The case for a focus on your website

This blog post will talk about having a focus on websites and in social media.

There was a time when websites were measured by hits. Some still are, even though, a website isn’t responsible for the visitor (how can it be?). Hits are a good measure of marketing, but not of a website. A Website can only get people into it (then back to it).

So a true measure of a website is the bounce rate. The bounce rate is simply this:

The percentage number of people who come to a site and don’t click a link.

The bounce rate is the true measure of a corporate or brand website. Avinash Kaushik says it really means this: I came, I puked, I left.

The bounce rate is a clear indication that the page lacks a focus (with the exceptiuon of media companies — they might have high bounce rates if people skim headlines and don’t actually click the articles).

But, when talking about brand or corporate sites, chances are if people come to a site and don’t do anything, it’s because the site was not designed to tell them what to so. Sites have top navigation and left navigation and even bottom navigation. Then around all this navigation they fill the space with stuff. Lots of stiff.

The eye doesn’t always know where to go, and the copy doesn’t tell the people what to do.

And yet, there’s a good example out there to copy. It’s one of the most famous websites in the world, and I’ll bet it has a bounce rate in the single digits. When you come to the site, there are a lot of options, but one really jumps out.

On this page, there are 15 links. Included in that list is a more that if clicked, opens a drop down menu that includes another 12 links plus an “Even More”.

Yes, it’s Google. But its clean and it works. This is a company trying to be one thing to people. Why can’t brands do that? Why can’t there be a Print Ad-like focus on web sites?

I think the answer is found in the way the internet was sold. It was “the world wide web”, meaning with this new marketing tool, one could literally market to the world. So websites were designed to be everything for everyone.

I even remember, in the early days of doing websites, an account person saying to me that she didn’t think her dad would like the website. Even though the brand’s target market was a lot younger than her dad.

Point is, websites rarely say “I want you to do this”. Google’s does, and they are multi-billionaires. Maybe there’s a lesson there?

Next week, how this applies to social media.

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Marketing as a contract with the consumer

Remember when advertising was simple?

Mass media created content for the masses on TV, radio and print. The people were amassed by the content and called the target market. Advertisers were invited (for a fee) to offer these people a reason to buy.

That’s brand marketing.

This article by Randall Rothenberg gives you a good look back on the history of marketing. It is one of the best things I’ve ever read on advertising, and where things are going. Stop reading this blog post and go read it. His post has some really head noddy stuff. I love it because the way Randall speaks about marketing sounds a lot like how my boss does.

Now back to this post.

This entire ‘brand marketing, mass media’ transaction was predicated on a ‘contract with the consumer’. The contract essentially went like this:

“The content you are consuming is underwritten by this ad”.

Advertising is an underwriter for content. The bigger the crowd the content amassed, the more brands paid to pitch the assembled mass. Think about the Super Bowl. The model that worked for ages was content subsidized by the ads.

 

There’s still validity in this model. The obvious issue is that content creators are having a harder time amassing the mass market in one place (one can watch TV on TV, on the computer and even on their phone).

And that’s blurring the lines of the contract. Alan Wolk wrote about a new contract, calling it another tier, in which iTunes sells a commercial free version of a show.

Newspapers are dying partly because they messed up their part of the contract. They gave people content for free in one place while charging for the same content in another place. And even though the fee was less than a dollar, free is significantly less than a dollar. So people opted for a different contract, and learned to ignore banner ads.

For an even stranger example, consider this blog. It has no contract: I don’t sell ads on this, nor do I ever intend to. Readers get content at no cost. Occasionally I post things I work on, but rarely. So this blog might actually be part of the problem we’re experiencing with digital.

Blogs, Twitter, Facebook pages, these all lack that content contract.

Is that bad? For an answer, consider direct marketing. It is a tactic that skips the contract.

Direct marketing comes from seller to buyer via mail, phone calls or e-mail, skipping the middle man. The middle man though is the content.

