Top-right-oriented-graph-itis is a particularly nasty condition, prevalent amongst many busy middle and senior managers; it gives them symptoms of a warm and fuzzy feeling that all is well, when actually they don’t know if all is well or not.  It manifests itself generally in a desire to view graphs which rise generally from bottom left to top right, with the issue of what is being measured, and how, simply secondary to having a graph conforming to the correct shape.

In the world of web analytics, top-right-oriented-graph-itis is particularly rife, with the only challenge facing the web manager being what to put into the x and y columns to ensure the graph goes the right way.  Web managers across the land, in a desire to state their senior management’s case of top-right-oriented-graph-itis, will put anything in the columns to make sure they stay out of the firing line for another month.

What this invariably means is that time goes in the x axis and anything from hits / page impressions / unique users goes into the y axis.  As sure as egg.com is egg.com, over time search engines and social media identify a website, some traffic gets driven to it, more pages are added to it, and by a process of osmosis all the KPIs for the website get driven towards the top right hand corner.

Senior management can breathe a sigh of relief that the online channel which they don’t quite understand is going in the right direction and they don’t need to cure their graph orientation medical condition.  Job done.

Therein lies the rub.  There is no relationship between unique users and commercial business KPIs, page impressions on their own do not facilitate the making of wise business decisions.  And heaven help us, unless you are a Unix system administrator, the humble hit has no value at all.

Many marketers have already observed this and thus have made valiant attempts to link online activity with more traditional KPIs.  Those involved in offline forms of communication will be familiar with measurements such as recall rates, column inches, and market penetration, but yet again these crude tools are clearly square pegs in round holes.  They manifest themselves in impossibly difficult to benchmark terms such as banner ad page impressions and click thru rates.

When it comes to the world of social media the challenge becomes greater still because our old world traditional marketing metrics, and our new world online metrics are entirely inadequate to allow us to set targets and measure performance.

There is a crying need within the Internet industry to establish a new set of metrics based on audience, engagement, loyalty, influence and action.  Once we understand that opt-in online marketing is about lots of individual dialogues, and thus contrasts in almost every way to offline marketing which is about lots of mass market monologues, it must change everything about how we measure what we do.

How large is our audience?  How engaged and responsive are they to our communications?  How loyal are they to our brand and how is that enhanced through online channels?  How influenced are they by us, and how well do they act as advocates to their friends and colleagues on our behalf.  Have we persuaded them to take the desired action?

We have been blessed in marketing by the work of Kotler, Peters, Drucker et al in the past three or four decades, with their seminal texts which have become the mainstay of third level education.  As the millennium enters its second decade an opportunity exists for web marketers to write their name into history by establishing a set of credible, senior-manager-friendly online metrics, which embrace new marketing, empowering businesses to understand their online return on investment, and make wise decisions about the future.

Lee Munroe is a web designer in every sense of the word.  He understands that the customer experience online is more than the prettiness of the website.  He designs and builds web tools that connect like minded people that share similar passions and allow them to amplify their collective voice and opinions.  He follows less than 300 people on Twitter yet more than 4000 follow him.  He is a web leader.

In Lee’s spare time he has constructed a website called lookaly.com, a Northern Ireland centric ‘rate your experience’ website.  It’s similar to TripAdvisor but region specific, not industry specific.  The site facilitates user contributed content and allows customers of businesses to rate their experience.  The businesses that are lucky enough to be rated can use the site to get honest and hard truths about their business and engage with customers that were moved enough to post a comment.

At a recent conference Lee was asked, “How do you intend to monetise the site?”.   Lee paused for a moment and looked mildly puzzled, almost as if he didn’t understand the question.  His response was “I am not a business man, I built lookaly.com because I am passionate about building great customer experiences online”.  The crowd looked puzzled.  Lee was then asked by a different attendee “Lee if I wanted you to design stuff for me could you?”.  Lee smiled and said, “I’m really sorry, but I am so backed up with work it would be at least 6 months before I could take on any new projects”.

Lee graduated one and a half years ago from university as a freelance web designer among thousands of freelance web designers.  What makes Lee different is that he has more commercial work offers than he can deal with primarily because of his reputation from building lookaly.com and donating it to the world.

