Even with 84 million uniques each month, About.com tends to fly under the radar. But there is change afoot since IAC bought out About.com from the New York Times last year, most notably the appointment of Neil Vogel as CEO. We brought in Vogel, as well as Chief Strategy Officer Scott Kim (who also served as interim CEO for the past few months), to discuss how About might be changing in the foreseeable future.

Neil has only been at About for a little over a month, but he has big plans. It’s a three-pronged approach really, involving social, mobile, and user experience.

Where social is concerned, Vogel mentioned that About hasn’t ever given the vertical any “water or sunlight,” which means it’s a huge opportunity to leverage thousands of expert guides (content producers) and the massive flood of traffic coming to the site each month.

He also revealed that 25 percent of About’s mobile traffic comes via mobile, and “it’s not cannibalistic traffic either, it’s a clear growth over the desktop traffic we’re seeing.” Confusing math aside, Kim explained that the mobile strategy doesn’t involve an app, since SEO is the primary driver of traffic to About.

“The goal with mobile is the same as desktop, which means that we need to have the best possible user experience so people will travel throughout the site,” said Kim.

I asked if SEO was enough for About, or if there are plans to bring users in more directly.

“SEO is a thing now. As the internet evolves, SEO will become less and less of a thing as Google and Bing are getting better and better at what they do,” said Vogel. “They want to give you the best content possible when you want to solve a problem, and we have great content.”

More important than how the consumer gets there, Vogel and Kim are concerned with keeping the user there. According to the dynamic duo, the plan isn’t a huge, monumental redesign.

“It’ll be 1,000 small things we do,” said Vogel. “If you look at what we’re doing 12 months from now next to where we are today, it will look like we did something drastic, but we didn’t. We’re going to do it one new thing at a time.”

After considering one of About’s greatest challenges, this plan actually seems much more logical. See, About is one of the top medical sites on the web, and it’s also one of the top food sites on the web. Vogel explained that it’s hard to get inspiration from competitors when you compete in so many verticals.

“The good news is there are a lot of ideas,” he said. “And the bad news is there are a lot of ideas.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

In this day and age, if you own a small business, you need a web (and mobile) presence. It’s just the way it is. Some might opt just to go for a social media approach, a Twitter account and a Facebook page, but the likelihood is that you want something a little more flexible, high-quality and something that gives you more control over the user experience. More and more, people are turning to Wix and Weebly. The two big “W’s” in the website creator world.

For those unfamiliar, Weebly is a service that lets you, your mom, grandmother, four-year-old cousin and anyone you know create a quality website for free. Launched out of Y Combinator in 2007, Weebly has had over 15 million sites created using its service to date, which collectively attract more than 100 million unique visitors each month. This week, Weebly has kicked its service up a notch with an all-new overhaul to its website builder — one that’s been a year in the making — and the launch of an interactive “Site Planner.”

This new site planner is designed to help give people ideas and a little lightbulb-style inspiration that will help them walk through the creative process and vision for the site. Plus, Weebly now offers an HTML5 site creator that offers new themes and pre-fab building blocks to customize their new site, and, most importantly, a new mobile new editor that helps them optimize their site for mobile devices, along with a now-globally available Android app.

In the lead-up to the big launch, co-founder David Rusenko tells us, Weebly surveyed several million consumers and found that about 56 percent of them, understandably, don’t trust a business that doesn’t have a website. And, yet, 58 percent of businesses don’t have a website. Pretty eye-opening in today’s world, when over a billion people are on Facebook and hundreds of millions have so much computing power in their pockets.

Ask the Weebly founders who their core audience is and they’ll tell you, proudly, that it’s entrepreneurs — people who are trying to build their own small businesses, across every industry, not just techies. And, regardless of technical proficiency, the problem that most small business owners struggle with is how daunting it can be to face that blinking cursor, the blank page. It’s the same issue we scribblers deal with in cases of “writer’s block.” When building websites, people want ways to test out their ideas, lay out their vision, and help bring it to life.

So how does it all work?

