Photo courtesy of LSE Library/Flickr Commons

I am torn between seeing Internet search as a blessing or a curse to those of us in the digital marketing industry. But regardless of how I feel at the end of the day, one thing I remain certain of is that our clients can benefit greatly from the pain we WELDers put ourselves through keeping up with search.

On the one hand, you see, it seems at times that Google’s intention is to never let us search optimizers get comfortable enough to feel as though we understand our jobs. One look at This Week In Search, posted every Friday on the Google Blog, and you can see why.

A year ago, you couldn’t get us to stop talking about “universal” search. These days, our concern is “real-time” search. Has the web search function and experience changed that much?

The answer, without a doubt, is a resounding yes. According to the Google Blog itself, the company’s engineers made 540 changes to Google’s algorithm and interface in 2009. That’s an average of 1.5 changes to how search works every day.

That means that, daily, we’ve had to reassess our search marketing and optimization efforts to make sure we’re pushing our clients in the right direction. In general terms, this has resulted in a shift of sorts, from focusing on” the what and where of content” to the “how of content.”

Here’s what I mean: Once we understood the importance of universal search — that Google and other search engines were not just indexing all the different kinds of Internet content (photos, video and audio, for example, in addition to the text on web pages) — we pushed and supported our clients in producing and distributing these myriad forms across the web, making sure it connected with their desired audience.

Now, in addition to that practice, we’re stressing to clients the importance of how content production happens — how will it get produced at a regular frequency, how will we tune the content subject matter to the needs and desires of the audience, how will we connect all these content platforms to create a seamless user experience that also guides those users to our client’s objective, and how will we track and rate the effectiveness of all this content. This approach is necessary because of the increasingly on-demand nature of our information gathering; people want the most recent information, and they want it right now.

So, we have to focus on the fundamentals, such as making sure that a client is represented on all appropriate search verticals. An ecommerce operation, for example, will benefit greatly (despite the somewhat time-consuming effort it requires) from full indexing in Google Base, which feeds shopping searches. And at the same time, we’re using pay-per-click keyword analysis and Search Trends info to help shape strategy of content engines that regularly find the stories that describe the value and benefits served up in our inbound marketing campaigns, because we have to do it every day to keep getting found.

If there’s no rest for the wicked, as the expression goes, it might be because they’re in the digital marketing business, too.

And I guess that’s the curse to which I alluded in the beginning. It’s a never-ending battle. One search epiphany today still isn’t enough to stay ahead the next day, as you’re already 2 innovations behind. It is the definition of sisyphean.

The blessing, on the other hand, is to see it as constant challenge and a bit of security in knowing that there are always learning and search optimization work to do.

Speaking of which, we’ve got work to do.

Marshall University’s Center for Rural Health links a network of rural health centers, churches and community organizations who provide chronic disease self management resources to the public. The Help Yourself self-management program helps develop programs that allow individuals to take charge of their chronic diseases, such as diabetes, by offering help yourself workshops and other resources throughout the greater Appalachian region.

Dr. Richard Crespo enlisted WELD to apply technology and marketing principles to training these organizations and creating resources for more than a dozen different health and wellness programs.

You can read about one example of a program Dr. Crespo’s team helps implement, a child oral health pilot, in the linked West Virginia Public Broadcasting article.

Forgive the pun and cliche, but this is a project WELD can feel good about.

WELD is currently re-designing the Marshall University Center for Rural Health website. The new website will feature improved functionality in a user-friendly interface. The site’s primary purpose is to serve as a resource clearinghouse and coordination tool for Help Yourself Program leaders and coordinators. Leaders and coordinators will have access to valuable tools that help them train as workshop leaders; market, plan and coordinate Help Yourself workshops; and aggregate participant data to improve the program’s reach and effectiveness.

The site will still feature its successful Chronic Disease Self Management Program and Diabetes Self Management Program, but will be adding Gentle Yoga. Gentle Yoga is an evidence-based program that teaches simple yoga techniques to participants. The techniques are practiced in a chair and can easily integrate into participants’ daily lives, improving breathing, circulation, and overall health.

The site will also provide support resources for individuals who already have or or are considering participation in Help Yourself Chronic Disease Management programs. Participants will be able to download educational materials and literature, stay connected to the program through several social media platforms, and locate or sign-up for upcoming workshops.

