CDG Interactive Blog

A friend and former colleague recently lamented on her blog that no one had commented on her new re-design. From the responses she received, the reason was soon obvious - no one had seen it. All of her readers were using RSS. Great for ensuring your readers see every post, but not so much for commenting on the design.

But that discussion highlighted another struggle we have - internally and with our clients. How do you measure blog interaction and engagement now? It's no longer as easy as the number of comments made on the post.

The way people interact with blogs has changed. Readers can now share the post with a comment in their RSS reader, tweet or re-tweet a comment and a link (with or without visiting the site), share the link or comment on a shared Facebook link. This means the conversation can be fractured and needs to be addressed in multiple places.

Some sites are currently debating the usefulness of comments - Engadget recently turned off their comments temporarily and Web Worker Daily is asking Are Blog Comments Worth It?

As you're thinking about interaction with your readers, remember the conversation happens where they are, not just where you are. And what they're saying there could be much more interesting than the comments they leave on your site. You may find it helpful to use a social media monitoring tool like Social Scan or a paid service like Radian6 to monitor and follow up on these multiple conversation threads.

It was Snowmageddon in DC this weekend. (Or snowpocalypse, or my personal favorite Snowtorious BIG). And in case you missed out on it, we bring you all the fun of the DuPont Circle Snowball fight that happened right outside the CDG Interactive offices at Dupont Circle.

Our Creative Director, Matthew Snyder, was in attendance and reports, "At first it was strange to see everyone walking in the same direction, but there was a great energy. Everyone was having lots of fun, running and throwing snowballs."  Many attendees headed over to the Hotel Dupont's snow bar after the fight.

Get the t-shirt commemorating the Dupont Circle Snowball fight.

Do more with mobile

Google is updating the features on mobile ads again - this time introducing click-to-call phone numbers in mobile ads. I can see this as a definitely helpful feature instead of trying to remember a number and dial.

Like Post-its for Analytics

Google Analytics has now made their annotations feature available to everyone. If you run a special promotion or your site is featured somewhere, you can create an annotation to note the event and help track traffic, conversions, etc. or just remember that it happened six months later when someone asks about the spike in traffic.

Social Sharing

Delicious changes the way you can view links which gives it a more StumbleUpon feel. You can see Google's take called Fast Flip in the Google Labs.

Checking in

The Frugal Traveler gives us an interesting approach to the benefits of Foursquare. Being mayor can be more than ceremonial when it leads to discounts or inside info on a venue. I finally broke down and installed Foursquare on my phone.

A tale of two social media sites

The New York Times reviews The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook, A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius, and Betrayal and Stealing MySpace: The Battle to Control the Most Popular Website in America. Sounds like a soap opera.

Imagine you’re a public relations professional in search of a job. You’re clicking through Craigslist when you see this ad:

“PR manager sought to execute association media campaign. Duties will include: contacting at least 7 radio stations per week (between 10 am and noon); purchasing banner ads on sites selected by PR director; launching a print ad campaign with the tagline “Building a Better Future”; pitching stories to the press (scripts will be provided). . . . . and other tasks as dictated by PR Director. Office hours are 8 – 5 pm; lateness will not be tolerated. For consideration, send cover letter, resume, five writing samples, six letters of reference, certified college transcripts, and Social Security Number.”

Would you respond? My guess is probably not. Not even in this lousy economy.

A job ad is the beginning of a dialogue between the employer and the eventual employee. This ad opens the conversation with a tone of micromanagement and mistrust, and eliminates any promise of autonomy. Most talented candidates wouldn’t bother to reply,

Think of your RFP as a want ad for a vendor. It’s an opportunity for you to outline your needs, identify your challenges, and articulate your goals. It should give potential vendors a solid understanding of what you want to achieve with the project and what their role will be. Here are a few tips on what to do, and what not to do the next time you sit down to write an RFP.

Continue reading "Writing an RFP for Results" »

In the movie “Groundhog Day,” Bill Murray’s character relives the same day of his life over and over again, at first making the same mistakes and suffering the same consequences.

Eventually, he realizes he can learn from what he does wrong. The next time the same thing happens, he adjusts with much more positive results. Only by improving himself can he break out of his déjà vu.

All too often, though, company web sites are forced to live through Groundhog Day over and over again. Pages with high bounce rates or poor converting landing pages are never optimized. Every day, the site continues to drive away visitors or lose sales. And new pages with the same exact weaknesses are added.

So how do you keep your site from suffering Bill Murray’s fate? 

Continue reading "Is it Groundhog Day for Your Web Site?" »

Iron Chef - Bing vs. Google edition

I haven't found much that Bing is better for - or maybe Google is just a habit. But this feature could be seriously helpful. Bing has added a recipe search that might help you decide what's for dinner.

Assigning authority to the Twitterati

In indexing Tweets, are re-tweets more important? Does it depend on who said it initially? Or who passed it on? Apparently so, according to Technology Review. Google is working to identify "reputed followers" which will presumably work like inbound links and PageRank to give higher authority to certain information on Twitter.

No RSS feed? No problem!

You can now use Google Reader to keep up with changes on any webpage. So if there's a product you've been keeping an eye on and want to know if the price or description has changes, Google Reader can now create a feed for that page and let you know when content on the page has updated. I tried it out and it's incredibly easy to use.

Content is King

The Online Marketing Blog offers 10 Tips for Content Marketing Success, and they have some thought provoking statistics. 900,000 blog posts are published every 24 hours and 20 hours of video are uploaded every minute to YouTube, so creating compelling content is essential.

Facebook Privacy Changes

We've written extensively about Facebook privacy settings in the past, but some new changes were made recently and it's important that you understand the changes and why you shouldn't automatically accept the Facebook defaults. Here are 3 Facebook Settings you should check now, from the New York Times. (More to come on this topic.)