I don’t think it is a coincidence that these are the three most hated tactics in marketing. Postal mail is junk mail. E-mail is Spam. And telemarketing has do not call lists. People appear to hate things that skip content.  They hate billboards and get annoyed by ads at the movie theater (where ads don’t appear to make the content cheaper). In examples where there’s no consumer contract, the result is a consumer backlash against the ads.

So this notion of skipping the content provider to go right to the consumer clearly agitates people. Maybe the simple answer is that consumers are aware they are getting nothing out of being pitched?

In the digital world, marketers are struggling to figure out ways to write a new contract.

Consider the Facebook page as exhibit A for the so-called new marketing. The Facebook Page doesn’t underwrite Facebook. A Facebook page doesn’t bring anything of value to the fan. (The exception is brands with a lot of brand cache. Well known brands get rewarded for building good brands).

Like the website before it, which also had no contract with the consumer, social media needs to ask: what’s in it for the consumer in a way that wasn’t required of traditional advertising.

What’s the 2.0 contract with the consumer?

Promotions:

The predominance of promotions in social media is the early solution to this problem. Fan this page, get a free thing. Enter to win on tabs on pages (or microsites). Those are clear contracts with the consumer. In return for a name, the brand offers a consumer a chance at something free. (Promotion experts are aware that there’s only so much information they can ask from a consumer before the consumer elects to not enter into the contract).

But when the promotion ends, that’s when a new contract needs to begin. What will you do with those names after? If not another promotion, then what?

For the record, that’s what I love about the McDonald’s ARG. I think that’s a real interesting contract with the consumer — play this game, have fun, and don’t worry, there’s no pitch.

For now, you can count on more promotions in social media. Brands can always give away stuff. From shirts and hats to free merchandise, the one to one ability of social media will force marketers to rethink the contract. But soon, we’ll need to think more about the relationship.

I think that’s when the fun starts.

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Facebook Page Marketing the pros and cons

Facebook is not a very good marketing tool.

There, I got that out of the way. It’s great a connecting people to people they know. Under that, it can be a good tool for connecting them to things they also know (that’s where pages and groups and causes come in). But it has limitations. I once wrote a post about 10 things to do with a Facebook page, and I still think they are valid.

But it’s time to update this with ten things Facebook can, and can’t do.

10. Facebook can’t: magically get those people to fan the page. A website needs marketing to tell people about it. So does a Facebook page. If you build it, they won’t  come. True, Facebook offers a little more interaction with people. It still is a tactic with a built-in send to friend key (someone’s interaction with a page is broadcast to some of the newsfeeds of their friends), but that demands some initial friends. It’s a quiet place if people don’t hear about it.

(An exception to this rule is a company with a really strong brand. A really strong brand gets a steady stream of people, I’ve seen it)

9. Facebook can: turn a promotion into something a little more special. For example, Elf Yourself now allows you to add images from your Facebook page. This promotion from Land’s End interacts with a Facebook page (or other network) to pull content that makes the interaction better.

8. Facebook can’t: be a place to give away product on the wall. As participation sky rocketed to over 360,000,000 people (almost 10 times the population of Canada), the refined their promotions terms and conditions. Brands can still think of ways to give away product, but it can’t be for getting fans to write on the wall, submit photos or videos.

7. Facebook can: offer a microsite-like experience on the tabs. Target has a microsite inside of a tab. Coke does too. If a brand is launching a thing, in the future we most-likely won’t be launching them on unique Facebook pages, we’ll be launching them on Tabs inside brand pages. Thus, this page for a promotion, would simply be a tab on the brand page. Then, when the promotion ends, the fans aren’t lost. The tab simply is removed.

6. Facebook can’t: create awareness. People become FANS of a Facebook page. No one is a fan of something they haven’t tried or experienced. No one. The word fan implies knowledge or the thing. If there is no knowledge of the thing, there will be no fans of the thing. See #10 for more details.

