Blog - Marketing Blog

Percussion Customers and Staff Gather at User Summit 2010 in Woburn, MA

Mon, 19 Jul 2010 00:00:00 -0400

We kicked off our first locally held User Summit at the Hilton in Woburn, MA this past Tuesday, July 13, with attendees from the Boston area as well as from companies and organizations all across the country.

It was great to see so many different industries gathered under one roof! A few names that come to mind: 24 Hour Fitness, MD Anderson Cancer Center, American Museum of Natural History, NIEHS, ASA, BabyCenter.com, Harvard Law School, Mathworks, Right Management, Virginia Tech and WWF.

Highlights included presentations by Percussion customers and staff:

Brian LaBrake (left) V.P. of Business Applications/ Right Management unveiled brand new site designs from his company’s offices all around the globe— including multilingual and cultural personalization tips in his presentation. Pictured chatting with Nick Lombardi (right) Percussion Worldwide Director Technical Support & IT, who presented the new Support Portal.

Dinos Papoulias (left) Web Producer, World Wildlife Federation chats with Stephen Bolton (right) Solutions Architect from Percussion Professional Services. Stephen presented new best practices and shared code on how to design templates for mobile websites.

Vern Imrich, Percussion CTO presents the company roadmap for 2010.

Ryan Choi (left) Web Architect, AMNH & Michelle Foley (right) Business Application Analyst, MathWorks brought good cheer.

Judy Gosiengfiao (left) 24 Hour Fitness and Jon Ball (right) Web producer, BabyCenter traveled from the West Coast to attend the event.

Dermot Conner (left) Web Development Specialist, MD Anderson chats with Paul Howard (right) Chief Software Architect, Percussion.

Jason Macauley (left) Director of Consulting, Percussion, Dana Miller (center) Customer Service Manager, Percussion chatting with Judy Gosiengfiao (front right) Business Application Analyst, 24 Hour Fitness, and Jay Seletz (back right) Engineering Director, Percussion.

Thank you to all the Percussion Customers and Staff for a healthy turnout. It was an excellent opportunity to match names to faces, and to share best practices across the board. We’ve already started planning the next conference to be held in California next year.

We hope to see you again soon!

Please feel free to stay in touch via Linkedin, Facebook and/ or Twitter.

9 Examples of Effective College and University Websites

Mon, 26 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0400

Higher education websites often need to target a number of distinct audiences including prospective students, current students (usually the most important stakeholders), alumni, parents, teachers, and staff.

Additionally, it’s often important to maintain consistency in branding, often across departments or even colleges within a university system.

Goals

While tactics like personalization can help target content to a school’s audiences while retaining brand consistency, the best projects start with excellent design focused on site goals. For a university or college, these might include:

Increasing the number and quality of applicants
Increasing donations
Communicating information about campus life to parents and students
Increasing the adoption of student tools, such as email, calendaring, and collaboration applications.

The over-arching goal should be to make the experience of doing business with the college as simple and intuitive as possible.

Techniques

Given the tremendous amount of content (and often, hundreds or thousands of pages) required to support a college’s many goals, it’s critical that you get design right. This means:

Useful content: While not generally considered part of the design process, all successful websites begin with a content strategy. Make sure you’ve outlined who the important audiences are, and what they are coming to your site for. Have it. This includes sourcing and reusing community and user-generated content, and employing automation and personalization to serve the most relevant information to visitors.
Calls to action: Conspicuous call to action buttons highlighting the important goals for visitors (hint: Apply) are becoming a mainstay of effective, modern web design.
Simple, logical navigation: Make it obvious. Along with clear calls to action, intuitive navigation helps your visitors quickly find what they’re looking for.

In general, focus on usability and make doing business with the college as easy as possible.

Here are a few websites we found serve as examples of the best web design out there for universities and colleges.

Aurora Community College

Aurora Community College features a Web 2.0 aesthetic, useful quicklinks, and a central promotion box to highlight important content.

Abilene Christian University

The mobile learning leader’s website includes links on the left for the site’s different visitors, a student profile in the center, and big calls to action down the right. ACU’s website is powered by Percussion.

Nebraska Wesleyan University

This homepage features a beautiful transparent header with a split screen showing highlighted stories next to quicklinks. The horizontal navigation is simple and makes great use of white space for an elegant look.

Boston University

Boston University, one of the largest private schools in the United States, recently redesigned their homepage. A massive image links to a featured article and gives the site a great deal of visual interest, while four columns below feature important content. The horizontal navigation is so obvious and simple its perfect.

Richland College

The light design makes use of obvious nav elements, featured content lists and a large promo box, all centered around a massive “Apply Now” button.

Tufts University

A non-traditional design showcases interesting events and news at Tufts, with a small but excellent set of navigation links top left. We love the “toolkit,” and area at the top right that presents links to tools students need on a regular basis in one convenient place, as well Tufts’ social network links. Also, a great example of how a great color scheme can give a site tons of personality.

University of Miami College of Arts and Sciences

Someone has taken a page from the Obama Administration school of web design, using an elegant but immaculate layout and sophisticated typefaces. The top half of the site rotates promoted stories and features (complete with pretty images and a beautiful transparency layer), leaving tons of space for news and events below.

Hampshire College

Another decidedly non-traditional design, the Hampshire College homepage is more akin to a magazine layout. Huge images, nice uncluttered nav with direct, descriptive titles makes it easy to find what you're looking for. Square promotion boxes overlaid over the rotating image give it depth. A useful dropdown allows access to deeper pages without adding complexity to the main navigation.

