The process that this went through consists of far more than I can do justice to here, but I wanted to share some really cool learnings with you all.

First: If you have a home page, don’t be unwilling to change it if the VOC warrants such a change.

Second: Make sure you listen to your customers. This can take the form of customer reviews, feedback through the socnets, usability studies and numerous other forms. Your budget and existing level of engagement may dictate your initial approach.

Third: Don’t keep changing your home page willy-nilly as that will confuse your users, and if you do change it, make sure you keep your primary brand message as consistent as possible.

Fourth: Ensure you approach any redesign, especially a VOC driven redesign with clear objectives based on your predetermined KPI. In this case a primary objective was to provide a much clearer ‘decision point’ to facilitate the navigation of first time users to their true product of choice, and…

Fifth: Facilitate their optimal engagement path, leading to a more streamlined and facilitated conversion path.

Here was the challenge and the result along with VOC feedback:

1. The original home page was very Online Product focused, not a bad thing, but not beneficial to the numerous CD/download customers

• “Home page was sneaky in that it wasn’t clear Intuit is directing people to the online tax returns.”
• “Ended up in the preparation of a return online which is not what I wanted.”
• “The download version of QuickTax I was looking for was not immediately apparent as an option, though I did later find it at the bottom of the page.”

2. The XD (experience design), usability, marketing and copy messaging folks came up with this new home page

The VOC now tells a NEW story

• “The homepage made my selection easy. The options were straight forward.”
• “Clear information on the opening page.”
• “Easy site to navigate and purchase download software.”

The Analytics Results in a Nutshell

• The new design achieved what it set out to do for desktop sales increasing them by 17% with immediate effect, with no negative impact on online sales.
• The site has since experienced a 14% increase in task completion

Lance (who spear-headed the project) had 3 Key-insights for Take-away:

1. What the business wants isn’t always good for the customer
2. Listening to customers can change how the business thinks
3. Behavioural and attitudinal data are the judge and jury in the court of expert opinion

Follow QuickTax and me on Twitter!

Disclaimer: nothing I say here may or should be attached to any employer, current or previous. This is my personal blog. The views expressed on this page are mine alone and not those of my employer.

I only made it to the Bat Cruise (awesome, live music, cruising on Lady Bird Lake, great people) and then to the incredible Salt Lick thingey-do. Picture beer-donkeys, chicken s**t bingo, mechanical bull riding, live western band, great Tex-Mex and fantastic hosts, great people… and you can’t do it justice.

I wanted to put a summary of my key learning’s down for everyone, and hopefully show you how much you all missed and how much you really should try to go to next years.

First, if you didn’t see their see zany intro on ‘The Forbidden Zone: Missing Influentials’ I highly recommend it (+/- 5 minutes excluding outtakes).

CONTAGIOUS MEDIA

This is basically the media you apply to any viral strategy you employ online via the socnets, or aimed at the social network market.

It works best when targeted at personality types (I particularly liked the “mullet” definition applied to personality – work in the front, party in the back!). The idea is to split your target market within a social network by personality type and target those personality needs and wants via different approaches.

The Huffington Post co-founder Jonah Peretti explained how they apply real time metrics and template movement facilitation to their editors to move popular topics up the page, less popular topics down the page, and offer front page real time involvement based on user interaction. In the background they have links to popular socnet conversations, sites, topics and offer great web-wide interaction for all readers. A measure of their enormous success is in their growth, and in Jonah’s incredible entrepreneurial ability and foresight regarding socnet interest including the Nike Sweatshop initiative featured on NBC.

Apart from targeting personality types, it also works best when the expectations are set to those types regarding rewards for involvement: for some folks it is reward enough to be part of a community – for them pure collaboration is the name of the game. Others want something tangible; so you can think contests, rewards, sweepstakes etc… it is well worth exploring your social network targets, defining your markets and then nailing your personality types and developing your engagement strategy based on those learnings as well as your objectives. If you want pure collaboration, that market is approached differently to a market that you may want to engage to encourage pure viral spread in the form of open sweepstakes.

YOUR INFLUENTIALS

A big take-away for me was the fact that it is possible to identify your major influentials; your multipliers. In the case of the speakers on this topic, affluent middle-aged women were their target multipliers. How to target them? Well, I’m not going to spoil next years conference for you, but apply basic target marketing based on demographic strongly salted with socnet requirements, and peppered with the online bus objective for your initiative.

Another big take-away was that supporting evangelists and dealing with detractors is not the be-all and end-all of your approach. What you really need to be doing is turning your neutrals into fans, and then your fans into ambassadors.

