Content is currency
Posted 3/23/2010 10:09:00 AM by Mark Reichard
We've quoted Mike Berkley's blog post previously in which he said that "content is currency --- companies can print their own, but most don't." The truth of that statement really struck me today as I was looking at the Google Analytics reports for our site --- especially because of the traffic that one fairly random blog post has been getting. Several months ago, I posted a simple html/css solution to an issue that I had in working on a customer site. I thought it was a good solution, and I wanted to share it. I had no intention of trying to attract search engine traffic, and I certainly didn't optimize the post to attract traffic.
Last month, that post got over 1700 pageviews, all from organic search results on sites like Google, Bing and Yahoo. Because I took a couple of minutes to write a quick post several months ago, our site is still getting thousands of pageviews a month from folks who otherwise might not have come. That has real value for us, even if HTML and CSS tips are not really what we are all about.
But, you may ask, is it really like being able to print your own money? I think so, but there are some caveats. Just like being able to print you own money would require a high quality printer and special inks, having people with valuable knowledge in a position to share it requires an investment in the right tools. At least as important, though, is the developing the skill and habit of producing content. Creating good Web content takes practice, and you have to know something worth sharing. Also, not every blog post will attract traffic, which is why making creating content a habit and an integral part of the culture of an organization is so important --- you never know which posts will attract traffic, so at the end of the day it is a numbers game.
Tags: Content ManagementComments
Determining the impact of a non-profit site
Posted 4/24/2009 11:22:02 AM by Mark Reichard
In our last post we talked about the importance of focusing on the concrete goals that a Web site is supposed to deliver and of measuring the site’s success in accomplishing those goals. We also discussed the difficulty that non-profits, social service agencies and government often have in identifying concrete goals and particularly in devising ways to measure their site’s success at accomplishing goals. In this post we’ll discuss three strategies that non-profits can use to determine how successful their site is in furthering the mission of the organization.
The first and most obvious of these strategies is using a Web analytics package such as Google Analytics (www.google.com/analytics) to monitor traffic to your site. As content and new features are added, you can track visits and page views on the site and determine whether more people are taking advantage of the resources on the site. It stands to reason that increasing traffic indicates that your site is becoming a more valuable resource, while decreasing traffic might indicate the opposite. Using raw visits and pageviews traffic can be problematic however, because raw numbers don’t tell you how visitors came to your site or why. If you want to truly understand how visitors are using your site, it’s important to know which areas of the site are most visited, how users are coming to the site (direct navigation, links from other sites or as a result of finding your site in an Internet search engine like Google). If you’re not getting traffic from search engines, it’s worth researching whether your site appears in search results for terms that are relevant to your site and, if not, to think about search engine optimization for the site.
If you are getting traffic from search engines, it’s a good idea to use your analytics package to understand what search terms users are using to get to your site. These details may tell a substantially different story than the raw data about site visits and pageviews. On the iData site for example, there are a couple of blog posts that have addressed somewhat arcane topics not well covered elsewhere and that rank well in search engines. These posts account for a substantial portion of the traffic to our site, but not they are not really related to our core products and services. If we relied only on overall site traffic to measure the effectiveness of our site, we would not get the complete picture.
Another often recommended strategy involves posting an online survey. Most modern Web Content Management Systems (CMS) such as iData’s Synapse Publisher include an online survey builder component, and there are a variety of free or low cost online tools such as SurveyMonkey (www.surveymonkey.com) that allow organizations to survey their sites’ visitors about how they use the site and what the organization might do better. These surveys can be a valuable tool, particularly when the organization’s understanding of how their site is used is wildly out of line with reality. In such cases, an online survey can provide an important wake-up call to those responsible for managing the site. In many cases however, a survey is of limited use. First of all, most users have been surveyed by so many sites that they will not participate, and they may resent being asked for their input. Also, online surveys may suffer from the same limitations that focus groups often do in the sense that site visitors feel compelled to offer strong opinions even when they do not feel strongly one way or another about your site, so the survey responses may include emphatic statements that exaggerate the importance of the data.
