Non-Line Blogging

Ford versus Ling's Cars. Email Address Gathering

2010-05-21T08:50:36Z

Let me start with an apology.

Dear Ford, I am sorry that your email registration is so bad that for 3 years I have been using it as an example of how not to do it. I am the owner of a Ford Galaxy and a Ford Fiesta and have owned more Fords than any other car brand. My mother recently bought her 14th Ford car and so it is in my genes to be brand loyal. It's only because I care that I choose to write about my on-line experience. So there.

Now I've got that out of my system here's the business issue: The aim of an email marketing programme should be to acquire, convert and retain customers. When we focus on the start of this process we should be looking to convert as many vaguely interested web visitors into qualified prospects by encouraging them to part with an email address or some other direct relationship (RSS subscriber, or Twitter follower, or Facebook Fan, and so on).

I'd like to think of these as "visitor-based micro-conversions". Having the mechanism to get back in touch with people is an important first step in a long sales process. So, maybe one of the most important things you can work on is turning a visit into a lead, and I did a little blog on that a year ago to help you with the maths.

Gentlemen, start your engines

OK, which one of these 2 sites do you think offers the best email registration experience?

Now, on first impressions it's a walk-over. The sleek engineering of the Ford site will power past poor old Ling's Cars and their (deliberately) amateur look and feel. And yet...

First challenge is to find the button that allows people to sign up. It's in the top navigation on Ling's site and also a long way down the right hand content bar. It's an image with a recognisable "Email Updates" or "Get Car Updates" heading. In one click I am on my way.

However, on the Ford site there is no obvoius link for people to begin an email relationship. The call to action people may be looking for is something like "click here to sign up for our newsletter", but it's nowhere to be seen on the Ford site.

Right at the very bottom of the left hand navigation is a cryptic "keep me informed" link. Could this be the one we need to follow? Who knows. So, in terms of clarity of the navigation, Ling's Cars is a bit ahead in the race to generate a registration...even though it is harder to find, the objective is clearly shared.

Lap 2 - what happens next?

In my breathless haste to sign-up for the Ford newsletter I click on the least important link on the home page (that's what the Home Page Committee thinks of the importance of building relationships eh?). I go to a new page that is strangely deviod of any of the magic and sparkle that was on the home page. It is as if I have arrived at a completely new site, designed in about 1975.

Where is the persuasive momentum in that journey? There is nothing on this page suggesting that this is the right journey, how long it will be and what the rewards will be. It's a leap of faith to click a button and proceed to the next page. But, as you know, I love Ford and so I click the New Galaxy box and click in faith...

Meanwhile, on Lings Cars, I'm on a page that delivers the value proposition, asks questions with explanations why you need to share the data and it is all done in a seamless, humorous way. It's pretty good.

Not only that, the Ling's Cars registration page is dynamic, using client side rules to make the experience swift and painless. And how about this for humour...the map of the UK alters dynamically based on your Post Code selection and comes up with some on-brand opinions about where you live...its about as fun as email registration gets...well done Ling!

Better still, as you work through the form more dynamic content appears...like images of the car make and model that you have selected. The whole process is engaging, relevant...even exciting!

Error Messages? Sorry again, Ford

In June 2008 I wrote a Blog piece entitled "The 1 Million Pound Error Message" and ventured to suggest that the way Ford told people off could be costing £1m of lost sales a year. It's a pity that 2 years on we still have the same error messages. Here is Ling's one, and beneath it Ford's version. I venture to suggest that Ling's Cars uses red imagery and rude tone of voice in a horrible font because they are pretending to be un-professional, whereas Ford....?

Anyway, my point here is that "error messages" should be called "sorry, we didn't explain things very well messages" and we should be using all our persuasive techniques to re-assure people that they should continue in their journey.

Page 3 - and Journey's end for Ling's Cars

Well, it's been a short, pleasant drive and we're greeted at our destination by Ling with a personalised landing page in the form of a sample email. Delightful. And at the same time a welcome email has pinged into my in-box and I am re-assured that everything is now under control. Put the kettle on. Have a cup of tea. After a little while look out the window and see if there is any sign of the Ford email registrant. I have a feel they are a very long way from home....

Where are they?

