Copious Blog

The Dark Side of SEO

2012-05-11T18:21:05Z

Who would have thought that my deep love of criminal forensics and the minds of our most hardened criminals would pay off in the land of online marketing. As it turns out they are not all that different.

We recently started an online marketing project for an exceptional client, offering great products and wonderful team members. Part of our initial discovery process includes conducting extensive situation and competitive analyses to establish a baseline against which to measure growth and ROI.

During this process, little red flags started popping up in my mind — their rankings were okay, but something wasn't right. Using some interesting forensic tactics, we uncovered a nasty leftover of their previous SEM agency: black-hat back link development in the form of paid content and link farms.

The client had no idea. Their previous agency had said these sites contained articles written for SEO — but in reality they were just irrelevant content pages stuffed with keywords that linked to our client's site.

Of course, Google doesn't care whose fault it is — if they detect unsavory tactics, they'll drop your site from their rankings. (For a classic example, read about JC Pennys' 3 month ban from Google) Knowing the impact that would have on our client, we sprang into action to clean up another agency's mess.

I compiled a list of the "bad" sites and manually review each one to determine who owned it, what it was about and how to best get us removed. Then, we created an situational analysis outlining the risks associated and shared the results with the client. The client put us in touch with the previous company to discuss their tactics and request their involvement removing the links they had created. Lastly, we reached out to Google to communicate our plan for remediation.

The biggest takeaway here is to know your agency. Know what they stand for. Know why they're in the business — is it to create greatness, or just to make a buck? I could (and will) devote an entire post to this topic alone. In the meantime, here are 4 tell-tale signs your SEO is on the dark side.

1 - Your agency promises hundreds of backlinks virtually overnight.
Earning backlinks is a lot like posting a flyer around town. There are crowded, community bulletin boards that are usually woefully out of date, advertising garage sales from last summer alongside used cars and piano lessons. A better, though more time-consuming option is to convince a relevant business to display your flyer at their checkout or break room. (You've likely noticed concerts advertised in coffeeshops, and the symphony promoted in book stores.)

If community bulletin boards are like link farms, and relevant businesses are like quality sites then you can see how it takes time and effort to earn the right kind of backlinks. Look at the reports from your agency and see how many links they say they are getting you. If it is more than 3 or 4 per month, or if they won't name the sites, investigate further.

2 - You've never heard of any of the sites your agency is earning you links on.
Are they writing irrelevant content with links and anchor text to your site and posting it up on "blog networks" that are obviously only there for the sake of rankings. These aren't sites your customers are reading — these are the sites your customers are bouncing from when they click a misleading link.

Ask your agency what they feel quantifies a quality backlink, if they say, "any link is a good link", run! Links should be completely relevant to your domain and content and should always ask the question " Is this site relevant" Would my visitors be here?

3 - The sites you're earning backlinks on all look eerily similar.
Blog networks are easy to spot, they are often wordpress and use the same theme but with different colors and urls. The content contained on each domain will be about every single topic known to man and have zero relevance to the domain itself. the postings will be stuffed with keywords that link to the sites paying for the programs. Example here: http://www.realityfire.com/. If this domain is no longer working then it has been banned by Google since posting.

You can also look into who owns the domains — often there's a consistent company or person tying them all together. Use WhoIs http://www.whois.net/ to look up the owner of any domain.

4 - Something just doesn't feel right...

Maybe you've requested data your agency wasn't willing to share. Maybe you've stumbled across a link to your site in the middle of content on a totally unrelated website (a common tactic). Whatever the situation, trust your gut.

If you think something's up, ask for more information. If they won't give it to you, walk away. You should feel good about the agency you're trusting with your online brand.

Dann Stayskal Promoted to Engineering Director

2012-02-10T16:36:29Z

I'm very pleased to announce that Dann Stayskal has been promoted to Engineering Director here at COPIOUS.

As a firm that is part digital agency and part digital product team, technology has always been crucial to our work. We build work with tightly-tuned user experiences. This means building platforms, mobile apps, social integrations, and deploying great software from our partners.

Dann’s experience architecting software and hardware is complemented by his passion for deeply understanding our clients and their digital product needs. In his previous role as Lead Engineer, Dann led our team to build some really incredible stuff — from ground up application builds (mobile and web), algorithm tuning, application security to reworking application data structures to take advantage of NoSQL.

One project in particular has been keeping Dann — and our entire engineering team — busy for the past nine months. I look forward to the public launch of this work later this spring with pride and anticipation. They’ve built some really incredible stuff.

Dann's larger leadership role will help COPIOUS continue to build great work for our clients. Stay tuned to see more of what our team has been working on.

And if you’re an engineer, software hacker, developer, or the like who would like to work with Dann, check out our list of open positions.

Encourage Word of Mouth with Social Share

2011-12-14T20:26:39Z

Sharing is caring. And on your website, caring about what your users want usually means incorporating social sharing functionality.

What is social share?

