Let’s enter fantasyland for a moment. What if you went home from work today and told your spouse that the best thing that happened at the office in months was a team meeting that ran all day? That you got more done in that day than in a normal month — and to top it off, it was really fun.

Contrast this vision — which probably sounds delusional — with most team meetings. As someone who has studied this up close as both an academic and as a consultant, I’ve said for years that most businesses would be better off if all meetings were disbanded. The reason is that three-quarters of tribal meetings are so nonfunctional that you’d be better off taking a nap instead.

Thanks to input from three friends, our meetings at CultureSync are like the fantasy I described. Two of the friends are from the Agile/Scrum world, Daniel Mezick and Si Alhir. The third is Robert Richman from Zappos Insights, whose excitement for what Daniel had accomplished at Zappos was so pure and joyful that it reminded me of my three-year-old daughter when she gets ice cream.

Let’s be clear on the benefits of following the guidance in this blog post. Your meetings will transform from slow marches in the snow without food or water into hyper-productive sessions in which — are you sitting down? — people love the process and can’t wait for the next session. At Robert’s suggestion, our CultureSync team invited Daniel Mezick to put us through a boot camp based on the principles of Scrum.

The result: We got more done in two days than in two months. People who normally hate meetings (I’m raising my hand here) were almost speechless with how productive and fun they were. By the end, Si’s words were ringing in my ears: “Tribal Leadership and Scrum are perfect for each other.” (Daniel and Robert had said the same thing, but I’m a slow learner.)

So how can you make your meetings like ours? You should immediately pre-order Daniel’s book,The Culture Game. (Full disclosure: I endorsed the book, and it quotes Tribal Leadership many times, but I have no financial interest in the book doing well — except that if companies actually did what Daniel recommends, they would become so productive that the stock market would double.) Until your book arrives, here are several steps you can take right away to make your meetings more fun and productive. It’s all in the details here, so please follow every step exactly.

First, start your next meeting by designating three roles. One is “Facilitator.” (In real Scrum, this role should be the “Scrum Master,” but doing so requires training outside the scope of this blog post.) The second is the “Product Owner,” the person who defines what qualifies as the “deliverable.” Scrum has very few rules, but one is that the Facilitator (Scrum Master) cannot also be the Product Owner. The third role is the team, and that’s everyone else.

Second, start your next meeting with the Facilitator helping the group establish working agreements. Do this by asking people how they respond when others bury their nose in their laptops or multitask with their smartphones. Don’t be surprised if the chief offenders here (I’m holding my hand up again) may say that they find it annoying. Then, as a temporary working agreement, ask what the group is willing to commit to. Most will say “no cell phones,” “no computers,” “no phone calls,” etc. The Facilitator should post these on the wall or whiteboard, where they are visible to everyone. Note that they will say this — it requires no confrontation on the part of the Facilitator.

Also, some people during this process may disclose that they have some reason to break the rules, and these exceptions go up on the list. In our meetings, I mentioned two people by name whose calls I would take. I then pushed my cell phone to the center of the conference table so everyone else could verify that I would take a call only from those people — and not from my bookie.

Third, set a schedule. For an extended meeting, like one going all morning, establish clear breaks. We settled on 50-minute work cycles with 10-minute breaks. During the breaks, people can email, text, use the restroom, refill their coffee cup, or anything else — including going outside for some fresh air. The blocks of work are called “iterations.” The psychological impact of knowing that a break is just a few minutes away transforms the iterations from possibly pointless meetings into goal-directed bursts of activity. People know that even a wandering, off-purpose iteration will end. You’ll find that everyone will be far more able to stay engaged and avoid the beeps and vibrations from their electronic friends.

Fourth, start each iteration with a big countdown clock, visible to everyone — and start it. As it begins to click down, ask the group to define what constitutes “done” for that iteration. Even if the group spends 15 of its 50 minutes on this question, that’s a great investment. In one of our meetings, we defined “done” as determining all of our company priorities, assigning them to a group with a lead person, and getting all of this set up on project boards. We had struggled to do exactly that for months, and we did it in a single 50-minute iteration, which included the time to define “done.” The team members may ask the Product Owner questions of clarification or scope.