It's getting dark. the Ford subscribers should have been here hours ago. So you go out to find them and discover why they are so slow. On page 3 of the Ford registration we are asked for our Post Code. Now, that might be enough to dissuade plenty of people from going any further, and it seems a strange time to ask for such details. I think Steve Krug sums up my views with a cartoon from his excellent new book.

Anyway, as I LOVE the Ford brand I am willing to share my postal details and I get to the next page. But Ford have done the web equilavent of changing road signs at this stage of the journey: On most web sites the "next stage" button is at the bottom on the right, so I click on that button and find myself going round and round in circles wondering why they want my post code AGAIN. After a few loops of this process I see the right sign post and, clicking on the left hand button I get to the next page. This is what Her Majesty the Queen would see if she was popping her post code in...

Are we nearly there yet?

By now the passengers in the Ford car are getting a little fractious. They set off on this journey a long time ago and its taking much longer than planned. Only the people who REALLY want to get to the end will be still travelling (more of that in a minute). We round what we think is the last corner and we are greeted with the most confusing, demoralising page so far...

So, what a frightening form. And look at all those mandatory fields - Phone Number as well...so unless I share my phone number my whole journey has been a complete waste of time. Anyhow, let's just put our foot down, grit our teeth and drive on into the night and we should be home soon.

Eventually I get to a thank you page that does include my name, but there is little else to re-assure me that this is the start of a wonderful journey. I'm tired, stressed and not really sure what I will receive and when. A quick look in my in-box and, Surprise!, there is no welcome email for me.

What have we learned from all that?

Using Ford as a metaphor for any customer form we see that we should try and keep data gathering to a minimum, unless we are building the value exchange and encouraging people to keep going all the way. Think about "persuasive momentum" as people are going through the process, remembering to make your error messages and any other navigation as on-brand and encouraging as possible.

The delicious irony of all this is I reckon Ford probably get really good results from their email marketing...their open, click rates and outcomes are probably better than average. But they have probably put off most of the prospects due to the lenghty registration process and the people who make it to the end really really want a Ford car. Like me.

Happy motoring.

Move away from Moveable Type. Video and animation web experiences

2010-05-20T13:44:00Z

Two years ago I wrote a blog about engagement through video. I would like to think that the marketing world has embraced the delights of video and animation and taken web experiences onto the next level. I would have to confess that when I am wandering around the internet there still seem to be less rather than more sites delivering wonderfully engaging content.

Show me the money

Let's begin with the justification. Zappo's have found that adding video descriptions to products boosed conversion rates by 6 - 30%. This is such a big win that all organisations should be thinking about ways that they can integrate video and animation into their web experiences. If you don't want to justify it with traditional business metrics like making money, then how about "engagement"? There are more reports emerging into how people consume video via digital media and I am pleased to say that a brand new one for the media industry has been revealed by Brightcove . They conclude that for media sites video consumption is significant...

On-line video content from broadcast networks average 2:53 minutes watched per stream followed by music labels at 1:50 minutes and newspaper publishers with 1:41 minutes per stream.

I Bet your products are not as boring as these...

No disrespect to Cisco, but I personally cannot get very excited about their 800 Series Routers. This is a job for Osman Mohammad. Osman loves routers. He speaks about them with a passion and he'd loved to tell you about them right now. Go on, just click.

Osman can sell 800 Series Routers in his sleep. His passion for Routers cannot be communicated through the printed word. He never fluffs a presentation and he's never late. Osman is probably the most prolific sales rep Cisco has ever has. I hope he's on commission.

So, video is not just for cool sneakers - its for business products too.

Let's take another BtoB cracker. How do you sell an interactive white-board to schools? This is the most delightful animation I have come across with cartoon characters in sync with interviews with real teachers.

It's called "Teacher Comforts" and is drawing on some excellent animations from Nick Parks (of Wallace and Gromit fame) called Creature Comforts in the 1990's. Skip to the end to watch the out-takes...a leaf out of Toy Story's book!

How about video to explain things?

Here are 2 of my favourite "explanation" videos. I run a lot of digital marketing training courses and try to blend the Powerpoint and web learning style with some video content. CommonCraft is a company that continues to develop really simple, clear videos that inform and entertain. The one on the left is for "social bookmarking" but check out their site for plenty of others (I can even recommend the "US Election" explanation as a puzzled Brit!).

