Danny Brown

podcaster - author - creator

Latest posts from Danny Brown

Enjoy the latest posts from Danny Brown, and feel free to add your own thoughts in the comments after the post.

Why Our User Experience Should Be Determined by Data

Anyone that follows this blog regularly will know there’s a wee bit of a running joke at how often the site design changes.

What started out as a semi-regular update (say, once or twice a year) to keep the look fresh, and the content front and centre, has become almost as regular an occasion as Facebook platform updates messing up everyone’s privacy settings.

Now, while I’m really happy with the current design and the way everything flows, there’s a reason behind the recent design changes, tweaks, and community feedback – simply, data informs our decisions and user experience.

Yes, gut instinct comes into play too, but when it comes to content and how that’s displayed and acted upon, for me data analysis, community feedback and AB testing is key. Here’s why.

The Data of Trends

The world is ever-changing. What we found popular and best practices 10 years ago is nothing like the best practices and popular trends of today. Heck you could halve that timescale at least, and find we move in a constantly-changing cycle of new trends, methodologies and preferences.

This is particularly true when it comes to content.

While there are several areas where the consumption of content has changed in recent years – curation, syndication, and accessibility, for example – perhaps the biggest game changer is how advanced mobile browsing has become. For example, in a study from June this year of U.S. consumer habits:

  • 76% access social networks, with 46% using a mobile browser versus an app;
  • 68% access news sites, with 63% using a mobile browser versus an app;
  • 56% watch video, with 58% preferring to use a mobile browser versus an app;
  • 41% read/access blogs, with a whopping 75% using a mobile browser versus an app.

Make no mistake, mobile is fast becoming the default browsing option for many of the platforms where we create and share content today. If we’re not ready for that, we’ll lose visitors, readers, subscribers and customers.

Web access preferences

From my own analytics, mobile visitors now make up 27% of my audience. If my site wasn’t set up to accommodate these folks, that’s a big potential loss in traffic just waiting to happen.

From that angle, and from the continued advances in the way people consume content on the web, the move to responsive design was key.

The Data of Analytics

I’m a data geek. It’s what got me into marketing to begin with, and it’s what drives me today. By understanding the data we have access to, we can make informed decisions on pretty much everything around us.

When it comes to content, that’s a given – or should be. It’s the one single biggest piece of advice I recommend whenever people are talking about blogging, whether they’re new bloggers-to-be, or existing ones: always be tracking and watching your analytics.

Analytics are key for several reasons:

  • They offer knowledge into how your content is being received and where it’s lacking;
  • They offer information about your visitors and their behaviour on your blog (entry point, pages visited, actions taken, exit points);
  • They offer actionable insights into improving your audience reach, interaction and participation (comments, shares, subscribers, downloads);
  • They offer opportunities to new audiences, based on external discussions (trackbacks, bookmarks, referrals).

Simply put, without analytics, you’re essentially producing content in the dark, whether that be blogging, video production, podcasting, or similar. And if you’re doing that, you’re wasting good resources that could be put to better use elsewhere.

From my own analytics of the first half of this year, the following became clear:

  • While traffic was good, people weren’t staying on site long enough;
  • The entry page was usually the same as the exit one, so people weren’t exploring;
  • My bounce rate (how long people stay on site) was horrendous.

DB JanJun13

Digging deeper into my analytics, especially around the stats highlighted here as concern areas – Pages Visited, Duration of Visit and Bounce Rate – a few things became clear.

  • The incentive to check out other pages wasn’t prominent enough;
  • Certain “drivers of traffic” were doing anything but (more on that shortly);
  • The content wasn’t conducive to long stays and participation.

Clearly things had to change. So they did.

  • I changed to a design that had a sticky navigation menu, where the Page tabs would follow you all the way down the post. This increased additional page clicks;
  • I stopped using Triberr, the content curation / blogger platform;
  • I deliberately changed to longer form content, as opposed to the standard 300-600 word approach.

The results? While it’s just one month’s analysis, they’re encouraging (click to expand).

Dashboard Danny Brown

As you can see, the three key metrics I wanted to improve have done so:

  • Pages per Visit rose from 1.40 to 2.23;
  • Average visit duration rose from 1.09 to 1.37;
  • Bounce rate dropped from 81.45% to 35.68%.

Now, it’s early days, but the signs are good. If I keep tracking where visitors hover their mouse/keypad, and what actions encourage them to stay on-site, I can optimize even further and improve these stats even more.