Fifth, do the work to get to “done.” Anyone is free to make suggestions or point out that “15:33 is left on the clock.” Some groups will start by outlining a set of steps to get to done, and others will jump in. The Facilitator may interrupt and ask if the group knows how it will get to done, but these interruptions should be minimal. This system puts everyone in a flat meeting, without rank. I’ve implemented this simple form of Scrum in meetings when the CEO came in to check on our progress. In one case, he began to critique the meeting while also playing with his iPhone. In one of the best moments of my professional life, a subordinate pointed out that the CEO was welcome to join, but only as a team member (technically, he was “de-authorized from speaking as the CEO”). And, she added, our rules require no gadgets, so the boss had to please either put down the phone or exit the meeting. He complied and sat down, as a participating team member. He later said that the meeting was the most productive he had ever attended.

Sixth, end the iteration when the clock times out. Alternatively, take a break when the Facilitator calls an end to the session. If you have time before the clock hits zero, ask: “Did we get to done?”

Seventh, after the break, start with a five-minute “retro” on what worked and didn’t work in the last meeting. Based on this brief reflection, the Facilitator may ask if the group wants to amend the ground rules, such as “no sidebar conversations.” Then start the process again. Begin with a check in on rules and assignment of roles (these likely won’t change), and move through establishing “done,” doing the work, ending the process, and taking a break.

When I saw this simple form of Scrum work in executive settings, I watched meetings dominated by “I’m great” (and you’re not)” tones flip into fully functioning, high-performance tribes. Robert, Daniel and Si, you were right. Sorry it took me so long to catch up.

What I’m outlining here is perhaps only 1 percent of Scrum. If you want to glance at the other 99 percent, check out my personal blog, which has lots of links to Scrum resources and properly credits the people who helped start this movement. This blog also highlights what could be the most important development in executive management since Peter Drucker’s ideas.

Imagine 20 facilitators, fully trained in Scrum and Tribal Leadership deployed throughout your company. If you decided to do this, please let me know, so I can buy stock in your company and short your competitors.

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“Vanished” Teaches Children to Save the Future with Science

Images courtesy of the MIT Education Arcade

Scientists from the future reached out to present day scientists as part of Project Phoenix to investigate a natural disaster that wiped out the historical record as part of Vanished, an alternate reality game designed exclusively for children. The game was a collaboration between the MIT Education Arcade and the Smithsonian Institution, and sought to engage kids and teens in the role of scientific detectives and inspire scientific learning through an epic story. Prior to the game’s launch, ARGNet provided a sneak peek at the upcoming campaign. Now that the game has come to a conclusion, I followed up with Caitlin Feeley and Dana Tenneson of MIT’s Education Arcade to take a post-mortem look at the game.

The true heroes of Vanished were the players, who uncovered the mystery by making scientific progress week by week. The game was also populated by a full cast of characters; the most prominent was Lovelace, an artificial intelligence who traveled back in time to assist in the investigation. Moderators had in-game personas, like Storm and Megawatt, who played the roles of guardians and guides. The journey also involved interacting with real-world scientists from a variety of fields, and players even encountered a few villainous trolls and hackers among their own ranks before reaching the end.

Vanished began when members of Project Phoenix, who are scientists in the future, contacted players through the game site requesting their help to gather data to test their hypotheses about the disaster, called The Epoch. Players had to gather temperature data, photograph plants and animals, and figure out how to convert present day units of measurement to those used in the future. They determined that an asteroid strike caused The Epoch hundreds of years in the future. That raised questions about what the future was like and why humans didn’t stop the asteroid. As the game continued, players discovered that global warming cause society to collapse, causing mass starvation and technological regression. When the asteroid approached, humanity was unable to muster a response and went extinct. Project Phoenix wasn’t comprised of future human scientists, they were from another world. Just by discovering this, players discovered that humanity has the possibility of changing the future.

The Vanished team sought to invite players during the lead up to the game through outreach from the Smithsonian and press. Player recruitment expanded organically as players pulled in their friends to join the fun, while the home-schooling community provided its own influx of players. There was significant international participation, despite the game’s US-centric design focus. Over 6,700 player accounts registered, plus an additional 3,000 watcher/adult accounts; over a thousand players remained active through to the game’s finale. The Vanished team attributed this high level of active participation to the tight player community that formed over the game’s eight week run.

