“Design is subjective but UX can validate success. Deploy – measure – improve. This is an endless loop”

Jonathan Karron @jonathanatlanta

“The keyword I’m hearing again and again at #dsum12 is “personalized.” User-centered design and #UX has won.”

Joseph Dickerson @josephdickerson

“@truste: Privacy by design: transparency, usability baked into UX must make it easy for users to keep their data private.”

Adam Hook @adamwritesgood

“When comes to UX, Designers must understand analytics. Analysts must understand design. @mickwinters”

Courtney Morton @CourtMortATL

“UX is the new black RT@iwanttobesocial: Product development shifts as people start to expect more and more from user experience.”

Jacqui Chew @jacquichew

“As design becomes commoditized, measurement driven optimization heightens the value of creative work.”

David Reeves @DavidReevesATL

“A/B testing should be a never-ending piece of the design cycle”

West Reed @WEST_REED

“The longer you inveset in design without validating its success, the greater the sub optimal ROI”

Simon Cole @simonjcole

“iPad=entertainment, iPhone=immediacy. Don’t adjust the current site, design the site specifically 4 the device.”

Bill Sullivan @nexxus1990

“Great design creates usability. Design without usability is just art.”

J Cornelius @jc

Did we miss any?  Let us know in the comments!  For any other questions, please email alyssa@infotrustllc.com

Twitter was the obvious choice of communication among attendees, and nearly everyone contributed to the hashtag #DSUM12.  So we decided to pull the top tweets from the Digital Summit and this hashtag, enjoy!

“Modern attention spans won’t tolerate paragraphs, sentences, words or characters anymore. They prefer visuals and images”

David Felfoldi @felfoldi

“60% of online video views click away from a video in the first 120 seconds. Short is good”

Virtue @virtue

“Takes 60 minutes after leaving your wallet at home to realize it. It only takes 15 minutes to realize you’ve left your phone.”

Alex Topiler @topularity

“A brand sits at the intersection of what a company does, and how the consumer feels about it.”

J Cornelius @jc

“Whatever you are thinking, think bigger.”

Tony Hsieh

“The customer is the number one sales person for your company. Why? They bought your product.”

Write2Market @Write2Market

“Your smartphone is now a store (and more) in your pocket.”

JR Schmitt @cloudspark

“Culture is the one competitive advantage a company can control.”

David Cummings @davidcummings

“A hashtag is a campfire that Twitter users gather around.”

Joel Lunenfeld @joell

“Customers expect companies to have a personality now; must change the way we think about engagement.”

Candace McCaffery @candacemcc

Did we miss any?  Let us know in the comments section!  For questions or if you want more information, feel free to contact me at Amin@InfoTrustLLC.com.

My presentation was on Measuring Social Media with Google Analytics, and throughout the conference I tried to attend other presentations on web analytics, measurements and metrics to learn the latest trends and tools. Throughout these sessions, there were 5 concepts that resonated with me the most.

1. Segmentation and personalization is the key to relevancy.

Every one of us wants to receive relevant information. Emails, messages and posts that do not reflect my needs and wants will never get my attention, will not generate a clickthrough and will not create a conversion. Every marketer needs to track and pay attention to the behaviors of their audience and adjust a message accordingly. Leverage buyer patterns, track content usage and my social media involvement to understand what content to send me at what time and through what channel. The ability to use data to create personable and relevant messages is instrumental in improving marketing ROI.

2. Averages are misleading.

During this conference several speakers stressed the importance of not getting caught up in looking at the averages. This information is often misleading as it takes into account uncommon visitor patterns. Average bounce rate is not a very good indicator of how your website is performing. Consider tracking your bounce rate on the landing pages or other key pages – this will give you more accurate information about your website’s performance. Another way to avoid looking at averages is by segmenting website traffic and comparing bounce rates by traffic source.

3. Making assumptions and going with your gut can be a costly strategy.

A lot of times marketing decisions are based on gut feelings and personal preferences. This means that the decisions are often biased and skewed towards our own preferences. The only way to be relevant is by following the following cycle:

1. Design your marketing campaign
2. Test its performance
3. Gather data
4. Analyze information
5. Optimize based on the identified insights

The most important aspect in marketing is constant optimization. The needs, wants and demands of your audience constantly change. If you do not constantly adapt to the shifts in the marketplace, you will start producing irrelevant messages that in return will make you irrelevant in the eyes of your audience.

4. Real time data matters when you can make real time changes.

Recently, Google Analytics introduced real-time analytics that show how your website is found and used by people in the real time. A lot of other analytical platforms offer similar capabilities. This creates a questions – what do we do with this data?

