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Managing disruptive collaboration tools

Yammer has a wonderfully disruptive marketing strategy - anyone with an email address can sign up and become part of the network for that email domain. No IT procurement process, no buy-in, no permission from anyone - you just get on with it and start collaborating.

Collaboration behind your back

A lot of companies will be using Yammer without knowing anything about it - even if they have an official collaborative platform as part of their intranet such as Sharepoint or Lotus Connections.

Some do know and try to “force” users over to their official platform, going as far as adding Yammer to the list of blocked sites.

But what should you do? how do you deal with Yammer, if Yammer isn’t your chosen option?

Don’t punish collaboration

The fact that people have chosen to use Yammer is great. It means they want to share and collaborate. These are exactly the people you want to use as role models for other employees who haven’t quite made the cultural leap into a digitally collaborative work place.

The fact that they have chosen to make Yammer their tool of choice rather than your official solution isn’t ideal, but it’s not something that should be punished. You should focus your efforts instead on gently massaging them into moving across to where you want them to be.

I’ve written about Yammer in this blog post, but the advice is just as applicable to other distruptive services such as Present.ly or Socialcast.

1. Create an account

Create an account in the name of your web management group or whoever is responsible for collaboration (or your intranet).

2. Social media policy

You need to have a social media policy in place to refer to (This article from The Next Web, amongst others, can give you some tips).

3. Talk to information security

Take some advice from your information security department, or check your security policies. It could be the case that Yammer falls into the same “open” security classification as regular public social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

4. Regularly post updates

You need to visit Yammer regularly (with your Web management account) and post some kind of update explaining what you can do here (and where you can do other stuff; the official platform).

Here’s a suggestion for the recurring update:

Please be aware that Yammer and this Yammer network
is not supported, maintained or approved by YOURORG. 

If you publish information on Yammer it must be 
information that is classified as "Open Information" 
according to YOURORGS's information rules. 

You must treat Yammer like any other Internet 
social network - such as Facebook and Twitter. 
Please read our social media and internet policy. 

Please also make use of our supported collaboration 
tools, LIST YOUR TOOLS HERE WITH LINKS.

5. Follow everyone

Follow everyone who joins. This makes your “Web team” account more visible, and increases the chance of people reading your updates.

By dealing with the non-official networks in this way we are educating these enthusiastic social workers rather than banning, closing down, or saying naughty naughty. It’s a mature and friendly way of managing disruptive collaboration tools. A gentle touch rather than a heavy hand.

Tips om hur du kan hantera samarbete med inofficiella verktyg som Yammer.

16 Articles worth reading… (Spotted: Weeks 1-2, 2011)

This edition’s collection of links includes posts related to: Intranets, UX, Web design and web development, web strategy and web tactics, Analysis and eye tracking.

Intranet

Round-Up of Intranet Trends for 2011

To save you visiting several blogs to get a grip of what’s hot within the world of Intranets, this article conveniently groups it all together for you in one post.

New BBC Site Search

Just before Christmas the BBC has launched a new enhanced site search. This is a detailed write up of what they’ve done and why. There’s a lot of useful information here that could be applied to intranet and enterprise search solutions.

Thoughts on a mobile phone enhanced intranet

A blog post talking about mobiles, intranet, QR codes, and location based services was bound to get my juices flowing. Kristian outlines a number of interesting possible applications for the enhanced mobile intranet of the not too distant future.

Silo-busting & customization in the digital workplace

Jane starts a discussion about breaking down Silos by using customization. This sparked a great discussion in the comments between Kristian Norling (featured in my previous recommendation above), myself, and Martin Risgaard on how to break down the geographical silo.

User experience, Web design, and web development

RSS Is Dying Being Ignored, and You Should Be Very Worried

Long post about the death of RSS. I don’t agree. Completely. Yes, RSS and the browser is a dying combination - but with tablets and the age of curation, RSS has a healthy future as part of the wiring beneath the scenes. Non-techies/non-curators can blissfully ignore it but still reap the benefits. This week Kroc followed up his post with this constructive reply.

Responsive Web Design: What It Is and How To Use It

If you haven’t yet heard about responsive web design, then this article on Smashing Magazine is a good and information-rich place to start. We’re rapidly moving away from the one-size-fits-all website.

