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In blog posts over the past month, Jason Smith has explored the concept of the engagement trajectory, the path that consumers take as they engage more with a brand. Starting out with low-level interactions, such as following on Twitter, interested consumers move along the trajectory until a percentage initiate a two-way conversation with a brand by registering on a social channel. This is the gold standard for marketers: starting the conversation with a customer, rather than simply broadcasting to them.
The key to starting that conversation is understanding the three top barriers that make customers hesitate before joining your community:

Time:

The Barrier: Consumers have limited time to engage with brands, and let’s face it, busy people don’t want to hang out online chatting about shirts.
How to Overcome It: Offer content on your website that is a good use of your customers’ time. Save them time by offering practical advice, important news, and valuable discounts. Structure your site so that information is easy to access—good information architecture is important.

Privacy: 

The Barrier: Increasing media scrutiny of targeted marketing practices and web analytics have made customers wary of providing companies with any information, based on the perception that companies know everything about the consumer and that targeting will be intrusive.
How to Overcome It: Educate the public on the real nature of the data most marketers collect, the uses we put it to, and the non-intrusive nature of most targeting. Create a clear, no-jargon privacy policy. Actively “push” that policy out through email, as well as having it as a link on your site.

Over-Commitment:

The Barrier: People are already registered for more social media services than they use. The abandonment rate for Twitter accounts is 80%; people have enough to do to keep up with the mainstream channels, let alone joining a niche channel devoted to a commercial enterprise.
How to Overcome It: Make interactions with your site simple: limit the number of questions in signup forms and use progressive profiling to gather more information from more engaged consumers over time. Use some push marketing, with members’ permission, to keep momentum going once people join. Groups within the community are a great way to segment audience interests; use group membership data to deliver targeted messages like email newsletters, special offers, and live events. Always have something new going on to give members reasons to visit your community. In the early stages, it will be up to community managers to provide that fresh content.

There's nothing more rewarding or productive than the two-way conversations that so many brands are now having with their customers. Getting customers to interact with your brand is not hard; they want to share with you. Making it obvious that your community is a place where that sharing becomes easier is the challenge. Overcoming the barriers that keep them from joining your branded community can pave the way for better, more effective marketing and customer relationships. 

Congratulations to our own Chief Creative Officer, Jason Smith. His article, The Engagement Trajectory, originally published on the OHO blog, was an Editor's Pick on Social Media Today for the week of August 11. 

Several months into the radical changes brought about by Google’s Panda/Farmer update, it’s becoming apparent that user experience has grown in importance. The series of updates to how Google ranks sites for search results started in February, with successive changes rolled out through late July. The stated goal was to penalize lower-quality sites, and make the Google Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) more responsive to social media.

• How many visitors return to your website after their first visit
• How many pages they view per visit, and
• How long they stay on your site

Last week, we talked about the engagement trajectory, and how customers have a tendency to move along a predictable path from noticing your social media presence to becoming true advocates for your brand on social media, actively participating in your online community.

Let’s look some more at how to move folks along that trajectory. The first step is to determine whether your brand has enough potential advocates out there to make the time right to build a community. Although community can be a great driver of awareness, loyalty, and ROI, not every brand has the brand equity needed to build a community around it. If you do, community makes sense as a strategy. If you don’t, you’ll best spend you time and efforts on other, more fruitful web efforts.

Listening is the key in determining if your brand has enough folks out there passionate enough about your brand that, if you build an online community, not only will they flock to it, but they’ll use it as a platform to engage with your company and other consumers.

The first place to look is your existing social media efforts. Look on your Facebook page:

• Are customers enthusiastically responding to your posts, adding content of their own, and engaging with each other? If so, then you have levels of engagement that could translate well into a dedicated online community.
• Look at other voice of the customer data, such as responses to emails, web analytics, and surveys. Do customers forward your email newsletter to friends often or tweet their favorite articles?
• How about your blog—does it get a lot of shares? And is traffic coming in from those shares?
• Do you get good response rates to your surveys, and do respondents share rich data in free-response questions?

If you’re answering yes to a lot of these questions, your customers are already engaged richly with your brand.  

