Social site StumbleUpon is a great way to drive traffic to your site. If you recall, from the end of year stats for this blog last year, StumbleUpon drove almost a third of total traffic.

For those who don’t know what StumbleUpon is, here’s a quick overview. It’s a social media site based on a toolbar. You install the toolbar, and can thumb up or thumb down any website you encounter. This plays into the functionality of the Stumble button on the toolbar. Pressing this button pulls up a random page that someone else has thumbed up (in a category that you’ve said that you’re interested in.) Stumbling can enable you to find useful, useless, funny, horrible pages that you would most likely never find. The more thumbs up a page receives, the more often it’s shown – the fewer thumbs, the less often.

So – what can StumbleUpon do for your site? Here’s an example from my blog – SearchEngineTigers. In the process of researching Social Search sites for my SES NY presentation, I came across an amusing Mark Spitzer image on Facebook. Taking a screenshot of this, I threw it up and thumbed it up to see how well it would do.

As you can see, on that first day it hit ~450 visitors, the next day close to 900 –  before it started to tail off. A week later, it started moving back up again…why? Because the people that saw it at that time started thumbing it up again.

StumbleUpon is a social network because you do have the ability to have a friends list, communicate with each other, send pages directly to each other, and filter to only show pages from all of your friends – or even only one friend. But, it’s the random factor that gives a user the edge over other social networks. As long as the content is compelling enough, it’ll get shown and thumbed up, which will take it to the next level.

What you do need to do though, in order to make your StumbleUpon a success is to actively thumb up / thumb down / comment / submit content. The more you’re involved in the community, the better the chance your page will get pushed out for others to stumble it. Oh, and don’t just stumble your own website.  You should only stumble one page on your site for about every 20 that you submit. This can be the difference between 5k visitors and 2.

Based on some testing that we’ve done here, it appears that your activity in certain categories can impact how many times an article can be shown. What we did was to place a post in an uncommon category.  We then had some experienced stumblers, with very active accounts thumb up the post. There was hardly any movement in the traffic. When people who actively stumble in that category thumbed it up, the needle moved.

As for time limits on the stumble factor? We’ve seen a post that was stumbled, go back down to the normal level of traffic for a while, then a few weeks later it suddenly spikes again, as someone else stumbles over it and thumbs it up.

All in all, StumbleUpon is a great traffic generating tool for your site, as long as it’s targeted correctly. Speaking of which, next Monday  – I’ll talk about paid advertising in StumbleUpon, and highlight some of the interesting issues that we’ve found with that.

Microsoft has been promoting their demographic targeting capabilities in AdCenter for well over a year now. They’ve produced a case study and a four step process to applying their demographic targeting.

Google came into the game late, but they also offer demographic bidding and reporting. But, how valuable is this new demographic bidding?

First, Google is being somewhat transparent, indicating in their official help files that demographic bidding is available on 32 sites - primarily of the social networking, dating site, and forum variety. The most notable sites include YouTube, MySpace, Friendster, HotorNot, and BlackPlanet.

So, what will you see when you download a demographic report if you are not bidding demographically? You will see age groups and genders of the people who are viewing your ads, the site where they saw your ad, and all the relevant detail down to conversions.

It is advised to carefully review your demographic report prior to doing any demographic bidding to determine where you can maximize opportunity, but also to see whom your ad may not be resonating with.

It has never been enough to go on gut instincts as to your target demographic.  Now, you have another way to integrate demographics while becoming a data-driven organization.

Yesterday, Google announced that anyone with a YouTube account can now access statistics for the videos that they’ve uploaded. Among the stats you can see is the trend for views, along with where in the world the views are coming from. This allows you to see the lifecycle of the video; as well to as get an idea of the impact that other initiatives you undertake & the ability this traffic affects your videos.

In addition, you can see the popularity of your videos relative to the other videos in the same category. The popularity is also shown as a trend, over a time period that you pick – as well as by geographic region.

While this is a good start, there is a great deal of room for improvement. One major piece of data that is missing – that I’d like to see added – is details on how much of the video is actually viewed. This would be a huge benefit to video creators by allowing them to further understand & gauge their audience. They would be able to tell the length of time that best fits their target market; as well as begin to learn what aspects of their videos tend to lose the attention of viewers. This would allow users to produce higher quality videos that resonate well with their audience and potentially, begin to expand their viewership.

However, the top addition I would suggest is to release Google Analytics for YouTube. This would be incredibly beneficial for YouTube users who are interested in knowing who their audience is. They could better understand how people find their videos and begin to leverage similar sources to gain a larger audience. They would also understand what segments are more likely to be engaged by commenting on videos, subscribing to the video feed, or in the case of non-profits donating through their YouTube channel.

These are just a couple ways Google Analytics for YouTube would be helpful. There are countless other ways it could be used to benefit video creators and Google/YouTube, but for now you’ll just have to settle for analyzing the trends for views and popularity by region.