.css{user:agent;}

A tiny bit of javascript (less than 2KB) that gives you the possibility to add user-agent based CSS classes to your code. After reading about responsive web design in the article above, you will probably understand the usefulness of this.

QR Codes Improve Web Access

I love this example of QR codes. It’s a wonderful example of an application of technology that benefits everyone involved. The teacher has more time for teaching (rather than just making sure everyone has typed in the right URL), the kids take to it like fish to water. It also gives a use for QR codes without using mobile phones.

Static Footer Bars – Web Navigation Trend

James gives some calm and thoughtful analysis of fixed position footer toolbars from the viewpoint of web navigation.

Web strategy and web tactics

Future Integrated Communication From A Digital Perspectiv

Yet more wise words from Johan. Even though there are many of us that bang on about how a web site needs to be focused and task based, the corporate world at large is a number of years behind in it’s thinking. We’ll get there. I’d expand upon Johan’s recommendation of moving 10% of your media budget to content by clarifying “content” to include web management - you content needs to be lovingly dealt with.

How does content strategy differ from corporate communications strategy?

Detailed post from Diana, and especially worth reading on the back of Johan’s post above on integrated communication.

The Web Is a Customer Service Medium

Niche walled gardened channels are forming - from Apps to Gaming worlds - but one thing will remain - the web is where people will go to complain.

8 things every marketing technologist should know

I often try to explain to people that the web isn’t simple. Yes, some tools make aspects of the web accessible and easy - but building and running a successfull web presence involves a huge list of competences. There’s hardly a discipline that isn’t touched. This post features a (non-exhausive) list and diagram of skills needed for a marketing technologist (you can switch that term for your web-title of preference)

Därför blir ditt företags webbplats aldrig färdig

Why your company’s website will never be finished. Something worth saving and remembering from this Swedish post is Magnus’s three focus areas he recommends spitting idea’s up into: improvements that bring more visitors, improvements that convert more visits, improvements to your products and services.

What’s the Future of Mobile Search and SEO?

Mobile search is another aspect that we need to consider and work with. Here are some trends from SEOmoz. Don’t agree with the “single set of SERPs” claim. I don’t see, and I don’t see it being a trend either. Quite the opposite.

Analysis and eye tracking

Mouse Eye Tracking – How useful is it?

If any of you have heard me talk about usability testing with eye tracking, you may also have heard me say how worthless mouse tracking is as a substitute for real eye tracking. Here’s an article that backs that up.

16 sidor som jag tipsar dig att läsa.

Did the mobile web reach tipping point?

A year ago I said that 2010 would be the year that the mobile web reached tipping point. The question is, did it?

There are many ways you could measure it and we could argue all day about what is the best way to measure it. Mobile page views? smartphone devices sold? Mobile web bandwidth use?

Visits and Pageviews

I’m going to use figures for pageviews and visits from a client’s website in this article to help illustrate how much mobile web use has grown in 2010. I’m going to leave the site anonymous, but I will give you a few background details.

The site is based in Sweden and it’s visits are predominately from the Stockholm area. It’s visited by a full cross-section of Internet users from all generations. There is no mobile adjusted site available - all visitors use the same, full, desktop version. The number of pageviews a month is around 45,000.

600% increase

Up to November 2009 the site had received no visits from mobile devices. In the three months from December 2009 to February 2010 this increased to 1.7% of visits. In December 2009 only 1.1% of pageviews were served to mobiles with most being to iPhones. (Note that I’m including the following devices in the statistics for “mobiles”: iPad, iPod, iPhone, Android, Symbian).

In December 2010, this figure had increased to 6.5% of page views and 8.5% of visits. The iPhone still dominates, with the iPad and Android devices sitting pretty and fighting over 2nd place.

Tipping point reached

The tipping point for this web site came at the end of July 2010. The end of July saw the launch of the iPhone 4 here in Sweden. Once people returned to work after the traditional summer break the number of pageviews served to mobile devices pretty much doubled and hasn’t looked back since.

It would also appear that plenty of people got an iThing for Christmas judging by the spike of pageviews since then. It is, of course, too early to know for sure if this new doubling of mobile visits will be sustained but so far it hasn’t dropped back.

Bear in mind that all of these figures are for a website that has made no attempt to attract mobile and handheld visitors, and has made no adjustments to cater for them either. These visitors are the people who are deciding to use the site regardless of the limitations - presumably because accessing websites via their handheld device has become a standard form of behaviour for them.

