After 25 Years, 87 Percent of Americans Connected to the Web

25 years after Sir Tim Berners-Lee released the first popular Web browser, many of us can't live without it. 

 

Get your party pants on, people — the World Wide Web is turning 25 on March 12.

 

In honor of the Web's impending quarter-life crisis, the Pew Research Center on Thursday released a survey showing just how far it has come over the years. Two and a half decades after Sir Tim Berners-Lee released the first popular Web browser Mosaic, an overwhelming 87 percent of American adults now use the Internet — and most say it has positively impacted their life and society overall.

The survey of 1,006 adults, conducted last month, revealed that 90 percent think the Internet has been a good thing for them personally and 75 percent think it has improved society. 

Fifty-three percent said the Internet would be, at a minimum, "very hard" to give up while four in 10 said it's absolutely necessary to their lives.


"The invention of the Web by Sir Tim Berners-Lee was instrumental in turning the Internet from a geeky data-transfer system embraced by specialists and a small number of enthusiasts into a mass-adopted technology easily used by hundreds of millions around the world," Pew researchers wrote in the report.


At this point, the Internet is nearing saturation, or 100 percent usage, among those living in households earning at least $75,000 (99 percent), young adults ages 18 to 29 (97 percent), and those with college degrees (97 percent), the survey found. In addition, 68 percent of adults connect to the Internet with mobile devices like smartphones or tablet computers.


Pew has been tracking Internet adoption since 1995, when a mere 14 percent of Americans used the Web (see chart above). While there has been considerable debate over the years as to whether the Internet has strengthened or weakened personal relationships, 67 percent of Internet users polled last month said their online communication has led to tighter bonds with family and friends.


For more, check out Pew's full report.

Article curated from PC Magazine

4 Mistakes You're Probably Making on Your Website

Launching a website is only half the battle. Now, find out how to get it right. 

 

So you finally got around to building a website, but now you're wondering why it's not driving the results you'd hoped for.

According to David Chen, CEO and co-founder of the Y Combinator-backed startup Strikingly, that could be because you're falling into one of the four big traps business owners often overlook. Strikingly is tool that lets you build a website in less than 10 minutes. This week, the company even launched a "one-click" website builder that literally allows people to build a personal website in one click of a button.

I recently asked Chen to share some of the top mistakes he sees on startup websites, as well as advice on how business owners can right their wrongs online. Here's what he said:

1. You're making customers click too much.

Blame it on society's increasingly shortened attention span, but Chen says most websites overestimate the number of hoops their customers are willing to jump through in order to get to the product or service they're looking for.

"Every single click is an action point. When people get distracted by all the different actions, they don't click on the one button you want them to," Chen says, noting that e-commerce is a slightly different story. "The best websites we've seen that increase action are the ones with only one action point."

His advice: decide what action you want customers to take, whether it's making a call, finding your address, or placing an order, and emphasize that button over all others.

2. You're thinking about mobile last (or not at all).

According to the National Small Business Association's 2013 small business technology survey, nearly one out of five business owners has a mobile website. That's progress. And yet, Chen says, most of those business owners aren't making the best use of the fact that they have a mobile website, because they're still designing for the Web. As mobile traffic becomes increasingly important, Chen says, entrepreneurs should begin designing their sites with mobile first in mind.

A good mobile website, he says, should look like an app. Users should be able to navigate it by swiping, rather than clicking, a motion that's native to the mobile phone. There should also be a constant action point visible to users, so they don't have to zoom in and out to get what they want and where you want them to be.

Plus, Chen says, a good mobile design with minimal clicks and clear action points translates to the Web much more easily than a complex website translates to mobile. "If you start by thinking about mobile and then bring that experience to the Web, it fixes a lot of other problems," he says.

3. You're using overly complex, jargon-laden descriptions.

As someone who makes her living talking to entrepreneurs, I can personally attest to this point. Entrepreneurs, brilliant though they may be, are often terrible at explaining what they actually do. Face-to-face, there's time for clarification. On a website, there's not (For a quick refresher, check out Jason Fried's 2011 story for Inc. on why most business writing sucks.).

Chen believes most business owners suffer from simply knowing too much about their own companies. "They're trying to tell everything they know about themselves to users in a short period of time, and in the end users don't know who they are at all," he says.

