Jeff Woelker : Chicago SEO, SEM, and Social Media Consultant

Google added several new features to Analytics last week and they look extremely promising. I haven’t had a chance to test them out yet, as many of them are still unreleased or in private beta, however you can find more information here.

One of the most compelling features appears to be custom reports and motion charts. Motion charts allow for you to plot up to five variables at once, which can make for some extremely compelling and useful results. Here’s the video from Google below:

According to the Google Analytics blog:

Motion Charts will be available through a new “Visualize” button at the top of reports.

But there’s no mention of an exact time frame. I guess we should keep an eye out for when that magical “Visualize” button appears. If you see it before I do, let me know in the comments.

Well, it’s been two years since my first blog post. On one hand, it seems like it’s been a very long time coming. My job, my life, technology, the economy – all of them have changed so much over the last two years. Allow me to get a little nostalgic for a second. In the last two years, I’ve:

• Moved in with my amazing girlfriend
• Landed a fantastic job as a result of this blog
• Sold my car and am now living car free in Chicago
• Saw one of the most important people in my life, my grandmother, pass on
• Attended the weddings of my best friend and my brother, both of which I was the best man
• Attended at least a dozen Cubs games, even though I’m a die hard Tigers fan
• Been to numerous conferences and met so many amazingly smart people all over the country
• Been approached to do several speaking engagements, again, as a result of this blog
• Attended a ton of great concerts (Ghostland Observatory (three times), Justice, Daft Punk, Chemical Brothers, Lollapallooza twice, and so many more)

And then on the other hand, it seems like only yesterday I started this blog and had zero traffic or readers to speak of. It was a meandering ride to get to where I’m at today, as evidenced by the list of categories on your right. It’s truly been a lot of fun and I’m overjoyed with where I’m at today both professionally and blog-wise, which I consider to be symbiotic.

Here’s some stats I’ve collected over the last two years:

• Nearly 50,000 visitors over two years
• An average of 60 readers daily
• An average of 100 hits daily
• TONS of comments from really interesting people who give me insightful and critical feedback on the topics we’re similarly interested in

So raise a glass to year two of (hopefully) many more. And once again, let me say thanks to everyone who I’ve met as a result of this blog, or who has participated in it over the years. If you have any insights into what I’m doing right, critique as to what I’m doing wrong, or just want to say Howdy please feel free to do so in the comments.

I was just thinking about this the other day and decided to compile a list of what I see as the 7 highly effective habits of successful Twitter-folks:

1. Let your profile speak for itself.
   Just as you would with your blog, your LinkedIn or Facebook profiles, or any of your other online personas, add some personality and depth to your profile. Make sure to customize your one line bio. If your screen name doesn’t reflect it, think of your bio as “SEO for your profile”. People can only find you by what you describe yourself as, or what you post. So if you want to be found, give them every opportunity.
2. Maximize your efforts.
   Twitter can become overwhelming really easily if you post often. Make sure to utilize a desktop or mobile application to make your life easier. There are tons out there. Test several out and see which works best for you. Here’s a few that I see pretty often around twitter: Twhirl, Tweetdeck, Twitterberry, and PocketTweets.
3. You’ll catch more bees with honey than vinegar.
   It’s easy to make comments about “This website sucks” or “Man, I hate how much XYZ charges me monthly”. Those are fine every so often, but more often than not, you don’t get as many new followers or as much buzz as when you provide insightful criticism or positive insights on your niche.
4. Go find your community and bring it to you.
   When I first started using Twitter the first people I added to my list were my friends, colleagues, and a few other people I knew were on Twitter. That was it. I think that ended at about 20-30 people, all of which I already talked with via email, instant messenger, on my blog, on the phone, or in person. And that’s how it stayed for a while until I began searching for people who I knew would have a similar interest. Searching for “chicago marketers” yields several hundred results. There’s several people who I’d like to connect with. Searching for “b2b marketers”, there’s another hundred or so. Searching for people talking about “SEO” or “usability”, there’s several hundred more as well. All of a sudden, I’m at 300 followers, just from me connecting with people and they follow me back, which then causes a chain reaction as we interact more and more. And now I approach 450 followers. Most of them one way or another interested in topics I speak about regularly, and which I get to read about from them in turn.
5. Be generous and share the wealth.
   This leads me to my next point, which is to share the wealth. If someone posts something truly inspiring, insightful, or interesting let others know about it via “retweeting“. Don’t just take a link or thought they’ve posted and repost it as your own. Give them credit where credit is due. I believe in karma and for me, not citing an original source is bad karma, so just avoid that whole mess and let others know where you get your great information.
6. Respond as often as you can.
   Just because you may not ever see these people in person or interact with them outside of twitter does not mean you can just blow off their efforts to interact. If you have the time, respond to every reply and direct message you can. And if you don’t have the time, let people know. That’s the whole point. It’s an ambient awareness tool. It’s to make people aware of what you’re thinking, feeling, or doing. 140 characters is no more than 30 seconds of typing, even if your a terrible typist.
7. 140 characters of fun.
   Twitter is fun. Nobody likes a Debbie Downer, so whenever possible, spice it up a bit with some light humor. With all the nuttiness happening lately, everyone could use a laugh. And at the end of the day, isn’t it just more fun?

