ChaosScenario

Page views don't equal engagement

In the work that we do, we end up looking at a lot of web site traffic and reports from firms that monitor traffic of our clients and our competitors. I love this information because it provides feedback from customers in aggregate. However, it never fully tells the whole story. For example, page views...

Page views, as defined by OpenTracker, is each time a visitor views a web page on your site. The more pages a visitor visits, the more page views you have. However, what if your site has poor navigation forcing customers to search every to find the information they are looking for? That can result in a large number of page views.

The moral of the story is not to trust one metric. If one metric seems to lead to a conclusion, verify that conclusion somewhere else. In this case, if page views are high, conduct usability testing on your site or conduct a survey to make sure customer's are truly engaged. - Paul Herring

Social Networking: Lessons from Overseas

Business 2.0 has an amazing article on the most popular social network in South Korea, Cyworld. While Cyworld's members are small compared to MySpace, only 18 million compared to MySpace's 93 million, that number amounts to one third of the population of South Korea. One of the things I found most interesting about Cyworld is the primary business model. It's not advertising, like MySpace. Rather, they make the majority of their money off of the sale of "virtual goods." According to the Business 2.0 article, virtual goods sales go something like this:

"If you wanted to decorate your mini-homepage, you could choose from tens of thousands of digital items - homepage skins, background music, pixelated furniture, virtual appliances. But you had to pay for them with "dotori," or acorns, and you had to buy the acorns with real money."

This strategy has definitely payed off for Cyworld. They make around $7 per member, compared to MySpace's $2 per member. But wait... there's more. Cyworld isn't just a website, they've managed to diversify into the mobile arena as well. In fact, 90% of mobile image uploads in South Korea go to Cyworld. Members also frequently check the site through their mobile phones.

Cyworld is now expanding into the US. They already have funding, and have set up an office in San Francisco. One of the big questions is, how can Cyworld adapt to appeal to the US consumer? I think MySpace could learn a thing or two from these guys. Keep an eye on them. - John Keehler

Where's your planning

Have you ever wondered how campaigns look so different across media? Ever seen a commercial and gone to a web site and wondered if it was the same company? Or even within the same media, seen a display ad that said and looked nothing like the website, that looked nothing like the email that you signed up for?

All of these are signs of lack of upfront planning. It's easy to preach integration but doing it is something different. It requires a thorough understanding of the customer and looking at the way the customer will react to the campaign across media, which, in a lot of agencies, comes down to the account planner or the account service team.

Account planning is relatively unknown in the interactive industry. In the traditional agencies, most account planners do not understand audience interaction and measurement online.

If integration is going to truly happen, it has to start with better upfront planning by not just those responsible for the brand, but those who understand how the audience will interact at different engagement points. If that's too much for one planner then they have to willing to put their egos aside and listen. - Paul Herring

 

Web needs to be more helpful

I'm at the tail-end of my vacation, and I've been sitting at the airport for more than four hours as my flight has been delayed time and time again. Not wanting to lose the opportunity to catch up on the reading I meant to do on my vacation, I picked up a text by the ever-popular Jakob Nielsen, which explains some of the best practices of e-commerce websites.

The book is really a collection of reports that he and his team conducted where users were observed while testing about twenty different sites. One of the chapters deals entirely with the search functionality on different websites… what works well and what doesn’t. While I was reading this, my current predicament was causing me to viscerally feel the frustration some of these users must have felt as they could not find what they were looking for because of the sites’ collective inability to discern for itself the users’ intent or tell them how to get what they were looking for.

Just as I was getting to that point of frustration, an apparently helpful airline employee picked up the intercom and announced to the passengers that the plane that would take us back to Texas had just left the gate at Richmond, and that it should be at our airport in about thirty minutes. Although my flight delay was a trifle annoying, since this was right after the third such delay, I had some peace of mind knowing where the plane was and when I would be able to board.

When I thought about it more, I realized that this is one of the ways that a search feature should help users find what they’re looking for. If users consistently create a query that doesn’t match anything in the database, two things should happen:

1. The site should make suggestions on how the user can find what he or she is looking for, and
2. The site owners should habitually analyze the log files to improve the database that drives the search engine, which will help users find answers to their questions in the future.

The book I’m reading was written in 2000, and the Web has, in general, improved since then to the point that some of the things Nielsen wrote about no longer apply or apply to a lesser degree. It is still a good read with useful information that every person developing a site could profit from. I still have problems finding what I’m looking for on certain large websites with diverse content (such as the Library of Congress), so I know the Web could still stand a little progress.

A good book that describes how and why to create custom error messages for failed search queries is called Defensive Design for the Web. – Cam Beck

Update: It's also important to note that the search results page should actually be truthful. I say this because, to tie it in with my analogy, the revised flight time has been pushed back two more times, and the gate from which we're leaving has been changed twice, causing me to not trust what the airline is telling me is true.

If this were a website, I'd have already gone somewhere else.
 

