Category: Post

September 5, 2003

  • RSS Will Be An Essential Part Of The Online Marketing Toolkit

    Jonathan Lane, a fellow AIMS member, just posted the ADL (AIMS Discussion List) asking for people’s thoughts on RSS. Here is the reply I submitted to the Moderator (June Macdonald):

    Hi all,

    Thanks to Jonathan Lane for introducing RSS as an ADL topic!

    I’ve been working with weblogs and RSS for a few years now and it is an essential part of my online experience. Many ADL readers are probably still in the dark about what RSS even IS, so I’d like to offer a few pointers to get people up to speed:

    1. What is RSS? Hand’s down the best explanation of RSS and why it is important is here.

    Another summary is at www.mnot.net/rss/tutorial/ and of course Googling RSS will get you pretty far.

    2. How can I stay on top of RSS news? There are tons of RSS resources popping up. Once you get a feed reader, you’ll be able to keep up with ALL of them! I’d suggest starting with Lockergnome’s RSS Resource Page and I’d also (humbly) point you to my blog as I’m posting most things I find on RSS as a marketing tool.

    3. How does RSS impact e-mail marketing? Steve Outing published a great article in Editor and Publisher on RSS vs. e-mail marketing. Highly recommended.

    4. What feed reader (aggregator) should I use?

    There is no clear winner in the race to build a better reader, so you’ll need to do some research on this one. I’d suggest newsgator if you really like working in MS Outlook and FeedDemon if you want a standalone reader. My guess is that a year from now there will be three clear winners in the feed reader race (one web-based, one integrated into Outlook, and one standalone).

    I look forward to some solid discussion on this topic in the coming weeks.

    Personally, if I was picking initials to bet my future on, I’d take RSS over SMS any day.

August 2, 2003

  • Internet Best Practice — 001

    Google is currently the de facto standard in search and you’ll benefit by thinking about Google as you build your site.

    Google recently released the beta of Google Toolbar 2.0. One of the neat features included in the new toolbar is AutoFill of web forms.

    Here’s how Google describes this feature:

    “The AutoFill tab in Toolbar Options enables you to automatically complete forms on the web. Enter your information and it’s stored securely on your own computer. When you see yellow-colored form fields on web pages, you can choose to have Google complete the form for you with the information you’ve entered.

    AutoFill stores personal data where only you can access it — your own computer. And your credit card data is encrypted and protected by a password you set. None of this information is ever sent to Google. In the Toolbar, the AutoFill button is enabled when you visit a page with fields that AutoFill can fill. Otherwise, the button in the Toolbar appears gray”

    As users download and become comfortable with the Google Toolbar, they will demand that sites build forms that work with the AutoFill feature. Luckily, Google likes standards:

    “You can ensure that AutoFill will work on your pages by using field names defined in the ECML (Electronic Commerce Modeling Language) standard, found at http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3106.txt.”

    Now for some sites, it may be onerous to change data field names on all forms. But if you have the option, you should use any existing standards. While the ECML field names may not have been important when you built your forms, now that Google has brought the standard to consumers, it will be.

    Originally posted to the Internet Best Practice Newsletter. To receive your free copy.

July 10, 2003

  • AdSense Sensor

    I just launched something I call the “AdSense Sensor”.

    Google recently launched AdSense, their contextual ad serving service for small sites.

    Using AdSense you (as a site owner) get to place ads served by Google on your site and share revenue with Google. This is exciting because the ads they serve are contextually related to the content on your site. They do this by using their crawl of your pages to determine which ads are relevant.

    The first question I asked when looking at the service was ‘what kind of ads will be served on my pages?’ I couldn’t find a way to determine this directly from the Google site (which seems like an oversight to me). So to help us all figure whether AdSense makes sense for us, I created this ‘AdSense Sensor’.

    Hope you find it useful!

July 9, 2003

  • “Mobile Snaps”

    The Economist’s “Mobile Snaps” article says:

    Sales of camera-phones are expected to grow from around 19m in 2002 to over 34m this year, according to IDC, a market-research firm. By 2005 they are likely to outsell film and digital cameras put together.

    The one issue I have with the comparison of film, digital and phone cams is that most people who buy phone-cams are really buying phones that happen to have cameras in them, not cameras with phones in them.

    Without real customer need and usable interface cameras in cell phones will have the same impact on digital photography that web browsers in phones had on Internet browsing — minimal.

    My guess is that the value of having a camera with you at all times will cause a real revolution in what people think is “camera worthy”.

    We’re seeing a long-term trend where we went from going somewhere to have your portrait taken, to film cameras there were when going on vacation and to birthday parties. Disposables get used as “fun”, and now digital cameras allow high volume snapping and post-picture editing (vs limiting what you snap in the first place to save on film). My guess is that phone-cameras will create a snap-crazy culture that doesn’t look at photos as precious, but rather as a simple way to capture anything visual that needs capturing.

