After writing my last post, I went offline for 2 weeks to skibble across the Atlantic, where I saw Gaudi's wild architecture in Barcelona, the aftermath of floods in Madeira, and the enormous Hassan II Mosque in Casablanca—among other things.

When I came back I returned to thousands of e-mails. My inbox was so cluttered that I'm still wondering what messages I may have missed.

Thoughts of clutter sometimes lead to thoughts of cleaning—or so I'm told. When such thoughts coincide with the chirping of birds and the sprouting of flowers, that means spring cleaning.

Spring cleaning is traditionally a time to take stock of our surroundings, get rid of the detritus and freshen up what's been getting stale over the long winter. Admittedly, this is not my area of expertise when it comes to house cleaning, but it is a task we should apply to our Web sites, particularly if you've not been caring for and feeding your site throughout the year.

Where to start: How effectively did your site achieve its goals?

Runners in the Barcelona Marathon. Did they achieve their goals? Only their times will tell.

Back when you first planned your site you (hopefully) had a purpose in mind. Today is a good day to look at your results. If your goal was to sell more widgets, how did you do? Did the site bring in traffic that converted to leads or sales? If your goal was to recruit students to your graduate program, how did that work? Did the site impact their decision?

Through a combination of Web analytics, leads from contact forms, applications, sales, etc. you should be able to measure your success and gauge how well your site contributed to that success. If you see room for improvement, you'll want to take a close look at what worked and what didn't and focus on enhancing the areas where you can make the most impact. Some of you may need to rewrite copy and offer more calls to action. Others may need to enhance SEO or improve site navigation. Different problems will require different solutions. For ideas that may help, try perusing my:

• Planning Your Web Site Tutorial
• Marketing Articles
• Writing Articles
• SEO Tips

Do your old goals still apply?

When I started this blog the goal was primarily educational. While that goal remains, my site now is also meant to attract potential clients. Whether your site is for a business, university, non-profit or your own personal use, your situation may have changed in the past year. Think about whether your own goals have changed and what you might add or change on the site so that it can continue to support both your needs and those of your site visitors.

Changes in technology

Trixi's are electrically assisted pedal cycles you can ride in Malaga, Spain. On your Web site, you don't always need to use the latest technology, you just need to use that which works best for your site visitors.

Generally speaking (very generally) the Web works pretty much the way it always has. If you view a site built in 1993 in a modern browser it will probably still work to one degree or another. But the technology has also evolved. Newer browsers are beginning to support HTML 5.0 and CSS 3. Designers are experimenting with those standards, while also trying to ensure that the sites they build degrade nicely when viewed in Internet Explorer 6.0.

Where does your site stand in terms of current technology? Does it support the browsers used by your visitors? Does your site use deprecated code? Are you still using tables for layout? Was it optimized for IE 6 in a way that it will break if viewed in IE 7 or Firefox? Are you supporting mobile devices? Should you? Have you incorporated social media features? Are you embedding audio and video in the most effective manner? We have far more options today than we did when the Web began, but that also means we have more potential for conflict. A flash-based site won't run on your new iPad and your CSS3 rounded corners won't be visible in IE6.

Your site has its own unique requirements and probably doesn't need all of the latest bells and whistles. If you don't need to support mobile just yet, or aren't designing for the iPad, then don't worry about that. The important thing is just to make sure that you are using the features and coding that work best for your target audience.

General maintenance

When you first launched your site, you and everyone else involved probably read each page countless times. But typos's and other minor errors may still lurk. Now that some time has passed proofread the site again with fresh eyes. You'll be surprised at what you might find. This is a good opportunity to catch spelling errors, or tweak some copy so it flows more smoothly. While you're reading through the pages, check your links. to make sure they still work. If a page has moved or a site has been deleted you will want to replace it with a working link. You may also decide to add links to newer or more comprehensive resources in addition to those old links.

As you explore your site, put yourself in the shoes of your target audience. Does your content still make sense? Are things missing that you didn't notice before? Looking at the site again after a long time can give you a fresh perspective and suggest ideas that you may not have thought of last time around.

Out with the old, in with the new? Not necessarily.

Market: Agadir, Morocco. This donkey may seem old-fashioned, but there is no reason to replace him with something new. As long he remains fuel efficient and can haul produce, he's still serving the needs of his owner—just as your historical content serves the needs of your site visitors.

Some people worry that having old pages on a site makes it look like they've not bothered to update it. But the age of a page doesn't matter as much as the information it contains. If your products page still lists that 20lb hand vacuum you stopped manufacturing 5 years ago, then yes, it's probably time to remove it. You don't want people trying to buy things you aren't selling. But you could also move this information to an historic products section where you include appropriate support materials, such as a .pdf of the user manual. This could be helpful to current customers.

I'm a bit of a pack rat, so I hate to get rid of anything that might be useful, but as you review your site, you too will notice that some older information still has value and is worth keeping. Here are some examples:

Factual information that doesn't change.

If your office has been in the same location for 20 years, then the page listing your address and phone number is probably still accurate. For pages like this, just give them a cursory review to see if all the information is correct and if anything is missing that might help your readers. For example, if you don't have a map, this may be a good time to add one. If you have out-of-date photos of the office, then perhaps a few fresh ones are in order. But otherwise that page may remain accurate for several years to come.

Press releases, news and articles

Press release are timely in nature, but they also provide an historical record of the news your organization has produced. These pages may contain valuable information that tells readers about your track record for innovation, the progress you've made, the endurance of your group, etc. Some organizations like to remove older news stories because they think that visitors will accidentally come across an article from 1985 and think it's current.

But there is an easy solution for that, especially if you maintain such documents using blogging software or other content management tools. Just make sure any news content contains the date it was published. Then you can keep this content in online archives that make it easy for visitors to browse while still showcasing what is new and what is not. In many cases this information is helpful not only for outside readers but also for your employees. If they're trying to find out more about how you launched product X in 1998, or who was the head of IT in 2001, this gives them a good start.

Recurring Events

If you hold an annual conference or other recurring event, consider maintaining archives of the event site for each year. While this year's site may showcase the location and speakers for the current year, the archives can tell the story of past years. Discovering who spoke before, watching videos or slides from past events, and other details can help readers decide whether or not to attend. Such archives also demonstrate that the event has a history of success, and as with news items, these archives offer information that may be useful to newer employees.

Evergreen Content

Evergreen content refers to information that is more timeless and less likely to go out-of-date. For example, my article, Voice and Tone: Writing to reflect your personality as well as your message (Part 1), still brings in search traffic 3 years after it was written, because the ideas within still apply today.

Reflections on social media networking and marketing, on the other hand, was written more recently but references social media services that no longer exist, such as Pownce. While some of the content in the article is still relevant, other parts are outdated.

Including evergreen content on your site is a good way to bring in traffic, because people will continue to search for such information for years to come. When they find your site, and discover it also offers other useful resources, they may also stick around to explore it further.

Don't break the Web when/if you delete pages

Closed roads during the Barcelona Marathon prevented our taxi from reaching our hotel. Thankfully the subway provided us with an alternative way to reach our destination. Similarly 301 redirects can help guide your visitors to theirs.

The Web, by nature, is interconnected by links. When we delete pages, we also break any links that go to those pages, thus causing confusion to visitors who follow the links and headaches for those who link to us. If a page is out-of-date and you want to delete it, see first if there is a way to make it more current.

If not, then you may want to set up a 301 redirect that will automatically take users (and robots who index the Web) to a more appropriate page. Another option is to add a disclaimer explaining that the page is an archival page with out-of-date information. This can include manual links to other pages you recommend users visit instead. Users who are guided to more appropriate materials, rather than to a 404 error page, are more likely to find what they need and continue to explore the site.

I have a blog, so my site is already up-to-date.

If you have a blog on your site, and you write with some degree of regularity, then you have a huge advantage over those who maintain more static Web sites. You've been adding fresh content all year, so it probably does include current information. But what about the other pages?

Are your entries and archives easy to browse? Perhaps what worked last year is less manageable now that you have so many more posts. What about your About page? Does it reflect your current editorial policy? Are there other pages you could add that would enhance your user experience? While frequent blogging keeps you involved with your site, a spring review let's you view the site anew and may give you ideas to make your blog even better.

The colors on our site are so 2005, we need a full redesign.

