Return on Intention

There is something magical about seeing presents under a Christmas tree. It doesn’t really matter what’s in the the colorful paper, whats really important is the feeling you get from knowing that someone cared enough to think of you. Make sure that those you care about know it.

A few decades ago, there was a Masonic lodge building in downtown Buffalo, NY that had the most beautifully ornate chairs in it. Many early members of that lodge were furniture makers and they applied their craft to decorate the room. These chairs were not only amazing to look at, but were also a grand sight to behold just by their sheer size. The furniture was built inside of the lodge and so big it couldn’t fit through the doors of the building. When the lodge moved to a new building, they had to cut a hole in the roof and get the furniture craned out.

In this age of mass production and Ikea, seeing ornate hand-made furniture really makes you appreciate the talents of man. Seeing work like this is a lot like viewing art. It’s inspiring to see what we as a race can create. Now imagine for a minute that when the lodge brothers got together in the early days they said “What we need is some furniture that can be swapped out of here into any other building quickly and easily, no matter what the building characteristics. We also need to make sure that they are very durable and inexpensive.”  If this was how it happened, the lodge room would be full of folding chairs.

There is nothing wrong with trying to create very portable and utilitarian solutions to problems, but be very careful what you are optimizing for. In the case described above, I think the best solution was the ornate hand made furniture. It make the room feel differently than it would if it was full of metal folding chairs. In this environment the way you feel when you enter is more important than the ability to move it out the door. When you are making your decisions about design and functionality, prioritize what you want to optimize for and develop your plans around it.

Whether you are a marketer, business owner or cubicle warrior it pays to understand people. Most of the really critical decisions made in organizations are related to the touch points, or the areas and means that an organization comes into contact with is stakeholders ( customers, employees, partners, etc.). Whether its a new market campaign or a revised company policy there is a high likelihood that the effort will effect people, so getting to know people is crucial for any professional.

This advice seems to be pretty self evident, but you might be surprised how many professionals forget this. It’s so easy to throw yourself into your work and spend all your time trying to get more done, all the while believing that it’s the most effective way to increase your value and your professional growth. Believe me and my 80 hour work weeks.

Its good to keep up with your industry, and just as Thomas Edison used to say “Genius was 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration”, so working hard is good too, but to really understand people you need to spend time with them. Get out of your safety circle of colleges and friends and meet some new people. It will give you a different perspective, and often, insight. Especially if your job is to communicate a message to a market (people) its good to remember that not everyone thinks the same way you do. Go find those people who think differently and have a conversation.

Part of Google’s philosophy is “You can make money without doing evil.” So far I think they have done a pretty good job. This philosophy is part of the Google culture, and we can only hope that it makes its way into all the decisions that Google makes. When a company can live its own philosophy and not just talk about it, that philosphy becomes a part of the brand, not because they say so, but because they live it.

So what does a company that is bent on “Not Being Evil” do for the holidays? They give a ton of money to charity. About 5 minutes ago I got an email from Google that looks like this:

Here is what it says if you can’t read it:

Happy Holidays from Google

Hello,

As we near the end of the year, we wanted to take a moment to thank you for the time, energy, commitment, and trust you’ve shared with us in 2009.

With sharing in mind, this year we’ve decided to do something a little different. We hope you’ll find it fits the spirit of the holiday season.

We’re looking forward to working with you to build lasting success in 2010.

Happy Holidays,
Your Google Team

When I followed the link, here is what I saw.

See Google’s Holiday Gift.

Thanks Google, for giving back.

I used to have a windows mobile phone. I was on Tmobile, and that was the most powerful phone at the time. Then the iPhone came along and I decided I had to have it (its no secret that I’m an apple fan ). As soon as my contract was up with Tmobile I immediately bought an iPhone. Boy am I much happier. There are some really cool features, but the by far the most important one is the fact that it browses the real internet and looks good while doing it. Many phones in mobile-internet-past browsed a different version of the web then you would see from your desktop computer. This version of the web  was much more restrictive and less useful, but now with the iPhone that web is gone.

On my old windows mobile phone I could browse the real web, but it couldn’t handle the display of it very well, making most of the web pages useless and unusable. I have been able to browse the web from my phone for about 3 years now, but it wasn’t until now that it has become usable, and that makes me use it even more. Apparently, I’m not the only one who thinks so, there are now more iPhones in use than Windows Mobile phones.

The iPhone isn’t the only phone that browses the real web, most new smart phones are doing the same. This has some pretty big implications for the web, but it also has a really big one for brands. The web has just gotten more important because people can go see a website about a company they are considering doing business with from their phone right before a purchase. There are a few minor points related to this, like make sure that your website looks better than your competitors, and your website should still be usable on a small screen, but as the apps available on the iPhone remind us, the real point is to make sure your website is worth going to. Make sure it does something. There needs to be a reason for people to go to your website, and reading corporate speak isn’t a good reason.

So many businesses don’t even have a good digital strategy much less a good mobile one. With these new versions of smart phones and other mobile devices that can browse the web (ebook readers, ipods … cars) the webs importance will only grow greater. Give coupons, special content, up to the minute news or an experience that is worth the effort, and make sure it looks good on a small screen.

NOTE: As I was finishing this post, I had to go look for the ReadWriteWeb post I read yesterday to make the above car link point to the right place. As I was going through my Google Reader account to find the post, I ran across a post from Mitch Joel entitled What A Website Will Be… And Never Be that talks about the mobile web. It’s definitely worth the read.

The trend of websites (or other online presence) being the first point a potential customer comes into contact with a brand continues to grow. First impressions are lasting so getting this introduction right is pretty important. There are many opportunities to get feedback on how your online first impressions are going, such as survey tools like 4Q from iPerseptions and Avinash Kaushik or simply asking your customers. You can also glean some insight from your web analytics – look at things like bounce rate and page views per visit. These can identify how people are using your site, giving you some quantitative results, while the surveys and user polls give you qualitative results.