July 5, 2003

  • Writing Social Software is Hard

    The always insightful Clay Shirky has posted a very long (almost 10,000 word) essay called “A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy”:

    “Writing social software is hard. And, as I said, the act of writing social software is more like the work of an economist or a political scientist. And the act of hosting social software, the relationship of someone who hosts it is more like a relationship of landlords to tenants than owners to boxes in a warehouse.

    The people using your software, even if you own it and pay for it, have rights and will behave as if they have rights. And if you abrogate those rights, you’ll hear about it very quickly.”

    Shirky gives a great overview of the issues that face all “online communities”, regardless of platform or technology used. After giving historical context by discussing the work of WR Brion, he provides “three things to accept” and “four things to design for”:

    Accept

    1. You cannot separate technical and social issues.

    2. Members are different from users.

    3. The core group has rights that trump individual users.

    Design

    1. Create “handles” (identities) that users can invest in.

    2. Create a way for there to be “members in good standing”.

    3. Create barriers to participation. (The group is the user, not the individual and creating barriers ensures that the group gets better signal-to-noise and this is better than maximizing individual ease of use.)

    4. Find a way to spare the group from scale.

    While the essay may be a bit long and theoretical for the casual reader, I recommend the article strongly for anyone interested in online group interaction. Learn from the mistakes of others! As Shirky points out:

    “Now, this story has been written many times. It’s actually frustrating to see how many times it’s been written. You’d hope that at some point that someone would write it down, and they often do, but what then doesn’t happen is other people don’t read it.

    The most charitable description of this repeated pattern is “learning from experience.” But learning from experience is the worst possible way to learn something. Learning from experience is one up from remembering. That’s not great. The best way to learn something is when someone else figures it out and tells you: “Don’t go in that swamp. There are alligators in there.”

    Learning from experience about the alligators is lousy, compared to learning from reading, say. There hasn’t been, unfortunately, in this arena, a lot of learning from reading. And so, lessons from Lucasfilms’ Habitat, written in 1990, reads a lot like Rose Stone’s description of Communitree from 1978.

    This pattern has happened over and over and over again.”

April 29, 2003

  • Thinking About Apple’s iTunes Music Store

    I’ve been reading about Apple’s iTunes Music Store and think they got it half-way correct — or maybe more accurately, 1/3 correct.

    Buying songs you know and love for $0.99 is perfect if you want to burn discs of current favourites. And Apple seems to have “fixed” most of what was wrong with earlier online download sites. I think this will be a hit — especially when they get the Windows version live — which they realistically need to do to make this work.

    But what happens if you’ve heard that Miles Davis is really cool but you don’t know anything about him? Well, for about $10 a month, a subscription to listen.com let’s you listen to most every album miles ever recorded. You can then make your decision about what songs you’d like to own forever (if any) and decide to download those for 99 cents (via Apple for example).

    And sometimes you just want music on in the background — music in a specific genre or to match a particular mode. You might want classical in the background for a brunch, 70s pop songs while you clean the house, or ambient “chill” for late night surfing sessions. In these cases you’re less interested in the actual performers than the feeling the music induces in you or your guests.

    So people have at least three goals with music: to own it, to explore it, and to use it to augment other tasks. The iTunes Music Store appears to do an admirable job of the first goal, but leaves the other two out in the cold.

    The “home run” in online music will be a service that combines cheap downloads (I think the magic number will be 10 cents a track, not a buck), music on demand from a vast library of diverse music styles, and high-quality commercial free “radio” that offers songs to match hundreds of genres, moods and situational settings.

April 16, 2003

  • The Seattle Windshield Pitting Epidemic

    A fascinating recounting of a classic example of mass delusion known as The Seattle Windshield Pitting Epidemic.

    While the story is important as an example of mass delusion, it is also interesting to note the lack of scientific awareness shown by the public and media.

    While SARS is real, I felt an eerie connection between what is happening in Toronto with SARS and what happened with windshield pits in 1954. Of course, I’m not saying that SARS is a mass delusion, only that the public reaction to an(as yet) minor threat is out of proportion and unscientific.

    Isn’t it hard not to have a moment of panic when someone coughs near you? Or when you shake hands with a stranger?

    [via the always wonderful Boing Boing]

March 6, 2003

  • “Doing Something” About Spam

    There is a growing urge amongst everyone using the Internet to “do something” about spam.

    The growing frustration with spam has lead to more consumer and corporate anti-spam filtering technologies. “ESPs” (E-mail Service Providers) are legitimately afraid that false positives by these filters are going to decrease the overall effectiveness of e-mail as a communications tool. And ISPs are getting very tired of the costs associated with the massive amount of unwanted messages that they have to deliver.

    Following behind the host of technical solutions to spam are the interest groups and task force groups being set up to represent the interests of each group.

