On January 18th tens of millions of users (and possibly more) found themselves without access to some of the internet’s most popular websites, and others found themselves witness to very public corporate protests. To help us better understand the impact on the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and what it potentially means for the practicing Web Professional, I reached out to Jeff MacGurn, VP of Earn Media and Serach Engine Optimization at Covario a San Diego, CA company and Brent Norris, WebProfessionals.org member and Web Designer from 808Digital.com from the State of Hawaii.

QandA with Jeff MacGurn, VP of Earn Media and Serach EngineOptimization at Covario

* Who Did the SOPA Blackout Really Affect?
* Why has this just become such a visible issue within the last few days?
* Why this is not just an issue for websites inside of the U.S.?
* What is the Marketing impact for Web professionals?

QandA with Brent Norris, WebProfessionals.org member and Web Designer from 808Digital.com

* What is SOPA all about from a Web professional perspective?
* Who’s behind this?
* Why should Web professionals care?
* What’s next?
* Where do we go from here

Transcript:

Bill Cullifer: On January 10th, tens of millions of users and possibly more found themselves without access to some of the most popular websites, and others found themselves witness to some very public corporate protest. To help us better understand the impact of the Stop Online Piracy Act, SOPA, and what it potentially means for the practicing web professional, I am reaching out to Jeff MacGurn, VP of Earned Media & Search Engine Optimization at Covario, a San Diego company and Brent Norris, webprofessionals.org member and designer from 808 Digital from the State of Hawaii. Good afternoon gentlemen, thanks for agreeing to the interview.

Jeff MacGurn: Hey thanks for having me.

Brent Norris: Good afternoon, Bill and thanks for taking some time to address the subject.

Bill Cullifer, WebProfessionals.org: Jeff let’s start with you. Now you recently posted a blog poster about whom did the SOPA black out really affect, can you expand on that article?

Jeff MacGurn: Yeah, we essential, you know there’s a lot of information out there about what SOPA was, what PIPA was, and the politics going on, who is involved with protesting it, but I think a lot of people really kind of missed who is actually affected by the blackout and what type of effect it would actually have, and I think that was the whole point of the blackout that people didn’t really realize what blacking out an entire major sites on the internet or censoring major sites on the internet would have on people, and so we really wanted to take a deep dive and look at what the overall impact of this blackout was, to maybe try and give people an understanding of you know what that impact could be in the future.

Bill Cullifer, WebProfessionals.org: Some of the key findings.

Jeff MacGurn: Well some of the key findings were you know really what we wanted to look at was, number one, we started looking at the demographical distribution of each of these major websites, and we picked four of the largest sites that were blacking out, that is to say, Wikipedia, Reddit, WordPress and Craigslist. And then we took a look at using Google Insights and some of their brand search data, to try and understand what the distribution of their user base was throughout the United States and we found some really fascinating things about exactly who was affected. Interestingly enough, all of those sites seemed to have really be densely used on the West Coast, which maybe that wasn’t so surprising, doesn’t really surprised me the people on the West Coast tend you know, tend to use technology, there are a lot of technology jobs out on the West Coast. The age groups that tend to be the most affected by these sites really were between 18 and 34, once again not completely surprising, and for the most part, I think most of the sites were just slightly over a bit more male skewed than female. But our estimates really put the number of people affected in the tens of millions, but the extension you know, if you consider how many people have Facebook friends, you know the average Facebook user I think have a 150 or so friends, and with the saturation of Facebook, you might say that by extension you know, many hundreds of millions of people were affected world wide.

Bill Cullifer, WebProfessionals.org: Why do you think this is, just becomes such a visible issue within the last few days?

Jeff MacGurn: Well I think you know, that’s an interesting question, I don’t think it’s a, I think it’s only become visible if you are not really participating in social media, because this has been a really big issue from a social media perspective for the last couple of months. I think it’s really only come into the main stream media over the past few days, because you have seen a social media grassroots movement that started to direct a lot of energy towards, or rather against the SOPA bill.

Bill Cullifer, WebProfessionals.org: Why is this not just an issue for websites inside of the US?

Jeff MacGurn: Well you know, SOPA itself covers websites outside of the US, and blocking websites outside of the US, but I think above and beyond that you know, we have a site here that, the internet is not really on a country by country basis that we are seeing a big internationalization of websites and indeed online marketing, so you know really, changing a website in one place can have huge repercussions throughout the world. Even if you are talking about you know in English only version of a website those are still accessed you know throughout the world.

Bill Cullifer, WebProfessionals.org: We represent web professionals world wide, and I am trying to hone in on why is this important to them, and to that end I’d like to know you know, what’s the marketing impact for web professionals?

Jeff MacGurn: So you know, I think, the marketing impact for web professionals comes in, you know in a number of different ways. First of all, I think it is a great lesson on how to understand social media trends, see what’s going on, on social media, and leverage those social media trends, not only you know, if you were against SOPA, obviously you with the business, or web marketer, may want to voice your opposition or you know, on behalf of your company. If your company was so inclined to do so, but by the same token you may also be able to leverage this as an opportunity to gain further visibility and exposure. If you take a look at the sites that went down, I mean one might argue that they could have potentially lost money, and you know we looked at Craigslist, and you know we found that on an average day, Craigslist posts about 33,000 jobs right, and they charge $25 a job post, which would then amount to about $825,000.