Social share buttons act as a shortcut for users to share content from your site via Facebook and Twitter — even if your brand isn’t active on social networks. Social share buttons are useful on all sorts of content — web pages, blog posts, videos, articles, e-newsletters, and more. How many buttons to include and for which sites will depend on the content and audience. Twitter and Facebook are a typical starting point, but for some brands Yelp, LinkedIn, or Google+ may be more successful.

How it works

You have probably seen social share buttons before — they’re the “Like” or “Tweet” buttons on blogs and websites. Many also display a tally of how popular the content is with other users.

Here is an example of social share buttons on a blog:

When you click a social share button, it opens a pop up window over the page you’re viewing, where you can type a comment to accompany your post. (Since most people never log out of Facebook or Twitter, the session is still open and authentication isn’t required.)

Here are examples of Twitter and Facebook share windows in action:

Once the post is complete, the popup window closes and the user can continue browsing the page he or she was on. The post is automatically added to the social network.

Here’s how the shared post appears in Facebook:

Common Questions

My brand isn’t using social, so why should I have social share buttons?

Social share buttons can be a great marketing tool, but more than anything they’re a service to your users. They make it easier for your users to communicate with their friends, and get the social benefits of sharing great content.

For example:
Daniel is redoing his kitchen. While researching ways to make it more energy efficient, he comes across a page of no-to-low cost energy improvements on his local utility site. He knows several friends and coworkers would be interested in the tips too, so he posts them to Facebook. Two of his hiking buddies “Like” the post, and his grandma leaves a comment of thanks— she’d been looking for ways to reduce down her heating bill this winter. Daniel gets a little ego boost seeing the positive feedback from his family and friends.

Can’t users just post to networks manually?

It’s true that anyone can post a link to your content on his or her social network, but that doesn’t mean they will. Just like in an ecommerce checkout process, it’s important to make each step as simple as possible. social share buttons provide a shortcut so users can share content in just a few clicks, without leaving the page they’re viewing.

For example:
While holiday shopping for her nephew in the iTunes Store, Jane runs across a song her neighbor Suzy and she were trying to remember the name of during a neighborhood association meeting last week. She starts to log in to Facebook to send her the link, but remembers her long to-do list and decides she better stay focused. Since Suzy is an acquaintance and not a close friend, she doesn't have an email or cell phone number. Jane makes a mental note to mention it in a month at the next neighborhood meeting.

Won’t social share buttons make it easy for people to write bad things about my brand?

The truth is, people can already write whatever they want about your brand, good or bad. (Though, many studies of social network activity have shown positive commentary far outweighs negative.)

Think of social share buttons like calling customer service. You’d probably wait on hold a lot longer to make a complaint than to give a positive review. Likewise, jilted customers are more willing to jump through extra hoops to leave feedback than happy customers. Social share buttons level the playing field — not to mention it demonstrates an interest in your customers’ lives.

For example:
After enrolling in electronic statements from his credit union, Bill notices a prompt to share his action on Facebook or Twitter. With just two clicks, he tweets “Goodbye junk mail! Just signed up for paperless statements — doing my part to save the trees. http://bit.ly/rw6oyN”. A business contact who works at PECI re-tweets Bill’s post to his own network. Bill’s adult daughter sees the post too and tweets back to him, “Proud of my dad, the treehugger!” Bill feels good about what was otherwise a fairly mundane action.

Ready to implement?

Facebook has a whole host of plugins to make your site more social and Twitter has a fair share of share buttons too, but not all of them are applicable to every site. Maybe LinkedIn is a better fit for your brand — for B2B, it usually is. Look at your site analytics. Think about your users and how they'd want to share information. Get creative. Look for opportunities to engage your users. If you aren't sure where to start, ask for help.

Are Tablet Users Taking Over Your Website?

2011-11-14T17:33:14Z

The folks over at Monetate recently created an infographic illustrating just how the growing population of tablet users (iPad, Kindle Fire, etc.) is taking over the ecommerce industry.

Case(s) in point:

12% of all Internet traffic comes from tablet users and...
43% of tablet traffic is from households making more than $50,000 per year.
50% more conversions for ecommerce sites from tablet visitors, versus their desktop-browsing brethren.

So, why should I care?

Even if you don’t have an ecommerce site, there’s a nugget of insight there: the type of device your website visitors are using to view your site is increasingly an indicator of their behavior.

The big boys are already taking note. Just last week, eBay launched a beta of an iPad-optimized browsing interface and Amazon.com is embarking on a several-month fundamental website redesign to make their entire site more tablet-friendly.

From simplifying navigation, to reducing the use of technology (like Flash) that can’t be viewed on industry leading-devices like the iPad, to optimizing web forms — there are a variety of ways to optimize your website’s user experience.

With so many choices, where do I start?

You don’t have to be in the dark about what kind of device people are using to view your site. Free tools like Google Analytics can provide a simple breakdown of your website traffic by type of device.