Enjoy.

I found this website yesterday on Twitter called Tweetbeep. Here’s Tweetbeep’s description of their service:

TweetBeep is like Google Alerts for Twitter! Put in a keyword or website, and get emails when others tweet it!

That’s pretty much it. I’ve already found several people on twitter talking about things related to me or my industry, but that I would have never found otherwise. One of my friends (@exitcreative) asked me, “why don’t I just subscribe to the RSS feed from Summize Search.Twitter.com?” Frankly, my tendency is going more and more away from RSS these days and pushing everything I can into email. Except for my really high volume RSS feeds, which would just inundate my email, I prefer to keep everything in as few repositories as possible.

In closing, check out Tweetbeep. It’s fantastic, even if you’re not on twitter. You can still see what others are saying and interact with them at your leisure.

In case you haven’t heard of it, Crowd Sourcing is the idea that you take a project or problem and distribute it amongst “the crowd”. The crowd then becomes a partner to help solve your problem or complete your project. In many cases, using the crowd is beneficial as they don’t have as much overhead as internal employees (job security, suggesting ideas which are too risky, wanting to save face, etc.), but they may not fully understand the business problem or issues at hand, so you might not always get exactly what you want, or expect.

In the creative community, crowd sourcing is often celebrated and chastised in the same breath. On one hand, it opens up a realm of new possibilities that would have been otherwise kept within the walled gardens of agencies or large and small businesses. It also allows for agencies and businesses to tap into a much larger community above and beyond their in-house creatives. Inherent in this is the fact that there are no guarantees for the work you receive.

On the other hand, at least until the marketplace learns the value of what they’re getting, it drives down the cost of creative a bit. This is mostly due to buyers being cautious of the new marketplace and evaluating risk versus reward.

In my opinion, the net-net is a positive impact on the creative scene as a whole. As such, I’ve decided to showcase some of the creative marketplaces available and I’ll leave it to you to make the decision as to whether they provide a fair value for the work being done on a case by case basis.

Threadless (Medium of choice: T-shirts)
If you live in Chicago, you know about Threadless. Although personally I think the best shirts I have from them are printed on American Apparel tees and not their house brand, I’d still recommend that creatives looking to expand into t-shirt designs definitely submit them to Threadless. They have a rabid fan base and provide tons of valuable feedback on each design.

CrowdSpring (Medium of choice: Logos, stationary, websites, and more)
CrowdSpring is meant as a creative hub for all digital media creation. If you need a business card, CrowdSpring can do it. If you need a logo, CrowdSpring. If you need a website designed (just the layout), CrowdSpring. They have tons of projects that are constantly being created and plenty of opportunities for testing new creative ideas.