Now if indeed they were unable to post those 33,000 jobs that day because their site was down, that could cost them a significant stream of revenue right, however, if you look at it from a web marketing perspective, and I am not saying that this was entirely PR [indiscernible] [00:05:46] for Craigslist, I’m sure all of the sites that participated in the black out really strongly believed that SOPA is a bad thing, but if you look at it purely from a web marketing perspective, you are actually gaining a lot of visibility from your you know, for your web site. People would have linked in to all of these major websites that have blacked out, they were taking screenshots, mentioning them in tons of news articles, blogs, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, StumbleUpon, all these places were abuzz with the sites that had gone down because of the simple black out, sending lots of you know, what you are talking about search engine optimization, lots of off page relevancy signals, but then of course, there’s also lot of traditional media exposure that these sites got as well, and I don’t think you could watch the news last night or the day before without hearing about Craigslist, Wikipedia, Reddit, or any media and WordPress, any of the other sites that went down. So you know, ultimately they may have lost in streams of revenue, but I am sure they made up for that with exposure of their sites.

Bill Cullifer, WebProfessionals.org: So Brent, how about you, so you know we have an interest in educating web professionals as to what these issues are all about, and why they should pay attention, and why it’s important and how it can impact them, so with that said, you know give us some background, what is this all about?

Brent Norris: Well I guess first and foremost, it’s supposed to be about copyright protection, it seems to be a little bit more about fear, the Motion Picture Association has concerned it, as it is the recording industry of America that their profits will continue to decline, and their business model will suffer, unless they can get hold of the bits and bites that are really distributing their movies, and their music without their control and so, the Stop Online Piracy Act was something that was intended along with PIPA, to really get control of that, at the internet’s foundation at the IT level. Now that’s what everyone is reading, and that seems to be what a lot of folks are thinking about, SOPA and PIPA, but the truth is the Motion Picture Association hired Senator Chris Dodd, well two months I guess after he left the Senate to become their Chairperson and they started really gaining the system, they worked to put the US Attorney General, Eric Holder in-charge of the internet in unprecedented ways, so much so in fact, what we are learning is that the same time this was making headline news, the FBI was in eight different countries shutting down different websites and organization businesses that were engaged in file sharing, so it’s not like we really needed these two additional bills, when the Federal Government can go into other countries and shut websites down, and take people to jail, it’s an indication that we don’t need new legislation that the legislation we have is working, and in fact all of these things are covered under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and two additional acts that are in Congress right now are up for discussion.

So there is a lot of background information that a lot of folks aren’t getting, and this could be you know, in part due to the fact that lot of people get their news from television, and television does show a lot of motion pictures, and television’s biggest competitor is the internet. So there is a lot that I guess, and I think that right now we are just seeing the very, very beginning of this story, I think this is going to get much larger as, maybe as lines are drawn between some of the players, and you know, one could say that all of this is about the transparency that digital brings to people’s lives. This is really a much bigger issue than web professional jobs, in my opinion, although it can affect jobs in very profound ways, and we are starting to run with this art.

Bill Cullifer, WebProfessionals.org: Yeah let’s dwell into that for a minute, so you know why is this issue important to web professionals?

Brent Norris: Well if you just take a web designer for example, we know that about 50% of Adobe Photoshop users are using illegal copies of the software, and as these users sometimes, first time users, start to use this professional tool, as they become professionals, get clients, pay for the software, then they find that their valuable work is stolen from them, and they find that they are not getting compensation, and their rights are taken away, so copyright law is very complex, and if it were broken, I am not sure that we will call the government to fix it, and I think that we would probably try and adapt our business models differently to try and address the issue. So for the common web professional we don’t want our material, we don’t want our content stolen without our permission, and used without compensation.

Bill Cullifer, WebProfessionals.org: Well thanks Brent for that so, you know, where do we go from here?

Brent Norris: Well I think that web professionals should care about these issues for several reasons, and one of course, like Mark Zuckerberg said the other day, is the world needs political leaders who are pro-internet. It’s not enough to elect local, state and federal officials and leaders that are just in support of the internet, or in support of copyright laws so on and so forth, we need people that really are taking the time to understand the issues. I think that we need to do what Finland is doing, which is basically ensure that our laws are written in such a way that uphold internet access is a basic human right first and foremost, so that we can access the information.

Then I think it’s, it’s important to understand how SOPA and PIPA could affect opportunities in jobs and education. Now we know that any time we fight for innovation, we are going to have set backs, not because we can’t recover from the set backs, but because the internet doesn’t stop moving. We have got all sorts of competitors in the internet space; I was reading a report from IBM that ranks in the United States 3rd in terms of digital economy, so it is important to put all of this in context of the competition that’s out there and the rules and laws that they are abiding by, so if government is going to play a role, in my opinion I think the role that they should play is that of a more agile government that is working with the Department of Education to develop web standards that allow us as a country to develop a workforce instead of always looking for these other countries that have developed the workforce to help us build the internet, and I think that’s probably a primary role and I am sure that web professionals agrees that we can do a lot in that area to make it better.

