I am currently a member of the Entrepreneurs Organization and it never ceases to amaze me how much I get out of being a part of their network. One of the small perks is receiving Octane Magazine which is chock full of interesting and informative articles relative to all facets of business. Recently my new LinkedIn friend Angela Randall (from EO Houston) wrote a great article about user experience that I felt obligated to share (with her permission of course). She says some pretty basic and very smart things we sometimes lose sight of and I think it makes for a quick and interesting read. Enjoy!

Want to know what really ruins a web site’s user experience?

Bending over backwards in an attempt to please each customer. Many eager Business owners conclude that the only way to satisfy a customer is to cater to his every whim. The result is ambiguous, be-everything-to-everybody customer experiences. Product teams try to incorporate every feature ever requested, while service teams try to be so flexible in their offerings that it’s no longer clear what the company specializes in. Of course, this ends up being counter-productive.

1. Reduce the amount of choices:
Choices give customers the illusion of being in control, but they’re actually a cognitive burden. having to decide between too many choices becomes work. Here’s an example: A design-it-yourself shades and blinds company couldn’t figure out why so few customers chose their feature-rich product line, when their competitors offered far fewer customization options online. After investigating, we found that the sheer number of available options overwhelmed and intimidated potential customers, making the competitor’s simpler experience more manageable. Removing the least-used options and hidings others under “Advanced Features” on their Web site helped the company streamline its offerings.

2. Tell your customers what to do:
Seriously order them about. When I tell my clients this, they look at me funny. Thing is, most people know what to do in a store, but on the Web, it’s not always obvious how to take the next step. Don’t expect customers to hunt around on your site for a phone number or e-mail. that’s too much work. instead, take the work out of navigating by using clear calls to action like “Learn more,” “Request a free evaluation” and “Buy now.” One of our client, a continuing education provider, didn’t understand why people weren’t signing up for their coursed. We added a prominent “Register now” button to the course-description page. Problem solved.

3. Observe, don’t listen to your customers:
What customers want and what they say they want are two different things. the only way to learn the truth is to watch their behavior. Basic analytics software will tell you you which of your site’s pages people visit most and how long they spend there. there are also more sophisticated tools that track user’ movements to give you an idea of what people are reading on your site, and where they’re getting stuck in forms. ultimately, sitting next to customer performing prescribed tasks on your Web site or application is the best way to discover reasons why users call customer support instead of searching the documentation, or why so many of them quite on the las step of the process.

For example, an African national oil company had built an oil-trading application that was intended to track US$160 billion worth of oil annually…but nobody used it. Since the users had meticulously described their workflow, the developers assumed the problem must be technical– “We need more servers!” User testing revealed, however, that the users’ workflow wasn’t really sequential as they had described. instead, they saved up all their orders for entry in a single batch at the end of the day. After modifying the interface to facilitate batch, adaption skyrocketed.

Of course, we would never advocate treating customers with anything less than dignity and respect. but we realize that an entrepreneur’s primary role is to be a steward, not a butler. We don’t pander…we lead. Customers will follow.

An Alexa ranking is every kid’s nightmare: a number that measures popularity. You heard me right, an Alexa ranking is a number that tells you exactly how many websites are more popular than your website. And you thought you left lunchroom dramas back in high school.

Obviously as the big wigs in the social web, Google, Facebook and Youtube take the cake as the ‘Populars’, while everyone else sits waiting and anxious for a chance to hang with the cool kids. The number is expressed in relatively big numbers and obviously, the more popular you are, the smaller Alexa you get. These number are updated often, usually daily, so with an exception of the big three, the numbers shuffle fast. You could be in with the in crowd one second, and out like moon shoes the next.

Metaphors aside, let’s get into the meat of what exactly you learn from seeking out your Alexa score. Our rank at Jacob Tyler is 283,640. That means that there are 283,639 websites out there in the world that are more popular than we are. In the US, there are only 115,318 bigger fish in the sea while in San Diego we’re moving up with a rank of 6,752. We’ve got 132 sites linking in and then we have a breakdown of demographics. According to Alexa, our audience is predominantly male, college educated, between the ages of 25 and 44 with other age groups represented and most are visiting the site from work. Most of our site traffic is from the United States and revolves around search terms pertaining to our industry: san diego web design, san diego ad agency etc. You can see pertaining search queries and in some cases, trafficking information….if you’re popular enough.

You can also compare different sites to one another and I’m proud to announce that Jacob Tyler Creative Group has the highest among the similar company sites I compared.  Other companies shall remain nameless to avoid tears.

You can also see where the traffic is coming from by clicking the Clickstream tab. For us, the top two referring sites are Google and Facebook and let it be known that Social Media Marketing has a HUGE impact on this score – so don’t miss the boat on the Social Media Revolution.

That, in a nut shell, is what the Alexa ranking can offer you so I encourage everyone to take a look at yours  and work on making that journey toward the top.

You would think it would be easy to tell whether your social network marketing plan was working or not. After all, you’ve either got hundreds of new contacts and a landslide of Internet orders or you don’t… right?

