On Monday, adidas and Isobar unveiled a series of exciting new enhancements to adidas miCoach, the interactive training service that delivers audible coaching while you run. Already one of the most advanced and personal applications on the Web today, miCoach.com incorporates new features and functionality that help runners better manage their training programs, and reflects adidas commitment to listening to the needs of consumers and creating a better experience for their miCoach users.

Key enhancements to miCoach.com include:

• A robust Routes management tool that enables users to create and edit routes, add ratings and notes to existing routes, and add, move or delete route points.
• New community tools that provide a forum where runners can share training tips with other runners, get tips and tricks on using miCoach, see upcoming events, access miCoach-related videos and get updates on the latest gear.
• Custom workout capabilities that enable runners to build their own custom workouts from scratch.
• A new Achievements section that recognizes key personal milestones, records and overall workout stats, such as fastest mile run, most calories burned, and more.
• Updated Reminder functionality that enable users to choose when they want to be reminded of workouts and when they’ve been inactive.

The enhanced site also provides adidas with sophisticated content management capabilities that enable each market to showcase featured products, as well as localized content, pricing and store locations to meet the needs of individual markets.

Intro to Post Click performance tagging:
Post Click performance measures the actions a user takes after entering a site via paid placement such as a banner ad or paid search term. Evaluating the connection between user behavior and which ads or ad locations (such as a particular partner site) helps optimize ongoing marketing by assigning value to those visitors. We can determine value by setting up measurement campaigns surrounding those click-through visitors, watching their drop-out rates and comparing them to successful conversion. Post Click measurement allows effective performance evaluation on individual ad campaigns.

Post Click performance tagging usually involves adding an image to your page. This image (1×1 pixel) uses the SRC attribute, a descriptor telling a visitor’s browser where to retrieve a file, to collect information about the users arriving to the site through an online advertisement. This is typically done by adding a string of campaign-specific identifiers in the space after the URL left for setting variable values (the stuff after the “?” in your browser’s location bar).

However, if there are numerous campaigns running through different timelines on your website, adding (and removing) the image code from the site is very tedious. The effort is exponential if the website is still under development and requires you to back up the production release code, add the image tracking code to each page and re-deploy!! The less dynamic your Post Click tagging scheme, the greater the effort to keep it current.

A great work around to the constant extra work to keep things current during deployments and post development is to use your content management system to store the tags (the image SRC and its URL variables) and use a general library to add an image node to the corresponding page document if a tag is configured to appear on that page.  This elegant solution eliminates the need for re-deployment every time new tags are added.

Anatomy of the image tag:
Post Click performance image code looks similar to this, in which we have a simple conversion funnel of visitors landing on index.html and successfully converting once they have visited StoreFront.html:

In index.html:
<img style=”border: 0pt none; height: 1px; width: 1px;” src=”serverName&amp;tagId=31354″ alt=”" />

In StoreFront.html
<img style=”border: 0pt none ; height: 1px; width: 1px;” src=”serverName&tagId=24395″/>

If you look closely only the tagId changes for each page and the rest of the image properties remain the same.

Content Management solution:
1) Using the CMS to store the tag Id. There are two ways this can be achieved:

a. Creating a page attribute (call it analyticsTagId) and assign it the tagId: This is better from the point of view of performance. It is however a bit more difficult to manage; the content owner has to remove the tags when the campaign is over. There is no central place to view all the current tags.

b. Create a separate CMS page, which maintains a Map of pages and their tagIds: This takes a bit of performance hit (which can be overcome by caching) and presents one central place to manage all of your tags.

Once the CMS has the tags, the business objects in the code will need to check for a tag on a given page and call a JavaScript function if that tag exists.

2) Write a JavaScript function that takes tagId as a parameter and adds an Image to the DOM. Using JQuery, this function can look like this:

function AddTags(tagId){

if(tagId!=”null”)

{

var source;

if(document.location.protocol == “http:”){

source = document.location.protocol +”//adserver &tagID=”+tagId;

}else{

source = document.location.protocol +”//adserver&tagID=”+tagId;

}


//create the image node and append it to body
$(‘<img/>’).css({height: ’1px’,width:’1px’,border:0}).attr(‘src’,source).appendTo(‘body’);
}
}

That’s it!