Don't panic. A site review may make small problems look bigger than they seem. The key here is to maintain perspective and look for issues that truly impact your goals and the user experience. While out-of-date product descriptions can be a problem, out-of-date colors may not be. If people aren't applying to your program, don't blame the visuals. They may need some sprucing up, when time allows, but your content and calls to action are probably the areas that need the most help. Craigslist, for example, isn't winning many design awards, but it continues to be a popular and productive site. As the site owner, you may be bored with the look and feel of your site, but that doesn't mean the same is true for users.

While you may be tempted to start over with a full site redesign, in most cases you don't need one. If your site is supporting its goals, and visitors seem happy, then just focus on small corrections, updates and improvements. If the flaws seem to be adding up to a nightmare, then you may want to do a more thorough analysis, but there's no reason to look for a catastrophe unless it really exists.

Regular care and feeding of your Web site

Web sites are like pets. You can't just stick them in a cage and ignore them. (No stuffed animals were harmed while shooting this photo.)

Ideally we'd all maintain and care for our sites on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. How often we should do this depends on the nature of our goals, our content and the scope of our sites. Alas for many of us time slips away, or we don't have sufficient staff to keep up. Others spend the little time they have just updating the necessary bits and may not have the opportunity to really review the site in terms of its overall performance.

A spring cleaning review gives us the chance to really look at how our site is doing as a whole, and to approach it from a fresh perspective. After we've gone through the process we can also get a sense of whether our normal maintenance and review schedule is on track or whether we have to make time to care for our site more frequently.

How is your site performing?

Are you able to maintain it as often as you like? Do you have tips to share with others? Do you measure your results on a regular basis? What did you learn from your last site review? Please share your ideas and questions in the comments below.

Resources for the care, feeding and maintenance of your Web site

• 5 Lists Every Web site Owner Should Keep
• Evaluating Web Sites: Criteria and Tools (This is actually a guide for student researchers, but could add perspective to our own site reviews)
• Fresh vs. Familiar: How Aggressively to Redesign (Spring cleaning doesn't usually require a full redesign.)
• Internal Site Search Analysis: Simple, Effective, Life Altering! (added insights into your users' experience on your site)
• Web site Maintenance Musts

Fan me on Facebook—Follow me on Twitter

We all know these blog posts don't get written as frequently as I'd like. But that doesn't mean you need to go weeks without hearing me babble. Over on http://www.facebook.com/heidicool, I'm sharing one tip per day, usually as a short paragraph with a link to something interesting I've found in the blogosphere.

At one tip per week day it won't clog your Facebook stream, but hopefully you'll find something useful. And for more links (and ramblings that may not always be related to the Web) I usually Tweet and reTweet a few (or several) times per day at @hacool. (I also have links to more accounts on My Social Media Profiles page and am now also babbling on Buzz.)

P.S. All the photos in this entry were shot on my recent holiday. I've not posted many yet, but there are a few more in my Spain, Morocco, Portugal collection on Flickr.

United Airlines received a ton of bad publicity after their baggage handlers broke Dave Carroll's guitar. According to Carroll, United did later offer to pay for the repair. He asked them to make a charitable donation instead, which they did.

But imagine the other possible responses they could have made. What if they made a video explaining how they are going to correct the problem to prevent future mishaps? Or a video about the charitable cause that will benefit from their donation?

If they did this the bloggers and media outlets who post Carroll's United Breaks Guitars video could also post United's response and the world would see that they took the problem seriously—all for much less than the cost of a television ad.

Today I had lunch with John Heaney, a local Cleveland entrepreneur, marketer and social media advocate who also blogs about marketing at Orange Envelopes. One of the topics we discussed was the hesitancy some organizations have about implementing social media strategies.

Issues about controlling the message, intellectual property, firewalls, time commitment, return on investment (ROI), measuring results and goal setting are all common concerns, but in particular John raised a point that I've been hearing a lot about lately: negativity.

Specifically we've both heard from individuals and companies who worry that if you're participating in social media, you run the risk that people will say something bad about you. This is true, but the risk is there whether you are online or not. No matter how ethical or clever you may be, someone, somewhere, will be ready to disagree. There's no getting around that. None of us is capable of pleasing everyone all the time. But if we're participating ourselves, we can:

Listen:

People will talk about you or your organization whether or not you can hear them. Ignoring them won't keep the criticism at bay, so you might as well pay attention. If you set up Google alerts on your name or brand, subscribe to Yahoo and Google news search feeds, Twitter searches, etc. you can find out what they're saying about you—be it good or bad—immediately. If we know what others are saying about us on their blogs, our blogs, Twitter, Facebook, online media, discussion forums and elsewhere, we have the opportunity to take advantage of that knowledge and use it productively.

Learn:

Criticism comes in many forms. Some people (trolls) like to leave rude blog comments or make nasty remarks about your brand just because they're angry or they like to stir up a bit of controversy. But other comments can be more constructive. If someone complains about your customer service or your product, this points out a potential problem. You can now determine if this is something you need to fix or if it was just a one-time issue. Someone's product problem could also give you a great idea for a new product or a new version of an existing one. If someone's critique can lead you to build a better mousetrap, then it's worth a listen.

Evaluate:

What was the context of the criticism? Does it have a bearing on your reputation? Your customer service? Your product design? Should this information be passed onto others in your organization, or can it be safely ignored?

Rebecca Kelley, Director of Social Media for 10e20, recently wrote a critical blog post about a panel discussion she attended, Black Hat vs. White Hat Social Media and the Battle for Common Sense. In the original post she had made some negative remarks about Beth Harte who is the Community Manager at MarketingProfs and very well regarded for her knowledge of social media marketing. (I read her blog, The Harte of Marketing and follow Beth Harte on Twitter.) Beth evaluated the situation and chose not to respond. As it happened, other people reacted for her. Readers responded in ardent support of Beth. Rebecca read their comments. She then toned down her blog entry, documented the change and contacted Beth directly to arrange to discuss the panel more thoroughly. Beth and Rebecca each listened and evaluated the situation so that the matter could be peacefully resolved.

You don't need to act on every mention that is made of you, but if you listen regularly you can develop a system of triage in which you determine which mentions deserve which reactions. If you do this regularly and establish a policy, you'll be prepared for the big nasty—that seemingly harmless negative reaction that will get you bad international press if you don't respond in the right manner.

Act:

Once you've evaluated a comment—and deemed it worthy of a reaction—it's time to use that knowledge productively. Can the comment help you improve your widget design? Send it to your product development team. Has it shown a weakness in your customer service department? How can you fix it? Frank Eliason of Comcast became the international poster boy—for using social media to enhance customer service—when he start solving people's problems on his Twitter account, Comcastcares.

Respond:

Let the person who made the comment know what you intend to do. As I recently wrote in Here’s how one web designer deals with negative comments, I like to take a deep breath and step back a bit before responding. If during your evaluation you decide that a response isn't necessary, then you can get back to other matters. But if a response is warranted, then one wants to react clearly and tactfully. Did the person point out a problem that you are going to solve? Explain how you will solve it. Was the comment the result of a misunderstanding? See what you can do to clarify the confusion—while allowing the commenter to save face. If you take the diplomatic route then you both have a better chance of coming out with your reputation in tact. If you respond in anger you'll just make the problem worse.

If you can't solve the problem, do your best to explain why in a manner that will let the commenter know you really did your best. Share the situation with higher-ups in your organization, find out if there is a way to turn the problem into an opportunity, and keep listening.

Establish a baseline reputation via social media NOW.

I've been telling people for years that they need to establish their online presence before someone else does it for them. It behooves us all to take control of our own message. If I'm a small business without a Web site or other online presence, then the only things people will find when Googling my business will be reviews from others, media mentions, social media comments and other opinions written from an external perspective. If I build a site (or hire Heidi to build it for me), start a blog, create a Facebook page, share tips on Twitter, etc. then I can share my expertise and let people know what my business stands for.

What John cleverly pointed out, during our lunch, was that this social media presence also serves to establish your baseline reputation for providing good customer service, offering educational content or whatever else you might be communicating through social media. If you've been doing this regularly, then next year, when customer X blogs about your lousy information resources, he won't have as much clout. Other readers will see that most customers love your blog, enjoy using your customer discussion forum, follow your Tweets, etc. Customer X isn't speaking for the masses, but is instead in the minority.