Data only matters when you know what do with it. Otherwise, you will get analysis paralysis. Always begin looking at the data with the goal in mind. This will help you find the right data insights. If you are still interested in the real-time data, make a list of changes and actions that you can take depending on what the data is telling you.

5. Data correlation is often more important than data causation.

It is always important to measure how each marketing tactic contributes to your overall marketing goals and objectives. However, I would also stress the importance of looking at the data correlation. Does the growth of your Facebook fan base correlate with an increase in the website traffic? For example, increased activity on Google+ will correlate with increased search engine traffic to your website that will correlate with the number of product demo sign-ups. Correlations and patterns will always help you figure out if you are going in the right direction.

Summary
There is a lot more information that I would like to share, but I would rather focus on these 5 tactics that can help you make actionable marketing decisions. We will post another blog post about this conference within a few days. This has been a great experience, and I plan to come back next year.

Background

Heather Alessandro is our Director of Operations here, and was actually the person who brought me in initially to interview at InfoTrust.  As any candidate coming in for an interview, I looked up my interviewer’s background and affiliations.  This is when I first came across Paige’s Princess Foundation.  Honestly, I was incredibly moved.  Taken from their mission statement, “Paige’s Princess Foundation, Inc. is a non-profit organization providing small grants to pediatric patients with life-long disabilities.  They are not condition-specific and consider applications from any disorder or diagnosis that results in the disability of the child.  Grants will be made to finance adaptive equipment or therapeutic services to enhance the quality of life, mobility and independent function of the child.”

So who is Paige?

Also taken directly from their website, “Paige Alessandro was a six year old kindergartner at Wyandot Elementary school when she passed away suddenly in May of 2010. She lived with her parents, Steve and Heather and big sister Grace and little sister Haley. Paige loved saying that she was the middle sister. Paige bravely battled a spinal vascular disease her entire life and suffered a very severe spinal stroke in 2008. After overcoming many obstacles, Paige died peacefully from acute liver failure which was more than likely a complication of her disease.”  Read more about Paige here.

Commitment to a great cause

I’m not writing this to solicit this organization nor the upcoming run (directly at least).  Instead, I’m writing this to share with you why we are committed to this cause.  I didn’t know Paige. I’ve never heard of spinal vascular disease and I’ve never known anyone that has passed due to this disease.  But I do know Heather.  She is leader that holds our team together and pushes us to continue forward.  Not only is she a visionary within InfoTrust, her unbelievable commitment to helping Cincinnati Children’s OT/PT patients reach their fullest potential through her foundation is truly inspiring.  This commitment and dedication is mirrored in Heather’s interaction and leadership in the office. It can be seen in our culture and core business values.  If nothing else, she and Paige’s foundation has helped me become more aware, motivated to give back, and ultimately more appreciative of how fortunate I am.

I pushed to have a blog post about this topic because I, and everyone at InfoTrust, feel connected to this cause.  We’ll close with a video about Paige’s Princess Foundation’s upcoming fundraiser run on May 19.  Okay, maybe I will solicit a little, register here! Or if you are not available (or not local) but would like to donate to this charity, you can do so here.

With all that being said lets Dive in.

While in the brainstorming process of creating my HTML5 Dart Tracking app I found myself with a problem of keeping the scores of the players even if your phone suddenly goes offline.  Cookies were one way of keeping my data consistent but with HTML 5 there is an even better solution and that is localStorage.  However while working with localStorage I found it had one unique quirk that required a bit of a workaround.  That is localStorage can only hold strings.  This was just not going to work because next to all my information that needed to be tracked was in the form of Arrays.

So after some research I found two functions that allow for arrays to be properly stored in localStorage. Below is some example code to help demonstrate the process.

The first function you will use will be
JSON.stringify(YourArrayVariable).  This will convert your array into a string that localStorage can handle and later be parsed.

This leads me to the second function which retrieves your variable
ArrayVariable = JSON.parse(localStorage['NameOfArrayString']).  And there you have it now you can store arrays in localStorage.

If you have any questions, leave a comment below or email me at andrew@infotrustllc.com

Change Your Site Name and Information

Go to Settings > General

From this page, you can edit general global settings about your website including:

• Site Name
• Tagline
• Email Address (used for notification purposes)
• Date/Time Formats

Make your URLS Pretty

Go to Settings > Permalinks

From this page, you can change your permalink structure to prevent WordPress URLS from having site.com?p=23. Using %postname% somewhere in your permalinks is great for SEO. WordPress will use the title of your page in the URL structure. If you look at this page, the title is “Guide to Setting up your WordPress Website”, the URL contains “guide-to-setting-up-your-wordpress-website”

Setup a Text Page as the Home Page instead of Blog Posts

First you need to create your home page, and the text you want to display on it. If your theme has a special home page template, be sure to select that template in the page edit screen under “Page Attributes”. You will also need to create a blog page that has no text, and select a blog template if your theme requires.

