Companies with conservative cultures should approach social media cautiously and in small steps. But they should definitely approach it. That was the key message from Tim Collins, senior vice president of experiential marketing with Wells Fargo & Company, brought to CMA’s National Convention this week.

With 100 million people watching YouTube daily, and tens of millions on sites like Facebook and conversion in their own blogs, your brands are inevitably going to get mentioned, so you need to be there to at the very least “listen and learn,” Collins said. “People are talking about you online, as the folks at Tim Hortons learned last week.”

Wells Fargo is one of North America’s oldest (established: 1852) and most trusted brands, and as a bank it is a very conservative business, Collins said. Yet, it has been something of a cutting edged innovator online, becoming the first U.S. bank to start blogging, the first brand period to set up a presence in Second Life and becoming one of the first companies to actively use YouTube.

Collins says the bank stuck to the marketing fundamentals in edging into the Web 2.0 space, approaching everything with the traditional goals of connecting with consumers and driving business results.

 Collins urged companies to start “small and safe” when entering the space. And he advised being sure to integrate whatever is done with offline marketing. Companies should look to leverage their existing assets. “No matter what your company is, you have assets,” he said.

In Wells Fargo’s case, it played up its heritage and history in the development of the American west in its first president’s blog. When it debuted in early 2006, the blog focused on the 100^th anniversary of the great San Francisco earth quake of 1906 and how the company helped its home city to recover.  Subsequent blogs dealt with other aspects of the company’s history.

When looking at what to do on YouTube, the bank observed that most video posts from financial services companies are boring and don’t have many views.  But, in an example of an asset the bank wasn’t even conscious it had, Wells Fargo also found that people were posting clips of “The Wells Fargo Wagon” song that had been featured in the 1950s Broadway musical, and subsequent movie, The Music Man. Collins noted that regional theatre and school productions of the show are still common in the U.S. Midwest –Well’s Fargo’s home turf-  and people were frequently posting versions of the song featuring friends and family on YouTube. 

So instead of doing it’s own video, the company created a contest, and invited people to vote on the best performances filmed by other people.  The CGC contest was  “silly and safe” Collins says, but it gave the company an opportunity to learn about what works and doesn’t work with video online.

Wells Fargo took a similar “watch, listen and learn” approach to its Second Life initiative, stagecoachisland.com, begun in 2005.  Citizens of the island can interact and play all kinds of Second Life games, including some smart money management quizzes. As well, citizens  can get paid virtual money for doing virtual jobs and even take out virtual mortgages (no subprime mortgages, however) But the only overt Wells Fargo created branding on the island are ATMS with the bank’s name. It hasn’t been necessary to force the conversation, Collins said, noting that visitors have even taken to creating bank branches on their own accord.

Originally written for and posted on In:fluencia Digital, a beta site created with Editions Infopresse to serve the Canadian online and interactive marketing, communications and media communities. The site’s development is in hiatus.

Posted by sutter or mckenzie at 3:25 PM EDT

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 Took in Toronto’s Case Camp 7  at the CiRCA night club a week or so ago, and it was an eye-opener on several levels.

First, there were almost 500 people–and not just bleeding edge digital agency types, I even spoke to someone from the Ontario government. They came out to hear the four short, sharp presentations of real life social and viral marketing in action–and to get in some major socializing and networking. Those numbers appeared to take even organizer Eli Singer, whose day job is director of social media at Toronto’s Segal Communications, off guard. There’ve been six other Case Camps in the past 18 months or so, including one in Second Life, and the growth has apparently been exponential for the handful that gathered around a couple of tables in a bar for Case Camp 1. Clearly, there’s a burgeoning hunger for knowledge and insight in the social space.

Case Camp is billed as an “anti-conference,” and with its free admission, very loose vibe and the nearly naked Amazonian mannequins flanking the club stage, this one surely was. Sue McVey, TD Canada Trust’s VP marketing planning, who presented the story of the bank’s Facebook program aimed at college and university students last fall, got off the best line of the night when she glanced archly at the boa-clad mannequins and quipped “I don’t think this is brand compliant.”

Singer acted as MC, and he had almost a Gong Show shtick going. Each speaker had just 15 minutes to do their case, and Singer had a big alarm clock on stage to enforce the timing (“If it can be presented in 45 minutes, in can be presented in 15,” he declared).

Actually ComScore MediaMetrix Canada’s Bryan Segal had just three minutes to present a snapshot of the entire state of social media in Canada–and he appeared to pull it off. Bottom line: Canadians are proportionately more active in social media than any other nation.