Perhaps the greatest benefit of the new site will be time-saving for users. In the past, the instructors had to submit hand-written forms regarding course participation to the Marshall CRH.  Every quarter, the data was then manually entered into spreadsheets for submission to the West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources. The submission of this data is critical for the continued funding of their program via the Center for Disease Control (CDC).

The new website, headed into the programming phase, will include a password-protected area for workshop instructors to enter their course participant data. This data will then be stored securely, and easily exported in the appropriate format for submission to the DHHR. An interactive map will also be created allowing public health professionals and facilities to find events and resources via county in WV and the surrounding states.

In a couple months, we’ll be launching the site, so stay tuned for more updates.

Want to learn more about self-management programs and chronic disease? Check out

• This AARP Magazine article, “Take Charge of Your Health,” about people facing diabetes, heart disease and arthritis;
• Or the USA Today Diet Challenge and series of stories on how to choose a walking program.

WELD Creative Director Haynes Mansfield also contributed to this project update.

If you watch the video in today’s post, you could very well end up A) nodding your head along with everything Carly and Jay have to say, and B) itching for an outdoor adventure vacation of your own.

If that’s the case, too, I’m willing to bet you’re a lot like Carly and Jay, demographically speaking. And that’s no accident or coincidence. We’re counting on it.

See, with online video, it’s not enough to just shoot, edit and upload, then cross your fingers and hope you get viewers and, as a result, customers. To make sure your time and resources are well spent in producing online video, it should be done under the guidance of an informed content strategy. Here’s what I mean.

Our partners at Mythology Marketing came up with an extensive customer segmentation array that puts these two natural web video celebrities squarely within one or two of 11 representative customer groups for ACE Adventure Resort. Guided by the Second Pillar of Meaningful Marketing — Priority — thorough integrated marketing will mean addressing those segments in different ways, with different messages.

It’s important to place this approach in comparison to a product-centered content strategy. With a product-driven content roadmap, storylines will predominantly focus on the item or the service offered.

And a wealth of information can be gathered, as well, when a mixture of video from both content strategies is distributed across dozens of channels on the Internet. More distribution points pop up each day, and most give great analytic insight.

ACE’s catalog of 35 online videos has amassed more than 180,000 views, and viewership continues to spread with the tidal wave of social media.

So maybe the clip speaks to you, maybe it doesn’t. We’d love to hear your feedback, either way.

With several recent and ongoing projects in the world of WELD, we’re looking for ways organizations can use the Internet and new technology to positively influence the quality of life factors associated with health and wellness. The good news, simply put, is that there’s great potential for these new digital platforms and channels to be applied in ways that educate about health choices, empower people to take charge of and better monitor their own health, and facilitate communication (and thus, hopefully, insight and progress) among healthcare providers and their partners.

And we’re only just getting started.

In future posts, we look forward to telling you about our work with The Center For Rural Health at the Marshall University School of Medicine and companies such as beBetter Health. But today, we hope you’ll take a few minutes to watch the accompanying video and learn about REACH West Virginia.

REACH (which stands for Racial and Ethnic Approaches to Community Health Across West Virginia) is an initiative aimed at eliminating the disparities in quality of life indicators between the minority groups of the Mountain State and the rest of the population. The statewide effort is part of a larger, national movement spearheaded by the Center for Disease Control and its Office for Minority Health and Health Disparities.

When you look at the numbers, there is a stark difference.

African-American residents of West Virginia, for example, have nearly twice the proportion of people living in poverty compared to white residents. Minority women are less likely to seek pre-natal care and experience premature births. There is also a greater prevalence of heart disease and strokes among West Virginia minority populations. Diabetes is perhaps the most glaring issue here.

What do you do about it?

The REACH approach is to address the “Social Determinants of Health.” It makes sense that, if we look closely at basics such as access to nutritious food, housing, economic opportunity, positive social relationships, good education and healthcare, even how easy it is for people to get around, we can have an impact on the length and quality of people’s lives.

So, coalitions are activating and motivating in Fayette, Kanawha, McDowell, Mercer and Raleigh counties with the objective of closing the gaps they find in these areas.

This is a project for which WELD was proud to be able to participate. For more information or to see how you can get involved, we encourage you to check out the REACH WV website.

