Building Successful Business Models Around Community – Interview with Jeffrey Veen, Typekit

by Bill Cullifer on May 8, 2012

A Web Professional Success Story

Jeffrey Veen is the Founder and CEO of Typekit. Founded in 2008 by some of the industry’s most experienced designers and developers, Typekit was acquired by Adobe Systems Incorporated in 2011. Veen and the TypeKit team continues to advance what’s possible on the web. Built around web standards, the Typekit service gives designers and developers a subscription-based library of hosted, high-quality fonts to use on their websites. With over 250,000 customers including some of the largest sites on the web today including: The New York Times, Conde Nast, IGN, Twitter, and many others. Adobe Typekit is actively integrating Typekit into hosted platforms—such as WordPress, TypePad, and Posterous—so that anyone with a website can use real fonts.

In addition to Typekit, Veen was one of the founding partners of the user experience consulting group Adaptive Path. While there, he lead the development of Measure Map, which was acquired by Google. During his time at Google, he redesigned Google Analytics and lead the UX team for Google’s apps. Veen was also a part of the founding web team at Wired Magazine, where he developed HotWired, Web Monkey, Wired News, and many other sites. During that time, he authored two books, “HotWired Style” and “The Art and Science of Web Design.”

Building Successful Business Models Around Community - Interview with Jeffrey Veen, Typekit Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Now serving as the Senior Director, Products at Adobe Systems, I caught up with Veen for an seventeen minute Skype interview to discuss the evolution of TypeKit, including the process from start-up to sale to Adobe, the power of the TypeKit community, lessons learned along the way and to glean some advice for those among us within the Web professional community interested in taking an idea to fruition.

Hats off to Jeffrey Veen a true Web Professional success story!

Building Typekit on relationships
by Jeffrey Veen

There are lots of reasons to do a startup. Sometimes, there’s an idea you just can’t stop thinking about — a thing you absolutely want to exist in the world. Or sometimes you see a gap in how an industry is evolving, and with a small team of talented people you think you can fill that gap much faster than the big companies can.

Both of these things were true when we started Typekit three years ago. Web browsers started implementing @font-face and a lot of people started wringing their hands over the issue of intellectual property and typefaces. A debate sprang up: Web designers were embracing new CSS features like never before, but font designers worried that their craft would go the way of Napster and BitTorrent. It was a recipe for disruption and opportunity, and we jumped in.

For us, so much was uncharted. The four of us who founded the company had worked together and built products before, but we’d never been down the venture capital path. We scratched up a little cash putting on a conference and doing some work with our friends at Twitter. Still, it was clear that if we wanted to build Typekit at the scale we imagined, we’d need some real money.
It takes a team

Cloud computing has really made it inexpensive to try out new ideas. I mean, seriously, it’s crazy cheap now. Case in point: when we started Measure Map in 2005, the table stakes were about $25,000 for a rack of Dell servers just to see if it would work. The machines were shipped to us and we took them to a data center and opened all the boxes and plugged them in and spent a few days configuring everything. Six years later, that feels as antiquated as starting your car by turning a crank.

So yes, it’s true that cloud computing has changed the startup world. It’s cheap to build stuff now, and that makes things less risky. But a great team costs money, and that hasn’t changed — nor should it. Experienced designers and engineers can’t pay their kids’ tuition for 10 cents an hour or spin down health insurance when it’s not utilized.

You need a team. I don’t believe you can do it all yourself, or even with a co-founder camped out in your parents’ garage. Examples to the contrary are the exception. It’s rare that one person can write all the code, craft an exceptional user experience, communicate transparently with customers, and manage the financial health of the business. Yes, you can build tangible proof of your idea. You can even launch it and get traction. But to really build something that has broad reach and significant impact, most of us need the diversity of talent and experience that comes with a team of collaborators.

So when we started Typekit, we did some math. Given our track record and how much we believed in the idea of fonts on the web, how much of the theoretical future value of the company should we take in advance? With that up-front capital, could we actually put together the team we wanted and move fast enough to get a compelling product to an audience that would pay for it? And even if we could, would it generate enough revenue to both share with our partners (since we didn’t actually have any fonts for our font service) and grow into a sustainable business?

When I say “math” above, I run the risk of implying some rational process. Sometimes, I wished there was a simple algorithm or an actuary table for startups — plug in your numbers and out comes the answer. Unfortunately, it’s nothing like that. Financing a startup has as much to do with timing as it does with the track record of the founders or the attractiveness of the idea. The first browsers implemented CSS font linking just around the same time as the 2008 financial meltdown. Was that good for us? Was that bad? Tough call, but it certainly was relevant. We iterated our business model as much as we did our interface.

There are other models for getting started, of course. We bootstrapped Measure Map with the profits of Adaptive Path’s vibrant consulting practice, following the model we saw 37signals forging. When you’re a consultant, you trade your time for money and once you’ve done the work, you can pretty much do whatever you want with the cash. But it’s distracting. For me, doing my best possible work requires complete focus on a single problem. I couldn’t solve other people’s problems to make money and build a great product at the same time. To do that, I needed — again! — a great team. So at Adaptive Path, some of the people earned the cash, while others burned through it building a product using — again! — the same sort of undocumented math as a VC-backed startup.

Ultimately, we did what might be called a traditional round of funding for Typekit: A VC firm led the round that included a number of angel investors.
A True story

Our lead investor was Tony Conrad. I first met Tony when he was one of Adaptive Path’s clients a bunch of years ago. He was on the entrepreneur side of things back then as the CEO of Sphere, and was looking for help with visualizing his product concept through Adaptive Path’s user-centered design process. This was during the time I was transitioning to Google, so we didn’t get the chance to do day-to-day work together, but we did spend a lot of time talking about the product and how he was designing the business to support it.

It was immediately clear that Tony put a lot of work into surrounding himself with very talented people, regardless of whether he could convince them to actually take a job at his company. In every project he’s taken on, I’ve watched him build up a network of advisors, and then trust what they would tell him. Later, when he launched about.me, the product’s initial growth was driven through Twitter. His group of advisors collectively had millions of followers to help him get the word out.

It was through Tony that we meet everyone else at True Ventures. He’s a partner there now, and when I left Google and started thinking about doing something with Bryan, True was our first call. They were one of the early VC funds, about five years ago, to focus exclusively on seed-stage companies — small teams that haven’t taken a formal round of financing yet. These companies are the riskiest investments since the team usually hasn’t even started building their idea. True focuses not just on giving them money to give it a go, but reducing the overall risk by attempting to eliminate as many of the factors that tank a company in the first year.

Specifically, True puts a tremendous amount of effort into the community of founders with whom they work. They host frequent events, bring in experienced and inspiratiional speakers, and help the entrepreneurs they’ve funded connect with each other. We knew we could pick up the phone and talk not only to the partners, but to any of the other founders and we’d find someone who’d been through whatever we were facing that day.
The most interesting dinner party ever

I may have lots of experience developing products, but navigating the ambiguity of a startup is a very different set of skills. I learned while working on Typekit that both the product and the business benefit from a user-centered philosophy. When you’re stuck with a problem and don’t know what to do next, talk to people. Ask them what they think. Collect a bunch of perspectives. Filter what they say through your own intuition and experience. Then ask them who else you should ask. Keep going and never stop. To put it simply: Great products are built on solid relationships.