    For example, the ESPs have set up a group via the NAI. And now standards body the IETF has set up the Anti-Spam Research Group to research technical solutions, some of which this CNET article says make take years to implement — because fighting spam may mean a fundamental change to the way e-mail works.

    JamSpam appears to be looking for a holistic approach, recognizing that all involved (okay with exception of the spammers) have legitimate concerns and the only solutions that will work are ones that recognize everyone’s issues.

    I have two big concerns in this rush to action:

    1. ISPs have taken it upon themselves to determine what is and is not wanted e-mail. That means that things that people legitimately want and senders have legitimate reason to send, are not being delivered by ISPs. While everyone can sympathize that they get more mail than they want to handle and that this is driving up their costs, they need to let the user decide what is wanted and what is not. Imagine of the Postal Service decided it had too much mail and these LL Bean catalogues seem to be in the mail far too often so they decided to dump them all in a big recycle bin.

    2. The other big issue as I see it is the amorphous definition of “spam” itself. Many people now think of spam as ALL marketing messages, or ALL messages from businesses, or ANY message that they are not interested in. And because people have been given the dubious advice to “never unsubscribe from spam” because it will beget more spam, we now have a situation where legitimate mailing lists have hundreds of subscribers who are submitting them to spam filters rather than use the standard unsubscribe feature to get off the list.

March 4, 2003

  • Stepping Down From AIMS

    Given the AIMS Announcement that is going Tuesday morning, there will most likely be a few more visitors here than usual. If you’re new — welcome! Take a moment and subscribe to A Piece Of My Mind while you’re here.

    Right now there is a mad dash to get everything in place for the Tuesday event and to put the finishing touches on transition work, so I don’t have much time to post right now, but I promise that, starting March 10th, I’ll be posting here regularly as I have in the past.

    AIMS has been a major rush and I’m very proud of what we’ve accomplished, but it has also been an incredible drain on me personally and professionally. AIMS became a 24 hour non-stop whirlwind over the last year and it hasn’t left me much time or energy for other important things I’ve been meaning to get to — like this blog.

October 22, 2002

  • Thoughts on Spam as a Marketer and a Human

    Alexander Bosika wrote recently about the DMA’s decision to “crack down” on spam. Since he baited me to comment, I’ll fall for the trap.

    Spam is a big issue that I tend to look at from two vantage points.

    1. As an individual.

    2. As a marketer.

    As an individual, spam is certainly a huge issue for most people. I think the issue has been somewhat exaggerated by the fact that the people comment on spam (journalists, pundits, those active online) also tend to have the most exposure of e-mail addresses online and therefore tend to have their e-mail addresses harvested and passed around a bit more. Good luck using your inbox effectively if you used your main e-mail address to register a domain.

    Still, for those less highly involved in online issues, spam is still a big problem for them. And certainly, the rise of hard-core spam with really raunchy subject lines doesn’t give anyone comfort that things are getting better.

    As an individual, I use Spamnet by Cloudmark. This is the best solution I’ve seen to date, building on the P2P concepts of Napster and some clever pattern recognition algorithms. The software is still buggy (it’s in beta), but it is getting close to primetime and more and more I’m seeing it listed as one of the options people list when talking about “fighting spam”. My guess is that 9 months from now (if not soon), Cloudmark will be the Google of spam-catching.

    So as an individual I see Cloudmark as a gift from above and use it constantly, even with the bugs in the beta version.

    As a marketer, Cloudmark scares the crap out of me. Because it allows users to determine what is spam, it has a tendency to give “false positives”. A False Positive in this context is a legitimate opt-in e-mail marketer getting labeled as spam. Cloudmark tends to be better than most, but the false positives it gives are very interesting. Because people vote on each message in real-time rather than identifying in advance which IP addresses or domains to block, you see the internal workings of people’s feelings on e-mail marketing.

    When the NYT sends me a book or movie updates, they always get through. As soon as they send a “special offer to NYT subscribers”, it invariably gets dumped. Amazon new release listings tend to get through Cloudmark, but the “affiliate updates” which contain a lot of promotional information, some of it for partners, gets labeled as spam.

    This means that marketers need to live in constant fear of having any given message deemed as low enough value to be spam, even if every name is legitimate. And the problem will only get worse as these tools become more prevalent and more effective.

    My guess is that e-mail marketing will change radically in the next 9 months as Cloudmark hits critical mass. When it tips, everything will change.

September 24, 2002

  • Double Opt-out?

    Many e-mail marketing experts recommend “Double Opt-in” as the best approach to building your e-mail marketing list. Double Opt-in means that the subscriber must respond to a confirmation e-mail before they are put on the list (i.e. you sign up at a site, get an e-mail saying “confirm subscription”, and only if you reply to that confirmation e-mail do you get put on the list). This is done to ensure that there is no abuse of an open e-mail list (for example, some people have been known to sign up enemies to lists they know they will hate — like baptists on the Barbie Fetish list.)

