'Net Features : week19-2012

Groupon Launches New Loyalty Program

Allison Howen — Fri, 11 May 2012 16:15:00 GMT

Groupon is on the search for loyal customers.

The once-upon-a-time daily deals giant has launched Groupon Rewards, which is a loyalty program that tracks consumers’ purchases through their Groupon-saved credit or debit card, in order to reward them when they reach a certain amount at a participating retailers’ venue.

Merchants can become a “participating retailer” for free by signing up on Groupon’s website. With Groupon Rewards, merchants have the ability to create their own spending requirements and rewards to compensate their most loyal customers without punchcards or check-ins. The platform also gives merchants access to valuable insights into their customers’ spending activity.

Loyalty programs are an effective way to maintain a business’ customer base and increase conversions, brand loyalty and brand advocates. However, with the popularity of social media and mobile devices, it is interesting that Groupon would emphasize the fact that merchants don’t have to deal with check-ins. Although monitoring such things can add to a business owner’s already busy work schedule, check-ins would provide small businesses and Groupon with additional word-of-mouth advertising – which could prove to be very valuable.

Watch the Groupon Rewards video below:

Facebook Announces Social App Center

Michael Garrity — Thu, 10 May 2012 23:00:00 GMT

Following in the footsteps of Apple, Google and many others, Facebook announced plans to unveil its own app store in the coming weeks.

This new offering will give developers a new avenue for promoting their work across multiple mobile platforms, while adding another place for users to discover new apps.

The thoughtfully named Facebook App Center will allow users to search for Facebook apps that run on the Web, as well as iOS and Android devices, provided the applications have some kind of tie into Facebook, which at the very least means using Facebook Login.

Apps will be searchable by category and ratings, with the most popular among them highlighted for convenience.

Facebook plans to set the App Center apart from its competitors by offering a social aspect to the discovery process. Instead of showing a single list of top apps that is identical for every user, each individual will see a list of recommended apps based on what their Facebook friends are using.

Developers can charge users for their apps, and anyone interested in building for the Facebook App Center can see the guidelines here.

AddThis Offers Three New Social Plugins

Allison Howen — Thu, 10 May 2012 21:00:00 GMT

The company formerly known as Clearspring has launched a new set of social plugins to help publishers better engage with their audiences.

Clearspring recently changed its name to AddThis – after the company’s popular share tool that is used by 14 million websites and reaches more than 1.3 billion users each month. The company’s three new social plugins expand beyond sharing to help publishers and advertisers make their sites more personal and engaging, and they come with enhanced analytics that provide better insights on content-generating fans and followers.

Check out more information about the three new plugins below:

Follow Tool – Enables publishers to place follow buttons with content on sites, which allows users to become fans, followers or subscribers with one click.

Trending Content Tool – This tool uses a content feed API to continuously promote a brand's top content in real time on their website, in newsletters or on social channels.

Welcome Tool - Publishers can optimize a new user's experience with this tool, by welcoming them with a personalized greeting and call-to-action.

"The flow of big data for advertisers and publishers is only valuable if the data becomes actionable," says AddThis CEO Ramsey McGrory. "AddThis powers the social web and social advertising through sophisticated data-driven products that make site owners and brands smarter and more effective."

Zoho Gets Social with Customer Support App

Allison Howen — Thu, 10 May 2012 20:00:00 GMT

If you are frequently responding to customer support issues via Facebook and Twitter, the updated Zoho Support app may just be exactly what you need to make the process less time-consuming and more effective.

Online app provider Zoho’s updated customer support app now integrates with both Facebook and Twitter. The new integrations enable businesses to quickly and easily monitor, route and respond to support requests on both social networks.

Users that leverage these new features will be able to provide their customers with unified Facebook and Twitter support from one central location, capture social interactions such as tickets, obtain notifications when an increasing number of tweets contain specified escalation keywords, as well as automatically direct specific keywords to specific support agents or teams.

Social media is a powerful tool that can affect a company’s reputation if not closely monitored. By becoming proactive and emphasizing strong customer support via these channels, brands have the opportunity to build their customer bases as well as loyalty among their current customers.

Student Developers Try to Crack Joomla's Core

Michael Garrity — Thu, 10 May 2012 19:00:00 GMT

The widely used open-source content management system (CMS) Joomla will be participating in the Google Summer of Code program to allow students 18 and older to contribute to the company’s CMS core.

Google Summer of Code is an international program that gives students stipends (up to $5,000) to write code for open-source projects.

Eight different students will each be working on a separate project, and when they’re finished their work will be considered by Joomla for inclusion in its platform. Among the assignments are creating APIs for integrating Facebook and Google services onto a Joomla-powered website, MediaWiki APIs and multi-language options for Joomla installation.