So we took Tony’s advice and surrounded ourselves with people we respected. And it turns out that the best way to get someone’s continued attention is to take their money. We set aside a portion of our first round equity for a group of angel investors who, in Bryan’s words, “Would make the most interesting dinner party ever.” And, as soon as we’d got everyone signed on, we sat down for dinner with Evan Williams, Caterina Fake, Matt Mullenweg, Chris Sacca, Josh Felzer, David Samuel, and the legendary Ron Conway. Some of them I’d known for years, like Ev and Caterina who had both been clients at Adaptive Path. Matt became a friend back while I was working on getting Measure Map integrated with WordPress. I worked with Chris at Google and he helped me to think about how things can get really, really big. But Josh, David, and Ron were new relationships we developed and I’m grateful we did. Everyone’s combined experience — and their willingness to share it — was both a tremendous head start and a reassuring saftey net for us.

My only regret in this whole funding process was that we weren’t able to work with twice as many people as did. We had so many great meetings and offers for support. In the end, we had to find a balance between how much of the company we were willing to part with and the number of investors who would end up with a reasonable stake. It was amazing that so many people believed in us, but it was difficult to make the final decision.

If I were an advice-giving guy, I’d tell entrepreneurs this: Raising money for your startup is not about the money. It’s about finding people to work with that you like and trust. Someone you wouldn’t hesitate to ask anything, and won’t make you feel stupid when you do. Use this test: Imagine your phone ringing; does the name on the screen make you feel eager to answer? Not nervous. Not dreading the call. Excited.

If you do go down the VC path, choose wisely. Your investors are one of the most important hiring decisions you’ll make.

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Advice for Creating a Top-Notch Web Developer Resume – Interview with Kimberly Blessing

by Bill Cullifer on April 20, 2012

Advice for Creating a Top-Notch Web Developer Resume - Interview with Kimberly Blessing Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

According to Kimberly Blessing, Web developer, author and principle at Kimmie Corp, your resume format should work to highlight your strengths. The chronological resume, perhaps the most traditional format, fails in this regard. A functional resume does a much better job of highlighting your experience in a specific role, but most web developers are good at more than one thing. I suggest mixing aspects of the two formats, organizing them in a way that makes sense for you and your strengths — then you’ll have a resume that stands out.

A special shout to Kimberly and her blog for the interview and the following content.

Here are the general sections found in a great web developer resume. With the exception of the first two, the rest can be ordered and/or further broken out according to your needs.

Objective: If you’re searching for a job, you ought to know what you’re seeking! Customize your objective, as needed, when replying to job postings. (Note: If you’re not actively seeking a job, but still want to have a resume posted online, it’s okay to omit this section.)

Summary of Qualifications: It’s a cheesy headline, perhaps, and all too often the summary is filled with buzzwords — but I have read really compelling summaries that made me want to know more about a candidate. Focus on describing your strengths and what you contribute to an organization.

Skills: This is where the keywords and buzzwords will start showing up. That’s okay: you’ll back them up with evidence in the other sections. You can subdivide this section in any number of ways: Technical vs. Soft Skills, Front-End vs. Back-End Skills, Design vs. Development Skills, etc.

Professional Accomplishments: Here you can include project accomplishments, awards, public speaking engagements, publishing credits, or descriptions of really awesome things you’ve accomplished. Like the Skills section, you can also break these out separately.

Work Experience: If you’ve done any combination of full-time work, freelancing, and volunteering, this is the most generic title you can use for your work history. Some people like to break out their professional experience from other work, but I think that can undermine the importance of having taken on freelance or volunteer work. If you list accomplishments for each job in this section, don’t repeat them elsewhere, and vice versa.

Education: I don’t like to see this section missing from a resume. Haven’t gone to college? That’s okay. Be proud of what schooling you have made it through and list it here. Oh, and that includes training programs, conferences — anything you’ve forked out money for that you’ve learned something from!

Required Information

If your resume were to consist of only two things, it should be these:

Contact Information: You’d think this would be a no-brainer, but I have seen resumes where developers didn’t list a phone number, email address, or personal web site (more on that below). In my opinion, it’s a waste of space to display your full home address, especially if you are looking to relocate. No one’s going to snail-mail you an invitation to interview, so city and state will suffice. HR will collect the rest of your contact information later.
URLs: I wish I could tell you exactly how many of those ~500 resumes didn’t include a single URL… but my gut says that at least half didn’t feature even a personal web site URL. Seriously? If you’re a web developer, you should have some URLs to share. If you’re brand-new to the field, put some of your school projects online. If you’ve only ever done intranet-type work, get permission to copy parts of the code and make it available, or create other projects of your own to demonstrate your skills. If you’re serious about getting a web development job, you need this.

On the flip side, don’t waste space on these bits of information: references (or the phrase, “References available upon request”), GPA, salary requirements, or personal information (except if you have hobbies that would be of interest to another geek and would increase the likelihood of getting invited in for an interview).

Frequently Asked Questions

Does my resume have to fit on to one or two pages? No, I don’t think that it does. However, I think it’s nice if a resume is so well edited and structured that, when printed, it fits to exactly one or two pages (one page if you’re young, recently out of school, or switching careers; otherwise two pages). However, if you truly have so much awesomeness to report, then, by all means, go on! If you’re really that super-duper, I’m sure I’ll want to know all about it.

Does one resume fit all jobs? NO! Don’t be afraid to tweak your resume format or content to the job you’re applying for. In fact, if you have diverse enough skills and interests (design vs. development) you should probably have completely separate resumes for these purposes.

I am graduating soon and don’t have much web development experience. What can I do to beef-up my resume? Use the “Objective” area to make it clear that you’re looking for an entry-level position. Highlight your strengths in the “Summary of Qualifications” area and place the “Education” section next, so it’s clear you’re just coming out of school. List your technical skills, as well as any soft skills that you can support with extra-curricular or volunteer work. If you have been active in a tech community or have attended technical or web conferences, list those.

I’m switching careers. I’ve taken some web design and development courses and done some small projects. How do I reflect all of this in my resume? First, don’t hide the fact that you’re switching careers! Your prior experience, even if in a completely different industry, has (hopefully) taught you how to deal with people and has helped you understand your strengths. Start your resume with an “Objective” statement that spells out your desire to move into web development. Then list your skills, training and experience with the web so far before providing your employment history and other educational details. Highlight any experience that translates across industries, but otherwise keep the non-web details short.

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Going Global: Web Globalization Strategies interview with John Yunker

by Bill Cullifer on April 11, 2012

Going Global: Web Globalization Strategies interview with John Yunker Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Web globalization isn’t just about expanding into new countries; many companies now must support additional languages within their domestic markets. In the eleven minute interview with John Yunker, co-founder of Byte Level Research, we discuss his annual the benefits of web globalization for Web professionals, the annual ranking of the best global websites, the Web Globalization Report Card he’s created and how companies like Facebook are leading in web globalization and how they got there.

