This month's newsletter is finally out. I waited until today to publish it because I discovered last year that publishing a newsletter a day or two before Halloween resulted in the lowest readership I'd seen in a long time (see the tracking data for yourself).

The newsletter's title is Who Are You Speaking To? How does that relate to robots? The gist of it is that we often focus so much on search engine optimization that we end up creating our content more for robots than for people. Then we wonder why our site isn't delivering any return on the investment of time and resources we sink in.

Head over and read it in full >

Last week I noted a post by John Hagel called Stupidity and the Internet in my post on the The Post-Screen Web. Hagel covered several topics in that post, one of which was the web's effect upon thinking and whether short-form content makes that effect a negative one. He writes:

If it is about content, will snippets trump books and will we all be dumber for it? As someone who has never mastered the art of the snippet, let me proudly count myself as one who still sees profound value in the long form where texture and nuance can be teased out and explored... Snippets of information, loosely coupled, have enormous value in enhancing peripheral awareness and provoking new ideas. At the same time, snippets of information alone are deeply dangerous. They distract us with never-ending waves of surface events, spreading us ever thinner and obscuring the deeper structures and dynamics that ultimately are shaping these surface events. Those of us who stay only on the surface, swimming in a sea of snippets, will ultimately lose sight of land. We need books, or whatever the digital long forms of content are that will replace the book, to help us penetrate the surface and explore the deeper structures and dynamics that make sense of the changes around us.

Don't Panic! We're in the thick of it, but all is not lost.
Ultimately, I think that Hagel is right. In fact, I agree with many of the thinkers who are concerned with the future of literacy in light of our digital life. I am concerned too. When writer's like Nicholas Carr talk about not being able to focus on a book like they used to, I can relate. But I'm not ready to declare a state of emergency. I think we're in the middle of a significant shift in the way we engage with information and learn because of technology and that there's no compelling reason to assume that reading will die. For more optimism like this, watch Andrea Lunsford, a researcher at Standford University, describe her study which led her to conclude that student writing ability has not declined as a result of recent technological changes.

There is a place for both short and long-form writing.
In the meantime, there is a place for both short and long-form writing. Each form has merit as a content strategy, depending upon the goals the writer has. In a presentation I gave recently called Professional Writing for the Unprofessional Writer, I elaborated on the different functions of short formats (i.e. blogs), and longer formats (i.e. monthly newsletter articles or whitepapers). Here's the gist of it:

Short-Form (Blogs)
Blogs take a cumulative approach to tell an ongoing story with many short posts. In other words, if you blog on behalf of your company, you'll want to think long term, allowing the "idea" or identity of the company to be worked out over potentially years of regular posting. Remember, blogs are essentially relational, so when someone subscribes to your blog's RSS feed, they're making a commitment to getting to know you and/or your company. The way you write should respond to that fact. One other thing that I really value about blogging is that it provides a good opportunity to explore new and untested ideas. I feel free to ruminate on things that might be risky and even say things that I'll disagree with later when writing for our blog in a way that I don't with our newsletter.

Long-Form (Newsletter Articles)
Long format writing, on the other hand, develops a single idea in a more in-depth manner contained in one article. This kind of writing requires a more strategic approach. Because of the infrequency of this format (for example, I write one newsletter article each month) your ideas need to be as tested as possible. You're going "on the record" in each article, and at the rate of 12 a year, it will take much longer to bury an idea that you've come to disagree with than it might had you written about it in your blog.

Patience
The only additional consideration of the long-form is that it is much more difficult to win readers than it is with short-formats. It obviously requires much more investment- attention and time- of the reader to get through multiple pages of content, so you have to captivate them early. This is not easy. I'm not sure I know how to do this consistently.

No matter what format you choose to write with, you must be patient and let your voice develop over time. Writing is an art that takes years of repetitive practice to do even passingly well. Again, I'm not sure where I am with that, but I know by reading things I wrote even last year that any improvement from then I owe to the commitment to regular writing.

You may have an easier time following along with my post if you look at a larger version of this chart. Click here to open this chart in another window at it's actual size.

