What is Valuable Content?

via Online it ALL Matters http://onlineitallmatters.blogspot.com/2013/12/what-is-valuable-content.html

Thursday, December 5, 2013

Ahava Leibtag explains four critical elements that make content valuable, as well as on-page and off-page factors that affect SEO.

From her popular content writing workshop.

More Than Usability: The Four Elements of User Experience, Part IV

By Frank Guo

Published: November 25, 2013

“The relative importance of these elements in driving UX success reflects what matters most to your users, in your particular business context.”

In Part III of this series, I explained how the relative importance of the following four elements of user experience varies depending on the type of product you’re designing:

• value
• adoptability
• desirability
• usability

For convenience, I’ll refer to these four UX elements using the acronymVADU (Value, Adoptability, Desirability, Usability).

“Compare where your product currently stands in terms of these UX elements with where you want your product to be, and you’ll know what elements you need to focus on.”

The relative importance of these elements in driving UX success reflects what matters most to your users, in your particular business context. For example, in the gaming industry, value is typically less important than desirability, but when it comes to enterprise software, it’s usually the other way around. That said, how do you know whether you need to work more on one UX element or another? In other words, how should you prioritize expending design resources on these elements to ensure that your focus is on the area that will have the biggest impact on your users?

The answer: Compare where your product currently stands in terms of these UX elements with where you want your product to be, and you’ll know what elements you need to focus on.

Now, in Part IV, I’ll show you how to do this by providing a step-by-step guide.

How to Set Design Priorities Using a VADU Scorecard

The most effective way to prioritize UX design decisions is to create a VADU-based scorecard. By rating a product’s various UX elements, then comparing your ratings with the targets that you’d like to hit for those elements, you can quickly create a scorecard that will point you in the right direction.

Step 1: Determine the Relative Importance of UX Elements

“The most effective way to prioritize UX design decisions is to create a VADU-based scorecard.”

The first step is pretty straightforward: determining the relative importance of the four UX elements for your particular product. As I described in Part III of this series, you can use a numerical value to denote the relative importance, or weight, of the four elements. For example, use a number between 0 and 1, where 0 means a UX element has absolutely no impact on the overall user experience and 1 means that element is making its full impact. Your rating could even go above 1 if you think a UX element is extremely important. That is a judgment call that your team can make. But, for the sake of simplicity, let’s keep the weight between 0 and 1.

Figure 1 shows a hypothetical example that I’ve drawn from the gaming industry. In this example, desirability has full impact on the overall user experience; therefore, I’ve assigned it a weight of 1. Then in descending order of impact, adoptability has a weight of 0.8; usability, of 0.5. Value is of little importance so has a weight of 0.2. Your team should decide the relative weights of UX elements depending on your specific product category. (See Part III for a detailed explanation of how to determine the relative importance of the UX elements.)

Figure 1—Prioritizing UX elements for a game using a VADU scorecard

Step 2: Set a Target Score for Each UX Element According to Its Relative Importance

“There are a number of ways of coming up with the actual scores—for example, through team members’ subjective evaluations, customer surveys, or heuristic evaluations performed by a UX expert.”

To build a VADU scorecard, use a 10-point scale, in which 1 means a UX element is implemented very poorly; 10, very well. Then, to set a target score for each UX element, multiply each respective weight by 10. For instance, in Figure 1, value has a weight of 0.2, so the target score for value would be 2. The target VADU scores appear in the Target Scorecolumn.

Step 3: Rate the Product Based on the Strength of Its UX Elements

Next, you’ll rate your product’s UX elements to get the actual VADU scores, which appear in the Actual Score column. There are a number of ways of coming up with the actual scores—for example, through team members’ subjective evaluations, customer surveys, or heuristic evaluations performed by a UX expert. What’s the best way to come up with the actual scores? Having your team synthesize the available metrics and user and market research findings to collectively determine the scores. Please keep in mind that this is not rocket science. A rough estimate of how well your product fares in terms of its VADU scores is just fine.

Step 4: Set Priorities by Comparing Actual VADU Scores with Target Scores

“For enterprise software, value is extremely important….”

Now, compare the numbers in the Actual Score column and the Target Score column, and you can easily see which elements need more work. Looking at the example in Figure 1, the game receives an actual score of 5 for adoptability, which falls far below the target score of 8, so the team needs to focus on adoptability rather than the other UX elements.

Furthermore, the actual score for usability is 9, far exceeding the target score of 5. That means, even if the team needs to compromise usability to improve adoptability, they should still consider going ahead. For example, creating many more online ads and landing pages to drive user traffic would enhance adoptability, but might undermine usability because there aren’t enough designers to support the ad campaigns.

Let’s look at two more examples to get a better understanding of how this works.

Figure 2 shows the VADU scorecard for an enterprise software product. With the same actual scores as in the gaming-industry example in Figure 1, but different target scores, you can see that value is the one UX element that the team should improve. Thus, the priority shifts from adoptability to value. Why? Because for enterprise software, value is extremely important, and an actual score of 3 falls far below the target score of 10. In contrast, the same score wasn’t a problem for games, with a target score of only 2. Adoptability is less important for enterprise software, so the same actual score of 5 matches the target score, and there’s no need to improve this UX element.