I do lots of presenting to hundreds of people every month regarding online marketing.  I share my experiences with as many people as are willing to listen.  Sometimes, I am lucky and a wealthy organisation understands that 13 years of experience can’t be replicated in a 30 minute presentation and they ask me to come in and help them change their business or charity.

Others take my ideas and implement them into their business themselves.  I am flattered either way and I know that those that do it themselves were never likely to be customers but always likely to be advocates ensuring that my business, like Lee’s business, has an endless supply of those willing to
pay for expertise.

The new web economy doesn’t always support revenue streams via the normal channels of subscription, advertising or payment for news, information or services rendered.  This model of gaining revenues from the few and giving the masses the service for free is now becoming the norm.  As counter intuitive as it may seem the new internet revenue model favours those that bring gifts not those that charge for them.

Lee's Gift Leads to Profits

“They should just put them all in a field and let them duke it out” was often an English man’s solution to the political problems in Northern Ireland in the ‘90s. “Just kick the Brits out” would have been the rhetoric from a New Yorker when sharing a drink in a Manhattan bar.

The problem was much more complex.  To understand Northern Ireland, you just had to live here and as a native, you knew that the outsiders just didn’t understand the culture and complexity of the solution needed.

There is a sculpture  in Northern Ireland’s second city, Derry.  It is called ‘Hands Across The Divide’ and it illustrates the change in Northern Ireland’s culture.  It symbolises how politics has moved from a shouting monologue to an engaging dialogue.  The sculpture shows the need to reach out and understand the differences in culture.

Deploying an online marketing strategy for an organisation is a lot like ‘The Divide’.  There is a temptation to use monologue techniques and try and advertise your thoughts, opinions and prices. This technique fails as it did in the old politics in Northern Ireland.   There is a temptation to think your message is all that counts and that everyone should listen.  There is a temptation to use traditional marketing speak and convince others that your products or services are worth their attention.  This is not the culture of new marketing.

New marketing, like the statue depicts is about understanding, listening and engaging.  It is about talking to your followers in their language and convincing them that you are worth engaging with, by respecting the culture of online marketing and showing some understanding. This cultural understanding can’t be taught.  To  truly understand the online conversation you need to get immersed in it and live it!

Hands Across the Divide in Derry.

No love needed

A cactus requires little love, occasional attention and not much work for the prickly companion to grow.  The fact that the cactus grows at all with such little resource and maintenance is a wonder and because we don’t invest that much time in nurturing it, we don’t expect the cactus to bring us joy and wonderment.

A puppy requires tons of attention.  We can’t give it a bowl of water once a week and hope that it survives.  It needs more than just sustenance.  The little dog needs care, lots of your time and love.  In return, when the puppy grows, we are rewarded with face licking affection, loyalty and obedience.

time invested rewarded with loyalty.

Online marketing can be split into either cactus or puppy activities.  SEO, PPC, online display ads and website design require little attention once established and will allow your business to grow slowly.

Blogging, email marketing, online PR, social media and web content are all puppy activities, requiring lots of attention.  Once you start a puppy activity, you need to commit time, emotion and passion to ensure the activities’ survival.  It takes time for your puppy to grow but given time and the right nurturing, your puppy activities will repay you with more loyalty and love than any cactus could bring.

Coke v Pepsi and the sip test problem

In 1972 Coke had 18% of the soft drinks market while Pepsi had a mere 4%.  By the early 80s, Cokes’ share of the market had fallen to 12% while Pepsi had grown to 11%, despite Coke spending more than $100m per year on advertising and having superior vending machine and retail reach.

Around the same time, Pepsi started promoting the Pepsi Challenge.  Consumers were asked to take a sip of Coke and Pepsi in glasses marked Q and M and choose their favourite.  57% picked Pepsi and 43% picked Coke.  Coke disputed the findings at first but eventually ran its own tests and found the feedback to be accurate.  Pepsi won in an A/B sip test.

Coke set about improving their formula to fight back against the slide of market share to Pepsi.   They worked restlessly to get a modified flavour and in September 1984, Coke ran sip tests with hundreds of thousands of Americans and came out between 6% and 8% ahead of Pepsi.  New Coke was born.

On the day of its launch Cokes’ CEO Roberto Goizueta announced, “This is the surest move the company has ever made” and there was little reason to doubt what he said.  The research was in, the stats showed New Coke would win the taste fight.

