It’s a personal bugbear of mine: the emphasis on getting a good measurement versus the actual delivery of results. It manifests in many ways - I recall a conversation with a digital media sales guy who was determined to tell me that the best thing about the web was that you could measure everything. Never mind how WELL it worked, the measurement was the best part.

And yes, measurement has value (usually to help improve results), but there is a point at which the actual value of what you are doing gets lost.

This is very apparent in customer service situations.

My wife took her car to the local dealership for its annual service a few months back. The customer service was, at best, average… actually, we had cause to feel it was not even that good. But the Service Manager was determined we should, nevertheless, give them a 10/10 in the customer satisfaction survey we were about to be invited to complete. Anything less than that, he told us, and his operation would get a black mark.

We were then told several more times that a survey was coming up. Despite having nothing to do with the service, I was telephoned and asked what I thought of the service - and to make sure we’d give a good mark in the service. When I indicated dissatisfaction, I was pressed to put this aside for the forthcoming service and still give a good mark.

By the time the survey came around… well, I’m sure you can guess my mood.

All this came flooding back to me with a piece in the paper today about a man who, having been told (rudely, it seems) that he could not extend his overdraft with the Abbey, was pressed to give a good mark in the post-call survey. The results make painful reading.

In either case, had a fraction of the effort expended trying to persuade the customer to mark the service well gone into actually providing good service, everyone would have been much happier.

So I will take actual positive experience over survey results every time.

… and that is reflected in the way consumers prefer peer reviews to marketing spiel every time too.

Tags: abbey, customer satisfaction, mercedes, survey

I was checking out the latest from over at Cheeze’s excellent marketing blog and spotted, almost incidentally, a really cool app sitting in the sidebar: ‘Live Visitor Feed‘ by Feedjit.

Apart from a small detail in error (it believes my London suburb is in Kent… it’s not, it’s London and it would more likely be Surrey anyway) it’s pretty interesting.

I’ve noted before that local targeting is challenging in the UK… local IP’s are much more difficult to pin down outside the UK, or at least they were. But Feedjit claim that they “…can determine the geographic locations at the city level of 90% of your website visitors.” That’s pretty impressive.

Now the interesting question is what we are going to DO with this information? I have some ideas… for another post.

Tags: cheeze, feedjit, geode, location

Yesterday's news...

Sandlines is eagerly awaiting Friday’s delivery from Ocado at home. It’s coming late in the day - around 8pm. I know, I know, but I have a 3 year old, so Friday nights are different to how they once were… and that’s not a complaint btw…

Anyway, I just read over at Brand Republic that Ocado and The Times have agreed to distribute copies of the paper to people getting a delivery. Nice touch. The Times is losing readers - and in credit crunch times, Ocado customers are presumably questioning the value of their weekly order (I know I’m down to about once a month now…)

So at 8pm, do I get that morning’s paper? If that’s the outcome, then someone, somewhere has really failed to think this through. What am I going to do with Friday’s paper at 8pm? If only the laws hadn’t changed, I could have used it to wrap up some fish and chips …

Or maybe wrap up the salad they’ve supplied that is also out of date the next morning.

I feel I should be more demanding!

Tags: brand republic, engagement marketing, newspaper, Ocado, Times

According to Gary Small, a neuroscientist over at UCLA, readers of Sandlines (and other regular internet marauders) are simply smarter than the rest. Well of course!

In his new book, “iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind,” Dr Small is of the view that the more we plough through screeds of irrelevant data trying to find gems of useful information through our Google searching etc, the better our brains become at, to quote Malcolm Gladwell’s excellent ‘Blink’, Thin Slicing… or making snap judgments.

I saw an excellent presentation by David Hawdale of Hawdale Associates a couple of years ago where he discussed the way the brain processes information in a ridiculously quick fashion when faced with an array of affiliate marketing, shopping comparison or other ‘hijack’ results when looking for actual things. Apparantly we make a decision in less than 2 seconds on a typical Google results page.

Now if only the web would smarten up itself and find me relevant listings for when and where I actually am, I could go back to my normal vegetative state and not have to ferret out what I am really after…

Tags: blink, brain, gary small, ibrain, malcolm gladwell, thin slicing

My post on Friday sparked a couple of conversations offline about participation in communities: how do you get people to contribute in an online community?

There’s a huge surge in interest in the ecommerce community, for example, in posting customer reviews on web stores. A couple of interesting businesses in particular (ReeVoo and BazaarVoice) are based around this concept, and both seem to be doing quite nicely thank you.

Over at the IMRG, I’ve participated in/listened to some discussions around the issues involved here - and a big initial concern for e-retailers is around the nature of things that people will say. The assumption is that consumers are far more likely to post negative comments than rave about good stuff. Apparently this assumption is false.

