Virilion - creative. strategic. interactive agency.

 If I were going to identify grand themes about the impact of the Internet of the last fifteen years, one of them would be the death of authority. The fact that we no longer automatically assign credibility to big enterprises of any sort has been a factor in: the inability of the record labels to get us to keep buying crap, once we had a medium to help us find other artists they weren't promoting or signing; the inability of newspapers, already reeling from the instant-gratification of cable news,...

READ FULL POST AT TRUTHYPR.COM >>

[Since this was first published on PRNewsOnline.com, Apple and AT&T announced an extension of upgrade subsidies for several people who are coming due. It's probably not enough to mollify the overall complainers, but certainly enough to take the wind out of its sails. I expect that Apple decided to look forward, and grow the overall iPhone market, as opposed to fighting over the existing users they already had. After all, if you've been a loyal iPhone user for a year, and someone whose never had...

READ FULL POST AT TRUTHYPR.COM >>

I love the news this week from Dell that visitors driven to their website from their DellOutlet Twitter account have made $3 million in purchases.   To know this you have to be measuring your website with any of the standard products like Google Analytics or SiteCatalyst, and then specifically hunting for which feeders of traffic are most effective at driving sales.   For Dell, which had revenue of $12.3 billion in the first quarter, $3 million may not seem like much, until you consider that the...

READ FULL POST AT TRUTHYPR.COM >>

Mike Morgan’s domain name dispute with Wall Street bank (and my alum) Goldman Sachs over goldmansachs666.com has gone a little differently than most domain name disputes. As is typical, Goldman sent Morgan a legal love note (known as a “cease and desist letter”) that suggested all sorts of bad things but had little actual legal content. I’ve actually gotten two of these in my life, one from Fannie Mae, and one from the Church of Scientology. The Fannie Mae one frankly, was scarier to me,...

READ FULL POST AT TRUTHYPR.COM >>

Last week I was on a panel talk at USC's Annenberg School of Communication to discuss "Measuring New Media" at the Beyond Broadcast 2009 conference. My slides are available online. I am starting to get used to being the guy that calls the emperor out on his new clothes. I made the provocative statement at one point that social media is useless if it doesn't lead to donations or some other big ask. I know this goes against current herd-think, but "engagement" and even "visits" are not some kind of...

READ FULL POST AT TRUTHYPR.COM >>

I'm doing a panel talk today at USC in Los Angeles on new media measurement for the conference Beyond Broadcast. My slides and additional material are online.

READ FULL POST AT TRUTHYPR.COM >>

YouTube is certainly well known for the success it has shown with marketers. Another effective tool is SlideShare. SlideShare offers the ability to post a presentation that others can view, share and comment upon just as you would a video on YouTube. There are a number of similar services, but SlideShare appears to have a solid user base. Easy to use and requiring nothing more than a PowerPoint deck, SlideShare is easy to test out for marketing and communications campaigns. What makes this really...

READ FULL POST AT QUIS.COM >>

Let me start with a note on my bias – I love WordPress. This said, I have tried not to let it color this post that attempts to highlight when and where to choose between WordPress and Drupal. No matter, I look forward to some solid comments from all sides on these ramblings. This evaluation really comes down to a definition of the task you desire. I have found that WordPress is the ideal selection for any blog. I have also found it to be an excellent choice for a small to medium Web site. Why?...

READ FULL POST AT QUIS.COM >>

[This article first ran in PRNewsOnline.com. Go check them out! -Shabbir]In the last few articles I’ve described the importance of measurement to your website, and how to examine whether your social media efforts are working or not. Now it’s time to look at the big picture. Are your efforts in each medium actually working, and how should you budget in the coming year?If you haven’t discovered yet, when you start using twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and press releases written with search engine...

READ FULL POST AT TRUTHYPR.COM >>

One of the things I fear when working with a developer is that they will claim to be as someone around here did to be a “code monkey.” Good Web site development and campaign delivery is not about creating code. It is about utilizing best practices to provide the best user experience. Those who solely want to work on the code level often miss the forest through the trees Each CMS must be configured to align with marketing, user interface and other best practices. The following provides for common...

