Death to the short sighted web
There is some degree of chaos in the way the web and its users evolve. It does not follow a blueprint or a masterplan, nor are there any "owners" of the web (although there are groups, organizations and foundations that have a huge influence over the underlying technologies).
That is, quite certainly, one of the things that make it so attractive and interesting.
The inherent and unavoidable byproduct of the web's chaotic nature is that its players need to update the way they conduct business and interact with customers in order to stay in top of the game and maximize the potential revenue stream.
Companies that fail in such endeavor will struggle and loose market share, those that excel and can keep themselves in top of the game will have the upper hand and boost sales and conversions.
One of the rules of the web that is rapidly shifting is the idea of the corporate website as the centerpiece of a company's on-line life. This was true in 2001, somewhat true in 2006 and completely wrong in 2010.
Behemoth websites are only part of a very complex web ecosystem, they should no longer be treated as the sole departure or destination point of any web-based activity. I have already stated this much almost 2 years ago.
The general direction in which web-based users ponder around the interwebs has changed quite a bit in the past years. Instead of a single direction of searching and/or accessing websites and interacting solely with vendors at their home sites we're seeing a shift towards people interacting with companies and other people at social networks. This can have a huge impact in the way we all shop online.
Welcome to the social shopping.
There are plenty studies out there in the wild that state how users rely more on peer reviews than on anything Marketing tells them, so I'm not going to focus on that part of the discussion at all. Assume you know as much.
Truth is that although many web-marketers know that fact is that there are only a handful of companies taking partial advantage of the power social networking yield over shopping behavior.
This has a lot to do with walled gardens. Social activities, shopping, pre-shop research all seem to happen in parallel universes. There is a disconnection between all of this things that is in part a product of all of them living in separate and unconnected systems and partially because no one has cared to try to create a single, seamless experience for the user.
The thing is that people spend (and share) more and more parts of their lives through the internet and all of that information and willingness to do stuff on the web has a potential yet to be unleashed.
The Proposal.
There are 3 basic premises for online shopping that we should look forward meeting as vendors:
- Convenience
- Fun
- Ease of use
I have also talked about how "fun" should be a key part of the e-commerce experience in the past.
Social Networks can add part of that fun component. But they can also add a the convenience and ease of use components. Potentially at least.
Facebook announced a timid partnership strategy with PayPal that is restricted to 2 very specific use cases:
- Paying for Ads
- Facebook Credits (a virtual goods environment aimed mostly at game users)
We had talked about this Jeremiah Owyang a couple of years ago and he dares to state that this move could be a testing ground for facebook to dip its toe in the e-commerce waters (although company representatives contacted J. to say that what is going on is all that is going on).
There is a huge unleashed potential in this, lets picture a scenario here for a moment.
Imagine that facebook (and other Social Networks) decide to open up e-commerce capabilities, working as a 3rd party identity provider. Users could then go into facebook, click on an ad or other users' status that lead to an app within facebook that allows them to buy goods using their tied facebook-to-paypal identity to complete the transaction.
There are several advantages for both the user, the 3rd parties and the companies involved:
- The users would only need to input confirmation data for security reasons, no more huge forms.
- Social networks can charge small fees for every transaction, shifting the current ad-based model to a broader income model with several income sources.
- Companies would benefit because they could boost sales through e-tail, at lower costs and higher margins.
Now, this would only be scratching the surface of the potential implications of social shopping. There could be all sorts of apps and functions tied with the process. Out of the top of my head I can think of functions that would allow users to brag about their newly acquired goods and rub them in their friends faces (something that would also tempt others to buy).
Also users could serve as advisors and could get discounts for referring their friends to a certain vendor. None of this is entirely new. Most of this things are already being exploited by online games such as Farmville. Yes, it can get annoying, but it is also very effective.
Finally support is also going to have a social component. It is true that many companies have forums and other peer-to-peer support systems, but I have yet to see one that can unleash the massive number of users social networks have to add them as listening ports and peer-to-peer help.
I also think Twitter might have a big role on all of this but I'll leave that for another post.
The idea of the corporate-site-centric web marketing is bound to disappear; they will still occupy an important place; similar to what it is today, yet less preponderant. Still their major role in the "commerce powered by social media" era is going to be as data feed providers.
Space Invaders (the Death of Conversation)
Markets are conversations. Then Marketers shout. Thus Marketers screw up conversations.
The logic is overwhelming.
10 years ago, a nice book called The Cluetrain Manifesto was published. It changed everything.
Wait.
That needs rephrasing.
10 years ago, a nice book called The Cluetrain Manifesto was published. Some of us thought it would change everything. (In my case it was the first Marketing book I ever read, back in 2000 -in English and while I studied music and worked for a construction company).
The book, in case you live in a cave, starts with 95 theses. The first one reads:
Markets are conversations.
