Marketing Technology Blog

In April 2009, Webtrends CEO Alex Yoder stood in front of his customers, the press, analysts and his board and committed that Webtrends would deliver on a new user experience vision. I asked the question… did Webtrends simply rebrand itself or is it being reborn?

The answer came today… and Alex and his team have delivered… Webtrends is reborn!

I had the opportunity to tinker with Webtrends old interface and it looked like it was a decade old (it may have been!). The new interface with Webtrends 9 is elegant, simple, clean and has exceptional usability. It feels as though you just sat down in a new Mercedes.

Once you dive into details on a given account, though, you’re able to seamlessly navigate either from report to report, account to account, or select different views (top right):

The views have a couple nifty features of their own, like the story view… which pulls your data and puts it into common English. This is a sharp feature for executive reporting:

There’s a table view… which you can literally copy and paste and maintain cell formatting:

There are two revolutionary features, though, that caught my attention.

The first feature should be a feature in every organization’s arsenal if they wish to make their platforms easy to integrate. That feature is the ability to click share and retrieve the actual data in Excel, XML or retrieve the actual REST API call! Wow!

The HUGE feature that I believe will shake the foundations of the Analytics world is the ability to overlay any RSS feed onto your data! Online marketing has dramatically changed over the last few years and off-site metrics are directly impacting online stats. The ability to overlay a Twitter Search, News, your Blog, the weather… the list is endless!

The new user interface is developed over their API – a move that provides incredible flexibility in developing new styles, new reports and new features.

Kudos to Alex and his team at Webtrends. All customers were migrated to the new interface today and the reaction has been incredibly good.

Did I mention it runs on the iPhone, too?

I was just doing a webinar yesterday and someone asked me to prioritize social networks based on their ability to drive business. Although I don’t believe social networks to be a primary medium for marketing and advertising (based on the intent of the user), I do encourage our clients to utilize RSS and other tools to automate publishing of their blogs to social networks. My order was LinkedIn, Plaxo and then Facebook.

That may change, though, with the advent of Appirio’s solution – which makes it possible for companies to utilize a user’s network in Facebook, but monitor and capture the viral campaigns within Salesforce.

The Appirio Referral Management solution is now generally available and is already being used or evaluated by almost a dozen companies. The Facebook App is called MyFriends@Work.

View a demonstration of a Salesforce integrated viral marketing application at Appirio’s web site.

My first access to the Interwebs was via InfiNet in the early 90s. I worked for Landmark Communications at the time and had a brand spankin new 14.4k modem. I remember all my friends and family were on America Online (AOL). I was on Prodigy.

That was back when we loved gifs and hated jpegs. Gifs would fade into view as they were downloaded, jpegs would scan from top to bottom. A 100k image was torture back then – you just went to go get a cup of coffee or went to sleep while things downloaded. You found out about new websites by truly ‘browsing’ from one page to the other.

While the web continued to evolve, AOL was battening down the hatches. I could visit websites using Netscape and all my friends on AOL were stuck within the boundaries of AOL. You used AOL Keywords to find things, you didn’t browse! As web pages began to take traction, everyone was fleeing AOL – no matter how many free months of service they received via floppy.

AOL responded late in the game and by the time they launched their integrated browser, Netscape was king and no one even used AOL with the exception to get their mail. Remember “You’ve Got Mail!”? (The UI actually popped that sound up when you did – it wasn’t made up in the movies.)

AOL, the king of the networks and guardian to the Internet, couldn’t invent fast enough. The bottom line was that AOL couldn’t compete with the hundreds of thousands of companies that were starting to put up web pages. Pretty soon, AOL was being used simply to get some free Internet time rather than for the software they had cherished. As people fleed, so did the advertisers and the custom applications built by those advertisers. AOL simply turned into an Internet Provider – and an expensive one with severe limitations in bandwidth and usage.

I’ve been pretty sarcastic about Facebook for a while now. In my opinion, Facebook is simply the new AOL. They’ve built out applications, not to expand out, but to keep companies and people within their turf. Anything outside of the Facebook is a threat, and they’ve already begun to attack.

As it took years to down the giant that was AOL, I’m sure it will take years for Facebook as well. However, I have no doubt in my mind that nothing can compete with entrepreneurial spirit of the planet – not even Facebook. Facebook is the new AOL, but it will only last until something newer, flashier, and fancier comes along and eats its lunch.

Facebook should be embracing integration outside of its walls, not fighting it.

Facebook should learn from AOL.

Today I had lunch with our team at work and talked through widget technologies. I’m not a fan of widgets to be honest. I believe they often break up the continuity of the graphics of a blog, clutter some of the blogs, and are often built to bring attention to themselves and not the website.

Whether you’re adding widgets or gadgets to your blog, your website, your iGoogle page or even your desktop… widgets are supposed to make it easier to integrate without the need for programming. Simply paste the code or download the widget and away you go.

My favorite source for checking out Widgets is Mashable, but I don’t find myself installing them very often. I’m always searching for a benefit to my readers – and I typically can’t find one. Perhaps I would install widgets if there were a search engine benefit, but the majority of widgets load client-side and the data gathered is never seen by the search engine bot.

The other problem with widgets is that one piece doesn’t fit all. The ideal widget from the creator’s viewpoint isn’t necessarily the ideal widget from a user’s standpoint. I see this over and over… I simply can’t style a widget to match the usability and design of my website. Clearspring has a huge following as a leader in widgetry… providing some exceptional analytics and tracking on widgets.

I’m not sure I’ve ever recognized a business value, though! I tend to gravitate towards integration through APIs since I can match the look and feel of my site, add some additional functionality, and perhaps take advantage of some search engine goodness.

For a Software as a Service blogging platform as Compendium, there are advantages to widgets, though. Since widgets load and run at the client and not at the server, you’re not putting the overall system at risk if someone integrates a bunch of crap. As well, the SEO disadvantages actually turn into advantages for an application that is so robust from a Search Engine Optimization standpoint. Widgets won’t dilute your search engine goodness.

If our clients wish to clutter their page, they’re probably going to hurt their conversion rates (people clicking through to a call to action that drives business), so we warn against them. We’re dependent upon our clients’ success so we push hard to get them to conform to online marketing best practices.

Do you use widgets? I’d love to hear what kind of business results you’re getting.