Tonight marks the start of the Toastmasters International Speech Competition, and I’ll be one of the contestants at my local club (Manassas Community Toastmasters.) This contest starts at the club level, working its way up through the area, district, and regional levels.  Then, finally going international – with one person being crowned the best speaker in the world.

Given this, and the fact that I received some very favorable grades yesterday for my presentation at SES London, I thought I’d go a little off topic today and give some tips on public speaking. Of course, it’s not really that off topic, as even though we deal with all manner of online marketing for our clients, we constantly have to make presentations to and for those clients. Maybe you’ll find some tips here that can help you the next time that you have to make a presenation.

1. Know your audience – What level of detail are they looking for? How granular should your presentation be? A presentation to your board may require the ubiquitous ‘view from 50,000 feet,’ while a presentation to the technical team may go down to the level of function calls and database field names.
2. Time it – You’re going to have a specified amount of time available for your presentation. Think about how much of that you want to allocate to Q&A, this can vary based on your audience and their familiarity with the material.
3. Set expectations up front – Do you want to be interrupted by questions during the presentation, or have them all gathered together at the end? The former can keep all questions in context, while the latter allows you to establish and control the flow of the presentation.
4. Engage your audience – Make them feel a part of the presentation. Use humor, ask questions, vary the tone of your voice, make prolonged eye contact.  Don’t just scan the crowd, connect with various people with your eyes over the course of the presentation.
5. Start and end strong – Your audience needs to be told up front why they should pay attention to you, and not to their blackberry or laptop. The end of the presentation should back up your points, and provide some form of call to action. Remember that the end of the presentation may be all that an audience with attention issues remembers, so make it worth remembering.
6. Prepare and practice – An audience can tell when someone isn’t familiar with the material, and if the presenter is not, why should they bother to listen? Walk through your presentation multiple times, try to see what’s working and what isn’t. If something doesn’t feel right, change the presentation until it does – reorder slides / key points, add data to back up a position, etc. Try not to read your presentation (either from notes or from your memory), know your key points, and let the rest flow.
7. Anticipate – Try to imagine what kind of questions the audience will and may ask, and have answers ready for them. If you don’t know the answer, don’t bluff, as if you get called out, that’s what people will remember.
8. Have fun – If you’re having fun with your presentation, then the audience can sense that and pick up on it.
9. Feedback - Get feedback from people in the meeting, find out what they think you did right, and what didn’t go down so well. Use that information to improve your next presentation.
10. Don’t panic – Even if the presentation goes badly, just remember that it can happen. Not every presentation is going to work how you think it will. If you stumble or mis-speak during your presentation, get up, dust yourself off, make a joke out of it, and continue.

I know that to some people, it’s hard to even imagine walking up on stage in front of 10 people, let alone 500, but with practice it becomes much easier. One way to get that practice is to actually do it. Toastmasters offers the opportunity for you to improve your speaking skills by presenting on whatever topic you want in front of a group of people who are there to help each other improve.

You can find a local Toastmasters club and attend a meeting or 2 for free to see if it looks like the right place for you.

There are lots of tools out there to view recommendations, costs and inventory (Google) or view competitive information for free or free trial – just to name a few. But, the best place to start your keyword research is using your analytics to find out what your current visitors are searching for on your Web site.

If you have a ‘site search’ on your Web site and you expose the search term in the query string of the results page (This is accomplished by having the search form programmed to use the ‘GET’ method, not the ‘POST’ method), you can see in your Web reporting not only what visitors are looking for when they visit your site, but also the high value keywords.

In Google Analytics, simply edit your profile to enable ‘Site Search’ and then, list the parameter that contains the search term. If you don’t know what this is, all you have to do is a search on your site, then look in the address bar to find the word you searched on. The parameter will be immediately before the =. For example, searching on ‘dog kennel,’ a result URL may look like this:

www.mysite.com/searchresults.asp?keyword=dog+kennel

You would enter ‘keyword’ as the query parameter.

Once you have that set up and collect data for a few days, you’ll be able to see the keywords that visitors are searching for in your reports – along with the number of unique searches, search exits, and other metrics.

ClickTracks takes it even a step further by showing cost, conversion, ROAS (return on ad spend) and time on site, as well as other metrics.

My father, Walter Dawkins, passed away today. He left this world on Easter Sunday, surrounded by family, music, and fragrant cuttings of the first spring blooms from a garden he nurtured for many, many seasons.

My father was not an easy man, but he had, as we say in the South, *texture*. I will always remember him (as I daresay my high school boyfriend will) sitting on the front porch of our house with an over and under shotgun bent across his knee, waiting for me to return home from a date. Ever the sentry, my dad made sure that there was absolutely no possibility of a long goodbye in that driveway.

Among other things, Walt Dawkins was a fine baseball player. He had a brief run as a pitcher in the major leagues but thanks to the Korean conflict, he spent most of his baseball career on a military farm team. That suited him just fine since he got to play baseball for many years longer than he would have as a pro.