Over the past several months, I've tried to keep a closer eye on how our newsletter campaigns are performing to see if I can draw any conclusions as to what makes one more successful than another. What I've decided is that it all depends upon what you mean by successful...

If It's All About Clickthroughs...
If I evaluate success in terms of the amount of readers who click through to our website from the campaign emails I send out each month, then the winner over the last six months is clear: Doing More with Less came in with more than double the clicks of the next highest performing newsletter, A Practical Guide to Social Media, which had 229. I have some pretty clear ideas as to why this particular newsletter had so much immediate interest:

1. Adapting the Title
   The title "Doing More with Less" is nice and short, and communicates something that would probably appeal to many in our industry, but it's not very specific. That's why I adapted the title a bit in the email version of the newsletter that I sent out. I retitled it to read: "Doing More with Less: 9 Simple Ways to Get More from Your Website." It's much longer, but it quickly communicates what this newsletter is going to be specifically- a list of 9 potential website upgrades that will enable you to do more with less with your website.
2. Imagery
   On the site version of "Doing More with Less," I used an image of Buckminster Fuller next to a quote by him about the idea of doing more with less. The entire lead-in to the article was about him and why he said, "Call Me Trimtab (read it to find out why)." But I had a feeling that an image of Buckminster Fuller would probably not interest many of our subscribers, so they might be likely to ignore this email. I decided to replace it with a simpler image of two screens (see it here).

My guess is that the combination of a more specific title with a simpler image in the email created more interest in the material than had I used the same title and image from the website version.

As you can see from the chart, I'm comparing stats from the first month each particular newsletter article is on our site to the all time stats, so I'll need to wait to see how "Doing More with Less" compares to the others in the months to come.

If It's All About Conversions...
However, if I evaluate success in terms of value added to Newfangled, particularly which articles generated further interest in our material, then I might decide upon a different "winner." The Future of the Web, Part 1 seems to be a contender here. Though it received fewer clickthroughs in its first month (177) and had a higher bounce rate (56%), the average amount of time spent on the site was longer (3:09), the comment string longer (25 comments), and the number of goal conversions highest (60).

Take a Long View
But take a look at what happens when you consider the long-term, or in this case, the stats representing the full amount of time this content has been on our website. From that point of view, I think that A Practical Guide to Social Media may be the winner. It did have more clickthroughs in the first month than "The Future of the Web, Part 1" (229), and a lower bounce rate (44%), but notice the all time numbers: this page has been viewed 1092 times since it was published with an overall average bounce rate of 45%, and has lead to 142 goal conversions- significantly more than any other in the past 6 months.

Evaluating the success of this content strategy is clearly a nuanced procedure that requires some time for data to accrue. Sometimes I find myself disappointed in the immediate response to the newsletters we put out, but in light of this data, it stands to reason that it takes several months to get a realistic picture of the success or failure of any individual article.

Are there any other aspects that I should be looking at? Do you agree with my conclusions?

I just finished reading an insightful post by John Hagel, which he titled Stupidity and the Internet as a response to Nicholas Carr's much-discussed Atlantic piece, Is Google Making Us Stupid? I like the way that Hagel re-frames the discussion based upon form rather than effect. His idea seems to be that "the internet" (I'm going to use "the web" instead) can't be assessed in simple either/or terms of stupifying or edifying, but aught to be considered based upon its currently evolving form. Here's a quote:

The debate also largely took the Internet, and specifically the World Wide Web, in its current form as a given.  This is a dangerous assumption given the speed of change in the underlying technology foundations of the Internet. 

As one small example, we are seeing rapid evolution of both social network platforms and physical presence tools that will lead to a much more complex interweaving of physical and virtual environments. Sensors and imaging tools will give us much greater visibility into the world around us.

This point is pretty important, I think. I mentioned the "fractalization" of the web in Part 1 of my Future of the Web article, which speaks to his point about the increasing complexity and interwovenness of the web. In Part 2, I also thought about the shaping of the web by mobile and "web-enhanced" devices. These two concepts are going to have an extremely significant effect upon how the web is shaped and used in the very near future.

