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Social Media Integration

Jody Pirrello Tuesday, June 21st, 2011

A well executed social media strategy is fully integrated – each touch point has the appropriate social components to share, log in, or verify. When you’ve done it correctly it will look seamless and natural. When you’ve done it wrong, it can look awkward, desperate or even like you don’t understand the medium.

Let’s review some common ways to integrate social with your other digital efforts.

Social icons

If they sought out your web site, let them connect with you as well – follow, like or subscribe. Twitter rolled out the Instant Follow button a few weeks back. Similar to the Like button for Facebook, click on the button to immediately follow.

Sharing

Make it easy for users to share your content with their friends by putting social sharing icons on each page. An important element here is to have a unique URL for each page. Overlays and page-wide iFrames obscure the URL and make it impossible for users to share each page. They also prevent users from bookmarking pages. Think long and hard before using overlays and page-wide iFrames.

You can also share activities on your site – website registration, document download or email signup are all possible sharing opportunities.

Be sure to use the Facebook Open Graph meta tags when offering Facebook sharing. Doing so allows you to specify the image and description that are posted to the user’s wall. If you don’t use these you’re leaving them up to Facebook. Do you really want Facebook deciding the most important image and content on your page?

The important Facebook meta tags for sharing content are:

og:title
og:url
og:description

These three are the basics but there are others. You can read more about Facebook Open Graph meta tags on the Facebook Developers site.

Note – if you use a sharing service like ShareThis or AddThis, resist the urge to add every icon. These services offer sharing with just about every network. Avoid overwhelming users and choose just the ones that apply to your audience.

Registration

Consider integrating with Facebook or Twitter for login and authentication. This gives you several benefits – users don’t have to create yet another account and as site owner you reduce bogus registrations.

Portability

If your site provides unique content – calculators, personalized images or other tools – make it portable and shareable. Consider offering embeds for bloggers to add to their blogs and share links to allow users to promote your site for you.

Videos

Most video platforms offer embeds, making it simple to include them on your site. Showing your product in action or demoing how it works are great ways to bring users closer to conversion.

Reviews

If you offer product reviews, give users an easy way to share that review.

Blog

In addition to the typical social icons and sharing opportunities, highlight a few blog posts on your home page and appropriate interior pages.

Comments

Speaking of your blog, upgrade your blog comments to a service that allows users to respond to each other, indicate that they agree or disagree, opt in to receive an email notification when someone leaves a comment and link to specific comments. Disqus and Echo both improve blog commenting systems.

Presentations

Not just for public speaking, your presentations can include client presentations and webinars. Get a Slideshare account to allow shares and embeds, and put those embeds to use on your own site too.

Social Bookmarking

Reddit, Delicious and StumbleUpon all allow you to collect links. Add the icon to your website and be sure to tag your links for improved searchability on the sites.

Email

Be sure to include your social icons on every email. Allow users to either follow your accounts or share a link to the email to encourage signup.

Facebook Apps

Make sure your apps offer users the opportunity to share as well. Apps usually offer special functionality; make it easy for users to let everyone know about it. When they do share, their wall includes a link directly to your app.

Now Let’s Get Started

This list will get you well on your way to social integration. A proper integration strategy will allow users to do part of the work for you – reaching out to their friends and their networks. This is important both to expose users to your brand as well as to help your site rank well in Search Engines and Facebook.

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Posted in deep dive week, facebook, social media, twitter, web dev | No Comments »

7 Reasons to Invest in a Mobile Web site Versus an App

Jody Pirrello Friday, May 27th, 2011

Have you ever found yourself trying to decide if a mobile web site or app better fits your brand? In our final mobile Deep Dive Week post, Jody Pirrello (VP, Technology) compares the features of each to help you make an informed decision .

If you’ve found this useful we invite you to share it with your friends or join the conversation on twitter via the hashtag #DeepDiveWeek. We’d love to hear your thoughts.
Deep Dive Week

Clients frequently come to us and say “We need a mobile app.” My first response is always “What are your goals for an app?” and I frequently get responses about it being sexy or cutting edge. You need something more than that to make it in the mobile app world, and if you get it wrong there’s a high price to pay (literally).

Before going app-crazy give this list a read-through and reconsider your brand’s goals and budgets, as well as your users and their interests.

1. Users prefer mobile web sites over apps. Product reviews, blogs, sports, news, shopping, video and local are all tasks users prefer to do via a mobile web site. Understandably, mobile apps were preferred for social, music and games.

2. Mobile apps are expensive to create and maintain. Unfortunately, we live in a world with at least 4 vastly different mainstream smartphones – iPhones, Android, Blackberry and Windows – and each requires its own app. That translates to 4 development, QA and maintenance phases. 3-4 times the effort and cost? Where do I sign up?

3. It’s much harder to market a mobile app. There are thousands of mobile apps and limited ways to get at them. App stores are adding social cues as a factor to their searches – downloads, uses, ratings. It’s increasingly difficult to get an app to stand out in an app store.