This will give you a very strong and adaptive framework to add/remove your Post Click performance campaign codes from your website without actually deploying your code.

Notes:
1) If your ad serving code is in an iframe format, it will still follow the same steps,but instead of creating an image node, create a div and place your iframe in it.

Sample js code:

function createIframeTag(src){

var axel = Math.random()+"";

var a = axel * 10000000000000;

This is a question I hear over and over from clients or colleagues who are tasked with managing a global web presence.

And for global site owners – choosing between hosting your global sites on a top-level domain (TLD) versus hosting it centrally on one domain utilizing a sub-directory hierarchy is a fundamental decision on the future direction of your online business. For instance, a business may need to choose between:

Option 1: ‘Molecular.co.uk’ in the United Kingdom, ‘Molecular.com.cn’ in China,

or,

Option 2: ‘Molecular.com/uk_EN/ for United Kingdom (in English)
‘Molecular.com/cn_ZH/ for China (in Chinese)

(Similarly, sub-domain options might also look like: ‘uk.Molecular.com’ for the United Kingdom or ‘china.Molecular.com’ for China).

While the answer is never entirely black and white, it’s not just a SEO decision.  Instead, I would start with 4 simple considerations that we always work to identify and prioritize when building out a domain name strategy with clients:

1)    Need for Marketing-friendly URLs locally
2)    Search Engine Optimization (SEO) priorities
3)    Global Domain Name Registration efforts
4)    CMS hosting / distribution of content considerations

Conveniently, and not surprisingly, the list is prioritized in the manner in which we would recommend defining and mapping out your global TLD strategy – business needs naturally superseding internal IT team preferences.  A bit more detail on each consideration:

1) Need for Marketing-friendly URLs:
First and foremost, there is a significant local ‘branding’ benefit and recognition/association of a country-specific top level domain (TLD) to establishing a locally-relevant and locally-appropriate market presence.  The ability to target, publish, and market to a country-specific TLD within all marketing collateral and use it as an appropriate destination for local marketing campaigns is most ideal – and the biggest priority in deciding upon which hosting solution to choose.

2) Search Engine Optimization (SEO) priorities:
Second, from a global SEO perspective, TLDs are always preferred for full optimization opportunities for indexing within global and local-specific search engines.  We define ‘indexing’ as simply the ability to have your site included within Google / Yahoo / Baidu / etc. search engines, and there are significant benefits to having your local content distributed across appropriate TLDs and hosted on globally-specific IP addresses.  Centralizing content into subdirectories will limit your ability to maximize your indexed URLs and distribution of ranking opportunities for targeted SEO keyphrases across multiple ‘sites’ – particularly around product-name or brand-based targeted keyphrases.

3) Global Domain Name Registration efforts:
Third, domain name registration can be difficult for some organizations to consistently own and manage worldwide.  With varying degrees of local requirements for registration and in-country business ownership validation, the challenge of a decision on a consistent domain/subdirectory strategy across all global sites can be affected by the logistical ability to own all top level domains across the world.  There are some managed services that will assist companies in maintaining the appropriate registration standards worldwide, but often we find IT departments hamstrung for months attempting to clear out ‘squatters’ who might previously own a country-level TLD for a priority market.

4) CMS hosting / distribution of content considerations:
Fourth, content management system (CMS) or distributed content hosting / content delivery factors always play a key role in the decision for a domain / subdirectory strategy.  Often, particularly for ‘coupled’ content delivery CMS systems or for high-security, transactional sites, the content repository needs to reside ‘close’ to where the content is being served up to users – therefore, great flexibility in full TLD and IP Address hosting cannot be fully optimized due to base global CMS publishing limitations.

