Gowalla is a location-based app that, until last week, shared a lot of similarities with Foursquare – the leading location-based app today. First launched about two and a half years ago, Gowalla has steadily grown to an active user-base of two million (about one fifth the number of users that Foursquare has). I’ve always liked Gowalla and I think they have a better interface and user experience than Foursquare, but there have always been so few people in Indiana who use Gowalla.

Just last week, Gowalla released a brand new version of their website and mobile app (iOS version here and Android version here) that really rebrands Gowalla. Rather than focusing on being a location-based check-in network (and, honestly, they were losing that fight to Foursquare. Even Facebook recently gave up on Places - their equivalent check-in service), Gowalla now seems to be more of a curated location guide app. If that sounds kind of weird, keep reading.

In the image above, you can see the new curated guide for the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, IN. By working with staff at Notre Dame, Gowalla put together a great guide showcasing what visitors to the university needed to check out while they are in town. There are more than 60 curated guides available for cities throughout the world and Gowalla is working to add dozens more soon. While Gowalla has worked with select cities and destinations to create these branded and curated guides, you can still create guides on your own, both as an individual and as a DMO.

When looking at the tourism industry as a whole, there are benefits to using both Foursquare and Gowalla. If you own or work at a hotel, attraction or a restaurant, Foursquare makes more sense as they allow users to manage venues they own and offer check-in specials. But, if you work for a city, county, regional or state DMO Gowalla probably actually makes more sense to use. As a DMO, you have the built-in authority about your area and you can create great guides for anything you want – wine trails, food trails, museum guides, historic sites and more. When you create guides for your visitors, you’ve putting your stamp of authority on the guide and letting them know which things they absolutely must do before leaving your location.

Have you ever used Gowalla or Foursquare? Do you think Gowalla’s new curated guides functionality would be helpful as a visitor to a new place?

At its core, Pinterest is a social bookmarking site similar to Delicious or SpringPad, but where Pinterest differs (and where they really shine) is how their bookmarks are organized. Rather than saving a list of text links, Pinterest is 100% image-based. The visual nature of Pinterest creates a clean and easily browsable interface that can be extremely addicting.

So, how does Pinterest describe itself?

Pinterest lets you organize and share all the beautiful things you find on the web. People use pinboards to plan their weddings, decorate their homes, and organize their favorite recipes.

- Pinterest.com

Pinterest Wall - Places I'd Like to Visit

You’re likely to find boards and pins full of decorating ideas and recipes as well as just about anything else you could think of, but Pinterest has a really unique opportunity to be a great place for Tourism entities to set up shop. In fact, I set up an account for Visit Indiana a couple months ago and have received a pretty good response so far. I’ve created boards for Favorite Indiana Destinations, Indiana Artisan Products, Indiana Beer and Wine, Indiana Arts and Crafts and Indiana Experiences. Each time I come across a great picture of somewhere in Indiana or something Indiana-related on Etsy, I pin it and share it with everyone who follows Visit Indiana.

You can browse Pinterest in several different ways. You can view just pins from your friends or you can search for and browns pins in countless topics (travel, decorating, recipes, etc.). One of the coolest features on pinterest is the ability to “repin” other people’s pins. Just like sharing on Facebook or retweeting on Twitter repinning posts the pin on your board so your friends can see it. It’s a great way to catalog pictures or links you want to keep handy.

Regardless of what kind of tourism organization you work for (State, County or City DMO or individual attraction or lodging facility) Pinterest offers you the ability to share great photos of places in your area, locally-made products or hidden destinations for visitors and residents alike.

Note that Pinterest is only available on iPhone/iPod Touch right now.

Are you already using Pinterest? If not, do you think its a good fit for your organization?

Also, similar to the way Gowalla allows users to create Guides, Foodspotting also lets users to create Guides like Taste the Vintage in Bucks County - created by the Bucks County Conference and Visitors Bureau. This particular guide looks great on both the mobile app and on the website and it details some great wineries throughout the county. As a bonus, you earn a badge once you visit all the wineries within the Guide.

As a tourism office, you’re in the unique position to be the curator for great food in your area. Like Bucks County did, you could created Guides for great wine, great burgers, great ethnic food or anything else food-related for visitors and residents to complete and add to. The more people that jump on the platform and add their favorite foods, the more useful and robust the app will become.

Check out the screenshots below for examples of the Footspotting mobile app (Foodspotting is now available for iPhone/iPod Touch, Windows Mobile and Android devices right now – a Blackberry app is coming soon). Have you used Foodspotting before?

