Earth to McDonalds.com: It's 2009

Last night I had an urge for a delicious caramel Sunday from McDonalds. Where better to find nutritional facts about MickyD's than McDonalds.com? So I visited and Ba da bum bum bum... I'm *not* loving it.

Surgeon General's Warning: The McDonalds.com home page may induce nausea and a loss of appetite. In other words, you might be seeing that Happy Meal again...

McDonalds.com Ingredients: a flash landing page, fixed-width tables used for layout, low-quality images, and a navigation bar outclassed by most homemade DVD menus.

@McDonalds:

It's 2009. Not 1999. Your website is as fashionable as trans fats and you are losing value because of it.

You're #17 in the world with ad spending. The world. 1.7 billion dollars on advertising a year. You're #1 amongst quick-serve restaurants in online marketing spending.  That's 10 million display ads a day. These are impressive numbers.

Your website gets over a million unique visitors each month and you greet your visitors with a severely outdated, aesthetically nauseating, dysfunctional website. Your web strategy is lacking balance: extravagant ad spending is driving traffic to a website that tarnishes your brand when it should be polishing it.  Large online ad buys demand a well designed website.

Let's try and put this in perspective. Imagine your monumental restaurant that opened on Times Square some 7 years ago. Sure, this isn't your busiest location in the world, but even if it were, it would see less visitors in a month than your website. Now imagine the owners of the Times Square location refused to clean or maintain it since it opened. This is what your website is doing for your brand.

Here are some quick ideas to improve your internet marketing strategy:

• Find a new internet team. It is hard to tell if the current site was designed by the CEO’s nephew or by an expensive, outdated ad agency that doesn’t get interactive. Either way, fire them. Find an agency or design firm that understands the web.
• Build a website for 2009. You're going to have a hard time convincing the iPhone generation McDonalds is worthy of "lovin' it" when your mobile site is designed for the WAP/WML phones of the early 2000s and lacks interesting content like nutritional facts.  Get rid of the tables, inaccessible flash, and put as much effort in carrying your brand properly on your site as you do in your commercials.
• Pay attention to your social streams. There are 3 McDonalds Facebook Pages that collectively have 1.5 million fans and they aren't monitored. These are being used host radical political messages, and offensive photos and comments right beside of your golden arches. Get more involved with Twitter. Join the online conversation.
• Get some dynamic content!  In the News section of your current site, there are literally no stories from 2008. You should even take the next step and add a Blog to your site.  Give your famous brand an online voice by blogging about corporate news, trends, interesting facts, and McDonald's happenings.  By putting your site on a Content Management System (looks like it currently isn't), you could easily have dynamic content on your site.

As we move into a new year, @McDonalds, consider bringing your website along for the ride. The internet is quite nice in 2009. With an improved site you'll see million of people a month smile... and we all know that's what you love.

Internet Marketing New Year's Resolutions

We all have resolutions for the new year, whether it's to save money or shed some extra pounds, the goal of a resolution is to always better ourselves in some way.  Companies also tend to make resolutions and goals for a new year with the same end result in sight of improving upon the previous year.

At NMC, we sat down a couple of weeks ago to etch out our resolutions and goals for the new year and many of them focused on how we market ourselves online.  I figured that I would share our Internet Marketing resolutions with everyone, thinking that they may also serve as a good model for your organization in the coming year as you move your marketing dollars move online in the tough economy.