Once all the above requirements are detailed out, we typically recommend the following best practice hosting solution (listed again in order of preference – and of course assuming Language HTTP Header is correctly assigned in all scenarios):

1)    Country level domain name, hosted on an In-Country IP Address: http://www.molecular.com.br/ (on Brazilian IP: 200.181.3.xxx)
2)    Country level domain name, centrally hosted: http://www.molecular.com.br/ (IP: 24.234.193.xxx)
3)    Centrally managed domain, first level subdirectory with consistent language header ID – note, some 301 permanent redirects from owned TLDs can be pointed to these subdirectories: http://www.molecular.com/br_BR/ or http://www.molecular.com/cn_ZH/

One final thought, there are long-term limitations utilizing of a locale-specific sub-domains (i.e., fr.molecular.com or br.molecular.com).  Over time, since you’re not appropriately associating the preferred ISO locale / language pair consistently in this model, having a ‘be-de.molecular.com’, ‘be-nl.molecular.com’, and ‘be-fr.molecular.com’ website standard may be quite counter-intuitive and relatively confusing for users, marketers, and the entire organization.

I hope this globalization ‘quick tip’ helps to organize your internal team’s hosting discussion – please do add comments or questions if you have any unique global hosting situations that you might be dealing with on your own global site.

This is the first of three blogs on accessibility for Web site owners and designers

Last August the Web world was shocked to hear that mega-retailer Target had agreed to pay $6 million to settle a lawsuit brought by Bruce Sexton, a blind California college student who complained that the Target.com site was inaccessible to him and other blind consumers.  Retail site owners lit up the blogosphere with complaints that the courts have stomped on their rights and with predictions that greedy lawyers would use this precedent to extort billions of dollars from any deep-pocket online retailer they could find.  Six months later, however, the buzz had died down and the real lessons to be learned from the Target case are now clear.

Above: Target’s public relations nightmare

The real reason that Target was forced to settle for such a significant amount was not because of overzealous government bureaucrats and greedy lawyers, but because Target stubbornly refused to acknowledge that online accessibility was at all their responsibility.  Instead of seeing the requested changes to their site as an opportunity to expand access to their online store, Target pushed back on what they saw as an illegal effort by the government and special interests to dictate to them how they should run their business.  Target contended that the cost of the suggested changes to Target.com would be prohibitive and refused to make any of the requested accessibility changes to their site and instead spent money building a legal defense. 

If you understand that ecommerce sites are the equivalent of brick and mortar stores to the 18.6 million Americans who reported having a disability that prevented them from easily getting out of their homes (http://www.census.gov/prod/2003pubs/c2kbr-17.pdf ), then you also understand where Target went wrong.  The National Federation for the Blind (NFB), who joined Mr Sexton as a plaintiff, convinced the judge to declare the suit a class action, which meant that just about any disabled person in the US who could prove they had been barred access to Target.com could also become a plaintiff.   The NFB and other advocacy groups began to publicize the case and the mainstream news media began to cover it. When Target realized that this was quickly spiraling into a public relations nightmare, they wisely decided to quickly settle.  Considering the potential reputational damage, $6 million was a cheap way to make it all go away (for the settlement details, go to http://www.nfbtargetlawsuit.com/ ).

Below are the four steps you should be taking now to make sure your site doesn’t get ‘Target-ed’:

1.  Become aware of the laws that pertain to the accessibility of your site

The Target case hinged on the US federal ‘Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA)’ law and the ‘Unruh’ California state civil rights act.  The ADA is a comprehensive federal civil-rights statute protecting the rights of people with disabilities and ensuring that ‘reasonable efforts’ are made to give them access to places of ‘public accommodation’.  The statute does not mention the Internet or Web sites, however, and the courts have not provided much guidance on the applicability of the ADA to online stores.  For this reason, the NFB also leveraged the California ‘Unruh’ statute that states that all state citizens, regards of disability (among other categories), are “entitled to the full and equal accommodations, advantages, facilities, privileges, or services in all business establishments of every kind whatsoever”.

Take the time to get up-to-speed with the federal or state laws that may apply to your Web site.  If your site is international, you may need to consider the laws of the various countries your customers reside in.  Once again, the WebAIM site is a good resource for investigating accessibility laws around the world.

Important caveat:  this post is not meant to be legal advice – please contact your lawyer or internal legal department for the most accurate and up-to-date information before you act on anything.

2.  Educate your site’s development team and content creators on Web accessibility

Train developers and communicators on Web accessibility so they understand how to identify issues and, more importantly, how to fix them.  There are many great online sources of Web accessibility training, but WebAIM (www.WebAIM.org) and the WorldWide Web Consortium’s (W3C) Web Accessibility Initiative (http://www.w3.org/WAI/) are good starting points.