First things first: The Plus-1 Button

About a month ago, Google unveiled their +1 button in what seemed like an attempt to compete with Facebook’s ubiquitous Like button. I quickly added the +1 button to several blogs I manage so we could start taking advantage of people starting to use the +1 button. Google first launched +1 as a way to ‘bookmark’  search results that you’ve found helpful. For example, if I search for a Chinese restaurant in Indianapolis and one of my favorites comes up in the list, I can +1 it and it will come up at the top of the list next time I search for a Chinese restaurant in town. Pretty helpful stuff. Now, with the release of G+, the +1 becomes even more useful. Before G+ there wasn’t a way to catalog all the things you +1′ed (search results, blog posts, websites, etc.), but within G+, there’s a +1 tab on your profile page so you can go back through everything you’ve +1′ed in the past – making it a better place to store true bookmarks and pages you’d like to return to than simply liking a site/post/etc. through Facebook (since there’s no ultimate catalog of the things you’ve liked outside of Facebook.com).

Circles 

Circles are the foundation that G+ was built upon. While you can add friends to different lists within Facebook, it’s a feature that was added to Facebook after many people joined, so there isn’t a great adoption rate for the lists feature within Facebook.

G+: Add to Circle

Instead of friending people like you do on Facebook or just following them like on Twitter, you add people to your circles in G+. Unlike Facebook, you can add people to your circles without them having to add you back, but unlike Twitter, by clicking on the Incoming portion of your stream (which I’ll get to later) you can see the posts of people who have added you to their circles that aren’t yet a part of your own circles.

In addition to a simple drag and drop feature for adding people to different groups, Google also has a suggested users section to the right of your stream where you can hover over Add to Circles and easily add people to your circles.

You can also easily view content from and share content with specific circles very easily with G+. Say you want to share some photos with just people in your Family circle, it’s simple to do. If you want to share a link to an article with friends from work or share a photo with friends from college, you can do that as well.

Profile

If you had a Google Profile, it’s now your G+ Profile. You can fill in information like where you work, a bio, where you went to school, where you’ve lived as well as add photos and links to your social media profiles, websites and blogs. Just like on your Facebook profile page, you can add as little or as much information as you’d like. When people land on your profile page, they can view previous posts (but only ones that are either Public, Extended Circles or shared with a circle that they’re a part of), About, Photos, Videos +1′s and Buzz.

Stream

The G+ stream is just like the newsfeed on your Facebook wall. When you log in, you’ll see each of your Circles on the left side of the page. You can click on any circle to view updates from people in that specific circle if you don’t want updates from your circles mixing.

You can easily comment on, +1, and reshare posts within your stream. With every new post you create, whether it’s a photo, link, video or text update, you can select who you want to share the post with. You can specify any combination of circles, individuals and email addresses as well as with the Public, all your circles or (a really interesting option) Extended Circles. Extended Circles simply means that your post is viewable by everyone in your circles as well as everyone in their circles.

While G+ doesn’t have a direct messages feature like Twitter or a private messages feature like Facebook, you can post messages that can only be seen by one other person by making sure they’re the only person that you share the post with. If this feels a bit uncomfortable to use for private matters,  you can always default back to another medium to send that truly private message.

I’ve tried out sending a more personal message just to an individual and they truly are the only ones who can see the message.

Tip: If you’re sharing a private post with someone, make sure you disable sharing on the post so they can’t reshare your private message.

Photos

G+ allows you to connect directly with Picasa (which will soon be rebranded as Google Phot0s) and share photos on your profile. With the G+ Android App (and the soon to be released iOS app), you’ll be able to take pictures and share them immediately with your circles.

Hangouts

In my opinion, this is one of the best features on G+ and one of the greatest differentiation point over Facebook. In short, Hangouts are group video chats. While Facebook just announced Skype integration to allow video chats directly from Facebook, G+’s Hangout feature is several steps ahead of the Facebook/Skype integration.

With Hangouts, you can have multiple people in the same video chat and you can also chat via text while you’re in the Hangout. This is a great way to share links or other information while you’re hanging out. Another unique feature is the ability to share YouTube videos with the Hangout. That way the entire group can watch a video together.

Tip: While you can specify groups or individuals who you invite to the Hangout, you can’t kick people out of the Hangout and anyone who is in the Hangout can invite anyone else. For that reason, if you want to have a private video chat, I’d recommend sticking with Skype or Facebook.

Sparks

The G+ Sparks feature is a combination of Google News and Google Reader. You can specify things you’re interested in and set them up as Sparks. G+ then feeds interesting news stories  each Spark that you can read through or share with your circles.

Measuring Traffic

All these features are great and they could lead to G+ becoming a legitimate player in the social media space, but when push comes to shove, you really need to know whether G+ is driving any traffic (and, in turn, any conversions) to your site. If you have a web analytics package like Google Analytics installed on your site, you can easily track the referring links coming to your site from G+. Just like how Facebook redirects all links shared on their site through http://www.facebook.com/l.php? to enable accurate clickthrough tracking, G+ redirects all links through http://plus.google.com/url? and that’s easily trackable through your analytics pacakge’s referring links section.

Side note: I’m not sure why Twitter hasn’t implemented something like this. Maybe that’s where they’re headed with their t.co shortener. Since Twitter is accessed through countless apps both on computers and mobile devices as well as through Twitter.com, it seems that by redirecting all links posted via Twitter through one standard redirector (t.co), it would make accurately tracking all Twitter traffic MUCH easier for everyone. Twitter, you can take this idea, I don’t even need credit for it.

