eBusiness Champions – Google Analytics

The next eBusiness Champions event is on Thursday 26 28th January 2010 at Cape, Victoria St, Nottingham.

The event will cover Google Analytics topics including setup, metrics, goals, filters, benchmarking and reporting. This will be an ideal introduction to the subject for those who are not yet using the tool and those you have not yet mastered it. If you are trying to understand how customers use your site and understand more about conversions, this session will help.

Please register your interest in the event.

Ebusiness Club Courses

Ebusiness Club is once again running its very popular training courses. At this point in time, they are all fully booked up but waiting lists are available.

• Google Analytics and Website Conversion Optimisation
• SEO
• Online Marketing
• Email Marketing

Everyone who attends these courses finds them to be of great value so make sure you sign up for news on future courses.

Sociable Networking

In a bid to extend the reach of Web 2.0 Surgery to the wider business community, Martin Wright has attended several Nottingham networking events in the past few weeks.

Ingenuity Gateway – a series of breakfast networking sessions with a taster seminar for workshops offered at a discounted price. The Ingenuity Gateway offers a unique way for local businesses to access knowledge from Nottingham University.

Inspire – an established group with presentations and opportunities to network.

Routes2Business – a newly formed group run by a team of experienced networkers and successful business owners.

All these events would benefit those who normally attend Web 2.0 Surgery and we looking forward to welcoming attendees from these events.

If you would like to receive more details on Web 2.0 Surgery, please subscribe to the newsletter.

If you know of any other useful networking events, please add a comment. Thanks.

PPC Advertising – Conversion Tracking with Google Adwords

About Guest Poster, Edward Lewis

Edward is an expert in search engine optimisation (SEO), pay-per-click (PPC) advertising & online marketing.

PPC Advertising – Conversion Tracking with Google Adwords

PPC advertising is a great way of driving very targeted customers to your website, and the system is fairly straight forward, which means that people can often get a simple account up and running in just a few hours. After the past few Web 2.0 Surgery’s I have spoken to several people about how they could improve the performance of their PPC accounts. One of the main ways this can be done is by using the conversion tracking functionality.

Conversion tracking allows you to measure “conversions”. Simply defined, a conversion is someone completing a measurable (and desired) action when they visit your website, be it a sale, a mailing list sign up, a download or somebody submitting a customer enquiry.

Conversion tracking is an important way to measure your return on investment (ROI). Within your PPC account, conversions are recorded at campaign, ad group, search network, keyphrase and ad variation level.

The process of adding the conversion tracking is fairly pain free. However, depending on the checkout process on your site it may involve some changes to the functionality of your website. The code has to be added at the end of the process – on your conversion page, for example a “confirmation” or “thank you” page. If you use a payment service provider such as Pay Pal or Protx/Sage Pay you must make sure that customers are directed back to your site after completing a purchase.

Google Adwords – Enabling Conversion Tracking

• Login to your Adwords account

• Hover over the “Reports” tab in the main navigation, then select “Conversions”

• Click the create an action button

• Give your action a name and select from the drop down list which type of action you will be recording

Tip: If you are unsure about the “Conversion page security level” select “https://” as this will work with either option – if you wrongly select “http:// ” the conversion tracking will not work.

• Select your preferred conversion actions

• Then click the “Save Action & Get Code” button

You now have two options, either copy and paste the code from the left hand box between the body tags on your conversion page. If you have a web developer you can choose the option on the right, and email the tracking code directly to them.

Once the code is installed on your site, it is a good idea to check that everything is working. Unfortunately, the best way of doing this is by spending some money by clicking on one of your ads and then put a test conversion through your site.

Tip: Pick a keyword with a low cost per click!

You can then login to your adwords account to check that the conversion has been recorded – it should be there within a few hours! If not, double check that the code is inserted on the conversion page and then retest it.

The next posts in this series will cover installing the tracking code from Microsoft Ad Centre and Yahoo Search Marketing. Check back next week!

Social Media Shortens The Gap Of Opportunity

About Guest Poster, Susi O’Neill

Susi provides creative industries and digital media consultancy for project management, partnerships, research and business development for commercial companies and cultural organisations.

Social Media Shortens The Gap Of Opportunity

This July I was the guest speaker at the inaugural launch of Nottingham Girl Geek Dinners, part of a worldwide network of local events bringing together women technologists for chat, networking and – importantly – dinner.

My presentation was about social media for business – with a bit of girl geek and historic slant. Here’s the presentation.