According to Wikipedia, in computing, internationalization and localization (other correct spellings are internationalisation and localisation) are means of adapting computer software to different languages, regional differences and technical requirements of a target market. Internationalization is the process of designing a software application so that it can be adapted to various languages and regions without engineering changes. Localization is the process of adapting internationalized software for a specific region or language by adding locale-specific components and translating text.

The terms are frequently abbreviated to the numeronyms i18n (where 18 stands for the number of letters between the first i and last n in internationalization, a usage coined at DEC in the 1970s or 80s)[1] and L10n respectively, due to the length of the words. The capital L in L10n helps to distinguish it from the lowercase i in i18n.

Some companies, like IBM and Sun Microsystems, use the term “globalization” for the combination of internationalization and localization.

Microsoft defines Internationalization as a combination of World-Readiness and localization. World-Readiness is a developer task, which enables a product to be used with multiple scripts and cultures (globalization) and separating user interface resources in a localizable format (localizability, abbreviated to L12y).

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3 Keys To Making Giant Leaps In Web Product Development – Interview with Robert Hoekman, Jr

by Bill Cullifer on March 29, 2012

According to an article written by Robert Hoekman, Jr., user experience specialist, author and principal at Miskeeto.com there’s nothing wrong with improving an existing design. But if you’re interested in UX design and designing a truly innovative product, listen and read on.

In this 10 minute interview, I talk with Robert about the walk-aways for Web professionals including his thoughts on how to “stop making problem-solving your end goal. Don’t just solve the problem; solve it in a way that leaves your customers astounded and your competition dumbfounded.” I also talk to him about his heartfelt experiences as a Web professional rock star and his new book entitled “Big Deal: On Being Famous to Almost No One” that is available as an ebook at Amazon.com

3 Keys To Making Giant Leaps In Web Product Development - Interview with Robert Hoekman, Jr Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Technology designers shout the famous Einstein quote with the same frequency and urgency that a puppy relieves itself on your favorite rug: “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” But how frequently do they actually achieve this noble ambition? Almost never.

Of course, the problem with Einstein’s quote is not in the words used to craft it, but in its application. Tech designers, almost as a rule, and without even thinking about it, use what they know now as the starting line for their designs. Good design, after all, comes from incremental improvements based on old standards. But there’s a catch: On rare occasions, a disruptive design comes along that establishes a paradigm so far beyond the current that competitors spend the next year with their jaws on the floor, struggling to catch up, and that kind of design doesn’t come from incremental improvement; it comes from an outright assault on the status quo. This is no time to be shy, or tame. If you want a great design, you have to go Samuel Jackson on the thing. “Part of the problem is that the tech has outpaced our thinking.”

Smartphones, if you’ll recall, were downright awful until the iPhone set the new standard. Prior to that seismic event, the Motorola RAZR was the best-selling cell phone. Using the web on that thing was almost as confounding as making a phone call. The iPhone’s biggest innovation wasn’t in the aesthetic, the hardware, or even the introduction of the app model (though both certainly played a part). Its biggest innovation was its extreme degree of usability, plain and simple. The phone represented an advance in usability significant enough to be considered a re-imagining by customers and the media. The product was so much more usable by all accounts than others on the market that all Apple had to do to make it fly off the shelf was show a disembodied hand using it to do all the same things we struggled with on every other phone. It took the competition well over a year to produce something that even compared.

[As Hoekman points out, the real innovation starts at your 11th idea, not your first.]

Apple’s iOS devices may be among the most advanced pieces of engineering in history, but that isn’t their purpose. Their purpose is to be among the most usable pieces of personal tech in history. iOS is arguably the most approachable computing platform ever invented, and the extreme degree of usability it offers is the reason every parent in America right now has a story about a three-year-old who picked it up and intuited its use. And although Apple is certainly playing catch-up now on a variety of features (such as wireless delta updates, something other phones had for months prior to iOS 5), it set the bar, and that bar has made the company billions of dollars.

The lesson to be learned here: Good design may come from small steps, but important design comes from giant leaps.

So what’s stopping us?

Part of the problem is that the technology, which tech companies have more than proven can now handle impossible things, has outpaced our thinking. We’re still thinking in clicks when the tech is giving us gestures. We’re still tying our users to desktop computers when the tech enables us to go wherever our users go. What will push personal tech into the future now is figuring out how people will use all that computing power. Once and for all, we need to stop making technology usable and start making usable technology. The goal can no longer be merely to improve peoples’ experiences with technology; it must now be to use technology to change their experiences in life.

It’s the plainest message, the most explainable scope, the most intuitive usage model, the most appealing aesthetic, and the clearest purpose that compose a design of superior usability. It’s when these things are at their absolute finest and working in concert that a user’s experience is truly great. And it’s the person who becomes giddy in the face of such a challenge that stands the best shot at realizing a product, or even a feature, that matters as much.
“Design criteria help you envision a product that pushes the boundaries.”
If you’re such a person, here are a few mantras to consider tattooing on your forehead:
1. Stop designing solutions

Creating a Flickr knock-off to address users who want to organize photos is a solution. Creating Flickr in the first place? That wasn’t about solving a problem. That was about reinventing the act of photo-sharing to create something that had global reach and could be used by the masses.

Stop making problem-solving your end goal. Don’t just solve the problem; solve it in a way that leaves your customers astounded and your competition dumbfounded.

Achieving this means developing a strong product vision and making sure everyone knows it by heart, and writing up a set of design criteria–specific, actionable guidelines that describe the eventual experience of using the design–that help you envision a product that pushes the boundaries established by your competitors (and likely even yourself). Setting up those criteria isn’t about laying out what you know is possible, but laying out what you want. The proof will be in the execution, of course, but great execution starts here.

2. Start at number 11

Make incremental improvements and you get a design that’s incrementally better; make significant improvements and you get a design that’s important. Never accept the first idea you have–or even the tenth. Start with number 11. Whether done through back-of-the-napkin sketches, wireframes, blueprints, or engineering schematics, keep designing wilder ideas until you’ve reached so far into the abyss you’re not sure the thing is actually possible. Most of the time, it is–you just haven’t yet pushed your team far enough to discover they can accomplish it. Technology is no longer a serious limitation for most products. The only thing stopping you is your desire and willingness to push yourself and your team toward something more extreme than you previously thought possible.

3. Extreme usability is the goal

Usable products are those more convenient than the current alternatives (including your own), which is to say they’re more understandable, more approachable, more accessible, often (but certainly not always) cheaper, and frequently more beautiful. Touchscreens made using the web more convenient than on older smartphones. Contextual virtual keyboards made data entry (an email address, for example) more convenient than on a tactile keyboard. Video streaming made face-to-face meetings more convenient than driving to and from an office. These are not solutions; they’re the product of the pursuit of extreme convenience.

Regardless of whether you aim for advanced technology, make it a priority to aim for advanced usability. Your new end goal should be to design things more usable than anyone has ever imagined–than even you imagined. Don’t bother with anything less.