Despite the boho circus atmosphere, the substance of the Case Camp presentations were impressively grounded in real business issues–save for possibly one, which I’ll get to in a second. Aside from TD Bank, the RedFlagDeals.com founders told the story of their founding and remarkable growth and the Sick Kids Hospital Foundation shared their learning from a daily video blog they produced, with Segal, to augment the charity’s annual radio telethon this spring. 

But what got the crowd most fired up–and that fire has had an impressive and continuing echo in TO blogging circles–was the presentation of an “experimental art project” from Toronto screen writer Jill Golick.

Golick presented her creation, Story20h! as a work of fiction/online performance art featuring several characters who interacted with each other–and the “audience”–through their personal blogs, YouTube video posts, Facebook profiles and even Twitter. The story line appears to be a kind of bawdy Friends–essentially twentysomethings in heat. Frankly, this post-modern concept reminded me a bit of Matt Beaumont’s 2000 novel “e”, which told a story through “found” e-mail exchanges within a fictional ad agency, or even to stretch a bit further, Orson Wells’ infamous War of the Worlds radio play, which freaked out many eastern seaboard U.S. listeners in the late 1930s with its mimicking of the then still young radio news form to tell the H.G. Wells’ alien invasion tale.

Certainly, some Case Camp attendees seemed as spooked by Story20h! as those credulous radio listeners back at Halloween 1938. There was an audible ripple through the crowd. Several people leapt up during the question period to challenge Golick on the “transparency” of her actions, and point out that Facebook is pretty insistent on its policy of only “real” people allowed in their community. A couple of people muttering near me sounded like they were shocked to discover these wild people who had friended them weren’t actually real.

Golick defended herself by saying that all the Facebook profiles of her characters admitted they were fictional creations, although she acknowledged that not every e-mail invite or twitter message in the exercise included that disclosure. “It’s not like I was selling anyone anything,” she declared in her defence. Although that defence was undercut just a tad by her making it mere seconds after showing a PowerPoint slide that advertised her desire to work with sponsors in the future.

Story20! was the topic of hot debate at the after party and after the after party online. The ultimate upshot however: Someone outed Golick’s creations to Facebook, which within a day had shut down their profiles. Which, of course, fed the online furor even more. (Links to many of the posts can be found at Golick’s own site and Eli Singer’s site where he expressed sadness at the lack of civility in many of the posts attacking Golick).

To me it was strangely sweet that people at a conference–even a hip grassroots conference- devoted to commercializing and monetizing the online space should get so bent out of shape over a little bit of online deception in some “entertainment” and “art.” On one level, you want to say, as William Shatner did in that famous SNL Trekkie spoof skit: “Get a life.” Don’t take yourself and the space so seriously. And, as I think it was Trapeze’s Andrew Cherwenka who said to me this week, anyone who allows themselves to be friended by strangers with even stranger life stories like Golick’s Ali and Simon, should hardly be shocked when things turn out to be not quite what they seemed.

But on another lever, the lesson for everyone, especially marketers who are trying to sell someone something, is total transparency is paramount. It’s the prime directive, to make another Star Trek analogy. Mess with it, try to deceive people, no matter what your intentions and motivations, and there will be hell to pay.

So there’s some real business learning in the arty experiment after all.

Originally written for and posted on In:fluencia Digital, a beta site created with Editions Infopresse to serve the Canadian online and interactive marketing, communications and media communities. The site’s development is in hiatus.

Posted by sutter or mckenzie at 1:13 PM EDT

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As the editor in chief of Wired magazine, and the author of the seminal new-economy business book The Long Tail and the forthcoming book Free, Chris Anderson is an authority on emerging technologies and business models and the cultures that surround them. He will be the keynote speaker at the Infopresse/In:fluencia Digital Internet Marketing Conference May 15 in Toronto.

Anderson recently spoke with me about the long tail and how its logical extension, the “free” economy, is transforming businesses both online and off. The full conversation can be heard as a podcast here.  Some highlights from the conversation:

Q: The Long Tail as an articulated idea is now 4-5 years old, which is what 28-35 years in dog and internet years… is there something in the book or original magazine article that has turned out to be not quite what you expected?

A: Sure, as you might expect mostly on the side of errors of omission rather than commission. The original article which was published in 2004 focused largely on entertainment and media, you know music, DVDs, books, that sort of thing. The book, which came out in ’06 extended that to other things: software, services, manufacturing. And what’s happened ever since is that people now see long tails everywhere. Sometime they really are long tails, sometimes they just look like long tails, but broadly this notion of the ability of these new efficient distribution systems, mostly the Internet, to access niche demand is as true for food and drink and clothing as we originally spotted in entertainment media. It’s been the long tail of beer and the long tail of travel that’s been the big surprise over the last few years, and that’s actually going to be addressed in the paperback version of the book which is going to be coming out in a month or two, which is going to be called The Longer Tail.

