Digital Marketing | Digital Strategy | This Digital World

LinkedIn Could do Better on Customer Empathy

Businesses that truly understand the needs of the customer tend to do well.  It's not a pre-requisite for success but it certainly helps.

I was recently left with a not so sweet taste in my mouth, when I tried to downgrade my premium LinkedIn account to a basic account.

For starters, if you allow customers to upgrade your account online then you should also allow them to downgrade their account.  Unless you are desperately concerned about the revenue risk (in which case you've got bigger problems), it is simply good practice. LinkedIn does a great job of telling you the benefits of a premium account and makes the sign up process simple, but if the customer tries the account and for whatever reason decides it's not for them, show some customer empathy and make it simple to downgrade!

For those of you that have premium accounts and have spent far too long trying to figure out how to do it, here is the link.  As far as I can see, it is only available in the help section when you do a search for 'downgrade'.  If you go into account settings you will see upgrade links but no downgrade links.

The actual process for completing the downgrade is here (from Linkedin's website):

To downgrade to a lower-level premium account: 
Click Contact us.
Complete the form.
In the "Question" field, tell us which premium account level you'd like to downgrade to (e.g. "I'd like to change to a Business account.")
We'll contact you after your request has been completed. You can still upgrade to a higher subscription level at any time.

All in all, quite a lot of hassle.

It took about 5 days before I got a reply.  It was a very nice email, although they refunded my last payment and changed my account immediately, whereas I actually wanted to keep my premium account until the end of the billing cycle and then downgrade. Meh. At least they came close but in my book, could do much much better.

 

Google Has a Great Future with the Arrival of the Chrome Web Store

In case you missed it, Google is trying to do for the web what Apple has done for the iPhone - provide an 'app' based experience for you to consumer content online.

The idea is that Google Chrome browser users can experience a much richer display of content through web apps - essentially web pages rewritten in HTML5 that are designed to be more immersive, look better and offer a more pleasant browsing experience (it also offers site owners rich advertising opportunities).

I think it's a good way to go and makes a lot of sense.  Most people tend to have a favorite website list of about eight frequently visited sites, so if they are all available as web apps and look better, it's got to be a good thing right?

Of course Google will also capitalize on the fact that as more and more web apps are created, it will become increasingly difficult to find the good ones.  Hey presto, isn't search something that Google does quite well?

And with free apps come paid apps and guess who is going to take a share of your hard earned cash when you buy a paid add through the Google app store?  Let me just say (as a long term shareholder of Google), that I am bullish on the future of Google.

WordPress Blog or TypePad Blog?

There were 16 million searches on Google last month for 'wordpress' and only 300,000 for 'Typepad' so on the face of it, one might expect the massive popularity of the WordPress blogging platform to be a strong indicator of quality and value, but I'm not so sure.

I have been a TypePad user for more than four years (this blog is a TypePad blog and so is my other restaurant blog, so I know that platform pretty well.  But recently I have also been playing around with creating a WordPress blog and thought it would be interesting to compare the two.

So what am I evaluating?

Thanks to Blogger (not evaluated here), WordPress and TypePad, creating a blog or website nowadays is very easy and very cheap.  Here I evaluate the ease of creating a new business website or blog for the typical small business owner, that doesn't know much about creating visibility online.  I will evaluate both WordPress and TypePad on the following:

>Account Creation
>Domain name
>Interface
>Design options
>Publishing
>Stats
>Marketing
>Pricing

Here goes:

Account creation

Both WordPress and TypePad allow you to set up a free account and both are very easy to set up.  Click here for WordPress and here for TypePad. Typical registration information is required and you do not need to enter any credit card information. Make sure you have already thought of your website name though, since this is one of the first things you will be asked; which brings me on to...

Domain name

Your website (or blog) address at WordPress will be yourcompanyname.wordpress.com.  At TypePad it will be yourcompanyname.typepad.com. Either of these is fine for a personal blog but if you want to be a bit more professional then you should register your own domain name and map your domain name to your WordPress or TypePad website address.  Check Go Daddy for .com availability.  Once you have your own domain name, the mapping process for both WordPress and TypePad is a little tricky to do the first time around but both provide good step by step instructions.  WordPress will charge you $12 per year to map your domain name and with TypePad you will need to be on their monthly plan (minimum $8.95 per month).  Money well spent.