One design goal for Vanished was to “squash the pyramid” by encouraging traditionally casual players to take a more active role. Typically, participation in high engagement campaigns like alternate reality games are expected to take the shape of an inverted pyramid, with casual players forming the base, supported by the efforts of the highly engaged few at the top.  To encourage active collaboration, players at received one of 99 unique codes at the beginning of Vanished, and the players had to assemble every code to advance. Assignment was random, so players actively solicited others to speak up and become involved. As the game progressed, players received achievement points for their participation, which could be spent to unlock documents. Many documents required more points than any single player could afford, and so players had to pool their points together as a team. While presenting Vanished at GDC Online in October, Scot Osterweil and Feeley cited improvements to the traditional “90-9-1″ player percentages of casual-active-enthusiast to 69-25-6 – tripling the active participants, with a large number of players serving as heavy contributors.

Players were allowed the freedom to discuss and critique the game as they chose. The forums were moderated, but moderation was limited to ensuring that content was age appropriate and that no players were posting personal information. Largely the players self-regulated; if someone trolled the forums, players told them to leave rather than ruin the experience for the group. When a player proclaimed “this isn’t real, it’s all fake,” moderator Storm replied in the forums, “please don’t tell [moderator] Megawatt, she’s been here for 14 hours, she’ll rupture a blood vessel if somebody tells her.” No one brought it up again. Only one troll was ever banned by moderators for repeat bad behavior.

Hacking stories flooded the news this year, so it was not surprising that a hacker emerged from within the player ranks. Anti-QWERTY found a way to unlock documents on the site without spending points. Instead of exploiting the weakness, he presented the issue to the forums. The players overwhelmingly asked Anti-QWERTY not to abuse the hack any further; they were having too much fun with the game. Anti-QWERTY privately revealed details of the hack to the moderators so that they could fix the site, and balance was preserved. The developers created a unique “White Hat Hacker” achievement and awarded it to the player.

Building community and showing that the players valued their experience powerfully demonstrate excellent game design, but the content focus of Vanished was teaching scientific skills and instilling life-long subject interest. This is a much more difficult objective to assess, but anecdotally it was a great success. Video conferences with scientists engaged otherwise quiet kids, and players across the spectrum demonstrated the transfer of newly learned knowledge to game puzzles. Initially, players had to be instructed to move beyond the initial step of creating a hypothesis, to figuring out a way to test each hypothesis. Once they had a direction, players jumped to execute.

Feedback from the participating Smithsonian museums was also highly positive. Kids visiting didn’t perform “badge checking,” a common behavior where players try to complete a checklist at maximum speed at the expense of immersing themselves. Vanished avoided sending players to answer specific questions, instead guiding them to gather information that might be applied to the week’s scientific subjects. The players seemed interested to learn about the subjects with a broader perspective. Players applied this broader knowledge to the puzzles they encountered online and critically thought through problems.

Feeley and Tenneson spoke particularly of a seventh grade teacher working with at-risk students, who contacted them after Vanished concluded. The teacher had to jump through hoops to get permission from his school and the parents in order to have his students participate, but claimsVanished transformed his class. The students were fascinated and engaged week after week, and many expressed a desire to be scientists as a result of their experience.

The team at MIT learned a number of lessons from Vanished that they hope to apply to future games. At the top of their list is the creation of additional characters; interaction with the game’s characters was a favorite part for many players, and strongly promoted engagement. The Lovelace AI began with a basic set of phrases, and the players actively taught her to improve her language when they realized she could learn. When Lovelace made comments that they perceived as rude, players reprimanded her extensively about “human etiquette.” When Lovelace was aggressive towards the moderators, players were protective and made it clear her behavior wouldn’t be tolerated. Characters like Lovelace require a real person to manage the character’s conversations and development, so additional characters would in turn require a larger staff.

For future iterations, the team wants to further improve “pyramid-squashing” and their community outreach. Flash games did a fine job of providing casual players with something to do, but also allowed some players to remain at the outskirts of the community. The response of the home-schooling community was also stronger than expected, and merits extra communication for future games. The team also plans on working closer with participating museums to create recurring events instead of tying events to a specific time. For those players unable to reach the museum at a specific time due to family schedules or distance, it would open up greater participation. Teachers who followed Vanished expressed a desire to be notified ahead of time about future games; with enough lead time, interested teachers will be better prepared to involve their students.

