But lately, I’ve heard a few comments from people that wearing of many hats probably means the person was not able to focus on their core responsibility (even from startups now looking for people).  Well, from my experience this could not be farther from the truth.  Most people I know that have worked in startups have had to do at least 150% of their core job PLUS the “other hats”.  This is a huge advantage when qualifying someone because you are getting a contributor who knows their core responsibility and how other functions interact with it.  People with this type of supplemental knowledge usually see the bigger picture better and are more capable of offering non-standard solution options.  They are also not afraid of taking on challenges outside of their core expertise and you’ll probably never hear them say “but that’s not in my job description”.

Add this to the other benefits of startup folks (high energy, ability to work under extreme pressure, over performers, flexibility, etc.) and you have a winner.  All you need is to harness these benefits with your superior management capabilities

So, next time you are thinking of bypassing a startuper, stop and have a chat with this person.  You might find a winning combination of experience, drive and aspirations.

Some reasons why this might not be the whole story:
1. Compete.com’s data is just wrong for general web data – it would be a good bet to assume these numbers are incorrect.  I’ve always found Compete to be off when compared to actual web data.  Most of the time the numbers are lower than the real web stats.  However, I’ve also found the relative positioning between the sites being compared and general increase/declining indicators to be accurate for sites with high traffic.
2.  Mobile traffic is making up the difference, but not being counted accurately – audience analytics companies have had difficulty measuring mobile traffic accurately due to sampling methodologies and challenges getting onto the mobile devices
3.  Access is coming from sources not measured here – RSS and Twitter are delivering enough of the message to keep visitors from hitting the website.
4.  Content is being syndicated and effort is focused on delivering there

The actual reason is probably a combination of these.  However, I would still want my trends pointing in the other direction if I were any of these publishers.  Also, with all of these Tweets, you would think an increasing number would get clicked from non-mobile devices.

One other interesting note is that Techcrunch hides their traffic info on Quantcast.  Why is that?  For competitive reasons?  If things were going great, I’d want the world to know.

And if people aren’t going to these websites for their info as much as they were, where are they going?  Has social media diluted the impact of the largest media vendors, including tech?

What do you think is happening?

NOTE: GigaOm was up significantly in year over year comparison.

Kevin

However, it’s important to note that mobile data is not included.  I actually read this article while taking a break from a blog post about my fishing website yearly analytics review.  This is going to be a yearly post where I briefly outline performance over the past 12 months relative to previous years.

Bing Organic Search for Mobile
When I returned to my analysis, I decided to look at the mobile traffic associated with organic search for this particular website.  Now, it’s important to note that this is a low traffic, niche website with only about 32,000 visits per year.  However, after looking at the data, it was clear that Google drove almost 100% of the mobile search traffic to this particular website.  In fact, I was only able to register a single mobile visit from Bing.  I immediately went to Bing with my Droid X (great phone, btw) to see if I had difficulty navigating to this website via Bing mobile search.  My queries produced good results for the terms my website usually performs well.

Perplexed, I checked various other higher traffic websites that I have access to analytics.  The result:  none showed much organic search traffic from Bing at all.  This tells me that between Android and iPhone, people are using the native Google search and not bothering using Bing.  Would they use Bing if it was the default?  Is search a commodity when compared between Google and Bing?  Is this less a brand game than one of distribution?

And didn’t Microsoft get into a bit of trouble bundling their browser with Windows?  There are similarities to an Android OS and Google search pre-installed, no?

What are your experiences with Bing organic search traffic?

Kevin

At some point early in the game, there was at least one bad egg that was being abusive to people.  Pretty soon verbal fights were breaking out all over the place and I can remember thinking that the place was filled with a bunch of kids with bad attitudes and too much time on their hands.  I was ready to just drop it and walk away, which would have disappointed me since I wanted to see Buzz succeed.  But I decided to stop following all the people who were involved and/or posting on topics I deemed too personal (my interests in Buzz were to primarily post professional topics).  Cleaning up my Buzz stream worked and I was once again fully active in the community, and a great one at that!

My desire to see Buzz succeed was driven by a feeling that the existing social platforms were either too personal (Facebook) or based on broadcasting and headline blasting (Twitter).  I felt that Facebook was fine for sharing photos with the family and Twitter was good for posting headlines for news I can relate to professionally.  However, Buzz seemed to be the engagement platform all the so called social media gurus/ninjas talked about.  They’ve been boasting about how businesses need to seek out and engage with their communities.  What better way to do this that within a platform that truly facilitates thorough conversations?  Buzz was perfect!  Well, maybe not.

So now months were going by and Buzz is starting to grow, while Google tries to fix some bugs (and a privacy issue here and there).  By the summer Buzz seems to be the perfect platform to discuss topics that are relevant to me, primarily industry related topics.  I’m finding as my posts become more popular, the amount of time needed to respond is growing tremendously.  Not only are the number of responses time consuming, but since we’re not limited to SMS size posts (i.e. Tweets), Buzz users tend to be extremely thorough in their comments.  Thorough comments usually require equally thorough comments if you are trying to explain a point.

But, I got into the groove with Buzz and really started to enjoy it.  Their small, but dedicated team was doing a great job jumping on little bugs and getting them fixed.  Hats off to the crew responsible for making Buzz happen.

But that wasn’t enough.  From my perspective (which will be argued by those active on Buzz now), Buzz lost momentum and started to deteriorate a few months ago.