Figure 2—Prioritizing UX elements for enterprise software using a VADU scorecard

In the VADU scorecard for an ecommerce site shown in Figure 3, the actual scores again remain the same as in the two previous examples, but the target scores change because the business context is different. As I mentioned in Part III, all VADU elements are equally important for ecommerce sites, so all target scores are 10. This time, value and adoptability are the two things that the team should work on, because there is a huge gap between their actual scores and the target scores.

Figure 3—Prioritizing UX elements for an ecommerce site using a VADU scorecard

We’re creating a business context–sensitive scorecard for user experience. Too many UX professionals evaluate user experiences withoutthinking about what the UX elements mean to the business. For example, if we identify usability issues, we feel that we have to fix all of them. But using the VADU scorecard, we might choose not to fix certain, less important issues depending on the business context. For example, in a particular product category, if usability is not the most impactful UX element, we should prioritize improving other UX elements. In this way, we can connect user experience with business results and prioritize UX-related business initiatives.

Final Thoughts

“Not only do we need to bring delight and ease of use to users, we must also understand what UX elements we should focus on first to ensure that our work moves the needle in terms of the product’s bottom line.”

Here are a few guidelines that can help you to understand why and how to apply the VADU scorecard.

Set the Right Focus

Creating a great user experience that can actually drive business success is challenging because, not only do we need to bring delight and ease of use to users, we must also understand what UX elements we should focus on first to ensure that our work moves the needle in terms of the product’s bottom line. A VADU scorecard can quickly focus your team’s work on the most important aspects of user experience and ensure that you make intelligent business decisions when you must make tradeoffs between the UX elements.

Look at the Bigger Picture

Often, when we’re dealing with s stuff—like moving a button from left to right, rewriting a page’s title to match its content, or making a call to action more noticeable—we lose sight of what really matters to users and fail to consider the business context. Much like personas, the VADU scorecard provides a tool that helps you to quickly look beyond your immediate deliverables and think in terms of how your work impacts business outcomes.

Make Simple, Actionable Decisions

“You’ll be able to identify your priorities quickly and move the business-value needle by making targeted UX improvements!”

The VADU scorecard is a tool that can help you to make high-level, actionable business decisions. To make the right decisions for users, you need to keep things simple. So, while you need to do due diligence in assigning actual scores and their relative weights, don’t spend too much time resolving small disagreements among your team members. It’s really not that hard to determine the relative weights of UX elements in your VADU scorecard if you have a good understanding of your industry. In fact, it’s pretty easy to determine where your product stands overall, in terms of the UX elements, without much data crunching. Keep things simple and avoid endless debates about small details, then you’ll be able to identify your priorities quickly and move the business-value needle by making targeted UX improvements!

Topic: Columns | UX Strategy

- See more at: http://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2013/11/more-than-usability-the-four-elements-of-user-experience-part-iv.php#sthash.rOxqXEvN.dpuf

via UXmatters http://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2013/11/more-than-usability-the-four-elements-of-user-experience-part-iv.php

‘Content’ Isn’t Just ‘Marketing’

NOVEMBER 13, 2013By Ann Handley

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“Content” isn’t just things we think of as “marketing.” A great example is Virgin’s new pre-flight safety briefing, which my friend DJ Waldow Skyped from on board a Virgin flight to share with me last week.

If you haven’t seen it, check it out here:

There’s much to love about this video. I detailed why I think it’s brilliant (and what companies of any size can learn from it, over at LinkedIn, in 4 Things Your Business Can Learn from a ‘Boring’ Pre-Flight Safety Briefing. (Check it out, and please subscribe to my updates there if you like what you see!)

But over here, I wanted to highlight one key takeaway from the Virgin music video safety briefing.

Notice Content Moments Everywhere

For all of us, it’s important to notice content moments everywhere. Or, as the image on this page suggests (to me, anyway!): Content blooms everywhere. Even in unexpected places.

Virgin could’ve produced a boring video like most other airlines do (not all: Air New Zealand is another notable exception). But it didn’t squander the opportunity to create something special, which (by the way) has garnered 6 million YouTube views and significant press coverage, including write-ups in CNN and (incredibly!) the New Yorker.

Here’s the thing: “Content” isn’t just things we think of as “marketing.”

Rather, your content is every word and every pixel your company produces: So, yes, it’s your blog. But it’s also your product pages, your FAQ page, microsites, About Us page, your whole website (!), and (in Virgin’s case) your Federal Aviation Administration-required safety videos.

Publishing is an incredible privilege! It’s an immense opportunity!

I’m sorry for yelling, but the truth is that I want to use SHOUTY CAPS here, because it’s THAT important a point: Don’t squander any content opportunity to connect with the people you want to reach—whether that “content” is traditionally considered “marketing” or not.

Related posts:

1. Airbnb: When Content Marketing Looks a Lot Like Art
2. A Simple Content Marketing Org Chart
3. Why Innovative Content Marketing Is About to Explode in Denmark (and Why You Should Care)
4. And Now, a Message from My Marketing World… I’m Writing a Book!

- See more at: http://www.annhandley.com/2013/11/13/content-isnt-just-marketing/#sthash.tRlnU7PD.dpuf
via Ann Handley - Content Marketing Keynote Speaker and Best-Selling Author http://www.annhandley.com/2013/11/13/content-isnt-just-marketing/

9 Qualities of Good Writing

NOVEMBER 18, 2013By Ann Handley

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Annarchy, Business,Content, Media, Social Media, Writing, advice,Content, content writing,Writing

There are two kinds of people: Those who think they can write, and those who think they can’t. And, very often, both are wrong.