The Triberr thing? I applaud the guys over there for what they’re trying to do for bloggers, but I’ve been finding – both myself, and with other bloggers I talk to – that Triberr is referring less traffic, and simply adding to social proof. ?The number of tweets may be up, but the desired action – traffic to the blog – isn’t.

Indeed, Triberr placed at a lowly #73 for traffic sources, and accounted for a mere 9 visits in the last 30 days.

Triberr Google Analytics

Then again, looking a little bit deeper into one of the larger Tribes I was part of, it perhaps shouldn’t come as a surprise that the level of traffic provided by Triberr was so low.

Triberr inactivity

As you can see, the activity within the group is very low, and it almost appears that people have left, or forgotten about the group, or simply don’t share anymore.

Looking at my own Google Analytics, visits from Triberr had a high bounce rate and low site duration time, so by removing that option, it added to the positive impact on these stats.

However, this is my own experience, and I’m sure Triberr woks well for some folks.

The Data of Community

For any content creator, but especially bloggers, the community around the content is hugely important to the success of the blog. Without a community, there’s pretty much nothing there except a part of the web that’s for an audience of one.

From regular readers to occasional commenters, and discussions elsewhere via Twitter discussions, Google+ threads, Facebook wall comments, etc., a community not only helps promote content, but improve its creation as well as its presentation.

This was evident from the excellent feedback and suggestions I received when I implemented my new design last week. After finishing, I dropped an update on my social networks, asking for thoughts, feedback and suggestions – and got great advice.

    • On Google+, marketer and blogger Ana Hoffman mentioned the font size of the headlines looked great on mobile, but looked too big via desktop browsing. After analyzing, I agreed, and dropped the pixel size down a few points. And Ana was right!

 

  • On Twitter and by email, social strategist Mila Araujo really delivered, with some great advice on dropping the Archives tab for a Topics one (to improve access to content), as well as advising of some areas that weren’t showing up on mobile. This information helped immensely, as did the suggestions to offer a separate tab for each of my books, particularly useful for mobile browsing.

By asking for, and acting upon, the fresh eyes of my community and their suggestions to improve the user experience, I was tapping into a rich source of data that helped improve the presentation of the content here, which should (hopefully) build upon the improvements on how it’s consumed.

Data is Everything and Everything is Data

Like I said at the start of this post, I don’t discount gut instinct at all when it come to making decisions. Some of the best experiences in my life happened because I acted on gut instinct over logical reasoning.

But for content, or for anything that has some form of marketing slant, for me data is everything.

By utilizing the data I had access to – archival analytics, visitor behaviour, trends in browsing, etc – I could immediately see where changes needed to be made. By accessing the experience within the community around this blog, I had even more data points from which to make choices to.

For me, this is invaluable, and can only help us grow, improve, and continue to make the user experience more enjoyable. Which, at the end of the day, is what really matters, no?

image: Marketing Charts

Why We Need More Partnerships Like the @Traackr and @Nimble One

Julia-Hull-on-Nimble-from-Traackr1

The middle of May saw a pretty big announcement in the influence marketing and social business space.

Influence platform Traackr and Social CRM platform Nimble announced a partnership that would see seamless integration of the two solutions, and allow much more effective management of influencer outreach programs.

From Traackr:

As of today, our users can connect their Nimble accounts to their Traackr projects and centrally manage influencer outreach efforts. It?s a huge step forward in closing the loop on influencer marketing.?What makes the Nimble-Traackr duo worth considering is that now you have Traackr?s contextual influencer identification and content tracking coupled with relationship management tools that enable you to create a plan, implement that plan, document the results, and even follow-up periodically with a complete interaction history.

From Nimble:

Up until now, companies that have invested in influencer marketing have faced the challenge of reconciling siloed solutions to manage their marketing programs with discovery, research, engagement and management happening in different places, making it difficult to truly nurture relationships. Using Traackr and Nimble together provide users the ability to perform influencer discovery and tracking, relationship building and nurturing, as well as activating and measuring results.

When I heard about this partnership, I was ecstatic. From a personal point of view, it was validation for the methodologies Sam Fiorella and I talk about in the Influence Marketing book, and what the future of that vertical looks like (integration between complementary platforms).

From a business and marketing point of view, it’s the kind of common sense partnership we see too little off, and yet one that reaps dividends for all involved – the two partners, their clients, and anyone looking to effectively use social media to drive leads, sales, customer service and more.

While this particular partnership is built around influence marketing, it offers a path that other businesses could [should] take when it comes to their own customers and the solutions they offer.

Social Behaviours and Decision Making

For any business, one of the primary goals – if not the main one – is understanding its customers better. These could be existing or potential, as well as stakeholders or employees.

