TheWayoftheWeb

Content and Digital Marketing Specialists

data

Content marketing, user data and the dangers of free WordPress themes

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Bit of a link post from me today as I’ve been working on a number of things for clients, and also updating some other projects. So rather than adding to the list that I intend to blog about someday, here’s some important things to consider:

Arm yourself with content, for Goliath is coming: Interesting post which reiterates a lot of the things I’ve been saying about content and marketing over the last 6 months – now is the time to start doing it. More and more companies are realising how useful content and social media marketing can be, and how much ROI it can produce, so you’re going to see more and more content fighting for attention. And given that it takes time to build an attentive audience, you don’t want to wait around any longer!

Myspace on the auction block. What happens to user data?: Given that I’ve just been writing about social media content and user data from the perspective of future historians having access, it’s also important to consider what happens to that data if a site sells to another owner, rather than shutting down. How do you feel about your content, information and contacts being transferred? Another reason to adopt a hub and spoke model, with ownership of your own content/business/contact hub. And it’s so easy to do with the availability of self-publishing tools…

The hidden dangers of free WordPress themes: But although setting up WordPress, for example, is pretty easy, there are still dangers that you need to be aware of. For instance, only using themes from trusted sources, and checking them before you install them. Do you know what links are contained in the theme you downloaded from a random website? The original post shows the examples of how you can actually decode what could be hidden in a theme. There are a couple of solutions – one is to only pick themes from trusted sources, and the other is to bite the bullet and pay for themes from trusted sources. For instance, in my case, I tend to pay for themes from StudioPress, but there are some other good alternatives, such as Woo Themes (which I’ve used on some client sites, for example).

So why not spend the weekend getting started on your 2011 digital content and marketing. And feel free to pose any questions in the comments – if I can’t answer them, there’s a growing number of people reading this site who probably can!

Data isn’t worth much without hygiene…

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In the digital world we’ve talked about the value of user data for quite a while – and it’s something direct marketing specialists have known for years. And yet it seems like the cost of old, outdated data and poor data hygiene is still ignored by so many companies.

In digital marketing terms, it can thousands, or even millions, of addresses which are being emailed and returning ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ bounces, with the cost of sending emails being wasted as those accounts are no longer active or checked.

Or wondering why you get a low response rate when it turns out only 1/5th of your registered users actually visited or logged into the site in the last 12 months.

Bad hygiene undermining brands:

I moved into my house over 3 years ago, and over that time we’ve returned tens, if not hundreds, of letters intended for the previous occupants – that’s something you tend to expect.

But one arrived today which stood out. It’s from a financial institution using details which are 3 years out of date – and furthermore, it’s a financial institution I use. So despite the fact I’ve been using their products with my home as the billing address for over 3 years, that didn’t stop them mailing the old residents.

And although I’ll just return it with the rest, it’s stuck in my mind when I consider the fact this company has probably more details and data on me than any non-Government agency, and yet still makes simple mistakes. If they can’t figure out that the details they’re using don’t add up, and don’t have any type of CRM flag to highlight the fact it doesn’t add up, do I really want them having access to more sensitive data?

Or will the wasted cost of one letter and envelope also potentially lose them a significant amount of business if I switch because they’ve lost my faith in them?

The beauty of data and graffiti

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The call for media companies to make more out of data has been growing for a while now, but I’ve just seen something that beautifully shows how there’s amazing ways to use data for things most of us haven’t even thought about…

Like many cool things, when I first picked up on it via The Pirate’s Dilemma, and PSFK, I wasn’t entirely sure it was real…

Anyway, this week is apparently Graffiti Markup Language Week:

As an aside, is it me or are far more digitally-savvy people choosing Vimeo over Youtube?

Anyway, what’s amazing is that there’s actually a markup language for grafitti, which is a specialised XML protocol dedicated to capturing the motion data created by tagging – allowing sharing, studying, cataloguing and analysis.

There’s so much data in our everyday lives which can now be collated, aggregated, analysed, dissected, repurposed, reused, translated, displayed.

