Irreverent Thinking

They call it Bacn (pronounced Bacon) and it’s starting to play a familiar part in our lives. It’s essence is that it is unwanted, usually repeated, emails from organisations that you have had some contact with in the past. You might have subscribed to a search on Ebay who then sends you daily emails for 6 months, telling you the nice shiny luggage rack you wanted for your motorbike is available now on ebay - except you don’t need it now so rather than change the settings for the email or unsubscribe from the process you mentally check the item off.

So, has it any value? Well I think it does, it’s a bit of branding and if the emails are sent often enough that you recognise seeing one last week then you might delete the current one safe in the knowledge that another will come along next week. They make great bookmarks as you’ve done the hard work finding the product/service in the first place and now they are pinging you - it’s great. As someone said," Bac(o)n is better than spam but not as good as steak".

Officially Bacn came into existence just a few weeks ago and already the concept is starting to spread, probably via some Bacn method. Now, how to better leverage the value of Bacn? How about Company A sending an Outlook rule with the first Bacn transmission - this rule creates a specific folder and all the Bacn email from Company A gets dropped into that folder.

If you worry about the long-term survival of email under the deluge of spam then this just might give you an edge as a marketer. Still, if you are a marketer then there is a good chance you’d rather be blanket dropping inserts into the Croydon Daily Shopper but that’s another story.

Trust is one of my favourite topics as the whole dynamics are changing. Take Facebook, you actually trust your friends not to spam your email address and this trust is extended to your friends friends as these guys have access to you via your network. Strange really, in a world where we feel more and more insecure and worry about identity fraud, credit-card scams and all of these new threats we now face.

We interact far more through the virtual world and maybe that gives us the feeling of physical security but we also seem to be learning a new way to trust - we trust by actions and opinions and we respect those that are around us. The reverse is also true - I belong to SELOC a forum created in 2002 for drivers and lovers of Lotus cars and I’ve been pretty active racking at 8,000 or so posts in the last 5 years. There are clear boundaries for what can be posted and generally they are adhered to but every now and again the whole thing goes off the rails and a mass debate kicks off discussing the merits of rule 5.4 or whatever. When this happens the forum splits into factions that are quite vocal and sometimes abusive in complete contrast to when the waters are calm. Anyway, a newbie arrived on the forum asking about an Open Day at Lotus’ headquarters to celebrate 40 years…blah, blah get the idea. Lots of people chipped in opinions about whether it was a good or bad thing to go to and then someone discovered that the original poster worked for Lotus’ marketing company. This generated so much bad-press for the event and the company that they requested the thread to be deleted.

Me? I chuckled. It’s good that the agency world understands the importance of the community but woeful if they think they can influence it by registering a new user and making a single post. It that post had come from one of the SELOC big-wigs then many would have listened and quite a few would have turfed up the ?40 to show up.

Abuse the trust and you get caught out.

The web is getting really cluttered, messy and difficult to use properly and the very out of date method of going to web-sites is crap. Lots of sites have tried to help with this, bookmarking stuff and various other ideas but what we really need is myweb whereby the experience is designed around what I want to see. For example, on most days the whether is not really that important to me, I will generally walk to work in the snow if required as I really can’t be starting my car/bike to travel 1.1 miles and claim to love the environment at the same time. But, I dabble in racing cars occasionally and the weather at race meetings makes a world of difference so in the 2-5 days before I race I watch the weather diligently. Saturday and Sunday look really nice at Donington with 19-20 degrees and mainly cloudy - perfect. But every time I need to know this I have to go looking and in an ideal world I would get told this, automatically, on the run-up to race days.

So, the answer could be to build composite pages, composites of the information I need and when I need it. It would usefully have a Google search box aswell as a Wiki box and would also show me the last few posts that Seth Godin has made and probably show me my Ebay watch list. Wouldn’t that be great and even better if it highlighted what has changed.

Years ago I worked in the City of London for a company that produced composite pages, they were composites of different news and financial feeds (Reuters, Telerate, Bloomberg etc…) and showed the information that dealers needed on a single screen. In 1987 it was radical, brilliant and un-licenseable due to protectionism by the traditional video feed suppliers but it certainly was a giant step forward.

Here we go again, bloody marketers spouting on about users and now we have to have a seamless experience. I know what they mean but they’re sort of missing the point, we need to remove all pointless and useless seams - these are a right royal PITA and need to go. Clothing manufacturers worked that out a long, long, long time ago - putting extra seams into clothes was expensive, made them uncomfortable and more to the point who would do it on purpose?

Brought in a new media translation what these “bravehearts” are suggesting is the bloody obvious - of course we need to remove tedious stages in e-commerce and of course we need to have systems that remember you and your details to save you time but come on. Can they really hang their hat on something they should be doing anyway? Not likely, in my book.

Seams are good, attractive and can flatter
Well, that’s a thought - that’s how they are used in the clothing world so is there a way to make seams in the e-world behave similarly? Well, a little creative thinking and you’re away - maybe when you are halfway through the checkout process (where many people still leave the process) a nice bright, intrusive element appears thanking them for valued time and custom and promises a little surprise at the end of the process. Seamless might work to avoid decreases buying momentum but there are lots of things we can do to increase the momentum - why do we assume that our checkout process is so bad that it will put people off?

So, don’t take the new credos at face value - the real sentiment behind the idea is about the reduction of friction in the buying process but if you can make the checkout process part of the value then you will have to have seams.

Me? I like the seam on the front of my jeans-fly - without It would look very strange with the zip showing although it would be seamless.