Then Hagel goes on to say something fascinating:

Tacit knowledge – that which cannot be readily expressed in published content of any length, whether snippets or books – has always been our most valuable knowledge. You can read all the books you want on brain surgery, but that alone will never qualify you to perform brain surgery. At an even simpler level, no book can teach you how to ride a bicycle.

The ultimate impact of the Internet on our intelligence will hinge on its ability to support the creation and sharing of tacit knowledge. Again, we are at the earliest stages of tapping into this potential.

This is where my skepticism tends to kick in. I often lament the real experiences I'm not having when I'm spending the majority of my time in front of a screen. Granted, I think what Hagel has in mind is that the potential to create and share tacit knowledge over the internet is contingent upon a post-screen web. In other words, a web that can be experienced and shaped away from the desk or handheld device. While such a web would enable tacit knowledge, it will also narrow the divide between the real and the virtual to such a degree that discerning between the two will be a matter of perspective or opinion. This could be frightening, or... something else.

A client recently asked me what I thought the key 3-5 metrics are that he should be focusing his Google Analytics reviews on. The following was essentially the answer I gave him:

I think that the most important metrics to track on a routine basis would vary depending upon the type of business, but for B2B service companies like ours and most of our clients, I'd list them as:

(1) Referrers - This metric has a much more frequent ebb and flow, and tends to be a good indicator of the scope of your reach. For B2B service, the currency of referrals is just as valuable as any lead you'd capture. Referrals also tend to explain spikes in traffic if there are any.

(2) Top Content - This is ultimately a way of seeing which pages on your site get the most traffic. If there are critical pages on a site that are not among the top 10 or 20- pages that define positioning, state pricing terms, thought leadership, etc., then the goal should be to get them there by working on improving their meta titles, descriptions, and even the copy on those pages. For pages already in the top that should be there, this is a perfect opportunity to evaluate where users go from there and whether the page's popularity can be leveraged with the right call to action. For pages in the top that shouldn't be there (we had a silly blog post called "national donut day" in our top 20 for far too long, skewing our bounce rate), that is an opportunity to adjust its title tag or delete it outright.

(3) Bounce Rate - This metric is slower to change but is probably the most effective means of evaluating whether your content is matching search intent. For organic search traffic (the most critical source for B2B service companies that actually care about connecting with potential clients with content), it may be impossible to hit unreasonably low goals for bounce rate, but it is always worth trying to tighten it up. For comparison, our bounce rate these days hovers around 64% - we've got a ton of content that would interest people that are not looking to hire a web development company, so that's ok with us- but my goal is to get us down another 10% if possible. Search terms kind of goes hand in hand with this metric.

For a far more in-depth review of Google Analytics reports, check out our newsletter, How to Use Google Analytics or our webinar, Google Analytics 101.

I was honored to be asked to share my (limited) writing experience with a class of undergraduates at Boston College. The image above is one of the slides from my presentation. The neat thing about this engagement was that it was all done online. I was asked to record a short lecture and deliver an mp3 that could be played for the class. I decided to take it a step further and put together a SlideCast so that I could make some fancy pictures, too.

I titled this "Professional Writing for the Unprofessional Writer" because I don't consider myself a professional writer- I'm just a guy who does a lot of writing as part of my job. There is a big difference there, one which I think is probably a reality for many people today. We're all probably doing much more public-facing writing for work than ever before. So, my presentation is basically my perspective as one of those people who need to make their public-facing writing more professional. You can view the deck of slides in high quality in the set I added to my Picasa account, or you can watch the SlideCast below:

This morning I published our September newsletter, Doing More With Less. It's been a while since I wrote something like this, which is much more practical and less conceptual than many of the newsletters have been over the past few months. The first half of the list of "ways to get more" contains things you can do simply and at no cost, while the second half contains slightly more complex and costly changes. My favorite one is the last one on Advanced Search Tools.

I think this one is timely- even though the recession is "officially" over, many of our clients are just as concerned with upgrade costs as ever, if not more conservative with their actual spending. I hope that seeing that there are still things you can do for free will encourage people to continue to build in to their site.

Now that Eric, our former CEO, is off to new heights in his career, I've invited him to contribute a few guest blog posts. This is the ninth of several that he'll share in the coming months.