Virginia Tech

Virginia Tech’s Percussion-powered site manages to present a tremendous amount of information without clutter – great use of images and a modular layout that includes multiple navigation bars, a promotion slider, a world location, and student links.

HealthCare.gov Launched! Congratulations to The Department of Health and Human Services

Mon, 26 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0400

Today, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services launched HealthCare.gov, a new website aimed at helping the public understand health insurance reform and find out what health insurance options are available and might work best for them.

We’ll be talking more about Healthcare.gov in the coming weeks, but for now – wonderful job to the entire HHS team.

It’s absolutely gorgeous, as you can see. As HHS Chief Technical Officer Todd Park mentioned in today’s live webcast, “It doesn’t look anything like a typical government website.” You can say that again – clearly the focus has been on making the user experience wonderful for the citizen, right down to the buttons allowing visitors to comment on what is most and least helpful on the site.

Besides really simple explanations of how the law is improving access to healthcare for citizens with all different kinds of needs, the website provides a tool that asks users a series of simple questions and suggests healthcare options that fit their needs. Astonishingly, it supports 3 billion potential personal scenarios or “pathways” to ensure that visitors learn about options most relevant to their lives. The entire project – including design, content, integrating health insurance plan data from thousands of sources, application development, and implementing the Percussion web content management system - was built in 90 days.

Already, it has received A Lot. Of. Press. Craigslist founder Craig Newmark on HealthCare.gov: “Overall, the deal is better customer service from government, and better return for taxpayer dollars, pretty good!”

So, from all of us here at Percussion to the team at HHS: Congrats, and thank you for all that you do.

Download the Free Webinar: Implementing Open Government: Technology and Policy

This free live webinar on Open Government will impart best practices on how web content management can make government websites more open and participatory and how it can best be implemented.

Managing Content Strategy: Clothing the Emperor By Asking Why

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0400

You may have been there: had a boss who told you to “throw together” a document, a newsletter, a slide deck—or some designs, perhaps. Or, just as likely, to start a blog, Facebook group, or Twitter account—without guidance on what the new channel is meant to accomplish, or who will tend it day-to-day.

A recent blog post from Georgy Cohen suggested that creating content without a strategy is the equivalent of the emperor asking for new clothes, but refusing to acknowledge that the clothes don’t exist—i.e., that the content doesn’t have a strategy. As professionals, we can all quickly create something that’s passable—for now. But if we don't understand the larger purpose of what we're trying to do (that pesky human problem), we can’t create content that will help us get closer to our goals. As a result, our website (or emperor) will have no clothes—whether we admit it or not.

Kristina Halvorson, a content strategist, helps organizations think about what their content is doing for them—and how they can make it do that work even better. Dozens of content and design professionals gathered to speak with the Brain Traffic CEO at a Content Strategy New England meetup last week. All clearly saw a need to better clothe their emperors and strategize for their sites. The "aha" moments in the room piled up faster than stale content on a website as Halvorson clearly and calmly explained what should be obvious but sadly isn't: we all need to know why we do what we do, not only so that our efforts can contribute to a larger success, but also so our websites won’t be functionally naked.

As Brain Traffic defines it, "Content strategy plans for the creation, delivery, and governance of useful, usable content." It's pretty simple, clearly necessary, and echoes some of the content governance principles we’ve explored previously. But amid day-to-day distractions, many important components of content strategy seem to fall by the wayside, creating problems that affect everyone but that no one knows how to solve. So how do you make the step back from creating content to strategizing about it?

One of Halvorson's top tips was to simply ask why. Why am I changing this headline to say "integrate" rather than "join"? Perhaps "integrate" was identified as a keyword in the SEO strategy. Why am I making a video explaining how to use a product that no one buys? Maybe the video is key to promoting adoption. Why am I writing an article about traveling to Mexico for the website of an insurance company? Perhaps traveler's insurance is the company's current focus. Whatever the reason, know what it is. And if the reason doesn't make sense, say so.

One of my favorite event wrap-ups came from Cohen, whose summary inspired me to think in the familiar fable terms that have guided this post. She said, “Amid all the talk about content as king, here—finally—is the sewing circle working feverishly to make sure that the emperor has clothes.” I like this sartorial metaphor for the way it evokes careful planning and detailed work—not to mention ongoing tailoring and repairs.

Ultimately, the best thing any content creator can do is ask why—and refuse to perpetuate the emperor illusion if there is no good answer.

The Human Problem in Content Management

Mon, 26 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0400

Tony Byrne of the Real Story Group remarked earlier this month that “The future is more of a content and human problem than a technology problem.” The notion seemed to resonate deeply with his audience at JBoye Philadelphia. Having already acknowledged the issues of scale inherent in human capital - “humans don't scale,” several presenters observed - the conference seemed to move towards consensus: we often have the technology we need. But technology is subject to all the flaws of its human users. The true problem: how do we get humans to adopt and use it appropriately?

Smart planning and governance can help, as we discussed earlier this month in a blog post. Plans can and should make good use of technology to achieve strategic goals. But humans will ultimately be responsible for adopting and implementing any plan that’s created. Without intelligent adoption and usage, no technology is useful: hence the human problem in content management.

In the book Drive, business and technology writer Dan Pink suggests that “autonomy, mastery, and purpose” are what motivate us. This suggests that humans will be best equipped to use technology when they have received sufficient training to be masterful users of that technology, as well as when they have sufficient context to understand the overarching purpose of the technology at hand.

