Business Development

It's just as well they have a good brand ...

2007-10-16T14:47:00.000+01:00

I was talking to a couple of people last week about an e-commerce website. Rather, I was listening, they were complaining. One person had stopped using the site completely while the other customer had recently contacted the Help Desk in order to overcome a problem during the checkout process which prevented them from completing a purchase. In a few moments, the Help Desk had identified the cause, described it as "common" and straight away emailed a 2 page set of instructions for resetting the browser. Browser reset, the purchase went smoothly, but how many customers would have had the patience to work through a 2 page email to find the five lines that related to their set-up?

In manufacturing that kind of solution would be laughed at. If you know you have a problem in a process then you fix the process, you don't develop a work-around for the customers. If this site has a problem with cookies then it needs to redesign the way it uses them. Asking customers to follow a 2 page email and decipher which instructions relate to them can't be regarded as a good approach. And the site that is having these problems? Tesco. It's just as well that it has a good brand, because any normal e-commerce site wouldn't be able to sell much at all with this kind of defective functionality.

The power of reviews

2007-10-12T08:06:00.000+01:00

Recently I bought a new electrical appliance. It came top in a (2 year old) Which consumer survey and they were completely unequivocal - it outperformed the brand leader by a healthy margin against virtually every criterion that they tested it against.

Next stop eBay. I saw the item on sale, placed my bid and won. So far, so good. I had seen an impressive review, decided what I had wanted to buy and got it at a great price. But then, the little green demon curiosity took hold and I Googled to see if there were any reviews other than the Which survey. There were, and I began to read ...

Disaster. The first few were unfailingly negative and said that the Which survey didn't know what it was talking about because it hadn't used the product over a sufficiently long period. I looked further afield to see whether these opinions were a flash in the pan or reflected the consistent mood in the market. Eventually I found some more recent reviews and they were unstinting in their praise of the product so I feel vindicated at last that I have made a decent choice.

This information is a potential problem for manufacturers. They need to be aware of what people are saying about their product because there is a risk that negative reviews will impact adversely on their sales. Perhaps their site should link to some of the positive reviews so that they take advantage of independent praise to help offset the effects of any negative press which may exist.

Travel companies have taken this idea rather further - there are consistent claims that they have written some of the supposedly independent positive reviews of holiday destinations and hotels which appear on the web. I'm not advocating that - I'm a consumer, too.

Now I'm just waiting for the postal strike to end so that I can begin my own extended duration consumer testing. I'm just hoping that it's a positive experience.

Making a business more stable

2007-10-05T13:23:00.000+01:00

A small business that I know set up a new offer in my area about a year ago. From a standing start this offering has generated new revenues of about $400k in the last 12 months. That indicates that there is a genuine need for the service and the pricing must be relatively attractive, particularly since this growth has been achieved without anything other than poster advertising.

It wants to grow the revenues from this new offer further since its core business has been cyclical and the new service is significantly more predictable, limited by the capacity of its facilities and the availability of suitably qualified staff. The supply side is complex with both national and local suppliers, all competing for the same kinds of staff and not differing much in the pay and benefits on offer. It looks as though recruitment may well be the key process in helping the business to grow.

19 55 28N 23 28 50W

2007-10-04T13:22:00.000+01:00

That was the reported position of the lead boat in the round the world race Clipper Round the World 07-08 at midday today. The current leg is from La Rochelle to Salvador. The 10 boats are all identical and will arrive back in Liverpool next July as part of the city’s celebration of its 2008 City of Culture status. Clipper Round the World is a major adventure for most of the participants – the only professional sailor on each boat is the skipper – but it is also a business.

Clipper Round the World was thought up by Robin Knox-Johnston, the first person to sail solo round the world non-stop 1968-69.

Clipper Round the World races take place every 2 years and last about 9 months. The current design is a lightweight cutter built from a glass fibre composite sandwich construction with two layers of glass fibre around a balsa wood core. It displaces 30 tonnes and is just short of 21 metres.

Clipper Round the World has several revenue streams from the participants who pay to take part depending on how many legs they crew in, sponsors of the boats themselves and advertising sponsors throughout the event and on the website. Visitors to the website can use a race viewer which combines Google Maps with a KML file to report the track of each boat on the current leg. Positions on the map are reported every 6 hours. Crews on each boat write occasional blog entries as well as taking photos and videos of what is going on around them.

I’m hooked already and it has only just started. Mind you, I’ve got an interest in one of the boats, a friend is taking part in all the legs.

Just a spike

2007-10-03T12:20:00.000+01:00

For the past 6 weeks or so I have been working in an organisation with about 400 managers and staff. Although I have been there every day and I have met a number of people, I can’t normally claim to know what everyone there is thinking about at any one time.

Last Thursday and Friday there was no doubt in my mind what they were thinking about. They were thinking about business continuity. The local power supply became intermittent and a couple of power spikes disabled a number of their central servers. E-mail, printing, internet access and their main database system were all down for most of the 2 days. The interesting point of the story is that, in an attempt to ensure that their IT infrastructure was well managed, they had contracted out its strategy and management to Very Well Known in the IT Industry Ltd who is easily big and experienced enough to carry out effective risk assessments.

There a couple of reasons why an effective contingency plan might not be in place for this kind of risk:

the probability of occurrence was thought to be vanishingly small
the impact was expected be minutes rather than hours (this organisation has its own power generation for extended power cuts)

Whatever the reasons, I’m pretty sure that they have been visited at some length over the last few days and that there will be a serious attempt to make the network much more resilient to this kind of incident in the future. It also reminds everyone that even when you have contracted out the activity to a 3rd party, the quality of the service will depend on your being an informed client.

Another food outlet

2007-08-17T09:49:00.000+01:00

Many UK golf clubs have had a thin time over the last few years. Some of them have decided that they should do something positive to increase their attendance and bar sales, so they have made a real effort to develop their restaurant's offering at evenings and week-ends.

Last week-end I was a guest at a club who were running with this idea. The quality of the meal was excellent, the prices in the menu appeared to be from an earlier age, and the bar prices were low, too. The good news for the club is that the restaurant is full and bar income has increased substantially so there are real benefits to the club. That isn't to say that it would be a successful tactic for all golf clubs - it requires a well-equipped kitchen and a capable chef supported by sufficient support staff. For some clubs however, it can make substantial difference to trading income.

Getting the budget right

2007-08-16T10:34:00.000+01:00

I've talked before about the problems of cutting costs in complex organisations. One of the things that I didn't mention is that arbitrary cost cuts can cause a good deal of internal debate as well as loss of morale.

I was reminded of this earlier today when two middle managers were describing the approach being taken to next year's budget. They were highly critical but were uncertain that there would be an opportunity to ensure that the cuts were made in what they saw as 'less essential' areas.

Whether those managers were right about the nature of the process, the fact that they have become emotionally committed to an outcome which is different from the existing proposal creates a loss of efficiency within the organisation. Budgetting processes need to be capable of bringing these middle managers along so that they can feel part of the process and accept the outcomes.

What does a product recall cost?

2007-08-14T16:21:00.000+01:00

At the beginning of July, I noted that finding a low cost supplier in a far off country wasn't guaranteed to keep input costs low. Maintaining quality over long supply chains is difficult.

Mattel is a business that is learning the lesson the hard way. Here the problem is not simply the cost of the recalls themselves, but also the damage to Mattel's brand - reputational risk is often talked about, but the real costs are very difficult to estimate, particularly since it can take a long period for the full impact to emerge.

The customer contact problem

2007-08-08T10:29:00.001+01:00

While on holiday I met some people who don't use mobile text messages - they claimed not to know how to access them on their phones. That can be a problem for an organisation which may assume that because it has a customer's mobile phone number, it can use it to send text messages that will be read.

Customer contact is strongly in the permission marketing area and if a customer hasn't given you permission to use a particular contact channel then you may well be wasting your time. The message may not be seen or worse, be filtered through a veil of annoyance that the company has used a channel that the customer finds irritating. It's no surprise that so many people sign up with the mail, fax and telephone preference services. They do it because they don't like the approaches, or they don't like the channels.

Don't ignore SPAM

2007-08-08T10:10:00.000+01:00

I have just come back from a few days holiday and was welcomed on my return by 1783 messages in my SPAM inbox totalling 12.2 Mb. It would be easy to delete it all without reviewing it, but I thought I would take a few minutes to see if there was anything valuable there.

Of the total, only one message shouldn't have been listed as SPAM (a false positive) so that means that the filters are working pretty accurately, but I still get quite a lot of false negatives in my normal inbox (messages which are cleared as good but which are still SPAM).

The point of the post is that SPAM is a problem because it can bury normal mail.

One of the organisations I have been working with recently has a website which allows its customers to complete transactions online. Once the transaction is completed on the webpage, the transaction is sent to the organisation's main email address and is processed as soon as the office opens. That has proved to be popular with some of its customers and the number of transactions processed in this way has been growing rapidly. However, on examining their SPAM inbox they found that a number of the transactions emailed to them from their own website had been categorised as SPAM (a false positive problem). What makes it more difficult is that their problem is subtle - there doesn't seem to be a clear distinction between the transactions which correctly find their way to the inbox and those which have been declared as SPAM.

So, don't ignore your SPAM inbox - there may well be something in there which is valuable to you.

Extending a supply chain doesn't just mean finding a low cost supplier

2007-07-10T09:39:00.000+01:00

Many European organisations have been shifting their focus from local manufacture to import and distribution from an increasingly long supply chain, all in the name of reducing the cost to serve.

I found this article today which describes the quality problems with some products sourced in China. The article refers to US importers and distributors, but the same issues face European importers and distributors.

Now, I'm not making the case that European good, Chinese bad. That wouldn't be accurate, but I have little doubt that the importers and distributors mentioned in this link thought that they were dealing with good products which met the appropriate safety standards. Apparently that assumption isn't enough to guarantee that delivered quality meets local requirements.

It also means that additional activities may need to be built into these long supply chains to make sure that quality standards are maintained. That will have the impact of increasing the cost to serve although it is unlikely to make these sources uncompetitive until their wage rates increase substantially.

What is the customer experience?

2007-06-09T20:21:00.000+01:00

The other day I called 118 118. For those of you outside the UK, that is one of a number of directory enquiries companies who provide details of business and private telephone numbers. I knew the name of the company I wanted to call and their address, but it didn't help. I didn't find out their number until I got back to my computer and looked them up on their website.

I don't imagine that many potential customers would try to find them through directory enquiries, and it wouldn't matter if they did, based on my experience. My point is that they haven't put themselves in their customers' shoes and tried it for themselves. If anyone in the business had a similar experience then I'm sure that they would have done something to get their number properly registered with the directory enquiries companies.

Not that they are exactly hurting on the telephone front. Last week I asked them what their incoming call volume was and they told me that it was running at about 150 calls per day - not bad for a micro business!

Writing a manual is tough

2007-06-02T07:52:00.000+01:00

I like espresso. I've had my current machine about 3 years and it's been excellent, but in the last couple of months it started to play up - the flow rate through the brew head didn't seem as fast and eventually it slowed to a trickle. The noise made by the pump motor sounded different, too.

I read the manual carefully and followed the instructions to clear any airlocks which the manual suggested might be the cause of the problem. It didn't seem to really help so I tried everything else I could think of to clear those pesky airlocks. No real improvement, so I decided to look at the problem more carefully.

Eventually I had an epiphany. Although the flow rate through the brew head was very slow, there was water escaping from the pressure release valve back into the reservoir. With that new information, I was able to solve the problem in about 10 minutes and the machine now works perfectly again. Better, I did it without using any tools or anything that wasn't in the kitchen already. My point is that the problem and the solution weren't covered in the manual.