Want to know how many people are using an iPad or an iPhone and how that compares with visitors on Android-based devices? It’s all there. Part of any digital content strategy should include regular evaluations of platforms and what content is being delivered to them. This is especially true if you’re thinking about a website redesign, where a comprehensive strategic review at the beginning of the process will pay immediate dividends when your site launches.

Just think: you’ll never know if iPad users represent 25% of your website traffic and convert twice as much as other users until you dig in and find out.

As with anything though having the information isn’t always the issue — answering the “what do I do now?” question is what’s really important. If you’d like to chat, sound off below or get in touch!

The World Series of Social

2011-10-18T17:56:05Z

The 2011 MLB world Series kicks off this Wednesday with the Texas Rangers and the St. Louis Cardinals squaring off in baseball’s fall classic. Should make for some stellar viewing.

The concept of baseball as a fan attraction has evolved significantly, and it’s not because of the recent hoopla surrounding steroid use. With a combined 2 million fans following the Rangers and Cardinals on Facebook and Twitter, (and another 2 million following the MLB itself), “America’s Pastime” has evolved into a bona fide social media drawcard.

Why does this matter? By its multi-faceted nature, baseball fans can be broadly grouped into two categories. While some view the sport as a charming dose of Americana and a great excuse to sit in the sun and drink beer, there are large communities who analyze the game as if it were a science, critiquing and extrapolating every base hit or sacrifice fly with a zealot’s fervor. Depending on your personal preference, social media provides a veritable smorgasbord of discussion topics to satisfy your appetite specific to your interest.

This changes the paradigm through how we view traditional fandom. In the old days, casual fans and hard core enthusiasts alike had to physically congregate together to watch and critique games. These communities were constrained by geography and personal networks, which before the Internet, would largely consist of people they met at the games or a local sports bar.

Social media, has changed this entirely. Twitter in particular creates an open forum where like-minded people can connect and discuss things, despite never having met in real life. Diehards can discuss what they love about the game, what drives them crazy and how their team could be improved. Casual fans can talk smack about which star has hit a game winner, choked in a clutch situation, or how the front office needs to make wholesale changes to the team roster.

So you're probably wondering, "How does this apply to the world of interactive marketing?" It’s human nature to discuss what we’re interested in, social media just provides a convenient conduit with which to do so. Home renovations your thing? What about finding cheap vacation packages? Brands like the Home Depot and Virgin America are showing how being active in the social sphere adds value to your brand. More specifically, it’s an environment where brands are brought in closer proximity to the interests and preferences of their customers, allowing them to adjust and refine their product or service offerings. Not to mention being a channel where people can connect and discuss what interests them, share tips and advice, in the process raise visibility and ranking of your brand at the Google search page.

Whether your selling baseball, airline tickets or home improvements, conversations between like-minded individuals beget a community. The MLB and other brands have realized this and add value beyond the product they sell by by connecting fans the world over, regardless of their addresses.

Skeptics of social media often like to pose a question which could elicit any number of responses. “What’s the ROI (Return on Investment) of social media”? Perhaps a more appropriate ROI question is, as former CMO of Kodak Jeffrey Hayzlett puts it, “What’s the 'Return on Ignoring'?”

Not a whole lot it seems.

Meet “Door Prize” for iPad

2011-10-13T00:01:05Z

COPIOUS recently capped our ten-year anniversary with an open house at our new digs here in Portland. The week leading up to the event was a buzz of activity as we all put in to prepare a great evening for our guests. We planned to give away some door prizes, but rather than hand out tickets at the door, we wanted to try something unique. An iPad app was the logical answer. Meet Door Prize.

Our guests were greeted at the door not with a pen and paper ledger, but by an iPad 2 running our app. An app which we took from idea to reality in about three days.

The interface is simple. The user taps the “Check In” button on the home screen, and is presented with a sign-in interface. Here they can enter their name, email address, and toggle a switch to opt-in or out of our e-newsletters. On top of this, we added a feature a dead-tree version couldn’t replicate: photos. The iPad’s front-facing camera was ideal to capture a snapshot of our guests on the way in.

Later in the evening, we utilized some hidden functionality to randomly select door prize winners. Drawing a circle gesture from the home screen selects the first winner and shows the lucky person’s name and photo. Below, there is a button to select a subsequent winner.

We were quite pleased with the results. The evening went off without a hitch, and the app was a great conversation piece.

Why do it?

We believe in the opportunities afforded by new technologies, and we firmly expect multi-touch mobile devices — from smartphones to tablets — to continue blazing a trail toward becoming the dominant computing medium of current and future generations. Experimentation is an important part of the creative process, and these platforms provide an excellent foundation upon which to play. More importantly, this particular exercise allowed us to do a little underground user testing with a fantastic group of our peers, friends, and family.

It Could Be Better

The first version of Door Prize (a rough prototype built in a day) did not have a separate camera shutter button. The visitor filled out the form, and the photo was snapped the moment the “Check In” button was tapped. Our rationale behind adding the separate button was that visitors would most likely want to take the photo at a time of their choosing, and adding the button made it very simple to allow visitors to restart the camera and take another photo if they didn’t like the first.

