The public side is where your online visitors go (www.your-website.org) to view and engage with your organization online. The private side is an administration or private area where you, or key members of your team, log in with a username and password to update and modify information on your public website.

If you are still relying on one person to make the updates on your website, you are behind the times. You shouldn’t need a computer geek, an intern, a web developer or any other techie to do this for you––you should be able to update information on your own with point-and-click simplicity. Drag and drop, and you’re done. That simple.

If you’re not able to update and modify your own website, you should resolve to build the next iteration on top of a content management system. There are hundreds out there. Some are free, some cost lots of money. Find the one that’s best for you.

If you want the public aspect of your website to be engaging, fresh and frequently updated, you need to focus first on the private side. Be sure you have a system that gives you the ability and access you need.

Your website is the face of your organization—what people see online should reflect who you are as a nonprofit. Think of it as a window into the soul of your organization.

One of the keys to building a viable web presence is to make sure that everything on your website speaks to your mission and your cause. This is called positioning, or the “voice” of your website.

Your mission should come across loud and clear on every page. It should permeate every part of your site so that each one of your online visitors comes away with a clear understanding of who you are and what you do. If you fail to create a website with a voice that’s clear and cohesive, then visitors may get confused or lose interest and never come back.

Why is the voice of your website so important? Because the way that we relate with people today has largely shifted from face-to-face meetings to digital communication on websites, social media and mobile devices. When you’re talking with someone in person, it’s easy to verbalize what you’re passionate about––your “voice” and personality are evident. But when people shift their communication to the web, many times they lose their voice, and they become stiff and lifeless.

If you want to have a viable website, you need to make sure your voice is alive, consistent and you, in everything you put out there. If it helps, pretend that your website is a one-on-one conversation with your most important constituent. Don’t create content as if you’re speaking to a group––write it as if you’re having an important conversation with your top donor. You certainly wouldn’t speak in generic terms with a lifeless tone and a robotic voice.

You’re not a generic organization––you have a unique personality, a clear position and an important mission. Be sure your website does as well.

photo via pinterest.com

One social site has captured the attention of the masses recently, and it’s not called Facebook or Twitter. The new darling of social media is Pinterest, a social network designed for users to share creative ideas, images and videos. Maybe Pinterest can’t claim to be a giant yet, but it’s clear that the up-and-coming network has found a niche in the social landscape.

The visual platform allows users to create “boards” or collections of images grouped by category. Redecorating your home? Create a board for each room. A geek? Create a board of cool infographics.

And here’s the cool thing—pinning is not just for kicks. It’s also a great opportunity for brands to engage with users.

Martha Stewart, Etsy, Real Simple, Nordstrom’s, Lands End and Whole Foods have all successfully used the network to promote their brand. You ready to jump on the bandwagon? Here are five tips to keep in mind if you’re thinking of testing out the platform for your own company.

Give Your Company a Face

Since Pinterest is mostly a visual network, it’s the perfect place to introduce your audience to the people behind your brand. Let’s say you’re a printing company. You could create several boards, showcasing the efforts of each of your teams. One board could highlight your equipment and the people who run it while another board displays pictures of logos or direct mail that your design team has created. Yet another could host pictures of your employees in action and give viewers a taste of your company culture.

Reward Fans with Sneak Peaks

Have an upcoming product launch? Pin it. Pinterest users will love getting a preview, and you’ll receive early feedback to give you an idea of how your new product will be received when it launches. Think of it as a social media focus group.

Don’t Just Pin Your Own Content

You know the guy at the party who can’t get enough of himself? Yeah, you don’t want to be him. People get tired of brands only talking about themselves. Mix it up by repinning compelling content from other user boards, as well. Share the love.

Follow the Big Hitters

One of the best ways to raise awareness about your company is to start following the big names on Pinterest. This is the proven method on Twitter. When you follow popular figures and they follow you back, other Twitter users get the message and follow the leader.

