Author Archives: Brian Remmel

KISSmetrics, the ‘people-centric’ web analytics company, has just released a new product to complement their easy-to-understand analytics product: KISSinsights.

KISSinsights fills in the blanks for website owners left behind by typical website analytics tools like Google Analytics. It’s a custom survey tool that allows you to collect qualitative information from your visitors using open-ended or multiple-choice surveys.

“The code is very simple to install… after that you can change your survey questions, the style of surveys (multiple choice vs open answer for example), and what pages you want the surveys to show up on – all from your KISSinsights account,” said Sean Work, media officer for KISSmetrics. “It’s really a great solution to help any website owner get a better understanding of what their users are experiencing. And we all know this information is extremely valuable.”

Screen shots are courtesy of TechCrunch. You can read their coverage of KISSinsights here.

It is no secret that traditional media has been on the decline since the advent of social media. Consumer trust of traditional media sources, and corresponding advertising spend by businesses, has continued to drop in recent years.

Businesses used to focus their marketing efforts on a few key channels (television, radio, and print). These media have very few decision makers controlling what stories and advertising they run, and it’s easy to identify who these influencers are. In social media, figuring out who matters most can be a daunting task.

The influencers (the people affecting our actions) are found in our network. They are the friends, celebrities, and other trusted sources that we follow. Sometimes, they are even you or me.

Here is a video outlining four rules that businesses can follow when determining who the influencers in their market are today:

Who influencers your decisions? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Disclosure: In addition to being a contributor to Bubblicious, I also work at FutureWorks. The above video was commissioned by mBLAST, a FutureWorks client.

In today’s competitive job market, monitoring the latest job openings and sending out applications can feel like a fulltime job. For those without reliable access to an internet connection, the task becomes nearly impossible. San Francisco-based Job Rooster is helping to bridge this gap using a technology that is available to almost everyone: SMS.

Job Rooster lets users conduct the full life cycle of hiring process over the mobile phone. Potential applicants receive relevant job postings and can even apply for positions via text message. The service is entirely mobile; moving information available online to offline.

As soon as a job posting appears on one of Job Rooster’s partner’s job boards matching the criteria indicated by the user, it is pushed to their mobile phone.

Applying for a job is as simple as sending a quick text message.

When an applicant applies for a job, the service evaluates the required education and skills against the applicant’s resume, and will then share local opportunities for gaining those skills and education with the applicant.

Job Rooster is currently recruiting paid beta testers in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Researching people on Twitter is very limited – users have to settle for reading a 160 character bio, some recent tweets, and one link to another site. Twitter has proven to be an excellent medium for discovering new contacts, but often the information there isn’t enough. So, do you turn to Google and wade through an ocean of results? Look up their LinkedIn bio, blog, company website, or…?

With qwerly, one can simply type in a Twitter username, and the site aggregates all related social profiles tied to the account. It will even include recent activity for the profiles, including recent tweets and Plancast posts.

There are similar services for aggregating social profile info about users (Gist, Rapportive), but these services are for people you are already in contact with (mostly via email). With Qwerly, you just need to visit their site and type in a Twitter username.

What tools do you use to discover people on Twitter? Let me know in the comments or on Twitter.

The following is a guest post by Christian Arno, founder of Lingo24.

Marketing and SEO for global websites

The web provides great opportunities to expand your business into global markets. But if you want your website to be successful overseas, you need to make sure it is properly localized for the regions you are targeting. There are several issues to consider, including translation, country-specific domains and hosting, geolocation and SEO (link building).

Overcoming the language barrier

In order to break into foreign markets, you need to overcome the inevitable language barriers. 78% of web users do not speak English as their native language. Also, research by Common Sense Advisory suggests people not proficient in English are six times less likely to purchase from an English-only website. These are two very good reasons for having your website content translated.

The best way to go about it is to employ a professional translator. This will ensure any irregularities in your text, like slang and abbreviations, will be properly translated. The translator will make sure your translated content is as accurate as possible. If you’re on a tight budget, you could try using a machine translation service, like Google Translate. The main benefit of these types of service is that they are free, but they will never be as accurate as a human translator.

Keyword translation

Despite the fact that automatic translation services are improving all the time, you cannot rely on them for your keyword translation. You can’t even be sure of a dictionary when it comes to keyword translation, because the most popular search term in any market could be a synonym, a local colloquialism, an adoption from English – anything at all. The only way to be sure is to work with a professional translator to develop your list of keywords in other languages, and then research these keywords using a tool like Google Keywords.

Geolocation

Once you have created the various translated versions of your website, you will want to ensure that your visitors can find their local version as easily as possible. One way to achieve this is to automatically channel your visitors to the page which is localized for their language. You can use Geolocation to identify a user’s location based on their IP address (stored by IP address databases like IP2Location and Digital Envoy) and then channel visitors from certain locations straight to their page.

Geolocation works well for most visitors, but if any are accessing the net via a proxy server which is not located in their own country, they may be forwarded to the wrong content. So you also need to provide a manual method for users to access their language of choice. This simply involves adding links pointing to the various language versions of your pages. Try to avoid using country flag icons for the links because many languages are spoken in more than one country. It’s best just to have text links, which could be in a drop-down menu in the website header.

Country-specific domains

Your website will perform much better in local search engine rankings if you register a domain name for each country you are targeting. For example, if you use www.yourcompany.se for the Swedish version of your website, you stand a better chance of ranking well in the Swedish version of Google (www.google.se). You should host these country-specific domains on servers within the relevant country.

Alternatively, set the geographic location of each of your subdomains using Google’s Geotargeting tool – for instance, set the location of your French-language subdomain to France, etc. That way when Google looks for relevant local results for your keywords it will pull up your pages targeted at that region.

Link building

It’s important to build links from sites within your target country. For example, if you have a .se domain, your rankings in local search engines will be improved by getting backlinks from other .se domains. Building backlinks in foreign markets involves exactly the same methods you would use on your English websites, but you may need the help of a translator if you plan to use article marketing or guest posting to build links. You might find some local web directories are worth submitting your foreign language site to, but before you do submit, do some research and make sure the directory is well-established and has a decent amount traffic.

As you can see, successfully localizing your website for overseas markets involves a number of considerations. As well as the technical side of things, like local domains and hosting, you also need to ensure your content is properly translated and makes sense – however, compared to the cost of establishing a business ‘on the ground’ in a foreign market, moving into foreign markets online is far cheaper and has the potential for massive increases in profits for very little financial risk.

About the author

Christian Arno is the founder and Managing Director of global Lingo24, one of the fastest growing translation agencies in the world. Launched in 2001, Lingo24 now has over 130 employees spanning four continents and clients in over sixty countries.

Contact Lingo24 with a translation request mentioning http://bub.blicio.us/ before 30 November 2010 and receive a 10% discount on your first order.