    Yahoo seems to have taken this to some perverse extreme by introducing “Double Opt-out”.

    I just unsubscribed from the Tom Tom Club mailing list (don’t ask), and got this reply from YahooGroups (where the list lives):

    Subject: Please reply to unsubscribe from tomtomclubnewsflash

    Hello,

    We have received a request from you to unsubscribe from the

    tomtomclubnewsflash group. Please confirm your request by

    replying to this message. If you do not wish to unsubscribe from

    tomtomclubnewsflash, please ignore this message.

    Regards,

    Yahoo! Groups Customer Care

    Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/

    While double opt-in is good because it keeps consumers off lists they might not want to be on, double opt-out is bad because it keeps consumers on lists they clearly want to get off of. Another move by Yahoo! that shows that they just don’t get the ‘Net anymore. Very sad.

    (And the pop-up ad for a casino on the Yahoo!Groups homepage didn’t help much with my opinion either.

October 18, 2001

  • Bert Is Evil

    The Internet continues to intersect with the “real” world in strange ways.

    This article on Wired News explains the strange story of a small group of people with too much time on their hands creating a cult around the idea that Bert from Sesame Street is evil. They built parody sites, photoshopped images of Bert at the JFK assassination, standing behind Hitler, corrupting his poor pal Ernie at a strip club — you get the idea.

    Someone decided to put Bert and Osama bin Laden together in a photo. Which is where the story turns bizarre. It turns out that bin Laden sympathizers have downloaded pictures of bin Laden from the Net to create posters to use at protests.

    So when the media showed up to take photos of the protests, they captured the “Osama and Bert” images on the real world posters of bin Laden supporters.

    What is truly strange is that the “Bert Is Evil” creator has decided that this was too much and he’s closed his site. Of course now others are taking the previously removed content and reposting it. And heated discussion has broken out in this subculture about what should be done.

October 14, 2001

  • “Big Red Fez” Homework

    The e-Book version of Seth Godin’s new book “The Big Red Fez” inclines me to give all imho* readers some homework:

    1. Buy the Big Red Fez e-Book through Amazon.

    You should do this for three reasons: a) to experience online shopping via Amazon.com — some of you STILL haven’t done this, b) to experience an e-Book (yes you can print it out, but use Adobe eReader to understand the e-Book concept), and c) it only costs US$2 (no shipping or customs to worry about).

    2. Read the book:

    The book provides a screen capture of something that either impressed or irritated Seth on one page, and his analysis on the opposite page. These real world examples are very powerful and many will leave you shaking your head at how any company could be so bone-headed.

    3. Think about YOUR site:

    Now turn this new found knowledge on your own site. I’m sure if you can look at YOUR site with the same critical and customer focussed eye that Seth would, you’ll find MANY things you could easily improve on your site.

    4. Report back:

    Tell me what you found wrong on your site, what you did to fix it, and what the results were.

September 28, 2001

  • The Tragedy of the Commons

    Forbes’ article The Tragedy Of The Commons by Nobel Laureate Daniel McFadden starts out with the simple but articulate explanation of “the tragedy of the commons” that I’ve long looked for, then moves to a sold analysis of how this situation plays out with online content and services, but cops out in the end by not offering a long-term solution.

    For those of you not familiar with the Tragedy of the Commons, I take the liberty of copying McFadden’s explanation:

    Immigrants to New England in the 17th century formed villages in which they had privately owned homesteads and gardens, but they also set aside community-owned pastures, called commons, where all of the villagers’ livestock could graze. Settlers had an incentive to avoid overuse of their private lands, so they would remain productive in the future. However, this self-interested stewardship of private lands did not extend to the commons. As a result, the commons were overgrazed and degenerated to the point that they were no longer able to support the villagers’ cattle. This failure of private incentives to provide adequate maintenance of public resources is known to economists as “the tragedy of the commons.”

    McFadden goes on to discuss various options for how content and service providers are going to get paid enough to induce them to put quality content online. The arguments against the four alternatives he lays out (ads, paid via ISP, paid via monopoly, paid via PBS style organization) are solid. But just when you expect an “aha moment” he copes out with this:

    The solutions that resolve the problem of the digital commons are likely to be ingenious ways to collect money from consumers with little noticeable pain, and these should facilitate the operation of the Internet as a market for goods and services. Just don’t expect it to be free.

    So, is this a fifth model — user pays via micropayments — that he has not fully analyzed, or is it a hope that someone will come up with a way of making the first four models work? An insightful analysis of the value of micropayment models is much needed to round this out.

    And of course, it goes without saying that my access to his article was made possible by the fine people at IBM who had banners all over the pages I read.

September 25, 2001

  • After September 11, 2001

    It’s time to resume regular programming.

    My last post was made on September 11th at 9:14 am. It’s been hard to find a context that makes my usual commentary relevant since then. But I’m ready now. Hopefully, you are as well.