And, since you are already listening, you will now be ready to respond to customer X in a timely and appropriate manner. If all goes well X can join the majority of your other happy customers. This is a far better outcome than you'll have if X writes a song—extolling your failures—that just happens to go viral on YouTube.

Related Social Media Resources

• A Chronology of Brands that Got Punk’d by Social Media
• Biggest Mistakes Made by Social Media Gurus
• Chicago Domino’s Gets Social Media Right!
• My biggest social media mistakes by Mack Collier
• Top 10 Twitter marketing blunders in photos
• United Airlines Online Public Response to Dave Carroll YouTube Video: 9 Tweets

heidicool.com is also on Facebook

I'm using the page to share one Web related tip or link each day, so that you can get more tips between blog posts—without being overwhelmed by a plethora of links. Become a fan today to receive these updates.

July meeting of the Cleveland Webbloggers

Social media is a great way to make face-to-face connections. I started going to our Cleveland Webbloggers meet-up group last summer. These real-life meetings have given me a chance to get to know the personalities behind the usernames. When we gather together, be it in a small group like last week or a larger assembly of 20 or more, we'll talk about anything from writing and blogging platforms to Cleveland politics and philosophy. The mood of the group sets the topic and the tone. But at it's core, the Cleveland Webbloggers group gives us a chance to share ideas and best practices with our peers, whether they blog professionally or just for fun.

Of course, as you know, one can only cover so much material in one monthly meeting. And not all of our peers are local. To reach others in our topical niche, particularly those who may come from other industries or backgrounds, we reach out through the Web. Each week via social media services such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, StumbleUpon, blogs, etc., I connect with people all over the world, from Syracuse to Singapore.

Most of this is done via time shifting. If I'm still up and Tweeting, when my friend Wayne gets to work in England, it means I've stayed up well past my bedtime. While that is not unusual, it is more often the case that Wayne will share a link via Twitter or save a bookmark on Delicious while I'm off dreaming about vampire sea turtles discovering underwater time portals—or whatever other nonsense floats through my mind. After I wake up I'll see what he and the other Europeans have shared so that I can respond, share my own links, and so forth. Generally speaking this works quite well.

Time-shifting is incredibly useful, but sometimes it's just more efficient to meet in real-time. Skype calls and chat rooms are quite handy when you know the participants in advance. But for larger topical meetings—open to a wide audience—real-time chats via Twitter are a popular alternative.

Last night I spent 2 hours chatting with 100+ fellow bloggers on my couch.

100 people would be a tight fit even on a giant couch like this.

As you may have guessed, my couch doesn't have enough room to accommodate 100 people. But it does have plenty of room for me and my laptop—through which I can login to Twitter and start chatting with bloggers, social media advocates or any other group that meets regularly online.

What are real-time Twitter chats and how do they work?

Real-time Twitter chats are typically held on a weekly basis, though scheduling may vary. Each topic-based chat picks a recurring day and time to meet, then assigns a unique hashtag for users to add to their Tweets. The hashtags mark the Tweets as belonging to the chat so that users can easily follow the discussion through a variety of online tools.

At the start of a chat, a moderator/host will typically ask people to introduce themselves, then ask questions or suggest specific topics for discussion. Some chats may follow a rigid format such as devoting 15 minutes to each question, while other chats evolve more organically. I participate regularly in two chats:

• #blogchat, hosted by @MackCollier is a forum for people to discuss issues related to blogging, including writing, marketing, blog platforms, RSS feeds, design, etc. Meetings are held Sunday nights at 9:00 p.m. U.S. eastern time.
• #smchat, hosted by @SourcePOV (Chris Jones) "explores Social Media best practices, and new ways to drive value in this space, with thought to collaborative innovation and viable knowledge networks." Meetings are held Wednesdays at 1:00 p.m. U.S. eastern time.

Other popular chats include #journchat ( journalists, bloggers and public relations—one of the oldest and most popular chats), #litchat (for booklovers) and #eventprofs (for event planning professionals). Meryl K. Evans assembled a very useful list of Twitter chats on her blog. New chats are constantly being added, so the list is now maintained as an interactive spreadsheet. Whether you are interested in agriculture, design, or food, there's probably a chat available to suit your needs. If not, check the schedule, choose a time, pick a hashtag and start one yourself!

Tools for following Twitter hashtags

If you're following more than a dozen people on Twitter, you've probably noticed that it gets a bit noisy. Trying to follow a hashtag in the middle of your normal Twitter stream can be even more difficult. Thankfully there are a variety of Twitter services and tools that can help. Here are a few of the more popular ones.

Tweetchat

Twitter Search

If you search on a particular hashtag, such as #smchat, Twitter search will pull up a list of all the most recent Tweets including that hashtag. If you see a Tweet to which you would like to respond, you can just click the reply button, write your message and type #smchat at the end of your Tweet. Then return to the search page to continue reading.

TweetChat

Sign into Tweetchat using your existing Twitter ID and password. Then type in the hashtag you would like to follow, such as #blogchat, and TweetChat will present you with a page listing all of the current #blogchat Tweets. Tweetchat features a box where you can type your Tweets and also includes buttons that make it easy to reply or retweet messages.

Tweetgrid

Tweetgrid works similarly to Tweetchat and is the service I use most often. Simply search on the hashtag you wish to follow and you will be brought to a page listing the recent Tweets with a feature enabling you to reply, reTweet, etc. If you select the "party" option instead of the "search" option you can also designate your username and the username(s) of the chat's host. This will bring up a page showing separate columns for the main stream, your own Tweets, and those of the moderator. This can make things a bit easier to follow.

What the hashtag?!

This user-editable hashtag encyclopedia let's users follow a chat as they would in other tools, but also let's moderators add descriptive information about the hashtag to the page. Users may also create transcripts of chat sessions based on date-ranges. These can be printed to .pdf files to be saved for archival purposes. As an example you can read the .pdf transcript from this week's #blogchat.

Monitter

Monitter is a tool to let you monitor keywords used on Twitter in real-time. When you enter the site you are presented with 3 columns listing various searches. Replace the search in any column with a hashtag, @username or plain word to follow it's mentions. You can respond to conversations by clicking a reply or retweet button appearing under each Tweet.

Tweetdeck

Tweetdeck is an Adobe Air application that you can use instead of the Twitter Web page for all of your Twitter activities. I use it because I can create columns multiple columns on topics such as Cleveland, marketing and higher education to which I can assign the users I follow most frequently. Tweetdeck also lets you filter columns by keywords, follow Facebook status updates and create search columns. The latter is another popular way to follow a hashtag or chat.

While these tools are helpful for following Twitter chats, they're also handy for following hashtags for other reasons. People use hashtags for topical searches such as tracking #recipes people post on Twitter, following Tweets related to conferences/events and to keep track of trending topics such as the Iran Election or Spymaster.

Twitter real-time chats offer access to new insights and opinions

As I hinted in the beginning, real-time chats give us the opportunity to connect with people we might never have the chance to meet locally. They give us access to people from a variety of backgrounds and experiences. I find this useful because it gives me insights into different perspectives.

For instance, recently on #smchat a lot of discussion has been focused on the topics of intellectual property and knowledge management. This is a concern for many companies exploring social media. They want to share information with customers that will help sell products and they want to share knowledge with other business and government collaborators as part of product development. But they also need to safeguard trade secrets and other confidential information. So the question for us is, how do they manage both? Should companies restrict access to technologies that make sharing easier? Should they open up technologies but educate users about policies regarding what should and shouldn't be shared? If we as social media advocates come up with solutions, how do we educate the corporate leaders who would implement such policies? How does the model change based on the industry in question or the communications goal? These are hard questions, so naturally we could spend months or years trying to sort this all out.

What's intriguing about this discussion is the variety of minds adding input. When I worked for a university I pondered communications concerns with colleagues in my department, the attorneys' office, ITS or with clients in other campus departments. I might also ponder such ideas with others in higher education or Web development. But I rarely had the chance to hold such discussions with attorneys, engineers, marketers, accountants, etc., working in industries ranging from consultants and government contractors to advertising agencies, restaurant managers and manufacturers—all at the same time.

I find this useful because people in industry X may be facing challenges that those of us in industry Y never encounter. By bringing everyone together we have a unique opportunity to learn how these questions impact others and we can take away knowledge that we can put to use in our own fields. This strikes me a an incredibly valuable way to collaborate.