1. Blog, Blog, Blog - We really began posting with frequency around September of 2008.  In that time, we've been averaging around 4 posts per week.  That's a great starting number, as it makes sure we have fresh content nearly every day of the business week.  However, we'd really like to crank up the content generation in the coming year and multiply that by threefold to bring our total to 12 a week.  We plan on accomplishing this by having more of our team contribute and branching our blog into different mini-blogs relevant to specific audiences such as developers, political clients, small businesses, etc.  This is a bold goal, but we think we can accomplish it by working together and the benefits will be great for our SEO, content resources, and Blog subscriber count.
2. Search Engine Optimization - In the past year, we've improved in many SEO rankings and our page rank has increased from a 4 to a 6 in just four months.  However, we want to continue optimizing for the terms for which we don't yet rank as high as we'd like.  One of our main focuses will be ranking highly for Raleigh web design and other geographic qualifiers that will help local businesses find us.  We plan on accomplishing this goal by continuing to build links within our blog posts, creating great content, winning mentions from outside sites, and submitting directories.  The fact that resolution #1 contributes directly to #2 is no accident and demonstrates the importance of a business blog.
3. Rework Homepage Design - We're very keen on our website design, but would like to make some changes to the homepage to make it more functional.  Currently, we're dedicating a lot of valuable real estate to the image rotation and not saying so much about our firm, services, and philosophy.  We'd like to add some function to the homepage by adding more copy about who we are and what we do and also giving visitors the opportunity to quickly jump to the content that's most relevant to them.  Whether it's our Content Management System for designers or our political website portfolio, we want targeted niches to have quick access to the content that they want to see.

These are our top 3 Internet Marketing resolutions for the New Year.  They're all quite achievable and will greatly benefit our business.  As you can see, these are all very cost-efficient methods to grow our business and require nothing else but some good elbow grease from our team.

Did you set online marketing resolutions for your organization?  How are you going to achieve them?  Good luck to everyone with their resolutions and I encourage you to check back here frequently to hold us to ours!

New Page Rank for a New Year

Page Rank is the cornerstone of Google's search engine algorithm.  Every website that Google indexes is assigned a Page Rank, which is what Google believes the "importance" of that site is on a 0-10 scale.  The way that Google discerns the importance of a page is based on the legitimacy of other websites linking to your site.

The more legitimate the sites and the more in number that link to you, the higher your page rank will be. The algorithm believes that if you're worthy of earning links from other trustworthy sites, then you too are a reliable site worthy of a good page rank.

Google does not divulge the specific details of the algorithm or how frequently it is updated.  From searching the blogosphere it looks like the last Page Rank update was September 2008...until today.  From what I can tell, it looks like Page Rank was updated today as our site and personal blogs pretty much all had a new rank.  New Media Campaigns is now a Page Rank 6, which we're very excited about.

A 6 is a pretty powerful PR and will give us more authority when linking to pages within our own site with targeted keyword phrases and will also let us pass along more PR juice to other sites that we link to.  Page Rank takes awhile to build up, and I attribute our recent jump to our increased blogging frequency, press related to votethesite.com (now a 4), and subscription to some new directories such as Yahoo!.

Kudos to Katy Barrilleaux for tweeting that she noticed a Page Rank change this morning, which led me to investigate it on my own.

Happy New Year to everyone!

Top 10 Most Important Online Political Events of 2008

Our political web design firm watched and participated in the 2008 elections with great interest and vigor.  2008 was possibly the watershed year for online politics where all candidates finally realized that the Internet wasn't just a fad or a gaming platform, but actually serves as perhaps the most powerful and efficient tool to mobilize volunteers and win votes.

There were many success and failures in the 08 cycle, below is the list of the top 10 that we put together.  If you have ideas for other events that we left off, be sure to leave them in the comments.  Also, we invite you to vote in our poll and weigh in on what you think were the most important online political events of 2008.  In the New Year, we'll release the final results of the poll and the most popular events that people felt we left off our list.

Enjoy the list and please join the conversation by leaving a comment or voting in the poll!

10.  Mitt Romney's YouTube Ad Contest - Romney crowdsourced an ad that actually ran on TV.  The campaign gave supporters an opportunity to make their own ad using Jumpcut's video editing technology.  While Moveon.org and Chevrolet had used similar strategies before, Romney was the first of the 08 candidates to use the technique and it was a great success garnerning 129 impressive submissions and producing this final ad.

