Sure, you can ask some friends for their opinion but, what if you could experience how a real person behaves, what they do or where they click.

 Think of retail stores or supermarkets and how they position every single product on their floor according to a strategy based on extensive customer behavior studies. Things are not just placed there to see what happens.

This is the second installment of the “Social Power Tools To Kick It Up A Notch” series. This time we’ll talk about a service that will let you watch how people behave when they visit your site or blog. Yes, I said “watch”. This application is called ClickTale and I will tell you how to benefit from it.

But let’s start from the beginning…

What Are The Objectives?

• The first thing we need is clarity about our objectives. What do we want our website/blog to do? You might be trying to increase your mailing list or generate more traffic, maybe convert visitors to potential clients.
• Once that is clear, look at how are you doing in those areas. Are people signing up for your newsletter or visiting your “Services” page after reading your latest post?
• Before we start moving things around or making our “Subscribe” button twice as big with a flashing effect, let’s take the time to observe.

And that’s where a tool like ClickTale comes in. Now we can move on to the main features and how you can leverage from them…

Record Your Visitors

ClickTale records whatever is happening on the screen when a visitor comes in your site. You can actually experience how the visitor scrolls down the page and observe the behavior through the mouse. See if your visitor hovers any sections or is actually clicking on them or if he/she scrolls down all the way or bounces before finishing your post.

You can also set the video viewing speed, it’s pretty easy to tell if the person is actually reading the post or just scanning it.

Heatmaps

Watching how a real user behaves in your site is truly an eye-opener but we need the big picture in order to make a significant change. Heatmaps are a great visualization tool for that. You can run heatmaps based on a specific URL within your site by a date range to see what are the areas where that group of visitors are hovering, clicking or whether they are scrolling down or not on separate maps. The next image shows you where visitors are mostly going over with their mouse.

Next is the Scroll heatmap. You can see how the temperature goes down as you scroll and what’s the hottest piece of real estate on the page. I’m not showing the entire image here.

Tip: Take a picture of the entire heatmap and download it. If you use Firefox this is as easy as installing the Screengrab! plugin, it takes a screenshot of the entire page even below the fold.

Reports

ClickTale also provides a series of valuable reports displaying data you can analyze if you’re trying to step up your game. These reports tell you what are the most engaging pages, the most clicked, the least scrolled and even the slowest loading, which is by the way one of the main reasons a visitor will surf away from your site.

So Now You Know What’s Up… What’s Next?

After paying attention to some videos and heatmaps you’ll have a pretty good idea of what’s going on. Now you know if people are just not seeing your Subscribe button, perhaps because it’s on the opposite side from where all the action is happening. You will be able to better position the different elements.

ClickTale has different pricing packages depending on your needs and it also has a free basic package.

What I learned…

I learned a couple of things after just watching a few videos, one is that people were looking for the top navigation bar and my blog only had the one on the sidebar. The other one is that I get better scrolls when the post has images.

If you find yourself screaming at the screen “don’t go yet! look at the pretty navigation on the right! tweet it dude, tweet it!”, maybe you should take a break.

See what you find out. Be curious and question everything. Don’t be afraid to make changes, it’s the only way to improve. Make your site do what it is supposed to do.

And visit the first post of the series: Social Power Tools To Kick It Up A Notch (Tool #1): ObjectiveMarketer

Photo Credit: Jerry Cook

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I’m writing a series of 3 or 4 posts with the intention of showcasing some of the tools you can use to upgrade your game in social media. This week, a closer look into ObjectiveMarketer, the application used by some of the top influencers like Guy Kawasaki.

 I will focus more on the individual use of the tool since the blog is based on personal branding but, I should point out that ObjectiveMarketer has the strength to be used by organizations and even agencies handling multiple clients. Also, I will try to emphasize on the features that make this app unique rather than what is already offered out there.

So let’s take a look at some of those features…

Multiple Users, Accounts And Platforms

This is one of the areas where the game is taken to the next level. You not only have the ability to handle multiple Twitter accounts but you can setup different users under the same account with their own roles and permissions.

For now ObjectiveMarketer can handle channels like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, but according to its founder Amita Paul, they are currently working on the integration of MySpace and Orkut with more to come in the near future.

Campaigns

If you have different objectives in your social media activity, you can design separate campaigns to track individual performance for them. For example, if you promote your own content and also share content from other sources or you are running two different promotions for your product or service, you can create two different campaigns and analyze their performance individually. You decide how to design your campaigns. Be creative.

Goals

The best way to determine if a campaign has been successful is by setting your goals or expectations in advance. Be specific, setup goals for clicks, retweets and even average clicks per post for individual campaigns.

Keywords

Keywords are used to monitor any mentions on Twitter that are related to your campaign, you can monitor specific events or product names and listen to what is been said out there.

