The Worst Kept Secret and Biggest Disappointment

Tuesday, November 27th, 2007

Facebookto remove ‘is’… or so we were told. The news leaked out in a Wired story and was picked up across the world. And it seems it was removed for about all of three hours (I don’t have personal experience – but that’s what the various FB groups are saying) and has been back for days.

Why is this such a disappointment? Not because it’s still there (well, okay maybe a little…), but because no one from FB has responded publicly – that I can find – either on the site or in any of the stories or blogs that wrote about this.

There are at least 20 groups on FB asking to remove this, including one with over 100,000 members. I suppose that’s not a huge amount when you consider FB has millions of users, but it boils down to FB ignoring their loyal customers.

Social media is about engaging and interacting in conversation – FB is one of such tools that has helped people do that in spades. However, by ignoring this and talking about all the other wonderful updates the site made, it’s simply hypocritical.

I’m addicted to FB myself, but have lost a lot of respect for them over this. Why create a tool designed to share information (as well as making connections) when it is obvious after this that the creators are not actually open to sharing with those who use their site?

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27.11.2007 Facebook, social media No Comments

What Ad Blockers Mean for Web Advertising

Wednesday, November 21st, 2007

I’ve been sitting on this post for a while, considering how to weigh in. I think I always knew what I was going to say, but wasn’t sure if it should be said. Then I realized I think most of us feel this way and it has been said before and will continue to be said – just not heard very often.

BANNER ADS SUCK. Call it display, web ads, whatever you want to call it, but at the end of the day with click through rates falling and a host of other more inventive ways to get your message on the web, they are just more noise than they are worth.

To effectively create a banner ad, you need to consider multiple things, placement on the page (i.e. please stop putting Calls to action at the bottom of skyscrapers.. you don’t see it unless you scroll – and really whose going to scroll to look at an ad? It’s not the reason you went to the website in the first place), audience, and even the website itself amongst other things.

Unless you know your media buyers ensured little to no duplication in terms of the number of units that might show up at once, you’ll want to make sure each format you have will be designed differently so that even though it’s the same message, you will have more chance of it being seen. Otherwise you’ll look like your product just wallpapered the site you’re on with one ad in three different sizes. Boring.

Getting your creative team, or agency to create ads like that, takes a lot of time and a lot of money. It’s not like a simple resize of a print ad, each ad unit needs to be created to its own spec and size. Seems like a lot of work for click trhough rates of 0.2-0.3% or lower (okay – or higher if you do more interactive ads, but then double the cost and time required to produce).

So then comes in the portls and sites who argue about the benefits of branding and the millions of eyeballs that saw your ad. But what if they didn’t? It used to be if your ad server indicated an impression served it meant that at the very least you had a potential eyeball.

Not any more – ad blockers are becoming more and more popular and should be becoming a big concern for advertisers, publishers, agencies and the industry in general.

According to an iMedia Connection article on this, more than 2.5 million people have already downloaded the AdBlock Plus plug in for the FireFox browser. It means that they can surf the web the way they want without any ads.

This should be a big concern for media buyers and advertisers who are forced into CPM buys. How do you know that you’re really paying for impressions that were truly served and not blocked? When determing response rate – how do you look at your CTR and determine if it’s truly accurate? What if 5-10% of your impressions were never served because of an ad blocker? That would change everything.

Personally, I think this is a good thing for the industry for a few reasons…

1. It will force publishers (especially some large major Canadian portals) to start lowering their CPM prices and look at other pricing models for advertisers.
2. It will force the industry to find new ways to measure banner ads and determine their effectiveness.
3. Publishers will be required to find new, more relevant ways of creating advertising and sponsorship packages in order to bring in the bacon from advertisers.
4. It will force advertisers and their agencies to be creative and to start looking beyond the banner ad and into things like content integration, social media and other relevant ways to reach their consumers and target audience online.

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21.11.2007 online advertising 4 Comments

My New Favourite Site

Monday, November 19th, 2007

I may be a marketer – but I too am a consumer – and as a result of both those things I have to give credit to one of the most brillant sites I’ve come across in a long time.

Ihatedoorknocking.com is nothing more than a marketing ploy – but one that couldn’t resonate better with its target market if it tried.

As a homeowner, I often get those knocks on my door asking to see my gas bill to ensure I am getting the “discount” on my utility bill that I should be. Give me a break – share my personal information and account number with some stranger? I don’t think so. This site takes that experience and pokes fun at it in every possible way.

You can print door hangers and watch a few comical videos on how to get rid of door knockers. My favourite is the turning of the tables using the second most annoying door knocking example out there (the third one down).

I don’t remember the last time I laughed so hard at a marketing campaign.

I first heard the commercials on the radio several months ago and confess though I’d always been meaning to go to the site – I didn’t get there until today. However, they were so memorable that not only did the url stick in my mind all this time, I told several people about the commercial and the site without even having visited it. That’s word of mouth marketing if I ever experienced it.

