Building your community on top of a third-party platform solves a number of user experience concerns, but also presents challenges. Out of the box, you’ll have content and widget types, and a general look and feel to the font, headings, icons, and navigation. These styles may or may not work for your organization as-is. Be sure to evaluate the following prior to deploying your community.

Audience
A clear understanding of your audience will guide most of your user experience decisions. Will your traffic be comprised of power users or novices? Is the target audience a highly technical group of engineers or the general consumer public? Will they need more hand-holding and concierge-like content and elements, or would they prefer to jump straight into the meat of the content with quick summaries and granular subscription and notification management? Understand their needs, key tasks, and desired content before taking another step.

Community Information Architecture
Should the hierarchy of the community be topic-based or function based? In the example of a community for technology enthusiasts, topic-based top-level navigation could include “Car Tech”, “Mobile”, and “Home Entertainment” whereas a functional approach could include “Discussions,” “Blogs,” Groups,” and “Members.” Your navigation may include both as subsets of the other.

Consider this carefully because your community platform will likely have certain content containers and modules that can be present or allow for cross-pollination only under particular structural arrangements. In the example of Jive, Spaces, Sub-spaces, Groups, and Categories have appropriate and inappropriate uses. The right scenarios will come as a result of clear user profiles and a scalable information architecture.

Login Strategy
What content can users see, and what can’t they see? Should the entire community be private or only partially so? Some content may need to exist pre-login to entice members to join. Another approach is to allow anyone to view content, but they must login to post. When prompting users to login, does your platform handle this in an elegant way, or are customizations necessary? For instance, you may want to present the login fields in an overlay, and ensure the user is directed back to their original screen/state after successfully logging in or registering.

Navigation
What type of navigation options does your community platform offer and how are they placed by default? The main navigation may not be styled or positioned to your liking, or it may not even be available unless it is custom created. Often, some navigation options are included which must be hidden especially if they lead to functionality you’re not utilizing in the community. An example might be a menu link to an ideation module that isn’t planned for community activation until a later phase. Is each set of navigation options scalable? As your community and content grows, will there be room for additional options or will space become tight? A clearly defined, multi-phased information architecture plan can prevent you from painting yourself into a corner.

Modules & Extensions
To get as close as possible to the best user experience, the standard feature set of your community platform may need to be expanded. For instance, video may be a key source of traffic driving content, but embedded YouTube players just won’t cut it. Or, a major strategy of your community is to build buzz around offline events and manage RSVPs. Allowing community members to rally around ideas and letting the best ideas float to the top could also be a goal. Certain platforms may well accomplish some of these out of the box while others require additional modules (at a price). Be sure to fully understand the user experience benefits of these extensions and the ramifications of making do with work-arounds or hacks.

Content Showcase
When it comes to highlighting key content and features of your community, one size does not fit all. In all likelihood this will require close attention and a truly custom approach. A static panel of “Getting Started” tips may suffice, or a rotating presentation window with targeted calls to action may be better. For maximum impact and effect, you may choose to display certain promotions or graphics depending on the user type (first time, frequent user, referring source).

Page Structure & Widget Selection
There are often default row and column configurations available in a community platform. Determine if the arrangement you need is available and if not, what it will take to get there. Understand the limitations of choosing a two or three column layout versus a hybrid approach. Will the types of content you need to include on each page gel with the frameworks available? Will the right content be above the fold? What types of content widgets are available and what are their default headings? Can certain widgets be combined to maximize screen real estate?

Iteration is Key
Most of the above questions and concerns will come up during a community planning process. Minimize rework by employing tried and true user-centered design methods and testing your taxonomies and prototypes with real people. Move in a progressive iterative fashion adding more detail to your prototypes and/or test “sandbox” area as questions get answered.

There’s a lot of buzz these days about driving greater online engagement on your website or in your community from customers, prospects, employees, or any specific targeted audience. This is essentially accomplished by creating and delivering the quality content, features, or tools your audiences want or need.

What constitutes engagement and how we measure it will always vary depending on the organization, users, content, and context. By asking this question of the key stakeholders in your company, you’ll provoke a discussion that will bring to the surface many of the key measurement challenges to overcome. Examples can include:

Video content can command and keep attention. Which videos are most important? Is our content fresh and relevant? Is it being published in a way that is user friendly and can we accurately measure views, shares, and completion rates? Can we map these metrics back to traffic source?

• Product views: Which product lines should we focus on? What number of product views most often results in an eventual purchase?

• White papers: Consumption of whitepapers by target audiences can be a conversion in itself, but definitely translates to engagement. Next steps will include assigning the creation of the content and evaluating whether or not lead generation and CRM systems and processes are properly in place.

• Comments published on discussion forums, community areas, or product review sections. Can you easily determine the number of comments per category of your site or community? Does the data differentiate between visitors’ comments and your internal employees?

• Rating of content or features: Caring enough to rate/Like a product or feature indicates interest and serves as a good supporting metric. How well are these functions integrated into the user experience of your site or community?

• Sharing content across social media via tools such as AddThis or ShareThis. These may not be integrated, or you may have to track down who owns the account in order to view the share data.
• Search: Are visitors actively searching for your content? Consider both external searches as well as internal. Evaluate whether the queries entered into your internal search box are being captured.
• Pages per visit: How deep is their session? Depending on your users’ goals, a deep session may or may not actually be desirable. In some instances, viewing many product pages, or consuming a number of videos is beneficial to the organization. On the other hand, the user should only have to view as few support pages as possible before finding the answer to their question.
• Time on site: Similar to pages per visit, the sweet spot for time on site can be low or high depending on content types and the overall goals of the site.
• Number of visits in a certain timeframe: Increasing the number of repeat visitors is the goal of most sites and communities. You’ll want to set your own targets in terms of what’s achievable and desired.

