The comment, “oh that’s easy,” has been a point of frustration for me since I started my career. I’ve heard it stated emphatically about features and tasks related to software development, web design, and web marketing projects.

What the client or manager usually means is: “The way I see it in my head, it’ll be easy for the user to use, so it must be easy to develop or execute.” What the project manager or software engineer typically says to themselves is, “it’s so easy, but you couldn’t pull it off in a million years - *cough*.”

I had a conversation with a friend yesterday that prompted me to start doing some research about the size and skill-set of web marketing teams. She started by telling me, “I’ve been told I’m responsible for the SEO, PPC, and Web Analytics Reporting for 15 dynamic (constantly changing) websites.”

To which I replied, “how big is your team?”

… “No team - just me.”

Then it went from bad to worse. She went on to describe the interactions she has with her higher-ups that include the frequent, “Why aren’t we already doing that? [insert idea they just read about in the WSJ] - It’s easy.”

In both in-house and client-consultant relationships, these types of interactions lead to frustration on both sides. Clients and managers will rattle off demand after demand in each meeting, and employees and consultants will try to deal with an ever-growing list of half-baked demands that will never get met.

At Awecomm, we have procedures that handle this type of interaction. Our project managers control the pipeline of current projects both internal and client-related, and provide time estimates for new task and project requests. If something needs to be escalated, something else has to get bumped. It’s a pretty transparent process, and it works really well.

If you (the Awecomm manager or salesperson) don’t like the time estimate that was generated by the team (the PM, developers, designers, and marketers) … well then you should try to go do it yourself! (READ: We trust our team) .

Don’t think for a second that I’m writing this out of some sort of bitterness for clients. I LOVE my clients. They push us to try new things and execute fast, and we push them to try new things and interact with us quickly. But without the proper framework to manage tasks and projects, things get wacky.

So where does this leave us?

I’m looking to put together some data about what in-house web marketing teams look like. How many websites is the team responsible for? How many people are on the team? What is the responsibility of the team (SEO, PPC, Reporting, Development, Design)? What is the nature of the websites (static, frequent updates, constantly updated, user-generated)?

I’m hoping that the research will lead us to some understanding of the bandwidth required (the hours-of-labor kind, not the bits-and bytes-kind) as it relates to keeping a site healthy and optimized.

So if you work for an in-house web marketing team, or your company has an in-house team, leave a comment and let tell me about the size of the team (you can be anonymous if you want). I’ll put a formal survey together shortly, and link it here as well so we can come up with some slightly more “scientific” results.

If this is something you can relate to, help out by spreading the link! I’ll post the findings here in a follow-up post and hopefully we can all benefit from them.

Thank you to everyone who showed up to celebrate with us! I’ll let the pictures tell the rest of the story.

Yesterday, Ted’s ideas spread to Detroit as some of the area’s top thinkers gathered at Lawrence Tech University for a day of compelling discussions about technology, energy, entrepreneurship, and other current challenges.

The first conversation that I had when I arrived at the conference I believe to be very representative of what everyone there was feeling. The man in front of me in line at the registration desk turned around, introduced himself, and asked, “So … what are your expectations?”

Anyone that’s been a long-time fan of TED.com knows that the expectations are high. When I watch a TED video online, it tends to introduce a number of new ways of thinking about the topic. On a very positive note, I can honestly say that many of the presenters at TEDx Detroit had the same impact on me.

Technology
I’ve seen Richard Sheridan from Menlo Innovations speak on a number of occasions, but this was hands-down his best presentation. Richard spoke about design issues, and specifically how they relate to software design. He opened with a wonderful example: “Have you ever walked up to a door and pushed on it, only to discover that it’s a ‘Pull’ door?” That is BAD DESIGN. His presentation went on to explain a number of examples where studying natural human behavior in the workplace can lead to better software interface design. I agree wholeheartedly with Rich in his argument that we don’t spend enough time incorporating user observation into the design process.

Entrepreneurship
Dan Izzo from Bizdom U gave a though-provoking talk on Turning Dreamers into Doers. Although I think that’s a pretty tough challenge to face (motivating people to act), especially in a 20 minute presentation, he made a number of good points about innovation. His most pointed comment being: “If your business idea is the answer, then what is the f$#@ing question?” The next time you have the next great idea, spend time talking to people about the challenge that they face, and be sure that your solution is actually mated to their problem.