Instead, Chen advises, try to distill your value proposition into one sentence, keeping in mind that once you hook a customer with a clear, concise pitch, you'll likely have time to expand later.

4. Your website has too much content.

Different from trap No. 3, this is not a matter of what you're writing, but how much you're writing. "One type of content people always go overboard on is text," Chen says.

Thinking about mobile first should alleviate this problem, because mobile websites have less space you might be tempted to fill with text. Instead, Chen says, whenever possible use a video, diagram, or other type of media to get your message across. Chen says, "If it's just your website, and not an article or something people want to read, the less text you have, the better and more beautiful it will be."

Article curated from Inc. Magazine

 

How to Use LinkedIn to Grow Your Business

A new survey reveals the best practices of SMBs on the professional networking site. 

 

Unless your company has a huge marketing budget, social media is likely the first place you turn to reach customers. Indeed, according to a study released by LinkedIn, an overwhelming proportion of small and medium sized businesses (SMBs) are using social media to market to customers, grow their audience, and derive business insights. 

The study, based on interviews with more than 1,000 SMBs that use LinkedIn's services, was aimed at finding new insights about companies' activity on social media and best practices on the professional networking site.

Conducted last November, the study found that 81 percent of the SMBs use social media to drive business growth, while a whopping 94 percent use it for marketing. Additionally, the study found that social media provides SMBs with a solution for their number one challenge: finding new customers. Of those surveyed, 64 percent stated that finding new customers was their greatest concern. 

Lana Khavinson, Group Product Marketing Manager at LinkedIn, stressed that the first step toward getting good results from LinkedIn is to build out a strong, robust profile for your brand. 

"Those that are very successful are using personal and company profiles to showcase their brands, and also post to engage with the network through those updates," she says. "That allows you to build this really rich conversation with your network, and then also get that viral reach that every small business is hoping to achieve."

About half of the SMBs surveyed use social media for learning. Nearly 80 percent said that industry-specific news is the most valuable type of content on social media, while 74 percent said that testimonials and customer opinions is the second-most valuable type. 

"Successful small businesses are also tapping into groups," Khavinson tells Inc. "Not only are they learning from the individuals in the groups but they are also able to share their expertise and position themselves in a way that brings interest and attention to their business."

Khavinson suggests that companies pay attention to what a few key influencers in their industry are sharing on the network to see how they can apply it to their business. It's also a good idea to follow other companies in the same industry to keep tabs on what competitors are doing, she says.

To learn more about how LinkedIn can help your business, click here to a free social media marketing consultation.

Article curated from Inc. Magazine

There’s Power in All Those User Reviews

You are no longer the sucker you used to be. 

So suggests continuing research from the Stanford Graduate School of Business into the challenges marketers face in reaching consumers in the digital age. As you might suspect, the research shows that a wealth of online product information and user reviews is causing a fundamental shift in how consumers make decisions.

As consumers rely more on one another, the power of marketers is being undermined, said Itamar Simonson, a Stanford marketing professor and the lead researcher.

In the study, participants were asked which of three Canon cameras they’d like to buy. Before deciding, they were allowed to spend a few minutes reading user reviews and other information about these and other cameras on Amazon.com.

To get the full impact of the findings, you first have to know the conclusions of a similar experiment decades ago by Dr. Simonson, then at Duke. In it, some subjects chose among three Minolta cameras: an inexpensive one, a midprice one and an expensive one. Another group was given a choice of just two of the Minoltas: the midprice one and the less expensive one.

The researchers found that when study subjects had only two choices, most chose the less expensive camera with fewer features. But when given three choices, most chose the middle one. Dr. Simonson called it “the compromise effect” — the idea that consumers will gravitate to the middle of the options presented to them.

The study showed how marketers could manipulate consumers. Just by presenting three differently priced options, they could get consumers to gravitate to a midprice one from a less expensive one. This finding further led Dr. Simonson and other scholars to describe widespread “irrational” behavior by consumers who made decisions not based on a product’s actual value but on how the item was presented relative to other products.

Flash forward to the new experiment. It was similar to the first, except that consumers could have a glimpse at Amazon. That made a huge difference. When given three camera options, consumers didn’t gravitate en masse to the midprice version. Rather, the least expensive one kept its share and the middle one lost more to the most expensive one.