Summer of Code ends on August 24, but the codes won’t be moved immediately into the Joomla CMS core; rather, they will continue to be developed, and may even be used by extension developers. Many of the projects involved in the program are focused on the Joomla platform, providing the infrastructure for the future development of the CMS and other applications that build upon it.

The Joomla platform generously allows developers to create multi-purpose and multi-device apps (including mobile and cloud computing applications) and enterprise systems that can be run independently of its core CMS offering.

Students working on Joomla projects span the globe, coming from Brazil, Sri Lanka, the United States, Romania and France.

Calling All Entries for the WebAwards

Allison Howen — Thu, 10 May 2012 18:00:00 GMT

Do you think yours is the best site on the Web? Prove it by entering the Web Marketing Association’s 16th annual international WebAward competition.

The WebAwards recognize individual and team achievements of Web professionals who create and maintain successful sites. Participants' websites are rated with a numeric score, based on seven criteria including design, innovation, content, technology, interactivity, copy writing and ease of use. Each entry is judged against other entries within the same industry category, as well as against an overall standard of excellence. Participants also receive a website evaluation and valuable feedback from the WebAwards' professional judging panel.

The deadline to submit your website into the competition is May 31.

This year’s top awards include a “Best of Industry” award that will be given to one website within each of the 96 industry categories; a “Best of Show” award that will be given to one site that represents overall outstanding Web development, and a “Top Interactive Agency” award that will be presented to the interactive agency that wins the most awards during the competition. And starting this year, every agency and corporation that wins 10 or more WebAwards will also receive an “Outstanding Interactive Developer” trophy.

The 2012 WebAward judging begins in June and runs through August, with the winners being announced in September. The judging panel is made up of Internet professionals who have direct experience designing and managing websites as well as posses an understanding of current website development and technology, this will include members of the media, interactive creative directors, site designers, content providers and webmasters. Website Magazine is on the list of the competition's past judges, which also includes top executives from organizations like CNN.com, Yahoo! and IBM.

ControlScan Merchants Can Rest Easier on PCI Issues

Michael Garrity — Thu, 10 May 2012 17:00:00 GMT

ControlScan, a provider of Payment Card Industry (PCI) compliance and security services for small and medium-sized online businesses, has announced its purchase of cloud-based secure payments solution CRE Secure.

The acquisition will allow ControlScan to considerably reduce the "scope" of PCI.

CRE Secure was already a level-one PCI Data Security Standard (DSS) certified service provider. It gives users a hosted payment page powered by patent-pending HTML cloning technology for a consistent consumer experience, and a secure e-commerce solution for merchants that is PCI-compliant.

By combining an already PCI-compliant object, such as a credit card form, with a merchant’s site template, merchant’s can simplify the compliance process by outsourcing consumer payment data to CRE Secure, putting their website out of the scope of PCI regulations, since it will not actually store, process or transmit cardholder information. This allows them to host their site wherever they want and save a lot of money on those annual PCI scans.

CRE Secure is based on a unified technology that utilizes a single cloud-based system to support a merchant’s payment channels, which includes everything from online, mobile and even mail/telephone orders. E-commerce sites can even take advantage of plug-ins that allow them to connect with their favorite payment processors and existing solutions, to create a seamless, secure customer experience that is light on the merchant’s wallet, too.

All of this is good news for ControlScan and the merchants who use their services, as CRE Secure technology and existing partnerships will now complement ControlScan solutions, opening up new opportunities in the card-not-present (CNP) space. ControlScan also hopes to build upon the current CRE Secure product.

Subject Line Testing Tool Gets Right to the Point

Allison Howen — Thu, 10 May 2012 16:00:00 GMT

A new tool aims to help email marketers create stronger subject lines.

Marketing service provider Worldata launched SubjectLine.com to help email marketers get the best results from their campaigns. The Subject Line Scoring Tool enables Web pros to test subject lines for deliverability issues and receive marketing-related suggestions for improving open rates.

The tool is free, but users must fill out a registration form to continue using it after the initial trial. The subject line ratings are based on more than a billion email messages that have been sent and tracked via partners and clients of SubjectLine.com.

More than 400 rules are tested, from evaluating filtering and deliverability issues to marketing and performance-related concerns. During a brief trial of my own, I entered what I considered to be one good subject line and one bad one.

In my opinion, both were rated pretty accurately. Both tests came back with a list of reasons for the scores they received, including deliverability and marketing issues (see below).

IT Budgets Rise 15 Percent for SMBs

Pete Prestipino — Thu, 10 May 2012 01:15:00 GMT

Spiceworks, a social network for the IT community and a provider of a provider of IT management software, has released its bi-annual State of SMB IT survey of technology purchasing and adoption trends.

