Return on Intention

I have been working on a lot of presentation as of late. BarCamp Albuquerque is coming up in a few weeks, and thats not lightening the load. I guess I shouldn’t complain, no one else signed me up to present. I’m actually looking forward to it, but as I sit here working on another presentation I think of all the presentations I’ve seen lately. There seems to be four kinds of presenters. One is bad. Thats it, just plain bad. No reason to spend any time here. Another kind is at the opposite end of the spectrum, there are good. Nah… increadible. Steve Jobs, Al Gore and Mitch Joel awsome. No real reason to spend to much time here either. Let get to the meaty middle.

There are two things that make a good presenter. Good Material and Good Presentation. In the middle you find people who have one or the other, but not both. Most recently I experienced the variety of presenters that had the Good Material part covered. The Presentation part, not so good. I really made me think as I stirring my coffee waiting for the hour to be over. This person I am listening to really knows what they are talking about. You can tell they have tons of great experience and a deep well of knowledge about their subject matter. But they were dead boring. 

I saw many presentations that day, some good and some bad. Here is the conclusion I came to. What you know isn’t what makes a good presentation. Sure you have to know what you are talking about, but that doesn’t win the day. Engage your audience. Tell a story with your presentation. Introduce conflict. Be excited. This comes easier to some than to others but I have a way to help with the transition to better presenting for those of us who slept in the day the presentation skills were handed out.

Take your presentation. Now go through all 50 of your slides and reduce them all down to have no more than seven words on each slide. Try for three, but settle with seven. Now take the clip art out of your presentations and replace the slide with nothing but a full screen image. Now try presentation again.

We just accomplished (hopefully) two things.

1. We made your slides better
2. We made your presentation better

Most people fill there slides with tons of bullet points. I think at one point I saw a presentation that had 25 points on one slide. STOP IT. This is not a reading document. Think billboards. When you fill a slide with bulletpoints you can’t engage with the audience… they are too busy reading. You probably are too. Additionally, people can read faster than you can talk, so if you read from your slides, everyone is done before you and waiting for your to catch up. If you whole story is on the slides, just print them out and give a copy to everyone attending and then you don’t have to present at all. 

With your slides whittled down to only a few words per slide, you now have to tell a story, not read a story. That is a lot more engaging to an audience. You will also no longer be battling with your audience for attention. They will look at your slide, see everything they need to in a few seconds and come back to you. This will increase their recall because they were actually listening instead of reading. 

No fancy presentation tricks or gimmicks today folks.  Just a few simple steps that everyone can follow. So go do it. I’ll try to do the same.

A mash up is when you take two things and make them work together to create something new. A good example of this is gruvr.com. Gruvr uses google maps to show users where local live music will be and pinpoint it on the map. Gruvr didn’t write the map software, they just use googles. 

Mashups allow developers to create more value out of existing tools. The only problem is you have to be a developer to know how to do it. Mozilla doesn’t think thats a good idea. Mozilla thinks everyone should be able to do it. To make this happen, they have introduced Ubiquity.  Ubiquity allows you web browser to do the work for you, and then gives you what you wanted by asking it in plain english (other languages to follow presumably), not computer code.

This could have really great future ramifications, so go check it out. There is a video a little way down the page that has some examples.

Here are a few articles I want to pass along. Happy reading.

Would you buy the cow?

The Psychology of Numbers in PPC Ads

As a culture, we seem to have an obsession with features. We always want it to do more and do it faster. Or, at lease thats what we think we want. 

In marketing, having more features does not mean “better”. In software, having more features isn’t better either. What more features will do is make things complicated. In marketing its hard to get across a compelling message when there are 8 pretty good messages. Good is the enemy of great. Its the same deal in software. The more options you have the more buttons you need. The more buttons you have the more crowded the UI (user interface) becomes making the software harder to use. 

One of the biggest reasons we go feature crazy is because when we are trying to grow our business, or create a new product in the market place, we tend to believe that adding one more feature will make our product stand out. Sometimes this is true, but if you do enough iterations of this processes, you end up with a mess. Sometimes finding a better, more elegant way of doing the same thing is a better proposition that trying to do more things.

The success of Palm was attributed to their resistance to feature creep. The Palm doesn’t do everything, but what it did do, it did well. This is also the reason that Basecamp is so successful. If you want full featured software, go away. If you want elegant software that works really well, buy from Apple… I mean use Basecamp (sorry, I try to control the Mac Freak within).

Whether in marketing communication, or software development, focus and elegance should be first priority. If that fails, add some new features :).

Thanks for pointing this out Mitch.

I have been asked recently by a few people “What is a landing page  and what does it do”? In a few short paragraphs, let me answer this question. I will post more about how to structure you landing pages later, but for now, here is the overview.

