Analytics are the cornerstone of benchmarking, with good analytics comes good design/information decisions. Google Analytics has become the de facto standard in analytics reporting, even Kyle James lives and breaths it . Idealy keeping all your stats in one place allows you to search and compare everything, getting a view of the whole picture and ultimately making better decisions.

The Problem

Google Analytics is great for regular HTML pages because it uses javascript to track the page loads. But what about the pesky embedded flash on your page? Whether its there as an essential addition to your site or because the boss wants the homepage to “have movement” and “look flashy”. How can you tell if it is effective? Either for building a case for more interactivity or to prove your boss wrong when they say “more movement will attract more visitors”.

The Solution

You can track clicks and interactivity of flash with Google Analytics, no need to dig through server access logs to figure out how many people are clicking through your flash, although it would be fun but you have better things to do. Google has put together an FAQ about flash click tracking, but I wanted to share our experience with a real life example

The Technique

Make sure you have the newest tracking code on your HTML page.

<script type="text/javascript">
  var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www.");
  document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js'
  type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">

  var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-xxxxxx-x");
  pageTracker._trackPageview();
</script>

As long as you have the above Google Analytics script someplace that loads before the flash you can easily track “fake” page loads in flash using the getURL() function.

on (release) {
  // Track a URL that does not exist
  getURL("javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview('/folder/file.html');");
}

Real Life Example

On the Wayne State University homepage we have a flash piece that highlights success stories in five different categories. The user interaction involves the steps in the video below and we are always looking for the optimal user paths to increase views and click throughs from the “impact area” as we call it.

The Results

Inside Google Analytics you can simply go to your Content Overview and search for the dynamic URL’s you created in the flash. Below is the search for “/category” which shows us the number of categories visited.

From this we determined Academics is the most popular category. We initially thought people would just click down the list to see what is new but it turns out they pick and choose what categories they want to see, the popularity order does not match the order on screen.

Here is the graph of our category clicks since we installed the script.

Because of a build issue with the homepage the tracking code was removed for few days for most people so our results do have a few days with lower results.

Article Views and Click Through Rates

Once inside a category the most recent story loads, below a chart which shows a specific article views (Dark Blue Top Line) compared to its click through rate (Light Blue Bottom Line). As you can see was not a very popular article, getting only 30 views and 16 clicks at the most.

What this does is give us a baseline ratio for click throughs per view: (41 clicks / 146 views) = 28% click through rate which is a pretty good for most promotions. But when you compare that to our site visitors we only get a (146 views / 261,827 Unique Views) = 0.055% view rate.

Take Away

Without being able to track within the flash we would not have known how bad the conversion rate was. We now have the ammo to bring to the homepage committee and tweak the flash interface. Web pages are getting more complex and for each additional layer of interactivity the less Google Analytics will show since the page doesn’t reload. Getting all these statistics in one location gives a true overview of your users and their interaction.

So eventually everyone is going to fumble or make a mistake. If we didn’t make mistakes then how in the world would we ever learn and grow. Fixing your mistakes and learning from them is the important part.

Keeping the End-User in Mind

Hopefully you’ve figured out that developing for the End-User – especially for public websites – is typically the best way to go. It is often easy to forget which End-User is the one we are designing our sites for in Higher Ed – especially when a site overarches multiple audience focus points. However, it is always good to try walking in their shoes before considering a project complete (or better yet getting them to do so for you).

I should probably clarify that our ‘FAIL’ was part of a third party contracted site page www.arkalum.org/join. However, just because it was a third party vendor that does not excuse it – after all to the End-User it is all part of our site.

Online Payments != Bill Me Forms

Since we’ve fixed the page already let me give you a walk-through on where the ‘FAIL’ was and what impact it was having on us.

You guessed it our online payment processing page (membership activation page) was originally developed to include a payment method of “Bill Me”. What is that? In short it turned the page into just another email web form (we had to follow up with print invoices).

Worse yet, as you can see above the “Bill Me” option was the default and the Order Confirmation page used the same button as the Credit Card option “Complete Payment” which meant that the End-Users didn’t even realize they were not fully completing the online payments (after all the button made it appear as though you had completed it).

The “Bill Me” option created confusion for those that thought they had already joined online and made it so that we were not meeting the End-User expectations.

How to Pick Our Self Up!

The answer is simple; remove the “Bill Me” option. But is that the best option for the End-User?