Interface

Both sites offer simple interfaces but both take some time to get used to.  Just knowing which section to make the change you want to make takes time to get used to.  But everything is logical. Just be patient.  At a push I would say that the TypePad interface is a little easier to use, mainly because there are less options.

Design options

Creating a professional, good-looking website takes time and if you outsource it to a design agency, can cost you a lot of money.  Fortunately, both WordPress and TypePad offer a range of design templates that make it very easy to create a professional looking website.  You need to think about the layout first - do you want two columns or three, headers, footers etc?  Then choose colors that reflect your brand.  Both WordPress and TypePad will allow you to upload your own photo or logo to use as a header.  If you don't already have a logo, you can create free, simple text style ones using Cooltext. Overall, WordPress has more design templates but TypePad has plenty of options too.

Publishing

Creating posts and pages (for companies wanting more of a website feel than a blog feel, you will want to create pages) is super-easy on both platforms.  Both are WYSIWYG interfaces (what you see is what you get) that enable you to change fonts, text color, size, insert pictures or videos etc.  If you know a bit of html then you can customize even more.  And both will let you post from your mobile phone. Simple all round.

Stats

So you've created your website and you've added a load of content to it. Is anyone reading it?  Both WordPress and TypePad will give you very basic stats packages that really just show you the number of visits per day.  TypePad however, offers very easy integration with Google Analytics and for that reason alone, I favor TypePad over WordPress.

Marketing

One of the biggest advantages of creating a website using WordPress or TyePad versus designing, building and hosting your own site, is search engine visibility.  You can submit a post and it will be indexed in Google in a matter of days (some TypePad posts of mine have been indexed in 24 hours), meaning that more people are likely to find your content.  TypePad has a number of options during set up that ensure your website will get maximum visibility (such as the option to create a site map) and enables you to add specific keywords to each post.  Downside is that you cannot alter the metatags of individual posts or pages.  WordPress seems to have less SEO (search engine optimization) options, but I haven't spent enough time evaluating all the options.  Any regular users of WordPress please comment on this!

Pricing

Finally, we come to pricing.  I mentioned that both sites give you a free option (and TypePad will give you a free 30 day trial of its monthly, professional package).  But as you develop your online presence, you will find that forking out a little cash will make things so much better.

WordPress charges 'add-on's that soon mount up. For example:

Domain mapping (essential for any business) - $12 per annum
More space - $19,97 pa for 5GB (you get 3 GB free)
No ads (important for that professional look) - $29,97 pa
Custom CSS (if you're a budding designer and don't like the standard templates) - $14,97 pa
Video uploads (if you want to upload regular video clips) - $59,97 pa

TypePad on the other hand, makes you pay monthly, with the first monthly package costing $8.95 per month.  This will enable you to map your own domain and gives you ample space for your website.  There is a 150 MB upload limit though (not a problem unless you are uploading a lot of video or audio files) and this option does not give you custom CSS.

So overall on pricing, WordPress probably wins through, since most people really only need to pay for the domain mapping and the ads removal.

Because I've used TypePad for so long, I am probably biased towards it, but having spent time with WordPress, I can see why it is so popular.  If I were to start a new blog tomorrow, I would go with WordPress.  But if I wanted more of a website than a blog, I would go with TypePad - it just seems that much easier to create the layout and pages that fit with a more traditional looking website.

 

Insights for Search - Digital Marketing Terms

Google's Insights for Search tool (beta) provides a simple way of looking at trending search terms.  Today I looked at digital marketing related search terms.  This data is worldwide searches since 2004.

Internet Marketing

 

Interesting decline from what was a hot keyword search from the early 2000's. 'Web marketing' shows exactly the same trend.

Online Marketing

 

Fairly flat for 'online marketing' - no distinctive change over time.

Digital Marketing

'Digital Marketing' shows a marked increase, possibly because 'digital' represents more than just online, so as mobile has grown, so has this term.

Affiliate Marketing

Finally I looked at 'affiliate marketing' and as you can see, it shows significant growth.  Interesting, since affiliate marketing has been around since the early internet days.  It shows just how important affiliate marketing is as part of an overall digital marketing mix and how valid affiliate marketing still is in today's digital world.