So even if human problems – adoption and usage – will continue to be our greatest challengers, we also have the power to be a solution. A comprehensive strategy, with a clear purpose that fosters understanding and adoption, is the beginning of a resolution. A successful strategy also marks the point where you can really start to get returns on technology, because your humans are able to work efficiently and with purpose, making the best use of the tools available to them. Sound too good to be true? Maybe - but with the right plan, built on the right purpose, maybe not.

3 content destination websites and what your business can learn from them

Mon, 26 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0400

Internet users are more empowered than ever to find what they’re looking for online, regardless of where that content lives. Content destination websites, whose business model centers around not only having what searchers are looking for, but having content that will keep them there once they arrive, have gotten very good at driving website visits and converting visitors to customers using content.

Not every business should be a destination or attempt to be. Every business, however, can learn from the tactics content destination sites employ to acquire and convert traffic. Here are three organizations from the Percussion family that fit the content destination profile, and what marketers can learn from how they succeed online.

Examples of Successful Content Destinations

BabyCenter.com

Articles, from “8 Ways to Get your Toddler to Listen” to “32 Ways Your Life Will Change,” are just the tip of the iceberg for the Web’s #1 global interactive parenting network. Expert answers, “Mom” answers, informational videos, baby names, a community in which users can form groups and post stories, photos, tips, and journals, and a bevy of useful tools such as Ovulation Calculator and Pregnancy Weight Tracker keep users finding the site - and coming back.

Visit London

VisitLondon.com hopes that leisure and business travelers to London (as well as Londoners!) will book accommodations using the website after learning about things to do, events, shopping, restaurants, and other attractions at VisitLondon.com. They can also get maps and guides to the city, as well as access a huge amount of information on travel logistics, customs and visas. User reviews of thousands of hotels from Trip Advisor often seal the deal.

The Motley Fool

Fool.com calls itself The World’s Greatest Investing Community, and provides its readers with stock tips, articles on how to invest and plan for retirement, regular columns by experts, a platform to rate and research stocks while sharing ideas, a radio show, and hundreds of community discussion boards. Overall, the site reaches millions each month through a combination of free and premium content.

The sites above use very effective techniques to be trusted sources for content in their industry. Here are some things marketers can learn from what they've accomplished:

It's About The Content

Consider all the different types of content that your readers might find useful (or entertaining): articles, blog posts, instructional videos or video interviews, how-to guides, podcasts, glossaries, diagrams, trade or industry statistics, social content, the voice of their own peers in the form of comments and reviews. Iterate and test what works on a small scale, then make the most effective content types a regular part of your content pipeline.

It's About The Experience

As much as users are empowered to find things on their own, compare the user experience of trying to find out what makes a good diaper on Google vs. BabyCenter, or try searching for which car to buy on Yahoo instead of AutoTrader.com. Good content destinations are an oasis in the desert of noise that often accompanies search engine results. They know that because you came for this thing, you might also want to see this thing. Once you find a good content destination, you're more likely to stay. Focus your planning on why the visitor should care and ask yourself whether every new piece of content or feature would add value to those who consume your content. Relevance and context are tremendously important here. That's what web content management helps you do: you've got the content - use it to interact with your customers in the most effective way possible.

3rd Party Content: Be an aggregator

As much as making your website a successful destination is about original content, its about having what your visitors are looking for. There is a wealth of content online on the topics that interest your readers, but often it's difficult to find. There's an opportunity to become the trusted destination for your readers by aggregating it. The content exists, you can help visitors find it. Import feeds directly into your CMS as reusable content items to publish on your site in lists of popular and useful content and license content from trusted sources to massively increase the amount of information you make available to your readers.

3rd Party Channels: Be ubiquitous

It's also important to get found by the people you're trying to convert, and search engines aren't the only place this happens. Find out which channels (from mainstream social networks like Facebook and Twitter to more specific communities like LinkedIn Groups and niche websites) your users are using most and link your content to them in an appropriate way. Submit articles to LinkedIn groups, comment on industry blog posts with links to your own take, offer up morsels to followers on Twitter with links to a bigger story.

Employ the Tools of Engagement

RSS: To both allow visitors to subscribe to your blog, increasing the likelihood that they will return to your site for content, as well as enable your own content for syndication.

Comments: To allow readers to build a connection with you around your content as well as source user-generated content.

Ratings: A simple engagement mechanism which also enables you to automate the generation of lists and suggest popular content to other readers.

Polls: Source input from your readers while allowing them to interact with the community on your website.

"Share" buttons: Whether using ShareThis, AddThis, or your own tool, give your reader's the ability to pass along your content conveniently to their friends and network. While sharing widgets have become pervasive on blogs and other forms of social content, consider adding them to all of your content.

Widgets: Create applications that, while connected to your website and content, can be placed on other sites by users. Flu.gov, for instance, allows visitors to embed Flu Vaccine Locator, Flu Map, and News widgets on their own websites and blogs, significantly expanding their content's reach to citizens.

Personalization: In web content management, relevance and context are critical. Websites can use personalization to track their visitors interests based on any kind of site interaction, referring sites, keywords searched (or even referring keywords), or explicit inputs to show them the most relevant content at exactly the right time.

Plan On It: Careful planning fosters continued success in content and community

Mon, 26 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0400

When spring arrives, we often think of planting gardens and doing our spring cleaning—but how often do we apply these principles to business? A few sessions at the JBoye Conference in Philadelphia last week motivated us to think about how spring can also be an important time for clarifying our approach to content and social media strategy. Here's a short summary of those sessions, as well as a few ideas for planting the seeds of a successful content strategy in your organization.