The best version of the same old thing isn’t the best version of anything. So forget what you know. Design like what you’re doing has never been done before and it’s up to you to become the person who sets the standard.

Look far enough and hard enough, and you just might.

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Content Strategy for the Web – Interview with Kristina Halvorson, BrainTraffic.com

by Bill Cullifer on March 8, 2012

According to Wikipedia, content strategy refers to the planning, development, and management of informational content—written or in other media. The term is particularly common in web development since the late 1990s. It is recognized as a field in user experience design but also draws interest from adjacent communities such as content management, business analysis, and technical communication.

Content Strategy for the Web - Interview with Kristina Halvorson, BrainTraffic.com Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

In this eleven minute Q&A interview with Kristina Halvorson, CEO BrainTraffic.com we cover:

* What is content strategy?
* Why content matters
* Have we evolved to the point where the enterprise recognizes the content specialist as a stand alone occupation role?
* What advice do you have for freelancers?
* What advice do you have for employers?

An individual who practices content strategy as a discipline is referred to as a content strategist. The perspectives that content strategists bring to content depend strongly on their professional training and education.

For instance, some specialize in content analysis, which roughly describes work with metadata, taxonomy, search engine optimization, and the ways these concepts support content.

Others outline web editorial strategies, guidelines, and tools, which may extend to organizational change management. This form of content strategy may be concerned with developing new forms of content, such as multimedia, or various “presence management” technologies like microblogging.

There is yet another stream of content strategy advancing information architecture goals. In this case, content strategy may only involve writing site copy for new website pages and adapting the content on existing ones. All content strategists are familiar with a wide range of applications and tools, and frequently are responsible for implementing and training individuals to best use them.

Kristina Halvorson is the founder and president of Brain Traffic, a content strategy consultancy. She is the author of Content Strategy for the Web; the founder of Confab, The Content Strategy Conference; and the host of Content Talks, a weekly 5×5 podcast.

Kristina is widely recognized as the industry’s leading advocate for content strategy. Her article “The Discipline of Content Strategy” (December 2008) was one of the first internationally-published articles on the topic. In 2009, she curated the first Content Strategy Consortium (as part of the IA Summit). In 2010, she delivered the keynote address at the world’s first Content Strategy Summit in Paris, France. Today, her work continues to shape and drive the global content strategy conversation.

Kristina lives in St. Paul, Minnesota with her two children, whom she often quotes on Twitter (@halvorson).

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The Art of Reinventing Your Personal Brand and Five things to Stop Doing for 2012

by Bill Cullifer on February 21, 2012

Interview with Dorie Clark, CEO of Clark Strategic Communications and author “What’s Next: The Art of Reinventing Your Personal Brand”

In this five minute interview with Dorie Clark, a frequent contributor to the Harvard Business Review, Forbes and the Huffington Post Dorie shares some key insights from the book and five things that she recommends for 2012.

The Art of Reinventing Your Personal Brand and Five things to Stop Doing for 2012 Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

A few of the walk-aways include:

* Her experiences in the corporate trenches
* How to change and control perceptions about yourself
* A process making clear what your destination is
* Evaluate your skills
* Develop a narrative
* Way’s to re introduce yourself strategically
* Prove your worth

Five things to stop doing for 2012

* Stop responding like a trained monkey
* Stop mindless traditions
* Stop reading annoying things
* Stop doing work that’s not worth it
* Stop making things more complicated than they should be

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Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Web Professional

by Bill Cullifer on January 24, 2012

On January 18th tens of millions of users (and possibly more) found themselves without access to some of the internet’s most popular websites, and others found themselves witness to very public corporate protests. To help us better understand the impact on the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and what it potentially means for the practicing Web Professional, I reached out to Jeff MacGurn, VP of Earn Media and Serach Engine Optimization at Covario a San Diego, CA company and Brent Norris, WebProfessionals.org member and Web Designer from 808Digital.com from the State of Hawaii.

QandA with Jeff MacGurn, VP of Earn Media and Serach EngineOptimization at Covario

* Who Did the SOPA Blackout Really Affect?
* Why has this just become such a visible issue within the last few days?
* Why this is not just an issue for websites inside of the U.S.?
* What is the Marketing impact for Web professionals?

QandA with Brent Norris, WebProfessionals.org member and Web Designer from 808Digital.com

* What is SOPA all about from a Web professional perspective?
* Who’s behind this?
* Why should Web professionals care?
* What’s next?
* Where do we go from here

Transcript:

Bill Cullifer: On January 10th, tens of millions of users and possibly more found themselves without access to some of the most popular websites, and others found themselves witness to some very public corporate protest. To help us better understand the impact of the Stop Online Piracy Act, SOPA, and what it potentially means for the practicing web professional, I am reaching out to Jeff MacGurn, VP of Earned Media & Search Engine Optimization at Covario, a San Diego company and Brent Norris, webprofessionals.org member and designer from 808 Digital from the State of Hawaii. Good afternoon gentlemen, thanks for agreeing to the interview.

Jeff MacGurn: Hey thanks for having me.

Brent Norris: Good afternoon, Bill and thanks for taking some time to address the subject.

Bill Cullifer, WebProfessionals.org: Jeff let’s start with you. Now you recently posted a blog poster about whom did the SOPA black out really affect, can you expand on that article?

Jeff MacGurn: Yeah, we essential, you know there’s a lot of information out there about what SOPA was, what PIPA was, and the politics going on, who is involved with protesting it, but I think a lot of people really kind of missed who is actually affected by the blackout and what type of effect it would actually have, and I think that was the whole point of the blackout that people didn’t really realize what blacking out an entire major sites on the internet or censoring major sites on the internet would have on people, and so we really wanted to take a deep dive and look at what the overall impact of this blackout was, to maybe try and give people an understanding of you know what that impact could be in the future.

Bill Cullifer, WebProfessionals.org: Some of the key findings.

Jeff MacGurn: Well some of the key findings were you know really what we wanted to look at was, number one, we started looking at the demographical distribution of each of these major websites, and we picked four of the largest sites that were blacking out, that is to say, Wikipedia, Reddit, WordPress and Craigslist. And then we took a look at using Google Insights and some of their brand search data, to try and understand what the distribution of their user base was throughout the United States and we found some really fascinating things about exactly who was affected. Interestingly enough, all of those sites seemed to have really be densely used on the West Coast, which maybe that wasn’t so surprising, doesn’t really surprised me the people on the West Coast tend you know, tend to use technology, there are a lot of technology jobs out on the West Coast. The age groups that tend to be the most affected by these sites really were between 18 and 34, once again not completely surprising, and for the most part, I think most of the sites were just slightly over a bit more male skewed than female. But our estimates really put the number of people affected in the tens of millions, but the extension you know, if you consider how many people have Facebook friends, you know the average Facebook user I think have a 150 or so friends, and with the saturation of Facebook, you might say that by extension you know, many hundreds of millions of people were affected world wide.

Bill Cullifer, WebProfessionals.org: Why do you think this is, just becomes such a visible issue within the last few days?