The new Weebly site planner offers people ideas and inspiration to help ‘em plan and think through the vision for their site, which is pretty cool, as it offers a step-by-step, interactive guide to help them identify goals, organize and layout their pages. According to the founders, 55 percent of people who visit Weebly have never built a website before, so the HTML5 site creator is designed to help make that process easy on n00bs and experts alike, give their site a personalized, unique design, photos, text and so on.

The new mobile site lets users customize how their site looks for their visitors on computers, phones and tablets, allowing them to create a separate design for mobile using a distinct theme, while editing their site in a mobile viewer. As they go, they can switch between different views to see how it will look on both Android and iOS.

In turn, the company’s new Android app basically brings everything that was already native to the Weebly experience to Android, including the ability to create blog posts on the go with drag and drop mobile blogging, add photos and text to their blog, social sharing, push notifications, commenting and analytics.

“For the first time, entrepreneurs around the world have a single place where they can easily
start a site that works across computers, phones and tablets,” said Roelof Botha, partner at Sequoia Capital who led Sequoia’s investments in YouTube, Square, Tumblr and more. “We believe demand for Weebly’s site creation tool is just beginning.”

Users can sign up for Weebly in a minute, pick their site address, whether or not they want to use the free service or a premium plan which starts at $4/month, and jump in. The service now helps you plan the layout, create the site, drag-and-drop-style and publish to the address of your choice. Weebly takes care of the cross-platform optimization and SEO, leaving you to do the rest. Pretty cool.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

This is a guest post by Todd Herrold, senior director of product marketing at Kenshoo Social, a Facebook Strategic Preferred Marketing Developer with Facebook Exchange access.

Facebook introduced Graph Search in January signaling a major shift in social search. Graph Search matches natural language search terms with content from the searcher’s network (social graph) to identify and return relevant results based on several factors.

The volume of Facebook users alone could propel Graph Search to be the first true challenger to traditional Web search engines, but the announcement of this revolutionary search technology prompted a number of questions from social marketers including:

• How will consumers respond/adapt to social search?
• How does Facebook determine relevance?
• What can we do to ensure our pages will appear in search results?
• What advertising options exist in Graph Search?

Determining Relevance

To determine which pages are relevant to a search query, Facebook utilizes a natural language processor (both to suggest search terms and identify connections) combined with algorithms that examine the “nodes” or connections of a searcher’s network to find content friends have “liked” that match the search. Graph Search can also consider second-degree connections or friends of friends, as well as content which has been shared either directly with the searcher or publicly on Facebook.

Unlike standard search engines, Facebook owns all of the data (page posts, photos, videos, etc.) which has ever been posted to the network. This inherent advantage enabled Facebook to implement a unique indexing structure to categorize the data based on a number of predefined properties. This indexing of owned data allows Facebook to quickly search, sort, identify and return relevant content. They dubbed this infrastructure “Unicorn.” Similar to a standard search engine, it supports search queries including “multi-hop” queries in a series of steps while searching “nodes” in a similar style to the way a search engine utilizes keywords.

The results then get scored based on a number of criteria depending on the search terms. Facebook implemented all of this with the goal to “maximize searcher happiness.”

Graph Search Optimization (GSO)

When marketers initially started exploring how to boost their website ranking in search results they coined the term Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Graph Search spawned an analogous process of searching for answers on how to optimize content to ensure it appears in Graph Search results; think of it as Graph Search Optimization (GSO). While Facebook hasn’t revealed the exact formula it uses to determine Graph Searching of content (they did provide a look “under the hood” which marketers may find helpful), we can identify several factors which likely impact Graph Search rankings.

Brands seeking Graph Search visibility should consider the following tips:

• Use photos and videos to drive engagement: posts with photos and videos routinely see increased engagement levels, which Facebook uses as a signifier of quality content.
• Multi-location brands should claim local pages for all physical locations: a strong local presence with accurate location data boosts visibility in local search results.
• Create a local engagement strategy: combining local data with engagement will significantly boost visibility. Engage customers with check-ins and promotions and be sure to ask for customer reviews.

Where are the advertising opportunities?