Plan On It: Careful planning fosters continued success in content and community

Peter Kim's session on "Making Sense of Social Business" and Christine Pierpoint's take on "Managing the Web: The Fundamentals of Web Operations Management" offered smart suggestions for dealing with potentially overwhelming tasks. Though each approached strategy from a different direction—Kim focusing on social media and Pierpoint tackling governance (as she'll be doing in her upcoming webinar with us)—their takes were remarkably consistent.

Kim put forward a project cycle consisting of "plan, construct, maintain, measure, and understand" iterations, each component aimed at ensuring the ongoing success of a project. Pierpoint proposed a similar "strategy, governance, execution, measurement" cycle for web operations management. The correlation between the "construct/maintain" and "governance" phases of these plans (visible below) clearly demonstrates that any plan is incomplete unless it's clear who will manage it and how.

Organizations often figure they'll "just try" social media or other seemingly minor endeavors without crystallizing a plan, and then lose heart when poorly aligned Tweets from junior staff fail to revolutionize the business. Pierpoint proposed a "social media litmus test" to reveal governance issues within an organization: If no one knows who should handle social media at your organization, it means you don't have an effective web operations management process or structure in place. Social media touches on so many aspects of an organization that it's understandable for an organization to be unsure who will handle it—but if an organization's governance is well defined, execution and measurement will benefit.

Even when a plan is in place, it's ultimately useless unless enacted and enforced. As one session attendee questioned, “What's the teeth?”—or, what are the consequences of not enacting a plan? This is where the “measurement” task and the iterative nature of the strategic cycle come in to play. If you’re measuring the outcome of your plan, you will be able to determine not only what has been done, but also the effects it has achieved.

Perhaps a complete strategic cycle that incorporates governance and measurement is key not only to defining the criteria for success, but also creating the conditions for achieving it. By creating an environment where people understand what the plan and purpose of their efforts are, a plan fosters employee motivation. Underscoring this point, a vendor-driven session about CMS community at the JBoye conference concluded that mastery is a significant portion of community. That is, the community members who feel they’ve mastered a skill are more apt to contribute again in the future. Likewise, employees who feel they’re contributing to a larger, well-defined strategic effort will be more motivated to contribute to their part of the cycle.

So, this spring, ensure the success of your content and communities by creating plans to drive them, or evaluating the success of your existing plans. A careful calibration of your strategic mission and the tactics for achieving it can pave the way for significant improvements both within your organization and the larger community around it, feeding the enthusiasm of already-engaged members and fostering participation among others.

Christine Pierpoint of will be joining Percussion for a free webinar on governance in Open Government on May 26th - don't miss it!

Register to Attend: Implementing Open Government: Technology and Policy

This free live webinar on Open Government will impart best practices on how web content management can make government websites more open and participatory and how it can best be implemented.

Building Effective Homepages

Mon, 26 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0400

Recently, our friends at CMSWire published an article entitled “The Decline of the Homepage,” alleging that because more and more visitors enter websites at specific pages, the homepage has lost its status as a critical element of an organization’s website.

While Gerry McGovern’s article makes a few good points, I would have to disagree.

Why The Homepage Is Still Important

Organizations are getting better and better at inbound marketing and consequently, more visitors are entering websites at article pages, blog post permalinks, and campaign landing pages. This long tail of content is indeed critical to traffic acquisition. The homepage, however, still remains the most frequent entry point to the vast majority of websites. Here are some reasons why:

Many potential leads use Google to search for your brand. Nearly all of these searches will list your homepage as the first result. Consequently, the homepage is the entry point for nearly all visitors searching your business name.
Your homepage is still likely to garner the most inbound links. Even though blog posts and articles might be link magnets, your homepage is where most people reviewing or linking to your business will likely link. Combining this with your own SEO efforts around important keywords means Google and other search engines are apt to offer it as a relevant result for many searches.
It’s easy to direct people to. Both for B2B companies who still drive a lot of new business with telesales, and B2C businesses that direct consumers to their website – that’s a lot of traffic being driven directly to your homepage.

While Gerry makes a good point – that oftentimes it is preferable for a visitor to find exactly what they’re looking for via a direct link or search result – many times your visitors don’t know what they need. The homepage is a perfect way to direct them. So instead of “is the homepage dead?,” the question becomes how do we make our homepages more effective?

Building An Effective Homepage

Marketers and web designers have learned a great deal about what makes an effective homepage. The goal is to take all the traffic you’ve acquired, help visitors qualify themselves as potential customers, and drive them towards a conversion.

Reduce Clutter: Reduce the number of content items on your homepage – lists and aggregation are fine if they drive towards a result, but resist the temptation to put everything under the sun on your homepage. Rather, use simple navigation to help visitors find what they need.

Mint.com does a beautiful job of laying out important information without cluttering their homepage:

Consider a large header: Large text can be in incredible effective in quickly letting your visitors know what you’re about and how you can help.Too many websites fail to help potential leads know that they’ve come to the right place.

The Onehub website, below, lets you know immediately that they can help you share files, manage projects, and collaborate with your team:

Big calls to action: Consider this question: what is the most important action you would like visitors to take on your site? Buy a product? Make a donation? Subscribe to your email list? Watch a demo? Give them a clear, obvious way to do it.

Even though AutoTrader.com, a media site, presents a lot of information on their homepage, a massive “Find Cars” button helps visitors quickly take an action:

Your homepage still presents a tremendous opportunity to turn traffic into action. Keep it focused on the actions you want visitors to take, and reap the rewards.

