In the digital world, of agencies, briefs and strategies there is always much talk of ‘funnel optimization’, of maximizing the number of actions you’d like the user to take based upon the options that you lay before them. For the majority of websites, these funnels come down to ‘buy’ or ‘sign-up’ . So, for customers to make a purchase now or give us permission to market to them so that they may, at some  future point, make a purchase.

For example, think about your user journey with John Lewis online, it’s effectively a one-way journey of finding the product you’d like, reading the reviews, help documentation or other supporting collateral then adding said item to your basket and completing the transaction. Read more »

People in restaurants have a sense that they want to create an entertainment experience online—that’s why disco music starts, that’s why Flash slideshows open. They think they can still play the host even here online.’

Sometimes, no matter how experienced, organized, planned and aware you are, fate throws in her oar. I’m a keen cyclist, not a lycra speed merchant but I like the freedom that my Pashley affords me when getting around London. As I was cycling along the Kings Road today a tradesman in his delivery truck opened his door at the same time as my head was passing, hitting me and causing me to fall headlong into the road where I lay stunned for a few seconds. Thankfully I had a helmet on, plus fate shined on me in that there wasn’t a bus following closely behind. Afterwards, as I sat in my office nursing a sore head I started to think about how fate intervenes, in ways that actually have a benefit, though perhaps not initially apparent.

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There were really only two subjects of discussion worth noting at this year’s FOWA (Future of Web Apps, London).  The talks were on a variety of subjects, but ultimately, they came back to one of two things: HTML5, or how to communicate with your customers/audience/users/call them what you will.  HTML5 is a dull technical subject, that developers understand so that you don’t have to, and I don’t propose to talk about it here, so you can breathe a sigh of relief.  

But how to communicate, that’s the important one.

All of the talks on it really boiled down to four simple things and one complex  thing, but the four simple things will make the complex one much easier.

The complex thing is this:

* Have a content strategy.

This sounds like it’s obvious.  But how many websites are there that sit with Lorem ipsum.. placeholder text in them, all through the design and implementation stages, and only have that content replaced at the last minute, by copy written (if you’re lucky) by an outside copywriter, or worse, by some harassed member of the marketing department, trying to get everything done by the deadline while also juggling their offline responsibilities, and three meetings about next year’s strategy? And even after the website is up, how much care is taken to ensure that the tone of any emails matches the tone of the website?  Or that the Twitter feed matches the blog?  Who pays attention to the frequency of the various updates?

Content is so often thought of as that thing that we fill our websites with when they’re ready, when it would be much more sensible to thing of the websites as the things we build to house the content.  Content, as we’ve been hearing for years now, is King.

So, if we accept that what we need is a content strategy, and not just some content, that what should that strategy be?

Let’s move on to the four simple things which are:

* Recognise the value of the customer

Customers are the reason we’re all in business.  And customers who are have actually given you your names, email addresses, and any other information you’ve asked for aren’t just any customer.  They’re your very best customers.  They’re the ones who have said “I want to have an ongoing relationship with this company”.  So the first rule has to be simple: don’t ever, ever take that for granted.  Don’t make them regret it.  You’re never more than a couple of mouse click or two away from them leaving, and once they’ve left, you’re very unlikely to get them back, unless you can convince them you’ve changed.

Good content is a vital part of good customer service.

* Do Less
If your content is being published just to fill some space on a page, or to remind your subscribers you exist, then it shouldn’t be published.  If your content is being published because your competitors are doing things like this, then it shouldn’t be published.  If your content is being published just for SEO purposes, then it shouldn’t be published.  (I’ll come back to that in a minute.)  Unless your content is genuinely A-grade content, that is core to your brand, that you love, and that you are sure that anyone and everyone who sees it will be impressed by, you shouldn’t publish it.

This has one instant, and obvious advantage: less content is easier to manage.

But what about my SEO?  Your top ranking in Google depends far more on the number of inbound links you have, and the number of people talking about you on the internet, than it does on the copy on your pages.  If your website is something truly exceptional, people will talking about it, and link to it, and that will do far more for your SEO than any keyword laden copy.  (And in any case, A-grade content related your brand should naturally be good for SEO.)

This is true of email strategy, too.  You don’t need to bombard your customers with messages – remember, these are the people who want a relationship with your brand, so you’re already winning with them.  

Your average consumer is exposed to thousands of brand messages per day.  (5,000 according to some research – obviously, this includes everything from the labels on underwear to adverts seen on TV, as well as all the staggering number of adverts one sees in an average day’s web browsing.)  If you constantly bombard your customers with information, far from being uppermost in their minds, you will become part of the brand-noise we all filter out every day.

But if you communicate with them only when you have something really new to say, something that is actually of interest to your subscribers (and have put the time and effort into being sure what is of interest to them), then your emails will be enough of a novelty that they’ll be worth opening just because they’re in someone’s inbox.