Here’s why from my perpective:

1.  IMO, one of Buzz’s weaknesses is the community itself. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed engaging with most people there on most topics….except the topic of GOOGLE.  You had better duck and stay down if you ever say a bad word about Google on Buzz.  The community over defends Google, sometimes to extremes that seem ridiculous.  Now, Google is lucky to have such a strong following as any company would.  However, in a social environment, too much pro anything is a big turnoff for many (including myself).

2.  Integration with gmail is a negative to enough people.  Yes, logically, it’s just another account and people don’t have to use gmail itself.  However, perception ruled on this one and Buzz needed it’s own home, separated from gmail…never happened.

3. The mobile (Android) app is confusing at best.  It’s a bit tricky to explain if you’ve never used it (good odds on that), but you have to bounce back and forth between the app and the mobile web UI in order to be fully using Buzz on your mobile.  It’s also virtually unusable when posting links.  This app progressed quickly early on, then just stopped getting better quite a few months ago.

4.  Complete disconnect between the popular tech media and Buzz users.  Motivations aside for a moment, the tech folks would knock the service for usability, privacy issues and the Buzz community would be dumbfounded by their lack of complete acceptance.  Buzz users started telling the naysayers they weren’t using Buzz the right way…that they were “doing it wrong”.  Well, from my experience, telling people they are doing something wrong is surely going to turn them away.  The service better be easy to use and understand, particularly for early adopter, tech media types…or you as the service provider are the one doing it wrong.

5.  Poor cross-service distribution (push) functionality. Sure, it was easy to import Twitter headline blasts, but sloppy to export buzz to Twitter.  The best solution is to go through FeedBurner, which can take hours to chron and also truncates posts way too early in the character count.  So, basically, most Buzz -> Twitter posts were incomplete headlines.

6.  Google itself let Buzz go. I’m convinced that they decided a long time ago to drop Buzz and distance the company from the service.  Why else would a company time after time ignore opportunities to use their new service as a PR medium and instead post directly to Twitter?  If Twitter was where they wanted the message, they still could have started with Buzz.  Why else would we not see Googlers flooding the service in mass?  Why else would the heads of the company not bother posting anything, including the guy running their social program??  Every company needs to put a little PR and marketing behind their products, including Google.

There are also numerous usability issues that should have been addressed along the way.  However, all would have been just fine if the company stood behind this product and gave it the time and resources it deserved.

BTW, I still go back to Buzz once and a while because I wish it would turn around.  I keep hoping Google has something up their sleeve that will incorporate Buzz.  It seems less and less likely as time goes on.

Ultimately, your online success is represented by quantifiable metrics like sales, leads generated, registrations, customer acquisition and/or a specific type of user behavior.  As an online marketer, in order to optimize your campaigns to achieve those metrics, it’s important to understand the equation for success.  For example, if you are trying to achieve a certain number of leads each month, you need to how you will convert those leads and how much it will cost.  You will need to make certain assumptions based on as much fact as possible.  If you know how well your inbound traffic converts today, or how effectively similar businesses convert, you can use this data to project your expected returns:  ”Based on historical data, we will have to spend X dollars to produce Y # of leads for our business, which will result in Z revenue”.

However, what happens when you don’t convert business in-line with your projections or assumptions?  Where do you look for answers to optimization?  Answer:  Your equation needs to be expanded.  This equation should be built as your business model and it is better to have more measurable points of conversion.  For example, each medium, geography, conversion method should have their own assumptions and points of optimization review.  The more precise you can be with a weakness in your campaigns, the more capable you will be to make an effective optimization.

In addition, each point of measurement in your model needs to be analyzed accurately.  Effective measurement builds confidence in optimization activities, model projections and assumptions development.  The analytics tools we have available to use are quite robust these days.  My suggestion is to build your model and wish list of conversions for measurement.  Then build your systems around measuring these metrics.

The more you measure, the better you can optimize.

I needed a little advice on migrating and I posted the question on LinkedIn.  The generous responses were quick and concise.  It turns out that WordPress has an import feature…awesome!  I was excited to get moving, but this domain was hosted on a friend’s server which was a bit bare bones, without all the bells and whistles you get from new hosting services.  It has been there for about 10 or more years, but I needed more control.  So, I setup an account with a new hosting provider and moved my files over.  Then we changed the dns and all was ready to begin.

The new hosting provider made it easy to install WordPress.  A couple of clicks and I was working in the admin.  I spend an hour or so looking for a theme I liked and voila, we were in business.  Moments later I find the import function in WP and that process began.  Unfortunately, it didn’t work.  I was able to make the connection to blogger, but received a generic message that “nothing was imported”.  Frustrated, I tried this a few different ways still with no luck.

I decided to manually pull the content and post them in the new app.  On this blog it was easy since there are only a few posts.  However, I have hundreds of posts on my other blogs and will NOT be copying everything over manually.  I will need to investigate an alternative that helps ease this process.

Once the content was uploaded I made some changes to the templates and added a few widgets and we were done…almost.  Now I had two blogs running with the same content and that would not be good.  My hosting provider offers a redirect function from control panel.  All I had to do was setup redirects for all the pages and we were done.  Well, the redirect function did not work either.  There might have just been a delay, but either way I was not seeing the results I expected.  That meant I needed to edit the .htaccess file and manually plug in each redirect.  This would include the actual post pages and any other page indexed by the search engines.  A little time consuming, but not a huge problem either.

I then added a few more pages and some ads and the job was complete.  Overall, it took about 10 hours to complete, including time spent choosing a theme/template and tweaking the layout.  Another 3 – 5 hours should be enough to make the additional changes I would like.  I’m happy with the results.

So there you have it.  A small blogger ftp account converted to WordPress manually.  Now I have to tackle the larger blogs!

Kevin