Manhattan Marketing Maven

3 UXD Factors Changing Strategic Planning

User experience design (UXD) is breaking out of its native digital niche becoming a critical element in marketing strategy. Understanding the full range of consumer experiences with a brand is a critical factor in building awareness, engagement and advocacy and in framing or evolving a value proposition that integrates and romances features and benefits in believable and sustaining ways. 

UXD is changing how brands approach strategic planning and how they develop customer insights. Once thought of exclusively as a digital concept, UXD promises to stitch together what consumers say with what consumers actually or habitually do to create insights that will suggest how messages are framed and where messages are transmitted and received. 

In apply UXD principles to integrated marketing programs, consider these 3 key factors. 

End-to-End Planning. It’s not just about the product or the transaction. People want to buy into brands not just buy stuff. You need a longitudinal perspective on the process. Anticipate and plan for information needs, feelings and functionalities at every step from the first glimmer of an idea in your prospect’s mind through the completion of a successful interaction and onto the next one. Every customer takes a journey to identify and interact with your brand. Map it. Think about it and carefully decide when, where and how you will have opportunities to shape the sequence, the messages, the offers, the incentives, the rewards, the confirmations and the back sell communications. 

Frictionless Interactions. The holy grail of UXD is to make every interaction simple, easy, intuitive and rewarding. It’s a very tall order, which requires alignment of all your resources to figure out where the likely hiccups might occur. Understand who your prospect is, what they are after and how they go about getting it. Then design your engagement mechanisms. 

Ethnographic research, rapid prototyping, task-oriented testing, in situ observation, eye-mapping and careful interviewing are the preferred UXD techniques which when married to focus groups, qualitative and quantitative research and customer data can deepen or supercharge a brand’s customer insights. The more you get into her head; the better. The more you understand her context; the better. The more you understand her workflow and her coping devices; the better. The more you anticipate where and how she’ll be hesitant, confused or doubtful; the better. 

Create Visual Cues. Too many brand experiences are like driving in New Jersey; under-marked and confusing. Develop plenty of visual cues to orient and direct prospects and customers. You can never reinforce where they are and where they are heading too much. Think of the customer journey like driving the interstate highway system. Anticipate where prospects will get antsy, where they need gentle reinforcement, where they need a big honking sign and when they need confirmation that they’ve gone in the right direction or made the right choice. 

The integration of UXD with traditional strategic planning will create a more accurate and powerful tool for brands to build deeper customer understanding, intimacy and loyalty.

 

The Pinterest Success Formula

Pinterest, the virtual pin board, tickler file and scrapbook, has come out of the woodwork two years after launching and captured the attention and the traffic of 10 million unique users and generated approximately 1 million pins almost overnight. The average user is a woman who spends 15 minutes per session on the site. 

According to RJ Metrics, Pinterest engages users two to three times more efficiently than Twitter did at a similar point in its history. Eight weeks after signing up, 40-60 percent of users are still pinning. This is counter to the usual cycle of sign-up, test and abandon that plagues so many sites and niche social media properties. 

In an arena of social media phenomena, it’s the latest skyrocket that sent start-up CEOs and VCs into a state of jealous lust. 

How has Pinterest done it and what is the formula? 

Newness. We’ve been doing Facebook and Twitter and the others for a while.  As we become complacent about social networking or burnt out on cat videos and baby pictures, it’s a shiny new object. 

Familiarity. Pinterest uses technology to do what most women already do – clip, pin and save stuff. They tapped existing scrapbooking behavior and it’s muscle memory with a new twist by adding the ability to share and see other women’s pins. 

 Petula Dvorak called Pinterest “digital crack for women” arguing that “the site’s churning cycle of interest, hope, inspiration, jealousy, desperation, despair and depression keeps them coming back. Add easy functionality. You sign-up and hit the “Pin it” button. It requires no investment of time or learning and accelerates behavior many women were doing anyway. 

Etsy is the most pinned site followed by Google, Tumblr, Flickr and shelter sites like Martha Stewart, Better Homes & Garden, Houzz, Apartment Therapy, Real Simple and others. Pinterest takes flipping through magazines and clipping them out of the bedroom, the nail salon or the waiting room and puts its online and on public display. Over 80 percent of pins are actually re-pins. Women see stuff other women like and virtually endorse it by passing it along or re-pinning it. 

