Featured Content – Page 2 – David Meiselman

November 23, 2009November 23, 2009

Islands in the social content stream

The social distribution system is a key aspect of why the web is becoming more about people and ideas and less about content and its static-object, connected-to-places (pages/sites) form…

I have had this post floating around in my head for literally about a year, but it hasn’t come out in written form until today. When it started, in my head, it was all about the fact that content wants to be independent of place or platform. Or, more specifically, that content should be “consumable” where and how the consumer wants to consume it. But, today the concept bouncing around in my head has gotten deeper and more complex. And, it keeps morphing…hence, perhaps, why it has taken me so long to write this.

The idea that we should not have to go to a web site to consume content seems somewhat obvious today, but it was a very short time ago that we needed to do exactly that. The advent of RSS and widgets that could pull content or functionality into any site or any online medium (e.g. start pages like iGoogle or social apps on Facebook, Myspace, or Open Social, etc.), however, meant that people could consume out at the periphery, without making them come to your site. This also meant that when your “stuff” was placed somewhere on the periphery, you could reach more people through serendipity. If someone liked your stuff enough to embed it in their “place”, their people could discover it and you. This was a big reason why social apps first took off, because their very use was a viral engine that connected to their social graph.

As this trend coincided with the advent of social sharing mechanisms like Del.icio.us, Digg, etc., and the attendant “share this” buttons, the isolated act of serendipitous discovery on the web became an ongoing flow of stuff. The web of places and destinations became the web of the stream.The nature of how we discovered or found stuff and gave it our attention had changed again.

The early web was all about browsing and hence about NAVIGATION. In this phase, the big players were the portals, like Yahoo, Lycos, etc., because they provided the navigation to get to the rest of the web. The next stage was about self-driven discovery and hence was all about SEARCH. Google figured out how to organize the content of the web by creating a proxy for the recommendations of the wide community via links to pages and their algorithm for assigning contextual authority to content. This stage, however, was still fundamentally about the location web and organizing pages and places.

Once we entered the content distribution and syndication phase, the construct changed again from BROWSE and SEARCH to DISCOVER and SUBSCRIBE. The acts of top down syndication and bottom up sharing fundamentally shifted us from LOCATIONS to STREAMS. We were no longer the ones moving from place to place to consume the content. It was now the content itself that was moving in a stream that could flow over or around us as we liked. If we wanted to ensure that a stream flowed past our island, we SUBSCRIBED to that feed.

At the same time that we began to subscribe to feeds, social networks started cranking up and created a whole new type of feed — the ever-changing STATUS of those on our “social graph.” What was previously a flow of articles or artifacts became a flow of comments, ideas, and links to other pieces of content.

This powered the disconnection of CONTENT from LOCATIONS even more and created a further meta layer for the exchange of ideas. No longer did you need to PUBLISH your thoughts, you could simply declare them out loud in a variety of ways. And, as people declared their thoughts, other people began to talk back and respond, in comments and social responses, and to pass ideas along by re-tweeting statements on Twitter and re-posting them in other spaces. This most recent shift completed a move from SUBSCRIBING to the acts of FOLLOWING and DISCUSSING. This last step is key.

John Borthwick wrote a pivotal piece on his blog last Spring which highlighted this shift in the flow of content called “The Rise of Social Distribution Networks.” The key word in the title is SOCIAL. The key take away (for me anyway) in that article and across my thinking on these concepts this year is that PEOPLE DRIVE THIS THING. What started as a digital printing press (hence “Movable Type”) focused on THE STUFF, has really progressed to be about ideas and the people who express them, respond to them, curate them, and pass them along. The most profound (or interesting, funny, etc.) of them get passed the furthest along the graph and have the greatest impact. This highlights what Mike Troiano of Holland-Mark talks about when he says that “the brand is the response, not the stimulus.” Ideas with the best response spread the most and gain the most currency. Producers of content, or products or services, all need to heed that concept within the framework of the web.