9.  5 Friends YouTube Video - An independent, funny, non-partisan viral video of celebrities urging people to vote.  The video embraced the viral nature of the web and encouraged people to pass along the Google Polling Place Locator to 5 of their unregistered friends.  The video and its sequel garnered more than 5 million views, mentions on hundreds of blogs, and were highlighted by many mainstream media outlets.

8.  YouTube Debates - At first the Republicans were hesitant of having a debate mediated by questions submitted via YouTube, but in the end, both parties hosted fun, but rather non-controversial, YouTube debates.  Itwas undoubtedly the first time debate questions had been asked in the form of songs and there was added emotion when soldiers in uniform asked about national security plans, which made the debates an interesting and innovative experiment.  Also, as the debates were co-sponsored by CNN and YouTube, it was an interesting and prophetic meshing of new and old media.

7. Ron Paul's Online Fundraising - While most of the online fundraising attention was directed at Barack Obama, almost more impressive is what Ron Paul was able to do as a longshot candidate that wasn't even allowed to participate in the debates.  No backing from the party and little media coverage didn't stop Paul from setting a GOP one-day record for online fundraising by hauling in $4.2 million in 24 hours on November 5, 2008.  It was all due to an independent grass roots campaign tie to the commemoration of Guy Fawkes Day through YouTube videos, blogs, and social networks.

6.  Disorganization of McCain's Online Campaign - While Obama's campaign will go down as the prototype for a new media campaign, McCain seemed to be stuck in the stone ages.  Obama had dozens of staffers dedicated solely to online operations, while many reports have the McCain campaign dedicating fewer than 5 people to the web campaign.  While Obama's campaign was busy mobilizing millions of volunteers through the web, McCain was content to go on the record saying he did not know how to e-mail.  The lack of online effort by McCain is almost as significant as Obama's innovation, as it defined McCain as a candidate of the past that didn't understand today's generation.

5.  Politico.com, HuffingtonPost.com, Fivethirtyeight.com - In this election, it seemed as Internet news sites had the upperhand on most of their "traditional" counterparts.  By being flexible and quick to update, these sites were the go-to sources for the obsessed campaign watchers that wanted the latest breaking news.  Their style forced media stalwarts to change their style and be more willing to update news on the fly and have permanent blogs on their homepages.

4.  Obama Driving Online Signups Through VP Text Promise - While this event wasn't strictly online, there's no way we could leave it off the list.  Obama's VP announcement text was able to signup millions of interested voters, many of those registered online or were pushed to the website to further engage with the campaign.  The VP announcement was texted to nearly 3 million mobile devices.  Over the coming months, Obama would use the numbers to push people to the campaign website, have them watch the DNC, and thank them for their support.

3.  Hulu, YouTube, Blogs, etc on Tina Fey's Palin Impression  - Fey's impression of the VP candidate may go down as the most famous impression in history.  The videos have garnered more than 20 million views on NBC.com and YouTube, and more importantly, it let Fey define Palin before the Governor could do so on her own terms.  Without the web, the impression would not have been nearly as ubiquitous and "mavericky" may have never entered our vernacular, however, through video sharing sites, the video was able to reach an audience exponentially larger than a typical Saturday Night Live broadcast.  Not only loved by the public, the impression was also a critical success, leading to Fey being named one of TIME's people of the year and the AP Entertainer of the Year.

2.  My.BarackObama.com - While other candidates were happy setting up supporter pages on Facebook and MySpace profiles, Barack Obama took it to the next level by hiring one of the Facebook founders and "re-inventing the wheel" by building his own social network, my.barackobama.com (MyBo).  More than 1 million people registered with MyBo, but the power of MyBo wasn't just registrants but the tools that the site put at their disposal.  Unlike the other campaigns, Obama used his social network to mobilize volunteers and give them the tools to fundraise and engage friends.  In the end, according to the P2P foundation, more than 1 billion emails were sent from MyBo, over 100,000 events had been scheduled, and hundreds of millions of dollars had been raised.