READ FULL POST AT QUIS.COM >>

The Internet is about to become an even more powerful tool for shareholder activism, thanks to Chairman Schapiro at the Securities and Exchange Commission. (That's her, announcing the proposed rule on May 20th)The Chairman announced that the SEC is going to put out for comment a rule that would allow any investor, or group of investors, holding a minimum amount of securities in a company to nominate up to 25% of the directors for a board election. The company would be forced to put these nominations...

READ FULL POST AT TRUTHYPR.COM >>

Are you looking for someone with fifteen years of experience web development, online strategy, and infrastructure management? Do you want someone whose actually managed a website with more than 11,000 pages of content and eight million pageviews per year? The economic downturn has hit the nonprofit sector hard, and one of my colleagues at the Human Rights Campaign was the latest casualty. She strategized and executed campaigns in all forms of digital media (traditional websites, e-mail campaigns,...

READ FULL POST AT TRUTHYPR.COM >>

Forgive me if this sounds like a rant. It has suddenly become popular to talk about "measuring engagement" with your audience. This has become code for "We have no idea how to prove that this is a worthwhile endeavor to your organization's bottom line, so we're going to invent a new metric."But I'm here to tell you, the Emperor has no clothes. One of my favorite clients was reviewing her reports in her web analytics product last year and said to me, "We have 125,000 visits this month, is that good?"...

READ FULL POST AT TRUTHYPR.COM >>

Yesterday as I was perusing my Facebook feed, I came across this: In case you're not up on the Pentagon-like acronym, FSBO is "For Sale By Owner", and the story is about people that try and save a little money by not using realtors. Fred is one of Washington's most experienced (and oddly low-key) realtors. He's watched most every neighborhood change and migrate and understands pricing particularly well. He friended me on Facebook, and though he usually talks about music (he's a fan of jazz and classical),...

READ FULL POST AT TRUTHYPR.COM >>

I meant to plug this a while ago, but I'm back in DC and catching up with an old colleague, Shayna Englin. In advance of seeing her, I went to her site and notice she plugged Jason's and my latest article about measuring social media.I know people just love to cross-promote each other just for the links, so instead of telling you to go read her stuff, let me be more specific: go check out her "Three Things" column. Roughly each week she summarizes something complex into three concrete things you...

READ FULL POST AT TRUTHYPR.COM >>

Constant Contact provides methods to segment lists when they are collected from different data collection forms. This is conducted by using a different list name for each data collection form. The following practices can help with this segmentation Import any external lists to a new list for each. Do not import these to lists used with data collection forms. If this import contains data from multiple external lists then use a column (custom data filed) for details on the original source list. Create...

READ FULL POST AT QUIS.COM >>

Let's say you wanted to monitor another website (not your own) and you don't have access to their logs or analytics data. There are a number of tools (for free!) that would let you benchmark their performance. While there is a lot of fudge factor in their accuracy, you can still get a rough idea about what the competition is doing.Check out their website trafficLet's say you're the nurse's association, which occasionally has conflicts with the American Medical Association, and you want to see if...

READ FULL POST AT TRUTHYPR.COM >>

Read this entire case study [PDF]By Shabbir Imber Safdar and Jason Alcorn, Virilion IncLast month, we talked about how important it is during the downturn to adopt a culture of measurement. When your PR efforts create a measurable impact on your organization’s goals, you will be at the head of the line for budget and staff. If you can’t measure your benefits to the organization’s goals, then your PR efforts are merely, “those communications people we have to keep around”.There are a number...

READ FULL POST AT TRUTHYPR.COM >>

There's no doubt that if you asked the attorneys at Goldman Sachs if they were afraid of Mike Morgan and his Goldman Sachs attack website, they'd dismiss you as overreacting. As this graph of people searching Google for Morgan's website shows, interest is currently high.(click on it to go directly to the Google search)See that spike before the 'A'? That was caused by Goldman sending a cease and desist to Morgan. The letter had no ability to take Morgan's website down, but as you can see, it gave...

READ FULL POST AT TRUTHYPR.COM >>

I was always close to the attorneys at Goldman Sachs when I worked there. When you do computer security, you have to be. The times my filtering systems caught IP flowing out the door or sexually harassing e-mails always landed me in the General Counsel's office along with one of the ex-NYPD detectives the firm had on staff.So it was with a great deal of dismay that I discovered that there's someone out there who has shorted Goldman Sachs stock and then created a blog which will help talk the stock...

READ FULL POST AT TRUTHYPR.COM >>