People who don’t “get” Twitter think of it as a communication platform or as “micro-publishing.” It is even generically referred to as “micro-blogging.” But that misses the point. Even the social platforms themselves have seen the need to go “location independent” via APIs, aggregators, etc. Once you move beyond thinking of the web and its tools as a set of PLACES and a way to COMMUNICATE, you can see it more clearly for what it has become: a stream of ideas that flows via social connections.

The implications of that reality for businesses and marketers we’ll get to another time…

Original photo by asphericlens.

June 17, 2009

Your social media voice – Be real!

You don’t need to yell your sales pitch through a bullhorn.

Social Media is not simply another platform for interrupting people with your sales pitch. Don’t get me wrong. There is nothing wrong with selling stuff, and to do so takes a pitch of some kind. But, even I, the sales and marketing guy, get turned off by the direct, no pleasant introductory conversation, dive right in and get it on type of sales come-on, whether it is face to face, online, or in any other medium. Social Media extends that rule and even amplifies it.

I like people. I like getting to know people and I like learning what makes them tick and hearing what it is they have to say. This is at the heart of the concept that many refer to as AUTHENTICITY. We all have a bit of the voyeur in us (in a good way…). This is why we see our news filled with personal interest stories. This is also why many of us like when people add tweets about their personal life or what they are currently doing to their supposedly business focused online persona. Sure it is a bit like a soap opera, but it makes us feel connected to those people with whom we have a mainly one way relationship of listening.

So your voice – how you blog, tweet, post, update – has a big effect on how people will perceive you and how they will place value on your stream. As I start to follow more and more people on my personal twitter account, this is being driven home very clearly to me.

I pay closer attention to those who tweet in an authentic voice like a real person. This is even true with those tweeters who represent a company or brand as opposed to an individual, especially those who mix personal remarks and commentary with the content of their tweets to go beyond business announcements and attempts to get people to click on a bit.ly link. As my stream gets more cluttered, some people will get a larger piece of my attention…the authentic ones.

So, be a real person. Write in a real person’s voice, not in marketing copy. Be a helpful netizen. Don’t just focus on your company’s content or products. Join the conversation. Post things that are relevant but have no benefit to you. That way, when you do post a “pitch” or a product message it will be resonate and have a much greater effect with people who actually want to listen to what you have to say.

Photo by adriaanverstijnen

May 3, 2009June 11, 2009

Turning website visitors into buyers – Online Funnel Part IV

Presenting a product for purchase – moving your prospects from visitor mode to buyer mode.

For those sites that monetize by selling products this is often the most important step of the funnel. It is all well and good to have people read your helpful content and even to continue to engage with your site or newsletters on a regular basis. But while you want to grow an audience, you need at least a chunk of them to eventually convert or else the exercise is not commercial. Likewise, if you are ad supported, you need some level of demonstrable ROI to show your advertisers, unless they are just concerned with brand impressions, which is less and less common. So someone needs to click on something.

How do you get visitors to consider buying something and how do you measure it?

Some people will measure the conversion from relationships to customers as one big step. I prefer to break it down further to two steps (or even three): purchase consideration and store check out process. Each of these steps is measurable and is effected by different drivers. If optimization and revenue maximization is your goal, it helps to attack each step separately.

The first step is to get your relationship or visitor into the store or into the mode to think about buying your product. The key metric here is the visit to the store or product page, though some tactics skip this step all together and drive clicks directly to the shopping cart itself. The key tactic is to present the target with an offer. This can either be in reaction to users, such as displaying a special offer callout on a content page they are visiting, or can be proactive, such as sending the user an offer specific email.

In future posts, we will go into much greater detail on the strategy and tactics behind specific emails and broader communications approaches. There are a wide number of inputs that drive their success, from the frequency of touch, to the mix of content and commerce, to the specific types of offers you present and the creative you use to do so.

