Is Facebook the Biggest Waste of Time?
It would appear that the average user spends 4 hours and 39 minutes a month (based on June 2009’s statistics) on Facebook, which is the highest of any of the top ten online brands.
This is all according to the most recent Nielsen report and has been digested and commented on by those reliable chaps at Mashable.
Click here for the full article
New Business Generation – Has Digital & E-marketing had its day?
With marketing budgets getting tighter ( is that even possible?), unsurprisingly Marketeers must validate and account for every £ or $ they spend. The need to create, qualify and groom new business leads for Sales is the ‘de-facto’ measure for the performance of every marketeer. The Finance Directors challenge of ‘Prove your value to me’ is heard in Boardrooms throughout the land. So as Marketing Management, how do we decide to allocate our budget across the myriad of choices? Clearly the logical place to start is by using those media choices that deliver the most tangible, qualified results. Now no-one ever claimed that solus TV can create sales – more reasonably it can launch and support sales activity, even moving market share points through concerted effort. What TV can never achieve is a 2 way, on-going communication with a Customer, much less a prospect. Anyone remember Radion Automatic?? Launched in a blaze of TV and POS glory, the brand quickly died once TV and retail support was reduced to maintenance levels. When it comes to e-marketing, it’s hard to benchmark your own campaigns against industry norms. It’s even harder to then turn that into real metrics for evaluation of absolute value.
Sometimes the product, offering, target market or even price isn’t right. What is important is that the Client (through Purestone) can see this, react to it, craft different messages & strategies and respond to the results immediately. What other media choice allows you to change and tweak your creative, or copy, or call to action as the campaign goes out? I genuinely believe that e-marketing can make a difference to the business generation capabilities of any organisation. Those that treat e-marketing as a truly strategic media choice through which they make highly personalised, 1 to 1 campaigns can expect to achieve great results. Those that treat e-marketing as ‘blast, forget and hope something sticks’ – well, they still form an unenlightened majority of marketers. Treat your prospects as people, personalise your messaging to distinct groups and, surprise surprise, your results will rapidly improve.
Useable Design: Nature vs Nurture
In the ever evolving world of interactive design, delivering solutions that are relevant, engaging and visually pleasing comes second to delivering something that is usable. In order to do this you have to consider the task that is being asked of the user, and say “what is the most intuitive way I can answer this question?”.
You can appeal to the two ways a user answers a problem, understanding through “Nature” and “Nurture”. Nature: what is natural for us to do without thinking, and Nurture: what we have learnt and expect to do, based on our experiences.
Defining a process through a creative journey can be done in many different ways, many prefer to take the “Nurture” root as this is in effect looking at what has been done previously to answer the same question, and adapting that, often even taking the same creative base style, you will see many re-worked versions of Microsoft products as people believe due to their market penetration they must be doing it right, but are they?
The Nature approach is more for the fearless and brave hearted designer. Take a question, and design the answer how you believe it should work, don’t ask what the user want as they have a preconceived idea based on their experiences… which may not be the right answer, just the one they know. If the design is truly intuitive the answer will be found through natural investigation, and who knows your answer my start to set people’s expectations.
Both methods are valid in their own right, but the outcome should be the same… “this is really easy to use”.
What’s the easiest way to keep your revenue moving forward?
Since the beginning of the year, I’ve been involved in a whole lot more discussions with Clients ( and prospective Clients ) about revenue or business generation. My first question is always ‘ Are you maximising your relationships with your existing Customers?’ It seems an obvious point but so many organisations devote huge resources to attracting new customers without first identifying what they can do to retain and excite existing ones.
Its a well quoted fact – its 5 times easier to keep a customer than to attract a new one’. A recent peice of research by Bain and Co. gave a good insight into the impact of Customer retention. A 5% increase in retained customers leads to 75% increase in net customer value ( i.e. once you have stripped out the implied cost of winning a new customer). Secondly, organisations that implement successful customer retention programmes grow at 6 times the average rate.
A key part of servicing exisitng Clients is to understand them. We start off with a huge amount of actual knowledge – who they are, who the key decision makers are, what they’ve previously bought from us ( and when), what we’ve quoted for, who their other suppliers are etc. etc. The biggest challenge is accessing this information and turning it into usable data for communications. This information typically lies in : a finance system ( like Sage, Pegasus, SAP or Oracle ), a contact system ( like ACT, Maximiser, Goldmine, Outlook or even spreadsheets ) and most risky of all – in the heads of our Commercial staff. Just recently, I’ve noticed ( and we have won) a number of deals to bring this knowledge together and make it usable for the Organisation through the implementation of formal Customer Relationship Management ( CRM) programmes. This process gives one view of the Customer, enabling all and any Customer facing staff to see a full picture of a Customer – who they are, what they’ve bought, have they experienced problems before etc. etc.
Providing access to this level of information - both transactional and personal – allows us to engage with them on a ’1-2-1′ level with personalised e-campaigns, personalised web content and genuinely as a person whom we seek to understand.
As the economic situation tightens, I’m backing Companies which spend time understanding their customers and then communicate with them personally to ‘weather the storm’ and keep driving their revenues forwards.
Pepperio v5!
Is everyone as excited about the upcoming launch of Pepperio version 5 as I am?
Pepperio is a hosted content management solution that makes it really easy for companies to take control of their websites. Version 5 promises to be bigger and better! What am I most excited about? Well …. there is too much to mention here, but as well as improving the overall user experience there are 2 massive revisions – e-commerce and custom database functionality – which open up a whole new world of Pepperio-Possibilities! Other revisions worth mentioning are improved text editing (including a spell checker), drag and drop menus/tree structures (amazing!) and improved form building functionality. Click here to find out more about Pepperio v5.
Roll on v5!
Facebook losing money ?!
Today to my astonishment I read that facebook, commonly recognised as the biggest and most successful social media website in the world is currently running at a loss and has not yet generated a profit in any financial year since launch. What I think makes this even more astounding are some of the facebook statistics which they actively promote via their own website -
- More than 200 million active users worldwide
- More than 100 million users log on to facebook at least once each day
- More than two-thirds of facebook users are outside of education
- The fastest growing demographic is those 35 years old and older
With this kind of consumer audience and what seems to be a fairly cost effective and simple advertising model, what is going wrong? Is too much time being spent on developing clever functionality and not enough focus being put into generating revenues?
If we are to believe what is reported, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg isn’t interested in making money, it’s more about connecting people (which I think is easy to say when you reported to be worth over $1.5 billion!!) but with his personal fortune depleting at a rapid rate, will his focus change?
In a recent interview the BBC’s Rory Cellan-Jones speaks to facebook Chief Operating Officer, Sheryl Sandberg about facebook revenues, piracy and what the future holds.
Facebook losing money interview
However much Sheryl claims that it’s all part of their global plan, in my opinion facebook needs to get its business model in order before they miss the boat, in case they haven’t heard, Twitter has arrived!