Consumers have way too much faith in what they read and hear online. The problem is that many people believe if it is written (or advertised) on the internet it must be true. We believe Wikipedia. And we believe all those ads on Google. And that’s the problem. Some of those ads are scams.
Lately, criminal organizations have found a new way to take advantage of the public. They place ads that prey on consumers who need help with their mortgages by promising debt consolidation and obligation reductions. When the consumers engage with these ads, they contact what they think is a legitimate organization. Instead, however, it’s a criminal collecting the person’s personal information and money without actually rendering any services.
Google just got in trouble once again for this and not policing their ads well enough. This is a tough challenge for Google. With millions of advertisers and billions of ads, how can it insure that all of its advertisers are ethical, or even just “not criminal”?
Consumers must educate themselves to research a business before they engage with it. Ironically, often the best way to research the business is also online – by Googling it. But you can also check to see if there are reviews about it, if there are complaints and you can do some basic detective work, such as whether the organization has a phone number, is based in the USA, has a mailing address (and not a PO box), and so on. One red flag is a web site with lots of grammar issues and no contact information.
Remember, you also “get what you pay for”. So if the deal seems too good to be true, it may in fact not be a deal at all. Go with trust, and learn to pay a premium for trust and quality and in the end you’ll be glad you did, as you will avoid being a victim as the result of trying to save a buck.
Now that Google is indexing JavaScript-originated content, such as Facebook comments, businesses may start seeing a shift in search engine results. What does this mean for you? Well, if there is a lot of buzz on the net about your business, and that buzz is contained in Facebook comments, searchers may now be exposed to said buzz – good or bad!
This underscores two powerful needs:
It is now more important than ever to monitor your company’s buzz. This will ensure if there is negative sentiment about your brand, you can quickly and proactively address it.
If you are not engaging with your customers on sites such as Facebook and blogs, you are missing out an opportunity to generate positive buzz and equally important earned media.
So, get cracking on your Facebook and social media engagement and monitoring strategy. Before you know it your rank in search results may just start rising!
Advertisers need to be weary about rising CPCs headed into the big retail holiday season. They should not based their budget on rates and costs from earlier in the year as their sole source. Look to prior year metrics for the same time period as a better base line. However, it appears that even those seasonally adjusted numbers are rising sharply.
As a result, I hypothesize that retailers may branch out into long tail a bit more than normal, as well as dabble in newer areas such as display markets, video and mobile.
This may cause a shortage in inventory across all channels, further driving up prices for non-retailers in related industries, especially when you take broad match in to account.
Falsified image of the US President created by Benetton
A new ad campaign by Benetton features the unauthorized use of images of political figures. Additionally, the images have been doctored to make it appear is if the figures are kissing.
This ad campaign really tests basic marketing 101 principles regarding moral and ethical obligation and demonstrates a basic lack of understanding with regards to truth in advertising.
First, it is well established that one must have permission to use an image for a commercial campaign and the White House has a very explicit policy forbidding the use of the President’s image for commercial purposes.
Second, the images are not real, they are edited/altered/doctored. This might be acceptable if this was stated in the image, but it is not. Because the images are doctored in a material way (versus simply airbrushing a skin blemish), I believe these ads violate the principle of “truth in advertising”. I understand they may not violate this legally, as the ads are not making a promise.
All in all, it is clear that Benetton is simply making a gamble that the debate over these ads and the press resulting from such a debate is worth violating common decency and ethics. This is not the first time the company has been controversial for the sake of attention, and I’m sure it won’t be the last.
I suppose being stupid is their substitution for being creative.
Here’s a fantastic video I recommend sharing with your web team (and executive team) on understanding the importance of making your website more usable. It is by HFI (Human Factors International).
Ever wonder how your team will handle a negative issue that hits the media? Maybe you feel you have your bases covered because you are monitoring social media and believe you”know what you are doing”. But what happens when the pooh hits the fan while you are flying from Washington, DC to Sydney, Australia and you are (a) unaware of the issue; (b) unable to respond; and (c) by the time you land if you haven’t acted, it’s too late?
Well, maybe that specific scenario won’t happen to you, but being naive enough to think you’ll be able to fully control a negative media issue alone, or by someone else in your absence is not all too common in businesses today. One of the primary reasons most businesses are unprepared is because their social communities manager or team is typically comprised of younger employees who lack the mature, experienced business know-how needed to respond swiftly, consistently and accurately in a crisis.
So what to do?
Don’t fret… there are many resources on the net for devising a great crisis management plan. The basic steps include:
Monitoring
Triage
Escalation
Notification
Coordination
Responding
Heidi Cohen writes a great article referencing Rick Perry’s recent debate gaffe and his team’s slow response. Her article is a great place to get started.
Additionally, once you have all these great plans in place, you should practice. On the surface, this may sound silly. But here’s what you should do:
Gather up your social media team in a conference room
Inform executives of the drill
Surprise your social media team with an issue that could actually happen. They should not know about it before hand. Try to make it as realistic as possible.
Have to team run through the crisis management plan, including each step…
Draft up responses, notify the proper channels and get all the approvals for your documents and responses as needed.
Assess how well your team performed, how quickly executives replied and identify any issues.
Once you’ve done a couple drills, I suggest doing one off-hours and seeing how the response time changes. This may help you identify further weaknesses in your plans. Can you handle a disgruntled employee spilling a secret on Twitter for Christmas? Well, it could happen, right?
