Steamy Kitchen

Joy the Baker

Delicious Days

Tasty Kitchen

Culinary Culture

Serious Eats

Guide to Twitter as a Tool for Marketing and PR

Twitter Tips For Bloggers

7 Ways Marketers Can Use Twitter

Twitter Analyzer (Twitter App)

Top 11 Twitter Tools and Twitter Best Practices (slideshow)

Demystifying Twitter Marketing (e-book)

Do you know any good tips or articles about how to use twitter as a marketing tool, feel free to leave a comment with the link or tip.

To come closer to get success with online branding, we have to take a look on what’s characterizing successful websites today. I’m going to use an example in this book to visualize the theory. It’s a quite successful website today, and I guess most of you know it. Facebook. Should I say more?
The question is why can it be so successful and how. I’ll define six criteria which have influence on how the user understands experiences and evaluates the company. The six criteria are linked together and have to be planned, coordinated and developed together.

Availability

One of the most important elements for successful online branding today is to be available. The Internet is big, and full of information. To be available is not just to have a good looking website with a lot of features. It’s also about having a relevant domain name. When users are looking for something the first thing they typically do is to write www.corporatename.com (or .co.uk, .ca, depending on the country). Coca cola has www.cocacola.com, and not www.colaisgreat.com, just as an example. Most of the users are also searching the web with search engines. So to be available is also to be visible and first in the search engines. Google and Yahoo is the most used search engines used and about 75 to 80 per cent of international users use google.com to find new websites. Being number one or in top three in search engines is very important to be available.  If you want traffic on your webpage, then you have to be visible in the search engines, and that is not easy. To be visible in search engines might be easy, but to be in top three is quite difficult. The company has to make a search engine strategy, and criteria as keywords, internal and external linkbuiding, content, description, structure and so on are all things that are crucial to the location on search engines.
Not just the domain and being visible in search engines are important to availability. It is also about accessibility. When users are arriving to the website, the access to information has to be easy. we can quickly agree on the server must be running, the website must be loaded quickly and the site must be visible in the web browser.

Structure

If a user visits your site without finding the information she’s searching for it can be catastrophic. She will properly never come back to the site and search for other sites. As the Danish usability-guru is writing in “Designing Web Usability, 1999”:

“A classic sign of mismanaged website is when the home page has a button for each of the senior vice presidents in the company. Remember, you don’t design for your VPs; you design for the users. Therefore, it will be quite common that you can’t tell VPs where “their” buttons is on the home page.”

The navigation need to help users answer three questions:

• Where am I?
• Where can I go?
• Where have I been?

The structure of the website is very important for the users to find information. The website must not have more than three layers. The navigation has to be easy and transparent and also a search function and a sitemap where the user can provide an overview and search for information on the website.

Personalization

To understand what personalization is and can be, I will use the four ways of personalization by Peter Svarre, 2003. Peter Svarre descipes himself on his blog in these words:
“Veiled in a cloud of buzzwords and hype, digital communications has changed rapidly in the past 3 years. Web 2.0, social networking, communities and viral marketing are just some of the words that have been plastered all over this change. This blog seeks to get behind the buzz and provide practical and theoretical insights about digital communications from my work as User Experience Director at Hello Group.”

The four ways of personalization are:

1. Interactive elements
2. Customization
3. Rule-based personalization
4. Collaborative filtering

Personalization is about creating relations and experience that improves and qualifies the contact between the stakeholder and the company by online communication.

Interactive elements

Interactive elements are the simplest way of personalization. It makes static information dynamic and alive. Interactive elements can be calculating functions, calendars, dynamic maps, chatting and forums, sound and video sequences and interactive games. All these elements increase the value of the visit and makes return on investments (ROI) interesting and relevant for the user. Bank websites are typically examples of using interactive elements. It could be offer a credit card, calculate currency, pay bills, invest in shares and so on.

Customization

Customization is typical tick-in-a-box personalization, where the user can make her own personal website by selecting her preferences. A good example to illustrate that is the iGoogle. You have a personal Google page where you decide what will be showed – the weather, financial news, RSS from a blog ect. Also Yahoo (my.yahoo.com), MSN (my.msn.com) and Lycos (my.lycos.com) has these my-page concepts.

Rule-based personalization

Rule-based personalization is when the website is designed to form after the behavior of the user. How? When you go to a corporate website and have two opportunities: Private or Business. If you choose private, the website will remember your choice and the next time you go to the website, you will automatically be directed to the section for privates.
This way to personalize can be confusing with users with wide interests and requires an active user, filling out questionnaires.