A landing page is the page on your website where a customer first comes in. If they just type in your domain name, they land on your home page. That would make your home page a landing page. As often as you can, use the page that your visitor lands on as a clue to find out what they want. 

Some customers will come to your site from places you have no control over, like blogs or links from friends. There is not much you can do to control this other than track these visitors, see where they came from and try to see if there is some context to give you an idea of what they are looking for. If these links push enough traffic to you, you might want to consider reworking the page to reflect you customers expectations, but other than that, lets talk about the landing pages you can control. 

Any advertising you do, traditional or digital, make sure to give a unique landing page address for each campaign, brand or channel. This allows you to not only find out where people are coming from (was it your email campaign or the print ad you have in the paper) but it also give you the ability to customize the page to reflect what the user is looking for. If you sell multiple products or services, this is a must. When a customer lands on your site, they do not care what else you can do yet. They only care about two things: 1. Is this what I was expecting, and 2. can you solve my problem. You can work on cross selling later, but the landing pages must be specific to the users needs. Don’t send all your traffic to your home page unless you only sell only one thing and advertise only one way.

In the information economy he who has the most information wins. Well, thats not exactly true. He who has the most relevant information that leads to insight wins. Trying to move forward and make positive changes without data is like trying to drive without a dash board. No, its worse than that. Its like trying to fly a plane without the instrument panel, at night, in a storm. Its a disaster. Imagine being on flight at 1:00 am and hearing the pilots voice comes over the intercom to say “Well everyone, we’ve lost power and have no visibility, but I feel like we should go left. Lets try that, I’m sure it will all work out”.  I can guarantee there is not enough tiny bottles of alcohol on the plane to make that announcement go over. We need information to make good decisions, without it we can only make changes based on our best guess, like going left and hoping it works out. 

One of the greatest things about doing business online is the ability to gain data about what is going on. Because of its nature, the internet allows us to closely track user interactions to a greater extent than any other channel. The truly amazing thing about this is not how much good data can be had, but the fact that so few companies actually use it. Perhaps its lack of knowledge, experience, budget or (I fear to suggest) care. To try and overcome some of these barriers, allow me to suggest a few simple, and cheap (or free) ways to gain better insight. 

1. Track your website usage. Tracking your website can offer you a chance to see how people are actually using your website. This means you can see how many people are showing up, but more importantly, what they are showing up for. You will be able to see what content they are reading, and what they aren’t. You can see how they move through your site and how they found you to begin with. This is the data that guides you to make the right decisions on what content to put up, and what your audience wants. Without this data, your really just guessing. 

It is true that in the past, getting this data required a software investment, and in some cases, a pretty substantial one. Alas, those days are over and you can now get a really great set of tools for free from google. Google Analytics takes nothing more than pasting a few lines of javascript on the bottom of each page of your website. Thats its, and did i mention its free? There is no reason not to use this. If you don’t already have it, go get it here. Right now.

2. Unique Contact Information. The internet has replaced the yellow pages as the number one way for people to find companies, products and services. Even the products and services that many people think are not “web” related, like plumbing. A client we work with wanted to know how many people were directed to them from their website. One of the largest revenue sources for this company was plumbing services. Not very techie is it. They weren’t getting a lot of responses from their “contact us” web form. Thats not really surprising, many people don’t use those. Many people like to call a phone number and talking to a real person. Imagine that. This companies market was no different.

To answer the question of how effective their website was at generating business, they published a phone number on their website that was different than all of there other collateral. On their trucks and service vans they have one number, on their phone book listings another. Because of this simple tactic they are able to track where people got the phone number. As it turns out, 63% of their business comes in through the web site number. Go ahead, steal this tactic. See where your customers find you. 

3. Ask. Yep, its that simple. Ask your customer questions. This doesn’t have to be a huge indevor, just ask. Think about this, when was the last time you were doing business with someone and they asked you for anything over “do you want fries with that”?  You can do surveys, paper or on the web. You could conduct focus groups if you have some extra budget allocation you need to spend. You could also pick up the phone and ask some of your customers how they are doing. Is your product / service working correctly? Is there anything that could make it better? It can take as little as three seconds to ask someone when they come into your store how they are doing. You might be surprised at what you find out. What have you got to lose, other than the opportunity to make a difference to your customers?

A lot of money is spent on experts to get a short cut to insight. This can very helpful, but consider this,  they are experts because they do this stuff over and over until they notice patterns in how people react to similar situations. They do this stuff over and over. Why not do some of that yourself and gain some expertise? It can only help. 

There are many other things that can be done to get a clear picture of what is going on. Many ways to slice the data and gain real bottom line shaping insight from it. This is where professionals can help. I hope this can at least get you started down the path of getting cleaner information so you can start to make decisions based on insight, not guesswork. When you have a good base of information, then call in the experts to help take you to the next level.