If you’ve been to one of our trainings over the past few years, or seen any of us present at a conference, you’ve probably heard the line about the average tenure of a Chief Marketing Officer being less than the gestation period of an elephant.  Well, it’s time for some new material.  New research from executive search firm Spencer Stuart shows that CMOs are making it into their 3rd year with the same organization, on average, based on a review of the 100 most advertised brands in the U.S.

The CMO Strategy column in Ad-age does a good job postulating why CMO tenure is rising, and soliciting feedback from the folks who put together the research for Spencer Stuart, as well as a few who currently hold the position of their firms marketing top dog.  I’m encouraged to see most interviewed recognizing the (necessary) shifting role towards more accountable marketing- establishing hard measures of success and utilizing Analytics tools to help achieve the organization’s underlying objectives:

“Elisabeth Charles, who starts a new post as CMO of Petco in mid-February, also credits analytics and measurable results for the increased tenure. “You see a lot more folks doing marketing ROI studies, using more direct marketing that can be measured and shows a payback, as well as really scrutinizing the balance of brand investment vs. traffic or sales driving initiatives.”

Ms. Charles goes on to point out an area that has improved but “is still highly underleveraged”, that of utilizing technology & tools to better tap into consumer insights- listening to the voice of the customer.  Interesting she brings that up, as it dovetails with a another piece of research on CMOs, seemingly far more negative.

Bestselling author Scott McKain (@scottmckain) points to a new study by the CMO Council, and opines:

“While we often first point the finger at the Chief Financial Officer as being disconnected from customers, the truly shocking part of the study is that it is the Chief Marketing Officer who fails to listen to, and learn from, the very people they are marketing to!”

Now before you get all hot and bothered by Scott’s comments, he’s simply reacting to the CMO Council’s published statistics.  MediaPost spoke with the Executive Director of the CMO Council, Donovan Neale-May, and when you understand the lens through which he views the role of CMO, it makes sense why he’s led Scott to the conclusion above.

Donovan defines the CMOs most critical role as “owning every facet of listening, learning, interacting, engaging, and optimizing the relationship with the customer, and understanding where the attrition, pain and aggravation is, and doing this in real time.”  I like that definition, although I’d offer we need to add an explicit benefit/outcome- optimizing the relationship with the customer, to what end?  As long as it’s help them achieve their goals, and by extension, our business goals, I’m on board.  Doing so also reminds ourselves of our responsibility to our organization to be new age accountable marketers   I digress.

“Neale-May argues that the study shows that marketers tend to view customer services reactively, as a function for resolving a problem, not enough as an opportunity to engage or interact. Only about 37% of companies surveyed gather customer insight from customer engagement situations, per the firm. Only 15% use such situations to identify and cultivate potential customer champions and advocates. Only a third reported that they look for ways to turn problems into new sales opportunities, and only 16% introduce new products or services to further monetize the relationship.”

Apparently this research seems to validate what Elisabeth Charles expressed in her Ad-age quote, underleveraged indeed.

However, I think these two pieces of research, taken out of context, simply show (or aim to show) extremes on a continuum.  This shouldn’t be a sky-is-falling blog post, there’s good news and opportunity here.  As a marketing community as a whole, there’s still plenty of room for growth, but collectively *I think* we’re improving.  I look at brands like Comcast (with Frank @ComcastCares), Dell (@RichardAtDell), JetBlue (@JetBlue), Southwest Airlines (@SouthwestAir) as signs of a positive trend.  I look at service providers like BazaarVoice, who not only get it themselves, but can be legitimate resources to helping their client organizations improve their efforts to better listen and serve their customers.  I look at CMOs like Barry Judge (BestBuy), Sam Decker (BazaarVoice), Patrick Moran (Mzinga) who are clear examples of accountable marketers, who know the value of (and have the discipline to) measure success and continually optimize, not to mention constantly listen, learn & interact with their customers.  These signs point me to this trend accelerating in the future, despite the current research.  I choose to see the glass half full, although I know, hope is not a strategy.

All that said, I can be as optimistic as I choose to be, but I’d much rather listen to the marketing practitioners themselves, you guys out there with your feet on the street.

• Do you see a shift in your organization towards aligning your business objectives with your customers?
• Do you see the Marketing group and the Sales groups breaking down silo walls and collaborating on the same performance goals?
• Are you finding service providers and tool makers who help you leverage the social web to get closer to your audience, to better understand them, and to better service them?

If so, we’d love to listen and learn from you, so please share with your community here and don’t be a stranger.

Transparency.
Speed.
“We” are smarter than “Me”.
Interconnectivity.

These are just a few of the staples of the digital world in which we now live, and each present opportunities for success, or potholes that must be navigated around as business owners & brands interact with their audience, prospects and customers.

Consider three brand interactions I had yesterday, and observe the different ways I shared my experience with others (prior to this very public broadcast of all three!)

The good, the bad and the ugly

As some of you may know, I’ve recently decided to take the plunge, and make an honest woman of the one whose been by my side this past decade and a half (note to female readers: yes, I’m aware, I took a VERY long time getting around to the question, and yes I’m VERY lucky she said yes!)  We’re having a destination wedding so we wanted to make sure we gave our guests as much planning time as possible, seeing as we’re the kind of friends who inconvenience you and make you come away on vacation with us   That meant getting the save the dates out uber-early (check) and then even getting the invitations out sooner than expected as well.  The invitation buying process wasn’t exactly what I’d call easy, and online was ZERO help.

[An aside, if you're in that business, an area the web *should* dominate is in the education process of nurturing first time B&G's from early through late in the buying process.  What types of things do they need to know, what does all the vernacular mean?  It seems the main value proposition most sites pitch is a cost savings, which while it's nice, seeing as every other wedding vendor adds the "most important day of your life" tax, is only part of the equation and a useless one if you can't figure out how to get the invitations you actually want!]

I digress.  We ended up ordering from William Arthur, via Papyrus.  Elka, our absolutely fantastic “coach” through the process at Papyrus told us not to worry when the first proof came back, and wasn’t exactly as we had planned.  We were reluctant to order a second proof, for fear of delaying the eventual shipment, but she recommended we did, just to make sure they’re exactly as we wanted.  The second proof came back perfect, and off to the printer they went.  Here’s where the two brands each went above and beyond, and provided a delightful experience worth writing about (seeing as we live in a pay-it-forward world):

1. Elka called us to let us know she rushed the delivery, so we wouldn’t be delayed from our original planned mailing date.  Within a few days of her phone call, we received our order, much ahead of schedule.
2. William Arthur, on the top of the box had included an envelope “to the bride & groom”.  When we opened it we found they had included 10 extra copies of everything we ordered.  There was a note that read, “While printing your order, we noticed a few extras came off the line, so we hope you enjoy them with our compliments”.  Whether they intentionally produce a few extras, or this really is the case, who knows, who cares.  The end result is, they know we have far greater use for the “extras” than the trash can does and even keeps the groom from having to open every box of inserts to see what the finished product looks like (and getting them all dirty!)

I wonder, how many soon to be brides has Kelly now recommended Papyrus to?

Contrast that with the last remaining newspaper I’ll ever subscribe to in print form, the WSJ.  For the past few months I experimented with reading the Journal online only, like I do every other newspaper I still read (a dwindling number these days, sadly).  Ultimately I noted, I read more of the paper when I had it in print form than I did online only- I had a deeper engagement with it. Then in the mail (interesting to me that it wasn’t an email) I received a “professionals discount” with a very good rate for home delivery, and I decided it was time to resubscribe to print.

The subscription process was smooth & easy, not unexpected although many other sites (and far too many newspaper sites) fail here, and I was emailed a confirmation upon completion.  Imagine if you bought from Amazon, and your confirmation arrived, noting what books you had bought, how much you paid, what CC you used, etc… everything but the shipping/arrival date.  It would never happen, right?  Well, it happens every day with the WSJ!  Great to know my subscription was confirmed, but would you believe I had to write back, not once, but twice before giving up and assuming I’d simply have to wait and see if the subscription ever actually started!  Fail.