Bill Cullifer, WebProfessionals.org: So what do you think web professionals or the community at large do to support this effort?

Brent Norris: Well I think most of the action is happening at the federal level, so we need a top-down approach, we need to make sure that while we sleep, [indiscernible] [00:13:14] restrict our access or shut down large networks that we use to do our jobs, but we need a strong bottom-up approach. In other words we have to work in our local community, I took a quick poll, I skidded around a lot of counties around the United States, which we have thousands of counties in the US., and in my particular county as an example, they were reporting the news on the various websites, there are about 10, 20 websites, but nothing was being reported on these two issues, and the reason that’s important is in the past, our national issues didn’t necessarily get a lot of coverage at the local level, but these aren’t just national issues, these are county issues, as well, these are community issues.

When you are not able to do your job as a web professional, in your home, it’s an issue in your home, so my point in all of this is we need to work with our county constitution, and we need to amend those constitutions so that they have open and transparent government amendments to them, to assure that everyone is going to have access and everyone is going to be able to have access to uncensored information. So it is important to work on the amendments to our local county constitutions, and to elect local officials that get it, that are pro-internet, and that are able to make decisions, and come out and talk about these issues as they come up.

So I think that that is super important and I think it is really critical that we all raise our awareness, our honest issues, because again it’s much larger than SOPA and PIPA, these are, some people call them, calling it the beginning of the Internet Freedom War, and so only time will tell but I should appreciate your asking the right questions Bill, and getting involved in the issues.

Bill Cullifer, WebProfessionals.org: Norris from 808digital.com and Jeff MacGurn from Covario, thank you so much for your time today.

Brent Norris: Thank you so much Bill, sorry if I sounded a little too far enough, but this one strikes close to home.

Jeff MacGurn: All right, thank you very much.

In this 10 minute interview with Aarron Walter, Web Designer and author of a variety of books, Aarron shares insights about his experience as a Web designer, user experience professional and concepts of “emotional design” and how to engage users through the website and his new book that covers how to create websites, solutions and applications that are not only useful but also fun and engaging. Aarron also shares his thoughts about the skills required and his enthusiasm for job opportunities for Web professionals.

Transcript:

Bill: I’m on the phone with Aarron Walter, UX lead at MailChimp and author of Designing with Emotion. Aarron, good afternoon your time and thanks for agreeing to the interview.

Aarron Walter: Hey, Bill, how are you?

Bill: I’m well, thanks. Thanks for taking the call. Listen, Aarron you’re a web professional, a consonant web professional. You’ve been around for a number of years and you’ve written several books. The one that I would like to own in on today is your Designing with Emotion book, in fact you have a session coming up you know emotional interface design session. Can we talk about that session and then can we talk about the book?

Aarron Walter: Sure.

Bill: What’s the session all about?

Aarron Walter: So, yeah, I mean I have been given this talk that’s essentially summing up some of the research I’ve been doing at MailChimp with my colleagues and the idea is that I kind of feel like if we’re at this point with communication on the web where it’s just you know this modification technology and so easy for people to build new applications and build new services and so the only thing that really separates our service from another service can be this personality or you know this human experience and because we’re so accustomed to communicating with one another with a really honest human voice through Twitter and Facebook, we have a shifted view or you know perception of the expectations that we have from brands out there. So my new book Designing for Emotion and its talk are all about what it means to think about the psychology of emotion and how that relates to design and how we can connect with our audience in a very human way.

Bill: That’s definitely important. What are some of the walkaways? What are some of the walkaways for web professionals? What can they start doing today to address some of these issues?

Aarron Walter: Well, kind of central to this whole idea of designing promotion is you know letting yourself show in your work and you know that’s through webbing what you do and the craft that we have of web design, but you know showing ourselves and showing our personality in our work is really important and so I’ve been thinking about how to shape personality in design and I created something called design personas and I think that there are few other designers that have been thinking about this stuff too, but a design persona basically just shapes the voice, it identifies the kind of structure of a brand and a voice of a brand, it creates key trades of what this brand persona is and what’s it’s not. So for example, I created a design persona for MailChimp where I work and one of the trades is you know it’s fun, but not goofy, so that MailChimp the brand can be fun and crack jokes, but it’s not goofy or cheesy. So and I feel like saying who we are as a brand is important, but sometimes it’s just as important to say who we aren’t and so when you start new projects, when you work on a new design thinking about this brand persona from the very get-go is a pretty important thing that’s something I talk about in the book.

Bill: Yeah, fascinating. Do you think that’s a function of a designer or if somebody from Marcomm?