4. Mobile web sites are accessible by search engines and other web sites. Most brands already have a search engine presence and users can more easily link to your mobile web site in their own site, blog, Facebook, Twitter, etc. Moreover, search is the second-most popular mobile activity. Users are looking for you via mobile browsers.

5. Mobile web sites can integrate with a content management system. Need to add a page to your mobile web site? No problem! Need to publish a page that automatically comes down after the holiday weekend? No problem! Want to update the look and feel – easily? No problem! And the list goes on.

6. Mobile web sites enable immediate content changes. Mobile web sites allow web site managers to add/change/delete content whenever they need to. While you can make content and functionality changes with an app, you’re at the mercy of users when they see that content. They need to download your updated app in order to see your new offer on winter coats. And hopefully they do so before the winter thaw.

7. Tablet owners are showing a web site preference as well. According to a study by Forrester last month, tablet owners expressed a 2 to 1 preference for mobile web sites over apps.

I don’t want to lead you astray. There are some cases in which a mobile app wins over its web site counterpart. Gaming, music and social are all great applications for a mobile app. The user experience and commitment by the user both make an app a good choice in these cases. And as you probably know, an app can deliver a better user interface than a mobile web site (although mobile web site technology is quickly catching up).

The bottom line? If you’re looking to boost your mobile presence, a mobile web site is likely the better bet for accessibility, budget, and heck, even to address user preferences. If you’re in one of the niche markets and you have the budget to develop, maintain and market your app plus a great idea to differentiate your app among the clutter then an app may be for you.

Posted in deep dive week, mobile, web dev | 1 Comment »

Mobile Design and Usability

Jody Pirrello Thursday, May 26th, 2011

Do you have a mobile web site? If not, it’s likely in your plans for 2011. In today’s Deep Dive Week article, Jody Pirrello (VP, Technology) gives an overview of mobile usability, discusses how to prioritize and shares a lesson about what *not* to do with your mobile web site. If you’ve found this useful we invite you to share it with your friends or join the conversation on twitter via the hashtag #DeepDiveWeek. We’d love to hear your thoughts.
Deep Dive Week

Let’s start with a lesson on what not to do with your brand’s mobile user experience.

I met a friend at a bar a few weeks back. She had just come from a test drive. We were discussing the model she was looking at and she offered to bring it up on her iPhone.

Here’s where things took a sharp left turn.

First step – go to the BMW site. Unfortunately the home page was not navigable on mobile because they created custom drop downs that didn’t work on the iPhone.

Next step – go to Google and searched for “BMW 328i”. Found what looked like the perfect page highlighting Features and Specs.

Finally – she clicked on the link and was redirected to a mobile “friendly” page of all their models. There was no way to the 328i page on mobile.
BMW Mobile
Even though the content existed, BMW wouldn’t allow mobile devices to get to it. Instead, they kept redirecting us to the mobile version of the site that had much less content.

We ended our search frustrated and annoyed. And ordered 2 more glasses of wine.

Our experience has unfortunately become more the norm than the exception. Web site owners can direct users toward a certain path, but they certainly shouldn’t put up roadblocks.

Mobile friendly or separate mobile version?

They both have their advantages and the decision doesn’t have to be an either/or. If you have the resources, feel free to create a separate mobile version. You get the advantage of a very clean UI, simpler forms and a user experience optimized for smaller screen sizes and touch screens.

However, you shouldn’t box visitors into your mobile site. If a visitor really wants to see a specific page, you should allow them to access it. Don’t continually redirect them to the landing page of the mobile version. Don’t make the same mistake as BMW.

If you prefer optimizing your site for mobile you get the simplicity of managing one set of content and a mobile site that’s as current as the desktop version. Of course, you will need to determine how the site layout will change for mobile, and you’ll want to review any forms for usability.

When you’re designing for mobile keep the mobile visitor’s objectives in mind:

Quick access – they’re visiting your site via mobile because they’re likely in the car, on the street, away from home, in a meeting, responding to a TV ad or email, etc. Don’t make it difficult to interact with your brand.
Out of home reference – at a minimum, make sure your store locator is accessible and usable. After that, do a content audit to determine what else a user might want to access via mobile. Store hours, phone numbers, menus, recipes and product information are candidates.
Finding a specific piece of information – search is the second-most popular activity on smartphones. If a user clicks on a link via a search engine it’s because they want to see that information. Don’t think you know better and send them to a landing page. Or alternatively, offer an easy way to get to the page they requested in addition to redirecting them to the landing page. A simple message and link at the top of the page will do the trick.

Ensure you always keep your mobile user’s needs in mind. Identify the top mobile activities on your site and make it an objective to keep those activities mobile friendly whenever making a site update. Mobile usage is growing every month. Don’t wait until users have a BMW experience (and complain about it) – make it a priority now.

Posted in deep dive week, mobile, usability, web dev | No Comments »

How to get the Facebook ‘LIKE’ to do the heavy lifting

Jim DelPizzo Friday, January 21st, 2011

In an early Web Development News, Tips, and Tricks post I showed how to implement the Facebook ‘LIKE’ button. After I implemented this on a couple sites I started doing some more research to understand how my site could take full advantage of the ‘LIKE’ button.

