Facebook Guidelines for Running Promotions

Promotions are an increasingly popular way for marketers to reach Facebook’s 400 million monthly active users. After all, if you see an item in your news feed about a friend getting a free burger, or entering to win an Xbox, you’re quite likely to check out how you can get the same thing.

But promotions are legally regulated through the United States and the rest of the world, prompted by countless fake giveaways, confusing prize terms, etc. For this reason, Facebook takes a number of precautions to protect users and itself from bad characters.

The company has been developing a set of official promotional guidelines beyond the general terms of service that all users, developers and advertisers also must agree to. The document has seen significant revisions over the past year or so, to try to explain what is or isn’t okay for the thousands of marketers that have recently become active on Facebook. The guidelines govern the publicizing and administering of any sweepstakes, contests, competitions or other promotions on Facebook and may change at any time without notification.

Facebook also makes clear that it can disable the Page and/or account of anyone who violates its terms of service and guidelines.

Because the rules are complex, we thought it’d be helpful to compile a list of tips for Facebook promotions, based on the guidelines last updated on December 22, 2009. Some recommendations are pretty common-sense while others are quite nuanced, and are the result of conversations we’ve had with Facebook and marketers over the past months and years.

Note that the guidelines are updated often; a more detailed explanation is available within Inside Facebook’s Marketing Bible. Also, to be clear, the promotions you see screenshots of in this article are all considered appropriate by Facebook.

1. Read All the Promotions Guidelines

This sounds obvious but Facebook has continued to expand the document, so make sure you are up-to-date with all changes. The guidelines currently include information on what Facebook’s definition of a promotion is (including “sweepstakes,” “contests” and “competitions”), as well as general terms that apply, aspects of promotions that are specifically prohibited, specific ways campaigns need to be administered and publicized, and Facebook’s legal protection and rights. And, as part of a big update last fall, it added a list of specific types of actions that promotions can or can’t include.

Between the terms and the examples provided, the guidelines should give most marketers a pretty good idea about how appropriate their promotion is for Facebook.

2. Clear the Promotion With Facebook First

Anyone who wants to run a promotion on Facebook first needs to get approval from an account representative at the company. In order to access a representative, though, one first needs to spend around $10,000 in Facebook advertising.

A main reason, according to Facebook, is that it needs to manually approve all promotions to ensure that each one is legal. If you’re with a small business or other organization with a limited advertising budget, a Facebook promotion is probably not for you. In this case, however, we suggest you experiment with a small amount of Facebook advertising targeted at the sorts of users you hope to reach. If those efforts are successful, more ad spending — and a promotion — may very well be worth the expense.

Obviously, anyone who seeks approval for a promotion from Facebook should first follow step 1.  If, however, you’re promoting a contest that involves Facebook (via Facebook Connect) that takes place “completely” elsewhere, on your own web site for example, you don’t need prior written approval. But you still have to stick to Facebook’s basic terms regarding Connect.

3. Don’t Call Facebook Your ‘Partner’

Facebook’s promotions guidelines state repeatedly that you can’t say that you’re partnering with Facebook, to quote, “You will not directly or indirectly indicate that Facebook is a sponsor or administrator of the promotion or mention Facebook in any way in the rules or materials relating to the promotion.”

We’re highlighting this guideline in particular because we still see some companies make this mistake. For example, you can’t say “We’re launching with Facebook today” in a press release if all you’re doing is launching a Facebook Page. Instead, you should say something like “we’re launching on Facebook today.”

As part of this guideline, you should also make sure to not use Facebook’s “name, trademarks, trade names, copyrights or any other…intellectual property” unless the company has given you prior consent.

4. Understand Local Rules, and How They Affect Your Facebook Promotion

Due to decades if not centuries or millenia of shady promotions around the world, a host of country and state-specific laws create certain restrictions on Facebook.

For anyone looking to run a promotion outside the US, note that all “sweepstakes” — or a promotion where prizes or winners are based on chance — are not allowed in Belgium, Norway, Sweden, or India. Make sure Facebook users from those countries will not be able to participate.

A number of other rules are based out of US state and national law, and influence what Facebook does not allow anywhere. Prohibited promotions include those that market to people under 18, to countries embargoed by the U.S. or require the “purchase of a product, completion of lengthy task or other such considerations.”

