Digital Marketing, Social Media, Web 2.0, Web Analytics, Web Design

I am sleepy! And I over ate for dinner so you must forgive me if I blabber! I will stay awake to write this article and I am sure I will sleep better if I share it with you!

These days we have many media channels, TV, Radio, Print and Web, telecommunication! Yes yes; broadcasting short message, mobile TV and even bbm are a media channels; I will leave TV & Radio out of this!

I will talk about Print & Web, Traditional VS Non-Traditional or (New Media also called Digital Media)! The current relationship is 80/20! 80% for Traditional Media and 20% New Media! The relationship encompasses using both mediums as content publishing and advertisement! By the way 20% for new media is an over-statement; but let’s be optimistic. This all is of course in reference to the new media usage status in Middle East region!

Traditional Media plays the prominent role in media buying and content publishing, the new media plays a support role more of a back seat when it comes to advertisement and content publishing; and sometimes it’s ruled out completely!

Reasons for that:

1. Extensive Lack of Knowledge
2. Technology Phobia
3. Resistance to Change
4. More Score Cards (YUCKH)
5. Habitual thinking!

The last point, habitual thinking relates to the mindset of people owning the strategic thinking of the companies, often these decision makers like to go by the old book and avoid changes, in fear of more cost or unforeseen risks! Guys!!! Listen carefully if you suffer from this condition:

New Media is measurable! Meaning you can track user behavior and understand his “likes” and “Dislikes”; this will help you in your marketing strategy! When it comes to cost, yes it may cost some money but it is money well spent! Nothing on New Media is disposable!  All your efforts will lead to success if you employ the medium right! You just have to learn how to drive the ship and the shore will be easily reached! Doesn’t this make it invaluable!

Web Actionable Analysis helps you understand the data behind the website and make smart business decisions. Ever since business started tools to measure the efforts flooded the market, from the pencil and paper manual data analysis to the most sophisticated CRMs! So what is it about the web that scares people please help me understand! It comes with full package, a fancy business presentation closer than ever to the consumer anytime any place and a data analysis tool measuring every breath of your consumer!

Why are you putting it in the back seat when it is the future tool for absolutely everything!  It is time to switch roles!  You have to face the reality it’s no longer the age of push marketing and interrupted ads! It’s TiVo age! Consumers are in control of the information they consumes!

Don’t wait too long the train is moving, and moving fast you gotta catch up!

Goodnight!

A good read is “Road Less Travelled“

There is a significant difference between a “Website” and a “Blog”; a website can be a page or more for presenting a company or offering a service or information and news etc… in that case known as a “Portal”.

There are 152,000,000 blogs on the Internet. (SOURCE: UM, OCTOBER 2010) these blogs are about different matters, it could be a personal journal, social issues, company blog or industry focused etc… The most important thing in a blog is that it is human influenced! It is a person speaking to the mass!

Human influence; in the sense that whatever you read there is expressing a personal point of view of the “blogger”, the blog post is either information the blogger is sharing with you, like what I am doing in this post, or sharing an experience of any sort!

In our region, which is Middle East, blogs have become very popular and important, many which speak in a strong political voices, others expressing social pains and sufferings, and many also offering great opinions about specific matters, we see it from fashion, beauty, politics, art, technology, social activists and more… People are talking to people.

I mark this as a revolution of content publishing; times has changed from the age we only used to get the information from official source or media or TV programs, print magazines and news paper or radio etc… It’s the time where anyone can create a blog and start blogging and reach the whole world!

You might think of the title of this article, well I am very keen to explain that the major difference that sets websites or “portals” and blogs apart; is that the first one is mostly managed by a company and the latter is by a person. A company, however, can have a blog, where a person or more in the company manages for them; company blog must follow overall marketing strategy of the company. As far as an individual blog it might not have any strategy to follow, but a blogger has a responsibility to keep his/her readers engaged and create valuable content.

Read further…

Read Blog definition

Read a very nice article about the importance of a “Company” blog

Did you really reach 1million visitors on your blog or website in less than a year! Look closer, are you reading the web traffic reports correctly?

