South by Southwest, better known as SXSW is taking place in Austin in March 2010. Joey da Silva, Director at FormFunction will be attending South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive from 12- 16 March. This year marks SXSW’s 24th year, and the event has grown to become one of the world’s biggest music and media conferences. For those that don’t know what SXSW Interactive is about, below is a video we found via GeekDigest.co.za.

Joey will attend SXSW as part of a group of South Africans who will be representing the South African geek community. If you are attending and have an iPhone you can download the official my.SXSW app to make sure you get the most out of the SXSW conference. This app allows you to “view/build your schedule, map conference and festival events each hour, exchange contact info with people you meet, view news, and search events, and venues.”

For a full list of attendees, visit GeekDigest.co.za. Keep in the loop by following their tweets on Twitter, the official hash tag is #sxswSA. Keep an eye on our blog for a SXSW update from Joey!

As previously discussed in “New Year’s resolutions for your website” website content should aim to drive action. Analytics software like Google Analytics will help you gauge how visitors interact with your website and that data can be used to enhance your web strategy.

In order to determine your website’s performance you need to know what to measure. Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) is defined by Wikipedia as “a measure of performance…such measures are commonly used to help an organisation define and evaluate how successful it is, typically in terms of making progress towards its long-term goals.” Essentially most websites are there to generate leads for the business and to sell products online. Below is a list of possible KPI’s for websites:

-  Filling in a contact form to be contacted by a consultant
-  Signing up to a newsletter
-  Subscribing to an RSS feed
-  Downloading a brochure or requesting more information
-  Viewing the contact pageThe website’s

KPI’s can also be thought of as the goals you want visitors to complete on the website. Each website’s goals will depend on the type of industry that you’re in and what you want to achieve through the website. Below is a list of indicators that can be used to measure your KPI’s:

-  Visitors
-  Total number of visitors
-  Number of page views
-  The number of new versus returning visitors
-  Visitor loyalty
-  Bounce rate
-  Top content
-  Searches conducted within your website (if you have a website search bar)
-  Goal conversion rate

Goal conversion rates are an important aspect to consider. This will tell you what percentage of visitors to your site convert into leads or sales.

In order to provide more accurate reports you can apply a filter in Google Analytics. For instance, you can exclude your company’s IP address from your reports for more accurate website visitor numbers (read more about filters). If you want to track certain campaigns (i.e. email campaigns or see how popular a certain link to your website in an article is), you can tag your URLs with variables to create a unique URL.

Are there any KPI’s that you consider important that are not mentioned here?

We’re nearing the end of the second month of 2010 and many of us have set goals for ourselves for the New Year – be they professional, personal or both. Completing tasks effectively and efficiently is necessary to reach goals yet maintaining productivity levels through-out the day is a challenge and many of us are masters of procrastination. There are a number of applications and tools available to improve your daily productivity and below we have listed our favourite four time management applications.

Remember The Milk
“Never forget the milk, or anything else, ever again.” According to the developers of this app creating and sharing tasks have never been so easy. With Remember the Milk you can manage your tasks from anywhere and easily share them with third parties. Twitter integration allows you to send new tasks to Remember The Milk by following @rtm and sending the task as a direct message. The app syncs with your Google Calendar and task reminders can be received via email, IM or sms.

Toodledo
Toodledo is an online to-do list that aggregates your tasks in one place.  Toodledo is a handy tool that can sync with Microsoft Outlook’s calendar and allows you to access your to-do list from anywhere, at any time.

Twittercal
Do you spend a lot of time on Twitter? With Twittercal you can add events to your Google Calender by following @twittercal and sending event details as a direct message.

Tempo
With this paid-for app you can track how much time you spend on certain projects (even when you are not in the office) and generate reports based on certain criteria. Twitter integration makes it easy for users to keep track of what they spend their time on by direct messaging the application with details of where they are and what they are busy with. Pricing for Tempo starts from $12.00 a month.