Strong Visuals. Pinterest is about pictures. It is a visual cornucopia reflecting personal tastes, choices and aspirations. Women vie to pin the most interesting and arresting images because what you pin says something clearly and definitively about your taste, aesthetic, class and lifestyle. It’s a fantasy look book and an on-going social competition that everyone can rally to. 

Press. Pinterest has become a media darling. And each story or link brings new traffic and new users to the site. The volume of coverage has created a spike in registration, even though newbies may be less committed or engaged than users who found Pinterest before it was cool. Add the usual woman-to-woman WOM to this press gusher and you have serious inbound momentum. 

 

5 Insights from Inventors

Inventors think about things that don’t yet exist; that aren’t there. They operate on a different frequency. 

They iterate, incubate, massage, manipulate and relentlessly test ideas. They seek to fix things and fill voids. Some ideas are radical, some incremental, some innovative, some ingenious, some inventive, some derivative, and some inexplicable. Some become prototypes though far fewer become viable products. 

Inventors can’t rest and can’t except the status quo. They have to fix it, find it, create it, built it, fabricate it, re-route it, re-wire it and make something new. 

Here’s 5 marketing lessons these guys taught me. 

Experience is Everything. We are sentient creatures. How we feel determines what we want and what we do. Feelings drive us. Marketers have to communicate or stimulate feelings to move the needle. 

Everything is Filtered.  There are no fresh or new experiences. Language, culture, experience, media and context filter everything. Every communications choice – words, color, image, music, tone, face etc – hits pre-set buttons which condition the response. 

Before we start, some part of the target audience has already made up their mind.  Each individual brings a huge bag of pre-judgments to every experience and every message. Knowing nuances and idioms, improves our chance for breaking through. 

People React Predictably. There’s no better barometer of human nature than watching random consumers react to something new. You can almost see the mental gears grinding as people sort, filter, file and compare the new thing against their stored databank of information and experiences. 

Some are surprised. Some instinctively point out the flaws or speculate about the downside while others instantly riff on the new thing suggesting features, changes, colors, applications and functions to make it better. 

By understanding and planning for the spectrum of predictable reactions, marketers can anticipate how we experience the new and to shape both the initial presentations and the follow-up messages. 

We Live in a Tower of Babel. It is very difficult to frame a single idea and communicate it to a wide range of people who come from different places, think differently, use words differently and hear differently. The inherent difficulty of framing and transmitting commercial messages hits you in the face. There are few common understandings about what is funny, cool, sad or ironic. 

It’s All About Differentiation. What’s new, what’s different, what’s better and why should I care are inventors’ and marketers’ challenges. If it isn’t different or different enough it dies. Marketers must exert as much effort and creativity into positioning and framing the difference as inventors must in creating something different.  

 

Does Facebook Work?

With 800 million active members, as many as 25% accessing the network using a mobile device, and hundreds of millions spent by brands to attract and engage fans, clients are starting the New Year by asking, “Does Facebook work?” 

The short answer is … it depends on what you want Facebook to do.

With massive reach, strong frequency and cultural integration, marketers expect Facebook to be a persuasive tool to reach and engage customers and prospects. Yet on a basic level, the jury is still out on these fundamental questions.

Some clients want to build brand awareness and amass large numbers of fans hoping to better engage customers and prospects in conversation leading to brand preference, loyalty and maybe goose a few more sales. Others want to reduce the distance between a brand and its clientele quickly and build intimacy necessary to accelerate the number, frequency and value of sales.  Measuring these desired results is not clear or easy.

For the most part, brands don’t really know who their fans are. There is no way to crosstab Facebook fans or likes with customer databases or purchase histories. So we don’t know if we are reaching new customers or saturating existing customers by using Facebook as a secondary or tertiary channel.

From a direct marketing standpoint, F-commerce is in its infancy, though Facebook has become an effective vehicle to tout deals or specials and is becoming a significant force in coupon distribution. But nobody is harvesting significant sales on Facebook … yet.