After studying at the Rhode Island School of Design, Eric Holter worked as an engraver and illustrator for Pagano, Schenck & Kay Advertising, then as a web designer at Leonard/Monahan. He founded Newfangled Web Factory in 1995.

This may be the most controversial of my series on advertising agency website gaffes. I’ve been advising agencies to avoid Flash as their website platform for…, well, ever since Flash existed. Let me make it clear from the outset that I’m not against Flash. It’s a great tool that, when used properly, can have a positive impact on website design and functionality. I am, however, against Flash as the primary platform in almost every case (exceptions would include certain website applications, web-based games, and some entertainment-oriented websites). By “primary platform” I mean that the entire website is contained inside a Flash movie file (or series of movie files). I’ve already addressed six reasons why Flash is not a great website development platform in a previous post about Google’s announcement that it now indexes Flash-based content. I suggested six reasons why this was not great news. My overall point was that agencies would now be even more inclined to use Flash–without realizing that there are still significant weakness with the Flash platform. And without very careful attention to Flash programming details, site content can still be locked up by Flash.

Here is a brief recap of the problems identified in the previous post

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1. Content weakness. Agency sites built in Flash tend to be weak on content and rarely updated.
2. URL Linking. Most Flash sites consist of one large Flash movie. This makes linking to a particular page within an agency site impossible.
3. Meta Data. Even with Google’s changes, Flash-based sites offer very few opportunities for search engine optimization.
4. Content Prioritization. An indexed Flash file is searchable, but the content lacks any underlying tags that help search engines determine the relevance and weight of the content.
5. Content Management. Flash is sometimes chosen not because it’s the best platform for the site, but because it’s the easiest tool (for a designer) to master. Which means the site is not likely to have a robust content management system–which means fewer content updates.
6. Distraction of Style Over Substance. More often than not a Flash-based agency website becomes the creative outlet instead of being a place where the agency showcases their creative work and thinking.

The reasons above (see the post for more details on those points) should be enough to persuade agencies to put Flash away and build their websites using standard web platforms.

But often these objective reasons are not enough. I think that’s because the causes of agency Flash dependence go deeper–so deep in fact, that the objective problems with Flash don’t seem to matter to them. Here are some of the underlying reasons that advertising agencies are so entrenched in Flash.

The Creativity Barrier
The “Creativity Barrier” is one of main causes of agency web strategy failure. Traditional agencies are geared to use their creative talents to help their clients overcome consumer inertia and information overload in order to deliver a message. Getting attention is a prerequisite before anything else can be accomplished. But this dynamic is drastically minimized, even eliminated on the web. People click links or type in URLs on their own initiative–not because their attention has been captured by creativity.

The misaligned creative impulse stems from not understanding the role of creativity in web strategy. But there’s more to it. When it comes to the agency’s own website the creativity barrier gets much stronger due to years of pent-up creative frustrations. When agencies present their creative ideas to clients they usually include a few different options. There’s usually at least one bold creative concept (the agency’s favorite). Then there are the other safer, slightly little less creative ideas. To the creative director’s dismay, clients almost always pick the safer ideas. And sometimes they want to water down the already safe concept–draining out out every last bit of creative boldness.

After years of great creative ideas being reined in by clients, agencies need an outlet with less creative resistance (which is why so many creative awards happen to be for the agency’s pro-bono clients). So when it comes to the agency’s own website there’s no client to muck with great creative ideas. The agency can be as bold as they like. And the Flash platform affords them all sorts of opportunities to go nuts: sound, video, animation, transitions. The agency can finally express its unrestrained creativity.

But in the end, these agency Flash sites (while certainly impressive demonstrations of creativity) end up delivering the wrong message. They succeed at saying “we’re really creative” but at the cost of adding the message “but we don’t get web strategy.” The same site on which you claim expertise for guiding clients into the right strategic mix of marketing channels (usually including web) betrays this claim–at least in regard to web strategy. Your example states “we’re willing to forgo a powerful marketing channel for an opportunity to be really creative.”