    While I chose to respond to the September 11 terrorist attacks in the US with silence, others in the weblog community turned weblogging into a vital source of voices outside the mainstream media.

    This CNET article provides some insights into the use of Weblogs since September 11 as did Wired News.

    In the days that followed the attacks, I used the following quote to sign off on my e-mail correspondence.

    “History is merely a list of surprises.
    It can only prepare us to be surprised yet again.”

    – Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

September 11, 2001

  • Sometimes Marketers Get Carried Away

    Sometimes marketers get carried away and forget why they are doing what they are doing.

    Take for example the E-mail Sign Up Page you get at KraftCanada.com after clicking on the “Recipes by E-Mail” link.

    My guess is that someone at Kraft thought that e-mailing recipes full of Kraft products would be a good way to increase use in the kind of consumers that care enough about Kraft to visit there web site. Then someone else suggested make the page “interactive” by collecting information on my particular interests and the kind of Kraft products I use.

    Probably the next person to look at the page said something like “why don’t we make this the core of our integrated offline/online CRM initiative.” At that point they added a lot of demographic and geographic questions.

    So now when a consumer clicks to get recipes by e-mail, they have to answer over 30 questions on their household and shopping habits. To make matters worse, the form requires that you tell them if you have kids at home, what your age is, whether you are female or male, and (sin of sins) what your street address is!

    So, instead of making consumers value them and their products for the many new ideas they email each week, Kraft probably alienates 90% of the people who attempt to sign up. A wasted opportunity.

    Compare this to the P&G run S Mag sign-up (you need to click on the “subscribe” link near the top).

September 4, 2001

  • Ads in Context

    Jakob Nielsen always has good advice in his Alertbox newsletter and this week’s article called Designing Web Ads Using Click-Through Data is no exception.

    Jakob offers some interesting real world experiences on running a text ad on Google. I think the analysis is spot on, suggesting that aligning the ads goal with the user’s goal in visiting the page make the ad more effective. I’ve been talking about building context into online marketing for a while now and this is a great example.

    One exception I take is that Nielsen feels this is only effective on search engine results pages. I think context will improve an ad on any page on any site, and it will be of particular value on pages that people go to for help. If I’m looking for information on getting stains out of clothes and see a link to download the Tide Stain Detective on my PDA so I’ll always have this information on my finger tips, that ad is in context and should out-perform generic “run of site” ads.

    I’d also suggest that the Tide Stain Detective download would also do well to advertise on Palm app download pages. The last place I would go would be a cooking page based on the assumption that whoever is cooking is also doing the laundry and will therefore be interested. This is weak context.

August 30, 2001

  • Search Engine Superiority

    Search Engine superiority is a big stakes game of one-upmanship that we won’t see the end of soon.

    I think that when many of us discovered Google we figured that the search wars were over and we’d found our home. Of course we said this forgetting that we’d said the same thing years before when we met Yahoo! for the first time. And then we said it again when someone sent us a link to AltaVista. And then again when we clicked the Hotbot link from Wired.

    I doubt that Google will be the final champion in the search game (at least not if they stick to current technology while others advance — hopefully they won’t).

    For a review of the current state of Internet search, check out this CNET article called “Start-ups Seek Google’s Throne”. One site they don’t mention that is probably worth monitoring (although it is pre-launch as I’m typing this) is Quigo, a “deep web” search tool.

    And of course, Search Engine Watch is a great place for general information on search and how it effects you and your site.

August 15, 2001

  • Examples of Beyond The Banner Ads

    I have to go buy some Lifesavers.

    As you can see from this MediaPost article Lifesavers has come up with a GOOD way to go “beyond the banner.”

    Essentially what they’ve done is pay About.com to change their logo so that the “o” in About is replaced by a Lifesaver, like this:

    Clicking the logo launches a large graphic pop-up for a Lifesavers contest.

    This to me is inventive and consumer friendly as it adds a little serenpidity to surfing but doesn’t really interfere with the task at hand the way pop-ups/unders do.

    Of course the idea is not a new one. We’ve seen Yahoo and Excite do this type of stuff back in 1996 with “101 Dalmatians” spots on the background of the home page. More recently MarketWatch has been selling “wallpaper” as an ad space (the jury is out on that).

August 1, 2001

  • Playing Whack-a-Mole with Online Ads

    This whole pop-under thing is getting ridiculous.

    I just went the New York Times site and watched as this pop-under loaded:

    Here we have the Grey Lady, the newspaper of record for the entire planet, resorting to sneaky ads that look like Windows systems messages. This can’t be good for the image of the NYT or for the concept of online advertising as something that people might actually want to look at. More and more online advertising is looking adversarial to consumers. This pop-under actually goes to the effort of trying to hide the window title by adding lots of spaces and dots so that it shows as a blank box on your toolbar rather than revealing itself as a browser window!

    I can’t believe this is going to do anything but harm in the long term.

