8:50 PM | Posted by Benin | Edit Post Even before owning a Mac or an iPod I have always been enamored with the Apple brand. And lately with the recent iPad unveiling the brand has been on my mind more than ever.

One of my observations about Apple is that they seem to enjoy the most pristine and unsullied consumer brand in the world. Much has been said about the company's use of tightly controlled and proprietary systems, however, this is probably of the chief reasons that Apple that is able to possess such a singular idea in the minds of consumers.

When I think of Apple what comes to mind is "forget about being commercial...its all about unapologetic innovation for innovation's sake". In doing so Apple has birthed a brand of one.

If there was one aspect of marketing that Apple has mastered it would be the Ries Law of Publicity (from The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding), which says that,

"The birth of a brand is achieved with publicity, not advertising. A new brand must be capable of generating buzz through the media and the public."

What is so interesting in fact about Apple's mastery of this law is that while most brands lose their luster and ability to generate publicity after a few years-more than 25 years later Apple is still wooing crowds. Take the iPad, for instance, it seems that for years bloggers and the tech community have been foretelling Apple creating an iPad-like device. So it should be no surprise that from the moment Steve Jobs proclaimed Apple's impending "big announcement" until the iPad was actually unveiled Apple has received a countless and near priceless amount of publicity from bloggers and any other media outlet that you can think of-both big and small.

But Apple doesn't stop there. I am told that that just one visit to their site is enough to give a usability pro goose bumps. The site is a study in what it means to have an effective user interface...Notice the consistent site navigation, the clean and simple interface, the intuitive labeling of everything, see how easy it is to find what you are looking for on this mammoth of a site? Now...contrast this to a competitor's website and you'll know what I mean.

My final observation about Apple is that they have successfully merged their Internet marketing strategy with their offline strategy in a way where instead of bumping into each other the two strategies seem to be seamlessly intertwined.

4:29 AM | Posted by Benin | Edit Post
INTERACTIVE MARKETING ANALYST


Job Description

Responsibilities include maintaining data integrity of the web analytics tools, tracking web metrics, providing quantitative reporting and analytical support required by key internal and external constituents of IL. In addition, the analyst should be able to create Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint reports for presentation purposes. This individual will be responsible for working with developers, business analysts and business managers to frame business problems into performance metrics and provide routine and adhoc reports supporting these initiatives.


Experience and Skills

• Bachelor's degree and at least three to six years of related experience and/or training; or equivalent combination of education and experience.
• Understand website structures and how websites are tracked through web analytic tools
• Analyze web site performance, trends and click stream path activity to provide insights into strategic marketing initiatives
• Provide weekly, monthly and ad hoc campaign specific reporting in order to understand traffic patterns, site metrics, marketing performance and optimization opportunities
• Understand the role of web metrics in achieving overall KPI
• Create and maintain key reports and dashboards
• Develop best practices for analyzing user behavior
• Provide ongoing training and support for users of analytical tools
• Experience in using web analytic tools such as Unica NetInsights, Webtrends, Omniture, Google Analytics
• Experience in SEO and SEM

JOB RESPONSIBILITIES

• Understand definitions of web analytic terminologies and how they translate into meeting key performance indicators
• Tag web pages and links for tracking purposes in order to provide reports and insights on trends and web usability
• Extract data from various data sources to develop ongoing reports to assist internal and external clients to make more intelligent, data-driven decisions
• Interpret and effectively present results of findings to technical and non-technical clients and project teams
• Help interpret, use, and identify trends to improve business decisions and knowledge base for future strategic initiatives
• Build and develop relationships with peers and other internal clients in order to exchange feedback on consumer issues, identify and solve problems, assess analytic needs
• Experience with web metrics, website creation process, Microsoft Excel including Pivot Tables, database structures, Microsoft PowerPoint and SQL.
• Participate in Business Intelligence activities related to the data warehouse life cycle

2:31 AM | Posted by Benin | Edit Post

• Usability Counts | User Experience, Social Media

  Always Be Testing: 8 Services For Usability Feedback

  tags: usability-tools, graphicly, ux, usability

• Usability Counts | User Experience, Social Media

  tags: no_tag

  • Over the weekend we had a chance to highlight Graphic.ly – a company that opted to release early (and imperfectly) in exchange for valuable user feedback.

• It's Time to Place Your Vote for Your Favorite Design and Usability SEMMY Article — Cre8pc Cre8pc Usability & Holistic SEO

  Usability 101... Kim Berg provides an excerpt from a checklist she created and wrote about last year that covers the nuts and bolts of usability.

  tags: usability, end-optimization, users, user-interface

  • User behaviors change and evolve and it’s up to website owners to adapt. Constant attention must be given to how users and search engines interact with your site to ensure that you not only attract visitors, but give them reasons to come back.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

4:00 AM | Posted by Benin | Edit Post Yesterday I ordered some of that delicious Papa John's Pizza. Somehow or another afterwards I noticed one of their door hangers lying on the counter.