What a revelation! So obvious. In the era of Facebook and Twitter, the time of "online friends", now that the blogs raised and died it is apparently so true.
True, but wrong.
(Yes, I love contradictions)
Marketers have invaded spaces where people lurk (it is the means to the end, right?). They have done so ever since the advent of mass media. When radio become popular advertising surged as almost natural. Then came TV.
Of course those types of media inherently go in one direction; so if someone did not like the presence of publicity there wasn't much they could do.
Then came the internet.
And something seemed to be different. The advent of the social web brought a promise of a different type of Marketing. One that would listen. One that would talk looking into the customer's eye. One that would be a conversation, much like Cluetrain proposed.
And then us (marketers) screwed it up. Conversations didn't quite have the impact we were used to with mass media. We needed more bang for the buck. We wanted more. We started shouting again. We went back from conversation to publicity.
But Marketers are not the only ones to be blamed, the recipients share part of the shame. Both in an active and a passive way.
The public is to blame because it allows their spaces to be invaded by vacuous marketing messaging. The most bluntly example of this becomes apparent with the usage of client-generated content to power marketing campaigns. This would be more acceptable if consent were not tacit but deliberate, but that is usually not the case. Maybe letting advertisements into our own private spaces is a price too high to pay to use many services.
The audience is also to blame because many have tried to take advantage of the few marketers that actually tried to do things differently, of the couple of crazy dudes that actually tried to talk. When I read news that state that a mommy blogger tried to bribe George Smith (Online Marketer) for a pair of crocs at BlogHer I feel saddened.
Thus when a Marketer tries to have a conversation this comes out as the result.
Yet that is deserved. Seth Godin's phrase "all marketers are liars" still applies. Or should I say: Applies today more than ever before.
In the mass media reign days lies were openly displayed and people "bought" them somewhat knowingly. Today things have become more dense, obscure and mangled. Most marketers have a discourse that says that they are part of the conversation, ("hey we even have a corporate blog!"), they find alternative ways to let the customers know about products and services ("we just placed a banner on facebook and MSN!") and have youth and massive appeal with lower than average investment ("we have this viral video you'll love") .
It is all lies. At least on most cases.
Viral videos are pushed to front pages using fake accounts and bots. Advertising, even on the internet, is just that: friggin advertising, not a "new way to deliver the message". Yes, even if you publish your Ad on a social network, it is still an ad. Most corporate blogs delete anything resembling negative comments; so much for open conversation. Not to mention the shallowness of the content and the fact that PR firms handle that instead of the actual, flesh and bone employees.
Metrics are inflated on a daily basis. Results are overrated. Everything is false.
Phony Social Network users, fake fans, non-existing facts and figures, pay-per-post. So much for transparency. So much for conversation.
I don't know about you, but when I talk I don't shout. Shouting defeats the purpose.
The marketers excuse for such type of behaviors is that, amidst so much noise, if they don't go above the mean murmur they would pass by inadvertently. If that is the case maybe what you are saying is not that interesting. Screaming about it is not going to make it any more appealing (or true, or conversational).
But then again, coming up with relevant content and doing thinks that can go "viral" just due to to their own weight and creativity requires thinking, inspiration and hard work. Those things are not readily available.
Thus it is Mediocre (social) Marketers and irresponsible customers who have killed conversation for the rest of us.
Thanks, much appreciated.
Now, lets cut the crap and lets all just say what we are really doing.
Flickr Viral
I despise viral. I hate most of the attempts to do viral crap. It is rather amusing to see companies spend big bucks on Agencies with the hope that a video (the usual suspect for virality) will make it to YouTube's home page and score a big hit in terms of views. This sort of strategies tend to fail, even when they do score big numbers. And scoring big numbers is getting increasingly difficult.
Yesterday we had a very interesting day at work. Let me recap how things turned out first.
A couple of weeks ago Engadget published some shots of a small Pocket PC that were snugged out of our Beijing headquarters. This was rare. We usually keep concepts strictly confidential and behind closed doors. Yet it leaked. What to do?
David Churbuck decided it was time to put our money where our mouth was and contacted the Beijing design labs team, discussed the possibility of going open on it and so it was decided. We needed to be clear on what that shots actually were. Transparency, remember?
We were to publish a blog post on Friday. After editing and prepping the post I uploaded the pictures to the flickr account, marking them as "private" so none would see them but me.
I also started a little tease on twitter, using our @lenovosocial account:
Calls to newly posted pictures at twitter
The idea was to create some expectation towards the blog post. To be honest, that didn't work. At all.
Thus came Monday. We made the final adjustments to the post and, since I needed to insert the images into the post I marked them as "public" in flickr. Hell gates went wide open.