Go to Settings > Reading

Under “Front page displays” select “A static page” instead of “Your latest posts”, then for front page, choose the page you want to use. Also, select the blog page you want to use for posts page. In this settings page, you can also modify how many blog items will display on the blog page, and any archive pages (category and tag pages).

Enable Search Engines to find Your Website

When your site is 100% ready to be visible to the world, go to Settings > Privacy and select the option “Allow search engines to index this site”.

If you are interested in learning more about WordPress, be sure to join us for our Advanced WordPress Workshop on May 18. If you have any questions, leave a comment below or email me at alyssa@infotrustllc.com!

Below is a quick list we compiled of some of the most commonly used Facebook Apps to help businesses manage pages and drive the best engagement for fans:

1. Fan of the Week

Every week one fan out of those who interacted with your page is picked as fan of the week, encouraging everyone to participate more.

2. RSS Feed or NetworkedBlogs

These apps allow you to add your blog/favourite RSS feeds to your wall, boxes tab or a dedicated tab on your profile or Facebook Page.

3. Post Planner

Schedule Facebook posts that rock!

4. Youtube

Connects your Youtube channel and favorite videos to be shown directly on your Facebook page.

5. Ecwid

Add a store to your Facebook page and get access to 800 million potential customers.

6. SurveyMonkey

Easily embed a survey directly on your fan page or post a survey link to your wall. Gather feedback from people where they’re already hanging out!

7. Flickr

This app displays a Flickr member’s collections, sets and photos as a Tab within yourFacebook Fan pages. You can choose from a number of different layout styles, and unlike most other apps like it, lets viewers navigate all your collections, sets and photos within your Facebook tab the entire time.

8. Nutshell mail

NutshellMail from Constant Contact tracks your brand’s social media activity and delivers a summary to your email inbox on your schedule.

9. Jobcast.net

Post Jobs For Free on Facebook

Whether you’r a small business owner, or marketing manager for a billion dollar brand, knowing what resources are available to fully optimize your social media efforts can be extremely rewarding.  The demands of providing valuable content and continuous messaging can be daunting, but with the tools listed above, it can at least be more manageable.

As always, we’d love hearing your thoughts! If you have any other apps we may have missed, any questions or you just want to chat, feel free to contact me at amin@infotrustllc.com.

Below is an abbreviated FAQ and answers for anyone interested in learning about our international student/via application opportunities.  For more detailed information, check our our About tab here.  Disclaimer: our answers do not substitute legal advice from a qualified immigration attorney.

Do you provide visa sponsorship?

InfoTrust will provide H1-B visa sponsorship for a qualified employee, including the cost of visa application

I already have an H1-B visa, how do I get a job with InfoTrust?

No requirements exist that the individual remain for any period in the job the visa was originally issued for.

Do you offer health benefits?

InfoTrust is a small business, but we offer the same level of benefits as a large organization. We offer health benefits to you, your spouse and your dependents.  We also offer dental, long term disability and a Simple IRA with a company match.

My family is located overseas and it takes a very long time to travel home. How much flexibility do I have to take a couple of weeks off in a row?

We offer generous vacation package and you never need to worry about taking more than a week at a time. See blog post http://infotrustllc.com/blog/hr-and-recruitment/infotrust-vacation-policy.

Are you only looking for full-time employees?

We are open to hiring part-time and we will work with you to identify hours when we will meet in the office or work via Skype.  We have only three requirements – you have to be smart, you have to get things done and you have to be a team player. Do no not compromise on these. Everything else is flexible.

Do I have to work full-time to qualify for an H1-b visa?

No, it is possible to establish an H1-B visa for a part-time employee.

I am graduating from University of Cincinnati or another US graduate school with a degree. Am I going to be a subject to annual visa quotas?

Good news, effective 2006, there are no H1-b quotas for candidates with US graduate degrees.

If you have any other questions about InfoTrust and visa sponsorship, feel free to contact us at heather@infotrustllc.com or again, check out our extended information here.

The following is a list of free tools that anyone can use to monitor any type of buzz, conversations or messages about a person/topic on social media.

1. Tweetdeck and Hootsuite

   Simple to use, you can monitor and manage multiple social media accounts all in one place with the ability to schedule tweets, create filters for only certain topic updates, research trends and hot topics for your industry, analyze social media traffic and impact, and have more engagement ability with specialized posting.