On a whim I decided to look at it. What immediately struck me is that they listed their Facebook Fan Page and then they also displayed their web url-twice.

Noticing this made me take a peek at their Facebook Fan Page. It looked to me like just about every fan was either saying they just ordered from Papa Johns, was about to order, or was considering ordering and many of these comments referenced yesterday's NFL play off action as well.

Since I do all of my Papa John's ordering online, I am already very familiar with their website. One of the things about their website is that the site layout is extremely simple and the ordering process is quite intuitive.

I am willing to bet that Papa John's understands that their primary website persona is someone who visits the website specifically to make online pizza purchases. They maintain a near flawless Information scent on their site and it is all aimed at helping their primary users to reach their #1 goal-painlessly ordering pizza online.

This is a company that understands how to use the web and how to inter-weave it into everything that they do.

A peak at their homepage illustrates that they strive to make it as easy as possible for their users to order online. My only suggestion for them is to maintain the navigation links at the top of the order site so that users don't need to rely on their browser for navigation. But otherwise, so far I love everything about their online strategy.

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10:39 PM | Posted by Benin | Edit Post I was just reviewing some of the work from my current Web Design for search engine optimization class and was reminded of a really insightful exercise.

2:31 AM | Posted by Benin | Edit Post

• Jonathan Mendez's Blog

  tags: landing, pages, goals, advertiser

  • As I’ve written before,
    value creation on the web involves more than a one-to-one exchange of value. A
    trifecta of goal fulfillment between your product or service, your audience and
    a third party (advertiser, restaurant, etc.) is required to create value.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

2:30 AM | Posted by Benin | Edit Post

• Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Google's SEO Starter Guide

  tags: google, webmaster, SEO, best, practices

  • So, the next time we get the question, "I'm new to SEO, how do I improve my site?", we can say, "Well, here's a list of best practices that we use inside Google that you might want to check out."

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

2:32 AM | Posted by Benin | Edit Post

• HOW TO: Leverage Social Media for Career Success

  tags: no_tag

  • Social media tools are becoming mandatory for career success. They are free advertising and give you the ability to connect directly with hiring managers, entrepreneurs and recruiters, instead of applying for jobs through job boards, which are black holes.  Your digital assets — blog, podcast, and social networking profiles — are your online identity and how people discover and connect with you.  You have the ability to leverage one or all of these social media tools in order to present a positive image and be recruited for a position that aligns with your passion. 

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

9:17 PM | Posted by Benin | Edit Post

Mashable Expounds on Using Social Media for Career Success

The other day while surfing the web I happened across something on Mashable that caught my eye...An article describing how to use social media to land a job.  Now as skeptical as I've come to become of the one size fits all approach to social media that has become so prevalent on the web as of late this is an article that I found to be highly worthwhile reading.

Decided to post it here because this is something that seems to be especially applicable to Internet marketing professionals.

HOW TO: Leverage Social Media for Career Success:

"Social media tools are becoming mandatory for career success.  They are free advertising and give you the ability to connect directly with hiring managers, entrepreneurs and recruiters, instead of applying for jobs through job boards, which are black holes. Your digital assets — blog, podcast, and social networking profiles — are your online identity and how people discover and connect with you. You have the ability to leverage one or all of these social media tools in order to present a positive image and be recruited for a position that aligns with your passion."

Also of interest to me in this article was Schawbel's bullet point describing the necessity of first defining and developing one's personal brand prior to attempting to utilize social media to further one's career.

I'd be curious to hear from any web professionals successes or failures regarding your use of social media to bolster your professional endeavors...

8:50 PM | Posted by Benin | Edit Post Here's a terrific piece by Aaron Walter describing how we can get findability buy-in from the rest of the our web development teams when we're attempting to build it into our web projects.

Because findability is such a broad discipline it can take on a fuzzy and academic tone in the minds of many web professionals.

As a result we see the same behavior that Mr. Walter mentions in this  A List Apart article.

I think that getting the support of other members of the team is a function of demystifying the topic both to the client and to the other members of the team.  Once web professinals are able to assign a certain value or relevance to findability then the rest should be easy...

A List Apart: Articles: Findability, Orphan of the Web Design Industry:

"Although Findability had a closely knit family, he felt like an orphan, because his siblings always seemed to get the lion’s share of time and attention from the folks in the web design agency. Everyone fawned over the curly-haired, rosy-cheeked twins Information Architecture and Usability who put everything in its place with a label that all would understand. Project Management garnered everyone’s respect for his deft communication, confident leadership, and his well-pressed, khaki trousers. Although Development was a little nerdy and shy, everyone admired his brilliance—from which he created an artificially intelligent search algorithm in just two lines of code. Super-hip Design was the cutest of them all. He seemed to win top accolades all by himself whether his siblings joined him on a project or not."