The truth is, most of us fall somewhere in the middle. We are all capable of producing good writing. Or, at least, better writing.

Why does good writing matter? Isn’t the best content marketing very often something short, snappy, and non-text? Like Skype’s Born Friends video, Lowe’s Vines, or Chipotle’s haunting video commentary?

Sometimes, yes. But here I’m not just talking about content in a marketing context. I’m talking about content, period.

Text is the backbone of the Web, and it’s often the backbone of any content you watch or listen to, as well. That Born Friends video started with a story and a script.

Words matters. Your words (what you say) and style (how you say it) are your most cherished (and undervalued) assets.

Yet, so often, they are overlooked. Think of this way: If a visitor came to your website without its branding in place (logo, tagline, and so on), would he or she recognize it as yours? Are you telling your story there from your unique perspective, with a voice and style that’s clearly all you?

Here, in no particular order, is what I’ve learned about the necessary qualities of good writing (or content, in our digital vernacular), based on my own 25 years’ working as a writer and editor… and even longer career as a reader.

1. Good writing  anticipates reader questions. Good writing serves the reader, not the writer. It isn’t indulgent. “The reader doesn’t turn the page because of a hunger to applaud,” said longtime writing teacher Don Murray. Rather, good writing anticipates what questions readers will have as they read a piece, and (before they ask them) it answers them.

That means most good writers are natural skeptics, especially regarding their own work. They relentlessly think of things from their reader’s point of view: What experience is this creating for the reader? What questions might they have?

(I did this above, when, before listing the qualities of good writing, I thought, “Why does good writing even matter to you? Why should any of us care?”)

George Orwell said the “scrupulous writer” will ask himself at least four questions in every sentence: “What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it clearer? Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he or she will probably ask himself two more: Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?” (Hat tip to The Economist style guide for that one.)

Lauren Vargas quoths the Raven

Here’s where marketing can really help add value in a business context, by the way, because “simple” means “making it easy for the customer.” It means being the advocate for them. As Georgy Cohen writes, “The marketer should be identifying (and ruthlessly refining) the core messages and the top goals, then working with the web professionals to create a website supporting them.”

2. Good writing is grounded in data. Data puts your content in context and gives you credibility. Ground your content in facts: Data, research, fact-checking and curating. Your ideas and opinions and spin might be part of that story—or they might not be, depending on what you are trying to convey. But content that’s rooted in something true—not just your own opinions—is more credible.

Said another way: Data before declaration. If you are going to tell me what you think, give me a solid reason why you think it.

3. Good writing is like good teaching. Good writing strives to explain, to make things a little bit clearer, to make sense of our world… even if it’s just a product description.

“A writer always tries… to be part of the solution, to understand a little about life and to pass this on,” says Anne Lamott in Bird by Bird.

4. Good writing tells a full story.  Good writing roots out opposing viewpoints. As Joe Chernov says, “There’s a name for something with a single point of view: It’s called a press release.” Incorporate multiple perspectives when the issue lends itself to that. At the very least, don’t ignore the fact that other points of view might exist; to do so makes your reader not trust you.

So make sure he or she knows you’re watching out for them. To quote Hemingway: “The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof, shit detector.”

5. Good writing comes on the rewrite. That implies that there is a rewrite, of course. And there should be.

Writing is hard work, and producing a shitty first draft is often depressing. But the important thing is to get something down to start chipping into something that resembles a coherent narrative.

As Don Murray said, “The draft needs fixing, but first it needs writing.” Or Mark Twain: “Writing is easy. All you have to do is cross out the wrong words.”

6. Good writing is like math. I mean this in two ways: First, good writing has logic and structure. It feels solid to the reader: The writer is in control and has taken on the heavy burden of shaping a lumpy jumble of thoughts into something clear and accessible.

It might not follow a formula, exactly. But there’s a kind of architecture to it. Good writing has more logic to it than you might think.

Second, good writing is inherently teachable—just as trigonometry or algebra or balancing a balance sheet is a skill any of us can master. Journalism professor Matt Waite writes in his essay, How I Faced My Fears and Learned to Be Good at Math: “The difference between good at math and bad at math is hard work. It’s trying. It’s trying hard. It’s trying harder than you’ve ever tried before. That’s it.”

I think the same is true about writing. Ta-Nehisi Coates, a senior editor at The Atlantic, spent a year teaching writing to MIT students. He later wrote, “I felt that the rigor of math had better prepared these kids for the rigor of writing. One of my students insisted that whereas in math you could practice and get better, in writing you either ‘had it’ or you didn’t. I told her that writing was more like math then she suspected.”

7. Good writing is simple, but not simplistic. Business—like life—can be complicated. Products can be involved or concepts may seem impenetrable. But good content deconstructs the complex to make it easily understood: It sheds the corporate Frankenspeak and conveys things in human, accessible terms. A bit of wisdom from my journalism days: No one will ever complain that you’ve made things too simple to understand.

“Simple” does not equal “dumbed-down.” Another gem from my journalism professors: Assume the reader knows nothing. But don’t assume the reader is stupid.