Girl Geeks dinner nottingham, photo byPaintedGhost

I don’t really see myself as a social media evangelist – I’ve been too long in the web industries for that kind of bandwagon-jumping, back since the first dotcom wave and my days in the music biz when the rage was guerrilla marketing, us record exec minions seeded chatrooms, assuming aliases of teen skateboarders, tweenies and rock dads to sell the latest CD album (yes kids, people still bought CDs then).

Rather I see social media as a new name for an old thing – like chat boards, newsgroups or forums – it’s just a newer more technologically sophisticated means of using digital tools to communicate – socially or for business. Online video and audio – as eulogised by @documentally et al – is yet another exciting means of creating many direct one-to-one and one-to-many interactions. Although the technology may not save the world itself, the accelerated serendipity and increase in openness to communication (as much a society as technology phenomena) helps us all to address our own personal, social and business goals.

This is perhaps as closely related to the rise in the mobile phone as much as the growth in broadband. This can include political campaigning (like the MPs expenses Facebook campaign), creating your own news radar and bypassing corporation (see the decline in newspapers) and marketing a local micro-brand internationally.

But the interesting dinner discussion we ladies had was about how social media hasn’t so much changed everything as speeded it up. In the old days contacting A meant knowing B. Email made finding out who and where was easy (eliciting a response though, now, harder than ever). Social media means those who choose are open to conversations and ideas more readily and easily than before. Twitter and Facebook create small interaction which are less formal than a direct business contact by phone, letter or email. If you play it right, this small talk can more readily lead to medium talk (then to business). But don’t mistake small-talk for actual business or social networking replacing marketing (or even work itself).

Social media also enables people to create their own social graph, connecting users to scattered networks reflecting their own areas of practice or interest (in my case, I’m part of a world-wide network of theremin players) which may be globally dispersed, or hyper-local and may be for both commerce or leisure. Local blogs and community managed websites are hugely important, using online media to connect people to things happening in the real world and empowering them to make change, as the 4iP (Channel 4’s digital content investment fund) investment in Talk About Local testifies. Back in Nottingham I’m currently setting up a blog for Nottingham’s creative and digital communities to strengthen these ties between business and the community and between content creators and audiences.

I’m also fascinated with how different networks create their own identities, just as different newspaper have their ‘target market’; Twitter users tend to be proactive creators of content and participation, as the global, Twestival event shows, taking place for charity simultaneously in over 200 worldwide cities (don’t forget to sign up to Nottingham’s Twestival event this September!).

Creating your own support network is quick and easy; seeking answers to questions, finding a supplier or partner more rapid and robust than ever. Social media shortens and accelerates the gaps between people and links up opportunities. Sometimes it fills the gaps to with meaningless twitter and chat, so we need mechanisms for filter this out (not an information overload but a filter failure) which is the next big challenge for us users, aided by technology, to address.

Ebusinessclub Funding Cut

Many of the attendees of Web 2.0 Surgery have highly praised ebusinessclub courses. The quality of speakers and content has been a consistent comment, only enhanced by the fact that the courses offered are free. It appears that this may be about to change in August as funding from EMDA is withdrawn. If you have benefited from the support of ebusinessclub in the past it would be a kind gesture to sign this petition and join this Facebook group to allow future businesses to benefit.

Web 2.0 Surgery was beginning to emerge as an event for extending knowledge based on topics covered at ebusinessclub courses. While Web 2.0 Surgery events can still offer you access to Web 2.0 Experts, the lack of ebusinessclub courses will affect the development of web and Internet business skills in Nottingham.

Win A Promo Video

Skeleton Productions is a Nottingham based Internet video production company that enjoys working with businesses big and small.

This month they are holding an exciting competition. One lucky winner from the competition will get to sample their video production services for free.

The Prize

1st prize in the competition is a professionally produced one minute video profile worth £1500!

6 Easy Steps to Brand Building with Twitter

About Guest Poster, Alexia Leachman

Alexia is a Personal Branding Coach and founder of Blossoming Brands a brand building consultancy. Blossoming Brands specialise in building brands through the holistic use of coaching and consultancy.

6 Easy Steps to Brand Building with Twitter

The thing with Twitter is, you’re either on the bus, or you’re not. Those that aren’t think it’s just a passing fad and don’t really understand it. But, it’s becoming increasingly important as part of any brand building strategy.

In a recent article, out of the 100 most mentioned brands on Twitter, less than half have a Twitter account. And, some of those aren’t really making the most of their presence.