In the absence of customer tracking or direct sales, brands developed content, games, promotions and on-going dialogues to engage customers. Marketers convinced themselves, with a little help from Facebook, that some combination of interactions, likes, clicks, plays, comments, time spent on apps and original posts constitutes engagement which mysteriously translates into brand awareness, preference and advocacy. But there is no consensus on these measures and nobody has documented this phenomenon in a credible way.

There are lots of correlations but little proven causation. Consider the stats that are bandied about brazenly.

• 86% of American women have a social network profile
• 95% of them are on Facebook
• 50% of female social networkers bought products based on information they found on social networking sites.  
• The average user spends 7 hours a month on Facebook,
• Roughly half (49%) of Facebook brand followers want sales and offers  

In spite of these data points, we don’t know who our fans are or their relative value to our brands or our business. We aren’t selling them much that we can track or directly attribute to Facebook. And we think consumers like us and engage with us.

But there’s evidence that brands and customers expectations are out of sync with each other. And Facebook itself has filtered access to the followers we’ve amassed and their friends, which limits our reach and frequency.  To confound things further, we don’t really have a way to translate discrete actions on Facebook by individuals or in aggregate into meaningful behaviors affecting brand or revenue growth.

If we are honest with each other the answer to the question of Facebook’s marketing efficacy is … we don’t really know.

Maybe we are in the infancy of Facebook marketing experimentation or maybe, as Catherine Boera of Active International argues users see Facebook as a social rather than as a marketing medium.

 

 

 

 

Optimizing the TV-Twitter Connection

 

Twitter has become a companion medium to TV. People watch their favorite shows, with a computer or mobile device at hand, tweeting reactions to the characters, the plot, the action sequences and the story line. They also tweet about brands while they watch. 

The volume of brand tweets can now be correlated with specific TV shows to create a new double-barreled channel for brands to engage their fans and more selectively target likely customers or brand advocates. Bluefin Labs, the social analytics firm associated with MIT Media Labs, has been keeping track of tweets as they relate to TV viewing. 

They found links between brands and the shows their fans watch most, which they call Social TV Analytics. For example Wal-Mart fans are most likely to tweet about America’s Supernanny on Lifetime or the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders on CMT or Las Vegas Jailhouse on TRUTV. In contrast, Target buyers tweet about or during CMT’s Top Secret Recipe or HGTV’s My Yard Goes Disney. 

It has always been assumed that there is lifestyle linkage between TV shows and the people who opt-in to watch them. Apparently this affinity dynamic is true for Twitter as well. 

The data can be correlated by brand and by category according to Bluefin.  For example,  3 of Coke’s Top 10 tweeted shows are on ESPN. But there are no sports shows among the Top 10 tweeted shows for the Pepsi faithful. Some of the results are predictable. Beer drinkers tweet during sports shows and wine drinkers tweet during fashion and relationship programming. TV programming and commercials have always prompted talk. Now everyone is a TV and a social critic with instant digital access to an audience on Twitter and beyond. 

It’s a chicken-and-egg question; do people with lifestyle preferences tweet about brands because they advertise on these shows and networks? Or is there an organic subject matter trigger that drives brand tweets within specific content? 

The relationship between TV and Twitter provokes 4 new thoughts. 

1. Should brands better align with highly tweeted shows and invest in added commercials and product placement to optimize fan engagement? 

2. Should brands anticipate heavy brand tweeting during particular shows and staff social communities to respond in-context and in real-time to fan comments and posts? 

3. Should networks merchandise tweets as a way to expand fan bases and better harvest brand advertising budgets? 

4. Should consumers expect increasingly integrated commercial messages in programming that intertwines their TV watching and tweeting habits?

Twitter is adding a new dimension to TV. It will be very interesting to see how it plays out and which brands leverage this dynamic inter-media relationship. 

 

Why iAds Bombed

The initial failure of iAds is a tale of Apple’s attitude and arrogance. The introduction of this new ad medium was heavy-handed. 

Three fashionably dressed hotties showed up at our offices, whipped open their MacBooks and laid out the take-it or leave-it value proposition  --- pay us a minimum of a million bucks, create what we tell you to create within a very constrained technology environment and then shut up and be grateful. 

Does it surprise anyone that brands and their agencies didn’t rally to this? 