Aarron Walter: I think that it is something, it kind of depends on you know who your team is made up of, but I do think that like a user experience designer needs to be thinking about this stuff because UX people they think about the big picture, they have kind of a T-knowledge that the X axis of the T at top bar is this broad understanding of a lot of different silos of disciplines of the web craft, but then they have you know deep understanding in specific areas about things like usability and design so forth.

Bill: Yeah…

Aarron Walter: So someone that is a strategic thinker, someone who is involved in product design or web design from the very get-go is the person that should be doing these design personas and that might be a creative director, that might be a UX lead, it just kind of depends on the organization.

Bill: Yeah, I appreciate that. What creative pathway would one take to get into you know that particular specialty I mean obviously you’re talking about a specialty and you know what would you recommend somebody do to study for such a position?

Aarron Walter: That’s a good question, it’s really hard these days.

Bill: Let me frame it another way. How deep do you think an ordinary, well, not ordinary because web designers are extraordinary, but how deep should a web designer working for you know whether in an enterprise or small organization, how deep do you think they should drill into the user interface specialty?

Aarron Walter: I guess it kind of depends on the type of work you are doing, but I definitely think that web designers in general should have at least a cursory understanding of interaction design. So you know you need to understand things like Fitts’ law, which is a principle with the fancy name that just basically is same that it’s easier to click on a button if it’s bigger and it’s closer to the center of action. You need to understand basic usability principles because you can’t really you know you can’t design of that, you have to keep your audience in mind and you use your goals in mind, your business goals in mind, so I think that I mean I’m biased because I’m doing UX day in and day out working on the really cool team of people, but I feel like UX is kind of a glue of what we’re doing right now. What can make a difference between like an okay thing we put out there may be it get accustomed, may be it doesn’t and something that just people latch onto and love and want to tell everyone about on Twitter and Facebook and so forth. So I feel like you know if you are new just getting started in web design and may be you are in a program or may be you are an independent learner either way I think you really have to spend sometime reading some books and reading some blogs about user experience, about usability testing and just kind of understand, not forget and always know that you are designing for people, we’re trying to communicate with people and so we have to understand people.

Bill: Yeah, that’s a good point. So would it be fair to say that the emotional interface design environment really is something more apropos for the enterprise or is it something you know that all web designers should try to accomplish further customers?

Aarron Walter: It’s for everybody. I mean, so that’s one of the things I wanted to point out in my book was you know I think that there are a lot of people especially in enterprise phase that we kind of skeptical about having some kind of collective personality in a very human voice and admitting that you’re wrong and kind of talking like you might talk to someone if you met them in person instead of we all know what enterprise speak sounds like and it’s really annoying kind of. So that has been the whole like super buttoned-up professional approach, I think is scary for a lot of people and so in the book…

Bill: I appreciate that…

Aarron Walter: …research for a longtime, but I wanted to find numbers, I want to just make it empirical and say emotional design doesn’t matter what you doing, but you know it boils down to return on investment and conversion rate and you know you make more money. You don’t need marketing budget because you’re just doing something that is so attractive to so many people. So yeah, I think that emotional design should be on everyone’s radar and I know that we’re all thinking about design right now because we just lost Steve Jobs and we’re investigating his life and we’re sort of seeing, looking at the mark that he made on our industry and just on our daily lives. And if there is one thing that we see that is kind of common threat is like this care about craft is really deep love and passion about craft that Steve Jobs had and Apple has always been really good about thinking about human emotion and its presence in the things that they make you know they have got little light on the front of most Mac’s, not on MacBook Air, but on MacBook Pros and Mac Pros, there is a little light that when your computers are sleeping that just gentle pulses and the rate at which that pulses is the same as our breathing rate at rest and that is to communicate in a human language to say, I’m a machine and I’m at rest, but it’s doing it in a very human way that we don’t necessarily have to recognize it looks like it’s breathing like it’s at rest, but you know it’s a subconscious that feels that and to have a calming effect on us too and that type of attention to detail and thinking about end users that I think it’s so fascinating in what Apple has done and I think so many other products and services out there that are thinking about emotion and design and it’s such a differentiator in a marketplace.

Bill: What’s the job market look like in your point of view for those that’s specialized in user interface design?

Aarron Walter: Well, I can tell you that the UX field is there are so many jobs out there and there is just not enough people, same with like mobile design, it’s just huge. There is so many jobs for designers, for developers, really good engineers and I feel like there is a lot of stuff that you know if you’re going to college one of the best thing you can do is get a liberal arts education and some kind of a creative arts education and think about you know just basically learning how to think critically about problems and think laterally to find connections in very strange places you know that may be reading a book about anthropology and then you can find connections to design there you know I’m really out of connections between topics like that or you know math and some kind of data visualization stuff. But there is so many really good jobs out there and I feel like a lot of people if you’re good at being an independent learner you can pick up books, you can read the stuff online, you can start experimenting on your own and really kind of teach yourself and get yourself started. But man right now like my son is 17 months old, so he is far to young for me to direct into this industry, but if I were 18 or 19 I would be so excited to be going into the web industry because there is just, there is fun stuff happening, people are building things that are having a real impact, a real influence on human history. And there are good jobs that are fun, that are challenging, that make a lot of money and that’s a heck of a combination.