* Do it Clearly
If you’ve decided to have only one page of content where you had ten before, or to send one email, instead of three, then there will be a temptation to make that one contain everything that all the things it’s replacing did.  Resist that.  One single clear message is all you need – it will be absorbed and understood far more effectively by your customers that a page or an email that contains six different calls to action pulling them every which way.

More than this: customers need to know what they can expect from you – at the point that they sign up, they should know exactly what they’re signing up for.  Their expectations should be set from the first time they interact with your site, and then those expectations should be met.

* Do it Authentically
I’ve said above that we’re talking about customers who want to have a relationship with your brand, but actually, I’ve been lying.  I don’t care what your brand is, there is no customer on earth that really, truly wants to have a relationship with your brand.  Human beings want to have relationships with other human beings.  And maybe dogs.  They don’t want to have a relationship with your logo, your ethos, or any of the other things that make your brand what it is – they might settle for that, if that’s all you’re offering, but it’s not what they really *want*.  

If you’re very good at branding, and have a very, very strong brand, they might aspire to the things they think your brand represents, but that will almost certainly be because of the (famous) people they associate with your brand.  Nike partnered with Michael Jordan, and many other celebrity athletes to make their brand the powerhouse it is today.  The famous “Think Different” advert that began Apple’s turnaround from a company on the edge of failure to the most talked about technology brand in the world invoked Albert Einstein, Bob Dylan, Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi, and Alfred Hitchcock, among others, and since that time, Apple have made Steve Jobs into a star figure in his own right.

Now, you probably don’t have the kind of budget to hire superstars for your brand, but that’s OK, because you don’t need to.  Authenticity is, in some respects, the reverse of that.

The point to take away from those things, though, is that what customers respond best to is human beings, not abstract brands. Appoint someone to be the public face of your company.  They should update your company’s Twitter feed, write on your blog, if you have one, and all the emails you send should come from them, and have copy that was written by them, and sound like it.  Instead of an email that starts “Here are the great new offers from WidgetCo” and ends “The WidgetCo team”, send and email that starts “Hi!  I’ve had a really busy week here gearing up for next month’s big surprise, but I’ve just got time to tell you about these offers from WidgetCo – I particularly like the second one – I’m taking advantage of if myself” and ends “Have a great week, and don’t forget to drop me a line with any good racing tips – John”.

They should be a real person, not a fake face run by your marketing department – your customers will be able to tell the difference.  Hire the right person, and make being the face of the company their full time job (or at least, the most important part of their job).  Yes, it’s true, if they leave, there’s a risk there, but if you’ve hired the right person, and you hire the right replacement when they do leave, then even that risk can be made into an opportunity to get your customers to engage with your brand, and it’s human face in a new way.

So, to sum up:

Have a single, unified content strategy. Don’t just throw content up here and there, and see what works.  Know what your plan is.
Do Less. Better to do one thing absolutely brilliantly than five things in an average manner.
Be Clear. Make sure your customers knows exactly what they should expect from you, and then meet, or exceed, those expectations.
Be Authentic. Your company is staffed by human beings – don’t be afraid to let people know that.

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A contact in the retail leisure sector recently asked me ‘Do customers really need to login to a restaurant site? Surely all they want to do is make a simple reservation’.

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Back in 2007 I wrote a blog post about the importance of influence for brands online. The research, published by OMD in late 2007, showed that amongst our European neighbours, Brits are the most likely (63%) to offer an unprompted opinion online and we are also the most likely to pass a negative comment (26%).  Back then, the report stated that 38% of UK online purchasers take other customers’ opinions into account before purchasing.

It would be interesting to see what impact the intervening years have had upon customer behaviour. My ‘reasonably’ well informed hunch is that the importance of influence is growing exponentially, and with it, the power of the websites that gate-keep the user reviews.

The commercialization of the ‘influence marketplace’ brings threats as well as opportunities. Take, for example, Yelp.com, the leading user review website in the USA who are being sued by a small veterinary practice in California. Greg Perrault, who runs the Cat’s and Dogs animal hospital is suing Yelp because when he asked them to remove an outdated, negative review from their website they retorted by saying that they would, if his business would advertise with them.  If he agreed to advertise with Yelp.com, then not only would the aforementioned negative review be removed, but in the future all negative reviews would have reduced visibility and be hidden from search engine results.

Whilst one may hope this is an isolated case, the law firm representing Mr Perrault, has indicated that they have been contacted by scores of other businesses that have been approached similarly and that there could be many thousands of businesses affected.

What this case shows, aside from possible commercial malpractice, is the power of the review sites in controlling the flow of commerce, brand reputation and customer opinion.

To some small degree we have experienced the frustrating power of review websites with the web’s leading App store where we have a client smart phone App featured. The App in question is in a highly competitive marketplace. Obviously you can’t hope to have all great reviews, but we’ve begun to see what we believe are suspicious reviews. Many just say ‘Don’t use this App, use this one instead’, whilst others provide feedback about services that the App doesn’t even provide.