Ironically enough, missing subscriptions must happen with some frequency, as evidenced by the fact that yesterday (a few days AFTER I started receiving delivery) I got an email telling me I should have started receiving the paper already.

Where does this actually hurt?  Well, seeing as the newspaper business seems to be fighting the banking industry for the title “most likely to be OOB” these days, you’d think they want new subscribers?  I had the option to pass along my discount to other colleagues I thought would enjoy it.

I wonder, why haven’t I passed it along to anyone yet?

Then there’s the really ugly… and since I made a new years resolution to be more positive, and less snarky (it’s a two year old resolution!) I’ll change the name to protect the guilty!  Our CTO and resident coffee roaster John (unlike me, who is our resident lives-at-starbucks-far-too-much-guy) was scouring the ‘net looking for a new source of beans.  He knows we’ve talked to a few of the leading players in this space of late, and wanted to see what was out there.  After a little hunting, he found just product he was looking for at, er, um, Bob’s House of Beans   We thought it was a little odd the logo didn’t resolve properly, but chalked it up to Firefox/Mac issues, and kept plugging along.  Added beans to cart, check.  Entered credit card info, check.  Make purchase, fail.  Try as we might, the shopping cart and backend merchant account just wouldn’t connect, and after five minutes of reloading, we abandoned.  We tried once more later in the day (I assure you, purely as an experiment) and still couldn’t order.  If you’re an online retailer, no matter how large or small, you simply have to be able to calculate the cost of downtime, and require some proactive monitoring to alert you while the problem is ongoing.  In this case, the problem could have been on the bank side (I suspect not) but it’s really irellevant- the retailer lost the sale.

This is conversion 101, and yet, these are the mistakes which are still out there on the web.  If your site has some of these basic challenges, don’t get caught up in judgment (or let anyone else make you feel bad, myself included), it is what it is.  What’s important is taking the steps to correct, early & often. Get yourself on a program, and commit to continually improving your customer experience.  It’s the only way to grow in this day, age and economy!

ESPN.com - 2009 first major redesign

In the first major redesign of the new year, ESPN.com unveils it’s latest redesign today, after two weeks in “private” Beta for it’s Insider subscribers.  Despite the two week focus group, today’s redesign doesn’t appear noticeably different from the version that launched privately 12/15.  Their stated goals were:

1) less clutter, ostensibly to drive higher engagement (more time spent on site, more pageviews, more traffic)
2) more ad space, to drive higher revenue

Do you think the new site accomplishes it’s objectives?

I’m not sure they achieve their primary objective (although one must wonder if that’s really their #1 goal behind the scenes in Bristol, or do Advertisers trump Audience?) as “less” clutter is a relative term.  I wouldn’t exactly describe the redesign as minimalist.  There are some nice touches though, even if they’re slightly hidden (checkout the scoreboard on the homepage, above the top navigation).  As for goal #2, after visiting last night I fell asleep dreaming of buying a new F150, and couldn’t figure out why the Ford homepage had so many clips from Sportscenter on it, so I’d call that a success!

Let’s hear your thoughts.  What works, what doesn’t?  How will you apply these lessons in your own redesign efforts in 2009? (Hopefully NOT by taking 1 calendar year to work on a single redesign!)  We’d love you to weigh in…

Well sports fans, here we go.  Black Friday.  Soon, Cyber Monday.  (Forgive me for the brief digression, but did you know neither Black Friday nor Cyber Monday typically deliver results, in the form of conversions, er, sales, mainly just delivering traffic   Unsurprisingly, retail numbers thus far have been bleak, to say the least.

Retailers are hopeful however, and doing everything they can to jumpstart the economy and try to turn a profit this holiday season.  Amazon got my attention with their personalized email, touting deals exclusively for me, but really failed to deliver on the promise.  Uber-disappointing when you consider how much insight they have into my buying process, not to mention my personal as well as holiday gift time purchase history.  Yes, even the market leaders sometimes miss opportunities. Perhaps they need some help harvesting the insight from their customers’ past purchase behavior?  [*Update* CNBC documents Amazon's strategy.]

Naturally, many retailers are using price cuts to try and attract attention.  Even brands who rarely do so, like Apple for instance, give kickbacks to customers this weekend.  Who says Politicians should be the only ones to prosper?!  [Don't say we're not in the giving back mood either- deal hunters should stop by Gizmodo for a rundown of all the best deals this weekend.  *Update* NY Times has a good rundown too.]

Not every retailer is up to the same old tricks though.  Sears, through a partnership with Yahoo is trying to capture the holiday spirit, and capitalize on the web sense of community to spur sales.  Of course, they promise exclusive deals as part of the promotion .

If history is any indicator, each of these efforts will result in traffic spikes (not only on websites but highways and mall parking lots as well!) of highly motivated would-be customers. These potential prospects certainly have a list of products in mind, or if they’re earlier on in the buying process, an idea of what type of product they’re shopping for.  Everyone hates to be sold, but loves to buy. Buying is about the experience, above and beyond the “right price”.  What will you do to convert those could-be customers into delighted customers?

Plato said, “necessity is the mother of invention.”  If Plato were faced with a marketing budget coming under fire to pare costs and brace for a long dark winter, I respectfully suggest he’d get focused on “inventing” some ideas around Optimization.  Your traffic is coming to your website for a reason, and if your conversion rate is in the single digits, perhaps it’s time to consider what your audience is telling you, and do something about it.  After all, you won’t have the same luxuries to keep spending $$ on driving an overabundance of traffic.  Perhaps now is the time to capitalize on opportunity: the web is your home to listen not to what they say, but rather to what they do! We’re always here to help you listen, and turn your audience feedback into actionable (and continuous) website improvements. 

Tomorrow we’ll start to see a harbinger of things to come.  Will Santa’s little elves be out in full force?  Most definitely.  But the larger question we want answered is, will the experience be enough to overcome the last stage of the buying process- reevaluation. So, in the name of research, go out and enjoy the deals… but let us know about the experience.

Do you see more sites this weekend who deliver on their promises, or are your expectations continuing to outdistance the experience they provide?  We want to know!  Our audience does too, so please sound off in the comments.

As online marketers are forced to reign in their spending (along with just about everyone else today), many may be tempted to cut their optimization budgets. After all, optimizing a website is w_o_r_k. It’s far easier to simply buy more traffic, when you need to generate greater profits.

That strategy even works too, on a short enough time horizon, although admittedly more so in bull markets than bear ones. But in recessionary times (or those dangerously close to it like, say, now) those who have become addicted to Google’s PPC fix find themselves up a certain creek, and lacking an effective paddle.

I made the case last month while talking to a group of Direct Marketers at the DMA, that increasing traffic is like a one night stand, where as conversion improvements are a long lasting love affair. When you increase conversion, the impact is permanent, and as you generate more traffic to your website, with your newly effective funnel, you generate exponentially more revenue than before. Far more so than simply incrementally increasing traffic.

While we’re talking about traffic… you know what happens to traffic when consumer confidence is low? It drops.

Sorry for the Debbie Downer post, but it’s not all bad news! Increasing conversion may be work, but it’s not hard to figure out. In fact, 3 simple questions are all you need to help you improve your website performance:

1. Who is your audience?
2. What action do you want them to take? (i.e. – what is conversion on your site?)
3. What information do they need to feel comfortable and confident taking the action? (i.e. – what’s their motivation for doing what you want them to?!)

If that sounds hard, give us a call and we’ll show you it doesn’t have to be. Want a sneak peak into how? Well since you asked, Bryan would be happy to show you, along with the fine folks at Sitebrand. Enjoy!

