Connecting to your customer on-line

If you're determined to try to make your connection with your customers on-line and your website isn't ready, you can still do it. At a previous employer, we heard a pitch from a web marketing team for all sorts of user generated content and a vibrant community that would then exist on the website. My reaction at the time, was maybe we didn't understand our customer as well as we wanted to believe. While we were absolute zealots for our products, most of the people who bought them saw them as a commodity. Why would they come to my site to talk about them? They are much more likely to show up at homedepot.com or lowes.com and talk about them there. You can take advantage of that. Ask your customers how they found you on-line, then engage them there!

I'll give you an example.

As a parent of two children, I can identify as a customer for diapers. Many, many diapers. But not once did I ever consider or even remotely think about registering at Pampers.com or Huggies.com or even at Target.com to learn about my child's development. It never once occurred to me. But surf on over to the My Pampers.com site and there it is. For all I know, it might be full of really good information about my toddler. Where did I end up? Babycenter.com It already had a hub of parents exchanging information and letting me learn about my child's development.

I'm sure when they had the strategy meeting to put together a wonderfully constructed site for the myPampers site, they talked about exactly the issues that might be important to me. They probably had a guy like me in their customer persona. But it's a waste of money. What would have been a lot smarter, would have been to go to the sites where parents are already looking for information and offer yourself up as an expert. So when a parent asks on babycenter.com about how to choose diapers, you're right in there, helping educate them and helping them make a decision. Right here as a matter of fact, where babycenter.com has a community section.

Selling locks? Write the installation guide for homedepot.com and lowes.com. Heck make one that you can let independent Ace hardware owners refer to. You don't need to spend your money looking to attract people to your social media on your website if they are already predisposed to look for it in an existing social media hub. The whole point of a social media website is that people can educate each other about products, services, and experiences in their life. Why recreate the wheel if someone else who's product neutral has already built it for you? Use a search engine to watch the site for changes, your products being mentioned, even your competitor's products being mentioned.

Then get in there and act the role of a professional, right in your customer's living room asking you a question in a subject where you're an expert. How delighted will your customer be then?

Predicting Trends on the Internet

Interesting story on Reuters about how the search requests on the Internet are changing. This quote in particular stood out to me.

Tancer, general manager of global research at Hitwise, an Internet tracking company, said one of the major shifts in Internet use in the past decade had been the fall off in interest in pornography or adult entertainment sites.

He said surfing for porn had dropped to about 10 percent of searches from 20 percent a decade ago, and the hottest Internet searches now are for social networking sites.

"As social networking traffic has increased, visits to porn sites have decreased," said Tancer, indicated that the 18-24 year old age group particularly was searching less for porn.

"My theory is that young users spend so much time on social networks that they don't have time to look at adult sites."

I'm a fan of the technologies that we see coming up on websites now. The ability for the web to adjust and get instant feedback from its users via comments and other user generated content is a powerful tool. However, sometimes I think we as people in the industry get a little excited about what we think we know.

Take a look at this report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project (2005). Some of its key findings...

A wide-ranging look at the way American women and men use the internet shows that men continue to pursue many internet activities more intensively than women, and that men are still first out of the blocks in trying the latest technologies.

At the same time, there are trends showing that women are catching up in overall use and are framing their online experience with a greater emphasis on deepening connections with people.

I'm wondering if the rise of social media is perhaps a result of the fact that more women are on the Internet (as a percentage) then ever before, and their interests on-line closely align with the types of activities that social networking promotes.

I still think that connecting your employees, listening to your customers, and letting your suppliers have even better insight into how you are marketing your products is a good thing. But it's a dangerous thing to hitch your wagon to the next great wave on the Internet. If your website already is content rich, now is a fantastic time to start weaving in social media to your website. However if you know your user comments are going to mostly be "Your website sucks!" and "Why can't I find this product on your website?" then that is where you need to focus.

User generated content sounds fantastic, because from far enough way, it sounds like you get content without having to spend the time and resources to generate it yourself. But committing to social media tools on your website means that you will end up spending more time and effort on your website than ever before. Because now you have to react at light speed to the corrections, comments, and outright complaints that your users will generate.

What do you do if you are determined to connect via social networks now to your customers? Hey, that's a good thing, and you can do it even if your website isn't ready. I'll talk about that in a later blog post.

