WavyBrainy

We recently transferred our Eyechat Blog for the ophthalmic market to FatCow.com, a 100% wind powered web-hosting outfit. The point is that making green decisions is becoming much easier now that business and environmental interests are converging. Consumers are more educated about the environment than ever before. Greenness is not only a preference, but also an expectation. A study by the Richard Ivey School of Business at the University of Western Ontario shows that consumers would be willing to pay at least a 10% premium for sustainable products.

Eco-Friendly Web Hosting Companies
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FatCow

A well-written profile on LinkedIn is key to making a good first impression and building trust with prospective connections.

Here are the key elements:

1. Who are you? Get to the point fast.
2. What do you do? Don’t be encyclopedic. Tell us what’s interesting and different.
3. Why should someone tap you as a resource or consider doing business with you? List special expertise and capabilities.
4. Convey passion and excitement for your work.
5. Cut everything else.

Many of us need and want to measure the output of our web sites in sales. This is particularly important with long sales cycles and cases where the sale isn’t completed online. By defining intermediate measurements, you can identify trouble points, enhance information offered, or remove steps from the process. Analytics need to be customized for each site, but here are a few tracking ideas we use:

1. Purchase – Yes, the sale!
2. Specific action – The visitor downloads content, engages an interactive application, visits a key page.
3. Registration – Whether this is a lead form or an email signup, this is an important indication of engagement.
4. Call for more information – A prospect calls to make purchase or get more information.
5. Extended visit – Flag visits that exceed the average visit length. Investment of time can indicate serious interest.

Of the many factors that determine the success of an email campaign, the time of day and day of week campaigns are deployed is the most often ignored. New research from Pivotal Veracity may just change your timing. It shows, for example, that the elapsed time from when messages are first sent and first seen has expanded from 23.2 hours in January 2009 to 25.9 hours in August 2009. This is critical if your email campaign is time sensitive.

Target an Episode

Pivotal Veracity also identifies 2 daily episodes especially pertinent to B2B mailings targeting office bound workers. The first period in the morning, from 7:30 to 9 a.m. is the most extended time people use to cope with their email. Later in the day, from 2 to 3 p.m., workers attend to their emails in shorter bursts. While mornings are popular, PV suggests that your customers may view your email as welcome relief later in the day.

The ideal time of deployment is a moving target. As soon as a day or time becomes “popular,” it’s time to move your campaign away from the onslaught of email competing for your customer’s attention.

An analytics truism we’ve noticed with the sites we manage is that visitors from social media stay longer and look at more pages. Hmmm. So if followers are valuable web visitors and potential customers, does it make sense to advertise for followers? We’ll let you know. We’re running tests for several clients and Ideopia on super targeted sites and blogs. Following is similar to opting into an email list, but with less risk. Look for a follow-up on our experiment, and see an example of one of our Twitter Banners.

The rebirth of web ads was a hot subject at the Internet Summit we attended in Raleigh. Until fairly recently, eye tracking studies and low click thru rates seemed to show that web ads and banners were largely ignored. New attribution studies that measure how different web advertising elements work together show display ads having a powerful impact, including up to a 60% lift in clickthrough rate on search results followed by a 35% increase in conversions.

Several studies show these click-thru rates improving 30 to 50% based on prior exposure to a web ad. The biggest challenge identified by the Internet Summit attendees is to improve ad creative, which most described as miserable, to engage consumers and drive an even higher lift on click-thru rates. Okay, we can do that!

Thanks to Open Source (free) widgets you can create your own division of the NSA to monitor social media conversations about your products and competition. Using free code from TweetGrid.com we did just that for a new section on our Eyechat Blog. Dubbed EyeSpy, the four columns on the page each search the Twittersphere for terms relevant to optometrists and display Tweets that match. Though other free applications, such as Tweetdeck and CoTweet, also offer search capabilities, they’re not very portable. A widget can work just about anywhere: you’re website, mobile phone, or intranet.

Keywords are the words or phrases that visitors use to find your site via search. Most web analytics programs track keywords and how many visitors each drive to your site.

Here’s what you can learn. Say that you’re in the candy business and your top keywords are “jaw breakers,” “salt water taffy,” and “Carbolicious Carmel Corn.” Great, you sell those products. But what if 30% of your company’s income derives from selling “candy gift baskets,” and that term ranks at the bottom of your keyword list? This is an example of an opportunity missed, and a website that’s out-of-step with its core business. To get the rest of the picture use Google’s keyword tool to find out the frequency of search on key terms. This will help you determine if your business is jiving with reality. For example, if  “mimeograph” machine is one of your top keywords, but it’s very low in popularity as a search term…uhhh…you may want to consider a new core business. Keywords can speak volumes about the state of your site and business, so dig in soon!

Foldit is an addictive interactive game that mimics the way complex protein molecules fold up, and allows users to find new configurations. It’s really fun, and four-year olds have already found solutions that have led to new vaccines. So when you disappear for five hours at the family dinner, you can tell your in-laws you were conducting scientific research. Unlike the hugely complex massive multiplayer online games, Foldit represents a trend in easy-to-use and snap together applications that offer great entertainment and learning environments.

Thanks to our new client, celebrity hairstylist DS Parada, Ideopia, Raleigh, is getting a buzz. Don is a favorite of the New York fashion scene and tames the shag for a who’s who in politics, Hollywood and business.

Huge kudos to our friends and clients at the Ronald McDonald House for their most successful Red Tie Gala fundraiser ever; and to Vivace and Urban Food Group on their new restaurant in Charlotte.

Oh yeah, and some people here want you to see a video about what happens at Ideopia when the executive branch leaves town.