Non-Line Blogging

Typical.  Just when you think you've cracked this Blogging lark, up pop a load of commentators saying that its all over. In November’s edition of Wired magazine the story is headed " Twitter, Flickr, Facebook Make Blogs Look So 2004".  Paul Boutin makes the following observation:

“Thinking about launching your own blog? Here's some friendly advice: Don't. And if you've already got one, pull the plug.”

Oh dear.  His point is that the blogosphere, “once a freshwater oasis of folksy self-expression and clever thought, has been flooded by a tsunami of paid bilge”.   The serendipity of googling a subject and finding independent writers with a genuine passion for a topic is now a distant memory, Boutin claims.  These days, if you “scroll down Technorati's list of the top 100 blogs and you'll find personal sites have been shoved aside by professional ones. Most are essentially online magazines: The Huffington Post. Engadget. TreeHugger. A stand-alone commentator can't keep up with a team of pro writers cranking out up to 30 posts a day.”

In November’s .net magazine Jason Calacanis, the founder of human search engine Mahalo has..

“...recently quit blogging altogether.  When it started, it was a very authentic conversation and I think it’s now more about marketing, promotion and link-baiting”. 

So there.

And in the UK Hazel Blears, the Government’s Communities Minister had a pop at bloggers at a political conference the other evening:

"Until political blogging adds value to our political culture, by allowing new voices, ideas and legitimate protest and challenge, and until the mainstream media reports politics in a calmer, more responsible manner, it will continue to fuel a culture of cynicism and despair."

But can they all be right?  Is there still a place in our lives for blogs and why should some of us continue?  Here are a couple of reasons why they are wrong.

Firstly, blogs still represent a fantastic digital marketing tool.  There are the Search marketing benefits – lots of lovely, frequently-updated text that robots love to crawl, lots of interlinking so that sites share their “google-juice” and lots of honest keyword phrases that consumers use when posting reviews (and when searching for products and services).  Here’s what Seth Godin says in Meatball Sundae...

"Let me be superclear here:  A post on a blog anywhere in the world could very well rank higher in a Google search than information on the same topic on your company’s web site. Which means your point of view disappears and the point of view of some blogger comes across instead.”

But secondly I think that the positioning benefits of blogging are even more important.  On my digital marketing courses I love to goad people into considering why a corporate blog is a fantastic idea.  First thing is to ask people if they have access to blogs at work – many people have their links to the blogosphere surgically removed by their weasely IT and HR teams...how un-trusting is that?!  Next up I show them blogs.sun.com and that great tag-line

Once they’ve picked themselves up off the floor and wiped the tears of laughter from their eyes, we try and dissect why this is such a brilliant positioning technique:  What words spring to mind about Sun’s corporate ethos?  “Mad” and “Reckless” soon gives way to “Transparent”, “honest”, “trusting” and “credible”...the kind of sentiment marketers cannot buy.  

The same is true for the housing charity Shelter’s blog from their CEO – it is not there to make you set up a direct debit and donate, it is there to show that Shelter is an organisation committed to fighting homelessness and Adam Samson’s blog talks about the work he does with the media, with the legal profession and with local and central Government.  It gives Shelter a brand position and a strong voice in a crowded marketplace.  Not bad for a blog.   

The other day I was trying to develop a “media displacement” model to justify blogs; if we all have the same amount of waking hours to consume news as a few years ago, what is it that would get thrown overboard to make way for reading a blog and the answer could well be, in a business context “trade magazine articles”.  I attempt to munch my way through Marketing, Marketing Week, Precision Marketing, New Media Age every week and also dip into monthly magazines like Marketing Direct and Revolution.  Yet a lot of the stuff is already several days out of date, some of it is not relevant to me and a lot of it is certainly not “best of breed” digital thinking. 

So ignore some 24 year old trade rag journalist trying to find an angle on a search news story and head for some of the great Search blogs out there for the really valuable content (look no further than Matts Cutts for SEO).  And for web analytics we should all be subscribed to Avinash Kaushik’s excellent blog that is better than any month old magazine article. 

So there is still a place for serendipitous search that yields a rich vein of independent thinking in digital marketing...despite what uber-cool Wired journalists think. And if anybody is reading this, I rest my case. 

It doesn’t take much to tip rational people (like me) into making emotional decisions.  One word did it for me the other day.  Walking past an optician’s shop I noticed (when I was close enough) a sign saying “Appointments Available Today”.   What was it about the word “today” that injected pace, excitement and a positive response from me?  Five letters on a sign and I’m a customer.  “KERCHING”.