1.  Campaign Websites Finally Come Into Their Own.  This was the first election year in which every Presidential candidate put forth a significant effort online.  In '04, Dean was the first to really "get it" and use his site as more than just a brochure.  This year, every candidate, specifically Clinton, Edwards, Obama, and Romney embraced the Web by having social networks, active bloggers, flash video, user generated content, and more.  The revolution wasn't just limited to these top level campaigns, as many Congressional level and even state races embraced the web as the engaging, efficient, and effective medium that it has become.

 

That's our top 10 list.  Let us know in the comments what we left out and be sure to vote in our poll for the most important online political events of 2008.  Some close runners up were Sarah Silverman's Great Schlep, the Google Polling Place Locator, and the GOP crowdsourcing their platform.

We're excited to see the new online political innovations in 2009; what this year did most successfully was convey the importance of online efforts to campaigns at every level.  

For more insights on the everchanging landscape of online politics, sign up for our online campaigning newsletter.

Launch of New PHP Framework, Recess!

We are very proud to announce that one of New Media's founding partners, Kris Jordan, has completed and launched a new PHP framework named Recess!  Kris has spent the past few months, much of it from the NMC office, developing the framework and preparing it for launch.  As a gift to PHP developers everywhere, Kris released the framework on Christmas.

Recess succeeds where other PHP frameworks have failed.  Just about all other PHP frameworks have fallen behind, especially in the department of RESTful development -- Kris developed the framework with these shortcomings in mind.  He took inspiration from what Ruby on Rails and Django get right, what PHP5 allows, and what has been left out of other PHP frameworks.

The team at NMC has high hopes for the framework and is dedicated to helping it succeed.  Our team of developers plans on rewriting our Content Management Software in the Recess framework, and we've already developed a couple of custom applications in the framework while we were beta testing it.

The development team at NMC is well versed in many different frameworks, and we have confidence that Recess outperforms them all and is well on its way to becoming a mainstay in the realm of PHP frameworks.

If you're looking for a powerful and modern PHP framework, I encourage you to register to preview Recess.  Congrats again to Kris on all of the work he put in and the success that he is already experiencing.

Loss of Industry Pioneer - Mike Connell

Online politics tragically lost an industry pioneer over the weekend.  Michael Connell was killed Friday night when his plane crashed in Akron, Ohio.  Connell was the founder of of New Media Communications, a Cleveland-based political web firm for Republicans.  The firm has replaced their homepage with a tribute to Connell.

Connell was one of the most innovative and successful thinkers in the online political space.  He was in charge of online outreach for both of President Bush's campaigns and served as the lead online consultant for dozens of Gubernatorial and US Senate races.

Being a partner at a political web design firm, myself, I was always impressed with the formidable business and client list Connell was able to assemble in a short period of time.  Personally, I will always remember the phenomenal work he did for Dick DeVos in the 2006 Michigan Gubernatorial campaign; to this day, that was the best use of video blogging that I have ever seen.

As a Cleveland, OH native involved in politics, I frequently heard stories about Connell, his firm, and their great work.  Whenever we competed for business, I considerd it an honor to be in consideration with such an industrty veteran.  He will be missed, but will always be remembered as a pioneer.  

A scholarship has been created by Mike's family and friends to benefit his four children that he left behind.  You can visit the scholarship page and make a donation here.

Tales From an Intern: Some People Just Don't Get It

I drove home to Greensboro, NC today.  On the way in, I dropped by the Mexican restaurant where I used to work.  When I walked in, I was thrilled to see two of my old bosses (friends of mine) meeting with the regional manager (another friend).

There's something that I just love about catching up with people who you used to spend hours with each day (especially if one of those people owes you lunch because he thought McCain would win the presidency).  

So I walked over to the table where they were meeting and sat down.  