GPlus: Early Verdict?

It’s still way to early to say that G+ is a boom or a bust, but I see a lot of potential and quite a few pitfalls at the same time.

Pitfalls:

• Numbers: With 750+ million people on Facebook and 200+ million on Twitter, Google really got to this party late and it’ll take more than just luck to siphon people from networks they’re already familiar and comfortable with.
• No Business Options – Yet: Google has announced that they’re working on a solution for businesses who want to get involved on G+ – they just don’t want businesses creating profiles just yet.
• Growth Beyond Early Adpoters: Several people have started wondering lately whether G+ can grow beyond the early adopters who are on the platform now. Mashable estimates that there are nearly 10 million people using G+ already, but I can attest to the fact that the vast majority of the updates I’ve seen so far on G+ have been related to G+. Part of that could be the novelty of the platform and everyone trying to figure it out together, but there have been other networks (like Friendfeed) that have languished with only early adopters.

Potential:

• Circles: Google has come up with an extremely intuitive and easy way to place people into groups. Facebook’s similar feature is clunky at best and if you haven’t already moved your friends into different groups by now, chances are you never will. It seems that Google started with Circles as the fundamental element behind G+ and it shows. It’s so easy to share anything with as many or as few people as you want.
• Hangouts: I think this is the killer feature in G+. I’ve tested it out a couple time with some colleagues and we’ve had as many as 5 people in the hangout at the same time.
• In addition to being able to have a quick video chat with one or several people, you can make the Hangouts as public or as private as you want to.
• The fact that I had already used G+’s Hangout feature made me yawn when Facebook announced last week that you could now (finally) video chat via Facebook. However, since you can only chat with one person at a time, this feature was out of date before it was even released.
• Integration with Google: This is another one of G+’s biggest strengths. Google already has a huge user base of people on Gmail, Google Docs, Google Reader, Google Maps not to even mention Google Search, and the fact that your G+ menubar stays with you whenever your on a Google property just means that people can stay connected to their network and share with them even easier than they can through Twitter or Facebook.

Report No. 8: The Social Breakup

The eighth report in the Subscribers, Fans and Followers series focuses on the “social breakup” – how and why consumers “break up” with brands and stop following them via Facebook, Twitter and email. You might be surprised at how much similarity there is across all channels. Here are some of the highlights:

• Email
  • 67% of subscribers hit the unsubscribe button to end the email relationship rather than just deleting (17%), reporting as spam (8%), ignoring (6%) or setting up a filter to auto-archive the message(2%)
  • Top 3 reasons people unsubscribed from emails:
    • Too many emails from the company
    • Repetitive or boring content over time
    • Email overload – too many emails in general, cleaning out the clutter
• Facebook
  • When fans no longer want information from a brand they previously “liked”, 43% of them go to the brand’s page and click “unlike, 38% click the “X” in their newsfeed to remove them from the wall and 19% just ignore the posts.
  • Top 3 reasons people “unliked” a brand on Facebook:
    • Too many posts – too much frequency can overwhelm users walls
    • Repetitive or boring content over time
    • They only “liked” the brand because of a promotion, discount or deal offered to fans, and “unliked” once they got what they wanted.

• Twitter
  • Nearly half of consumers who created a Twitter account no longer use it with 52% saying they found Twitter to be pointless, 38% saying it became boring and 23% thinking that Twitter was too chaotic.
  • Top 3 reasons people stopped following a brand on Twitter:
    • Repetitive or boring content over time
    • Tweet stream became overloaded with marketing posts, wanted to clean up
    • Too many posts – too much frequency can overwhelm users tweet streams

Notice the striking similarity between why people unsubscribe, unlike and unfollow brands? While there are different strategies to employ for brand to get the most out of email, Facebook and Twitter, online consumers – across the board – seem to all be saying the same thing when it comes to ending their relationship with a brand’s digital initiatives: don’t talk too much and keep the content interesting.

Report No. 9: Mobile Dependence Day

The ninth report in the Subscribers, Fans and Followers series really focuses on our increasing dependence on our smartphones and other mobile devices. Even within the past year, the share of US consumers with smartphones (as opposed to feature phones) has grown dramatically. Here are some of the high points about what it means for interactive marketers:

• 89% of US consumers 15+ own a cell phone. 41% of those have smartphones
  • Android: 33%
  • iPhone: 25%
  • Blackberry: 19%
  • Other: 23%
• Smartphone’s Big 5 (the five most frequently used functions on today’s smartphones):
  • Phone Calls
  • Texting
  • Email
  • Internet
  • Facebook
• How important is the smartphone to people who own and use one? Here is the percentage of people who would (if forced to choose) rather keep their smartphone than the following items:
  • Game Console: 72%
  • Dishwasher: 46%
  • Laptop: 40%
  • Microwave: 34%
  • Refrigerator: 13%
  • Car: 8%

The rest of the report gives recommendations of ways you can integrate your marketing efforts across all three communications channels and is definitely worth a read.