Wired’s (and Valleywag) Paul Boutin writes a eulogy for Blogs. Link-bait? Probably, but he certainly raised the ire of several in the online community, myself included. Heck, he even got me to crawl out from the rock I was hiding these past few months and pen a few words of commentary, in defense of blogging (yes, I recognize the irony . I think Mathew Ingram wrote the best counter to Paul’s argument, so I’ll let you hop off and read his discourse before returning to hear a few questions I’m pondering.

Here’s what I found myself wondering after reading Paul’s post:

1. Why does having a number of different authors make the blog any less “blog-like” – i.e. if there are still good blogs out there, albeit less personal and more representative of a group of persons who all share a similar view on a particular topic, why can’t that be considered a blog? Shouldn’t the litmus test be the value of the content they produce, regardless of the person(s) who created the content?
2. Why does the fact that blogging about mainstream topics like presidential candidates makes it difficult to rank highly in google equate to “kill yr blog”? Google is all about relevance, always has been, always (most likely) will be. If the most relevant answer to a searcher’s query could be found on a personal (or professional) blog, it would rank high. For “Barack Obama”, aren’t most searchers looking for that wikipedia page, or the Fox News article (ahem, wouldn’t MSNBC be more likely?!) What about the blogger who writes about a passion topic, something like the greatest college basketball team, and wants to be able to connect with those who share that passion. Is this form of community no longer valid?
3. Why does the “insult commenter” need to ruin the fun for the rest of us? Assigning so much power to those silly flame comments seems to ignore the power the rest of us have to ignore things that don’t add value. It’s like the reviews people post on Amazon, with a absurdly high (or low) score but no substantiation for their claims. People today seem to be far better equipped to deal with hype and BS, and tune out what doesn’t make sense in favor of what does. I strongly disagree that these silly one-off comments really degrade the experience the rest of us enjoy.

His close though seemed to help me understand where he was coming from:

As a writer, though, I’m onto the system’s [Twitter] real appeal: brevity. Bloggers today are expected to write clever, insightful, witty prose to compete with Huffington and The New York Times. Twitter’s character limit puts everyone back on equal footing. It lets amateurs quit agonizing over their writing and cut to the chase.

Ok, so as long as you and I agree not everyone writes about topics covered by the mainstream media on a daily basis, I think Paul will agree with us that the platform still adds value. I’d love to try and have a meaningful and interactive and ongoing marketing optimization discussion, 140 characters at a time.

I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments- are you reading more or less blogs today than 4 years ago?

As well what are the topics you enjoy reading about *outside* of the mainstream media (and any blogs you like that cover those topics). For me, scanning my bloglines start page shows:

• Neuroscience – The Frontal Cortex; Cognitive Daily;
• Web Analytics – Marketing Productivity blog;
• Venture Capital – Feld Thoughts; Fred Wilson’s blog;
• Personal Productivity / Simplicity – 43 Folders;

… just to name a few! So if you’re out there blogging, please feel free to ignore the opening advice from Wired, and keep up the fine work- I’m sure your audience appreciates it.

Truth be told, what stopped me in my tracks when digitally thumbing through the Globe was not the headline, but the leading image of CC Chapman, all-around Podcaster-extraordinaire. Seems CC’s tv was on the fritz during a little thing called the 17th championship in Boston Celtics history, and he twitter blasted Comcast to make himself feel better (he should’ve realized in title-town, it takes a lot more than OD [original def] to keep a team down .) Here’s the amazing part – Comcast responded, via Twitter, within minutes. They also had a technician out to solve the problem…before the tip off of the next game!

We get asked a lot from clients about how to build communities online, or how to shape the conversations that exist online to be more favorable towards their company or product. I can understand and empathize with their perspective, but more often than not, the companies asking these questions haven’t done the basic fundamentals yet. Don’t worry so much about figuring out the 1-3-1 full court trap; rather focus on perfecting a well executed free throw. Not sure where to begin? How about:

1) Setting up Google alerts for your company and/or product name, and commit to spending an hour per day reading and responding honestly and in a human voice to the comments you read. Remember in the age in which we currently live, our heroes are more flawed like Jason Bourne, than the Rockwellian images of yesteryear. It’s ok to not be perfect, but you’ll get torched for not being honest. If you don’t believe me, see Pettitte, Andy and Clemens, Roger.

2) If Google alerts doesn’t give you enough fodder, try Technorati, or Twitter or Niche sites in your space, like Techmeme. Despite what the old commercial said, it’s tough to reach the end of the internet. There are plenty of services out there to help you comb through what’s out on the ‘net, but you may be surprised to see how much you can learn through sweat equity alone.

3) Go to sites that sell your product and have reviews. Mine through the treasure trove of data that your audience gives you about what works and what doesn’t about your product or service. What’s the vocabulary they use? In addition to learning why they hate your product or service at times, I’ll bet you a quarter you find new benefits you never considered that your audience is realizing as a result of your efforts. Bonus points if you use those benefits to rewrite some product copy.

4) If you don’t have reviews on your site (why not?- Is there something you are afraid of hearing?), read your competitors’ reviews, and instead of trashing them, learn from them. Reach out to the consumer base, and offer a few free products in exchange for free flow of feedback. You can’t improve what you don’t measure.

Those are just some top of mind ways you can get started. I’m positive the GrokDotCom audience base has far more, and even better, ideas for how they overcome these challenges, and learn from their current and past customers. Perhaps if we ask them politely, they’ll even share. Anyone care to share their stories & ideas in the comments below?

First up, John Broady writes about 5 fundamentals for improving the ROI from landing pages. This has long been a popular topic, yet, sadly, it’s still front-and-center in a lot of practitioner’s minds. The fact that so much has been written on the topic only makes John’s piece that much more impressive. His word choice to present “fundamentals” people should learn from and “apply,” as opposed to “best practices” people should blindly follow is spot on. He offers concrete examples of each fundamental in action, too. Best of all, he didn’t pontificate for days; he simply gives you what you’re looking for (you know, if you’re the type to be interested in increasing return on your landing page investments).

Don’t just take my word for, invest the five minutes to give it a read. But if I may be so presumptuous as to add two bonus fundamentals, well, here they are:

• Fundamental 6: They can trust you, right? John pointed out the cardinal sin in landing page design: not presenting a clear call to action. Once you’ve got that covered, you want people to actually click through your call to action, right? Tell them it’s OK to. click. If you’re asking for their email or phone number, or any personally identifiable information, tell them you’re not going to sell their information and will protect their data as if it were your own. Give them the assurances they need or else they just may talk themselves out of the action they actually want to take!

• Fundamental 7: It’s the intent behind the click that matters most. You’ve reinforced the specific search term as instructed. Check. You’ve kept their options clear and simple. Check. Essentially, you’ve built it, but you still don’t see them coming (or rather, acting). What was the intent behind their search? What was the real question that was on their mind when they went Googling? “Trade online stocks” (active voice) implies a different intent, albeit a subtle one, than “online stock trading” (passive voice). The latter could be an exploratory search, an early stage query from a 75 year-old retiree in Boca Raton, following up on how his grandson could possibly have left his six-figure job at Goldman Sachs to be an online stock trader. (”You can do that?” he wonders.) “Trade online stocks” is more likely to be a late-stage — late in the buying process, that is — search, where the intent is actually to trade. This is a landing page I’d use to present my best offer to people who know what they’re looking for, not to try and pitch “casual consumers” into becoming more educated. It’s not that those potential customers aren’t real; rather, they’re asking a different question and therefore need a different answer and a different offer.

Next on the tour of Omniture’s blog, I found the latest post by our good friend Brent Hieggelke on “Creating a Culture of Optimization“. (Bryan posted something similar last week, when he returned from the eMetrics Summit, on how to get organizational buy-in for Optimization.)

I will tell you flat-out, when a marketing superstar like Brent tells us (emphasis mine) that…

“…there seems to be no top-down mandate pushing the entire team to make optimization a part of their culture.

