I love ice cream and my friends know that. When someone asks my what ice cream they should buy my response is usually one of the following: 1) You should definitely get Häagen-Dazs ice cream. OR 2) OMG! Go get the Häagen-Dazs Belgian Chocolate Chocolate flavor. It’s to die for!
Now consider those two answers carefully. Which one allows you to make a decision easily if you find yourself knocking on the door of the Häagen-Dazs shop in the Burlington Mall at 6:45 am? If you like if chocolate ice cream (which I insist you should) the info in answer 2) would allow you to just walk up and say: “I’d like a medium cup of Belgian Chocolate Chocolate ice cream with jimmies on top”.
If however my reponse was 1) you’d have to window shop, look at the menu, perhaps leer at the others while they are devouring tasty ice cream till you can make up your mind. The same goes for your marketing.
Apart from knowing that your site visitors are trending up, how would you know what is driving that effect?
The reality is you get no actionable data from the graph above. You can’t see what is working and what is driving the growth of your site’s visitors. On the other hand the graph below provides some interesting insight:
By breaking down the number of visitors by each source or channel you can see that direct traffic in the graph above was cause for growth in March. At the same time there was a slight decrease in the Webinars channel because there was only one HubSpot marketing webinar in March instead of two.
The marketing takeaway is that you can spot trends by looking at graphs and stats at the high level. However the root cause of changes of trends in in the details. Go granular, dig deep and find out the root cause of your peaks or dips in your marketing reports. You will get a lot more actionable information from it.
LinkedIn is one of my favorite networking sites. I use FaceBook and Twitter as well but so far when it comes to professional networking, LinkedIn is the center of my Universe. There’s been a lot of angst with LinkedIn lately and LinkedIn vs. FaceBook comparisons (and I have some strong opinions about that) but I’m going to save that for another post.
Let’s face it. The future of the web pages is to make them more like note books. You need to be able to annotate pages, take notes, mark them up. That was the Tim Berners-Lee’s original vision of the web — to make it read/write. Most sites on the web are read only but blogs comments, product/merchandise reviews (such as on Amazon.com), social news aggregators such as Digg or Reddit are now read/write.
LinkedIn’s latest read /write feature (that I noticed!) is the ability to capture notes on the profile page for each contact in your network. Your online rollerdex just became more useful. No more switching back and forth between Word or Outlook or your hard copy notes. Live in LinkedIn, email, call, take notes and network away — beautiful!
Over time all these personal notes will behave like tags. LinkedIn’s search engine could use the information behind the scenes to make their search more semantic. If 50 of my contacts have the word marketing in their notes about me, that should help make LinkedIn’s search results for the keyword marketing more relevant. Read/write web helps make it a semantic web!
Now I’m not just happy with taking notes. At some point I’d like to capture all my touch points with my contacts one place. So that means I will need a private wall-to-wall feature like we have in FaceBook to capture online conversations I want to have with my contacts, or access to all the InMail emails passed between me and a particular contact over time.
It doesn’t stop there. Once the LinkedIn API opens up a little more I’d like to pull in conversations I’ve had with my contacts in other media such as FaceBook, Twitter, Gmail/Ymail. Might be useful to see if my contact has Digged or Stumbled my blog articles that I’m pulling into my LinkedIn profile. Some progress on LinkedIn’s part but they’ve still got a ways to go.
OK, so that was totally link baiting because technically this isn’t a mashup in the web 2.0 sense. But from my point of view the blend of works from two talented artists to create something unique and beautiful could also be considered a mashup.
So what’s mashed in this video? While not extra-sensory, this visually stunning footage was inspired by Hans Zimmer’s haunting sound track from the Dark Knight. Apart from daring the waters around the Galapagos islands teeming with all kinds of creatures the creative Darek Sepiolo did an awesome job playing with the brightness to give it a darker effect to go with the theme.
Another reason I love social media — we would never have found out about some indy oceanographer whose footage rivals the works of Jacques Costeau and he surely would not have received the recognition that it deserves without it. Also check out Sepiolo’s other video, Sipadan. This would make Charles Darwin proud! Enjoy!
A lot of companies refrain from using twitter and other social media because they feel their customers are not on there. But what if someone were bashing your company on twitter? Let’s face the facts — the twitter community has a large reach (and mighty influence), whether it is in social media or outside of it.
Check out this dialog below between @chrisbrogan and @technorati. Chris had a bad user experience with the Technorati site, vented about it on twitter (without addressing them directly, mind you!) and they immediately responded to it. How cool is that!
Are you missing opportunities to respond to some bashing or constructive criticism by not getting involved? Are you missing a chance to influence experts or analysts in your field even if your customer audience is not using social media? It’s easy to get involved, get started today and start influencing today!
A happy ending to an extreme case of misconduct by a NYPD police officer who shoved a harmless bicyclist off his moving bicycle during Critical Mass. Unluckily for the officer the entire incident was caught on camera and uploaded to YouTube which spread virally over the internet.
The YouTube footage below was used to indict the officer for falsifying records that the cyclist attacked him first. It seems the cop may also be charged with misdemeanour assult. You can view the entire 12 minute video on blip.tv. Hooray for another victory for social media!
McGregor:
Thats a really good stat! Go for twitter and forget about emails. I bet you that everyone will be able to deal with customers and friends a whole lot
Wayne:
Im enjoying your blogs. Got you bookmarked. Nice work.