When Facebook announced Graph Search, it made no mention of how (or if) advertising would be incorporated, but that doesn’t mean Facebook isn’t working on it. In fact, Facebook recently began testing ad placements on Graph Search results pages, though they’re not targeted to a user’s search query yet. There’s simply too much advertising potential for Facebook not to monetize its new search capabilities in some capacity. Combining the GSO insights with knowledge of existing Facebook ad types and examining the test ad placements allows us to predict some advertising opportunities we are likely to see in Graph Search’s future:

Sponsored results: Similar to sponsored results in search engines, these paid ads will likely receive prominent placement atop relevant search results. How these ads might be targeted is interesting to consider. Currently, Facebook Sponsored Results (non-Graph Search) can be targeted to users searching for specific objects, like pages, place, and apps. Facebook doesn’t currently offer keyword or key phrase targeting. Enabling this for targeting sponsored results on Graph Search could be very powerful and would bring Facebook one step closer to direct competition with traditional search engines.

More product-specific ads: Advertisers are increasingly running product-specific advertising, especially through the Facebook Exchange (FBX). We may see this or something similar to Google’s Product Listing Ads in Graph Search as well. Facebook is currently testing standard, right hand side-style FBX ads in Graph Search and we are likely to see more creative units in the future.

Offer ads integrated into results: Facebook Offer ads seem a natural fit for incorporation into Graph Search. We may see offers show up as part of the organic search results themselves or as one of the ad types available as sponsored results.

Local advertising: Graph Search offers tremendous potential for social local advertising. Some of the most common searches will be for restaurants, bars and other local businesses and we are likely to see some new advertising units or targeting capabilities as a result.

Rich media ads: Third-party developed rich media News Feed ads could grow in popularity; they offer a unique advertiser experience with interactive video and photo options and the ability to convert leads and other conversion events directly within the advertising unit itself.

Graph Search offers enormous potential for Facebook, its users and advertisers, but for now, we can only speculate on if/when Facebook will roll out Graph Search more broadly to its user base and make advertising in search results available on a wide scale as well. The fact that Facebook is already testing ad placements on Graph Search results pages tells us that monetization of this new feature is a clear goal for the social networking giant.

Previous Facebook product enhancements have often followed a path of unveiling the new user feature, gaining widespread adoption and incorporating advertising at a later time. It appears that in the case of Graph Search, advertising may be an integral part of the wide scale release.  So, for brands, the time is now to develop a GSO strategy.

Todd Herrold has more than 15 years of digital marketing experience and currently serves as Kenshoo Social’s senior director of product marketing. In this role, Todd leads the product marketing team for Kenshoo’s global social media platform, a technology solution that helps agencies, brands and performance marketers illuminate and activate the full value of their social media investments. Before Kenshoo, he served in various product, marketing and management roles at companies like Yodle, AT&T, Time Warner, MarketWatch and IDG. 

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Airbnb today announced that it is open sourcing Rendr, its library for running Backbone.js apps seamlessly on both the client and the server. After launching its Chronos cron replacement a few weeks ago, this marks the company’s second major contribution to the open source ecosystem this year. Airbnb originally developed Rendr for its mobile site.

A few months ago, Airbnb talked about how it started using Node.js to bring its listing to users. To provide a good, fluid user experience, Airbnb’s Spike Brehm said at the time, more and more of the application logic for many apps has now moved to the client. The company itself previously took this approach by using Backbone.js and Rails. This, however, means the application logic is then “somewhat arbitrarily split between client and server, or in some cases needs to be duplicated on both sides.” It also, the Airbnb team argues, poses challenges when it comes to SEO, performance and maintainability because the app is then divided into at least two different codebases – and both of those are likely in different languages.

But what if you could have a JavaScript runtime on the server? Then, Brehm wrote, you could “pull most of this application logic back down to the server in a way that can be shared with the client,” developers could just focus on writing application code and the app could serve up real HTML on first pageload, which is great for SEO reasons. To make this possible, the company developed Rendr.

Rendr, Airbnb says, allows your web server to serve “fully-formed HTML pages to any deep link of your app, while preserving the snappy feel of a traditional Backbone.js client-side MVC app.” You can find out more about the technical details behind Rendr here and in Airbnb’s original post about the project.

The team says Rendr is already ready for production-quality apps and while Airbnb hopes that it will become more modular over time and maybe even decouple it from Backbone to allow it to work with other client-side MVC libraries, it doesn’t intend for it to become the next Ember.js or Backbone.js.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Facebook has begun passing keyword data to websites that receive referral traffic from search queries that originate on the social network, allowing sites to more accurately track where visitors are coming from.