You can also create a low cost accessibility lab by installing demo or freeware versions of assistive technologies, such as screen readers and screen magnifiers, on a spare PC.  Engage the disabled community in your organization or city – invite representatives in to give assistive technology demonstrations to your staff or to evaluate your sites.

3.   Assess your site’s accessibility

Matthew Kreeger, a partner at the law firm of Morrison Foerster and a former software designer, suggests that Web sites prepare for accessibility suits by first taking an inventory of how easy it is to navigate their site using a screen reader.  “We have found that this first step helps clients determine the extent of any potential issues and puts them in  a position to evaluate any programming updates or modifications” (http://www.mofo.com/news/updates/files/14568.html) . 

There are also several free online accessibility assessment services that can be used to get an understanding of what issues may exist on your site.  WebAIM’s WAVE assessment tool is easy to use and comprehensive.   A complete list of free and commercial assessment tools is also available at the WebAIM site.

4.   Create a remediation plan and measure your progress against it

The National Federation for the Blind (NFB) has been approaching major online retailers and financial services providers about the accessibility of their sites for years.  In almost all cases, these businesses worked with the NFB to develop plans for improving the accessibility of their sites over time.  As long as the business showed reasonable progress on their accessibility plan, the NFB, courts, and regulators were happy and enforcement actions were not pursued.

A good example of an accessibility remediation plan can be found at the US Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) site.  Scroll to the bottom for the timeline – note that they have taken a multi-year phased approach, and that they are keeping track of their progress as represented by the percentage completed next to each active task.  Also note that HHS is working towards compliance to Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act – this is an accessibility statute that covers government Web sites and the Web sites of any private businesses interacting with the public on behalf of the government.  We will discuss Section 508 in more detail in the next accessibility blog.

Summary

According to the US Census Bureau, nearly 8 million Americans have visual or motor skill disabilities that impact their ability to use the Internet.  All commercial Websites should be aware of how their site is experienced by the disabled and come up with a plan for correcting any issues.  To ignore the pleas of this large and growing sector of the Internet population is to take on significant legal and reputational risk.

To avoid Target.com’s fate, Web sites should be gaining awareness of accessibility, assessing the accessibility of their pages, and creating and acting on realistic long term remediation plans.

In the next two accessibility blogs we will learn techniques for advocating and winning funding for accessibility remediation tasks, and for how to integrate accessibility remediation into a traditional Web development project.

Yesterday I had the pleasure of joining Stephen Powers from Forrester and Joel Shore of Ziff Davis for a webinar on globalization title “Getting Started With Your Global Site Initiative. The event was sponsored by SDL Tridion and is now available online at eSeminarslive.com.

Getting Started With Your Global Web Site Initiative

Many organizations face the challenge of going global, particularly when it comes to Web site strategies. While these organizations have made the decision to better manage their Web sites globally, they face many issues deploying multiple Web sites, in multiple languages.

Topics Discussed:

• How to get started on a globalized Web site project, before even looking at specific technologies
• What stumbling blocks to avoid, depending on organization and culture.
• Tips on implementing technologies and gaining user adoption

This past week I had the opportunity to participate in two Interwoven events directed at interactive marketers and the challenges they are facing online. The first event was a panel discussion, entitled “From Browsers to Buyers: How to Drive More Value From Your Online Marketing” that took place Tuesday night at Umbria Ristorante in Boston and was expertly moderated by Senior Editor-in-Chief at 1to1 Magazine, Ginger Conlon. Panelist Dave Churbuck, VP of Global Web Marketing at Lenvo and Ben Kiker, CMO at Interwoven both provided excellent insight into how companies are addressing the new online challenges facing their marketing departments. The discussion was very interactive and the format provided a good forum for open discussion and sharing of ideas. I was particular impressed with David’s thoughts around “The Year of the Landing Page” and enjoyed the other insights the former founder of Forbes.com and author of churbuck.com talked about during the evening.

Earlier that day I got a chance to participate with Eben Miller, Director of Product Marketing, as a guest on Interwoven’s “Intersections” podcast to discuss the topic “User Generated Content (UGC) and Its Effect On Your Brand”. The podcast was hosted by Scott Whitney and runs about 25 minutes. You can listen to the show at www.interwovenpodcasts.com.

