The link below is PG-13, so if you get offended by scatological jokes and such, give it a pass. But it actually makes some really good points about store design issues, required fields, and some of the silly things people try to put their customers through.
I’m reading What Would Google Do? Generally speaking, and to over-simplify, it’s about the new relationship between producers and consumers, and how consumers are in charge. Companies that allow their customers, clients and partners to do what they want to do will succeed. And if at all possible, companies should strive to make their products free.
It’s a good perspective and I agree with a lot of it, although sometimes I think this approach is overblown.
Anyway, it’s all well and good thinking about these things in terms of internet content and services, but it’s another thing to apply these concepts to something tangible. Like beer.
So I tried, and this is what I came up with.
An old-school approach to brewing would be to pick a demographic, try to find out what kind of beer they like, brew something like that, and then get your marketing team to convince your chosen demographic that this is really the beer for them.
There’s nothing wrong with that approach, except that people’s tastes vary considerably. Just go the local mega-beer store and look at all the styles and varieties of beer that are available.
The WWGD approach might ask how you can put the customer in charge of the brewing process?
So what would that mean? To oversimplify things, imagine that beer can be …
+ more or less malty,
+ more or less bitter, and
+ have more or less hop aroma
Now imagine that the customer is at a tap with three dials, one for each characteristic, and he can dial it up or down to suit his tastes.
Then, when he picks his perfect blend, he can order a case made to his own specifications.
That seems like step 1. But there’s more to “putting the customer in charge” than just allowing the customer to define the product. The customer also needs to be able to mix your product with other things.
A snakebite is a mixture of beer and cider, and there are various kinds of shandies and other drinks out there that mix beer with ginger ale or what have you.
The next step would be allowing people to share their particular recipes and discuss / review them, or bring their own mash-up with them to the bar.
(Re-posted from here.)
This morning I had to get the emissions inspected on one of our vehicles, so I was in the car listening to morning radio, which usually goes something like this — The host picks a juicy morsel out the news, possibly adds something salacious, and then tosses it out to the hungry masses who wants to have their say.
(People with a neighborhood pub or coffee shop, where they can jaw with their friends, probably don’t need that kind of outlet.)
Anyway, the topic of the day was Juan Williams’ comment that Sarah Palin is not up to snuff with Obama on an intellectual level.
To which, it seems, several obvious responses come to mind.
1. Palin can seem rather ditsy at times,
2. But there’s no question she communicates well with a large segment of the population,
3. Who says Obama is so smart?,
4. But he does speak well and has that professorial manner about him, and
5. Is Williams simply trying to mend fences with the left?
Everything on the radio this morning focused on points 2 and 3, with a large emphasis on the claim that Obama blithers when he doesn’t have a teleprompter. (Does he? I haven’t paid attention.)
In other words, the morning listeners to WMAL were only getting a slice of the story.
Later in the morning I sat down with my Nook and started in one of Wodehouse’s Psmith novels, which began with a soliloquy on journalism in New York City, and that got me thinking.
What niche is not being fulfilled in the news publishing world today?
The answer, I believe, is a review of the daily buzz that covers all the angles on every story — briefly — with links to more if you want to dig.
That would be worth dialing up on the metro every morning.
It would have to be non-partisan, by which I mean that it would have to have partisans from all possible sides.
I think that would be a good daily read, so long as it’s short, and so long as it can balance the talking points of the various factions.
(Ignore this — JJCKCYP2GEJ3)
There’s a really dumb story in the news right now. (You’re thinking, “Just one?”) Well … I have one in mind that I think is really dumb.
But what if I write a post about how dumb it is? I have no illusions about the effect of this blog, but to some very small degree that only makes the story “what people are talking about,” and therefore “news.”
This is an uncomfortable fact about the modern world.
Back when there was a small cadre of newscasters who controlled the public’s access to stories, they could exercise some taste and common sense and say “a story about [dumb thing] isn’t news.”
Now you have “what’s hot” on Alexa, and “most emailed” on the NYT, and “top searches” all over the place.
“This is what people are talking about! We need a story on that!”
No, you don’t.