There are a few steps you need to take to fully integrate the ‘LIKE’ button on your site. Facebook uses the Open Graph protocol, enabling you to expose content on your web pages to the social graph. Page selection is important when you consider adding ‘LIKE’ buttons – you should choose to add them to pages with something a person would actually like, e.g. a product, an event, a personal bio, etc.

Along with the ‘LIKE’ button you’ll need to add some “og” meta tags. These “og” meta tags will help you specify structured information about your web pages. The more information you provide in the “og” meta tags, the better your chances are that your page will show up on Facebook.

So let’s look at the example Facebook gives you – a person goes to http://www.imdb.com and clicks the ‘LIKE’ button on the movie “The Rock” (with one of the greatest actors ever, Nicholas Cage). IMDb has implemented the following “og” tags:

As you can see, the “og” meta tags contain several pieces of descriptive information about the movie. Let’s dissect the tags.

The Open Graph protocol defines four required properties:

og:title – The title of your object as it should appear within the graph, e.g., “The Rock”.
og:type – The type of your object, e.g., “movie”. See the complete list of supported types in the Facebook Open Graph documentation.
og:image – An image URL which should represent your object within the graph. The image must be at least 50px by 50px and have a maximum aspect ratio of 3:1. Facebook supports PNG, JPEG and GIF formats.
og:url – The canonical URL of your object that will be used as its permanent ID in the graph, e.g., http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0117500/.
og:site_name – A human-readable name for your site, e.g., “IMDb”.
og:description – A one to two sentence description of your page.

When a user clicks the ‘LIKE’ button, the following will show up for all their friends to see:

Once someone likes your page, the image, name, likes, web page, and the number of people who also like it will show up on that user’s profile under the Info tab.

I’ve just reviewed a few of the basic “og” tags – there are close to 50 tags, and growing. You can see all the meta properties you can include on your site by visiting ogp.me .

When building a site or updating a site I recommend adding as many of these meta tags as applicable. Review the list of og tags on Facebook, identify appropriate content, and add the tags to your site.

Why are you doing this extra work? As I reviewed above, when a user likes something Facebook adds that to the user’s wall for all their friends to see. That’s free advertising to their friends! Facebook also displays a user’s likes on their profile page by adding both a link to the page the user likes and a link to the main web site. That’s two links per like. Now if 5,000 people like you that’s 10,000 inbound links.

Facebook also offers per click advertising advertising. As a part of the segmentation and profiling Facebook offers, you can specify groups such as “friends of users who like the Rock” to target your ads to those who are more likely to be interested in your product.

With all the benefits of a ‘LIKE’ button, what are you waiting for? Get working on your “Like” button now!!

Posted in facebook, ppc, SEO, social media, strategy, web dev | No Comments »

Smartphones – App vs Mobile Sites

Jim DelPizzo Monday, November 15th, 2010

Most companies have realized the shift, the shift that smartphones are here to stay. More and more people are using their smart phones to surf the web, download apps, play games, and check email. The smartphone is taking over what people used to do on a laptop to some extent.

Here is some information on the increase of smartphones and the projections of 2011.

“65 percent of people 18 to 29 years old use their smartphone to access the Internet. Just under 50 percent of people 30 to 39 do the same. Expect those numbers to grow.”
- from the Pew Internet and American Life Project reported in July

There are over 60 million US smart phone users.

2011 smartphones will surpass featured phones by Q3.

Now that companies realize that and finally want to go mobile where do they start? Do they need a mobile website? An App?

Build Apps
Building apps for each device might be time consuming considering as of right now there are iPhones, Andriods, Blackberries, and soon to be released Windows. So you would need to build an application for each device. Though for each device you could use the rich hardware feature of your phone like GPS, maps, and the camera.

Mobile WebSites
Building a mobile web site would be less programming but you would lose out on the hardware features of the phone. Also the display across all the phones might be off, since there are high end smartphones like the iPhone, Andriod, and Blackberry and the low end smartphones that don’t have the display as the high end phones. With the introduction to HTML5 a lot of the mobile sites can act like mobile Apps.

Conclusion
The first thing a company should ask themselves is what are the reason they want a smartphone app or website. From the chart below we can see the breakdown of Apple’s App Store compared to mobile sites

If you are going to use Mobile apps do research on people who are currently using your site, questions to ask – are they iPhone User or Blackberry Users?

My suggestion would be to build a Mobile website first and then if you are in need of an App, you will know which smartphone most of the users of the mobile website use.

**UPDATE pretty cool video on mobile devices:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0aUQLIPdtg8&feature=player_embedded

Posted in digital marketing, gaming, mobile, strategy, web dev | No Comments »

Archive for the ‘web dev’ Category

7 Reasons to Invest in a Mobile Web site Versus an App

Mobile Design and Usability

Smartphones – App vs Mobile Sites

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