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Verizon Droid: iDon't Understand Microsite Search Engine Optimization
Kris Jordan
Kris Jordan leads web programming & development at New Media Campaigns; Kris previously worked for Microsoft's Developer Division, and studied Computer Science at Brown University and UNC Chapel Hill. You should follow Kris on Twitter.
I've been waiting for Verizon to announce a competitive smart phone for a quite some time. With a barely functional, 3 year old Motorola Q you better believe the first time I saw the much talked about "iDon't" commercial running during a ballgame I to ran to grab my notebook to check out the campaign's microsite: DroidDoes.com.
Big Red is flexing its marketing muscle to hype its self-proclaimed iPhone killer on all major mediums: TV, direct mail, Google ads, you name it. "Everything iDon't Droid does." Like the TV ad, these other pieces drive users to the microsite, too. With this big of an ad spend and a first-class partnership with Google you would think the microsite would be out of this world good.
As far as microsites and marketing landing pages go, DroidDoes.com is out of this world bad. Google should be embarrassed of how their Android Experience phone is being marketed. Not only is DroidDoes.com 100% flash but the flash itself isn't being indexed by Google, the content behind the flash is embarrasingly bad (pictured below), and you can't link to features you've navigated to within the microsite.
"Don't you wish you had a sidekick robot that moved at light speed?" This is what Google (via Google cache) sees when it visits DroidDoes.com and its indexing algorithm tries to figure out what the Droid is about. Google doesn't care about the fancy flash techniques or the robovoice saying "droid". Google cares about content, not flash.
When Google has access to meagingful content it can read, i.e. plain old "semantic" HTML, Google does a lot of work on your behalf. Check out what you get when you search for 'iPhone':
Not only do you get a link to the web site, but Google provides links to the other places on the iPhone website a visitor is likely to want to go and brings them directly there. This is possible because Apple's iPhone content is properly crafted using semantic HTML. Apple also used a meangingful meta description allowing Google to succinctly describe and position the iPhone.
Contrast this with the official result on a search for 'Droid':
Because subpages don't exist, Google can't do a better job linking you to the things a Droid-seeker is looking for: how to buy, features, support, apps, etc. The DroidDoes microsite is one gigantic flash file Google can't link to. The DroidDoes.com website team should be even more embarrassed of their meta description which doesn't describe what Droid is, at all. Upon further inspection there is more to the meta description than meets the eye:
"Get to know Droid a little better. Droid Does the Network. Droid is exclusive to Verizon Wireless, the most reliable network available. Droid Does Android 2.0. Droid contains a new exclusive version of the OS. Droid Does Multitasking. Make a call, answer an email and launch multiple apps simultaneously. Droid Does 10,000+ Apps. Gain power with every app. Droid runs multiple apps simultaneously. Droid Does 5 Megapixels. With a built in flash and 5 megapixels of detail - enhancing resolution, you can capture low light, fleeting moment in detail."
What DroidDoes.com doesn't know is that Google caps meta descriptions at around 160 characters. The DroidDoes microsite's description is 550 characters. No one will ever see the meat of their description because it is too long.
Everything DroidDoes.com uShouldn't on a Microsite
Most of us don't have multi-million dollar budgets to launch and hype advertising campaigns on the scale Verizon has taken its Droid campaign. For all the money they are throwing at consumers they are losing valuable, targetted inbound traffic because of the many poor technical decisions making up DroidDoes.com. With tighter budgets the rest of us can't afford to make these microsite mistakes. Here are a few high-level lessons to take away:
- Do not build 100% flash based microsites
- Especially if the flash file is not created carefully for Google to index
- Especially if you can't link directly to locations within the Flash file
- Always have meaningful HTML content for search engines to index
- Meta description should be less than 160 characters long and descriptive
- Use language and keywords that people search for to find your microsite (i.e. not 'always wanted a pocket robot?' when you're selling a phone)
- Content for all images and flash should also be in HTML
The Droid is going to be Verizon's most compelling smart phone. It's Google's most complete Android phone and first in the Android 2.0 line. Yet the Droid's promotional microsite is underwhelming, clunky, and out-of-touch with the internet of 2009. If your marketing budget isn't that of a Fortune 500 company you can't afford to make the same inbound marketing mistakes with your microsite as the hotshots at Verizon who decided to promote an internet phone that can't play flash videos using only flash video.