The survey revealed that SMBs are expanding their IT budgets, growing 6 percent in the first half of 2012 from the second half of 2011, and 15 percent year-over year. The research found that SMBs are adopting tablets, cloud services and virtualization and have some strong opinions on the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) trend.

"Data from this recent survey confirms that the consumerization of IT is flourishing among SMBs, although opinions vary on how to manage its impact on organizations," says Jay Hallberg, co-founder and vice president of marketing for Spiceworks. "The results also show that SMBs are spending more on technology across the board, from hardware and devices to cloud services and virtualization. This bodes well for technology vendors serving the SMB market in 2012."

A few more highlights from the survey include the following:

- Fifty-six percent of SMBs are retaining their IT headcount and 30 percent intend to hire additional staff over the next six months. These metrics remain consistent with the results from the second half of 2011.

- Sixty-two percent of SMBs have deployed or plan to deploy tablet devices, such as iPads, within the next six months. That figure is up from the 50 percent reported for the second half of 2011.

- The largest portion of IT budgets (40 percent) will be allocated to hardware purchases, followed by software (34 percent) and IT services (26 percent). The two biggest planned IT services purchases are web hosting (54 percent) and ISP (44 percent).

- Cloud services are now used by 48 percent of SMBs, up from 46 percent in the second half of 2011 and 28 percent for the first half of 2011.

- The top five cloud services by usage are Web hosting (49 percent), e-mail hosting (32 percent), data backup (25 percent), content filtering (24 percent) and application hosting (23 percent).

- The top cloud services that respondents plan to purchase in the next six months are data backup (17 percent), application hosting (12 percent), data storage (12 percent) and e-mail hosting (11 percent).

- Currently, 64 percent of respondents use virtualization, up from 61 percent during the second half of 2011 and the 54 percent reported for the first half of 2011. In addition, SMBs using virtualization are now virtualizing an average of 3.1 applications compared with an average of 2.1 applications a year ago.

Track What’s Being Pinned

Pete Prestipino — Thu, 10 May 2012 00:30:00 GMT

Many digital media professionals, myself included, expect that Pinterest's days as the darling of the social media world are numbered.

The popular pinboard, however, remains appealing to merchants as it has been shown time and again to drive website traffic, and in some cases even conversions.

Website Magazine has seen an influx of tools and resources designed for merchants to optimize use and improve understanding since the rise of Pinterest began. The latest comes from PinnableBusiness.com, which just announced the release of PinAlerts, a free Web service that tracks pins being added to Pinterest from any website or blog.

Users of the service are notified by email about the pin along with a description of it when new items are posted. Users can also control the frequency of those emails, choosing alerts in real time, or opting for daily or weekly aggregate reports.

Here's a screenshot of what the email reports look like.

Why Did Web Builder Wix Drop IE8 Support?

Pete Prestipino — Wed, 09 May 2012 22:30:00 GMT

In what I consider a rather bold move, HTML5 Web publishing platform Wix announced that it will no longer support Internet Explorer 8, citing a general lack of support for its emerging HTML5 product.

While IE commands approximately 20-percent share of the browser market globally (according to StatCounter), Wix analyzed its 20 million-strong userbase and found that only 12 percent were using IE8. Couple that metric with IE8's widely known inability to handle HTML5's interactive elements, and the decision was likely not a difficult one to make for Wix.

But how do Wix clients feel about the decision?

Apparently, 89 percent of Wix users support the addition of HTML5 features to the website builder over the continued support of IE8. Enough said.

"By freeing the Wix platform from the constraints IE8 places on its users, Wix will continue to lead the advancement of HTML5 Web design features that aren't supported by outdated browsers today," says Avishai Abrahami, Wix CEO and Co-founder. "The Wix user demands more variety and a consistent stream of new features which will benefit their website in the long run. Advanced HTML5 Web design and IE8 support cannot co-exist."

Facebook Metrics: Reach, Engaged Users, Talking About This

Pete Prestipino — Wed, 09 May 2012 20:30:00 GMT

The investing world is certainly going gaga over Facebook's upcoming IPO, but the community of social media professionals continue to scratch their collective heads about the meaning of the available metrics within brand pages that is being reported by the social network.

Based on my conversations with those both successful and struggling with their social media participation and optimization, much of the troubles stem from a simple lack of understanding. There's a lot of "overlap" in the reports, which I believe is certainly one reason this data doesn't generate more attention and exploration.

Let's look at these metrics in more detail and consider how you, as a social media maven, can use the information to your benefit.