The promise of additional games from the MIT Education Arcade is more than lofty hopefulness, based on the success of Vanished. There has been a strong response from outside parties interested in their own games, including major publishing, tech, and arts institutions.

At the end of Vanished, players concluded their epic journey as heroes. They saved the world. And yet, saving Earth from a fictional future disaster was a vehicle for the game’s educational goals; players learned critical scientific skills, were inspired to pursue science on their own, and may follow new careers that will produce material discoveries and changes in the future. If an environmental disaster does occur, they may just save the world for real.

As a present to players, one of the team artists created a thank-you comic of a scene from the end of the game, featured at the beginning of this article. Though the Lovelace AI had never been visualized during the game, players uncovered an image of Lovelace hidden within the comic. Can you spot her? If you have trouble, check out the original Lovelace sketch for reference.

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Jeff Kirchick is Director of Universities at SCVNGR, the popular mobile game about going places, doing challenges and earning points. He presents regularly about the future of mobile and location-based services in education. You can follow Jeff on Twitter @JeffreyKirchick or e-mail him at jeff@scvngr.com.

Mobile technology is on the minds of higher education professionals more than ever before. At the recent HighEdWeb conference in Austin, the itinerary included several ways schools can use social media, blogs and mobile technologies to better captivate its student body. And last week, hundreds of orientation professionals gathered in New Orleans for the National Orientation Directors Association annual conference, where they discussed how to engage with prospective students in modern and relevant ways — including mobile — to welcome the next freshman class.

It’s no mystery why: The latest numbers show 40% of teens plan on buying an iPhone within the next three months. In the last three years, the smartphone penetration rate among the 18-24 age demographic has risen by nearly a fifth. It’s not unreasonable to expect that nearly all of the Class of 2015 will have smartphones by the time they graduate. At the same time, nearly half of all college students are using their phones to access the mobile web.

There’s a recent debate about whether schools should create mobile apps or mobile websites. Either way, according to Dave Olsen, a web developer at West Virginia University, roughly 15% of colleges and universitieseven have a mobile website, much less an app or set of apps targeted to their prospective, current and/or alumni bodies.

To be fair, universities have come a long way. Nearly all schools are now using social media for everything from brand awareness to event management. And some institutions — for example WVU, William and Mary and Ohio State University — are pioneering and already providing an impeccable mobile experience for students.

As tomorrow’s grads become increasingly married to their mobile devices, here are five ways that mobile tech matters just as much as social technology in the higher ed space.

1. Engaging a Mobile Student Body

Students today seem unable to go five minutes without checking their phones for a text, notification or email. (88% of students even text during class!) The power of that reliance could be harnessed to announce campus events, such as a fundraiser or a special guest lecture, or even incorporate it into the class curriculum.

Technology in education usually means places of higher learning play a bit of catch-up, but those who start embracing mobile now with development and budget resources will be ahead of the curve for years to come. Check out what Purdue University’s done with mobile learning with their remarkable Studio Project. In particular, the project’s Hotseat app takes status updates and creates a “collaborative classroom” by allowing students to provide near real-time feedback during class. The idea is that professors can then adjust the course content and improve the overall learning experience.

2. Providing Real-Time Information that Matters

Even though the latest numbers show only 4% of adults use location services to check in, nearly a quarter of them use it for practical things like getting directions and recommendations. Savvier teens are more likely to use location for fun, but they’re also looking for practical information: campus events, news alerts, social recommendations — you name it, there’s probably a need on campus.

One great example of this is at WVU, where the school’s iWVU app shows everything from athletics to shuttle bus info. Another is Ohio State University’s OSU Mobile app that even gives students their grades and schedules in real-time.

3. Creating a Safer Campus

Just this summer, the University of California, Davis removed more than 100 emergency landline phones from campus — not only to save money, but because the idea of a stationary phone-based system seemed draconian when compared to the ubiquity of mobile. Indeed, a safe student body makes for a happy one, and the rise of mobile technology should empower students more than ever before to report dangerous situations and remain safe from harm.

