When it comes to marketing, you need to analyze your campaigns to find out what works and what doesn't. Split-testing is one way to compare a group's response to a marketing campaign. Split-testing can get granular very quickly. Comparing the response from ads based on words chosen, or even word order may provide an edge using one ad or another. This is all well and good, but how do you predict which ad campaigns in the future will have a better chance of success?

A client told me about a voicemail she received (from someone else) that frustrated her. The person who left the voicemail spoke so fast, my client could barely understand the message. She had to replay it five more times to decipher the message. As we run through life at the speed of business, let's remember that communication is not successful unless the person receiving the message understands it as you intended.

An email retention policy is essential to the successful continued running of your organization. For the small business owner, it does not have to be expensive. These owners rely on their web host, internet service provider, or a free online email entity to provide their email services. Reasons to archive email:

• Email system performance: Yahoo email works best with fewer than 5000 emails in your Inbox.
• Recoverability: My email crashed, and now my Inbox is corrupt.
• Business Intelligence: Yes, you can run usage reports on your email.
• Compliance: Government and regulatory agencies require it.
• Legal Discovery: "Sue Me Sue You Blues" --George Harrison
• Remove Duplication: Replies to an email that include the thread, duplicating the same messages with every send and receive.

There is always room for improvement if you know just where to look. Pareto Analysis, also known as the 80/20 rule states that 80% of returns can be gained with 20% of our effort. To eek out the remaining 20% of improvement, we will have to invest the remaining 80% of our effort. Today, we will look at using Pareto Analysis to help us prioritize what process we can improve the most for our investment.

Although this information is geared towards donations to charities, the message could still apply to for-profit businesses and sales. There are many large-name charities whose board members earn many hundreds of thousands of dollars to run the charities. (You can research charity tax records to find out if your charity board members get paid a significant salary.) Cost-conscious donors want to know that their money is going to the cause that the charity is championing, not filling the coffers of administrators' pockets. When a donor finds your charity, and a campaign you are running spurs them to contribute, does the donor get value out of your work?

Having a backup policy is only half of your disaster recovery plan (DRP). The other half is the restoration of your data. This second half is just as important as the first. Without the ability to restore your data in a timely fashion, it is useless. For those who are planning their disaster recovery plan just now, here are some points to consider.

The House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed HR 624, otherwise known as the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, an amendment to the National Security Act of 1947. The bill is another attempt, like last year's SOPA and PIPA bills, to restrain what some in Congress believe is an under-regulated industry. Introduced by a Republican representative from Michigan, Michael Rogers, HR 624 allows the sharing of cyber-intelligence (i.e., information on the Internet) between the private sector and intelligence agencies.

What intelligence is shared?

If you are marketing a business, you are no doubt measuring some aspects of your customer base. You can track purchasing trends from a macro level of ordering inventory down to a micro level of predicting who will buy what items and when. If you request user's information, including first/last name and email address, you need to supply a Privacy Policy on your website. This policy states to the visitors of your website how you use, share, and protect this information. Here are the sections to include in your Privacy Policy:

Anyone? No?

Annoying a potential customer is not the best way to start a long-lasting business relationship, first impressions being lasting ones. But that is exactly what spam is. Untold hours are spent by the spammers harvesting lists of email addresses, and sending unsolicited email to the junk email folder of thousands of recipients. On the receiving end, we spend hours deleting spam email, or devising anti-spam routines. You are not alone.

Facebook and other social media sites present you to the Internet community. Similar to products, you have a brand on the Internet, whether you like it or not. The information that gets published on the Internet alongside your name places you in that context to those who view it. It is time to take control of this information people see about you. Let's take a look at your Facebook account and make sure it is to your liking.

When search engines index your website they look for ways to categorize its content. They can't glean meaning from images, nor from Flash content. What is most helpful for search engines is the text on the page. This text is both visible on the web page, and hidden in the header of the page. The variety of words on the page give the search engines more context with which to correctly categorize your web page.

You can try to game the search engines by stuffing your page with a lot of meaningless words. Doing so would only defeat your purpose of getting people interested in your page to visit it and view more pages on your website. You might get people to visit your page accidentally with this red herring approach. Since the page will not deliver on visitors' expectations of the information they seek, they would quickly return to their search engine results and try a different page. What needs to be done is identify those words that most accurately represent the content of the page and provide the categorization that will guide the search engine's interpretation of the page.