Before rushing into a hasty announcement about your web traffic numbers and over promising advertisers, read further to understand what really counts when it comes to web traffic.

Unless you are selling everything for $1 or giving away free iPad 2 for all then it is impossible to reach 1 million sustained actual visitors to your blog or portal in less than a year.

I admit reading reports is not easy it’s a task of a trained web analyst with the right skills to extract the numbers and bring the intelligence behind them, but I will lay out few simple facts for you to help you extract the true performance numbers on your web analytics report.

You must understand first the two main key measurements you need to focus on, they are “Hits’ and “Page Views”; website “Hits” are not to be measured by when it comes to web traffic, simply because a “Hit” on your website is the retrieval of any file, like a page or graphic and other resources such as scripts like .js and .css files etc… from a Web server, so one visitor can generate 4 hits or more at the same instant.  Therefore the hits number showing on the web analytical report is an arbitrary number reflecting on the page content. Do not get caught up in the dramatic numbers the “hits” indicate; it’s always misleading!

The real deal is the “Page View” this is your bread and butter; a “Pages view” is the single page logged on your web analytics report. One “page view can generate” many hits. Simply a “page view” is the page you requested to view; the “hit” is the page and the things it carries.

So if you are selling advertisement, then you must reveal the “page views” this is what the advertisers are interested in, and they will choose the number of impressions they needs to buy; an “impression” is made upon the deliverability of the ad banner to the end user’s request, an impression is generated every time a users interacts with your page so one user can register one or much more impressions in one session.

Now! web analytics does not end at “page views” or “impressions”, if you are managing a blog or you are an advertiser you need to look beyond the “impression”. Get bigger glasses role up your sleeves and look closer, numbers that must not go unnoticed are:

If you are site manager look out for: Unique Visitors, Loyalty (Recency, latency, Length of visit, Depth of visit), Content (types of content views).

If you are an advertiser: first you care about number of “Page Views” then you must dig into the visitor behavior performance, to make sure the site has what you need. First you must look at “Page Views”, and then comes user behavior; which consists of content viewed, loyalty of viewers and over all usage of the site, this will give you as an advertiser insights on the overall health of the “Page views” and consequently the “impressions” you are purchasing. Usually the “publisher” does not reveal that much depth stats reports not because he is holding information from you but because providing intelligent reports requires more than just reading the numbers, so compiling reports and analyzing are a costly task. But you as an advertiser can ask the publisher for performance review in any form.

The truth is Web Analytics is a science helping you in every aspect of running your website or blog, when “actionable web analysis” is practiced to the fullest potential you are able to see how your website is performing and how you can optimize it for better performance. Ideally a full time Web Analyst must be on board to cater for this task. But now from this article you got the main and key information to help you manage your blog/website on your own.

Yoda and Batman have big ears and superman has the ability to listen through walls – Learn from them

Why haven’t we thought about it before? All super heroes we know have the super power of true listening and as a result have the ability to save the world! So since we do have ears by default and hearts then combine both together and there you go; you have the secret weapon of “TRUE LISTENING”!

At this age and time customers gain control over brands; they are able to turn you into  a frog or prince whenever they wish. By all means you have no choice but to stand in front of this magical power of social media channels use the power of dialogue!

Establishing dialogue plays a vital role in marketing your brand, managing and maintaining brand reputation and expanding your reach.

Steps to join the Dialogue:

1. L —- I —-S—-T—–E—-N
2. Genuinely indulge in the process of creating dialogue based content
3. Be yourself!  Be Human
4. Close all the loops
5. Give personal attention to user regardless if he is a customer or not
6. Make it part of your daily routine

I have spoken about listening in the beginning and this is where the dialogue process begins. Indulging in the process allows you to be focused and able to captivate the user through cultivated content leading to a genuine experience. Real indulgence will result in a lasting relationships with your customers, and attracting prospects. This indulgence process is exactly what the customer expects these days, they are no longer satisfied with a greeting from your floor staff, and a “thank you come again note” from your cashier staff, the customer is expecting long and lasting relationship with the brand allowing him/her to connect to you farther than the sales transaction.