    My suggestion is that all publishers immediately stop accepting anything that is designed to trick visitors into clicking. That includes fake error messages or non-functional interactivity that just causes you to go to the advertiser’s site.

    Now I’m off to play “whack a mole” with more pop-up ads.

July 10, 2001

  • Size Matters

    Most web developers have had the fact that images have to download fast drilled into them. But sometimes, consumers WANT huge files. If I’m about to buy a $600 couch, an $800 stereo or $25,000 car, I won’t mind waiting to get a REALLY big picture that shows lots of detail.

    I wanted to buy an a/v receiver recently and the remote control’s ergonomics were a major consideration. All the sites I visited had either no picture or a small picture of the remote. Before I would buy I needed to see DETAIL on the remote — a two-minute wait for a high-resolution large size image would have been quite justified.

    Of course, this isn’t supposed to give designers an excuse to put huge images all over commerce sites. Add a link beside your products, or features of products that allow for detailed images and note the file size and/or download time.

July 5, 2001

  • Every Cabbage Has Its Pimp

    Every once in a while you find a quote that seems to mean something totally different from what the author intended. Since the following quote is from Jean Giraudoux’s 1945 play “The Madwoman of Chaillot”…

    “I remember a time when a cabbage could sell itself by being a cabbage. Nowadays it’s no good being a cabbage — unless you have an agent and pay him a commission. Nothing is free anymore to sell itself or give itself away. These days, … every cabbage has its pimp.”

    For some reason this made me think of affiliate programs on the web. I have a strong preference for contextual links from content that allow you to find stuff or buy stuff. I guess sometimes a cabbage should just be left to be a cabbage though.

December 6, 1999

  • Why Post on ADL?

    I had a conversation with someone the other day about why people did or did not post to ADL. I thought that a lot of people might not understand the power of an ADL post, or may not think that they have much to contribute. He thought that we were all too wimpy to have an opinion.

    In the spirit of proving my friend wrong and showing that we as a group are not too wimpy to have an opinion, I offer a short list of “Reasons to Post on ADL”:

    1. Be Recognized for the Expert You Are: There are now over 800 people on the AIMS list. And this is not just any 800 people. These are all Canadian Internet Marketing and Sales professionals. If you wanted to show that you knew your stuff, what better place to do it?

    2. Give and Get: Most of use will read ADL far more often than we’ll post, but if we ALL take the attitude that it is a good read that doesn’t need our help, it won’t be much of a read at all!

    3. It’s good for business: If you are a consultant or writer, what better way to increase your profile than offering a few “freebie” bright ideas to the list. I know that I’ve already twigged to a few bright bulbs out there I hadn’t come across before ADL.

    4. Find Answers, Find People: Posting to ADL can put you in contact with other people who may have run into the same issues you’re facing. Why not learn from their experiences? And if you have an answer, share it so that others can benefit.

    How do you make yourself heard? Just look at any issue of ADL for convenient mailto’s between postings and at the bottom of each issue. Let’s show we’re not wimps without opinions! I’ve talked to a lot of you at AIMS After Parties, so I KNOW you have opinions!

December 1, 1999

  • Customer Experience

    In ADL-0033, Chris Anderson wrote:

    We spend all this money trying to get people to visit our site but we don’t offer them anything when they get there. The best website I have seen so far on the web is http://www.boo.com these people put a lot of imagination and work into this site, I am now their client because they gave me more than one reason to return.

    I fully agree that the key to online success is what you do with people once they get to your site. The statement SOUNDS obvious, but it seems that many people either don’t get what this means or they don’t truly believe it. It is quite common to see companies spending millions on advertising to get people to sites where search doesn’t work or the shopping cart function is intimidating. These same heavy advertisers baulk at the cost of doing usability analysis.

    I would STRONGLY urge everyone on the list to take time to get a copy of an outstanding report on the customer experience recently published by Mark Hurst at Creative Good in New York. Some of you may remember Mark as a speaker at the AIMS/CMA Interactive Conference last spring. Mark is quite an impassioned spokesperson for making sites work from the customer’s perspective.

    You can find the 78 page report, which gives analysis of usability problems at 10 major e-commerce sites, at: http://www.creativegood.com/holiday99/indexdd.html

    The report is incredibly popular right now, so you may have to suffer through long download delays, but it is worth it. Normally they charge a bundle for these reports, but this one is a freebie for the holidays.

    After you’ve downloaded the Creative Good report, click over to Jakob Nielsen’s site and sign-up for his bi-weekly mailing of usability insights at http://www.alertbox.com . For those of you not in the know, Nielsen is THE guru of usability and his comments are essential to understanding what works and doesn’t work on the web.

    I want to emphasize that EVERYONE should be looking at this stuff, not just those with a technical mandate. Your site is your customer experience and your customer experience is your brand – don’t blow it once you get them to your site – your company’s reputation is riding on it.