With the launch of Graph Search, Facebook more deeply incorporated Bing so that queries that can’t be answered by Facebook’s internal search, will direct users to a page of results powered by Bing. This could lead more users to conduct searches through Facebook that end up on third-party sites. However, previously, there was no way for someone to tell whether a visitor from Facebook came via search or a shared link somewhere on the site.

G-Squared Interactive’s Glenn Gabe says the social network recently changed this and started including keyword strings along with the referrer of a URL.

Typically analytics providers classify search engines differently from other sites and they allow people to see the keywords that users searched for to find a site. For now, platforms like Google Analytics don’t recognize Facebook as a search engine so users will have to do some manual configuration to be able to see and track their Graph Search traffic and keywords. Gabe describes how to do this here.

Graph Search is in limited beta among a small percentage of English-speaking users on desktop. The number of referrals to any given site is likely to be very small right now, but it would be valuable for any publisher to understand how people are using Graph Search to find their site, especially as the product evolves and usage increases.

URL image via G-Squared Interactive.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Y Combinator-backed BuildZoom, a new service to help homeowners find licensed contractors to help them with their remodeling projects, is today making its public debut. The startup’s database now contains every licensed contractor across the U.S. – over 2.5 million of them. Users can search this database, drilling down into categorized contractor profiles which are enriched using government data from state licensing boards, Better Business Bureau ratings, and more, as well as customer reviews.

The company was founded by Jiyan Naghshineh Wei, formerly a product manager at Vocus, and David Petersen, who previously founded ImportGenius, a shipping database, another company built on top of public data.

“We were looking at other ways we could use government data, and we realized we could use it to seed the community of homeowners and contractors,” Petersen explains, describing the inspiration for what is now BuildZoom. He and Wei are also homeowners themselves – Petersen owns some rental properties, as well – giving the founders an even more personal motivation to build a tool that addresses this market.

Consumers can visit BuildZoom to find out whether a contractor is licensed, what class of license they have, the year they were licensed, whether their license has ever been suspended or there’s been a compliant against them, whether they’re bonded or insured, and more, depending on their own state’s requirements.

All of this is public data, but states tend to be bad at sharing that information with consumers. “There’s all this really important data that’s out there to protect consumers, but there was this big obstacle between doing all the regulatory work, and having consumers access that information,” Wei explains.

In addition to licensing and other regulatory data, BuildZoom is also starting to augment its contractor profiles with information from the Better Business Bureau (BBB). However, it doesn’t yet have this information for all contractors nationwide because the BBB has regional chapters which have to be brought on board individually. Today, BuildZoom has data for around 10 percent of the U.S. market, including places like Phoenix, Boston, Columbus, Pittsburgh, and Rhode Island, for example, but not regions like L.A.

Of course, when it comes to finding reliable contractors, BuildZoom has a big-name competitor it will have to take on to gain traction: publicly traded Angie’s List. In order to make its service more appealing to homeowners, the startup is forgoing the subscription-based, members-only model that Angie’s List uses, and is instead offering free access to its database and user reviews to all homeowners and contractors alike.

The company plans to monetize by offering services to the contractors themselves, including the opportunity to buy paid advertisements on the site, and it will offer to design websites for its contractor customers, too. Notably, unlike competitor HomeAdvisor, BuildZoom won’t charge contractors for lead gen and referrals. During its beta period, the company signed up around 20,000 contractors who have already personalized their profiles by adding additional information, which in some cases includes photos of their work.

The site also features a Q&A section where people can ask questions about remodeling projects, which contractors can respond to. This is another differentiating feature for BuildZoom, says Wei, because contractors will write high quality answers here, giving the consumers more of an idea what that contractor is like. “What [homeowners are] looking for is not just a good contractor,” says Petersen, “they’re looking for a good businessperson, because that person will fulfill everything they promise to do.” The answers are meant to help with that (though some SEO boost couldn’t hurt either).