A proper manual needs to be comprehensive to be useful and that means not just instructions on how to switch the machine on, but helpful in identifying common problems and providing guidance for what can be done. On that basis, most instruction booklets for appliances fail as manuals. Trainer tip for budding manual authors: the phrase no user maintenance possible, is probably not one that you should use unless it is really true.

So how can you write a comprehensive manual? The most obvious approach is to provide the equipment to some would-be users and find out what happens when they try to operate it without any instructions at all. That will provide a very quick insight into how a group of people think and what kind of instructions would help them to get an acceptable outcome.

If you have access to a pool of machines with long working lives then you can also assess what kinds of problems those machines have experienced and provide advice on how people can analyse their problem and carry out simple maintenance.

I'm just off to have an espresso with a full, rich, crema.

The two tail problem

2007-05-09T06:47:00.000+01:00

A and B are rarely separated by a clear unambiguous line. Statisticians refer to this as the two tail experiment. The attempt to separate A and B into 2 categories automatically will actually result in 4 groups:

correctly categorised as A (positives)
incorrectly categorised as A (false positives)
correctly categorised as B (negatives)
incorrectly categorised as B (false negatives)

In most real situations there isn't enough cash to reduce the size of the false positives and false negatives to zero so the designer has to decide where he will accept a higher level of false results. Over the weekend I have had an opportunity to review how one of my email providers had set the limits on their junk mail filters.

Like most people I get junk mail. Like most people I moan a bit about it but generally ignore it. Over the week-end one of my email providers had a significant problem and in only 4 days 87 megabytes of junk mail was sent into my junk mail box - almost 3000 messages - most of which was delivered last Friday and Saturday. That's a pretty unusual blip and since then it seems to be running at a more normal 1 megabyte per day.

Clearly, this email provider had attempted to reduce the level of false positives (emails incorrectly categorised as junk) at the expense of a higher level of false negatives (emails put into my normal inbox which were actually junk. I reviewed the junk mail box to check if there was anything in there that was worth keeping and found 4 false positives - but I was able to sort the junk in a different way than my email provider and was able to immediately throw out stuff from mailer daemons; postmasters; mail delivery systems; mail delivery sub systems and so on which meant that in the end I needed to review only a handful of messages to find the 4 messages which have now been correctly classified in their filter system.

No system is perfect and we need to keep checking that the results that we are offered by these type of systems are actually correct.

Cutting costs

2007-04-30T17:10:00.000+01:00

A good pal of mine says that "Any fool can cut costs, it's reducing the cost base without reducing organisational capability that's the tricky part." That's been brought home to me during the last few weeks as I've been doing an operational review for a fairly large sized organisation which has been through a series of cost reduction exercises over the last 5 years.

What I have been doing is to establish the organisation's current capability in a number of dimensions and the answers have been occasionally bleak. Some of these cost reduction exercises have limited the organisation's ability to create value which has created a rather damaging spiral of decline.

The moral: think hard and make sure that it's just costs that you are cutting.

It's just like Pinnochio's nose

2007-04-28T09:51:00.000+01:00

At the end of January, I reported that Feedburner's stats showed that over time 51 different types of feed readers, aggregators and bots had accessed the blog.

Today that figure is 61, including three cutely named and highly memorable visitors: ocgnpaCs4eCrcdamsfuu4c4n ggp, tctnbtkw9yoj9 x ps oxcpvajmNrtx and eapjsi dm f vtv ei0x all of which appear in the feed reader and aggregator area.

Here I am, where are you?

2007-04-28T08:51:00.000+01:00

I got an email from someone the other day which said, more or less, "Here I am, where are you?", it then went on to describe some work that the writer wanted me to do.

The email was from the Managing Director of a high street brand that I had done some work for a couple of years ago. I had facilitated a 2 day workshop for a cross-functional management team and although I had excellent feedback from them, nothing seemed to happen as a result. I followed up several times over the next 3 months but it went very quiet.

The moral of the story has to be, don't bore people to death with follow-ups but have patience. If they really liked what you did then you won't be forgotten.

Salary sacrifice

2007-04-28T08:11:00.000+01:00

I'm working with a team at the moment which provides a range of services associated with salary sacrifice programmes. Salary sacrifice involves deductions made from an employee's monthly pay which are hypothecated for a specific purpose and are free from income tax and national insurance. It's an interesting idea as a business:

it provides a win-win for everyone (employees [who can make savings against specific, government approved purchases] and employers [who make a net overall saving on their payroll costs even after the management fees charged by the service company]
after selling in the initial programme, the service company can use its relationship with the employer to offer additional programmes so there are great opportunities to deepen the relationships within the existing customer base
it's fast growing - the number of approved programmes is increasing all the time and as more and more employees find out about the savings they can make, they are pressing their employers to set up their own programmes which drives demand for the service companies' expertise
almost best of all - the group of employees who stand to benefit most from this are higher rate tax payers - the group that the employer least wants to lose, so employers tend to respond relatively quickly once the idea takes hold

Lorem Ipsum

2007-04-28T07:39:00.000+01:00

If you have ever been involved in the design of any collateral then you have almost certainly seen the dummy text which is used to provide an impression of how the text would appear in the design layout without allowing the reader to become overly distracted by the content.

I had assumed that this material was garbage pseudo Latin, but it seems that I was wrong. It has a distinguished provenance. According to Richard McClintock, a Latin professor in Virginia, it comes from sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33 of "de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum" (The Extremes of Good and Evil) by Cicero, written in 45 BC. It seems that I have been exposed to historic literature far more frequently than I had thought. If you would like to learn more, then Lorem Ipsum has a more detailed description of the source text with translations by Rackham. It also has a true Lorem Ipsum generator which it claims is unique since it does not rely on the repetition of text blocks and contains no padding text from other languages.

Copywriting the Halbert way

2007-04-11T16:07:00.000+01:00

Having noted the death of Gary Halbert in a previous post, I thought that it might be worthwhile to reflect on why his style of copywriting worked. Halbert himself didn't think it was much to do with the quality of his writing. He said that it was the quality of the ideas that was important and he used to spend at least 90% of his time on thinking about what he was supposed to be selling and less than 10% on the writing itself. On that basis, Halbert should probably be revered as a marketeer or a super salesman rather than a copywriter.

The thing that he looked for was a hungry audience. He didn't mean people who were literally hungry of course, he meant a group of buyers who were desperate for the product or service he was promoting. If he could identify that audience then he knew that he could sell. His gift was very often to identify an aspect of a product which had been overlooked by other people which could confer real benefits to that hungry audience. He was, in his own words "an ideas man" who could generate value for a business both on the top line and the gross margin. Read some of his newsletters to get a flavour of how he helped to redefine business models for some of his clients.

He appeared to be a robust character who enjoyed telling the unvarnished truth, but that was probably a persona for public rather than private consumption. He was obviously a complex man who straddled the old and the new and tied them together by understanding that, at root, the buyer was untouched by the technology. His ability to tie in an advertisement to that buyer was what made him famous. His influence is significant and I have no doubt that many of his ideas will be stolen and used again and again.

A sale is a very fragile thing

2007-04-11T08:06:00.000+01:00

The headline is a quote from Gary Halbert who died on Easter Sunday. Halbert was internationally respected as a copywriter and managed the later years of his life as a mentor and trainer of people trying to develop their own skills.

Like many people, I became aware of him through the Gary Halbert letter which contains several hundred newsletters, begun by him during the 1980s and selling at that stage for about $185 per year. A lifetime subscription to the newsletter sold for about $2800. The point is that people paid over that money willingly because they admired the content, but also the style. Halbert's sales letters are masterpieces of carefully drawn, highly effective prose. If you want to look at a master writer developing a variety of themes then this is a great place to start.

The thing that makes Halbert stand apart as a copywriter in recent years was in his understanding of reach and channels - he knew that for the copy to do its job, it had to find its audience, and he was very inventive at getting his copy in front of plenty of eyeballs. A talented writer and one well worth celebrating.

Link building

2007-03-30T09:10:00.000+01:00

Everyone wants to build their site traffic. There are a variety of ways of building traffic, but organic search results offers lower cost traffic than pay per click advertisements. Pay per click advertising offers other benefits, but that is a post for another day.

People understand that links are important in building their organic search traffic, but they tend not do much to actively manage their links. The very best type of links are one-way inbound links, but the quality of the site providing the link is important too.

Actively managing links takes time and it relies on a series of activities. Many sites don't tend to do these things but they are vital unless you believe that link building should be left to chance or that the investment is a diversion which gets in the way of the day to day business.

These activities include:

research, which sites do you want to target?
classifying possible links, can you use any facts to help you decide which of these target sites deserves special attention?
developing an outline link request letter for webmasters which should be personalised to their site and describing why a link will benefit both them and you
testing the letter on some sites which are less important to you
developing an escalation process, in case they don't respond to your initial offer

I'll be developing these ideas over the next six weeks or so.

Kempton Park on Saturday

2007-03-30T08:59:00.000+01:00

One of my clients has a horse running in the 2:55 at Kempton on Saturday. I won't mention the name of the horse because I wouldn't want any of you to complain about the quality of my racing tips. The reason for the post is that this hobby has become a business sponsorship. The silks which the jockey wears are in the company colours and the website address is clearly shown. I would never recommend a business to indulge in this kind of sponsorship, but as it is an investment that is going to be made anyway, why not try to take a business benefit, too?

The race is a 2000 Guineas qualifier, and it is the horse's first real attempt at running a mile. It has done very well at 7 furlongs in the past but this may be a trip too far. The race is live on Channel 4.

PPA and click fraud

2007-03-29T07:17:00.000+01:00

Advertisers will like Pay per action adverts because they will pay out only when an action is completed. In the current experiment, advertisers can define what the action is (for example, a newsletter sign-up or a sale). It should eliminate the incidence of click fraud too, because the action has to complete before the advertiser has to pay Google. That's where things may start to become more complex.

If the desired action is a sale then at what point does the advertiser pay Google? At the point that their card acceptance service registers the payment from the customer? When the product or service is delivered? What happens if the advertiser pays Google for a completed sale and the customer subsequently asks for a full refund? If these issues can't be handled automatically, then Google may fall out of love with PPA very quickly.

PPC or PPA?

2007-03-27T14:08:00.000+01:00

Pay per click has been with us for a while and it has proved to be highly popular with web marketers. It offers immediacy, targeting and test data. What it hasn't done up to now is offer every advertiser low cost. Some advertisers find that Pay per click advertising is highly expensive since they find themselves paying for clicks which don't convert into sales or relationships which can be exploited subsequently.

Google is experimenting with Pay per action advertisements. During the experiment, these will be available only on Google's content network, but because they focus on advertiser-defined actions they may ultimately prove to be even more popular than Pay per click ads.

While the experiment is in beta, there are some additional limitations for advertisers wishing to take part:

U.S advertisers only
You must have conversion tracking (or be able to implement conversion tracking code) on your website

Advertisers will have to think through just what an action (a sign up for a newsletter, a sale of a book or another product, for example) might be worth to them and that will no doubt mean that bid prices for sales actions could rise sharply which will do Google's share price no harm at all.

I can't wait to see this experiment roll out beyond the content network and then into Europe. This looks as though it will be a very exciting innovation.

What is the purpose of your website?

2007-03-26T18:30:00.000+01:00

There is a point of view that the main point of website is no longer to simply sell a product or a service but to begin a relationship with the visitor. As a concept I'm not entirely convinced by this since it is difficult to test, and the essence of the proposition is that it won't be testable for a period.

The idea of changing the purpose of a website from one which sells to one which develops a relationship is that a site which is attempting to develop the relationship is more interested in giving the visitor something than it is in selling a product or a service. Normally the things being given away are in exchange for an email address and the list which develops becomes the focus of an extended email campaign which may include additional free materials in order to cement the relationship further.