The video on the right is an explanation of ChatRoulette, the web phenomenon that seems to polarise opinion almost as much as Facebook did a few years ago. It's very very well deisgned and deserves a wider audience, so share with your friends - it's from a designer called Casey Neistat and is a lovely piece of work.

So there you have it. A quick round up of great animated experiences on-line and not a single YouTube logo in sight. But of course, if nothing else, find a home for all your video content on a branded YouTube page or on your Facebook pages.

Happy animation

The Best Election Email Ever?

2010-05-05T08:25:46Z

We're gripped with election fever in the UK right now. We're being told to vote with our hearts by some parties, and tactically with our heads by others. One thing we do know is that this election has been dominated by the old medium of TV and not silly old new media.

However, to show just what is possible, here is a great viral campaign from the Obama camp a couple of years ago. Pretend that you're called David Hughes (it's easy for me) and you've just been sent an email from a friend worried that non-voting will ruin Obama's chance of victory. Click on this link and enjoy great personalisation, fantastic re-statement of the issue and some really nice calls to action to spread the word.

http://bit.ly/9KQGkb

A good point well made, I think

Happy voting

Life Time Value - a free spreadsheet to help with all the tricky sums

2010-04-16T09:07:53Z

My last blog post in collaboration with Avinash Kaushik included a wonderful free souvenir. It was an Excel workbook that we created to help with all the tricky sums you'll need to crunch when you begin a life time value analysis of your business. The blog has generated lots of queries about the topic that we thought we would remind people there's a tool to help!

So, feel free to download the "Life Time Value Workbook" and use it to kick-start your LTV journey. One Worksheet helps you understand just how different your "best" and "average" customers may be. Simply plug in a few facts about order values, number of sales a year and how long they have been customers for and BINGO the spreadsheet shows you how much profit you make from different customer types.

The second worksheet takes you though a much more complicated LTV model for a specific customer segment. It lets you make projections up to 5 years ahead and builds in the "Net Present Value" calculations so that you can impress your Bean Counters that you recognise there is a risk involved in spending money on marketing.

One final thought. You'll need to do some rummaging around in buckets of data to get some of the customer information - don't expect it all to be waiting for you in your web analytics tool. For example, you may not have "repeat orders" consolidated for individual customers - you'll have to run a few reports to get a basic "single customer view" and then tot up their total spend and total orders for a given period.

Once you have that data, you can rank and segment the customers into best, average and worst. Or, by adding a source code, you could split your file down between "email list rental" versus "affiliate" customers, or people recruited by "price offers" versus "partner offers". You should be able to see patterns emegring that will have a profound impact on your future acquisition and retention activity.

Our blog and the comments will give you much more food for thought.

Enjoy!

Life Time Value - solving tomorrow's problems today

2010-04-06T07:23:32Z

I have been meaning to write a piece about life time value for many months. It's the most important metric for marketers focussed on optimising long term value for their organisations, yet in the digital world we have not really embraced it. This is partly because the industry is not old enough to need to worry about customer segment performance in 3 or 4 years time, so we could put it down to a "capability-maturity" thing.

However, as we drag ourselves out of recession now may be a great time to consider whether you are recruiting the "right" customers and using the "right" metric. By happy co-incidence I was invited by the wonderful Avinash Kaushik to work with him on a piece on life time value and the results of our endeavours can be found here on www.kaushik.net.

Happy reading!

Surprise me, don’t scare me – behavioural targeting and "dynamic serendipity".

2010-02-22T09:56:37Z

Here are a few definitions from Wikipedia to get the blog rolling:

Serendipity is the effect by which one accidentally stumbles upon something fortunate, especially while looking for something entirely unrelated

Behavioral targeting uses information collected on an individual's web-browsing behavior, such as the pages they have visited or the searches they have made, to select which advertisements to display to that individual

Stalking is a term commonly used to refer to unwanted attention by individuals (and sometimes groups of people) to others.

We’re not short of data in digital marketing. In fact, we’ve too much of the stuff. Let’s take the marketing of expensive holidays: Every couple of years in the Hughes household wanderlust overcomes us and a couple of weeks in delightful West Wales will not quite tick all the R&R boxes. So, sensing this restlessness, I venture onto a few travel web sites and see what destinations like Thailand may offer us that Wales can’t. (Sunshine seems to be the short answer).