The conversation shifted to memories and co-workers.  We reminisced about playing rock-paper-scissors to see who had to fix the clogged toilet (I lost) and I made sure to remind my boss about his little lunch debt, just in case he'd forgotten. 

As I was about to get up and get some food, I asked what they were meeting about.  

The regional manager told me, "We need to cut some more hours."

And that's when the flood of frustrating memories washed over me.  In a market with six virtually identical Tex-Mex restaurants within 7 miles of each other, when the only real differentiating factor is the customer's experience, the corporate response to decreasing sales was always cutting hours. 

I just can't understand that thought process.  Sales are down, food costs are up, so let's make (insert name of $7-an-hour employee here) leave early.  That'll fix it.

Well it didn't and it won't.  In exchange for that $7 (that's one burrito), the company understaffed the store for an hour.  That means everyone working was more stressed, customer interaction was tense and rushed and the restaurant eliminated any chance to provide remarkable service.

What makes it even worse is that Qdoba preaches the importance of customer service to better its word-of-mouth marketing.  

And that reminded me of why I'm glad to be working for NMC.  I get paid by the hour here too.  But I can't imagine being asked to hurry up with my work when it might mean sacrificing quality.  NMC talks a lot about valuing customer service, but it also acts like it values customer service.  
 
Here are four other articles on the importance of customer service:

• http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/customerservice.html
• http://www.zazlamarr.com/blog/?p=240
• http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/06/learning-from-f.html
• http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2006/04/the_art_of_cust.html

Anybody else have a good one?

Top 5 Improvements of ESPN.com Redesign

Today, ESPN launched a beta version of their redesigned website.  The New York Times wrote about the site and the main goals behind it.

The new site is aimed at simplifying a visitor's experience by reducing the amount of clutter on the homepage.  The goal is to encourage visitors to delve deeper into the site and view more pages. ESPN was concerned that the overflow of information on the old homepage led people to bounce off and not necessarily delve into the site.

The new beta site feels like a definite improvement over the previous version.  Here are the 5 best things that ESPN did differently.

1. Removed Automatic Playing Video - On the old site, a video of highlights in the top right would start automatically playing upon your arrival to the site - this was counter-internet.  We use the internet to seek information, not have information pushed on us like television does.  The video that played was not one that a visitor was likely to be looking for. Instead it stole attention from looking for the information actually desired. Also, even though it was a minor graphical element of the design in the top right corner, by playing media, it stole attention from the most important news highlighted in the middle of the page.
2. Personalization of Information - Immediately available on the new site is an option for "My Headlines."  This feature allows visitors to personalize the information they see, making it much easier to get the news they find important.  By making this a prominent feature of the homepage, it entices visitors to click through to more interior pages and spend more time on the site.
3. Simpler Navigation - The new site has streamlined the main navigation by hiding the inactive sports.  The previous site had 36 links on the top block of the homepage; that number has now been reduced to 19, and the links have been cleaned up to better fit the design.  It makes it easier to find and click on the news that a visitor cares the most about. 
4. Larger Feature Video - The new video is 16x9 and displayed as a central part of the homepage; this is key. It allows ESPN to editorialize on what is important (which is their purpose) and takes advantage of their audience's faster computers.  They have traditionally been a leader in web technology and also led the way in the migration to compliant browsers.
5. Cleaner Homepage Layout - Underneath the main video player and headlines, the new site has 3 more main columns and rows of information/ads.  The sections are all lined up nicely and each content area in a given row is the same size.  This makes it much easier to scan the homepage and find information than it was on the old site.  Previously, the homepage was full of content boxes that varied in size and didn't line up to adjacent boxes, making it very hard for the eye to read over the page.

Overall, ESPN did a really great job with the redesign.  Currently, the site is a traffic hub that captures nearly 50 percent of total minutes spent by Internet users watching sports video and the seventh most total video streams, according to Nielsen Video Census.  So, you can be sure that other media companies will be taking close notes of the design and eagerly awaiting ESPN to report the new traffic data from the redesign.