Determine what these folks want, apply an open stealth campaign to integrate and engage them, push the engagement into collaboration via a securely defendable social media plan, and make tactical refinements based on learnings.

1. social media is not that new that there are not a lot of very strong, very savvy players
2. social media is still new enough that even the biggest folks are learning and make mistakes.

If you make a mess of something, own up straight away, apologise and offer an alternative. If something works, give kudos to your socnet members and participators; especially your multipliers.

WHAT ABOUT THE ENGINES?

Another take-away was to make use of the SERPs as a playground for social media target research. Pick some phrases you would like to be associated with, and some you do not want to be associated with… this is very different to traditional keyword research as it is based on wording and commentary you will have picked up in the socnets via reputation management tools (like Radian6).

Check out what Google listings are for those top 10-20 positive and negative terms and proactively target those terms in the social networks, including online PR.

CONCLUSION

This is a small sample of stuff from only 3 sessions I attended (and takes up 3 slides of my 17 slide feedback ppt presentation). Obviously as my employer (Intuit) paid for me to go, my learnings in toto will be applied to our offerings, and I can only strongly encourage anyone who reads this blog to attend next years BazaarVoice Social Summit. It’s interesting and groundbreaking, and the insights are all easily applied and implementable – if you have a progressive management team willing to let you play in the Social space. Read more about how you can encourage your management to do just that!

BAZAARVOICE MENTION

Customer reviews are the way to go regarding UGC integration from a marketing insights and R&D learning platform direction at the very least. Quite simply, these guys rock.

Thanks for reading. Follow me on Twitter and let’s see what we can continue to do together to make social networks a legitimate point of customer collaboration, communication and learning, not just for marketing, but for R&D… better products and better services will make for a greater global competitive advantage for our businesses… we need that, and we can do it, together!

Disclaimer: nothing I say here may or should be attached to any employer, current or previous. This is my personal blog. The views expressed on this page are mine alone and not those of my employer.

The issues of ensuring that SEO is involved from the concept stage, or at the least IA stage was repeatedly emphasized. One of Marshall’s anecdotes to this point relates to the recent Hudson plane crash. The article title and header went out within minutes of the disaster; unfortunately the title and header said ‘Plan Ditches in Hudson’ (I may have that a little mixed up, but you get the point), and no-one was searching for ‘plane ditches’. However a competitor utilized the prime search phrase ‘plane crash’, and scooped the NYT. Marshall’s team was on it as soon as they realized (which was to all accounts and purposes pretty much immediately it went live), but despite their best efforts, the fact that they were not involved from the beginning meant that the time lag in the exceptionally fast-paced industry of online news was just too great.

Two salient points following on directly from this were (1) to ensure you own the templates and (2) to ensure that you are on the global email list.

There was some discussion about the amount of time being on the global-email list would inevitably require in terms of monitoring and follow-up. The consensus appeared to be that evangelizing related supportive cross-disciplines to encourage SEO inclusion would be optimal. However, it was noted that getting a full team of inter-related cross disciplines who work indirectly to become SEO evangelists can take quite some time. If it is possible to find a happy medium between being the SEO baby-sitter, and waiting to be spoon-fed information on new initiatives, then that would be a good place to start.

Apart from owning templates and CSS from a process point of view, it was also proposed that whether you baby-sit or strive to gain enough credence and respect via effective benchmarking and reporting on success metrics; if you don’t have upper management support, things are going to be tricky.

And it’s not only upper-management you need to convince. Sometimes, you really need to train or educate information architects, experience designers, copy writers, web developers, QA as well as project and account managers on what you can achieve, what support you need, and how you need to be able to work with every team as a cohesive whole to achieve the best result from a usability, marketing and SEO perspective.

If you can educate each discipline on your wish-list and how they fit into achieving the best in terms of SERP exposure and organic click-throughs, and how their input actually affects bottom line based on clearly pre-defined KPI, you can not only share this information with them, but involve them in discussing lost opportunities, competitor inroads, new initiatives and more. The more FACE time you get with each team, the more they will trust your ability and your judgment – especially if you back up your discussion with data; your argument with analytics; your talk with telling-points.