Reach: The number of people that have seen your post. The Reach metric is segmented into three seperate channels - organic, paid and viral.

Organic reach is the number of people that have seen your post in their news feed, within the ticker, or on your page. Keep in mind that metrics reported under organic reach can include people that have never liked your page.

Paid reach is the reach associated with sponsored stories or Page Post Ads. It is reported as the number of unique people that saw an ad or story that pointed to your page.

Viral reach is where things get tricky. Viral reach is the number of people that have seen your post because one of their friends interacted with it, either liking, commenting, sharing, answering a question or responding to an event. Viral reach also has to do quite a bit with the Talking About This (TAT) metric discussed below.

Engaged Users: The number of people who have clicked within your post/update.

The Engaged Users metric is reported in three forms: link clicks (clicks on links within your post/update), stories generated (a story is created when someone likes, comments, shares, answers a question or responds to an event), and other clicks, which are clicks on names, timestamp or the number of likes (the "other clicks" metrics is a good indicator of attention).

Talking About This: The number of people that have created a "story" from your page post. The TAT metric reports the number of likes, comments and shares in aggregate.

Self-Service Retargeting from Bizo

Allison Howen — Wed, 09 May 2012 18:30:00 GMT

Marketers can start their own retargeting campaign with a new solution from business audience marketing provider Bizo.

This new self-service tool is currently in public beta, and enables marketers to launch a retargeting campaign for as little as $5 per day. The solution helps marketers recapture leads and increase conversions by targeting consumers that didn’t convert on their first visit to the marketer’s website.

Retargeting can make a business’ other marketing programs more efficient because it brings lost prospects back to a website in order for marketers to gain leads, increase conversions, obtain less wasted spend and therefore a better ROI.

The self-service retargeting tool is an intergrated part of the Bizo Self-Service platform, which also includes the company’s Audience Analytics, Social Marketing and Campaign Performance Reporting solutions.

Check out this infographic about retargeting via Bizo:

Measure Website Performance with User Timings

Michael Garrity — Wed, 09 May 2012 17:30:00 GMT

When it comes to a website’s productivity, every little detail is important. For some time now, Google Analytics has provided its users with Site Speed reports to study their site’s page load times, and now the company has developed User Timings, so users can measure and diagnose page speeds with more refined accuracy.

User Timings will allow Web workers to track and visualize user-defined custom timings about websites, which will show the execution speed or load time of a discrete hit, or even user interaction, depending on what the Google Analytics user decides to track. Included in these metrics are the load speeds of specific images and resources, the response times of select button clicks, AJAX actions timings both before and after onLoad events and more.

Plus, these User Timings are the preferred method for tracking various action timing metrics, as they won’t alter page view counts.

Google Analytics users wanting to collect and take advantage of User Timings data will have to add a JavaScript timing code to the interactions they want to track by using the trackTiming API included in ga.js (version 5.2.6+), which lets site owners track visitor action timings related to events that don’t directly correspond to page views. To enhance organization, these can be defined using categories, variables and optional labels.

User Timings reports can be accessed by going to the Content tab of a Google Analytics dashboard and clicking on the “User Timings” section, where there are three tabs to review. Explorer, Performance and Map Overlay each provide different views of user timings.

Explorer shows information about average user timing and user timing sample by Timing Category, Timing Variable or Timing Label. The Performance tab tells site owners which timings are the most common for user timings. And Map Overlay gives owners a view of how users in different geographical regions experience site speed.

The Top 10 Comparison Shopping Engines Compared

Linc Wonham — Wed, 09 May 2012 15:30:00 GMT

Data feed management and comparison shopping engine (CSE) management firm CPC Strategy has released its quarterly report ranking the top 10 CSEs in a variety of categories.

The 13th overall report rates the shopping engines’ performance for the first quarter of 2012.

The data is pulled from 113 CPC Strategy e-commerce clients and analyzes approximately 4.2 million clicks, 82,845 orders, $1.15 million in spend and close to $8 million in revenue that the CSEs drove during Q1.

Visit CPC Strategy for the full report, but below are some of the highlights:

Best Performing CSEs (overall):

1. Google Product Search
2. Nextag
3. Pricegrabber

Best Paid CSEs (overall):

1. Nextag
2. Pricegrabber
3. Shopping.com

Best Converting CSEs:

1. Google Product Search
2. Nextag
3. Pronto

Best Paid COS (spend / revenue) CSEs:

1. Pricegrabber
2. Nextag
3. Shopping.com

Biggest Traffic-driving CSEs:

1. Amazon Product Ads
2. Google Product Search
3. Shopping.com

CPC Strategy, founded by former members of comparison shopping engines, builds, manages and optimizes CSE campaigns for e-commerce merchants.