During its beta trials, BuildZoom grew to 20,000 unique visitors per day, reaching nearly 500,000 per month, and nearly 1,000 contractors are claiming their profile on the site each week. Homeowners across the U.S. can now visit BuildZoom to search for contractors in their own zip code, read reviews and ask questions.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Crushpath, a startup founded by former executives from Jive Software and Socialcast that aims to disrupt the sales space, $6 million in Series A funding led by The Social+Capital Partnership with participation from Charles River Ventures. The company previously raised seed funding from Marketo CEO Phil Fernandez, Jive CEO Dave Hersh and Box’s CEO Aaron Levie. This brings Crushpath’s total funding to $8 million.

As we wrote last year, the basic idea behind Crushpath is to make it easier for salespeople to track their relationships with sales prospects. The company is the brainchild of CEO Sam Lawrence (who founded the company after leaving his position as CMO of Jive Software).

If users sign up with Salesforce, the Crushpath platform links up with that database and automatically synchronizes actions like recording sales. Similarly, data from email, news, websites, LinkedIn, Box, Google Evernote also gets pulled into the platform to create a concentrated view of a client and its activities. Promotional materials that a salesperson wants to push to a client can also be stored in the app.

Today, the company is expanding beyond simply sales channels with a new product called Pitch Sites. The site aims to give anyone, salesperson or not, a way to pitch, get responses, and also keep track of relationships.

Lawrence explains that Pitch Sites are a super visual way to tell story, pitch product idea, a job candidate. “It’s not just for a sales person selling software and creates a play by play for any business relationship,” he says. Users who have been testing the product include recruiters, journalists, realtors, business unit managers, agents, entrepreneurs.

The product itself is like a visual elevator pitch for an idea, service, person or event. It’s a one page website that allows you to upload text, customer references imagery, videos, links to other content (i.e. content in Box). Users can also customize public or private Pitch Sites that each zero in on a specific customer, product, or offering.

Crushpath will help users with SEO and sharing for sites, so that Pitch Sites are searchable, shareable, and social. And you can manage responses and track the success of each pitch with detailed analytics like visits, click-throughs and more. Users can also send emails with links to Pitch Sites via the platform, which are seeing 75 percent click-through rates on average.

“We love businesses that can deliver discrete tangible value to people in the near term but have the potential to change industries in the long term,” said Chamath Palihapitiya, founder and managing partner of The Social+Capital Partnership in a release. “Crushpath has identified the fundamental issue with sales that comes before any CRM product can really add value: the pitch itself. We all know how ineffective cold calling and emailing is, so Crushpath starts by allowing people to build compelling sites to communicate the value of what they are selling and then have a more social way of organizing and moving these communications and interactions forward. If their early growth is any signal, Crushpath may have hit a vein of frustration with today’s alternatives in sales automation.”

The product, which costs $9 per month, per person; is already being used by big companies like Cox Communications and McCafee. But Pitch Sites is also serving a purpose amongst individual entrepreneurs as well. A fitness coach is suing the platform to find more customers. A fundraiser for high school sports teams is using it to sell her capabilities.

The new funding will be used towards distribution of the Pitch Sites product and towards hiring engineer. Crushpath is helping sales people manage relationships, and handle pitches so the next step, says the company is qualification. The startup is going to be developing ways to qualify individuals in the sales process.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Automattic’s WordPress.com recently added a restaurant vertical to make it easier for restaurant owners to manage their sites and avoid the pitfalls of Flash-based homepages that auto-play annoying music and don’t work on mobile. Today, those sites get even better, thanks to a new integration between Locu and Automattic that makes it easy for restaurateurs to bring their Locu menus to their WordPress.com sites. WordPress.com users can simply embed a Locu shortcode on WordPress.com and every edit they make on Locu will immediately appear on their sites.

Locu, which raised a $4 million Series A round last year and recently branched out a bit beyond restaurants with the launch of its merchant dashboard, allows restaurant owners to manage their menus in one place. Once the menu is finished, users can print them (Locu offers a number of templates and design tools), share them on social networks and push them out to Locu’s partner sites like CitySearch and OpenTable.

The new WordPress embeds also come with a number of menu templates and, Locu stresses, should also provide some SEO enhancements on the site because it automatically embeds the “menu and price list metadata into the body of the website, increasing the likelihood of items being found online by potential customers.”