Many schools, like Princeton University, send their student body SMS alerts for emergency situations. And new apps like MyForce Campus Interface provide crime data about campus and surrounding areas. Mobile technology has enormous potential to bring real-time knowledge and assurance to any college student today.

4. Empowering Mobile Commerce

The idea of paying with your phone is starting to catch on, with Square and Intuit’s GoPayment, as well as LevelUp and Google Wallet. Some early-adopter institutions are already on top of it.

Last year, the University of Denver partnered with Mocopay and a local coffee shop to test things out. Stanford University is experimenting with BlingTag stickers, which charge students’ PayPal accounts for purchases on campus. Embracing mobile payments on a wide scale will result in new levels of data and commerce, for example, giving schools a better read on dense periods of commercial activity. This will help identify the best (and worst) performing kiosks and services. QR-code technology could also securely add value to promotions, such as apparel and attendance at athletics events.

5. University Brand Reputation

All of this doesn’t have to take place in a vacuum. Developing a strategy where mobile activity is easy to share on existing social networks is key. Allow your app to connect with Facebook when possible and appropriate. Your students will be able to share what they’re up to with their friends, mapping directly to the brand of your school.

Adding game mechanics — for example, asking challenge-type questions during an orientation game to baking in reward elements — can encourage even more sharing and memorability.
When creating a mobile strategy, consider these successful social media ideas. Emerson College, for example, has brought big brands in need of social media help together with an eager-to-learn, hyperconnected student body. The process alone earned big social media savvy points for the brand.

Mobile is the next imperative channel. Technology makes things easier and adds new layers of engagement, commerce, safety and knowledge. This provides a better overall college experience, which is increasingly important to college rankings and polls. Putting the right mobile technology in place strengthens overall brand perception and student welfare alike.

Are there are other reasons why mobile matters to your college or university? What is your campus doing with mobile? Please share your stories and feedback in the comments.

Image courtesy of Flickr, hellobeautifulworld

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Great article over at http://www.meridahome.com/blog/ by Cameron

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Every so often you come across one of those strokes of brilliance that makes you ask the really important questions: Is there another way of doing things? Is everything I know about XYZ-topic completely wrong? Why aren’t we all doing this? (And, of course, why didn’t I think of that?)

Recently I came across one such idea. HubSpot, thought leadersextraordinaires in the inbound marketing realm, recently became the first B2B business ever to launch an Alternate Reality Game (ARG) to promote their products.

The premise is simple: HubSpot invented a company, Kronus Media, and told all of their followers that Kronus had issued a Cease & Desist order that forced HubSpot to shut down inboundmarketing.com, their thought leadership arm. The same day, HubSpot launched a Ning network — captaininbound.ning.com — dedicated to solving the mystery behind the evil Kronus Media and their motivations, and eventually to get inboundmarketing.com back up and running. To solve the mystery, the proprietor of the network (who goes by the name “Captain Inbound” to protect him/herself from violating a non-disclosure agreement) points out “clues” left on HubSpot’s various social media sites and asks people for help figuring out what they might mean.

Here’s why this is brilliant:

1. It’s instantly engaging. The Inbound Marketing University is shut down?! How could they do something like that?!
2. It requires subscription. Part of the fun of the game is discovering clues. Where are these clues? On HubSpot’s Facebook page, in their Twitter updates, on their blog, etc. In order to find these clues, you have to be actively monitoring HubSpot’s social media accounts.
3. It promotes followers. There is tremendous incentive to be an active part of a game like this for several reasons. First, it’s reasonably high-profile, which means that there are lots of eyeballs scanning your content. Second, participating in — never mind winning — the game gives you a chance to show off your analytical skills. And third, it levels the playing field for exposure. Anyone can find a clue, anyone can solve a riddle, and anyone can win the game. So why wouldn’t you participate?
4. It promotes an ideology. The very nature of this game is to pit those people interested in the Inbound Marketing University — who are, for the most part, modern and forward-thinking marketers — against Kronus Media, a company that represents the exact ideology against which Inbound Marketing rebels. The success of HubSpot as a company revolves around their ability to make people understand that this dichotomy exists, and that HubSpot’s side is the side to be on. This game helps to reinforce that idea.
5. It creates a positive sentiment. I don’t know what this game will do to drive business for HubSpot — I’m thinking it won’t drive much, but that’s me being skeptical. To be honest, though, I don’t know that HubSpot is thinking about this game in terms of ROI. Any return that they’ll get from this game will be entirely metaphysical in nature. There is an unspoken value in the number of times someone says, “Hey, did you hear about that cool game that HubSpot’s running?” To have the words “cool” and “HubSpot” in the same sentence, multiplied by a couple of thousand, adds up to the kind of achievement that they probably couldn’t have accomplished otherwise.
6. It happens in a natural environment. HubSpot isn’t asking you log into some third-party website to access the game. You don’t have to download anything, you’re not using some kind of game widget. You’re doing things that you were probably already doing: interacting with HubSpot on their blog and on Twitter and Facebook. You already do that (or if you don’t, it’s really easy to start doing it). So there’s no barrier to entry.