“The compromise effect was gone,” said Dr. Simonson, or, rather, he nearly exclaimed the absence of the effect, underscoring his surprise at the findings. They are to be published next month in “Absolute Value,” a book by Dr. Simonson and Emanuel Rosen.

Today, products are being evaluated more on their “absolute value, their quality,” Dr. Simonson said. Brand names mean less. The results suggest that companies should spend less money trying to shape consumer opinions in traditional ads, he said, and more on understanding what and who are shaping those opinions.

Ran Kivetz, a marketing professor at Columbia who did his dissertation at Stanford under Dr. Simonson, calls the new findings “very significant,” but sees a catch: Digital tools can change the compromise effect but strengthen companies in other ways, letting them gather consumer data and gain instant feedback on what marketing ideas work. In theory, it could lead to more powerful, if subtler, manipulation.

“If I’m a marketer and I want to manipulate choices using the compromise effect, it will be harder,” Dr. Kivetz said. “But there’s another side, which is that it’s easier for the marketer to present information in different ways and to rapidly learn what people respond to.” 

Article curated from the New York Times

Team USA Put the Social Back in Social Media

An Olympian reminder that your social accounts can be so much more than a repository for links to your website. 

If you were on Twitter recently you probably saw the #GoTeamUSA hashtag flying around. This was just one element of a day-long, multi-channel social media campaign by the US Olympic Team.
While you may have just given the news a passing glance, there is a very simple lesson here in social media marketing.

With the Sochi Winter Olympics just two weeks away, Team USA fans were encouraged to submit questions and messages of support, and saw the team's athletes field those questions and respond to the messages throughout the day. #GoTeamUSA quickly trended in the United States as athletes fielded questions on their individual Twitter feeds, and also across the Internet on Google Hangouts.

The send-off was also promoted on Facebook.

Let's acknowledge right away that Team USA can do things on social media that small businesses can't. Your campaign probably won't ultimately draw a tweet from the White House, for starters. The Olympics boast a massive consumer following that a B2B company or even smaller B2Cs just aren't able to leverage. That's not to mention that without staff dedicated to it, social media can be a massive timesuck.

All the same, there's a lesson here for any company, even if only an aspirational one.

Here's Where You Need to Pay Attention

While your business at this point has probably recognized the importance of social media and probably even strategizes about it some, many companies see their varied channels as a place to drop links to their website, maybe share some press in which they're mentioned, and promote a sale or deal on their products. Maybe you've tried to get a hashtag started to promote yourself, but those efforts usually fall flat without a big following. Maybe--maybe--you've done a little social customer service.

But Team USA's sendoff reminded the Internet of how social media really can be what it claims to be: social. By giving fans the opportunity to interact with the athletes they'll be cheering on in Sochi, Team USA broke down the boundaries that social media is capable of breaking down.

Yes, athletes create a little more demand for interaction than an accountant or a salesman might.
That's worth acknowledging. But a restaurant owner might get some fun hosting a Twitter chat with its chef, and even B2B products are sure to have their superfans who might love the opportunity to really interact with the brand.

It's not all about Q&A sessions and hashtags, either. That's just howTeam USA generated some social hype around its athletes today. The point is that social media has the power it does because it allows for real interaction between company and customer--and not just as another place to send out your message.

Article curated from Inc. Magazine

Are Your Tweets Effective?

Twitter has introduced a new analytics tool that will help businesses understand how well they are engaging with customers on the social media platform, according to a post on the company's blog. The tool also will provide insight into how publishers, developers, and brands can improve their social media messages. 

The new feature is specifically for Twitter cards--expanded tweets that allow businesses to include more content, which were introduced to the platform in 2012.

Although Twitter unveiled basic analytics back in June, the company's new tool will give users a more in-depth understanding of the effectiveness of their tweets. Information is displayed in a dashboard that shows impressions, app installations, and URL clicks for individual Twitter Cards. The analytics tool also will measure retweets, favorites, and follows. 

Twitter partnered with Time Inc., ESPN, MLB, Flipboard, Etsy, BuzzFeed, Foursquare, NBC News, and Path to test the new analytics tool, according to the blog post. 

Article curated from Inc. Magazine