Twitter chats are a great way to find cool Tweeps

Of course, useful insights tend to be shared by smart minds. The people who provide the ideas are people worth following. I often follow (and am followed back by) dozens of new contacts after a good chat session. While many Twitter users are overly concerned with gaining a large quantity of followers, my focus is on quality. It's hard enough to follow 1,000+ people, so if I'm going to do it they better have something useful to say. The people I meet during Twitter chats do.

This sounds great, but seriously, how could you possibly have a worthwhile discussion in 140 character Tweets?

Before I started attending chats I wondered the same thing. It's challenging to make a point in 140 characters, especially when those characters must also include the hashtag. But in a way it's easier in real-time. If you make point A, and I respond with point B, you'll see it right away. Then you can respond back and things start flowing like a normal conversation. You may have to break up an idea into a few separate Tweets, but somehow it all comes together.

Conversations begun during Twitter chat can also continue later in other venues. For instance #smchat has a sister site on Ning through which users can post discussions, questions, videos and other documents. Mack Collier, posts a recap of the #blogchat on his blog to which users can add additional comments. With all of the social media tools available, there's always some way to continue the conversation.

If there's a Twitter chat related to your field of interest, I highly recommend giving it a try.

Twitter chat and hashtag resources

• Fast & Furious - Twitter Chat (reactions from a guest chat host)
• #hashtags directory
• List of Twitter Chats
• Tweet Your Message to a Larger Audience with Hashtags
• Tweeting With Your Twitter Community: How To Participate In A Twitter Chat

Recently a fellow on LinkedIn asked about developing Web content for lead generation. His company produces equipment used in manufacturing. This equipment is sold through sales representatives who can work with prospective clients to choose the product best suited to their needs. Thus the goal for his Web site is to solicit qualified sales inquiries from prospective customers.

Generating leads is different than generating direct sales.

If you are marketing books, you can sell directly to the customer via the Web. On a site like Amazon I can look at a product description, read some reviews and make up my mind right away. If the book sounds promising and the price is right, I'll click the "add to cart" button and be on my way.

But what if my purchase represents a more significant investment?

What if I'm shopping for a $500,000 machine that goes "bing." This is not the kind of thing I'll blithely add to my online shopping cart. This is the kind of thing I'll research. Based on the (hopefully) thoroughly prepared needs of my organization I'll start my research on the Web looking for product information, recommendations, etc. The information I find on the manufacturer's Web site, via Google and Yahoo News, on Twitter, etc. will help me narrow down my list of potential vendors.

If you happen to market a machine that goes "bing" and have made my short list, then I'll become a qualified sales lead as soon as I fill out your online contact form. At this point it is up to your sales staff to match my needs to the right item in your product line. If all goes well, I'll buy the machine, it will serve my needs, and the next time I visit your site will be to share ideas, tips and tricks on your customer forum or to buy another machine.

The costs of dissatisfaction—what we want to avoid

Alas, not every story has a happy ending. But the level of unhappiness depends on the situation.

If it's spring and I'm ordering herbs from your online catalog, I have certain expectations. I want the plants to arrive healthy and ready for the garden. If the mint plant I ordered turns out to be basil, I'll be disappointed, but I'll probably just end up making pesto and e-mailing you to see about getting the mint.

If I've bought a machine that is supposed to go "bing" but instead goes "ploing," my unhappiness level goes up considerably. If the machine doesn't perform as expected it could frustrate the staff who operates it, produce inferior products that my customers don't want, increase my costs, decrease my revenues, etc. Who will I blame for my unhappiness? I'll blame you, the manufacturer who made the machine. Who will hear about my dissatisfaction? In this age of social media, it could be anyone. Obviously I'd start by seeing if my sales representative could resolve the problem. But if not, a quick grumble on Twitter, Facebook or a blog can ripple through the Internet quite rapidly.

Now everyone's unhappy including your attorney, sales department, media staff, other customers who begin questioning the quality of their machines, etc. This negative turn of events could lead to a return of the product, a lawsuit, bad press, the loss of my future business and the loss of business from other customers.

If you're a legitimate organization interested in generating repeat business, rather than making a quick sale and skipping town, this is obviously a situation you want to avoid.

Preventing unhappiness—qualifying leads on the Web

With big ticket items much of the decision making is done during the sales process, after the lead from your Web site is turned over to your sales representative. As Web marketers we can't do much about that, but what we can do is manage expectations by providing clear and accurate online material on what our products or services can or cannot do. This will help to insure that the leads we pass onto the sales team are from well-informed consumers who have an actual need for our product or service.

Our job, as lead generators, is to make introductions. Just as a matchmaker vets her clients to ensure they are potentially compatible, we want to vet our site visitors to ensure that they:

• Are in the market for a product or service we offer.
• Can afford to purchase the product or service we offer.
• Wish to make a purchase in the near future (they aren't just window shopping).

We also want to educate our potential customers so they can assess us. They will want to know that:

• Our product or service will serve their particular needs.
• We offer the most efficient and cost-effective solution to their situation.
• It won't require undue amounts of modification to do the job.
• Our customer service team will offer ongoing support to help them get the most out of their purchase.
• They can trust in our quality and expertise both now and in the future.

The material on our site should give our visitors the knowledge they need to determine if our offering has the potential to meet their needs. For example, if you are in the market for a Web site, my Web services page will show you the types of services I provide, and my portfolio and this site overall will give you examples of my work. If you want to dig deeper, this blog and my Planning Your Web Site Tutorial will tell you more about my Web philosophy. From this you can learn that I can develop a site that will serve your academic department, small/medium business, blog, etc. so that you can inquire about how I may help you develop a site suited to your goals.

I don't publish pricing, because there are too many variables involved—you can assume that I'll cost more than your nephew who taught himself HTML and less than some giant uber cool design agency. Not listing prices is common in lead generation because customers often have a budget in mind and may exclude a vendor on price alone. If our actual costs are fixed, we could publish prices to let clients make the choice immediately. But if pricing is flexible, it better serves our clients if we can work with them to find a service or product that fits their budget while still serving their end goal.

It's also important that our sites provide enough information to let customers know if we're not the right solution for them. If my services aren't right for you, it's better for you to know that from the start. If you're the Behemoth corporation and you need a new 15,000+ page site that will require a large team to input the content, write custom programming and shoot video it makes perfect sense that you'd be better served by working with a larger firm.

I'm continuously tweaking my site to better serve the above objectives—and have come up with some new ideas while writing this article—but in the end my site (and yours) must serve the needs of our visitors.

If our Web presence (which may extend beyond our own sites to include social media and news sites) can match qualified parties with the right product or service, while weeding out those who would be better served with something else, then we'll have done our jobs. Our sales team will be one step closer to making a sale that will be satisfactory to both parties.

Content development for matchmaking

This all seems obvious enough but how do we do this? How much information should we provide to entice customers to make an inquiry? If we offer too much information, such as pricing and detailed product specifications might we accidentally turn away customers who would actually be a good match?

That all depends on the product or service we're offering. Each situation is unique, but it all comes down to educating our audience. We have to let them know the core qualities of our offer so they know whether it has the potential to suit them. And we have to let them know where the wiggle room exists in situations like pricing. If there are specific areas or features in which questions may arise, we should use these as opportunities for them to make an inquiry.

College and university admissions Web sites can teach us a lot about this. While university Web sites, as a whole, tend to offer information on almost anything you would want to know about a school, the admissions sites are aimed specifically at recruitment. As we all know, a university education is very expensive. It also requires a time commitment. You'll not only pay a lot to go school, but you'll be living there for at least four years. What you experience in those four years will affect the rest of your life, so picking the right school is one of the most important purchasing decisions most of us will ever make.

Admission sites usually provide a good overview of campus life and academics, but they know we can't make an application decision based on student quotes, course listings and pretty pictures alone. They're also quite aware that they're in the matchmaking business, they want to attract students who will benefit from what they have to offer and they want to accept students who will add value to the school through their research, leadership, volunteerism, personality, etc.

To help students through the process, schools may:

• Ask students to join a mailing list so they can get updates from the university.
• Publish calendars of regional events where students can meet admissions counselors in their hometown.
• Invite students for campus open houses where they can spend a weekend on campus with a current student.
• Blog about the admissions process and what to expect.
• Showcase the availability of financial aid to show that the school is more affordable than tuition would indicate.
• Arrange for them to interview with alumni.
• Help them connect with a sports coach or professor in their field of interest.