At the App store there is a link alongside each review allowing you to contact the authorities to request its removal. This feature is similar to the OS crash reporting mechanism ‘Your word processor has stopped responding, would you like to send us a notification?’ In a vain hope that the action may have some affect you submit the form into the ether, never to be heard from again.

So, the negative, truth impossible reviews continue to appear at the App store. At best, this is simply frustrating for us as we’re left to rely on the positive reviews and the good sense of new customers. At worse though, the lack of proper moderation is indicative of a wider trend of abuse in the user review marketplace.

If this is true then we’re likely to see flame wars between competitors in the ‘no mans land’ of the review sites, with those with greater brand reach not only applying their own resources but also leveraging their army of brand advocates to flame perceived rivals. In this scenario, the innocent public will lose faith in the review mechanism as a reliable source of influence and revert to other means to communicate their opinion and many, many more legal cases.

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 I was told recently via a very reliable source of an extremely wealthy private equity player, one of the richest people in the UK, who had a despairing experience at the worlds best restaurant.

El Bulli, in Southern Spain is held by those in the know as the world’s finest restaurant. The sort of place where when you ask for a reservation they’ll tell you the date, sometimes months away, when they’ll fit you in, regardless of your social or financial status. The story is that the private equity player wanted to take some long-term clients to lunch at el bulli. Now, as you may expect when dealing with people of this stature, there is an awful lot of planning, airplane hiring, helicopter scheduling, diary management and triple checking. This private equity player has three secretaries who handle his various diaries and activities.

They had followed the due protocol and had made a reservation for el bulli. One of the secretaries was tasked with double checking to see if everything was confirmed with the restaurant and duly rang them up to be told that there was no record of the reservation. When told of the restaurant’s abject failure to undertake one of the central, and most basic functions of a decent retail-leisure establishment he hit the roof. He was heard shouting ‘Those F**@King amateurs!’ . Somehow I don’t think he’ll be returning to that particular restaurant, or telling his friends about how ‘great’ it is.

All too often organizations and websites, forget about getting the basic operational elements right before they leap ahead into peripheral esoteric marketing and branding messages. From the customer view they really want to get to the end destination, if the website becomes a hurdle on the journey then they’re less likely to convert to the action point that actually delivers business to the organization.

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 I’m a big fan of Basecamp, the online project collaboration tool plied by 37 Signals out of Chicago. We started using this ‘software as service’ ten years ago and have kept with it as our company has grown. We’ve found it to be a reliable and friendly tool that clients can easily get to grips with, and it’s proved invaluable in helping us to manage multiple projects, milestones and disparate team members. Over the years Basecamp has become assimilated into the daily life of the business and assumed a higher status than the phone system, which to be frank, has become principally a vehicle for recruitment agencies to cold call us.

A few weeks before Christmas a letter arrived with a Chicago franking mark. It contained a hand-written personal letter from Jason Fried, the CEO of 37 Signals, thanking us for using the service for ten years. ‘Wow!’ I thought, I’ve never received anything like that from a business before. Impressed, I posted about it on Twitter as we passed the letter reverently around the office. Also included were the personal business cards of Jason and his head of marketing so I could contact them should I so wish.

A couple of weeks ago another letter arrived, this time from Tampa, Florida. This letter had a dinosaur (T-Rex) sticker on the back of the envelope and inside was a handwritten note from a developer at Wufoo (the online survey supplier) introducing himself and personally thanking us for using Wufoo. Not quite the CEO but then we haven’t been customer’s for a decade.

Perhaps these two letters indicate the emergence of a new trend of personal notes thanking customers personally for their business;  the power of the handwritten note trumping the less-than-personal, manufactured emails that are automatically churned out by eCRM systems the world over. Will we soon get thank-you notes from the likes of BT and London Electricity? Will it extend to the shadow-faces at HMRC thanking us for filing their coffers every year? Some how I doubt it, but in an age when we’re constantly pushing the digital boundaries it is great to see that those leading the online revolution are the ones reverting to good old pen and ink.

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It seems that remembrance day has a particular poignancy this year.

Nothing has really happened online (that has grabbed my attention). If you search for ‘Poppy Campaign’ you’ll find the Canadian Legion website as the top result. But I’m not sure that veterans will be particularly concerned about their Google rankings.

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I used to work for a publishing house, producing a number of monthly magazines and annual handbooks. We found that it was relatively easy to hold to the rate-card when selling ads for new publications or features but when it came to renewals the situation was much reversed. One of the main issues was that although a publication is essentially a form of localised marketing, the ability to measure response accurately was not available, meaning that there was no leverage for re-negotiation. We face a similar issue now when choosing the (if any) print magazines for advertising Aardvark Media, we approach them with a high level of doubt simply because we’re accustomed to the online accountability of advertising campaigns.

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