Q: Free, which you are working on now for publication in spring 2009, is the logical extension of The Long Tail. Or is it?

I think it is. The world will decide if it is the logical extension or something else entirely. The ability to address niche markets, the ability to access latent demand for products of quote unquote minority taste was initially enabled when you got over the limits on shelf space. Be that physical shelf space in stores or virtual shelf space in things like television channels and radio stations. The Internet offers infinite shelf space, and the corollary to that is that its free shelf space. The only reason you can offer products that are probably of small appeal but very certainly unpredictable appeal is that it doesn’t cost you anything to do so. So free shelf space, free distribution, was what enabled the long tail to emerge over the last ten years.  The notion that “free” is different, that zero is a number unlike any other, that zero basically takes the “is it worth it” calculation off the table, is bigger than just the long tail. And it was just the recognition that there was really an whole economy built around free growing up online –products and services that are free to consumers and yet can be the basis of really profitable business models- that struck me as being fundamentally new, fundamentally unaddressed by traditional economics and worth a whole other book.

Q: You opened the Wired essay on the ideas around “free” in March with the example of Gillette’s business model, which was created about a hundred years ago. So in a way free has been around, so what is the difference between what was being done in that stage and now?

There are three kinds of free, two that are old one that is new.

The first is what we call cross subsidies. You know, you don’t pay now, but you pay later. You don’t pay for this, but you’ll pay for that. You pay one way or another. But it sort of shifts the payment from one pocket to the other. Razors and blades: you don’t pay for the razor; you pay for the blades later. Cell phones and minutes: you don’t pay for the cell phone but you pay for the minutes later. That’s just really the notion of shifting the time of payment and the way you pay. But it doesn’t necessarily change the overall amount that leaves your pocket. That’s the first kind of free, and that’s as you say a hundred years old.

Another old model is the media model: third party pays. Advertisers subsidize a product so that the consumer gets it for free or close to it. And in that case it’s a three party market. There’s the producer, the consumer and the subsidizer. And what we’re seeing online is an extension of the media model, which is the advertising driven model, to all sorts of new products and services that don’t traditionally fall within media: Search being the most obvious example. Basically everything Google does is paid for by the media model, which is advertising driven. That’s why Google doesn’t show up in your credit card bill. And yet Google is an extremely profitable company. Again not a new model, but we’re seeing extended to new businesses on the Internet.

The new model is the one where the cost goes to zero, not because its magic or slight-of-hand and you are paying later or because an advertiser is paying. The price goes to zero because the underlying cost falls to zero. This is sort of the Web 2.0 model. As you move goods and services online where the underlying costs of the bandwidth, the storage, the processing fall by fifty per cent every year, then you don’t really need to charge most people for the product at all. In basic economics there’s a rule that says in a competitive market price falls to the marginal cost. Online, the marginal cost of everything digital falls toward zero every year, which means the price must inevitably fall to zero. We can talk about all the different ways you would make money from something when you’re not charging the consumer at all. But that ability to be able to assume that the costs are going to fall to nothing at all is really unique to the last 10 years of Internet economics.

Q I can see how the notion of free works easily in entertainment and media products. I have a harder time- and I think most people do- with more tangible goods and services.  Tell me about how it works in other areas, for example with Ryanair in Europe.

A Ryanair is a kind of razor and blades model, which is to say most airlines are in the airline seat business.  They charge you for the seat. Ryanair, as a kind of newcomer in the market back in the early nineties, decided to take a more holistic view of the business. They’re not going to be in the seat business. They are going to be broadly in the travel business, which means they could be agnostic about where they made their money. And right now you can fly from say London to Lisbon for something along the lines of 10 Euros or five pounds. And the CEO of Ryanair has promised that someday soon that will be zero.

Where do they make their money? They make their money in rental cars and hotel reservations and advertising both on the websites and on the planes. They make their money from the cargo in the hold, which is why they charge you more for your luggage. They make their money from the sandwiches and drinks on board. They get subsidies from the locations that they fly to because they fly off the beaten path. And these tertiary destinations will charge a very low landing fee or even subsidize Ryanair to bring the tourists to them. And the way you get to zero, the Ryanair CEO has suggested, is gambling. You turn the airplane into a flying casino. In Vegas you get your drinks for free if you gamble. On Ryanair you get your seat for free if you gamble. The Internet lowers the cost of being an airline and that takes customer service and check in and a lot of the human costs out of the equation, so it allows them to lower the costs. But that doesn’t bring them to free. What brings them to free is cross subsidizing from the ancillary markets around the airline seat itself...