The idea is that by getting the visitor to commit to a free gift, you have achieved significantly more than the average website which has no way of capturing any information at all about its visitors.

The core of the argument is that permission marketing like this allows the website operator to provide the mailing list with a wider and more comprehensive view of the products, services and value that he/she can add to potential clients without actually attempting to actively sell anything. It's because this is so difficult to test that I have difficulty with it - if a sales effort fails it could be either that:

the relationship isn't sufficiently mature and the sales offer will be more successful at some point in the future
the offer wasn't well presented and wouldn't be successful, irrespective of how mature the relationship is

That confusion seems to me to get in the way. Give things away by all means, but don't allow low response rates to promotions to become confused by assumptions about the maturity of relationships. If a promotion fails then take a hard look at the offer. Test it if necessary on a subset before mailing it out to the entire list. Use that research to tune the offer further.

Permission marketing is a great way to build a list, but I'm not convinced it is the way to really build sales. To do that, you need to qualify prospects and that is a very different way of developing the offer.

Copywriting thoughts

2007-03-23T07:30:00.000Z

Read, read and read again!

Don't just keep a swipe file of advertisements or PR copy to raid when you have to create a new piece of copy, read the material to try to understand what works and what doesn't. If you use the swipe file simply to provide you with crude templates then it is almost inevitable that your resulting copy won't perform quite the way you expect.

Good copy relies on you being truthful about the product or service to the target audience that you want to keep, it doesn't rely on using psychological trickery or deception in order to force people to make a purchase from you. Writing to an audience that you want to keep will help you keep the writing more focused and readers will qualify themselves better, too. Then, when the product or service lives up to the descriptions in your copy, you can expect that you will benefit from word of mouth and referrals to support your campaign.

More on digital rights management

2007-03-22T08:17:00.000Z

If you are attempting to develop a business, it might be a good idea to think through the customer experience. Here is a post about someone who couldn't get his properly licensed tracks to play at all.

You have launched your great new idea but somehow you have alienated your distribution channel. No-one could have foreseen that, surely?

The longest suicide note in history?

2007-03-21T22:24:00.000Z

Peter Gutman is a researcher at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, working on the design and analysis of cryptographic security architectures. He helped to write the PGP encryption program and has authored a number of papers on security and encryption. Most of his time is taken up with development and support of the open source cryptlib security toolkit. He has exposure to industry practices and trends and says that his background is a 50/50 mix of industry and academia.

That's all a bit serious which seems only right since Mr Gutman is a person with bottom. Serious he may be, but he can write exceedingly amusingly and at length about the failures of Vista as an attempt in managing Digital Rights. Like many people, I had heard the disasters about people not being able to play their properly licensed HD material on their new high-end HD kit, but Peter Gutman makes a compelling case that the concepts within Vista are very badly flawed.

This is a long document, but is well worth a read, if you have the time. It shows what can happen if suppliers ignore what consumers might actually want to do with the hardware they buy. Here are a few nuggets:

At 44 pages, Microsoft's “Output Content Protection and Windows Vista” document may well be the longest suicide note in history.
... in order to work, Vista's content protection must be able to violate the laws of physics, something that's unlikely to happen no matter how much the content industry wishes that it were possible ...
... Windows content protection will make your hardware more expensive, less reliable, more difficult to program for, more difficult to support, more vulnerable to hostile code, and with more compatibility problems ...

Changes at Webmaster Central

2007-03-20T23:12:00.000Z

Google is improving the functionality of the data that is being made available at Webmaster Central.

The information provided now includes up to 100 complete phrases used to link to a site, not simply the individual keywords. Phrases are aggregated by eliminating capitalisation and punctuation.

This kind of information has always been available, but not directly from Google. Webmasters now have fewer excuses for not attempting to take stronger control over linking text.

This information is distinct from the long tail of keyword phrases used by people in their organic searches but there are tools - like Hittail - which collect the phrases people use in their organic searches to find your site and report them as an aggregated list.

Marketing Business Services

2007-03-19T08:07:00.000Z

The big word in marketing Business Services has always been reciprocity. Business Services firms work with intermediaries to put them in touch with work and the reciprocity principle - you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours - has been a major feature of the partner relationships that have developed over time.

Sometimes this was driven by professional ethics, when a particular group of professionals felt that they should not accept commissions for introducing work to another firm or give commissions on work that was introduced to them.

What has kept reciprocity alive is probably something much more Darwinian. Organisations work more positively with a small group of intermediaries where they understand the obligations clearly. Trying to develop similar relationships with all intermediaries would be counter-productive because of the amount of energy that would be required to support all the relationships. Broader partnership marketing has to be financially based. Where reciprocity gains over broader based partner relationships is in the more detailed understanding and trust which can be conveyed to clients.

Eye tracking gives us clues on how to write for the web

2007-03-15T22:14:00.000Z

In late 2005, Nielsen/Norman conducted an eyetracking test with 255 people in New York City. Sessions with each test subject lasted about one to two hours.

The study helped to highlight how people read web pages and illustrated some interesting differences in the way males and females scan the screen differently.

Here is one of the key findings:

An original press article should not be used on the web - Rewriting & reformatting can increase recall.

Rewriting a dense text resulted in higher comprehension and retention than the original newspaper article.

The original version was revised to increase white space, make the main idea concise, remove unnecessary images, shorten lines of text and adding a graphic for each element in the article.

The eyetracking data highlighted the length of time that readers spent looking at each area of the screen. Readers spent a longer amount of time (about one minute) viewing the original version of the content but remembered 34 percent less than those who received the reformatted story. In both cases a greater amount of time was spent looking at the left-hand side of the page.

Readers find it difficult to read large amounts of dense text on screen unless it can be made memorable in some way. Take this into account when constructing copy and test wherever possible the readability and clarity of what has been written.

BTW, this post has been constructed to follow those guidelines, so make sure you remember what you have read!

What will 3-D Secure Enabled actually change?

2007-03-15T07:35:00.000Z

I suspect that the major change in this experiment will be to business models based on capturing card details for subsequent processing by a Virtual Terminal. 3-D Secure Enabled requires transactions to be live and for the cardholders to key their pin numbers into the Bank's system as part of the checkout process.

That will mean some changes in the online eCommerce world where a surprising number of transactions are handled indirectly, rather than in real-time. The good news for etailers is that it should reduce the level of fraud and charge-backs, but it may mean some ingenuity on the part of existing partners to ensure that everyone is happy in the new environment.

Increased level of security planned for eCommerce

2007-03-14T21:48:00.000Z

The future of online payment processing is coming under significant debate, both nationally and internationally. In the UK fundamental changes are happening. The major clearing banks are attempting to make online banking and credit / debit card clearance significantly more secure. This is both to reduce the current levels of fraud but also to give normal customers the confidence to spend more money online.

In order for online retailers to process Maestro cards from 1st July, 2007 all merchants will be required to be “3-D Secure enabled”. Inevitably this change will cause teething troubles.

For those of you not yet fully aware of “3-D Secure”, the process is actually quite simple; as part of the website checkout process, at the point when you seek to authorise payment from the customer's payment card, the customer is taken to a pin / password entry screen. This screen is hosted on their own card issuer’s servers. The customer will then need to enter the correct password (like a PIN number). If the wrong password is entered then the transaction will be rejected and the merchant will not get the authorisation of the order. However, if the password is correct the customer will be returned to the shopping site to finish their transaction.

While this promises a reduction in the level of charge-backs levied against suspect transactions, online retailers need to make sure that their sites will be compliant by 1 July.

More Feedburner stats

2007-03-13T08:07:00.000Z

Taking a quick look at my FeedBurner stats for the week-end I noticed that Sunday's figures for subscribers seemed to have taken a sharp dip. Feedburner expects subscriber numbers to reduce at the week-end and has several reminders dotted around its site so that neophyte bloggers aren't shocked when they see their numbers coasting south.

This was a little different though since on looking a bit further, the email subscriber category was missing and since emails work on a push basis, they tend to be much more static than the figures for other types of subscribers. Adding those subscribers back in, the week-end total was actually pretty flat.

Now that I have satisfied myself why the total dipped so sharply, I can stop worrying about it and do something more important.

Get the right headline for your readers

2007-03-11T09:57:00.000Z

I have just read an interview with a copywriter called Gary Bencivega. He tells a story of writing headlines for investors. One of his clients sold gold and silver coins and bullion. In this case it was an ad for silver. The headline ran for many years, “Why the price of silver may rise steeply”. He suggested that the agency should test a headline that sounded stronger, bolder, more confident such as ‘Why the price of silver will rise steeply’. He wanted to make it sound as if the writer believed what he was predicting.

Testing the new headline showed that the original was better. “Why the price of silver may rise steeply” outperformed “Why the price of silver will rise steeply” by about 200% despite having the same body copy in both versions. He found it difficult to understand why “may rise” worked so much better than the more forceful “will rise”.

Finally he concluded that it was the disbelief factor. Most investors are knowledgeable and thoughtful. The promise of something that is unknowable such as “will rise”, makes readers conclude that the writer didn't know what he/she was talking about. By building in a little bit of understatement at the headline stage, investors got pulled in to read the whole of the copy.

FeedBurner stats

2007-03-11T09:44:00.000Z

At the end of January I made a post about FeedBurner's stats for this blog. At that time, the all time stats showed visits by 51 different types of browsers, bots, readers and aggregators and that was an increase of 10 in the previous 6 weeks.

Today, the same report has 61 lines excluding category headings so there are plenty of new programs out there sampling the blog universe.

Don't always trust the results

2007-03-10T10:21:00.000Z

There is a tool that I use every now and again to report on websites. It provides summary information about the extent to which a site is indexed on Google, MSN and Yahoo! as well as providing information about inbound links.

This morning I took a quick look at some of the underlying data and found that although the numbers reported for indexed pages were pretty accurate, the figures for inbound links were significantly flawed.

It is important to understand how report programs work and to test out whether the figures they report are accurate. That's true for spreadsheets as much as for other reporting programs. I worked in a Big 5 environment for a number of years and they generated good revenue streams simply by showing clients that the spreadsheet models that they were using in their businesses were defective.

How important is the brand?

2007-03-10T07:54:00.000Z

In Rain's 2007 report on lead generation, there was an interesting insight on the importance of brand in the sales process. Brand matters: 65% of well known companies report themselves as being good or excellent at lead generation while the comparative figure for less well known organisations was 44%. If you are well known, whatever lead generation tactics you employ are likely to work better.

So what does that mean? It could be that branded companies are overemphasising their abilities at lead generation, but that sounds unlikely. It could be that less well known organisations less gung-ho in their self evaluation but that sounds unlikely too.

The Executive Summary - 6 Lead Generation Insights - can be downloaded from Rain at no charge.

What should we spend the money on?

2007-03-08T07:54:00.000Z

Sagefrog carried out a survey last year of 100 marketers in North America and discovered that the activities that respondents reported as having the lowest ROI were:

Direct mail
Advertising

It's easy to understand why marketers feel negative about Advertising, it is difficult to justify print advertising and there is no guarantee that the beautifully crafted ad will even be read. Direct Mail on the other hand is much simpler - lower cost to develop and simpler to test. It's odd that a technique which has a long history and which is still developing major revenues for some organisations should be regarded so negatively by this group of respondents.

The survey results can be downloaded from Sagefrog.

Putting SEO specialists to the test

2007-03-07T16:18:00.000Z

What does the word globalwarmingawareness2007 mean to you? Probably not much unless you are a Search Engine Optimisation specialist putting your skills to the test in the current SEO World Championship.