Any prize that promotes “gambling, tobacco, firearms, prescription drugs, or gasoline ” is not allowed on Facebook. The prize itself cannot include “alcohol, tobacco, dairy, firearms, or prescription drugs” — so its okay to promote alcohol as long as you don’t award it or break any related laws. The surprise in this latter category is that you may not administer a promotion on Facebook if any dairy products are part of the prize — this is due to some US state laws, and Facebook has previously said that it is working on allowing dairy-based prizes.

5. Heed Facebook’s Formatting Requirements

Facebook has a very specific way in which promotions may interact with their platform, again, a good idea to read these before designing your contest.

You can only administer a promotion through an application on the Facebook Platform and you can only have users enter the promotion in specific locations on your Page. Either the canvas Page of an app or an application box in a tab on your Page may be used for entry into your promotion on Facebook.

Also, Facebook has some very specific language you need to include in your promotion that essentially notes that it is in no way sponsoring your promotion. It reads as follows: “This promotion is in no way sponsored, endorsed or administered by, or associated with, Facebook. You understand that you are providing your information to [recipient(s) of information] and not to Facebook. The information you provide will only be used for [disclose any way that you plan to use the user's information].”

And, you have to designate someone as the primary contact person for communication associated with the promotion.

6. Don’t Require Facebook Actions

You basically cannot require users to do anything on Facebook as a condition of a promotion other than becoming a fan of your Page.

There are a lot of “don’ts” in this category. The exact language: “[Y]ou will not condition entry to the promotion upon taking any action on Facebook, for example, updating a status, posting on a profile or Page, or uploading a photo.  You may, however, condition entry to the promotion upon becoming a fan of a Page.”

The guidelines offer examples of what this means in specific terms. For example, you cannot require users to post a photo or status comment as a condition of entry, but you can use a third-party application to do this.

You can’t automatically enter users who become a fan of your Page, but you can allow new fans to access a third-party app to do so. You can’t notify promotion winners via Facebook with messages or profile posts, but you can get their email or use an app.

Most especially you can’t require people to sign up for a Facebook account before entering a promotion.

Posted via email from Nick Nicholls Thoughts…

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Social Networking Now More Popular on Mobile than Desktop

A recent study from Ruder Finn revealed that Americans are spending nearly three hours per day on their mobile phones. And what are they doing there? Educating themselves, conducting business, managing finances, instant messaging, emailing? All of the above, as it turns out, and then some. But perhaps the most interesting finding from the new data is the fact that more people are using the mobile web to socialize (91%) compared to the 79% of desktop users who do the same. It appears that the mobile phone is actually a better platform for social networking than the PC.

During the 2.7 hours per day that people in the U.S. spending on the mobile web, 45% are posting comments on social networking sites, 43% are connecting with friends on social networking sites, 40% are sharing content with others and 38% are sharing photos. While those last two figures represent activities that can take place outside of a dedicated social networking service, like a Facebook app for example, they still are inherently social activities.

Mobile Web: A Better Platform for Socializing?

What has given rise to this trend? What makes social networking such a popular mobile web activity? It's easy to point to the proliferation of smartphones and their host of applications, 3G network speeds and more affordable data plans, built in web browsers and mobile-ready websites. Of course these are all important factors that have helped increase mobile social networks' popularity. However, these measurements are the reason why mobile web use, in general, is growing, not specifically mobile social networking.

A less quantifiable statistic that may also have impacted the rise of mobile social networking to the point where it has surpassed desktop-based social networking is the fact that it's an activity that taps into how people – normal, everyday people – go about their lives. Of course, readers of a technology site like this may indeed spend hours upon hours behind a computer screen scouring news sites, reading RSS feeds, updating Twitter and chatting on Facebook, but that's not necessarily the norm. A good many of folks out there still spend more time offline than on. For these people, screen time is spent doing business-related activities at the office (with the occasional jaunts over to YouTube and Facebook) followed by briefer after-hours web surfing that includes catching up with friends on Facebook and reading personal email, downloading music and other media, streaming videos and/or playing games. But these online sessions have to interspersed with other real world activities like cooking dinner, caring for the kids, watching primetime TV, running errands, etc. That's why it's no surprise to find that the rise of the mobile phone corresponds with the rise in Facebook's (and other social networking sites) numbers. It has become a do-anywhere activity that captures people's attention whenever they have free time instead of an activity that requires people make time for it.