These are all opportunities that allow the school to connect with—and help guide—the potential student, just as a sales representative might guide a prospective customer. Each place this information is shown—on the Web—creates a lead generating moment in which the student is given the opportunity to connect online or in person with someone who can answer questions and provide more in depth information.

Admissions officers are well aware of the factors a student considers when choosing a school so they focus on the core factors as areas to generate leads on their Web sites.

But similar information is available in the corporate world. If you're developing content to generate leads, talk to your sales representatives. They can show you what factors apply to your product or service. They may also be able to introduce you to current customers who can give you insights into how they made their purchasing decisions.

Happy endings: educated site visitors are more likely to buy

You may send out e-mails and brochures, but your Web site is online 24 hours a day all year long. For many customers your site is the first impression they'll have of your organization, product or service. If you give them the information they need and offer convenient points for them to make contact you'll have started them off with a good impression and you'll provide your sales/admissions/recruitment team with leads who've already expressed a sincere interest in your product or service.

This will make it easier for the sales representative to match the prospect with the best product or service for his/her needs and make the actual sale. If the sale is made and the match turns out to be well-made then our long-term benefits are greater than the one sale alone. Most of us want repeat business. If we're making heavy equipment we want to sell more of it to our current customers. If they're happy with our products and service they will buy more. If we're a university we want the relationship with our students to continue past graduation. We look to alumni to become donors, volunteers and good will ambassadors for our schools.

We can't achieve all of that with a Web site alone, but we can use our sites to lay the foundation upon which the rest of the relationship is built. If we're generating leads, we're not selling widgets. We're making introductions that could lead to long-term relationships.

What's your story?

Do you have a lead generation story you would like to share? What's worked for your site? If you have tips or best practices, please feel free to share them in the comments below.

Related Marketing Articles

• MKTG 101: Web Content Should Serve Visitor Needs
• Copy Writing: Long vs. Short, Does it Matter?
• Don’t build your Web site in a vacuum

Edu Blogger Scholarship Update

I didn't win the top prize, but I did win one of the two smaller blogging scholarships. Thank you all for you support and kudos to fellow Ohio blog, The Old College Try for the winning entry.

At some point in the past you revamped your site for search engine optimization (SEO). Now it's time to measure your results, and share them with your client or development team. These people come from a variety of backgrounds. Some of the marketers will be perfectly happy to look at your Google Analytics page or stare at your graphs and spreadsheets. Others will quietly gaze at your numbers and wonder (to themselves) what any of this means—and they might not ask you for clarification.

This provides us with a teaching moment that we can use to enhance our SEO in the future. Rather than sending out a dry report or giving a presentation that falls on deaf ears, use this as an opportunity to remind people of what it is you are trying to achieve.

What are we trying to accomplish with SEO?

All we're trying to do with SEO is to make our sites more findable through search engines. The point is to optimize our site content and code in a manner that allows people with some interest in our organization, product, content or services to easily find our site, and the information they seek, when using search engines such as Google or Yahoo.

It's important to remind your team that SEO is not an end goal. It will not get students to apply to your program, buy your widgets or drink your Kool-Aid. But it will bring more traffic—from those with an interest in your stuff—to your site so that your content can encourage them to do those things.

How do we measure SEO?

If our SEO strategy is working we should see an increase in

• traffic from search engines
• time spent on site by search engine visitors
• conversions (search engine visitors attending your events, signing up for your classes, buying your rhinestone studded earmuffs, etc.)

These are the core things to review. To learn more, visit the sites listed at the bottom of this entry.

What's working and what's not

Swim with Sea Turtles while studying marine biology

You've looked at those numbers and everything's gone up. Yay! Or perhaps it hasn't. Boo! How can you tell what's performing well and what needs to be improved? This is where your keywords come into play. If our point is to bring in qualified traffic—people more likely to enroll in our marine ecology program or donate to our new cosmology research center—then that traffic will come from people who have searched on words and phrases related to marine ecology or cosmology.

If what they find on our site matches what they were seeking they are more likely to enroll, donate, etc.

Google analytics, and other such programs provide quantifiable data on key words and phrases used, the number of visits per word or phrase, average time spent on site by those visitors, average number of pages visited, etc. The top 10 phrases for my blog for the past month were:

• tone in writing
• writing tone
• browser testing
• web development blog
• logo
• tone of writing
• social media networking
• add caption to photo in css
• writers tone
• converting word doc to html

I can learn a lot from this (and the rest of the report listing 3,007 words or phrases.) In reviewing this data I'll consider:

Does my site offer the content described in these phrases?

Yes, although my entries about a logo are outdated, the other topics continue to be relevant and I know from past experience that my articles on tone and writing are my most popular pages.

Does my content provide the information users seek?

Yes, they are spending enough time on the pages to read them. If visitors came for 10 seconds and left I would know that they were looking for something different, and that I should reword some things to draw in more relevant traffic and to not waste the time of visitors who clearly want something else.

Are expected terms missing from the list?

No. But if I'd written the definitive post on the eating habits of owls and didn't find any listings for bird, eating, diet, owl, etc. then I'd know I have to edit that article and do some research to determine the most effective key words to include.

Using Wordle word clouds to visualize the results.

I'm the kind of nerd that is perfectly content to spend time poking about in spreadsheets. But 3,007 phrases are still a lot to swallow, and those are just for my little blog. If you have a large university or corporate site your list could be exponentially larger.

Also, people don't all search the same way. They use variations on the same terms. In my list we have 4 variations on writing and tone. If I want to quantify those properly it means merging terms together adding up the combined results etc. How much data you need to quantify depends on your needs, but in many cases you just need to get a sense of which terms are prominent and which are not. This will help your content producers so they can edit their copy to enhance the results in the future.

To get a quicker sense of what's working, I like to copy my results into http://www.wordle.net which let's me create a word cloud of the terms, as shown in the two examples below. Terms showing up more frequently are larger while infrequent terms are smaller. Word clouds can be especially helpful in presentations and reports because they make it easy for readers with varying skill sets to get the point.

In this first example, I copied all phrases that generated 20 or more visits to the site so I could focus on the most frequently used phrases. (This narrowed the list to just a bit over 100). I also removed terms like "of" or "and" so that I could focus on keywords only.

As you can see, "tone" and "writing" show up prominently, as we'd expect from our list. The other words that are easily read are also things I've written about, and it would be easy to notice if a topic I was trying to promote was missing.

Watch for irrelevant results

While it's most important to make sure that our topics show up, it's also important to watch for words we're not trying to promote. If, for example, I saw "Beluga whales" in large letters, and I'd only mentioned them casually in passing it would mean that I was bringing in a lot of people who wanted to learn more about whales. While traffic is good, misguided traffic is not. The people who want to know about whales could care less about my thoughts on Web development so there is no reason for me to waste their time. If that term showed up here I would want to rewrite my article to reduce the number of times I mention Beluga whales.

Fine tuning your word cloud

While this first Wordle word cloud is helpful, it's not overly precise. Some terms, such as "development," are smaller than I might expect. That's because my content wasn't weighted. My analytics report gave me both a list of phrases and the number of times they were used. I pasted in the phrases but not proportionally to their frequency of use. The words that are larger are showing up that way only because they were used in a variety of search phrases. Huh?

"Tone in writing" generated 949 visits in a given time period. "Flash embed script" generated 20. For my Wordle to more accurately reflect the frequency in which these terms were used, I'd need to paste the phrases in as many times as they were used, or in a smaller, but proportional, amount.

To determine how many times to paste in each phrase, I put all the phrases and their frequencies in a spreadsheet similar to the following table. I was only using phrases that brought 20 or more visits so my lowest frequency is 20. If I divide each of my frequencies by a factor of 20, then round the results to a whole number, I come up with a manageable number of phrases to paste.

Phrase Frequency Table

To make my improved Wordle, I pasted "tone writing" in 47 times, "writing tone" 21 times, etc. as indicated by the chart. This rendered an accurate cloud, but "writing" and "tone" were so enormous that you could barely read anything else. To improve readability, I deleted several copies of those phrases so they were still dominant but not so much that you'd need a magnifying glass to read the other words.