It’s not really that simple.

New revenue, customers, and contacts are the simplest way to gauge your progress, but the problem is they tend to show up relatively late in the game. It’s very possible to be making progress long before it shows up in your bank balance, or your e-mail list, which is why it’s so important to pay attention to some other relevant indicators before you decide to pour a lot more money into your social networking plan… or ditch it altogether.

Here are a few ways to get – and use – the right metrics for social media:

Put technology on your side. By all means, take advantage of the software and tools available for tracking hits to your website, registering traffic on your blog, finding out how people are coming to you, and so on. The more information you have, the more informed your future choices and investments will be. If you can’t tell where customers are coming from, or why, then how will you know which parts of your social networking plan to keep pouring time and money into?

Look at the situation from all angles. That doesn’t mean you can stop at simply looking at before and after sales numbers. You need a big picture perspective. For example, it would be easy to see a growing number of Twitter followers, and an increase in online sales, and conclude that things are going well. They might be, but it also could be a case of cannibalizing your offline sales by driving buyers online for lower prices, or enticing new customers with price cuts that you can’t sustain over the long term. These would be extreme examples, of course, but the point to remember is that you need to keep a close eye on how things are really going… not just the numbers of “friends” and sales you have.

Know when to pull the plug. As we hope you’ve gathered by now, nearly every business can use some level of social network marketing. That’s not to say that every business needs a ton of it, though, or that every online marketing firm you can hire is worth the expense. Keep tabs on your social network marketing plan and if it looks like things aren’t working out the way they should, don’t be afraid to pull back and go smaller – or even start over. The process takes time, but it only works if you do it the right way, so be ruthless in your desire to stop throwing time and money at activities that aren’t ever going to pay dividends.

Build and keep building. In the end, social networking always comes down to widening your net and broadening your reach. To that end, start with quality content and strong profiles, and then keep adding to them. I can promise you that, eventually, the payoff in your ability to reach potential customers and industry peers – instantly and with the full weight of a strong social networking profile – will be well worth the wait and effort.

When we talk about “budgeting” for social network marketing, realize that there are actually two things that can be invested: time or money. For smaller companies, or those who are brand-new to social media in general, marketing through Facebook, Twitter, and others  might be a largely “sweat equity” endeavor; they either don’t have the dollars to throw at bringing new business in through these avenues, or aren’t convinced enough of the potential benefits just yet to part with hard currency.

Of course, there’s also the other end of the spectrum: large companies, or the Internet marketing savvy, who will devote large portions of their budget to having social networking experts help them to tweak and optimize their campaigns. Usually, this involves a combination of in-house staff and outside expertise working together, with the expenses making up a healthy part of the profit and loss sheet.

Most businesses, naturally, will fall somewhere between. They’re doing most of the day-to-day work on their social networking profiles in-house, or even by the owner themselves, but might seek some guidance in setting up their accounts, crafting the right tone and message, and keeping things on track. Social network marketing is an area where expertise can help, but it’s also a field where you can do a lot of the legwork yourself.

When trying to decide how to budget your social networking dollars and time, here are a few things to keep in mind:

Always choose quality over quantity. Like search engine optimization, social network marketing is one of those areas where people often try to do too much at once – sacrificing quality to produce a high volume of online content. This is a losing approach every single time: no one wants to look at your profile, much less read your blog posts or view your videos, if they aren’t at least a little bit insightful or entertaining. Regardless of whether you are generating material in-house or hiring creative help, be sure that what you’re putting online is worth a potential customer’s attention.

Plan for the long haul. Except in rare cases, setting up your social profiles isn’t something that’s going to pay you back in a month or two. By adding content and material, as well as making new contacts, what you’re really doing is building a bigger lever. It’s not going to show up on the bottom line very much in the short term, but once your plan is well underway and working, it can create a steady flow of new business, professional contacts, and even new employees that won’t take a huge effort to keep coming in.

Increase your budget slowly. Whether it’s time or currency you are pouring in, add a little bit at a time. That way, you won’t become frustrated if the results don’t come right away. Likewise, a small but realistic plan is easier to stick to – and a whole lot more effective – than one you can’t keep up with on a busy schedule or during a tough fiscal month.

Learn to ask good questions. At some point, one of two things is bound to happen with your social network marketing: either you’ll give up without seeing a profit, or your efforts will start to be successful and you’ll look into getting outside help. Once marketers get a whiff of what’s possible with sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube, they start to look for ways to optimize what they’re doing. What they usually find, however, is that it can be a pretty complicated area once you break into the competitive circles – that’s usually when they start looking for hired guns.

Unfortunately, like all new Internet disciplines, social networking has attracted its fair share of “experts” who promise a lot but don’t do much. The best way to protect yourself from these types is by knowing enough about the basics to have realistic expectations, and then asking lots and lots of good questions. If you’re satisfied with the answers, go ahead and try somebody out. But if you aren’t comfortable with them, trust your gut and move on – because social network marketing takes a long time, choosing the wrong partner usually means suffering through months of wasted time and invoices before you find the truth.