excel sheets.

While in retrospect this random approach to project management seems dysfunctional, it really wasn’t a huge problem until we started growing and hiring new people.  When you have a small group of people that have worked together a long time, formal process and tools are less important.  You just sort of know how people work, where they saved their files and how they want to be communicated with.  However, this reliance on personal relationships falls apart when the volume of work increases and you have to integrate new employees into a poorly defined process.  It doesn’t scale.

So we started using Basecamp.

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Twitter was barely off the ground before companies and programmers were looking for ways to monetize it, and a new tool by 83 Degrees has found a new  way to do that.

The tech company on Sunday launched Super Chirp, a subscription-based service allowing Twitter users to require payment to receive certain direct messages.

While most Twitter users aren’t thrilled about paying for Tweets from their favorite celebrities or areas of interest, even getting just a fraction of their fan base to sign up could end up turning huge profits for Twitter publishers with a big enough following.

The Washington Post reported that if even one percent of Shaquille O’Neal’s 1.1 million followers paid $0.99 a month to access a for-subscribers-only direct message stream, “he could bring in about $100,000 worth of extra revenue this year.”

Super Chirp is a little different from past efforts at monetizing Twitter streams, such as Twitpub. Unlike its competitor, Super Chirp doesn’t require Twitter users to create a new account, but lets them set up special direct-message only streams for subscribers, according to TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington.

“Twitter is mobile and it’s real time, two huge advantages over normal fan sites. And it’s constantly refreshed with new content,” Arrington reported Sunday.

The tool runs through PayPal, and Super Chirp keeps 30 percent (including PayPal fees) of the profit. Publishers can charge anywhere from $0.99 to $9.99 for subscriptions.

TechCrunch points out the tool can be utilized not only by celebrities and businesses, but also by charities.

“Loyal supporters can donate to the charity and get a stream of news relevant to that charity,” Arrington reported.

While Super Chirp offers something new over competitors like Twitpub and Be a Magpie, brainstorming ways to profit from Twitter has just begun.

“Super Chirp is just the latest in a stream of third-party services and apps trying to capitalize on Twitter’s social infrastructure,” Arrington said.

I participated in a panel discussion put on by NextGenWeb last week on building communities online.  Over the course of the discussion, I mentioned that on the sites I manage Twitter generally drives more traffic than Facebook.  Adam Conner from Facebook was also on the panel, and quickly rattled off a few sites for which Facebook is a significant traffic referrer as a way of countering my argument. 

The fact that Twitter drives traffic is not news, but I figured I would do some quick research and share my experience as to how Twitter and Facebook compare as traffic drivers.  I looked at the May statistics for five sites Bivings’ manages that maintain active presences on both Facebook and Twitter.  On Facebook, in all cases the organization’s primary presence on Facebook was a Fan Page.  Here is what I found:

• On average, Twitter was the fourth biggest referrer for the sites.  It ranged from the third to fifth most popular referrer. 
• On average, Facebook was the tenth biggest referrer for the sites.  It ranged from sixth to fifteenth most popular referrer.
• Twitter drove more traffic than Facebook on all the sites I looked at, despite the fact that on two of the sites the number of Facebook fans was far greater than the number of Twitter followers (a ratio of three to one).
• Overall, Twitter was responsible for driving two times more traffic than Facebook. 

Note that these stats probably underestimate the traffic driven by Twitter, as it doesn’t take into account traffic coming from third party tools like Twhirl and Tweetdeck. 

Obviously, this is not a scientific study and the results are anecdotal.  Things may also change quickly.  But I’m not going to let that stop me from speculating as to why Twitter is driving more traffic on the sites we manage.

Twitter is all about links.  Facebook, less so.  While my personal Facebook stream is slowly being taken over by people cross publishing their Twitter feeds, the status updates of my friends on Facebook typically don’t include links.  And if they do, I typically don’t click on them.  On Facebook, I’m much more interested in looking at pictures and engaging in discussions with people than clicking on links to third party sites.  Finding and clicking on links is the thing I do most on Twitter.

The level of engagement people have with the pages they are fans of on Facebook is pretty low.  Facebook redesigned their pages feature a few months back, and the change definitely made pages more valuable by inserting page updates into users Facebook news feed.  But I think users still tend to tune these updates out, and are also pretty good at ignoring the mass messages page administrators can send out through Facebook. 

Indeed, last night Patrick Ruffini tweeted that for the projects he is working on he is seeing three times better results from regular Facebook profile pages as compared to fan pages.  I’ve seen similar results.  Despite Facebook attempts to blur the distinction between pages and profiles, I think users can tell the difference and are much more engaged with their friends on the network than the brands they are fans of. 

Ultimately, I think Facebook is still primarily about your friends, while Twitter is more about content discovery (and, increasingly, brands and celebrities).  I have no doubt this will change as Facebook continues to grow and tweaks its model further.  But for now the nature of Twitter makes it a better driver of traffic than Facebook, at least in my experience.

What has your experience been?

I came across a great article today entitled How to Design for Your Worst Client: You. While the article aims to provide designers with tips for designing their own personal websites, there are some some lessons that anyone working on a web design project can learn from.

“Be as specific as you can on what you would like on each page. That means decide on the content first. I know, it’s a design portfolio. You need something to design though. How many times has a client had you design something without saying what content they want on there, or saying they will get it to you soon (meaning the day before it goes live). Don’t do this to you.”

Too often sites are designed without a thought out content plan in place.  This usually leads to last minute redesigns or sites that are squares when they should be circles.  Content should be where you start, not an after thought.