As big as Chrome

Given that total number of mobile pageviews is over three times as many as for IE6, and pretty much the same percentage as pageviews served to visitors using Google’s Chrome browser - It’s crucial that you regularly check your website on mobile and handheld devices.

You need to check your site regularly, not only during development development or design projects. Just as it has been standard practice for many years to check a range of web browsers, it is now standard practice to check a range of handheld devices too.

August 19, 2010

Tweetmeme button versus Twitter official button

Twitter has launched it’s own (re)tweet button for your website. They’ve done this in co-operation with Tweetmeme; the undisputed masters of the Twitter button until this week. But which one is best? What’s the difference?

I’ve been testing and comparing the two buttons. The Twitter button is installed here on the Beta Blog, whilst the Tweetmeme button is installed on the Beantin blog.

They are very similar in their implementation and possibilities for customisation – so that isn’t really a deciding factor – but here are my initial findings that are relevant when deciding which button to use:

Advantages of Twitter button

• Post Tweet “suggestions” page. Once you’ve tweeted, you are then presented with up to two (customisable) suggestions of Twitter accounts to follow
• If logged into Twitter, works without additional oauth authorisation

Advantages of Tweetmeme button

• Counts “Twitter” retweets as seperate Tweets in the total
• Picks up a wider range of URL shortening services, including self-hosted ones such as Yourls
• Goes back further in time. Twitter’s service only started counting In July 2010.

Conclusion

If you have an established site and have been accumulating tweets for your pages over a period of time before July 2010 you will have a lot of “zero” Tweets icons on your pages, giving the impression that no-one has Tweeted your content.

The suggested accounts to follow feature of the Twitter button is very interesting and will increase the number of follows your account(s) receive post-tweeting.

You need to work out which features are tactically most important to you. If technically possible on your site, look into using the Twitter button only on new posts, and Tweetmeme on archived ones.

Vad är skillnaden? Vilken är best?

Wordpress plugin: Measuring browser viewport size

Previously I’ve written about the importance of browser viewport size, and also explained how you can measure the browser viewport of your visitors and store the result in Google Analytics as events.

Given the 25 million sites out there running Wordpress, I decided to invest a bit of time into creating a Wordpress plugin to track viewport size. It uses exactly the same technique as described in my earlier post but conveniently wrapped up as an easy to install Wordpress plugin.

Download the plugin

You can download the Measure Viewport Size plugin from the Wordpress plugin directory. Or you can install it directly from your Wordpress site by searching for “Measure Viewport Size” from the “add plugin” page.

There are a few prerequisites; you will need to have Google Analytics installed on your site (the asynchronous “_gaq” version). I’ve tested the plugin with Google Analytics for WordPress and it works fine. You will also need to make sure that your theme supports the body_class trigger. The body tag in header.php wthin your active theme should look something like the following:

<body <?php body_class(); ?>>

How does it work?

The plugin uses a javascript function to obtain the width and height of the viewport of the browser window your website visitor is using to view your site. It then sends three “events” to your Google Analytics account. One for the width, one for the height, and one with a text label containing the full dimensions.

You can then view the events that have been recorded as people visit your site in Google Analytics under Content -> Event Tracking. It can take a day or so for the events to be processed and to appear in your GA reports, so be patient!

Why bother?

Monitoring and analysing the browser viewport size is a crucial part of designing and maintaining a successful website.

50 pixels fewer in available height for content could be the difference between your call to action being visible or disappearing below the fold. That could have a noticeable impact on your conversions and goals.

The browser viewport is the window in to your world. Your visitor sees everything through it. So why drive blind when you can quite easily gather and analyse a bit of data?

Why the name Beantin?

In Sweden when creating a company you need to send an application to the Companies Registration Office. In that application you need to list, in order of preference, the names you are willing to accept for your company. Beantin webbkommunikation was one of the names towards the top of that list.

Webbkommunikation is the simple part to explain. That’s Swedish for online communication. I do internet-based communication stuff, not TV, print, events, or things for other channels - so webbkommunikation seemed the sensible choice

Why Beantin though? Well. At the University of York in the early 90’s I studied Economics. One of the lecturers there was David Gowland. A clever, slightly eccentric, entertaining lecturer. Being 18, creative and foot-loose at university, David became the inspiration for a single-frame stick-man cartoon I started to draw.

