April 2010 Archives

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April 15, 2010

Pedalling, Pain and Social Marketing

Social Media Marketing has empowered all sorts of charitable and other organisations as well as businesses to reach audiences, communicate needs and touch lives that would have been beyond their capability as well as their bank balances before Facebook, Twitter and the like.

Social marketing also enables businesses to turn their social media audience to charitable purposes when the mood takes them.

Patrick during Cheshire Cat 2010

That’s a roundabout way of introducing my son, Patrick, who is about to launch himself on a solo cycle ride 1,100 miles up the length of Britain from Land’s End to John O’Groats. What’s more he’s doing it on his own and with no support. Why put himself through what will inevitably prove to be the sorest a*** he has ever had? Answer; to raise money for his girlfriend’s charity.

So the mood takes me to throw all the rules about not making personal appeals in your business communications out of the window because, ultimately, it is what you care about that matters.

There will inevitably be some unsubscribes from my list and followers but I will take that hit in the hope that some people who read this will contribute and help make his efforts worthwhile using the JustGiving widget in the right sidebar.

You can read more about what his girlfriend, Hannah, is up to and why he’s doing this over at www.TeamPickle.co.uk.

He’s big and ugly and I just love him. (And the other one, too)

If you’ve got this far – then think about contributing – use the blue ‘Just Giving’ widget top of the right sidebar.

HOW TO: Target Social Media Influencers to Boost Traffic and Sales (mashable.com)
Social Media Marketing…what to do, what not to do…that is the question? (insights-group.com)

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Tags: bank balances, charitable purposes, media audience, social media marketing

April 27, 2010

Are The Critical Elements of Your Squeeze Page Visible?

The perceived wisdom for effective landing and squeeze pages is that the optin box by which you would like your visitors to join your list should be ‘above the fold’, i.e. visible to your visitors without them having to scroll down.

But is what you see also what your visitors see – given the multitude of screen sizes, resolutions and browsers out there? One way to find out is to use one of Google Labs tools called Browsersize.

The attention of left to right readers will inevitably start at the top left corner of the page and Google has used the analytics data it has gathered from visitors to its own home page to develop ‘browsersize’ to show just how much of your page is visible to what percentage of your visitors by drawing contour lines overlaid on the URL you input.

Here’s my home page where, at the time, a donate widget for my son’s charity efforts has temporarily moved my optin boxes down the page. All the same, you can see that the ‘donate’ widget may not be immediately visible to between 5-10% of visitors.

Browsersize in use

Browsersize looks like another useful little tool coming out of Google Labs. Try browsersize for yourself at http://browsersize.googlelabs.com and keep an eye on Google Labs for other useful tools.