This word cloud provides a more accurate representation of the frequency in which these words and phrases bring traffic to the site. When reporting to your client or team you can use such a word cloud to easily show which words are pulling in traffic and which are missing. This visual representation makes it easy for everyone to see what's going on, even those not fond of graphs and spreadsheets.

If you find that it takes too much time to generate the second version of the cloud, the first version is still helpful. You just have to remember that it's not as precise.

An educated Web team is an effective Web team

SEO can be confusing to both clients and other members of your team. A client may have overly optimistic expectations. A writer may not fully understand why you keep pushing them to use key words and phrases. But if you can teach them about SEO basics and give examples of what you are trying to accomplish, you can set realistic goals and ensure that all members of the team contribute to the success of the project.

More articles on measuring SEO

• Are You Measuring SEO Success Correctly?
• How to Measure SEO Success
• Measuring SEO Success: Solve Personalized Search Misperceptions
• Measuring SEO Success With Web Analytics (Good intro for those new to Web analytics)
• Measuring SEO: why rankings are worthless
• What Google's Matt Cutts Sees In 2009

Looking for more educational resources? Check out Learning for fun and adventure: online education comes in many flavors for sites that will entertain your brain.

As the semester winds down, and the holiday season encroaches, it seems there are more and more events to publicize, greetings to send, end-of-year newsletters to distribute, holiday sales to promote, etc. T'is the season for HTML e-mails. Alas, as many of you know, creating and distributing an HTML e-mail message is far more complicated than building a regular Web site. As we struggled in the days of the browser wars, today we struggle with the myriad ways popular e-mail programs support HTML. Anyone who has had to create an HTML e-mail message, or has received one they couldn't read, knows what I mean. So today I'll present five tips that should help to make your e-mails readable by the masses.

Throughout this article I'll refer to the sample Gothfest 2009 e-mail pictured (in various renditions) on the right. This sample was created with certain features in mind to demonstrate how such an e-mail will render in different programs.

1. Use images to convey a mood or theme, not to present content.

In many popular e-mail programs, the default preference is to have images turned off in incoming messages. Thus many of us receive e-mails with little boxes and some indicator that says "click here to load images." If you are like me, you rely on the remaining text of the message to make you decide if you should bother or not. Recently I received a message from a well-known business magazine in which the only text provided stated only the name of the magazine and its address. The subject line was equally informative in that it said something like "Special News Update from Magazine X."

The rest of the content was contained in .jpg files linked in the message. This is problematic for two reasons:

1. Sighted readers, such as me, have no way to judge whether the message is worth reading (or not) unless we click on the image. If we're busy reading through a long list of e-mails we may just send it to the trash. If the sender didn't care enough to present the information clearly, then why should we care enough to read it?
2. Readers with vision problems who rely on screenreading software have no way to read a message that is part of an image. They are relying purely on the text of the message and any "alt text" provided for the image. This particular message didn't include any "alt text" so the message was lost to such recipients.

We all want our messages to be read. To ensure that they are readable by everyone in your audience, just be sure to include all the important points as actual text. This doesn't mean you can't use images to add visual interest, it just means that your message will be accessible to everyone whether they can see the pictures or not.

In the Gmail screenshot on the right we see a sample message without images. The original file contains two images, a picture of Death and a white background image with shaded edges. Because the content is text-based the main message is available and the alt text provides a description of the missing photo. This would also be readable in a text-only mail program with no colors or styles available.

2. Use Tables for Layout (WHAT????)

Most of us know that tables are meant for tabular data and CSS is meant for style and position. Alas many e-mail programs, including Gmail, don't support the positioning features of CSS. If you want to put text on the left and an image on the right—as I did in the sample— and you can't use the float property of CSS, you're stuck with tables.

To create this layout I made a table that has 3 rows of one column each.

• The top row has a dark background, a green bottom border and contains the title.
• The middle row has a white background and contains another table with one row and two columns.
  • The left column contains a background image, but no background color and features the main text. With images off the white background from the main table will show through so that the text is still easily read.
  • The right cell has a dark background and the Death picture. With images off the picture is replaced with alt text. In our sample this is showing up as black which indicates that the table cell should be restyled to feature a lighter color.
• The bottom row has a dark background, a green top border and the opt-out message. In some of our samples the e-mail is showing up as dark blue which is hard to read against the dark background. In the Macmail version it has been re-styled in a light green that is easier to read.

To get a better idea of how this was set up, view the source code.

3. Use HTML 4.0 Standards Compliant Code to the extent that you can.

Going back in time to use tables makes us feel like we're breaking the rules of HTML, but it is still possible to adhere to standards compliant HTML in e-mail if you use the HTML 4.01 transitional doctype. While adhering to Web standards is a good idea in general, I also find it helpful for testing and troubleshooting e-mail files. When I find a problem in my message, the first thing I'll do is validate the file. This helps me determine if the problem is a simple coding error or if it is due to a feature not supported in one of the e-mail programs I'm testing. By eliminating any coding errors I can then focus on the work-arounds I may need to implement to solve the e-mail specific problem.

4. Use inline styles

Most of us are used to using external or embedded stylesheets. Alas, some programs don't support those. To ensure that your styles aren't ignored, use inline styles to format everything in the document. This takes more time and adds to the code, but will be accepted by more programs. For example, to style the top table cell and the header within, I used the following code:

<th scope="col" width="700" style="background-color:#24333a; border-bottom: 1px solid #87d143; color:#c02c18; text-align:left; font-family: Georgia, serif;" ><h1 style="margin: 10px 30px 10px 30px; letter-spacing:2px;">GOTHFEST <span style="letter-spacing:0; font-weight:normal;">2009</span></h1></th>

To add an inline style to an html element just include style=" " and put your regular CSS information within the quotes.

In this case I styled the top row (which uses a <th> because it is a table header) to have a dark background, green bottom border, red type, left-aligned text and Georgia or other available serif font. The title was put in an <h1> header styled to have 10 px margin on the top and bottom and 30px on the left and right. I also added 2px of letter spacing. I surrounded 2009 with a span styled to use 0px of letterspacing and a normal font weight. I incorporated the letter spacing and the 2009 span changes mostly to see if they would be carried through in the e-mail programs I tested.

Note: When coding for the Web I find padding works better to ensure files work well in IE 6, &, Firefox etc. But I've found that padding seems to fail more often than margin in e-mails, so I use margin to ensure that I retain space between paragraphs in as many programs as possible.

People sometimes worry that they'll lose too much flexibility if they try to stick with Web standards, but this example shows that despite the limited support of CSS in e-mail there is still room for experimentation. These styles worked in most of the programs I tested.

5. Test your mail in several different e-mail programs.

The e-mail standards project provides information on what features are supported by the most often used e-mail programs. These offer helpful guidelines, but the only way to know what will work for your file is to test it in as many different programs as you can. You can do this by installing several programs on your own computer and by enlisting the aid of friends and colleagues. I can access my work e-mail in Outlook 2003, MacMail, Gmail and Case's Webmail, so I send myself messages then check them in each program. I haven't upgraded to Outlook 2007 (as I'd no longer be able to test 2003) so to test that I send messages to my colleague Kim—who patiently lets me look over her shoulder or makes screen captures for me to evaluate.

As my samples indicate, your e-mail will not look the same in every program. That's O. K. The important thing is to make sure that it renders cleanly in each and degrades nicely if images or styles are not available. If you can do that, you will ensure that your message doesn't get missed because of poor formatting.

I can't embed HTML code in Outlook. How do I send an HTML e-mail?

How you send an HTML e-mail depends on your mailing list and the programs you have available. If you're regularly sending mass e-mails to large lists, you may wish to use an e-mail service such as Target X or Constant Contact. There are many such services available. Check with your organization to see if they already have an arrangement with a preferred vendor.

For occasional mailings sent to smaller lists, or via listservs such as those available through https://lists.case.edu, you need an e-mail program that will allow you to insert HTML. Case's Webmail program, found at http://mail.case.edu let's you paste HTML into your message body, but only if you are accessing it through Internet Explorer.

An easier option for most users is Mozilla's Thunderbird, available for Linux, Macintosh and Windows. Thunderbird is free and very easy to install. To send an HTML e-mail just click the "Write" button to compose a new message, type in your recipients addresses and subject line then go to the "Insert" menu and choose "HTML." A box will pop up in which you can past the code from your HTML file.