When you get to the site – it’s very obviously sponsored by
RiteRate, an online energy utility company. However, it is not shoved down your throat and nowhere on this microsite can you get a quote. If you’re interested, you can click through to their site and get one. Yet the entire time, they encourage you to “stay a while” on the microsite and “have some fun.” The site has tons of little goodies including “tall tales” told by door knockers, knock-knock jokes, the top-ten list of good door-knockers (including the kiddies who trick or treat and cookie-selling-Girl Guides), and of course the ability to report door knocker sightings in your neighbourhood.

This is a great example of branding as well as subtle marketing that allows the consumer to come to you. They’ve taken the most annoying aspect of selling gas and turned it into a statement about their brand and their respect for customer service. By not including a quoting engine on their microsite they are staying true to their statement that the customer should take all the time they need to make an informed decision. I am not a customer of RiteRate (yet), but one of my other browser windows currently open is their site so I can get more information – because after working so hard to prove they offer more than just a price difference to me, I definitely deserve to ‘hear’ them out and see what they can offer.

The only thing I would do to improve the site – add more interactivity. Allow users to create and upload their own videos of how to get rid door knockers. Also, instead of just posting door knocking alerts, allow people to email these (and share the site) to their friends and neighbours. This has great legs for a wonderful viral campaign, but requires the user to work at creating this, something I ‘knock’ them for.

Kudos to the creators behind this idea and site though – absolutely brilliant.

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19.11.2007 online marketing, viral marketing No Comments

TwitterDee and TwitterDum

Friday, November 16th, 2007

I must confess – I have yet to really spend a lot of time with Twitter, but I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about it and trying to wrap my head around it.

I get what it is supposed to be, that’s not the hard part, what I can’t really understand though – and maybe because I have yet to “see” – is the marketing opportunities it holds.

I’ve spent the last few days asking opinions of several people I know about Twitter (which describes itself as: a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?) and their opinion of it.

It seems most people I know have joined because they were curious – not because they think it is the next best thing. And to be honest, most people I know have given up on it after a short period of time and I have to say I’m coming to that same conclusion.

In this day and age of social media clutter and overload, another service to tell my friends what I am up to seems more trouble than it is worth. After all – isn’t that what Facebook is for now? Perhaps Twitter was great before the land of FB – who knows, I can’t really say one way or another since I hadn’t brought myself to get an account until just recently.

What is somewhat interesting though is that according to Alexa, it’s traffic spiked dramatically in April and has been up and down in spikes since then. Perhaps last night’s mention CSI will give it yet another spike. Who are the people on Twitter? I’m not sure, but I do know it seems a lot of marketing folk are on it which begs the question of whether or not there’s more marketing people communicating with one another than with potential consumers or customers…

I do know that you can incorporate the best of both worlds so to speak and add Twitter into your FB account, but I also know people who have had many issues with compatibility once having integrated the two. Again though, it just seems kind of like a bit of overkill to me.

In my conversations about Twitter this week, I think someone hit the nail on the head with a great comment.

“The big thing is, if no one’s “following” you on Twitter, you might as well be talking to the wind.”

Well said and I think the perfect answer to why I am having such a hard time wrapping my head around yet another social media application.

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16.11.2007 Twitter, social media 2 Comments

Flickr’s Mistake in User Experience

Friday, November 9th, 2007

I was setting up an account for a client on Flickr today and had a pretty bad user experience.

My client happened to have a very long email address that would be used for their alternate contact info and Flickr wouldn’t take it. It was cut off before I could finish entering all of the charactrs. While I searched for a way to inform them of this error or find a way to know exactly how many characters they allowed in an email address, it was to no avail. I actually had to ask for a shorter/secondary email address in order to create this account; it was somewhat embarrassing.

Here’s a few simple tips to creating forms with the best possible user experience in mind.

1. Always let the user know how many characters they have when creating usernames, passwords or providing email addresses. Supplying information including any special requirements – either in text below, or in a little question mark pop up to the right of the field will keep user frustration to a minimum.

2. Let the user know how many steps, or how long it will take them to fill out this information. If your form is long, try a percentage complete bar and if it’s short – a simple step x of x, or “This will take less than x minutes to complete” will do.

3. If your form is long, ensure that you actually allow users to save their information and come back at a later time to complete or finish it, as life doesn’t always allow you to do things in one sitting. Nothing is worse then getting halfway or more through the form and having some kind of technical malfuction or other interuption that erases it all (as I also recently experienced while trying to fill out a five-page form on another site).

4. Contact information – when creating contact information fields, think of where your users may be located. If your users will be only from one country, then consider using short fields that are the exact length of the information they have to enter and automatically tab over to each place (For example in Canada postal code could be broken up into two fields of three and once three characters are entered, you could program it to automatically tab over so there’s no error in entering information and the user understands how you would like it collected/entered – spaces or no spaces). If you will likely have many users from multiple countries, than something like that likley doesn’t make sense, unless you spend the time programming your fields to update based on country chosen.