To be eligible the winning domain must be registered on or after 15 January 2007, it must contain a banner or link to the competition site and the site must comply with Google's Webmaster's Guidelines. The winning site will be the one that scores the highest aggregate search engine ranking position in Google, Yahoo! and MSN for the keyword globalwarmingawareness2007 on 1 May 2007 (roughly 15 weeks after the competition began).

Filter behaviour

2007-03-07T07:44:00.000Z

Yesterday evening I found a legitimate email in my SPAM box. I marked it as not being SPAM and replied to it. Weirdly, the sender's next email landed in my SPAM box this morning so the SPAM filter is not learning quite as rapidly as I would like.

The point of the post is that SPAM filters aren't totally reliable. It is important to look at the contents of the box periodically in order to make sure that nothing important or even interesting is being hidden away from your Inbox. That remains true even when you are reasonably certain that the SPAM filter has learnt your preferences and is behaving consistently.

Yet more stock photo sites

2007-03-06T06:07:00.000Z

Here is another tranche of stock photo sites. As before, I have listed sites which have their own image databases rather than image search sites. I have tried to exclude sites which have overly complex licences or onerous terms of use.

http://www.freemediagoo.com
FreeMediaGoo.com was created for developers by developers. They provide a way for developers to gather assets that can be used in print, film, TV, Internet or any other type of media both for commercial and personal use. The content is royalty free. No need for links and no limits to the number of images that you can use.

There are 10 directories set out with 16 thumbnail images to a page which are fairly quick to browse. This is a simple site to navigate.

http://tofz.org/index.php
This is a more idiosyncratic site, based largely on cityscapes and metropolitan images. It is the work of a single photographer - Jeremie Zimmerman. There are 23 directories, some of which have sub-directories.

You can freely distribute copies of images, modified or not, for a fee or for free providing that you:

attach the Creative Commons licence, in its entirety, to the copies or indicate precisely where the licence can be found
attribute the author of the originals

http://free-stockphotos.com
There are no thumbnails which makes this a more awkward site to browse, but keyword or category search is possible. Use of the images for personal or commercial projects is free but the source - Free-stockphotos - should be attributed and (preferably) a link back to the site provided.

http://www.freephotos.com/
There are over 2700 photos already categorised and another 800 or so are 'in the queue'. Usage of images is absolutely free and doesn't require attribution of the source or a link back to the site. Registration is required for download and the site has a very comprehensive classification system.

http://aarinfreephoto.com/
There are 950 images on the site. Images are the work of a single photographer - Aarin Yu. Images are free for use. The site offers images that are free for personal and commercial use. Images may be downloaded for use in a web site, print ads, brochures or any end products.

Use requires attribution irrespective of the medium. The copyright information will need to be legible. If these images are in use on a website, a link to AarinFreePhoto.com is required.

http://www.geekphilosopher.com
There are about 65 directories. GeekPhilosopher provides royalty free stock images, wallpapers, and desktop backgrounds. Currently, the collection categories include free photos of children, people, sports, fruit, vegetables, eggs, fun and different, medical, airplanes, flowers, outdoors, sky, sunsets,clouds, stars and planets, water, domestic animals, butterflies, insects, grazing animals, birds, horses, famous paintings, music, texture, tile, and paper.

The images in the database comprise both original photographs where Geekphilosopher owns the copyright - those images are free for use except redistribution - and other images which include public domain and expired copyright images.

http://www.bigfoto.com/
bigfoto.com, is a royalty free photo agency offering free use of low resolution images (with link or attribution). Some images are available in high resolution and in those cases, specific terms of use would need to be negotiated with the photographer.

http://www.freeimages.co.uk/
Over 2500 original royalty free medium resolution stock images in 58 galleries. Terms of Use are straightforward for personal and commercial uses - credit to the site and, if possible, a link. Prohibitions include resale of the original image and sub-licensing.

What makes a great eCommerce website?

2007-03-05T19:15:00.001Z

Creating a successful eCommerce website requires the same kind of tried and tested approaches as those used in sales letters. So what are those techniques?

develop a focused approach to a targeted audience (pre-writing preparation) - that focus will help you to develop the right kind of copy and it makes testing simpler because you know what type of audience to test it on

grab their attention using a combination of powerful headlines and sub-headings which they can use to navigate their way through the site

hold their interest by reminding them why they are on the site (to solve a problem) and give them teasers about the solution or product that you are offering

develop trust - often the biggest hurdle for budding copywriters – building an interesting and emotionally-compelling story that can get through built-in lie detectors that readers have developed and make them trust you, as well as convince them that you have the right solution or product

demonstrate your credibility using testimonials although if you are already high profile in your market, talking about your background by mentioning specific achievements (facts and figures) will work as well

make your offer by setting out the pricing, the main product, the incentives and so on

close the sale. The “Call To Action” must be absolutely clear – there's nothing worse than going through all the effort of writing a carefully constructed sales letter than to have your reader leave at the end because the close isn't doing its job

UBPs and ad copy

2007-03-03T07:45:00.000Z

Remember Andy Bounds? He is very good at reminding us that everything we do as sales and marketers has to be tested in a world populated by buyers who look at the world differently from us. He believes that the copy has to meet the buyers' unique buying points (UBPs) rather than our selling points.

So where does the buyer want to see the price in an ad? Different ad producers tackle the problem in different ways, some people:

put the price in the headline
set out the price in the opening paragraph
leave the price until the point they are asking for the sale

It's obviously important to get this right, so let's start to look at an ad from the Andy Bounds perspective. The price is not a benefit to a buyer so emphasing price in the headline could alienate some buyers before they find out how wonderful the product is. Of course, if the product is a staple where the price is well-known then a low price could make a compelling headline providing it detailed the saving rather than the price itself.

Putting the price in the headline makes a number of assumptions:

the buyer is aware of the normal price for the product
the buyer will find the discounted price attractive rather than suspicious

Using the UBP approach, it makes more sense to focus on the benefits that the buyer will enjoy from the purchase - what they are left with after the product or service is delivered.

If the benefits are really compelling then the price can be introduced after the buyer understands what the purchase will do for them. It's at that point that the buyer makes a decision based on their individual value proposition - are those benefits so attractive that they overcome the price that you have just disclosed? If they do, then there is a good chance that your buyer will close the sale.

When is a number not a number

2007-03-02T04:41:00.000Z

How many visitors did this blog have yesterday? I don't know and it isn't because I don't have access to stats.

In what you might think is overkill, I have 3 sources of visitor stats. It would be overkill if they agreed. They don't. It would be overkill if they gave approximately the same figures. They don't.

I have a range where the high value is more than 50% higher than the lowest value reported. That's surprising to me because it highlights that we still have difficulty in agreeing on the value of the base currency of the electronic world - traffic volume.

A whole new Vista awaits

2007-03-02T04:24:00.000Z

At the beginning of February I posted a link to Robert Peston's experience in upgrading to Vista. This is something in a similar vein, this time from Tim Weber, Business Editor on the BBC News website.

He was brave. The machine he decided to upgrade was over 4 years old and had evolved from its original configuration. However, buoyed by the analysis provided by Microsoft's Vista Upgrade Advisor, he decided to take the plunge.

Would he do it again? The answer is no.

He believes that he should have done what he originally planned to do. Wait for half a year until the driver issues are settled and then buy a new PC. Once that was in place, he could have upgraded and tinkered with his old machine, to give to someone.

His conclusion: you will probably enjoy Vista, but there's little reason to do it the hard way.

Even more stock photos

2007-02-28T15:46:00.000Z

Another collection, all based on sites which have their own image databases and clear Terms of Use:

http://www.photocase.com
Images may be downloaded for private use and for commercial and non-commercial purposes as a component of "new independent graphic works" or within "an editorial context". Independent graphic works for the above purpose are new works created by the downloader and integrating the subject photograph such as collages, Internet pages, print products and advertising media. Download credits are earned daily (1 per day but expire at day's end), and may be earned by uploading images or by cash payment.

http://majesticimagery.com/
Majestic Imagery has over 450 images in 18 categories. Registered users are welcome to download and use images within graphics projects on a royalty free basis. The sole stipulation is that credit is given to the photographer and the Majestic Images site through a back link.

http://www.cepolina.com/freephoto/
This is one of the larger private image databases and consists of over 5000 images which relate to a wide range of topics which can be searched by keyword, by geography or by colour. Terms of use include private and commercial uses providing the source is attributed and there is a backlink to the site.

http://imagebase.davidniblack.com/main.php
High quality photos, but a relatively small database organised in 5 categories. Usage is free for personal and commercial use providing the photographer is attributed and there is a backlink to the site. There are some excluded categories, but this is one of the simplest licence agreements that I have come across.

http://www.woophy.com
A large collection of over 232,000 images organised geographically. Usage is free for personal and commercial use for low resolution images - further rights need to be negotiated with the owner of the image. Several search types are possible including country, city and keyword.

http://yotophoto.com/
Yotophoto has indexed well over a quarter of a million Creative Commons, Public Domain, GNU FDL, and various other 'copyleft' images. Images are free to use for public and commercial applications. Because of the large range of sources, licence conditions vary and it is important to check the terms of a specific image before use.

http://www.creatingonline.com/stock_photos/
Free stock photographs and a premium image area. Free photos may be used in both personal and commercial projects, subject to the Licensing Agreement. No linkback or credits are required, although a link back to the gallery would be appreciated.

http://www.amgmedia.com/freephotos/
A number of free stock photos which are free to use for personal and commercial projects providing you give credit to the photographer: Ernest von Rosen.

More stock photos

2007-02-27T08:09:00.000Z

Continuing from the last post on where to find some royalty free stock photos, here is the next batch:

http://amazingtextures.com/
This site has about 850 free stock photos which are grouped in 21 directories. The key theme is texture. Exploration of the site is free and registration is required to access high quality images.

http://www.nps.gov/archive/yell/press/images/
This site features 12,000 public domain images of the Yellowstone National Park. Terms of use are limited to crediting the source or the photographer.

http://www.freephotosbank.com/
Free Photos Bank has 9 directories which you can browse as well as a number of other free resources. Terms of use include commercial contracts but preclude the resale of the images.

http://freedigitalphotos.net/
FreeDigitalPhotos has thousands of royalty free stock photos for commercial and non commercial work - use within a site requires a link back, but not necessarily on the same page. Users should attribute the source and not claim the work as their own. The images are not for resale or download.

http://www.artfavor.com/
Several hundred royalty free photos - some of excellent quality which can be used for non-commercial projects.

http://www.burningwell.org/
1400 photos in the public domain which can be used for any purpose.

http://visipix.dynalias.com
Use of the images is restricted to 50 in any publication and use must include attribution of the photographer and Visipix. There are additional exclusions, but they are not onerous.

You only have seconds to make a good impression

2007-02-24T12:54:00.000Z

Today I got some junk mail. It was a reasonably well-constructed sales letter and it was well directed - I was certainly within its target group. It was let down by some very basic failures in the paper and the printing.

I know I'm obsessive about this stuff, but plenty of people notice if a letter is produced which:

is printed on 80 grammes paper which looks as if it has been recycled from old cereal boxes
is printed by a jet printer where the paper handling is so poor that the area of the letter with the contact address has bounced under the print head producing a quite unacceptable blurring of the print
carries a print ghost higher on the paper, presumably produced by stacking the printed output while the ink was still wet
has a very low quality logo in the top corner of the letter

It wouldn't matter if I thought the offer was good. Their lack of interest in these details means that they are people that I don't want to work with.

Stock photos

2007-02-23T14:59:00.000Z

In a couple of previous posts I have mentioned Stock xchange and Stock xpert as well as Every Stock Photo and Morguefile. Chris was looking for an image today and couldn't find anything in the normal places that we look. I decided to do a little more research to put together a more comprehensive list. I have excluded picture search engines in favour of sites which have their own photo database since the copyright and terms of use are clearer.