Usually you know you find a job, but you hate, maybe it makes money or you find a job you love but it just doesn’t pay anything, you know web is the best of both worlds that it’s such a cool time for people to be getting into our industry.

Side Out – Google Changes Selected Paid Search Results by Eliminating Side Bar Ads

What Is the Side Out Format?

Interview with Gary Ware, Covario.com

For certain query types, Google is going to replace the listings traditionally that show up on the right side bar and place them at the bottom of the page. An example of this new layout is shown on the Google Blog.

Like a volleyball player on the beaches of Southern California, Google is calling “Side Out”! In addition to the new “recency” algorithm changes that are impacting SEO results, Google announced a phased rollout of a new paid search format that changes where paid search listings appear on desktop and mobile search results pages. The rollout is slow—searchers may or may not see the changes during their casual perusal of their favorite phrases. But it is coming, or at least, being tested. The new format will impact CTRs, pricing, and effectiveness of paid search programs. The point of this POV is to describe our views on what the importance of this change is.

Note, advertisers (and their agencies) will not be able to directly control this. Much like all ads on Google, bottom ads will be placed based on bid strategy and Quality Score—but not for a targeted bid position. The appearance of Google Maps on particular queries may impact placement, but it is unclear exactly how this will play out on an impression-byimpression basis at this point. So a strategy to bid on position “4” in the past may result in Side or Bottom ads.

Why is Google Making This Change?

There are two reasons for this change—one technical and one tactical. The technical reason is that Google is aligning the way the search results pages work for desktop, tablet, and mobile devices. This format for results has been used on mobile in the past. Due to the spacing and usability of mobile phone screens, Side ads are not desirable or renderable in many cases. The tactical reason is that Google indicates click through rates for listings at the bottom of the page actually are better
than those at the side of the page.

Google offers a capability to evaluate CTRs based on page placement within AdWords. The system traditionally allowed users of AdWords to see the comparative CTRs of Top versus Side ads. Google indicated that the bottom of the page ads will be listed as “Other” in the system, where Other will include both Side and Bottom ads, so the specific effectiveness of the new format will be hard to test. The only way this can be done is if it is know that certain keywords consistently are showing up in the bottom listing. AdWords is not providing that information now.
When asked about this, the Google team that works with Covario indicated that Google “may” be updated in the future as this change is rolled out more widely, but there is no commitment on timeframe.

What Does This Mean?
There are a number of ramifications to this change—most of which depend on whether Google’s statement that CTRs at the bottom of the page perform better than Side ads. So that is the critical factor.

First, this all comes down to CTRs. We did a quick study to see the difference between Top and Side ads for a numberof keywords. The average desktop CTR on Google Search (no partners) for Top ads is 3.3%. The CTR for Side (or Other) ads is .16%. No big surprise there—the value of being in the prime real estate is well known. So the question
is whether the Bottom ads will beat an average .16% CTR. As stated above, testing this appears to be harder than it
needs to be, since AdWords is not breaking out Side vs. Bottom ads in AdWords. However, if an advertiser (or theiragency) can identify a set of keywords where the ads consistently are being served at the bottom of the page, then this can be tested, albeit manually.

If the CTRs are better than .16% (or the appropriate equivalent for a particular advertiser) on the first page, then the
question comes down to CPC, and whether there will be a non-linear impact on CPCs. This is also unknown at this
time, and Google makes no comment, believing that the market is rationale and that advertisers will bid commensurate with the value delivered—a fair assumption.

More significantly, if the CTRs are over .16% on average, advertisers should embrace this change. It will create
standardization between the device types, a more consistent way to evaluate PPC, and in the end, better ways to target PPC for response. Google has made it clear that dominating mobile advertising and operability is its most critical strategic objective, and this is part of that strategy. As we stated, there are two drivers for this change to PPC: trying to drive better CPCs on desktop through placement of PPC ads at the bottom of the page, and the more strategic issue of alignment of results pages across all device types. If successful, the Side ad is toast. Even Karch Kiraly will not be able to dig it out of the sand. Google is going to wean advertisers off of this ad format in order to make the desktop perform like mobile—not the other way around.

Interview with Dennis Yu, CEO of BlitzLocal.com of Portland. Ore.

Let’s say you run a business making websites for dentists. You might buy the keywords “dentist”, “dental marketing” and “dental websites” on Google. In between the consumers who are looking to get some cosmetic dentistry, teeth cleaning, or other procedures done, there is a sprinkling of dentists who are looking for marketing help.

Depending on the term, it could be 90%+ of these searches not being relevant, and at $5-10 a click, that’s a lot of irrelevant clicks to pay for to find a winner, even if that winner will pay you $10,000 for a new website.

The biggest problem with B2B is that when someone types in “dentist”, you don’t know if they are a dentist or if they are looking for a dentist.