That must change — and marketers, who know the benefits of optimization better than anyone, need to be the driving force.”

…we should all stop and take a moment to listen. This is a man who’s forgotten more about marketing in his career than I’ve ever known. He’s challenging marketers everywhere to grow their sphere of influence within their respective organizations. He’s challenging marketers everywhere to ask bigger questions. And by the way, he’s even telling you a few different ways to get started.

If name recognition alone isn’t compelling you to click your way over to read Brent’s piece, perhaps these two benefits from fostering an Optimization Culture in your organization are:

1) End the debate: Opinions are like heartbeats; everyone alive has them! Toss aside intuition and your boss’s gut feel and replace them with hard facts and metrics (i.e. proof of what works). Just don’t forget to define success metrics in advance.

2) Guaranteed* performance boost: By testing the assumptions that underly the strategy and creative execution, your team is actively tuning your marketing system for optimal, or at least improved, performance. Guess who just created an ongoing system for increasing ROI!? (*The results suggest as much, anyway.)

Finally, the post that drew me to their blog in the first place, Matt Belkin’s post — the one that mentioned FutureNow — on “vindication”. In the two years since our public debate spilled out into the blogosphere, it’s the #1 post referenced to me when I meet GrokDotCom readers at conferences or training events. Each time, the reader seems to have enjoyed the experience, like I imagine most who attend Wrestlemania enjoy the WWE. (Aside: Did you know Wrestlemania still exists today? After 27 years, it’s like the Super Bowl. If I can dig up my ticket to Wrestlemania II, eBay, here I come! But I digress.) While I’m thrilled to entertain our audience, I’d much prefer to educate them first. Even better than education is when we hear from people who took our recommendations and put them into action, actually optimizing their marketing and reporting their results.

For that to happen, issues will arise and healthy debate should help distinguish the signal from the noise. But it also behooves us to keep the debate centered around the issue at hand for the audience. Matt’s right. John and I were particularly scathing, one might even say snarky, in our criticism of his take on unique visitors. It honestly wasn’t our intent, but I can certainly see how it came off that way, and for that I apologize.

Each and every time a reader mentions that post, I cringe a bit and see a little devil sitting proudly on my shoulder. Suffice it to say, the blogosphere is a better place, and the audience learns more (and achieves more of their goals), when writers avoid the temptation to flame, and look instead to the angel who’s rumored to live on their other shoulder. I’ve certainly tried to, and I must admit, sometimes it’s much harder to find positive examples to learn from than negative ones. Hopefully, some of the other FutureNow voices have excelled at pointing out the positives where I could not.

And for those of you who are wondering, John and I still disagree with Matt’s argument, especially his second reason, i.e., that every visit represents an opportunity to convert. There’s an excellent comment in Brent’s post that lists a scenario I think violates this premise, but that’s a post for another day, or a conversation over dinner next time I’m in Utah.

I do know one thing for sure, though: Matt and I are 100% on the same page when it comes to our desire to help marketers derive better results from their hard-earned marketing budgets. Those looking to increase the punch from their online efforts could do a whole lot worse than reading and acting on Matt’s advice.

Look on the bright side: For followers of the online space, if you didn’t like the coverage you read, you certainly had other rehashes and “me-toos” to keep you occupied. In fact, the hardest thing about actually reading all this coverage would be keeping up with the onslaught every time Techmeme refreshed.

Yet there was a beacon of shining light above and beyond the rest of the noise, but since the blogosphere was so cluttered, many of you probably missed it: The Compete blog. Once again, they found a fresh perspective and unique angle of approach to the same old story.

Check out their “Microhoo” analysis. They have some perrrty charts too!

P.S. There’s also a marketing lesson here. As our editor, Robert, pointed out to me last Friday, the Compete blog is great at demonstrating the power of their analytics tool, in terms of the benefits received from using it, to derive insights about one’s audience.

P.P.S. Since we’re on the topic of visual inspiration found on blogs, it’s worth giving a hat tip to our friend and analytics blogger extraordinaire, Avinash Kaushik. In a blogosphere without the visual stylings of Kathy Sierra, Avinash has really stepped it up of late. If more “stats geeks” were as personable and kind-hearted as he, and genuinely focused on helping people learn how analytics don’t need to be uber-complicated (nor must they even look like actual data!) to be valuable, this Marketing Optimization space would attract a lot more executive eyeballs.

In Roy’s practice, advertising builds brands and drives traffic for his offline clients. Roy cautions his clients not to get ahead of themselves. If all the traffic (read: visitors) he drives get what they expected, then the business grows organically from repeat customers and word-of-mouth. If these visitors don’t get what they want, their lackluster experience will erode the brand. In other words, they would be refilling a leaky bucket with new traffic. Unfortunately, the supply of new traffic is never unlimited.

Jeffrey Eisenberg likes to ask, “Are you paying your marketers to make promises that your business has no intention of keeping?”

On the Web, how much traffic is enough?

If your site has a few thousand visitors a month, what would you do with a few thousand per day? Sadly, with average conversion rates barely hovering in the low single digits for most markets, for most of us, a sudden boost of traffic would do little more than squander our audience. In fact, we’d simply do it faster. When your funnel leaks like a sieve, do you really want to turn on the fire hose? Conventional wisdom on the Internet says ‘yes,’ but I challenge you to ask yourself if that’s wise, or just more convenient.

Bryan touched on this topic yesterday, and Robert Scoble, Dave Winer and the Guardian are debating the concept over at Techmeme. Scoble claims he wants a “smart” audience, not a “big” audience. (Sounds like he’s found conversion.) He can model a smart audience, plan an experience for them, then measure and improve upon that plan. A big audience — just for the sake of winning the Web’s version of “Best Looking” superlative (technically speaking, of course ) — I’d imagine leaves him with the same void some people feel when they grow up, only to realize they’d peaked in high school.

Let’s contrast this with a story I read in yesterday’s Internet Retailer. Our friend Dustin Robertson from Backcountry.com has been experimenting with one of their brands on MySpace. They’ve spent a year, added 3,000 friends, and still can’t find a correlation (forget causality) between MySpace and sales. He acknowledges the experiment costs only a few hundred bucks per month, so their current plan is to keep it going.

Typically, when I hear things like this, Einstein’s definition of insanity comes to mind (or Franklin’s or Twain’s, depending on who you believe originally uttered the quote). In this case, though, it’s more a symptom of the low relative cost of doing business online, and the large numbers the ‘net provides. We’ll happily chase our tails on the logic that we only need a small success to realize the value of a home run.

Funny. Given that thinking, I’m surprised more people don’t take the, “If we build it, they will come” approach to traffic. Of course, that only works if you build what visitors want, and give it to them the way they want it. Do that, and you just may be amazed at how much profit you can squeeze out of the traffic that stops by for a visit.

These “dollar words” are truly excellent… at going over your audiences’ heads while keeping them from accomplishing their goals by taking the actions you’ve set out for them. Anyone who’s taken our Persuasive Online Copywriting course would agree; Jakob is singing our tune in his discussion of a usability test he did on the U.S. Census Bureau website:

Beyond banner blindness, the major reason this homepage failed is that it used made-up terms or branded descriptions rather than plain-spoken words. Terms like “Population Clock,” “Population Finder,” and “QuickFacts” are not as descriptive as a simple line of text that says:

Current population of the United States: 302,740,627

Once Jakob goes beyond the heatmap, things really get interesting. He uses gaze plots (click thumbnail for image) to describe 4 main classes of behavior — “search-dominant,” “navigation-dominant,” “tool-dominant,” and “successful” — and gives insightful descriptions for each. If one were so inclined to look at the same observed behavior through the lens of the personality types or the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, they’d see beyond the how people clicked, and into the why they clicked. It’s how they’re wired, naturally, according to their preference, or type.