Of course, it’s a big step from having an engaged blog readership or Facebook fan page to having a fully-functioning online community. It’s fortunately feasible to test whether you can expand the boundaries of your existing levels of engagement to something more along the levels you’ll need to sustain community: ramp up the calls to engagement on existing channels:

• Add contests and quizzes to your Facebook page.
• Invite reader contributions to your blog and email newsletter.
• Create Twitter contests and polls

If consumers respond enthusiastically to this new level of engagement, chances are, your brand may be ready for a branded community.

Next: getting consumers over the engagement line.

Last week, I presented at a webinar hosted by Acquia: “B2C Branded Communities: Delivering ROI, Making Customers Happy.” In it, we looked at ways that consumer companies are using online communities to drive stronger engagement with their customers, leading to higher customer loyalty and, along the way, greater revenue. 
What we’ve seen when we build communities is that there’s a predictable trajectory that people follow when becoming more engaged with your brand:

• They start out with actions that are low in time commitment, such as following you on Twitter, liking you on Facebook, or just reading content on your social media channels.
• If they like what they see, and like your brand, they’ll move along quickly to more involved ways of interacting with your brand, such as rating products on your site and sharing or retweeting interesting posts.
• At some point, though, they cross the dividing line between lurker and member. Signing up for your online community signifies that they’re willing to engage more deeply with your brand, starting conversations that identify their needs as a consumer. From providing more contact information to giving you insights into their preferred product features, they’re articulating that they want to make themselves heard, and hear what your brand is saying.

A select few of these community members will grow into advocates for your brand, the final step on the engagement trajectory:

• Talking about your products or services with others
• Sharing ideas for new products
• Providing trusted feedback on products

One of the challenges we’ve seen for any community engagement strategy is getting customers over the “dividing line” between a lurker and a true community member. And it’s crucial to get people over that line, because that’s where you can start to really understand your customers, segment them for targeted, relevant messages, and build a solid relationship with your customer base.

Next Week: Part 2: Determining if customers are ready to move over the engagement line

We're really excited about a new project we're working on right now: a new website for Roger Williams University, complete with another installation of our popular UniversityNOW media and communications center. The Bristol, R.I. school, ranked one of the top 10 comprehensive universities in the North by U.S. News & World Report, tapped OHO earlier this year to build them a new site, one that brings more social interactivity and fresh new look and feel.

Existing RWU website

Last evening, I had the pleasure of organizing the first mobile and location-based marketing event for an organization of which I am on the board, the AMA Boston. I designed an immersive learning experience for participants, trying out location-based services in a marketing tour of Harvard Square, but I feel that at the end of the evening, I was the learner. We had an enlightening talk by authors Aaron Strout and Mike Schneider on best practices for mobile marketing, enlightening for marketers, even in the B2B space, where technologies such as the popular check-in service Foursquare are seriously underutilized. (Watch this space for a Foursquare promotion next time you see the OHO team out and about). 

The immersive experience before the talk, though, brought up some vital points about mobile user experience. Mobile is still in its infancy, although the much-touted “year of mobile” is apparently finally upon us. But the user experience of customers using mobile applications varies widely, a sign of a medium that is still just finding its legs. Dealing with this varied experience requires some serious thought from UX designers:

• Actions need to be super-quick and simple for users on the go. People using mobile devices are standing on a sidewalk, looking something up while in a meeting, or waiting for their lunch. Easy to use interfaces, simplified actions (without stripped-down functionality), and speedy app performance are essential to help users accomplish tasks.
• The learning curve for B2C mobile apps is essentially zero. If users cannot learn how to use an app within the first minutes of accessing it, they will uninstall it. B2B apps seem to have a little more leeway, but the necessity of extremely intuitive use is high for all types of apps.
• People with different smartphones are still having very different experiences not only with native apps, but also with HTML5-based mobile web applications. Companies can boost the likelihood of word-of-mouth buzz by showing, on their web site and in app store descriptions, that they have thought through and tested performance across all platforms and devices. This gives consumers the confidence to recommend apps to colleagues using different devices.
• Peer-to-peer support is more important than ever with mobile. People are unlikely to have access to, let alone consult, documentation for a mobile experience. Word of a poor user interface will spread quickly among users, since people are more likely to ask a friend for help than to call company support. All the more reason to give the mobile experience the attention it deserves.