Take it beyond customers, and switch the wording a little, and you get the same thing – donors, political party supporters, activists, etc.

If we, as businesses, can understand what makes our customers tick, and offer them solutions based on their freely submitted data and information, we can identify certain behavioural aspects and provide a message or solution accordingly.

Tie that into their social behaviours online, and then use complementary software that monitors, analyzes, segments and recommends, and we’re moving into an area where we can truly be smarter about how we meet the needs of our customers.

Not only that, but we understand what makes potential clients or strategic partners tick.

Whereas before it could take months or even years to gain enough knowledge to turn a cold call into a warmer introduction, using Traackr’s identifying process along with Nimble’s project management tools gives us data we can really use to break the proverbial ice.

  • New contract details;
  • Personal and professional milestones;
  • RFP timescales;
  • Deciding factors;
  • Competitive influencers;
  • Peer connections.

Information in business is king – analytical information even more so. The Traackr/Nimble partnership brings this information to us in a more cohesive manner than before.

Collaborative Consumption is the Way Forward

Apart from the obvious business solutions the partnership brings, it also enables both companies to fine-tune their own offerings based on how their clients are using the new combination.

For instance, while Traackr has an excellent influence marketing solution, especially when it comes to identifying who influences the influencers, they don’t go quite as deep on the measurement path when keeping track of where someone is in the purchase life cycle.

For a sales team, this information is more key than knowing who the influencers are in a particular vertical – that would fall more to the marketing team to handle.

With Nimble’s integration, a sales VP could allocate team members different leads, at different stages, and base success criteria on how well that sales person moves the potential client into the next stage of the decision-making process.

Each time the lead is moved into a new section – from awareness to research, for example, or research to intent to buy – a new set of influencers could be identified by Traackr. The warmth of that lead would then either increase or decrease based on what needs to happen next.

Alerts are set up to monitor sudden spikes in activity, or mention of certain keywords that would suggest the intention to buy soon.

Now, instead of influence being used for promotion and social share of voice, it’s a true, lead generation tracking tool. All because two companies decided to partner as opposed to leaving clients to figure out how to connect all the dots themselves.

The Possibilities Are Limited Only By You

It’s this kind of forward movement that today’s technologies allow and, for the smarter companies out there, actively encourage.

Developers that build their solutions with Open APIs in mind – the ability for different technologies to connect to each other reasonably easily – are the ones that will be positioned to lead the marketplace.

As the conversation around social media and business matures from “oh, nice to have” into an actual business conversation, partnerships like the Traackr and Nimble one will become ever more prevalent.

It’s about time.

image: Nimble.com

A version of this post originally appeared on DannyBrown.me

Where Does Online Video Sit in Social Media for Marketers?

Video and social media

With the recent implementation of video posts for popular photo app Instagram, and the swift uptake of the Vine platform when it was released on iPhone and later Android, video has continued to make bigger inroads into the marketing tactics for brands and agencies alike.

Whereas previously marketing budgets would allocate a certain amount for professionally-filmed video for promotion and media ad spots, the rise of YouTube as a content-rich medium for brands saw tactics change.

Videos could be more “real”, with less focus on polish and more on the brand: its story, its products use cases and, most importantly, what its customers felt.

Big Things Can Come in Small Packages

This richer interaction has led the way for Vine’s short, snappy videos, which – despite early criticism of the six second limitations of the format – saw successes for brands that adapted to its style.

Instagram’s new video feature isn’t slouching when it comes to brand usage, either. Despite being later to the market , their longer videos – 15 seconds, compared to Vine’s six – has seen a variety of ways to showcase a brand’s message and culture.

These are just some examples of how brands are not only using video effectively for promotion, but using short-form video and making it count.

So how does this impact where marketers focus when it comes to integrating different tactics when it comes to social media?

The State of Video for Social Media 2013

A new mini-report from digital publishing company Uberflip shares some statistics regarding video’s continued ubiquity when it comes to online and social media crossover.

Using data from reports by Google, Forrester, ComScore, The Guardian and The Globe and Mail, they’ve compiled this overview into a short video that shows just how much we’re using video, both from a creation and curation standpoint.

Some of the key stats that stand out include:

Search Google for “online video marketing statistics” and you’ll get about 97 million results, with stats, figures, predictions and more around this ever-growing medium. Simply put, it’s about to be very big.

How this impacts your brand marketing is up to you – but as both the Vine and Instagram examples linked to in this post show, as well as the more traditional marketing videos, it’s an impact that is growing.