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4:31 AM | Posted by Benin | Edit Post Just the other day I was contemplating the fact that I'm now at the half way point of my Internet marketing accelerated master's program at Full Sail University.  

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10:39 PM | Posted by Benin | Edit Post

In this video usability expert Steve Krug breaks down usability and testing from a practical standpoint. Tip: The video gets especially interesting around the 45 min mark when Steve conducts an actual usability test with what appears to be a random audience member...

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8:35 PM | Posted by Benin | Edit Post
Bargain Basement Usability Testing

Paul Boag explains how to do web site usability testing on a shoe string budget. To summarize usability on a budget entails more regular testing, smaller user groups, and less concerns over who gets tested. The article even provides a sample test script.Tags: usability websites testing test Posted by: beninb



Source: http://www.diigo.com/user/Beninb

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11:22 AM | Posted by Benin | Edit Post How To Use Google Analytics To Maximize B2B ROI: Part II

Nice article describing how to use Google Analytics to help manage PPC campaigns.

eBay's Approach to Enterprise Level Ecommerce SEO

Wonderful interview with Dennis Goedegebuure, head of eBay's SEO team about search engine optimization in general, his background in the field, and how SEO has helped eBay.

10:25 PM | Posted by Benin | Edit Post I really like this definition of a persona.

Practical Persona Creation | evolt.org:

"A persona is a user profile that you can use to help make design decisions, as well as use to aid you in other ways. These profiles are created from your knowledge of your users, usually knowledge gained from user testing and research. Think of it as having a “virtual” user to bounce ideas off and help you keep the goals of the user in mind on a day-to-day basis. They are another powerful and valuable tool you can add to your toolbox."

The article goes on to describe the process, from start to finish, of collecting a web site's user data to sorting the data according to recurring patterns and then using those patterns to label the personas.

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10:10 PM | Posted by Benin | Edit Post InTopic Media, a start up online media company, seeks a contract to hire Web Content Specialist who will be located in Atlanta, GA to produce well crafted messaging that resonates with the target audience and exceeds our client’s goals. You’ll need to be well versed in a broad range of styles for a variety of media, including websites, videos as well as direct mail, event and collateral material. The position will allow you to work in conjunction with a Marketing Manager, Web Designer, and Web Development team to ensure maximum effectiveness of various projects.

You’ll be entrusted with a high volume of work that requires versatility and problem solving skills. It is crucial that you understand the strategic business intent of specific projects and audience goals, which will guide the overall creative direction and influence the customer experience for InTopic clients.

All candidates must have:

• BA/BS degree from an accredited four-year college or university
• 4+ years of previous experience with an agency or interactive shop
• Excellent writing, grammar and listening skills
• Strong portfolio that showcases writing and conceptual skills
• Ability to communicate effectively with team members and clients
• An understanding of branding and brand development
• Ability to deliver projects from concept to launch on time
• Strong desire to learn about our clients and their industries
• Unrelenting attention to detail and a passion for quality

Please send resume and cover letter to careers@intopicmedia.com

4:43 AM | Posted by Benin | Edit Post
We are a growing and thriving Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing company in Atlanta. We are looking for an entrepreneurial minded individual with Pay Per Click experience to run our growing Search Engine Marketing department. The ideal candidate will be much more than just a techie, their opinions and input will be valued to maximize profitably for both the company and the selected candidate.

The selected candidate will be expected to conduct face to face and web based meetings with customers and potential clients. The candidate will also be expected to build and foster relationships with our customers for long term retention.

The ideal person would have these combinations of skills: PPC + Analytics + Customer Service/relationship + web design. This person may have been or might still be a PPC/web design freelancer that wants to join forces with a team of professionals.

Your responsibilities will be:

• Delivery + customer coddling. 
• Manage add on products (call tracking, retargeting, display advertising) 
• Customer service and retention. 
• Run monthly reporting calls with customers 
• Manage credit line with Google 
• Establish messaging of PPC service 
• Grow our display advertising line 
• Web design skills are a big plus. 

Compensation is based on experience and ambition.   No agencies, no staffing companies, and no phone calls, please.

Send your resume to: SEOAtlantaGA-at-gmail.com

10:55 PM | Posted by Benin | Edit Post

Image via Wikipedia

Web-Design 101: First Impressions Are Everything! (Part 2):

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7:35 PM | Posted by Benin | Edit Post I want to try and be brief here.  It has always been my belief that blogging can be one of the best forms of Internet marketing available to entrepreneurs or large corporations alike.  Blogs allow their authors to connect with a captive audience.  Oftentimes this audience has goals that are similar to the blogger and that's one of the things that makes blogs so fun.