And yet, away from the direct retail environment, one of the themes I’ve heard from new (and new-ish) businesses is around the difficulty in getting conversations started at all. It seems that once they’re underway, it’s somewhat easier to keep it going, but seeding the discussion is a tougher proposition.

What does the Sandlines audience think? I’d love to hear back from people about their ideas on this? Or experiences?

Tags: BazaarVoice, communities, ReeVoo, Reviews

Is this getting too real?

I’ve been looking at a lot of research this week, and this has been one of the questions that is much discussed: the degree to which people care about the online communities with which they are engaged.

There’s some excellent insights in a report by the Center for the Digital Future’s Jeffrey Cole.

One of the questions asked is “How often do you take action offline … related to your online community?”. Turns out 14% of people surveyed do at least once a week.

Then all this began to fall into place when I read this story about a woman in Japan who faces a possible jail term for the virtual murder of her virtual husband in Second Life style game called Maple Story.

I’m not sure which is the scarier idea: that this woman logged on and killed off her ‘husband’ or that the man turned around and filed charges against her for doing so.

Tags: center for the digital future, jeffrey cole, maple story, online communities, web 2.0

Yell.Com: no to doordrops

No, not the end of Yellow Pages deliveries (yet), but I saw today that Yell have pulled out of a recently launched (August) venture to compete with asrecommended by publishing a consumer car insurance guide. The pilot went well, and 1.5 million copies a month were thudding onto doormats - and the plan was to grow that to 40 million.

My doormat is sighing with relief.

I think I hear the odd environment lobbyist cheering somewhat, too.

Can a magazine really be the right way forward to promote insurance…? A ’service’ that means, almost by definition, that 11/12 of the audience will find it irrelevant each month as they are not in the renewal cycle. What on earth were they planning to say each month?

To paraphrase the old adage, “I know that 92% of my ad budget is wasted, I just don’t know with 92%.”

Tags: direct mail, door drop, local, relevance, waste, yell, yellow pages

I was once (several years ago) having a pint in a pub (I know, shocking news). A young lady approached me wearing a big black felt hat and asked me for my email address. Next thing I knew I was on the Guinness mailing list.

I then decided that I didn’t want to keep getting their emails. This happens, marketers, get over it.

What I saw is probably the worst opt-out in the world.

Who wants to fill THIS out to unsubscribe from an email blast?

It is a minefield of unnecessary information across a range of brands in the Diageo group. It is almost certainly against the rules set out in the UK under the wonderfully named PECR legislation (pronounced ‘pecker’). It is definitely against best practice.

Oh well. Yahoo! mail has a ‘This Is Spam’ button. Just got hit again.

Come on, Diageo, get a grip!

Tags: diageo, email, guinness, opt out

So another entry to the buzzword bingo chart, Forrester Research have published a report under the heading ‘Ubiquitous Marketing’. Whilst it’s not quite James Lee Burke, it is nevertheless a good read… and plays well with Sandlines’ manifesto.

Taking an inevitable cue from Minority Report, this research identifies a few key trends that ring very true:

• consumers don’t much like - or trust - advertising
• marketers are finding it tougher to make advertising work
• people move about, and as they do, their needs change

Their conclusion? Marketing needs to be contextual, reciprocal and successive. In other words, we need to morph marketing broadcasts into something that looks more like a service: relevant and useful, building on previous exchanges.

Digital marketers who have embraced the concept of marketing as a conversation should rejoice: their stock will rise yet higher.

Consumers should, also, be happier - if it leads to fewer, more welcome marketing messages. Broadcast or ‘one size fits all’ marketing starts to look more and more like spam every day.

Tags: engagement marketing, forrester, research, ubiquitous marketing

Don't Panic Mr Mainwaring

Back when I was 8 years old, I got into a lot of trouble at school by quoting Dad’s Army, calling out: “Don’t Panic Mr Mainwaring” during a fire drill. Judging by this morning’s front page on Brand Republic, I might expect a more lenient response today: it seems to be a message that many want to hear.

Dear old BR’s done a voxpop in London - and it’s really interesting hearing people talk about who they trust and why: there’s quite a range.

• “Big companies like HSBC, Marks and Spencer, John Lewis…”
• “I trust Abbey National and NatWest because they haven’t asked the government for money yet”
• “Don’t trust the big companies: integrity lies with the small family businesses.”

I’m interested in how people’s perceptions have been filtered: of course NatWest is part of RBS, who have gone hand in cap to the government, but this gentleman had no idea of that, so his trust remained firm. Another man fervently declares his faith in HBOS, despite all that went on last month with them… hope over expectation?

These are going to be really interesting questions to watch unfold over the coming weeks and months, as the recession unfolds. But I’m once again greatly encouraged by the broadly positive expectation from the (wo)man in the street.

Tags: recession, trust