“There is always someone better than you. Always. But remember: That person’s first few websites sucked. Not only did they suck, they might have been the worst website ever created. So why are you trying so hard to have the best website ever in one shot? You won’t get better unless you start making your own sites.

Stop using other websites as a crutch while you aimlessly wander looking for something to spark an idea. Since you have your goals defined and know what content you want, you can quickly move along until you find the elements that match your needs. Then STOP looking.”

In almost all cases, organizations are better off getting something good, but simple up quickly and then improving in an iterative way over time.  Don’t let perfect be the enemy of the good.

One of the biggest obstacles to getting good design implemented is a dysfunctional approval process, as this article on the struggles American Airlines has had attests.

“The biggest challenge to better design isn’t getting better designers. The problem is organizational, and the hub-and-spoke decision-making process that was originally created to slash bureaucracy–that is, to create more decentralized decisions and less hierarchy. But the overriding weakness, which design thinking makes manifest, is that good design is necessarily the product of a heavily centralized structure. Great design at places such as Apple isn’t about “empowering decision makers” or whatever that lame B-school buzzword is. It’s about awarding massive power and self-determination to those with the most cohesive vision–that is, the designers. Those are the people with the best idea of what customers want. That’s the essence of design thinking.”

While the quote references problems with the way things are structured at American Airlines, I’ve found that organizations of all sizes and shapes have similar structural problems.  No matter how talented the design team, it is difficult to produce good websites unless the end client has efficient structures in place for responding to and approving your work.  Committees are probably good for a few things, but designing websites isn’t one of them.

President Obama made his way into office with a tech savvy campaign team and promises to use new technologies to change the way government gets its job done. With the campaign over and the administration under way, shifting rhetoric into action has happened in notable ways but also raised major concerns.

The Center for American Progress held a roundtable discussion Monday with a few of those working inside and outside government to improve Federal impact and navigate some of the hurdles presented by opening government up through technology.

“The Web and the Federal Government grew up in different neighborhoods,” CAP Senior Vice President for Online Communications Andrew Sherry said in his introduction.

Speaking directly on how these two elements from different sides of the track are learning to work together was Alec Ross, Secretary of State Clinton’s senior advisor for innovation, who led the roundtable’s central discussion on 21^st century statehood, and what he termed “Diplomacy 2.0.” (more…)

Conversations about blog posts are increasingly taking place on Twitter in addition to the comments section of blogs.  Due to this trend, over the last six months we’ve seen lots of blogs integrate tweetbacks into their comment sections.  Building on the trackback concept, a tweetback searches Twitter for links to specific blog pots and displays relevant tweets in the comments section of your blog. 

I’ve had a variety of clients request this feature over the last few months, so we’ve spent some time figuring out how to get tweetbacks working in our core platform, Drupal and Wordpress. 

For Drupal, we did an exhaustive search for tweetback modules back in February and didn’t find any that work, so we developed our own custom module.  We are currently fine tuning the code we wrote and hope to release our Drupal tweetback module to the open source community in the next few months.

For Wordpress, there are quite a few tweetback modules to choose from.  We tried a handful of the plugins with mixed results.  I’m posting a quick review of our experience with each in the hopes that it saves time for others hoping to implement tweetbacks on their blog.

Before I dive in, please note that we did not test all of these plugins exhaustively.  In my mind, the point of plugins is to quickly add functionality without involving our development team.  So if I couldn’t get a plugin to work within an hour or so, I chose to cut my losses and move on to the next one instead of spending time debugging.

Tweetbacks and Tweetsuite by Dan Zarrella

As far as I can tell, Dan Zarrella was the first to build a tweetback plugin module for Wordpress back in January. 

His first take on it was a simple javascript solution called Tweetbacks.  While this solution probably works, it relies on inserting a javascript hosted on his personal server on your blog/website.  While this might be ok for some, we simply did not want to take the risk of inserting a javascript from an individual on a client website.

Later in January Dan released Tweetsuite, which moves away from javascript and includes a bunch of additional features.  This plugin looks awesome, but unfortunately we couldn’t get it to work on the two blogs we tried to implement it on and gave up.  The plugin also doesn’t have a lot of documentation, and from reading the comments it doesn’t sound like it is being actively supported.  So we grudgingly moved on.

Disqus

Disqus is a third-party commenting system that can actually take the place of your Wordpress commenting system.  I’ve written about it before, and use it on my personal blog.  I’m a fan of the product, and when I saw Disqus was adding social media reactions to its feature set I was anxious to try it out. 

We decided to install Disqus on our own ImpactWatch blog as a way of testing out tweetbacks and giving the the system a full test drive before recommending clients start using it.  Unfortunately, the tweetbacks feature in Disqus worked correctly for exactly one day and then mysteriously stopped and never got working again. Disqus has also periodically had performance issues that have caused our blog to load slowly.  Disqus recently acknowledged that they are having some significant problems.  Despite my fondness for Disqus, we will be uninstalling it from ImpactWatch this week and go back to Wordpress comments, with Backtype for tweetbacks (see below). 

I’ll probably loop back on Disqus in a few months and see if they’ve gotten their act together.  At this point, I simply can’t recommend the service.

Backtype

Last week, we gave Backtype Connect a try here on The Bivings Report.  The installation of the plugin went smoothly and tweetbacks started showing up pretty much immediately.  While the service definitely misses some tweets (probably due to people using some obscure URL shortening services), it seems to capture around 90% of relevant tweets.  It is definitely the best and most consistent of the tweetback services I have looked at and would be the one I would recommend at this point.

Note that I did not look at Tweetbacks by Yoast or Intense Debate, which is a service similar to Disqus that includes tweetback functionality.  If you have used these plugins, please post about your experience in the comments sections.  Please post if you think there is another service I should look at.