Add Pinterest Plugins to Your Website

Pinterest offers brands a few buttons to add to their websites as a means of connecting their web visitors to the Pinterest network. The Follow button can be added to your website or blog to allow your web visitors to quickly and easy follow your profile on the network. The Pin It button allows your web visitors to pin the content from your website directly to their boards on Pinterest. This button makes your web content extremely easy to share on the platform.

Have you gotten “pinterested” yet? How has your brand used the popular social network?

They may be fashionably late, but Twitter still knows how to draw a crowd. At the end of 2011, the social media giant followed in Facebook’s and Google+’s footsteps with the launch of their new brand pages. The new pages/features have not rolled out to all brands quite yet, but you would be wise to pay attention to what’s coming down the pike.

Twitter’s brand pages promise great new features which will allow brands to interact and engage with their followers even more than before. Here are three of the coolest.

Expanded Header Image Area

Advertisers and brand managers will be able to use the new Twitter brand page to display their logo and tagline more prominently.

The “Featured Tweet”

The “featured tweet” will be an easy way to highlight specific campaigns, promotions or offers over a much longer period of time. The shelf life of a tweet is typically short. With the new brand pages, an advertiser can expand any given tweet’s shelf life, which lengthens the amount of time they have to convey a specific message

Separating Out a Brand’s @Replies and @Mentions

This is great news for marketers who manage Twitter accounts––it will help them streamline their responses and communication by separating @replies and @mentions from all the other Twitter noise.

The new Twitter pages started with 21 brands including Coca-Cola, Dell, Nike and Disney. You may have to wait for your turn, so be patient. Both the new brand pages and the ability to see the changes from your own Twitter account are being rolled out slowly.

Recently, Simple Usability conducted a study to see how users are interacting so far with Twitter’s brand pages, and they released a report with some good tips on how to grab users’ attention and get them to your page. Once you’re able to create your own brand page, keep these in mind:

• Brands should pay particular attention to what the header image on their page does. McDonald’s and Coca Cola simply used their header as a banner ad, and they have gotten the least attention from visitors.
• Embedding media (videos, photos, etc.) in promoted or featured tweets is an effective way to engage users.
• When it comes to the content itself, transparency is the most important element users are looking for (kudos to HP for addressing consumer complaints through its Twitter account).

Tell us—what new and exciting plans do you have for social marketing in 2012?

Looking for the best post-holiday bargains? Check your phone.

Earlier in 2011, Google predicted that almost half of total searches for last minute gifts and store locator terms would be from mobile devices this past holiday season. No doubt this trend will continue on this year as the number of smartphone users grows.

This is something to phone home about. Unless you don’t have much of a mobile presence.

Wait––don’t hang up. Here’s the 4-1-1: If you haven’t already, you need to prepare a marketing plan for smartphone users or you could lose a chunk of change in 2012. When it comes to researching products and services––and purchasing––the masses are going mobile.

Consider these statistics:

• It takes 90 minutes for the average person to respond to an email. It takes 90 seconds for the average person to respond to a text message. (Source: CTIA.org)
• 70% of all mobile searches result in action within 1 hour. (Source: Mobile Marketer)
• Mobile coupons get 10 times the redemption rate of traditional coupons. (Source: Borrell Associates)

Mobile is here to stay. If you don’t have much of a mobile presence, it’s time to get busy. Start with these basics.

Show Up

As Woody Allen put it, “Eighty percent of success is simply showing up.” When mobile consumers search for products or businesses, they’re typically ready to act quickly, or in marketing terms, “intent is high.” If you don’t show up, you lose.

Mobile consumers generally find businesses in three ways––search engines, maps and directories, which sometimes come with their own location-based apps like Yelp, Urban Spoon or Trip Advisor. Be sure you’re findable and that your profile on these directories and networks is current. There’s nothing less inviting than a Facebook Page with a big “?” as your profile picture.

Play Nicely

Once a user finds you, what’s next? They want information. Mobile users’ behavior is different from those online. It’s crucial to have a website that’s optimized for them. This basically means skipping the fancy graphics to instead provide key features or information that are no more than one click away (click-to-call, mapping/directions, menu, reservation links or any coupons or specials you can use as incentives).