Learn more about HTML e-mail

• E-mail Standards Project
• CSS and Email, Kissing in a Tree
• How to Code HTML Email Newsletters
• Outlook 2007 change sends HTML email back to the future, for better and worse
• E-mail Standards Project

Last month, when I wrote about subdomains, I promised to find out more regarding the question of URL length. Site owners had been telling me that their URLs were too long for users to type and that this was keeping people from responding to their direct mail campaigns. Typically the URLs in question were 30-40 characters in length. These don't seem excessively long if you consider that even a short domain name such as www.case.edu takes 12 characters itself. But it did make me wonder if anyone had studied the role URL length plays in direct mail response rates.

In search of the answer I hopped on the Web and began searching. In a utopian marketing world, I would have found some insightful marketing research that would indicate that once an url reaches X characters in length, readers—hesitant to type so much—became less likely to visit the site. Of course, the real world is not so simple, and I found no such data. If I had, it might have included a graph like the one pictured here.

If you think about it, the reason I couldn't find such data is obvious. The length of an URL is but one of several factors a reader considers when deciding whether or not to respond to a direct mail offer. When deciding whether a mailing is potentially useful, recipients, consciously or subconsciously, ask the following questions.

Why did I get this? Is it relevant to me?

You have a Ph.D. in philosophy and the mailer is telling you how to get an associates degree in 90 days. Since you are not the target audience you will throw the mailer in the bin. But if you are restoring a 1966 Mustang and the mailer is from a parts supplier—specializing in 60's muscle cars—you'll probably take a closer look.

Is it something I need/want/can afford now?

The new Macbook Pro looks great but if your current one is only a year old and serves your needs you may not need to order a new one just yet. On the other hand perhaps you can justify getting a new one by giving the older one to your daughter—who could use a better computer. If so you'll keep reading.

What are the features and benefits?

You've been invited to a conference in your field of interest. Who are the speakers? What is their level of expertise? When is the event? Will it fit in your schedule? What is the cost? Will there be food? If the speakers are well-resepected experts, the event fits your schedule, is reasonably priced and includes lunch, chances are you'll go.

What is the next step?

To respond to the offer, do you call, e-mail, visit a Web site? If the next step is to visit the Web site then you probably will take the mailer over to your computer and type in the address.

If you've made it to the last step in the above process then you've already made a choice. You have decided you are interested in the product or service and want to place your order, RSVP for the event or do whatever else may be appropriate to the offer. So what happens when you sit down at the computer to type in the Web URL? Do you stop typing because the URL is too long? How long would it have to be for you to change your mind and not order the product or service that you've already decided you want?

I don't know the answer to that but I suspect it would be more than 30-40 characters, and would depend on the strength of your original decision. If you've been searching for 6 months trying to find a certain part for your Mustang restoration project—and this supplier has that part—you'll probably be willing to type a lot to complete the order. If you're not as firmly committed then maybe a long address, particularly one with lots of special characters, would dissuade you.

Was it the URL or was it the message?

Let's say that you did change your mind about attending the event. Perhaps you've decided you'd rather catch a movie that day. What really caused you to change your mind? Was the URL impossibly long and too hard to remember? Or was the message not persuasive enough to close the sale?

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/09/books/review/Zerkin-t.html?_r=1&ref=authors is long (70 characters without the http://) and includes non-alpha-numeric characters that make it difficult to remember. If The New York Times were sending out direct mail promoting their book reviews, they probably would send you to the shorter http://www.nytimes.com/pages/books. It would be unusual that any of us would need to create a 70 character URL, even for a very targeted marketing campaign, but if we did, I don't know that it would be a deal breaker.

When you consider how much most of us type every day, 70 characters isn't very much. If the chore of typing 70 characters is enough to deter someone from completing their order, then perhaps they weren't that committed in the first place. If your direct mail campaign isn't sending sufficient traffic to your Web site, then you should also review your message. Was it targeted to the right audience? Did you provide the right information to help your readers make an informed decision? The only way to really know whether the message or the URL is the problem is by testing. Test different urls with the same message, try different messages with similar urls of the same length and so forth. (I'll write about split testing for direct mail in a future article.)

Isn't there any URL length data out there?

There is, but most of it is focused on URL length for search engine optimization, maximum URL length able to be read by certain browsers, etc. For our purposes the most useful number comes from usability expert, Jakob Nielsen, who recommends we use URLs that are less than 75 characters so that they don't break into multiple lines when sent through e-mail.

That was the most quantifiable answer I could find. Many people are researching various aspects of URL length, but without very specific testing it can be hard to determine if URL length or some other factor is the relevant issue. In The impact of domain name length on Web site popularity, Jeremia Froyland analyzed URL length of the top 100 sites as ranked by Alexa. The majority of these sites have short domain names (and thus short URLs) and he concluded that there is a correlation between short URLs and site popularity. But correlation is not the same as causality. The top 100 list includes sites ranging from Yahoo and Google to Apple and Hewlett Packard. Their strong brands would play a greater role in the popularity of their sites than the length of their URLs.

Conclusion

Instinctively we like the idea and ease of short URLs, but URL length is only one of many factors to consider in our Web related marketing strategies.

Learn more about URLs

• I Musta Got Lost: URL Naming Convention
• Naming and Addressing: URIs, URLs, ...
• Talk like a Googler: parts of a url
• URLs week: Principles
• WWW FAQs: What is the maximum length of a URL?

"The site looks great. But could you take out the links? I'm afraid people will follow them before they apply to our program/sign up for our event/read the installation instructions/etc." I don't hear this as often as I once did, but it still comes up often enough that it's worth addressing. So today I'll try to dispel some myths about Web stickiness and outbound links.

Will they stay or will they go?

They will go. You know that, because you will go. Whether I bore you halfway through this article or you go on to read several more entries, at some point you will leave this blog. I could offer you videos of the cutest dancing penguins or a fool-proof Web marketing technique and you would leave. I could even tell you the meaning of life (42). You would still leave.

But that's alright. My goal isn't to keep you here forever—trapped with my musings on Web development. My goal is to share ideas and best practices with you, and learn more from the feedback you provide, so that we can all strive to make the most useful Web sites possible. Your goal may be to recruit students to your program or sell more towels, but either way the same principles apply.

What is a sticky Web site?

According to myth, a sticky Web site is one that compels visitors to stay on the site for a long time. The content and features of the site are so enticing that users will stay there wandering about for hours. This is why many Web marketers fret over the percentage of visitors who bounce out of the site and the amount of time spent on it by those who stay. But time is relative. I think a Web site is sufficiently sticky if the goals of the site owner and its visitors are achieved. If the visitor has a positive experience, follows your call-to-action and comes back to visit in the future, then the site is sufficiently sticky.

For example, if I need to order a copy of Don't Panic, I can skibble over to Amazon.com, place the order and be done in less than a minute. I'm happy and Amazon is happy; after all they know I'll be back.

This blog, while vastly different from Amazon, has similar requirements when it comes to stickiness. Perhaps you'll spend a few minutes reading the one article that answers your question. Perhaps you'll linger over the Planning Your Web site Tutorial. Either way, if I've provided something worth reading, then we've both reached our goal. If I'm lucky you'll also subscribe to the RSS feed and Stumble this page so that you and others come back for future visits.

Where will they go when they leave?

On the one hand, that depends on their plans for the day. If they're feeling peckish and adventurous they may want to run out for lunch at Milliways. But if they have time to keep surfing the Web, where they go is partially up to you.

If you've been writing a blog entry about Web site stickiness and outbound links, perhaps you've piqued their interest enough that they want to learn more. In that case you can provide links at the bottom of the page that will give them more information. If you choose these links carefully, you can:

• keep them thinking about the subject
• lead them to content that adds depth or breadth to what you have already covered
• reinforce the idea that your site is a resource—to which users should return—for quality information and site referrals
• influence the pages they visit, ensuring they see pages you trust—as opposed to pages that may be your competition
• link to sites that may return the favor by linking back to you in the future
• enhance search engine optimization (SEO)

I'm not providing information, I'm trying to sell anti-depressants to paranoid androids, where should I link?