A: The Competitive type — what Jakob observed as “search-dominant user” in this study; Using the MBTI lens we’d shorten their preference to operating in “NT” (iNtuitive/Thinking) mode- working at a fast pace, with a logical bias. The Competitive quickly scans and skims everything, looking for a clue as to how to solve the puzzle. Neither Active Window [define] content nor navigation seemed to be the path of least resistance. (Notice: Competitive type didn’t even look in the right-hand column; they’ve been trained to ignore it.)

The right and left vertical lines clearly illustrate the Active Window, where a Competitive is most likely to spend time. (The same goes for all types, but the Competitive does this more often.) Once this person struck out with copy in the Active Window, they aimed for navigation and, after quickly striking out there, went to search.

As a footnote, Jakob adds, this “user” (don’t get me started) mentioned the ability to search faster for the answer… at Google.

B: The Methodical type — Jakob’s “navigation-dominant user”; “SJ” (Sensing/Judging) on the MBTI — behaves with a logical bias similar to Competitives, but with a far more deliberate pace. You know the Methodicals in your audience. They’re not easily satiated by the answers you give them. They want more. No detail’s too small. They want it all. The good news from a marketing communications perspective is they’re willing to give you their time — provided you’re willing to give them relevant content.

The Methodical approach was to look everywhere; Active Window, left navigation, right-hand column (where the answer was actually sitting, cloaked in techno-babble and jargon), above the fold, below. You name it, they saw it. They just didn’t find anything that seemed like the answer until, finally, navigation appeared “most promising”.

C: The Spontaneous type — Jakob’s “tool-dominant user”; “SP” (Sensing/Perceiving) on the MBTI; — behaves at a fast pace, with an emotional bias. They’re highly experiential by nature. (Notice how Jakob describes this type as people who “like parts of websites where they can do something”.)

The Spontaneous visitor clicked around briefly, mainly focusing on the interactive features, before most likely leaving in failure. The gaze went everywhere, without focus, until a single feature grabbed their attention — that is, until another rabbit hole appeared (on another website) that was more entertaining.

D: The Humanistic type — Jakob’s “successful user”; “NF” (iNtuitive/Feeling) on the MBTI; — behaves at a slightly less deliberate pace than the Methodical, but with an emotional bias. Testimonials were created for this type. Show them how you’ve treated other people like them, and you’ll gain their confidence.

My assumption that Plot D represents the Humanistic is based on a few observations and is a shining example of the value of optimizing your experience based on a plan, rather than some out-of-the-box analytics package or testing platform. Had we planned this experience using a customer-centric methodology like Persuasion Architecture™ [define], we would have a context in which to view this gaze; to know how far off the execution was from what we’d originally planned. That would give us an actionable approach to making website improvements.

With Plot D, I see someone who’s spent more time than the other visitors — except, of course, for the Methodical — not just scanning and skimming, but actually connecting. I also see someone whose gaze fell oddly on the right-hand column; a behavior we typically see when people are capable of scrolling with their mouse without actually looking at the gutter to find the down arrow. They intuitively know the scroll bar is there.

Each of these experiences could have been planned better to achieve the task at hand, but that’s a post for a different day. For now, simply consider that people are wired to behave according to different preferences, their behavior fueled by their own momentum.

For you to achieve your goals, your audience must first achieve theirs. That means presenting what they want, when and where they want it — even if you have to make a single product page speak to 4 different “types” of people. But that’s the beauty of the medium. Online, it’s far easier to measure and improve your plan dramatically over time.

(Author’s Note: Anyone think my headline would’ve been better if it were “What People Do on Your Site and Why”? Now do you see the power of plain-spoken language?)

[Editor's Note: Here's more on persuasive copywriting by personality type and how to make your site reader-friendly. Enjoy!]

2) Hold yourself accountable. Stop whining about the rising costs of media, the ineffectiveness of channels, and pining for more results; it won’t get you what you seek. If you convert 5%, what happens to the other 95%?

3) Do something about it. Get up off your @ss and stop interrupting your audience with boring, average, sensational crap they didn’t ask for. They want what they want. They’re out there actively searching for, and truly craving, an experience that’s relevant, engaging and anticipates their concerns. Why can’t they get that from you?

If it were easy, more people would be doing it… like your competition.

Carpe diem. There’s an opportunity while it’s still yours to seize.

Take Roy’s advice and rethink what you leave out of your messaging.

Take Jeffrey’s advice and rewrite your calls to action.

Take Bryan’s advice and rethink what you test and how you test it.

Take my advice and reconsider your audience and their angle of approach.

Take Jeff’s advice and rewrite your online copy.

Take Holly’s advice and rethink how you approach female customers.

Those are six actionable pieces of advice among the many powerful voices here. Combine them with the powerful voices in your organization, KAPOW, dynamite.

Here’s the challenge: I’d love to hear what works (and what didn’t) in the comments below. But what I’d love even more are people posting on their own blogs, offering the approach they took to putting one of these pieces of advice into action. Be sure to trackback ping to this post, so we can all share in the learning.

What’s in it for you? How’s a free copy of Waiting For Your Cat to Bark grab you, for starters? The bounty for the best effort: a seat to a Future Now training. Persuasive Online Copywriting is coming up, but this free seat would be good for any of our trainings in the next 12 months.

We’ll give you two weeks to chronicle your efforts before picking a winner.

Best of luck…

Perhaps the grandfather of Usability, Frederick Winslow Taylor, could have called his audience such a thing — they were factory line workers, using a tool to do their job — but today’s consumers are anything but “users”. They’re volunteers, and they’re empowered; they do what they want, when they want because, most importantly, they want to. The “why” is up to them, not you.

I often challenge people to come up with positive associations with the term user. I’m still waiting for one positive response. Sure, I’ve heard “Mac user” and even that falls flat given the very real problems with technology — yes, even with Macs — that rear their ugly head at the most inopportune of times.

While at the event, my favorite Usability-pro-at-sea, Todd Follansbee, offered one of the best jokes I’ve heard in the industry about a man and woman on a first date. The punchline from the woman, upon hearing that the man was a Usability Engineer, was that she hoped he knew sometimes “task completion” and “time spent on task” weren’t the best measures of success! PG-13 material to be sure, but you can see why we like Todd so much.

I digress. Haven’t we all walked past a homeless person, panhandling for change and not reached into our pockets and given a buck or two? Perhaps in your town it’s students asking for donations for new uniforms. Surely not everyone who walks by contributes, or they wouldn’t have to stand out there for weeks on end! Is anyone willing to offer their reason for not supporting either the cause, or the homeless man’s jones for a slice of pizza — at least in NY — that they simply didn’t know how to complete the task successfully? If the task got easier, without him removing the change from your pocket himself, would the conversion rate magically go up? Of course not, because the choice not to give was explicitly made — or implicitly, but it was a decision nonetheless — and was based upon an individual’s motivations.

Contrived example? Maybe. But it’s important to note, without the desire to take action — something your audience controls 100% — it doesn’t matter how easy the task is to complete, or how efficient a process it is.

So, here’s my advice should you find yourself in the unenviable — but let’s face it, all too common — position of trying to determine the best course of action for improving your business online: Stop. Take a step back. Consider that while you want more revenue, more revenue requires more people taking action. But people only do what they want to do.

You have to give them what they want in order to get what you want. Your job is to understand what your customers truly want and help them get it. Then, and only then, does it make sense to try and smooth out the process by removing the stumbling blocks from their path. Remember, 99% of our challenges online have little to do with technology but, rather, with words on the screen before them.

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P.S. – What brought on this little rant? Our friends across the pond at E-Consultancy came up with a list of their hall of fame “User Experience gurus” based on a survey of their audience. Our esteemed founders, Jeffrey and Bryan, were selected for the list. Flattered as Jeffrey and Bryan were, those who’ve followed our work over the years know our collective disdain for the casual use of the “guru” label these days.