If you think your business-to-business concept is too complex to be conveyed simply, take a look at the very first line of The Economist’s style guide: “The first requirement of The Economist is that it should be readily understandable. Clarity of writing usually follows clarity of thought. So think what you want to say, then say it as simply as possible.”

8. Good writing doesn’t get hung up on what’s been said before. Rather, it elects to simply say it better. Here’s where style be a differentiator—in literature and on your website.

Mark Twain described how a good writer treats sentences: “At times he may indulge himself with a long one, but he will make sure there are no folds in it, no vaguenesses, no parenthetical interruptions of its view as a whole; when he has done with it, it won’t be a sea-serpent with half of its arches under the water; it will be a torch-light procession.” He also might’ve said: “Write with clarity and don’t be indulgent.” But he didn’t.

That doesn’t mean you need to be a literary genius, of course. It only means you have to hone your own unique perspective and voice.

9. A word about writers: Good writers aren’t smug. Most of the really good writers I know still feel a little sheepish calling themselves a “writer,” because that’s a term freighted with thick tomes of excellence.  But like many achievements in life—being called a success, or a good parent—the label seems more meaningful when it’s bestowed upon you by others.

“Most of the time I feel stupid, insensitive, mediocre, talentless and vulnerable—like I’m about to cry any second—and wrong. I’ve found that when that happens, it usually means I’m writing pretty well, pretty deeply, pretty rawly.” —Andre Dubus III (House of Sand and Fog)

BONUS: Good writing has a good editor. Writers get the byline and any glory. But behind the scenes, a good editor adds a lot to process.

Remember what I said above about there being two kinds of people? Those who think they can write, and those who think they can’t? And very often, both being wrong? A good editor teases the best out of so-called writers and non-writers alike.

The best writing—like the best parts of life, perhaps—is collaborative.

And by the way, is it odd that I’m seeding what’s essentially business advice with insight from artists? And if so, why is that odd?

Because in a world where we have an opportunity and responsibility to tell our stories online, we need to find not just the right words… but the very best ones.

- See more at: http://www.annhandley.com/2013/11/18/9-qualities-of-good-writing/#sthash.HJ3yQi6B.dpuf
via Ann Handley - Content Marketing Keynote Speaker and Best-Selling Author http://www.annhandley.com/2013/11/18/9-qualities-of-good-writing/

Quick SEO Tips to Boost Holiday Sales

NOVEMBER 4, 2013 • JILL KOCHER

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The holiday selling season is in full swing. If your natural search visits and sales are falling short of your goals, try these quick search-engine-optimization tips to give them a boost. Focus first on what you control — on the pages and keyword phrases that will actually make a difference.

Find the Sweet Spots

Before you touch a single title tag, do a quick analysis of your natural search performance. It’s tempting to skip this step to get right to making things better, but it’s just as likely you’ll make things worse. An hour spent with the data will tell you where to focus and what to tweak.

Start with the natural search visits and conversions reports from your analytics, specifically on the entry page and keyword reports. Which entry pages and keywords drive the most natural search visits and conversions? Then move to your Google Webmaster Tools account and match the entry pages and keywords from your analytics with the entry pages and keywords in the “Search Queries” report. This will give you an idea of how you’re ranking for those entry pages and keywords, as well as how many natural search impressions you’re getting.

How do you use this data? Your brand name is probably among the top performing natural search keywords, both in terms of rankings and impressions, as well as visits and conversions. Your home page most likely has the highest visibility. Tweaking these already performing pages and keywords is likely to have little benefit to performance.

Nudge the Lazy Middle

It’s far faster and easier to nudge an underperforming page up a couple of ranking spots than to improve a page with nonexistent performance. And there is typically more benefit to squeeze from the underperformers than the pages and keyword phrases that are already performing strongly.

It’s far faster and easier to nudge an underperforming page up a couple of ranking spots than to improve a page with nonexistent performance.

Identify the pages and keyword phrases that drove some natural search performance, but should be able to drive more based on the keyword research. Compare your impression, ranking, visits, and conversion data to keyword research to identify which keywords are underperforming.

Look for keyword phrases that capture between 0.1 and 1 percent of the available keyword market. These keyword phrases are visible enough to drive natural search traffic to your site but not relevant or authoritative enough to perform strongly. Then look for ones that pages that rank between positions 5 and 20 in Google. These pages are visible enough to rank, but not optimal enough to rank well.

These pages are your lazy middle. Whip them into shape with some of the optimization tips below to help them drive the natural search visits and sales you need.

Optimize for Relevance

Take another look at your keyword research and keyword map. Are the lazy middle entry pages you’ve identified as opportunities to grow SEO performance optimized as strongly as they can be for the terms assigned to them in the keyword map? Does the keyword assigned mesh with the reality of the keyword phrases driving customers to that landing page? This is the time to re-optimize the pages to reflect the keyword phrases that the data suggests are best suited to that page.

Starting with the pages that represent the best opportunity, rework the title tag, meta description, main heading, and body copy. The changes likely won’t be huge, and may just be a matter of swapping one phrase for another or changing up a sentence or two to make the keyword phrase more prominent.