That’s where niche publishing comes in. There’s obviously a market for niche stories about pension and benefits legislation, but there’s also a niche for news content that is selected and presented from a particular point of view. That means bias, of course — because the editor is deciding what’s worthy to be reported and what’s not — but … so what? Bias is unavoidable. Just be honest about it.
When the world is overflowing with content noise, content curation is the order of the day.
One of my concerns with asking customers to do a transaction on a mobile device is the trouble of online forms.
If you think online forms are a pain when you have a big monitor and a full-sized keyboard, try completing a form on a silly little device with a keyboard made for gnomes. I don’t think people are going to want to fill in registration / payment screens.
Some will. The Wall Street Journal has had some success. But we’re in the business of eliminating barriers, and asking customers to switch back and forth between the ABC, the 123 and the Symbol option on their mobile devices is a nightmare as far as usability is concerned.
If you look at mobile commerce from the user’s point of view, Apple and Amazon offer a great experience. If you want to buy something, you’ve already set up an account with all your payment information, so you just enter your password and you’re done.
The trouble for the merchant is that Apple and Amazon keep the subscriber record, and that doesn’t work at all for publishers. We have to have the customer record.
But there are other systems like iTunes and Amazon where the merchant does get the customer’s information. PayPal is the most obvious.
So is PayPal the right solution for mobile commerce for publishers? Should we be integrating our e-commerce (and m-commerce) systems with PayPal? Would that make form completion easier on the user?
At the SIPA marketing conference in Miami I gave a presentation with that title. The presentation is based on my own experience as well as quite a few interviews with marketing and IT professionals.
Some of the slides might not make sense on their own (like the ones about the bicycles), but if you’re interested in viewing the slides, here you go.
Slides for What marketing needs to know about IT.
And feel free to post questions.
So … about those bikes.
There are lots of things that you think you know — like what a bicycle looks like — but when you have to get down to details, you often miss some important things. Not because you’re stupid, but because that’s how your brain works.
People make funny mistakes when they try to describe simple, everyday things. For example, when some people draw bicycles, they’ll connect the chain to the front and back wheels, or forget the seat, or something like that.
The relevance to “what marketing needs to know about IT” is that you can’t give an engineer a half-baked drawing of a bike and say “build this” any more than you can give IT a half-baked web concept and expect them to make it happen. It doesn’t work.
The two drawings in my slides are from two helpful marketing professionals, and they actually did pretty well. But there are some minor problems. See if you can spot them.
And here’s something else, just for fun. I wish I’d had it for my presentation.
On top of all the other bad economic news, the postal service is about to raise its rates, which is going to have a very bad effect on lots of companies. It might put some out of business.
So what’s the solution? Is it time to de-regulate the mail?
I know some people think mail is antiquated and should go the way of the whale harpoon and the gas street light, but the truth is that lots of businesses still rely on (and profit from) mail. And the truth is, sometimes printed stuff is better. I’d much rather browse a printed Lands End catalog and then place my order online than suffer through browsing their web pages. Direct mail is still useful stuff, but the postal rates are out of control.
I’ve posted a few times here about the problems with display ads and ideas about ways to measure their true effect.
Part of the problem is that web designers marginalize them — quite literally, by lining them up in the right column — and people have learned to ignore them. If you look at those funny charts that track where people actually look at websites, you’ll notice that people avoid the ads.
But ads have some effect. The problem for the advertiser is in figuring just how much.
It’s easy to measure a click, but very few people click on ads.
So the folk who sell ads have come up with a new metric. They want you to measure the effect of their ads based on views, because studies have shown that people who see an ad are more likely to type in your URL or search on your brand terms. IOW, clicks underestimate the effect of the ad. Hence the “view-through conversion.”
But there is no such thing as a “view-through conversion,” there’s only a “display then convert.” Attributing a conversion to the fact that the ad was displayed is a leap of faith. The person might have responded to some other marketing effort.
So how do you test the real effect of the ad? Clicks undervalue them and “views” overvalue them.
The first requirement is that you have a defined audience.