In case you didn’t read Robert’s post from last week, where Jeffrey suggests that we marketers need to “get over” ourselves, it should give you some context. A few days later — while, as Jeffrey put it, the woman behind the counter at his local Starbucks still didn’t know who he was despite all the publicity – another list came out with an amendment to the E-Consultancy list where both Seth Godin, and Eisenbergs were left off. This new list was created by David Armano, who runs the widely popular Logic + Emotion blog. (If you haven’t read David’s stuff, his manifesto is what converted me into a regular reader. Although I often disagree with his approach, Logic + Emotion comes highly recommended.)

David’s perspective in removing Seth, Jeffrey & Bryan was that they’re too much in the marketing camp to be considered “User Experience”. My question, though, is this: “Would you prefer to have the experience designed by a top Information Architect but never planned with a deep understanding of the audience’s needs? Or would you prefer to plan the experience according to human motivations, then adjust the architecture to match?”

I think you know my answer.

If you’re interested in their analysis, read the full post; it’s excellent stuff. It’s also a great example of the speed with which we move these days. Michele’s earlier post about Twittering with John Edwards is another.

The Compete folks predicted, based on website traffic, that Mitt Romney would win the GOP nomination. I love their spirit, and the visuals are damn cool. But as this is the Conversion Rate Marketing Blog, I have to admit, Conversion would be a far greater predictor than Traffic.

I know we’re biased but, at the end of the day, when you’re running for President, what you care about first and foremost is votes (much like when you’re running your business, dollars and delighted customers come first). People voting is about an audience taking an action based on their own motivations. And that’s exactly how we’ve defined conversion for the past decade.

The election itself measures macro-conversions (i.e., votes) but the predictive model can only measure micro-conversions (e.g., donations, volunteering, etc.). Just like smart marketers plan a persuasive system to predict sales, one could plan a persuasive system to predict votes. It’s simple, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy

1. First, you’d define the audience, using an intelligent framework like Jungian archetypes or Myers-Briggs (define – find your type).
2. Then you’d consider the micro-actions you’d want them to take; those from an earlier-stage decision than voting. For instance, offering an email address as a way of communicating, signing up for a Twitter update, making a financial donation, or volunteering your time.
3. Once you’ve decided on the micro-action conversions, plan an experience to facilitate these actions you’ve laid out for your audience. The key is in understanding the individual’s motivations for taking the action you’d like her to take.

Some of this information is publicly reported, specifically fundraising totals. Fundraising shows a different prediction than the traffic alone; namely, Rudy getting the nod to partake in the 2008 general election. Obviously, campaign donations represent only one scenario, of which there are many.

Anybody know any sources that track the other potential scenarios? I’d love to assemble a predictive model based on the wisdom of crowds.

[Editor's note: For more online campaign analysis, stay tuned for "If Clicks Were Votes" -- President Obama?"]

Longtime readers know I’ve often been skeptical of MLBAM (the digital arm of the owners of all 30 MLB franchises). It’s nothing personal, it’s just that, as purveyors of America’s Pastime, they’ve been given a product most marketers would kill for, yet they often seem to be actively trying to drop below the NBA in the court of public opinion. It’s gotten so bad at times, the Consumerist aptly dubbed MLBAM the “Department of Hating Your Customers.”

Recently, Newsweek profiled the organization and hailed it as a huge success, given that revenues are up 30% to a whopping $400M. Keep in mind, before you buy the hype and tout them as “the grand slam online leader,” these guys have inventory that includes unlimited supplies of memorabilia, authentic hats & gear, tickets (both retail as well as those they resell) FOR ALL 30 FRANCHISES–not to mention an advertising model that has a steady stream of big name brands who essentially advertise online to round out the rest of their MLB sponsorship campaign (and round up on the balance sheet). $400M per yr? Let’s talk when they get to $4B/yr online.

Sounds high, I know… until you realize the 30 franchises do over $50B combined revenue each year. Is setting the bar below 10% really striving too high? I digress, as I promised myself this wouldn’t be an overly negative post.

Back to Actober.com, I actually have a good feeling about this. Honest, transparent, non-self-serving (or at least, not only self serving). This isn’t Chevy revisited. (Or at least it doesn’t appear to be. ) Of course, the execution has yet to be seen, but I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised to see baseball fans, past and present, more actively engaged this October, and not just to tune in to a possible revised version of the 1986 World Series–but, you know, with an alternate ending.

Subject: Write Articles, Not Blog Postings

Summary: “To demonstrate world-class expertise, avoid quickly written, shallow postings. Instead, invest your time in thorough, value-added content that attracts paying customers.”

Guess what I decided? I did have about that amount of time, and yet I preferred to spend 10 minutes reading his summary and intro, get the gestalt of his point, and spend the remaining 10 minutes sharing my reaction with my community.

Audacious, I know.

I actually don’t want to discuss the meat of his “analysis” (yet), because there’s real charts and data, and I’d like to try to understand his “scientific” position before I decide to agree or disagree. As I said, this takes more than a few minutes. What doesn’t take more than a few minutes to observe, however, is what I do want to discuss: his clear bias.

Avoid shallow postings and instead write value-added content, he says. I couldn’t agree more. But what exactly does this have to do with the medium chosen for the writing in question? Is it possible to write regularly scheduled and published “articles” that provide little value add? Is it equally possible that some have found an ability to “post” interesting and thought-provoking commentary in real time, and influence an ongoing discussion?

Jakob has never written a blog–at least as far as I can tell–but he has written an excellent and respected newsletter for years. Seth Godin, on the other hand, has never written a regularly scheduled newsletter full of articles–at least as far as I can tell–but writes an excellent and well respected blog.

Marshall McLuhan said, “The ignorance of how to use new knowledge stockpiles exponentially.” So, don’t worry about Uncle Jakob. He’s simply mistaking the medium for the message.

I invite you to comment

In Part 1 of this post, I alluded to a process to plan the customer experience around facilitating their buying process rather than your sales process. Those who’ve studied Jungian psychology or Myers-Briggs typology know how to model different decision making styles (or preferences) that make up individual buying processes. But the advent of advanced web analytics allows us to go a step further to prove these models as being more scientifically valid than ever.

Previously, I discussed the question many seem to ask once they embrace the concept of people operating according to their own motivations and preferences: “How do you research WHO makes up my audience, so you can then ASK them about their motivations?” I offered that the question was an understandable one to ask, but far from a productive use of the wise marketer’s time to go find an answer.

I was watching Morning Joe on MSNBC last week, and they illustrated my point wonderfully. Erin Burnett, a correspondent from CNBC, reporting from Wall St. (on, you guessed it, the iPhone) had an exchange with the host, former congressman Joe Scarborough. Joe was remarking at how he always looks at consumer confidence reports as an indicator of what trends are emerging, where gas prices will go, the real estate market, the economy in general, etc. Erin surprised Joe with her response, namely that history shows since the Great Depression–shortly after which consumer confidence began being scientifically measured–public opinion of what would be spent wasn’t exactly a consistent predictor what actually got spent as time went on. I’ll say it again, for the record, believe what they do, not what they say they do.

OK, ok, ok… I can see you nodding your heads in agreement. I can see you waving your hands, saying, “We agree knowing what type they ARE is not worth focusing on, but rather what type THEY WILL BE when they engage with us (and how to do we give them what they want) is where we spend our resources.” The question is, HOW do we get started?