In hindsight, what we witnessed was very predictable:

The visitor starts the check in process from the large button on the home screen. The Check In button is dark and translucent. It is not active.
The visitor fills out name and email address.
The visitor optionally taps the “Sign up for email” switch.
The visitor taps the disabled “Check In” button two or three times.
The visitor taps the camera shutter button. The screen flashes white briefly, and the picture is locked. The Check In button is now brighter, and not translucent.
The visitor taps it, and is welcomed. After a moment the interface transitions back to Home, and the next visitor starts.

The problem: The “Check In” button became active after name and email were provided and a photo had been taken, and the dimmed, semi-translucent state wasn’t enough of a clue that the remaining step - taking the photo - was required. This is a great example of a tough problem in interactive design: obviousness.

We set a very aggressive timeline for rolling out the app, which left no time for our normal process of extensive user testing to validate each step with both internal and external users.

Throughout the evening I casually asked our guests if they’d checked in, and if there was any trouble doing so. On the contrary, I was greeted by compliments on the effort. I was confident that we’d gotten it done and the app achieved its goal, but I confess there was a moment of hesitation where I considered grabbing the iPad, firing up Xcode, and making some improvements!

We care about usability here at COPIOUS. A lot. If your organization needs some help in the mobile department, let us know.

Interactive is the New Word of Mouth

2011-10-03T20:20:10Z

Truth, as the experts say, is the best marketing tool. Provide a worthwhile product or service and customers will beat a path to your door. Long before the advent of advertising, truth fueled word of mouth, which meant continued business. Truth mattered.

Then came along the days of the big media buy, and truth suddenly became less important. First with newspapers, then later with radio and TV, corporations began to realize that spending money to buy ad space allowed them to effectively control the public’s perception of their brand. If a company extolled the virtues of its own brilliance, for the most part, consumers just had to take its word for it. This is how smoking companies got away with selling the benefits of “cool”, while beverage giants told us giving soda to infants was a great idea.

Then the Internet came along and changed everything, bringing with it a new wave of accountability. Consumers became more savvy and discerning, while brands could no longer masquerade as something they weren’t. Transparency was king once again, with the online realm meaning word of mouth has returned to its position of prominence in purchase funnel.

Whether through a blog, user review site, or social network, consumers will critique the performance of your brand. The word of mouth renaissance is in full swing, but this time with a twist -- written reviews online can hang around much longer than the spoken word, sometimes in perpetuity. As Bazaarvoice’s CEO Brett Hurt recently put it, “This is the first time in history that word of mouth has become a digitally-archived medium.”

The rise of this new transparency comes at a unique economic time. The rocky economic climate of the last few years has created more mindful, post-recession consumers who take a deeper, more nuanced interest in the values of the brands they buy. Once captivated by price, performance and status, now consumers are assessing brands on deeper emotional drivers like kindness, empathy & social responsibility.

It’s precisely for this reason that it’s a good idea to be transparent and authentic with your online marketing efforts. Even the most loved brands are going to draw some negative reviews, but negative reviews are valuable in and of themselves. Not only do they build trust and credibility with your audience, they are a free and forthright assessment of what your brand is doing well and what needs improving. Like it or not, your customers (and potential customers) will be discussing your brand in the interactive realm, the challenge therefore is to give them something worthwhile discussing.

A recent example of the importance of transparency came in the case recent client of ours. We conducted a robust qualitative and quantitative analysis and found the brand was widely loved, with research suggesting that ninety percent of its customers were either likely to recommend the brand to others. The company does stellar work in the community, having built ties to the region through deep customer centricity which resonates powerfully with its user base. The disconnect we found was that the client’s interactive marketing efforts lacked the warmth, brand affinity, and sense sense of community for which it was so well known.

This, we felt, was a missed opportunity. The brand had come to embody certain values which weren’t obvious when viewing its marketing materials. The brand’s interactive marketing efforts conveyed a professional and clean image, the problem was, several other brands could lay claim to this position in the marketplace. We are currently taking steps to help our client elevate elements of the values that makes it unique, a process the client has been very receptive to.

How does apply this to your brand? Next time you are looking to refine your strategy, ask yourself two questions:

“What is true our brand that isn’t of any of our competitors?”
Think beyond product or service offerings that are easily replicable. Think of the values and mindset your brand represents that can’t be copied.

“What content can we make available that will demonstrate the answer to question 1?
Provide shareable content with your interactive community (company blog, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube) that will resonate with your online audience.

Summary: Whether you like it or not, people are going to be discussing your brand online. The key is to elevate what is best of your brand and empower your customers (and future customers) the opportunity to discuss it.