And yet comparatively little appears in mainstream news sources – although that seems to be slowly changing.

But any media, marketing or PR effort should be looking at how to effectively use public or proprietary data to inform, entertain, amaze etc..

It’s why I’m still so excited about the One Golden Square Labs project, Compare My Radio, (disclosure, I work for One Golden Square/Absolute Radio). It takes data and uses it for something noone else had done…

Other great examples include The Guardian’s Datastore – a compendium of publicly-available data which can be used for free – Paul Bradshaw has a nice look at it… Or what about Daytum, which allows you to collect and communicate your data on whatever you choose?

And the visual ways of communicating data can attract attention – particularly when we have so much text and so many moving pictures coming into our space on a daily basis…

There’s no excuse for producing anything which doesn’t have decent data behind it (I’m not suggesting 100% perfection…but so much isn’t good enough), and there’s no reason why I should accept 100% of people like something because you asked 20, and they all said yes.

And allow us to explore it, play with it, and produce our own interpretations – and export it into other places…

All that Twitters is not gold for Twitturly

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For a while it seemed as if building a third-party application for Twitter was a route to instant fortune (as were Facebook apps before it, and iPhone apps after it). But judging by the eventual sale of Twitter link tracker and aggregator Twitturly, it appears that bubble may now have burst.

Since launching in April 2008, rivals such as Tweetmeme and Topsy have joined the Twitter aggregator space – and when founder Joel Strellner put the site up for auction, just 5 bids came in, with a final price of ‘no more than $8,500’ (HT Techcrunch).

Having said that, Strellner has moved onto other things, leaving the site with a Google PR of 6, Alexa ranking of 40,106, and most importantly, only around 1000 Unique Users per day. And less than 1000 visitors per day definitely doesn’t get the big bucks.

The only thing I can’t understand is why there wasn’t more effort to boost PR and visitor numbers immediately prior to the sale? Then again, the auction details reveal Strellner is working full time, didn’t want to invest more in costs (the EC2 server costs were apparently around $3k per month), and has also recently found his free time taken away by becoming a father (Something which I can totally understand!)

It will be interesting to see whether the new owner can make use of the 622GB data, the agreement to access the Summize (Twitter Search) API an unlimited amount, and a site which claimed 5000 UUs per day.

Twitter traffic overtakes mainstream news

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Twitter website traffic has overtaken both the New York Times and Wall Street Journal for April 2009, as picked up by PaidContent and expanded on by ReadWriteWeb.

Which is a handy stat, but….

Are we really comparing like for like, or is this as misleading as comparing print and online figures?

For starters, we’re looking at website traffic, and although publication has numerous ways to be accessed online, I’d risk assuming that Twitter’s proportion of mobile and desktop client access is greater than that of the newspaper sites – which probably means the numbers went past the paper sites long ago.

And where’s the measures of interaction for comparison? While not every Twitter user is interacting, and newspaper sites are building in increasing routes to conversations and communities, surely it’s the engagement, interaction and effectiveness of Twitter versus other sites which is of as much importance? Even when it’s breaking news, e.g. Mumbai, the ability to converse with both the source and others is built into Twitter to a far greater extent than the paper sites.

Finally for a comparison – what amount of data is being generated by the different sites?

That’s surely of major importance considering the changes happening in general searching:

First hands on test with Wolfram Alpha

Google search tools moving closer to ‘real-time’

And considering the current wave of new and improved Twitter search tools:

Scoopler

Twitscoop

Tweetmeme

Oh, and major changes to Twitter Search itself.

Whether or not the current buzz and celebrity/mainstream adoption continues, or whether a backlash increases along with the pretty high drop-out rate from people trying Twitter for the first time, it’s the levels of data and engagement which are key to the longterm success, and routes to monetization for Twitter, rather than sheer mass audience numbers. Particularly when the types of both advertiser and advertising which are going to be most effective will also be quite different from traditional publishing outlets.

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