I doubt many would argue that it is but just in case let’s look at how the page is used. The End-User’s goal is to “activate” their membership and that means paying the money. So although there might be a few reluctant individuals that will not make a payment online or those that forget their credit card the day they come, the majority will expect the page to actually charge them (that day).

So That We Can Learn!

If you have not checked out the page at www.arkalum.org/join then now is defiantly the time as although this fixes the ‘major’ problem with the page one should never stop doing End-User testing. Thus, I hereby ask you “How can we keep improving this page?”

So Chris Brogan is a pretty well known social media guru who had a gig recently as keynote speaker at  Stamats Integrated Marketing Conference: Technology, Collaboration, Results. I am a some-time blogger, a regular blog reader and I was an incidental conference attendee. So how did I end up at dinner with Chris and the conference “cool kids,” and more important, why should you care? It’s all about creating conversations and building relationships through social media. Here’s the story:

A few weeks before the conference, Stamats created a social network for conference attendees using the build-your-own network tool, Ning.   Discussions started right away among the attendees, including presenter Brad J. Ward’s  “Twitter Rollcall.“  Chris Brogan, who I doubt knew any of the presenters or attendees before the conference, started following those of us who listed our IDs.

When he arrived in Tampa, we were already in session. The Twitter users, who included a good share of the presenters and a handful of attendees, were doing what we do - blogging, shooting video, snapping photos, posting comments on Twitter (aggregated at TwitterSearch with the tag #stamats08 ). Pretty soon we saw this:

Yep - Chris was “crowdsourcing” his way to the conference venue, and he got there easily with the help of the network. Once there he spent two days hanging out with, not the conference sponsors who’d invited him, but with people he’d conversed with online ahead of the conference. And on that last evening a group of us - all “old friends” by now, including Chris - rehashed the conference and traded stories over some nondescript Southwestern food and plenty of beer.

The bus to dinner

Which is all a long-winded way of pointing out what should be obvious, but isn’t always, when we’re thinking about how to entice prospects to our institutions: People are going to spend their time, money and personal capital with those they know and trust - people they’ve talked with and built relationships with. People they care about and who care about them. Social media tools offer us ways to initiate and establish those relationships.

When I am reading this blog, I feel like most in the audience already have solid social media efforts in place. But I also know that there are others out there - my own school included - who are still struggling to get started. What to do? Take one step at a time, as they say. (We started with sharing tools on our website.)
Listen to what they’re saying out there about you. And join the conversation.

Oh - and keep reading and participating here. There’s a whole network here to support you.

Like most professions it’s easy to get caught up in the day-to-day projects, politics, and assignments inside Higher Education. However, sometimes especially during holiday breaks or slow Fridays we do get some breathing room to catch up or sometimes step forward in our professional lives.

It Starts With You

Now most you by merit visiting this blog (or reading it on your favorite RSS reader) likely suffer from the same addiction as me with information overload from RSS feeds, Twitter, email and number of other sources that provide a swell of ideas, useful tricks, and inspiration. Now in order to leverage that bit of information you came across, rather then filing it away or sending it to bookmark oblivion. You need to TAG it, try using these handy addons from delicious, Remember the Milk, or your own Get Things Done process. The important part is that you classify the article/idea to help you later act on it.

Handy Resources to fill your plate

Now in case you haven’t had your fill of sources, let me point out a few good feeds to add to your inspiration toolbox that vary on your role:

Graphic / UX Design

• Smashing Magazine - Showcasing some of the best designs and web techniques around to inspire us all.
• PSD Tuts - Staple of the Envato network, excellent resource for photoshop tutorials.
• Boxes and Arrows - Take usability to next level with these indepth articles.

Marketing / Social Media

• Traffic’d - Social media Marketing is what they do [period]
• SheGeeks - Feeding your social media and Web Addictions
• Alumni Futures - Quite frankly one of the best High Ed authorities on marketing with emphasis on technology.

Professional Development

• Freelance Switch - We’re all ‘freelancers’ at heart aren’t we? Helpful tips managing your personal brand.
• Lifehacker - Improve your life, not just your career with tips ranging from DIY projects, personal finance, to software tricks.
• Freelance Folder - Another read for perpetual multi-tasker and everyman in the office (or home office).

Web Design / Coding

• Net Tuts - New from Envato, has quickly become indispensable resource for coding how-tos.
• DZone - Digg-style mashup of latest greatest coding and design articles on the web.
• Vandelay Design - Alittle of everything to give you tuturials, tips, and lots of inspiration.