I’ve had countless conversations with ad salesmen who try to tell me they can test the effectiveness of their ads by comparing the people who see the ad with the people who don’t see the ad.
I often wonder if these people failed elementary school math.
The effectiveness of an ad is measured as a percentage — total sales divided by the number of people promoted. Many systems can distinguish “conversions from people who have seen my ad” from “conversions from people who have not seen my ad,” but in order to get a useful percentage they have to also tell you how many people were in both groups. And they usually can’t.
This means that the first step in measuring the effectiveness of display ads is to define the size of your test groups. There may be other ways to do this, but the way I chose was re-targeting.
In a re-targeting campaign, the universe is defined by the number of people who visit a site and get the re-targeting cookie. The sequence goes like this. A person visits your site and gets the cookie. He visits some other site in the ad network and sees your display ad. He comes back to your site and buys something, and the conversion tracking on your “thank-you” page shows a success.
To test if display ads really work, here’s what you need to have.
1. a defined universe that you can divide into subgroups — like people who visit your site.
2. a way to divide that universe into subgroups and treat the subgroups differently — i.e., display ads to one group and not the other.
3. a way to track conversions and map those conversions back to the subgroup.
Re-targeting is the perfect way to do this. First, you put a re-targeting cookie in the browser of all the visitors to your site and put conversion tracking on your “thank you” page.
Then you set up a campaign. Half of the people who visit your site go out into the wide world and see ads to bring them back. The other half of them see some irrelevant ad, like a public service announcement.
This kind of a test allows you to compare conversions in the group that saw the ad against conversions in the group that didn’t.
I recently did such a test and found that the group that saw the ads converted at three times the rate of the group that didn’t see the ad.
This tells me that I can value 66% of all the view-through conversions.
IOW, let’s say I do a re-targeting campaign where group A sees irrelevant ads, and group B sees ads designed to bring them back to my site. 100 people from group A convert, but 300 people from group B convert.
That tells me that 100 people were going to convert anyway, but that the ads brought in another 200 conversions.
So 2 out of 3 of the conversions in the “they saw an ad” group can be directly attributed to the effect of the ad.
At the SIPA Washington conference I heard some interesting comments about how quality free content is a gateway to paid content.
Miles Galliford said that in a session on “developing online communities” and one of the other speakers said similar things in a general session.
And it seems to make sense — as if there’s a funnel of engagement, from stranger, to some level of awareness, to website visitor, to “registrant” or other form of free content user, to paid customer.
But I also had some hallway conversations with marketers who said that their lists divide quite neatly down the paid / free divide. IOW, the people who download free stuff don’t pay and the people who pay don’t download free stuff.
So which is it? Or does it vary by market, or by industry, or by the type of content you’re discussing?
One possibility is that when people download free stuff they give you their garbage email address. We all have one — the “give away” address that we never really use. And then when we want to do something serious we use our real email address.
If this is true (and I’m only mentioning it as a possible explanation), the same person might be downloading the free stuff on his crapmail address and then purchasing on his realmail address.
Just a thought. Any ideas?
Zuckerberg has said that he’s building a new web where “the default is social,” and new Facebook apps are bringing that to life as they pop up on other sites. Those apps allow you to see what other people say about the site, or whether any of your friends like it.
We are witnessing a fundamental change in the nature of the Internet and how people use it. At one time the internet was about technology and information. The geek who could trick the search engines got all the traffic and most of the ad revenue.
The search engines responded by changing their algorithms, and there’s been a “who’s the better geek” contest ever since.
But now the internet is becoming social. That’s the driving force behind Facebook’s success. But it’s not so much that the web is social. People are social, and the web is catching up.
I’m more inclined to believe something from a friend than from a stranger. I’m more comfortable taking advice about my car from the mechanic I’ve used for 20 years than from anybody else. (Note: “social” doesn’t mean “free.”)
This is the challenge for publishers. They need to be like my trusted mechanic. Some people say that when they buy their groceries they prefer one cashier’s line. They like that particular cashier. IOW, there is a social element to the marketplace.
Publishers can’t only be about information and data and products. They need to establish a relationship with their customers.
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