Become a User Yourself

If you haven’t already, try mobile marketing for yourself––as a consumer. If you’re like most people, you’ve never scanned a QR code or clicked on a mobile banner ad. But to use mobile marketing effectively as a marketer, it helps to understand it from the consumer’s point of view, so dive in. Search, scan, check in with location-based apps, visit mobile-optimized sites and familiarize yourself with the mobile world that is connected 24-7.

We want to know––has mobile marketing been effective for you in the past year? Are you planning to incorporate it into your marketing plan in 2012?

Little Thor – Having kids in commercials is always a win, just take for example the E*Trade baby who makes a huge impression every Super Bowl game as of late. But this year was the year for kids with imaginations. The first was a little spot by Volkswagon starring a child dressed as Darth Vader, attempting to use the force. It was cute, effective and enjoyable. But the one that stole the show, and created a seamless integrated online marketing campaign was Marvel Comics “Little Thor.” This online video promoted the new Paramount Pictures movie “Thor” and was a direct parody to Volkswagons “Mini Darth Vader” commercial, but with a different ending of course. The video exploded online and surpassed 1 million views within a week. With a direct link to the “Thor” website, it created one of the top online marketing experiences of the year.

Decode Jay-Z with Bing – Being able to innovate your products and services are what keeps brands afloat in today’s world. Consumers are always looking for something more to keep their attention and keep them entertained online—and Bing did exactly that. With Jay-Z’s upcoming book, “Decoded”, Bing decided to give the audience a little challenge by actually having them decode Jay-Z’s book on Bing Maps. How it worked was that actual pages of the book were physically placed around the country, mostly in New York, for people to find on Bing Maps. 5-10 pages were released per day, and if you found a page online or in person, you got credit for it and were entered into a drawing for signed copies of his book, as well as for the Grand Prize of winning tickets to his New Year’s Eve show in Las Vegas with Coldplay.

This is a great example of an online marketing campaign that integrates the online world and physical world while giving the audience an actual/physical challenge to stimulate their senses.

Tesco – Retail marketing and the innovation of retail technology has been a major subject the past year, especially with PSFK’s Future of Retail report. Retailers want to create the shopping experience as clean and smooth as possible, and are almost pushing out human interaction all together. But the integration of mobile with retail shopping is an interesting concept that Google has been pushing with mobile credit card processing, along with Square. But the retailer that really pushed the envelope was Tesco with their “virtual shopping wall.”

Setup in the Seonreung subway station in central Seoul, the virtual shopping center was the first of its kind in August and will surely inspire more retailers to follow suit. While commuters are waiting for their train, they can do some shopping using only the digital images of products and their mobile phone to scan the product and complete the order. The integration of this innovative mobile technology with our everyday activities makes life a lot less complicated and will inspire other brands to tweak the idea to fit their consumers needs and wants. Hopefully this technology will reach the states in the early stages of 2012.

Adidas 3D Mapping Projection – If there had to be a trend in 2011 that saw the most love and attention, it would have to be the use of 3D technology. At least 25% of the movies that came out in 2011 were shot in 3D, either during production or post-production. There were 3D cameras introduced into the amateur photography market and even 3D television sets. But in the world of advertising and marketing, nobody utilized 3D technology better than Adidas France. Sure, there are other brands before Adidas to dip their hands into the 3D honey pot, but it doesn’t seem they are too invested in the technology. Adidas, on the other hand, creates the ultimate consumer experience by making their 3D projections invigorating and breath-taking. Now that the tool has been introduced, it is up to the brands to use the tool to expand their creativity. Adidas set the bar, and that bar is sitting pretty high.

And that concludes Firespring’s examples of awesome online marketing campaigns from 2011. The examples covered almost every aspect of a truly integrated online/digital marketing campaign, and did so in enthralling fashion. Each campaign set the bar pretty high for 2012, so keep an eye out to see if anyone will accept the challenge.

Did we miss any great examples of awesome online marketing campaigns from 2011? Feel free to share them in the comments below.