Web Content Management is more than just a technology; utilized correctly, it can become the hub for all your digital content, an enabler to engage your customers in ways never before possible, if you are a marketer your WCM system could (and should) be the most valuable weapon in your arsenal for differentiation.

This has long been a belief of Molecular, but the recent acquisition of MediaSurface by Alterian is a good example of how WCM is being seen as a necessary component to any successful marketing offering

Here’s the first line of the Alterian press release, “Integrated marketing platform provider combines online and offline analytics with content and multi-channel execution to help marketers optimise customer experiences across the web”

A lot of marketing speak for sure, but I think Jason McNamara (Alterian CMO) is correct when he says “Analytics is the new measure of how well marketers understand their customers, but people react to content. And reaction and interaction with content creates new analytics. Unlike offline, these interactions are often inbound and real-time in nature, thus impossible to manage with manual processes….”

This is just one example of how technology companies are trying to combine, analytics, content management and campaign management to create offerings that speak better to marketing departments. Something they all feel they most do as they see the money (and decision making power) moving from IT to to the business.

Other recent examples include Interwoven’s acquisition of Optimost (A/B testing) and Vignette’s acquisition of Vidavee (video and analytics).

Will all this activity enable these companies to make the jump from selling technology to IT to selling solutions to marketing? In the future, maybe, but right now it’s just a good story with little “real” integration and few success stories. And as is always the case with technology, it’s usually not the product itself that makes you successful, it’s HOW your organization uses that technology that gives you the competitive advantage. If you don’t understand what you need the technology to do, just buying an integrated platform isn’t going to make you a success.

No matter how you get your news these days you can’t help being bombarded by the talk of a recession. With all the talk I thought I’d take a quick look at some of the WCM vendors and see how they were doing.

This is not an in depth financial analysis, but I think it is safe to say the WCM market is still strong and shows few signs of slowing down. The vast majoriy of vendors has posted records numbers, with (Vignette and MediaSurface being key exceptions, and seem to have positive outlooks for 2008.

Here’s is a summary of the most recent releases.

Interwoven
Interwoven reported total revenues of $61.5 million for the first quarter of 2008, an increase of 17% from total revenues of $52.7 million for the first quarter of 2007.

“Our first quarter performance provided an excellent start to 2008″, said Joe Cowan, CEO of Interwoven. “We posted a revenue increase of 17% over last year, while increasing earnings and cash flows. These results are a direct result of a strategy that is tuned to the needs of our customers.” Full Story (Interwoven)

OpenText
Total revenue for the third quarter was US$178.8 million, up 15% compared to US$156.1 million for the same period in the prior fiscal year. License revenue in the third quarter was US$51.5 million, up 20% compared to US$43.0 million in the third quarter of the prior fiscal year. Full Story (CIO)

Tridion
“SDL Tridion’s revenues hit a record USD 42M in 2007 driven by strong expansion in the US and UK markets as well as market share growth across Europe. With year-on-year revenuegrowth of 58% and license revenuegrowth of 67%, ….. Net profit also reached record levels in 2007 and net margin was a class leading 16% of revenues in spite of heavy investments in global expansion and incidental costs related to the acquisition by SDL” Full Story (Tridion)

Fatwire
Web Content Management Provider Achieves 21 Percent Increase in Year-Over-Year RevenueGrowth

FatWire Software…., announced that the company delivered its strongest year ever with record-breaking fourth quarter fiscal year 2007 results. FatWire achieved an exceptional 35 percent growth in total revenuefor the quarter which ended on December 31st, 2007, driven by a strong demand worldwide for its products and services.” Full Story (Fatwire)

Day Software
The Company reported a record first quarter, achieving a 15% growth in total revenue over the same period in 2007. Revenues for the first quarter totaled CHF 7.4 million, compared with revenues of CHF 6.4 million for the first quarter of 2007. License revenues increased by 39% over last year, totaling CHF 4.3 million, compared with license revenues of CHF 3.1 million for the same period last year.” Full Story (Day)

Clickability
Clickability, …… today announced the closing of $8 million in its second round of venture funding. Shasta Ventures led the round, with additional investment from Convergence Partners, which financed Clickability’s initial venture capital round. Full Story (Clickability)

Vignette Corporation
Vignette Corporation (NASDAQ: VIGN) today announced that total revenue for the first quarter 2008 was $44.8 million, a decrease of 6.0% from the first quarter of 2007.