5. Facebook can: be a place to poll your customers and gain insights into their behavior. With the right investment (see #10), a brand can build a room whereby people for like the brand can be asked questions about why they like it. It might be smart to turn over a Facebook page to a “director of Insights” or something with a planner structure. The ROI of the community is figured out not in interactions, but in insights gained. Something that more and more brands are going to be looking for in these fast-moving times.

4. Facebook can’t: work without a goal. Here we are, all the way at #4 and we’re talking goals. The 2 year goal of a Facebook page could be #5 above. It could be to drive traffic in store. It could be x, it could be y. It could be part of an overall strategy that works with print ads and radio spots that drives evangelism. It could be other buzzword bingo like goals, but it should have one. And, “because my competition has one’ isn’t a goal.

3. Facebook can: drive traffic in store. Brands can’t give away product or gift cards on the wall of Facebook anymore, but they can do it in store. If a brand has an in-store location, then give Facebook fans a secret password and let that password get them something special in store. Almost 2 years ago, Whole Foods gave away a Facebook only $5 off coupon. It was just $5 to be used in any way, no restrictions. If  fans come in-location (or on a website), is it easy to give them a Facebook discount code? Figure out a way to give your fans, AKA your best customers, a discount for their loyalty.

2. Facebook can’t: work alone. It’s not a lone gunmen. It needs help from the website (in the form of badges), e-mail blasts, ads…whatever. It’s not a silo, sitting in the wilderness collecting the 150 or so people who know someone who works on the marketing of the brand. If a brand decides to do a Facebook Page, it needs to work with other things. It might mean an ad drives people to a Facebook page instead of a website. It might mean something different, altogether. Figure that out as part of the goal.

1. Facebook can: be a nice new tactic in your marketing plan for 2010. It can do some wonderful things. Just set your expectations on something less than the top pages, and something a little more than the bottom pages. Be realistic, and Facebook can be a realistic tactic in your arsenal.

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Target, a target on Facebook

Social media is scary for the obvious reason that it means giving up some control.

Take Target. On their Facebook page, they have half a million fans. That’s a pretty solid number of people who are “fans” of the brand.

But with the good, comes the bad. This is a screen shot of the Discussion page on Target’s Facebook page (see item #2).

The conversation inside of the second topic is about as clear as the title.

Target is left with the weird situation where people who identify as “fans”, clearly aren’t. And the people who aren’t appear to be the people who work there. People who are important to maintain the overall brand at target.

So what do we learn?

It’s not a bad idea to put together an employee posting guidelines document. It’s not an enforceable policy, it’s more a document designed to protect people from themselves.

It’s like a seatbelt law for social media.

There’s a really good chance that people who are posting on discussion boards about how much they hate working on Target haven’t put two and two together to come up with HR.

I know what you’re thinking: “Are people really that dumb?”

I think the answer is no, but they just might be that uniformed. A published guidelines for brands that engage in Facebook is another product we can offer clients. It’s not a policy. But it can protect a brand from itself.

We’re not promising that brands will be protected on Facebook from anything.

On the topic of large retailers, the Wal-Mart Facebook page has this comment on the top of the wall:

“Julie Jones Hunt hum… interesting… why confront when you can delete!”

Presumably, Wal-Mart has been deleting her wall posts, instead of addressing them. Another issue that Facebook brings.

The final thought though is this: if people have complaints they will air them. Not having a Facebook page doesn’t mean a brand will be safe from people saying bad things (see SideWiki entries for Walmart.com).

But having a Facebook page means inviting people to say them. Even the bad things can offer learning.

Engaging in social media

So, you’ve bought in to the notion that social media is the newest greatest thing, and you want to get in there before it’s too late.

The internet has changed the way people talk about your brand, product, and category. Think about it: SideWiki allows people to comment on actual websites, even if that website wasn’t looking for feedback. Facebook allows people to comment on anything in private to do with your brand. We’re at a point where people like to share their opinions about everything on the hundreds of tools in between.