Beyond Geekdom: Mobile Brings the Mainstream

In addition (and although I don't have statistics on hand to back this up), the mobile web allows social networks to overcome their more "geeky" stigma of days past. As one friend recently scoffed to me about this particular pastime, "I never saw the point of going home, logging on to the computer and updating my Facebook status. I mean like, who cares what I'm doing? But then I got an iPhone and I could share photos and stuff right then and there. It was cool." OK, not the most eloquent speech, but the point is obvious: mobile social networking isn't just convenient, it's cool.

Here's the bottom line, a trend we've been seeing for some time: the mainstream has arrived. They're buying smartphones and downloading mobile applications. They're surfing the web on the go. They're playing FarmVille on Facebook. They'll probably get an iPad. And for them, mobile social networking is an easy activity to participate in now that it's been unchained from the PC. The broader implications of having the less tech-savvy masses online are only beginning to be explored and understood. Developers and designers will now have to take this into consideration, too. Either they make their applications accessible and simple enough for least common denominator – or risk losing out to competitors who do.

Posted via email from Nick Nicholls Thoughts…

Blow Away Your Audience with a Stunning, Animated Presentation (That Doesn't Use PowerPoint)

Ditch your old decks and try this new tool for stunning, animated presentations – Prezi.

PowerPoint is so synonymous with presentations that it seems like there’s virtually no alternative at all. That ubiquity makes PowerPoint decks boring and predictable. Want to shake things up the next time you need to pitch an idea in Conference Room A? Then I’ve got just the ticket: A presentation solution so innovative that it’ll leave the crowd’s collective jaw hanging open.

Prezi is an online presentation tool that dispenses with the idea of individual slides. You get one huge canvas on which you can add text, images, and shapes. You scatter these elements anywhere you want on the page, and then build a path that you can use to “fly” through the presentation. There’s never a page change or a “next slide, please” moment — it’s all one big seamless zoom around an infinite virtual backdrop. I don’t say this sort of thing often, but the effect is simply stunning.

Most of the common stuff you’d expect to find in a presentation package is here. You can add hyperlinks, images, video, and sound. You can size and rotate text, add bulleted lists, and more.

Prezi does its magic using Flash in a browser window, and you can use it for free, or pay for a premium account ($59/year or $159/year, depending upon how much storage space you need) that removes the Prezi watermark, adds privacy settings, and even includes an offline editor.

But don’t take my word for it. The easiest way to understand Prezi is to check out a presentation, like this one:

Posted via email from Nick Nicholls Thoughts…

Your consumers do not view your website, email, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and even their mobile as mutually exclusive channels; neither should you.

Search engine optimization was once a very powerful form of communication and marketing by itself but as time has pushed on and the technology has changed, morphed and evolved SEO alone will become less potent than it once was. However SEO is still very important at the very minimum and should always be implemented and taken seriously but coupled with other forms of internet marketing SEO becomes a much more powerful driving force in the online marketing space.

Search engine marketing comes in many different slices and search engine optimization is really just one slice of the marketing pizza. There are many different approaches to SEO which is primarily why so many website owners have a hard time putting a definition on what it really is.

It is important that whenever feasible other aspects of online marketing are introduced with your search engine optimization efforts. This will help strengthen your SEO by not only allowing for new pathways to your website but it shows the search engines that you are diversifying your online marketing approach and trying to build your business online the right way. Remember that the search engines are always changing and what helped them grow in rankings a few years ago does not necessarily work now.

The search engines reward those who take a diversified approach to their online marketing efforts so it is important to really take a step back and put together a comprehensive online marketing plan that is robust and full of different entrance ways to your website. Search engine marketing gathers strength in numbers so have many different quality pathways or links connecting to your website will allow for you to over time to really grow in visibility.

Social media marketing is a very important element that is just as important as SEO. It is an element that is vital in today’s market place and should be included in your internet marketing strategy at all times. Even if you have a business that is very obscure and niche it is important to find your community online and reach out to them.

Remember, today consumers engage with a variety of online communications and activities and have different preferences and tastes which underscores the importance of including a full range of online interactive and mobile-marketing vehicles in your digital-marketing campaigns.

Therefore, never put all your hopes into one marketing or advertising effort but rather approach it with a multi pronged approach in order to keep things diversified if one should stop working for you.

How do you manage your online and mobile marketing efforts?