Here at Firespring, we put our minds together as a company to come up with the best examples of online marketing from 2011. We thought about just leaving it to social media, but that excludes other campaigns and promotions that have a solid social media piece that’s tied in to a bigger online marketing campaign. So, we now present you with the best online marketing campaigns of 2011.

Underheard in New York – Over the past few years, unemployment and homelessness have been major issues all over the country. It especially hit hard in major cities such as L.A., New York City and Detroit. So the people at Underheard, with the help of BBH, decided to give a voice to the unsheltered. They picked four people (Danny, Derrick, Albert and Carlos), gave them each a phone with unlimited texting for a month along with a Twitter account. With these tools, people were allowed to get to know these guys on an individual basis and include them in a global/digital community through social media. The outcome was more than satisfying as donations poured in from around the world, job offers came to surface and even New York Giant’s tickets were offered. Underheard not only exposed these four men to the world around them, but also gave them a voice for themselves and the rest of the homeless.

Dermablend “Go Beyond the Cover” – I’m sure everyone has heard of the phrase “never judge a book by its cover”—which is exactly what Dermablend was going for with their new professional product. Here they are targeting people with skin concerns or tattoos. And who better to promote your product than fashion model “Zombie Boy?” Their website and viral video have exploded on the Internet and have given a voice to people whose underlying beauty isn’t yet socially acceptable in today’s world. But the viral video showcasing the product’s use is what really makes this campaign pop. At first you see what appears to be a normal looking man with a couple piercings—but within a few seconds, the man wipes away the Dermablend makeup to reveal his actual surface. The campaign is eye opening and effective, and in some cases, a learning experience.

Dos Equis “Most Interesting Man in the World” – Characters are nothing new to the world of advertising and marketing. In fact, many brands are built around a face such as Frosted Flakes (Tony the Tiger) and GEICO (the GEICO Gecko). But if you asked anybody today to name a famous advertising character that came out within the this past year, over half would probably mention Dos Equis’s “Most Interesting Man in the World.” A persona built on “Chuck Norris-isms”, Dos Equis created a character that isn’t so much relatable as he is inspiring. With quotable one liners, an excellent YouTube page and interactive website (Stay Thirsty My Friends), the “Most Interesting Man in the World” is a phenomena that won’t die out anytime soon.

What our audience can take away from these examples is that the integration of online marketing with any promotion or campaign is important in today’s culture. You don’t have to have a major budget to get the same effect as these three examples—all you need is solid content that is contagious. Making a quality video and uploading it to YouTube with a link back to a landing page or your business’s home page can go a long way for a promotion that just needs some affection to be a major success.

Stay tuned next week for 7 Awesome Online Marketing Campaigns from 2011: Part 2.

What are some of the best online marketing campaigns you’ve seen this past year?

Here’s a typical scenario:

An organization decides it’s time to update their website, so someone calls a meeting and invites everyone in the office to participate. The leader writes “Ideas for our new website” on the whiteboard and kicks-off a discussion.

Someone blurts out, “I saw a cool website yesterday, and it had such-and-such, we should have that!” And someone else chimes in, “I saw xyz on this other site, let’s include that.” This continues on for a while with people throwing out ideas and the leader writing feverishly. It’s called brainstorming––and that’s a good thing, right? You take everyone’s ideas, write them down and see what sticks.

The problem with this scenario is that the people who are actually using the site––the end-users––are not part of this conversation. Your constituents, the people you serve, volunteers, donors, other nonprofits and, hopefully, the media, are the people you’re building your website for, but typically they don’t have a voice.

Many different audiences will visit your website, and they’re all looking for something unique. Your website needs to be built with these end-users in mind––designed to cater to their needs and include the features and content that each group is looking for. That’s great that your staff and employees have an opinion, but your site should be all about meeting the needs of your intended audience, not your internal team.

Careful research and planning will help you hit the mark on what your target audience is looking for. To learn more about what your constituents want in your website based on Firespring focus group studies, I recommend attending the next Firespring webinar on “How to Captivate and Engage Constituents With Your Website.”

Need to catch up on the first two mistakes? Take a look under Related Posts below.

How accurate are the results? Should you lose sleep over a bad grade?