Om.ly

ObjectiveMarketer has its own short URL so there is no need to setup any third-party services or make two stops to send out your message. As long as you are using Om.ly, everything gets tracked.

There is also a bookmark plugin available so you can share from anywhere in the web.

Post Your Messages Like A Rockstar

Sending out a Tweet is one thing, choosing the account, scheduling it, assigning a specific campaign and adding tags to your post is something else. All these features allow you to track your performance and adjust your strategy like no other application.

Calendar

Scheduling posts in advance is a good way to control your frequency and collaboration with other users. OM generates a calendar with a unique URL that you can then export to your Google Calendar.

Influencers vs. Amplifiers

This is another feature I haven’t seen before. OM classifies your followers into two categories, “Influencers” is a count of your followers retweeting your posts and the “Amplifiers” are determined by the times your follower has been retweeted. Your follower is promoted from influencer to amplifier when he/she amplifies your message to a 2nd level.

Analytics

Setting up goals, tags and some of the other criteria on your posts and campaigns provides you with a great set of metrics to analyze your performance. The main dashboard gives you the big picture but you can also get in-depth charts of all kinds…

You can measure an individual post or campaign by its lifetime and performance during the day, by clicks and by different channels where it has been posted.

Compare between campaigns and even archive these reports.

Track daily trending topics from your tweets and your followers. OM also generates a tag cloud once a week.

Final Thought

If you are a serious entrepreneur or independent trying to step up your social media results, leveraging from tools like ObjectiveMarketer is a must.

Oh, one last thing and this is for the awesome team at OM… thanks for not calling it Twobjective or Twiketer!

Photo Credit: banola

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 I’m going to show you how to produce your own video interview guerilla style… I mean, without losing an arm and a leg and without hiring anybody. First let’s review the ingredients:

The Ingredients

• Webcam
• Screen capture software
• Skype
• Basic video editing software
• Video sharing website

Record A Little Intro

With just a simple webcam, record yourself doing a short introduction for your guest, tell people what they are about to see. Make it short because your viewer will not stick forever to see you hook it up.

When you are done save it, you will need it later to edit the final piece.

Screen Capture

When doing an interview you will face two possible scenarios, is the person you are interviewing physically reachable or on the other side of the planet. In this case we’ll talk about a long distance interview and since this is going to happen over the internet, what we need to record is what’s happening on the screen, this is called Screen Capturing. This software will also take care of the audio part.

I personally like iShowU from ShinyWhiteBox, but there are plenty of options out there. Depending of your choice, you should expect to pay up to $100, don’t pay more than that (iShowU is about $30).

Skype

Oh, the beautiful and FREE Skype… If you don’t have an account you should probably make the time to get one, today. In my opinion, the only thing Skype doesn’t do is record, that’s why you need to use screen capture software. Other than that, it makes everything much more simple. Setup your appointment, make sure you have a good connection for the call, make a couple of tests and you are ready.

Consider that your interview should probably not exceed the 10 minutes but try to record more material to play with at the editing stage.

Editing Your Video

The term “Video Editing” is probably the one that scares everybody, but don’t complicate things. Remember that you are producing something for the Internet, not for TV. While there are many options in this field, I recommend you stay in the lower end, the basics. I’m using iMovie but if you are on the PC side, Windows Movie Maker should be the equivalent.

These programs are very easy to learn because they are meant to help beginners like you and me. If you take a couple of tutorials, you’ll be on your way pretty fast (These links are for tutorials on both iMovie and Movie Maker).

During the editing stage, you want to play with adding different elements like pictures, text, effects and music. You will also be able to chop the raw video in pieces and paste them together.

Video Sharing Service

Now that you have your video edited and saved on your computer (usually on a MP4 format), you need to share it with the world and for this you will need to create an account with a service like Vimeo or YouTube if you don’t already have one. I prefer Vimeo but that’s just me, there are plenty options out there for you to find a good fit.

Once you have your account setup you just need to upload your file, be patient, it’ll take a while. Set up a title, a description, tags and whatever you can do to make it a little more friendly. Publish your video and make sure everything is looking good.

Embed To Your Post

The last step is to bring it to your blog, where you want to place it on your next post. Wherever your video lives now (Vimeo, YouTube or other…), copy the “Embed Code” (read my post: “Mini-Tutorial: How To Embed A You-Tube Video On Your Blog“) and insert it into your post. Preview and test everything before hitting the “Publish” button.

It’s A Wrap!

It’s not rocket science, anybody can do a video interview and while the technical part is very important and entertaining at the same time, make sure the main focus is on delivering good quality in the content. People will forgive a technical difficulty if the content is of value.

(2 mentions before I go: Sorry Andrea for using you as an example… and thanks Glenn Sakamoto for the idea for the post).

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