Create an “Engaged Visitors” Segment

Each of the above activities generates data (if configured to do so). The first step is to ensure there are no data gaps so the desired action can actually be measured. For instance, you may need to utilize event tracking to verify when white papers are downloaded or, your site has an internal search function, but it may not be integrated with your primary web analytics tool.

Once data gaps are closed and the proper data is flowing in, you can create an “Engaged Visitors” segment in your analytics tool to group the metrics your team has agreed upon and their related thresholds together. Once applied to your standard reports, you’ll be able to tell what traffic sources, campaigns, regions and keywords are driving quality traffic to your site.

Turn this into a percentage of overall traffic and you have a Killer KPI.

I highly recommend it.  You’ll learn new things and solidify existing knowledge as well.

Like Button
This is the core plugin that can free your content to be easily distributed across the web and to open a dialogue between your site and Facebook users. The Like Button enables users to post pages from your site back to their Facebook profile with one click along with an optional comment.

Once a user has “liked” your page, product, or other piece of content, they will be notified whenever you post updates about that item such as a sale for a product line, news about an upcoming movie, or an update regarding an open job.  The Like Button indicates the popularity of an item by showing the number of likes it received.  What’s more, it will also let you know if any of your friends have also liked that item.

Ways to integrate the Like Button:

• Add the Like Button to every product on your site.  Make sure the product image is also associated with the item so it can stand out in a user’s stream.
• Integrate with each press release, news article, or blog post.  A good strategy here is to add it to the top of the article or post to encourage user to read the content (will shows friends who have also liked) as well as the bottom to make it easy for them to like the content when finished reading.
• Certain types of content (such as movies, books, sports, restaurants and celebrities) can be automatically added to a user’s interests area of their profile when liked.  If you offer this type of content, integration of the Like Button is clearly a must-do.
• Consider using the Like button at a category, topic, or even author level for broader interests.  For instance, a user may want to be kept up to date on all of your mens shoes offerings.
• If you’re a financial site, you can offer the Like button so users can track certain stocks in their news feed.
• Charity sites can use the Like button to virally spread the word about specific initiatives.

There are also WordPress plugins available.  Try it out at the end of this post!

Recommendations
The Recommendations plugin makes use of all the social interactions with your content (especially likes) to provide a list of recommended content for your users.  If the user is logged in to Facebook, the plugin highlights the content their friends have liked.  This plugin gives new credibility to your content and can serve to drive visitors deeper into your site.

Ways to use the Recommendations plugin

• This is a great candidate for use on your homepage to immediately make a connection with visitors and deepen their visits.
• Use the plugin on category pages to help users move to the next step.
• On product detail pages, use the plugin in place of, or in combination with “You may also like” features.
• Watch your web analytics data to find the most common exit pages you feel users shouldn’t be leaving from.  Add the plugin here in an attempt to prevent abandonment.
• If you have a search function on your site, add the plugin to your results pages (especially the no-results page).

Activity Feed
This plugin is very similar to the Recommendations plugin.  The only difference is it’s designed to focus on your friend’s activity exclusively.  However, if there is not activity from your friends, it will back-fill to show recommendations.

This plugin is particularly useful on sites that feature local attractions such as restaurants.  Sites like Yelp have jumped at the chance to integrate this plugin as they understand the power of friends’ influence on user behavior.

Login with Faces
The Login with Faces plugin doesn’t require you to scan your face in order to gain access to a site.  No, it’s actually an effective way to motivate someone to take the next step and create an account.  The plugin shows the user’s friends who have signed up for a site along with a login button.  By seeing familiar faces, a user will be more inclined to participate with your content and will want to learn more.

Of course, your site needs to already offer login via Facebook accounts (using Facebook Connect).  Once setup, add the Login with Faces plugin next to your site’s primary login area and registration screen.  Combine this with the Activity Feed plugin for maximum results.

Comments
One the biggest hindrances to fostering a dialog on your site is the requirement that users have to create an account before they can post comments.  This of course, is necessary in most cases in order to prevent spam comments and auto posts from bots.

However with the Comments plugin, you can now add a comments thread to any page on your site and allow those already logged in to Facebook to add their two cents.  In addition, the user can opt to have their comment also posted to their Facebook profile.  If they do, that comment will show up in their news feed, viewable by all their friends.  They just might bring more peeps to the party.

Use the Comments plugin anywhere you want to solicit feedback such as:

• Local business review sites
• Product reviews on ecommerce sites
• News announcements and press releases
• Featured destinations on travel sites
• Gauging user interest in potential new site features

Like Box
You’ve seen widgets on sites advertising their Facebook page for some time.  The Like Box takes this a step further by integrating the Like Button into it.  The big benefit here is a user can see which of their friends have also liked the page.  Recent activity from the Facebook profile is also displayed.

This plugin is useful anywhere you want to advertise your Facebook presence.  It takes up a bit of space, but the header or activity stream can be removed if desired.

Facepile
Very similar to the Login with Faces plugin, the Facepile plugin shows which of the user’s friends have signed up for site.  The really nice difference though is that the plugin can dynamically resize its height based on available data and even won’t show at all if no friends have signed up or if user is not logged in.