It seems crazy to think that there’s a whole heap of conversations going on about these brands in the twitterverse and these brands aren’t even listening, let alone participating. You can bet your last dollar that if these conversations were happening in print, they’d be watching, reading and taking notes. But here, they choose to ignore. So, if you are one of those brands that is not taking part in the twitterverse, you’re probably wondering where to start. So here’s my beginner’s guide to brand building with Twitter.

1. Clarify your objective!

You must first decide on what basis you are going to participate. Is it to enhance your brand story and add personality, or is it for customer services? Are you going to have just the one twitter account or are you going to encourage employees to tweet. Word of warning with the latter: make sure this is part of a wider social media strategy that permeates the business so that everyone concerned is clear on best practices. Reputations can be destroyed online in seconds, both personal and corporate.

2. Decide on the nature of your tweets

It may be worth having some guidelines in place as to the sorts of things that your brand will tweet about. It’s not about sell, sell, sell, but about listen, engage, listen, and engage. So how are you going to engage? And, when you listen, how will you respond? There are 6 main types of tweet;

a. Brand news
b. Customer support
c. Feedback
d. Special offers
e. Interesting info or resources
f. Random thoughts

You will need to be clear as how you will employ each of these and if you will actually use all of them. Some say, it’s best to reserve using the last one for personal brands. But, if random titbits is part of your brand story then why not?

3. Register your brand name twitter profile

Make sure you pick something that sounds right. You may want to use your name to reinforce your brand message in some way.

4. Create your Twitter page

Use the background to display your brand assets and key brand messages. You might want to use the profile pic to display your logo. Some brands put a pic of the person managing the account. This reinforces the personal nature of twitter and can be a good tactic if twitter is a key strand of your customer services strategy.

5. Allocate resource to maintain your twitter account.

There’s nothing worse for a brand than lack of consistency and the same applies here. The person who’s job it is to manage your twitter account must be very clear on the brand values and proposition. Twitter can enhance your brand if used correctly. It can also destroy.

6. Listen, listen, listen

I know, I’ve mentioned this already, but it’s a biggie. It’s important to track what is being said in the twitterverse, so make sure that your twitterer is using an application that allows you to keep track of your brand mentions. It’s also a good idea to listen to what’s being said about your competitors as well as your product/service category. You could pick up some great ideas for new product development or service improvements.

Developing your personal brand online

About Guest Poster, Alexia Leachman

Alexia is a Personal Branding Coach and founder of Blossoming Brands a brand building consultancy. Blossoming Brands specialise in building brands through the holistic use of coaching and consultancy.

Developing your personal brand online

The growth of the online world has meant that we can now connect with others not just in our neighbourhood but also around the world.  As individuals, we can do this through blogging and sharing podcasts.  As businesses, we use technology to deliver our services online and engage with our customers in a new and different ways.  This rapidly evolving online world is challenging many established behaviours and habits.  But it also offers up massive opportunities to connect, do business and live nothing before.  But can we all keep up?

For many, the idea of having one’s own website is very exciting and bunch loads of people clap their hands in glee when they discover that their name is STILL available as dot com.  Not as dot net but a dot com!  So, they promptly buy it.  And, why not?  With all this online stuff going on, you at least need your name as a web domain.  Right?  Well, yes.  But what are you going to do with it?  Good question.  The answer to this question is not all that easy to get to.  To some, it might seem obvious.  Write a blog.  Of course!!  But this throws up a lot of questions;

• What are you going to write about?
• Are you any good at writing?
• Do you have the time to write?
• Do you have something interesting to say on your chosen topic?

Before getting too excited at this stage, it may be worth taking a few steps back. What are you trying to achieve?  That question’s got the potential to stop a lot of people in their tracks.  “- What do you mean?”  Well.  Why are you doing it?

• Is it just to join in the fun?
• Do you want to generate some income online?
• Do you want to be considered an expert?

Your answer to this question could suggest many options.  So, it is important to try and understand this before you jump in otherwise you could end up wasting a lot of time and effort.

Doing some work up front can be critical to any success you may achieve later on down the line.  If you take the time to understand what you want and why you want it, you’re more likely to come up with a solution that better fits.  It is also likely to be more successful.  The blog might not be the answer to your dreams.

A good starting point is to think about all the skills and life experience that you have.  There are often hidden gems that can help you shine, if only you uncovered them and gave them a good polish!  But treasure hunting can be tricky on your own.  Sometimes you need someone else to hold the torch so you can see what you’ve got in your hand.  This is where working with a coach can be magical.  They can help you to discover the potential that lies within and then help you to work out a way to make it happen.  After all, we’re all very good at coming up with great ideas.  But are we all that good making our big ideas turn into reality?