Inspiration & Creativity
In her TED presentation, Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love discusses the creative process, and explores the demands that we put on creative thinkers (the possibility of never creating anything great, and the even greater challenges that come with actually creating something incredible).

Art
I believe one of the only standing ovations of the day went to Blair after he performed his poem Detroit (While I Was Away), and it was definitely much-deserved.

Advertising
Rory Sutherland presents one of the funniest TED videos that I’ve seen so far as he explores the differences between actual “real” value, and perceived value. If you’ve read Predictably Irrational, you’ll definitely want to watch this.

Would I Attend Another TEDx
On the drive home I thought back to the first conversation of the day; had it met my expectations? The short answer is that I would definitely go to another TEDx. The long answer is a bit more involved.

For me, TED is always about taking in a new, thought-provoking perspective on a topic, and the online videos fill that need perfectly. When I think about how I pull them into my life, they are effective because 1) I can watch them whenever I want, and 2) I can skip to the next one if a video turns out to be boring.

I’ve spoken to a few people about the idea of collaboration at the TEDx conferences. I didn’t experience a whole lot of it (the physical layout of the auditorium didn’t lend itself terribly well to round-table discussions), and I didn’t really expect to. Most of the useful conference-type collaboration that I’ve been involved with have been with a number of people who are all experts on the same subject, throwing ideas around (e.g. a CIO conference).

I think there are both obvious benefits and challenges that would come along with a group of people with very different backgrounds digging deep into a wide array of topics. It might be worth exploring these types of round-table discussions at future TEDx events (I’m sure some light discussions happened at the after-party, but that’s not the same as a deep exploration of a topic).

All-in-all the event was a great experience. Kudos to Charlie Wollborg, Derek Mehraban, Catherine Juon, Jennifer Wright, and Terry Bean for putting it all together.

The conference had a definite undertone that could probably be described as something like: Do whatever it takes to get Detroit back on its feet. One quote that I absolutely love stuck in my head that I think sums it all up:

Hell, there are no rules here - we’re trying to accomplish something!
- Thomas Edison

I’ve written before about the inability of advertisers to control what websites their advertisements are displayed on when using the Yahoo Search Marketing platform. In this post I’ll substantiate it with some real-life examples of websites that are part of Yahoo’s “network.”

Why would Yahoo restrict advertisers in this way?

The answer is simple: inventory.

Yahoo can artificially inflate the number of impressions and clicks that they deliver (and charge advertisers for) by displaying advertisers’ ads on sites like this:

It’s true that Yahoo Search Marketing allows advertisers to manually enter domains that they explicitly don’t want their ads to appear on, but attempting to find every website that your ad appears on, and entering into Yahoo’s interface would take years (not to mention they restrict the number of sites you can list).

So how does this affect the performance of an online advertising campaign? For one of our clients, traffic from Yahoo search converts at 44% (44 out of every 100 website visitors buys/converts). Traffic from Yahoo’s “network” converts at 16%.

In this example, this means that if we chose to advertise on Yahoo (something that’s becoming increasingly harder to justify), 64% of our money is spent buying quality traffic, and the remaining 36% is wasted because Yahoo chooses to display our ads on arbitrage websites like the ones displayed above.

Why not just let advertisers disable the “network” and buy quality search traffic?

We’re all aware of the fact that there will be all kinds of long-wave implications to this partnership. Marissa Mayer (Google’s VP) has been quoted earlier this week saying that the partnership will hinder innovation because there are less people “running in the race” now. I could easily argue that both Microsoft and Yahoo have been spinning their wheels in attempts to develop sustaining innovations that are just barely keeping up with Google for quite some time now, and I don’t think that cycle was going to change any time soon. Maybe the partnership will disrupt that.

What I want to know is, will the partnership lead Yahoo to be more precise in their paid search targeting? More specifically, will they begin to allow search advertisers to ONLY target Yahoo search traffic, and not force them to run ads on every Yahoo affiliate site in the universe.

Let’s take a look at some sample paid search data from one of our sites (data is over a one week period):

In the first column, Yahoo is providing over three times as many impressions as Google within the same time period. Strange considering Yahoo’s ~20% search market share, compared to Google’s ~65% (based on May 2009 ComScore data).