This can be a great addition to the header or top portions of a homepage and key landing pages to further encourage users to dig deeper.  Your screen real estate is reserved if there are no friends to display.  Truly a win-win.

Live Stream
The Live Stream plugin allows users to post comments in real-time. This is a great addition for sites that feature live events like live streaming video for concerts, speeches, or webcasts, live Web chats, webinars, and massively multiplayer games.

You can filter the feed by all “watchers” or by just your friends.  You’ll want to verify you have enough interest in your event prior to adding the Live Stream or risk featuring a ghost town plugin.  However, for those with a significant following, the real-time chat can keep visitors engaged with your event.

Extensive Integration Examples
These examples go beyond simple social plugin embeds.  They are the result of careful and deliberate partnering with Facebook.  Each user experience has truly pushed the envelope in terms of social integration and benefit to the user.  Be sure to check these out for inspiration.

Pandora
Now you can see which songs and stations your friends recently listened to.  Get new music ideas from your social circle.

Simply Hired
When viewing companies or specific open jobs, the site displays your friends that work at these companies and may be able to recommend you for a position.  It will also display friends whose companies currently have open positions which might be a fit for you.

Microsoft Docs
Makes it easy to share documents and collaborate online with friends.  Comments can be run on any document.   Eliminates the need to log in separately to the Microsoft Docs platform as users can also login via Facebook.  This should truly help with adoption of the new service and offer Microsoft a little edge in their battle with Google Docs.

Pluck
Pluck is a robust social community platform used by major national brands.  Their recent integration with Facebook has taken full advantage of the new capabilities including:

• The ability to post comments using your Facebook account profile
• Automatically “verifying” a commenter who uses their Facebook profile to post comments.  A comment thread editor can easily mark these comments as featured since the editor can verify the user’s identity.
• Users can discover their other Facebook friends who are already part of the community
• Comment threads can be filtered by all comments or just comments from their friends

Getting Started
How do I add these plugins to my site, you ask? Trevin Chow offers tips and code snippets, and of course there’s the Facebook Developers site.

Check your pages after adding plugins using the URL Linter (love that name) to make sure everything’s working properly.

I hope you liked, and will “Like” this post (try it out below)! As always, comments are encouraged.  How are you using (or intend to use) the Facebook social plugins?  What other great examples of integration have you seen?

Location
Centare Group
125 North Executive Drive, Suite 104
Brookfield, WI 53005

When
Monday, June 14, 5:30PM

Agendas
5:30-6:00 Networking (a light meal will be provided)
6:00-7:00 Presentation
7:00-7:30 Discussion

Agile Web Analytics: Tracking What Matters to Improve Site Usability and Performance
Time is, of course, money.  If you really want to see an ROI from web analytics, you need to reduce the time to insight.  This may mean slaughtering some sacred cows and taking a fresh look at what you’re tracking, why, and how.  In this presentation, Brian Molstad will outline ways to abandon bureaucracy and obligatory reports, take action faster, and point out why more automation is not always the answer.  Find out which reports and functions in Google Analytics lead to insight and how to avoid useless aggregate metrics.  In addition, you’ll learn how web analytics can be a valuable addition to the user centered design process and why usability practitioners are well-suited for implementing web analytics methodologies within their organizations.

Speaker
Brian Molstad is an interactive media architect who has been defining and leading online initiatives for over 10 years. His talents and experience lie in the areas of information architecture, web analytics, usability, information design, and project management. Beginning with an education rooted in advertising, marketing, and sociology from Marquette University, Brian’s focus has been on ensuring clarity of communication since the earliest stages of his career. A true user advocate, Brian is passionate in his pursuit of designing the perfect user experience and specializes in leading multi-disciplinary teams to success with a high standard of excellence.

You can read Brian’s blog at http://www.molstadconsulting.com/blog/  or catch up with him on twitter: http://twitter.com/MolstadConsults

Admission
MilwauCHI members: free 
Non-members: $10
 Students: $5

In this post we’ll discuss data automation (and why it’s not the end-all-be-all), reporting strategies, insight brainstorming sessions, and the relative importance of data accuracy.

To Automate or Not to Automate?

The fully automated analytics dashboard is sort of a holy grail of marketing. The concept is having one place to check that shows performance data across all of your digital (and perhaps even offline) marketing, automatically updated as new data comes in.

Many vendors and agencies will claim this can be setup for you, (and some can take this concept very far such as Omniture, albeit at significant cost) however the devil is often in the details. One thing likely all can agree on is that online marketing continually evolves and it is evolving at a faster and faster pace. This means that your marketing objectives, content, campaigns, and the tools in your toolbox will be in a constant state of flux.

With data coming in from your primary web analytics tool (i.e Google Analytics), Facebook, Twitter, various other social media properties, email marketing, surveys, rating and feedback systems, search marketing, CRM systems, and more, the task of staying on top of the data each tool creates and funneling it into your dashboard accurately is daunting to say the least. Many of these systems will tout an API (application programming interface) however each one is different and is subject to change.

By committing to keep all of your various data sources integrated and automated, you’re adding a complex technical layer that may significantly increase your time to insight. When a decision is made to change the site, switch to a different social media platform, create or modify campaigns, you’ll likely have to submit an IT request to ensure your dashboard remains accurate. By the time this is completed, you may have already moved on to the next iteration of your strategy. Not exactly agile.

