Intellisites, the smart choice for web design

We recommend social media to many of our clients. It’s a great way to discover what your customers want, to interact with them in a place where they are comfortable, to generate search engine rankings, and so much more. But it’s not right for everyone. If you’re not prepared to do it right, it might not be the right strategy for you. Ask yourself these four questions to see if you’re ready for it:

1. Could my business benefit from hearing what people are saying about us? If you already know exactly how people talk about your business, you might not need social media. On the other hand, if you’re not tracking your word of mouth reputation, you may not be able to afford not to participate in social media.
2. Could we benefit from learning more about our target customers? If you think you know exactly what it is that makes your customer tick, maybe you don’t need social media. Maybe your sales are great, and finding more effective or efficient ways to serve your customer just isn’t a priority. ‘Nuff said. Social media might not be in the cards for you.
3. Would it be useful to meet and talk to industry influencers? If you’re the kind of business who leads the pack (y’know, like google), then maybe you don’t need to worry about social media. You influence the influencers, and your business leadership is regarded as the gold standard. That’s great! The connections you can make on social media probably won’t turn into any valuable insight or influence.
4. Are we willing to commit to using social media?  Having a half-hearted social media presence is like having a lousy TV commercial – it can annoy people and do more harm than good. If you set up Facebook and Twitter accounts but don’t have the time to follow up when people ask you questions, you’re going to have some disappointed customers. Should you decide to enter the social media scene, make sure you are prepared to update your pages regularly and interact with customers punctually so your followers and fans feel the love.

We’ve talked before about how e-marketing campaigns can help drive traffic to your site.  But the reverse is true, too.  Your website can also include a short form that collects email addresses, which can build up your email list.  And when you have a strong list of email contacts, you have the potential for a lot of repeat visitors to your site – not to mention repeat business.

Of course, having a form on your website isn’t going to do much unless you can get people to enter info into the form.  And, truthfully, there just aren’t a lot of people out there who spend time browsing the web and generously inserting their contact information into forms out of the goodness of their hearts.  So if you want the form on your website to collect a lot of information, you have to give it a little incentive power.

People Will Do Anything for a Reward

Since people aren’t likely to volunteer their e-mail address for no reason, it helps if you give them a little reward for providing their contact information. 

There’s a huge difference between asking for someone’s email address and asking for someone’s email address so that you can send him a coupon.  Restaurants and department stores already use this technique to entice their patrons to fork over their email addresses, so go ahead and jump on the bandwagon.  And if your form-filler-outer uses the coupon, you not only have his email address, but you’ve also actually made a sale.

Besides a discount or coupon, another “reward” is good content, packaged in the form of an e-book or secret members-only article archives.  If someone has come to your site in search of information, the person might be willing to give out his or her email address as long as it opens the vault of information.  Of course, there are benefits to providing free information, too, so you might not want to hide away all of your factoids under lock and key.  But for businesses in some industries, reserving some information for members will get you new entries in your contact list.

Keep the Circle Spinning

Both your email list and your website are awesome tools that help the internet bring business to you.  So use your website to collect email addresses.  And use your email contacts to bring visitors to your site.  And as this cycle continues, you’ll find your business spinning its way to more clients – and higher profits.

Just recently, I’ve had at least three people come to me about a web site that tracks your web site visits, called compete.com.  They called because of what is being reported by Compete.com’s analysis of their web site – either in a panic because it looked like they were getting no traffic, or crowing because it said they had a bajillion visitors.

Compete.com – what do they claim?

Compete.com claims to show “competitive metrics on every site on the web, powered by the largest pool of online consumer behavior data in the industry”.  Essentially:  “show me my competitor’s traffic!”

They even have a funny tagline:  “Track your rivals.  Then eat their lunch.”

(That’s funny:  I thought it was “eat them FOR lunch.”  Why would I want to eat their lunch?  Gross!)