Denook (Medium of choice: Logos, stationary, websites, and more)
Although similar in function to Crowd Spring, Denook doesn’t have the coolest community manager around.

Genius Rocket (Medium of choice: Videos)
Genius Rocket is a crowd sourced community around video creation; ads specifically. A client creates a creative brief, a prize is assigned, and voila, the creative community gets to work. Churning out ads as fast as they can be reviewed. If you’re trying to get your foot in the door doing video work, why not try your hand at creating videos with a real purpose and win some cash in the meantime?

PopTent (Medium of choice: Videos)
PopTent is much the same as genius rocket, but they have a slightly different videographer audience. Whereas genius rocket is open to anyone to submit a video, PopTent only allows for select video creators to compete for the projects created. Contact PopTent to see if you can be added to their list of select vendors.

YouTube Contests (Medium of choice: Videos)
And last, but not least, we have YouTube contests. Again, what better way to get your feet wet than to say “I won the Home Depot green video contest“.

Did I forget any other sites? Am I completely missing some aspect of this controversial creative medium? Let me know in the comments.

This last weekend, I had the pleasure of volunteering with Chicago Cares for an adult computer education class at Ella Flagg Young School on Chicago’s west side. Several of us showed up to help teach basic computer skills, internet browsing, and Excel to some more advanced users. I ended up tutoring two women who couldn’t have been nicer if they had tried. I haven’t seen anyone that excited about Excel in such a long time. It definitely made me laugh and smile. Working in online marketing, it’s easy to become cynical and think “Oh, everyone knows about LinkedIn” or Twitter or Digg or etc. etc.

Well let me tell you, there are people – LOTS of really great people who are out there that know very little about things you and I take for granted everyday – Google, email, Microsoft Office, paying your bills online, and so much more. But there is hope. You can help them. Chicago Cares, Chicago Volunteer, and even Craigslist have lots of opportunities for you to spread the wealth of knowledge you carry with you each day.

I’ve volunteered at the Recording for the Blind and Dyslexic before and, although worthwhile, it was nothing compared to the excitement these folks showed at, what I consider, some of the most common tasks. I’m headed back on November 8th and you’re more than welcome to join me. I think the class next time will be much larger and we’ll need more help. Email me or leave a comment for more info.

I’m sure by now most marketers know about Google Trends. Trends can provide some great insights about search traffic over time. It’s now updated daily, but what happens if you want to know the search landscape hour by hour. For that Google now has Hot Trends. By acting early, you can grab traffic at it’s peak and while there’s still fewer competitors in the market. Hot Trends is still in beta, much the same as Google Trends, so I suggest you use this data with an ounce of caution, but that it’s definitely worth testing for yourself.

From the Hot Trends site:

Google Trends provides insights into broad search patterns. Please keep in mind that several approximations are used when computing these results.

So how would I use this data?
Well, let’s say you’re a local electronics store in Chicago. You notice that “circuit city closing” is a hot term today. You create a geo-targetted paid search campaign around that term announcing “Joe’s Electronics. Open for 30 years” or whatever it may be. Now let’s say you’re a news station with nationwide coverage. You notice that “colin powell” is a hot term today. You setup a paid search campaign on that term that says “Colin Powell endorses Barack Obama. See the video here.” These are B2C examples, but this can easily be extended to B2B depending on the keywords.

How do I do this?
Well, it does require you to be pretty agile. If you’re working at an agency, hopefully your client allows the freedom to act on these quick trends. If you are not working with an agency, the same holds true for the speed necessary to act.

Image courtesy of daigooliva

I’ve seen lots of these graphical word representations all over the web lately, but didn’t know where they were coming from. I recently found out at a BMA breakfast with Steve Rubel that they are created by a website called Wordle. Wordle looks at web content and aggregates it, counts it, and presents it in a number of different ways, based on a user’s preferences. The size of the word represents the number of times it was mentioned in a given block of text. You can rotate, change the layout, the color, the font, and the size of the words. It makes for a really handy conversation analysis tool and, my favorite part, some pretty geeky word art. Here’s a Wordle I generated from my own blog.