Instead, simply keep and update brief instructions next to each important metric about where and how to get the data. You may be able to link directly to a specific report. When your strategy or site changes, you only need to update text and/or a link. Follow your own instructions and you’ll have your answer in seconds. You can manually enter the number or metric to track over time, or simply look to see if it changed significantly. The level of effort you go to will depend on where you’re focusing your marketing efforts that month or that quarter. If you know nothing’s changed, why measure it?

Less Reporting, More Insight

If you want to ensure your web analytics initiative does NOT improve the overall company condition do this:

Create the same reports every month, exported into spreadsheets or PDFs, and distribute to top stakeholders. Wait for their feedback.

If on the other hand, you want results, a more hands-on collaborative process is in order. Try the following:

1. Using your agile, not-necessarily-automated inventory of metrics, review the data that matters based on business goals and current marketing efforts. Identify significant improvements or problems in those areas.
2. Draft a summary of the most important issues, highlighting the ones that likely contributed to the significant rise or fall of a major KPI. Create a list of the top 10 high priority initiatives (listed in order of importance/opportunity) you feel the company should take as a result of recent data.
3. Organize a meeting of the top stakeholders in your organization (executive, marketing, customer service, technical) and use your summary of issues and opportunities as an agenda.
4. Prior to the meeting, make sure you have the proper facilities and presentation equipment to bring up analytics tools on the fly during the meeting to illustrate your points and to reference the company website and/or social media properties to provide context.
5. During the meeting walk through the issues and opportunities step by step, bring up data and representative screens to support your assertions.
6. For each step, solicit direct feedback from the stakeholders and get each unique department’s perspective on what the data is revealing. Have there been major changes in strategy, technical updates, or content updates that the rest of the group wasn’t fully aware of? What are their plans for the immediate future?
7. As responsibilities become clear, immediately assign them to the proper stakeholder. It may be a good idea to update your online collaboration tool’s task list (SharePoint, Basecamp, activeCollab, etc.) right then and there.
8. After the meeting, go back and update your top 10 high priority initiative list and publish to the stakeholders. Also update your metric inventory based on revised goals and shifted marketing focus.
9. At the next session, measure current progress against this updated set of metrics and new agenda.
10. Lather, rinse, repeat, and progress.

Use web analytics data and A/B and multivariate tests to settle arguments. End the opinion loop and learn to take action as an organization regularly and rapidly.

Data Accuracy Matters…Mostly

We all want to be sure that the data we’re looking at is correct. Of course, we should take all reasonable precautions to ensure that it is. Properly tagging your site with tracking code tags, filtering out internal traffic, understanding how your web analytics tools tracks vists, sessions, events, etc. are crucial.

However, the more tools you use, inevitably, the more discrepancies you’ll see in terms of visit counts, referrals, views and so on. This is simply because they all track data differently and always will.

You can lose hair trying to reconcile all of these data sources, or you can act based on trends you see across the tools. Google Analytics may be telling you one thing about referrals from Facebook, Facebook may be telling you another, and your CRM system may be telling you something else. However, if each system is proportionally telling you that conversions from traffic driven by Facebook decreased significantly, then act. If you wait for 100% data confidence, you’ll miss the boat.

For more on freeing yourself from data accuracy dependency, see Avinash Kaushik’s blog post on the subject.

You Are Ready, Grasshopper

By integrating the points above (and from Part 1) into your web analytics process, you’ll decrease time to insight, and learn to act quickly to keep pace with the rapidly evolving digital landscape.

As always, comments are encouraged. What steps in your company’s data review process should stay or go? What challenges are you experiencing in the effort to end opinion loops and become a data-driven organization?

First Things First
As with any other initiative, if you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll never know if you arrived.  Save massive amounts of time and cost by ensuring your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are clearly defined and accepted throughout the organization.  For most websites these can include:

• Purchases or revenue goals
• Generated leads or quote requests
• Acquisition rates for key target audiences
• Email signups
• Trial downloads
• Dealer contacts
• Site engagement levels
• Ad impressions
• Etc.

Elevate your KPIs in your reports and focus on outcomes.  In most cases, your web analytics tool (once configured correctly) will automate the tracking of these metrics (also providing your data gaps are closed – see below).  If this is challenging due to the use of numerous third-party systems, you may want to manually log performance over time in a spreadsheet or work toward automating KPI data collection via APIs.  These are also good candidates to be featured in custom-designed reports for the top brass in your organization.

Close Those Data Gaps!
Now that you’re in agreement as to why your site exists in the first place, it’s time to make sure you can actually verify if it’s achieving set objectives.  In some cases, your site may not be configured in a way that allows for the right data to be collected at all.  Minor site updates can have major impact.  Examples include:

• Contact forms don’t submit to a unique URL making it difficult to track conversions in your web analytics tool
• Single pages contain content for multiple topics:  Breaking topics out into separate pages allow for individual pageview measurement, segmentation, and targeted landing pages.
• No site search!  Without a search function on your site, not only are you depriving users of a helpful tool, you’re also missing out on seeing the terms they enter into your search box.  Learn what your customers are NOT finding by reviewing internal search data and the start pages that trigger the most queries.
• No campaign parameters:  You advertise a key promotion from various places (homepage, banner ads, external sites, email), but lacking proper campaign parameters in your URLs, you can’t tell which source is performing best. (More on campaign tracking in Google Analytics)
• You hand off traffic to affiliates or partner sites without measurement:  For example, your main site features product overview information but the actual purchase takes place on a partner ecommerce site.  If sharing clickstream data across two different profiles isn’t possible, at least track referrals to the partner sites as events.
• No voice-of-customer tools:  By tracking only the quantitative, you’re only getting half the story.  Add rating and comment tools, opt-in surveys, and social sharing tools to collect and compare the qualitative response.
• Cryptic URLs:  If your URLs are full of parameters and session IDs, or worse, are dynamically created based on various scenarios, it will be difficult to sort out which page is which in your analytics data.  Work to standardize URLs, file names, and page titles.