Celebrating 10 Years

2011-09-28T18:36:57Z

When you get busy with life — and in this case, growing a business — it's crucial to step back and appreciate all that you've accomplished. In the past few years we've seen a great deal of success: landing new clients, helping current clients succeed in the midst of so many who are not, assembling an incredible team of truly talented individuals, and continuing to build muscle in our areas of expertise.

As I step back and appreciate all this, I find myself also revisiting the lessons that got us here. They're not all original, but they're all crucial nonetheless.

Surround yourself with people smarter than you ✓
Don't settle. Ever. ✓
Continue to innovate and grow — the lack of growth gets us closer to death ✓
Don't be afraid to change what you do or how you do it ✓
Create a culture that is about something. Shared vision and purpose are vital. ✓
Listen. To your clients, to your team, to yourself (don't ignore that gut instinct). ✓

A heartfelt thanks goes out to all our clients, my team here at COPIOUS, and all of you we count as valuable partners. We truly wouldn't be where we are without you. If you're in Portland we're throwing an open house to celebrate next week. Drop me a line if you'd like to attend: patrick@copiousinc.com. Old friends or secret admirers alike — we're always looking to meet great people.

The Problem With Interactive Marketing

2011-09-26T06:48:10Z

Anyone can create a Facebook account. Anyone can send an email. Anyone can run Google AdWords campaign. Anyone can post a website.

But very few people can turn these pieces into revenue.

You can’t just write and design an email, send it out to your whole subscriber list and expect results. If it were that easy, Wieden + Kennedy would be broke.

I know how to use a hammer and a saw and a power drill — but that doesn’t make me an architect and it doesn’t mean I should or could build a house.

The problem with interactive marketing is that it’s incredibly easy to create, produce and publish. (Yes, you read that right, I said that’s a problem.) It’s a problem because it’s much more time consuming to curate, assess and improve (more on those three to come.) Interactive media allows you to measure your results incredibly accurately. But business teams are accustom to traditional marketing and advertising where any number of executions running simultaneously are equally attributed for an uptick in sales in some vague period during or after launch. So, the ability to track and measure this makes people uncomfortable.

With interactive marketing, if you send an email blast and no one opens it, you know. If they open but don’t click, you know that too. You can pinpoint exactly where in the world they were at the exact moment they opened it and from which browser using what device. And all that information tells you something about your audience. But it’s no good to you unless you do something with it.

Recently, while split testing an e-newsletter for a client we ran into some interesting results. With one group we’d nailed it — earning a 53% open rate and an equally strong click rate. With the other, results were more sluggish. We’d successfully isolated a group of inactive subscribers. People who hadn’t opened a single email in over 6 months. These inactive subscribers were dragging down our open rates, but more importantly, they were skewing our perception of our audience and inhibiting our ability to accurately discern what our audience wants.

Averaging the two groups gave us open and clicks on par with project goals. By splitting the groups, we put ourselves in the position of needing to explain the low clicks and opens to the client — and that’s a good thing. We could have kept on keeping on and continued to deliver the same average to above average results we were used to. But instead, we looked for a way to make it better.

Interactive marketing makes it easy for you to learn from your mistakes teachable moments. Embrace that — don’t ignore it! Done correctly, interactive marketing should go something like, “Test. Tweak. Repeat.” You can stop refining when 100% of your customers are doing exactly what you want. (And you can stop testing when you and your stakeholders are done making money.)

The Open Source Agency

2011-08-23T15:30:14Z

Innovation through collaboration is all the rage these days. Pick up any modern business publication and you’ll read how the old fashioned “siloed” organization is a dinosaur. Creativity authors like Steven Johnson and Warren Berger, assure us that useful ideas often arise from unexpected places, so building barriers in the workplace by job title are often unnecessary obstacles to creative output.

While this campfire “kumbaya” mindset is a warm and fuzzy scenario, the reality for most creative agencies is a far different proposition. Designers and strategists usually brainstorm and operate within the confines of their philosophical cubbies, while account people and software engineers get to work in seeing projects through to execution. There’s nothing entirely wrong with this picture, it’s just with ever looming budget constraints and deadlines to meet, collaboration is often sacrificed on the altar of expediency. Any industry vet will tell you, satisfied clients are the end goal, so getting the job done on budget and on time is the most important thing.

With this in mind, I was pleasantly surprised when I joined COPIOUS to find that collaboration is seen as not an addendum, but the crucible of the creative process. While most management teams pay lip service to open sourcing ideas, COPIOUS has taken several measures to ensure collaboration is “baked in” to the agency’s DNA.

From a project materials standpoint, rather than use a memory heavy internal server, the agency is run almost entirely from the cloud. From Dropbox to Box.net, to Google Apps aplenty (email, calender, docs, spreadsheets), sharing and participation is strongly encouraged at every level. Documents are frequently altered by multiple team members during meetings, with feedback and tweaks made simultaneously to the same document in real time. This allows ideas to be built on and fleshed out, ensuring no good idea slips through the cracks.

Perhaps most unique, each day begins with the ritual of “Morning Stand-Up,” a quick internal review where each team member outlines their tasks and goals for the day, and whether anything is “blocking” them from achieving their goals.