Preparations

Once you found a task from your varied sources you need to quickly tag it with the type of action or category (see catagories above for example). I prefer to cross tagging such as DIY (Do it Yourself) with Office Upgrades or Inspiration and Web Design to aide with some quick context when you revisit the task later.

Just like attending a conference, schedule the time for yourself to work on these individual projects - such as a slow Friday afternoon, a quiet holiday break. And in case your boss wonders what your up to - reassure them this is to develop your skill set just like conference or training seminar and doesn’t cost them a dime.

Why it Works

The key to making this work, is that you select projects that interest and challenge you, especially if you haven’t flexed those skills in a while or EVER!

For instance, take a tutorial on creating a movie poster in photoshop - can increase your understanding in typography, graphic layering, and help you ace that next graphic invitation or HTML email.

Or try that integrating your favorite social media service into your portfolio or blog - not only will it help professional site it will give you the skillset to deploy the same integration in your next project website.

Finally, take the time to write that guest blog you’ve been itching to do to highlight your latest projects and expand your ability as copywriter and educator.

All these actions help to benefit value as working professional and build on your existing strengths to both your employers and yourself - so encourage each of you to make the time to pick a new fun project for the holiday season.

Sound off below and share your tips for professional development, everyone has method to organize the maddness - what’s yours?

I often receive e-mails from people around campus asking for the “number of hits” their site received for a given time period. (My favorite is “…in the last year, so I can include it in my annual report.”) With some people, I take the time to try to get to the root of what it is they’re trying to find value in, and often times try to explain that what they actually asked for isn’t going to help their cause. Will a random number really help them? Do I really need to dig deeply into Google Analytics to give them the number they requested? Why not make one up? Will they know the difference? How does this number have context?

In academe, we’re often asked to undertake assessment projects. One of my biggest professional challenges is to find a credible, valuable way to assess the effectiveness of our electronic media. Using Web Analytics and calculated ROI for certain projects are great starts, but I think there’s more to it.

Kyle talks a lot about Web Analytics, and teaches us how to make sense of these numbers.

Karlyn talks about ROI, especially with e-mail marketing campaigns, and proves you can put a dollar and percentage return value on your efforts to share with the powers-that-be.

For a museum on our campus, what does it mean to them to have 5,000 visitors to their site a month? Does it mean a good percentage of them physically went to the museum to see a particular exhibition? Does it mean a local school teacher was influenced to schedule a field trip to the museum for her class because of what she saw? Did they see enough online exhibitions that they felt they didn’t need to come to the museum in person? Sure, there are ways to track all of these things, but not solely by providing “you had 5,000 visitors to your site last month.” And should that take into context the overall university site having nearly a million visitors in that same month? Are they the same audiences?

I think there is a way to quantify all these numbers in a way that impresses directors/administrators, but provides them greater value. I’d argue it would be more effective to provide dialog. Collect anecdotes – turn on comments and engage people in blog conversations. Share stories from your Facebook Fan Page wall. Be part of the conversation in your forums.

Can you put a number on value and influence? Say your university has a Twitter account and 100 people follow. You have over 2,000 fans of your Facebook Page. Your main university site has one million visitors on average every month. What did you do to convince those following you on Twitter, Facebook and your site, that your college is the right one for them? Were you directly involved, or was it the influence of the community sharing their thoughts and opinions? Will these efforts turn into more prospects, more applicants, higher yield rates? And are these higher quality students? What are your university’s strategic goals? How do you embed these goals into the use of social media, and further, train key players at your campus that being able to rattle off “your site had 5,000 visitors last month” doesn’t get them any closer to achieving them?

Let’s compare stats for three college Facebook Pages:

Which college would you want to be providing numbers for?

I would argue college #1 (and it’s not because of my personal bias of knowing the real college behind the curtains) – look at the activity of the community. It’s not about hard fast numbers – especially the fan numbers, as College #3 is currently in the lead. All three have very similar number of fans, but the difference is the conversation – the volume of conversation, and the topics of discussion that the community is engaged in. These are the numbers, and the anecdotes behind them, that I’d want to be sharing (and do) with my administrators on campus.