Q: What are some other examples of tangible, non internet based products?

We talked about lots of examples [of this] in the Wired article and will in the book. There’s the case of Prince giving away his CD in the Mail on Sunday in the UK to sell the concert. On phone services you can get directory assistance for free. It turns out that’s not even advertising-driven; you’re just training the speech recognition algorithms. You can get a DVR or a plasma TV for free if you sign up for cable TV services. If you bring cross subsidies into it, as we do because they are many creative ways to do it, the sky’s the limit. You can talk about cars for free. You can get a free electric car in Israel. You get the car for free and you pay for the electricity. You name it. Furniture. There’s almost nothing you can bring up that I haven’t already found somebody giving it away for fee.

In the In:fleuncia Digital Podcast, Chris Anderson goes deeper into how the Long Tail and Free business models work, his plans to publish free version of Free, how Apple gets away with defying  all the conventional wisdom of business in the 21^st century and how the Internet is changing religion and social movements.

Originally written for and posted on In:fluencia Digital, a beta site created with Editions Infopresse to serve the Canadian online and interactive marketing, communications and media communities. The site’s development is in hiatus.

Posted by sutter or mckenzie at 2:44 PM EDT

Updated: Monday, 23 June 2008 3:39 PM EDT

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Paul Gillin, the U.S. social media observer, consultant and writer -and author the one of the most acclaimed early books exploring the social media boom The New Influencers (link to www.paulgillin.com)- is a featured presenter at the Infopresse/ In:fluencia Digital Internet Marketing Conference, May 15 at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre.

I recently spoke with Gillin about how blogs, podcasts and social networking communities are creating new centers of influence -and big new challenges and opportunities for companies looking to connect with consumers.

The full conversation can be heard here. Some highlights:

Q: Who is doing the good stuff in social media? Who should we be copying these days?

 Well there are so many different kinds of social media. There are blogs, which have been popular for about four or five years, and are the most mature form of social media. There are some excellent examples there. I think Southwest Airlines does a wonderful job. Dell is very effective in blogging. The Google blog is outstanding. Kodak has just appointed an official Kodak blogger- that’s what they do full time- and they’re doing some very interesting things. There are about 60 or 70 major corporations that are doing some kind of blogging work right now.

In social networking -the Facebook, Myspace domain-it’s fairly new still.  I think Victoria’s Secret on Facebook has done a very nice job. Southwest Airlines –again- on Facebook has a very well done presence.

There are some companies that are doing their own captive sort of gated social networks, where they are bringing enthusiasts together. I would point to Nikon and what it doing on the photo sharing site Flickr.  Nikon has very effectively engaged those photo enthusiasts and brought them into a kind of community of Nikon customers. I think they’ve done a wonderful job with that.

And actually there are many excellent examples of what Procter & Gamble is doing here. There’s one called BeingGirl.com which is for teenage girls and has a very active audience. There’s another one, there’s a program they’re doing right now based on their talking stain commercial from the Super Bowl, where it’s a video contest where people are being asked to create their own videos of the talking stain. And that’s worked out very well.

Q:  Are there companies you can name that are going where you shouldn’t go?

Wal-Mart.

Wal-Mart is an amazing company that does so many things right­. But in social media it has for some reason just tripped over its feet repeatedly, through fakery.  They’re using social media tools but disguising what they are trying to do with them. They were trying to look like something they weren’t.  And this has happened a couple of times with Wal-Mart now and it’s very kind of painful to watch the embarrassment they’ve gone through.

Sony has had the same problem. Their technique called flogging –or fake blogging- has bitten them. Sony also was a victim of an early blog attack about three years ago over some spyware that was embedded in its music CDS. It took them a very long time to respond to the charges that were leveled by a very prominent blogger and they just looked worse and worse the longer they waited.

Those are a couple of notable companies. But frankly, big embarrassments have been rare. For the most part you can get away with a lot right now because everyone knows it’s a new medium and if you stub your toe people are pretty forgiving.

Q: Where does responsibility for social media reside in the company and their agency partners? Is this a PR function? Is it a traditional marketing function? Should the C-suite be involved?

That question comes up all the time at conferences. And I have yet to see any unanimity on this. I believe the PR function should own it, and has the opportunity to own it because they are the story tellers. They are the relationship experts and these really are about relationships.

That said, in most companies it is falling under the aegis of marketing. For some reason PR people seem to be kind of timid about this whole thing and marketers are more aggressive about seizing the initiative.