This is a pretty critical question — especially if you’re in a business like ours, recommending and executing digital marketing strategies such as, say, getting a client’s organization active on Facebook and Twitter.

So, on the one hand, there’s success to be found in marketing where the crowd gathers — but not if the crowd is explicitly gathering someplace where they expect to be free from marketing messages. That’s the concern on one side of the debate, anyway.

Fortunately, there are researchers attempting to resolve this debate. What concerns me, however, and what became the impetus for this post, is the possible hyperbole used in reporting the results of this research. Anything seem odd (or just plain wrong) about these charts shown here?

Hopefully, you noticed that the smaller proportion in each chart is contained within the larger circle. The “yes” groups — those that follow brands on Twitter and those that have “friended” brands on Facebook — are the minority, i.e. most people do not report very brand-ophilic behavior on social networks, according to this data. Maybe no one is fooled by the inappropriate size of the circles, but it does cause me to question the author’s agenda.

These specific examples of misleading graphics come from the digital agency Razorfish, from their 2009 FEED Report, which surveyed 1,000 social network users. A very similar study by Performics and ROI Research was also recently released, and the findings are similar in scale but provide additional insight.

In surveying 3,000 people and asking over 100 questions, the Performics/ROI study authors report that some social network users are not only open to a sales pitch, but act on it:

• Thirty-four percent of respondents have used a search engine to find information on a product/service/brand after seeing an advertisement on a social networking site
• Forty-six percent of respondents say they would talk about or recommend a product on Facebook
• Forty-four percent of Twitter users have recommended a product
• Thirty-six percent of YouTube users say that they have gone to an online retailer or ecommerce site after learning about a brand on a social network site

Interesting statistics for sure, but again you’ll notice we’re dealing with less-than-majority groups on each and every dimension. So, is it my point to say that businesses shouldn’t be active on social networks? That people aren’t going to respond to brand marketing on Facebook?

No, and no.

First, it just takes a look around to see that social networks are only becoming a more and more integral part of life. Once Asia, Africa and Latin America have the same proliferation of smartphones we see now in the U.S. and Eurpoe, expect to see Facebook cross the 1 billion-user mark. And look at what the companies in the best position to predict are doing: Facebook is now allowing marketers to target connections of fans, and Google is experimenting with Social Search. These are just two anecdotal examples, but the point is that social networking is still growing.

And every decent marketer knows that you can’t please all the people all the time. This is why we develop a spectrum of customer segments or personae, this is why we devise messages that speak to each of them and take those messages to conversations happening across diverse channels. Social networks are some of these channels, and any organization will find an audience there — just not their entire possible audience, nor should they expect 100% penetration in a channel. So those less-than-majority figures in the research don’t really cause me to balk.

The real reason your organization should be active on a social network like Facebook is, yes, because there are potential customers there, but more importantly, there are guaranteed messengers. Just through the act of signing up on social networks, people show an interest in the activities of others, in others’ connections, and in communicating. In most lines of business, that’s what you’re really after on social networks: people who pass the word to those they think need to hear it.

I know that the fans of my client on Facebook are not buying my client’s products every day. For one client in particular, customers typically only transact once or twice a year. So when we communicate events, discounts or new offerings, we can’t expect a windfall of business as a result. But what we can count on is our fans thinking enough of the information and how it might benefit their friends that they pass it on — by embedding, by forwarding, by emailing, etc. Any business that is by definition “remarkable” will have people talking about it.

We know this works on social networks. The client I mention has less than 2,000 fans on Facebook. We study the client website’s analytics and know for a fact that Facebook has directed visitors to the site, and a percentage of those visitors are transacting. But what I’m arguing as even more important, and as the ingredient that’s missing from the two studies mentioned above, is the “contagion” benefit.

See, what we also know by studying those analytics is that, even though our client has less than 2,000 fans on Facebook, the social network has referred nearly 7,000 unique visitors to their website. More than 5,000 people who are not fans were still induced to check out our client — thanks to the efforts of a group of people one-quarter the size.

This is the beginning of a formula for the all-important return on investment calculation, and I think, my summary point. Your organization should be actively marketing and creating brand experiences on social networks. This is not because all the people there will flock to you. Quite the contrary, enterprises should use social networks because they empower small groups of people to achieve significant results.

And when you explain it that way, you don’t need trick graphics.