2) Do some “work” yourself (and if need be hire a firm to come in and help wrap up)
Level of difficulty: medium (there’s a process that can be followed, you just need to allocate the resources: time or money)
Likelihood of success: great

Here’s the first exercise to kickoff your internal persona project:

1. Assemble a small team (2 – 4 members) with diverse backgrounds. Make sure to include people who have close contact with end customers, and have a strong understanding of the value proposition (benefits) for the customers. Don’t worry about explicitly including experts in your business for now (if they’re there, great, but if not, the exercise will still work). Remember, the goal is to better understanding the buying process, not redoing the sales process.
2. Give everyone on the team 15 minutes to brainstorm as many attributes as they can about the product, why someone would buy it, or what makes it unique. Collect these attributes, and combine them on a central whiteboard for all to see and discuss to ensure clarity.
3. Next to each attribute, gain consensus on whether it’s more likely to be appealing to logic, or to emotion. Resist the urge to say “both” for each attribute, the exercise is designed to make sure you make some hard decisions. Re-sort the list into logical attributes on one sheet, and emotional on the other.
4. Now repeat the process, this time gaining consensus on how hard it is to understand the attribute, and to which pace it’s likely to appeal. Is the attribute something concrete and crystal clear to anyone after 3 seconds of reading it? Rather, does it require a bit more education or a finer subtle experience level to reach it’s full value? Resort each list according to “faster” or “slower” pace.
5. You know have 4 sorted lists into fast/logical, fast/emotional, slow/logical, and slow/emotional attributes. Here’s where the fun part comes in These lists of attributes are probably too abstract for people to relate to, so make them more concrete. Use your demographic data (you know, the research you bought that didn’t answer the question of why people buy) and your market “segments” to layer a profile; a story which sets the context for the attributes on your lists to be appealing.

Did you just create fancy Personas you can put up on your walls? Are you now in line for that promotion? Sorry, probably not, but if you’re a shareholder, what you’ve done is likely far more valuable. You’ve taken the first step toward building a system to plan different experiences for different types of people, all easily executed on the same website, within the same copy, that provides feedback to prove or disprove the motivations and attributes you assumed. You’ve begun to answer question 1 of the 3 questions for designing persuasive systems.

Yes, learning to crawl can seem frustrating when all you want to do is walk. But remember, given the state of affairs online, our collective track record dictates we’re very good at persuading our visitors to take an action (97.5% of ‘em, anyway). Unfortunately, that action is pounding on the back button until they find someone who seems to understand them better! Set aside 60 minutes to go through the exercise above, and put it into place in whatever capacity you easily can.

I’d love to hear what happens from all who try, and I’ll gladly offer any advice or feedback if you just reach out and share. (If you’d prefer not to comment publicly, please do email me: howardk [at] futurenowinc [dot] com.)

There are 2 ways to begin a Persona project:

1) Hire a firm to conduct research.

Level of difficulty: easy
Likelihood of success: minimal

Expect to cough up tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars on this research–and the wise marketer would do everything in her power not to entertain discussions of ROI (at least positive) from this exercise. Expect the resulting research to create beautiful-sounding Personas and make excellent posters to put up on the wall. In some organizations, you may even expect a raise for a job well done, but you’ll profit more from selling all your company stock short. (Bryan chronicled this approach in his ClickZ column, but it’s worth diving into even further, because the underlying question marketer’s are asking when they hire a research firm is an understandable, but flawed one.)

The question being asked of the research is, “How do we know which types of people make up our audience?” Cough up the dough, create a survey, and you’ll find out something absurd, like your audience is made up of “Info-Driven types,” “Conquerors,” and “Browse-2-Buy” types. How did they determine that? They asked about past purchases, of course, and–naturally–those are good predictors of future behavior, right?

Let me know how that works out for you.

Our clients undoubtedly tire of hearing us over-communicate, “Believe what they do, not what they say they’ll do“. Why? It’s simple. People lie. Not intentionally per se, but between people telling you what they think you want to hear (in America, there’s a bias against being “wrong”), people telling you what they want to be perceived as (what they wish were the case), and finally, people telling you something they simply don’t know (the right brain makes the decisions, and the left brain articulates & rationalizes them, yet both sides of the brain “speak” in different languages. Ever played the telephone game?), it’s virtually impossible to separate the signal from the noise.

“Who makes up my audience?” isn’t the question to be concerned with; rather, “How will each different type of person approach and buy my product?” The smart marketer uses this last insight to align the sales process with their customers’ buying process.

Let’s look at a concrete example of why “who” makes up your audience is irrelevant, while understanding the “buying mode” they’re in is essential.

My mom is a Methodical personality type, meaning her preference dictates a logical process, and one that is rather deliberate in its pace. She works professionally as a bookkeeper and routinely catches oversights by the auditors of her books. She remarks with bewilderment that someone whose singular concern is maintaining hyper-accuracy of the data can so easily miss the details. Notice, she wouldn’t qualify the details as minute, though to many they would be. To a strong Methodical, no detail is too fine. When she buys, chances are she’ll ask 10 – 20 extra questions than most other buyers, and with each successful answer, she’ll gain a touch more confidence.

My preference shares her bias towards a logical process, but has a much faster pace; what we call a Competitive personality type. Whereas Methodicals need a sense of order (or structure) to their process to gain confidence over time, Competitives are perfectly comfortable living amongst the chaos, and letting intuition guide their decision making process. The Competitive type can quickly dismiss logical-sounding fluff (you know, the statistical correlations marketers present when they have no actual causation to report). Think like “The Donald,” and you’re probably closely resembling the Competitive’s approach. When he buys, he’s in a hurry, and just wants the bottom line.

The key word in the examples above, is preference. My mother doesn’t methodically choose where to get her nails done, or where to go for a special dinner. In both of those cases, she buys more experientially, favoring more of an emotional process, and eschewing her normal deliberate pace for a much quicker one. She’s quite comfortable giving it a whirl. After all, “How bad could it be”? (Spoken like a true Spontaneous type, she’s operating outside of her typical buying mode.)

I went to buy my first car right out of college and, despite my bias toward a logical process, did zero research on the ‘net–and never checked out a consumer report. I also didn’t use my typical fast pace; I was much more deliberate. I talked to other people who’d owned the car previously and asked for their opinions and experiences. I considered the car to be an extension of my personal brand. My process was almost purely emotional and, with the deliberate pace, was the complete opposite of my typical buying preference.

Had the manufacturer done market research and decided Competitive types were their #1 audience segment, what would they have done? Built a micro-site catering only to fast-paced, logical thinkers. If they did, the conversion rate would’ve likely been the same anemic 2.4% we see today (because, after all, that’s what most sites today do: cater to one type of person, usually resembling the CEO/founder or IT professional who put the site together in the first place).

The point is, knowing your audience’s type doesn’t tell you which mode they’ll be in once they buy your product. That’s what you want to know and, unfortunately, research can’t tell you the answer to that question. If it can, it’s totally different research than anyone has ever done before. It involves using live test subjects, and not in some contrived listening lab. It involves designing the experiment so that the subjects don’t know they’re participating, they’re actually operating according to their own motivations. It involves making the experience become the experiment.

Planning the customer experience in advance, so you can hypothesize motivations, will drive their buying process (read: what mode they’ll be in). Once you’ve properly accounted for motivations, you can test their actual behavior–in a real environment–thus proving your assumptions about their motivations and optimizing the experience accordingly. The level of difficulty is far higher than simply hiring a firm to conduct research, but the likelihood of success is infinitely higher. And there’s a process to it, so you don’t have to bite off the entire approach in one sitting. This process leads me back to where I started, the second way to get going on Personas.

To be continued . . .

[Read Part 2 to learn how you can build Personas from the ground up without costly research, and build in the feedback loop necessary to know where you're right and where you need to focus additional energy.]

Markus Frind, the founder of PlentyOfFish.com is my new hero (James Hong of Hot or Not is a close second). Marcus spends about two hours a day in his underwear managing a free dating website that gets twelve billion page views a year. He is the only employee, and he only has one server. And by the way, he makes $5-6 million/year with Google ads.

I’ve moderated many panels in my time, and if I had to choose one that entrepreneurs should watch, this is it. If you’re one guy/gal or two guys/gals in a garage, it will push all the right buttons, and you’ll love it. However, if your plan is to raise several million dollars from venture capitalists and then hire five engineers, one VP of biz dev, one CTO, two testers, and a VP of marketing to ship a product in a year, you probably shouldn’t spend your time watching it.