But it does not work without C-suit support. In order to really make this work you have to expose voices within the organization. You cannot delegate this to a small group of people and say “you be in charge of social media.”  You have to empower people who are at the product management level, at the engineering level, at the customer service level. They have to be empowered to speak for the company. Giving this all to marketing is not a very effective tactic because they can’t enforce that engagement. So I think it works best when people at the very high levels of the company buy into it.

In the In:fleuncia Digital Podcast, Paul Gillin goes deeper into questions like what social media is -and isn’t-, how it is and should be measured, what the differences between Canadian and Americans –and the rest of the world- in their approaches to social media are and his how he’s turning the creation of his next book into a social media experience.

Originally written for and posted on In:fluencia Digital, a beta site created with Editions Infopresse to serve the Canadian online and interactive marketing, communications and media communities. The site’s development is in hiatus.

Posted by sutter or mckenzie at 1:59 PM EDT

Updated: Monday, 23 June 2008 2:54 PM EDT

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It may be the new car syndrome –you know the phenomenon that happens when you buy a new car and suddenly you seem to spot the same model at every intersection on the road- but every where  I look in the Canadian marketing communications space these days seems to underscore the need for the kind of media and forum that we’re aiming to create with In:fluencia Digital.

As I say, I may be simply finding what I’m looking for, but the constant subtexts at the two significant Toronto conferences I attended in the past two weeks were the pressing need for more common language and for more leadership on the digital marketing front.

I’m speaking of the first Canadian edition of the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit at the start of April and the Canadian Media Director’s Council’s annual daylong conference on the 8th, this year themed “What a wonderful world: The Digital Reality.”  You could say that these are events came at the question from almost opposite ends of the interactive divide.

CMDC conference co-chair, and Cossette media director, Cathy Collier crystallized things for me in her opening comments on Tuesday when she described the digital marketing world as being populated by “natives” and “immigrants.” The “natives” are mostly the under 25 set who barely remember a time before the World Wide Web, video gaming as a dominant entertainment form and a cell phone in every back pack. They are fluent in all things digital and are frighteningly adept at multitasking at lightning speeds through the environment. The “immigrants” are generally the over 25 set who are coming later to the party, are slower to figure it out and no matter how hard their try will inevitably speak the lingo with a thick accent, especially the older ones.  They know interactive is the future and want to learn the ways of this new world. And most importantly they are in positions that make the decisions and control spending priorities at marketers, agencies and media companies, and will be for some time.

(While it’s easy to think of Collier speaking primarily about the Boomer set at the very top ranks of business these days, a lot of Gen X folks in their late, mid, and early 30s can also be considered digital “immigrants.” These are people who entered the workforce just before or as e-mail was only coming on stream, and have been steeped in traditional marcom tools and tactics with only a passing involvement with the Web.)

The natives and the immigrants are going to have to come to terms with each other, speak in the same language and work in harmony if the opportunities of the interactive marketing era are to be exploited fully.

The morning CMDC keynote speaker, David Kenny, chair and CEO of Publicis’s interactive agency network Digitas carried that theme forward. He likened learning the digital marketing world to learning French-something he had to do in order to better communicate with his Paris-based bosses. His advice to learning French:  start by reading childrens’ books. Don’t be afraid to go to the basics and learn from the ground up. (Of course, he acknowledged learning a new language –either French or digital- is a lot easier said when you’re 14 rather than a successful executive at the top of your game in mid-career.)

Kenny predicted that the question of which kind of agency should be leading interactive marketing efforts will soon be moot. The distinction between digital and traditional agencies will disappear, and it will again simply be agencies. That said, he argued that the disciplines that underpin media agencies position them to take the lead in the interactive space and urged them to do so.

Digital marketing is all about “media creativity, media distribution and media optimization,” Kenny said. “It’s not that complex if you let the consumer be your guide. And she will … if you listen.”

The freewheeling afternoon CMDC panel of client and agency (including media, creative, and several flavours of digital) stakeholders led by Taxi Canada’s Rob Guenette also dealt with a lot of the same questions of how to bring digital fully into the marketing mix-and who should be taking the lead in doing that.

 Of course, -after the unanimous lip service that the consumer is the one calling the shots-, there was no big answer on the later question. There probably won’t ever be. But for sure everyone agrees the silos have to come down, both within companies and between their agency partners.

The primary constituency at the eMetrics event, of course, was the pure lain “natives” of the interactive world: the metrics and analytics people who are the front lines of making online work. Many of them take pride in being called geeks and nerds.

