Latest Web Engagement News & Articles

Imagine your social world—Twitter, Facebook, etc.—all on one page. Popular lifestreaming solutions like FriendFeed and Tumblr work to provide just that. Now, imagine it's a Microsoft offering.  

Oh yes I did — I said the engagement word. And did I hear a small sigh? Is the word already starting to creep into the lexicon of marketecture? Has it fallen to the same reason that I can no longer utter the word leverage without people giggling? Is it all a bit, you know, web 2.0?

Or can we still talk about it as an industry best practice, a unit of measure, a goal or a set of tools for defining and describing that connection with our audience? I'll argue for the latter.

Some say WEM's the latest WCM marketing ploy. Some have never heard the phrase. We think Web Engagement Management (WEM) is an important change in the way people build and utilize web content management systems.

When we last spoke about usability testing, we introduced the what, why and how of website quality assessment. Though many appreciate the need for usability testing, some may be skeptical about paying for tools. There are a handful of free tools available that can help users better understand how website elements can be improved and how analytic tools can improve the process.

This week we took a look at some of the free tools available and what they offer.
 

Well, the iPhone isn't a fan of Flash but the Android sure is. Skyfire (news, site) launched its first Flash-enabled mobile Web browser last week.  

The only thing better than utilizing great platforms is utilizing great platforms that can communicate with each other. A new plugin from Salesforce (news, site) aims to provide exactly that by automating the lead creation process between its own CRM platform and WordPress. 

LinkedIn is not about to give up its spot as the most popular social networking site in the workplace. Not without a fight, anyway. The platform recently took a tip from Twitter and integrated a follow feature of their own. 

The history of social interface design can be divided into two periods: Before Flickr and after Flickr. In the first period, any social interface functionality was added as an afterthought to the design—something to layer on top of the core functionality. In the after Flickr period, teams were now considering social components as core to their design's value.

Semantic analysis company Attensity just rolled out the red carpet via the acquisition of social media monitoring solution provider Biz360 in order to welcome us all to what they're calling the "Open Enterprise."  

Working with contractors or 3rd parties, like any relationship, is a two-sided affair. Here are some tips for keeping your Web projects running smoothly.

If you're a fan of dead simple solutions, then you may want to give Tal.ki a try. The forum system from Lefora is a chat box that isn't limited to one community—it can be placed on any page, any post, or any site. 

When I told Lew Frees, of Harmony Inc., that I was writing this article he told me a story about how the Beatles created the album Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Sergeant Pepper came out in June of 1967. Of all the Beatles many albums it represented a genre breakthrough bringing all kinds of new sounds and instruments into the music mix.

Social media works, plain and simple. For businesses, it's a trend that represents a marketing opportunity so huge it eclipses the need for intermediaries by connecting companies directly with their customers. Have you taken a proper look at how best to utilize this phenomenon? Read on, we aim to help you. 

Focused on helping organizations listen to their customers, Medallia has released a new Advanced Insights Suite to go along with its Customer Experience Management solutions.

Recently, we did some extensive task testing with a technical audience. 70 percent started the task by clicking on a link, 30 percent used search.

Via a partnership with SocialEyez, Alterian (news, site) is offering social media monitoring service with its SM2 product for the Middle Eastern, Arabic-language-speaking market.

Twitter recently held its first-ever developer's conference in San Francisco, and among the highlights was the announcement of open annotations. With the ability to add any kind of metadata to tweets, we're looking at what could be the most disruptive thing to happen to our 140-character friend since, well, the beginning.

iPerceptions, like many analytics companies, aims to redefine market research by "boldly changing what it means to listen to customers."  Unlike many analytics companies, their solutions focus on testing performance. Their latest efforts take the form of WASP (Web Analytics Solution Provider) 2.0, a web-based tool for taking a deeper look at the state of analytics solutions. 

To tweet or not to tweet? Is that STILL the question? For many CEOs it is.

According to Forrester Research Chief Executive Officer, George Colony, “within 15 years CEOs will need to know the ins and outs of new media, social network technologies and social communities before they get the job.” As you can imagine his prediction caused a few rumbles from the audience at Thursday’s Forrester Marketing Forum 2010 conference in Los Angeles.

Social media marketing solutions just won’t stop cropping up. Japan’s latest is called AppTraq, a free analytics tool that specializes in the analysis of social technologies such as Facebook applications.