Today I will be at the Site Executive User Conference, “Empower” in Baltimore, MD. This conference is free to all existing Site Executive customers.
I will be a panelist on the keynote panel, “Creating an Excellent User Experience” along with Dan Greller – Legg Mason (@dgreller); Ken Nakata – Director Accessibility Consulting Practice, HiSoftware; Jeanne Ivy – D.C.D., Web Consultant, Systems Alliance (@jivydesign).
Following the keynote panel, I will be leading a session along with John Mohr (@johntmohr) entitled, Web Effectiveness Strategy Track: Social Media – The Value of a “Like”.
Landing pages are living canvases in the world of direct response marketing. We’re always testing, tweaking, refining and even full-scale redoing them to achieve the perfectly optimized and conversion experience.
Consumers crave information, and unless your conversion point is a coupon or freebie, you’re going to need to work at convincing the consumer to complete your form.
That’s why you might need a micro site. A micro site simply let’s you string together a few extra pieces of content to tell a story or help the consumer understand your value proposition a little bit more before they convert.
I’m not going to dive into how to create a micro site today. Instead, I want to simply encourage you to think beyond the stereotypical landing page that only has a headline, image, paragraph of text and a form. Start thinking outside the page. What else can you do to convince the user to convert? Is it a social signal? Visual impression? Navigation to other content? Testimonials?
To help you understand that a landing page is not limited to a single URL, here’s a great article by Scott Brinker on “Landing Pages 3.0”.
As marketers, we spend a lot of time focusing on the funnel and creating the perfect landing page optimized to convert visitors into leads. I’ve even compiled a list of great resources to help folks get started with their landing pages.
But what about the unsubscribe page? Should you spend time on this page? Well, yes and no.
The unsub page should be clean and simple. It should be as confusing as a traffic light – meaning – not confusing at all.
I highly recommend a simple text statement, box for the email address, and a unsub button. Kind of like this:
The Perfect Unsubscribe Page
There’s just no other way to simplify the unsubscribe process. And in my opinion the goal of your process should be to get unhappy people off your list. This saves you time and money, but also reduces the risk of creating a even more unhappy customer who may start speaking about their displeasure.
Now, if you have a complicated marketing process that involves multiple newsletters, lists and all touch points, you will invariably have to add to this page. But do so cautiously – you don’t want to make it difficult to unsubscribe.
For instance, I have a client that let’s people unsubscribe their email address separately from their phone number. When you hit their unsubscribe page, it looks like the above page. After submitting, it then asks, “would you also like to remove your phone number from our list?” And it walks folks through how to do that.
Perhaps even more importantly, if the email address is cached as a cookie, the unsubscribe page recalls the address for the user so they don’t have to type it. This is particularly helpful if the user has multiple email addresses and is unsure which one they used to sign up on your site.
Still not satisfied? Here’s a great (and humorous) article about unsubscribe pages that I recommend.
The following article is by a colleague of mine, George Fox. George is a guru in all things web design and development and we’ve been working on a number of projects together this past year spanning the web with regards to intake, branding, conversion and usability. You can access George’s blog here for more insight: http://tigerfox.posterous.com.
Adobe Flash
In early August, one of my colleagues forwarded me an article on Read Write Web heralding Adobe’s open beta of Edge: a tool for creating animated web content in HTML, CSS and javascript. At the time I wrote:
I’ve been following Edge for the last year when teaser footage of it showed up on Adobe Labs. I’m sure it will eventually be pretty cool, but any talk of Flash’s death is greatly exaggerated. I have Edge on my (personal) laptop as well as Tumult’s Hype and used to have Sencha Animator. I don’t think there’s any danger of any of these replacing Flash for its breadth of mature programming capability, workflow or file I/O in the next few years. I do think that a vast majority of Flash banners, basic web animation stuff and interactive infographics will be replaced by HTML5/CSS3 alternatives. But deep stuff like games, applications and specialized front-end interfaces will require more than basic web technologies alone can deliver – at least until a competitively-priced robust, easy-to-author framework comes along.
I stand by my assertion that Flash isn’t going away soon. The news about Adobe abandoning Flash Mobile isn’t surprising – as far as I can tell they never got much traction with it anyway. But in line with what I said: as more “banners, basic web animation stuff and interactive infographics” are built in HTML/CSS rather than relying on plug-ins, Flash’s web usage will ebb. It’s not just Flash Mobile that will be affected. This change will affect PC browsing and hasten Flash’s obsolescence. Just browse the comments.
Besides the kneejerk overreactions, there’s so much anger and apprehension. Too bad Adobe can’t simply state that they want to make the best software available rather compromise on shoddy initiatives or all that ambiguous mumbo-jumbo about ‘increasing investment in HTML5’ and ‘delivering compelling web and application experiences.’ Flash may not be dead, but this will be seen as an epic fail.
Now is much like ten years ago when Flash became ubiquitous. The state of the web was shifting from static pages to interactive ones; from CD-ROMS to streaming media. Flash had a decent authoring environment and adapted to the programming challenges well enough, but never could keep up with the shift toward simple standards-based accessible content. Even now, the best it can do is act as a browser or mediator for such content. We don’t need that anymore. What we need are tools that help us take advantage of the advanced capabilities inherent in HTML and CSS. I don’t think it will be one of our current crop of word processors, page layout applications or IDEs. Whoever builds a scalable, efficient, capable authoring tool for HTML5 web applications may rule the next decade.
Dan Soschin 