This will probably go over several posts since I will restrict the number of sites to between 6 and 8 per post.

http://www.nationsillustrated.com/
About 7300 photos for personal and non-commercial use. Landscapes, people and a few wild life shots all of which are categorised geographically. Some genuinely stunning images.

http://www.designpacks.com/
Design Packs offer free, high quality image collections that can be used in both personal and commercial web design projects. Each collection features a group of 15 images that share a common theme. They have created a number of collections. New sets are added periodically. Downloads are limited to a whole theme rather than individual photos.

You are permitted to use their photos to design as many projects as you wish, including commercial projects. Resale of the images is not allowed.

http://www.pixelperfectdigital.com/free_stock_photos/
Approximately 4400 stock photos categorised in broad groups. Terms of use are for personal and commercial use providing the commercial use does not include resale of the image. There are also a series of additional exclusions.

http://www.pyed.net/eye/
Photo repository has about 300 royalty free stock photos arranged in 9 albums. Registration is required to download high quality images and attribution is required when using an image as part of a web project but the terms of use are not onerous.

http://www.diwiesign.com/index
If you want pictures of corrosion or peeling paint, this may be the site for you. All the images are royalty free for personal and non-commercial use, but read the disclaimer and terms of use before you download.

http://stockcache.com/gallery/
Stock cache has a small stock photo library (about 1000 images) which seems to be organised in 13 directories.

http://www.unprofound.com/
Free for personal use and commercial uses which don't include resale of the images. Directories are organised by colour.

http://www.piotrpix.info/
Piotr.Pix is an image database providing free high-quality images. You can freely use pictures in your personal, charity projects or any non-profit project. About 2000 images in the library, arranged in 7 directories.

It wasn't just me, then

2007-02-22T10:32:00.000Z

I mention SEOmoz from time to time. They have a nifty tool which provides an evaluation of page rank and shows the components which they use to drive their overall score. I plugged some of our sites into it today and got some strange results.

To confirm that the tool was not reporting correctly I went to some of the underlying sources and found that our sites hadn't lost their links in Yahoo! or Google. So it isn't a disaster. SEOmoz will no doubt bring the tool back up eventually and I'll keep waiting.

It's got great distribution

2007-02-22T08:37:00.000Z

My wife likes to drink tea in the morning at breakfast and when she stays at hotels outside the UK they very often bring hot water to the table and a selection of Lipton's tea bags. She doesn't enjoy it much. Her description of Lipton's tea bags is that they are designed for people who don't enjoy drinking tea.

As a brand though, it's well-known, and it must have great distribution. They claim that their teas are drunk in 180 countries. Hotels obviously buy it because they want their guests to enjoy the authentic flavour of a quality tea in the morning. All that well-meaning effort and they buy Lipton.

What Lipton has done very succesfully is to provide Hotels with a short-cut. They can buy the (admittedly extensive) range as an easy choice. That makes it hard for a new entrant - unless they used a cherry-picking strategy to develop volume and then use the volume to justify the distribution required to deliver greater penetration. That's quite an uphill struggle and not many competitors are going to want to adopt that as a strategy.

The squeeze

2007-02-15T13:47:00.000Z

We had a prospect who had been dithering. Time was moving on and they seemed to be reluctant to get down off the fence and make a decision and live with the consequences. Eventually we used a squeeze to close the business.

I'm not sorry that we used a 'trick' to encourage the decision. It was important that they moved on and stopped wasting time. I think that they have made the right choice but only time will tell. We will do what we can to make their copy sing and if we get it right then we should see the results in their visitor statistics.

In pipeline terms we understood how much they needed our solution and valued our input - where we took a risk was on how much we could influence the outcome.

First it's gone, now it's come back again

2007-02-15T13:33:00.000Z

A few weeks ago I made a post about the death of Overture but it continued to limp along, forecasts of its demise proving to be a little premature.

Yesterday I got a clear and unequivocal opinion from someone I respect that it had definitely gone, but today Overture seems to be offering responses from all the tools I have that can access it. Perhaps it is simply that the service is creaking and just runs out of capacity from time to time.

What this indicates is that relying on Overture for something as commercially important as keywords may backfire. It makes sense to take advantage of the service if it is up, but it is probably a good idea to have a series of fall-backs available for those times when you need that analysis in the next hour and Overture seems to have gone for a walk.

At root this is about risk management - and relying on a single source of key statistics can be regarded as higher risk than developing a series of sources. It is rarely the case that anyone needs to compare results from different sources, so the fact that they produce different absolute results is rarely going to be a problem. Keyword analysis is very often a snapshot in time and in a perfect world we want to know what people will be searching for next month, not what they were searching for last week.

Make sure that you sell value, from the beginning

2007-02-14T14:34:00.000Z

We have the best product / service
Our customer service team is the best
Our pricing is the most competitive
Our team is the most qualified
We are number one in our market

Buyers hear this day after day and they simply stop believing it and start looking for more solid evidence. It's a common habit in sales to present these descriptions as fact when there is no opportunity for the Buyer to test whether the statements are true or not.

As a sales and marketing approach it isn't very effective and it doesn't distinguish the business from any other supplier - it's a 'me too' sales tactic. These approaches are often supported by marketing programs that use a relatively passive communication model which consists of "here it is, this is what we do". Why not try something a little different?

Is it possible for any of your prospects to experience your business value prior to the first meeting with your sales team? If they can, it can be a springboard to the process - it reduces the comparison with competitors, the sales cycle can be shortened and it will be easier to protect gross margins.

Your sales team can spend most its time personalising how they will help the prospect use your product or service as a business tool, instead of spending a disproportionate amount of time in the sales cycle cold calling, and educating prospects.

One way of letting prospects experience the value is give them free business content which encourages them to make a call for a salesperson to visit.

Marketing tools like webinars, teleseminars, newsletters and workshops can be the key to communicating your value first to generate qualified leads. These marketing devices allow your prospects to learn about your value through their own filtering and judgment process and if done correctly, they will call and say "I am interested".

A different eye

2007-02-14T08:13:00.000Z

A designer has taken a look at one of our eCommerce sites and has shown us some ideas about how we might change its look and feel. We looked at them together yesterday and we all agreed that visually, he was right - his visual concept is significantly more sophisticated than the one we are using.

The trick is to combine some of those visual concepts with other things we already doing. In some ways we are very pleased with the site - it has great positioning for several good keywords and products already sell from the page - and although it is intended as a classic B2C site, it is developing a steady list of enquiries for larger volumes from businesses who are interested in buying the product.

I'm going to have a word with him today to see if I can get him to adapt his approach a little to see if how can we can get the best of both worlds. None of us claims to be strong in design - but we know what we like - and we get plenty of value in working with designers who approach our problems without our baggage about what the web page has to include.

Linkbait works

2007-02-12T15:21:00.000Z

John Chow's accelerated authority in Technorati continues apace. When he launched his latest link exchange idea towards the end of December, his ranking was 1529. Today it is 500. That's a pretty impressive movement in less than two months.

I like John Chow's blog - he has something to say and is often amusing. But he is demolishing Technorati's primary measure of authority - inbound links - because he has found a way of building them so quickly. Does the Technorati team honestly believe that Chow's blog is better and more authoritative today than it was at the end of December?

How rude can you be to a prospect?

2007-02-12T14:25:00.000Z

Sometimes, selling business services there is a reluctance to be too candid. You have probably trained yourself not to be rude to the client either about what they have done or what they propose to do. Like any rule, it can be broken - sometimes accidentally, sometimes deliberately.

At one time I was working with a number of prospects and one of them was moving particularly slowly. In fit of frustration, I told them candidly that what they had done was far from perfect and that they needed to sharpen themselves up. Amazingly they read what I had written and decided that it reflected a passion for their business and there is no doubt in my mind that it helped me to close business with them.

A few months later, a copywriting colleague was looking at the collateral put together by one of my prospects and was very scathing about the nature of the offer and how they were promoting their service. Instead of attempting to turn those comments into something more emollient, we took the decision to face the issue head-on. It's always a high risk strategy, and it isn't something that is appropriate for all situations. However, if you feel that the prospect needs to see how strongly you feel about their business and there is a real risk that your normal approach won't be successful then it may be worthwhile taking the risk.

What's the right price?

2007-02-12T11:16:00.000Z

Price is a complex topic. The right price is the one which allows the Seller to sell profitably and where they Buyer can see real value in what they have bought. That price is going to be different for different Buyers so some experimentation is called for. Sometimes an offer of a great product or service is let down because the seller doesn't have the nerve to pitch the price high enough - the prospect looks over the offer and dismisses it because "it couldn't be as good as they say at that price!".

As a real life example, a website that I'm aware of has just increased its prices by 20% and Buyers seem to be undeterred. Should they increase prices further? I don't know, but it might be worth more experimentation.

Why have they got clay feet?

2007-02-10T10:39:00.000Z

The latest sales person or sales manager is recruited with the best of intentions, but after 6 months or so it is clear that they haven't turned performance around - they are OK, but they simply aren't setting the world alight.

There could be plenty of reasons for this, and it needn't be because the latest recruit doesn't have the skills that they mentioned on their CV.

Sales is a team game. For the salesperson to be really successful, there are plenty of activities behind them which need to be working well, too. Paying upper quartile salaries to people with good CVs isn't enough. Managers of the business need to make sure that the organisation has positioned itself to help its salespeople be successful.

A little preparation might be a good idea

2007-02-09T21:20:00.000Z

If you are pitching to a big company and you think that you have just one shot then you are probably doomed to fail.

In big companies, people rarely (if ever) decide to change how they're doing things in just one meeting. They need to:

involve others in the decision process. Getting management & staff buy-in is often essential for the success of any new initiatives or products
compare your potential ROI figures with their own internal analysis
make sure it's worth their while. Bringing in new vendors, service providers or consultants is a lot of work and frequently disruptive to their existing schedules

As a seller, you need to realize this from the beginning. It's going to take multiple calls, multiple meetings, multiple contact points. It can go more quickly, but you have to prepare for the long haul. You can't disclose too much at the initial meeting. You have to think about how to spread out what you want to say over time so as to advance the sales process.

Key questions to ask yourself as you get ready for that first meeting are:

what is the logical next step? Once you know this, you can evaluate all your other ideas in terms of how they contribute to that outcome
what do I need to share with this decision maker to entice him/her to learn more? Which stories and examples will have the strongest resonance with this buyer?
what do I need to learn about them to ensure my offering can make a valuable contribution? Selling consultatively means that you need to think through the questions you want to ask before you go on that meeting. Your ability to engage the people that you meet in an intelligent discussion of their business objectives, issues and needs will be crucial to your success

That's not selling, that's giving it away

2007-02-08T17:34:00.000Z

This morning's post brought forth its usual mix of junk mail, most of which could have been classified as a series of 3 month trial offers.

The logic seems to be that once you, dear reader, have used the service for a period you will be so overwhelmed by the value you have been able to uncover that you will happily sign on for a full subscription. More likely, since you need to provide your bank details in order to qualify for the 3 month trial, you will be forgetful enough not to cancel the subscription before your bank pays the subscription on your behalf.

This looks like a very lazy sales technique. If the offer has real value then the 3 month trial shouldn't be necessary, the copy should make it crystal clear to the readers that this offer will satisfy real wants or cravings that they have. Do some research, establish what the value proposition is and develop some proper copy. Selling may not be easy, but giving the service away for 3 months is unimaginative. There wasn't a lot of similarity between the services being promoted in my junk mail pile except the offers that were being used to promote them.

Money makes the world go around

2007-02-08T17:05:00.000Z

At the end of December I posted about some difficulties that my wife was experiencing in getting a new tax disc for her car. Those tax discs have never arrived, so if they were sent then they have been delivered into someone else's hands.