    BTW, I think that boo.com would fair rather poorly on the customer experience test. You like many of us on the list are most likely interested in technology and new web techniques, which makes boo.com’s gimmicks appealing, but consumers are turned off by ANYTHING that gets in the way of buying. It would be interesting to discuss boo.com in terms of the Creative Good report.

November 29, 1999

  • Novelty and the Future of Online Marketing

    I’ve been thinking a lot about how the Internet confuses novelty with effectiveness. Let me explain.

    Back in 1994, when I worked at Sony Music, we did an online chat with Our Lady Peace on our BBS (yes, this was before the commercial web even existed in any real sense – people had to dial in using their modem, not the Net). At that time we put out a press release and we ended up on the nightly news and the New Music talking about the chat. These days there are hundreds of chats every day and almost none of them get any press coverage. The effectiveness of chats didn’t come from the 100 hard-core fans that figured out the software to type with the band but from the media coverage.

    When banners were first introduced years ago on the HotWired site, the clickthrough rate was incredible. Everyone was talking about the Zima ads and most people I knew in the industry had gone to the site and clicked on the ad just to see how it worked. Over time the effectiveness (measured in clickthroughs) decreased precipitously. The effectiveness of banners in the early days was largely a function of people thinking they were cool (or not even realizing that they were ads!). Now, no one really talks about banners they’ve seen or gets media attention for running an ad. And consumers have actually learned to not even SEE anything that resembles a traditional banner.

    So we now look to three new trends as being the “Future of Net Marketing”. The first is Rich Media ads, followed by Email Marketing, and finally (how ironic) Offline Advertising. Each of these are now being touted as a way to cut through the clutter, usually with examples of how Company X or Site Y managed a coup by using a cursor to run an ad, or bought 30 seconds of Super Bowl ad time, or got a 30 percent response rate to some house mailing.

    My guess is that once EVERYONE starts using these techniques (“hey, this looks good, let’s spend some money on flavor of the month here>”), the techniques will lose their effectiveness as well.

    Look at Super Bowl ads as an example. When Monster Board and Hot Jobs ran ads during last year’s game they managed to get weeks worth of free publicity. This year there are many companies following their lead and blowing half their annual ad budget on one or two 30 second spots. How effective do you think these ads will be? I don’t think anyone will get a big hit from the ads, and next year the effect will be minimal. What really made those ads effective was the novelty of dotcoms running ads during the Super Bowl, not the ads themselves. I mean look at this posting – we’re STILL talking about Zima and HotJobs.

    Lessons learned? When looking at marketing techniques that worked for others, subtract the novelty factor before proceeding. How much of the lift came from the actual campaign and how much came from the buzz around the campaign. And how long will the novelty last before effectiveness starts to slip?

October 22, 1999

  • Security Issues

    Glad to see the list is now percolating quite nicely.

    In ADL-0017 Marlene Kohn wrote:

    A client of mine purchased some inexpensive computer accessories from an on-line company in Texas and found $3000 worth of charges on his next credit card statement. The purchases were from a variety of stores in the Texas region.

    While I empathize with your client, I really don’t see this as an “Internet Security” issue. I don’t see any technological way to have prevented what happened to your client as it was in all likelihood a disreputable firm, rather than some underlying flaw in Internet security that allowed this to occur. Even crooks can use SSL.

    This does however bring up the issue of how consumers know who to trust online. In the “real world” you have brands you trust. A friend’s recommendation will often carry greater weight than advertising. And for brick and mortar retailers you at least have some sense of who you are dealing with when you go into a store. The simple fact that the store is there, and was there yesterday is enough for most people to assume that a company is legit.

    Online, these assurances don’t come as easily.

    One attempt at building consumers’ trust in online retailers is the use of “trustmarks” like TRUSTe. TRUSTe in particular seems to be gaining ground. In fact NetRatings just announced that almost a quarter of a billion TRUSTe logos were viewed last week.

    That means that one-seventh of the online audience was exposed to TRUSTe’s logo.

    While I like the concept behind TRUSTe, I wonder how many of the people who saw their logo really understood what it meant? It also gets me to thinking about other things sites might do to increase consumer trust.

    Here are a few quick thoughts:

    1. Use credit card “accepted here” logos.

    2. Post a plain English privacy policy in an obvious place.

    3. Include third party endorsements and customer satisfaction affidavits.

    Any other suggestions of things you’ve used to increase trust or that have caused you to trust a site you’ve never visited before?

September 24, 1999

  • Where Shopping Trips Start

    In ADL-0007 Brian Bimm asked: “Has anyone seen any research on where consumers begin their online shopping trips?”

    My favorite Net mag, The Industry Standard, published some interesting metrics a few days ago that start to answer this question.

    The article gives lots of information on the effectiveness of portal deals. In short, only about half of e-commerce site referrals are from portals – the rest being from “other”.