Regardless of the tool, the underlying notion is that people are offering their opinions within their networks. For brands, there is an opportunity to get your best customers to talk about your brand in a positive way. Here’s my advice. 

Don’t if…
It’s long been a marketing cliché: The fastest way to put a bad product out of business is to advertise it. Obviously, a brand doesn’t want to tell people about their offering if it’s crap. But nowadays, the warts won’t be hidden for long. So if you plan to ask people to talk about your product or service, get rid of the warts. If the experience needs to be tweaked, do that first. You can’t control what people will say in social media, you can only control the experience they will talk about. Make it good, and they will accentuate the good.

Start listening.
Scour search engines, blogs, Twitter, Technorati, for everything that pertains to the brand. Then search for everything that pertains to your category. Then look for everything that pertains to your competition. Save everything you find in bookmarks for later use (I recommend Delicious.com since more than one person can add bookmarks).

This will give you a look at the conversations that are happening around your category. It will let you know what people think of your brand, your category and your competition. This knowledge alone is a powerful way to incorporate social media. Don’t run from the bad, learn from it. If many people think of the brand as X, and the marketing or mission is Y, figure why there’s a disconnect and address it.

When you’re ready to engage, start with your best customers.
The words used in social media already imply this: on Facebook, people are fans. On Twitter they are followers. These words describe people who like the experience of the product or service. Start with them, your best customers. That other old cliché about the 80/20 rule – where 80% of business comes from 20% of your customers — applies here. Find the 20% and get them working for your brand.

That means you talk about your efforts on invoices, e-mails, on hold recordings, marketing brochures, etc. Tell people where you want them to talk about you, and they will talk.

Be patient.
Social media isn’t a sprint, it’s a marathon. Unlike traditional advertising that works to create awareness through interruption, social media builds advocacy through participation. Be generous to your best customers, and let them talk about your generosity.

The overall goal of social media is this: turn your best customers into advocates for the experience. If your product or service is more like a commodity, then turn them into advocates for the category. But for the most part, you want them to tell their friends about your thing.

So design your communications to be shared. Design them to work together. Design e-mails to link to a website, which links to a Facebook page, which promotes a Twitter feed, which promotes and event that’s promoted everywhere.

Always think the message in terms of how it might be shared. Are you giving your best customers the simple tools to share your message? Are you rewarding them for compliments?

So that’s my advice. What do you think?

(P.S. Even though I’ve written about this before, a tip of the hat to Armano, who inspired this post)

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What can we bring to the brand?

I want to talk about silos. And agency titles. If you click the link to my post about Agency Titles, you’ll read the fourth most read post I’ve ever written. It was written to reflect the idea that digital marketing is creating executions that don’t fit into the narrative of the typical agency.If you don’t mind taking a look, I think it will help understand the post below. It kind of adds to the argument.

Here are a couple of things that have happened recently that have me thinking about this topic:

1. I recently listened to a Bean Cast episode that wondered if the Direct Marketing people should re-brand. (If you’ve ever talked to a DMer, then you know the irony in DM people thinking they need to “re-brand”.) The crux of the thinking is that DMers are good at understanding response, and the internet offers the ability for people to respond in wonderful new ways. I came away from this discussion thinking that DMers want to redefine what they do in their Silo of the marketing mix. They want to think digital. They want to use Social Media. Etc. Have a listen, and then think about the kinds of ‘ideas’ that DMers could bring to the table.

2. Metaphorically speaking, a marketing plan is like the drawings for a house. It takes a lot of talented people to design it. Then, it takes a lot of talented people to build it: You have plumbers who plumb, electricians who run wire, woodworkers who work with wood, etc.

That’s a good metaphor for what we have now. In the execution phase of the marketing plan, we have interactive people who work on the interactive. Copywriters and Art Directors who work on the idea. DMers who work on the mail. Media people who work on picking the media… this is simplified, but you get the drift.

