Worldlogger Improves Their Social Media Monitoring Platform (Discount Included)

A few months ago I introduced Worldlogger, a web tool that lets you monitor your website and social media stats in real-time. Well, they’re now out of beta and have stepped it up with quite a few additional features and upgrades. Let’s take a look.

They have noted that their graphs are now more functional and, there are more types of graphs to view. There is an additional bar graph that has been added to the social media monitoring section as well. There is also a new tab specifically dedicated to traffic sources. Lastly, the site is now more secure with everything being SSL encoded; added security is always a plus.

The first thing I noticed different from last time is that all of the real-time streaming data seems to be moving at a faster pace. Though some parts do seem to move too fast (faster than you can actually read), it’s still a nice change.

You still have the dashboard where you can see who’s online now, pageviews, unique visitors and a world map of visitors. Of course, none of this will work until you add the tracking code to your website; so remember to do that. The social media tracking and goal tracking continue to be my favorite parts of the site. “Goals are actions that you want to track. For example,  you may want to know how many people reach the signup page.”

If you already have an account and you login now, you will see a notice stating that your websites are migrating to the new servers. So, you will not be able to see any new data until this process is complete. Also, don’t forget to correct your timezone in the settings area so that your data will be time specific to your area.

Worldlogger does give you a 30-day free trial to test the waters, after which there are 4 plans to choose from:

• Basic $4.95/month; 1 website
• Pro $9.95/month; 5 websites
• Premium $34.95/month; 20 websites
• Custom (Call  for price); more than 20 websites

You can choose to pay per month or per year (at a 25% discount).

Worldlogger has also been nice enough to supply our Blogging Tips readers with a coupon code, in order to receive a 50% discount on the plan of your choice (after your free trial).

This code is good for 30 readers only, so snatch it while you can! The coupon code is “BLOGGINGTIPS” (without the quotes). You will need to add this coupon to your account page before checking out (see below).

So, if you didn’t before, be sure to stop by and give Worldlogger a try. It’s definitely a nice way to visually see in-depth statistics about your website while monitoring the social media world.

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Control-Freak Execs and Online Marketing

CC BY 2.0

This week, I saw several posts on Search Engine Journal’s weekly news recap with people talking ownership of their trade, how each facet of online marketing is truly a craft and really, the need for experts.

• Rishil at Explicitly.me points out that people forget SEO is a marketing discipline, both quantifiable and accountable.
• Nichola at Search Engine Watch talks the art and science of building links, and how it takes a keen eye to determine the quality of a page you might be considering as a link source.
• Lisa at Outspoken Media talks 9 SEO mistakes businesses make with content, and I think she makes a good case for hiring the experts to get the job done.
• And finally, Jon at Raven writes a post with a headline that really sums up why some things should be left to the experts in, “Why We Don’t Tell People How to Do Their Job.”

This got me thinking about that age-old issue of business owners and execs believing that just because they run successful companies, they have the expertise to make critical decisions as it relates to online marketing. Funny thing is, we’re still talking about it … after all these years.

To Whom It May Concern:   I see that you have a college degree and several credentials mounted on your wall. And they actually have nothing to do with marketing, copywriting, SEO or any of the like. So please stop trying to run the show. Sincerely, The Expert

Eh, maybe they didn’t get the memo. But there’s a strange phenomenon happening all over the U.S.: Countless business owners are actually hiring experts in their craft to improve their company’s online presence. Crazy, right?

Except instead of trusting their expertise, everyone involved becomes part of a weird control freak show, where the experts are only allowed to contribute as much as the boss will let them.

One of my favorite comics by The Oatmeal is How a Web Design Goes Straight to Hell. It really sums up the twisted relationship that can happen sometimes between company and expert. So, how do we, as experts, get past this endless push and pull?

This past week, Bruce Clay hosted a webinar on Search Marketing Now that talked about SEO in large organizations, managing expectations and tactics for successful implementation. One point he made loud and clear is that education is key when receiving buy in. This includes educating the decision makers to make sure people understand the process so they can support it.

At Bruce Clay, Inc., it’s in our contracts that clients attend our SEO training so they can understand everything that goes into what we do here, because we’re committed to knowledge transfer. It not only gives them a good grasp of the craft of online marketing, but also allows communication of the strategy to become more fluent during the span of the working relationship.

In the webinar, Bruce also talked proving the benefits of an SEO strategy. It’s been my experience that if you can show how the strategy can affect the bottom line, you’re more likely to get what you want (aka, what’s best for the company) – but it’s not always easy to define success with things like Web design and copywriting. And seems like it’s even harder to prove you actually want the company to succeed, which is why they hired you in the first place and why you’re making the suggestions you’re making. So, what gives?