This weekend, we had the privilege of taking part in D4D Boston 2011--Drupal Design Camp as exhibitor and sponsor. I was also on board personally as an organizer & speaker(yes, it was a busy and fun weekend!) The team from OHO Interactive turned out in force on Saturday, with Ed, Barry, and Stacy there to field questions and help provide an OHO-sponsored lunch for 318+ Drupalists after an inspiring keynote from none other than Dries himself. Sunday brought a lively, informative keynote by Josh Porter of Hubspot (formerly of Performable) on how much testing should impact your creative decisions, and more sessions, including one by yours truly on measuring usability and their impact on conversion paths-slides to follow.

More photos at the D4D Boston official Flickr stream.

Are You Making It Easy for Them?

Crucial to the success of any new cloud-based applications’ launch is effective marketing—but how do you know it’s effective? This is an especially hard question to answer when marketing budgets are small and focused on limited channels, and it’s especially true when leveraging emerging channels such as social media, which relies so much on personal connections among key users. Tracking the effectiveness of existing users in recruiting new users is important to identifying potential markets and potential partners. It’s also essential to verify the level of interest in an application by tracking the percentage of conversions that result from beta invitations issued to users’ friends. Combined with data on users from other systems, it can also pinpoint where that interest lies, whether in specific industries, user groups, or geographic segments.

Because tracking the success of efforts to increase user adoption is so important, we're offering an additional service as part of the toolbelt that a Drupal-based site offers: BetaConnect, an additional service that helps facilitate measurement and makes it easier to market SaaS products and web applications. The premise is simple: your best advocates for your product are your existing users, none more so than your earliest beta users. Allowing these users to invite their friends to a private beta is the best way to market your new web application for several reasons:

• Your existing users can attest how good your product is
• Their friends and colleagues are more likely to try your product if they recommend it—early adopters are often asked for technology advice by their peers
• You can limit your beta testers to your experienced users’ peer networks, so any bugs in early versions don’t circulate among public users
• A good application can spread virally among users connected on social media

But making sure this word-of-mouth marketing works can be difficult if you don’t have measurement built in from the beginning. This is where our new solution for Drupal marketing websites comes in. It allows every existing user of your application to automatically generate invitation codes to your beta test. They can then share these codes with specific friends on Facebook, or invite people via email or Twitter. You can easily track which new signup came from which of your existing users’ social networks, since each invitation is unique, and is traceable to the person who generated it. This makes it easy to verify whether your social media and word of mouth marketing campaigns are working.

How BetaConnect works: 

1. Ann likes SaaS product, visits company website, and sends personalized, trackable invitations to colleagues.
2. Three of these friends sign up for the beta, and several of them, in turn, invite their connections.
3. Company marketing tracks signups and who originated the invitations. They can respond to Ann by thanking her, inviting her to additional betas for advanced features, or inviting her to customer panels. Getting key influencers engaged and winning enterprise sales is the goal. 

The system also makes it a lot easier to manage betas:

• No more setting up a placeholder webpage where people have to preregister, then you have to email invitations to new signups—your users can instantly invite their friends. Your processing time—and the wait time that can make potential users lose interest—is gone.
• You can still control the number of beta users by simply shutting off the system when you have enough users.
• You also control the kinds of testers you have, since they are all in your core group of testers’ social networks. This reduces the likelihood of having inexperienced users struggling with early, buggy versions that aren’t ready for public viewing.

Making it simple for your users to not just recommend your software, but share it with their friends is a crucial part of marketing. Personal recommendations are one of the single most trusted sources of information on what new products to try. A 2009 Nielsen study found that 90% of consumers trusted product recommendations from people they knew, and 70% trusted user reviews from strangers, while only about half trusted most forms of advertising at all. This is as true for B2B as it is for B2C: just as getting a consumer app to go viral involves users recommending it to their friends, so, too does increasing adoption of a B2B app involve reaching influential industry users for their feedback. Turning your marketing website into a personal recommendation engine changes the game for your marketing efforts. BetaConnect gives SaaS companies and web application developers unprecedented options for using word-of-mouth and social media marketing efficiently and with the built-in ability to measure the results. 