20 years ago I went on a Kuoni holiday with my parents and, as it was a great success, I thought I’d check out the delights of Kuoni once again, so Googled the brand and went to their site. I say this to demonstrate that key drivers to branded search could well be deeply emotional , not just seeing a Kuoni banner a few days ago – oh! the perils of attribution modelling. Anyhow, I now left a rich stream of data across the Kuoni website and was maybe a couple steps nearer to knowing what I wanted.

Meanwhile in a distant galaxy far, far away...some analysts were piecing together this trail of data.

Total pages in session – check.
Depth of content viewed - check.
Total time on site – check.

We have engagement!

Cue the scary music.

A few days later I am on the Autotrader website looking to replace my recently-written off Fiat Punto (that’s a long story), and what appears before me – a display ad for Kuoni. But this is not any old banner – it has behavioural targeting under the bonnet:

“Thank you for visiting the Kuoni website” whispers the disembodied voice of the banner.

And then it gets a little more scary. A couple of page loads later, my stalker says

“Thank you for your interest in Thailand”

Now at this point some people may be looking over their shoulder to see if some Peeping Tom is behind all this. For hairy old digital marketers like me it’s not a problem – good luck to Kuoni for using all this data in a positive way. But I can’t help feeling that some customers out there will be a little spooked by all this, which leads onto my real point here...

The medium is the message.

I often use an Amazon email as an example of “as good as it gets” in digital marketing. A few months ago my TomTom SatNav died and I wandered on to Amazon to check out prices of a new one. 24 hours later I got this delightful email with the wonderful copy...

I’m a little more comfortable with this “email stalking” because the terms of engagement are different to display advertising: I leave myself logged in on Amazon because I can do useful things like “buy now with 1 click” and I expect Amazon not to shout general email offers at me...I am delighted when they notice things that could be worth re-visiting. Similarly, I like it when they say on the web site

“Hello David Hughes. We have recommendations for you”

They remind you of things you may have been looking at and fire up the old “collaborative filtering” engine to make things even more relevant for me. Virgin Atlantic have a delightful personalisation box in the “My Booking” area that reminds you how long it is until the next time we meet. They could probably serve that up to me as a banner when I’m on Autotrader, but just wouldn’t be right and proper, would it?

Less is more.

I may wish to keep myself anonymous in certain media, but expect/demand more personal touches at other times. I do not always expect to be singled out for personal treatment and when strangers start talking to me like long, lost friends I begin to feel uncomfortable. I’m talking here about a slight shift in creative tone that would have the same relevance but in a less threatening way...

“Latest ideas and greatest offers for Thailand Holidays”

...could have been equally powerful from Kuoni but with far less emotional damage! People like it when they "accidently" stumble upon something fortunate, especially when looking for something else unrelated! Maybe Amazon has mastered the science of "dynamic serendipity", where people think that stumbling upon relevant things is pure luck! After all, Amazon don't say:

Last night between 7.21pm and 7.28pm you viewed the Garmin Nuvi 225 pages for 4 minutes, the Navman S30 for 2 minutes and then you had a quick look at the Tom Tom ONE v4. Here are some special offers.

That would be stalking.

But, Behavioural Targeting is wonderful!

Wherever I have seen it used, behavioural targeting generally drives up opens, clicks, conversions, average order values and drives down costs per outcome. It may well be that Kuoni have tested the “less” versus “more” intrusive copy and the ones I didn’t like pushed up sales...so there, they would say. But for many consumers this “stalking copy” can create the wrong feeling, a sense that something sinister is happening on the interweb. It's a question of using the right tone and not relying too much on the data to drive the conversation. The whole BT industry nearly came clattering down in Europe a couple of years ago with Phorm and British Telecom’s sneaky attempts to get it in under consumers’ privacy radars. Let’s hope that over-friendly creative techniques don’t have a similar impact on people’s goodwill.

Don't be Mr Average. Why averages are a bad, bad thing in Digital Marketing.

2010-02-11T21:00:10Z

American author Will Rogers is attributed with this rather caustic one-liner from the 1930’s.

"When the Okies left Oklahoma and went to California, the average intelligence of both states went up."