You’re probably thinking, “But that’s just basic SEO.” Yes, it is. And the reason it’s basic SEO is that it’s foundational to everything else. Without strong on-page SEO to send a clear relevance signal, everything else in your SEO strategy is just amplifying a muddy signal. Most merchants can find basic on-page SEO elements to improve on at least half of the pages they are targeting if they just take the time to do it.

Cross Link for Authority

Rankings require authority signals as well as relevance signals. Cross-linking and cross-promotional elements can help funnel additional link authority from throughout the site to the pages for which you most want to improve natural search performance. External links from other sites would have a much larger benefit, but they’re also more difficult to acquire quickly and ethically. Start with elements you can control for faster performance improvement.

Thinking about those lazy middle pages. Which of them has the potential to drive the highest natural search visits and conversions? Create a list of pages on your site that are relevant to that high-potential page and design a cross-linking element to drive link authority to that page.

If you can do it quickly and professionally, consider a visual element like a call out box with a relevant image and a line of text that contains the keyword phrase for which you want your high-potential page to rank. If you don’t have the resources or the access to your platform to make larger changes, perhaps you can insert selected links into text fields on relevant pages. These cross-linking elements should also double as relevant cross-promotional elements that, if done well, will improve customer experience.

For example, if you sell Christmas sweaters and your sweaters featuring reindeer are not getting the natural search visibility they need, a cross-linking element on the Santa Claus sweaters and Christmas tree sweaters pages pointing to the reindeer sweaters page may help. In other cases, the page you have linked to may be a single product page or an informational page.

Drive More Clicks

Even pages that are ranking well can be optimized to drive more clicks from the search results. If your high rankings aren’t driving the visits you’re expecting, consider optimizing specifically to attract searcher clicks to your search result instead of your competitors’.

via Practical Ecommerce http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/60445-Quick-SEO-Tips-to-Boost-Holiday-Sales

Smart, Effective Strategies To Design Marketing Campaigns

• By Simon Schmid
• October 14th, 2013
 
• Business, Content, Interaction Design
 
• 9 Comments

Ever since I’ve been involved in the Web, I’ve been fascinated by little things that make a big impact. It’s one of the reasons why I startedcollecting and blogging about these details, which could in some way help others grow an audience. One recurring topic early on was launch and landing pages and the strategies that creators use to expand the reach of their websites, which led to a Smashing Magazine post titled “Elements of a Viral Launch Page.”

Another interesting recurring topic is the campaign page, which you’ll find either embedded in an existing website (Foursquare’s Game of Cones and Dropbox’s Great Space Race) or as a completely independent website (Iubenda’s Orwell Test) that redirects traffic back to the source. Such campaigns have varying goals, such as to drive traffic, to raise awareness or simply to get a single person’s attention.

In this post, you’ll learn what to look out for when creating your own small campaign and how these elements fit together in existing campaigns around the Web.

What Do We Mean By “Campaign”?

The word “campaign” is traditionally defined as a military or political operation that is confined to a particular area or involves a specific type of fighting and that is intended to achieve a particular goal. That’s exactly what we mean here: A campaign is a sustained effort that is slightly beyond your day-to-day business but still connected to it in some way.

Interestingly, a campaign can be carried out with little effort, if you closely monitor what is going on around you and your brand. In the wake of PRISM, we recently ran a small campaign calledOrwell Test, trying to redirect some of the attention to Iubenda, an app that generates privacy policies.

This post contains my observations and a framework for coming up with new campaigns, which you can integrate in your own marketing activities. Thus, it will include subjective opinion to complete the picture.

9 Things To Look Out For

After the Orwell Test campaign, I have been thinking about some of the reasons why it worked and how to come up with even better ways to get the word out about our startup. Obviously, the main driver here was the timing with PRISM and people’s emotional response to its outrageous reach. (Anger spreads faster and wider than joy on social networks, according to a scientific study on Weibo.)

The campaign asked a simple question: Is your company any better than the governments that collect data without informing people? This way, we made a connection with what is happening right now. We made a connection to something that people are very upset about (we’ll discuss why that’s important in the section “A Little Viral Theory” near the end), and we challenged them to think about their own behavior.

So, what things can you take advantage of, and what are some great campaigns that do?

THE ELEMENTS

• Relevance
  Tell a story. What is happening now?
• Cause
  Contribute to a cause.
• Popular issue
  Geek out on a popular or niche topic.
• Competition
  Host a competition.
• Stats, stats, stats
  Infographics, shareable data, etc.
• Content
• Partnerships
• Targeting someone or something
• Creativity and innovation
• Related fields
  Branch out into something related.

This list is not exhaustive, but it’s a good framework to start with, and the examples below will provide some perspective. To understand what your campaign should look like and to make it perfect, you will have to do a bit more homework and incorporate a few additional elements:analyze your target users, set a goal for the campaign, and add viral elements.

OTHER KEY ELEMENTS

• Persona
  Who are your target users? Build a persona.
• Goal
  What goal would you like to achieve?
• Virality
  Understand the viral loop and what it is caused by to maximize your reach. (Again, we’ll cover this in the “A Little Viral Theory” section.)

Now we’re ready to look at some examples.

1. Relevance

One of the easiest things to leverage is relevance. Something might be happening out there that you can add your own perspective to. The more relevant or innovative your contribution, the more attention you will be able to draw.