Are you ready for it?

[youtube]http://youtu.be/VyqD0Vzo_K8[/youtube]

image: Daniel Proulx

The Changing Face of Social Media for Business in the B2C and B2B Space

Changing face of social media

With the shorter buy-in cycle of consumer customers versus business clients, and the natural usage of social media by “everyday consumers”, the ratio of B2C (business-to-consumer) versus B2B (business-to-business) has traditionally been in B2C’s favour when it came to how companies could benefit from social media as part of their business arsenal. Not any more.

Two recent surveys not only highlight the diminishing notion that social media is better suited to B2C companies, but also how well B2B companies are adapting and competing with their B2C counterparts.

The B2B Integration of Digital and Traditional

The first report is from New York-based abm, or the Association of Business Information and Media Companies. The report – a whopping 425 pages long – was carried out between March and April of this year, with more than 6,600 respondents covering 11 markets, including agriculture, marketing, engineering, healthcare and more.

The goal of the report was simple – to identify what resources B2B companies use to identify/encourage buying signals in their market. The three main questions of the report were:

  1. Marketers, advertisers and sellers: How well do trade media help you reach customers?

  2. Users, readers, media consumers and event attendees: How much do trade media influence your buying decisions?

  3. B2B media professionals: How effective are you at bringing buyers and sellers together?

The results were illuminating. While traditional methods like print magazines, product info from the manufacturer and print newsletters were still leading the way, digital resources were equally important.

B2B resources for media

While websites play a huge role, and are equal in usage to the more traditional print magazine approach, it’s the implementation of digital or social media-led resources that catch the eye.

  • Digital magazines – 69%;
  • Mobile-optimized websites – 56%;
  • Social media – 54%;
  • Mobile apps – 51%.

For consultants and agencies pushing the line “social media doesn’t work in the B2B space”, this should act as a bit of a wake-up call.

Not only that, but when you look beyond just the current business use of social media and dig into how B2B sees resource use in the next 3-4 years, the picture becomes even clearer with regards the changing landscape.

Future of B2B media resources

The difference in where the B2B industry sees the market going from where it currently is now is striking.

  • Only 39% see print magazine usage as important, compared to today’s 96%;
  • Just 61% rate product information from the manufacturer, compared to 93% today;
  • Conferences and trade shows drop to 46%, compared to 80% today.

Meanwhile, social media, mobile-optimized websites and mobile apps remain steady in their importance. It’s a clear signal that the B2B space is moving beyond traditional thinking and into more integrated and agile solutions.

However, if the B2B space is showing an interesting trend upward, the B2C space is starting to show some serious wear and tear.

Senior B2C Marketers Know Less Than They Did Before

Marketing used to be so easy. Create a campaign, allocate a budget, blast a message out, (hopefully) see some traction, call it a success, rinse and repeat.

Deeper strategies and tactics weren’t needed, because the channels to view marketing messages were limited – print, TV, radio, billboards, and maybe some emails and telephone calls.

Of course, today it’s completely different. Not only do you still have all these channels, but now you have social networks, review sites, forums, game sites and more competing for your customer’s attention. Combine that with the reduced attention span of today’s connected consumer and the need for much better targeted marketing “just got real”.

The problem is, it doesn’t appear that marketers are keeping up, according to a new study from Yesmail Interactive and Gleanster. Also carried out between March and April this year, the two companies surveyed 100 senior B2C marketers representing brands with revenue between $10 million and $1 billion.

The results were just a little bit scary, although not too surprising.

B2C effective use of data

The main takeaways from the image show that while marketers believe they’re doing a good job of understanding their customers, the reality is a little further from the truth.

  • Marketers are still using reactive data to define customer knowledge – purchase history (67%), customer feedback (59%), and transactional/campaign response data (56% and 54% respectively);

  • Proactive data, such as likelihood to purchase (41%), online behaviour patterns (41%), social data (38%) and customer value scores (36%) is being severely underutilized, despite the fact it paints a far deeper picture of a brand’s customer base, existing and potentional.

By not using this data, the results are two-fold: the false belief that the business is meeting its customers’ needs, and resources being allocated to projects, products and services that are more likely to fail, due to non-relevance and non-market need.

Dig further into the report, and you can see this disparity become even more transparent.

B2C disparity of audience

As per the previous image, the senior marketers surveyed believe they’re doing a great job at understanding their customers based on historic purchases and interactions with the brand.

The problem is, this is just a small part of the bigger B2C picture, and that picture shows a much smaller understanding of the customer than the marketer believes.