A surprising –to me anyway- number of the presentations and conversations at eMetrics dealt with how to better communicate the complex and often confusing –not to mention voluminous- data that Web sites and all e-initiatives can generate to the “immigrant” bosses and clients in terms and forms that they can understand. And that they can act upon.

Interestingly enough, the question of who gets to “lead” the whole enchilada of marketing communications in the digital era didn’t come up that much at the eMetrics sessions. That might be because there were proportionately more client people and proportionally fewer agencies of any flavor attending. It also seemed like the eMetrics natives are more preoccupied at this stage with just making sure they are at the table and understood.

Or it may be that they’re just quietly confident that their discipline will inevitably conquer the rest of the world.

Now that I think of it, eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit founder Jim Sterne made a point of stressing that his conference series is  about total “marketing optimization” not just Web site or digital marketing optimization.

Originally written for and posted on In:fluencia Digital, a beta site created with Editions Infopresse to serve the Canadian online and interactive marketing, communications and media communities. The site’s development is in hiatus.

Posted by sutter or mckenzie at 1:01 PM EDT

Updated: Monday, 23 June 2008 1:12 PM EDT

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The beagle has the most developed sense of smell of all canines. While that makes them a great hunting dog, it also contributes to the breed’s reputation for having a notoriously short attention span.

Humans are a lot like beagles when it comes to Web searches, says Bryan Eisenberg. But most Web sites lose the vast majority of the audience sniffing them out within the first three clicks, all because they don’t do enough of to keep things simple and obvious so that the scent trail for customers stays hot.

Eisenberg is the co-founder and CPO (chief persuasion officer) of the Brooklyn, NY-based Bryan interactive marketing optimization firm Future Now, Inc. and noted blogger (GrokDotCom) and co-author, with his brother and business partner Jeffery, of several analytics books ( Call to Action, Waiting for Your Cat to Bark). He presented advice and tips on how to keep the Website hunt for visitors alive longer during the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit in Toronto April 2.

When on the hunt for something online, people tend to click forward until they find what they want or they “lose the scent” of the key word or phrase they are searching. Then they usually click back to where they started from. This lose of “persuasive momentum” is dramatic, Eisenberg says.

Future Now research shows that the drop off after the first click on an ecommerce site averages 10%. The drop off after the second page is a stunning 55%. After the third click drop off rates fall to a mere 17%, although that still leaves less than 20% of the visitors that initially caught a whiff of something they wanted left after just three clicks.

That’s just leaving money on the table, Eisenberg says. He cited a 2006 Forrester study that showed 67% of Americans have visited Web sites with the intention of buying something but were not converted to actually making a purchase. Only 26% of those survived could cite a single satisfactory online shopping experience.

Indeed, despite increasing attention to and sophistication with online marketing and tactics, conversion rates are in decline, Eisenberg notes. In 2002, the average conversion rate was 3.2%. In 2005, it was 2.5%.

What are missing on most sites are “intuitive” and “persuasive” paths for users, he says. “Great experiences aren’t accidents.”

Building better e-commerce experiences doesn’t have to involve expansive site overhauls. Often it’s the small changes that make the biggest difference, be they changing a colour scheme or adding a prominent graphic -or even some keywords- that ensures greater consistency of a home or landing page with the advertising or keywords that brought the visitor to the page in the first place.

Eisenberg‘s $25 million example of this in action is overstock.com, a site dedicated to selling discounted clearance items of all sorts. Future Now was asked to advise the site’s owners on how to increase conversion rates and reduce high levels of visitor abandonment in its books, movies and CD section. Eisenberg and company determined that the “search any title” tool was too close to a small banner promoting deals on children’s books. The proximity of the two elements would cause many visitors to assume the search tool was for children’s books only. In that moment they’d lose the scent.  Simply by moving the two things further apart and tweaking the search tool text to make it clearer that every title in the site could be found using it, user abandonment from the site fell 33%. That meant an immediate increase in sales of $70,000 per day, or $25 million over the course of a year.

“You can optimize all you like,” Eisenberg, but the real improvements in ecommerce usually come from adapting to the natural impulses of your consumers. “It’s about the people, not the technology.”

Originally written for and posted on In:fluencia Digital, a beta site created with Editions Infopresse to serve the Canadian online and interactive marketing, communications and media communities. The site’s development is in hiatus.

Posted by sutter or mckenzie at 4:08 PM EDT

Updated: Monday, 23 June 2008 4:17 PM EDT

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No, that’s not advocating muttering under your breath or even swearing out loud at them. Rather it’s the acronym from Forrester Research Web marketing manager  Corey Mathews for a simple strategy for data and analytic people to get the right information to decision makers in formats they can use: DARN IT - Define, Automate, Report, Nudge, Iterate.