My blog forays started in the fall of 2006. Of course my initial blogs focused on a slightly different topic which we occasionally address here too-doing business in Africa.  But my point is that this was before other platforms such as Twitter and Facebook became predominate forms of instant communication.

Since initially starting I have stopped twice.  The first time was after Joshua Wanyama and I founded Pamoja Media (digital think tank agency helping marketers engage African audiences) together and then a second time after making the decision to go back to school and pursue a master's in Internet marketing.

So during my holiday break, the one that is just barely in the rearview mirror I decided that it was time to jump back in.  And in doing so I have noticed that blogging now is different than it used to be.  In a sense it can be tougher now to gain momentum because a large portion of would be blog audiences spend most of their time on other platforms now-such as Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed, and a host of other related mediums.

Initially, I was somewhat taken aback or even frustrated by this trend-but it didn't take long for me to throw up my hands and just accept that it is what it is.  There's doesn't seem to be much that anyone can do about it.  For a blogger to continue the process of engagement, in today's online environment, then they must learn to engage their audiences on all of the platforms that their audiences embrace.  This means that as a blogger you may often need to continue conversations about something mentioned on your blog with someone via Twitter, a Facebook group, or whatever.  And when this happens it is helpful that you just allow the conversation to go where it will without forcing it into particular direction. So my point is to say that blogging can still be a wonderful marketing tool, but not without leveraging other online communities.

Thats all I have.  Please sound off on how you feel on the state of blogging in 2010...thanks for listening.

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10:43 AM | Posted by Benin | Edit Post
So I am reading Steve Krug's Don't Make Me Think and its one of the most awesome books that I've ever read-period!  Seriously, the book's about web site usability and contains tons of insights that I'd highly recommend to anyone that publishes or maintains a web site or even a blog for that matter.

The Premise of Don't Make Me Think

The premise of the book is that as businesses or content publishers we only have a few milliseconds to capture our audience's attention.  Because if we don't the competition is only one click away.

But what resonates with me is the author's candid no non-sense tell it like it is approach to the subject of web site usability.

For example...

For instance he starts the book by sort of building upon the title of the book, "Don't Make Me Think".  What he's getting at is that when it comes to the Internet, all of us really just want sites that are simple to navigate and intuitive to the point where we are not forced by the site to ask ourselves little questions like, "what's this for?",  "what do they mean by this phrase?", "are they trying to say such and such?", or my personal favorite, "can I click this?".  So if your site makes people ask themselves those types of questions, then no matter how many bells and whistles you've got plugged into it...they just wont help you much.

The Bottom Line

So what's the point why would I be mentioning usability on a site that's supposed to be about serious Internet marketing???  Well, it's like this...If you're going to spend the time and resources to market and get the people to visit your site, wouldn't you rather that the customer or reader doesn't make it to the site just to bounce off less than a minute later due to usability mishaps?  I thought so...and that was my point and if you haven't done so already please buy the book.  By the way, its an e-book so if you head over and purchase it you wont even need to wait for shipping.

1:21 PM | Posted by Benin | Edit Post

I have been asking myself lately what are the best cities to live in for professionals who work in the Internet marketing field.

Unfortunately, I am unable to find anything like this online.  Has anyone seen any surveys touching on this topic or does anyone have ideas on how to go about putting such a survey together? Thanks!

11:49 PM | Posted by Benin | Edit Post
I found this quote today from one of South Africa's leading digital marketers-Walter Pike. I especially love the part where he discusses the object of marketing:

"My argument about the change in marketing is just this phenomena. The object of marketing has always been to spread an idea, the idea that the consumer should buy my product or service instead of someone else’s.

The best way in the past was to broadcast it over and over until the audience did, but as broadcast media loses effectiveness the best way in the future will be to produce something remarkable and get the former audience to talk to each other about it."walterpike.com, PiKE’s Thinking …, Sep 2009

As Pike alludes to I think we will continue to witness further growth in the Internet marketing as more companies experience diminishing returns with their traditional mass marketing campaigns.

Also let me say that I think that allowing the users to talk to each other about products or services that they like is powerful. However, what I believe has been even more instrumental at ushering in a new era in marketing are the predictive trending tools now available to marketers by way of search engine marketing, behavioral targeting, and pay per click. Traditional media just has a really tough time competing, especially on a local level, because these forms of marketing are capable of yielding such amazing ROI.

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9:43 PM | Posted by Benin | Edit Post Without getting too carried away with the 2010 posts I just wanted to do something that was short and to the point. For starters let me say that although 2009 wasn't without challenges, overall, it was a good year for me. It could probably by characterized as a year of new beginnings and growth.