The reason for this is an inability to target only Yahoo’s search traffic. As opposed to running ads that are tightly connected to a user’s search terms, advertisers are forced to display “content” advertisements on websites that are a part of Yahoo’s network that may or may not be contextually relevant.

As a result, impressions skyrocket, click-through rates and conversion rates plummet, and ultimately the cost-per-conversion (the return-on-advertising-dollar-spent) suffers greatly.

The last row of data is what compels me to be shortsighted, and to beg someone at Microsoft to begin addressing the problem. Call it Live, call it Bing, call it Panama, but someone help Yahoo restructure their targeting model!

TECHNICAL NOTE:
There are site-exclusion methods that can be used within Yahoo’s platform that will begin to limit the websites within Yahoo’s network that your ads are displayed on. It’s not even close to an acceptable solution to the problem, but if you’re bleeding budget, look into those methods.

Enjoy!

I don’t.  I really wasn’t boasting, I was just telling her the truth.

Over the past few weeks we’ve seen many of our clients’ paid search and organic optimization budgets double, and then double again.  Some of it can be attributed to the holiday season (for the B2C clients that we serve), but the rest of it can be largely tied to the recession.

It’s no secret that an economic downturn will drive businesses to run more efficiently.  This means reducing operating costs by running with fewer employees, putting the clamps on purchasing procedures, reducing capital investments, and yes, slashing the marketing budget.

This squeeze brings on an evaluation of the company’s current marketing initiatives.  Those of us in the interactive space know that the more return-on-investment (ROI) and cost-of-customer-acquisition (CPA) focused our customers are, the better we look.  When our clients evaluate their marketing spend from a ROI perspective, the web often rises to the top.  They can understand dollar-for-dollar what they’re spending, and the leads and sales that it is creating.

This realization not only leads to a reappropriation of the marketing budget to be more web-heavy with regards to current initiatives (e.g. increasing the PPC daily budget), but it seeds conversations about online opportunities that haven’t been explored yet.

“If PPC and SEO are working for us now, why don’t we start attacking the social media space, and make some much-needed improvements to our website that we’ve been putting off.”

This is no time to be paralyzed.  When new product development goes on hold, use the time to do the things that you’ve been trying to find time to do.  Take a good look at your web analytic data, review your site and your competitors for opportunities, and talk it all over with your web marketing consultant!

After being peppered with commercials for Pizza Hut Pasta all day on Sunday while watching football, my friend and I decided to take the leap and place an order.

Even after being inundated with the commercial that many times, I only could recall two of the varieties: Mac ‘N Cheese, Alfredo and …. something.  So I pulled out my Blackberry and browsed to PizzaHut.com to find the menu so we could make a decision.

At PizzaHut.com I was presented with the mobile version of their site.  “Maybe we can even order online,” I said out loud (very few of my friends share my passion for web strategy, so I’m sure I was talking to myself).

At that point, my primary task as a user changed from finding the mystery flavor of pasta, to ordering online, assuming that I’d be able to pick the flavor somewhere along the way.

That was when I hit my first dead-end.

After selecting “Place Order,” I was taken to a login screen.  No option to skip registration; no option to register.  I clicked “Help” (something a geek only does when there are NO other options).  The help page stated that I would have to register first on the main (desktop) site.

Useless.

Deciding that my new goal was a bit lofty, and eager to return my attention to the game, I went back to my initial task of trying to find the menu.  Without a “View Menu” option on the mobile site, I browsed to Google, and clicked the “Menu” link in the abstract on Google’s Search Engine Results Page (SERP).  My hope was that their browser-detection redirect only happened on their home page.

I was wrong, and was flung back to the same mobile site with the same three sad options.

My final two attempts (changing my browser emulation to “Microsoft IE” and trying to open the site in Opera Mobile) were equally unsuccessful.

Now, I should give praise to PizzaHut.com for having a mobile site, but in some ways they’ve missed the mark.

Mobile web designers need to be aware of the context in which their websites are used.  Typically, mobile users are looking for a specific piece of information (event details, address information, contact information, or in this case, a menu).  This differs from standard website usage in that desktop users may be “browsing” or just reading and researching.

