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Facebook – Quality or Quantity?

I’m not a fan of Facebook. I lost interest a while ago and stopped using it. I’m still, however, feeling the network effect as some disciples don’t respond to email anymore and instead prefer to be engaged on Facebook. I had reason to message some family members recently, so I bit the bullet and found my login.

There was a very blatant, right-column reminder about Facebook’s exploitative business model as I navigated the Site. Take a look at the range of ads and sponsored-whatevers I was served. Untargeted. Irrelevant. Horrible.

They’ve connected a billion people on the planet and this is the world they want us using?

I’m trying hard not to bash Facebook from my middle-classed platform of privilege. But when I compare their efforts to engage with relevant information, entertainment and ads with, say, Google and Amazon: I see no signs of improvement and can only feel they are failing. They publicly state higher moral aims to connect the world and this puts them firmly in the path of my criticism.

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Managing Customer Loyalty

How loyal are your customers?

92% of consumers trust referrals from friends and family more than advertising and 70% trust consumer reviews (via Loyalty360). But do they trust the brand? eMarketer talks about millenials (aged 18 to 34) being very price sensitive in a recent article ‘Millennial Grocery Shoppers Favor Deals Over Brands’. Their research concludes that the path to a purchase grows increasingly fragmented and brand loyalty is diminishing. Shoppers – across many retail areas – are becoming used to switching brand, channel and outlet in an effort to save on price (87% of their survey respondents suggesting price was the biggest influence).

These are just two examples of recent research reports that raise the role of loyalty in a purchase decision. How do retailers respond in this multi-channel world? Is building customer loyalty worth the effort?

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Online Retail in China

“It is ‘one of the few bright spots in the Chinese economy,’ says Zeng Ming. He is talking about e-commerce. Mr Zeng, the chief strategy officer for Alibaba, a giant Chinese internet firm, predicts that digital transactions on his firm’s platforms will top 1 trillion yuan ($159 billion) this year—more than Amazon’s and eBay’s combined. That is a bold claim; but consider what happened on Singles Sunday.

Invented a few years ago by students and seized upon by digital marketers, this festival for lonely hearts falls annually on the 11th day of the 11th month (since 1 is the loneliest number). It is like St Valentine’s Day, only worse. Singletons shower each other with tender gifts: a barrage of pearls; a storm of sweets. This November 11th they spent a staggering 19 billion yuan on Alibaba’s online platforms—a fourfold increase on a year ago, and more than double what Americans spent online last Cyber Monday (the Monday after Thanksgiving, when retailers urge Americans to shop online). More than 100m purchases were logged, accounting for 80% of the packages shipped that day.”

(Taken from The Economist ‘Pity the Parcel People’, 17th November)

These numbers are staggering.

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Collaboration and the Ballbuster

On the 29 October, a senior exec at Apple – Scott Forstall – leaves. Official line: “change to increase collaboration across hardware, software and services”. Media reports ascribe the departure to the failed attempt at replacing Google Maps in iOS and the significant rifts he was rumoured to have generated with other senior members of the team.

“Software engineers and designers who worked for Forstall were loyal to him and ranked among the hardest working at the company, the people said. Yet his management style also led a several senior executives to leave Apple because they found working with Forstall difficult, several former Apple employees said. The mapping missteps were a final straw, people said.”
(Bloomberg, 30 Oct)

On the 13 November, a senior exec at Windows – Steve Sinofsky – leaves. Media reports infer, contrary to the official memos, that the departure was prompted by the divisive power politics being played between Sinofsky’s Windows team and the rest of the Company.

“Behind the scenes, Sinofsky also achieved what few could do at Microsoft: he changed the culture. He introduced triads, cells each comprising a developer, a tester and a programme manager to speed up development and tighten coding. The triad model stripped out middle management and was so successful it’s been rolled into the Server and Tools division and his old home of Office.” (The Register, 13 November)

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Chasing Conversion Rates

Econsultancy released its annual Conversion Rate Optimisation Report earlier this week. The highlight? “Satisfaction with conversion rates has been on a downward trend in the last four years. Just over a fifth (22%) of companies surveyed are satisfied with their conversion rates.”

