Irreverent Thinking

PayPal is widely maligned but for me it has got one huge thing in it’s favour - I know it, it’s in my Pod!

I spend my time preaching about the value of consistency and familiarity but seldom do I get such a violent reminder as I did a few weeks ago. Having bought a few things on eBay I was going through the process of bulk paying for them when  I was stopped dead by one item that required me to go through a “channel partner”. This was a nightmare; I wanted to go click, click, click to pay for my stuff in my familiar way and now I had to look, search, read, learn.

Yuk!

Keep it simple = keep it familiar (unless you can improve on it - lower sellers fees is not an improvement, ever)

I used to do it a lot, quite often they were there “just to brighten the page up” but mostly they were pointless. I’ve recently started using mobile broadband and get frustrated when people stick huge images on web site so maybe I just carried that thinking across and am being more considerate.

Or it could be because I am still learning WordPress and the Typepad platform I used before was easier (for me) to insert images

We have been successfully using our VITES platform to control the flow of visitors through site for a number of years now. We have tended to use it to drop the visitor into a profile which deals with them according to individual attribute (gender, age etc). As a result we have been building big matrices of attributes that are starting to get a little cumbersome.

Recently we adopted “personas” to better understand the needs of site visitors and this is a simple way to work out how we deal with visitors. Yesterday, Andy (our systems guru) suggested we directly map the personas onto the profiles! This reduces the complexity of the VITES profiles enormously so we are going to implement this on one of our current build sites.

I’ll keep you posted on the outcome of this, it will be a great experiment and everyone at Connected reckons it’s a great leap forward. So do I.

If you don’t understand or haven’t come across VITES or profiling then have a read of this.

Our new corporate site has been live now for some months. It replaced a larger and more expansive site and is now a simple 4 page affair with some links to various other places (including here) and also to our VITES software platform site.

The problem for me is that it is drawing mixed responses. Some people seem to love it with the likes of David Pinchard (founder of TopInterim), a very senior and well respected marketeer who I have known for 10 years, saying it is “great” and that “less is more”.

On the other hand I have had comments that is lacks substance and doesn’t say enough. It is true that the audience will probably know of us but that does worry me. Should it? What do you think of our corporate site? Please do tell me, warts and all.

I’m really very fortunate to work with some of the most forward-thinking companies in the UK, but sometimes they just plain don’t understand this Net thing.

This week I had a meeting with a large client who has spent over £10m on his web strategy since 2005. Big money, big ideas and huge amounts of success. Ace.

As part of the (large) strategy is a very successful forum, it’s the only one in their space and it stands large and dominating. They rarely have to moderate it and have a great community of about 6,000 registered users and around 50,000 lurkers every year reading 20,000 posts. It cost less than £5,000 to setup in 2003 - what a bargain!

It’s a great opportunity to communicate to their ‘family’, their customers, their messengers. It could be the most influential element of their brand. In the world of semantic trust, social networking, link-sharing and search engines it offers a unique (in their marketplace) opportunity.

Last year they spent less than £500 and 1hr a week looking after it. Not surprisingly it’s dying. That is dysfunctional marketing.

Put simply, they just don’t get it. What a waste.

I do love the way the web is moving - I’m now a full-time convert to Mahalo, why not add me if you sign up to the social bit of it (you can find me here). It does nicely show how the world is moving on and our measurement of trust is changing. I wrote back in September about trusting your Pod, or group of “knowns” (you can read my original post here) and with the emergence of social bookmarking we can see that take another step. I recently joined Diigo, which offers a way to not only bookmark pages but also annotate those pages both for yourself and for anyone who trusts you.

You can see my profile easily and see what I have saved and tagged, or at least the public version of what I have tagged. Diigo call it social annotation which is an interesting concept as it opens the world, and specifically the corporate world, to semantic trust. I keep harping on about e-PR but I wonder if KFC know that I have commented on their “dietary guide” in a less than positive way? The reality of this open (trust) network is that the large corporate animals either better be on their best behaviour or better keep their eyes wide open.

(Thanks to Dan Otterburn for putting me onto Diigo)

In a monthly e-commerce “conversion olympics“, the winning team achieved a 24% conversion rate. Not bad: in fact its 10 times the average of 2.4%.

The figure of 2.4% comes from shop.org. According to their survey, if you are converting at better than 10%, you are in the elite top 7% of e-commerce websites.

That’s at the top of the table. At the bottom end of the food chain, plenty of sites are chugging along at below 1%. And an interesting 9% of websites do not even know their conversion rate.

Possible reasons behind this are:

• Don’t know what conversion rate means.
• Don’t know their own conversion rate.
• Do really know - but it’s a secret.

In fact for a lot of e-commerce firms, their conversion rate is their big competitive advantage. If you have similar gross margins as your rivals, similar costs, then the only thing left is your conversion rate. A better rate means you can bid more for Google AdWords, run more banners, send more e-shots. This means it’s a good idea to keep it secret.

So the measure of a good conversion rate is: better than your competitors, and trending up. Maybe think of a bricks-and-mortar supermarket: what’s their conversion rate. 99% ? 99.9% ?

I’ve been a little quiet on here over the festive season so I just thought I would wish everyone a happy and prosperous 2008. I’m back in posting mode now

Following on from a post a while back I have been re-visiting Psychological Profiling and found this great little site which goes, at some length, to explain the different types of people.

I can’t help thinking that there is a great deal of mileage in working out the Psychological Type of visitors to a website and dealing with them appropriately.

Have fun establishing yours

I recently published a post on how you could start to use trusted third-party organisations such as the BBC to help your natural search results. There is another step forwards you can take to help this process. If you recall from my post the most important thing about your network of feeds is the quality of them as measured by Google, Yahoo etc.

You need to look at creating independent bodies of information that are uniquely and directly accessible on the net. A good example of this would be the creation of a forum for your customers to talk about your products and services - this independent source would start to build a quality rating on the internet and the fact that it (frequently) links back to your site means that this quality is bestowed upon your site.

Add a blog from an industry leader who works for your organisation, add several (or hundreds) of blogs by customers, suppliers and partners and you are starting to build you own network. The great thing about this is that any of the sites within your network can now attract feeds from other sites so the affect of this is to greatly widen your net (no pun intended) and generate a snowball effect.

It doesn’t need to stop here, Wikipedia is another example of a high rank site and the great thing about Wiki is that you can add, edit and change the entries in there yourself. So, do you have a page on Wiki? Try searching yourself. Is there any pages on Wiki that you or one of your staff could contribute to?

And what about Facebook, LinkedIn, Youtube, Myspace, Bebo, Piczo? The list keeps growing …