Have you looked through ExactTarget’s Subscribers, Fans and Followers series? What do you think about their findings?

Here’s where Qdoba comes in. Not only are there two Qdoba locations within about 2 miles of my house, but Qdoba is constantly sending out coupons through their permission email channels. When they launched their Craft 2 menu item last spring, they sent several emails letting their subscribers know about their Qdoba Craft Your Life microsite, which allowed you to play a short game, and rewarded you with a coupon at the end. The coupon was anything from a free order of chips & queso with the purchase of an entrée to a free entrée with the purchase of a drink.

Last fall, Qdoba  launched a promotion, Food Lovers Fighting Burrito Boredom, which allowed customers to make their own entrée online – which they can spice up however they want – in order to help fight burrito boredom. Just like with the previous promotion, Qdoba allowed users to place once a day per email address and awarded them with a different coupon of varying worth. Though the coupon portion of the promotion is over now, Qdoba has kept the microsite alive to continue to educate their potential customers.

Although the US has started to see economic growth in the past few quarters, high gas prices threaten to dampen some of that growth for this summer. For a fast casual restaurant like Qdoba, they certainly don’t want to dilute their brand’s quality perception by focusing solely on coupons, but by creating innovate campaigns like this, Qdoba is showing that they understand the economy we’re in now and are trying to build up brand loyalty for when the economy rebounds and discounting isn’t as common.

In addition to their promotions, Qdoba is also doing a great job of creating real conversation and interacting with their customers (below is a tweet I sent out that they quickly replied to).

Google Analytics is a powerful tool for measuring traffic to and within your website, but it can also appear overwhelming at first glance. There’s such a wealth of information available through Google Analytics but unless you know what you’re looking for and how to access that data, you won’t get much out of implementing an analytics package like Google Analytics.

Last week Google debuted an upgraded version of Google Analytics (v5), and anyone with a Google Analytics account can now view the old version or the new version. In order to access the new Google Analytics, simply click on new version next to your email address on the top right corner of the page. While Google is still in the process of pulling all the old features over to the new version of GA, the new version seems to be working just fine and there are even a few new features to go along with the redesign and reorganization.

You could spend months learning all the ins and outs of Google Analytics, but here are some of the most important things to look for when you’re tracking visitors on your website using Google Analytics.

The Basics

Google Analytics - Visitors Overview

When you first log into Google Analytics you’ll see the Visitors Overview that includes stats like Visitors, Pageviews, Time on Site and Bounce Rate. The Visitors and Unique Visitors numbers are important because it lets you know how many people have come to your site during the time frame you’re looking at and you then know approximately how many of those visitors have been to your site before. Pages per Visit lets you know the average number of pages each visitor goes to while on your site. Don’t think that just because you have a high Pages per Visit number it means your visitors are happy with your site and they’re getting what they wanted from your site. I’ve seen instances where a campaign caused Pages per Visit and Time on Site to drop, but have dramatically increased conversion rates. As much information as Google Analytics provides you, it still requires old fashioned individual user research or surveys to find out users sentiments.

The term Bounce Rate can be confusing. A bounce rate is the percentage of visitors to your website that only view one page (the page they landed on first) and then exit your blog. In general, you want as low a bounce rate as possible, but much like the Pages per Visit and Time on Site metrics, a bounced visitor isn’t necessarily an unsatisfied visitor. If your website is more informational in general (many Local, State and Federal Agencies have more informational than sales or conversion goals), a higher bounce rate might not be a bad thing. But for most organizations the goal of your website is likely to sell a product, ticket, room night, service or something along those lines. If you notice high bounce rates for pages where you’re specifically selling an item or asking the user to take an action (sign up for an email newsletter or download a whitepaper), you should make some modifications to the page that could help lower the bounce rate.

Traffic Sources

Tracking where your visitors are coming from is important for any organization. Under the Traffic Sources section of Google Analytics, you’ll find detailed information about how visitors came to your site and you can determine which keywords, search engines, referring sites and even ad campaigns are driving the most traffic (and even which ones have the highest ROI, through more advanced Goals).

Keywords (Organic Search)

Most websites will see the plurality (if not the majority) of traffic come through search engines. Whether it’s paid traffic via search engine marketing or organic traffic from users typing search terms into Google or Bing, you’re likely to see a lot of visitors come to your site through search. Click on Traffic Sources –> Incoming Sources –> Search –> Organic to see all the search terms that people used get to your website. Looking at the organic search terms can help you to know what kind of content you need to beef up on your website to increase traffic and conversion.

Referrals

Referrals are visitors that get to your website by way of someone else’s website, but not a search engine. For instance, if I have a link on my website to yours and someone clicks through to your site from mine, then SocialMediarology.com will appear as a referral on your website. Click on Traffic Sources –> Incoming Sources –> Referrals to view all referral sources for your website. It’s great to see sites that are referring traffic to you, but the real benefit of referrals is when you dig down just a bit deeper to see exactly where those referrals are pushing the most traffic on your site.