(Note: As I look at Percussion’s homepage, it’s clear that we’re not making use of my own advice. I’m on it. Luckily I have this great web content management system that will make changing it all a piece of cake.)

Images and SEO

Mon, 26 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0400

In past posts, we’ve looked at some tips for quickly optimizing page titles, H1 tags, and URLs for better results. Today we’re talking about images.

Images are sometimes overlooked as an opportunity to improve SEO results. Properly optimized images contribute to improved rankings in search and can also drive their own traffic through Google Image Search.

Optimizing Images for Search

Two elements make up the bulk of search engine optimization for your images, filenames and alternate text. Ensure that you are properly employing both.

Filenames: The actual name given to your file, such as red-balloon.jpg. In most cases, the filename should be simple and descriptive.

Alt Text: Alt text describes an image, and is used by screen readers for the visually impaired as well as rendered by browsers when for any reason an image can’t load.

Below is an example, from Flu.gov, showing an image as well as its filename and alternate text.

I like this example because it shows that any significant image asset – not just photos – can contribute to SEO.

Best Practices

Use them. Not only is it excellent page-building practice that breaks up copy and improves the readability and flow of your pages, but studies show that all things being relatively equal, web pages with relevant, well-optimized images rank better than those with none.
Employ important keywords in both filenames and alt text when possible, but don’t artificially stuff them with keywords – this can lead to penalization by Google.
Image filenames should use all lowercase letters and employ hyphens (dashes) as word separators.
Filenames and alt text should be concise – keep filenames to 3-4 words max and alt text to a short sentence.
Alternate text should describe your image to someone who cannot see it. Boy playing with dalmatian is an example of great alternate text for an image.

Images, SEO and your CMS

Here’s how easy it is to designate search engine-optimized filenames and alt tags in Percussion:

Any content contributor can quickly create SEO-friendly filenames and alternate text simply by typing it in. Because you can input them either when the image asset is being created or at any point afterwards, it’s possible to make quick adjustments to your SEO strategy as you find out what’s working most effectively.

Learn more about optimizing your enterprise websites for search engines by downloading the free webinar below:

Free Download: SEO for Enterprise Sites

Packed with examples, this recorded webinar explains how Google works and provides helpful guidance on how to plan an SEO-conscious web content strategy and properly optimize your web pages for better rankings on Google.

Download it now.

URLs for SEO

Wed, 21 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0400

We’ve taken a look at how to create effective page titles and H1 tags for SEO, now let’s look at another important on-page SEO element: URLs.

Modern URLs

For most cases, traditional dynamic URLs have been replaced by modern, SEO-friendly URLs. There is no longer any excuse for most of your webpages having URLs that include query strings, chains of numbers and special characters, or unnecessary extensions.

A URL like http://www.yourcompany.com/products/video looks much cleaner than http://www.yourcompany.com/page/index.aspx?topic=PRODUCT::321566

Not only are the aesthetics remarkably better, but it is much easier to read. Studies have shown that people are more likely to link to (boosting search rankings) and share (boosting traffic) web pages with clean, human-readable URLs.

Best Practices for SEO-Friendly URLs

Use dashes instead of hyphens as separators. Not only does Google see them as individual words, significantly increasing the number of relevant searches for which your page might be returned, but they also read cleaner and easier to humans.
Keep URLs short but descriptive. A human being should be able to read them and easily understand what the page will tell them just from the URL. Do not try to artificially pack them full of keywords. SEOMoz correlational data has shown that “Keyword effectiveness in URLs decreases as URL length increases.”
URLs are case sensitive – use all lowercase letters whenever possible, as this is what most people will type.
Be careful with subdomains, as they may be viewed by search engines as separate domains, splitting your authority.

SEO-Friendly URLs and Percussion CMS

Percussion’s content management system allows content contributors to create search-optimized URLs. All you have to do is type in the name of the page, and it will be appended to your folder structure.

You can even easily override folder structure and create URLs like Percussion.com/campaign-page, which comes in handy for marketing campaigns and important landing pages.

Here’s how easy it is to create friendly URLs in Percussion:

And here is the resulting URL!

For many more SEO tips and best practices, check out our recorded webinar, "SEO for Enterprise Sites" below!

Free Download: SEO for Enterprise Sites

Download it now.

H1 Tags for SEO

Mon, 29 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0400

Today we continue our exploration of on-page SEO elements with the H1 tag.

The H1 Headline

H1 headlines - text surrounded by <h1> header tags - are used to define the most important heading on a web page. If you can think of your website as a magazine, and your web pages as articles, H1s would be the articles’ titles.

Here’s a great example of an H1 headline in action (from BabyCenter.com):

This is what it would look like in the code:

Pretty simple, right?

Are H1s really useful for SEO?

For a long time, H1s were viewed as highly important to SEO. Recently, many (including SEO.moz, who perform frequent studies correlating on- and off-page factors to search rankings) have significantly de-emphasized what they believe to be the level of importance that Google and other search engines ascribe to H1 tags.

Nonetheless, we continue to recommend that web pages include proper H1s as they are helpful to users and may still carry some small SEO value.

H1 Headline Best Practices

Employ keywords but make it an appropriate title (short and descriptive of the web page’s contents).
Make it consistent with the keywords used in your page (browser) title, web page URL, and web copy.

Creating H1 Headlines in your CMS

Most web content management systems with in-context editing capabilities make it easy for those not versed in html to apply heading tags to text.

In Percussion, for instance you simply highlight the text you would like to give title status to, and select the correct style from the style drop-down:

Make sure you’re making use of this capability to provide each page with a proper H1 header.