The die-hard PPC folks will argue that you’re just not choosing the right keywords (go for more specific terms), don’t have enough negative keywords (exclude anyone searching with city terms—since these are likely consumers), or you’re not writing specific enough ad copy (supposedly, consumer won’t click on your ad if your title is “Hey Dentists!”) While these comebacks are true, they are missing the big point.

In B2B marketing, you must target WHO the user is, not WHAT they are searching on.

In search, you don’t know who the user is, but you have a clue by the nature of their search terms. In social, you know WHO the user is and you’re catching them before they search.

STEP 1: Isolate the Target

So while you can get a ton of consumer traffic by targeting “dentist” in Google, when you interest target “dentist” on Facebook, you’re targeting by job title and profession. Try it. In fact, try a number of job titles and see just how many chiropractors, teachers, plumbers, administrative assistants, and marketing managers there are out there.

Voila! Now you’ve pinpointed all the dentists, dental assistants, students studying to be dentists, retired dentists, and folks who have a dentist fetish—all of them on Facebook. Now narrow down to the specific target you want by age, location or even specialty—maybe you want to talk to just cosmetic dentists in California.

Add in lateral targets—magazines they read, associations they’re a part of, and so forth. You can read more about micro-targeting here.

STEP 2: Get Your Testimonials and Trust Signals

You probably thought I’d next talk about ads, which is what most people do. Nope, in social people don’t search—they are interrupted with banner ads. You can focus on ad copy in Google PPC because people are actively looking. In Facebook, you have to gently nudge people to take a look at you and momentarily distract them from spying on their friends, or whatever they happen to be doing on Facebook.

So you need distraction-worthy content, which comes in the form of what their friends are doing. If that potential dentist client of yours is perusing through what her friends did yesterday, she might be persuaded to click on news where those very friends are talking about your business—maybe how they used your software to get more traffic to their website, streamline billing operations, etc.

When you have a TON of testimonials (across Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, and so on), paired with content that you’ve published in major outlets, paired with positive things that other reputable organizations have said about you—then it’s more likely they are coming to you versus you coming to them. Some people call this “inbound” or “pull” marketing because you’re leveraging that prospective friends to do the selling for you. Because, despite your Harvard MBA and years of business experience; sorry Charlie, they trust what their friends have to say more.

Ideally, get this content to live on your website or Facebook page, although this is not completely necessary. Let’s say that you wrote some compelling article in an industry journal. Send ad traffic directly to that site so you can leverage their trust. If you wrote your article correctly, the by-line (about the author piece at the end) will have a line or two about what you do. And if you did a good job creating real value in that article, as opposed to selling, they’ll contact you. No need to scream at them or place popup windows in their path—they’ll find you.

Step 3: Turn Your Ads On

You wouldn’t have a grand opening party without first making sure your place has plenty of food and drinks, right? In the same way, make sure you have the compelling content from Step 2 before you start advertising. Otherwise, you’re just wasting money.

Take the interest targets that you set up in Step 1 and pair it against the content you have in Step 2. Think about WHO you are talking to, not WHAT they might be searching on. For example, if they are a dental hygienist, what content is most compelling to them? What if they are a receptionist—what might they find interesting? You’ll find that you might not have super relevant content for everyone. That’s okay—you’re just testing at this stage. Later you can mix and match what combinations work best.

Note that this is NOT landing page optimization, which is more superficially about elements that comprise the landing page—the image, the size of the button, the headline, and so forth. We’re talking about the whole lead gen. lifecycle—creating a clear path between the targets, what we say to them, and what we want them to do. That last piece is the landing page—to get them to call the phone number, fill out the form, watch the video, etc.

Step 4: Run the Math

Set your Facebook campaign budgets low, perhaps $10 a day. Use the default CPC bids, since you don’t need to get into the nuances of how bidding works—this is not Google. What you care about is your Cost Per Click and conversion rates. CPC divided by conversion rate is your cost per lead, by the way. We created a calculator for your use, in case you are rusty on first semester statistics:

This is B2B, so your cost per lead could be over $100. Maybe you’re at $2 a click and 1 in 50 clicks results in a phone call. Maybe it’s a lot more because you’re selling something that costs thousands, so that a hundred dollars is an acceptable price. Or maybe you’re competing in New York City, where the price is exorbitant from all the advertisers that overlap one another from poor targeting.

Whatever the case, if you’re doing this on Facebook, you have to be prepared for seemingly negative ROI for the first few months. Why? Because we are catching people well before they are searching, so it could be months before they want that new website, CEREC machine, billing system, or whatever it is you’re advertising. With Google, the conversion timeframe might be that same visit. This is unlikely in your case, unless your product is an impulse buy and also under $100.

Some final thoughts:

We are often asked a common set of questions, so let’s address some of them here:

How big should my interest target be? You don’t need a thousand ads—just a handful that target just the people that you want to hit. If your interest target is over 10,000 people, then either you’re doing something wrong or your audience is nationwide.

Do I need new landing pages for Facebook? Probably. Video is what converts nowadays, so you probably need to fix your other landing pages while you’re at it. Camera shy? They aren’t choosing you for your good looks, so get your Flip video, some good lighting, and film a 2 minute intro. Say what you’d say if that dentist was sitting right in your office—don’t be “fake” or talk like a newscaster.