Yesterday I realised that my son had bought his car almost two months ago and I didn't recall him getting his copy of the vehicle registration document. I left him a message on his phone. He telephoned the Vehicle Licensing Centre to find that the registered keeper of his car is someone else. The agent at the Vehicle Licensing Centre couldn't / wouldn't reveal the name of the currently registered keeper (the Data Protection Act once again) but gave good advice on how he could get the vehicle properly registered in his own name.

He is being treated as if he has lost the log book - a log book that he has never had. There is a charge for the replacement of the 'lost' log book - although I'm struggling to see how my son is responsible for the charge since he has never had the log book to misplace.

There's a link here somewhere

2007-02-07T07:53:00.000Z

Many people know that inbound links to a site are helpful in developing the page rank of a website which in turn has a positive impact on where the site will appear on a search engine page for a particular keyword.

One of the irritations for people measuring the success of their efforts to build the number of inbound links is that Yahoo! and Google reported the figures quite differently. That has changed and Google's webmaster console now reports backlinks reasonably accurately, once you have identified your ownership of a specific site.

Matt Cutts has clarified on his blog that not all links carry the same weight. That's an interesting post in its own right but the concept that not all links are equally valuable has been "understood" for a while. A link from a highly relevant site with a strong page rank and highly relevant anchor text has to be worth more than a link produced from an automated site whose relevance is more questionable.

I'm confused about organic search again

2007-02-07T06:46:00.000Z

I have been blogging for about a year and it shows. I have learnt quite a lot but there is still a mountain of stuff that I don't know. What is confusing me at the moment is how blog posts appear in organic search engines and what that means for people following links to the blog.

When an organic search for a keyword term lists a post from the blog it seems to be entirely random whether the listing links to:

the home page (which shows the newest post rather than the post that appeared in the search listing) which means that some visitors leave without actually finding the post that they found on the search engine
all the posts which contain one of the labels from the post itself (Blogging; Business and so on)
the post itself

The confusion arises because I use the same basic process whenever I make a post. I publish it with the appropriate labels and then I link the post to the same labels on Del.icio.us. That's it. If I was doing something radically different each time then perhaps it would be easier to understand. The BUT is that organic search engines are supposed to deliver relevant links irrespective of the workflow that created the content, and what could be more relevant than the original post?

It doesn't matter much at one level - I'm writing this, not searching it - at another level it is an indicator that organic search is behaving unpredictably and while that is the case, we don't honestly know if we are getting to see the most relevant returns to our queries.

Make sure the product is ready for launch

2007-02-06T11:12:00.000Z

I noticed that earlier today, Robert Peston made a post which reported on his week-end lost to Vista - his conclusion: the product simply wasn't ready for retail launch.

Modifying sales activity

2007-02-06T10:49:00.000Z

Phil and I sat down yesterday to review what we had been doing for one of our clients. How we had shared the activities; what had worked; what we might do differently. It also gave us a short term plan to share with our client.

It's important to have this kind of review meeting periodically. It gives you an opportunity to stand back from the day-to-day activity and take a more critical look to see whether your investment in individual activities is paying off. In sales it is important to focus on activities that take you forward in your pipeline. The moment that you undertake activity for activities' sake, you are probably wasting your time.

It was a useful session and both of us got a lot out of it. The frequency of account reviews depends to an extent on the nature of the account and the amount of effort that you are putting into it - the higher the investment - the more frequent the reviews. As a minimum, all live accounts should be reviewed once per year. A large account with many contact points might require a review every 6 weeks.

Blogger breakdown

2007-02-01T19:38:00.000Z

An unusual loss of service at Blogger today. Let's hope that this isn't going to be a regular feature of life in New Blogger. I joined the Help community to raise a ticket, but once I was in the forum I could see that it was barely worthwhile raising a comment - several hundred people had already beaten me to it.

My problems related to labels and archives but anyone who had accessed the blog through Del.icio.us had no problem - at least I'm glad that I kept that work-around running. In fact, the Del.icio.us taxonomy is more comprehensive than the labels because I ran it from my first posts. It would take a while to do that for labels which is why I have ignored the problem.

PayPal breakthrough

2007-02-01T19:32:00.000Z

After being rejected by PayPal, they invited us to re-apply and this time we have been accepted for PayPal Pro.

That's great because it means that we can start offering virtual terminal functionality to cardholders - it should also reduce the number of bale-outs that we get at the shopping cart stage. We plan to use Roman cart for the shopping cart and PayPal Pro for card acceptance.

I'll let you know how it goes.

What's happened to the disk capacity?

2007-02-01T08:36:00.000Z

Last night I took a look at the free space on the disk in my laptop. It looked quite a lot smaller than I expected so I booted up a utility and found that there was a 9.4GB file which shouldn't have been there.

The whole process took less than a minute - booting the utility, logging the disk, finding the file, viewing it and deleting it - but the interesting thing is that I didn't use any XP tools to do it. I don't know them well enough and the whole Windows approach of trying to hide things from the user leaves me vaguely uneasy. I'm sure that those tools would have worked, it's just a matter of confidence. My approach means that I have seen the file and been able to take a quick look at it before deleting it.

It's one of the features of growing older - a reliance on doing what you know works.

Thanks for the phone call

2007-02-01T08:10:00.000Z

We got a phone call from someone last night that we didn't know. He had found a mobile phone and dialled the stored number for 'Home' . After some confusion, we realised that the handset belonged to our elder son who hasn't lived at home for a number of years (but it's nice to think that he still thinks of where we live as home).

Our first thought was to call our son, but like many 20-somethings he uses his mobile as his primary contact, so our initial searches through address books didn't yield anything useful. We called his girl friend instead.

The phone was found in central London, but the guy who found it doesn't live far from where we live (out in the sticks) so we will meet him later today and give him a small reward for his honesty. I'm not sure how you can avoid losing a mobile from time to time, I'm just glad that in this instance it was recovered so quickly.

The email barriers are going up

2007-02-01T07:55:00.000Z

I hate spammers. Not because I find it tedious to delete all the ads for penny shares or canadian pharmaceuticals. I hate them because they are having an impact on legitimate business.

Talking to someone the other day, he complained that 40% of the people that signed up for email updates to his blog weren't able to verify their subscriptions. I didn't believe him so he checked in real time - the actual figure was 37.5%. Now that probably doesn't mean that he has lost all those people as readers, simply that the basic process of sending an autoresponder confirmation email to an email address and getting a positive response has failed. Perhaps those autoresponder emails are getting caught up in company firewalls or maybe an overactive spam filter has pushed them into an email limbo.

We have the same problem with one of our contact lists - we use an email distribution service which generally works very well, but at one very large organisation, virtually none of the emails distributed by the service reach the inboxes of the people on the list - the exception seems to be a couple of their subsidiaries in Australia which don't seem to be protected quite as diligently as their operations elsewhere. That means that email requires work-arounds if you intend to use it as part of your contact strategy.

In some utopian future, spam won't exist and email will work perfectly, but don't hold your breath.

Wants or needs?

2007-01-31T08:54:00.000Z

If you were ever in any doubt about whether you should try to satisfy wants or needs then this article in Slate about buying and drinking a spectacular white Burgundy should clarify the matter for ever.

Mike Steinberger not only paid $700 for the bottle of hauntingly good 1996 Coche-Dury Corton-Charlemagne, a grand cru white Burgundy, he drove away from the restaurant feeling that he had paid a bargain price.

How long is your tail? (FeedBurner stats)

2007-01-31T08:07:00.000Z

It's about six weeks since I last took a look at FeedBurner's stats to see how many Feed Readers and Aggregators have accessed the blog over time. The current figure is 51 different types of browsers, bots, readers and aggregators. That's an increase of 10 new lines in the report in the intervening period.

We talk about the long tail in relation to keyword searches, but there is a different kind of long tail developing in RSS feeds.

Where's a non-expert when you want one?

2007-01-31T07:19:00.000Z

We know what we want to find - a group of non-experts in a particular subject. So how do you go about finding a non-expert? They realise that this topic is important to them but they don't think they have got it mastered - they need to know more. Where do they sit? What do they read? How do we recognise that they are non-experts? Are they capable of classifying themselves as non-experts?

Actually, thinking about it, targeting has to be based on self-assessment. It doesn't matter to us how expert these people are, it is the fact that they think that they are non-experts that makes them the right targets.

OK, now I've understood that, where are they?

Don't forget the feedback

2007-01-31T06:22:00.000Z

Feedback is important in plenty of areas, particularly in training. The mantra in training delivery is: give feedback when it isn't asked for and ask for feedback when it hasn't been offered. Both my wife and my younger son have been on training courses this week and their experiences have been very different.

My younger son has been on an induction course at Pretty Big Employer Ltd which gave him an opportunity to meet a range of fairly new starters from around the organisation and learn something about the history of the business. He seems to have enjoyed the experience immensely which is fine. The training seems to have managed the mix between socialisation and content pretty effectively.

On the other hand, my wife was at a regional course on Tuesday which was supposed to be the last word on how to improve an aspect of her College's delivery and she came home spitting feathers, complaining that the trainer was completely useless and unaware about the impact of legislative changes occurring in her area of provision. She deliberately didn't complete her feedback form while she was on the course and brought it home last night so that she could compose something suitably scathing. Now, I don't know the process for analysing those forms or indeed who reads them, but I'm in no doubt that the course designer and the trainer could both learn something fairly useful from that feedback form.

When it's gone, it's gone

2007-01-30T11:58:00.000Z

Not so much an Overture, more like the finale. Overture, criticised by many for the quality of its outputs seems to have finally disappeared.

Where Overture was useful was in its ability quickly to report on keyword usage by country and that, coupled with some ingenuity on the part of the researcher could highlight which keywords were gaining ground by language of search. As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, Overture's accuracy has been under fire for a while. That said, the output provided a ranked list of keywords and that alone is almost worth the price of admission because it begins to provide an indication of the long tail which webmasters can use within their website or marketing campaigns.

It is too early to say that it's gone for good, but I can't access it all today so I suspect that it has been withdrawn.

Traffic mix

2007-01-25T14:43:00.000Z

We have several eCommerce sites. As part of another exercise, I have been looking at traffic sources for each of these sites.

What is interesting is that the towels site - on almost every measure [page rank, inbound links and SEOmoz page strength] - would normally be regarded as a less successful site than the champagne site. The measure where towels outperforms champagne is in the volume of organic traffic ... and that, Ladies and Gentlemen is the only measure that really counts.

I haven't done a detailed analysis of the competitive sites, but if I did then I imagine I would understand better why the towels site is bringing such a high proportion of organic search visitors. Very often, it isn't necessary to build the perfect website to get organic traffic - just a little better than the competition.

Link bait

2007-01-25T12:48:00.000Z

Link bait is a derogatory term used to describe a trick to attract inbound links to your blog. John Chow is using a cracker. If you provide a review of his site then he will offer a link back to your site, providing you follow a few review rules which are set out in this post (essentially it should be more than 200 words and contain a link both to the blog and the post which launched the idea).

I'm not following those rules because this is such an amusing idea. Technorati's major measure of authority is links, and John Chow is subverting it in a very simple and direct way. He is currently reported at 834 in Technorati with inbound links from over 1300 blogs. That's pretty impressive, but what is more interesting is that when he launched this link bait idea, the blog ranked at 1529. Just to put this in context - Technorati is now tracking over 63.2 million blogs so John Chow's blog has greater authority on Technorati than 99.98% of the blogs they track.

I'm not a great fan of inbound links as a measure of authority and relevance and this exercise shows just what a poor quality metric it is.

Where is the business going to come from?