I deeply enjoyed reading Brian and Jeffrey Eisenberg’s Call to Action: Secret Formulas to Improve Online Results book and love the passion with which they talk about “persuasion architecture”.  It’s the little things that can make a huge impact on a customer journey, they say, and come up with countless strategies for improving web page successful outcomes.   In an earlier blog I talked about the value of short, succinct copy in digital marketing.  I also blogged about the “Aggregation of Marginal Gains” and how lots of little improvements can end up with one whacking great big business win.  So, armed with these 2 pearls of wisdom I have been impressed with a few little touches from our friends at the world’s favourite airline. So let’s fly.  “Cabin Crew, doors to automatic and cross-check...”

Recently the British Airways site has improved, although there are still a few painful moments as I’ll share in a minute.  However, it’s the small things they have been doing that I like (and fall for).   On a recent trip to Helsinki I was checking in on-line and up popped an up-sell.  “Upgrade this flight for £138.50” they enthused.  So I did.  “KERCHING” went the BA cash register.  How easy was that?  It goes to show that if you don’t ask, you don’t get.  Can’t we all learn to adapt that simple technique to increase average-order value?

Not only that, I loved the way that they took me to a page with the “riff-raff” fare crossed out and “Club Europe” now proudly displayed as if to confirm my new-found social status.  It’s not often that we get to play with “strike-through” fonts but this time it persuaded me that my action was a wise one. “Hello” Executive Lounge and “Goodbye” Post-Purchase Dissonance.

Later that day I had to book another flight and I was seduced again by the BA Persuasion Team.  Just recently they have unleashed into the booking process every salesman’s 3 greatest friends – Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt.   Looking at my fare options I was persuaded to take a positive action and generate a successful outcome for BA.  All because of 64 characters...

The word that hurt the most?  “Disappointment”.   How would I live with myself if I let this golden opportunity slip through my fingers, I wept.  ”KERCHING”

So, BA recognises the value of using every single character to their advantage and I’ve been taken for almost £400 as a result... not bad for a day’s work in the persuasion architecture team.  But there are 5 characters they still use to humiliate me.  Sometimes in my breathless haste to book a flight I miss one of their mandatory check boxes.  No chance of an “Ooops” Message or a “Sorry something didn’t quite work out there” Message, or even a “we sneaked an extra tick box that you missed” Message.  Nope.  It’s an “Error” message.  And of course it’s in red font just to ram the point home.  With an exclamation mark!   Might be enough to put me off one day, just as the 5 characters in “Today” made me become a customer for another company.   Maybe not quite as appalling as Ford's £1 million Error Message but it makes you think about every single letter, doesn’t it?

As a post-script to this blog I just came across another use of strikethrough font - the hugely impressive Avinash Kaushik used it at the end of his latest blog to display to everybody that a great offer (to upgrade to Clib Class Google Analytics) was at an end.  Oh Woe those who dithered - the offer is crossed uot before your eyes...take action next time it presents itself or you too will be disappointed. 

I don’t get much chance to talk about Danish thinkers but maybe we can learn something about running our businesses more effectively from a couple of them, so here goes...

I blew the dust off my copy of Jakob Nielsen’s Prioritizing Web Usability and, as usual, I have been reminded of lots of vital design principles.  There are a few books that I dig into on a regular basis simply because I seem to take away different business benefits depending what I’m obsessing about with clients at the time:  I have been doing a lot of work on a web site re-design and so was lapping up all the lovely stuff about page load times, content above the fold, and aiming for readable fonts not font size rules (more of that in another blog soon).

I know that Danish Jakob has his detractors who say that he dogmatically insists on fast page load times in a world of fast internet and even faster browsers (have you tried Google Chrome yet?).  However, most of what he says is good common digital sense and all the other usability folk tend to concur with his principles, If nothing else it re-assures us that common-sense design principles have been validated by people like Jakob and in Steve Krug's excellent Don't Make Me Think!: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability 

Anyway, whilst thinking about Denmark’s contribution to digital thinking I was reminded that Soren Kierkegaard, an 18^th century Danish philosopher, came up with an interesting view...

“Life is lived forward but understood backward”

So indulge me whilst I attempt a “Danish web usability and philosophy mash-up”: Jakob is an advocate of the “iterative web site design processes” and believes that you need to try things, review them and improve them otherwise you will not get anywhere.   In the testosterone-fuelled world of 21^st century digital marketing this is now called “rapid iterative design” and comes complete with its own intense seminar programme...

Kierkegaard, were he alive today, may suggest that only by delivering different web experiences will you learn which ones work best, so the Danes, 100 years apart concur on the best way to deliver business results.