Whether your Web site is meant to sell widgets, promote an event or disseminate knowledge, your outbound link strategy should be to provide helpful information to your visitors. If you're selling pharmaceuticals to robots, you could link to:

• studies showing the efficacy of your product
• reviews of your product by satisfied customers
• social media networks and discussion groups geared towards or run by paranoid androids

By providing such resources you can build goodwill towards your brand and help users make a purchasing decision. The same can be applied for events. If it is a lecture, provide a brief biography of the speaker and include a link to his/her own Web site, links to videos of past presentations and other pages that will demonstrate what a compelling speaker he/she is.

In the end, if you take as much care with your links as you do with your other content, your readers should come back for more.

Learn more about outbound links and stickiness

• Debating the Value of Outbound Links (for SEO)
• Linking out: Often it's just applying common sense
• The Role of Outbound Links
• 10 ways to make your Web site 'sticky'
• 21 Ways to Make Your Blog or Web site Sticky

In prior reflections on social media, I've mentioned how services such as Facebook, de.licio.us, Twitter, etc. can be effective marketing tools. Much of this has to do with the fact that they foment two-way communication. When we join these communities and services we participate in a dialogue between our friends and contacts. We make connections based upon common interests and share information accordingly. The fact that we can share things—such as our blogs, Web sites, products or services—that will be of interest to those who follow us is what makes these so useful to us as marketers.

What we don't discuss as often is the fact that these same qualities are what make these tools useful to us as consumers of products, services and information.

We know that success in social media requires us to participate in both sides of the conversation. We must speak, listen and respond online just as we would it a real world conversation. But the point of listening isn't just to abide by the rules of the game; the point of listening is to learn. The ones who do all of the talking are missing out because they don't give themselves the opportunity to learn new ideas or to hear vital feedback about their own ideas.

Imagine a social situation in the real world. Have you ever come home from a party all excited because you spent the night telling 18 different people all about your collection of pressed flowers and the methods you use for preparing them? Neither have I. But I have come home excited that I met interesting people. Usually I find them interesting not just because of the topics they discuss, but because of the way they discuss them. They share their viewpoints, listen to your responses, then respond in kind. In this way the conversation evolves in a way that will be of interest to both parties.

The same thing happens in social media. If you follow a like minded group of people on Pownce, Digg, StumbleUpon (or wherever you hang out online) you soon get a sense of who just talks and who is also listening. This may happen over the course of weeks or months rather than hours, but over time you get a sense of who you should be following.

As you do so you find that they start sharing more and more information that is of value to you. I noticed this in particular today when I forwarded on yet another bit of information I'd found via social media.

Recent tidbits gleaned from social media

Today at lunch I was checking Pownce, Twitter and Facebook. On Twitter I saw that David Bradley had shared a link to an article called, "How ‘Mini-Funnel’ Websites Can Help You Increase Traffic, Generate Leads and Build Exposure." Initially the title of the article sounded like it might be some sort of nefarious black hat SEO strategy. But I followed the link because David, who I know through Wayne, wouldn't condone, let alone link to something dodgy.

When I got to the article I saw that it was written by Maki who I first met on Pownce and now follow on Twitter and Friendfeed. The article demonstrated a fairly clever idea that might work well for some upcoming projects in our department so I forwarded the link to my teammates.

A few days earlier I saw that George Nemeth had posted a link on Pownce about the newly formed Social Media Club - Cleveland network on Ning, so I passed that along via Twitter—just in case there are any Clevelanders following me who aren't already following George. (This seems unlikely because George, of Brewed Fresh Daily, is like the Robert Scoble of Cleveland in that he is online almost everywhere and somehow manages to keep up with it all.)

A few days before that I received a shout on Digg from Kyle James, a fellow bloghighed blogger, linking to an amusing video Butler University produced (shown on this page) in which a Bulldog showcases their athletic facilities whilst trying to find a missing mascot costume. I passed this along to colleagues as well.

Listen and learn

Those are but a few examples of intriguing things I've found through social media. The Internet is rife with information, but when you make the right connections, and listen to their recommendations you'll soon find that the most useful (or amusing) content begins to stand out.

Where have I been hiding?

For those who may be wondering why this blog has been so quiet lately, I've been doing a lot of traveling this summer and have been swamped with other projects in between. I've just returned from the Galápagos—it seemed like a good way to kick off the Year of Darwin and Evolution—so as soon as I catch up on all the email things should be returning to normal.

Until recently I was one of the only nerds who had yet to upgrade to Firefox 3. I'd been waiting until I could find an easy way to install it alongside (rather than in place of) Firefox 2. When I'd tried doing this a few months ago—with the beta version of Firefox 3—it hadn't worked properly, so I'd put the idea on hold.

I mentioned this in a meeting, when a colleague piped up with a simple solution. He suggested using the PortableApps version, a standalone version of the program that can be installed on a Flash drive—for portability—or simply in a directory you designate on your computer. This was so obvious I immediately wondered why it hadn't occurred to me before, but then, practical ideas are like that.

PortableApps.com offers a plethora of portable software solutions—including Firefox—for Windows

Once I got back to my office I hopped over to http://portableapps.com/, looked for Firefox 3, then proceeded to download it. Within minutes it was installed, separately and independently of Firefox 2. When I tried to start it up I discovered that you can't run them both at the same time—I had to close out of 2 to open 3, then close out of 3 to reopen 2—but you can run them on the same computer. This will be tremendously useful if I discover some quirk in Firefox 3—such as an add-on that no longer works and has yet to be updated—or if I need to see how a Web page renders in each version.

That solved the problem for the Windows P. C., but what about the Macintosh?

FreeSMUG: Portable Applications for OSX

Firefox 3 from FreeSMUG (Mac)

A quick Google search turned up FreeSMUG's portable applications section. FreeSMUG offers a portable version of Firefox 3—in several languages—as well as other popular open source programs such as Open Office and Audacity. Those new to many of the Open Source programs available through FreeSMUG can learn more about them through a variety of helpful tutorials available on the site.

FreeSMUG says of its portable applications, "OS X FOSS portable applications are packaged so you can carry around on any portable device, USB thumb drive, iPod, portable hard drive, memory card, other portable device (or also on your internal hard disk), taking your preferences with you." This of course could be handy for any number of reasons, but the ability to run multiple versions of browsers to use for testing Web sites, is particularly useful to me.

Why test in multiple versions of the same Web browser? Why not just upgrade?

As a Web developer, you probably upgrade your browsers fairly often. That's not true of the average user. In many cases the people who visit your site are using the same browser that came with their computer.

The most popular browsers used by visitors to the Web Development Blog this month are:

• Internet Explorer 7.0 - 24.6%
• Internet Explorer 6.0 - 24.3%
• Firefox 3.0 - 12.7%
• Firefox 2.x - 17.8%
• Safari - 5.4%

Interestingly .5% were still using Netscape 4.0, which is over 10 years old!

To ensure that you, my site visitors, can view and use this site with ease, I need to make sure that it works properly in the browsers that most of you are using. This requires testing in multiple browsers and versions.

When a browser releases a minor upgrade, this isn't a big issue. But when a Web browser makes a significant upgrade it can make a big difference. A site that looked fine in version X, may look horrible in version Y.

When Internet Explorer 7 came out, users and developers quickly noticed that many pages didn't render properly in the new version. I.E. 7 was actually more standards compliant than I.E. 6, but developers who had used I.E. hacks to make pages look right in I.E. 6 found they didn't work with I.E. 7. This led to a lot of sturm und drang about I.E. 7 "breaking the Web," as those developers needed to modify those hacks to make their sites work in both I.E. 6 and 7.

Here at Case our templated sites don't rely on many I.E. hacks so they transitioned smoothly from I.E. 6 to I.E. 7. But when I'm building new sites, I may sometimes incorporate new styles or features that I've not used before. This is when I make a point of testing in multiple browsers. Tredosoft's Multiple I.E. Installer provides a convenient way to run different versions of Internet Explorer on Windows XP. They also provide information for running I.E. 6 natively on Vista.

Must your site work in every browser available?

No, the Web has evolved enough since 1993 that making a site backwards compatible with every browser version is pretty much impossible. But if you adhere to Web standards, build sites that degrade cleanly in older browsers, and test in the browsers used by most of your readers you should be able to provide a good user experience for all of your visitors.

Web Browse Testing Resources

• Browsershots
• Browser testing CSS and JavaScript
• Browser Tests, Services and Compatibility Test Suites
• CSS: Browser testing order
• Why your site should work on multiple browsers