Within minutes the pics were picked by the main gadget / tech sites. We know they watch our flickr stream, but not that closely. While I was prepping to publish it went crazy.
We were expecting some level of visibility, but this wildly surpassed our expectations. Our aim was that the blog post should get the attention, not the pictures.
What ended up happening was a 2 wave shock. While many sites and blogs talked about the pictures and went into wild speculations about what that little pocket-fitting-thing would actually do we were publishing the official story. After pushing that live and starting to draw attention to it there were updates all over the place, letting people know that what they were looking at was a concept.
There were many lessons learnt. Most of those shall be kept private for the time being. The ones I can share with you here are:
- Content is still king (even when content is just pictures)
- "Viral" will happen in unexpected ways. And the not-so-prefabricated virals go to greater lengths than the agency stunt ones.
- Innovative design is the key for a company in the PC industry
Things didn't play exactly as planned, but they turned out nicely nonetheless.
(Post en español!)
Make it fluid
Last December I wrote a post on shopping process. One of the main premises on that post was that e-commerce should be entertaining, it should somehow captivate the customers and drive them through the entire thing while making it an enjoyable experience:
Entertainment.
Buying stuff should be fun. Or as close to fun as it can get. It must be a pleasurable experience. Once we understand that our abandonments will invariably go down.
Today, on my daily sweeping read of my Google reader I find out, thanks to Churb, that Craig Merrigan, VP of Consumer at Lenovo has joined the merry band of bloggers in the ranks of the company.
So I click the link and head over to this newly-found reading material. What do I see? The very first post I set my eyes on is talking about e-commerce, and from a perspective that has several contact points with what my personal opinion is.
(...) during my round trip to and from the milk, I munch a free sample, and grab a box of fudgesicles, knowing that my kids’ enthusiasm will counteract my wife’s annoyance.
When we build e-commerce sites, certainly we need to know what the customer wants, and give it to them. But we also need to use our spiffiest analytical tools to optimize two things: profit (dollars, not percent) and Net Promoter Score.
Yes!
One carrot for every site visitor
So, what would happen if we combine this thoughts on making the Shopping process entertaining and tempting our customers with extra treats with that other thing that has become a buzzword lately: Targeted ads.
Forget about the “ads” part for the time being. Lets just concentrate just on the Targeted part instead.
Using smart analytics, a powerful CMS and some multivariate wizardry e-commerce sites have the potential to create a unique experience for each customer that arrives to the site.
E-commerce has three main advantages over Grocery stores: 1) you don’t have to physically move products from one side to another, shifting aisles and pushing fridges, 2) you can track every single visitor and see how they behave and 3) you know where the visitors come from and, to a certain extent, in some cases even why.
With that in mind it is quite natural to imagine scenarios where visitor segmentation serves the purpose to profile each visit and build the e-commerce experience accordingly.
Granted, the approach would require massive investment in both Analytics and CMS, but the payoff should be huge. If the analytics team can profile and breakup visitors into smartly differentiated groups (natural search visitors, ad visitors, affiliate program referrals, coupon page referrals, etc.), pass along that information to the publishing / developer / user experience people and they, in turn can create experience that present stuff in ways that maximize the buying potential of each segment you’d have a winning recipe.
Multivariate tests should help determine what works for each segment.
In-site behavior should also be tracked, studied and used to present the visitors with different options according to the path they take.
This can be taken to various levels of complexity, and an investment & experimentation to revenue ratio would be determined. In other words: how much to invest, experiment and segment to obtain the highest return.
Another ingredient comes from a suggestion Mark made in the comments of my December post:
Reading what people write about your site shopping experience can fill in the gaps in analytics. Sites like Bizrate gather customer comments, and of course, blogs and forums are another great place to learn about the barriers to purchase one may have unknowingly created.
So Social Media (monitoring) can also play an active role in enhancing conversion rates and customer spending on e-commerce websites.
The final piece would be a dashboard that "adjusts" the settings under special circumstances. It is not the same to have an e-commerce site during the seasons than in Mid September when nothing happens. Since such events can be planned, they should be planned.
Stir together, cook for 90 minutes and you’ll end up with a “Fluid e-commerce experience”.
We don’t all have the same tastes, why should our shopping experience be dull and unique for all the population? The tools exist, the expertise exists, and some sites already run similar experiments.
Finally I encourage you to go ahead to his site and subscribe to the feed. It looks like we have another very eclectic blog at hand.
A morning with Avinash
After waking up early and coping with morning rush hour traffic accross the city I finally made it to Puerto Madero in order to attend Google's event featuring Avinash Kaushik as its sole star.
The event was scheduled at 9:30 AM, and it only started at 10:30... oh well.
