The Holistic Web

I’ll be in Arizona from Thursday afternoon till Monday afternoon. On the outside chance any readers are in the area, drop me a note, would be great to meet up.

I’ll be in Phoenix mostly, but in Sedona parts of the weekend, not exactly sure when at this point, although looking at the weather forecast I might be trying to spend as much time there as possible! 38C in Phoenix, 32C in Sedona.

I’ll have my laptop but uncertain as to how widely available the net will be, so preparing for the worst.

I’ve got this idea for a blog post. It would take a lot of work to put together well - probably at least a day or two full time, maybe more. However, I think it would, for a few minutes at least, set the blog world on fire. I’d pretty sure I’d get a few a-listers linking to me, and many minor bloggers. It’d probably get me a bunch of new subscribers.

The problem is, the people who would come would be the Dave Winers and Robert Scobles of the world, the people who spend half their lives meta-blogging. My blog isn’t aimed at them. And though I’d probably pick up a few dozen new subscribers, and maybe a few hundred, they’d probably all be techies interested in discussing meta-blogging.

So, the question is: would it be worth it? I could probably spare the time at the moment if it was worth it. I dunno.

I just saw this great chart on the Creating Passionate Users blog. It’s the best summary I’ve heard of “old school marketing” vs “neo marketing”.

I’m hoping they won’t mind if I show the image directly (guys, if you do ping me and I’ll edit).

Wow. That’s all I can say. What a superb summary.

The biggest one for me? Deception versus transparency. I think if you change your mindset to become transparent (which is a big change) then the rest will kinda follow.

A few people were pointing at Gaping Void this morning, specifically this post.

It’s discussing what happens to the big mega brands, those dependent on true mass media advertising (Budweiser is one example given), when the mediums they rely on, TV in particular, get further into their current wane. The conclusion?

TV is as much a part of their brands’ DNA as any molecule. So as the Complex dies, so Budweiser and Velveeta die along with it.

I agree a big shakeup is due. But will those mega-brands really die? Or will they adapt? I guess a closely related question is: is it possible to survive? Whether it’s possible, and whether they will, aren’t the same question. Are the big ad agencies flexible enough to be able to push those brands forward in a new world where less people are watching prime time TV? Time will tell.

On one hand, they have a challenge ahead of them and their traditional methods will fail. On the other hand, even if there is ways to advertise 100’s of brands, supermarkets (and I don’t see their death anytime soon) still only have limited shelf space. Many people just don’t want to think - they are happy just to grab a budweiser. Perhaps there will still be major dominant brands, but it’ll be much easier to knock the big brands off the top spot?

I’m just speculating here. If you have any thoughts, please comment as I’m really interested.

One of my favourite forums is WebMasterWorld. There’s a lot of very high quality users there, some real pros. Today, I saw an awesome post by digitalghost, one of the moderators at WebMasterWorld. Unfortunately it’s in the members only section (which requires payment to access) - if you happen to be a paid up member you can see the post here. Digitalghost has kindly given me permission to reprint here.

For those of you who have read the Cluetrain Manifesto (and if you haven’t, why not?) this will come as no surprise, but it’s a beautiful example of those principles in action.

Soft Focus Marketing
My favorite diner has a wooden sign over the door that says just that. Come For The Food - Stay For The Conversation. The first time I stopped there, I didn’t know what the food was like, but from the amount of cars in the dirt parking lot, instinct told me the food was decent.

So I stopped. The woman behind the grill said, “C’mon in, have a seat”. The thing was, there were no booths, and no counter to belly up to. Just tables, and there were people sitting at every table. Not being used to the place, I said, “I’ll wait until there’s a table clear”. The nice woman at the counter just smiled and said, “Hon, if you plan on waitin’ until these fellers leave an empty table yer gonna go hungry, now just scootch on in and sit a spell”.

So I looked around a bit, and sat down at a table around which, a group of sun-browned, cap-wearing men in bib overhauls were having an animated disussion about tractors. I turned up my coffee cup which was promptly filled, and gave my order. And I listened for bit. The conversation turned to hay cutting, round bales versus square bales, until, one of the older gents turned to me and said, “Well, whaddya think young’un? And I replied, “Well, I like the convenience of round bales, it’s nice to be able to spear one and set it out and not worry about it, for cows at least, but I prefer square bales for the horses, they tend to hold better and stay fresher, and I can control the amount of hay they get”.

