Have you ever noticed how long these Web addresses are?  Ever wonder why these URL are so long?

The answer is simple: tracking codes. Tracking codes are strings of text added to the end of a URL that let you track the source of a click.  For example, if your organization has an e-mail newsletter and you want to know how many people click on the links in your e-mails, you add tracking codes to the URLs.  Your usage tracking software will almost always treat the URLs with the tracking codes as unique from the same URLs without the tracking codes.  So, when looking at your usage reports, you can look at usage overall to specific pages and then figure out how much of the traffic came from the e-mail newsletter.

If you usage Google Analytics for usage tracking, Google has a terrific URL builder that create properly formatted tracking codes to track the source of clicks, specific campaigns, even the duration of your campaign.  Here’s an example of how it works:

Let’s take the URL to my recent blog post on magazine subscriptions on the iPad.  The URL looks like this if I navigate directly to it:

http://www.thematrixfiles.net/blog/am-i-really-going-to-pay-4-99-for-one-issue-of-time-magazine/

When my marketing team promotes this blog post e-mails, Twitter, Facebook, etc., we use the Google URL builder to add tracking codes.  Here’s a sample URL:

http://www.thematrixfiles.net/blog/am-i-really-going-to-pay-4-99-for-one-issue-of-time-magazine/?utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=SM&utm_campaign=blog

If you look at the codes closely, you’ll easily decipher that the source is Twitter, the medium is SM (social media, as opposed to e-mail or a banner ad) and the campaign is blog (as opposed to events, news, jobs, etc.).  On a regular basis, we filter our usage reports in Google Analytics to see how many clicks we’re getting to the blog post from our posts on Twitter, as opposed to direct traffic and traffic from other sources.

Oh, btw, since these URLs are crazy long, I use a URL shortener service like TinyURL or Bit.ly to keep my links manageable on sites like Twitter.  I don’t bother shortening the URL when I’m posting links on Facebook, Amplify or this blog.

Bottom line?  Tracking codes are key to tracking the success of your outbound marketing campaigns.  I recommend never linking to pages on your Web site without some type of tracking code.

How about you?  Are you using tracking codes in your campaigns?  What services are you using?  How are tracking codes helping your measure the success of your campaigns?

More and more of my clients are making the decision to eliminate their print magazines and newsletters.

All of this makes sense to me.  I get most of my information via e-mail these days, and I’m subscribed to dozens of newsletters via e-mail and RSS.  And in an effort to minimize the “piles” at home, I have canceled all but a few paper subscriptions.

But I got to thinking:  Am I ready to ditch ALL of my paper subscriptions? Am I ready to cancel my print subscriptions to my favorite magazines, namely TIME, Smithsonian and Stanford magazines?

Here’s my concern about all digital publications:  it’s easy to ignore an e-mail newsletter as just another e-mail in the hundreds I get every day.  Consider this:  when my copy of TIME magazine arrives on Saturday, it ends up in my “to read” pile. This pile gets shuffled around from dining room table to coffee table to bedroom side table.  Each issue sticks around until I read or skim it, then toss.  But here’s what happens with some of my e-mail subscriptions:  if I have the time, I read them on the spot.  If I don’t have the time, I may leave them in my inbox or move them to a “read” folder for later reading.  Trouble is, with the flood of e-mail that I get, I rarely get to my e-mail read pile. And sometimes, in an attempt to gain back control of my inbox, I delete a huge group of e-mail newsletters and start over.

Ugh, so much for the future of publishing.  What is the balance that content organizations should try to achieve between print and digital?  And if digital is your only future, how do you ensure delivery and readership? I have some thoughts:

• As with everything, it’s important to consider the audiences for your e-mail alerts and publications.  Who are they?  What are they looking to you to provide?  How do they want to consume the content?
• Is it even an option to mail a publication out to customers, if they so request?  If not, then you better be able to rely on compelling headlines, great writing, a great opt-in list, and good design to get readers to read your e-mails on the spot. (Hmmm… come to think of it, printed pieces need the same things to be successful.)
• Be sure to embed open and clickthrough tracking in your e-mail campaigns. While you’ll never know if people are reading your printed pieces, you can and should benchmark online usage over time using tracking codes.
• Test, test, test. Figure out the best day for sending e-mails to your audience, which topics generate the most interest, and which headlines result in the most traffic.

One final thought.  I think that the iPad (and similar devices) could revolutionize how we consume content.  While I won’t skim an entire issue of TIME on my laptop, I will read or skim an entire issue on my iPad.  Why?  It turns out that the iPad lets me browse online content the same way I read my printed magazines: on the couch or in bed.  And if I get used to this, I will likely cancel my print subscriptions and opt instead for the digital versions of my favorite magazines.  Which I think would be a win for publishers because they will still get subscription revenue AND they can track my reading habits.

How about you?  Have you ditched your print subscriptions? How do you manage the flood of e-mail newsletters coming your way?

But then I read a study by Nielsen that reports “member communities, which includes both social networks and blogs, has become the fourth most popular online category – ahead of personal email.” Whoa!  Social networking and blogging have overtaken personal e-mail?  Could this signal another monumental shift in our communications?