Create Your “To Review” List
In the early days of web analytics in order to gain insight, data needed to be pulled out of the web analytics tools into spreadsheets with various custom calculations applied.  These days, even free tools like Google Analytics have evolved to the point where many of those calculations are handled for you.  You can spend more time generating insight, and less time processing your data.

Even with these significant improvements, one still needs to have a very clear agenda of what to track on a regular basis.  This need not be complex.  It could be a simple list in a Word doc with approval from all key stakeholders, an Excel spreadsheet designed to be a living document (Google Docs work well for this), or a custom-built web application.  The key is, keep the focus on strategy and analysis, not on automation and reporting.

Your agenda will likely include some of the following:

• Google Analytics Intelligence: A fantastic, and relatively new addition to Google Analytics that generates automatic and custom alerts of significant events within your data.
• Overall goals and conversions per audience segment (provided you’ve closed your data gaps)
• Campaign performance (again with the data gaps)
• Email campaign performance
• Search marketing performance (both organic and paid)
• Top traffic sources by key segments and audiences
• Specific referring site traffic (who is sending you love)
• Regional performance (where are your conversions and quality traffic occurring)
• Internal search usage (what are your visitors looking for)
• Social media monitoring

Under each of the above you’ll break out the specific campaigns, keyword groups, referring sites, and so on that contribute to success in each area.  You’ll also want to group specific metrics by business goal and by key audiences.  Depending on your marketing focus in a given month or quarter, you’ll know where your efforts have been directed.  It’s in those areas where you may choose to document your performance in your spreadsheet or custom web application.  However, in most cases, your web analytics tool (if configured properly) is already doing this for you and you can easily view trends.

You’re ahead of the game simply because you knew, very specifically, which reports to review rather than meandering aimlessly.  Save time by documenting (or automating) only what will directly help you gauge whether you’re moving the needles you’re trying to move in a given time period.  Take a serendipitous approach with the rest of your list.  For instance, if a new referring site surfaces which is sending quality traffic, make a note of it and look for it next month.  If all looks the same as last month, don’t bother reporting it. Make your metrics work hard to be logged and apply the “So What” filter mercilessly.

Tune In Next Time

In Part 2, we’ll continue our exploration of an agile web analytics philosophy and cover topics such as data automation (and why it’s not the end-all-be-all), reporting strategies, analysis and insight brainstorming sessions, and the relative importance of data accuracy.

As always, comments are encouraged.  What data gaps are you working to close?  What’s on your “To Review” list?

In this post, I take a look at the websites of each of the three candidates, Scott Walker, Mark Neumann, and Tom Barrett, and evaluate them based on their homepage performance, promoting email signups, usage of video, and available supporter tools and resources.

First, a quick overview of the candidates’ domains:

• Scott Walker: ScottWalker.org – Has held and used this domain since 1999.  Announced run on April 28, 2009
• Mark Neumann: MarkForGov.com – Announced run on September 8, 2009 with traffic data for the site showing as starting in July of 2009.
• Tom Barrett:  BarrettForWisconsin.com – Launched February 18th, 2010 (very late) – Announced run on November 15, 2009.

Compete.com Data

Barrett clearly has some catching up to do, however the data indicates the race (at least in terms of site unique visitors) is narrowing.

Unique visitors in month of January

• Walker: 4,052
• Neumann: 3,651
• Barrett: 1,251

HOMEPAGE
In this section I take a look at the homepage of each site and outline positives and negatives.

Walker

Positives

• On entry, an overlay prompts the user to sign up for email updates.  A cookie is placed on your computer and the site remembers you so you aren’t bothered every time you visit the site with the signup form.
• High up on the page is a list of the ways a supporter can take action and a call to create your own “spot” (more on supporter tools and resources below).
• The “What’s Your Take?” section highlights recent comments from site visitors.  This is a good way to grab the attention of site visitors.  See the “Negatives” section below for more.

Negatives

• The prominence and size of the callout for “MyScottSpot.org” does not match its importance.  This is one of, if not the most important call to action of the site.
• Within the video/presentation area, there are only three frames and each includes a quote and a photo of a citizen with a concern.  Upon clicking these, a page merely reiterates the quote and presents you with another link to “See what Scott says about [topic].”  One would think that there is a video associated with these callouts featuring the citizens concerns.  The actual content is a bit underwhelming.
• There is a video player integrated within the homepage, however it is too small to expect someone to watch the video in this space.  It would make more sense to incorporate the videos in the main presentation area above.
• The “What’s Your Take” section only displays three handpicked comments.  It initially appears as if your comment may immediately be submitted to the site, however this is not the case.  It’s understandable why the campaign wouldn’t want comments posted directly, but the site shouldn’t give the impression that it accommodates this action.
• There’s a “Breaking News” section, however it’s very far down the page in small font.  Easy to miss.