For today’s post, we will stay at a macro level and note the fact that the key aspect of conversion analysis here is to measure the effectiveness of tactics based on both the click through rate (CTR) they achieve, as well as the downstream metrics of orders/click and dollars/click. As we have said before, too keen a focus on the immediate metric (CTR) can lose the forrest for the trees. At the end of the day, it is all about the dollars that come from the activity. So do not stop your analysis between approaches at the one that produces the best CTR.

You can actually logically connect certain creative approaches to higher click through rates that have lower sales rates. Pitching something for free that actually has a cost is the clearest example. In so called “direct PPC” campaigns that focus on selling something immediately to those who click, driving down CTR can actually have a highly positive effect by focusing on those who are serious about buying something vs. those who never intended to buy, but were “just looking” or seeking a freebie. When you are paying for that click, you want a high ratio of buyers within clickers.

So if the key metric is visits to the store, which in turn is driven by CTR of site visitors or email readers, etc., what are the core drivers to effect that number? The main variables are within the offer or the pitch itself. What product are you offering? Do your prospects know the product? Where is the price point? Is it discounted? Are there special aspects beyond price, like free shipping? How are you describing the offer? What benefits are you presenting? What copy or visual creative are you using? Each of these elements can be tweaked and tested to optimize results.

Outside of the offer, what other factors drive success? How relevant is the offer to its context? In other words, does it match the content it sat next to? Displaying call-out ads on a site that relate to the content pages themselves will tend to have a much higher rate of engagement. If you run a home improvement site, ads for painting gear will generally drive better results sitting in the painting how-to section than generic home-improvement ads in their same spot. This sounds obvious, but it is amazing how many sites take a one size fits all approach.

In the next installment, we will finally examine the final step of the online conversion analysis funnel, the shopping cart and driving higher close ratios.

Photo by macmuc

February 8, 2009June 11, 2009

The Online Funnel – Part I

Any website or online business that exists for any purpose beyond self expression has a set of conversions that drive its success. Just like any traditional sales process, online success can be measured as a series of conversions that resemble a funnel. A large number of “targets” or “prospects” is driven into a process of steps that narrow their number down and down until the last remaining targets turn into whatever goal the driver has in mind…customers…users…readers, etc.

This process is often best represented as a funnel, with the large top section getting narrower and narrower with each step, as the pool of targets diminishes with the loss of those who did not “convert” from step to step. Some funnels are short and go right to the ultimate end conversion. Others are taller and multi-stepped, with a more gradual buildup of connection between the user and the site, service, or product.

Why is this important? Well one of the best things about online marketing is the ability to measure success quantitatively and adjust your approach to improve results. When your task is something as large as turning the denizens of the wider internet into customers for your product or service, that is not a single conversion or a single measurement. Rather, most strategies involve many steps and inputs, each of which can be optimized for its greatest contribution to ultimate success. Funnel analysis is a very useful way of breaking down a complex set of drivers into ultimate success and examining the success of each factor. When comparing the metrics for each step to industry standards and to themselves over time or under one approach versus another, online marketers gain a framework for doing their work, applying scarce resources, and seeing where they might have the biggest impact by applying change.

This is the first in a series of posts that will examine the various steps of the online funnel, the metrics that are generally measured for each step, and the tactics that are employed at each step. There are as many different funnels as there are businesses or site publishers on the internet. For our purposes however, we will look at the funnel as consisting of four primary stages prior to ultimate monetization:

1. Traffic driving
2. User engagement
3. Relationship building
4. Monetization events (AKA Purchase decisions)

In its most basic framework, this involves single conversion metrics leading from step to step.

1. Converting measures of traffic to some action on a site or using a service.
2. Moving from a single interaction to a repeated one.
3. Moving from a set of interactions to the consideration of a purchase (for example).
4. Consummating monetization (through a purchase, click-through, or otherwise).

In our next post in the series, we will look at the tactics used in the first funnel step, driving traffic, and the drivers and metrics that lead to conversion from that step to measuring the movement to the second funnel step, user engagement.

Image adapted from original by Normann Copenhagen.