Will BlitzLocal do this for me? Sure, if you have at least $10k to spend in fees, not counting advertising budget. If you’re a dentist, we require only $2k a month in total (labor plus ad spend), since we’re targeting just one region and because our dental campaigns can be replicated. If we have to build something that is not reusable across many clients, then we have to charge more for it. We are not the cheapest game in town.

Do you offer free articles and training? I would love to use your service, but cannot afford it. Sure. Send a note to info@blitzlocal.com and we’ll send you some of our internal training materials. You can also post a question at facebook.com/blitzlocal, where others can see and benefit from what you ask.

About the Author:

Dennis Yu is Chief Executive Officer of BlitzLocal, a Webtrends partner that builds social media dashboards to measure brand engagement and ROI, specializing in the intersection of Facebook and local advertising. You can reach him on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, his blog, or good old-fashioned email at dennis@blitzlocal.com. BlitzLocal is a leader in social and local advertising and analytics, creating mass micro-targeted campaigns. Mr. Yu is an internationally sought-after speaker and author on all things Facebook, and has been featured in National Public Radio, TechCrunch, Entrepreneur Magazine, CBS Evening News, and other venues.

User Interface Design – Collaging: Getting Answers to the Questions You Don’t Know to Ask interview with Kyle Soucy

When conducting user research, we all know asking the right questions is just as important as how you ask them, but how do you even know what questions to ask? What if the discussion topic is extremely personal and private? How do you get a complete stranger to open up to you? There is a better way to conduct an in-depth interview and it doesn’t involve using a clipboard. Just imagine what you could discover if the participant’s answers weren’t limited to a predetermined set of questions.

In this five minute interview with Kyle Soucy, founding principal of Usable Interface, Kyle will explain the history of collaging and other projective techniques, what you can learn from it, how to conduct it, and how to analyze the findings.

Collaging is a needs-elicitation technique where users randomly select images to represent how they feel about a specific topic. Users then explain the reason they chose each image to the moderator. The collage becomes an instrument for participants to express the needs that they might not otherwise have been able to articulate. This information allows us to better understand the user’s world and how to design for it.

Kyle Soucy is the founding principal of Usable Interface ((www.usableinterface.com), an independent consulting company specializing in product usability and user-centered design. Her clients have ranged in industries from pharmaceutical giants like Pfizer to publishing powerhouses like McGraw-Hill. She has created intuitive interfaces for a variety of different products, everything from web sites to touch screen devices.

Google Launches New Organic Search Algorithm – Emphasis is on Breaking News and Commenting systems like Facebook, and Google+.

According to the Search Marketing company Covario, the goal of this change is simple. For queries conducted by searchers where information changes constantly—which Google estimates is about 35% of the queries—there is a new rendering of the organic results page starting with “news for QUERY.”

The speculation is that this is a strategic response to Facebook and Twitter—i.e., provision of real time information through directed queries on relevant topics (as opposed to open stream of incoming information, albeit timely, from competing social media platforms). Also, at a technical level, Google is rolling out some new technology to Googlebot that helps the system better index AJAX/Java Script commenting systems like Facebook, along with Google+. Walk aways for Web professionals include:

* Social signals is s strong factor
* Early end of the buying cycle
* Reputation management

In this five minute interview with Pete Dudchenko, Senior Director Covario provides a couple of recommendations for our customers to help them understand what impact this will have on SEO results, and what they need to do to address this change.

First, social media will be more intertwined into SEO. Remember 18 months ago, Google rolled out the “Latest”
function; a secondary page that users could activate on the left hand navigation to see social media data. We wrote
about that update and said at the time “that if more than 10% of queries ultimately go to this secondary page, then
optimizing for “recency” as well as “relevancy” will become the key to SEO. And how will that be done—integration of social media programs with SEO.” This is an upgrade to this function that a) moves the “latest” to the main SERP and b) does so only for a subset of queries where recency is relevant. So social media programs—i.e., updates to Facebook and Twitter comments by advertisers, updated reviews, and any time of blog based content generation will require infusion with high value SEO keywords and link backs to other content pages in order to align with the high value queries and command the newly available premium shelf space.

Second, the high value generic keywords will make up the majority of the frequent updates (“Best camera,” “cheap
laptop,” “best tablet”) category of affected queries. If advertisers are going to build their processes—we recommend this. Identify the top 25 queries driving traffic to their site. Conduct queries and see if the “News for” box is appearing. If so, monitor competitor and advertiser presence on a series of queries over a week or two and see what happens. If there is degradation in corresponding web traffic during this time period, then these become the priority for the social media programs content generation.