Neumann

Positives

• The site elevates where you can find the candidate across the major social media properties very high on the page.  They take the most prominent position of all the candidates’ sites.
• The main presentation area on the homepage is well-designed and does a great job of calling out the key areas of the site and the tools available to supporters.  A much better job is done here than on the Walker site.
• Next to the presentation area, the site includes a photo of the candidate and a quick summary of why he’s running.  The Barrett site takes a similar approach.  More effective than the hand/card graphic on the Walker site.
• The “How Can I Help?” section in the right column clearly and succinctly summarizes available features coupled with recognizable icons.
• Instead of a pseudo comments section, Neumann showcases the latest from his blog.  This is a good approach, however see the Negatives section below.

Negatives

• The sign-in form for the user account area should be much higher on the page, perhaps as a permanent spot in the header.  Yes, there is a “Login” link up there, but it’s easily missed.
• Even though “Contribute Now” belongs in a prominent place, it should be preceded by at least a sentence or two enticing the user to take that step.  Clickthrough rates would likely increase.
• The blog section shows the entirety of each post.  This limits the ability of the user to scan the posts, read a quick summary and then decide which is worth clicking through to.  It’s easy for other posts pushed far lower on the page to be overlooked.
• Perhaps it was decided to show the full content of each blog post so some content was alongside the overly long series of callouts in the right column (8 in all).  If the blog posts were reduced to a title and summary, more room would be available to present these callouts in a more effective grid form.  Removal of redundancies would also help such as the “Endorse Mark Neumann,” which could be integrated within the “How Can I Help?” section.

Barrett

Positives

• The main navigation on this site is large, clear, and obvious.  Each button feels like a call to action in itself.  A strong point for a political candidate’s site.
• An email list is the lifeblood of any candidate, and the Barrett site calls out the signup form most prominently of the three sites.
• The initial frame of the presentation window includes a welcome video from the candidate.  Unlike the other two sites, you can watch this video right from the homepage in a window large enough for comfortable viewing.
• The presentation window’s frames are easily navigated and each includes a summary of call to action destination.
• The blog area lower on the page features each post’s title and summary, with a link to the detail.  This is better for presentation’s sake as well as for tracking of most popular posts.
• In general, the site is well-organized and easy to scan.  The homepage doesn’t attempt to cram in every conceivable callout.

Negatives

• Similar to Neumann’s site, the “Contribute” button would be more effective moved underneath the candidate’s photo and intro paragraph giving the user more of a reason to take action.
• The site does not summarize or callout the ways a supporter can get involved.  This may be because in general the options are limited compared to the other candidates (a rather big negative).  More on this in “Supporter Tools & Features” section below).

EMAIL MARKETING

Each candidate site is relatively similar in that they prominently call out the email signup form.  The Walker site is the most up front about this as mentioned previously, by greeting first-time users with an overlay.

After entering your email address, however, each takes a different approach in terms of gathering more information.

Walker

The Walker site requires confirmation of your email address in order to start receiving updates.  Obviously this was implemented to limit the amount of junk accounts created, but it creates an unnecessary level of friction for the user.  A better practice would allow the user to finalize their subscription and begin receiving messages right away.  The campaign could utilize behavioral targeting to force those who never open emails to validate their address later on.

Neumann

• Neumann smartly combines the email signup process with the ability to create an account at the same time.  The screen reiterates the email address.  The email address functions as the user name and a password can be selected and confirmed to create an account.
• It may not be clear to some however, what the, “publicly support and endorse” checkbox is actually for.  What will the campaign do with your information should you check this box?  A simple “What’s this?” which reveals an explanation would be helpful.
• After submitting the form, you’re directed straight to your account dashboard.  An email is sent to your address asking you to validate your email address; however this doesn’t prevent you from using the system.
• From the user account, you can specify in-depth the types of emails you want to receive. These range from general campaign updates to specific activity within the community such as friend requests, event and blog postings, and comments.

Barrett

The Barrett site unfortunately doesn’t prompt you to create an account, however it does introduce one feature the others don’t.  A check box at the bottom of the form reads, “Sign me up to receive text messages on my phone.”  Surprisingly, this is the only campaign utilizing mobile notifications.

VIDEO
Some observations regarding the candidates’ use of video:

Walker

• The tiny homepage video mentioned previously, is definitely a negative, and the main video page isn’t much better.  This page is simply a scrolling list of embedded YouTube players with a .wmv file at the bottom.  There is no way to share to easily share or bookmark individual videos other than the default embed/URL YouTube features.  The entire page can be shared via email but this is only moderately useful.
• Despite being able to boast the longest-lived website, there are only five videos.

Neumann

• Best practice dictates publishing videos on your site directly and integrating the content within the user account area.  When not possible, a fully-branded YouTube channel is a good second choice.
• The Neumann campaign’s YouTube channel integrates the website’s graphics as well as key calls to action such as to contribute or visit other social media profiles.  The channel’s profile information is filled out in detail and includes a “Why I’m Running for Governor” intro.  Well done overall.

Barrett

The Barrett site is sort of a hybrid between the other two in terms of video.   A single page on the site highlights only three videos with many of the same faults as the Walker site.  They do have a YouTube channel (pictured above), however little thought was given to integration of brand or overall look and feel.  The channel lacks an overview statement and calls to action.

SUPPORTER TOOLS & FEATURES
Each site featured tools and resources for supporters; however these differed significantly from site to site.