Posted via email from Nick Nicholls Thoughts…

Measuring the success of competitors using your keywords is a must. Known as competitive analytics, the process looks closely at what differences there are between their search engine optimization strategies and your own. Where some businesses let themselves down is the area that determines who their competition is. Just because another business is in the same niche doesn’t necessarily mean they are competitors. When it comes to search engine optimization, they are only competitors if they are targeting a similar set of keywords to you. Your competitors are those placed above and just below you in the search results for that keyword.

On the flip side, it is important to understand who you business competitors actually are. I can’t tell you how many times I have seen companies not properly identify their competition. Just because you are in the same industry does not mean you are a competitor. If you have an established company that has a great reputation and brand and if you starting out then, I would think twice about considering them your direct competitor.

Now lets switch back for your competitors in the search engines. If they rank above you, why? Do they have more links, or better quality links than you? Are their pages well written using known SEO techniques? By analyzing what they are doing successfully, you can determine which areas need more work on your own pages. By analyzing those behind you, you can determine where they are improving and what strategies you need to undertake to maintain your position.

Here is a good list of SEO competitive research tools that I recommend:

1. Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics – Yes, these are 2 of the best free tools on the market. Before you can look at your competitors, I would look at and analyze your own website. Organic search visitor data and the amount of inbound links.

2. Compete – Compete has become a great and industry standard for competitive research that goes beyond SEO. They offer tool and several anayltics products that are truly excellent. I would recommend Compete to any marketer or business owner at every level of experience.

3. SEOmoz – If you are not going to hire an SEO expert or search engine optimization firm to help you with your SEO, I highly recommend SEOmoz. I consider SEOmoz to be advanced and is excellent for the marketer or business owner that “gets” search engine optimization. If you are a beginner then, I would look elsewhere. SEOmoz offers a full suite of tools including the competitive research aspect.

4. Link Diagnosis - Here is a good tool that combines some other link data, I think it pulls in data from Yahoo and Bing as well.

5. SEO Book Firefox Tool - Very good plugin to install on Firefox that gives some top level podata about your competitors as you search. This one is a must use…I switched from the IE web browser to Firefox when I found and started using this tool.

Another important point here is to always remember to check your own analytics to determine which keywords are delivering visitors and conversions. Make sure you undertake a competitive analysis for those keywords as well. You may not be targeting them, but if they are delivering traffic, don’t let your competitors overtake you and steal that traffic away. Those phrases possibly rank well – can you improve their rankings and maintain that advantage? Competitive analysis is all about measuring your competition – just make sure you are assessing your competitors correctly.

NickNicholls

courtesy of Nick Stamoulis

Posted via email from Nick Nicholls Thoughts…

10 Commandments for Bloggers…
  1. Thow shalt not comment on a blog before reading the entire post
  2. Thow shalt not click on thine own ads
  3. Thow shalt not Stumble, or Digg thine own blog (But it's OK to ask a friend to…)
  4. Thow shalt not take the name of Google in vain more than thrice a day
  5. Thow shalt not steal content from thy neighbors blog (Borrowing is OK)
  6. Thow shalt not covet thy neighbor's new Word Press theme, traffic or CTR
  7. Thow shalt not bow down at the altar of the A-Lister's blog to the detriment of thine own blog
  8. Thow shalt not kill thy blog by leaving it unattended for days on end
  9. Thow shalt post meaningful articles on a regular basis
  10. Thow shalt not speed link more than twice a week

Posted via email from Nick Nicholls Thoughts…

With detailed user profiles, their social network and precise location, Google could do what futurists have been dreaming about: offer relevant, interest-driven mobile advertising, geo-targeted down to the micro level.

Google announced its new social media product, Buzz, on Tuesday. While still in the early stages of development, Buzz marries many tools Google has created over the years and could be significant to journalism.

Based on the YouTube video explanation, Buzz is kind of a Facebook-foursquare-Twitter-FriendFeed competitor, but could be much more than the sum of the Google products they're integrating with it, including Google Profiles, Google Gmail (its Contact list gets integrated automatically), Google Picasa photos (it can also incorporate feeds from other multimedia tools such as Flickr and YouTube), Google Voice & Talk (SMS and voice posting capabilities have high utility in this tool for status updates) and Google Wave (real-time updating, commenting, sharing and collaboration tools).

For those in Marketing, here are the most interesting applications and implications I see, especially for breaking news, public relations and mobile advertising.

Google Latitude
On its own, Google's live GPS location tracking tool is not very impressive, but with an active audience of participants through Gmail Contacts, this technology makes Google Buzz much more interesting and relevant, especially if those participants are contacts you know.