Next time you’re asked to provide numbers - throw them a curveball and provide more than just a number. Share with them anecdotes, comments on blogs, flattering Twitter messages, and engaging Facebook wall posts and discussions. More specifically:

• Summarize the types of conversations that are taking place – share a specific anecdote or two
• Talk about the activity that is taking place – is there interaction going on between individuals? Are they helping each other? Are you guiding them?
• For the museum example – suggest they start tracking individuals that walk through the door with some sort of survey that asks if they’ve explored their Web site.
• Which blog posts drew attention of commenters? Which ones didn’t?

Help give them context and illusrate how just providing them with one, or even a few, numbers, may not provide the value or insight they’re really looking for.

The web has united people of common interests and kept them connected through a communication technology that rivals anything we have ever seen in history.  Finding out what Peter had for lunch in Beijing last week or which is the best camera for underwater photography from someone who went diving yesterday has never been easier.  Information from real people (not media or corporate marketing) on anything is available 24 hours a day.

The world as we knew it before the web and social media is just a memory.  The world is now a village. Does a billboard ad work in a village? How about a TV spot?  Ridiculous right.  If I want to buy a roof for my hut I will go to see that guy across the way that just put up a roof and find out about his experience.  This is what people are doing on the web before they make most major purchases.

Decisions are not being influenced by a convincing slogan or a slick ad.  Decisions are being made by conversations.  A great commercial or a clever campaign will draw attention to your product or service but if it is not supported by conversations and real voices, chances are, it will not lead to action or sales.

This is what we need to keep in mind as marketers next time we are at the table coming up with our organizations strategic marketing plans for the next 3 years.

It’s mid-November, and regardless of political affiliation, you are probably a little weary of hearing about change. But the thing about change is it doesn’t cease to exist when we lose interest; we just lose our relevancy.

You might also be weary of change because you’ve spent the better part of your post-conference enthusiasm trying to get your supervisors and directors to adopt some of the ideas they’ve paid for you to bring back to your departments.  But change does not follow org charts.  Just read Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations to see how change has circumvented the usual hierarchies.

You could also be weary of the change in your own department, when what you really require is a change in how somebody runs a service in another department.  Change can’t happen in isolation, can it?

If you really want change to happen, it doesn’t happen with supervisors or interdepartmental committee.  I served a year in an interim role until a new assistant director could be found, and I can tell you that if you are hoping to climb the ladder to effect change, you won’t find what you’re looking for.  All management is middle management. There is always some director, executive director, dean, president, donor, or trustee above.  There are always subordinates and hindrances to enforcement below.

If you think you will reap the benefits of official channels and an interdepartmental committee, you must be planning to retire in your current position.  Coordinating calendars, competing interests and replacing vacant committee members will delay decision-making and implementation.

So how can you make change happen?  The truth is, like Dorothy and the red slippers, you had it in you all along:

• Use your social network to campaign for your idea. If you have a sizable network within your institution and a really good cause, you can publicize your ideas and people may respond.  For example, I tweeted, “Why aren’t we using our wiki space as a knowledge base instead of static Web pages with approved authors?” knowing my followers would get the ear of people involved in these areas.
• Find evangelists. Try to gather a few people who are really passionate about your cause.  Get them to enlist others until enough buzz has been built around it that the idea precedes you or until the people who don’t buy into it are shrinking in number.
• Just do it! In academia, we tend to favor inertia.  People are reluctant to change direction and stray off-course.  If you want someone to adopt your change, start practicing it, make it the norm, and eventually people will be reluctant to stray from the path you’ve created.  As an interim supervisor, when our communications policy got shelved because of a vocal minority, I implemented it informally anyway, until even that minority followed suit.

A community college has some special challenges, one of which is the demographics of our audience. We offer both “academic” degrees for students looking to get an affordable start to a four-year degree and career programs that provide the skills necessary to enter directly into the workforce. As a consequence, there is a wide range of ages and academic backgrounds in our student body. Trying to write content in a manner that appeals to the variety of visitors creates some challenges.

When we undertook a complete rewrite of our 30,000 page Web site, we started almost from scratch. Most of the writing was done by folks in the Community Relations office that have extensive backgrounds in writing, mostly for the print world. We also made the decision to use the AP style. We launched the new site with just over 3,000 pages of new content. It was much more concise and consistent and, according to all reports, a huge improvement.