Last, reputation management will also be impacted. Industry announcements, including company wins and losses will find their way to the top of the rankings and may begin to overtake historically high ranking pages for branded search terms. This is both positive and negative depending on how good the news is on a given topic. Reacting quickly to negative publicity, while promoting positive news, through the systems by which “News for” reacts will become a key aspect of public relations. Additional information can be found on the Covario website

Closing the Gap between Design and Web Development – Bring Your Design to Life Interview with Chris Converse, Author, Web Designer and Principle at Chris Converse Design

“A sizable gap between exists between the Print Design and Web Development side of the house” says Chris Converse, principle at Chris Converse Design. In this six minute interview Chris shares his perspective on:

• Steps to close the gap
• How to improve workflow between design and Web development
• Ideas and principles for incorporating HTML and CSS for print designers
• A step by step best practice to render and optimize your design in multiple browsers
• About his book “Bring Your Web Design to Life: Creating Rich Media Websites with Adobe Creative Suite” available at PeachPit Press will be sure to please any experienced developer that works with traditional print and newbie Web designers

Chris in his own words:

In working with design companies and advertising agencies around the world, we at Codify Design Studio noticed a common gap in the web design workflow—a gap between designers and developers, and the creation of the HTML and CSS necessary to bring that design to life within a browser. This gap in the workflow results in aspects of the designer’s vision being unrealized in the final design represented in a web browser.

In my seminars, I ask designers to raise their hands if they would be willing to send only artwork files to their commercial printers, and let the prepress men do the layout work instead of them. No designer raises his or her hand. Just as print designers are responsible for bringing their designs to the press, web designers should be responsible to bring their designs to the browser.

To help designers transition to web design, I’ve written and designed Bring Your Web Design to Life: Creating Rich Media Websites with Adobe Creative Suite. and its available at Peachpit Press. This unique video series and reference guide starts form the very beginning and teaches designers step-by-step how to bring their web design to the browser. You’ll start with a design comp in Photoshop, click on the slicing tool, and get to work creating the assets we need for your web layout.

“We combine graphic design with the technologies necessary to achieve communication goals across various media.”

We designed and developed the Project Rome site to reflect aspects of the software’s interface, while also adhering to requests to integrate social media and online forum discussions into the design. The homepage also features an xml-driven interactive carousel highlighting various features of this new product.

About Chris Converse

Chris is graduate of Rochester Institute of Technology with a degree in graphic design. He began his career in print, designing and preparing digital files for commercial offset printing. Chris has spent the last 15 years studying and applying design and interface principles to technology. His work spans various distribution media (CD-ROMs, web sites, and interactive DVDs) and applies many authoring media and techniques (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, AJAX, image optimization, motion graphics, Flash, Director, Shockwave, sound engineering, digital video compression, PHP, and ASP). Chris has a passion for and a commitment to conceiving, creating, and delivering the best possible user experience, regardless of the medium.

More information about Chris can be found on his website at:
http://codifydesign.com

Organizations who harness the power of post-click optimization can achieve a significant increase of conversions, resulting in a huge competitive advantage. In this five minute interview with Lance Loveday, CEO of Closed Loop Marketing, Lance shares his perspective on Post Click Optimization and how:

* Getting granular after web visitors land on your site by utilizing usability and persuasion marketing techniques and best practices can increase conversion rates as high of 30-50%
* Can provide you with a strong competitive edge
* Jobs in the Web profession with emphasis on Search are in high demand

101 Landing Page Optimization Tips Courtesty of Oli Gardner, UnBounce.com

Battling Bureaucracy – Overcoming Challenges and Techniques for Launching a Web Project – Interview with Paul Boag, Headscape

Whether you work as part of an in-house Web team for a large or small organization or solo as a freelance Web professional you will appreciate this five minute interview with Paul Boag, founder of UK Web design agency Headscape, author of the Website Owners Manual and host of award-winning Web design podcast Boagworld.

Paul shares his perspective and techniques for hitting and battling organizational bureaucracy when launching a Web project for large and small organizations:

Issues include:

* Departmental feuds
* Uninformed decision-makers
* Committees
* Endless scope creep
* Glacially slow progress

From Traditional Print to Web – Challenges, Lessons Learned and Advice: Interview Nora Abousteit, co-founder of BurdaStyle.com

BurdaStyle.com, is a DIY fashion community and a place for people to sew, with over 500,000 members where you can share PDF sewing patterns to print at home, techniques and projects.

In this four minute video Nora Abousteit, co-founder of BurdaStyle.com shares her experiences and advice with taking a traditional print publication online. Previously, Nora worked at a German publishing house in the staff of the owner – writing speeches, organizing workshops, and events. She is part of the founding team of the DLD conference.

She has been invited to share her experience at Picnic, FOO Camp, Parsons School of Design, Stream, the WEF Media Strategy Meeting, and the Menorca TechTalk.

Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Wired, BusinessWeek, WWD, and Fast Company.

Previously, Nora worked at a German publishing house in the staff of the owner – writing speeches, organizing workshops, and events. She is part of the founding team of the DLD conference.

She has been invited to share her experience at Picnic, FOO Camp, Parsons School of Design, Stream, the WEF Media Strategy Meeting, and the Menorca TechTalk.

Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Wired, BusinessWeek, WWD, and Fast Company.

Nora holds a degree in Middle East Studies, Political Science, and Philosophy from the American University in Cairo.