Google Maps
Much like Latitude, the integration of Maps makes Buzz unique, and at this very early stage, it was the most interesting experience because it visually displays what we're used to seeing in long linear lists on Twitter and Facebook.

Going through your local map and seeing what people in your very near proximity (down to the city block level) say was a different experience. While Twitter and other social media apps have moved into the geo-location arena, this is the best, live implementation I've seen of a real-time geotagged social media experience.

I can't help but feel like I am looking into the future, thinking about how this could be used in breaking news situations to reach people who are physically located near news events (as well as getting their contact info easily).

Google Search / Relevance algorithm
Google became king of the search business for developing superior algorithms that organize information and return relevant results. In the Google presentation announcing Buzz, the company said the social tool will use customized algorithms to learn your personal interests; users can also hide or approve of news and social content that interests them (like on Facebook).

Buzz could help filter and call out personally relevant information for you based on its knowledge of you, your network and your location information, so over time, it will understand your interests better. If its algorithm is effective, this could be what really differentiates Buzz from most social media news streams.

Google AdSense
Perhaps the most dangerous element for media organizations is the threat Google could pose taking their micro-payment and highly-targeted advertising model to the local level.

With detailed profiles of users' likes, dislikes, their social network and precise location, Google could do what futurists and journalism advertising techies have been dreaming about, but no one has really pulled off on a large scale yet — offer relevant, interest-driven mobile advertising, geo-targeted down to the micro level.

So you and your friends could be bee-bopping down the street after a late night out dancing and the local pizza joint a block away could target you (and everyone in a three-block radius) to come down for a hot slice of pie, half off if you mention the mobile Buzz ad.

Google didn't explicitly speak of this example at Tuesday's presentation, but did say there's an "Enterprise" version of Buzz coming out which could offer very valuable tools like this when paired with Google's stockade of applications.

Buzz is rolling out to Gmail users now and available in upgraded versions of the Google Maps mobile phone application as a new map layer.

The full launch presentation from Google is available here (56 minutes).

What marketing applications do you see?

— n1ck

NickNicholls

Internet Marketing Best Practices

… with help from Will Sullivan

Posted via email from Nick Nicholls Thoughts…

Back in mid-2006, a friend of mine, Dave Senay, became CEO of one the world's most celebrated strategic communications firms, Fleishman Hillard. Upon assuming his new role, he asked himself a fascinating question, "Is my organization 'switched on' for digital?" He was focused on his firm's readiness for new ways of doing business in a world permeated by digital networks and devices, social media, and data analytics. Asking that simple question led to a company transformation that has touched every one of Fleishman's traditional 2,500 PR professionals in its 84 offices around the world.

Why? Because, on reflection, Dave concluded that the answer to his question was an emphatic "no."

Importantly, the question was not about whether Fleishman did top flight digital work at scale (it did) nor whether it ran a top flight social media practice (it did that, too). Indeed, thanks to Fleishman's integrated digital offerings, it already ranked by revenues as one of the top "interactive agencies" in the world.

Rather, the question that obsessed Dave was about how the agency did business.

Since then, I've become convinced that Dave's question is one that every business — especially in these challenging economic times — should ask itself. It's not an issue of whether your corporation has an award-winning website or a successful Facebook outreach program. For every business leader, the more profound questions are these: what impact has digital had on what you offer your customers or clients, how you interact with them, and, perhaps most critically, how you lead and manage yourselves?

So, how do you know if you and your organization are poised to win the future? Take a page out of surgeon and writer Atul Gawande's recently released polemic, The Checklist Manifesto, and assess your organization with a checklist of your own. Atul's checklist is focused on hygiene. Your checklist is also about hygiene, but of a corporate kind. It's about "digital readiness" for a digitally transformed world.

Ask yourself the following questions:

  • Do we use a "walled garden" client (like Lotus Notes) for e-mail, calendar, and contacts that constrains easy connectivity with colleagues, clients, and the Web?
  • Does our technology staff behave as if we work for IT, rather than technology staff working for us?
  • Do our firm's policies block external streaming media, social networking, and some commerce sites to PCs, and apps downloads to mobile devices?
  • Do our day-to-day communications rely on extended voice-mail and lengthy face-to-face meetings?
  • Are our internal company communications infrequent and randomly issued; do they take the form of "official" memos; and are they sent by e-mail as static text-based Word or PDF attachments?
  • Does our intranet lack or have only limited social media features and crowd-sourcing of ideas?
  • Is our knowledge management system hierarchical, top-down, and run by KM "professionals"?
  • Do our company meetings take place in broadcast mode as "one-to-many" communications?
  • Does our corporate culture encourage information hoarding rather than information sharing?
  • Are our corporate politics non-transparent and predicated on information asymmetries?

