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.

Well, the person on the phone recommended a “network extender” to enhance the signal in my house.  I said great, when can you send one out to me?  The answer was as soon as I could shell out $200+ for this little piece of hardware.  This did not make me happy at all and I eventually was so angry that I went over to AT&T wireless for the first time in my life.  Well, the relationship with AT&T was rocky from the start and ended with me saying some not so nice things to a CS person (sorry about that).

This altercation pushed me into the new world of smartphones and I ordered my first one…a Droid and went back to Verizon Wireless.  I wanted this phone because of the optional hard keyboard and the Google Android platform.  Not having this was my biggest fear at the time.  Anyway, I loved the phone.  It was amazing and I didn’t even use the hard keyboard.

At the time my Dad showed some interest in having one of these smartphones, so I made a deal with him.  I’d give him my Droid at a big discount and I could get a new Droid X.

Back to present day:  I’ve had the Droid X for about one month now and it’s pretty cool.  The size is nice…much bigger than the Droid and BB, but great for visuals on screen and clicking text links.  The camera is a HUGE improvement over the Droid.  If a good camera is important to you, don’t even bother with the Droid…it’s terrible.  Only in very specific lighting was I able to get good shots in.  The Droid X has 8 megapixels and you can really see the difference in quality.  I bought the car mount and a hard case for carrying also, which I highly recommend.

However, there are a few issues that have been bugging me about the phone.  For one, I have not been able to upgrade to Android 2.2.  There are some great enhancements there and I’ve  been waiting for a while (with no end in site).  If it’s coming soon I’d never know since I have no information about the release date.  The second thing that bugs me is the HDMI capabilities that are promoted so much.  I actually went out and bought the multimedia station and extra HDMI cable thinking I would be downloading HD movies to my phone and watching them on the TV.  That’s not going to happen anytime soon since there are no good apps/providers for HD content for download and display via the HDMI/TV.  Netflix doesn’t have an Android app yet and Blockbuster…well, stinks.  I could download a movie from Blockbuster, but I could only play it on the phone, not transfer it to the TV for viewing…weak.

One other thing I think needs a major upgrade is the “Car” mode and music management.  The Car mode is a great c0ncept, but listening to media in that mode is too basic.  There’s very little functionality, which is probably good for car mode but needs something more.  Music management for me on the phone is to use Itunes then drag and drop the media onto my phone.  This is ok, but will only work for so long.

Well, let me just wrap up by saying I love the phone…Droid X.  However, I’m also looking forward to some enhancements (oh, did I forget about the upgrade to gmail mobile, which is desperately needed?).  I highly recommend it from an old Blackberry user’s perspective!

Kevin

Google recently announced that it was going to provide a browser plugin that allowed anyone to opt out of being tracked by their metrics reporting product, Google Analytics.  From a normal user’s perspective, it sounds great that they are providing this type of flexibility.  However, Google has been pushing this (free) web reporting product for years as an enterprise-level solution for tracking web visitor activity.  And now, after gaining significant market share, they tell their customers people will have the option of easily opting out.  While adoption rates are projected to be low, this is not a friendly gesture to users of Google Analytics.

This move by Google has generated several discussions on the importance of web analytics in the world of web KPI reporting.  I have heard people say lately that “eyeballs” and “pageviews” are becoming less relevant and the impact of Google’s move is lessened by this change in the way we look at web analytics.  My answer to this discussion is that “eyeballs” and “pageviews” have never really been the metrics to watch on their own.  However, both can represent achieved objectives in the eyes of many businesses, and this can’t be ignored.

For example, due to the powerful downturn in the global economy, in late 2008 and 2009 many businesses were expanding into new areas of opportunity or contracting to focus on specific areas of business.  In either case, their messaging needed to be modified in order to properly communicate with existing and new customers.  Without properly communicating the change in messaging, these businesses would have a hard time generating leads, sales or other types of conversions.  People read content in many ways online, but many still do it the old fashioned way…they visit the company’s website.  So, in order to tell if people are effectively browsing your new content/messaging, a proper view of your website activity (analytics) is necessary.  It may not be eyeballs or pageviews, but your analytics application should give you the ability to view the equivalent.

Businesses that seek B2B lead conversions as their primary object also need to watch web activity.  Many businesses with long lead, or long sales cycles need to understand web user behavior better than fast converting products or services. Various important questions should be answered by your web analytics operation, including the following: What content are visitors looking at prior to conversion?  What content are they viewing and not converting?  Where are the breaks in my conversion funnel?

Once these and other questions are answered, the right reporting structure will give you the tools to optimize your web assets that will ultimately increase conversions.  So, don’t dismiss the importance of analyzing web activity.  It is likely more critical than you may think.

Kevin

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

The in-line Google translate feature is being tested on the website. So far, it works fairly well. You can still get around the website if your Chinese isn’t very good. We do plan to have multiple language versions, but the method of delivering that will probably be a combination of automated and manual translation.

So, take a look, get registered and feel free to send me an invite to network.

So, Google is now allowing users to search across forums outside the Google Groups platform. When we started to build the vision of Twing back in late 2006, one of the questions that arose during the business validation and competitive analysis processes was “If Google entered the market, what would happen to Twing?”. Of course, when you consider an 800 lb. gorilla like Google entering your space, there is always pause.

However, while your business could be greatly damaged by such a situation, there is also opportunity. One of the challenges we faced at Twing was mainstream awareness of “cross forum search”. Yes, it is true that more than 25% of the U.S. internet population uses online discussion forums. However, mainstream awareness about the benefits of this content is limited. Users tend to not understand the differences between different collection types.

In our case the comparison is simply between standard web results and discussion content found in forums. Online forum content is also very different from blogs (in their current mainstream form). We refer to forums as places where many to many discussions take place, or groups speaking amongst themselves. Blogs are usually individuals or entities that post broadcasts to other users. Blog comments can be referred to as discussions of sorts, but they are not the same as forums, in general.

Back to the point. Since awareness about our benefits was always a challenge, we viewed an entry from a major player (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Ask) as an opportunity to generate awareness. For example, if they implemented functionality that replicated ours, they would drive mainstream users to the product. Those (now converted believers in forum content) are possible users of Twing.

Oh, and there is one other reason it’s not all bad Google is getting into our space. It helps justify our belief that this is a growing opportunity, not something of the past.

Now that you have a little insight into our positive way of thinking at Twing, I need to get back to figuring out how to battle the fully armed cruiser on my tail doing 40 knots! (Thanks for the analogy Scott)

Anyway, since you read all the way through this blog post (thank you), have a look at Twing if you are interested in searching forums and online discussions. We think we have done a pretty good job.

Kevin Shea