To dig down to the Landing Page you can click on the image at the right for a more detailed view. Next to Secondary dimension: just below the graph, click on Select –> Traffic Sources –> Landing Page. This will then give you the great detail in the screen shot below. You can now see not only which referring sites sent you traffic, but which actual pages on your site those visitors were sent to and what their Pages Per Visit, Avg. Time on Site, % New Visits and Bounce Rate were for each specific landing page from each specific referral. See how much information you’re getting now?

Google Analytics - Referral & Landing Page Stats

Campaigns

The campaigns section is one of the most powerful features of Google Analytics. I won’t go into too much depth about campaign tracking, but check out this post if you want more detail about campaign tracking – specifically as it relates to tracking referrals from social media properties like Facebook and Twitter. You can view campaign tracking by clicking on Traffic Sources –> Incoming Sources –> Campaigns. Campaigns are a great way to accurately track exactly how visitors are coming to your site.

If you place several different banner ads on a website (let’s say you have IntAdA, IntAdB and IntAdC as your different ads), you can append special Google Analytics campaign tracking codes to each link on those banner ads so you know exactly who came from which ads and which ads performed best. The first thing to understand is what Google’s campaign parameters are and how to add them to your links. Below are the basic campaign tracking parameters that we’ll use.

• utm_campaign: Your campaign name (IntAdA, IntAdB, IntAdC in this example, but it could also be another campaign name or a date if you’re tracking an email send)
• utm_source: The source for the link (The site your ad is placed on for this example – we’ll call it AdSite.com – but it could also be Twitter, Facebook, HootSuite, TweetDeck)
• utm_medium: Identify your medium (For this example, we’ll call it BannerAd, but it could also be email, search, social media, SEM, display ads, twitter, facebook, etc.)

If I were running an ad campaign to push people to the Interviews section of Social Mediarology, the page I’d push visitors to would be: http://socialmediarology.com/category/interviews/. But, to more accurately track the entire campaign – including the different creative versions of my ad, I’d append the following to the end of the URL: ?utm_source=AdSite.com&utm_medium=BannerAd&utm_campaign=IntAdA So the full link would look like this: http://socialmediarology.com/category/interviews/?utm_source=AdSite.com&utm_medium=BannerAd&utm_campaign=IntAdA

The easiest way to create trackable links like this is by using the Google Analytics URL Builder. Simply put in the link you want to append tracking code to and enter the campaign, source and medium names into their respective spaces and the site will generate your trackable link for you. Throw that long URL into a URL Shortener and you’ve got a short URL you can easily share via Facebook, Twitter and other social mediums. Within Google Analytics, you can now visit the Campaign section and you can filter sort and search for your campaign, source and medium names to see how much traffic you received from all your different campaigns.

Content

Google Analytic’s Content section features detailed information on individual pages, events (like outbound clicks) and in-site search metrics. Depending on how you’ve set up Google Analytics, your outbound clicks and in-site search may or may not work right off the bat, but the Site Content section will be a section you use quite a bit.

Site Content

Within the Site Content menu, you can look at Pages which sorts all the pages on your site by the number of pageviews. It’s a great quick way to check out what your most viewed pages are so you can know what your top content was for the time frame you’re looking at.

You can also look at the Content Drilldown section that allows you to drill down deep into your site architecture to see how many views a particular page or blog post got during the time period you’re looking at. This is where I spend most of my time, as you can add a secondary dimension like City, Region or Browser which can give you a much more granular look at who’s visiting which pages.

Google Analytics also lets you dig down into your Exit Pages. An exit page is the last page a visitor was on before leaving your domain altogether. In the end, the exit percentage for every website is 100, but by looking in depth at the Exit Pages section you can see which pages are particularly notorious for sending people away from your website.

If your top exit pages are confirmation pages that visitors receive after placing an order with you, that’s not necessarily a bad thing – but couldn’t you offer them something on that page to convince them to stay at your site a little longer? If some of your top exit pages happen to be during the checkout process BEFORE visitors have purchased from you – then you’ve got a problem and need to figure out how to close the deal with those visitors before the exit your site completely.

Landing Pages is another section in the Site Content area of Google Analytics. Here you’re able to see your pages sorted by number of entrances. It’s a great way to look at your top few landing pages on your site and dig down into how people are finding those pages. In the screenshot below, I took a top landing page and segmented it by source – now I can see how many people are coming to into our site from that post through Google, Bing, Yahoo, Facebook and more.

Site Search

Google Analytics’ Site Search section allows you to dig down into how visitors are using your internal search to find what they’re looking for on your site. Setting up site search is something you’ll have to do (or have your IT department do) in addition to the basic Google Analytics setup, but it setting up your GA account to track your internal site search isn’t too difficult. In Google Analytics, you can modify the account settings and there’s a place under the Profile Settings tab where you can request that GA tracks Site Search. All you have to do is enter the parameter your site uses for search and GA will start tracking it.