Apple’s reps asserted that iPad users were smarter, richer, more likely to share and buy than the average Joe. That brands could micro-target using rich data from the iTunes app store. They suggested that those who didn’t get in early on this amazing deal like Target, Unilever and Geico did, or you’d be left in the dust. 

Of course, there was no data to support or document these claims other than the hockey stick sales curve for iPads. There was also a clear suggestion that since Apple invented the platform and since Apple ran the famous “1984” ad, they knew much better than brands or agencies who to talk to, what to say and how to express it on the new tablet landscape. 

A year later, many brands have tried it. Revenues are way off projections. And brands are under-impressed with both the creative canvass, the targeting options and customer response. Marketers have also figured out that iAd creative is one-system only requiring additional, costly creative and technical resources where the cost/return ratio is out of whack. 

Couple that with emerging customer usage patterns that suggest iPads are primarily entertainment vehicles supporting TV and movie watching, games and social media. These are  behaviors and attitudinal inflection points only open to a finite number of brands and campaigns and virtually force advertisers to intrude on customers and prospects.. The promised creative bonanza has not materialized and while rep visits to agencies has increased, interest in iAds hasn’t. 

Apple isn’t the first Internet giant to break into the market with a bull-in-a-china-shop profile. But it could be the first to eat some humble pie, re-tool, re-think and re-stage their approach to the advertising and marketing community.

 

 

 

Why FourSquare is Toast!

Foursquare, the leading independent location-based social network, cannot survive because it lacks scale, context, committed constituents and a compelling customer experience.  The purchase of Gowalla by Facebook, signals the beginning of the end for one-trick ponies like Foursquare. 

Foursquare is a case study in rapid growth but unrealized potential. In spite of growing from 2 to 15 million total users since July 2010, recent research from Forrester indicates that only 30 percent of Internet users are aware of the category called location-based services.  A mere 6 percent actually have used them. And just two percent are active weekly users. 

Three-quarters of Foursquare members are 23-45 year old early adopters, 73 percent men and 37 percent women, who are twice as likely to share product information, promotion codes, coupons, discounts, offers and their results from online games. And while sharing might be caring, the numbers are very low and the ability to track and measure this marketing potential are very fuzzy.

As a proud member of the active 2 percent, who connects his Foursquare account with Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, I can tell you that the customer experience is bewildering. You check in. Each time you check in, you get a different number of points benchmarked against different set of friends. Points are awarded with each check-in but they never seem to accumulate. Nobody knows what the points mean or what to do with them. Similarly I’ve earned a bunch of badges, whose names are forgettable and purpose indiscernible. 

Reaction to my frequent check-ins, from my social networks, range from validation or criticism of my restaurant selections, to occasional tips about out of town destinations to mild irritation about why my friends might care where I am and what I’m doing. 

From a marketing standpoint Foursquare could be empowering local merchants, pushing out timely geo-based offers, rewarding frequent store visits, enhancing the in-store experience and connecting or cueing friends in nearby vicinities. But they haven’t really got traction on these prospects from either merchants or customers.There has been some big brand experimentation but no significant campaigns on a regional or national scale.

Location-based marketing will not go away. Pure play LBS providers like Foursquare will disappear as the geo-social functionality gets wrapped into larger contexts and subsumed in e-commerce, m-commerce and f-commerce functionalities.

 

Why Living Social Will Crash & Burn

National advertisers are extremely skeptical about daily deals. They abhor the 50/50 split, they doubt the targeting capabilities and they are convinced that deal shoppers either don’t return or won’t ever again pay full price. 

But the real reason Living Social and the army of also-rans will fail is that they don’t know how to engage agencies and sophisticated marketers who can provide them the credibility and scale they crave. 

After months of convincing my client that these guys provide value and can engage customers who don’t consider their brand, we craft a test plan in a key Southwestern market. The logistics and operations of getting a Living Social deal designed and approved are kluge-y. The initial design comp omitted their logo. The reps seem inexperienced and mostly clueless.

Following a yeoman effort at sell-in, we prep the clients, hold endless conference calls, salve internal political and personality disputes and get everybody prepped to handle inquiries, social media reactions, PR, purchases, redemptions and potential competitive responses. All eyes within the huge national client organization are on this pilot deal slated to run on Monday. 