This exercise takes hardly any time, but can save a ton of it as team members who have solved similar problems previously can pass on their knowledge to their cohorts.

Perhaps what’s impressed me the most so far at COPIOUS, is the strong belief that no one person has the monopoly on good ideas. In the rapidly changing interactive realm, this makes a great deal of sense. Rather than individuals brainstorming and concepting in isolation, siccing multiple sets of gray matter in pursuit of a creative solution ensures our clients receive the best outcome possible, rather than individuals working alone in an ad hoc manner.

Albert Einstein famously defined creativity as a “combinatory play” — that the process of synthesizing and recombining seemingly disparate ideas was the bedrock of many of his discoveries. We think Albert would have fit in quite nicely at COPIOUS.

What’s your take? Do you feel creative ideas come best via collaboration or in isolation? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.

Understanding Google+

2011-07-20T14:51:54Z

According to a recent post by Larry Page, Google+ now has over ten million active users. While this pales in comparison to the 750M users Facebook claims, the rate at which the new social network is growing is nothing short of astonishing. Given Google's past mistakes in the social arena, one could reasonably conclude that Plus is here to stay. There is an understandable amount of confusion over the app, including why it's different, why someone would want to use it over the well-established competition, and whether or not Google can be trusted with even more control over our increasingly taxed private information.

It's About Circles

On Google Plus, your friends are organized into circles. Circles are like Facebook’s Groups — but useful. Google helpfully suggests some common circles, and provides some with special functionality. The Incoming circle, for example, only shows content from those users who have you in circles who are not in any circles of your own. As people are added to circles their posts appear in your main timeline. From there users are able to click specific circles to see only the posts made by members of those circles. On its own, this is a one-way relationship. While it is possible to broadcast posts publicly, users are able to choose one or more circles with whom to share specific pieces of content. Users are also able to share content directly to specific users.

One of the many benefits of this method of doing things is it negates the need for users to confirm one another as "friends." If a person is interested in hearing what I have to say on Plus, he or she only needs to add me to one of their circles and any post I choose to broadcast publicly is available automatically. On its own this encapsulates virtually all of Twitter's current functionality. Adding a person to a circle is the equivalent of following that person on Twitter. Plus' reshare is Twitter's retweet.

What about Facebook?

When Plus was announced at the end of June the social web immediately dubbed it Google's "Facebook killer," and early indications are that this moniker may ultimately be deserved. While Plus is currently an invite-only system, Google has only opened invites several times since it was originally introduced, and only for several hours at a time. Each time invites have been made available tweet streams and Facebook timelines fill up with offers of available invites. It was reminiscent of the Wave launch, with the primary difference being that most who have been able to get into Plus have found it engaging.

As a response to Facebook, Plus is incredibly interesting. One of the core design goals with Plus was to ensure privacy. Users should know at all times with whom they are sharing content. Users have the ability to disable resharing of this content. With Google Takeout, users are able to download all of the information they have shared in Plus with a single click. This is in stark contrast to Facebook, whose privacy options consist of a large table of checkboxes. The Plus user interface makes it simple and easy to choose with whom to share. This makes it possible to share content we may otherwise have held back. The people in my Colleagues circle probably aren't interested in that cute thing one of my cats did yesterday, but my Close Friends will likely find it amusing. Google hasn't eliminated the need for care when posting content online, but has instead made it very easy to share the right content with the right people.

Another area where Plus stands above Facebook is in its look and feel, which sits nicely against the well-received visual refresh Google implemented to coincide with the Plus launch. This can largely be attributed to Andy Hertzfeld, who led the design team that produced the look and feel as well as the interaction design and information architecture. Hertzfeld worked for Apple from 1979 through 1984 and was one of lead designers of the original Macintosh.
While design is subjective, there can be no denying the cleverness of the system. Finding people is incredibly easy, and adding a person to a circle is as simple as dragging that person's name from a list of search results onto a literal circle with a label on it. The interface contains a level of polish never before seen in a Google product. Compared to Facebook's tiny text size and clutter, Plus is a breath of fresh air. Everything from the commenting interface to notifications to the modal view presented when looking at photos is faster, simpler, and easier to use. The iPhone-optimized web app puts Facebook’s native app to shame.

What else?

Plus also contains an assortment of features the incumbents lack. Most notable among these is the Hangout feature, which allows a user to create a video chat room where friends can join and interact in real-time. Vic Gundotra, SVP of Social at Google, recently hosted a public hangout session. It filled up almost immediately.

Plus users will also notice the notification system integrated throughout other Google properties, including Search, Gmail, Calendar, and Docs. The integration of Plus within Google’s other apps feels reminiscent of Microsoft bundling Internet Explorer with Windows. Whether you leave Gmail open throughout your workday or are simply looking for Caturday photos once you’re on Plus, you never really leave.