Perhaps.  But yet another Nielsen analysis reports that “the heaviest social media users actually use email more” than other segments. My God, how could this be?  And where the heck are these people finding the time to be on both social networks and e-mail so heavily?

Here’s my take on what’s going on:

• E-mail isn’t close to being dead because while I can broadcast a status to my Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn, I can’t direct message everyone in my universe because they’re not all on social networking sites, nor are they all on the same site.  My contact list, however, is pretty much all on e-mail.
• The social networking sites make heavy use of e-mail to let me know that someone has commented on my update, sent me a direct message, written on my wall/profile, etc.  I actually find a lot of this e-mail annoying because on Facebook, for example, if I “like” something, I get all the follow-on likes and comments.  On some days, it’s just a lot of noise.  On the other hand, I like the e-mail reminders because I won’t necessarily revisit a status update, link or friend’s wall regularly.  And RSS gets overwhelming and another place to check!
• MarketingSherpa sees a pattern of “aggregation and adoption rather than replacement” when it comes to social networking and e-mail. “Some media suffer in the exchange, but none are eliminated entirely.”  In an interesting survey, MarketingSherpa respondents overwhelmingly said that when they want to share a link, 78% say they use e-mail, while 22% say they use social media (there is overlap in these numbers, of course).
• As more and more of us conduct our daily lives online, e-mail is used for confirmations of purchases, meeting reminders, notes from teachers, yada, yada.  Somehow, I have a tough time imagining that Amazon is going to send me a tweet about my most recent purchase.

I am one who makes heavy use of social networking sites to keep in touch with family, friends, client and colleague.  My e-mail exchanges with certain groups have probably suffered as a result.  But the hundreds of e-mails that pour into my inbox each day tell me that e-mail is alive and kicking.  E-mail is my lifeline and still supremely critical to my business.

How about you?  What’s your ratio of e-mail to social Web usage?  Has your e-mail time declined?  Is e-mail dead?

I had a lot of time to think about the offer because everyone in front me willingly gave up their e-mail address and contact information. Me, it took about 30 seconds to realize that saving less than $5 on a pair of shoes worth $49.95 was NOT worth getting spam from a store I don’t visit often (even though the shoes were really cute).

My shopping experience went from bad to worse. At a kids’ clothing store, I waited in line as each mom was asked, “would you like to give us your e-mail address and get $250 worth of coupons, would you like to subscribe to this magazine for the discounted price of $20, yada, yada.” And I was amazed at how many people provided their phone number AND e-mail simply when asked! When it was my turn, I paid cash and said no thanks when asked for my phone number, address and e-mail.

So I got to thinking. What is my e-mail address worth and when am I willing to share it with a site or vendor?

I thought about all the sites I’ve visited recently that required registration; on most of these sites, I just clicked away because I wasn’t willing to provide my precious contact information.  On the other hand, I willingly provided my e-mail address to Nordstrom (one of my favorite retailers), Amazon, MarketingSherpa, the New York Times, Barnes & Noble and Epicurious. And yes, I actually like getting my weekly recipes from Epicurious and fashion updates from Nordstrom. I read my Sherpa e-mails and New York Times digests religiously. And I use the Barnes & Noble coupons that come via e-mail.

Bottom line for me: I have to already be a believer in your brand and content for me to give up my e-mail, and you can’t buy it from me for $5, not even $100.

My niece (age 17) and nephew (age 20) ignore my e-mails. But when I send either of them a message via Facebook, I’m likely to get a message back. When Facebook sends an automated messages about what I’m doing or posting, I might get a hello or an update. My older sister says she gets the same kind of treatment — that she needs to contact her kids through Facebook.

A friend who lives in Philaldelphia wrote on my Facebook wall to let me know he and his family were coming to the DC area and ask if we were interested in going to the Baltimore Aquarium.

After our trip to Costa Rica, I posted a few photos to Facebook and sent messages to friends. I’ve even had long lost high school friends send me messages via Facebook even though my e-mail is part of my Facebook profile. Finally, a friend is throwing a party next week and she sent an invite via Facebook.

It seems I’m not the only person to notice this phenomenon. Steve Tibbett talks about how conversations in Facebook are more meaningful because they are in context (of your interests, photos, activities) and they are not subject to spam filtering. Yes, Facebook sends you an e-mail when you’ve received a message, but if that e-mail gets lost in cyberspace, it still lives in Facebook and will be waiting for you when you next login.

It’s been fun to keep up with friends, read about their activities, and see photos where they’ve been tagged. I even love the little Facebook apps that let me announce how green I am, send karma points to friends, show the world where I’ve lived and visited, and send cute animal postcards. No, I don’t have a gajillion people in my network, just people I know and have some type of relationship with.

Don’t get me wrong.  E-mail continues to be a killer app for me. I get hundreds of e-mails a day on my matrixgroup.net e-mail — from clients, staff, family and friends.  But a great many of my family and friends are on Facebook, so it just makes sense for me to be there, as well.