The 4Es were mentioned regarding gaining cross-discipline support and ensuring SEO inclusion:

1. Educate – training, lunch-and learns, whatever works best
2. Excite – show them what you do, they may not be aware of what it is, tell them a primary goal and explain how you want to achieve it, and why and how you need their support to do so
3. Empower – provide them with clear KPI and benchmark data followed by result based data on the same set of KPI
4. Evangelize – inform them, thank them, support them and request their input or new initiatives

It was also mentioned that SEO needs to be involved not only from the concept or IA stage, but through every stage of the process. Reactive SEO implementation results in a re-do of many elements of the initial web task; design may be affected, copy will be affected, web dev time will be required, as will QA and release time. It may even require a rethink of the navigation and additional pages, thus IA time; your analytics team may be required to create new SEO based dashboards for stake and share-holder reporting purposes… and so on.

Conversely, proactive SEO ensure that SEO is part of the initial budgeted charter in terms of resourcing and cost factors. Being proactive means less time being reactive; which in turn means more time for strategic development and discovery, tactical refinement, personnel development and training, and less frustration all around. Jessica had some great points on this, and her experience speaks to early involvement as a prerequisite for the most effective implementation of SEO resources and experience.

Apart from SEO being involved in the actual web development process, the concept of being a friendly FACE (Facilitate communication, Apply insights and learning, Create processes and Establish relationships) was touched on from the perspective of ensuring that SEO is integrated in all marketing discussions and initiatives. This involvement ensures that new tag lines used in banner ads, PPC, social marketing as well as print, radio and TV are incorporated into landing pages, and that landing pages are optimized prior to release to ensure a holistic presentation of the marketing message across the marketing mix.

It was also noted that SEO is a piece of the overall pie, and may in some cases have to curb its enthusiasm due to brand or legal constraints especially where the bigger brands are concerned; but not without push-back where warranted.

In closing, it was a true pleasure to be on this panel. I knew I was holding the short straw being on a panel with two true icons of in-house SEO. I can only thank both Jessica and Marshall for their support and generosity, especially Jessica’s as I ran over time. Nonetheless, being the commensurate professional she is, she still wowed the audience with her presentation despite my stealing some of her time, and ensured more than enough Q&A time at the end for session attendees.

If you ever get a chance to listen to either Jessica or Marshall speak at a conference, I strongly recommend you attend. Their individual and collective experience is formidable, yet they are two extremely approachable professionals. It was an honor to speak with them, and my privilege to meet them both.

This post is a bit of ramble but it does contain my picks on:

• Most amusing event
• Most embarrassing comment
• Best session (of course this is not in any way biased)
• COOLEST people I met!

Most Amusing Pick
I realize this is not related to the conference directly, but I was in Toronto, and it was at the end of the Epiar/Yahoo! SES after party…

As we (Epiar) sponsored the after party with Yahoo! it was, on one hand, probably a good thing that we all stayed well into the early hours. On the other hand, by the time we got around to grabbing a taxi from outside the Ultra Supper Club, one of our Epiar party was three-sheets to the wind. That’s not to be unexpected you say? No, I suppose not. But there are a few points worth mentioning:

• Said person is one of the nicest people I know, he is also very calm and collected… usually
• Said person appears to have a slightly more ‘instant’ aggressive-response-gene that is triggered only by one or six drinks too many
• No one told us that garbage collectors in Toronto are part of the mafia… yes that is a salient point.

We were only about a 4 minute drive from my hotel (I was at the Intercontinental with Lyndsay Walker from WestJet. See Comment Pick below.) About 90 seconds into the journey (yes I realize ‘journey’ is something of an exaggeration – but this teensy trip is one I will never forget), when the taxi inadvertently – and with absolutely no malicious intent – blocked a garbage truck from maneuvering out of an alley way. Unfortunately the taxi driver was half asleep, didn’t care, or was simply functioning a few sandwiches short of a picnic. In any event, he just sat there. The garbage truck couldn’t move, and we didn’t move.

Considering that the garbage truck was massive and looked like one of those huge mutant bugs from Starship Troopers (but yellow), our teensy cab must have appeared positively snackish.

To compound it all, the garbage truck was manned by two similarly large specimens of the human variety, while our mini version was manned by one small taxi driver, one small woman with a somewhat petrified expression, and two other males, only one of which could be seen. The male in view was our slightly inebriated colleague in the passenger seat. It appears that he may have been a *smidge* too quick to ‘flick the bird’ at the truckers in response to their rude and angry sound-off at the taxi driver from inside their monstrosity.

The finger thing was all they needed to decide to add a little muscle to the equation. They both lumbered out of the truck. The ‘lumbering’ denotes size, but they sure as heck didn’t lumber slowly. Big dudes move surprisingly fast I notice.

