Irreverent Thinking

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.