Events

Events is  pretty flexible part of Google Analytics. you can set up the Events section to track all of your outbound links and any downloads you offer on your site. Events were added to Google Analytics relatively recently and they’re a great addition. Before Events, most outbound clicks were tracked as pageviews – which can seriously affect your webstats with inaccurate numbers.

Overview

There are many different analytics packages (including free packages like Yahoo Web Analytics and GoingUp or paid packages like Mint, Woopra and WebTrends) and Google Analytics may not be the best package for your business. However, as one of the most popular web analytics packages in use today, understanding Google Analytics and how you can use it for your business is extremely important.

Do you use Google Analytics or some other package for your blog or website?

Looks like Facebook has decided to jump head-first into offering group buying discounts a la Groupon, Living Social, and a host of other local and national ‘group discount buying’ programs. I checked my email about 10 minutes ago and had my very first Facebook Deal staring me in the face. There were rumors that Facebook Deals would launch in five US cities this week and it appears they official have launched in Atlanta, Dallas, Austin, San Diego and San Francisco.

Just like Groupon, Living Social and other group buying programs, I received the Facebook Deal in my email instead of through Facebook. They must have realized the power and personal nature of email marketing to have launched a program that is so dependent upon email as opposed to their own platform.

The most interesting part of the email is that I now live in Indianapolis, but the Deal (see screenshot below) is for horseback riding in Acworth, GA (a suburb of Atlanta). I did live in Atlanta for a couple years, but I’ve been in Indy for the past 5 years, so Facebook needs to do a bit of work with their Deal targeting.

Have you received a Facebook Deal yet? Do you think you’d be likely to buy a deal via Facebook or will you stick with Groupon, Living Social or another similar daily deal program?

Welcome to our series of interviews with local (and sometimes national) leaders in the social media and technology industry that will be featured on Social Mediarology. Today’s interview is with Douglas Karr of  DK New Media, an Indianapolis-based, globally-focused new media agency.

Douglas Karr – DK New Media

Below is Part 1 of the interview. See Part 2 at the bottom of the post.

Author of Corporate Blogging for Dummies, Chief Blogger/Founder of the Marketing Technology Blog and CEO of DK New Media. Douglas and his team specialize in performing due diligence analysis of marketing technology companies for venture capital and investment firms. DK New Media also consults on an ongoing basis with large companies who wish to leverage online strategies to build inbound marketing efforts using search and social media.

Can you tell me a little about yourself and DK New Media?

I’m Douglas Karr, author of Corporate Blogging for Dummies, and I helped start up Compendium (Indianapolis-based corporate blogging company). I’ve been blogging for a long time on the Marketing Technology Blog – I think I’ve been blogging for about six years now – and have a tremendous following on the blog. We get around 40,000 unique visitors a month on the blog and it’s a very centered demographic. The core of the visitors are CMOs and directors of marketing.

DK New Media is the agency that I built up. I had done email work at ExactTarget and blogging work at Compendium  and started doing a lot with SEO and pay-per-click and all of these other vehicles and what we saw was there was a gap in the industry as far as people who understood how to put all the pieces together and conduct what Forrester calls an omni-channel approach to marketing. DK New Media does a lot of “outsourced CMO” work, where we’ll be your CMO-for-hire for companies that may not have many resources. For other companies like ChaCha, we’re a trusted advisor and for folks like Webtrends it’s a hybrid where we do a lot of the work, but they also have some incredible internal marketing minds.

Our job is basically to prove ROI to our clients. So what we do, more than anything else, is inbound marketing – setting up analytics properly, getting a wholesale approach and adding a piece at a time – and then always showing clients their return on investment and how to measure it. I think that’s a differentiator in the industry because a lot of people, social media consultants especially, don’t actually go for the ROI for their clients.

Most companies now realize they need to use social media – what do you feel is the most effective medium for reaching consumers?

That’s a good question. We tend to stray away from that question and instead find out where the audience is. For some of our clients, the audience is on Facebook, so that’s where we want to meet them. But there are advantages and disadvantages to that platform. Maybe your audience is there, but are they really ready to buy? Are they really ready to engage with your business?

I think we tend to back up and go a different route and actually test the mediums. We’ll test Twitter, test LinkedIn, test Facebook, test blogging, test all these things and start to measure the reaction. Over time, we can then hone in and say “We’re getting more out of this, so let’s start investing more here”.

B2B clients sometimes gravitate toward LinkedIn, our smaller businesses tend to do really well on Twitter, large businesses that have a large following sometimes can get traction in Facebook, so it all depends on the company.

How important are blogs to a company’s digital strategy?

Well, you know blogging is dead! We hear that all the time. I think there are people from outside the industry that think blogging is dead because they can’t even recognize what a blog is anymore. A typical website that has a blog just looks like a standard website now.