Walker

The Walker site offers tools both outside and inside the login.  Outside the login there are a series of universally accessible pages on the site under “Get Involved.”

• Volunteer: A simple signup form with check boxes for ways to help
• Social Networks: Basic directory of the social media profiles the campaign maintains
• Attend Events: This is a great feature which offers a detail page for each event and often a link to registration or more details.  Each event can be mailed to yourself or a friend
• Scott Walker Store:  Not a bad idea to make it easy to buy T-shirts, stickers, signs, and other merchandise to show your support.  This ecommerce store even handles paid event registration

The ability to create a “MyScottSpot.org” also exists and offers a very full-featured experience with innovative tools.

• Similar to LinkedIn’s “profile completeness” MyScottSpot measures “impact points” and plots where you are on the scale from being a new “Recruit” to becoming an “Operative.”  A page summarizes how their “Personal Impact Engine” is calculated.
• Your to-do items are summarized on the dashboard with each one displaying its potential score getting you closer to “Operative” status.
• Recent blog posts are summarized neatly in the right column.  The main site would benefit from this approach as well.
• Lower on the dashboard are recent comments separated by official comments and user comments.  You can post a comment any time, however there is a 500 character limit.
• You can form or join a team (by county) or recruit friends or create groups (no groups at time of review).
• You can RSVP for events or invite others (import contacts from your email system or select friends on Facebook).
• Repository of all media including documents, images, videos and audio
• Built-in feedback submission form available on any page

Neumann

The Neumann “Personal Dashboard” area is also very advanced and similar to the offerings of the Walker campaign.  From here a supporter can manage their profile, interact with other supporters, and learn of ways to get involved.  Features include:

• Invite friends: Includes pre-populated verbiage to make it easy to send.  Contacts can be selected via your own online email account, uploaded file, or manually added.
• Full profile management and summary including your recent blogs and events, groups you belong to, a summary statement of why you support the candidate and important issues.
• The ability to create a blog, share your posts, read others’, and search.
• Events are integrated within the account area along with RSVP capability, social media sharing tools, and even Google Maps integration!
• Groups:  None exist yet, however the system allows you to create one based on a variety of issues and start inviting your friends. (UPDATE: Some groups do exist however I missed this in the interface.  See comment thread below to read my recommendations for improvement.)
• Send and receive messages to/from the campaign and other supporters
• Fundraising: Create your own fundraising page, set financial goals and manage its content.  From there you can choose friends to invite and ask for their support.  Very impressive.
• Ability to search blog posts, team members and groups separately

Barrett

The Barrett campaign doesn’t offer an actual account, however there are dedicated pages under, “Take Action.”

• Contribute: A succinct and well-designed form allowing a supporter to quickly donate in pre-set amounts or “other.”
• A basic volunteer form which actually lacks suggestions for ways to participate.  Not good for those who want to help but need some specific ideas in order to convert.
• A separate “Join Our Campaign” form which doesn’t explain itself and is too similar to the “Volunteer” form.
• “Intern With the Campaign”:  A lot of details are provide here in terms of responsibilities.  This much thought should have been given to the “Volunteer” and “Join the Campaign” forms as well.

MY PICKS

Each of the three sites has strengths and weaknesses; some subtle, some glaring.  Of course, there are a number of other criteria one could review the sites by but are beyond the scope of a single blog post.  Here’s my take at scoring the sites based on the criteria discussed above (1-5 with 5 being highest):

YOUR THOUGHTS

As always, comments are encouraged.  In what ways do you think these sites excel or fail?  Please play nice, and keep the discussion focused on digital features and tactics, not politics.

Boost Mobile – boostmobile.com/shuffle

Right or wrong, Boost brings back the 1985 Bears in an odd (to put it mildly) spot featuring McMahon in a motorized chair getting a spray tan and other antics.  The site is in all Flash for which it loses some points from an analytics perspective, but at least it’s a unique URL which makes it easy to segment their traffic.  There’s also an ever-present banner that calls out Boost’s unlimited mobile plan so users can take the next step toward conversion.

Among the fun features are:

• An extended version of the ad as well as behind the scenes clips.
• Downloads and Fun Stuff including wallpapers, ringtones and a Ditka-shaped waffle currently for sale on Ebay!
• McMahon’s Headband: links to McMahon’s Twitter accounts
• Mike Singletary Party Police:  During the game and soon after you could rat out your friends for their faux pas during the game (asking what the score is, touching all the wings, etc.).  You pick a message and a recorded Mike Singletary would call their number (after the friend approves this via an email link).  The feature is no longer live, but here’s a screenshot.

You might have the shuffle song stuck in your head along with some weird imagery for a while, but it’s still a fun and engaging site and does a good job of integrating the brand.

Dove Men Care – DoveMenCare.com

While not as entertaining as the Boost Mobile campaign, a vanity URL directs you to a well-designed, targeted site which features the ability to play the ad along side prominent links to product, overview information, and special offers.  The site is a nice blend of Flash and XHTML/CSS to maximize both look and feel yet still provide quick page load times and easier tracking of key metrics such as product pages view, social media sharing, and offer signups.  It’s clear you’re in the right place if you visit the site as a result of seeing the ad, but the Dove smartly doesn’t allow the ad to take up all of the valuable screen real estate.  There’s also a nicely done shower curtain effect and a Drew Brees cameo.