Thursday night before we push the button, we are told that it has to be pushed back to satisfy some arbitrary new policy cooked up by Living Social’s management. Everyone on our end goes bat shit crazy. None of the daily deal guys understands why this is a big deal. Now nobody cares how it turns out. 

Moral of the story --  If you want to play with the big brands you have to understand our world and service us in context. You need us more than we need you.

 

Google Takes on Facebook

The introduction of Google Plus, amidst of frenzy of product improvements and introductions by Google, represents the first salvo in a war between Facebook and Google for the soul and the direction of the Internet. It may also reveal the thinking and ambitions of Larry Page, who now has a firm grip on Google’s tiller. 

Google, the ubiquitous utility with a billion users, might be the only contender with the technical firepower, cash, scale and energy to take on Zuckerberg & Company, who clearly aim to swallow the Internet as evidenced by the use of Facebook Connect as single sign-on device, the widespread use of the Like button as a sharing and voting tool and regulated but wide access to the Facebook API as the connective tissue underlying an array of functionality. 

As Ben Elowitz noted in his All Things Digital blog piece, Google focused on processes and utilities (search, maps, e-mail, satellite images) to dominate the Web since the 90s. But Facebook, focusing on people and the connections between them, has already matched and will regularly exceed Google’s traffic. Facebook is becoming a “new home base” for people to use the Web. As the gateway to content and functionality, Facebook will be in a position to set the agenda and squash nascent competitors. 

Google + is a button (similar to Like) and a social network (reflective of Facebook). In addition to launching these directly competitive offerings, Google has also redesigned its search home page, introduced free analytics tools for social and mobile media, launched Mobile Sites landing pages, built a Google Plus Android app, created Google Swiffy which converts Flash files to HTML5 and promises even more inventions and upgrades. 

The early reviews for the Google + social network project are mostly favorable. It’s clear that Google has learned from its past mistakes and has adopted tools and lessons learned from others in the space. The friending and sorting tool looks and feels like Plaxo’s friend finder. The home page, minus a wall, resembles a streamlined Facebook page.  

The new functionality – Circles for finding and sorting friends is not new but emphasizes the need to bucket friends and makes it easy.  Hangout, a Skype-like, group video chat function is a nice to have feature that will appeal to certain audience segments. Sparks and Huddle allow an individual to cue or organize online or offline group activity easily. 

Other not-so-new but useful refined features include emphasis on mobile and social tools like an easy photo upload tool, instant connections to Gmail, a simple sharing mechanism, the ability to add location, using the GPS function, to any post. While this will appeal to developers eager to participate in Android’s spectacular growth, these are cool and useful but hardly killer apps. 

Clearly Google watched, listened and responded to evolving needs and nuances in the use of social media. The Google Plus features make sense and add incremental value to the social networking experience. They also refine, build and improve functions that will enable and accelerate advertising sales opportunities. What’s not clear is why somebody would either switch from Facebook to Google+ or add it as a second social network. 

Google+ will get a lot of attention. Launched using Google’s standard BETA-invitation only tactic, it is spawning curiosity and demand. But the really play is long term as King Kong meets Godzilla.

 

7 Ways to Keep E-mail Competitive

Email, the digital communications workhorse, will be eclipsed by social and mobile media, unless e-mailers get more sophisticated, segmented and interactive. 

E-mail is the ubiquitous digital marketing tool. Everybody uses it; many every day or every week. Pathways to opt-in are well known and for the most part well-disciplined. CAN-SPAM is generally adhered to. And while consumers routinely sign up in anticipation of early information and deals, marketers continue to carpet bomb their e-mail lists with one-size-fits-all offers. This widely and frequently used practice will ultimately kill e-mail as a relevant, interactive marketing tool. 

In a world of instant, multichannel 2-way communication, personalization and relevance are the gating factors. If all you can do is bomb me with a generic offer, you’re not really in the game. The ugly truth is that you have to sort the list and create separate and relevant messages for each sub-set. Its much more work for a much better return on investment. 

If your message doesn’t know who I am and what I like and doesn’t arrive at the right time with the right offer; you and your brand are toast. The average e-mail message gets less than 5 seconds of consideration. A passing scan of the FROM line and the SUBJ line determines if you get opened or deleted. 