It has since been used by many people, including Robert Muldoon, the former New Zealand Prime Minister, about his countrymen migrating to Australia. I’m proud to say that I am personally responsible for improving the average health of many cancer patients – another example of the “Will Rogers Phenomenon”. A while ago I was at the un-healthy end of the “Stage 2” cancer segment, but after a couple of scans and no change in my overall condition I was popped into the “Stage 4” cancer segment along with some really ill people. In that single action I had improved the “average health” of both segments . How barmy is that?

These examples show us that averages can be misleading and confusing. So, what do we get when we open up our web analytics reports or our email campaign dashboard? Averages! I’d like you to stay awake long enough to convince you that averages are a bad, bad thing in digital marketing and here’s why...

“Utterly Useless Average Metric” Number 1 – Site Conversion Rate

Let’s take an “average” site conversion rate. It’s probably 3%. That’s average. But just a couple of simple steps gets us to a better place – how about conversion rate between new and repeat visitors, or conversion rate by source of traffic? A couple of clicks and you’re somewhere exciting. As Avinash Kaushik would say “BAM!! Context, Baby!” You find that repeat visitors are probably 3 times more likely to convert than first-timers, or that people coming from your Facebook invitation-only group convert 10 times better than people clicking on banners. So get into some pretty basic segmentation to give some meaning to what you’re doing. Here’s how Matthew Tod of Logan Tod demonstrates it.

See, conversions from banners are much worse than “average” and conversions from previous customers is much higher than “average”. In short, it looks like people don’t buy on their first visit from any source, but will probably buy if they are returning visitors or past customers. We could drill further and find out what products drove highest re-purchase rates, or what creative/media gave the best conversion rate....there may be some winners lost among the “average”. More segmentation; more context; more correct actions taken!

“Utterly Useless Action” to improve average site conversion rates? Turn off your marketing.

I’d like to thank Matthew Tod for this one, too. Promotional activity will drive prospects to your site and they are unlikely to buy...but some of them will. Trouble is, they drag down the average conversion rate. So switch off all your campaigns and watch those averages soar. The only people who will come to the site will be your family, close friends and past customers - and they love you. Average conversion much better, sales volumes plummeting.

Be careful what you wish for.

“Utterly Useless Average Metric” Number 2 – Email Click-through rate

Here is a list of average metrics from Mailchimp.

Email marketers feel a sense of “market sector envy” creeping in as they look jealously at how big the averages are elsewhere. Art has a 26% click-through rate and Arts_Music has a feeble 5%. And what about Education getting a whopping 181% click-through rate? Does the average relate to how good they are compared to other sectors, and if you have a low average are you a bad, bad marketer?

The trouble here is that we are worrying about “soft” outcomes – even if we do improve our average open and click rates we will not necessarily improve our revenue, or net yield.

If you want to improve your click-through rate you could probably make everything you wanted people to know about on a web page.

"Find out how many points you earned last month - click here"

Bingo! A quick and easy way to improve average click-through rates, and here's another...

“Utterly Useless Action” to improve Average Click-Through rates? Don’t mail non-openers.

So let’s really improve the average click-through rate. Below is a graph showing what happens when you mail lots of "emotionally un-subscribed". If the number of customers (who love you) is low, then the average click through rate will be, well, average!

But stop mailing people who have not opened for over a year as part of the same campaign. Drop them into a different programme and the composition of the file will change. You will have fewer non-clickers and your average click through rate will shoot up like this:

I have been banging on for years about “open” and “click” rates being “soft metrics” and I’m sure I’ll blog about that again soon. In the meantime let’s all just agree that improving “average” click through rates is an utterly meaningless objective. Getting the “emotionally un-subscribed” to click on something is good, but judge yourself by what “outcomes” you deliver and then you’ll be adding value to your marketing activity.

We really need to segment out the non-openers and treat them differently (test From fields, Subject Lines, Preview Panes, time of day, day of week, text only messages etc etc) and you will be able to improve the open rate for non-openers. Just don't mix them up with your best customers or you'll never be able to be relevant and engaging to all of them.

So there you are. If your company's "bean counters" want you to improve averages, tell them that it may not be what they really want. Increased clicks, sales, order values by all means. But not averages, please.

And how about this for one final silly average...Twitter users have more than the average number of ears. That’s because nobody has 3 ears (apart from Davy Crockett with his “wild front ear”), but a few people will have only one or no ears. So dividing the total number of ears by the total number of users we have a figure of 1.99 something, so most people have more than the average number of ears.