Jeff MacGurn: Well I think you know, that’s an interesting question, I don’t think it’s a, I think it’s only become visible if you are not really participating in social media, because this has been a really big issue from a social media perspective for the last couple of months. I think it’s really only come into the main stream media over the past few days, because you have seen a social media grassroots movement that started to direct a lot of energy towards, or rather against the SOPA bill.

Bill Cullifer, WebProfessionals.org: Why is this not just an issue for websites inside of the US?

Jeff MacGurn: Well you know, SOPA itself covers websites outside of the US, and blocking websites outside of the US, but I think above and beyond that you know, we have a site here that, the internet is not really on a country by country basis that we are seeing a big internationalization of websites and indeed online marketing, so you know really, changing a website in one place can have huge repercussions throughout the world. Even if you are talking about you know in English only version of a website those are still accessed you know throughout the world.

Bill Cullifer, WebProfessionals.org: We represent web professionals world wide, and I am trying to hone in on why is this important to them, and to that end I’d like to know you know, what’s the marketing impact for web professionals?

Jeff MacGurn: So you know, I think, the marketing impact for web professionals comes in, you know in a number of different ways. First of all, I think it is a great lesson on how to understand social media trends, see what’s going on, on social media, and leverage those social media trends, not only you know, if you were against SOPA, obviously you with the business, or web marketer, may want to voice your opposition or you know, on behalf of your company. If your company was so inclined to do so, but by the same token you may also be able to leverage this as an opportunity to gain further visibility and exposure. If you take a look at the sites that went down, I mean one might argue that they could have potentially lost money, and you know we looked at Craigslist, and you know we found that on an average day, Craigslist posts about 33,000 jobs right, and they charge $25 a job post, which would then amount to about $825,000.

Now if indeed they were unable to post those 33,000 jobs that day because their site was down, that could cost them a significant stream of revenue right, however, if you look at it from a web marketing perspective, and I am not saying that this was entirely PR [indiscernible] [00:05:46] for Craigslist, I’m sure all of the sites that participated in the black out really strongly believed that SOPA is a bad thing, but if you look at it purely from a web marketing perspective, you are actually gaining a lot of visibility from your you know, for your web site. People would have linked in to all of these major websites that have blacked out, they were taking screenshots, mentioning them in tons of news articles, blogs, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, StumbleUpon, all these places were abuzz with the sites that had gone down because of the simple black out, sending lots of you know, what you are talking about search engine optimization, lots of off page relevancy signals, but then of course, there’s also lot of traditional media exposure that these sites got as well, and I don’t think you could watch the news last night or the day before without hearing about Craigslist, Wikipedia, Reddit, or any media and WordPress, any of the other sites that went down. So you know, ultimately they may have lost in streams of revenue, but I am sure they made up for that with exposure of their sites.

Bill Cullifer, WebProfessionals.org: So Brent, how about you, so you know we have an interest in educating web professionals as to what these issues are all about, and why they should pay attention, and why it’s important and how it can impact them, so with that said, you know give us some background, what is this all about?

Brent Norris: Well I guess first and foremost, it’s supposed to be about copyright protection, it seems to be a little bit more about fear, the Motion Picture Association has concerned it, as it is the recording industry of America that their profits will continue to decline, and their business model will suffer, unless they can get hold of the bits and bites that are really distributing their movies, and their music without their control and so, the Stop Online Piracy Act was something that was intended along with PIPA, to really get control of that, at the internet’s foundation at the IT level. Now that’s what everyone is reading, and that seems to be what a lot of folks are thinking about, SOPA and PIPA, but the truth is the Motion Picture Association hired Senator Chris Dodd, well two months I guess after he left the Senate to become their Chairperson and they started really gaining the system, they worked to put the US Attorney General, Eric Holder in-charge of the internet in unprecedented ways, so much so in fact, what we are learning is that the same time this was making headline news, the FBI was in eight different countries shutting down different websites and organization businesses that were engaged in file sharing, so it’s not like we really needed these two additional bills, when the Federal Government can go into other countries and shut websites down, and take people to jail, it’s an indication that we don’t need new legislation that the legislation we have is working, and in fact all of these things are covered under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and two additional acts that are in Congress right now are up for discussion.

So there is a lot of background information that a lot of folks aren’t getting, and this could be you know, in part due to the fact that lot of people get their news from television, and television does show a lot of motion pictures, and television’s biggest competitor is the internet. So there is a lot that I guess, and I think that right now we are just seeing the very, very beginning of this story, I think this is going to get much larger as, maybe as lines are drawn between some of the players, and you know, one could say that all of this is about the transparency that digital brings to people’s lives. This is really a much bigger issue than web professional jobs, in my opinion, although it can affect jobs in very profound ways, and we are starting to run with this art.

Bill Cullifer, WebProfessionals.org: Yeah let’s dwell into that for a minute, so you know why is this issue important to web professionals?

Brent Norris: Well if you just take a web designer for example, we know that about 50% of Adobe Photoshop users are using illegal copies of the software, and as these users sometimes, first time users, start to use this professional tool, as they become professionals, get clients, pay for the software, then they find that their valuable work is stolen from them, and they find that they are not getting compensation, and their rights are taken away, so copyright law is very complex, and if it were broken, I am not sure that we will call the government to fix it, and I think that we would probably try and adapt our business models differently to try and address the issue. So for the common web professional we don’t want our material, we don’t want our content stolen without our permission, and used without compensation.

Bill Cullifer, WebProfessionals.org: Well thanks Brent for that so, you know, where do we go from here?

Brent Norris: Well I think that web professionals should care about these issues for several reasons, and one of course, like Mark Zuckerberg said the other day, is the world needs political leaders who are pro-internet. It’s not enough to elect local, state and federal officials and leaders that are just in support of the internet, or in support of copyright laws so on and so forth, we need people that really are taking the time to understand the issues. I think that we need to do what Finland is doing, which is basically ensure that our laws are written in such a way that uphold internet access is a basic human right first and foremost, so that we can access the information.

Then I think it’s, it’s important to understand how SOPA and PIPA could affect opportunities in jobs and education. Now we know that any time we fight for innovation, we are going to have set backs, not because we can’t recover from the set backs, but because the internet doesn’t stop moving. We have got all sorts of competitors in the internet space; I was reading a report from IBM that ranks in the United States 3rd in terms of digital economy, so it is important to put all of this in context of the competition that’s out there and the rules and laws that they are abiding by, so if government is going to play a role, in my opinion I think the role that they should play is that of a more agile government that is working with the Department of Education to develop web standards that allow us as a country to develop a workforce instead of always looking for these other countries that have developed the workforce to help us build the internet, and I think that’s probably a primary role and I am sure that web professionals agrees that we can do a lot in that area to make it better.

Bill Cullifer, WebProfessionals.org: So what do you think web professionals or the community at large do to support this effort?