Always proceed with your best judgment, but then take the time to set up a feedback / improvement system to continually improve. Like many things on the web, getting this part right is usually done faster through quick test and improve cycles rather than months of contemplating the right move.

The key here is make sure that you are offering an experience for your user. Pay attention to not only what you are saying, but how your are saying it, and how it all looks. A good combination of content, presentation and interaction are the cornerstones of a good experience, so long as its unique.

Being unique is critical. With so much competition out there on the world wide web, it is easy to forget or get confused about who is who. Getting around this problem is the process of building a brand. Too often, however, people try to take a shortcut and end up shooting themselves in the foot.

Remember splash pages? Thankfully most of these monstrosities are now gone, but there was a time when the “splash page” was running rampant and out of control. Part of this tragedy can be linked to the early idea of the web being the new television, but a lot more of it had to do with trying to take an experience short cut. Instead of spending the time to make a compelling experience, these folks tried to throw so much sizzle at us in flashing, fast moving graphics hoping to blind us from the lack of steak.

While splash pages are now mostly gone, the tendency to take this short cut still exists. It is a good idea to try and be clever and push the envelop, but there is a line that shouldn’t be crossed. This line comes in the form of the “use your mouse to chase down the moving navigation elements” and other such ill-conceived ideas. The biggest problem is that it can be hard to know where this line is until you’ve crossed it. Getting the user to chase your page elements around is interactive and can even be fun the first time, but when the novelty wears off it becomes frustrating and a waste of time. Its kind of like a one night stand. It seems like a fun adventure, but it’s no way to build a long lasting solid relationship. No one wants to be with (or be) the guy who is a lot of fun for the first few minutes but then falls short after that. Don’t let your first impression online be that guy. Marriages are built with the consistent guy, not the party guy. Spend 10 minutes on your own site everyday for a few weeks and see if you can find where it falls short.

The best thing about digital media is the worst thing about digital media. Data. Online its easy to track just about everythings, but often so much data is produced that its easy to get lost in it, especially if you new to the game.

Every business, organization and person has a slightly different idea of what success is. For some people, their primary reason online is to provide information and sway opinions. For others the goals is sell products or attract new sales leads. For each case, there is a different set of KPI’s (Key Performance Indicators). You can spend hours digging through numbers and never find insight if you don’t know what to look for. So regardless of what your goals are, or if your new to the game are 3 metrics you can’t afford to ignore. These metrics are not the be-all-end-all, but they are a really good place to start and refer back to from time to time to monitor general health.

1. Is anybody listening?

No matter what your goals are, your website or online presence isn’t doing any good if no one hears it. Yep this means traffic, but before you go looking for your monthly “hits” report lets talk about your metrics options. Hits are about the worst option you have. A “hit” is a request sent the web server. This means when you type www.google.com into your web browser, a request is sent to Google’s server asking for the home page. That’s a hit. Then to load the Google logo on that page the web browser sends a request to Google’s server again asking for that image. That’s another hit. Suffice to say, Hits don’t measure people, it measures request to the server. If your home page has 20 images and two css (cascading style sheets) files, then one person loading your home page once will result in 23 hits. Not a good metric really.

The best metric to use for gauging traffic is unique visitors. Most web analytic programs have this metric built in, so it won’t take much to find the number, just look. Unique visitors will show you actual people, not server requests. It is a much more accurate number and one that is essential to keep track of. Keep in mind that you are not necessarily looking for a big number, your job is make that number grow. If you have 10 hits a month, then make it 20. This is about growth, not volume.

2. Does Anyone Care?

While traffic is good, its not the whole story. Not only do you need an audience to send your message to, you also need to know if that message is working and relevant to the audience. Engagement is what we are looking for.  Measuring engagement is hard and can be done in many ways, but the simple and quick way to start to find insight is by looking at time on site.  This metric can be substituted with time on page, but both get at the same point. Time on site (or page), as its name implies, is how long someone stayed on your site. The longer they were on your site, the more engaged they were with your content. If your website is boring or too hard to use, the user will give up and go away, so a long time on site usually means that your are doing a good job of engaging your visitors. Beware, sometimes a long time on site is the result of people going around in circles looking for content. This means that your website isn’t so frustrating that they give up right way, but the content they want to find is hard for them to get to.  Look at other metrics like returning visitors and click paths to try and get a better idea of what your time on site stats are telling you.

3. Is it doing anything for me?

The granddaddy of them all – conversion. If you have an action that you want a visitor on your website to perform, and they perform it, you have a conversion. If you are trying to sell online, then every sale is a conversion. If you want people to sign up for a newsletter, then when they do its a conversion. These are real tangible results we’re talking about here. Most web analytic programs have a way of setting goals to track conversion, but at its crudest level you can calculate a conversion rate by taking the number of people who took the specified action and divide it by the number of visitors you got in the same time period. If you had 3 people out of 200 sign up to your newsletter in a week, then your conversion rate would be 1.5%.

Wheres the insight?

The real insights you can gain from these metrics are what they tell you all together. Each one tells a fact, but together they can tell a story. If you have a low unique visitor number, then you have an awareness problem. Your solution is in marketing. If you have a high unique visitor number, but your time on site number is low that means either: A) people are finding what they want to know on your site right away, or B) people think that your website is not the one they want to deal with for this subject matter. If your conversion rate is high, then the most likely scenario from the previous sentence is A and your doing great. If your conversion rate is low, then the answer is more likely B, and you need to work on your website.

These three metrics can go a long way in helping you steer your online efforts in the right direction. The name of the game is continual improvement, so see where you are now, try some things and keep what brings up your numbers.