For more information, email barry@oho.com

 D4D Boston 2011, also known as Drupal Design Camp, is just two weeks away. The only Drupal conference dedicated to design, D4D is in its 3rd year. As usual, it's bringing together the Drupal community for a weekend-long series of great sessions, June 25-26. Also same as last year, it'll be at the MIT Stata Center in Cambridge, a great space for thinking about design. We're especially excited this year, since we'll not only be speaking, but also sponsoring a luncheon on Saturday. We'll also be exhibiting: if you've ever considered working for OHO, drop by our table to talk about what you're interested in doing, and what we're looking for. 

Saturday's keynote speaker will be Dries Buytaert, the founder of Drupal, who'll be talking about Lessons Learned from the Drupal Community, and Sunday's will be usability expert Josh Porter of Performable. There will also be multiple sessions on design and more--including a talk on usability by our very own Jason Smith. If you love Drupal and design, this is a great event. We hope to see you there! 

When working on a site redesign, one of the main questions site owners often have is how to make sure that months and years of careful SEO work, often building to #1 rankings in the search engines, can be preserved when the new site launches. We’ve all heard of site relaunches in which a company dropped from page one in Google to page 20, or disappeared for weeks altogether. Then there are complaints from users who had a specific page bookmarked, only to find it gone when they visit the site. These concerns are especially top of mind when deploying a new CMS. Fortunately, with good content migration practices, all of these issues can be averted, and a site can maintain its top rankings.

For the purposes of SEO, migrating content over depends on first determining which pages have value, and then migrating them over to the new site in a way that preserves their value. Determining which of your pages has value is the more complex process. You’ll need to look at every page of your site to make sure hidden SEO gems are not overlooked. To measure value accurately, you need to use multiple tools, too:

• A web analytics solution
• A ranking tool such as RankChecker, to measure where a page ranks on different search engines for specific keywords
• A backlink checker, also called a link popularity tool, to measure how many websites link to a specific page

With these tools, you’ll be able to analyze each page to determine whether a page is worth migrating based on these criteria:

A page doesn’t need to meet all four criteria to be worth migrating. Indeed, as long as it meets one, it’s generally worth migrating. When in doubt, migrate over more, not less, for maximum SEO value.

Migrating Your Content to Preserve Rankings

Once the decision is made to migrate, preserving value is a matter of making sure search engines (and customers) can still find the pages:

• If possible, use the same URL, and simply change the template of the page
•  If you must change URLs due to rebranding, company merger, or name change, or the use of an entirely new domain name, use 301 redirects to tell  search engines that the new URL is the permanent new address of the content of the page from the old URL
• If you need to eliminate pages entirely—for instance, because you’ve discontinued a specific product or program—provide 401 redirects to pages where people can find similar information, so loyal visitors don’t become frustrated when they can’t find information they had bookmarked

An Opportunity for Change

Managing SEO during a site relaunch is not all about preservation—it also presents new opportunities. Properly deployed, Drupal can enhance your existing SEO efforts, with its numerous modules for controlling key data that search engines use to determine rankings. New site launches are often part of a larger rebranding, and SEO can, and should, be part of the mix.

Preserving the URL of a page with SEO value is important, but other aspects of the page can be changed—and in fact, you can use the opportunity of a site redesign to change TITLE tags, descriptions, image ALT text, and more. Don’t completely revamp the content of the page—after all, you were ranking highly for that quality content—but make sure your META tags are making the most of that content. Look at your headings and descriptions, especially if your website relaunch is part of an overall rebranding. Things change with rebranding, and you should ensure that your new descriptions—what searchers see first, before they even come to your site—accurately reflect your new messaging and brand. With good planning, a site relaunch can breathe new life into your SEO, as well.