As I said, Barmy, isn't it?

Digital Marketing Christmas Presents – Just Add Imagination

2009-12-15T16:46:58Z

With Christmas nearly upon us I was wondering what presents digital marketers would like to find in their stockings. A perennial favourite toy across the world is Lego and, whilst we’re probably a bit too old/busy/grown up to get any this year, the joy and wonder of the little bricks is brought to life with these fantastic advertisements from 2006.

Then I began thinking that, just like some children these days, digital marketers have too many toys to play with. We should play more often with the fantastic tools we have or we should be using our imagination to make the most of them.

Display Advertising - Just add imagination

What do you see when you look at a 728 x 90 Leaderboard display ad - just some pixels (a digital Lego Brick?) or a wonderfully flexible and creative marketing format?

Here are some games you can play long into the New Year with your digital ad inventory:

Frequency capping – it’s amazing how many campaigns still get deployed in a wasteful, sub-optimal way...work out how many times people need to see an add before it wears out, and make sure your ad budget goes further by serving it to somebody else
Format testing – so they didn’t click on a leaderboard, so re-assemble the pixels into a sky or an MPU and measure the impact of format on response (interactions or clicks...you choose).
Contextual targeting – find out from publishers how they can deliver ads based on page content and do some playing (testing). The click-through rate uplift should pay for the incremental costs and your conversion rates should grow too.
Behavioural targeting – make 2010 the year that you unwrap individually targeted ad deployment. It will mean that you can alter your creative to suit people who are in different stages of the consideration and purchase funnel, based on what they have been viewing and clicking recently.

Email recipients are like snowflakes - every one is different

What do you see when you look at an email address? Just another name to blast a standard message to? The wide-eyed marketing child will see some wonderfully exciting opportunities to create imaginative messages that make email more interesting for the customers and more successful for you.

Here are a few traditional email marketing games to get you started...fun for all the marketing family:

Acquisition tools – if you’re renting data, ask the list owner what variables they hold and then deliver different versions of the same message. For BtoB that should be different subject lines, opening paragraphs and calls to action based on “job function” or “industry sector”. For consumers you may know their lifestyle and affluence from geo-demographic variables that list owners like Acxiom hold...have different propositions for less affluent and older prospects or use a different creative for young professionals. Let you imagination run free!
Conversion - as digital marketers we sit on the most valuable real-time prospect data so let’s get it out of the toybox and play with it. Who clicked on an email link but did not complete a successful outcome? Who looked at deep product pages on your site but did not buy? These re-marketing campaigns should deliver 4-16 better conversion rates than one-size-fits-all messages so start building them.
Retention – send different message programmes to your newer customers, or have a different tone of voice for purchasers of specific products. Build “personas” (imaginary friends?!) to help with your tone of voice, imagery and calls to action.
Re-activation – how do you know when you’ve lost a customer? Probably when they’ve not bought for a specific time period. So develop a “win back” programme with the first message triggered by a “date of last purchase is more than 60 days". And be relevant...”we’ve noticed that you have not bought from us for a little while....” is a good start.

Fuel your imagination – get reading!

It’s good to know that even digital marketing kids can find pleasure in moveable type. When I was growing up the “must have” book was the BBC’s “Blue Peter” annual. This year you ought to be asking Santa to bring you the wonderfully comprehensive “Web Analytics 2.0” by Avinash Kaushik. Weighing in at more than your festive turkey, with 450 pages that gives you just over a page a day for all of 2010!

But aside from being a real “value for money” present, this book encourages us to explore our world of data. It’s partly a “how do they do that” book (go on, admit you’re not really sure how “multi-tabbed time on site is calculated, are you?), but it’s also an activity book along the lines of “what shall we do today to make sense of our marketing”. With information covering pure web analytics, analytics for search, email and social media and links to further reading it is as near to a “Boys Own Annual” that digital marketers can get.

So there you have it. Some ideas for kindling your imagination in 2010. And we’ve not even touched on multi-variate landing page testing, search marketing or social media experimentation...better leave some of those for your birthday!

Here's wishing you a peaceful Christmas and an imaginative New Year.