Blogging is the engine to the car. Blogging is doing for marketing what the production line did for Henry Ford.

Now, we’re able to put out content easily and as often as we want, and represent it well in social, in search, maybe integrate it on other platforms or even syndicate it out via other mediums, even in email, and do it really effectively and with minimal effort.

I tend to look at blogging, when clients are culturally able to blog – when they have the resources, when they have the time and the patience – as a real centerpiece to their strategy where, for example, people are coming from Twitter, to the blog, to a call to action, to a landing page and then converting. It ends up being that blog – the unique post that’s relevant to the right person at the right time – that ends up drawing them in, so it’s a centerpiece for DK New Media. The Marketing Tech Blog is the center of the universe for everything we’re doing.

What are some things that you wish organizations knew about social media metrics?

I’ve always thought about social media as an amplifier. When you look at what PR accomplishes – and I’m a proponent of having a PR strategy, we have one for ourselves – PR amplifies the message. You do something special and PR helps you get the word out. With social media, that’s exactly what I see too. Companies that have a great foundation and have information that people what to know about, when they use social media, it just amplifies their message and gets it into the right hands. I think a lot of people are thinking that there’s social media, then there’s email then there’s something else – all these silos.

Social media isn’t something where you just hire an intern to retweet for you, social media is something that has to be integrated into everything you’re doing.

When we put out a press release for one of our clients, we have an integrated social media campaign to measure results. When we do email, we’re promoting social media in our email and we’re also promoting our email on social media. It’s a cog in a whole machine and too many people think of it as an isolated piece – I’m just going to blast out through social media and not monitor, not react, not measure – and they look at it and think it was a big waste of time and they’re not getting any results…of course you’re not getting any results.

What do you see as new on the horizon for social and digital media? Is it location based networks, which was the big thing last year, is it QR codes, which are becoming bigger now, or is it something else entirely?

I’ve got a unique view on QR codes because I think we’re already getting to the point of logo recognition for smartphones. Look at [AR app] Layar, where you can look through your phone’s lens and the app can identify landmarks and provide data on that, so I think QR codes are kind of a short-lived thing. I think you’ll eventually just be able to point at a logo on someone’s shirt and be able to find out all the information, website and anything you want instead of having to scan a QR code.

Geolocation of course is huge. My hope as a sophisticated marketer is that we stop just looking for eyeballs. With one of our clients, we actually dropped traffic to their site, but they’re getting greater conversions. It’s because they were getting a lot of bad visitors. The analytics field is finally catching up and they’re getting to the point where they’re able to look at what’s going on off-site that’s leading to onsite conversions and leading to actual business.

So, to me, the next big thing is finally the ability for marketers to not have to code and do all this technical stuff. We’re finally going to have true plug and play systems that work well at communicating with one another. Facebook has opened their back door with WebTrends to get analytics into their platform. Bit.ly has mobile SDKs so whether you’re on an iPhone app or visiting the Facebook page, they’re going to be able to show what your interaction is and target and present different material.

To me, all of the silos we have right now – that’s the problem in the industry. As a marketer, you know you have to make a decision about where you’re going to spend your time every day and we keep adding things to marketer’s plates: mobile apps, twitter, QR codes, etc. It’s unmanageable and finally we’re getting to a point where we have app platforms where you can (for example) build your own polling app for Facebook – you don’t have to code anything, you just drag and drop, build it and publish it. We’re finally getting the tools to allow us to not have to hire third party developers and invest hundreds of thousands of dollars. We’re getting the technology that allows us to bridge the gap. The goal is that we’re not fighting for social dollars or SEO dollars or email dollars; it’s that we can now finally invest in a package that does dozens of things for me, does it well, measures the results and gives me what I need. That’s the exciting thing that I see on the horizon.

That’s really interesting – I think you’re the first person I’ve talked to who has said that the democratization of code is the next big thing. There are more and more applications that enable you to create what you need without having to know HTML, CSS, PHP and other programming languages.

Yeah and we need to be there. We’re moving so fast now. I was talking to a company who hired 45 developers to develop their mobile app platform and within a year they backed it down to five people and the mobile app wasn’t even used very much. Everyone said “We need a mobile app”, you know, the CEO got an iPhone, so they made this massive investment and it was all for naught. The exciting thing to me is that we can go out and buy a platform license for five or ten thousand dollars and we get all these pieces. That, to me, is the next wave and that’s where we see companies like ExactTarget churning and burning. They have CoTweet and email, now they’re working on their Interactive Marketing Hub and enabling one place to monitor everything.

Making it easier for the marketer to do their job…

Right. I think we (as marketers) tend to work in our area of expertise. If you’ve been doing email for ten years and you need more prospects, you’ll tend to send more emails. We now finally have these tools where we have the options of what we want to do and you can test to see what performs better. I think it’s the next wave for us.

Any final thoughts? How should readers get in touch with you?