“We are very excited about the integration with Locu,” Raanan Bar-Cohen Automattic’s SVP of commercial services said in a statement today. “With Locu’s easy-to-use WordPress.com shortcode, restaurants can more easily deliver an engaging menu experience directly on their WordPress.com sites to further connect with their consumers.”

Locu offers a free tier for restaurants that also includes this new WordPress.com integration and paid accounts that offer more advanced features and premium templates cost $25/month. The service currently has about 15,000 users.

For WordPress.com, this integration is yet another step toward positioning itself as more than just a site for hosting blogs. Besides restaurants sites, WordPress.com also launched verticals for schools and portfolios. As Automattic’s CEO told our own Colleen Taylor last year, WordPress may have started out as a service for blogging, but “then it became just a content management system so people started building all kinds of websites. And now, those websites get more personalized into small business areas like restaurants.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Due to its massive reach and ability to attract viewers on a wide range of devices, YouTube has become the de facto place for many new media companies to distribute their video content. But analytics is one place where YouTube is lacking. Making sense of all the data behind where viewers came from and why, and how they can get more of them.

San Francisco-based startup VidIQ hopes to provide that layer of analytics, as a way to help those who distribute their content on YouTube — be they brands, marketers, or independent producers — to reach more viewers. Through a mix of YouTube SEO, smart scheduling, and listening tools, VidIQ promises new ways for producers to optimize their distribution strategies.

VidIQ was founded by Rob Sandie and Todd Troxell, two of the folks behind video distribution platform Viddler. In 2011, the two moved out to the Bay Area from Bethlehem, Penn., and have been busy building their new company ever since. Early on, they were focused on the distribution problem, particularly on getting video on an increasingly fragmented number of devices.

But two things became clear: YouTube was already solving many of the difficult distribution problems that media companies were facing, providing reach both online and on a number of mobile devices. And what the company’s clients really needed was analytics — and a way to actually use them to grow their audiences.

That’s where VidIQ comes in. Its “listening tools” allow YouTube users to find out who their top influencers are on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, and to connect with them and respond to their comments. That can help its clients engage directly with their biggest fans, and, in turn, help transform those commenters into evangelists.

VidIQ also provides a dashboard of analytics, showing viewer and engagement metrics and helping content creators to know when the best time to upload a video is. It also helps them to better tag their videos and optimize descriptions for YouTube search. Since it has a large store of YouTube searches, VidIQ knows which terms would be most appropriate to get users to watching.

VidIQ clients include AOL (for TechCrunch* and Moviefone), Mondo Media, and Revision3. To grow the business further, VidIQ has raised $800,000 in seed funding from a group of investors that include Mark Cuban (who seems to be on a roll with early-stage video company investing lately), as well as David Cohen, Scott Banister, Peter Weck, Tod Sacerdoti, Don Hutchison, Jared Kopf, Jason Seats, William Lohse, Savan Devani, Shriraj Gaglani, and I/O Ventures.

==
* Disclosure: I honestly had no idea that TechCrunch had a commercial agreement with VidIQ until just now, writing this. Make of that what you will.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Here’s a great infographic from TurnTo, one of the leading social apps for e-commerce sites (Kiehls, Vitamin Shoppe, shoes.com…), on ‘Social Q&A’.

Social Q&A is an increasingly popular e-commerce site feature that allows shoppers to ask pre-purchase product-related questions, and get them answered by customers who have already purchased the product. Astonishingly 9 out of 10 questions posed get answered answered the same day.

Like other social commerce technology, social Q&A helps socialises an otherwise solitary e-commerce experience, and dies so by creating connections between customers. It’s simple and smart, and refreshingly free from any techno-babble voodoo.  Rather than read what other people have wanted to say or like – social Q&A allows customers to get answers to their own specific questions.

And, according to TurnTo, it pays – for the retailer and the shopper. Social Q&A is like product reviews on steroids – personalised customer to customer communication.

• Inviting shoppers to ask questions and get them answered by existing shoppers can boost store loyalty (propensity to repurchase) by 15-14%
• Social Q&A generates 2-4 times more user content for SEO than customer reviews
• Shoppers who use Social Q&A to ask pre-purchase questions are 10