Anyway, they get their data from numerous sources.  Their biggest source is apparently the two million people who have downloaded their search toolbar.  They take the data from each person’s history, and use that to guess how much traffic any web site gets.   On the surface, it’s a really cool tool.  And it does work…kinda.

Should you be concerned?

One of those who seemed concerned initially was WNYT.com – Albany’s local NBC TV affiliate.  They said that another local TV outlet was going around town with printouts of the compete.com web site statistics.  Of course, those statistics in hand indicated that the “other guy” was getting much more traffic to their web site recently.*  They came in saying: “Quick! Please buy from me today while we’re ahead!!” 

It sounded funny.. in both ways.

Funny Ha-Ha

Funny because the ‘other guys’ (in this case the local CBS outlet) get spanked regularly in regular TV news ratings by WNYT.  I mean, every Neilsen rating, without fail, in almost every age group and demographic.  It’s been going on for so long that the other news outlets have a fixation on who can just be number 2 .  One such CBS guy was heard to say:  “Hey, sure they beat us in the 35-50 demo… but we kill in the 90+ demo between 11-12 a.m. during early bird lunch specials at the diner!”

(OK, not really.  They don’t ‘kill’ there either.  But trust me, that’s very close to what they say.)

Smell Test Funny

It also seemed funny because the web site traffic comparisons seemed off.

It doesn’t make sense that the web site of the TV market’s “first place leader” would rank behind the web site of the TV market’s  “first place loser” .  If you watch news on one TV station regularly, it seems that you’d follow that one on the web, too.  Think about that:  If you buy at Wal-Mart, do you think of Target.com first on the web?

So I asked WNYT to supply their monthly traffic from LiveStats, their highly regarded on-site statistics program.

Our own little Fact Checking

I took a look at what WNYT provided from their actual web site statistics.  Wow.   For February 09:

Actual Statistics show:  168,717 unique visitors.
Compete.com statistics indicated:  59,569 unique visitors.

That’s pretty bad.  But I gave compete.com the benefit of the doubt.  Maybe they just didn’t get one month right.  So I kept checking, going backwards.

January:  Actual 261,683; Compete claimed 300,000
December:  Actual 272,602; Compete claimed 250,000
November: Actual 272,602; Compete claimed 90,000
October:  Actual 148,335; Compete claimed 100,000

Holy cow.  Those are some big differences.  Don’t trust compete.com alone with your daughter.

Keep Looking.

And, being one of the area’s largest web design firms with 500+ web sites, I took a look at some of our own actual Google Analytics statistics from a bunch of the web sites we manage.  Google Analytics is installed right there on the site – and it tracks completely accurately, and privately.

Here’s a graph of what Compete.com said:

Wild and Crazy Swings!

 According to Compete.com – their best month was under 10,000 visitors.  their worst month was 1,800.

Will the real statistics please stand up?

That’s right…their worst month ever was just under 10,000.  Who is running compete.com..are they working for an Albany politician, too?

Nothing to see here.  Move along.

So you see, both fact checks seem to bear witness:  Compete.com is cool for water cooler talk.  That’s it.

And if you use it for water cooler talk, you need to find a better hobby.  Really.

* Oh – one more thing.  What were the results of the Pepsi Challenge?

You may not have noticed the asterisk above in the first few paragraphs.  Those other guys from CBS, showing the “great” results vs. WNYT?  Did they get too much of Liz Bishop’s hairspray in their eyes? Here’s what compete.com said:

WRGB - we're #2!

Check it out for yourself. 

It shows that WRGB.com has about 1/2 of the traffic that WNYT.com does.    But we know compete.com is way off… maybe CBS’ web site does get a lot of traffic.  The question is:  how off are they?

I invite CBS to send me their data, and let’s settle this the real way – with real statistics from your actual web site statistics.   I’ll post your results too and then you can have a news team rumble.

Otherwise, I’ve got to assume that WNYT remains the true leader.