Well, of course, DKNewMedia.com and the Marketing Tech Blog. Be sure to sign up for our newsletter, we’re giving away a ton of stuff, including a new iPad 2. The Marketing Tech Blog has really evolved. We’ve got videos, a radio show (every Friday at 3:00), the newsletter is unique content that goes out weekly and if you’re a marketer and have a great story you want to get out, pitch it and we’ll put it up there on the Marketing Tech Blog. We have about 60 bloggers on there now. I still do the majority of the blogging on the site, but it’s becoming quite a centerpiece for marketers to get inspiration and assistance.

Below is Part 2 of the interview. See Part 1 at the top of the post.

Douglas Karr, is the author of Corporate Blogging for Dummies, Chief Blogger/Founder of the Marketing Technology Blog and CEO of DK New Media. Douglas and his team specialize in performing due diligence analysis of marketing technology companies for venture capital and investment firms. DK New Media also consults on an ongoing basis with large companies who wish to leverage online strategies to build inbound marketing efforts using search and social media.. You can follow DK New Media on Twitter (@DKNewMedia).

For the next few days, you can optionally switch to the new Pages format or stick with the old one, but as of mid-March, all pages will be automatically transitioned to the new Pages format, so it’s worth making the switch today.

Photo Ribbon:

One of the most visible changes is the addition of the photo ribbon to the top of the page. Just like user accounts, pages can now feature a random assortment of their recently posted photos. A couple of details:

• Unlike on your Personal Profile, you can’t specify the order of the photos – it just selects the 5 most recently uploaded photos to display at random.
• You can remove photos from showing up in the ribbon – simply click on the ‘x’ in the upper right-hand corner of each individual photo.
  • Note: This won’t delete the photo from your gallery, it just makes it so it won’t show up in the photo ribbon at the top of your page.

Tabs Moved to Left:

This was another big change from the way that Pages used to function; but again, it helps Pages mirror the Personal Profiles display and shouldn’t take too much getting used to. Now, instead of seeing your tabs at the top of your page, they cascade down the left-hand side. This also allows for longer custom tab names (see the image at right) and Facebook allows you have more visible tabs.

If you already had a custom landing page, everything should still work fine and users can still be defaulted to whichever page you’d like.

Use Facebook as Your Page:

This is one of the most significant upgrades to the new Facebook Pages. We actually saw a glimpse of this when Facebook accidentally rolled out the feature to all users for about an hour back in December. When you click on the link that allows you to use Facebook as your page, it literally allows you to use Facebook as your page.

This means several things:

• Your notifications area () now shows new fans added and lets you know when someone leaves a comment on your wall, or likes or comments on one of your posts.
• You can post on other Pages as your page – very helpful if you’re want to post as your official presence on other pages – just don’t go overboard. This is the feature that has the biggest opportunity for abuse.
• You can now “share” items from other pages onto your page. You’ve been able to do this as an individual for a long time, but now this functionality extends to Pages and is extremely helpful.
• You now have your very own News Feed. Go around and Like different pages and they’ll all show up in your custom news feed. Just click on the Facebook logo when logged in as your Page to get to your Page’s News Feed.
• You can also set up email notifications to be sent to you when a user likes or comments on a post on your wall.
  • This is a great feature for any Page managers who have been looking for real-time notification when their Facebook Wall gets some responses.
  • However, if you manage a Page with a large following, you could very easily become inundated by a flood of email notifications, so it’s probably only really useful as you’re beginning to grow your page.

Featured Likes:

You can now feature up to 5 other pages in the Featured Likes section on the left-hand side of your page. Click on Edit Page, then go to the Featured Tab to select anywhere from 1 to 5 pages that you want to always display under the Featured Likes section. The other pages featured will randomly generate from all the pages your brand has liked.

This is a great way to feature timely pages, to highlight members of your organization or to give someone an added-value push on your Facebook page.

Move to iFrames Instead of FBML:

This is probably the most important and most technical upgrade that Facebook made with their recent Pages upgrade. I’ll go into more details about how to set up a Facebook Landing Page without using FBML in an upcoming post, but here’s the short of this change.

Several years ago Facebook developed their own simplified version of HTML called FBML (Facebook Markup Language). FBML was developed with the intention of making coding easier for people who didn’t know the first thing about coding. It enabled users to utilize a very simple block of code (see below) to do many things, including specifying which content could only be seen by fans as opposed to anyone who visited the Page.

<fb:visible-to-connection>
Fans will see this content.
<fb:else>Non-fans will see this content.</fb:else>
</fb:visible-to-connection>

Back in the fall, Facebook announced that they’d be getting rid of FBML in favor of a standard HTML control called iFrames. Essentially, an iFrame allows you, as the programmer, to call in an entire page – created and hosted elsewhere – to display within the iFrame. This actually allows for much more flexibility when creating customized Facebook landing pages, but it is a big departure from Facebook’s old standard of FBML.

Those are some of the biggest changes involved in the Facebook Pages redesign. How will you start using the redesigned Pages for your organization’s benefit?