When you sell items, the obvious choice is to make purchases as easy as possible for the customer. The Abbey of Saint Sixtus of Westvleteren uses a different method of selling its beer than most merchants. These instructions from their website are how you purchase beer from the Abbey:

1. See our web page Up-to-date Information for information regarding when reservations will be accepted for which beer and how much beer can be reserved at any one time.
2. At the time indicated, call us using the beer phone number (+32 (0)70/21.00.45)
3. Then you can make an appointment (date and time) with the beer phone operator, providing the license plate number of the car which will be used to pick up the order.

When Texas Instruments (1981), Commodore (1982), and Atari and Macintosh (both 1984) produced personal computers, school children picked them up and started programming their first lines of BASIC. Fifteen years later, these young programmers were the driving force behind the dot com boom. For the ensuing fifteen years, the tech industry focused on marketing finished products to consumers. The more predictive processing the application performed, the less thinking the end user needed to do. Ease of use equated to higher user satisfaction and higher sales. Advertisers locked onto a catchphrase of making "simple" the competitive advantage of their products. As the Raspberry Pi gets its one-year anniversary last Friday, with one million units sold, we look at how this circuit board is turning the industry's past fifteen years on its head.

Content Management Systems (CMS) are a great way to get a decent website up-and-running with tools to help organize and maintain the information on the website. Wordpress, Joomla, and Drupal are very popular CMS applications with about 30% of all websites built with just these three applications. According to Cameron Crest, CIO of Crest Web Services, in 2011 25% of the websites were built with WordPress, about 4% with Joomla, and 3% with Drupal. This kind of installation-base makes it particularly attractive for hackers to take advantage of vulnerabilities in these apps. Often, they build robots that search and exploit websites built on a particular CMS, like Wordpress. They kick off their robot and it goes from website to website looking for markers to see if it can do its dirty work. If websites are not properly secured against known attacks, there is a good chance that one day they will be compromised.

Be prepared. This motto works for the Boy Scouts so they can better respond to unexpected events. It can also help businesses get into the posture to respond to unexpected requests. Understanding the customers' point-of-view will allow you to refine your processes so that it is easier for the customers to get what they want.

On February 6, 2013, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) issued a press release asking for feedback on their "Security and Privacy Controls for Federal Information Systems and Organizations, Special Publication (SP)800-53, Revision 4". Given the developments in technology for mobile and cloud computing, supply chains, and corporate network attacks, it is necessary to update the risk management guidelines to address these changes. After two years of developing this document, the Internet community has until March 1, 2013 to respond to NIST with concerns surrounding this document. Although the 455-page document is a surprisingly fast read, it is important to point out the more salient points of this publication.

Tracking sales (or donations) in the past has required a little extra effort for both business and customer. For example, sending out a mass mailing with a coupon code allows customers to get a discount if they use that coupon code. The business owner can then see how many sales were completed for that specific coupon code. That works well for when customers remember the coupon, but the solution is far from perfect. The coupon might not be used during the sale or by the person to whom you sent the ad, you might not capture the customer's contact information to follow up on similar sales in the future. Facebook ads now allow businesses and charities to plug up a few more leaks in your sales funnel, with their Conversion Tracking Tool.

When you go on a long road trip, like from Los Angeles to Denver, you must plan ahead. You need to know where you currently are, where your destination is, and how you get there. This 1016 mile trip cannot be done in one stretch. You must stop for fuel, food, bio breaks, and maybe even to stretch your legs or take a refreshing nap. Your map plans your route from start to finish. The route will show the roads that will take you through Nevada, Arizona, and Utah before getting to Colorado. In finer detail, you will know how many miles to drive on each road, and where to make turns.

Service planning uses a similar metaphor for you to reach your goals. While planning your service goals, develop 3-year, 1-year, and 6-month plans. The 3-year plan will provide your organization with the vision and strategy of where you want to drive the organization. The 1-year plan will establish the initiatives and budget needed to move you along the 3-year plan. The 6-month plan will comprise the shorter fundraising and marketing campaigns.

Participation dwindles, donations have slumped, and campaign engagement wanes. These signals should alert you to boost your fundraising activity. Identifying the cause of the drop-off may be unclear. Defining your organization's current processes is a good first step to improving donations. Here's how:

In honor of Aaron Swartz, who passed away on January 11, I am revisiting his creation of the RSS protocol. RSS (Really Simple Syndication) has become a critical method of sharing information on the Internet. The two halves of RSS are the creation of a collection of information, and the consumption of it. Manually or automatically, one can create a list of articles on the Internet. That list is the RSS feed. The list contain links to the articles where we as people (or RSS readers) can view the information.