- Do not build 100% flash based microsites
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Quickly Build and Share a Sitemap with a jQuery Sitemap Creator
Joel Sutherland
Joel Sutherland leads operations at NMC where he has launched over 250 sites and served as lead developer on the company's CMS which serves millions of unique visits each year. Joel has an Honors Degree in Computer Science from UNC Chapel Hill where he was a Morehead Scholar. Follow Joel on Twitter.
A while back we saw the SlickMap CSS that generated a sitemap from nested unordered lists and we were inspired. Since the DOM is so easy to manipulate using jQuery, why couldn't we build a nice and quick sitemap creator? With a little bit of free-time hacking, we came up with the HiFi Sitemap Creator.
With this tool it is easy to create and collaborate on a sitemap. Using the textbox on the left, you can build textile-like nested lists. This instantly updates the sitemap to the left. When you click the save button, a custom link is generated for your sitemap. Share this with a client and they can see and edit the very same sitemap! They can even make changes and send a link back.
Additionally, since this is based on CSS it prints beautifully:
This was largely based around the Slickmap CSS and jQuery. Some custom functions were written to translate the textile list to and from html. This will allow us to add cool features like edit-in-place and drag-and-drop in the future. For now though, we really like being able to quickly type plain text and see generate a good-looking sitemap.
We also used the Recess PHP Framework to build a RESTful key-value store for the saved sitemaps. This took no time at all becuase of the great scaffolding and tools it has out of the box. It was my first time integrating Recess and jQuery and it couldn't have gone better.
Check out the final product and be sure to leave comments and suggestions on how to improve it.
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Highlighting Raleigh with a jQuery Microsite
Joel Sutherland
Joel Sutherland leads operations at NMC where he has launched over 250 sites and served as lead developer on the company's CMS which serves millions of unique visits each year. Joel has an Honors Degree in Computer Science from UNC Chapel Hill where he was a Morehead Scholar. Follow Joel on Twitter.
Recently, one of our partners, Liaison Design Group came to us with a fun sounding project. One of our clients wanted to build a microsite that highlighted some of the Raleigh buildings that would be interesting to corporations looking to relocate.
The plan was to cycle through a number of the buildings and show where they were located in Raleigh on a map at the same time. The client already had a site on our Content Management System, so ideally, this section would be controlled by the CMS as well.
We decided the easiest way to make this happen was with jQuery. The client would upload some images of the building, content about the building, and coordinates of the buildings location and the CMS/jQuery would take care of the rest.
Some key takeaways
Animate position, not just opacity or size
The most eye-catching part of the project is the star that slides around on the map. With jQuery, it is often natural to use the built in animation functions like
fadeIn(),show(), orslideUp(). Some of the coolest effects can be done when moving something around on a page.Start with the data first
We knew we wanted this to be easy to maintain for the client, so before I even considered what I would need to do with jQuery, I set up the CMS to produce useful html. Currently, each of the six buildings has its own page, with a gallery attached. The client can add pages, change pages, reorder pages or edit the pages and there are no adjustments required. The same pages even drive the "Learn More" content.
Keep it simple
This follows from the above takeaway. When you keep your html simple, your jQuery will be simple as well. This project just has about 50 lines that make it all happen and it doesn't depend on another plugin. When possible, have your jQuery limited to DOM manipulation and animation. Let CSS handle the rest.
If you've got any questions or comments on the project, let me know in the comments.
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Vote the Site Final Report Released!
Clay Schossow
Clay Schossow leads New Media Campaigns' project management and business development efforts. A graduate of UNC Chapel Hill, he has guided more than 200 websites from concept to launch. He is a frequent writer on Internet marketing and online campaigning. You should follow him on Twitter.
In late October, we decided to work on a side project known as Vote the Site. The site let visitors vote on which candidate had the better campaign website. Visitors could vote on any Congressional level race or higher. In addition to the marketing benefits of a microsite, our goal was to gather a significant piece of data and see if there is a correlation between a good campaign website and successful campaign.
After gaining more than 15,000 votes, we're confident that we had a pretty significant data set. The results were certainly interesting and confirmed our original hypothesis about the link between a good campaign site and a successful campaign. The data gathered will definitely help us, as a political web design firm, sell potential clients on the importance of a high quality online campaign. Here's a quick snapshot of the report:
- Campaigns that won on Vote the Site were nearly twice as likely to win the actual election
- Campaigns that lost on Vote the Site were 1.33x more likely to lose the actual election
- Democrats won 65% of the online campaigns
- Action centers are nearly ubiquitous, with 75% of campaigns featuring them on the homepage of the campaign site.