I jumped in and used one of my own personal reports from my photo art website, along with a client’s report they shared with me so I could really understand what kind of differences there were between two DRAMATICALLY different websites.

Here’s a quick synopsis.

The grader is broken out into three sections which include:

“ToFu” – Top of the Funnel

This analyzes whether or not you are engaging in activities to generate leads to your website—which includes creating content, optimizing it and promoting it. It specifically categorizes these into blogging, SEO, Mobile and Social Media.

“MoFu” – Middle of the Funnel

This determines whether you are doing a sufficient job of converting traffic into sales leads and ultimately, paying customers. Conversion forms, email marketing and social media are indicators of success.

Analytics

This reveals whether you have tools in place on your website to help you better understand what marketing activities are working. For example, if you have Google Analytics or any other statistics package, you’ll probably have a passing grade.

The Good

1. I must say that the best part of the grader is that it is effortless… all you need to do is type in your website and an optional entry of two of your closest competitors. It’s a breeze.
2. Each of the three sections gives you three action items to improve your grade. It’s concise and clear.
3. It checks alt tags for all images, and it turned out I was missing a couple. That’s helpful.
4. The report reveals how many sites have linked to yours, including “authoritative pages”—a crucial component of SEO.
5. The report emphasizes the importance of mobile websites. It also outlines Apple icons and meta viewport tags, details that are often missed.
6. Twitter stats are revealed, including the average number of days and hours between tweets which was certainly a wake-up call for me. It also knows whether you are conversing with others and not just standing on a soap box. Guilty as charged. Good stuff.
7. It pulls in useful social data including traffic statistics, Facebook fans and Klout score. Nothing you couldn’t find elsewhere, but it’s certainly nice to have on the report for convenience.

The Not-So-Good

1. The results got off to a rocky start, with the very first one stating that my last blog entry was on Wednesday, December 31, 1969. Considering my website didn’t exist, and I wasn’t even born yet, I scratched my head. My blog clearly states the dates, so I’m a bit confused as to what the crawler may be searching for to extract that data. It penalized me for not having any recent blog posts when my last one was just over a week ago.
2. A few philosophical differences popped up. For example, it says that all blog post titles should be 75 characters or less. Perhaps this grader presumes that the title tag will be the exact same as the article title. This is often not the case. If 75 characters should be the length for brevity, I can’t totally disagree, but I’ve seen some pretty interesting titles longer than 75 that I absolutely HAVE to click on.
3. Several errors appeared, including not being able to tell how often I post new articles on the blog. Simply the downside of a robotic crawler in this case it seems.
4. The report states that my blog is “not easy to share” because I “forgot to add social sharing buttons to my blog.” I have two large “Share” and “Tweet” icons on every blog post. I suspect since my buttons are a bit custom, the crawler didn’t see the code.
5. It takes a few random internal pages and sees how well they are optimized. It chose a couple of pages that have little relevance to SEO (including an account page), so that seems it would confuse or lead astray an end user less familiar with SEO. In the other report, it penalized this aspect of the site, but gave absolutely no reasoning or suggestions on what to fix. I’ve been looking at website Page Titles and Page Descriptions for many years, and I thought they were rock solid. Hmmm….
6. The report offers some interesting results such as visits, visit to lead ratio, lead to customer ratios and monthly customers compared to other companies. It uses its data from over 5,000 of its own clients. This seems really awesome at first, until you realize that it’s useless to smaller companies that receive less than 34k monthly visits. This is probably you too. Congratulations if it’s not! The data is irrelevant and hurts your feelings at the same time. Perhaps this is a clever psychological HubSpot sales strategy
7. I can’t be sure how this grader calculates whether your traffic is sufficient or not, but I’m guessing that 2,000 visitors per month might be the make or break point. One report was acceptable while the other was not, and both were close to that line, but on opposite sides. Seems a little strange to cast a judgment blanket over traffic numbers like that, but I may have no idea of the sophistication level of the measurement. Further, there doesn’t seem to be a distinction between pure organic traffic vs. paid traffic which can really fog up the results.
8. I was astonished to see that it detected a mobile version of my site, which isn’t the case. Sure, my site can be seen on mobile phone, but it is obvious it is not built for it.