There are a lot of people who were upset about the way HubSpot launched the game. I’d like to address some of those concerns on Monday, if you’ll give me the weekend. In the mean time, tell me what you think about www.captaininbound.com — A cool game or a spectacular failure?

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We’ve discussed bounce rate numerous times, yet we find that we continue to get asked questions about bounce rate and why it is a metric that should be a regular part of a client’s dashboard when reporting on the success of online campaigns (organic or sponsored).

So before we dive deeper into how to reduce bounce rate, here again is our definition of bounce rate:

Bounce Rate: the percentage of web site visitors who arrive at an entry page on your web site, then leave without visiting any other pages or leave without going any deeper into the site. Bounce rate is typically measured as a percentage. The lower the bounce rate that you have the better as this is an indicator of how users are engaging with your website.

In order to understand bounce rate, you must identify it within your site analytics. Google Analytics makes this easy by placing bounce rate as default item on your main analytics dashboard. This says something in itself, if Google has included bounce rate as a metric on the dashboard, they must think that bounce rate is a fairly important metric right? Well in fact it is a key metric when measuring user engagement on your site. A high bounce rate is a good indication that users are not finding the information that they are looking for and as a result are not proceeding any further.

What is a Good Bounce Rate Anyways?

Great question. We’re glad you asked. As with many items in the world of SEO and organic search, the answer is it depends. Obviously a lower bounce rate is better, but bounce rate averages can vary by industry or type of site. Sites that are information portals will most likely have lower bounce rates than sites that feature limited content. The fact is that bounce rate is affected by the user’s intent. That is, based on the user’s query did they find the information that they were looking for? For example let’s say you were looking for information about the TV program Las Vegas and you typed in “Las Vegas” in a search engine. You would no doubt receive a lot of Las Vegas (the city) related sites and potentially you might even be returned with a result that talks about the TV show albeit briefly. You might click through to some of these sites but unless the information that you were looking for about the show is present you would most likely revisit the search results page and/or re-enter a more specific search query. The bounce rate of the sites that you did click through would be affected as you were unable to find the information that you were looking for.

So to answer the question, what is a good bounce rate, generally speaking if you have a bounce rate that is in the 40-50% range that is not bad. If you manage to have an overall bounce rate that is in the 30-40% that is fantastic. As Avinash Kaushik states “a 35% bounce rate is very good…” We’ll add that anything less is pretty spectacular. For the record, we’ve worked with clients and have helped them lower their bounce rates to less than 20% and in some cases to 7 or 8% which is quite exceptional.

So the question becomes, how do we lower bounce rate?

Five Ways to Lower Bounce Rate

Provide Relevant Content – seems simple enough doesn’t it? Well then why are so many sites not doing it and why are people abandoning sites soon after arriving on them? If you are going to optimize a webpage, do it right. When writing copy, consider your audience. Use their language not yours, which leads us to point #2.

Use the Language of your Target Audience – do you really think that using the fancy industry lingo is always the way to go? Well sometimes, but many times your target audience may be versed in an entirely different language… that is their own language. Corporate or industry speak may not always be the same language that your target audience uses or is looking for. Work to understand your target audience and the terminology that they are using. If your content can speak to your site visitors, your bounce rate will decline significantly.