The number one reason for the seeming decline is splitting up Web traffic over multiple domains.  For example, many clients are moving to Web-based membership databases hosted by their providers.  Which means they now have usage at www.association.org and www2.association.org. Their Web traffic is now on two different servers, in different log files.  So, if a lot of your functionality (e.g., member directory, events calendar, meeting registration, manage profile) moved to another server, your traffic on the main Web site could take a nosedive.  The solution?  Get usage reports from your providers, arrange to download log files and run reports yourself, or add Google analytics or Webtrends on Demand to your header files to get consolidated reports.

The second reason is RSS feeds and e-mail updates.  Don’t get me wrong.    RSS feeds and e-mail updates are powerful push marketing tools.  You need them.  Your overall traffic is likely to increase as a result of these tools, but there is also a chance that your traffic will be redirected.  Here’s why: FeedBurner, the popular RSS feed aggregator, caches your content and serves it from their servers.  So all the visitors who read your content through their RSS readers and e-mail clients, AND who do NOT click through to your site are still valid visitors.  But now their traffic is logged in FeedBurner.  Make a habit of checking your FeedBurner stats along with your Google or Webtrends stats.

The third reason is less happy.  If your site relies on push marketing to drive traffic to your site, there’s a chance that spam filters and firewalls are blocking a larger percentage of your traffic.  Be sure to check delivery reports, ask your readers to whitelist your domain and vigorously follow-up with domains that regularly block your e-mails. I’ll post next time about software you can use to test the likelihood that your messages will be blocked by spam filters.

So, be sure to add your RSS and e-mail usage reports to your overall usage dashboard.

Oh, and if you’d like to learn more, I’m holding a seminar on usage reports on July 29.  Get more details and RSVP

This blog publishes partial RSS feeds and e-mail updates. You get the title and the first 60+ words and a link to the full article. The thinking is that you would get the gist of the article, then click through to read the rest of the article. While viewing the full article on the site, you might be enticed to click on past postings, the favorites on the right, or perhaps the related projects at the bottom.

Sounds logical right? But wait, there are many some views:

According to Rick Klau, VP of Publishing Services at FeedBurner, there appears to be no
significant difference in click through rates between full and partial RSS feeds.
http://thewrongadvices.com/2007/04/20/full-vs-partial-rss-feeds/

Jonathan Christopher of Monday by Noon, defends partial feeds because of the scraper sites that publish full articles on their sites and possible negative penalty that search engines associate with duplicate content.  Klau agrees with Christopher on the issue of scraper sites. http://mondaybynoon.com/2006/09/04/partial-versus-full-rss-feeds/

I personally like the truncated posts because I subscribe to many RSS feeds. This helps keep my Google Reader inbox more manageable. If the articles are written well, I get the sense of the post from the first paragraph; if I’m interested, I click through.  For the sites that send me a full feed, I still only read the first paragraph and keep reading, only if the topic really interests me. As far as I’m concerned, full and partial feeds make no difference.

How about you?  Do you prefer full or partial feeds and e-mail updates?  If the feedback is more towards full articles in RSS and e-mails, then I will definitely consider changing our set-up.  Please send me your comments!

A recent study by Nortel and IDC showed just how wired and connected we have become. The study found that:

• 16% of global workers are already “hyperconnected,” fully embracing a world of multiple devices and intense use of new communication applications. The hyperconnected worker uses a minimum of seven devices for work and personal access, plus at least nine applications like IM, text messaging, web conferencing, and social networks.
• 36% of global workers were designated as “increasingly connected,” meaning they use a minimum of four devices for work and personal access to six or more applications.
• The most hyperconnected country is China and the United States. The least hyperconnected countries were Canada and the United Arab Emirates.
• The ranks of the hyperconnected are expected to rise to 40% in the next few years.

Seven devices and nine applications! Okay, I use four devices: My laptop, iMac, regular phone, and cell phone. And I thought that was over the top, but seven?

I can think of eight applications I use to stay connected and have people stay connected with me: E-mail, voice mail, text messaging, IM, Facebook, LinkedIn, personal blog, company blog. I can barely keep up with all these communication vehicles and I’m not even hyperconnected! Last weekend, I picked up voice mail messages on my home phone and discovered three messages that were nearly a week old. Can I / should I even consider twittering? I wonder if that’s why my husband and I like to vacation in places like Cambodia and Vietnam and we don’t stay in the big cities? Are you hyperconnected?

“Please call me today. In an effort to facilitate better communication, I am not going to be communicating by email on Fridays. I look forward to meeting / speaking with you directly. Otherwise, I will respond to your email request on Monday. I encourage you to consider participating. Have a great day.”

Wow, no e-mail on Fridays. I’m not sure I can even imagine a day without e-mail. Would I have the guts to try such a thing? What would my clients and staff say? Would not responding to e-mail be liberating or would I just pay for my indulgence on Monday, when I come back to double the e-mail I have to respond to.

Has your organization implemented a similar policy? How have your members or clients responded? What do you think of the concept?