There are a few well-tested best practices. Interesting, punchy offers in the subject line prompt more opens. A recognized and preferred brand in the FROM line drives opens and clicks. Bigger typefaces and big bold buttons identify links that drive clicks and conversions. E-mail templates should put the key messages on top and limit the copy to 400 words; the point at which readers bail out. But using these creative best practices isn’t enough. 

Creating testable segmentation isn’t as difficult as e-mail providers and software vendors make it sound. Here are seven basic ways to make your e-mail smarter and more relevant. 

Develop Simple Segments. Segmentation is job #1 on the path to competitive preservation. Segmented email marketing programs generate between 2X and 5X the performance of non-segmented programs. Anyone can sort their list by baseline variables. Sort by about gender, age, geography, date of sign-ups, product use, sizes, coupon redemption or channel preference and then A/B test your way to optimize results. Build hypothesis based on customer behavior. Send different messages or offers to those who opened, those who clicked and those who bought or signed up. 

Use Triggered Communications. Send e-mail to establish a dialog. Focus on the ask-and-answer paradigm, where answers to polls or surveys prompt sequential messages. Customers loved to be asked and are delighted when a brand responds to their input. If somebody responds, wait 24 hours and respond. If a customer expresses a preference for content, frequency or channel; respond in kind. Focus on purchase cycles. 

Not all triggered messages have to be in real time. Do your customers shop every Saturday? If so, parse your messages ahead of their shopping visits. If customers buy your product seasonally, its not hard to figure out an effective timing strategy. This is easier with an automated e-mail system driven by embedded business rules. But it’s not that hard to do even if you manage your e-mail list in Excel or Access. 

Work Across Channels. Follow an on-going brand or industry conversation in social media and use this content in your e-mail marketing program. If a customer posts on your Facebook wall or positively tweets about your brand, these can be triggers for thank you or follow-up messaging. If you ask customers to rate their store visits or review products purchased (based on loyalty card data) respond with a personal email and a follow-up offer. 

Your customer is interacting with you across channels. They aren’t thinking about it. Brands should anticipate this behavior and use e-mail as a private, direct one-to-one follow up tool.  

Build in Choices. An e-mail with a link to your branded website is advertising not relationship building. Add a question, a poll or a way to solicit interaction in each e-mail in order to create dialogue. Consumers are eager critics and reviewers. They appreciate an avenue to express their opinions. 

Embedding these requests in an e-mail that drives them to either a dedicated landing page or a social network transforms e-mail from a one-way ad into a branded interactive experience. A real relationship is about give-and-take over time not repeated blasts of short form ads. 

Experiment with Personalization. Social media makes the world immediate, intimate and transparent. Experiment with using a real person’s name in the FROM line and/or signing e-mail messages from local or regional store managers. In a branded context, e-mail offers the possibility of creating personal relationships between customers and the people who routinely meet and serve them. Some brands can insert customers’ first names and tap purchase histories and preferences to populate e-mail templates. Those who can’t can personalize by closing the gap between the faceless corporate brand and customers by leveraging and introducing its people. 

Establish a Contact Strategy. You have to know how much is enough and how much is too much. Savvy e-mail marketers establish limits on the number of contacts per record in a given time frame. Some limit e-mail contacts to once a week or twice a month. Each brand and category has a different business and messaging cadence. Set limits based on yours and stick to them. 

Manage Technology. A large and growing number of consumers read e-mail on mobile devices. The latest estimates are that 15-20 percent of all e-mail is read on mobile devices. There’s nothing worse than clicking on an e-mail that’s nothing more than outlines and broken images. Create mobile friendly e-mail formats and/or use sniffers to serve e-mails optimized for mobile devices. 

Similarly many images end up as RED Xs on laptop and desktop machines. Use ALT-text tags so users can at least read the text inside blocked images. Put your offer or your most important idea up at the top of e-mails in text blocks to finesse computer users who block images or who have unusual frame settings for their e-mail clients. 

E-mail marketing will not disappear anytime soon. Marketers are addicted to email blasts; many of which result in predictable sales. But unless marketers use it in ways that intersect with changing customer behaviors and expectations, its marketing value will be sapped by emerging and more buzz-worthy social and mobile media.