But the Great Danes are not the only ones who ascribe to the "live life forward" approach:  The evergreen Jim Sterne coined the rather jaunty “TIMITI” (Try It, Measure It, Tweak It) model many years ago and is still a great believer of testing, measuring and optimising.  In my digital marketing training courses I regularly flash up a quote from John Caples from way back in 1932 who said:

“In planning an advertising campaign the first step should be to clear the decks of all opinions.  The next step should be to find a scientific method of testing”

So maybe the answer to all digital success lies in the work of Kierkegaard.  We could even link his "live life forward but understand it backwards" to the "aggregation of marginal gains" concept to deliver a new philosophy for digital marketing.  For the record, Kierkegaard was not a marketer and would probably not have made a great web-master. Apart from his “Live life forward” quote his next best soundbite, referring to the inaccessible nature of most of his writings, seems to have been:

“The task must be made difficult, for only the difficult inspires the noble-hearted”

Funnily enough, there are a few sites out there that seem to design by that philosophy and so maybe he could have cut it as a web master after all.

Even if you consider yourself a bit of a wordsmith the intenet is a pretty unforgiving place and will not tolerate excessive words.  Make web pages "appear" easily laid out to guide people through the content, obsess about every one of your 95 characters in Google AdWords, and ensure that your email subject lines persuade in less than about 80 characters (and don't waste 18 of them with "October Newsletter" either!)

In case anybody else is grappling with the same problem this appropriately brief post gives you some inspiration from others who have tried...

I have made this letter longer than usual, because I lack the time to make it short.  Blaise Pascal

Omit Needless Words.  William Strunk 1918

Omit Needless Words.  Steve Krug 2000

Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.  William Strunk

Get rid of half the words on each page, and then get rid of half of what's left  Steve Krug

In protocol design, perfection has been reached not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.  Antoine de Saint Exupéry

So there.

Back in the 1980's Jan Carlzon was trying to breathe new life into an ailing Scandinavian Air Services.  He was famous for saying "You cannot improve one thing by 1000% but you can improve 1000 little things by 1%".  Wind the clock forward 20 years and "Team GB" scooped a helmet-ful of gold medals in Beijing by following a similar principle.  According to David Brailsford, the British Cycling Performance Director, their success has come by way of the “aggregation of marginal gains”. 

So perhaps digital marketers should adopt the job title of "Performance Director" and we should set out to find, and improve, hundreds of different things to have a gold-medal-winning impact on our business.  The really good news is that, unlike elite cyclists we have loads of big and quick wins within our grasp.  So, rather than committing to a gruelling training regime, why not set out on a journey of digital optimisation?

Let's look at the micro and the macros to see where marginal gains make a big difference.  First up, driving traffic.  My thanks Mike Rogers of Optimize for this case study but it just shows how powerful a series of marginal gains can be in overall performance.  The beauty of Google Adwords is that everybody has just 95 characters to get their message across so those that use their characters wisely will enjoy the rewards.  Let's see how changing a few words drove click-through rates up...

The Aggregation of Marginal Search Gains delivers 15% more traffic

The real beauty of this case study is that Yell.com gets more traffic for less cost...the Google Quality Score in PPC, where you pay less for more successful ads, means that you end up with a lower cost per click and your ad gets shown more often meaning even more traffic.  Gold Medal Mike Rogers!

Having managed to drive more people to the site for less, lets look at the macro end of marginal gains.  Email marketing is still a land of sub-optimised marketing and with a little effort pulling the right levers you can make a massive impact on campaign performance.  Below is a scenario for an email marketing campaign.  Let's pretend we're a BtoB organisation and we want to generate 40 registrations for a seminar.  Our campaign metrics may look like this...

Not bad, but not good.  However, let's get the Performance Director in and work on each element: 

• Hard bounce rate...use email repair software to re-build basic errors (missing "@" sign, invalid Top Level Domains etc).  Moving forward, use validation scripts in your web registration form (see Flybe for "best in breed").
  
• Soft bounce rate, use Spam checking software, make sure you are working with your broadcast partner to identify possible Spam blocks at ISP or Corporate firewall level.  We will never get 100% deliverability, but we should be aiming for 90%.
  
• Open Rate.  Test "From Fields" with different names, use industry or region personalisation in the subject line and work on the appearance of the preview pane by getting exciting text in the first 6 lines not a great big fat banner that will be disabled in virtually all email clients.
  
• Click-through rate.  Through segmentation and cunning use of personalisation give the illusion that this email has been crated just for the recipient.  Similarly, work on your "persuasion architecture" and sell the benefits, provide clear cals to action and introduce pace, excitement, fear, uncertainty and doubt!
  
• Conversion rate.  Pre-populate the landing page or, better still, register them in one click by taking them to a confirmation page.  Certainly don't take them to an empty form with acres of fields to fill in.  Repeat the reasons to register and keep the pace to make sure people don't get cold feet at the final stage.