Needless to say they made a bee-line (no pun intended) right towards the aforementioned finger flicker. When we had climbed into the taxi, I had innocently placed myself directly behind the passenger seat, and in a brief moment of panic watching the swift approach of the angry garbage people I made a concerted effort to get away from the approaching menace by scrambling across the back seat and nearly ended up on my fellow backseat passengers lap. Being the cool, calm, collected person he is, he advised the taxi driver that now would be a smashingly good time to start driving away – backwards, forwards, sideways… the direction was not of paramount importance – the away bit was.

Unfortunately the two agro truckers got to the window first and I was treated to the delightful experience of being mooned by a Toronto garbage collector. I can honestly say I would not recommend it if it is in any way possible to avoid. The mooning was accompanied by a lot of far more advanced (and seemingly choreographed) finger flicking, and possibly the vilest stream of invective I have ever heard in real life.

Fortunately, the other two sandwiches arrived, or some instinctive self-preservation instinct kicked in, and the taxi started to move. The driver did not seem terribly phased at all. He nonchalantly waved his hand as we screeched off in the wrong direction and said, ‘You do know that the garbage men in this city are part of the mafia, no?’

Incidentally, dreaming of hairy garbage man bums is also not advised.

Comment Pick
Lyndsay and I went to the Epiar/Yahoo! party relatively early. She was super accommodating as I had to get there to help with some set-up. Anyway, we were chatting to folks as they started to trickle in around 6:45.

Lyndsay knew a few folks from a Toronto company, Alan K’necht and his colleague Joe Dolson came over, and we slowly ended up with a great group of people.

For some reason the conversation came around to where we were staying. Lyndsay said that she and I were sharing a suite at the Intercontinental. Someone then said it must be great to be sharing with a friend and that we must be having an amazing time together. At this Lyndsay smiled at me and innocently announced; “Oh yes, but we haven’t slept together yet.”

The amount of crap we got from that comment alone cannot be imagined.

(Some) Super Cool SEO Folks I met

I will start this with a caveat; I have not gone through all my business cards, so I am mentioning the people I ended up spending quite a bit of time with. Some of the people I have never met or corresponded with before, some I have ‘known’ for ages, but simply never met face-to-face.

Jim Hedger – a personality on his own. It would be great to have more Jim’s around. He’s funny, super-intelligent, an exceptional writer and marketer, and just an all around extraordinary person I am now fortunate enough to call a friend.

Alan K’necht – Another superb personality. Interesting, intuitive, compassionate and also a highly intelligent individual. Alan left us early, but he had good reason – wife and kids at home. Love that.

Richard Zwicky – unfortunately I did not get much time with Richard, but I had been so looking forward to meeting him. His is a handsome, suave, intelligent man who knows his stuff inside and out, and I am so glad to have met him finally.

Glenn Convey – Richard and Alan facilitated this. Glenn is an incredibly interesting man. He retired at 40 and bought a sail-boat/yacht and cruised the Caribbean and Pacific for 6 years. He decided to return to work a few years ago and heads up Metamend, which is well worth checking out if you haven’t yet. Metamend spawned Enquisite. Richard Zwicky is involved in both. Glenn has a fabulous sense of humor, and it was a pleasure to meet him.

David Szetela – David is one of the most down-to-earth, compassionate, and interested and interesting people I have ever met. He gave me some fantastic tips, and while our conversation was mostly on a personal level, he is a true gentleman as well as an expert in his field. I wish him the very best with his approaching wedding, and hope to stay in touch , as I do with all of the folks I have mentioned.

Matt McGowan – Matt sent me a comp pass after Jim hedger’s article. I had heard a lot of great stuff about Matt. It’s all true. He is surely one of the stalwarts of the industry. He made time for me to chat about SEM Canada to give me some thoughts even when he was run off his feet. He party’s hard, and works twice as hard. He is passionate, intelligent and one savvy business dude. He tempers that with a fabulous sense of humor and an easily approachable manner. I am honored to have him as a solid on my SEM family friend’s hit list.

(I met loads of incredible people at SES, but these are a few I really spent a lot of time with, and I wanted to do a public shout out.)

Session Pick
My pick of the sessions was ‘My SEM Toolkit’. Ian McAnerin has some cool general insights, Julien Raby approached it from a totally different angle looking at automating reporting, and Ken Jurina wowed the room with a fantastic array of all free tools. I highly recommend taking a peek at his presentation. Moderated by Amanda Watlington, this was a panel that really gave attendees concrete take-aways.

Final Thoughts
SES Toronto was a blast. I am so sorry to have missed some folks who couldn’t make it; Martin Bowling, the SEOmoz crew, and Todd Friesen to name a few. I hope to connect with you guys soon, as well as my new favorite SEO people.

Gotta Love SES!!!!