It’s been a flurry of activity in WELD-world lately, with numerous fascinating video productions, presentations and digital marketing campaign launches. The activity has taken us all over our beautiful Mountain State, not to mention trips to great destinations like Pittsburgh and New York City.

If you’re curious about the corner of the world we’re exploring at any given moment, you can keep up with the WELD photostream on Flickr.

We take a lot of pictures and shoot a lot of video in all our myriad digital marketing projects for clients. In addition to the campaign work, we try to take photos whenever we can to show:

• The unbelievably smart people with whom we get to work everywhere we go.
• The behind-the-scenes life of digital marketing content production.
• Scenes from this wonderful place that is our global headquarters: West Virginia.

Enjoy, and let us know what you think.

If you’ve asked these questions of yourself or your marketing director, then we just might have some answers for you.

We’d like to cordially invite you to a Mountain State Marketers webinar, from noon to 1 p.m. on Monday, Nov. 16. This webinar will feature Beth Gill, marketing director for ACE Adventure Resort, and Mike Pinkerton of the Hatfield-McCoy Trail System — two of West Virginia’s largest outdoor enterprises. Both will speak and answer questions about how they have used social media as part of their marketing strategy.

We’ve got about half the seats left, as there is a good bit of interest in this topic. If you have questions or would like more information on the webinar, email jeff@mythologymarketing.com or brandon@weldtheweb.com.

Thanks, and look forward to meeting everyone there.

Image by Capture Queen (TM)/Flickr Creative Commons

Have you ever found a website that upon first impression immediately struck you as, well, beautiful, but then when you started trying to actually use it or trying to find some information within those pretty pages, your impression of the website soured?

The results of a study at the Software Usability Research Laboratory at Witchita State University indicate that type of experience isn’t really that common, after all.

In fact, it seems pretty pages go a long way to determining a person’s positive perception of a website, whether the site works well or not.

“The visual appeal of an interface appears to play a role in the user’s rating on perceived usability,” say study authors Christine Phillips and Barbara S. Chaparro.

But if we’re going to believe them, we have to see how they define what’s usable, and how they determine a website is appealing.

In this study, the researchers took advantage of previous studies (example) that evaluated both the aesthetic appeal and how well a website worked. You might think that these are completely subjective or arbitrary evaluations, but the research unit’s studies since 1995 have been able to identify dimensions of each quality that can be quantitatively measured.

For example, it turns out that the websites most of us agree are good looking also happen to have high image-to-text ratios and lower ratios of image or text to white (”negative”) space. This makes quick sense I think if you compare, say, Craigslist and the White House’s website. The latter, I think it’s safe to say, has greater aesthetic appeal. Other factors that can contribute to this perception include balance and symmetry, color palette, typography — variables that, despite their infinite combinations, Western web users can still agree for the most part make some websites pretty and others ugly.

To determine how well a website works, the study participants in different groups are asked to explore the site and learn as much as they can or complete tasks in which they search for specific information based on researchers’ requests. The academics manipulated things such as broken links, the consistency and location of navigation menus and buttons, and the use of meta data as way-points. I don’t think it takes much convincing to say that websites with clear, consistent menu systems and links will make for a less-frustrating experience and, consequently, evaluation of how well a website works.

Given the definitions, I can imagine most people feigning a lack of surprise that the study found what it did: That people seem to be positively swayed by appearances. We’re all familiar with the aphorism “beauty is only skin deep,” but this seems to get chucked out the window when put to the test — even with our perceptions of people, I think.

No, what surprised me the most about these findings is the quickness with which the test subjects seemed to make up their minds. The determination of aesthetic appeal, the results of which were fairly consistent in the results, was made in a manner of milliseconds. In most cases, the subjects decided how well a site would work in less than 10 seconds of viewing the homepage, and that from only exploring it visually.

This study also showed subjects’ evaluations to be resistant to change. That is, even after some subjects found the pretty website difficult to use, their original evaluation of the website as usable didn’t change. As the authors note, though, previous studies showed the opposite effect, so we’ll need some more research to make up our minds about this.

In the end, what does it mean for you? If you had to choose one or the other, aesthetics or function, which would it be?

I’d love to compile a list of pretty websites that just don’t work. Have you experienced this?

Photo by Chiarra Marra/Flickr Creative Commons

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been grocery shopping and while inspecting the product labels looking for information, spy the 800-number that every piece of merchandise seems to have, and I’ve wondered, “Does anyone ever call these things?”