- Online video has spiked in popularity with over half of all campaigns featuring video on the homepage
- For more detailed information, go view the report or download it in PDF format.
We encourage you to forward the report along to your friends, share with your clients, and use to make informed decisions.
We're very pleased with the results and with the success of VTS. Thousands of people viewed and voted on the site, it earned media attention from across the country, it referred interested visitors onto New Media Campaigns, and it was an exiciting experiment. Vote the Site turned out to be a great marketing technique for us, and I am confident that we will launch other side projects in the future after this successful microsite campaign.
Do the results surprise you? What is your take on the data we gathered? Thanks again for everyone's participation and help in making this project a success.
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The Success of Our Microsite Marketing Strategy
Clay Schossow
Clay Schossow leads New Media Campaigns' project management and business development efforts. A graduate of UNC Chapel Hill, he has guided more than 200 websites from concept to launch. He is a frequent writer on Internet marketing and online campaigning. You should follow him on Twitter.
We launched our microsite votethesite.com exactly 7 days before election day. We had grand ambitions of gaining thousands of visitors and thousands of votes to the site, hoping to be able to figure out the correlation between a successful online campaign and an actual election victory. We knew that this was a bold undertaking that had a chance of failing, but we were excited about the prospects of the project and thought it could gain some traction. Also, before launching the microsite, we put together a comprehensive strategy on how to successfully market our microsite and reach our traffic goals.
We adhered to our strategy and were able to accomplish our goals for the site. My original goals with votethesite.com were to have 2,000 unique visitors and 10,000 votes. I thought these were lofty goals that would both achieve a significant sample of data and also gain our company some recognition. By the evening of the election, we had over 3,000 unique visitors and 14,000 votes, exceeding both goals by more than 30%! Beating our goals was extremely exciting, but it would not have been possible without our original microsite marketing strategy or a group of others that helped spread the word about votethesite.
We first sent the site to our friends and family, encouraging them to check out the site and make it their Facebook status, Tweet about it, etc. This was a great first step - it got us around 300 initial visitors and 1,000 early votes. This group was even more rock star than we ever expected when it came to discussing the votethesite on social networks. In the end, votethesite.com was the Facebook status for more than two dozen people (leading to 155 unique visits), tweeted about more than 50 times, and linked to from various other profiles and away messages. These friends and family were able to help us get off to a quick start, and they demonstrated the importance and reach of the individuals in your immediate network.
From there, it was time to engage strangers and see if they liked the idea as much as our friends. We sent the site out to all of the campaigns that we featured on the site. We didn't expect much out of this and were surprised when we immediately got emails from candidates thanking us for featuring them and for having us update their screenshot. When anyone asked us to update their image or include different information, we were quick to oblige, because we knew that if we took care of them, they were more likely to pass it along to others.
The strangers that really helped us take off were news aggregators and the blogosphere. We submitted the site to Digg, Reddit, and Hacker News. Digg never really caught on - a visitor of the site submitted it without us know and didn't insert a descriptive name, just the link to the site, so people weren't really pushed to click it. However, we made hard pushes on the other two networks.
We submitted the site on Reddit under the title "Vote for Politicians Based on Their Web Design" and got more than 30 ups. One important thing is that we submitted it in the Web_Design thread, making sure that it was in front of the most relevant audience that would be interested in the topic. More than 7,000 people subscribe to this feed and it shot to #1 in their feeds, which was a great push for us. In the end, Reddit pushed almost 500 people to the microsite and engaged them to the point where they spent more than 8 pages/visit on the site. Similarly, on Hacker News, we referred people to our blog posts about the site and pushed them to go directly to the site. It's hard to know the exact number of views that HN generated views, but I would estimate it was around 1,000.
Finally, we were fortunate enough to get some love from the blogosphere. None bigger than being featured on the homepage of Download Squad, which ended up driving nearly 400 visitors to the site. Also, several other, smaller blogs picked up the site, accounting for around 100 visits.
I know this doesn't add up to the 3,000 unique visitors, but the majority of the visits came directly to the site - I would wager that most of them saw it on one of the news aggregators, a social network, or a blog and just typed the URL in rather than clicking on the link.
We had a great rush of pride after accomplishing our goal, but it was accompanied with a sense of graciousness for all of those that passed our site along. It just goes to show that if you create something interesting or continue generating good content, your idea can get traction on the web. It's good to approach every marketing situation with an executable strategy, but the most important part is that you really believe in the idea and how it could help/entertain different people.