Brent Norris: Well I think most of the action is happening at the federal level, so we need a top-down approach, we need to make sure that while we sleep, [indiscernible] [00:13:14] restrict our access or shut down large networks that we use to do our jobs, but we need a strong bottom-up approach. In other words we have to work in our local community, I took a quick poll, I skidded around a lot of counties around the United States, which we have thousands of counties in the US., and in my particular county as an example, they were reporting the news on the various websites, there are about 10, 20 websites, but nothing was being reported on these two issues, and the reason that’s important is in the past, our national issues didn’t necessarily get a lot of coverage at the local level, but these aren’t just national issues, these are county issues, as well, these are community issues.

When you are not able to do your job as a web professional, in your home, it’s an issue in your home, so my point in all of this is we need to work with our county constitution, and we need to amend those constitutions so that they have open and transparent government amendments to them, to assure that everyone is going to have access and everyone is going to be able to have access to uncensored information. So it is important to work on the amendments to our local county constitutions, and to elect local officials that get it, that are pro-internet, and that are able to make decisions, and come out and talk about these issues as they come up.

So I think that that is super important and I think it is really critical that we all raise our awareness, our honest issues, because again it’s much larger than SOPA and PIPA, these are, some people call them, calling it the beginning of the Internet Freedom War, and so only time will tell but I should appreciate your asking the right questions Bill, and getting involved in the issues.

Bill Cullifer, WebProfessionals.org: Norris from 808digital.com and Jeff MacGurn from Covario, thank you so much for your time today.

Brent Norris: Thank you so much Bill, sorry if I sounded a little too far enough, but this one strikes close to home.

Jeff MacGurn: All right, thank you very much.

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Designing for Emotion Interview with Aarron Walter, Lead UX Designer MailChimp

by Bill Cullifer on January 13, 2012

In this 10 minute interview with Aarron Walter, Web Designer and author of a variety of books, Aarron shares insights about his experience as a Web designer, user experience professional and concepts of “emotional design” and how to engage users through the website and his new book that covers how to create websites, solutions and applications that are not only useful but also fun and engaging. Aarron also shares his thoughts about the skills required and his enthusiasm for job opportunities for Web professionals.

Designing for Emotion Interview with Aarron Walter, Lead UX Designer MailChimp Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Transcript:

Bill: I’m on the phone with Aarron Walter, UX lead at MailChimp and author of Designing with Emotion. Aarron, good afternoon your time and thanks for agreeing to the interview.

Aarron Walter: Hey, Bill, how are you?

Bill: I’m well, thanks. Thanks for taking the call. Listen, Aarron you’re a web professional, a consonant web professional. You’ve been around for a number of years and you’ve written several books. The one that I would like to own in on today is your Designing with Emotion book, in fact you have a session coming up you know emotional interface design session. Can we talk about that session and then can we talk about the book?

Aarron Walter: Sure.

Bill: What’s the session all about?

Aarron Walter: So, yeah, I mean I have been given this talk that’s essentially summing up some of the research I’ve been doing at MailChimp with my colleagues and the idea is that I kind of feel like if we’re at this point with communication on the web where it’s just you know this modification technology and so easy for people to build new applications and build new services and so the only thing that really separates our service from another service can be this personality or you know this human experience and because we’re so accustomed to communicating with one another with a really honest human voice through Twitter and Facebook, we have a shifted view or you know perception of the expectations that we have from brands out there. So my new book Designing for Emotion and its talk are all about what it means to think about the psychology of emotion and how that relates to design and how we can connect with our audience in a very human way.

Bill: That’s definitely important. What are some of the walkaways? What are some of the walkaways for web professionals? What can they start doing today to address some of these issues?

Aarron Walter: Well, kind of central to this whole idea of designing promotion is you know letting yourself show in your work and you know that’s through webbing what you do and the craft that we have of web design, but you know showing ourselves and showing our personality in our work is really important and so I’ve been thinking about how to shape personality in design and I created something called design personas and I think that there are few other designers that have been thinking about this stuff too, but a design persona basically just shapes the voice, it identifies the kind of structure of a brand and a voice of a brand, it creates key trades of what this brand persona is and what’s it’s not. So for example, I created a design persona for MailChimp where I work and one of the trades is you know it’s fun, but not goofy, so that MailChimp the brand can be fun and crack jokes, but it’s not goofy or cheesy. So and I feel like saying who we are as a brand is important, but sometimes it’s just as important to say who we aren’t and so when you start new projects, when you work on a new design thinking about this brand persona from the very get-go is a pretty important thing that’s something I talk about in the book.

Bill: Yeah, fascinating. Do you think that’s a function of a designer or if somebody from Marcomm?

Aarron Walter: I think that it is something, it kind of depends on you know who your team is made up of, but I do think that like a user experience designer needs to be thinking about this stuff because UX people they think about the big picture, they have kind of a T-knowledge that the X axis of the T at top bar is this broad understanding of a lot of different silos of disciplines of the web craft, but then they have you know deep understanding in specific areas about things like usability and design so forth.

Bill: Yeah…

Aarron Walter: So someone that is a strategic thinker, someone who is involved in product design or web design from the very get-go is the person that should be doing these design personas and that might be a creative director, that might be a UX lead, it just kind of depends on the organization.

Bill: Yeah, I appreciate that. What creative pathway would one take to get into you know that particular specialty I mean obviously you’re talking about a specialty and you know what would you recommend somebody do to study for such a position?

Aarron Walter: That’s a good question, it’s really hard these days.

Bill: Let me frame it another way. How deep do you think an ordinary, well, not ordinary because web designers are extraordinary, but how deep should a web designer working for you know whether in an enterprise or small organization, how deep do you think they should drill into the user interface specialty?

Aarron Walter: I guess it kind of depends on the type of work you are doing, but I definitely think that web designers in general should have at least a cursory understanding of interaction design. So you know you need to understand things like Fitts’ law, which is a principle with the fancy name that just basically is same that it’s easier to click on a button if it’s bigger and it’s closer to the center of action. You need to understand basic usability principles because you can’t really you know you can’t design of that, you have to keep your audience in mind and you use your goals in mind, your business goals in mind, so I think that I mean I’m biased because I’m doing UX day in and day out working on the really cool team of people, but I feel like UX is kind of a glue of what we’re doing right now. What can make a difference between like an okay thing we put out there may be it get accustomed, may be it doesn’t and something that just people latch onto and love and want to tell everyone about on Twitter and Facebook and so forth. So I feel like you know if you are new just getting started in web design and may be you are in a program or may be you are an independent learner either way I think you really have to spend sometime reading some books and reading some blogs about user experience, about usability testing and just kind of understand, not forget and always know that you are designing for people, we’re trying to communicate with people and so we have to understand people.

Bill: Yeah, that’s a good point. So would it be fair to say that the emotional interface design environment really is something more apropos for the enterprise or is it something you know that all web designers should try to accomplish further customers?