Within months of the launch, New Coke failed.  Coke drinkers rose up and Coke were forced to bring back Classic Coke. But oddly enough Pepsi never managed to capitalise on the rebellion of Coke drinkers and to this day still lags behind Coke in terms of popularity.

So how did Coke get it so wrong?  They had all of the statistics that any manager would need to make an informed decision.  The problem came about because Coke took the wrong data.  In a sip test, you only take a mouth full of Coke and a mouth full of Pepsi.  Pepsi is sweeter and when taking a sip will win the preference of most tasters. But we don’t just sip a Coke or Pepsi, we drink a can, bottle or glass of the stuff.  So when the new, sweeter flavour came into being, it was rejected, as the overall experience wasn’t as pleasurable as the original Coke.

The same thing happens when we review our online marketing stats.  Page impressions, unique viewers and open rates blind us. Finding followers and even goal pages seem to be a sensible measure of our success.  I argue however, that this is just another sip test.  It gives us a sense of how we are performing but it doesn’t give us the whole picture.

So what should we measure?  When creating an online marketing review I believe that the new metrics and the measurement of success or failure should be based upon the quality (not quantity) of your audience, their level of engagement, their loyalty, your influence over the audience and whether or not they are spreading your good word.

By combining your metrics to give a holistic overview of your audience and your influence then you are drinking the full can of Coke.  Looking at click-to-sell ratios is just sip tasting.

“We use Twitter, Blogging, Facebook and Email Marketing”, said Andrew the Managing Director of an online travel firm. But under scrutiny Andrew didn’t know what to expect from using these tools. He just knew he wanted more orders. His strategy for getting more orders was to shout loudly until someone listened.

On closer inspection the Twitter account was following 1986 people and had 33 followers. Out of the 33 followers, 7 were spam, the rest contra-following from organisations that were sympathetic to the travel company but never likely to purchase anything from them. The travel company insisted on tweeting a new offer every day. They treated their Twitter channel as an advertising channel.

The Facebook fan page has employees and family as readers and again contained a sequence of ads for holidays and short breaks. The email list had nearly 100,000 email addresses but rarely achieved open rates in excess of 3% with purchases often equating to zero.

Andrew wanted to grow his Twitter following, Facebook fan base and rent new email marketing lists believing that his sales funnel would grow. Needless to say that this growth tactic would just annoy more people and not increase orders. The problem wasn’t the size of his audience; it was how Andrew’s company engaged with them.

Having a hammer doesn’t make you a carpenter nor does having a paintbrush make you an artist. The problem in Andrew’s case is not the tool set he uses nor is it the force he is applying. The problem stems from a lack of understanding the art and craft of how to use the tools. From experience I find that most organisations start with the tools before they ever ask the question if anyone is skilled enough to use them. Sometimes the tools fall into naturally skilled individuals’ hands, most times they don’t.

Give me tools...more tools!

Phil Lynott - A good pose in it's day I'm sure

When Thin Lizzy released their magical album Jailbreak in 1976, the title track of the same name contained amusing lyrics;  “Tonight there’s going to be a jailbreak somewhere in this town”.  The precise location of the jailbreak is obvious – the Prison.  We forgive the band because of their creative license and ability to move us in other ways.

Gucci for years have shouted at us installing the virtues of their brand with a relentless onslaught of glossy ads containing gorgeous people.  They have created design masterpieces but have had their share of catwalk boo-boos. We have let them away with their errors due to creative license and their ability to move us in other ways.

Gucci’s recent attempts at using online social marketing site Twitter however are criminal. The error goes beyond creative license and the marketing team should be jailed for their efforts, or lack of.  They have adopted their above-the-line marketing strategy and used it on the web, giving us a spectacularly good example of how not to engage with customers using social media.

In Gucci’s twitter feed they have tweeted 16 times.  11 have been ads for their site and four times requesting that advocates help them move from having 3800 followers on Twitter to 100,000 followers! – Why on earth would I help? Are we supposed to feel sympathy? You haven’t earned my trust or respect yet.  You haven’t given me a reason to help you!

A clear case of “Searchlight on my trail, Tonight’s the night all systems fail” – Thin Lizzy, Jailbreak.

(twitter @GuccibyGucci)

Gucci twitter feed