I was looking up the contact information for an international advertising and marketing firm this morning (that shall go unnamed), and after drilling down through the various region, country, and city options of their “Contact Us” web application, it occurred to me that not enough companies are using geographical IP databases to help their visitors find locally relevant information.  Sure, their little geographical office-finder map looked great, but wouldn’t it be much more effective to figure out where I am based on my IP address, and present me with the coordinates of the closest local office, and then present me with the cool office locator in case I was looking for an office elsewhere?  It would certainly be more impressive from a marketing perspective.

Geographical IP databases are very powerful tools for any web marketing or e-commerce initiative, and extremely cost effective given the flexibility and breadth of the services they provide.  Beyond website customization, they can be used to help avoid credit card fraud by identifying high risk countries, to distribute regionally-relevant ads and marketing material, and even (more controversially) disallow network connections from specific geographic regions.

One solution in this area is MaxMind’s GeoIP offerings.  They offer several different pricing options based on the level of accuracy your project requires.  Their database is available by country (US$50), region (US$150), and city ($370) – all products have additional monthly charges for updates (see their web site).  In addition, Maxmind has offerings that can identify the originating organization, ISP, netspeed, etc.  Maxmind also offers less accurate free offerings so the web team can play with the databases and then update them to the commercial versions in the future.  Just be aware that these free versions are subject to open source GPL/LGPL licensing and thus may not be appropriate in a corporate environment.

Another option in geographical IP solutions is IP2Location.  Their solutions start as low as US$50/year for a country-specific database and includes free monthly updates of the informations, or US$199/year for the city level of accuracy.  And if you really want to go crazy with geographic data you can subscribe to the $1399/year service which includes country, region, city, latitude, longitude, zip code (US), time zone, ISP, domain, area code, and weather!

There are ways to get around geographic IP databases, so I wouldn’t advise using it as the sole form of security for anything regionally sensitive – though both companies have made great strides in detecting proxy servers used to get trick these databases –  but being able to serve out locally relevant content in this manner is an incredibly powerful tool.

For the web team, implementing solutions based on geographical IP databases are fairly straight forward.  In the case of the office location function I identified at the beginning of this post, a simple script that checked the incoming IP address against the database and served the appropriate page would have been enough.  They could even have simply imported the appropriate parts of the database (which comes as a large CSV file) into their own SQL server database, and run the check against it to speed things up – with a “catch all” page for regions not serviced by a specific office.

If you have any experience using geographical IP databases in new or innovative ways, I’d be interesting in hearing about it.  Also, if you have a project that might benefit from this sort of technology, feel free to comment or contact me directly.

Generally speaking, I subscribe to the belief that everything a business puts out on the Internet should be measured in some way. Granted, this can seem a little tedious, and there are times where the logistics that go into collecting data can appear to be complex or time consuming to those responsible for managing the message. In my experience, however, the benefits of being able to make informed decisions of where a company and its people should concentrate resources based on solid analytics pretty much always pays off in the long run.

Take Twitter, for example.  Many organizations and professionals have engaged the global conversation that is Twitter in hopes of connecting with potential clients and to bring attention to their own products and services.  Certainly, there can be a great deal of benefit in participating in this form of social media networking when implemented well, though blatant advertising only works under very specific circumstances.  In fact, anyone using Twitter as a communications tool quickly realizes that it is far more effective to converse in a human sort of way than to blindly attempt to herd folks to the corporate web site.  Still, if the end goal of the campaign is ultimately to increase traffic to your web properties, than visits generated by Twitter posts (OK, tweets) is definitely something you want to measure.

You can, of course try and guesstimate traffic coming in from Twitter by having your web analytics package report on traffic coming in from twitter.com, but that solution will omit traffic from stand alone clients (probably the bulk of users these days) and cases where people share the link from your tweet with others via email or some other means.

A far better way is to treat Twitter traffic as you would any other online marketing campaign.  And, as most web analytics packages have the ability to track campaign traffic separately from regular web site traffic, you will be able to then track the effect of your Twitter communications as it relates to your web traffic as a whole.

For example, if Google Analytics is your web analytics package of choice, simply create a URL with the campaign tracking parameters using the Google Analytics URL Builder as shown below.

Then, take the generated URL (the big long one at the bottom of the image above, with the utm codes included) and use a URL shortener (another set of utilities that have sprung up as a result of Twitter’s 140 character limit) like Bit.ly or Tinyurl.com to convert it to a version much more suitable for use with Twitter.

Bit.ly Conversion Step 1:

Bit.ly Step 2:

Now, whenever you use the shortened URL in Twitter, you will be able to track and analyze the traffic resulting from those links because they will be grouped in to the Twitter campaign (or whatever name you’ve given the campaign).  If your Twitter profile has a link to the web site, you may want to replace it with the Google-generated URL as well, so you can track traffic coming in through that link.  The image below shows the results of the campaign tracking in Google Analytics.