Aarron Walter: It’s for everybody. I mean, so that’s one of the things I wanted to point out in my book was you know I think that there are a lot of people especially in enterprise phase that we kind of skeptical about having some kind of collective personality in a very human voice and admitting that you’re wrong and kind of talking like you might talk to someone if you met them in person instead of we all know what enterprise speak sounds like and it’s really annoying kind of. So that has been the whole like super buttoned-up professional approach, I think is scary for a lot of people and so in the book…

Bill: I appreciate that…

Aarron Walter: …research for a longtime, but I wanted to find numbers, I want to just make it empirical and say emotional design doesn’t matter what you doing, but you know it boils down to return on investment and conversion rate and you know you make more money. You don’t need marketing budget because you’re just doing something that is so attractive to so many people. So yeah, I think that emotional design should be on everyone’s radar and I know that we’re all thinking about design right now because we just lost Steve Jobs and we’re investigating his life and we’re sort of seeing, looking at the mark that he made on our industry and just on our daily lives. And if there is one thing that we see that is kind of common threat is like this care about craft is really deep love and passion about craft that Steve Jobs had and Apple has always been really good about thinking about human emotion and its presence in the things that they make you know they have got little light on the front of most Mac’s, not on MacBook Air, but on MacBook Pros and Mac Pros, there is a little light that when your computers are sleeping that just gentle pulses and the rate at which that pulses is the same as our breathing rate at rest and that is to communicate in a human language to say, I’m a machine and I’m at rest, but it’s doing it in a very human way that we don’t necessarily have to recognize it looks like it’s breathing like it’s at rest, but you know it’s a subconscious that feels that and to have a calming effect on us too and that type of attention to detail and thinking about end users that I think it’s so fascinating in what Apple has done and I think so many other products and services out there that are thinking about emotion and design and it’s such a differentiator in a marketplace.

Bill: What’s the job market look like in your point of view for those that’s specialized in user interface design?

Aarron Walter: Well, I can tell you that the UX field is there are so many jobs out there and there is just not enough people, same with like mobile design, it’s just huge. There is so many jobs for designers, for developers, really good engineers and I feel like there is a lot of stuff that you know if you’re going to college one of the best thing you can do is get a liberal arts education and some kind of a creative arts education and think about you know just basically learning how to think critically about problems and think laterally to find connections in very strange places you know that may be reading a book about anthropology and then you can find connections to design there you know I’m really out of connections between topics like that or you know math and some kind of data visualization stuff. But there is so many really good jobs out there and I feel like a lot of people if you’re good at being an independent learner you can pick up books, you can read the stuff online, you can start experimenting on your own and really kind of teach yourself and get yourself started. But man right now like my son is 17 months old, so he is far to young for me to direct into this industry, but if I were 18 or 19 I would be so excited to be going into the web industry because there is just, there is fun stuff happening, people are building things that are having a real impact, a real influence on human history. And there are good jobs that are fun, that are challenging, that make a lot of money and that’s a heck of a combination.

Usually you know you find a job, but you hate, maybe it makes money or you find a job you love but it just doesn’t pay anything, you know web is the best of both worlds that it’s such a cool time for people to be getting into our industry.

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Side Out – Google Changes Selected Paid Search – Interview with Gary Ware, Covario

by Bill Cullifer on December 30, 2011

Side Out – Google Changes Selected Paid Search Results by Eliminating Side Bar Ads

What Is the Side Out Format?

Side Out – Google Changes Selected Paid Search - Interview with Gary Ware, Covario Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Interview with Gary Ware, Covario.com

For certain query types, Google is going to replace the listings traditionally that show up on the right side bar and place them at the bottom of the page. An example of this new layout is shown on the Google Blog.

Like a volleyball player on the beaches of Southern California, Google is calling “Side Out”! In addition to the new “recency” algorithm changes that are impacting SEO results, Google announced a phased rollout of a new paid search format that changes where paid search listings appear on desktop and mobile search results pages. The rollout is slow—searchers may or may not see the changes during their casual perusal of their favorite phrases. But it is coming, or at least, being tested. The new format will impact CTRs, pricing, and effectiveness of paid search programs. The point of this POV is to describe our views on what the importance of this change is.

Note, advertisers (and their agencies) will not be able to directly control this. Much like all ads on Google, bottom ads will be placed based on bid strategy and Quality Score—but not for a targeted bid position. The appearance of Google Maps on particular queries may impact placement, but it is unclear exactly how this will play out on an impression-byimpression basis at this point. So a strategy to bid on position “4” in the past may result in Side or Bottom ads.

Why is Google Making This Change?

There are two reasons for this change—one technical and one tactical. The technical reason is that Google is aligning the way the search results pages work for desktop, tablet, and mobile devices. This format for results has been used on mobile in the past. Due to the spacing and usability of mobile phone screens, Side ads are not desirable or renderable in many cases. The tactical reason is that Google indicates click through rates for listings at the bottom of the page actually are better
than those at the side of the page.

Google offers a capability to evaluate CTRs based on page placement within AdWords. The system traditionally allowed users of AdWords to see the comparative CTRs of Top versus Side ads. Google indicated that the bottom of the page ads will be listed as “Other” in the system, where Other will include both Side and Bottom ads, so the specific effectiveness of the new format will be hard to test. The only way this can be done is if it is know that certain keywords consistently are showing up in the bottom listing. AdWords is not providing that information now.
When asked about this, the Google team that works with Covario indicated that Google “may” be updated in the future as this change is rolled out more widely, but there is no commitment on timeframe.

What Does This Mean?
There are a number of ramifications to this change—most of which depend on whether Google’s statement that CTRs at the bottom of the page perform better than Side ads. So that is the critical factor.

First, this all comes down to CTRs. We did a quick study to see the difference between Top and Side ads for a numberof keywords. The average desktop CTR on Google Search (no partners) for Top ads is 3.3%. The CTR for Side (or Other) ads is .16%. No big surprise there—the value of being in the prime real estate is well known. So the question
is whether the Bottom ads will beat an average .16% CTR. As stated above, testing this appears to be harder than it
needs to be, since AdWords is not breaking out Side vs. Bottom ads in AdWords. However, if an advertiser (or theiragency) can identify a set of keywords where the ads consistently are being served at the bottom of the page, then this can be tested, albeit manually.

If the CTRs are better than .16% (or the appropriate equivalent for a particular advertiser) on the first page, then the
question comes down to CPC, and whether there will be a non-linear impact on CPCs. This is also unknown at this
time, and Google makes no comment, believing that the market is rationale and that advertisers will bid commensurate with the value delivered—a fair assumption.

More significantly, if the CTRs are over .16% on average, advertisers should embrace this change. It will create
standardization between the device types, a more consistent way to evaluate PPC, and in the end, better ways to target PPC for response. Google has made it clear that dominating mobile advertising and operability is its most critical strategic objective, and this is part of that strategy. As we stated, there are two drivers for this change to PPC: trying to drive better CPCs on desktop through placement of PPC ads at the bottom of the page, and the more strategic issue of alignment of results pages across all device types. If successful, the Side ad is toast. Even Karch Kiraly will not be able to dig it out of the sand. Google is going to wean advertisers off of this ad format in order to make the desktop perform like mobile—not the other way around.

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Marketing B2B via Facebook: The Most Common Mistake You’re Probably Making

by Bill Cullifer on December 14, 2011

Interview with Dennis Yu, CEO of BlitzLocal.com of Portland. Ore.