Project Orientation Rather Than Strategic Orientation
Most “process” pages on agency websites follow something like this pattern: step one–we {evaluate, research, ask, orient}, step two–we {think, plan, strategize}, step three–we {design, create, innovate}, and step four–we {evaluate, measure, refine}. Each step usually starts with a “D” or “P” for alliteration. There’s nothing wrong with this kind of page (though they’re not as differentiating as they ought to be). But have you ever read such a page that didn’t not include a think, plan, or strategize step? Of course not. Nobody proceeds straight to design without thinking first.

Now this may hurt a bit. If we’re sober and honest in evaluating the real depth of our strategic efforts, we’re going to find that we’re really more tactical than we are strategic. In fact, we usually enter into assignments with most of the strategic issues already mandated by the client. Or if not mandated, we establish our tactics even as we hear the assignment for the first time. We’re already thinking, or have been told, that the assignment requires a six page brochure, or a full spread ad, or a point of purchase display. We then move eagerly to the design step.

If you want to check yourself on this reality, just consider how often your clients pay you just for strategy (without rolling it into the project fee or before establishing the project budget in advance). How many clients give you time to deliver a strategy before defining the deliverables and costs? The reality is that many of our firms are more project-oriented and tactical than we are strategic. We all want to think of ourselves as being more strategic (perhaps that’s because we equate “strategic” with “important”) than we really are.

Because we tend to be project-oriented, we think about our own agency site as an internal project–rather than a long term strategy. You can tell that most Flash-based agency websites were treated like internal projects when viewing time stamped content. News items or press releases on agency Flash sites are often very old. It’s because there was never any serious strategic thought given to the on-going content strategy. And if there had been serious thought, the choice to use a Flash-based platform would have been evaluated with more scrutiny.

Instead, someone was tasked with the project of designing an amazingly creative agency website. And once produced and launched, it’s rarely thought about again.

Technology Barriers
Another reason agencies use Flash is that they feel more comfortable with Flash technology than standard web technology platforms (php, asp, ruby, html, caa, javascript, etc.). They are already masters of Adobe software and Flash, while not simple, feels familiar and within their technical reach. To move away from Flash would mean using other, more complex technologies or leaning on technology partners to deliver them. I empathize with the fear of making bad technology choices. And there are many disaster stories that resulted from the uneasy alliances between creative firms and technology companies. There are even more horror stories of freelancers disappearing in the middle of a project, or becoming unavailable to maintain a site when it’s done.

Such problems usually mean that web projects are often unprofitable, almost always frustrating, and in the worst cases threaten an otherwise healthy agency/client relationship. But despite the risks, the days are long gone when a client will accept a Flash-based website from an agency. The agency might be willing to forgo all the amazing benefits a mature website can bring, but clients are not so easily satisfied. So whether it’s for the agency’s site or for an agency client’s website, creative firms must learn how to hire or partner with technology providers.

Lack of Experience With, and Appreciation for, the Power of Content
Agencies are satisfied with Flash, in part, because they have not tasted the power of the web in their own new business development efforts. The previous post described how Flash sites simply don’t perform as well as standard websites. And even non-Flash sites don’t see much action if there’s not a focused, sustainable content strategy in place. But when there is, the power of content on the web is amazing. You probably only come to value this after your first experience of having a well qualified prospect call you after reading much of the content on your site. They’ve already convinced themselves you are the agency for their business. They understand what you do and who you do it for. The sales process is so much easier when qualified, educated prospects approach you. And great websites make this happen.

But since most agency sites perform so badly, the agency has no appreciation for the power of content on the web. Their minimization of the importance of web strategy becomes a self-fulfilling reality. They get no results from their site, so they don’t value the web enough overall. As a result they don’t make efforts to improve/maintain the site, and so the poor performance continues. But ask yourself–why do agencies like Currency Marketing keep up with such a robust content strategy if it doesn’t work? It does work. And every effort of content creation has a considerable shelf life. It keeps working for years, sometimes while you sleep. Every effort becomes a deposit in the marketing bank account. But this doesn’t happen for cool Flash websites.

Moving Beyond Flash
Well, that’s all I got. If you’re still convinced that Flash is the right platform for your agency’s website–good luck with that. But I hope that you’ll take a sober look at your Flash site’s performance and see how much more there is to gain by moving past Flash. If you do decide to move beyond Flash let me know!