Gowland

Gowland was the main character, but even from the first first cartoon, Gowland’s girlfriend made an appearance. Beantin is her name. She is the one with the brains. Her greatest hobby is confusing Gowland. Which she does with remarkable ease.

Even though The Cow is my favourite character, I have a particular fondness for Beantin and her intelligence. Beantin works well from a web-age branding perspective. Written as a single word it is readable, searchable and recognisable.

Admittedly, one thing I failed to realise was that many Swedes wouldn’t automatically recognise Beantin as English, and often pronounce it “Be-an-ten”. On the plus side, when I created Beantin webbkommunikation in 2006, there was the obvious bonus that beantin.se was still available.

Only 24 hours in a day…

The Gowland website isn’t quite as well maintained as I’d like it to be. The 24-hour limit gets in the way of doing everything. But read more about the characters and take a look at some of the cartoons. Some day soon I’ll start drawing more Gowlands again, and hopefully painting a few more on canvas.

En kort förklaring av varför jag valde Beantin som företagsnamn.

5 new social memetrackers

Twingly Channels is a social news reader what gives you the possibility to aggregate feeds and real-time search results into a single channel where many people sharing the same interest can view, comment and vote on the content.

Earlier this month Twingly opened their doors a little wider and started to allow anyone to create channels. So I took the opportunity to create five new channels focusing on five seperate subjects.

Content that receives attention - such as retweets, linking blog posts, likes, comments - bubbles up to the surface and is shown under “top stories”. If you really want to dive in deep then you can click on “Show incoming stories” for a real-time display of incoming articles.

Eye tracking

http://www.twingly.com/eyetracking
Articles, blogs and resources about eye tracking and usability testing using eye tracking.

Intranet

http://www.twingly.com/intranet
Articles, resources, blogs about Intranets, intranet managment and intranet collaboration.

Google Analytics

http://www.twingly.com/ga
Aritcles, blogs and resources about Google Analytics, measurement and web analysis.

QR Codes

http://www.twingly.com/qr-codes
Aritcles, blogs and resources about Quick Response Codes and their uses.

Beantin

http://www.twingly.com/beantin
Beantin says and Beantin reads… A collection of my blog posts across all my blogs plus my favourited tweets.

SEO

http://www.twingly.com/seo
A bonus channel. This one wasn’t created by me, but rather by Simon Sundén. Contains everything regarding Search Engine Optimization in English.

What do you read?

If you read any blogs related to the above topics and think they would be good to add to the Twingly Channels, then get in touch with me and let me know!

8 Articles worth reading… (Spotted: Week 27-28, 2010)

The Real Life Social Network v2

216 slides, takes about 20 mins to view and read; but it’s worth it. It’s where we are heading. With this kind of insight, working at Google, you can start to understand that Google producing a Facebook killer isn’t at all unbelievable or unrealistic.

That website costs how much?

Oh my, I think I’ve found true love! Brandon Godwin (and David Hobbs in the comments) have written some incredibly wise-words. Client expectations of what is needed for the perfect web-presence, and the price they are prepared (or have budgeted) to pay are both too low.

Are We Not Context Strategists?

We’re seeing argument after argument about which discipline lies at the top (or bottom) of the pyramid – “xxx is king”. What we should be doing is concentrating on linking these skills horizontally in order to help organisations get the best out of the web.

Forbes: How To Create A Customer Advocacy Program

“Social media doesn’t scale. That’s right, social media doesn’t scale.” says Jeremiah. He goes on to say that your community managers will always be outnumbered by your customers. You need to have a strategy that does scale. His suggestion: Customer advocacy programs.

Innovation: Shrewd search engines know what you want

New Scientist writes “unfortunately eye-tracking hardware is expensive, and few people use it.” …Not a good reason to use inaccurate mouse-data. Read this explanation of mouse-movement correlation problems from Acuity ETS.

Few Facebook users notice ads on News Feed

An eye tracking report concludes that few Facebook users notice ads on News Feed page, but the majority look at status updates from pages they are fans of. But, with 31% looking at ads in the right hand column they are a really cost effective form of advertising.

Millennials will make online sharing in networks a lifelong habit

Millennials will make online sharing in networks a lifelong habit… or at least that’s their intention right now.