Thanks again to everyone and stay tuned for the final voting results from votethesite.com!
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Votethesite.com Featured on Download Squad!
Clay Schossow
Clay Schossow leads New Media Campaigns' project management and business development efforts. A graduate of UNC Chapel Hill, he has guided more than 200 websites from concept to launch. He is a frequent writer on Internet marketing and online campaigning. You should follow him on Twitter.
The friendly team over at Download Squad featured our microsite votethesite.com on their homepage. They also are holding an impromptu poll on their site asking visitors "strictly from a geek perspective" which Presidential website they prefer.
We really appreciate the shout out as it has driven a fair amount of votes to the site - we're now over 8,000 votes in just 40 hours! Also, it helped us fulfill one of our goals in marketing a microsite by getting picked up by a major blog.
For those of you not familiar with Download Squad, they've got some great content and contributors - I definitely recommend checking them out.
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Why a Microsite Can Help Market Your Company
Clay Schossow
Clay Schossow leads New Media Campaigns' project management and business development efforts. A graduate of UNC Chapel Hill, he has guided more than 200 websites from concept to launch. He is a frequent writer on Internet marketing and online campaigning. You should follow him on Twitter.
My last post was about how to successfully market a microsite for your company, and it outlined the current steps we're taking to market our recent microsite votethesite.com. However, I realized today that in that article, I didn't put forth the basic tenets of why a microsite can be a very good choice for many businesses.
I think the general philosophy behind a microsite is one that Jason Fried articulated in his keynote at Northwestern (if anyone has the video, leave a comment):
"Out teach, out share, and out contribute"
Fried was describing how the marketing of celebrity chefs demonstrated to market online, and I think that quotation is nearly identical the goals of launching a microsite.
Perhaps the biggest reason to build a microsite is to drive traffic to your organization's main site. Due to the fact that you're out contributing to your space, people will be driven to your site. It's nearly impossible to make a corporate site go "viral" and quickly spread around to thousands of people - however, an interesting microsite can easily take off and start referring traffic to your main organization's site. In addition to the upfront traffic from initially marketing your microsite, there will also be a longtail, as different blogs continue to pick up the site down the line and it continues to rank on Google for keywords.
One great example of a long tail generated by a microsite is Website Grader. This microsite was created by an internet marketing and SEO company named HubSpot. It started off as a fun experiment and microsite for their team and has resulted in thousands of sites linking to the tool, references from major blogs, and more than 400,000 URLs being graded. The microsite captures people looking for a free website evaluation and then drives a portion of that traffic to HubSpot as; almost all of these visitors are part of the company's main target.
Another great reason for a microsite is to establish your firm as an innovator in the space. This would be considered out teaching. By creating a forward-thinking microsite that has great content and addresses an important topic, people will begin to look to you as a thought leader and innovator in your space. This was certainly one of the motivations behind votethesite.com; our firm has always done a great job of developing political websites, but the microsite helps establish us as a thinker in the space that is exploring how online campaigning is affecting real elections. By taking the time and putting in the effort to build an innovative microsite, people will realize that you're a leader in the space and a company worth following.
A microsite also allows you to create powerful spinoff content, whether it is blog posts, free reports, white papers, or others. Giving this content away would be classified as out sharing. Our microsite wasn't just a one-off solution, we've used it to generate several good blog posts (one of which drove nearly a thousand visitors to our site today), and it will also allow us to repurpose the data for reports and white papers. A microsite gives you an ideal opportunity to generate valuable data and content that you can continually use for your company's advantage.
These are a few really compelling reasons to build a microsite. It is certainly a time investment, but is well worth it when you think of the longtail and the ability to create spinoff content. However, be sure not to half-ass it; if you're going to build one, really throw yourself behind marketing it and getting value out of it. Have you had success with a microsite? If so, leave a comment and let us know your story and why you decided to build it.
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Six Hours In: Launching a Niche Microsite
Clay Schossow
Clay Schossow leads New Media Campaigns' project management and business development efforts. A graduate of UNC Chapel Hill, he has guided more than 200 websites from concept to launch. He is a frequent writer on Internet marketing and online campaigning. You should follow him on Twitter.