In addition to improving the user experience on the site, there is also a more corporate goal - the new design gives advertisers eight options to purchase ads on the most popular pages rather than the three that the old site had.  This increase in ads was one of the motivating factors for the redesign, as the NY Times points out that Disney, ESPN's parent company, was disappointed in soft ad sales by the channel in the most recent quarter.  However, it seems that ESPN did not sacrifice tact for revenue, as the new ad placements are not distracting, and they even eliminated the distracting banner ad up top.

What are your thoughts on the design?  Where does this design put the ESPN site relative to other media company sites such as the NYT or WSJ?

Consumers Trust Search Engines More Than Traditional Media

A recent Forrester Research study shows the breakdown of how much consumers trust different information sources.  Search engines come in third place only behind email from friends and consumer reviews.

This data is somewhat surprising since search engine results can be manipulated through Search Engine Optimization efforts, which sometimes go as far as Google Bombs.  However, this research is also a great validation to the importance of internet marketing efforts and well designed websites.  With people placing so much trust in search engines, it reaffirms the importance of Search Engine Optimization and being in front of potential clients. 

Knowing the importance of search engine results also demonstrates the importance of making sure your site looks like a trustworthy source.  People looking for reliable information or vendors on a search engine will quickly discredit you if your web presence is lackluster and untrustworthy.  It's important that the quality of your website compliments the quality of your online marketing strategy.

Another interesting tidbit from the report is that corporate blogs are the least trustworthy information source to consumers.  This is a disappointing trend as blogs should be the most honest outlet for corporations to disseminate information and voice opinions.  However,very public errors, such as the Wal-Mart blog fiasco, have caused consumers to be more hesitant when using company blogs as an information source.  The report is very clear that this should not serve as evidence against blogging, but rather as encouragement to do it in an honest and engaging fashion.

Another interesting aspect of the report is that consumers are more likely to trust email from a company rather than direct mail, supporting the value of email marketing vs. direct mail.

Overall, new media fared very well in the report often times beating out its traditional media counterpart.  It will be interesting to see how this trend adjusts over the next year as people become more savvy online and the space also becomes more crowded. 

By making sure to project yourself in a trustworthy manner online, through well designed sites and honest content, you have the opportunity to continue effectively influencing consumers in a cost effective manner through SEO and online marketing.

Growing (Staches) With Our Clients

For the second year in a row, we built the website for the Charlotte Chapter of Mustaches for Kids.  The group was started by Joe Romanelli, president of Romanelli Communications, one of our ad agency partners that uses our content management system for designers.  While we worked on the site last year, we did not participate in the event.

However, Joe used his superior salesmanship this year to get Joel and myself involved in the organization as growers.  So, for the past 4 weeks, we've subjected ourselves to public shame as we grew mustaches.  Joel's could best be characterized as a "trash stache" while mine would more aptly be described as non-existent.

It was a lot of fun to be involved and the organization was extremely successful.  This year the growers raised over $50,000!!  That's not even including matching funds from institutions around Charlotte.  By being the most successful chapter in the nation, M4K Charlotte also won an additional $75,000 from the Knight Foundation to distribute to schoolroom charities around Charlotte.

Not only did we grow staches for the organization, but we also built out some custom features to help engage and excite the growers.  Each grower had the ability to create their own profile on the website.  With the profile, they could easily edit their information and post pictures of their stache's progress.

By integrating with DonorsChoose, a non-profit aimed crowdsourcing funding for projects posted by teachers around the country, visitors were able to visit the M4k website, view growers' profiles, and easily donate to their favorite participant.

The website was a great hit and allowed growers to have full control of their web personas, leading to some very funny profiles.

Congrats again to Mustaches for Kids Charlotte and to all of the "talented" growers and wonderful donors!