On-line Reputation Management - Thierry Henry versus Ireland

2009-11-20T09:49:39Z

Don't believe everything you read. Here is a story from PR Week in the UK

Thierry Henry Brand 'Not Irreversibly Damaged', Say Sports PR Experts

Synergy Sponsorship director of comms Stephanie Branston said: ‘The Thierry Henry brand is not irreversibly damaged. His value to sponsors will not suffer in the long-term although I would not envisage too many Irish companies beating down the door of Henry's agent this week offering brand endorsements.'

Now, I've never met Stephanie Branston and I wish her all the best in her career, but really, what planet is she on? What do Audi and Coca Cola think about placement in photos like the one on the left...or the many others on-line?

So Stepanie, and anybody else out there in "PR", this is a quick lesson in what is happening to shatter Thierry's brand. Goodness me, things move fast. Just when I'm about to post this blog something else pops up worth talking about. So, in the spirit of real-time information I'll make it as short and current as possible.

This is not a lesson in how mean football fans are...it's a lesson in how quickly your brand equity can be destroyed on-line in front of global audiences. (Insert your brand name for Thierry Henry and it may make it more of a lesson in how you need to keep track of on-line sentiment)

The story so far...

Thierry Henry, gifted, charismatic talisman of French football is taking a bit of an on-line kicking. He helped France beat Ireland (and so gain entry to the 2010 World Cup Finals) with a deliberate hand-ball. Cue much anger from the Irish, followed by much derision from the rest of the world (except France).

Let's start off with a song. After all, the Irish like a nice sing song...especially this cunning re-working of Michael Jackson's "Beat it" into "Cheated". What do you think of that Stephanie?

Next, the tweeters. Here is the chart from this morning showing a search for the fabled French footballer...at least he's in people's minds!

Being able to track what those brand advocates are saying is pretty important and so here are a list of Twitter tracking tools for Stephanie to use as the day wears on...these are from the fantastic social media site Mashable

1. Twitter Search: The simplest way to see trends on Twitter is on their official search page. Hot trends on Twitter appear on the search page and on the Twitter homepage, and clicking any will bring up a feed of the public conversation.

2. Twist: For those who are visual, Twist provides a graphical interface to see trends and keywords on Twitter. It not only lists out the hot trends over the last few hours, days, and week, but it provides embeddable charts and the ability to compare trends.

3. Monitter: Monitter is one of the best ways to track trends in real-time. Type in keywords and it will automatically update with the most recent tweets containing those terms. Add or remove columns to give you the right amount of information.

4. Hashtags.org: The popular webpage on Twitter hashtags also provides graphs on hashtag use just by hovering over the hashtag. There are also pages that show the most popular and newest hashtags, but their uptime is unreliable.

5. Tweetmeme: Looking for the most popular links on Twitter? Tweetmeme is the epicenter link sharing on the service.

6. Plodt: This website is a user-generated trend tracker based on tagging and ranking your tweets. It requires you to follow the Plodt Twitter account to participate. But even without participating, its timelines, tags, and statistics are still useful and interesting.

7. Twitturly: Twitturly is another way to track top-shared URLs. The interface allows users to see all of the active tweets that have shared a specific link.

http://mashable.com/2009/04/04/twitter-trends/

Next come the socially networked masses and here is a selection of the Facebook groundswell. Plenty of groups for Stephanie to join where she too can add her thoughts to why Thierry Henry is a good investment for brands right now. Go tell 'em Stephanie!

16,265 fans for "Le Handball" group

81,694 fans for We-Irish-hate-Thierry-Henry-the-cheat group

60,913 fans for La-main-de-Thierry-Henry (Can't work out sentiment of this one...French ironic seems best bet)

And already we have the first Facebook Application up and running..they must have been burning the midnight oil to get that one up and running

http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=177803303259

Then after that we get the saboteurs hacking into Wikipedia. Today, the Free Encyclopaedia page for our footballing hero says...

This page is currently protected from editing due to vandalism.

Changed protection level of Thierry Henry: Excessive violations of the biographies of living persons policy: France/Ireland match fallout

And all we wanted to do was have a little harmless fun, and now they've taken our ball away. Despite this, there have been a number of less-than-complimentary versions that have stayed live for a few minutes and it seems the challenge here is to share the "naughty" version with as many people as quickly as possible...as these tweets show...

theneilthing RT @lucyporter @Mark_Wyatt: RT @rupinjapanThierry Henry's Wikipedia page http://tinyurl.com/yzmq56u - QUICK BEFORE IT CHANGES! (quite rude)

Finally, it's time to turn our attention to the sponsors and see what damage we can inflict on them. I think this is not a bad effort to have a dig at one of them and there are many other similar versions doing the rounds.