Data Gold Nuggets

(Taken directly from HubSpot’s Report. I’m not sure about the source of the studies, so there’s my disclaimer.)

1. Companies that blog get 55% more web traffic and 70% more leads than those that don’t.
2. Businesses with 31 to 40 landing pages get 7X more leads than those with 1 to 5.
3. US Internet users spend 3X more time on blogs and social networks than on email.
4. Companies that use Twitter average 2X more leads per month than those that do not.
5. Companies with 1000+ Twitter followers get 6X more traffic on their websites than those with fewer Twitter followers.
6. 39% of B2B companies using Twitter have acquired new customers from it.
7. Companies that blog have 97% more inbound links than those that don’t.
8. Blog posts shared on Twitter get 113% more inbound links than those not shared on social media at all.
9. 46% of daily internet users read more than one blog every day.
10. 46% of daily searches are for research on products or services.

Drum roll please, it’s time to grade HubSpot’s Marketing Grader.

80/100 B-

The accuracy of the grader is a little disappointing, but the information on the report itself saves the day and certainly sways you, the student, in the right direction. I will give kudos since both reports did share some similar information, but certainly isn’t a cookie cutter. Each focused on different ways to improve which reveals some sophistication in the grader.

It turns out that the greatest convenience of simply typing in your website (that’s it) is this survey’s greatest downfall. The crawler is limited in its ability to fully understand intentions of pages, read blogs properly and can just pull random information that does little good for analysis. If you don’t have a blog, prepare to get scorched. If you don’t participate in social media, it’s gonna hurt. It most heavily emphasizes blogging and social media, and because of this ignores some other smaller components of effective online marketing strategies. Perhaps it was an attempt to focus on the larger items rather than overwhelm the student with more details and specifics.

If you take HubSpot’s Marketing Grader, just make sure you understand that the final report is the most important takeaway, not your score.

Do you have any questions or comments about your HubSpot Marketing Grader Report? If so, please leave a comment.

And yes, I’ve seen ALL of these mistakes at one time or another.

1. Do not use abbreviations in your URLs.
NO – www.yourdomain.com/about-us/jd
YES – www.yourdomain.com/about-us/john-doe

2. Do not shorten words or make meaningless abbreviations.
NO – www.yourdomain.com/pdcts
YES – www.yourdomain.com/products

3. Separate words using hyphens. Underlines are also acceptable. Resort to “+” plus signs last.
NO – www.yourdomain.com/customflags
YES – www.yourdomain.com/custom-flags

4. Keep your key pages toward the surface. Don’t bury them.
NO – www.yourdomain.com/services/specialites/industrial/sign-repair
YES – www.yourdomain.com/services/sign-repair

5. Do not make URLs too long. They are tough to remember, type, and can be viewed as spam by search engines.
NO – www.yourdomain.com/custom-engraved-indoor-displays-and-signs-for-offices
YES – www.yourdomain.com/custom-engraved-signs

6. Use specific targeted keywords in your URLs.
NO – www.yourdomain.com/graphics
YES – www.yourdomain.com/vehicle-graphics

7. Avoid dynamic URL strings.
NO – www.yourdomain.com/products/forums/thread.php?threadid=54243&sort=date
YES – www.yourdomain.com/products/forums/url-mistakes

8. Use lowercase text always with no exception.
NO – www.yourdomain.com/locations/Utah/Salt-Lake-City
YES – www.yourdomain.com/locations/utah/salt-lake-city

9. Make sure your site does not use both “www” and “non-www” URLs. If given the choice, use the “www” form. Make sure that one funnels (redirects) to the other. If you can type in both and your URL string doesn’t automatically change in both cases, you’ll need to get it fixed.

10. Make sure your home page does not have duplicates, for example:
http://www.yourdomain.com
http://yourdomain.com
http://www.yourdomain.com/index.html
http://yourdomain.com/index.html

If you have any questions whatsoever or if I’ve left any out, please post them in the comments! Cheers to perfect URLs!