If you answered "yes" to more than a few of these questions, your organization is "switched off" for digital.

If you're working for an organization that's "switched on" for digital:

  • You use an "open platform" (like Outlook) for e-mail, calendar, and contacts that facilitates easy connectivity.
  • Your technology staff knows its role is to work for you; IT enables productivity and output.
  • Your firm policies embrace external media streams in all formats and from all sources, and downloads to any device.
  • Your day-to-day communications rely on e-mail, IM, phone, and concise face-to-face meetings.
  • Your internal communications are frequent and regularly issued; they take shape as e-mails employing rich media, including dynamic content and clickable links.
  • Your intranet is abundant with social media features to encourage collaboration and crowd-sourcing of ideas.
  • Your knowledge management system is non-hierarchical, bottom-up, and managed by a lean staff (creating coherent "folksonomies" based on firm-wide social bookmarking and tagging).
  • Your company meetings take place in dialogue mode as "many-to-many" communications.
  • Your corporate culture encourages information sharing rather than information hoarding.
  • Your corporate politics are relentlessly transparent and predicated on information symmetries.

Of course, the lists above are by no means exhaustive, and you may want to add to, or modify, these criteria. The point is, this is the new Digital Divide: it's the "switched off" versus the "switched on." Like it or not, if your company is on the wrong side of this divide in 2010, you should worry. (Sound crazy? There are still an estimated 145 million Lotus Notes users around the world.)

The future belongs to those who are switched on for digital — and there's no turning your back (or turning back the clock) on that reality.

Posted via email from Nick Nicholls Thoughts…

Get more SEO juice from your website content.

So while you are working through your keyword matrix and getting your site more Google juice, here are five tactics for keeping your content in better SEO ranking.

1. Break up your content (Intelligently!)

There are four good ways to break up your content:

  • paginate articles
  • create slideshows
  • turn long features into a series instead of a single article
  • turn sidebars into separate articles

The effectiveness of these ideas is open to discussion. Each tactic can help reduce your bounce rate, but you must consider the other effects and make intelligent decisions. Let's look at some nuances for each technique.

Pagination

The business imperative for most websites is for more page views, ad impressions and leads. However, achieving bigger numbers in the short term must be balanced against the long-term effect on reader experience. On my site, we paginate our articles after roughly 500 words. That's pretty tight. I wouldn't cut it shorter and could argue to make it longer. Sites that only serve 200 words before requiring another click make readers mad.

Slideshows

Slideshows that shouldn't be slideshows also make readers mad. I refer to a slideshow made using images that don't add information. When the material is inherently visual, as in this inside tour of the Hoover Dam, a slideshow is a legitimate treatment. If you're just taking a list and throwing in stock art to create more pages, readers can see through it.

Series

If you produce a magazine-style feature, consider turning that piece into a series of articles online, each piece linking to the others.

I absolutely reject the dogma that says "long articles don't work online". (As the saying goes, all Web dogma is stupid.)

However, long articles typically need to be propelled by a great narrative, which is why this gigantic article about an online extortion attempt remains one of our most popular articles ever online, and presumably why ESPN still runs its wonderfully compelling e-ticket features which aren't even paginated! Nevertheless breaking long features into multiple articles can actually serve the reader in the same way as breaking up magazine articles with subheads, boxes, callouts and other "points of entry".

Sidebars

For the most part I don't believe in sidebars online. By this I refer to one article embedded in another. It works great in print, but online articles are hard enough to read without other articles crammed inside them. And you've also missed an SEO opportunity, because the sidebar typically has a slightly different or more narrow focus (i.e. different keywords) than the so-called mainbar.

This is an opinion with no statistics to back it up, but if your print sidebar is 60 words or more, online I'd say you should make it into its own article.

2. Put related links in and around your article copy

This idea is simple and common. It's worth experimenting a bit, however, to find the places on the page that most effectively catch the eye of the first-time visitor with content related to whatever brought them to the site.

Generally speaking, the closer the links are to the article copy, the more effective they will be. Related links may be presented as a box within the text or a simpler treatment. Look at the several excellent ways my sister site Network World provides related links in this article: 9-year-old plots his fifth Microsoft certification.