On-page SEO elements are often the lowest-hanging fruit, opportunities to significantly impact your rankings in search results by making a few important changes. Next, we'll explore how H1 tags influence search rankings.

Free Download: SEO for Enterprise Sites

Download it now.

Page Titles for SEO

Mon, 29 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0400

Ensuring that on-page SEO elements (such as page titles, header tags, URLs, copy, and images) are properly optimized is a critical part of getting found, particularly for enterprise or large websites that have already begun to amass a large number of inbound links (and thus authority). CMS-managed websites can also take advantage of the ability to make sweeping changes to quickly impact and improve on-page optimization elements.

Nonetheless, organizations often have questions about how to best optimize on-page elements for better ranking in search, and a surprising number of established sites fail to make proper use of them.

This week we'll be exploring best practices in optimizing on-page elements, beginning with page titles.

What are Page Titles?

A page (or browser) title is displayed at the upper-left corner of most browsers. They are also frequently displayed in search results and bookmark lists. Page titles are generally accepted to be the single most important on-page keyword elements for SEO. Not only do they directly impact ranking, but because Google displays your page title as the title of a search result, they are often your first interaction with a visitor. A compelling, accurate page title can encourage click-through and set the right expectation for a new visitor.

Your page title should describe the web page accurately and include the most important keywords you want to rank on. Here’s an example of a great page title from the website of email marketing software provider Mailchimp:

And what the source code for that title looks like:

Page (Browser) Title Best Practices

Here are some guidelines for generating effective page titles:

Employ your keyword phrase(s) early on in the title. If you include a company name in your page titles, place it after your keywords, not before:

Web Content Management | Percussion Software

as opposed to

Percussion Software | Web Content Management

Write descriptive, compelling titles in natural language. Don't just pack them full of keywords.
Use dashes (-) or vertical pipes (|) to separator your keyword phrase from your website title.
Don’t make them too long – very long titles begin to correlate to decreased rankings in search results. A good rule of thumb is around 60 characters – Google displays just under 70 characters in search results, so anything longer than that will be cut off.

Page Titles in your CMS

Your web content management software probably makes it easy to generate page titles - make sure you are using this capability to add great titles to every page on your site. Here’s an example of how you would do it in Percussion, for instance:

Free Download: SEO for Enterprise Sites

Download it now.

Ask the Social Media Experts… on Twitter only?

Tue, 9 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0500

Percussion Staff Guest Bloggers Today:

Kerry Skemp, left, manages the proposal process and sales collateral for Percussion, and is the voice of Percussion on Twitter.

Erika Frey-Hasegawa, right, is responsible for updates to the website, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Last Thursday, MITX and the Boston Interactive Media Association gave members a chance to "Ask the Social Media Experts" at the UK Trade & Investment offices in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The panel,composed of social media experts Lois Kelly from Foghound, Erik Qualman from Socialnomics, Larry Weber from W2 group, and Dan Zarella from HubSpot, answered questions submitted via Twitter in advance and during the session.

MITX moderator Robert Davis, VP of Digital Marketing at PJA Advertising & Marketing, launched the discussion with great insights on starting out in social media, effective behavior, and techniques for defining and measuring success. Throughout the evening, the panelists handled the range of topics with impressive savvy. But in the audience something felt a little off. There was an elephant in the room.

Because questions were taken via Twitter, many of the audience members remained completely focused on their gadgets instead of interacting with panelists or raising their hands to ask questions. When the panelists weren't talking, the room itself was often oddly silent—except for the rapid clicking of Blackberries and iPhones. People were tweeting away. We wondered: was Twitter - a "social" tool - impeding actual connection?

Tweets were displayed on a big screen behind the panelists during the session. At times, it seemed that Tweetdeck was more active than the audience. A few bold souls stood up to ask questions, but for the most part, folks stayed behind the digital curtain—even when they didn't have to.

Twitter is a useful tool, and the social media experts on the panel provided strong rationale for its business use, showcasing statistics on company responsiveness increasing customer engagement and loyalty. However, in some cases, are social tools like Twitter preventing people from making actual human connections?

Twitter isn't always a distraction in social settings. Percussion CTO Vern Imrich had a positive experience with displays of Tweets at the Inbound Marketing Summit last fall. He found that they sparked conversation. Tweets certainly sparked conversation at the MITX panel, too—but did they need to? Couldn't questions have been raised just as easily, and perhaps even more effectively, in person? Marketers are often guilty of trying to incorporate every “shiny new toy” into their arsenal just because they are available – something we often advise against, as we do in the comments when analyst Janus Boye suggested that vendors' mobile websites and Facebook pages are critical to selection.

We’re all about Twitter and its use in communicating with customers, prospects, and our industry friends, but we do wonder if it has to be used in every situation, just because it can. Last week’s session was excellent but raised those questions for us again.

Next week we’ll address some of the insights the panelists shared.

The Private Sector Can Learn About Openness from the Government… no, I’m not joking.

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0400

Businesses who see the web as an important part of their communications strategy can learn a lot from the insight and complete approach the Administration has taken.

5 Ways E-Commerce Companies Can Use Content to Increase Conversion

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0400

Retailers now have the tools and the data to use content to significantly impact conversion in a big way.

3 Key E-Commerce Trends for 2010

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0400

How do internet retailers gain competitive advantage in 2010?

We're Turning Up The Blogging Heat

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0400

Welcome to the Percussion Marketing Blog, meet Marketing Manager Chris Oquist, and learn a little bit about what we'll be talking about.