I only watched the first 30 minutes of the Google video this AM, before I realized that 15 minutes of checking Bloglines had stretched well over an hour. I’ll be back later to watch the rest, and comment on the highlights. Will you?

I just read this in an article from Bloomberg:

Marc Greenberg, a Deutsche Bank Securities Inc. analyst in New York, reduced his target price for Starbucks shares to $32 from $37 today, saying that positive consumer reaction to McDonald’s brew poses a threat to the coffee chain.

Yesterday, Jason West, a Deutsche analyst in Boston, upgraded McDonald’s shares to “buy” from “hold” on its “expanding beverages opportunity.”

Will you be going to McDonalds for your coffee instead of Starbucks?

Sadly, said Mr Nielsen, the rush to embrace Web 2.0 technology meant that many firms were turning their back on the basics.

“They should get the basics right first,” he said. “Sadly most websites do not have those primary things right.“

There was a risk, he said, of a return to the dotcom boom days when many sites, such as Boo.com, looked great but were terrible to use.

“That was just bad,” he said. “The idea of community, user generated content and more dynamic web pages are not inherently bad in the same way, they should be secondary to the primary things sites should get right.“

“The main criticism or problem is that I do not think these things are as useful as the primary things,” he said.

Wow. Besides that “secondary things aren’t as useful as primary things,” what exactly concrete did we learn there?

The term Web 2.0 is already burdened with Gumby-like elasticity, so it hardly needs to be the logo (pun intended) for a return to the bubble days of the late 90’s–especially, without defining what it actually is*.

Aren’t websites “more usable” today than they were then? Absolutely. So, a better question for Jakob would be, with so many of the top sites focusing on usability for so many years, why aren’t Conversion Rates any higher? According to the latest Shop.org numbers, they’re not even trending upward.

If he’s right, and the “web is a tool” users, as most usability practitioners would like to call your site’s visitors (can you think of any positive meanings to the word ‘users’?), attempt to accomplish tasks, Conversion Rates (the ratio of actions taken per total visitors) should have risen each-and-every year (until, naturally, the big-bad Web2.0 trend came to bring them crashing down ).

The web is no more a tool than a print catalog, social club, newspaper, radio, television or a brick-and-mortar storefront, but it’s far more experiential and participatory.

What’s sad about many of today’s websites is not the abstract “things” they don’t do well (nor whether these mysteries are primary or secondary); rather, that they simply haven’t taken the time to understand our [the audience's] needs and plan the experience in advance to ensure those needs are met. Instead, they’ve been retrofitting Marketing 1.0 into a new medium, just as they have done with every medium that came before it.

It doesn’t take a “guru” to know that the Internet is fundamentally different than everything that preceded it. It’s continuously evolving and is less about technology than communicating effectively.

Online planning is simple–albeit not easy–and will help you to not confuse the forest for the trees. Don’t believe me? Let the three questions be your guide, fix one scenario on your site, or let’s work on a new campaign with you and measure the results. Be sure and let us know how the experiment turns out, though!

(*Sidenote: On the design side, I came across a great style guide for designing “Web2.0″ sites, by Ben Hunt. Even though, from a conversion standpoint, I wouldn’t agree with 100% of Ben’s conclusions, any designer who exclaims “Design the content, not the page” is A-OK in my book!)

(PPS: Criticizing “Uncle Jakob” is up there with heresy in some circles, I know. Those who reside in such circles may not want to attend my talk with Todd Follansbee at the Usability Professionals Association tomorrow night in NYC.)

We’ve all been there.

As business owners, these are not the customers we’re typically looking for. Picture the Comcast phone rep who answers the phone when this person comes home to no digital TV service during the big game, or the Amtrak phone rep who has to explain why the Friday train service is running four hours delayed–again.

These experiences start off behind the proverbial 8 ball before they ever get going. They’re also experiences where the right attitude, great energy, and a good listener who actually communicates relevant information (i.e., delightful service) can generate oodles and oodles of positive Word of Mouth, and rivers of referral revenue.

On my way home from the office last night, I discovered something curiously missing from my laptop bag–my car keys. I hadn’t actually driven to the office, because the car was blocked in by an age-old Brooklyn tradition of double parking during street cleaning. (Don’t ask, really, it’s a topic for another blog .)

Somewhere between the coffee shop, the cab, and the office, the single set of car keys we own were gone. Oops. Long story short, AAA to the rescue! They’ve heard this song-and-dance before, and without judgment (something the Ms. can’t claim this AM), they found a 24-hour automotive locksmith, setup the appointment, got him to call us on a cell phone when he was in the neighborhood so we didn’t have to wait in the rain, AND kicked in $50 off the outrageous-stupidity-fee the locksmith charges to boot. AMAZING.

They were with us all the way, calling on several occasions to check the status of the locksmith and to make sure we were delighted once the service was rendered.

I’d happily take the time to write a letter exclaiming my adulation for all things AAA and end with a strong Call to Action urging people not to wait until they’re stuck on the side of the road with a flat tire in the snow; rather, to sign up today while their car is still running strong. I’d send an email they could use as a testimonial, I’d even talk to the rep’s superior and share my delight… if they’d only ask.

Why are we so afraid to ask for our customers to share their wonderful stories? Are we afraid they may tell us mostly good news, with some sprinkles of less positive mixed in? Great. Too bad we can’t fix what we don’t know.

Are we afraid people only do what they’re incentivized to do? True, to an extent, but don’t underestimate the power of the Delight Factor. Ask for feedback. Facilitate sharing among customers. Embrace the transparency of today’s environment. And run, don’t walk, to your nearest AAA website and sign-up for a year of their service!! You won’t regret it.

It’s not only preschoolers who enjoy a good game of you show me yours, I’ll show you mine

While randomly strolling through the Future Now offices, there’s a vast array of books teammates are currently ensconced in. Here’s five:

1. Made to Stick, by the brothers Heath. We know a thing or two about getting two very bright, very opinionated brothers together to crank out a few hundred pages. It’s not always easy, but it seems it’s almost always worth the effort. This book is sweeping through the office like wildfire. Easily the book most widely read and applauded within these halls since Freakonomics.
2. How to Win Sales & Influence Spiders, by Cat Seda. The sheer fact that Cat was wise enough to put the goal of influencing spiders AFTER influencing people makes her a big hit in our book. Then again, she already was a big hit, writing one of our collectively favorite blogs.
3. Crucial Conversations, by Patterson, et. al. The quote I got was “Excellent for consultants… Even more excellent for anyone in a relationship!” Double points!
4. Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, by Robert Cialdini. You may have heard, we’ve been busy hiring (interested?). With hiring, naturally comes training. Can’t train Persuasion Architects without the godfather of persuasion!
5. Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus, by Orson Scott Card. With as eclectic a group as we have, be thankful it’s only this last offering that’s off the beaten path. (Bonus points if you can guess who’s reading it–and for the seventh time, I might add.)

Btw, another fun fact about Future Now: the average teammate actively reads 3.4 books at a time. Imagine that, from a collection of pretty high P’s

Anyone care to share their upcoming reading list?

Josh Bernoff of Forrester Research gushes over Rentvillas.com’s latest email to him, remarking at how it succeeded at tapping into his emotional right-brain:

“…this marketing email actually managed to stimulate the nostalgia I had for that trip, and generating an emotion like that from an email is just spectacular.”

He struck up a conversation with Nikki Hootman, author of the email, and she gave an insightful tidbit for all email marketers out there:

“The interesting thing is that we actually tried a much more “professional” looking format with a very nice visual element… but we discovered that people treated it like a mass mailer you might get from Amazon.com or another huge company. When we just use plain text and a photo or two, people consider it much more personal.”

Transparent. Real. Surprised Broca.

Great Job, Nikki!!