“Your managers aren’t stupid, they’re just busy,” said Mathews during his presentation to the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit in Toronto at the beginning of April.

“We’re the experts in understanding the data. The issue is reporting to management in ways they can understand,” he says. “Executives need information in ways they understand and that they can make decisions on.”

Prior to presenting, Mathews informally surveyed analytics heads in 42 organizations around the world on their reporting methods and issues. Precisely what is reported, and the formats and frequency of reporting, may differ, he says. But the challenge of effectively sharing the right data with the right people is a “common frustration” in most organizations-even the enlightened Web-based businesses.

Information needs to be presented “carefully, repeatedly and patiently,” says Mathews, and always with an eye to what’s most important to managers and the organization-and in terms they are comfortable with. And that inevitably includes making sure you report on “the money,” especially ROI.

Define

Since what’s most important does and should vary from organization to organization, “defining” what success for the enterprise is and how those goals are measured is the first step in any communications strategy.

The primary data that is reported should speak directly to the organizations’ over-all business goals.

Automate

Metrics and research people often find themselves answering the same questions from different managers over and over, or being asked to do up special reports drilling into data that’s of special interest to one group of stakeholders, often on extremely short notice. And in every organization there are always a few managers who like to be able to dig into data themselves when they want it.

Where possible, automatically generated data streams and reports on FAQs or regularly asked questions should be created. This might be a dashboard with real time stats on sales or conversation rates, or it could be an e-mail with weekly or monthly updates on key stats.

This allows users to access data on their own, and frees up analytics people from constantly getting pulled off projects to do unscheduled updates and reports.

Report

It’s what it should be all about, but a remarkable number of organizations don’t have a thought-out plan for reporting Web data. Figure out a plan and schedule for who needs to see which reports and how often.

Not every report needs a formal face to face encounter, but there should be some of those planned, whether monthly, quarterly or annually (or weekly).

The presentation of content should be simple and clean, says Mathews. Live by Edward Tufte’s law of now more than six points per Power Point slide. Keep data tables as simple as possible; four columns by four rows are optimal.

Make the data easier to process by varying the shape of boxes, colour or even point size of the key numbers that should jump out.

Nudge

“Don’t just throw data at executives, give them actual recommendations,” Mathews urges. “Robots can pull numbers. You add value when you interpret and act on analytics.”

Presenting and assessing multiple options is good, just not too many or too few. A “lack of context” for information can often lead to misinterpretation of data and errors, Matthews says.

Iterate

Or as Mathews rephrases it, “keep throwing spaghetti at the wall.”

“It’s a conversation, not a lecture,” he says, so you need to keep repeating the key recommendations, with the renewed data to support it, on an ongoing basis. “Iterate, iterate, iterate.”

Posted by sutter or mckenzie at 9:16 AM EDT

Updated: Monday, 23 June 2008 4:15 PM EDT

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Data measuring Web and other online marketing activities are inevitably wrong.

That’s not likely a message one would expect from the chair of the Web Analytics Association and founder of the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit conference series. But that was a key insight that Jim Sterne delivered in his opening keynote address at the first Toronto edition of the eMetrics event in Toronto April 1.

Not that Sterne, a Santa Barbara-based consultant and author of six books on Internet marketing, was advocating ignoring data or not even bothering to collect it. Far from it. His main point is that the specific numbers measured in anything are almost beside the point. The real actionable learning is always in how the numbers are trending, or changing over time. And getting hung up, for example, over what impact cookie deletion might have on the “true” precise numbers obscures the utility of having a proper web metrics and analytics program.

Marketing optimization is all about making Web sites better and using what you learn online to impact the entire enterprise, Stern said. Companies and organizations should think of Web sites as being like giant radio telescopes pulling in a vast universe of consumer and customer data, he said.

 There is an almost unlimited amount of data on customer interactions and experiences with Web sites. They key is figuring out what is the most important data sets for your particular needs. And to get to that point, you need a good answer to the question: what exactly are you trying to do with your Web site.

For example, duration, or time spent on a site, can be good or bad depending on what you are trying to do. Your goal may be to have people spend lengthy periods of time with a site’s content if you are offering an information gathering or entertainment experience. But you may, instead, have a site that gives the customer instant gratification. If the consumer is looking for a 30 second e-commerce experience, a long duration may indicate a serious problem with your navigation. 

“A bad customer experience online can potentially more seriously damage a brand” than just about any other encounter, Sterne insisted. These days people are more forgiving of weak or insulting advertising or a bad retail experience with an undertrained employee than they are with a Web site that fails to meet their expectations.