5. Required information and error notices. The most frustrating part of filling out forms for a user usually comes down to one of two things – either not knowing what information is mandatory – or not properly being able to identify what errors occured in an easy to figure out fashion.

Both of these items happened when signing up for my client’s Flickr account. Not knowing my client’s birthday, I didn’t put it in. The instructions on the sign up page simply tell you to answer a few easy questions – and don’t specify that they are all required. When I tried to create the account it didn’t seem to work, I wasn’t directed to a thank you page and I seemed to still be on the same form. I didn’t get an error message (or so I thought). After clicking to create again, I did some investigating and scrolled up to find out that there was a little red exclamation point beside the birthday box indicating that it was required.

Better user experience? After either clearly identifying (with symbols, or better text) what is mandatory for the user to complete. Program the form so that if an error occurs, it will automatically jump to the field in question and identify the mistake and possibly provide solutions to resolve the problem; or have the error message appear at the bottom of the form in a place that is easy to find, rather than making the user work to find out the problem, and again, identifying how to rectify the situation, isn’t such a bad idea.

At the end of the day, the most important piece of advice is this: If your user has to work so hard to sign up for your service, chances are you are going to lose a whole lot of potential clients or leads in the process. In this day and age when time is a commodity, wasting minutes means wasting money and no will waste their own money on a bad experience if they have an alternative.

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09.11.2007 online marketing, user experience No Comments

Online Banking Experience Discourages Loyalty

Wednesday, November 7th, 2007

After nearly 11 years of loyal service with one bank, a few frustrations of not being able to access my money when I want (low daily cash limits don’t work for contractors) and the promise of Airmiles and I forgot my loyalty faster than you can say Debit Card.

After my experience this past week/weekend – I am happier than ever that I made the decision I did. End of the month comes, every one knows – it is time to pay bills. So I log on to pay the non-automated bills that have not yet switched over to the new account and think I’ve paid them because I get reference numbers – but see a strange note that also says they didn’t go through.

I decide to leave it for a day – and log on the next day seeing that in fact nothing was paid. So I call the bank, who decides to tell me that my card had been compromised and my account was frozen. They can’t tell me how my card was compromised or when. I know I haven’t actually used that account in a couple of weeks and start thanking my lucky stars that I have two accounts and automated payments like my mortgage are coming out of the new account.

Then I get mad – I didn’t get a single kind of notification – no email, no letter, no phonecall and start to imagine how embarrassing it would have been if I had been in line at the grocery store with a cart full of groceries. I ask the client service rep how to fix this and he explains that I have two hours to get to a pavilion and change my pin, or I will have to go into a kiosk with two pieces of ID and get a whole new bank card.

Well I definitely can’t get in within two hours – so on the weekend off I go to the kiosk (yes this is a non-traditional bank), hand over my pieces of ID and get a new card – still with no information available to me on how or when my card was compromised.

Home I go and decide to log in and check my account, okay I can get in; so I decide to log in to my rewards account – one of the reasons I was loyal to this bank, until they changed the program providing very few points for my every day loyalty – only to get an error message. It tells me the account number can’t be found..

On the phone I get, talk to a CSR who proceeds to tell me – “Oops turns out we didn’t take the hold off your account. Hold on and I will get a manager to do that.” While she’s off doing that – I realize that I only provided my first and last name and bank card number. Previously to find out my card had been compromised – I had to provide a whole host of information, plus all the identification at the kiosk. Great security. The CSR comes back and tells me everything has been sorted out and tells me to have a great day.

Back I go to log into the account – and sure enough – I still can’t. On the phone I get again, to which I am now told I actually have to call the rewards people and the bank has nothing to do with it (wait – why didn’t they tell me that the first time?).

So I call the rewards people who decide to tell me that there could be any number of reasons why I can’t get in to the site – but telling me them probably won’t help any. Say what? What kind of customer service is that? I tell the CSR to humour me and he starts reading off options – to which I stop him after number 2.. And ask if a new card number would be considered a new account (a new account can take 5 business days to be activated or reactivated), to which he replies “Of course.”

Shaking my head, I explain that would then be the reason I am not able to access my account – to which the bell finally goes off and he explains why yes, yes it is. Then he proceeds to tell me if I happen to apply for a credit card with them – I could get a number and get in faster and that would solve all my problems. Right.. nice upsell, great way to service a customer.

Long story short, I still can’t get in and the left hand doesn’t seem to know how to talk to the right hand. I’ve learned that while I can log in to both accounts from the same application, they actually aren’t connected to one another. I’ve also learned my old bank had zero sense to let one of their loyal customers know (even an email – or an automated message in my online message centre would have been great) that something has happened to their card/account. In fact – they let me try to pay my bills all the while sending me mixed messages about whether the bill was actually paid.

Banks need to learn that customers do expect something for their loyalty these days – especially with all the different rewards programs out there. But what they don’t realize is it could be as simple as starting with the best customer service out there – both offline and online. And perhaps letting customers know when something has happened and they won’t be able to access their own hard-earned money.

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07.11.2007 Integrated marketing No Comments