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If you're like most of the marketers or business owners I talk with these days, you're wondering what exactly are the benefits of Facebook fans (i.e., "Likes") to your brand. Also, how much more likely are they to do business with you than those who don't "like" you on Facebook? Those who profess to be fans are much more likely to participate in "desirable actions" using Facebook, such as making a purchase, installing an app, entering a sweepstakes or voting online in a contest. That's according to SocialCode, a full-service social agency owned by the Washington Post Company, which looked at 50 brands and more than 5 million Facebook ads over a five-month period earlier this year.

The holiday shopping season is in full swing, and once again, we find ourselves scrambling to figure out what to buy our friends and family. Black Friday and Cyber Monday have come and gone but I still have plenty of shopping to do. My wife started dropping subtle hints about a month ago, but I'm still not confident that what I end up getting her will be what she really wants. And this isn't a new pattern of ours. Every holiday season when we exchange gifts, she thanks me, she smiles at me, she hugs me, and then she inevitably returns everything.

Ecommerce sites should consider how they can personalize their sites using Facebook data, as a new study shows 50% of visitors to ecommerce sites are currently logged in to Facebook. Using Facebook social plugins and Connect integrations, sites can leverage Facebook data to show visitors what friends bought or shared, what products relate to their Likes, and which friends they might want to invite. The study was conducted by Sociable Labs, which helps websites implement social functionality, and looked at 456 million visits to over a dozen ecommerce sites catering to different demographics.

What is the biggest missed opportunity in ecommerce optimization? Is it A/B testing? Performance testing? How about cart recovery? We put a lot of focus on optimizing the cart, getting the customer through to conversion, yet still it's not uncommon to have abandonment rates of 50% or higher. We know a good chunk of abandonment does not occur because the button wasn't big enough or green enough or our web forms are too long. Some got distracted, some wanted to hold items for later, some left and couldn't remember your site URL, some even thought the transaction went through when it did not.

Discovery Week is an experimental and learning process to look at the next phase of the Guardian's digital future. The plan for the week is for the various teams and departments within the Guardian to collaborate and build a wide variety of projects and then demo them across the organisation at the end of the process. There are five themes for the week: Content Journeys, Visual Design, Social, Live and Commercial. Teams from Google, Mozilla, and the Guardian's US office have travelled to work on one or more project within these themes.

Why did you click on this blog post? Right now, you're probably able to answer that question with relative ease. Micro-surveys are short and to the point. Similar to the question above, they only have one or two questions and they're extremely targeted. This means that they're not only easy to answer, but easy to create, implement, and analyze. If your company is practicing agile, or just trying to move quickly, you can easily integrate micro-surveys into your existing schedule.

sort of like usertesting.com but with a lot more detail. eye tracking and emotion tracking coming soon.

Originally shared by Beth @ July 12, 2011

In part one of this series, we examined some of the more problematic personality traits user researchers are likely to encounter in their work. Now that we've seen how individual personalities can put a damper on your day; let's explore some ways to overcome the problems inherent to each. Originally shared by Beth @ July 12, 2011

August 18, 2011 03:49 PM Eastern Daylight Time KANSAS CITY, Mo.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Barkley, one of the largest independent marketing agencies in the U.S., in partnership with Service Management Group and The Boston Consulting Group, released findings today from a groundbreaking study of Millennials, "American Millennials: Deciphering the Enigma Generation."

Originally published: Apr 01, 2003 Not so very long ago, it was agreed that five to eight users was enough for a good usability test. Somehow, this idea achieved mythic status. We believed it. We preached it to everyone who would listen.

By Christine Perfetti and Lori Landesman Originally published: Jun 18, 2001 One of the most popular questions we hear from web designers and usability professionals is: "How many users is enough when conducting usability tests?" Until recently, we had believed -- and told our clients -- that it wasn't usually necessary to test with more than eight users.

Looking for 80% convergence

Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox, June 26, 2006: We can define usability in terms of quality metrics, such as learning time, efficiency of use, memorability, user errors, and subjective satisfaction. Sadly, few projects collect such metrics because doing so is expensive: it requires four times as many users as simple user testing.

Often we are faced with determining the appropriate number of participants for our usability tests. Too many participants increase the cost and development time. If the number of participants is too small, the testing process may fail to detect important problems and result in reduced site usability.

What is the most important element of your checkout sign in page? As I've blogged many times before, guest checkout is critical to conversion. Forrester Research found that 23% of consumers abandoned the checkout of the last site they shopped on that didn't have a guest checkout option.

The next time you're faced with an incentive program as a consumer, think about how it makes you feel and ask yourself, "is this motivating me to refer my friends to this business?" Your answer to this question is important because the key to creating a successful sales organization in the next decade will be understanding how to leverage one of your greatest assets, your customer relationships.

The concept of social commerce can be taken literally, as in making a purchase directly through a social media property. This can be done, such as renting "The Big Lebowski" and watching it on Facebook. That's happening now, but as a revenue stream, it's insignificant.

When I recently browsed my Foursquare contacts - admittedly to remove some dead weight because I was getting too close to the 1,000 friend limit - I saw that a number of friends had stopped using it. I wanted to know why, and several were kind enough to share their stories.

Part 2 of 7 articles on Essentials for Customer Centric Business