“Our business remains volatile on a quarter by quarter basis,” said Mike Aviles, president and CEO of Vignette. “We need stronger focus and more consistent results from our sales and marketing efforts. License revenue in North America was particularly challenging for us in the first quarter; however, services were strong, and we continue to make good progress around our technology. Customer satisfaction and renewal rates are up. We announced several new products during the quarter and added integrated video content management capabilities with the acquisition of Vidavee.” Full Story (Vignette)

MediaSurface
“In recent years Mediasurface has grown — a bit haphazardly we thought — via acquisition, but evidently failed to control costs, and a surprise announcement (pdf) of losses late last year sent the stock tumbling from around 25p to languish at about 5p per share, at least until this latest courtship. You can track the stock price here.” Full Story (CMSWatch)

The Molecular CM Team got a demo of Percussion’s new Personalization Solution the other day. Tying CM and Personalization is not a new concept and Percussion is not the first CM vendor to offer a solution like this, but their open implementation offers extensibility and simplified integration.

As with all products I’m holding my final opinion until I work with it at least once.

After reading a blog posting on CMS Watch the other day about how SaaS Content Management vendors are trying to position themselves as the “Green” solution to Content Management I thought it would be a good time to write about my desire to be a “green consultant”.

I’ve started my journey with the following initiatives:

Commute – Although it would be great to move closer to the office and reduce my one hour (each way) commute time, I really like my neighborhood and my current residence, so I looked for innovative ways to better utilize my commuting time. My first initiative was to purchase carbon-offset certificates to ensure I was compensating for the CO2 my drive time was putting into the atmosphere. I choose to purchase my certificate through RenewableChoice.com, but there a plenty of sites available (Carbonfund.org is another good one). My second initiative was to take advantage of the energy my car was producing while I was driving. I decided to use the two hours per day I sit in the car to charge my electronic devices. Using a variety of gadgets I’m able to charge my Blackberry, Bluetooth headset, digital camera, laptop and iPod with just the energy from my 12v car outlets during my commute! This was good, but I wanted to go one step further. Wouldn’t it be great if I could run my laptop all day using my commute as the energy source? Thanks to some innovative technology from Batterygeek.net this was a real possibility. Batterygeek offers lightweight external ‘Green Lithium’ batteries that can produce 9+ hours of laptop operation, and thanks to an available 130w inverter you can charge the battery from your car. I’m still waiting for my Portable Power Station from Batterygeek, but I’m optimistic this will enable me to operate all day without drawing any additional power from the office. I’m also assuming that I might need more than my commute time to charge the batter, but no worries, I just pre-registered with NSTAR Green to make sure 100% of my home energy is delivered via a wind farm in upstate NY.

Laptop – To get through a full day on battery power there are few things you can do to your laptop to help conserve energy. 1) Don’t use an external monitor 2) Decrease the brightness on your laptop LCD screen 3) Maximize your power setting (for Windows machines you can do this under ‘Power Options’ in the control panel) 4) Use an Ethernet cable instead of wireless and make sure your wireless adapter is off

Lights – The best way to reduce the energy you use for lighting is to utilize natural sun light. If that’s not possible the second best option is to use an LED desk lamp and if that’s not in the cards the last resort is to buy a CFL lamp or bulb. I good source for LED and CFL lighting is www.eco-lights.com.

Printing – This is simple. I try not to do it. If I absolutely need to print a document I print on both sides of the paper. Printing on recycled paper is another step.

Office Supplies – I try to use recycled products as much a possible Staples has an “Eco Easy” section of their site that offers a great selection of products.

I’ve got a long way to go before I can claim to be a green consultant. I should be bringing filtered tap water instead of grabbing bottled water at work, bringing local foods for lunch instead of grabbing packaged food from the vending machines and should probably look harder for earth friendly clothing (Bollorganic has great organic cotton dress shirts) but for now I’m happy I’m just moving in the right direction.