The Drupal Gardens Affect

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0400

The introduction of Drupal Gardens will provide many companies, colleges and non-profits with a vastly simplified CMS. The introduction also marks the beginnings of a sea change in the industry.

Measuring Marketing Results – 6 easy steps to make your organization a Quant Shop

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0400

The first step in generating marketing results for your organization is setting up a measurement system. This will allow you to look back and determine what worked, and what didn't. These 6 steps help demystify the process.

That Sucking Sound from Down Below

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0400

The WCM category is changing. No big surprise. But what makes the dynamics interesting is the change is not coming from the deep-pocketed, large players. Rather, the lower price point vendors are marking change and forcing others to pay attention to their product roadmaps.

Brand Building and Social Media, Pt. 3: Media Buying in the World of Social

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0400

Social media moves the fulcrum of power away from brands and towards the small sub-set of individuals who are active and have cultivated a following. Part 3 of Brand Building and Social Media explores how this shift may impact targeting and valuation of future media purchases.

Brand Building and Social Media, Pt. 2: The Economics of Density and Leverage

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0400

The many dimensions of influence
Part 1 of Brand Building and Social Media included the notion that the marketing campaign is losing it’s relevance as a front line tactic. At the core of a marketing campaign is a temporary and finite relationship between a brand and a prospect or customer – that being a transaction (a registration, download or checkout, a rebate, to name a few).

Similar to the concept of Relationship Marketing, the Passion Pyramid is a continuum without an end point. It is not bound by time or defined by “completion”. A customer can move fluidly up or down the pyramid, and in a non-linear fashion.

Here again is the pyramid as introduced in Part 1.

The Passion Pyramid is based upon a simple theory. A brand has a direct or indirect relationship with a person, and if a marketer is successful in creating relevant and motivating interactions, “brand love” improves. But is there another dimension to the Passion Pyramid? Consider the reach and impact of each Passion Pyramid customer or prospect. For most who visit social sites, they do little but read and observe from the sidelines. They are less involved in the brand, and therefore less likely to jump into the conversation. If that behavior is extrapolated, one can assume that these lesser involved reach a relatively small universe. .

The Power of Peer-to-Peer Influence
But what about those who are in the Discuss, Join or Lead circles (as depicted in the graphic above)? Like popular bloggers, they have a following. As a Leader shapes and influences online conversations, she creates a following. A group of folks follow a Leader that makes sound decisions or taps into the emotional motivation of a purchase in ways that no one else can match. Whatever the case, the Leader now has leverage over the brand. People follow, absorbing advice or information, and their perception of a brand changes based upon the impressions gleaned from the Leader. And quite possibly the follower’s change in perception results in a different action. Understanding the Leader’s impact on his or her following, the Leader’s value to the brand has increased by orders of magnitude. If a brand can activate the Leader, imagine how that can change the economics of media buys, research and new product launches.

It’s Not A Numbers Game
The game today in social media is about density and leverage. As a first step, marketers need to find the dense pockets or hubs of brand influencers - perhaps focusing a majority of resources on the top 5% of total target, populating . And while size still matters, understanding the impact a Leader has on the purchase habits of his or her following places immense value on that Leader. The greater the influence a Leader has over his or her followers, the more valuable that person becomes to a brand. Would I pay 2x the prevailing CPM to reach this Leader? 4x? Keep going, because if I can reach 30 Leaders with true leverage to help shape my brand, I will gladly pay a handsome sum. Buying access to my top 5% influencers beats any other media buy – hands down. When one moves many the way a Leader can, the economic model gets turned on its head.

When many marketers today make an online media purchase decision, they start by reviewing a Media Kit. Right age? Check. Appropriate income level? Check. Traffic trending up? Check. CPM in line with other purchases? Check. I for one don't believe demographics are a powerful or even trustworthy marker of purchase intent. Particularly when there is rich, interaction-level information available. Soon - I hope - the notion of target density and leverage will change the way we buy media.

Brand Building and Social Media, Pt. 1: The Brand Passion Pyramid

Thu, 14 May 2009 00:00:00 -0400

Is the Marketing Campaign losing its Crown?

For those of us who have responsibility for generating tangible online results, there are few weapons more important than the Almighty Campaign. While some in advertising may use a different definition, I have always viewed an online campaign as a point-to-point exercise:

Outbound Stimulus From Brand >> Recipients Respond >> Recipients Take Action

An offer is pushed from the brand, a small percentage of recipients hit a landing page and an even smaller percentage transact. A nice, neat package. Metrics galore. And there are plenty of vendors out there to help me with list selection, predictive analytics, outbound strategies, landing page optimization and lead nurturing.

But the rise of social media has made me think a bit differently about the value of the Campaign. Although they remain critically important, response rates are suddenly not the only end game. Now, the nature of a prospect’s or customer’s interaction with a brand on proprietary or social sites provides me with potentially rich information. How vigorously are customers and prospects tracking my brand? What is spurring a rise or fall in their sentiment? Does my brand strategy leverage all of the different channels consumers are using to discuss my space or product? How are their interactions with competing or complementary products impacting their perception of a brand? And importantly, how can one use content to influence these interactions?

The Influence Game

In the world dominated by Campaigns, I had a nice tightly defined group of metrics. Most were binary. Recipients responded or they didn’t. As my targets participate on social properties, they have infinitely more points of expression. They can participate or observe. If they participate, there are varying levels of engagement and sentiment. And the metrics are more about shades of gray. Customers can now be represented along a spectrum of brand passion.