From this point you can further refine your analysis based on region, operating systems, etc., as with any other online marketing campaign.  And obviously this method of tracking has applications far beyond Twitter.  It can, and should, be used for other social media campaigns, email newsletters, etc.  It really allows you to get a much better idea of what your audience is interested in, and provides some guidance as to the best ways of engaging social media tools in a much more intelligent way.  Good Luck!

Incidentally, I have covered a fair amount of information in this post, and it is a fairly broad example, more to illustrate the point that provide step by step instructions.  Anyone interested in learning more about using this technique, or if you’re wondering how to implement something like this within your own environment, feel free to leave a comment, or contact me directly.

As an aside, the jump in Twitter popularity has produced numerous services and tools designed to measure the success or impact of a Twitter campaign.  Twitalyzer will evaluate the activity of a Twitter account against a number of social media indicators including influence, signal to noise, generosity, velocity, and clout (see their page for definitions). With Twist you can identify key word trends (your company name, perhaps), and see how they are trending over time.  And TweetEffect matches your tweets to your followers in an attempt to give some idea of what messages brought you the most attention. There are a myriad of utilities, and even most of the large Web Analytics vendors are including some level of Twitter analytics tools in their enterprise level offerings.  Being as the bulk of this post centered on Twitter, I thought it might be useful to flag some of these for anyone just beginning their Twitter conversation.

In a perfect world all of a company’s web based marketing and online communication initiatives would entail an integrated, multi-disciplinary approach involving almost every facet of the organization happily working for the greater corporate good.  Marketing and Product Managers would steer the message, the IT and Web Team would provide guidance, implementation, and support, with input collected from other relevant divisions – Customer Service, Research, Sales, Finance,etc.

Unfortunately it is a rare organization that can informally achieve the level of collaboration required across various departments and spheres of influence to accomplish this state of being.  The more typical approach is to assign “ownership” of different facets of the online presence to different levels of the company, and have them sort out the best methods of implementation through some combination of internal and external resources.

This segmentation of the online presence of a company, however, almost inevitably leads to conflicts amongst the different areas of the business simply because the level of innovation required to be effective online tends to cause problems for those tasked with maintaining the integrity and security of existing systems.  In fact, a whole industry of consultants and hosted solutions has grown up around the perceived need of one department to do an end-run around another in order to satisfy their own responsibilities.

One method for dealing with this problem is through the creation of a Web Intelligence Steering Committee.  This committee is made up of the main corporate stakeholders and is tasked with overseeing all aspects of the organization’s web presence – from existing web properties, to social media marketing campaigns, online advertising, web analytics, to establishing clear methods for responding to any external “buzz” about the company online.

To be truly effective, a Web Intelligence Steering Committee requires, if not the direct involvement at least the strong backing of senior management responsible for guiding the company’s marketing messages on the Internet, as well as the support of the most senior technology managers.  It should have two main positions: a Program Manager, typically led by Marketing; and a Technical Manager drawn from IT or the Web Team.  The Program Manager takes the lead in defining the business processes, goals, and needs collected from every other department affected by the web presence, while the Technical manager brings the technical innovation of the company to bare on the business requirements put forward by the committee, and identifies where new technology or external resources may be necessary.

Beyond simply leveraging the resources of the company and ensuring integration of the company’s online presence across different divisions, having a dedicated Web Intelligence Steering Committee allows a company to better respond to external threats on the Internet, such as negative blog or twitter message, or even serious malicious damage to a web site, before it reaches a critical mass in the eyes of the public because established lines of internal communication are already in place to deal with a crisis.  Moreover, having such a committee can be a significant cash savings where external solutions are providing redundant services to different areas of the business.

Most importantly, though,  a Web Intelligence Steering Committee can bring a new synergy to the organization, based on the combination of innovation and technical expertise required to operate effectively on the web today.

So what’s your experience?  I’d love to hear about anyone’s experience with similar committees in a corporate environment.

Welcome to Employing Innovation, a blog about finding smarter ways to use new and existing web based technology.  We live in interesting times.  Innovations in computer, communications, and web-based systems are happening at considerable speed.  New ways of managing, disseminating, and communicating information can enable organizations and professionals to communicate like never before.

Yet with these new opportunities can come a significant learning curve, I often go into companies and see people working on an entire range of disconnected web initiatives and social media campaigns.  It seems that somewhere there is a real disconnect between the power and availability of new technology, and its application on the part of the organization as a whole

Granted, there are a number of road blocks and hurdles to injecting new methods and technologies into existing business processes.  The aforementioned learning curve for one, along with various internal gatekeepers and time limitations can all work against the implementation of new ideas in the way we manage our messages in a coordinated way.

It is my hope that this project can provide some guidance and a framework for anyone looking to understand, assess, and engage available web, social media, and related technologies –  and determine its relevance within their own business environment.