Our SEM Synergy podcast earlier this month invited a couple specialists here at Bruce Clay, Robert Esparza and Alan Lamb (see Robert catch Saturday night fever here), to talk challenges of selling an SEO project that meets the client’s goals and needs.

Alan and Robert speak on behalf of the vendor versus the in-house expert, and say if you have the luxury, assess the project and the client’s expectations prior to taking the business on, so you know it’s something that’s set up for success in the long run. Ask yourself, Are the client’s expectations feasible? If not, be honest with yourself and the client, taking care not to sacrifice your recommendations at the cost of being amicable.

A recent post by Robin Fox on the HubSpot blog talks 10 steps to get CEO approval for online marketing. She makes some really great points on how to communicate to the decision makers, regardless of the recommendation:

• Study the decision makers like customers to find out what makes them tick.
• Focus on the benefits not features.
• Speak their language. Literally. Then make concepts visual not just language-based.
• Find the right person in the organization to deliver the message.

Sometimes these concepts work, and sometimes you can talk until you’re blue in the face and still, your decision maker might just go with his or her opinion. And so the story goes …

So it seems like all we can do is exchange our secret weapons on how to conquer the anal retentiveness that is the control-freak executive. I want to know, how do you assert your expertise either within your organization or as a vendor working with client companies? Chime in and tell us about it.

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When the Game Changes, Change With It

The new Jabulani soccer ball being used all month during the World Cup is meant to be faster, more accurate and more reliable. But even such noble qualities didn’t help the change find acceptance with those playing the game.

In an interview, Italy striker Giampaolo Pazzini said:

“It moves so much and makes it difficult to control. You jump up to head a cross and suddenly the ball will move and you miss it. It is especially bad for the goalkeepers if it means they concede a goal because they can’t judge the trajectory.”

Image via Wikipedia

Sound familiar?

SEOs are accustomed to the task of aiming at a moving target. Changes to the ranking algorithm and search engine guidelines come fast and furious, with the intention of bringing a faster, more relevant experience to the end user. Adding to the complex challenge of online marketing are shifting user preferences, emerging technologies and the conventions of newly sprouted social watering holes.

This week Adam Audette gave us a thoughtful and tactically driven analysis of today’s search marketing landscape, offered in the midst of industry growing pains instigated by what is perhaps the largest tectonic shift the industry has yet seen. Consider the critical mass of Internet and social media users, the spiking adoption of mobile and tablet computing devices, and even the effects of the new Caffeine indexing infrastructure. A Turning Point in the Field of SEO may help refresh and reframe your current priorities in interactive online marketing in the face of the next Internet marketing era. Clearly the rules have changed since the first players made a dash to the top more than a decade ago.

And the rules continue to change. For a view of what could be the future of online interaction, check out Bruce’s tell-all predictions, shared with WebProNews at SMX Advanced Seattle.

Some highlights from the interview:

• Optimization is not just about search engines, either paid or organic, as SEOs have known for some time. Optimization applies to analytics, usability, site architecture and social media presence.
• Traffic past the first three results will have such a pronounced drop-off that the goal of SEO will shift from first-page status to top-three results status. The top three results are the new first page.
• There will be a distinction between “search” and “find”. “Search” will be about research while “find” will refer to the user’s desire to go to a specified online location.
• The application experience will become the new Web as mobile devices boom. However, developers won’t be creating applications for every website. Rather, the OS will become the new browser, communicating directly with websites which will deliver the data through an application shell experience.

Watch the video yourself for all the above and more to start conditioning your skills for the new game.

More WebProNews Videos

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Online Reputation Monitoring: the Fastest Growing Analytics Niche in 2010

The third annual Online Measurement and Strategy Report, has been published by Econsultancy and it’s full of great news for the online reputation monitoring industry!

As someone that offers social media monitoring tools, this chart brings a little tear to my eye.

That’s right, there’s been a 9% increase in the number of agencies using reputation/buzz/social media monitoring analytics since 2009–the greatest increase across ALL types of analytics!

Next, we see exactly how companies are monitoring their reputation.

As you can see, there’s a broad mix here. Some are using free tools, others are using paid social media monitoring tools–with others either doing a mix or have yet to get started.

Lastly, take a look at this chart. You’ll see that just 23% of companies are relying on automated sentiment analysis to judge the positive or negative tone of media mentions.

Granted, the majority of respondents simply haven’t gotten around to testing automated sentiment analysis, but I’m surprised that the majority are not relying on some software to gauge their online reputation–pleasantly surprised.

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