Have Clear Navigation – if you are lucky enough to have a user find your site through Organic Search, treat them well. Every site page that you makes up your site, should have clear and intuitive navigation to guide the user through their site experience. Capture their interest and guide them with a well interlinked site to assist them in finding all of the information they are looking for. If they expect to see pricing on the site, be sure to provide them with this information. Someone who performs a search for “CRM pricing comparisons” expects to find a page that features jus that, comparisons of CRM (software) pricing.

Provide Ample Content – whether in the form of page copy, images, video etc. Be sure to provide sufficient content to your site visitors. If you have a page about green widgets, make sure that you have some information on green widgets. Here’s a hint, product or vendor comparisons work well, as do consumer reviews, pricing and shipping information. Having a brief sentence or two just doesn’t cut it. Try to have a minimum 300-400 words of content on your site pages.

Update Your Content – if you have content that is dated, consider adding some new information. Check your analytics to see which pages have the highest bounce rate and revisit the page copy for these pages.

There are a number of ways to improve (lower) your bounce rate. As you can see many of the easiest ways to reduce your bounce rate is through your content. In the world of Search, content is king for a reason. Use relevant and informative content to reduce the bounce rates of your site pages because if you don’t, your competition definitely will. The Searcher will eventually find what they are looking for. Why not keep them engaged on your website?

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Last week I was fortunate enough to be invited as a guest speaker to the Drucker School of Management. What a great place that is. Anyhow, I was gifted a couple of different Peter Drucker books which I have been reading over the past few days. One of the things that Peter Drucker frequently mentions is the need to recognize trends that already happened. Don’t worry about predicting the future (nobody can do that anyways) but rather analyze and benefit from the future that already happened. Here are three consumer trends, which affect marketing in a big way, that are happening right now and definitely cannot be stopped.

1. Consumers are in control

I hope every marketer has realized by now that they can’t spoon feed consumers with information any longer. Consumers will seek out information about your products and services when they want and how they want. While you as a marketer can spend some money on advertising to hopefully inspire that process, you also have to make sure that your website can be found through Google, looks good on a smartphone and probably soon on TV.

2. Consumers are skeptical

So they should be. For years, they’ve been bombarded with overly biased commercial messages. And now they’re running across all sorts of “honest” information about your products on forums, via search engines and now on Twitter. There is nowhere to hide for bad customer service or lackluster product performance. We’re finally moving to a time where the best products become popular and not the ones with the biggest advertising budget. Until then, consumers will be very skeptical of all your commercial messages and double-check everything. As a marketers, you need to be transparent and make it easy for consumers to find the information they’re looking for – not just the information that you want them to find.

3. Consumers expect value

That is certainly true from a product level. Consumers want to buy a quality product at a fair price. If your product is overpriced, they will find that out through forums and online reviews such as on Amazon.com. More importantly, consumers expect your marketing to deliver some value as well. That means if you do a TV commercial, you better make it very informative (tell me something that I don’t know) or entertaining (Apple is a great example). If you want me to visit your website, please offer content that delivers meaningful value. If you want me to subscribe to your email newsletter, what are you going to give me in return?

These consumer trends are forcing companies to be more transparent and deliver actual value across many different levels. So while marketing has certainly become a lot more challenging over the years, it also should be lot more rewarding. These times provide a huge opportunity for marketers to really contribute – not just sell, sell, sell. Contribute first, then sell, sell, sell.

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In July, Logan received a notebook in the mail, along with news that his friend Matt Selby had committed suicide. Logan started posting pictures of the notebook’s pages to his blog, attempting to decipher its meaning. But in September, Logan disappeared, and now his friends are all trying to find him. There’s only one problem: Neither Logan nor his friends exist.

They’re characters in the Alternate Reality Game Just Another Fool. Alternate Reality Games, or ARGs, blur the lines between reality and the game by telling the stories through various on- and off-line media, such as websites, social networks, mail, video, phone calls, and even real-life events. The players have to solve puzzles contained in these media in order to advance the story.

The Future of Entertainment

ARGs started out as a form of viral marketing for various products. The first big ARG was The Beast, set in the fictional world of the movie “A.I.” There have been highly successful ARGs for movies like “The Dark Knight,” “District 9,” and “Pirates of the Caribbean.” One of the most famous ARGs was called “IloveBees,” which was a promotion campaign for the massively popular video game “Halo 2.” Even though these ARGs were essentially giant advertisements, the players still found them incredibly entertaining.