And that’s all it took for me to gain “entrance” into the group. The Thursday night group anyway. Stop on a Tuesday, and it’s a different crowd mostly, but the same lively discussions go on.

Now the food, well, it’s okay. Big portions that fill your belly, but it’s nothing special. This is where the marketing bit starts to come into play. These folks aren’t “coming for the food and staying for the conversation”. They’re coming for the conversation and they just happen to order food while they’re there. Conversation is the focus. Food is an afterthought. The whole place is geared for conversation. So I took a long look around to see what could be applied to website design and marketing.

One of my widget clients was experiencing low conversion rates and the only saving grace was good traffic flow. He owns a site that sells a widgets to a niche group of highly talkative and technically adept clients. His site is, or was rather, highly professional and technical in nature. His copy reflected the technical aspects of his widgets and supplied a price.

The entire site was done in banker blues and the focus was clearly on selling widgets. He’s been selling these widgets in his bricks and mortar store for 26 years. So I spent an entire weekend at his place of business, listening to him talk to customers. Then I asked him, “Why doesn’t your web copy sound anything like you”? The reply was succinct. “I didn’t write any of it, I hired two guys and they did all of it”. And it’s slick, and professional. The copy reads well. But it’s slick copy.

I suggested a few changes. We changed the banker blues to warm browns and oranges. We changed the copy to reflect his voice and tone with customers. Soft sell approach, with a heavy leaning on conversational tone. And we added a forum. Absolutely no promotional language in the forum. It’s Q&A and friendly discussion about his widgets and widget accessories and those widgets in general. It reads exactly like his bricks and mortar shop conversations sound.

His conversion rate has tripled in thirty days and we expect it to triple again within ninety days. People are arriving for the conversation, and ordering a widget or a widget accessory as an afterthought.

It’s about immediacy. It’s about the conversation. It’s about having a true voice. It’s the difference between creating a relationship and merely obtaining a sale. It’s about customer retention.

It’s about making the visitor feel welcome. All too often websites appear to be nothing more than a greeter shoving flyers at you. It’s really refreshing to be invited in and asked to “sit a spell”.

I’m working on an e-commerce site at the moment which is trying its best to embrace “Soft focus marketing” - having conversation at its core. The site aims to welcome the customer, embrace them, and make them feel like they can belong, and participate, not just come to shop. It should be live later this month, I’ll most likely blog it when it does.

Think about it: how can you make your site more accessible, more human? How can you change your site from saying “Welcome to Widgets incorporated, home of world leading widgets” to “Hey, how ya doing? Got questions about widgets? Let us know your thoughts.”

I was doing some reading this morning, and bumped into this article on CIO.com about the “truth behind CRM”. I was reading it, think it was a good if not fairly standard article on the failure of large scale CRM implementation projects. I’d almost finished reading it, when I noticed something - the date the article was published: May 2001. The scary bit is it could have been written yesterday. People still do massive CRM projects, and still fail for exactly the same reasons. Have we learnt nothing in 4 years? I dunno, maybe the success rate has gone up, maybe not.

I’ve been on both sides of the fence - as a user & a maker of both successful and unsuccessful projects. Obviously achieving success is very complex and I don’t want to underestimate that. However, in my experience there’s one thing which is consistently over looked. There’s a great quote in the article which summarises it:

Others who have run into problems with CRM projects stress the importance of focusing on the users throughout the process, letting them test different programs and creating an incentive plan to encourage use of a new CRM system.

It’s amazing that people will spend millions of dollars on these projects - getting the process flows right, back end integration, etc, but will neglect one thing: the people using the tool. My experience is that if you create something that is easy to use, and perhaps heaven forbid, even enjoyable to use, adoption will go that much more smoothly. Get the users to test early. Get a usability expert in. An interface designer. Get influentials (call centre reps, sales people, whoever) involved in the test. It’s a marketing campaign - sell it to the users. Yes, there’s still a lot of tricky back end stuff, but please, won’t someone think of the users?