As a side note, anything with 'digital media' in it has seen a significant drop off over time.

Facebook Fan Growth for RealPlayer

This is an article I wrote for the RealNetworks intranet this week - highlighting the growth to 100,000 plus Facebook fans:

We hit a new milestone this week with our RealPlayer social media efforts – over 100,000 Facebook fans!

The graph below shows the growth in fans/likes since we launched the RealPlayer Facebook page in November 2009.  The spike that you see in March 2010 coincides with us encouraging users to become a fan on Facebook after they had installed the RealPlayer.

 
 

Facebook has been an important tool in our customer communication strategy over the past 12 months. Earlier this year, we moved some our customer support team to active Facebook duty  and encouraged our RealPlayer users to post questions, issues or general rants about the product on the RealPlayer page. 

With 24/7 monitoring, we are able to respond quickly to posts and point users to the appropriate help sections on our website.  It has done wonders for our transparency as a business, since everyone can see how well we are dealing with customer comments, both good and bad.

We also use the Facebook page to poll fans about new feature ideas and gauge their feedback on existing features.  Our Facebook fans even got a taste of the new RealPlayer via a special download link two days before we released the product to the public.

You can see from the graph below that the fan base is more heavily male, in line with our overall RealPlayer user base and is much younger than our traditional RealPlayer user.  This is important as we continue to extend our user base to younger audiences that have never previously needed or wanted to download RealPlayer.

 

Growing our Facebook users will continue to be a focus as we develop deeper relationships with our customers and engage them across many different platforms.  If you like RealPlayer but haven’t yet ‘liked’ our RealPlayer Facebook page, then please visit the page and join the 100,000+ strong community already there.

Facebook is just part of a larger social media presence that includes our RealNetworks blog, our YouTube channel and Twitter presence.

Daily Deals - know what you're getting into

A new marketing category is born - daily deals.  Sites like Groupon, Living Social, Tippr and others have sprung up across the world, offering consumers amazing discounted deals.  In Seattle alone there are more than 6 companies competing for their share of the coupon stampede (Foodie Offers does a good job of aggregating the restaurant only deals which makes my life easier).

So, it's good for consumers because they get access to a wide range of discounted offers. But is it good for the businesses involved?

I went to Flying Fish in Seattle the other night to take advantage of a restaurant deal there.  The place was packed out, we waited half an hour longer than our allotted booking time to get a table and the service was average.  They just couldn't cope with the influx of new business.  What is that going to do to their reputation and will all those people that jumped on the discounted meal really come back.

If your business is approached by a daily deals salesperson, make sure you know your margins so your 'free marketing' doesn't hurt your business or your reputation.

Related links: Groupon and why it matters to your business

Google Tools Critical for Profitability

Paid search tools have come a long way since the mid 90's, when all you could do was create a simple text ad on your favorite search engine and get basic click through and cost per click data.

Nowadays, Google's AdWords center offers a whole host of analytics tools that any business, serious about maximising online marketing spend, should be using.  If you don't already have an AdWords account then sign up here and start making use of the tools, even if you don't start spending money straightaway.

I have summarized the most important tools below, which can be found under the 'opportunities' tab within Google AdWords:

1. Keyword Tool

A very easy way to find out how many times a keyword or phrase is searched for on a monthly basis.  It's useful because you can gauge the current interest level in keywords related to your existing or proposed business.  It also shows how much 'competition' there is for that search term (in other words how expensive a buy it might be relative to the number of other advertisers bidding on it).  You can target by country and also see what related keywords and phrases are popular.

Entering 'razor blades' for example, returns 110,000 monthly searches in the USA and moderate competition (surprising).

2. Traffic Estimator

Closely related to the keyword tool is Google's traffic estimator.  This will tell you how many clicks you are likely to get every day for a specific keyword or phrase, based on how much you are willing to spend on a click through (your cost per click or CPC rate) and your maximum daily budget.

Using the 'razor blades' example again, with a maximum CPC of $1 and a maximum daily budget of $100, the estimator told me that I would get 25 daily clicks at an average CPC of $0.71.  It estimated my ad position to be 2, but writing good quality copy could improve that and therefore drive up the click through rate.