The Future

Plus has been available for two weeks, and it shows no signs of slowing down. That being said, it is not quite ready to serve as a complete replacement for Facebook or other social networks. In its invite-only state there are still too few people in the system to really see how it works at scale. Plus does not currently handle Events. It also currently lacks an API of any kind. This point in particular is important, as Facebook's platform and integration capabilities has played a significant role in its success. One can imagine that Google has many of these items in the pipeline, but we're left to guess at this point.

8 Steps to a Faster Web Stack

2011-07-14T16:16:07Z

June was (unofficially) optimization month, here at COPIOUS.

A new client came to us with an existing Ruby on Rails (version 2.3.2 onRHEL) application that had become frustratingly slow. The application and its database had been consuming the entire computing capacity of the hardware, and the client has plans to expand their operations. Optimization of the existing software allows them to scale more efficiently and with fewer complications. This is one of my favorite software tasks—you learn what works poorly (or not at all), what issues to avoid, and how to write good code.

Here’s how I like to do it:

1. Document everything

The page load time will help you establish the overall speed trends. Google Webmaster Tools provides a consistent and reliable chart on the “Crawl Statistics” page. Google Analytics’ Site Speed implementation also provides this measurement, but on the client side (allowing you to evaluate how users perceive your site speed).

The page views, pages per visit, and average time on the site can contribute to a subjective measurement of user satisfaction and engagement. Google Analytics is the go-to standard for these reports.

The utilization of CPU(s), RAM, and network connections will help you analyze the efficiency of your expenditures and plan for upgrades. MRTG-style graphs are optimal, but random sampling can be useful enough.

Push the software and hardware to their limits and identify the details of any failures. Apache Benchmark and Siege are effective tools with simple controls and sophisticated details.

Save a report of statistics from your database daemon, if available. MySQL’s status variables provide a wealth of measurements to evaluate the efficiency of your configurations and SQL statements.

User comments, requests, and complaints can also provide a wealth of information. Consider them to be interpretive materials, rather than literal issues, though, as surface-level reports can be symptoms of problems deep within the application stack.

2. Identify the issues

Where are the bottlenecks? Is it more effective to fix them or work around them?

How much memory does the server use? Should you give it more RAM or improve its efficiency?

Are there usage patterns? Consider the day of the week, time of the day, and the distance between your users and your server(s).
Which parts of the site are static or dynamic? Does this change for logged in users?

What tasks contribute most to the overall request time? Consider the order in which assets are loaded (Google Code explains this well).

How do the server-side and client-side page load times vary? Do you have inefficient JavaScript? Excessively-large images?

Do your database queries use indexes? Sub-selects? Joins? Are the database configurations adequate to store and process keys, sorts, and joins entirely in-memory? How many temporary tables are written to disk?

Do your HTTP headers allow browsers and caching services to store assets? Are these expiration times appropriate?

Is your webserver compressing text-based files before sending them?

Have you disabled Rails’ cache-busting URLs in production?

3. Plan the improvements

Perform a full backup so you have a recovery point. Include the application code, server configurations, and take note of maintenance or auxiliary tasks. Test this backup to ensure you’ve hedged against failure.

A developmental or staging environment will let you make errors without the stress of degraded customer experiences.

Releasing optimizations sequentially allows you to see the individual adjustments’ contribution to the overall change.

Ask your IT deparment and/or hosting provider for RAM upgrade options. The standardization of 64-bit environments and decreasing memory costs has greatly increased the affordable limits.

4. Review log files

Errors, deprecations, and warnings contribute to inefficiencies and complications.

Hard work can be for naught if you have deep security issues.

Intensive read and write operations can trigger deep warnings and errors relating to the Kernel. Pass these to your resident Linux expert to make sense of the issues.

5. Write the improvements

COPIOUS prefers Git to Subversion, as it allows us to easily build and maintain separate branches for each significant feature set. Upon completion and successful testing, we merge each branch back into the master branch.

COPIOUS typically uses the Rspec and Rcov gems (and cucumber, occasionally) to test our applications and check the quality and quantity of these tests.
We aim for one line of testing for every line of code and try to ensure that more than 90 percent of the codebase is covered by these tests. Critical, high-risk applications in industries like utilities, finance, automobiles, and aeronautics deserve greater scrutiny of 100 percent test coverage and up to six lines of tests for every line of code.

Well-supported applications should at least have a staging and production environment. The role of a staging environment is to simulate the production environment by being as similar as possible. This allows you to have a high level of confidence in the outcome of your changes.

When I’m targeting specific Rails controllers or views, I typically insert Rails.logger.debug statements at the start of each significant action, helper, or partial to track processing time by the millisecond. I also use tail -f log/development.log to scan the behaviors of the full application stack to ensure only the necessary actions are performed—slow, repetitive database calls are my primary target.

6. Test the improvements

Run as many of the tests from step one as you can. The outcomes should be reduced server load, faster response times, quicker DOM parsing, and reduced network overhead. Summarize these changes for primary stakeholders.