The thing is though: we’re no longer building houses. I’m not sure what we’re building, maybe engagements, interactions, or some other marketing buzzword that explains what all this means. But in real terms, think about it this way.

An ARG is not your typical house. It doesn’t need a media person (or maybe it does, but not to do the same thing). The new style of marketing is more like hiring a plumber, and having them build you a whole new system for going to loo.

So why do titles and silos matter? Well, when marketers are off doing their own thing, the end result is confusion to the consumers. If the TV said this, but the Facebook page says that, then what you’re left is more than just a disjointed message — you’re left with a disjointed consumer.

So this comes back to the age-old question: who comes up with the ideas? When crafting the plans for a brand, who should be involved? Does your agency have planners, media people, creative people, and account people. Or does it simply have humans who are charged with forging the idea that can work seamlessly across mediums and actually get the consumer to do something?

If you’re that last person, the human, is your title is in the way of your accomplishing it?

When I turn this question to me, I ask this: as the social media strategist, will people even accept ideas from me that don’t fall into my niche? I know the answer at my agency.

What’s the answer at yours?

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A social media bubble?

A social media bubble. It’s starting to look that way (and yes, I’ve written about this before, but I still think it’s coming). And it might not be a bad thing.

(Note: I’m about to make some sweeping generalizations to make a point. Obviously this doesn’t apply to everyone)

First, lets look at the first internet bubble. The so-called Web 1.0 bubble. More and more websites popped up in the 1990’s because, they could. In advertising agencies across the country (and in Canada, where I was working then), they put up websites for clients.

Why?

Because businesses wanted websites. It was the first marketing tool that people had to have without really knowing why. A consequence of having something without knowing why is that the only objective thing to measure is look. Chances are, if someone doesn’t like the way their site looks, it lacks a marketing objective. If it had a marketing objective, the color or look would be something to change only if one felt would impact the objective.

So you have fleets of people putting up websites in the 90’s because they feel they have to, not because they have objectives. Combine that with a chorus of people saying the whole internet thing is a fad, and you have the makings of a bubble.

So here we are, a decade later, making the same mistakes. Brands are getting into social media because everyone else is. I heard it a lot in the last week. I made eight presentations, and after, many of people told me they need to get into this thing.

That’s even after I stressed that if one were to engage in the tactic of social media, one needs a strategy that combines all aspects of the campaign with all the other marketing the brand or company is doing. You need a goal.

And I kept hearing back that people wondered how much time they should put into this. Their skepticism creeped into the question. And it should. All business should take on marketing initiative skeptically. Many didn’t with websites, and it soured them on the internet. Many should skeptically look at social media and say: “What can it do for me?”.

They should never say: I need a Facebook page.

And therein lies the place we are. A place where people are getting a Facebook page because it seems everyone is.

Now that being said, like the internet, I don’t think the bubble that’s coming will mean the end of social media. The internet didn’t go away with the first bubble — but the notion that we can put up online brochures and leave them for 6 months did go away. We now have website that interact in profound and entertaining ways. Experiential websites, if you will.

And that’s what will happen with social media. A drum beat will rise about how this is a fad, and how it will go away. Something big will implode, and the drums will reach epic stages. But while many people will sour on its ability to engage — it won’t be because the tactic doesn’t work, it will be because they didn’t know what to measure.

What do you think? Are we in a bubble?

We live in a feedback world

Two entirely separate things happened in the last week to prove it. I gave three presentations on social media last week. The first was in Syracuse, the second in Binghamton and the last one was in Albany. At all three, I asked that anyone using Twitter during my presentation use the hash tag #TWCBC.

At all three, I got feedback.

The comments ranged from indifferent, to good and bad (another word for bad is constructive). That last one lets me know a couple of things about the build up of my presentation. I either need to be more clear about what I’m saying, or I need to kill the silly play on words at the end of the presentation. I think the asnwer is the latter, and I think I’ve known that for a while.