After the launch, someone in the group thought to run an analysis of the content through Hubspot’s website grader that evaluates the reading level of a site. We discovered that our pages “read” at a level of the Harvard Law Review! The discussions began as to what, if anything, needed to be done. One side said that we are an institution of higher learning and the quality of writing should present a polished image to the pubic to maintain our credibility. Another said that we need to consider our audience and we need to be “user friendly” to all our audiences.

The decision and recommendation was, *surprise,* a compromise. First, there was a discussion of the Web site that did the analysis and how it determines the reading level. It uses an algorithm that analyzes the number of letters in each word, the number of words in a sentence and the number of sentences in a paragraph. Many of the pages dictated the vocabulary appropriate for the subject, so we were limited in the changes we could make there, but we did find that we could often make our sentences shorter, break up our paragraphs and use more lists to improve the presentation of our information and the readability of the pages.

In the end, I felt that our writers had to write in the manner that was most comfortable to them or the quality of their writing suffered. We did encourage them to keep certain guidelines in mind,

Our results have been good. Follow-up scoring of a variety of pages have shown that our scores are more in line with our audience. We also surveyed some of our readers to get a feel for their reaction to the content. The results were as expected; our expected audience found the content informative and understandable.

So, is it necessary to write to lowest reading level of the audience? I do not think so. If the content is written clearly and concisely with liberal use of lists and tables where the information warrants it, you can still maintain a high level of quality of writing while making the content accessible to most levels of reading ability.

Many of you may heard of and perhaps are already using Xenu’s Link Sleuth to check your website for broken links.  However, what you may not know is some of the hidden extras that I have come to love.  Most of the features can be found, by simply sorting the results in a certain way.

So here are some of the uses I have found:

1. Find Broken Links: Sort the list by “Status” and you can quickly see all the broken links on your site.
2. Optimize Page Load Times: If you sort the results by “Size” you can easily see what images, videos, ect. are taking up the most space.
3. Find Duplicate Titles: Sorting by “Title” will allow you to see pages that have duplicate titles.  This has many advantages, from  SEO (See Google’s SEO Quick Start Guide) to finding and removing duplicate content within your website.
4. Find Buried Pages: The “Level” column shows you how many clicks the user would have to perform to get to the page.  If you sort this in a descending order, you can quickly find pages that are buried and make decisions to either make the page more accessible or perhaps remove the page if it is not needed.
5. Find Link-Heavy Pages: If you sort on the “Out Links” column you will get a list of the pages with the most out-bound links.
6. Find Least Linked Pages: The “In Links” column tell you how many pages are linked to a particular page.
7. Find Images Missing Alt Text: Start by sorting the list on the “Type” column.  Now scroll down the list keeping an eye out for image content types.  A glance over at the “Title” column will show you images that do not have alt text included.

As you can see, just by looking at the results a little differently you can accomplish many different tasks in Xenu.  Here are a couple other tips that may help you out:

• By right-clicking a result in the list and selecting “Properties” in the menu, you can view lings like:  what pages link to this url, what links are on the page, and the title or link text.
• By right-clicking a result you can also access the Google cache, Wayback Machine, and Alexa results for the page.  I have found Google Cache and the Internet Archive to be a life-saver a couple times that I’ve lost pages.

What other uses of this product have you discovered?

I’ll admit it: I’m a newbie. When it comes to understanding the politics of the higher education atmosphere I’m just losing my green. Spending the last 10 years in college access marketing, I’ve been humbled by stretching a dollar via grassroots and internet outreach. Making the move to actually sitting at the institution has been challenging, but the same integrated marketing tactics apply.

What’s important to understand is the need for a combination of grassroots and web outreach. Some may argue that these have become the same tactic: that social media is the updated version of grassroots outreach. Marketers should consider that both are needed in order to ensure reach and maintain branding to all audiences, regardless of race, income and level of technological savvy.

Why Grassroots Outreach?

Anyone in non-profit work or those working within the confines of a small budget have had to get creative. In order to communicate your offerings to subsets of your audience, you need to understand where and how they communicate. The importance of this is not only in getting your message across, but in getting it there in a trusted way. For many audiences, this could be in person, via community or faith based organizations, or through specific thought leaders. This is mimicked in most social media efforts.

Many non-profit organizations create specifically targeted campaigns to subsets of their audience. They go door to door or provide information to people at churches or community nights. Especially effective is enlisting someone who represents the community; someone that they aspire to be. Most times this is not a celebrity, but a real person. A great example is the Vermont Start Where You Are Campaign.

