Return on Intention

Location based social networking is on the rise, with Twitter‘s relatively new location API and the social networks Foursquare and Gowalla leading the charge. The review site Yelp also started location based services, and the augmented reality apps like Google Goggles and Urban Spoon, where you are is now becoming a source of filtered content. Social networks and “Web 2.0″ have long given users the ability to find the content they we’re interested in, but relied mostly on relationships to expose them to things they may not have known or initially thought was interesting. Now with location based services, users have a new avenue of finding content that they may be interested in.

Imagine that you go to your favorite coffee shop in the morning to get your super tall non-fat decaf mocha latte. When you get there, you pull out your iPhone or Andriod phone and check into a location based social network like Foursquare. You immediately discover that your friends are just a few blocks away, but you also see that the local paper has written a few articles about the coffee shop, and that there is a concert there tonight from a popular local folk duo. Its unlikely that most people would have thought to ask all those questions to their favorite search engine that morning. This new functionality is making relative content more accessible through the actual actions of the users. Just wait, you know the target ads and coupons are on the way.

This change really signifies another important lesson for businesses. If there was ever any hesitation on getting a companies digital strategy figured out, this is another reason to get into high gear. As location based services become more popular, this content filter will be a very important part of the marketing mix as it has the potential to become some of the first brand touch points for consumers. When a mobile device gives information about a location and its surrounding business then that may be the first place new customers come into contact with the brand. If there is no online content for that company, then through that lens the company doesn’t exist. Ignoring the online conversation won’t help either. Many companies have been ignoring what is going on online and pretending that it doesn’t effect them. The market is talking whether the brand is there or not, but now that lack of participation can hurt even more. There is only so much information that the average mobile user will be interested in digesting as they stare at their phones screen waiting for a cup of joe, so staying on top of the conversation is now more important than ever.

What would your customers phone say you are all about?

When you’re building a website, it doesn’t matter what the strategy is or who the site is intended to reach, the design, markup and programing processes will share some pretty standard activities. Knowing how to create a semantically correct website doesn’t have much to do with what the website does. Because of this it is very common to find information about the “How-To” then it is to find the”Why-To”. Most searches for web related activity centers around the how-to, and most content out there is too. This isn’t necessarily bad, its important to have good tacticians and skilled professionals that can actually take a plan into action, but the success or failure of a website, or any other business venture starts with a good strategy, not technical skill.
There seems to be a shortage of people talking about, or in a manner than can help people think about the plan and strategy, so to get this new year started off right, here’s my top 3 list of resources focused on getting the strategy right.

Six Pixels of Separation
This is a blog and podcast produced by the president of Twist Image, a great digital shop in Canada. Mitch was (or I guess still is) a journalist, so his blog is very well put together. Mitch is also the author of the book, also titled Six Pixels of Separation.

Around the Net with GrokDotCom
This is an RSS feed that comes from the fine folks over at Future Now, Inc. Future Now, Inc. is home to Bryan and Jeffery Eisenburg, the authors of the books Call to Action, Waiting for Your Cat to Bark?and Always Be Testing. This feed is a list of other blogs and websites that the staff at Future Now, Inc. come across that they believe is worth sharing with the world.

Marketing Over Coffee
This is a blog / podcast put on by John Wall and Christopher S. Penn. This is a very well rounded show where they talk about strategy and tactics of marketing online (and off). Both John Wall and Christohper S. Penn also have their own blogs, Ronin Marketeer and Awaken Your Superhero that are also worth checking out.

Tmobile is the proud new papa of the G1, the first Android based phone for sale on a major network in America. Android is the linux-based open source platform created by Google for cell phones. So now Apple and Google both have a product in the market… so who’s is better?

Well, for style and cool factor of the user interface, the iPhone wins hands down. The G1 is an ugly phone, but hey, its only the first Android based phone, so give it some time. Both the iPhone and the G1 are both 3G phones, both have the real web through their webkit (safari) based browsers, both have push email (gmail only for the G1) and both have a chat style texting client. So far, there is no way to link the G1 to a computer, no list style voice mail, no GPS or cool two finger screen manipulation on the G1. Of course the G1 does have one thing the iPhone doesn’t, a full physical querty keyboard. 

Of course, at this point we are overlooking the most important part of both the iPhone and the G1 ( or more specifically Android), they are both open to developers. Android is a fully open project, but both Android and the iPhone have accessible SDKs. Any developer on the planet can now make an application for either or both systems, an application that no one else thought of. The cell phone is becoming democratized. With mobile adoption rates soaring and mobile connectivity becoming ubiquitous, the cell phone is becoming a true digital lifestyle assistant, and now it can be programmed for every lifestyle. 

Whether you are an iPhone lover of a Android zealot, remember that the best is yet to come.

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. 

Admittedly, I am a little behind in my podcast listening and blog reading; however, I did just finish listening to Joseph Jaffe’s Across the Sound episode #82. As I sit here writing this post, Jaffe has put out episode #85, so I’m almost caught up.

In this episode of Across the Sound, Jaffe has a conversation with CK and Tangerine Toad about blogger outreach programs, and a lot about the Nikon D80 campaign specifically. For more info about the campaign, listen to the episode or search for Nikon D80 on technorati. In the course of the conversation, it seems that Nikon got a bad wrap. While I will agree the campaign wasn’t perfect, I can’t say it was bad. Here are my thoughts on the conversation.

1.) They should have used photo bloggers – I disagree. I think that photo bloggers are probably well aware of what the D80 is and what it is capable of doing. I agree this would have been a great idea if the D80 was revolutionary, but I don’t think it is. To be sure it’s a great camera, but it doesn’t do anything the Canon equivalent can’t do. For this campaign, I think getting a lot of people to talk about the Nikon worked well to get people to at least say “Nikon, huh? Let me go check them out.”

2.) This wasn’t a one shot deal. This isn’t the only thing that Nikon did to get attention for their D series cameras. They also gave a small town a bunch of D40’s and just let them go wild with them. They set up some web space for the townsfolk to upload their images and tell their story. This D80 campaign seems to be another aspect of this same strategy. I may only be speaking for myself, but between the two parts of this effort I have to say I am impressed with what Nikon is doing. They are putting product in the hands of people who will use them, and that has to generate some buzz. It also makes me think that Nikon is being a pretty good company. To me it says, “We at Nikon know we have a good product, so here check it out.” This is much more compelling than saying “We at Nikon have a good product, trust us and just buy it.”

3.) Final point – whether you think this was a good idea or not, just ask your self this – what did Canon do? I happen to be a Canon fan. When it was time to buy a digital camera I got the Canon Rebel XTi. I believe that Nikon is a good camera, for that matter I think the Nikon and the Canon are basically the same (although cnet doesn’t agree). I bought the Canon because I believe they have better lenses. But when I bought the camera, even though I thought that both Nikon and Canon were the same quality wise, I bought the Canon and didn’t even consider the Nikon. Now between these two campaigns for the D40 and D80, and the fact that a few of my friends and colleges went Nikon, I would have reconsidered my purchase.