Social Kind

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“It worked better than I could have possibly imagined.”

May 11

Posted by Kevin in Analytics, Blogging, Web Presence

The customer feedback from our latest project is in.

I just finished the development work for the Hydrocephalus Association’s website.  Most of the site was already built by a 3rd party.  The association turned to Social Kind to get help for the most complex lingering problems.

It was critical to the association that people be encouraged to register for the site when they clicked on certain links, but they didn’t want to lose visitors with a complex registration process.

Social Kind helped Hydrocephalus Association build a new login page that featured all the registration information right away.  The page also helps prospective visitors subscribe to categories on the site that they would like to receive regular updates on.  One of the problems with the WordPress sign-up process is that it requires you to check your e-mail for a message, and only then can you login to the site.  The association was noticing that when users finally got this e-mail and clicked through to complete the sign-up process, they had forgotten what they originally wanted to download on the site.  Social Kind helped build a WordPress plug-in that remembers where you came from and takes you back after the registration process.

Congratulation to the Hydrocephalus Association on their updated site!  They are fighting for an important cause, and I am proud to be a small part of it.

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bit.ly versus digg

Jun 30

Posted by Kevin in Analytics

Earlier this month I wrote a post about Measuring your referral impact using a new service called bit.ly.  The excitement around bit.ly is heating up as TechCrunch this morning chronicles the brewing battle between bit.ly and a competing service Digg: Bit.ly’s Grand Plans, And their Inevitable Clash with Digg.

If you are in the business of building your online presence, both of these tools matter.  Most of your customers don’t wake up in the morning and think about visiting your site.  In fact, most of them won’t think about it period unless they hear about it word-of-mouth from one of the sites they already visit.  Both digg and bit.ly are avenues for you to get the word out about your site, blog or press release.

I am rooting for bit.ly in this battle, because they help people that produce viral campaigns measure their effectiveness.  In my post linked to above I detail just how this works.  I have used digg before as well, and it’s a multi-step process I haven’t bothered to repeat in over a year.  Maybe this is why digg receives just 20,000 new links each day while bit.ly garners 2-3 million.

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Measuring your referral impact

Jun 12

Posted by Kevin in Analytics

bitlyA few days ago I read a great letter in Business Week from someone who had just lost their job, but was celebrating how it turned out to be a positive impact on their life. I love sharing good stories like this, and I have always wondered whether my followers on Twitter and friends on Facebook are reading the links I sent, or if they fall on deaf ears.

Bit.ly is a great tool for figuring out what impact you have when you refer your friends, followers and site visitors to sites you don’t own. Even for your own site, where you can set up Google Analytics, you can figure out exactly which marketing helped you the most.

To get started, visit bit.ly and make sure to sign up for an account (otherwise, you cannot see usage data for URLs you shorten). Once you have an account, simply enter the URL you want to point friends to into the big textbox. The site even features a handy box to share your newly shortened URL on twitter.

The site doesn’t have a feature for sharing your most popular links itself, but here are a few of my best bits:

Go ahead click on them and stroke my ego ;-)

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