Creating Grassroots Effects with Social Media.

Social media are by nature grassroots organizers. They provide a way for communities, not only to interact, but to form around topics. If your target audience communicates via social media, it only makes sense to include this as another channel to engage in conversation.

Remember that the rules of marketing always apply: be sure to do your research. It’s a shot in the dark to simply create profiles or groups in social media if you won’t be reaching the audiences that you intended. Simple research can be done via survey, focus group, or social media research. A little effort goes a long way when beginning on such an endeavor. Another example is Delaware’s Yes You Can Integrated MySpace Campaign.

How Do You Measure Success?

With both in person and virtual grassroots outreach, success may not be obviously quantifiable. By setting benchmarks, it will be easier to see how your efforts have moved the needle or not. Be sure to use both qualitative and quantitative measurements. Numbers of students, families and others involved in the behaviors you are hoping to influence (applications, visits, etc.) are only one measurement that should be monitored. Results of brief attitudinal surveys, increased levels of community engagement and blog posts or press clippings should also be tracked.

The important thing is to remember that the overall gain of community outreach in whatever format or combinations you choose is the overall power of the community itself. You are only a member taking part in the conversation, not the one controlling or steering it. Your job is to listen, communicate, and be helpful. Once you master these strategies, the community will build upon itself, and ultimately become its own success. By using both in person and social media strategies you expand your reach, coolness factor, and strategic two way communication. This will not only provide an outlet for your target population, but it will also give you information to change they way you provide these, and other services.

1. Barack Obama’s Ultimate Guide to Marketing: How he Used Internet and Social Media to Become President-Elect - Barack Obama ’s election was historic not just politically – his use of the the Internet to promote awareness and create a loyal following will be the template which all future presidential campaigns will draw inspiration from.
2. Google’s SEO Starter Guide - Google finally issues an official SEO guide. Nothing you wouldn’t expect to see in this thing, but it is coming from THE official source so it is nice to have an actual confirmation that this is the right way to do it.
3. Google adds ‘on demand’ indexing to Site Search - New feature gives control to Web publishers over the frequency with which Google refreshes its index of Site Search’s content.
4. Google Analytics for SEO programs - Actual examples of the new Google Analytics features in use. Specific examples showing how to use it for SEO research.
5. Flip Camcorder Goes High-Def - Over the past couple of years, Pure Digital Technologies has changed the way people think about video cameras by turning these heavy, expensive, intimidating devices into affordable, user-friendly gadgets that fit into a shirt pocket.
6. Sizing Up the Long Tail of Search - There’s so much traffic in the tail it is hard to even comprehend. To illustrate, if search were represented by a tiny lizard with a one-inch head, the tail of that lizard would stretch for 221 miles.
7. Customer Service and Reputation Management the Twitter Way: A Case Study - A case study of a company that “gets it” and using Twitter to satisfy a client where other channels failed.
8. The 22 Step Social Media Marketing Plan - A plan based on what others are doing. Great insight.
9. Facebook Ad Rates Fall: When 32% Growth Is Not Enough - AllFacebook reports that both the CPM and the minimum spend for some Facebook have dropped 50% since October of last year:
10. How to Get the Most Out of LinkedIn - LinkedIn has a lot to offer regardless of where you are in your career, especially with the economy the way it is.
11. 50+ Must Read Web Design for ROI, Usability and SEO Articles - This collection of 50 must read web design for ROI, usability and SEO articles also embraces the philosophy behind designing websites for the ROI of it not the looks.
12. 25 Web Form Optimization Tips - With web forms playing such an important role in the completing goals, it goes without saying that we should optimize the heck out of them. Below are 25 tips for doing just that.
13. Underline Links, People - A quick reminder to make sure your links on your website are still underlined.
14. The 6 Dangerous Fallacies of Social Media - You may have heard of social media. There ’s been a bit of news about it recently. However, a lot of people making that news have created expectations and beliefs about social media that aren’t true.  Also there is a nice continuation of this post here, Social Media Myths and Reality.
15. Study: Influencers are Alive and Well on Social Media Sites - Online reviews drive far more purchase decisions than newspaper articles, reviews by website editors, or advice from store employees.

So how is that?  I cut three weeks worth of awesome bookmarks down to fifteen links?

Funny Video of the Week

Mark Wahlberg talking to animals.  Ok not really… but sort of.  I’m out, say hello to your mother for me!