“If a ‘Halo’ fan hears about an ARG about ‘Halo’ or a ‘Terminator’ fan hears about the [‘Sarah Connor Chronicles’] ARG, they would jump at the opportunity to participate in a story,” said Tyler Parrott, a first year student at Colby College, who has been playing ARGs for over three years. “ARGs have gotten me in touch with some incredible stories. Enitech got me watching [‘Sarah Connor Chronicles’] and now I love the series.”

Steve Peters, who has been developing ARGs professionally since 2005, sees ARGs as a new art form. Peters is the Chief Experience Architect for No Mimes Media and has worked on ARGs for “The Dark Knight” and “Pirates of the Caribbean.” “What hooked me was when the game called me while I was at lunch,” Peters said. “It’s the future of entertainment.” In recent months, there has been an explosion of grassroots ARGs run by fans, for fans. These “unofficial” ARGs have met differing levels of success. This is largely due to the fact that the people working behind the scenes, known as “Puppetmasters” in the ARG community, are required to balance the game with real-life obligations.

On the Unfiction.com forums, the largest online ARG community, these grassroots campaigns now outnumber the “official” games 2-to-1, and they have a comparable number of players. “ARGs sort of blur the line between creator [and his or her] characters and the players in a way,” Regina Erbs, a webmaster from Lima, Ohio said. “Being a part of the action is a lot of fun.”

Riddle Me This, Riddle Me That

When “Logan” disappeared, his friend Joshua hacked into his blog and started updating on how the search was going. Following Logan’s advice, he got rid of the notebook by mailing it to Tyler Parrott, .

Parrott then posted a YouTube video of the notebook’s pages. That was when Erbs spotted a pattern of numbers that turned out to be a phone number. When players called it, they heard “Logan.” Using the information he gave them, they were able to correctly answer a riddle, and the players were each sent pages of a new notebook. It was through their teamwork that they were able to advance the story.

“Ultimately, the main pull is the interactivity, the challenging puzzles, and the community that forms as a result of these games,” Parrott said. Parrott, who goes by the online persona of Dav Flamerock, is a community leader on the Unfiction forums, and a highly prominent player of the fan-created “Just Another Fool.”

Online Family, For Better or For Worse

According to Parrott, the large interest in these games is due to the player community’s involvement in the story. “I have made some amazing friends through these games,” Parrott said. These games are simply impossible to play by yourself, according to Erbs. The community is all-important to figuring out riddles and advancing the story. “So much of these games are about sharing information,” Erbs said. “If Dav hadn’t posted the video of the first notebook, he might not have noticed there was a phone number hidden in it.”

But it’s not all roses and butterflies. The community can create problems as well, particularly in grassroots ARGs. The stories are often inspired by conversations on other forum sites like SomethingAwful.com, which is where “Just Another Fool” and a related ARG, “Marble Hornets”, started. Because these games start in public forums, there tends to be a lot of what ARG players call “gamejacking,” which is when people who aren’t playing the game attempt to divert the course of the story by pretending to be characters.

When Peters was running a game for Cisco Systems, Inc., they created profiles for several of the game characters on LinkedIn.com. Someone attempted to “gamejack” them by creating a profile on LinkedIn.com, claiming to work at the same fictional company. This person then sent puzzles to players while claiming to be an official part of the game. But despite these annoyances, most players still find the games very rewarding. “Challenging puzzles … engage players and make them feel accomplished when they complete a seemingly impossible task,” Parrott said.

Immersing Yourself

ARGs are always evolving, as the Puppetmasters discover new ways to deliver their content. And though the community is much more mainstream than it was ten years ago, Peters says it isn’t quite enough yet. “The next step is for [ARGs] to go mainstream in a big way,” Peters said. “What does a movie look like when it’s not limited to the screen?” But with the amount of media that we are inundated with, it’s difficult to tell the difference between a legitimate website and the beginning of a game. The easiest way to find a game to join, according to Erbs and Parrott, is to check out http://unfiction.com orhttp://argn.com.

“Go to the News & Rumors section of Unfiction.com and find a trailhead that looks promising,” Parrott said. And from there, as ARG players say, go down the rabbit hole.

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