So there we are. 48 hours in the hands of the technologically democratised and Thierry Henry is probably worth a little less than he was. The lesson for all of us is that we need to be able to track the social media world and be aware when a storm is brewing (start off with Google Alerts for your brand on the "as it happens" frequency setting). Then we must recognise that it is foolish to underestimate quite how much power tweeters and bloggers and Facebook groups wield in today's networked society. That's why sorting out your social media strategy for 2010 should be top of your list of things to do over Christmas...followed by your email strategy to keep in touch with all your customers.

Quite how much long-term damage has been done to Thierry will remain to be seen. At least Stephanie's right behind him.

Allez les Bleus!

If you only read one digital marketing book...Web Analytics 2.0

2009-11-14T07:40:31Z

Avinash Kaushik has been de-mistyfying the world of web analytics for years through his excellent blog Occam's Razor. He took us deeper into the murky world of Java-script tagging and standard reports with his comprehensive "Web Analytics: An Hour a Day" in 2007. Now he has written a book that all digital marketers should buy, read and leave on their desk to refer back to on a regular basis.

Web Analytics 2.0 shows us how to move from shovelling buckets of meaningless "clickstream" data around our organisations to developing a love for true insight.

In short he encourages us to move towards adding qualitative data to our limitless supply of quantitative data in order to really understand what people are doing on our sites. We must learn to use our hearts as well as our minds.

Lets take a simple example - that old favourite of "Engagement". Marketers run so many analytics reports to get a fix on engagement that the lights in most offices regularly dim. And the bad news according to Avinash is that you will NEVER be able to measure how much people are enjoying themselves on your site just with the click-stream data. For instance, to paraphrase Avinash, 2 people visit your site and spend 10 minutes looking at 12 pages. Both happy right? One loved your site, but the other was frantically trying to find some content and gave up after 10 fruitless minutes - you will never ever ever know this just from your data. By adding some qualitative data (an on-site survey?) we have more chance of finding out how satisfied, not engaged, these 2 visitors were.

So Avinash takes us on a journey to show us where we should be using our hearts to make sense of data. On our way we look at the need to move away from once a week reports to continuous streams of meaningful data; we are constantly reminded that customers, not marketers, are the best people to inform us what our site should look and feel like; and we are taken on a guided tour of the mountainous areas of competitive insight and told how to mine it profitably.

But this book does so much more than just change the way you think, critical though that is. It shows you what buttons to press to make your reports more actionable, tells you what sites to look at when considering additional solutions and gives clarity to virtually all the web analytics jargon terms. Some of the content will be familiar to regular readers of his blog (like the excellent explanation of multiple-tab time on site calculations!) but that makes this even more of a reference book for all our analytics needs.

As you may know I am a huge fan of testing everything that we do in digital marketing and so the chapter titled "Failing Faster: Unleashing the Power of Testing and Experimentation" took me around all my favourite sites in the digital marketing landscape: A/B testing, Multi-variate testing and some really sound advice about where to start and a few quick wins to get you in the mood! Here is my favourite slide that I use to introduce the issue of testing in my courses...I'm sure Avinash would not disagree!

Avinash shows us that web analytics is woven into all our digital marketing activity - from search to site usability and email campaign analysis to off-line integration. I even spent a rewarding few minutes simply reading the sub-heads and being reminded of things we ought to be doing all the time:

Segment or go home
Five Rules for creating a Data-Driven Boss
The Key to Glory - Measuring Success
Context is Queen
Failing faster - unleashing the power of Testing and Experimentation

So there we are. Web Analytics 2.0 is a digital marketing book that takes you from thinking differently to doing better, packed with explanations about the things we ought to know about (or showing us how wrong we have been!). It comes with a CD brimming with Podcasts, Video and Powerpoint material as well as lists of additional resources. He even finds time on page 400 to mention Non-line Blogging as a resource people may want to use! It's taken me 2 weeks to work from the start of the book to the end but it's been a fantastic journey...and at over 450 pages you may want to pack a lunch before you set off!