Don’t forget to watch the followup to this video.

So if you are not on Twitter here is just another example of the power of the community and reason to join.  Without two minutes I had six “tweets” of interest.  That was more than enough to convince me of the value of putting together this post.  I mean everything else is already compiled.  So here it is guys.

View October 2008
Web Analytics Report for Wofford
(PDF)

Also below are some key takeaway and actionable steps for moving forward that I noticed and reported on in my monthly email.  Remember just because I care about all these numbers most people aren’t going to understand or care about the report so a summary brings you some takeaway points and also provides you with some actionable steps for the month going forward.

October 2008 Analytics Summary

Takeaway points

• Wofford continues to trend positively against benchmark institutions across all three ranking services.  Recent trend downward (remember closer to 1 the better in rankings) are a direct relation to the start of school and increased site usage.
• Analytizing some additional data this past month shows that we need to optimize lower pages around specific keywords as we have a lot of searches taking place on pages other than the homepages.  These visitors are looking for something specific and not finding it.
• Off-Campus traffic continues strong.  Relatively speaking we care more about this traffic segment.
• Our Email Marketing campaign has been recognized as a Benchmark for Email Marketing by other institutions and even our Bronto representative says that we set the bar for what higher education should be doing.  This effort continues to draw strong traffic to the Wofford website.
• Our audience continues to not use embrace RSS to gather content from Wofford or our blog network.  Despite this they obviously read and consume content in the Blog network.  It is also an additional measure for Wofford to “get found” online bringing 1,144 visitors through search engines that might not have found Wofford otherwise.
• Social Networking outlets continue to blossom.  Facebook and LinkedIn specifically.

Actionable Steps for November

• Using Site Search data to analyze where searches are happening and what individuals are specifically looking for to make that easier for visitors to find.  With the purpose to lower searches on these sub pages.
• Focusing on off-campus traffic looking for “low hanging fruit” pages that could be optimized to reduce bounce rates on pages greater than 70%
• Digging into departmental specific reports looking for under performing pages and optimize based on factual data.
• Attempt to increase email traffic to the site 10% to 2,600 visits in November through better calls to action and better tracking measures.
• Setup a profile to track Blog traffic for off-campus visits only.  Is our blog reading audience strictly on campus visitors?  Doing some drill down digging looks like about 17% of traffic is on campus.
• With Social Networking showing promise we are also planning on pushing forward with more video syndication across multiple sites with much of our video content.  It will be interesting to measure the success of this.

Closing

Remember I’ve been working and refining these monthly reports for over a year now.  You won’t have segmented data or year over year data out of the gate.  Just add those segments as they come along.  Also this shouldn’t take all your time.  One day a month compiling the report.  So if there are 20 work days in a month this is 5% of your time.  Give it one good day of focus and make sure that you come out with actionable steps from your research and reporting.

Here is the full list of previous Monthly Analytics Posts to help build a fuller strategy.

• 2007 Annual Web Analysis
• February 2008 - also includes an Introduction
• March 2008
• April 2008
• May 2008
• June 2008

Karlyn also posted her Reflection on the conference.

The Brand

Probably my favorite quote of the conference came from Fritz McDonald in his first presentation.

“Usability is about your Brand and your Brand is about your Experience”

Think about that for a second.  That is truly a powerful statement.  Everyone talks about building their brand and the importance of branding.  Branding is an important thing.  I’m completely sold on the power of a powerful, meaningful, and trusted brand.  So how do you get a trusted brand?  Your site have a good user experience.  How do you have a good user experience?  Through usability.  Light bulb!

Content Creation = Buzz

My rule of thumb, don’t remember anymore if I read this somewhere or what, but 10% of the people will create 90% of the content.  This is especially true for forums, social networks, blogs, etc.  Just another example of the long tail at work except this time let’s focus on the front end.  Now what happens when you get that group of people together that are in that 1% of content creators?  You get the explosion of content created for a conference like this.  I’m not even going to get into the SEO and other reasons why lots of positive content on something is good.

Kathleen VanderVelde wrote it perfect on her blog yesterday.

“This conference produced a whole other conference outside of the presentations - streaming video, videos of presentations, photos, blogging, a #stamats08 Twitter Search (where everyone’s tweets are aggregated in real time, even people who weren’t there), a Ning group.

THIS is social media - the networking, but most important, the relationship building. Plus it gives us a chance to see and understand what others are doing and what we might do with social media for recruitment, retention, alumni …”

Bingo.  But before I leave it I’ll include the comment I posted.