He once told me that the only sound sweeter than the crack of a ball on a bat was the roar of a flight line. My dad loved everything about the Air Force – the discipline, the mission, the ceremony, but most of all, the people. The friends he made in the Air Force were friends he kept for life.

As I flipped through his address book tonight to make the inevitable phone calls, I was reminded of the incredible life my father led. Tucked into the “C” section, there was the home phone number for Claire Chenault of The Flying Tigers (who passed away in 1958).

Safe passage, Dad. Wherever you journey, I hope you find a field of dreams and a good garden, and that you keep the blue at your feet.

Marketing a company to a variety of audiences – either through separate social media sites or a variety of marketing channels such as search, email, or video – may at first glance appear to fragment your marketing message and dollars. In reality, your online and offline marketing efforts often complement each other and work in sync to create an aggregated marketing effort.

As more and more individuals stream their lives in pictures, video, blogs, bookmarks, and social news sharing; companies will continue to see the value of marketing in different channels and testing each – both separately and as part of a larger marketing strategy.

Sites like Netvibes and Pageflakes can aggregate RSS feeds and webpages into one central, branded location.  And, it is becoming easier to aggregate these into corporate sites and create versions of aggregated content that can reside directly on a corporate server.

Posting photos, videos, and bookmarking sites are all forms of marketing.  They can be integrated into a corporate site in relatively short order. I highly recommend it.

Google has released Google For Non-Profits which they describe as “a one-stop shop for tools to help advance your organization’s mission in a smart, cost-efficient way.”  There are no new tools being offered.  But, since many non-profits are unaware of these free Google tools – it is an excellent source for organizations to learn about and benefit from using them.  On Wednesday,  Simon listed these tools, but I wanted to go into a bit more detail on each tool contained in Google For Non-Profits.  There are two categories of tools that are offered – one to save time & money and the other to find & engage supporters.Included in the tools to save time and money are:

If you are a fan of bubble gum, you probably know Bazooka Joe, the main character of the comic appearing on the inside wrapper of Bazooka bubble gum. Bazooka Joe has been around since the 1950’s. I (still) find him strangely wise on occasion.

One of my favorite BJ strips features an interaction between Bazooka Joe and a man who has lost his car keys. Bazooka Joe happens upon the man, frantically searching for his keys on the ground underneath a street light. As Bazooka Joe helps the man search, he asks the man where he likely dropped the keys. The man points over his shoulder to the dark side of the street. Bazooka Joe, now puzzled, asks the man why he is looking in this spot under the street light instead of where he thinks he dropped the keys. The man replies with some irritation: “Because the light is better over here.”

We often find marketing staff focusing on the part of their Web Analytics tool that is under the street light (the metric that they understand, the data presented by a default setting, the overview report, etc.) even though they aren’t likely to find something really useful.

Why?

• Lack of knowledge about what is possible with their current WA tools
• Lack of support from IT (“we can’t help you with Web Analytics; we installed it, now it is up to you to make it work”)
• Lack of time
• Lack of clearly defined brand and business goals
• Lack of clearly defined success metrics

In short, senior management believes that Web Analytics is covered because someone bought and installed (maybe correctly, maybe not) a Web Analytics tool. How do you change that?

1.) Educate internal stakeholders about the ROI of Analytics and what it really takes to become a data driven organization: In-depth analytics skill; collaboration across departments; a culture of testing and experimentation; an Analytics strategy and well-defined metrics; established methodology; plus infrastructure and policy to ensure that data is successfully translated into action. (If senior management resists, you might try embarassing them into action.)

2.) Incorporate training costs into the budget. Until staff is empowered to tap the full potential of the WA program, analytics won’t be where it needs to be in the organizations, i.e., at the center of marketing decision making.

3.) Find a partner in IT. One of my clients who is in marketing (her name is Colleen) recently shared with me that she and her IT buddy (his name is Deming) have become “joined at the hip” — so much so that their coworkers have now assigned them a celebrity name. Look out Brangelina: Here comes Demileen.

How do you convince management? Where do you get training and how do you know what you need? Call us! Web Analytics is one of our biggest growth areas at Serengeti. We are Analytics evangelists and we love to share!

Yesterday, Google launched their brand new portal aimed directly at the ranks of the nonprofits. From this portal you can access:

• GMail
• Google Checkout
• Google Docs
• Google Calendar
• Google Analytics
• Google Grants
• YouTube
• Blogger
• Google Maps
• Google Earth
• Google Gadgets
• Google Groups

So nothing new, but it’s all gathered together in one place to make it easier for nonprofits to access all of the available resources that Google has made available for them.  So if you’re a nonprofit, go ahead and bookmark it. And, if you need someone to help make sense of how all the pieces should play together, I believe I know a Digital Marketing Agency that can help you with that.