Is Your Web Page Getting a Lot of U-turn Traffic?

There is one word that spells the dirty little secret of useless web traffic: Bounceback. For all the search optimization that brings your site in the first ten blue links on google, what good is a site traffic that will make a u-turn and go away?

Let's declare a war on clever schemes that bring u-turn traffic to web sites. We want engagement and stickiness - visitors must stay on site and interact meaninfully with the site. That should be our goal.

Present Interactively - Your Audience Expects It!

Ellen Finkelstein, the noted Presentation Guru, recently conducted a webinar with a catchy title: Present interactively — your audience expects it!

Everyone kind of knows that presentations should be interactive - this webinar showed how to do that. Ellen stressed that we need to keep the audience, not slides, as the focus of the presentation. Some of the ideas she presented were:

Interact before the presentation
Ideally, the interaction needs to start before the presentation. One can do some kind of surveys using sites or different tools such as surveymonkey and surveygizmo. Surveys help in understanding the audience.

Feedback loop
During the actual presentation, create a feedback loop – you speak, listen and let this continue throughout the presentation.

Menu-based presentations
Ellen explained as one can hyperlink different slides from the menu so that - based on the audience needs - one can navigate to specific slides.

Use of third party software
Ellen talked about YawnBuster – a software tool to engage the audience for group activities. She also showed how YawnBuster is used in a webinar mode by taking votes / new ideas in a brainstorm activity using the chat pod available. Ellen further demonstrated the use of Raptivity Presenter – another software tool to create interactive presentations.

Use of social media
Here Ellen referred to Twitter and other tools to create a backchannel for audience interaction: A concept I introduced in one of my earlier posts in this blog.

Sixth Sense

The buzz around Sixth Sense technology developed at MIT Media Labs continues to grow, especially after Pranav Mistry delivered this inspired speech at TED.

The idea of wearable sensors and cameras that track gestures and enable the interaction between the physical world and the digital world is compelling. However, for it to meet its full potential, a plethora of backend applications will need to be built. There are several killer apps waiting to be built here, and they could be harbingers of a new generation of technology ventures.

A Poll for My Readers

A recent article on InstantShift titled 'Why is Social Interaction Important for a Website' has generated plenty of interaction on the site that hosts it. I mentioned this to Poonam Agarwal, the author of this article. She argued that if the readers had additional interaction tools beyond 'leave a comment' and 'retweet' available, they would have even more fun interacting. Do you agree?

The article has some nice graphics (credits : josephgilbert.org) - be sure to check it out!