3. Placement Tool

A relatively new addition to the tool suite, this will offer you a range of websites and feeds that you can specifically target your advert on.  The razor blade example doesn't work too well here - it threw up a load of random and frankly dodgy looking websites, but for ideas on targeting your product/service to specific sites in Google's ad network, this is a fun and useful tool to use.

4. Google Insights for Search

Still in beta, Google insights for Search offers a way of assessing the relative interest in a keyword/product/service over time and by country or regions.  It provides a rudimentary trend line showing interest over time and related searches.  Worth keeping an eye on as there will undoubtedly be improvements coming soon.

5. Conversion Analysis

Whilst the first four tools discussed above help at the top of the funnel - deciding on keyword campaigns, volumes, trends, competition etc, this conversion tool is critical to measure the return on your keyword buy investment.

It enables you to track at both campaign and keyword level, the profitability of your paid search marketing.  By adding a piece of code to your 'action' page, whether that action be a product sale or an information enquiry, you can see which keywords are generating business for you.  Adding metrics such as average sale value will then help you determine campaign profitability.

It's fairly simple to set up but will require tweaking and a few validation cycles before you can rely on it solely to manage your online profitability.

Conclusions

Google has built a multi-billion dollar business on the back of keyword advertising, so it's great that it provides some really useful tools for businesses to manage their campaigns effectively.  What scares me most is that so many businesses are either not using the tools at all or not using them properly.  Experience has shown me that many digital marketing departments manage their paid search spend to an overall CPA (cost per acquisition), which is not necessarily the most profitable way of doing it.

Take our razor blades example again.  Let's say you sell razor blades online and you know that your average sale is $30 and you make $20 profit on each sale.  You tell your marketing person (or agency) that you are prepared to spend $10 of that profit to get a new sale and that you need 1,000 new weekly sales. Typically what happens is that a number of keyword campaigns are set up, some of which drive new sales at $15 and some of which drive new sales at $5. Your marketing expert manages the campaign to hit your target sign ups and your target CPA. In isolation and with good analytics, you have to question the spend that is unprofitable.  Doesn't cutting it out altogether and being more realistic about your sales targets make more sense from a profitability standpoint?  Sure, you can argue that those customer acquired at unprofitable levels have a brand exposure value etc, but it comes at a price.

I'll get contentious here - what if your marketing agency is getting a cut of your overall spend?  They can manage to your overall CPA budget but they are interested in volume spend, not profitable spend. Take a step back and think about your agency relationship - you might want to rethink it.

No matter how large your paid search budget, managing it for profit makes business sense and the tools are there to make it happen, so if you are not already using them, get cracking!

Digital Sales Will Take Time to Replace Physical

A recent study by research firm EMarketer shows that it will be another tough few years for the movie business, as sales of DVDs continue to decline and digital sales fall short of making up the gap.

 
Despite expected healthy growth in digital, it is a bleak picture for many of the big entertainment companies, who some say are still not doing enough to embrace this real change in consumer behaviour.

With services in the US like Hulu offering a simple way to watch movies and TV online, often for a fraction of the price of DVDs (or free), it is not too surprising that consumers are opting for the simplest, cheapest way to get what they want.  Netflix launched its streaming iphone app last week, which gives any registered user paying about $9 a month, access to hundreds of movies instantly, through their iphone or ipad.  It works beautifully, so long as you are on a decent wifi connection.

The music industry has the same set of issues, although arguably piracy is a bigger problem.

As technology improvements continue to make life simpler, we will all gravitate to accessing content in the simplest, cheapest and least riskiest way possible.  Now is the time for traditional entertainment companies to start building some brand equity in the digital world and position themselves for future growth by building relationships directly with the consumer, rather than dragging their heels and pretending that this digital evolution is smaller than it really is.

Facebook is a Great Customer Support Tool

 

 

Many businesses are now using Facebook as a valuable way to solve their customers' product questions and problems.

RealNetworks's flagship application, RealPlayer, is a great example of how the company interacts with its users from all over the world, solving problems and saving money into the bargain.