Marketing B2B via Facebook: The Most Common Mistake You’re Probably Making Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Let’s say you run a business making websites for dentists. You might buy the keywords “dentist”, “dental marketing” and “dental websites” on Google. In between the consumers who are looking to get some cosmetic dentistry, teeth cleaning, or other procedures done, there is a sprinkling of dentists who are looking for marketing help.

Depending on the term, it could be 90%+ of these searches not being relevant, and at $5-10 a click, that’s a lot of irrelevant clicks to pay for to find a winner, even if that winner will pay you $10,000 for a new website.

The biggest problem with B2B is that when someone types in “dentist”, you don’t know if they are a dentist or if they are looking for a dentist.

The die-hard PPC folks will argue that you’re just not choosing the right keywords (go for more specific terms), don’t have enough negative keywords (exclude anyone searching with city terms—since these are likely consumers), or you’re not writing specific enough ad copy (supposedly, consumer won’t click on your ad if your title is “Hey Dentists!”) While these comebacks are true, they are missing the big point.

In B2B marketing, you must target WHO the user is, not WHAT they are searching on.

In search, you don’t know who the user is, but you have a clue by the nature of their search terms. In social, you know WHO the user is and you’re catching them before they search.

STEP 1: Isolate the Target

So while you can get a ton of consumer traffic by targeting “dentist” in Google, when you interest target “dentist” on Facebook, you’re targeting by job title and profession. Try it. In fact, try a number of job titles and see just how many chiropractors, teachers, plumbers, administrative assistants, and marketing managers there are out there.

Voila! Now you’ve pinpointed all the dentists, dental assistants, students studying to be dentists, retired dentists, and folks who have a dentist fetish—all of them on Facebook. Now narrow down to the specific target you want by age, location or even specialty—maybe you want to talk to just cosmetic dentists in California.

Add in lateral targets—magazines they read, associations they’re a part of, and so forth. You can read more about micro-targeting here.

STEP 2: Get Your Testimonials and Trust Signals

You probably thought I’d next talk about ads, which is what most people do. Nope, in social people don’t search—they are interrupted with banner ads. You can focus on ad copy in Google PPC because people are actively looking. In Facebook, you have to gently nudge people to take a look at you and momentarily distract them from spying on their friends, or whatever they happen to be doing on Facebook.

So you need distraction-worthy content, which comes in the form of what their friends are doing. If that potential dentist client of yours is perusing through what her friends did yesterday, she might be persuaded to click on news where those very friends are talking about your business—maybe how they used your software to get more traffic to their website, streamline billing operations, etc.

When you have a TON of testimonials (across Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, and so on), paired with content that you’ve published in major outlets, paired with positive things that other reputable organizations have said about you—then it’s more likely they are coming to you versus you coming to them. Some people call this “inbound” or “pull” marketing because you’re leveraging that prospective friends to do the selling for you. Because, despite your Harvard MBA and years of business experience; sorry Charlie, they trust what their friends have to say more.

Ideally, get this content to live on your website or Facebook page, although this is not completely necessary. Let’s say that you wrote some compelling article in an industry journal. Send ad traffic directly to that site so you can leverage their trust. If you wrote your article correctly, the by-line (about the author piece at the end) will have a line or two about what you do. And if you did a good job creating real value in that article, as opposed to selling, they’ll contact you. No need to scream at them or place popup windows in their path—they’ll find you.

Step 3: Turn Your Ads On

You wouldn’t have a grand opening party without first making sure your place has plenty of food and drinks, right? In the same way, make sure you have the compelling content from Step 2 before you start advertising. Otherwise, you’re just wasting money.

Take the interest targets that you set up in Step 1 and pair it against the content you have in Step 2. Think about WHO you are talking to, not WHAT they might be searching on. For example, if they are a dental hygienist, what content is most compelling to them? What if they are a receptionist—what might they find interesting? You’ll find that you might not have super relevant content for everyone. That’s okay—you’re just testing at this stage. Later you can mix and match what combinations work best.

Note that this is NOT landing page optimization, which is more superficially about elements that comprise the landing page—the image, the size of the button, the headline, and so forth. We’re talking about the whole lead gen. lifecycle—creating a clear path between the targets, what we say to them, and what we want them to do. That last piece is the landing page—to get them to call the phone number, fill out the form, watch the video, etc.

Step 4: Run the Math

Set your Facebook campaign budgets low, perhaps $10 a day. Use the default CPC bids, since you don’t need to get into the nuances of how bidding works—this is not Google. What you care about is your Cost Per Click and conversion rates. CPC divided by conversion rate is your cost per lead, by the way. We created a calculator for your use, in case you are rusty on first semester statistics:

This is B2B, so your cost per lead could be over $100. Maybe you’re at $2 a click and 1 in 50 clicks results in a phone call. Maybe it’s a lot more because you’re selling something that costs thousands, so that a hundred dollars is an acceptable price. Or maybe you’re competing in New York City, where the price is exorbitant from all the advertisers that overlap one another from poor targeting.

Whatever the case, if you’re doing this on Facebook, you have to be prepared for seemingly negative ROI for the first few months. Why? Because we are catching people well before they are searching, so it could be months before they want that new website, CEREC machine, billing system, or whatever it is you’re advertising. With Google, the conversion timeframe might be that same visit. This is unlikely in your case, unless your product is an impulse buy and also under $100.

Some final thoughts:

We are often asked a common set of questions, so let’s address some of them here:

How big should my interest target be? You don’t need a thousand ads—just a handful that target just the people that you want to hit. If your interest target is over 10,000 people, then either you’re doing something wrong or your audience is nationwide.

Do I need new landing pages for Facebook? Probably. Video is what converts nowadays, so you probably need to fix your other landing pages while you’re at it. Camera shy? They aren’t choosing you for your good looks, so get your Flip video, some good lighting, and film a 2 minute intro. Say what you’d say if that dentist was sitting right in your office—don’t be “fake” or talk like a newscaster.

Will BlitzLocal do this for me? Sure, if you have at least $10k to spend in fees, not counting advertising budget. If you’re a dentist, we require only $2k a month in total (labor plus ad spend), since we’re targeting just one region and because our dental campaigns can be replicated. If we have to build something that is not reusable across many clients, then we have to charge more for it. We are not the cheapest game in town.

Do you offer free articles and training? I would love to use your service, but cannot afford it. Sure. Send a note to info@blitzlocal.com and we’ll send you some of our internal training materials. You can also post a question at facebook.com/blitzlocal, where others can see and benefit from what you ask.

About the Author:

Dennis Yu is Chief Executive Officer of BlitzLocal, a Webtrends partner that builds social media dashboards to measure brand engagement and ROI, specializing in the intersection of Facebook and local advertising. You can reach him on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, his blog, or good old-fashioned email at dennis@blitzlocal.com. BlitzLocal is a leader in social and local advertising and analytics, creating mass micro-targeted campaigns. Mr. Yu is an internationally sought-after speaker and author on all things Facebook, and has been featured in National Public Radio, TechCrunch, Entrepreneur Magazine, CBS Evening News, and other venues.

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