If you need to build a website and you’re in a hurry, there are lots of tools that can help you get going quickly. Let’s go through the 5 D development process and I’ll point out tools to help at each stage.

1. Discovery
2. Design
3. Develop
4. Deploy
5. Deliver

1. Discovery
The discovery stage is where you are looking to learn about the target audience and how they’ll be using the site. You need to learn about your audience quickly and efficiently. You need an online survey tool. I’d recommend SurveyMonkey. It’s quick, easy to setup, and cheap. The basic account is FREE. If you need to do surveys over a longer period (a month) or need to survey lots of people, you can upgrade for $20/month. Really nice! If you want to get down to just the facts, try 4Q (4 Questions) by Avinash Kaushik. It only allows you to ask and have answered, 4 questions. That’s it. So you get to the heart of the matter quickly and completly for free.

2. Design
Need a sweet design, but don’t have a huge budget or the time to go look for a bunch of designers? Try crowdsourcing. Specifically a site called CrowdSpring can give you a hand with this. You submit a project with a creative brief, designers submit their ideas, and everyone gets to vote on what they like, both you and the creative community of CrowdSpring. If you don’t get 25 artist submissions, you don’t pay. So the risk is fairly low. Plus the creative designs coming out of CrowdSpring are very hip and vibrant, so don’t worry about something you can’t use. Once you have a design, run it past your users before you start developing. You can use Five Second Test for this. Five Second Test allows for you to show an image to a user for five seconds. The user then submits the five items they recall along with their name. It’s a great way to see if your website objectives are coming across in the first five seconds of a user visit.

3. Develop
Don’t have a lot of time to build your website? Use a content management system. I’ve written on this before here and here. It provides for an out of the box framework that allows you to get a site up and running with little knowledge of HTML. If you have an extensive knowledge of HTML, there are numerous options that you can use such as CushyCMS, Wordpress, DotNetNuke, all the way up to enterprise solutions such as Sharepoint and Microsoft Content Management Server.  However, unless you have these enterprise infrastructures in place, this is neither quick nor cheap. Here’s a list of 50 other content management systems to get your website off the ground quickly.

4. Deploy
The best way to get your site off the ground quickly is via social media and search engines. Depending on the market segment and audiences you are targeting, social media may be a perfect way to reach them. To check, you should hop on Twitter, Plurk, Jaiku, Facebook, etc. etc. etc. and see if your audiences are there already. Quickly doing a search on Twitter, you’ll be able to find:

• Blogging Moms
• Industrial Suppliers
• HR Consultants
• CEO’s

And obviously, the 16 year old high school girls often associated with many social media outlets.

In terms of search engines, using tools such as Google’s webmaster tools and Google Analytics give Google a better idea of what content you want indexed and how. Granted, you are not going to be #1 in Google overnight, but this will get you on your way and provide you with insights into what users are doing on your site and what Google does or does not understand about your site. With that information, you can optimize accordingly over time.

5. Deliver
Delivery of files can sometimes be a hassle, and who needs a hassle when you’re in a hurry? Once you’ve got your final site developed and need to send it to the client, a friend, etc. you can use various websites to deliver any file format you want. For general file delivery there’s:

• Drop.io
• YouSendIt
• TransferBigFiles
• A whole host of other options

For specific file types, why not try Flickr or Vimeo. With Flickr you can upload your photos and short videos and send them along. Your recipient can then view the photos online and download them if they want. Best of all, Flickr is free for basic accounts (I think it’s up to 100 Megs a month in uploads). Vimeo is entirely free and allows you to upload extremely high quality videos, which you can then send along. Again, the recipient can view the entire video online and download the source files, if you so choose.

Many of these tools can be used across stages, so please don’t think that because you are in design you can only use Five Second Test. By all means, feel free to use any of these tools at any point along the development cycle. I just pointed out their most typical uses.

Hope that helps. Did I forget anything along the way? Know of other tools that would be beneficial to any of these steps? Post them in the comments.

image courtesy of Chrys Omori.