Orwell Test was born out of pure timing and our eagerness to work on something that people might appreciate. Another project that did an interesting job of capturing attention because of its content and name recognition was Prism Break, which was started by a Japanese developer and designer and posted in Reddit’s technology section and which has since taken on a life of its own.

Responding to short-lived events — for example, via Twitter — also has potential.

SKETCH

When Adobe was considering discontinuing Fireworks (which it did), Sketch invited people to look at its alternative, which it was offering at a 50% discount. Sketch’s tweet resulted in 33 favorites and 299 retweets!

TWEETBOT

The same thing happened with Tweetbot, which discounted its flagship app when Twitter killed off some versions of its TweetDeck app. Above is a humorous tweet by Paul Haddad, a member of the Tweetbot team. The tweet got 420 retweets and 152 favorites!

2. Cause

Another approach is to announce your support of a recurring event or cause.

MOVEMBER

Movember is a movement in which men grow moustaches in November to raise awareness about prostate cancer and to fund organizations that fight the disease. The movement is important to New Relic, which decided to donate $10 to the cause with every registration. New Relic ended updonating around $55,000 to the Movember Foundation and the Susan G. Komen foundation.

If we do the math, that’s 5500 new customers, if all of the registrations were legitimate. The campaign had a single landing page at newrelic.com/movember, organized into various sections. (It has since been removed, unfortunately, but might come back in a new version. Do visit the 404 page there, though, a great example of an actionable landing page.)

The campaign’s home was a one-pager that explained the concept of Movember and why New Relic is supporting it (the Movember Foundation is one of its clients). Visitors were invited to sign up below each of those sections (“Create your FREE account!”).

To remind people to share, the website also asked visitors to consider spreading the word below the different sections. The page’s header contained the usual Facebook, Google+ and Twitter buttons.

The last section offered the visitor the alternative of supporting a female-oriented cause. Notice how the copy taps into the altruism theme discussed earlier. It’s hard not to participate when you can support by “just sharing.”

3. Popular Issue

Being relevant could also mean building the campaign on something very popular that people identify with (a form of relevance). Below are some campaigns based on very popular issues.

Crowdfunding is all the rage these days (deservedly so), and all aspects of it are being discussed in blogs and social media and even traditional media. Nintendo played with this concept for the launch of its Game & Wario game for the Wii U.

CROWDFARTER

With Crowdfarter, Nintendo built its very own Wario-themed Kickstarter-like campaign, featuring “executive updates” by Wario himself. Visitors could preorder the game, and the page explained everything they needed to know about the upcoming release.

The pages were structured to obviously reflect Kickstarter (and similar websites): video at the top, social elements along the right, and details just below.

The most important part was that the goals and donation element were connected to the sharing elements. That is, visitors could “buy” into the campaign by sharing in social media.

When the campaign had been shared a certain number of times, Wario badges would be released for downloading. The last prize was a video of the gameplay.

MAKERS

Nike did something similar by tapping into a popular current topic. It built and released itsMakers app in July 2013. Visitors could download the app and educate themselves on how to work with materials in an environmentally sustainable way.

Quite a few sharing elements were built into this campaign. The campaign lives at its own domain,nikemakers.com, not a subdomain of nike.com. The website was built with Tumblr to appeal to people who love the platform. It also includes a video explaining how this campaign could turn into a full-blown movement. (By the way, check out Tomasz Tunguz’s post on how to start a movement for your product.)

MARAUDERS MAP

The makers of Circle, a local social network app, created a small campaign website based on a Harry Potter-style marauders map to explain what its service does, which is to track nearby friends. (The marauders map was apparently the result of a Circle hackathon.)

4. Competition

People love to compete. And people love the chance to win something, however improbable the chance of actually winning might be. A competition is always an interesting basis for a campaign.

THE GREAT SPACE RACE

Dropbox understands the viral loop better than anyone. When it started out, it promised free additional storage for users who referred their friends as well as for the friends themselves. This not only incentivized existing users to share, but also enticed potential users to sign up because they would clearly be getting a better deal than anyone else. Earlier this year, Dropbox decided to run the Great Space Race, which would give free Dropbox space to everyone at a student’s school (more precisely, an extra 3 GB to the student for two years, plus the additional space their school had earned).

The campaign hinged on two elements: acquiring users and activating those users. Every invitation would earn two points towards free space for the student’s school, and new users would unlock four more points by completing the “Get Started on Dropbox” guide. The points would be converted into free space for everyone at the school for two years (to a maximum of 25 GB).

Right below the simple instructions appeared the school rankings for the student’s own country, and below that the international rankings, so that the student could see where they fit in and how far they had to go. (The competition is over, but the page is still available.)

GAME OF CONES

Foursquare built a campaign named Game of Cones, launched around the time when the “Red Wedding” episode of Game of Thrones aired, which dominated social media for a while. Foursquare’s competition was a battle in which the ice cream shop with the most check-ins in New York City or San Francisco would win the Iron Cone.

Foursquare combined a competition with a very popular phenomenon, Game of Thrones, working with HBO to bring this campaign to its users. The sharing aspect was a combination of rooting for the various “houses” — for example, Bi-Rite and Smitten — and sharing via the hash tag #SummerIsComing.

Users were incentivized to share by “choosing their allegiance.”