Earlier this evening, we launched a microsite at www.votethesite.com to allow people to vote for their favorite political websites. In just six hours, the site has already recorded 3,000 votes, received dozens of comments, and been viewed by hundreds of visitors from across the world. This site wasn't just launched with an "if you build it, they will come" strategy, but is the result of a multi-stage, concerted effort by our team to publicize and market it.
We launched the site hoping to gain as many votes as possible, and hoping to get picked up by outside political blogs and circulated around the designer community. We knew that we had to crawl before we could walk, so first we needed to get traction with low hanging fruit, such as friends and family. So far, we've followed a pretty regimented roll out; here are the steps we're taking to market our microsite.- Send to friends and family - Everyone on the NMC team sent the project to their friends and family, encouraging them to pass along to others. This was kind of a light launch that let us fix any problems that arose, knowing that the visitors would "love us no matter what" as my grandma told me when her district's screenshot didn't appear correctly. This led to a good first wave of traffic and gave the voting some momentum, encouraging others to vote when they got to the site.
- Distribute to Favorite Social Networks - For this stage, we all posted on the social networks that we spend the most time on, which are still composed of mainly friends, but more distant than in stage 1. We each posted the link as our Facebook status, Tweeted it (follow me for more updates on the site), put up as our Gchat away message, and a couple more. This round was really successful, leading to several re-tweets (including from complete strangers), and getting picked up by a North Carolina newspaper's blog.
- Email out to list of political contacts - As a political web design firm, we have a pretty sizable amount of consultants and campaigns that we work with, who we knew would be interested in the site. We sent them all individual emails, encouraging them to try the site out. This resulted in some good feedback and even a call from a contact that we hadn't spoke to in months who wanted to hire us to work on a new site (nice!). In addition to just our personal political clients, we also sent out an email to each contact from the campaigns featured on the site, letting them know that they had been highlighted and to let us know if they had any feedback or changes for us.
These are the stages we considered part of the initial rollout. The goal here was to gather a decent amount of votes on the site, so each race had multiple votes and to start a little buzz around certain circles that we had launched this site. Considering we launched the site at 5pm, we had modest expectations for the results of these phases, and have exceeded all our expectations so far.
Below is a brief overview of the next steps we're taking to get the site in front of more voters. I'll offer more details on these steps later this week, after we have tangible results on whether they worked or not.- Continue Blogging about the project - Over the next few days, we'll be continually blogging about the project, the programming behind it, and it's coverage. By continuing to create good content about the site, visitors to our main site are likelier to go to it, it can spark interest in different web communities, and will more likely get indexed by Google.
- Submitting to popular news aggregators - This is the stage where we really try and take the views to the next level. We'll be submitting to Digg, Reddit, Hacker News, and some others. If it gains steam, these sites could drive some serious traffic.
- Reaching out to industry decision makers - In this stage, we'll reach out to the big time players, such as Politico, large newspaper blogs, and other relevant sites. Hopefully, they will like the idea, see that it has already been fairly popular, and write up the site. This would result in huge traffic and give the site a lot of credibility. This would be the ultimate win.
Well, there's still 6 days before the election, so we think people have plenty of reason to check out votethesite.com and vote on their favorite political sites. Per #4, we'll be keeping the blog updated as we keep publicizing the site and we'll let you know if we reach our goals and how the traffic is doing. Wish us luck and be sure to go vote - both in our fake election and in the real one!
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Vote for the Best Political Websites
Joel Sutherland
Joel Sutherland leads operations at NMC where he has launched over 250 sites and served as lead developer on the company's CMS which serves millions of unique visits each year. Joel has an Honors Degree in Computer Science from UNC Chapel Hill where he was a Morehead Scholar. Follow Joel on Twitter.
Even though our days are consumed with building client websites and providing customer support - that doesn't mean we don't have some free time in the evenings to work on some side projects together. The New Media team just released a new microsite at www.votethesite.com - the site allows you to browse campaign websites from races across the country and vote on which candidate has the better site.
We had a lot of fun building it, but it also serves a functional purpose - we want to see if there's a correlation between which campaign has the better site and who wins. As a political web design firm, we're very interested to see if the better campaign site is also winning the actual election. The more votes we record on Vote the Site, the more data we'll have to include in our results. If you'd like to signup to receive the final results after the election and the correlation chart, send an email to results@votethesite.com.
To get this site up and running was a team effort. Everyone burned the midnight oil gathering screenshots, designing the interface, and programming the functionality, but we're really pleased with the product. Please be sure to check out votethesite.com, vote, and let us know your feedback.
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