Collaborative filtering

Collaborative filtering is a very strong and effective way to personalize. The website automatically learns the users preferences as the user navigates, reads, buy stuff, uses functions ect.
This type of personalization is used by amazon.com, and requires lots of users, products or pages. The user doesn’t need to fill out any forms. Just by clicking in to the website, all her actions are being registered and saved to generate rules.

“Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought” is a good example of collaborative fitering.

Choose strategy

When a website has to be personalized all the parts in the production of the website has to be involved. It’s important that all of them knows the different ways to personalize, and knows the consequences of them. A discussion of that is necessary and so is a discussion of the necessity of the personalization.

Language style and tone

The language is a very important but often overseen part of both online branding and creating and updating content on the website. There’s a difference between writing technical articles, sales information, augmenting or being humoristic or funny. The language has to fit the situation. There are a few rules that are good to follow:

• Don’t use too many technical words.
• Write short. Internet texts are read 25% slower than paper texts.
• Help the reader to make an overview fast and easy.
• Use words and sentences that the user knows.
• Write correct and directly.
• Write objective. Make sure that your research is okay.
• Don’t write too many slogans ect. If it’s for advertising, present some data, tests, graphs and reviews for users.

When writing for the internet you also has to write to the segment you are writing to. Write in words that your segment understands and uses.

Identity and integration

When building up a new website, the identity and integration are very important. There has to be synergy between external, internet, offline and online communication to build- and keep up a brand. If folders and posters signal professionalism, sharpness and strength you don’t want the website to signal some other values. In TV commercials L’ORÉAL is “because you’re worth it”, on the website it is, on their posters it is and so on. L’ORÉAL is “because you’re worth it”. The internal, external, offline and online communications has to be coordinated all over. That can be quite hard to do, when traditions, culture and leaders often blocks for that.

The Graphic aesthetic expression

The last factor for successful online branding is the graphic aesthetic expression. It is the visual design and graphic interface which can both be the functions and the aesthetics like proportions, colors, width, lightness, text, fonts, forms, balance. The graphic interface is the first time impression that the user gets. If it doesn’t hit the user, she might be clicking to the next website. To illustrate the effects of the graphic aesthetic expression I’ll show an example. The example is the well known Facebook. So what’s about Facebook? It isn’t that much. No harder graphics, just simple blue. It could look like a bank website.

And that’s exactly what they want, simple. No ads on the front page. A web usability dream, with big explaining buttons, not much text but enough to make it understandable. And first of all it is serious by its signals. It could look like a bank website. Danske Bank (Bank of Denmark) has this “Facebook look” to. Or is it Facebook that has “bankers look”?

We know six criteria for successful online branding. But how do we know when online branding really is successful?  You can measure the value of a brand in some ways. The first way is Young and Rubicam’s Brands Assets Valuator (BAV). The Brand Asset Valuator is a database of consumer perception of brands created and managed by Brand Asset Consulting, a division of Young & Rubicam Brands to provide information to enable firms to improve the marketing decision-making process and to manage brands better.

BAV measures the value of a brand along four dimensions: “Differentiation,” “Relevance,” “Esteem,” and “Knowledge.” Differentiation and Relevance build up to “Brand Strength.” Esteem and Knowledge are used to calculate “Brand Stature.” BAV defines these terms as follows.

1. Differentiation – Differentiation is the ability for a brand to stand apart from its competitors. A brand should be as unique as possible. Brand health is built and maintained by offering a set of differentiating promises to consumers and delivering those promises to leverage value.

2. Relevance – Relevance is the actual and perceived importance of the brand to a large consumer market segment. This gauges the personal appropriateness of a brand to consumers and is strongly tied to household penetration (the percentage of households that purchase the brand).

3. Esteem – Esteem is the perceived quality and consumer perceptions about the growing or declining popularity of a brand. Does the brand keep its promises? The consumer’s response to a marketer’s brand-building activity is driven by his perception of two factors: quality and popularity, both of which vary by country and culture.

4. Knowledge –Knowledge is the extent of the consumer’s awareness of the brand and understanding of its identity.  The awareness levels about the brand and what it stands for shows the intimacy that consumers share with the brand. True knowledge of the brand comes through brand-building.

Differentiation and Relevance taken together say a lot about its growth potential (“Brand Vitality“), while Esteem and Knowledge determine the current power of a brand (“Brand Stature“).

BAV’s database is the result of the world’s most extensive research project on branding, based on data on 30,000 brands across 400,000 consumers in 48 countries through 240 studies.

Here’s an example of the BAV-tool that can be found on the internet:

You can see how to two companies B&O and Sony are valued by momentum and credibility. Both of them are very unique but in relevance, esteem and knowledge Sony wins.

