Measurement vs actual results

 engagement marketing, Manifesto, Reviews, sidelines  3 Responses »
Oct 302008
 

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.

Rate this:
2.5
 Posted by Sandlines at 15:38  Tagged with: , , ,

Cheeze knows you’re here

 location, sidelines  2 Responses »
Oct 292008
 

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.

Rate this:
2.5
 Posted by Sandlines at 14:29  Tagged with: , , ,

Small things amuse…

 sidelines  No Responses »
Oct 282008
 

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…

Rate this:
2.5
 Posted by Sandlines at 09:41  Tagged with: , , , , ,

Do online communities matter?

 engagement marketing, Manifesto, sidelines, web 3.0  2 Responses »
Oct 242008
 
Is this getting too real?

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.

Rate this:
2.5
 Posted by Sandlines at 09:03  Tagged with: , , , ,

Today the newspaper made me laugh

 recession, sidelines  No Responses »
Oct 142008
 

Things must be getting better – or at least, further to my post last week – the media are beginning to run out of black ink, so the heavy borders round the front pages are on the ebb at last.

Anyway, I saw this in the Times, under the heading “You’ve got to laugh”. I’ll quote directly:

How markets work

Rate this:
2.5
 Posted by Sandlines at 16:44

Yesterday’s Twitters are tomorrow’s fish ‘n’ chip virtual paper

 iphone, sidelines  2 Responses »
Oct 082008
 
Twitterific

Maybe the whole point of twitter is that it is time-sensitive. If you feel that strongly, stop reading now.

But a colleague of mine was twittering from a conference that my company, Silverpop, staged yesterday in London. He was using his pet iPhone for the task.

Apart from showing some of the things that I’m professionally interested in, I was curious about how the twitters worked to develop a historic record of how the event worked. I’d love to hear any feedback!

Rate this:
2.5
 Posted by Sandlines at 11:50  Tagged with: , , ,

I didn’t realise the google phone was THAT heavy

 mobile, sidelines  3 Responses »
Oct 072008
 

I noticed a review last night of the T-Mobile G1, the first Google Android phone, in online magazine iGIZMO. I was alarmed when clicking on the ‘details’ icon (the little red “i” bottom left) to learn that the G1 is even more hefty that at first I’d thought… according to the reviewer it weighs 1.58kg. Makes my old XDA Exec look positively lean and mean.

Shurely shome mishtake?

Rate this:
2.5
 Posted by Sandlines at 10:41  Tagged with: , , , ,

Book 2.0

 DRM, ebooks, sidelines, smartphones  8 Responses »
Oct 012008
 

This has been brewing in my mind for a while, so it’s about time I talked ebooks – and the devices on which they’re read. And AFullerView’s comments on the subject have nudged me to action.

Book 1.0

Following Sony’s belated entry to the UK market, the likely arrival here of Amazon’s Kindle, and the already available Iliad, there’s been a lot of talk about the future of the humble-yet-mighty book.

Jeanette Winterson wrote an impassioned, if Luddite, piece about why she’s not a fan, though somewhat muddled up with a defence of the importance of spelling correctly… a somewhat linked, but discrete topic. Her main criticism is that ebooks don’t make it any easier to get books into people’s hands.

Well, I do and I don’t agree. Not sitting on the fence: I want to make an important distinction.

I don’t believe the ‘dedicated device’ route is a good way forward for reading ebooks. Particularly via the Sony eReader approach, which (in true Sony style, limits you to buying a proprietary DRM format of books that is at odds with the best range of ebooks available online, over at the excellent Fictionwise.

And there’s good news. If you own a decent smartphone, you can read books in a variety of formats right there – on your iPhone/iPod Touch (by far my favourite ebook reading device to date), on Windows Mobile devices (I’ve had a couple of those) and on old fashioned PDAs. I started reading ebooks back in 2002 on my Palm T3, and I’ve never looked back.

The screens have become gradually more eye-friendly. The range of books is slowly but steadily increasing. The price is appropriate – a little less than a printed book. Reader: this is the way forward. And as the digital ink that makes the Sony device look so good gains currency, the experience can only improve.

And if you go down this path, the green credentials of ebook reading are pretty decent too: you’re simply expanding the value from a device you already have, so no overhead there. And no trees.

Book 2.0 in action

Book 2.0 in action

Crucially, it means that hefty tomes, such as Neal Stephenson’s new 800 page wopper, Anathem, is reduced to something that puts no additional strain on my briefcase for my commute.

So, better screens on existing ‘smart devices’ = less eyestrain, less backstrain, less bagstrain. And removes the ‘barrier to entry’ issue from Ms Winterson et al… it’s not just putting books in the hands of people who haven’t tended to read them, it’s putting the opportunity for entire libraries there.

= result.

Rate this:
2.5
 Posted by Sandlines at 10:44  Tagged with: , , , , , , , ,

 Permalink  sidelines  No Responses »
Oct 012008
 

Every couple of weeks, Jeff Jarvis, who is Journalism Professor at the City University of New York, writes a piece of commentary for the Guardian. I happened on Monday’s piece, and followed through to his blog for more. If you care about the online world, I can only strongly recommend you do the same.

Turns out some of the people he talks to think the Internet is full of junk – read by junkies – littered with inaccuracies – amoral… the list goes on.

As he says, far more eloquently than I can, it sounds a lot like life. And I’m not in a hurry to give that up, either.

Rate this:
2.5
 Posted by Sandlines at 09:05  Tagged with: , ,
 Older Entries  Newer Entries