This is much stronger than the treatment on my site. Although we copy NWW's style with the in-line link ("See Marko give Active Directory training…"), our Related Articles box falls so far below the text that relatively few people find it.

3. Make directories, lists and similar resources

Still stuck in that "article" paradigm? Kick the habit and create some directories. If you can't afford the time/technology/training to make them into actual databases, you can fake it with HTML.

For example: Of my top 250 search terms, one of the lowest bounce rates is for the term "security recruiter", which leads you to The Security Recruiter Directory. It isn't sortable, but it's manually paginated and uses internal anchor links to help with navigation. And because it's well labeled and is a strong reader-service type of content, readers tend to rummage around in it – to the tune of six pages per visit for those coming from a search engine.

This isn't an aberration. A similar list of security certifications has a higher (though still great) bounce rate and five pages per visit for people coming in via search.

Lists of this sort will help your engagement metrics.

4. Update your content

You'll notice that the inelegant headline of one of the aforementioned directories is "The Security Recruiter Database – UPDATED". This is a great thing about lists and databases and roundups: You can refresh the content and re-highlight the article.

Although I am reluctant to cite apocryphal information, there is a school of thought that says including text like "Most recent update: 2/05/2010" may help alert search engines to the evergreen nature of such a resource.

Even if this is not true, it's a practice that DOES alert the incoming reader and thus means people are less likely to assume it has become outdated and bounce off the page.

5. promote newsletter signups on article pages

Here's a strategy we are very late deploying on my site. Hope you're ahead of me on this one.

A newsletter subscriber is in some regard the ultimate success in the battle against bounce rate. It's a sign that you've really captured someone's attention and that he has great affinity with your content. So you should make newsletter (and RSS) signup promotion VERY PROMINENT on your article page template.

In this way, effective SEO work should yield an overall rise in your number of newsletter and RSS subscriptions.

I look forward to hearing from you!

— n1ck

NickNicholls

Internet Marketing Best Practices
nick@nicknicholls.net

courtesy of Derek Slader

Posted via email from Nick Nicholls Thoughts…

The Splinternet means the end of the Web's golden age

The golden age of the Web is coming to an end. Prepare for the Splinternet.

As we all gird for the launch of the Apple Tablet, take a moment to step back and realize what all these new devices are doing. The whole framework of the Web (and Web marketing) is based around the idea that everything is in a compatible format. Any browser, any computer, any connection, you see pretty much the same thing.

Now with iPhones, Androids, Kindles, Tablets, and TVs connecting to the Web, that's not true. Your site may not work right on these devices, especially if it includes flash or assumes mouse-based navigation. Apps that work on the iPhone don't work on the Android. Widgets for FiOS TV don't work anywhere else.

Meanwhile, more and more of the interesting stuff on the Web is hidden behind a login and password. Take Facebook for example. Not only do its applications not work anywhere else, Google can't see most of it. And News Corp. and the New York Times are talking about putting more and more content behind a login.

Web marketing has grown since 1995, based on the idea that everything is connected. Click-throughs, ad networks, analytics, search-engine optimization — it all works because the Web is standardized. Google works because the Web is standardized.

Not any more. Each new device has its own ad networks, format, and technology. Each new social site has its login and many hide content from search engines. 

We call this new world the Splinternet (with a nod to Doc Searls and Rich Tehrani, who used the term before us with a somewhat different meaning). It will splinter the Web as a unified system. The golden age has lasted 15 years. Like all golden ages, it lasted so long we thought it would last forever. But the end is in sight.

Here's what not to do: panic and try to unify things again. The shattering cannot be undone.

Here's what to do: choose your devices carefully — investments in one cannot be transferred easily to others if you make a mistake. Rethink analytics, links, and measurement — they're just becoming available in the new environments. Promote the new channels, SEO won't help you so much here. Platforms like iPhone apps and Facebook are some of the most exciting new channels out there. Just realize that you're leaving the comfy environment of the Web behind — along with all the tools you've grown dependent on — as you embrace the new platforms.

Forrester clients can read our report with more details.

Note added 1/27 after iPad announcement: It appears the iPad, like the iPhone, doesn't support Adobe Flash and runs the same proprietary iPhone apps. Regardless of how successful it becomes, it's another splinter — an Apple controlled platform in which much of the Web's infrastructure is missing.

Splinternet

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