Presentation title is: "Accountability, Analytics & You"
"I want to share with you what is possible to do through the web"
Avinash starts by presenting his book, "Web Analytics an Hour a Day". People pay for something that is free (through his blog). He started as a blog. He is passionate about it, takes risks.
"It is astounding that a company (google) that does no Advertising has so much power". Well, the "no advertising" is relative, IMHO, we see google everywhere, on every online add, ain't that advertising of sorts?
"Faith Based Initiatives": How can the success of an Ad in a magazine be measured? An ad on Yahoo's homepage for the same product is not a faith based initiative, because it is relevant and can be measured.
Online Marketing: not faith based initiative.
"I am not telling you not to run ads on magazines, just telling you that it is not as accountable as the web".
As with everything in life analytics can be as complicated as you want, but it is easy to start with it.
"Google holds your trust with us as the most important thing we can ever have, we realize how fragile it is. If you share your Analytics data is just used to benchmark; if you choose not to share there is a legally binding term that prevents us to share it".
"Nothing I'm going to share with you is unique to Google Analytics, you can use any tool"
Showing Geo segmentation, content segmentation, how to break down data within Google Analytics.
"Bounce rate is one of my favorite metrics. I think it is a sexy metric, I love it because beyond pageviews and visits (which are analytics currency) it shows the user experience, it shows how much you suck"
"I came, i puked, i left, that is bounce rate"
"It is also a very actionable item."
"Look at the top entry pages in your website and see which of those suck".
Avinash is analyzing Clarin.com; it has 419 links, not counting buttons. They fotocopy the newspaper and make it a website. Shares http://tr.im/hmSG which is an article that tells where newspapers are going.
Measuring Success
Reports should be focused on outcomes. What you should care about (and what your boss cares about) is how much money you made.
"We improved customers satisfaction by n%" is another possible outcome, that can be shared.
"Life is not like a one night stand, people come many times to your website. You have to understand the behavior of the customers on your website" (picture of a conversion funnel).
"3 pages can account for most bounces. You can fire most of your company, fix those 3 pages and make a lot more conversions"
"It is idiotic to measure the number of members, it is not important how many sign up to your site (Using facebook as example, but when they start actioning on the site. If you are Facebook you want people to come over and over again, you need to analyze whether people spend a lot of time on the site or not"
Shows an example that shows that 66% of people return within the day to the website"
"A newspaper should measure the depth of the visits, this makes you think very differently about your business"
"See what the important segment of people need and want from your site. Take a look at people who puked and left, try to understand why they left"
"70% of the people working on a Newspaper we recently analyzed were writing content with a high bounce and no - return rate"
"The average convertion rate for the US on e-commerce sites is 1.72%. What was happening to the other 98%? It is very important that you quantify the value of that 98%. You can set different goals to see if there are other types of conversions"
"In my blog I measure hits to my about page, it makes me happy, in your company measure the ammount of people who visit the executives page, they will love it, they wont admit it, but they'll love it."
"All of the clicks on my blog are tagged, because the conversions happen elsewhere"
"The web is also reducing costs, there are a lot of different conversions of different types going on"
"Look at the whole company, always compute the total economic value of the site. For example, in my last company we saved $3,000 in consultants each time someone applied jor a job through the website"
"If you do adwords don't just measure visits and pageviews"
"Getting Visits is OK, making money is astounding"
"In my blog I had 64K visitors, 23K came from Search Engines, searching 11,5K different keywords. That is the power of the web. How do you find those keywords? You can use 'search based keyword tool', what the tool does is bringing the search queries and the indexed pages back together"
"Custom reporting: every individual needs and is interesting in a different set of metrics"
"When you don't segment your data don't be surprised when you can't make any important decisions"
Last part of the the talk: "Fail Faster; Experiment or 'Die'"
"Most web sites suck because the HIPPOS (Highest Paid Person's Opinion) created them. Never let your Hippo think they are the customer of the website. You need to prove them wrong fast. I recommend you use google website optimizer. I worked with a company that reduced the number of ads in their web page by 30% and increased their ROI"
"Don't guess, don't impose, Partner."
"Competitive Intelligence"
Analyze trends, Identify Audience in smarter ways. You can even look at the competitor's trends and audience of your competition.
Q&A
"If you share your data on Google Analytics you get access to 6 different metrics as benchmarks"
"Privacy is extremely important. People will share data with you if you are clear enough about what you are collecting. Google has created a plugin that prevents google from collecting data. We believe that Yahoo! and Microsoft will follow this trust mechanisms."
"A+B testing makes each website more unique. A good example in teh US is if you go to BestBuy and CircuitCity websites, they look alike. Circuit City filled for bankrupcy, Best Buy invests on targeting their audience and testing to optimize the site for their audience"
"There are few things that are shared by most sites. Internal searh (on top right) is one of them. Carts are usually to the right, but a site improved conversions by moving it to the left"