GETAROUND RACER

Getaround repurposed a racing game into a competition for its brand in which users could “drive with style, like 007.” The winner spent a day in an Aston Martin car, with a custom-tailored suit, had a five-star dinner and spent the night in a luxurious hotel.

Users could participate in the competition by sharing their racing time in the game on Facebook.

5. Infographics, Compilations And POV

An infographic is a great campaign tool, as we all know. It compiles a few interesting facts into an easily digestible (and, thus, shareable) format. One of my all-time favorites is the Web Trend Mapby iA.

iA has become well known for these infographics, repurposing metro maps into what could even be considered as posters.

TIME MACHINE

Foursquare’s Time Machine was an interesting partnership (with Samsung’s Galaxy S4) and a good example of emotional design. The time machine took users back in time in an interactive, visual way, showing what they’ve been up to and the places they’ve visited.

If the user changed cities, the machine would take them there as well, changing locations with a small spaceship animation.

After the user had completed and seen their own history, they could check out some interesting new places around them. To finish off, they could see a colorful infographic of their own journey, which they could easily share.

FLURRY

In a post titled “Why Your Marketing Campaign Sucks” on TechCrunch, Mark Suster singles out Flurry as an exceptional campaign marketer, and he introduces the term “point-of-view marketing,” which a campaign creator needs to follow in order to succeed. The gist is that it’s not all about you, but rather about why the campaign is newsworthy.

Flurry’s campaign was a simple blog post, “Christmas 2012 Shatters More Smart Device and App Download Records.” As Suster puts it:

“Flurry doesn’t talk about all of their analytics features and functions. They offer a point-of-view about their market. And they back it up with data. And journalists eat that shit up because it has all that they’re looking for: facts, charts, an angle, news, something that their readers care about, etc.”

The takeaway here is, are you painting the big picture, or just talking about yourself?

6. Content

Words. Images. Content. These form an integral subset of all of the other categories we’re talking about. All of them matter, the color choices, contrast, symmetry, balance. Yet they stand as a category of their own.

Justin Jackson perfectly captured the idea that content can be the message in his piece “This Is a Web Page.” He opens with the heart of the matter:

“There’s not much here. Just words.”

Those words garnered over 200,000 page views in just two weeks.

7. Partnership

We’ve seen partnership campaigns before. Here’s one GE pulled off on BuzzFeed.

FLIGHT MODE

GE partnered with BuzzFeed to promote GE Aviation at the Paris Air Show. With BuzzFeed, GE created sponsored content related to aviation, and it provided a novel way to navigate the content, called “Flight Mode,” whereby users could fly towards the content they wanted to read.

It might not have revolutionized online reading, but it was a memorable campaign.

KITKAT AND ANDROID

Most of you have probably seen this. The campaign launched after I had finished the final draft of this article, but I just had to squeeze it in.

Google and Nestlé have come together to promote the next version of Android, 4.4, by naming it Android KitKat, continuing Google’s convention of naming major Android releases after desserts. This dessert campaign includes an actual dessert: Android will be featured on KitKat packaging, and customers can win little prizes.

KitKat’s campaign website.

Android’s campaign website.

9. Narrow Target

An effective campaign could just as well target an extremely narrow niche audience.

“HOW MUCH TO MAKE AN APP”

Ooomf is a service for people who are looking for developers and designers to make an idea happen. It recently released a side project and campaign titled “How Much to Make an App.”

The website helps users estimate the costs of a project. It targets anyone who types “How much does it cost to make an app” into a search engine. Additionally, Web professionals may send their customers this way to get an idea of what’s involved.

Sharing is enabled by the handy nature of the tool, which explains what is expected of the visitor to make their idea a reality. In general, the more useful something is to someone, the more likely they will share it.

Ooomf added two links to its website, one on the main landing page at the top, and a call to action to “submit your project” right on the website (plus a “learn more” link).

“PLEASE FEATURE US, TECHCRUNCH”

Here’s a company that tried to increase its chances of being covered by TechCrunch by targeting the publication with a campaign page titled “Please Feature Us TC.”

The campaign never got Hipvite the coverage it sought; however, according to TJ Tan on Dribbble, it gave the company a nice flow of registrations (the app no longer exists). In an email to me, Tan explained that Hipvite’s primary goal was to attract early adopters to try out the product; the TechCrunch feature would merely have been a great bonus.

NEARBOX

The team behind Nearbox wanted to meet up with Andrew Chen to discuss “growth hacking” in their area of interest (mobile). They sent him the Snapchat image above, along with the website they built. This is a great example of how to target an individual in a small campaign. They even asked people to tweet about it:

“Those guys from @Nearbox really want to meet @andrewchen http://bit.ly/YzKesU.”

It’s hard to turn down people who do things like this.

8. Creativity And Innovation

This next creative campaign is still running.

HOLLYWOOD AND VINES

This campaign, called Hollywood and Vines, consists of a compilation of six-second Vine clips submitted from all over the world.

Sharing is encouraged via the usual social channels and with an email like this:

“Airbnb creates the world’s first film made entirely of Vines. Check out the project athttp://www.hollywoodandvines.com/ #AirbnbHV.”

SOLVED BY FLEXBOX

Creativity also means coming up with a great campaign name. “Solved by Flexbox” is a great name to support the CSS Flexbox campaign.