There are a lot of ways that Pizza Hut could have avoided this.  A simple review of PizzaHut.com (the desktop version) reveals that “Menu” is the first item on the site’s primary navigation.  It must be an important piece of content!

I also suspect that viewing the web analytic data for PizzaHut.com would show a large amount of traffic to that section of that site.

As you plan your mobile site:

- Put yourself in the context of your users (pick up your phone, and start to browse).
- Review your standard website’s information architecture for pieces of content that are relevant to mobile users.
- Perform a review of your web analytics, paying close attention to how the pieces of content on your site that receive the most views can be consumed by mobile users.

Using these three steps when selecting content for your mobile site will help you avoid creating a site that, although optimized for the handheld device, doesn’t contain the information that your visitors are looking for.

The pasta was great, by the way.  If anyone knows anybody at Pizza Hut, have them call me.  I’ve got a team of developers that love pizza, and it looks like they’re in need of some mobile web consulting.

We’ll work something out …

Last night I had the honor of being one of the chronic mistake-makers chosen to moderate a series of discussions on web strategy at the Troy Chamber Tech Exchange.

The event structure allowed attendees to select three subjects that they were interested in, and then participate 20 minute discussions on the topics with a group of eight people and an expert. When the 20 minute session was up, they would switch tables, and participate in the next discussion. It was a new format, but judging by the feedback that I heard, I wouldn’t be surprised to see it implemented again in the future.

I can’t speak for the attendees, but I can say that I learned a lot about doling out quick snippets of web strategy.

From past experience, I know that it’s quite simple for me to look at a website, hear a few seconds of background information about a business, and rattle off five to ten things that a company could change on their site that will produce fairly drastic results.

I also know that I can spend weeks diving deep into a business’ sales, marketing, and operations processes, and surface with a web strategy that they can implement that will produce an increase in online business (meet Deep Discovery).

What I learned last night is that the 5 minute web strategy does not exist, in a broad sense. Sadly, even with everything in my bag of tricks, I cannot listen to the question, “I’m the marketing director for a IT company and I’m redoing our corporate website. How do I make sure that the new site increases sales?” and provide anything but an ultra-generic answer (concise copy, clean design, and strong calls to action!!).

I can, however, provide tough answers to tough questions, and prescribe things that you’ll never end up doing. The unfortunate answer to the question, “I don’t want to spend money on SEO, how can I outrank my competitors?” is still, “blog like crazy, create new website content every day, write industry articles, participate in online discussions, and spread your content far and wide to attract inbound links to your site.”

I could have spared them and just said, “it’s unpossible.”

Don’t get me wrong, we had some incredibly compelling conversations about web strategy, but there’s a lesson to be learned from all of this. The lesson was taught by the people who got a LOT of value out of last night’s session. These people came to the event after putting some thought into exactly what they were looking for.

A number of attendees came to the discussion and opened with questions like, “my homepage contains x, y, and z, and my goal is to drive phone calls or emails about these specific products by enticing my visitors with online incentives. What should I pay attention to?”

Now we can have a great discussion about things to do, things to avoid, and things to test.

Were these people BETTER attendees than the ones with broad questions? Absolutely not! But I truly believe that they left the session with a number of website improvements that they can implement quickly, and I’m excited to watch their websites as they put them in place.

Learn from this experience. The next time you have the opportunity to attend an expert discussion, take a few minutes during your drive to the event to formulate what you’re looking to get out of it. Ask some hard, specific questions to the expert, and you’ll most likely take home a few tips that you can quickly put in place that will yield good results.

After all, we’ve already made all of the mistakes. Why should you have to?

Many thanks to Deb at the Troy Chamber of Commerce for the invitation to moderate!

To be perfectly clear, Santa in this case is Entrepreneur Magazine which recently ran the Caffeine Marketing Jolt contest. The contest awarded the winner with over $20,000 worth of services including SEO, and six months of online promotions. The elves that are delivering these services are Awecomm on the SEO side, and ePrize who will be providing online promotions from their Caffeine group as well as strategic consulting.

The opportunity to work on this project is a great gift to us at Awecomm as well. It’s apparent that Rhonda doesn’t shy away from creativity or new ideas, and that’s the cornerstone of great search engine optimization!