Customer generated content and advertising

There are a lot of brands now that are trying to get on the customer generated content band wagon. Here's a couple of ones that come to mind:

• American Airline's "we know why you fly"
• Wal-mart's MySpace like site
• Secret and their Share your Secret campaign
• HP's What makes your PC personal again

I like the way that these type of sites allow users to participate in the advertising, making less advertising and more about building a quick community. What I don't like is when the site seems to be a knock off of another campaign or site and isn't really about brand participation but about trying to ride the wave of someone else's idea with little original thinking or extension of the idea.

I liked the American Airlines campaign because it was about the customer, and, in my opinion, was pretty original at the time (it was released a year ago). Wal-mart's MySpace knock off is an uneducated attempt to tap into the youth market. Secret's campaign is really just Method's confession campaign all over again. HP's site reminds me of the GM "create your own" commercial and is particularly bad because it is arrogant enough to assume you'd want to be in their commercial. 

Developing a site that invites customer's to participate is a great idea. However, if you're going to do it, be at least slightly original and come up with some idea extensions of your own. Otherwise it's really just plagiary. - Paul Herring

Time reports

There's nothing enlightening about this post, except for the realization that I forgot to do my time report for today (we must to do them everyday at ClickHere) and I must do it tomorrow. Check this out.

I know there are quite a few people who visit the sites from companies that require time sheets. You know my pain. - Paul Herring

YouTube Trends

On the heels of yesterday's announcement that YouTube is serving up a whopping 100 million video views each day, I ran across a great analysis of the top 100 viewed videos this month on the site. Here are some of the highlights.

Of the top 100...

• 58 are user generated content
• 31 are music videos
• 4 are commercial ads
• 3 are commercial virals
• 2 are movie trailers
• 2 are Asian "candid camera" shows

The most viewed video of all time on YouTube is the fairly recent "Evolution of Dance" video, which has been viewed almost 30 million times. Second place doesn't even come close.

Read the full analysis from No Man's Blog - John Keehler

eMarketer changes it's mind on blogging

Wow, nothing for the last three days. The ChaosScenario authors have been on the road and unable to post.

Last Thursday, eMarketer released a new report on the "business of blogging" (subscription required). If you don't have a subscription, here's some highlights:

"A year ago eMarketer looked at the business of blogging and said that blogs were a one-to-few medium, and they were not practical for most businesses. After years of meticulous branding, carefully arranged PR messages, and committee-developed corporate-speak that offends no one — especially lawyers — successful blogging requires ceding message control internally to a single, real voice, and externally to commenters whose feedback may not always be positive. A growing number of businesses, however, are moving beyond the blogging-as-sales-tool mindset that hindered adoption. GM and Sun, notably, are blogging with a one-to-many voice that gives them one of the most low-cost PR options available. At the same time, companies are learning, often the hard way, that monitoring blogs is becoming an essential part of brand management."

I have to applaud Sun and GM. Sun began blogging and started out the right way, not as a sales tool but a way to have honest and open conversation with their customer and those interested in their companies. They allow their CEO to blog, a bold step. GM's blog is about their cars and includes a pod cast.

Not to be cynical, but I'm skeptical about the ability and willingness of other large companies to do this. Unlike eMaketer, even a year ago I felt like blogs were practical for most businesses. The problem is not whether or not they will be effective, but if they'll ever make it out of committee, and will be positioned correctly by the companies that are publishing them. There are two main issues that companies trip on:

1. Blogs are not about promoting your celebrity or mascot, they're about communication with your customer
2. Part of that communication is allowing feedback, both positive and negative

It's not difficult, it can be done. It takes a different mind set, however, and finally understanding that, although you may think you own your brand, it's also owned by your customer. - Paul Herring

The Long and Winding

In my latest ClickZ article, I discuss a presentation I recently attended by Yahoo! as part of their Summit Series. They presented some research they conducted in conjunction with OMD about how people research and buy online and offline. They concluded that there are different patterns people exhibit: short, winding, long & long and winding. Short shopping patterns are associated with things like consumer packaged goods and long and winding patterns are associated with automotive purchases. The patterns often include research online, offline, consulting with friends and family as well as consumer reviews on websites. It's interesting research. Check it out here and let me know what you think. - Pete Lerma

Farewell, TV. We hardly knew you.

Nielsen Media Research has come up with a new plan that could bode well for Internet professionals. The company, which usually tracks how many people watch programs, will also now start tracking how many people watch the commercials (or at least keep the television tuned to that station). Experts suspect that this will lead to a decrease in advertising rates for television, which could free marketing capital for online channels.

This is significant for several reasons. First, one must presume that advertisers have suspected for some time that they were spending too much for too little in television ads, because NMR wouldn't have made this change out of abject curiosity. Consequently, they must already be ripe for a change of venue. Second, it means that we have to step up to the plate by putting out great work that delivers results. The interactive media put us in a unique position to target specific audiences and measure the results.

As broadband becomes more ubiquitous, researchers are discovering that certain segments of society are spending more time online than watching TV. One study claimed that Britains between 16 and 25 are dominated by their computers. However, as technology is developed that allows users to block ads, our goal as we create advertising should be to lower the inhibitions of people we are targeting by making the ads relevant to our audience. - Cam Beck