Their attitude is: “You’ve had years to get ready for me. How bad are you?”

And people’s expectations are high, Sterne said. “Amazon has trained us on what to expect from a Web site.”

But you don’t have to have excessively sophisticated tools and research methodology to make progress online, Sterne said.

“Incremental improvement wins the race,” he said. “Test, measure, test, measure… you keep doing it over and over.

“And get over wanting to be right. Just ask the questions.”

Originally written for and posted on In:fluencia Digital, a beta site created with Editions Infopresse to serve the Canadian online and interactive marketing, communications and media communities. The site’s development is in hiatus.

Posted by sutter or mckenzie at 9:08 AM EDT

Updated: Monday, 23 June 2008 9:15 AM EDT

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Procter and Gamble Canada is metaphorically holding its breath as it unleashes a playful new microsite intended to create viral buzz for its staid Scope brand.

The testyoutbreath.ca site, which goes live this week, invites visitors to check their breath by blowing into their computer microphones. An on screen gage rates users’ breath on a scale that goes from “fragrant” to “noxious,” but the action of blowing also causes a guy in an elevator to recoil in a variety of ways –ranging from whimpering, to him imaging a rhino excreting on up to him grabbing a skunk to mask the odor and his head exploding. In all, there are 14 reactions, none of them flattering. At the end of each, an arm holds up a bottle of Scope and users are invited to try again.

The site was developed for P&G by Dentsu Canada, under the direction of the agency’s creative director, Interactive Michael Gramlow.

The aim of the effort, says Alex Glover, P&G brand manager for Scope, is to engage younger consumers with the mouthwash brand in an environment where they are increasingly spending a lot of time. But mainly, Glover admits, it is simply an experiment in viral and word of mouth marketing for P&G. “We’re really excited to explore the online environment and learn form it,” she says. “We hope this site gives us new insights, new understanding.”

Dentsu creative catalyst Glen Hunt says the agency and P&G will be closely monitoring traffic parents like unique visitor levels and time spent, and while they do have target levels they expect to meet he and P&G declined to reveal them.

Dentsu and P&G also declined to be specific on the budget for the effort, although Hunt did suggest that the production cost for a site like testyourbreath.ca –which involved film production through Sons & Daughters, and post-production with Crush, both of Toronto- would be in the $200,000 to $400,000 range that is typical of a Canadian-made 30 second commercial.

Hunt notes P&G is being bold on at least a couple of levels with the testyourbreath program. First, it is not doing any traditional advertising to promote the site, instead relying on some inhouse PR and a small blogger relations effort through Toronto’s Glossy Inc. to get the viral ball rolling.

More importantly, Hunt says, P&G is embracing the notion that it has to move beyond the hard sell rational brand utility proposition that has generally typified its mass advertising in the past. In the online environment, Hunt says, messages work best when the selling is subtle and there is an element of interactive engagement.

And finally, Hunt notes that Dentsu is not a P&G roster agency, but when the shop approached the company with the idea for the site it readily agreed to try it out.

“We’re always looking for anew and exciting ways” to reach our consumers, says Lara Banks, P&G Canada’s senior external relations manager. “We work with some core agencies across our brands, but we are really excited about this new medium. So we are open to exploring opportunities as they are presented to us.”

Banks agrees the site needed to avoid forcing itself on consumers, and they think they’ve succeeded in creating something fun that younger consumers online will want to spend time with. “We want this be seeded but truly interactive,” she says. “These people are sitting at their computers all day, and we just want them people to find it, love it and share.”

Glover adds that while testyoutbreath.ca’s content may be a bit edgier than the kind of messages what P&G might have traditionally used in other channels, it is still in keeping with Scope’s positioning. “Scope as a brand has always stood for fun, connecting with people and being very social,” says Glover. “So we don’t think this execution is anywhere removed from the fun brand that we are.”

For now the site is strictly a P&G Canada initiative, but given the nature of viral marketing it could easily travel well beyond the border.

“Being in this new space, we have the opportunity to go global. It just depends on how excited our consumers are and if they want to share,” says Glover. “The possibilities are endless. This is a completely new space for us, and so we’re willing to go down the path that it takes us. It’s like a waterslide.”

Originally written for and posted on In:fluencia Digital, a beta site created with Editions Infopresse to serve the Canadian online and interactive marketing, communications and media communities. The site’s development is in hiatus.

Posted by sutter or mckenzie at 8:52 AM EDT

Updated: Monday, 23 June 2008 9:07 AM EDT

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