    Here’s a quote from the article:

    “In the future, marketers will rely less on the major portals and more on vertical portals,” says Peggy O’Neill, director of analytical services at Nielsen NetRatings. For specialized products like golf clubs, for instance, marketers will be more interested in hooking up with a golfing portal than a general-interest portal. O’Neill says that big-name portals currently rule simply because there aren’t enough vertical portals to compete with, yet.

    And people’s use of the web changes as they move beyond being newbies. In some categories the shift in people bypassing portals is incredible. For example people online for one year or less only bypass portals 34% of the time when looking for investment and trading resources. But by the time they’ve been online two years, that number increases to over 60%.

    You can find the complete article, including some pretty graphs at:

    http://www.thestandard.com/metrics/display/0,1283,988,00.html

    (And sorry Brian they didn’t mention microwaves once!)

September 21, 1999

  • Email Sponsorship Rates

    In ADL-0005, Tiffany Welch said: “I am looking for information on what fee sites are charging advertisers for highly targeted email sponsorship.”

    I’m glad that Tiffany raised the question of email marketing. While the buzz about email as the “next big thing” has already begun (how ironic), I don’t think we’re going to stop hearing about its effectiveness as a communications vehicle in the near future.

    There are four ways to use email as a marketing tool:

    1. Mail to your current customers and prospects. These are usually people who have “raised their hands” at your website by giving you their email address or by buying something.

    Forrester Research released two reports in the last six months that have really highlighted the value of an effective email strategy for websites. (For Forrester junkies, the reports are “Driving Site Traffic” in April and “Opt-In E-mail Gets Personal” in March). Both of these reports are worth tracking down. http://www.forrester.com Forrester suggests that the two best ways to drive traffic to your site are to start an affiliate program and to start emailing current customers and prospects.
    They also found that 70% of sites rated email as either important or very important to their online initiatives.

    2. Marketing to Opt-in email lists from third parties.
    This entails “renting” names from a company that provides consumers with the option of receiving email. This is not spam because people have consciously decided to be on the list.

    PostmasterDirect (http:www.postmasterdirect.com) says that they get response rates “as high as 5 to 15%” and that they will email to their 100% opt-in list for “as little as 10 cents (US) a person”. That’s about a C$150 CPM if my calculator is working correctly.

    3. Ads on newsletters. Most of us subscribe to a bunch of editorial or discussion email lists that provide regular news and opinions. Marketers can (obviously) buy ad space on these lists to reach their targeted audience.

    As for ad rates on third-party lists (which I think is what Tiffany was looking for), the market doesn’t seem to be solidifying around newsletter ad rates or standards the way it has for banners. I’ve seen other lists discussing the potential for IAB-like standards for email ads, but my gut reaction is that this is wrong-headed. The overabundance of generic size banners in “standard” places on web pages is one reason for declining response rates. Putting the same kind of uniformity in place for email newsletters could kill the effectiveness of that medium as well.

    4. Spam people. I can’t believe that some marketers still think this is an option, but I get email from people who should know better more often than I’d like to admit. I think the fundamental problem here is that the marketers don’t understand the medium and they genuinely think that THEIR message isn’t spam because it is a good/interesting/ relevant offer. Sorry folks, spam is in the eye of the beholder (a bad metaphor that one), and the fact that you think it is interesting doesn’t mean I want to get it.

September 17, 1999

  • Retail.ca

    Hi all,

    I’m not sure if everyone saw the extensive article in the Thursday Globe and Mail Technology section, but it was a very good overview of some of the issues we’ve been addressing regarding the relationship between online shopping in Canada and the US.

    The GlobeTechnology site has a special section on the topic with extra information: http://www.globetechnology.com/e-shopping/

    I’d recommend you take a trip to the site and check it out. This may also be a good starting point for intelligent discussion about this topic on ADL. We need to move beyond “amazon-envy” and start talking about what it will take to kick start commerce in Canada.

September 10, 1999

  • Service Failure Recovery

    Great to see ADL finally taking off after about a year of planning. I hope everyone works to make this the great resource it most certainly can be. And hats off to June for taking on the challenge of herding cats!

    In Issue 1, Tim Silk wrote:

    “My Question: I would like to know of any companies that currently use their website for dealing with service failures and what the response has been from customers. Any measures of volume and frequency of service failure in comparison to customer retention or repeat customers would also be helpful.”

    One example I recently found that relates to customer service online is the way Barnes and Noble in the US handle returns on items. When I received a book I ordered recently, the invoice included a peel-off sticker with a bar-code that could be attached to the box for return. This identifies the package for B&N to allow them to track the return and provides the consumer with the return address and a feeling that it is “okay” to return something.

    I think a few other firms are even including return courier waybills that the consumer can use for no charge returns.

    I bring this example up primarily because it is pre-emptive in that it assumes that problems arise, rather than treating them as an afterthought.

    Anyone else have a particularly good example of e-commerce return strategies? Any horror stories?