Soon, it won’t matter. The numbers won’t really be needed.

Oh, people will still use their phones to get product information and give their feedback, but dialing will be the least of what they do. It’ll start with scanning.

And the scanning won’t be limited to items on the shelf in the grocery store. We’ll be scanning buildings, paintings in an art museum, billboards or posters for movies, and applications we haven’t even imagined yet.

These bar codes, however, will have three big differences from the bar codes you’re used to seeing:

This is a 2D bar code used for check-in with Air Canada (Image by Andrew Currie/Flickr Creative Commons)

• They won’t be a series of black lines. They’ll be little Jackson Pollock-esque, pointillist splotches or colored geometric patterns that are full of squares or triangles, not bars;
• They’ll contain way, way more information than the old-fashioned bar code; and,
• It won’t be only the cashier who’s scanning them — shoppers like you and me will be scanning them, too.

Scan one of these modern bar codes and you’ll get price information, coupons, ingredients, the carbon footprint of the manufacturing process, recipes and who knows what else. Imagine being on a walking tour of a city’s historic district and scanning signage, a building’s name plate or a statue in a park.

Think of the multimedia and sheer volume of information that would become accessible if every painting in the Louvre had a bar code tag on the wall right next to it. The opportunities will be immense.

There are other variations, such as the MIT-born Bokode, which is a tag that looks like a small hole in an object.

Microsoft Tag has been released in beta and is under continuing development. This technology looks promising, but the pastel colors are a little annoying and (dare I say) present some clashing potential depending on the palette of your product design. They might have received early feedback on this aspect, because they followed up with a black-and-white version. Microsoft also released the Tag API, which allows users to create their own tags.

So far, you might have seen 2D bar codes in advertisements printed in the Wall Street Journal or with promotional material for the recent Tim Burton film “9.”

Why don’t we see these codes all over the place, then? The barrier at this point is that viewers have to be motivated upon seeing the ad to go get their phones, download the app that enables their phone to capture and process the bar code, then go to the web page that serves up the targeted information. In the time it takes to do that, I could have simply typed in a URL that was in the ad.

Until an ice-breaking, tipping-point ad campaign comes along that makes this kind of app a must-have, I wonder just how many people will actually go to the trouble. My prediction: Look for advertisers to push smartphone makers to get this technology installed standard in phones, if not free apps and a marketing push encouraging us to download them.

Of course, that’s unless something better comes along and beats bar codes to the punch.

So what does this mean for the businesses and organizations we serve?

As I’ve said in previous posts, the world will quickly shift to a mobile-centric ecosystem. It’s important to start right now by making your website — your overall web presence, even — mobile friendly. That means it should render well and quickly across a spectrum of mobile devices.

For the more aggressive clients we serve, we are pushing into SMS marketing and creating campaigns that take advantage of the “transaction and play” functionality that is now capable via smartphones (maybe even part of the experience customers expect).

We’d love to tell you more about it. Now is the time to start looking ahead.

Image by bixentro/Flickr Creative Commons

From the electronic reams of blog posts and articles I sift through week after week looking for the next trend, the next tool that could be used to a client’s benefit, the next big idea, I end up with a lot of little scraps.

You know, the little bits of trivia that seem super-important, but then upon reflection you’re not sure how to apply them just yet?

So, here are some of them, and I share them in hopes you’ll offer some insight or significance to attach to them:

• About a quarter of Twitter users rate and review products online, and about a fifth of all tweets mention brands. (Source: PaidContent)
• Four in five U.S. adults check in with a social network at least once a month. 25% of them are content creators. (Source: Forrester)
• What do people do on social networks? Mostly, they look at pictures — about 70% of the time. (Source: Harvard Business School)
• Ratio of ad money spent online to ad money spent on TV: $1 to $65. Ratio of dollars spent per hour viewed, online versus TV: $.17 to $.13. (Source: eMarketer)
• In 2005, according to the Economist quoting the CDC, 7.3% of households were mobile-only. By the end of 2008, mobile-only homes accounted for 20.2%.
• 73% of Blackberry owners have downloaded 5 or fewer applications; 72 percent of iPhone owners have downloaded 10 or more applications. (Source: Reuters/Compete)

Thoughts? Reactions?

What does it all mean?