Will Marlow

I was just speaking to an executive at a university Annual Fund who told me that she wanted to use social media platforms to drive more traffic to her website. 

If you can relate to this desire, I need to stop you right there.  You need to understand something: you don't want more traffic.  More traffic by itself has zero value.  You want: more donors, more volunteers, more customers, and more satisfied "readers" who visit your site regularly to read your new content.  If you optimize your website so that every year you get more donors, more volunteers, and more happy subscribers, you'll win promotions, raises, praise and other good things.  If you optimize your website simply to generate generic traffic, pretty soon you'll be asking yourself why you wasted your resources to do that.

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Will Marlow is a digital strategist/online marketing consultant.  He's the co-creator of  AlumniFidelity, which is a Web 2.0 fundraising platform for colleges, nonprofits and secondary schools.   He’s working with clients such as UVA, the College of William & Mary, the University of Oklahoma, and Bowling Green State University and he loves nothing better than a thorny marketing challenge.  He would love to help you market your business on the Internet, boost the fundraising numbers for your school or nonprofit, or sellout your next big event.  Email him at will@alumnifidelity.com.

You should never use a new feature just because it's awesome.  This is because "awesome" isn't awesome unless it advances your goals.

My blogging platform (Posterous) added a new feature recently: this feature allows you to add "page breaks" into your blog posts, so that if someone is visiting your blog homepage, they would get to read perhaps the first paragraph, and then they would need to click "read more" to get the rest.  Most people think that this feature is nice because it allows you to fit more content on your blog homepage, but the point of it is actually very different.  If people can read your entire blog post (or, in fact, multiple blog posts if they scroll down the page) without clicking on anything, their entire visit on your website would be registered as "0.0 seconds," because analytic software always measures time on a website by subtracting the time stamp on page one from the time stamp on page two.  If there is no page two, your metrics look really boring because the visit will show up as zero seconds in duration, despite the fact that it could have lasted for 30 minutes.  Combine this with the fact that blogs typically don't require lots of clicking, and you get really boring data on blog traffic.

I doubt I'll use this feature, because even though it helps optimize your blog for analyzing traffic, it de-optimizes your blog for delivering content.  (This is because people frequently read blog posts by scanning them, and it may be a tidbit in the last paragraph of a blog post that convinces them to become a subscriber.)   I care about delivering content, not analyzing time stamps.  The features you choose to add on your website or blog should always be determined by your goals, and nothing else. 

Will Marlow co-founded AlumniFidelity to help his clients reposition their fundraising to benefit from Web2.0 technology and marketing techniques. He’s working with clients such as UVA, the College of William & Mary, the University of Oklahoma, Bowling Green State University, Randolph Macon College, and he loves nothing better than a thorny marketing challenge.  Email him at will@alumnifidelity.com.

Today I am beginning to unfollow 12,000 people, making my way down to zero.  Currently, almost everyone I am following is also following me back.  And starting last Friday, I began informing my "followers" of this experiment, and anyone who has been paying attention to my feed has had ample time to hear me announce that I am culling faux-followers, and that I will quickly begin to add people back who I interact with, or who reach out to me, or who I am interested in.  

Some people have a hard time understanding why Facebook is so valuable.