2007-01-25T12:11:00.000Z

We obsess about our pipeline. Which companies are in it, what is the nature of the opportunity, do we have a solid chance of winning the work? These are all good questions.

It's important to use a variety of different channels for winning new business. I was at a meeting of SME consultancies a couple of weeks ago and one of the people there said that all his business had come from Networking. Networking is a powerful tool and I don't want to decry it, but it is important to have some more active channels which you can develop alongside it. The power of an effective sales and marketing process which includes a number of different channels is that you will inevitably increase your reach. The more people who know about you, the more business you will do - all other things being equal. The point about networking is that it is indirect and although you can do a number of things to make yourself more effective at networking, it is difficult to regard it as an active channel where activity links quickly and directly to outputs. By comparison, targeting particular types of businesses and talking to them is almost entirely active.

Having opportunities in the pipeline is not the same as guaranteeing that we will win the work. Sometimes the main competitor - the status quo - prevents the prospect from becoming a paying client. Things move through the pipeline at their own pace and we have to recognise that there is often a fine line between staying in touch and appearing overly eager. That said, one of our prospects has decided not to go ahead with one of their business ideas which we were very excited about. They had an enormous competitive advantage in a consumer product of growing importance. The idea was that they would start to sell direct from a website using a new brand name while continuing to support their existing B2B sales with their current brand name. The margins were potentially very attractive and we were looking forward to making the business perform spectacularly, but the status quo has reared its head and the prospect isn't going ahead.

We are looking for another opportunity which is just as exciting.

Green is the colour of growth

2007-01-25T11:59:00.000Z

The headline makes sense only for those of you who use the Google Toolbar. Google's algorithms have determined that the page rank of the blog is now 4 rather than 3. For those of you without the toolbar I should explain that the page rank is shown as a small graphic with a green bar.

I'm a bit surprised. This is a blog which doesn't attempt to cover day to day news or fashionable topics, although I did get very interested in Linkie Winkie for a few weeks last summer. That means that I have a small niche, posting reasonably regularly on the business things that I see around me. What is good about the blog is that it has generated correspondence with a number of interesting people and allowed me to monitor and take part in some debates that I doubt I would have been aware of otherwise. It has also provided an excellent proving ground for ideas which I have then re-used in our newsletter and in several White Papers.

Who thought this one up?

2007-01-24T09:56:00.000Z

I went on a site yesterday aimed at an SME audience. The site has the highest pedigree. It has been developed by Famous Name Inc. and is sponsored by several well-heeled companies. They claim that the site has been running at a rate of 200,000 visitors per month since the beginning of January.

I hope they have a strategy here, because Famous Name Inc. notwithstanding, the site is tosh. I can't imagine why any SME would visit more than once - the content isn't strong enough. It is reassuring that a business with all their resources can still get something so badly wrong. They need to have a complete re-think about what they are offering their visitors.

Email disaster

2007-01-23T08:44:00.000Z

Over the last week I have had a disaster with email. At first I thought that it was a delay problem and that I was receiving all the email and that all my outbound mail was being received. It seems that hasn't been the case.

That's a problem when you rely on the system to deliver yet very often systems are imperfect. It doesn't matter what the system is: email, voice mail or snail mail, a proportion doesn't get to the recipient. Sometimes because the receiver makes a mistake and drops your letter in the wastebasket with the junk mail, sometimes because the delivery process fails to deliver it in the first place.

If the communication is important then you had better make sure that whatever system you use, you check to make sure that your message has been received and understood.

Organic champagne results

2007-01-23T07:56:00.001Z

Another seven weeks on and here are the positions for the champagne site in Yahoo!, MSN and Google. We are still first page for the three search terms that I have been tracking since 13 October. Once again, thanks to Brad Callen on how to do it. Incidentally, just in case you want to check that I'm not making it up, you can access all the tracking posts very simply by searching for champagne from the blog search bar.

Here are today's results with the figures for 3 December in curly brackets, 25 November in round brackets, 13 October positions in square brackets:

3 word search term
Yahoo 1 {5} (4) [3]
MSN 2 {3} (3) [7]
Google 6 {4} (19) [not indexed in first 1000 sites]

2 word search term
Yahoo - 1 {5} (5) [7]
MSN - 8 {8} (7) [13]
Google - 9 {10} (311) [not indexed in first 1000 sites]

2 word search term
Yahoo - 1 {1} (1) [1]
MSN - 1 {1} (1) [1]
Google - 1 {1} (1) [1]

That's still pretty pleasing - still first page on all 3 terms and the upward movements outweigh the downward movements.

What do they mean?

2007-01-17T22:40:00.000Z

Who are they? They are PayPal. I have a serious problem in understanding PayPal emails. My mother tongue is English. PayPal emails are created in a parallel universe where syntax and vocabulary appear to be English but where meaning seems to be completely occluded.

A few weeks ago I mentioned that we had a charge-back on one of our eCommerce sites. This means that the funds resulting from the sale being ring-fenced while the the charge-back is investigated. Last week we got a PayPal email. (The emails created in a parallel universe which are written by an infinite number of monkeys on an infinite number of typewriters before they get around to the works of Shakespeare.)

The email was equivocal. It appeared to suggest that the charge-back was still being investigated. Today I took a look at our PayPal account to find the charge-back was closed and that the decision had gone against us.

We are now out of pocket to the tune of the:

cost of PayPal's charges on the original sale
value of the towels
courier costs to deliver them
credit card company's charges for investigating the charge-back.

Great, we are now acting as insurer of last resort to Big Companies Inc..

I'm struggling with this, we acted in good faith and we rely on PayPal to offer us transactions which aren't fraudulent. It seems that the only way we can further limit our risk is to authorise sales only when the delivery address and the credit card billing address are the same - if you want to buy from us and have something delivered somewhere else as a gift then I'm sorry, you're out of luck.

Selling to the little old lady

2007-01-16T08:38:00.000Z

Earlier this month, my mother-in-law decided that her house needed some work and asked a firm to quote for replacement barge boards and soffits. A salesman went around and offered her a price for the work. She knows enough negotiating to keep a trainer in business:

"Do you want to go ahead at that price?"

"No, I know that if I don't then you'll reduce it."

This was an opportunity for the salesman to do some value selling, but he didn't. He gave her a 18% discount on the spot and asked her again if she would close at that price. She didn't. Off he went with the 18% discount still live.

They sent another salesman. This was a young man who thought he might be able to play the sympathy and empathy card. He told her that he found it very expensive to live in the area, he was hoping to get married soon and money wasn't going very far. He also brought the price down again by another 9% on the last offer - just over 25% below the initial price - and asked for the business (you've got to admire some aspects of their training, they knew how to ask for a close!). She didn't buy.

She got a phone call from their manager - and after he offered her another small discount, taking it to just over 27% below the initial price, she caved and bought. When the surveyor came around to measure up he asked how much she was paying for the job and when she told him, he said that he didn't think that they could do it for the price. He might be right.

My mother-in-law comes from a long line of negotiators and she likes a little challenge during the day to keep her amused. The barge boards and soffits are just the latest example. Her double glazing came in at 25% less than the "absolute minimum price" - a final discount of about 80%. The double glazing salesman was speaking the truth - the firm went out of business just after completing the work.

Sales is a tough job, and if the only lever you have in your negotiation is price then you had better not try and sell to my mother-in-law, not if you want to make your bonus this quarter.

Does your copy paint pictures?

2007-01-16T08:16:00.000Z

I'm not the only one to stress the importance of copy - here is Brad Callen on the topic:

Here's a question for you: what makes people buy from the page or the screen? It's sales copy. And yes, it's because you are selling them a solution and not the features. But have you ever thought about what goes on inside a prospect's mind, from the time they see your sales copy till the time the they have an “aha!” moment and decide to buy your product?

Sales copy is a static medium. You can't use your positive body language, your disarming smile and a confident voice to sell – all you've got is words. Jumbles of letters. How the hell do you sell from that? The key is NOT what you say - even the most focused and ingenious copy can fall flat if it doesn't have “what it takes” to create that desire, that spark inside your prospect's head. It's all about delivery. Not visual delivery of your sales pitch but… The words that you use to deliver your sales pitch.

Michael Fortin calls them UPWORDS. Joe Vitale, another great copywriter, tagged the whole process as hypnotic marketing. Famous marketers of an older era such as David Ogilvy and Joe Sugarman swore by the principle. It's dead simple. You have to translate all that positive body language, all your confidence, all your energy, into a tightly written, powerful, visually stimulating sales copy. Visual stimulation. Painting pictures for your prospects to imagine.

This is what separates the great from the merely good in marketing and copywriting. If you want your prospect to be fully convinced that you are the best deal in town, use your words not only to sell the solution, but to paint that solution as a powerful, eyeball-grabbing picture in their minds. And once you're inside their heads, you just have to connect the dots and show them (once again using words as a visual tool) how they can use your product to erase a problem that has plagued them until they read your copy. Build your sales copy using your words as visual aids – to support, represent and ultimately sell your solution to your prospect.

Take a good, hard look at your sales copy. Are you missing the whole point? Does your copy lack focus? Are you just selling the features and assuming that the prospects will do the mental legwork for you and become motivated by themselves?

So what are you waiting for? Challenge what you have written and test whether your new ideas and copy work any better for you.

That was the 1980s - things are different now

2007-01-14T11:53:00.000Z

Back in the days when I was a strategic planner in an industrial holding group, I saw a campaign for a foodmixer which boasted the power of the direct drive motor in their top of the range model. They didn't say that the same engine powered a cement mixer, which I knew because I knew the company supplying the laminations for the core.

The point was that no-one buying that foodmixer was particularly interested in the size of the motor. They might have wanted to know that it would last forever without maintenance, cut large quantities of food every day without breaking down, make life in the kitchen easier but somehow those benefits didn't come through in the campaign.

I can hear the sussuration in the background - it wouldn't happen today - I'm sorry to say that you're wrong, it happens every day. It was a major mistake in the 1980s and the rules of what works in a sales process had been thought through many years earlier by some excellent copywriters and salespeople.

I was on a website recently and the entire website was a paean to product features which no doubt would have been admired by the developers of the foodmixer advertisement. If your buyers and visitors can transform those features into benefits, then you are extremely lucky - the rest of us have to work with humans.

Try and view your copy and your offering through your buyers' eyes - what made them buy the offering, what did they value, how do they talk about it to their friends?

Back to the benefits

2007-01-14T11:29:00.000Z

We have been thinking hard for the last few weeks about benefits - what is a buyer really getting after they have had the service delivered. That's a challenging question and how many business services firms ask themselves that kind of question:

what will this web site deliver to the client? Will it improve visitor retention? Will it improve customer service? Will it increase sales? Will it reduce churn?
what will this advertising campaign deliver to the client? Will it increase reach? Will it increase sales? Will it increase or decrease the cost of sale?
what will this PR campaign deliver to the client? Will it increase sales? Will it reduce churn?
what will this consultancy assignment deliver? Is this the best consultancy intervention for the client? Will the benefits be maintained?
What will this coaching support deliver? What will be the business benefits? How will those benefits be maintained after the coaching stops?

Unless business services firms can answer these kinds of questions then they shouldn't be surprised that clients are reluctant to dive straight to the dotted line to sign. The last of these bullets prompted a furious debate on eCademy when Max Blumberg pointed out that most of the "evidence" about the benefits of coaching were testimonials rather than quantified outputs and that testimonials are notoriously weak at quantifying outcomes. At the time, he challenged the coaches on eCademy to provide evidence of quantified benefits resulting from their coaching. Not only did many coaches find that a foreign concept - most never asked their clients how they had benefited from their support - they just knew intuitively that coaching was "good".