A better way to gauge how the site is used is to incorporate the site into the business processes of the organization. This can be done by encouraging site visitors who need to contact you to do so through online forms with responses emailed to someone in your organization and stored in a database so that they are available for periodic review and reporting. These forms can be developed for any area of your organizations mission where you get information from customers or clients and act on that information. Applications can range from typical contact forms that users fill out to request more information about your products or services to event registration forms that users fill out to register for events or classes. For non-profits, a key part of the organization’s mission is often providing information, which at first glance might not seem amenable to this approach. If the information is important enough to your clients, you could consider requiring users to register before providing the information. Based on our experience, we would exercise caution with this approach, however, because --- particularly in the case of non-profits --- getting critical information out is often more important than measuring who is consuming it. In most cases, using Web analytics reporting to understand how frequently your key information is accessed and downloaded is a better idea.
Two objections that many non-profits have to the idea of incorporating online forms into their business processes are:
- The staff of the agency or organization would often prefer to speak with clients and potential clients who access the site in order to accurate access their needs and be sure that they are pointed in the right direction.
- Wise non-profits and government agencies sometimes do not object to providing an online form but they also want to provide a phone number, email address and mailing address in order to allow site visitors to contact the organization in the way that is most convenient to the visitor.
Both of these issues can be addressed by providing
offline contact methods that are published only through the Web site. These can include a site specific 800 number or phone extension, a Web-site specific PO box or mailstop and a Web-site specific email contact address. Many 800 number services (such as Ring Central ---
www.ringcentral.com) offer detailed reporting on use of the 800 number, and email traffic is easy to track. Using these methods, organizations can provide site visitors a choice of the most convenient way to contact the organization while still providing an accurate picture of the impact of the Web site on the organization.
This post has discussed how non-profits, social service agencies and government can understand the impact that their Web sites have on their operations. The next post in this series will discuss what to do when you get those results --- particularly when you determine that you need to attract more traffic to your site.
Tags: Analytics, Content Management, E-marketing Strategy, Project ManagementComments
ROI of Tagging
Posted 8/27/2008 6:01:37 PM by Mark Reichard
I'm just back from vacation in Canada, and I found it interesting that the author of one of my favorite Cleveland blogs is also just getting back from a week in the same general area of Ontario. Like my family, Callahan is impressed with the commitment of our neighbors to the north to the idea of sustainable energy. We're always impressed with the everyday, just-a-part-of-normal life environmentalism we see there, including recycling bins in restaurants and limits to out-of-control growth.
Now that I'm back and catching up on podcasts, it seems that I'm hearing everywhere (for example, here) lately about the growing awareness of the business value of tagging content to make it more searchable and indexable. Tagging content is the process of associating keywords and other meta data ("tags") with content -- either when the content is created or when users read it. In the study I linked to above, researchers estimated that users at IBM save 12 seconds for every Intranet search they do because of good tagging --- which saves IBM an estimated 955 person-hours a week.
As someone with lots of experience both building data repositories that depend on tagging and using them (going back to work with Lotus notes at PMSC and E&Y in the mid 90's), I'm surprised that the figure is as low as 12 seconds per search. In my experience, good meta data, including keywords and tagging can make the difference between Intranet or Web users finding exactly the resource they need the first time and hours of fruitless searches. In my experience, it's not an exaggeration to say that good tagging is as important as good content, or, more precisely, that good tagging is enables good content to do its job. The value of tagging goes way beyond search and visually appealing Web 2.0 tricks like tag clouds. If you build tagging into the information architecture of a site before you start writing code, you can design the site to dynamically display relevant content --- things like showing related product pages when a user reads a blog post, or showing industry specific information for the industry a user selected when they registered with your site. Bottom line --- tagging is key, as is a good information architecture and content plan (developed before you start writing code).
Tags: Content ManagementComments