Another way to measure the value of a brand is with BrandZ. BrandZ is a brand equity database. It holds data from over 650,000 consumers and professionals across 31 countries, comparing over 23,000 brands. The database is used to estimate brand valuations, and each year since 2006, has been used to generate a list of the top 100 global brands.

According to BrandZ,
“Brand value is the financial value of a brand defined as the sum of all earnings that a brand is expected to generate.

Strong brands have the power to create real and sustainable competitive advantage. They can:

• Drive revenue growth by ensuring higher demand and market share

• Help improve margins by commanding premium prices and better supplier terms

• Reduce capital requirements by minimizing the costs of entry into new categories
Strong brands can also create differentiation that allows companies to overcome commoditization and reduce overall business risk.”

Well, if you are an analyst or just an internetsurfer, you can read this, and I’ll try to give you some of the most common reasons why we are being tracked and analyzed out there, and what you can use it for. I’ll base this article on Google Analytics which is an amazing analysis tool with lots of features and capabilities.

What’s Google Analytics?

The Google-branded version was rolled-out in November 2005 to anyone who wished to sign up. However due to extremely high demand for the service, new sign-ups were suspended only a week later. As capacity was added to the system, Google began using a lottery-type invitation-code model. Prior to August 2006 Google was sending out batches of invitation codes as server availability permitted; since mid-August 2006 the service has been fully available to all users – whether they use Google for advertising or not. A new version of the user interface was released on May 17, 2007.[3]
‘ wikipedia.org

In my words Google Analytics is the best free web analytics. It’s quite popular, because it is free, it is very easy to use and it is a professional tool, not just another free counter for your notorious website.

In this article i will not explain how much about how to use Google Analytics. I will leave that to Google themself.

The main features of Google Analytics

So why is Google Analytics such a great web analytics tool? Because it has some very useful features. With Google Analytics you can…

Gather information about what happens on your website and bechmark the effects.

Very useful. But how can I bechmark the effects and see what happens?
I’ve divided the features into two layers. First layer, the simple data, is the cool facts about your visitors:

1. Layer (simple data)

• Daily visitors
• Avarage conversion rate (sales, downloads, ect.)
• Avarage time on site
• How often the visitors come back
• Do visitors stay on your site? (single page visit?)
• Top visited pages
• Geographic distribution of visitors
• What language they are using
• What operating system, browser, screen size they are using.

The next layer is a little more complicated. But as with the datas from the first layer, you can also measure these data from the second layer with Google Analytics:

2. Layer (complicated data)

• Return on investment (ROI), new versus returning visitors
• What is the value of a visitor?
• What is the value of the web page?
• Does the internal search help with conversions?
• How is my site engaging with visitors?
• How do bounce rate vary by page viewed or referring source?

Very cool stuff to know about your visitors. You do not only know how many visits your website has. You are also able to see a lot of information about them – where they came from and what they are doing on your website.

The Dashboard

Google analytics is very Web 2.0! The user interface makes use of the latest developments and features in Web 2.0/Ajax technology. The report data is constructed in a highly accessible format, wich makes the user encouraged to drill into the data.

From this dashboard you can now drill into the data by clicking on the menu, but you can also change the dates for the graph and change from daily, to weekly, to monthly view. But what can you use these data for?

To illustrate that I will make a little example:

John is a musician and he lives in Florida. John has this website mostly to get some PR. John is quite good at playing guitar and plays for weddings, birthdays and celebrations. One day he decides to make an online campain to get some more costumers. He wants to brand his own name – be mister guitar in Florida and neighbor states. He makes an AdWords campain with keywords like ‘guitar for weddings’, ‘music for weddings’, ‘guitar florida’, ect. As the time goes by he can se that a lot of people is clicking on his links. But he doesn’t get new costumers.

Let us imagine that John now hired us to analyze the data and increase his conversion rate. In this article I will only focus on Google Analytics and not so much Search engine optimization.

So, the first thing we might have to look up is his visitors. Are they from Florida? Let’s take a look at the geographic overview:

Well it seems that only 6 percent of the visitors (from US) are from Florida. Most visitors comes from California and Montana. Since California and Montana is North-West and Florida is South-East this campain doesn’t make any sense. His visitors from North and West are simply not interested in guitarplayers from Florida.

This will lead us back to the search terms he used for his AdWords campain. ‘Guitar for weddings’ and ‘music for weddings’ might have some relevance to his site, but it is not targeted to his potential costumers. His demographic segment is placed in Florida (some in neightbor states) and if he wants this campain to succeed, he has to be more accurate and targeted.

This may not be the only problem for this campain, but this article is just an intro to show what big potential webanalytics has. Other problems could be his AdWords campain and the text in it he uses and it could be the layout, usability and availability on his website.

I hope you enjoyed my first article, and you were motivated to use Google Analytics.