But all the feedback also gives me insights into why people Twitter the things they do.Which is important for my job.

Then, for something completely different, I was live blogging a curling tournament on the weekend. And yes, a blog offers built in commentary, but this was a little different. One of the players who played in the game read what I wrote and offered feedback via e-mail. He saw the game a little differently than I did, so we chatted via e-mail. But he said this, and it fits right:

“I always enjoy feedback from people after televised games on what people thought during the game.”

Prior to the internet, this world class player would never have been able to get this kind of feedback about the game. True, he could have watched the tape of the final on CBC and got the commentators take on the game, but that’s more an official take. Mine was kind of off-the-cuff riffs on the game in general. He may or may not find value in the feedback, but he’s at least taking the time to acknowledge that feedback can be valuable.

The reason I tell you this is because overall, people can offer feedback on every aspect of your offering. Be it during a presentation, or during a sporting event, the feedback channels are wide open. So it’s not just about listening, it’s about letting people know you’re listening, and telling them where to offer feedback. Telling people you plan to listen makes it easier to get the feedback.

The hard part is making sense of it all, and acting on it. But step one is encouraging feedback.

Targeting on the world wide web

Assignment: Target men, 18-34.

There they are, the ever elusive 18-34 year old males. The single most attractive demographic of any brand. The reason, you wonder? Men tend to spend more money than women over their lives. As for the 18-34 part, it’s thought that when someone is in that age bracket, they can be influenced to pick a brand. Get them early, and there’s a better chance they will stay on longer.

Marketing 101.

Problem is, getting their attention isn’t as easy as just buying Lost on ABC. That’s partly because they aren’t watching Lost on ABC, they are streaming it on their computers or getting it commercial free from Apple, and it’s hard and expensive and even impossible to buy it all (see link for explanation).

So that leaves online.

Because that’s where the bullseye of the mythical demo hands out. On Twitter. MySpace. Facebook. YouTube. Digg. We all know that, but again, reaching someone in that target market is even tougher than getting them on Lost.

The solution: “Go Viral”.

Viral makes us shudder. Creating something for the purpose of going viral is link writing an ad with the express purpose of winning an award at Cannes. (For a good conversation on the topic of winning an award at Cannes, check out the BeanCast episode 59.)

To go viral, one must create something that people in their target market will share. And one can argue and/or suggest a million ways to accomplish that, but one of them is to push the envelop.

Our client let us do that. The same week Pepsi’s let an agency do it. In the same month that 7/11 let their agency do it.

What is it? You can see for yourself. But that’s not the point.

The point is this: by putting something online, that’s targeted to a subset of the population, one risks the entire world seeing it. Yes, I realize that viral means mass. If 10 million people see the thing obviously only a percentage of those people will be in the target market. So creating something that is edgy to one segment of the population could pose risks that it offends another. That was the risk that Pepsi didn’t even know was coming, since it was a brand that took the risk but the ire went upstream.

Is that the result of every promotion?

Maybe. But it’s the dilemma of using the web as a tool to target. If it takes off, more than just the target market will see it and comment. Clearly, that’s something to prepare for in advance.

Thoughts?

This isn’t a website, it’s an interaction

I’m lucky enough to work with some really smart people. And those people have put together a promotion for a client that is cool. I like it because it isn’t about driving someone to a website. It’s about driving someone to an experience with the brand that is memorable and shareable.

So here it is. (We’d love to know what you think)

There’s a sweepstakes attached to it as well that offers 4 people a chance to win a trip to Vegas. You can see the rules there. But this promotion is meant to show off what happens when people interact with a website.

The goal was to target 18-34 year old males. But then, what brand doesn’t want to attract these people? And since they are online, on social media, and on Digg.

As the promotion carries on, we’ll update the social media aspect of it. But for now, the game is the cool part.