Every time someone picks up the phone and speaks to an advisor, it costs the business money.  By directing users of its free RealPlayer application to the Facebook page, Real has been able to save tens of thousands of dollars and provide feedback and support in an environment that the user is comfortable with.

Customer support on Facebook also provides a level of transparency that has helped bolster the brand value.  A problem shared is a problem solved, so the saying goes. Well by posting a problem, which others may have, and seeing the company respond quickly and (usually) to the satisfaction of the user, does wonders for reputation.

Of course it still costs money to provide 24/7 support via Facebook, but online responses are more cost effective, more transparent and often faster, so it ends up being a win win for both the business and the customer.

How Dell is Embracing Social Media

This is an interesting interview with the guy who is responsible for corporate blogging at computer giant Dell.

I have reposted the entire article courtesy of Digital Media Buzz:

DMB’s Dave Fidlin recently spoke with Menchaca, a 17-year Dell veteran, about social media, and how the method will continue to shape the company’s marketing and outreach efforts in the future.

Can you explain your role as chief blogger for Dell?

My role is to keep things moving with our external network of blogs. Direct2Dell now exists in five languages. Direct2Dell is our main corporate blog. Beyond it, we have 7 additional blogs. Our latest is Direct2Dell India, which focuses content on one of our fastest-growing countries in Dell’s business.

How is Dell marketing beyond established, traditional methods? Is the company getting the word out about its products through such avenues as Facebook and Twitter?

Yes, very much so. We have two main pages in Facebook — Facebook for Home, which focuses on product and service information for consumers and Facebook for Business, which focuses on reaching business customers there. We’ve been very active on Twitter as a company since 2007. We use Twitter in 4 main ways: 1) to keep our customers informed 2) to engage our customers from different areas of our business 3) to sell to our customers who opt in to sites like @DellOutlet and 4) to support our customers. We now offer 24/7 support to customers on Twitter via @DellCares. See Dell.com/twitter for more details

Aside from the two big companies — Facebook and Twitter — how else is Dell using social media?

Our core strategy in social media is to go where our customers are. That means we maintain a Dell presence in many other social sites like LinkedIn, YouTube, Flickr, SlideShare, Scribd and outside the US in Sina’s microblogging service. Beyond our own blogs, our forum site and all of our presence on outside social networks, we’re also focused on responding to comments on other places on the Web, like third-party user forums or blog sites.

Can you quantify, percentage-wise, how much of Dell’s marketing and outreach efforts go toward social media (versus traditional marketing) in 2010?

Our social media marketing budget is very small compared to our traditional marcom spend. Outside of some ad credits to drive awareness to the Dell Facebook for Home pages and drawing attention to some of our social media efforts via Dell.com, we spend very little to promote our social media activities.

Do you have an idea of what the ROI (rate of return) is for Dell’s social media efforts?

Yes, we do, and that’s an area where we are still working on. In the early days, we measured social media’s impact on customers’ perceptions and found a pretty strong correlation—at the low point in 2006, about 48 percent of what was said about Dell was negative. We were able to get that into the low 20+ percent range. Today, we’re able to track all the basic traffic numbers you would expect, but beyond traffic, we’re looking at things like reach, engagement, brand reputation and more. We’re also starting to use more of the same tools on the social media side that we’ve been using to measure Dell.com like Omniture. There’s still more work to be done, but we’re making progress.

Where, in your opinion, is social media heading into the future, and how is Dell going to stay on the pulse of this still-growing method of communication?

I really think over the next several years, social media will become an integral part of how companies in many industries will do business. To me it’s a natural progression to add from things like telephones, e-mail, the Internet, chat and beyond. Just like many other aspects of business, it all comes down to execution. In my view, companies who learn to use social media to really connect with their customers will have a huge fundamental advantage over companies who don’t.

Do you envision a day when social media might completely replace traditional marketing methods, or is that an extreme statement?

No way do I think that social media will ever replace traditional marketing methods. I do think that social media can and will continue to augment traditional marketing methods. I think social media will make companies smarter in how they market to and engage with customers, and I think that’s a good thing. Like many others in social media today, I’m glad to see the era of one-way push marketing giving way to something different – a place where customer feedback shapes the direction of the company.