2. Twuffer, Twitterstats

   Twitter tools to both schedule tweets and see the changes with your follower base (increasing or decreasing).

3. Twithawk, Twilert, Monitter

   All three of these tools send updates when there is mention about a specified topic or person on social media: good for monitoring your own name mentions or specific topics of interest.

4. Twitterfall

   For popular trends, Twitter is queried from the Twitterfall server, and results are streamed directly to you.

5. Social Mention

   Similar to Twithawk and Twilert, this tool scans all social media for mentions about a specified keyword, name or topic and sends alerts when there is any talk about those searches.

6. Klout

   This is a fun tool to determine your social media influence, designed to encourage more engagement online and through social media.  Based off your number ranking, you can potentially earn free prizes and awards.

7. OpenBook

   Facebook helps you connect and share with the people in your life.  Now, even if they are not your friends and you don’t know them, you cans till read people’s recent posts (based on their own words).

8. Google Alerts

   Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your queries.

9. Guzzle

   Guzzle reads hundreds of feeds every second to get you the latest news about stuff you care about.

10. Social Seek

    Socialseek is for anyone looking to rise above the social media noise and finally get real engagement and social media ROI

Some other manual free searches can be found here: http://www.socialbrite.org/2011/01/11/guide-to-free-social-media-monitoring-tools/

Knowing what’s happening in the world can be very powerful and enlightening.  By monitoring yourself or the topics you care about on social media, you can potentially be better informed about what the conversations are and how to push yourself, your knowledge, and your personal brand, to the next level.

How can organizations improve the newsletter sign-ups on their websites? Let me help by offering 10 easy tips that can help you increase conversion – # of sign-ups/ # of visitors. 

1. Your newsletter sign-up form needs to have a value proposition. Too often, I see a newsletter sign-up box that doesn’t even tell me what I am signing up for. Here is an example:

Add a brief description to the offer, just to help your website visitors understand why they should join your mailing list. Here is an example: FREE subscription to a weekly newsletter with marketing research, case studies, web clinics and news digests.

2. Segment from the start. Offering several subscription options to your visitors can serve a dual purpose. On one hand, you are immediately segmenting your list; on the other hand you are telling your visitors that the newsletter is tailored to their interests. Here is how MarketingSherpa does it:

Do not offer your website visitors too many options. At the end of the day, you will have to produce all the different pieces of content that you promised.

3. Incentive goes a long way. Your newsletter is an offer, but what about an incentive? Think about giving people something of value if they sign-up. For example, sign-up for our newsletter, and we will send you a copy of our latest FREE eBook on <topic your audience is interested in>. Make sure that your incentive offers real value to the people who you want on your email list. I probably will sign-up for your newsletter if there is a chance to win a Starbucks Gift Card, but I will unsubscribe soon after. Here is an example of an incentive:

4. Address privacy issues. Last thing we all want is to get spammed. Tell people that you respect their privacy, and will protect their email and contact information. A short statement about your privacy practices can put your visitors’ minds at ease. Here is an example: We never sell or share your information.

5. Begin with an email box. When asking people for their contact information, begin with an email box. You do not need any more information, and when people list their email address they tend to be more committed than when they simply list their name. You might want to consider asking for an email (required), and then asking for person’s name (optional).

6. Do I really have to SUBMIT? Submit is not the most effective call to action. It is ambiguous to say the least. Try something more specific. Your call to action button should tell me what exactly I am getting myself into. Here is an example:

7. Consider using an image in your newsletter sign-up box. This might give people a preview of what they will be receiving from you soon. The image, however, should not be ambiguous but rather tell a story and support your offer.

8. Experiment with a newsletter sign-up pop-up box. This might work well on your blog. The reason I say experiment is because this doesn’t work for every site. However, it might be worth trying. I am inclined to sign-up for a newsletter when I am reading a blog and see that the company offers real value. Here is an example of the newsletter sign-up pop-up box:

9. Split test your newsletter sign-up form. The only way to surely increase the newsletter sign-up is to test your form and a call to action. Sometimes the color of the button, the call to action or the size of the form makes all the difference. Here is an example:

10. Leverage social proof. Consider including how many Facebook fans your company has as a way to prove the value your company offers. Another option is to add a quick testimonial to the newsletter form to give people a glimpse of what makes your newsletter special.

Summary

At the end of the day, do not try all of these tactics at once. Use your website analytics to test which options work better, and continuously optimize your newsletter sign-up form. Remember; never take the attention of your website visitors for granted. You have to work hard on getting people to join your mailing list.