  • Transactional data is still viewed as key, despite offering limited and dated insights;
  • A customer’s preferred channels to interact on are unknown;
  • There is no underlying understanding of when a customer is ready to buy;
  • The customer’s use of social media for decisions and actions is unknown;
  • How profitable offline customers are compared to offline ones.

These are just the basics – important basics, but basics nonetheless. If marketers are getting these wrong, then it’s disconcerting to picture what else they’re missing out on.

The blame for this lack of understanding? ?Limitations in marketing tools, poor data quality, and fragmented marketing systems. Sorry, but that’s bullshit.

No-One Said Success Was Easy

These excuses are the same ones that marketers used 10, 20, 50 years ago and more.

“We only have radio to market with”, “we only have TV and radio to market with”, “we don’t have audience insights from TV viewers”, “we have audience insights but they just represent a median percentage”.

And on, and on, and on. While there might have been some validation to that argument a few years back, today it’s anything but valid.

Today, technology – or Big Data, if we want to use the current buzz term – allows us to understand the minutest detail about our target audience.

  • We can understand the emotional triggers that make them take a specific action;
  • We can understand the emotions they feel when viewing a certain product;
  • We can target geolocated offers based on propensity to buy when in a certain neighbourhood;
  • We can identify who influences them to move along the purchase life cycle path at any given time;
  • We can identify cross-cultural opportunities and best practices to implement them;
  • And much, much more.

By using this data and more like it, and having the right people in place to both analyze and deconstruct, we can now target very small and specific buyer communities, allowing for more focused marketing and subsequent performance. This enables a richer understanding of success and failure, and future methods and relationship paths.

Simply put, it’s smarter marketing and where businesses need to start being now, as opposed to 12 months down the line. Does it take a lot of work? Yes, with a capital Y.

It takes employing people that understand the data beyond the data – emotions, human psyches, emotive terminology like sarcasm, and more. It means moving beyond the algorithms and blast radius marketing, and beginning with the customer at the heart of all you do, and working back from there.

It’s not easy, but it does deliver, and much more effectively than current transactional mindsets.

The B2B space is realizing this and catching up on the previously dominant B2C space. Who would have thought..?

The full B2B report from can be downloaded here. A shorter, PDF version can be downloaded here.

The B2C report from Yesmail Interactive and Gleanster can be downloaded here.

image: jbhalper

Social Media Intelligence, The UK / North America Digital Divide, and Social’s Impact on Influence

Social media and HR

With a long weekend coming up here in this part of Canada, I’m about to take some downtime with my family and switch off for a few days. So, to end the week, I thought instead of a normal post here, I’d point you in the direction of three recent guest posts / Q&A’s elsewhere around the web.

I was grateful to be asked to contribute to three very different blogs in recent weeks – Canyon Communications, Salesforce and The Social Penguin – and the results can be found below. They cover different yet connected topics, so hopefully you’ll find use in at least one of them!

Cheers, and see you next week!

How Social Media Impacts Influencer Marketing

My guest post for the Salesforce.com blog takes a look at how influence is being skewed by the ever-growing noise and ambiguity of the social web.

By creating systems where noise and amplification is rewarded, and social impressions are currencies versus dollar return, are we creating an ecosystem where brands can no longer pinpoint who can help them reach, and meet the needs of, their target customer base?

Read the full article here.

Social Media Intelligence Isn’t Exclusive to Interaction and Participation

Over at Canyon Communications, the topic of discussion is determining business value and the return on investment for your social media efforts.

Often business are out off from entering the social space because of the “engage or die” mindset that often pervades their participation. This fear of scale, interaction, negative feedback, etc., stops many businesses from enjoying social’s benefits across multiple verticals.

This post shares three ways to overcome that fear and use social media intelligently – Social Research, Social Listening, and Social Influence. But more than just marketing examples, it shares how to optimize data insights, company culture, customer retention, crisis communications and much more.

Read the full article here.

Social Media, Digital, and the UK / North America Digital Divide

The last, but not least, post can be found at UK-based The Social Penguin, and is part one of a two-part Q&A.

While many companies are using social media as an integral part of their bigger business strategy, others are lagging behind or struggling to adapt. This can be for many reasons, all of which may have some validity but more often than not are simply used as a fallback.

In part one of the Q&A, I discuss why conflicting information and the fear of selling is social media’s biggest detractor; an example of a great social media campaign that delivered results; the differences between the UK and North America when it comes to digital and social; and why we need to break the silos of PR, social, SEO and content.

Read the full article here.

And with that, I bid you adios!