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Old Town at Sahl HasheeshHurghada, Egypt
I’m not an expert, but I play one at conferences.
Last week, I was invited to speak at a "Marketing Now" conference in San Francisco. The organizers presented WATG with a first-place Marketing Excellence Award for the design of our web site, and I was invited to speak on two panels on "new media."
Thanks to Dean Kawamura, WATG's marketing resources manager and webmaster, I was able to share some useful bits of information:
Web traffic – Of the 60,000 visitors to www.watg.com so far this year, half find us through search engines, a quarter from referring sites, and a quarter from direct traffic. Those who find us directly arrive through over a dozen variations of our name, including misspellings of Wimberly Allison Tong & Goo.
Search engine optimization – There has been a four million percent increase in web pages on Google in the last decade! 68% of searchers don't go past the first page of results. So, if you're not on page one, you're virtually invisible. The key to high rankings is regularly adding keyword-rich content.
Global differences – www.watg.com has had visitors from 171 countries and territories. While most spend an average of four minutes on the site – usually searching for information about our projects – those who linger the longest are from Azerbaijan and Lichtenstein (13 minutes), Bahamas (14 minutes) and the Seychelles (17 minutes). Those who view the greatest number of pages are from China and South Korea.
Twitter – According to fellow panelist Vik Duggal (www.konstructr.com), "Twitter is word of mouth on steroids." Last year, Twitter was #475 on the list of referring sites to www.watg.com. This year, it has risen to #17. We are following over 1,700 clients and thought leaders, re-tweeting their tweets and sending them information of interest anytime we post something new to our web site.
By the way, Hyatt, Marriott, Fairmont, and Aqua Hotels & Resorts are among those who have found very creative business uses for Twitter and other social networking sites.
Other topics of interest to attendees of this conference included e-newsletters (the best day and time to send them, apparently, is Friday morning); video on web sites (www.fliptv.com, www.blip.tv.com, and www.vimeo.com); blogs, podcasts and a host of other new technologies.
What I learned is that there are very few "experts" in new media; there are simply those who are embracing it (and learning as they go) and those who are neither.
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