Metadata does a website good.

Maybe you remember that old tag line from the dairy industry here in the US. The advert claimed that "Milk does a body good."

Metadata on the web has a checkered past. Back when I was starting to put up websites in the mid '90s, Metadata tags, embedded in your webpage was what search crawlers used to help determine how significant a particular piece of content was to a website. So you'd overload your meta tags on a piece of HTML to completely spam the page with the terms you wanted to be ranked highly on. It quickly became worthless as everyone would work to put whatever the hot search terms were as metadata, even if the page didn't relate to that subject at all.

So why are we talking about metadata again? A picture is worth a thousand words.


That's United Airlines stock. You can't help but notice that they took a very hard hit on Monday. That's because there was a news story out that they were close to declaring bankruptcy. Unfortunately for the good shareholders and employees of UAL, that story had been dredged up from earlier this decade on a Florida newspaper's website. Google news saw that it was getting a lot of links and play and picked it up, bringing it to the front page for millions of people. Once it started to drop, in rolled the automatic sells and voila, you have the making of a very bad day.

A mistake. But for UAL stockholders and employees, not all that funny. The stock, even after recovering most of it's value that same day, is still trading over 10% lower than it was. That's a lot of value to lose because of an old news story being mistakenly played as current.

That's where metadata comes in. If the Florida newspaper's website had used metadata to tag each of its news stories with a "published date" the crawler could have known to safely ignore that story. Hell, the newspaper could have even built their own crawler to stamp the archived content with simple metadata pieces of information like "Last Published" and "Written By". Metadata can be held in a separate data structure that can then be joined to the content by the publishing system so that you're not having to reconstruct old legacy systems. If you're building a new content system for the web, it's a fantastically powerful tool to allow your users to see things like related content, manuals for your products, aftermarket items that connect to the product you are looking at, service programs for the product, etc.

Got an old stale site? It doesn't take much to wrap a metadata system around it to allow you to be able to flag content. If you've got the content quality at a high enough level, you can even offer to let your web viewers help you tag some of the content groupings. Good luck!

When You Shouldn't Blog

I've worked most of my career in manufacturing and distribution companies. Typically these are companies that are slow to new trends in Information Technology. For instance, I had the privilege of being able to put in the first e-mail system for a $100m distributor back in the mid 90s as well as drop in their website. I've also recently been involved in helping another company try to consolidate their brand presence on-line. In the rush to "get on the web" sometimes companies make strategic errors.

The core of these errors is forgetting the cardinal rule of the web. Content is king. It's not the volume of content that one pushes out or we'd all be so much happier with the volume of spam we receive. It's the content that fulfills three requirements: content that is accurate, relevant, and timely (ART) to the end user.

Think of it, you have spam filters in your email clients to try to use a Bayesian filter to make sure you never have to read email that isn't accurate, relevant, and timely to you. With the migration of web content into digg, delicious, and RSS feeds, you are starting to see some of those same ideas about how to filter content done by humans. It won't be long before you see your web browsers using search engines and your surfing history to suggest stories and sites you might find interesting. Similar to Amazon's recommendation engine, but with your web surfing as input.

So if you're blogging all the time for your company, but you struggle for content to write about that you feel your customers want to read, then you have a problem. You're drowning your signal in noise. Instead, it's important that your customer can expect a certain level of quality and topic consistency. Is your blog about you, or is it about your product, or a topic of interest.

Related, maybe you don't want to be blogging at all. I've found this column by Jakob Nielsen so insightful, that on the strength of it I went to one of his usability conferences. Jakob's point is that given the ease of blogging, and the standard distribution of quality that blog posts will have, it's sometimes better to write an article and let the blogs point to you. (And as I've blogged about his article, you can see it can work.)

Basically, if you are the acknowledged expert on a particular subject, blogging actually detracts from your status as the expert. On any given subject, many people will blog. Some number of them will communicate it better than you, even if they aren't as educated on the topic. And by coming into the blogsphere to write about your expertise, you actually remove part of your expertise.

So my recommendation to you? Blog. But blog with a purpose, not a deadline. If you're writing on your expertise, make the blog post meaty enough to be an article. Give your viewers something solid enough that they always see your posts as high value and worth reading.