Volkswagen PunchDub – VW.com

The automaker’s call to action in the ad is to play PunchDub on VW.com.  Sending  traffic straight to VW.com/PunchDub would have helped them with entry page analysis to segment ad-driven traffic, but that’s a minor negative compared with the overall quality of the site’s execution.  Upon arriving at VW.com, the normal site remains intact, but the presentation/branding area showcases the PunchDub game and a video player to watch the commercial.  VW dealers are getting into the act with “PunchDub Days” special offers and deals that are “So good it hurts.” Ouch.

In a new twist on share with a friend, the game lets you “punch” a friend by selecting a model, choosing a photo, and then picking your attack type and reaction sound.  You then connect with Facebook and send the pain on to one of your friends.  Give it a try, it’s well done, and you might find yourself up on the “Leaderboard” which is a stock ticker-style run down of the most punches, weekly winners, and top vehicles.

For back story you can learn from Sluggy Paterson, the outspoken man who started the whole punching tradition (it was initially the face, not the shoulder!) and even follow him on Twitter.

Overall, VW offers a seamless integration and a great user experience.

HomeAway – HomeAway.com

Everyone remembers the Griswolds and HomeAway brings them back with gusto.  A prominent callout on the homepage leads to an immersive experience that still keeps the site’s main navigation easily accessible.  You could spend half a day watching videos and playing with all the features but here are some of the highlights:

• Of course, the ad itself, but also a newly-created, 2-part short film (with smartly-placed quick 10-second pre-roll ads from HomeAway), as well as clips from the classic films.
• Win a Dream Vacation contest by submitting your own hotel vacation stories.  Entries from others are featured on the site which can be rated.
• Impressively designed Flash video game featuring the Griswold’s Truxter station wagon.

These are just a few examples of good executions tied to the Big Game.  Which ads do you feel were best supported on the web and took customer engagement to the next level, or were just plain fun?

Ad Age and Social Media Today have taken a look at (and criticized) Coakley’s overall digital and social media’s approaches.  This post narrows in and serves as a reminder of web analytics best practices which can mean the difference between coming in first or a distant second.

The Obama campaign tracked digital metrics obsessively yet ingeniously with great success.  The techniques they used are just as applicable today as they were over a year ago.

Dan Siroker was a Google employee, who in December of 2007 decided to take a leave from Google and assist the Obama campaign in setting up a web analytics methodology.  He was there for a month, came back to Google for a stint, then in July quit permanently to join the campaign full time through to the general election as director of web analytics.

As a measure of their success, of the $656 million raised by the Obama campaign, $500 million of that was raised online compared to $201 million the McCain campaign raised overall. ($201 million does not include the federal campaign funds McCain accepted).

In November of 2009, Siroker gave a presentation at Google about his experiences and the campaign’s web analytics wins.  In it, he outlined five key lessons learned, which are excellent guidelines for any web analytics initiative be it for a political campaign or business marketing.

Lesson 1: Define Success with QUANTIFIABLE Success Metrics

Setting goals such as, “drive traffic via PPC” or “use the email channel to maintain a dialogue with our audiences” are not specific enough to gauge success.

Instead, Siroker’s team set quantifiable goals related to cost per click, signup rates, money raised per email recipient, and many more.  He said, “We always had more to do than we had man hours to do it.”  As such, having very targeted goals was essential to ensure time expenditures could be justified.

Lesson 2: Question Assumptions

The team utilized Google Website Optimizer to determine which landing pages and creative content pulled its weight.  As an ad-hoc survey, Siroker asked the audience of a series of images and calls to action, which combination they thought was best received by splash page viewers and resulted in the most sign ups.  It turns out the audience’s assumptions were wrong (so were the analytics team’s originally) and it required multivariate testing to get to the truth (“Learn more” and the “Family Image” were the winners).

Getting the version right meant over 4 million more people signed up for the email list between the time they ran the experiment and the election!

Lesson 3: Divide & Conquer

This lesson demonstrates the power of segmentation.  As Avinash Kaushik puts it, segment or die!  Data takes on a whole new meaning when you can know as much as possible about the people who generated it.

This was illustrated by the team’s donation button experiment.  In it, they sent donation solicitations and tested different donation button verbiage (Donate Now, Please Donate, Why Donate, Donate and Get a Gift, and Contribute) with each audience (never signed up, signed up but never donated, previously donated). The results varied significantly based on who the visitor was when they got there.

Winning combinations:

• Never signed up: Donate and Get a Gift
• Signed up, never donated: Please Donate
• Previously donated: Contribute

Monetary results: tens of millions of dollars in additional donations.

Lesson 4: Don’t Reinvent the Wheel

This lesson goes to show that it’s not how much you spend on technology; it’s how much you invest in talent.  One would think that a presidential campaign which broke all sorts of war chest records would use its means to select the most robust and most expensive analytics tools on the market.  In fact, Siroker’s team used many free and open source tools.  These included Google Analytics, Website Optimizer, Trends, and App Engine, TextMate, Open Reports, and DbVisualizer.

Lesson 5: Take Advantage of Circumstances

After Sarah Palin made a remark at the Republican National Convention in an attempt to undermine the perceived value of being a community organizer, the Obama campaign immediately sent out an email to their list protesting this notion.

The recipients responded.  From that one email the campaign raised $10 million.

Think of your own organization.  How close are you to putting these lessons into practice?  Do you have examples of challenges or success stories?

Don’t pull a “Choke-ley” and underestimate the power and benefits of digital marketing, social media, and web analytics.  Know where you stand before you’re passed up by a Brown blur.