10. Related Area

One last option worth mentioning is to choose an area of focus that isn’t necessarily your core business, but where you can add unique insight or get a lot of views.

SPEAKEASY

When Speakeasy launched its product to book locations for events, instead of a typical launch party, it threw 50 parties by getting promoters to use its ticketing platform for the same weekend. The incentive for promoters posed a problem; Speakeasy wanted to host a liquor giveaway, but that wasn’t viable because of the high turnaround time that spirit brands usually have. So, it decided to make its own Vodka brand and advertise it in its emails (and on a fake website), without any explanation.

The campaign’s results were impressive: media coverage in New York and Toronto, one weekend with 45 parties in three cities, and 5000 new users.

LITENSE

I’ll conclude with our newest campaign at Iubenda, named Litense. We tackled a subject related to what we do, open-source licenses, and added our expertise. Because we have some experience in creating legal documents, we attempted to redesign open-source licenses to make them instantly understandable and easy to use, both for their creators and their users.

We picked the catchiest name possible, Litense, made the licenses easy to scan and read, with the help of icons, and added a few descriptive sentences of what you can do with the licenses.

To make it even easier, we host the licenses on our own servers. All the user has to do is link to the license, which will pop open in a modal window over top their page.

At the bottom of the page, we list the various licenses, with an overview to help visitors make sense of the various clauses; it also contains the only link back to Iubenda’s website. We hope the service provides value to a lot of people, people who might need Iubenda’s other services at some point. We hope the project will draw a bit of attention to Iubenda’s vision of reworking legal documents for the Web.

A Little Viral Theory

Now that you know the ingredients of a campaign, let’s look at the recipe to make it effective. You’ll usually want to follow a few rules to make as big an impact as possible.

For starters, you’ll need to bake in a bit of a viral loop. In short, you’ll need to get a viral coefficient above 1.

viral coefficient = (average number of users invited by each active user who invites someone) × (proportion of invited users who actually join or become active) × (proportion of active users who invite others)

Ultimately, it comes down to eliciting a strong emotional driver that will get visitors to share. (If you’re interested in emotional design, check out Aarron Walter’s book on the topic and my earlier article). What’s the strongest driver on social networks? Anger.

Higher virality is achieved by eliciting strong emotions. Here are a few things you can do:

• Make your content visual.
  Use images, infographics, videos, GIFs. Visual content is more engaging, faster to consume and faster to activate the response you seek.
• Make the content interactive.
• Personalize the content.
• Create emotional stacking with lists.

Emotions aren’t the only thing that raises the viral coefficient. Other factors that motivate people to share are social benefit or ego appeasement.

• Exclusivity
  The viewer wants to feel in the know.
• Altruism
  The user wants to do something good.
• Self-image
  How does the shared product represent the user?
• Convenience
  Make sharing as easy as possible.

Now that we’ve covered the theory, let’s look at a recent and brilliant execution of it.

ONE SECOND ON THE INTERNET

Designly’s One Second on the Internet campaign taps into so many of the themes above, and the website has been shared like crazy. See for yourself with a live Twitter search.

Let’s review five reasons why this campaign is so effective:

1. Visual content
   
   The highly visual content centers on the blocks of bright logos. The page has the feel of an infographic, because the size of each block correlates to the number of actions performed on that platform in one second.
2. Interactivity
   
   The interaction is subtle yet important. The number in the top left of each section adjusts to the time the visitor has spent on the website relative to the block being viewed.
3. Personal
   The page is not necessarily personalized, but it surely is personal. Designly is talking about everyday things: voting on Reddit, posting to Instagram, posting to Tumblr, Skyping, tweeting, uploading to Dropbox, searching on Google, watching Youtube videos, liking on Facebook, sending email. Hey, I do that!
4. Emotional stacking
   
   The page starts with the smallest block (Reddit) and finishes with the biggest (Facebook). Then, we get a few mind-boggling (and very shareable) facts, before the invitation to click that email button.
5. Convenient sharing
   
   Notice how the sharing buttons stay with you the whole time and how Designly’s URL sits in the bottom-right of the page?

Now What?

Now it’s your turn. Go create a great campaign with what you’ve seen here (and use one of Iubenda’s newly released licenses!). Also, don’t forget to tell us in the comments about the last thing that left a lasting impression on you. And feel free to link to any campaigns you may have done.

FURTHER READING AND LINKS

Here are some links from the article you shouldn’t miss:

• Full views of some of the campaigns: Great Space Race, Movember, etc.
• “Why Your Marketing Campaign Sucks,” Mark Suster, TechCrunch
• “The Secret Recipe for Viral Content Marketing Success,” Kelsey Libert, The Moz Blog
• “How to Make That One Thing Go Viral,” Upworthy
• “Elements of a Viral Launch Page,” Simon Schmid, Smashing Magazine
• “Key Ingredients to Make Your App Go Viral,” Carla White, Smashing Magazine
• “30,000 Newsletter Subscribers in 12 Months (Startup Lessons Learned),” Gregory Ciotti
• Influence: Science and Practice, Robert B. Cialdini
• Yes!: 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive, Noah J. Goldstein, Steve J. Martin and Robert B. Cialdini

(al, ea)

via Smashing Magazine Feed http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2013/10/14/smart-effective-strategies-to-design-marketing-campaigns/