Time to get SaaS-y? – Considering Software as a Service

About Guest Poster, Ryan O’Sullivan

The following guest post is written by Ryan O’Sullivan from Shoosmiths and is reproduced here with permission. Ryan is a Solicitor within the Commerce and Technology Unit at the national law firm Shoosmiths. He advises on a wide range of non-contentious commercial matters, specialising in IT Law.

Time to get SaaS-y? – Considering Software as a Service

A few years ago cloud computing was something the early adopters said was going to be big but hadn’t taken off. With the increasing use of Software as a Service, more and more companies are choosing to put their head in the clouds.

As a result of the current climate, the demand for more economical and efficient ways of doing business has begun to develop. Perhaps this goes some way to explaining the growing popularity of Software as a Service (“SaaS”) solutions at the expense of more traditional on-premises applications.

SaaS is a model of software deployment where an application is hosted as a service provided to customers across the internet. For example, instead of your word processor being installed from CD-rom or internet download, with SaaS you would simply load it up onto your web browser. Whilst it is a model that is best known for its use in customer relationship management and sales automation solutions the number of SaaS providers is rapidly increasing and SaaS alternatives now exist for nearly every field.

Forecasts have predicted that by year-end 2011, over 25% of all software sales will be SaaS, whilst present trends indicate that it is becoming an option that will need to be considered. Whether it is an appropriate solution for a business will depend not only on the commercial benefit but will also demand a consideration of the new risks and vulnerabilities that the model creates.

The functional capabilities of SaaS have improved immeasurably in recent years due to the ever increasing speed and reliability of the internet. Whilst there will always be a threat of disruption, many businesses are beginning to balance this risk against the ongoing cost of enhancing and maintaining their own software.

The SaaS model can offer customers a cost-effective subscription based on per-use pricing, limiting the need for substantial capital expenditure connected to the purchase, maintenance and updating of software under perpetual licences. Customers are also being drawn by further savings when it comes to the cost of running and maintaining the system hardware and ensuring that appropriate security is in place.

Worries about security have hung heavy around the neck of SaaS from the outset but, following recent, well publicised, security breaches arising from organisations running traditional application models, businesses are beginning to recognise that the storing of critical data in remote hosting facilities may prove beneficial and that, rather than adding risk, adopting this model may be a way of making information more secure.

Customers have been demanding greater assurances from their SaaS providers, requesting guarantees in service availability, security and privacy by bolstering the number and standard of contractual warranties and service levels given by the vendor. Before choosing a SaaS solution businesses are considering the vendor’s credentials and ability to comply with industry certified security and privacy standards. In a competitive market vendors have had to adapt and now offer a range of security functions, providing a higher degree of comfort to wary buyers.

Another long running concern has been that SaaS solutions are inflexible and are difficult to customise but, again, businesses are beginning to recognise that customisation of traditional applications is either not possible or is likely to be very costly. Given the increased range of solutions that are becoming available, buyers are considering whether it might be possible to adopt a standard package which has been reconfigured to meet the bulk needs of the market, rather than incurring the time and expense involved in reworking a package to meet their specific needs.

Integration remains an issue and care should be taken to ensure that the solution is capable of working alongside existing back-office applications but, provided that businesses carry out a reasonable level of due diligence, it should be possible to identify any areas where a vendor’s solution falls short.

Finally, it is important to consider the financial and general stability of a vendor in a market that is rapidly growing. As SaaS software is hosted off-site, any disruption to the service arising from the supplier’s insolvency could have a significant impact on business continuity. With more companies being drawn to this market it is important that a customer considers the history of the vendor at the outset.

Escrow arrangements may or may not be appropriate. SaaS solutions are designed to supply services to a number of clients at the same time and therefore often require massively powerful and expensive software. Even if source code materials were to be released, it may not be possible to run the program on a company’s existing system. Other precautions should be taken to ensure that data and documents are properly backed-up and that the customer does not become “locked in” with one supplier, so that if escrow does not provide a solution there are other options available.

There are risks attached to SaaS but provided that the right questions are asked and that preventative measures are taken, it is possible to mitigate those risks just as with any technological solution. A reduction in costs was not enough in itself to draw businesses to the SaaS model but, now that it has developed and the level of safeguards has improved, it is becoming an increasingly realistic and attractive option.

This guest post is written by Ryan O’Sullivan from Shoosmiths and is reproduced here with permission.