“YES! You got it. Social Media = Relationships. The tools and sites don’t matter and they are all over the place, but what is important is the relationships being built and shared. I have spent most of the day showing the girlfriend all the pictures, videos, and posts from the conference. Flickr, Ustream, Google Video, Twitter, various blogs, ning, the tools aren’t important as the relationships and conversations being shared and built out there. You will never be able to keep up with it all and that is ok too. People just won’t understand until they simply join the conversation and give it a try them self.”

Don’t Be Afraid

Social media and measurement from a business sense were a large part of the conference.  Running a college marketing and web initiative from a business perspective is something that seems to be quite foreign to a lot of colleges and universities.  So many people just do things without really having a game plan about what they want to do.  This critical first step is so important and a huge reminder for a takeaway.  There are so many things to do and not enough time so how do you do it all?  Well Karlyn’s expert advice of “Just do one thing at a time” is so important to keep in your mind.  It is so easy to get distracted and feel like you need to do this and this and that and forget what you really want to accomplish.  One of the first things I plan to do when I get back is to spend half a day, away from the computer, defining a strategic plan for the remainder of the year and layout how I want to accomplish it.  Then start taking things out one at a time.  It was also said: “The great thing about social media is that it’s easy”.  Hundreds of millions of people have Facebook and MySpace pages so it can’t be too hard.  Check out the Social Marketing tab on this site if your looking for a place to start.

The Tools are Free

There are many tools that you can use and there is almost always a free or very affordable alternative to what you want to do.  Invest your money on the people to use the tools not the tools. I know your saying well that’s great Kyle, but I don’t have any budget left to hire people!  Well let’s just think about this for a second.  What about student workers?  Are you taping that resource?  Are you tapping it effectively and using this option?  The tools are free and honestly social media is dead easy to do but you just need time.  Honestly students probably understand this medium probably better than we do so why not have them feel important and take the lead on these initiatives?  Just as they are there to get an education they can also educate us.

Google Analytics, Facebook, Open Source software, reading blogs, YouTube all have one great thing in common.  Assuming that you have a computer and connection to the internet they cost absolutely nothing but time.  All you have to do is find the time, or hire more people with the time. The only way you fail in these is by not jumping in.

I’ve had some great discussion and people who disagree with me on this point and I think that’s great that we have different ways to approach things, but just go setup these services and spend a few hours getting them setup right.  You spent part of a day and then see what happens.  Tell a few people and see which one picks up steam.  Don’t go and build your own social network until you know your community is ready for a social network.  Setup a free group on ning and see if it gets traction and grows.  If it does then you have built your case about why your developer needs to spend months working on a project to build your own social network.  If it fails well it wasn’t what your audience wanted and now you know and can try to reach them in a different way.  It is ok to fail in this way.  Truthfully we learn more through our failures than our successes guys!

Where to Start

I don’t remember who said it, but another very powerful statement was:

“Never start with technology.  Start with your goals and the user experience then find the technology to do it.”

I’m such a big advocate of this approach it’s not funny.  Figure out what you want to do first.  Never be satisfied that we need this product because it does X.  Is X what you really want to do or do you just think it would be cool?  Does it help your user experience?  Is it something your audience cares about?  Have you asked them what they want before you got it?  Really understand exactly what you want to do then find the tool that does it best and is in your budget.

You want to purchase an Email Marketing Solution, great!  So what exactly is important for this solution to do for you and your audience?  Don’t know well ask your audience, see what others are doing inside and outside of the email industry.  Subscribe to a bunch of email marketing campaigns and figure out what they do that you like and don’t like.  You will probably notice that most every solution does all these things so you will find that you like the user interface of one better than the other.  Wait… the user experience sways you on a specific product, imagine that?  If your actually trying to select an Email Marketing Solutions here’s a great post to help with that decision process.

Closing

So much great content was created for the conference so I’ll close with some links to find it and help us remember it.

Pretty much everything is compiled together in the All of Stamats 08 BlogHighEd compilation that Jacob Oyen was awesome enough to put together.  Thanks Jacob!

A few specific:

• Stamats 08 Flickr Group pictures are in slideshow above
  
• I tried to video a good many of the presentations which you can find on Google Video with the #stamats08 search.
• Stamats Ning Group which includes discussions around the conference.