Application optimizations often expose the dark, cobweb-filled corners of your web presence. Expect new bottlenecks to appear, make quick adjustments as possible, and plan for the next round of adjustments.

7. Deploy

Prepare the release and send it to production. Coordinate the timing for this with marketing efforts and consider emailing your customer base to tell them you’re working hard to serve their needs.

8. Celebrate!

:-D

Don’t Put People In Boxes

2011-07-11T16:20:39Z

Over the last month or so, our Twitter stream has been buzzing with news of our upcoming move to a new (and bigger) office. It’s been fun to see our friends, colleagues, clients and even competitors share in our excitement watching the place come together through tweets and Facebook photos. What really makes our new place great isn’t the carpet samples or paint swatches we’ve chosen, however.

What makes it great is not new at all. In fact, it’s been a part of our agency since its birth over a decade ago — the strategic decision not to put people in boxes. To embrace an open floor plan, and all that comes with it.

Developers, creatives, and strategists side-by-side. Collaboration. Communication. Transparency.

These things are a big part of what makes “us” us. It helps drive what we look for in team members — individuals who have a clear area of expertise, complemented by several strong areas of interest. We believe it strengthens our work too, by enabling us to deeply examine projects from every angle and build smarter solutions.

Breakout meeting rooms and spaces are scattered throughout the office so there’s always a spot to share a thought, talk through a strategy, lay out an idea, a wireframe, or an entire marketing strategy. (That is, assuming the over 450 square feet of whiteboard wall will contain it.)

There are also places to relax and find a fresh perspective. Cozy, laptop-ready corners to slink off to when we need to totally submerge ourselves in a project. Every inch of our new space has been engineered to help us do what we do better and more efficiently. It also gives us room to stretch our legs creatively.

It’s going to be a good year.

Numbers Don’t Lie…Or Do They?

2011-06-23T15:45:52Z

As someone who could while away hours on WhichTestWon.com, I’m a big fan of A/B testing and so is the rest of the COPIOUS team. Hardly an email marketing campaign test goes by without casting internal bets on which variate or subject line will “win” — but results aren’t always as they seem.

Tip #1: Decide what you’re testing for — before you test
Recently, while A/B testing an email campaign subject line, we ran into a conundrum. Open rates were 3% higher for one subject (lets call it Email A). But clicks were 2x as high for the other (Email B), even though the content was the same.

Since we were testing the subject line, you’d think all that matters would be open rates. But a good email marketer knows that’s not true. This particular email was a newsletter, and our ultimate goal was engagement and getting users on-site. The subject line sets a precedent for the content. When customers buy in to the subject line, they’re more invested in the experience — they’ll spend more time viewing and clicking.

And when we looked at which links were clicked in each email, the results got even more interesting.

Email A showed only a moderate number of clicks, spread across the board. A slim majority of clicks landed on the offer mentioned in the subject line, but a fair number were scattered among the various other touts and links.

Email B, however, showed almost 80% of the clicks were for the offer mentioned in the subject line. Users who opened Email B did so with a purpose. The offer resonated with them and they completed the steps necessary to get it.

Tip #2: Apply what you learn to the long-run
By tracking this information, we now know which users are receptive to this type of offer and can save this information for use in the future.

On the flip side, the offer was so clear in the subject, that we can infer the people who did not open Email B are less receptive to this type of offer. The more we can refine audience segmentation, the better we’ll be at delivering the right message to the right people at the right time. And that’s important not just for our own results, but more importantly, for the customer experience.

Tip #3: Remember your ultimate duty — serve your customers
While customer experience doesn’t show up in analytics, it’s what all the testing and hard work is all about. Your ultimate goal for any email should be to speak to your customers about things they care about, in a voice they’re receptive to, when they have time to listen. Do this and you efforts will pay off.

Birchbox Site Recognized at 2011 Marketing Awards of Excellence

2011-06-21T16:01:06Z

In a town like Portland — a flocking ground for top creative folks of all kinds — the local interactive scene packs some pretty stiff competition. No doubt about it, this town is brimming with talent, as evidenced at the American Marketing Awards (AMA) Marketing Awards of Excellence held Thursday at Urban Studio.

As a finalist in the Website category, COPIOUS landed second place for our work for Birchbox. A big congrats to our team and valued client for all their hard work.

This hasn’t been the first time we’ve landed Birchbox’s name in the headlines, and it certainly won’t be the last! We’re proud to work with clients like Birchbox who know where they want to go and are willing to take intelligent risks to get there. We hope you’ll help us congratulate them with a quick note on Twitter @birchbox or a wall post on their Facebook page.

The show was hosted by our friends at Perkins & Co., and (aside from the presentation reel being in need of proofing) went off without a hitch. A great space, good food, friendly bartenders. The awards were spaced out through the evening, leaving plenty of time to mill about, nosh, and rub elbows with peers, clients and professional rivals alike.

Oh, and be sure to check out Birchbox's award-winning website at http://www.birchbox.com.