This comes back to testing again. If you don't test the outcomes of your interventions with clients you risk repeating mistakes of which you are unaware. Services have to evolve to become better value, to offer the same benefits but in less time. Services have to be bit like the Olympic motto - faster, higher, stronger. Testing needs to be an important part of your delivery, not just in 2007, but as long as you want to be in business.

How is this site performing

2007-01-11T09:12:00.000Z

NicheBot has a nifty new feature for those of you lucky enough to have a Google SOAP API key - they aren't issuing any more.

By editing your personal profile on NicheBot you can develop search term rankings for both Yahoo! and Google anywhere within the top 1000 URLs returned for the search term - not both at the same time, but significantly quicker than you would be able to do it yourself. If you don't have a Google API key then you are obviously limited to competition results from Yahoo! alone.

The Google SOAP API results are significantly slower than those from Yahoo! and some search terms seem to produce endless 502 errors which is one of the reasons that Google is not issuing any more. Maybe at some point NicheBot will work with AJAX API keys but that doesn't appear to be forthcoming at the moment.

Getting the copy right

2007-01-09T12:14:00.000Z

Writing copy takes time. The reason for that is that few of us think like copywriters. Copy tells us what a product or service can do for us and doesn't necessarily labour the point about what the product or the service is. One of the key features about copy is that it has to grab hold of its audience quickly and keep them interested.

That means that the headline has to be strong enough to encourage people to read the first paragraph, the first paragraph has to lead the reader to learn more and finally, the call to action has to be sufficiently compelling to make the reader perform an action.

There are a lot of basic rules about copy and they tend to be similar. The key rule is that the copy has to talk to the reader as you and about the reader's problem as your problem. That's easy if you follow Andy Bounds' concept of AFTERS because you will be thinking about what you are leaving the reader or the buyer with as a result of buying your product or service.

Good copy doesn't have to follow a specific format - I have seen a 30 page sales letter which was broken up into smaller sections, each of which was terminated by a call to action. Readers who ignored the call to action at any point had the option of reading more of the letter and reading additional detail about the products and what they could deliver either from the seller or testimonials written by happy customers. This didn't follow many people's idea of a formal structure for a piece of copy but it was highly effective.

Typically, people writing copy use one of two main structures:

Attention; Interest; Desire and Action
Problem; Solution and Action

The actual structure is less important than the response it generates in the reader - and the best of all responses is to get them to read down to the last line and follow the call to action.

Advertising for the advertiser

2007-01-07T17:46:00.000Z

There is a quote which is attributed to Lord Leverhulme "Half of my advertising is wasted, the problem is that I don't which half." That may sound bad, but for many businesses the figure is much worse.

Advertising is relatively expensive so it is worth looking at to see if it can be made more effective. Once again, the key is testing. If you don't know whether something works then stop until you have inserted some control codes so that you can begin to collect some data. Businesses often use their competitors as their research vehicle:

advertising in the same journals and papers
using advertisements which are almost indistinguishable

Advertising based on that kind of research is almost certainly wasted. Competitors aren't being scientific about what they are doing so they aren't a good role model.

Here are some high level guidelines for the neophyte advertiser:

all advertising should contain some call to action - when you have a restricted budget, the advertising that you buy should pull its weight in your sales cycle
don't advertise on the left hand side of the page - studies show again and again that advertisements on the right hand page get more eyeball time
be prepared to negotiate a rate

Many people seem to believe that advertising is the most important lever in marketing - in fact it is one of a number of methods of getting access to a market. If you treat all these mechanisms as if they are in competition with one another for your budget then you have a chance of getting better value out of your investment.

Writing that article

2007-01-06T19:58:00.000Z

If you know that your PR would fit well into a particular publication then it is still worth going to them with a proposal rather than a finished article. If you take a synopsis and some samples of your writing style to them then they can discuss whether they have any themes that they would like you to explore. If you take them a finished article then it is a bit late to allow those kinds of contributions.

However, if you have produced an article and your target publication isn't expressing strong interest then don't give up. You simply have to change your approach and look for websites and publications which are working in the right general area. Many people are looking for content and providing that your article is strong, newsworthy and relevant then you might be surprised how wide its coverage can become.

Is your presentation self-consistent

2007-01-06T19:40:00.000Z

I attended a presentation last week. These kinds of presentation generate most of the presenter's income since he uses them as a sales vehicle for his paid services. The first point on the presentation was ho-hum, but the third was a doozy which made his audience sit up. The problem was that some of his later points contradicted the third which seemed like a major faux-pas to me.

I'm anal about presentations - the material itself has to tell a story when I'm not there but it has to tell it in a way which is self-consistent. The presentation that I attended just about worked despite the incongruities because the presenter had just about enough skill to bring it back even if he was unaware why he had a problem in the first place.

This comes back to being ruthless in checking and testing presentations before you make them live - once they're gone, they're gone and if you don't test it, you risk that part of your audience will never think about you as positively in the future as they did before point 4.

Presentations aren't easy, if they were then people would be better at them - most presentations are tosh. Since they are so important to many people's professional lives, they deserve more thought in the planning, development and execution. These are all skills that can be learnt and practiced - promise yourselves that you will do better in 2007. Then, having made the promise to yourself, do something about it.

Just email Rebecca

2007-01-05T07:32:00.000Z

SEOmoz has had a great idea - to build an accurate measurement of search traffic for as many keywords as they can. They want to find a formula which assesses the accuracy of keyword research sources like Overture, KeywordDiscovery, Hitwise's Keyword Intelligence, Google's Adwords Estimator, MSN's Adcenter, and others. It shouldn't take much:

Gather a large list of hundreds, hopefully thousands of keyword terms and their actual search numbers at Google - this can be done by getting data from advertisers who were always listed on the 1st page of results for the term through AdWords (using the impression numbers for "exact match")
Gather a list of the estimated numbers reported by all of the major keyword research services for those same terms and phrases.
Distill the data, tossing out those phrases that might cause issue or those reports that wouldn't have a huge impact and keep only the best, most useful ones.
Compare the two sources (Adwords Impressions and estimator tools) and find out fascinating information like - which tool is most accurate? Is there a formula that would predict (based on all the estimation sources) within 10%, 20% or 30% of actual traffic?

SEOmoz is putting in some of its own client data but they need more help. They promise to collect the data, report it honestly (but anonymously - not revealing any of your keywords or those of clients) and build a tool that will use this formula. They will also provide the exact formula publicly, so that anyone can use the same information to build their own tools, use it in their internal calculations, etc.

How can you help?

If you are willing to participate, please email Rebecca@SEOmoz.org. SEOMOZ will work out all the necessary details, whittle down what's required, and request screenshots to help make the data collection happen
If you are a PPC expert and can help them to analyze the data and issue the requirements, please email Rebecca as well; they will need some help from the best :)
If you're a blogger, you could ask your readers to do likewise
If you participate at forums like DigitalPoint, Sitepoint, WebProWorld, SearchEngineWatch, HighRankings, etc. you could post about this and ask for volunteers (again, no need to link)

This kind of analysis is endless - SEOmoz may well develop a tool, but it will reflect a moment in time - as things evolve the work will need to be revisited unless one of the big keyword players unlocks the secret to offering accurate search traffic estimates.

Who sent me this email?

2007-01-05T05:46:00.000Z

UK legislation for electronic communications and websites has changed and many companies are non-compliant. The details are set out in a summary by Outlaw posted on the Register.

Companies in the UK must include certain regulatory information on their websites and in their email footers before 1 January 2007 or they will breach the Companies Act and risk a fine.

Every company should list its company registration number, place of registration, and registered office address on its website as a result of an update to the legislation of 1985. The information, which must be in legible characters, should also appear on order forms and in emails. Such information is already required on "business letters" but the duty is being extended to websites, order forms and electronic documents.

This isn't onerous, but a quick check of a number of sites this morning revealed that many organisations hadn't got around to editing their websites even if they have put together a new email footer.

What is this invoice for?

2007-01-04T10:12:00.000Z

Sometimes B2B service providers work with operators in the business who are not Buyers. When this is the case, it is worth providing evidence of value:

do the work with/for the operator and
EITHER provide copies for the buyer with an explanation of what the work for the operator has delivered. That thud factor can be important to remind the Buyer just what you are doing and why you are doing it
OR have formal review meetings with the Buyer to cover not only what has been done to date but an assessment of what needs to be done next

The risk of not doing this or having regular contact with your Buyer to review what has been done, is that the sole evidence that they have of your activity is your monthly invoice which is probably not the best way to be remembered. The advantage of the review meeting is that it provides an opportunity to develop the relationship and use the time to think forward as well as back so that the client feels in control of what is happening and starts to consider the work as an investment rather than simply a cost.

The value(?) of external metrics

2007-01-03T11:28:00.000Z

I posted earlier about the difficulties of comparing the results of external metrics. Here is a more serious evaluation of my gut feel. This was a pretty exhaustive look at a number of sites using a range of sources. These included: Technorati, SEOmoz Page Strength, inlinks reported by Yahoo! Site Explorer, Bloglines subscriptions, Alexa rank, Netcraft rank, Newsgator subscribers, Compete.com rank, Ranking.com rank and Google page rank. They then compared the outputs from the metric with the traffic actually recorded at the site and tried to establish a correlation between the metric and the traffic for the range of sites in the study.

Their findings:

Number of Technorati Links (0.74)
SEOmoz Page Strength (0.60)
Number of Links to the Blog URL via Yahoo! Site Explorer (0.56)
Number of Links to the Domain via Yahoo! Site Explorer (0.54)
Bloglines Subscriptions (0.49)
Technorati Rank (0.49)
Alexa Rank (0.49)
Netcraft Rank (0.43)
Newsgator Subscribers (0.39)
Compete.com Rank (0.38)
Ranking.com Rank (0.36)
Google PageRank (0.21)

Their conclusion: none of the metrics are accurate enough to use, even in combination, to help predict a site's level of traffic or its relative popularity, even in a small niche with similar competitors ... it appears that the external metrics available for competitive intelligence on the web today simply do not provide a significant source of value ... anyone who applies this data for competitive analysis/research [should] do so with the following limitations in mind:

Unless the discrepancy between the metrics is high and universal, they cannot be taken to mean that one website, blog or page is necessarily more popular than another
Generally speaking, the more well-linked to a page/site/domain, the higher its traffic levels, but there will be a significant number of exceptions
Services like Alexa, Ranking.com, Compete.com & Netcraft are nearly useless when it comes to predicting traffic or comparing relative levels of popularity, even when used on a highly comparable set of sites in a similar field

Correlation coefficients can be slightly arbitrary in use, depending on how the analyst chooses to set the cut-off points. On most people's scales only Technorati is showing a strong positive correlation while more than half of these metrics would be classed as showing only a weak positive correlation.

Perhaps they should have added coin tossing to the list!

Body Shop - ethical sales approach?

2007-01-02T23:52:00.000Z

Just before Christmas I went shopping for presents with my younger son - typical male-bonding activity - drive, park, walk, find shop, buy, walk, go home. One of the stores we went to was Body Shop. I know that it has its admirers but I'm not one of them. Body Shop claims that its products aren't animal tested and takes the position that it is opposed to animal testing.

That may or may not be true, but at root the marketing proposition must rely on the fact that their ingredients have been animal tested at some point, although not by Body Shop and not in the formulations which Body Shop's product developers have created. In their heart of hearts, which of Body Shop's customers would answer yes to the question "would you like to be the first animal in the world to test this product?".

That qualifies as a dishonest sell in my opinion. None of us wants to be the first guinea pig to test the product range for all the other eager buyers. We may be quite happy to be the 100th or the 1000th or even the millionth. There was a furore last year when 6 paid volunteers suffered significant physical damage as part of a clinical trial. The drug company was villified for putting the volunteers at risk, but that's how life is - someone has to be the first.