5 Key Trends of 2010: Half-Year Report for The Web

Readwriteweb takes a look a what they consider to be the 5 Key Trends of 2010 so far. A fair chunk of their “trends” are actually “events”, but it’s a worthwhile “year-so-far” summary.

8 sidor som jag tipsar dig att läsa.

Search-engine friendly country site select boxes

Design often has the final say in a redesign project - or at best, a very powerful voice - which isn’t always a good, or acceptable, situation.

Recently I was part of a project where I needed to preserve an aspect of the old design for SEO reasons. The new design had included a select box, but I needed those “options” to be real links that would pass link-love. So, I offered this search-engine friendly solution.

Country links

To give a bit more background, the old site had a footer that contained links to every single country site within the organisation. This was about 26 links. On every page of the site. Most of those country sites had a similar footer, making most of the links reciprocal. That’s quite an international network of inter-linked international top level domains.

I obviously wanted to maintain that network of links after the redesign. It clearly wasn’t going to help the position of any of the sites in SERPs by removing them.

Country select box

The design that was produced had “simplified” the list of countries in the footer to be a select box drop down menu. Although this is not unusual for companies with multiple country sites, it’s not always a good thing for usability (I like populating the select box using geolocation as a solution - but that would be another blog post!) and it’s really not a good thing for search engines.

No link-love for select boxes

Although Google has indexed text in select boxes for a number of years, and also indexes (new) URLs that is discovers within those lists, it doesn’t pass any pagerank to those links. Neither does it attribute the anchor text (or more correctly in this case: option text) to the destination link.

This obviously meant that the international network of inter-linked top level domains would come crashing down to the ground. Not really something that was on the list of requirements…

So in order to preserve the link network, and to honour the design decision, I decided to re-introduce the <a> link list of countries, and in order to not make this visible to (most) end-users, I set it to “display:none”.

Now hold on I can hear you say. Doesn’t Google (and other search engines) consider adding “display:none” to things as cloaking? Well, not necessarily. The key is whether there is a mechanism for making the content visible to visitors or not.

So in order to keep both the search engines and users happy what I did was add the “display:none” only if javascript is enabled. That way we are always serving the same HTML content to all visitors and search-engines, but making parts of it invisible when viewed in the browser by most visitors. Importantly, we are letting the search engines see and index all the links to the countries.

Adding a class

Add a js class to the country link list, or whatever element of the page you want to be hidden when javascript is enabled.

<div class="js">

Include an external js file

Add a link to an external script directly after your CSS styles (you may already have such an external file already)

<script type="text/javascript" src="/script/functions.js">
</script>

Document.write

in that script add a document write to write the additional css style link

document.write('<link rel="stylesheet" 
href="/styles/js-enabled.css" 
type="text/css" media="screen" />');

Display:none

Finally, your js css file. Add the “js” class styling with display:none there.

.js {        display: none;}

There are other ways you could achieve the same result; especially if you’re already using an Ajax library such as jquery, but I thought it was good to share with you an example that didn’t force the introduction of that overhead.

Cloaking

Yes, you could argue that this is technically cloaking, but it is better to say that we are offering enhanced content to those with javascript disabled. By doing this we are cloaking in a way that is helping Google and visitors who find long lists within select boxes difficult to use.

5 Articles worth reading… (Spotted: Week 26, 2010)

Why I Still Blog

Hans Kullin asked and answered Why do I still blog? last week on his blog, this week, John Cass gives his answer. Both provide some interesting insights into the ever-evolving blogosphere.

Yahoo Style Guide

July 6th Yahoo will launch their book, which will cover grammar, punctuation, web accessibility and writing copy that helps SEO. The companion web site has some useful articles too.

10 Reasons Why Your Analytics Are Failing & 13 Tools To Help

The reasons listed here are quite a nice analytics “basics” overview. Covers a lot of things that are all too often overlooked.

Serving Static Content from a Cookieless Domain

You are all (as you’re clever, web-savvy people who read this blog), already serving your static content from a seperate domain. This is a good explaination of why (and how) you should make sure that your media domain doesn’t serve up cookies with all the media requests.

Sitemaps: One file, many content types

Now all specialized sitemap formats can be rolled into one file. Sitemaps, and how Google are enhancing them, is a “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours” situation. Google want to serve accurate, useful, search results - and we all want our pages, images, videos, etc to be included. Get scratching.

5 sidor som jag tipsar dig att läsa.