This is the usual case of a new technology over-promising and under-delivering. Conversion Rate Optimisation has been vigorously chased over the last couple of years: it clearly offers a way to boost the bottom line, not just click through rates in one’s online campaigns. The tools are improving. But we need to keep in mind that any optimisation technique is relative.

By relative, I mean it is not a gain that gets permanently locked in. It’s a process of structured experimentation to provide the most relevant and efficient path for a customer to travel. By relative, I also mean it is sensitive to the quality of the site, the quality of the traffic acquisition, as well as the rigour in which the experimentation takes place. All of which fluctuates quite regularly.

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Making Online Advertising Work

I love the internet.
Online advertising makes the internet work.
Therefore, I love online advertising.

That’s not meant as a confession, but more a statement of wobbly logic to introduce something very close to any online business: online advertising.

An advertiser and a publisher have a huge learning curve to tackle if he or she wishes to use the latest innovation in ad technology to unlock the promise of higher returns on ad spend (for the advertiser) or yield (for the publisher). The great catalyst for this innovation over the last 5 years must surely be ascribed to the increases in cheap, scalable computer power and digital storage. It’s a full time job now to keep abreast of new ideas and technologies, especially if you are trying to derive an income from online advertising, lead a marketing department or talk to an ad agency. Encouragingly, many a conference speaker continues to implore the world to look beyond the technology and focus on the online value chain (it’s just a deal between buyer and seller after all!). That’s all good sentiment, but you still need to figure out your ad servers from your trading desks, your DSP’s from your exchanges.

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Timing is Everything

On a human-computer interaction (HCI) and design thread again. I was reading the seminal article by Dr. Vannevar Bush in which he introduces ‘memex’ to the world (Atlantic, July 1945), I love this passage which eloquently reminds us that however brilliant an idea, it’s quite possible the rest of the puzzle/ stack/ ecosystem isn’t ready for it yet.

“Two centuries ago Leibnitz invented a calculating machine which embodied most of the essential features of recent keyboard devices, but it could not then come into use. The economics of the situation were against it: the labor involved in constructing it, before the days of mass production, exceeded the labor to be saved by its use, since all it could accomplish could be duplicated by sufficient use of pencil and paper. Moreover, it would have been subject to frequent breakdown, so that it could not have been depended upon; for at that time and long after, complexity and unreliability were synonymous.

Babbage, even with remarkably generous support for his time, could not produce his great arithmetical machine. His idea was sound enough, but construction and maintenance costs were then too heavy. Had a Pharaoh been given detailed and explicit designs of an automobile, and had he understood them completely, it would have taxed the resources of his kingdom to have fashioned the thousands of parts for a single car, and that car would have broken down on the first trip to Giza.”

Have We Got a Good User Experience?

What is user experience beyond the obvious reference to the experience a user (or customer) has of a product or service? And importantly, do we have one!

In the online world specifically, we have great tools to measure how people use and interact with our business. The question is whether we make use of this to extract the most benefit.

In many online business situations, user experience is the thing that suffers when there’s a mentality of ‘just do it’, demanding deadlines, etc. Like most things, user experience needs a business case along side many other operational decisions like timing, staffing, marketing, etc. Without a strong business case it cannot be prioritized and ends up being a bit of an artistic flourish.

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Work is a Game, Seriously

I love video games. In the not-so-distant past, I have lost countless midnight hours totally absorbed with particular games. From Tetris and Sid Meier’s creations in the early days, to Second Life and Minecraft more recently (I’m more of a strategy guy than an FPS junkie). So much so, that I forbid myself to start new games now for fear of losing chunks of my life.

It’s no wonder that research and opinion makers have latched onto the fact that a task, when treated like a game, becomes enjoyable and perhaps even addictive. If you can persuade someone that a task is to be ‘played’ as a game, the perceived time spent doing the task reduces and a more positive energy is created.

This is interesting: can gamification be a legitimate way to boost someone’s motivation in the workplace?

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