Be yourself, it’s very easy to spot a fake and you know that! So why embarrass yourself! The days of polished marketing messages are over, it’s now the time to reveal the mask and speak from heart to heart!

Closing the loops comes easy when you are both true to yourself and giving personal attention to the dialogue in action, so never leave a comment not responded to, or a question not answered or a good mention of your brand not thanked and of course do not leave a negative feedback unattended too and fixed!

Social web must become part of your daily routine just as emails are! Remember if you chose to be on social web that’s it! No chance to leave or disappear! You got to keep going and growing. To manage the multi channels and monitor your channels use the available tools on the web and be proactive about it, I’ll mention few but there are more of course: HootSuite, Social Mention,  Scoutlabs. You got to spot the sentiment of the dialogue and jump in when you need to.

Remember that Social Web is an emotional ecosystem show the human side of your brand and enjoy the process. So it’s all about being human, genuine and showing true emotions.

by Dawser Al Hadidi

You might have heard about RSS recently. Do you know how to use this new technology trend to expand your web presence?

If you are part of the internet generation, RSS, would probably be a part of your daily internet content consumption already. However, if you are in the planning stages of developing a website to represent your business, you may not be too familiar with the term. Your agency may be selling you the new trend “RSS” and you are fascinated by the technology, maybe leaning towards having it on your future website. Well, first you need to understand that this new trend should serve a purpose. Don’t just add it to your site because it sounds fancy! This is not the purpose of RSS.

First of all, a quick explanation of RSS is appropriate at this stage. It is REALLY SIMPLE SYNDICATION, a form of web feed which sits on your site, aggregates content, and delivers it to consumers, who opt-in for it and consume it anytime and anywhere.

Now let’s step back for a minute. We said it aggregates content, but what type of content? Well, it can be text, audio, video, or images. Aggregation is a function which performs continuously as the end user requests it.

Let’s focus on the word syndication now. It is a function used in the media production industry, such as newspapers, television, and radio. For example, newspapers and news broadcasters syndicate content amongst their networks in order to reach a wider audience.

The whole concept of syndication and aggregation of content has existed for quite some time. I cannot exactly pinpoint as to when it started, but I would have to say it was before I was born. In case you are wondering, that was 1974. Thank God, I’m not too old for the internet generation!

The new media has reused this function and developed a new trend known as RSS, which is a form of Web 2.0 technology. The latest web service that enables user interaction, it is the opposite of Web 1.0 which ran in a completely passive one way direction; the best examples of Web 2.0 I can give you is, RSS, blogs, Facebook.

I will take you now to my main point, my dear business owner, as this is addressed to you. As I explained earlier, RSS is a widespread technology; it encourages user interaction and collaboration, and empowers users in controlling content consumption. Basically it delivers content to end users at their own convenience, and is an absolute luxury on both sides. From your side, it will help ensure that your content reaches users who are genuinely interested in your business at their own time and place. You also allow users the freedom of enjoying this content where and whenever they want.

BUT…

There are also some important questions you need to consider before you invest in RSS for your website, such as:

As a business owner, do I have content that users will want to download? Hmmmm!!!

• How often will I provide new content? Daily, weekly, monthly, once in a lifetime?
• Where do I want to deliver this content? To users’ inboxes, iPods, mobiles etc?
• Does my company organization structure support the fact that I need to dedicate a resource to actually produce and manager content? Hmmm, tough one!
• Will I get a return on my investment if I have content and insist on RSS? Will I get a return if I outsource this to a content provider to produce content for my site and provide users with RSS facility? What is the best approach?
• Last but not least, am I going to become an industry specialized publisher? Do I really realize the seriousness of this service?!

Consider these points first, and save yourself the trouble of investing way too much effort on your website than you really should!! They may save you from ending up with a fancy site with all these new trends that no one will ever bother using – not even you!