As the more passionate customers move up the scale, they join discussion groups around the brand, they formally join groups and actively participate, and are provided administrative rights to moderate and lead discussions on a site.

Alternate paths exist – the pyramid is not always linear. A consumer might very well discuss a product on a forum or ask for advice on Twitter before buying.

The end game for the marketer is to pull their target up the inverted pyramid of Brand Passion. As the inverted pyramid gets more top-heavy, the franchise becomes stronger.

So if the Marketing Campaign is to be displaced, a few things need to happen. First, analytics that help marketers segment by passion need to be nailed. Second, we need information that defines what content most efficiently moves the customer up the inverted pyramid. And third, we’ll want a way to deliver content to the pure social sites – such as forums - that will help marketers influence outcomes. I suspect these missing pieces are closer than we think...

It's all ball bearings these days

Tue, 24 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0400

Fletch is one of my personal heroes. He could bluff his way into any club, party or conversation. In the classic 1985 movie, Fletch (Chevy Chase) wanders into an airplane hangar in one of his many Clouseau-like costumes, picks up some tools and begins working on a LearJet. He is clearly not a mechanic, nor does he belong in the hangar. But when asked for his opinion on a certain technical matter by a pair of fellow mechanics, he responds “Oh c'mon guys, it's so simple, maybe you need a refresher course. It's all ball bearings these days.” Clearly it’s not about ball bearings, but his bravado works. No one calls his bluff and he stays in the hangar.

So it appears that IBM is pulling a Fletch. I was a bit surprised to read a recent strategic insight from IBM titled “Beyond advertising: Choosing a strategic path to the digital consumer.” IBM appears to have done a fine job with research, generating 2800 responses from six countries among consumers. Additionally they conducted 70 one-on-ones with content owners, media distributors, agencies and advertisers. So far, so good.

What was a bit surprising was the rather vanilla information that came from the report and a focus on well-worn advertising formats. One example is the chart below. TV, promotions and branded entertainment. Yes, these remain relevant formats (for some), but they hardly represent new media in light of “Beyond Advertising”.

A second example of Fletch-ism is the increased need for measurement by heads of marketing. The study states “And increasingly, a new brand of Chief Marketing Officer is comfortable with – perhaps even demanding – digital, measurable formats. The implication? [CMOs] require the ability to analyze campaign results to prove the value of spending, now more than ever.” Wait… Hadn’t we already made that transformation? Aren’t a vast majority of us evaluated by leads, revenue or some other hard metric?

What was missing in the report was the lack of Web 2.0/social media. A scant four mentions. As if it is too infantile to mention. I might be breathing my own fumes, but all I see and sense in the market is the massive shift in branding leverage away from advertisers and marketers and toward customers and consumers. Is there a top e-commerce site out there without a rating or commenting function? Aren’t there forums for just about any interest where died-in-the-wool consumers can have a hand in enhancing or destroying a brand? Doesn’t the fortune of many restaurants, shops and salons hang in delicate balance of customers who are digitally connected?

But IBM does hit pay dirt. Early in the report, the authors make the point, “Becoming consumer centric requires a combination of granularity – the ability to target and reach desired consumers while measuring results – with cross-platform integration.”

The practice of marketing or selling to one – the ultimate in granularity – would arouse any marketer. As a profession, we have already begun the journey. Custom publishing, Google adwords, LinkedIn and web site personalization services begin to marry behavioral information with content. Creating context for the visitor and paying it off with laser-focused messaging or promotions is a great first step. Finishing the journey and getting to one-to-one can’t come soon enough.

A Day of Doubling

Thu, 26 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0500

The day the new percussion.com was launched, we experienced a doubling of traffic. Not so unusual, except for the fact that we hadn't told a soul about the launch.

Short Guys Rule

Tue, 17 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0500

In my present and past I have many marketing friends who directed some big brands. Really big brands: Yahoo, Sony, eBay, and some big-hankin’ Kraft products. Creating their brand persona was akin to writing NASA’s Kepler project brief – beautifully detailed, well orchestrated, and above all, little left to chance. When I see these brands in-market, I must admit I am a bit jealous. Big stuff, done well on a grand stage.

So how is a smaller business supposed to think about branding? For many non-Fortune Global 2000 businesses, the term brand can be confusing, and even a bit intimidating. Going beyond consistent colors, taglines or logo use can help the small player in a market build trust, relevance and distinction. Some small businesses reverse-justify their brand, and capture brand definition as an extension of the founder or a particularly strong-willed CEO. They become comfortable with using personality terms like “bold”, “trusted” or “visionary”.

But defining a brand is more than that. It must contain some detail. It should express a company’s reason for being, and how that reason is expressed through all touchpoints – the site, the look of the product, where the product is distributed, and yes, the logo. One of the best small business branding examples is Duct Tape Marketing – John Jantsch’s consulting business. John’s reason for being is captured in the term “Simple, effective and affordable small business marketing.” My guess is he started with that thought and used the elements of that term to anchor everything he did. His branding discipline is not only evident in the “what” (use of the term duct tape appeals to those who see themselves as the romantic David among Goliaths), but the “how” (his writing style is simple and to the point – appealing to small business owners who likely have a disdain for complicated consultant-speak). He appeals to those who have small brands and corresponding budgets.

Here at Percussion, I like the fact that I can make quick changes in direction based upon some good market information, vibes from partners and direct input from some clients. Developing partnerships takes months, not quarters. And our content editing workflow within our CMS is about as easy as it gets. The real issue is how often and to what extent I wander from our reason for being.