Test and Retest Your Online and Mobile Campaigns

It’s a cardinal rule in Internet Marketing. Whatever communications you create have to be tested again and again, on every possible platform and configuration. Even a simple website has to be reviewed repeatedly in different browsers, different browser versions, different operating systems, to make sure your message is properly formatted and reperesents your brand favorably no matter where it’s seen. If there are multiple steps from first touch to final purchase, the list of testing scenarios grows quickly.

This is the most tedious part of the business. And unlike many tedious tasks, it can’t really be delegated to the lowest levels of the organization. Someone who doesn’t have a full grasp of your communication goals can’t tell you if they’re being met. Fortunately, at Zacks, we’re able to divide the workload so each team member is responsible for two or three browser/OS configurations. Even so, a good chunk of time can be easily eaten up with creating test email accounts, logging in and out, deleting cookies and starting over again. When product or promotion launch deadlines are looming, it takes real discipline not to cut corners and actually go through all the steps.

Apparently, even the biggest companies with the largest marketing budgets have a struggle in this area. And mobile marketing opens a whole new frontier of possible platforms and formats. I was surprised recently to see the glaring neglect of testing in a mobile campaign for Coke Zero.

Checking scores in the excellent iPhone app SportsTap, I saw an ad headline that read "Join Facial Profiler." So far so good. It’s a mobile ad, so maybe this "Facial Profiler" does something cool using my phone’s camera. It got my attention and made me curious enough to tap the ad.
The landing page looks nice, and is obviously formatted for the iPhone. The imagery and typography are attractive and easy to read. Now I see that it’s a Coke Zero project. So now I think there’s an even better chance that it’s something cool, since they certainly have the budget to create something entertaining or engaging.
Scrolling down the page, there’s a video thumbnail. Whoever designed the campaign seems to have understood that I’m not going to keep reading forever, so here’s a video file to explain the promotion. Brilliant.
But that’s where the whole thing breaks. Somehow, they encoded or embedded the video in a way the iPhone didn’t like. This video is the only means I have to find out how the program works, so when it fails, the entire experience becomes a dead end. So now, whatever Coke spent on this campaign has been 100% wasted. Even worse, this experience lowers my opinion of the brand, so they’ve actually put their marketing budget to work in a way that damages their brand image.

It’s an excellent example of what can happen when you don’t commit to testing your entire campaign. And there are no shortcuts. Even when you duplicate an existing process and apply it to a new product or promotion, unforseen details almost always become obvious during testing.

If it can happen to a marketing powerhouse like Coca-Cola, on a closed platform like the iPhone, it can certainly happen to your email campaign or banner ad landing page. All the time, effort and money you spend promoting your product will be wasted if an overlooked error gets between your customer and the sale.

Update: Cheryl Gledhill at molt:n took the Facial Profiler application for a test drive and found that the actual feature was just as unsatisfying and poorly executed as the mobile campaign.

Tags: Coke, Facial Profiler, Internet Marketing, iPhone, Mobile Marketing, Online Campaigns

Amazon’s iPhone Kindle Strategy, Take 2

Here’s an update to my earlier post about Amazon’s strategic decision to release a free iPhone application to read e-books published for its Kindle device.

Of course, it’s undeniably brilliant to cultivate an audience for reading books on a handheld device, reaching people who have a history of buying expensive electronics. But as you’d expect from Amazon, their followup is also first rate.

Knowing that I’d downloaded the iPhone app, they sent me an email this morning announcing that their Kindle device is now on sale. At Zacks, we’re always looking for opportunities to target our email campaigns like this. There’s no better way to reach your customer than demonstrating that you’ve paid attention to his interaction with you. When you can credibly make the claim that you’re sending this message specifically because he might find it useful, you’ve greatly increased the chances that your customer will click through to the action page.

Actually, the Kindle app has made me a believer when it comes to reading text on my iPhone. Except the Kindle app isn’t my platform of choice. Instead, I’ve been using the much more versatile Stanza. Where the Kindle app concentrates on titles available from Amazon, Stanza and its companion (Mac or Windows) desktop application make it unbelievably easy to put any text on your phone in ebook form. Just open text files, word docs, pdfs or html pages in the desktop app and load them over wi-fi onto your iPhone.

Now any time I stumble upon a long but interesting blog post or article, I’ll load the URL in Stanza and take it with me to read whenever I find a spare minute on the go. The very legible and customizable display makes it much easier and more enjoyable to read than if I’d copied the bookmark and navigated there in the mobile browser. And the text is loaded on the phone itself, so I don’t have to worry about the availability or speed of my connection.

Of course, the retail giant took notice of how well Stanza works. In April, Amazon bought Stanza’s development company Lexcycle. So far, though, they have not disabled the Stanza app itself. Presumably, they’re working with the Lexcycle developers to morph all the extra features of Stanza into the next generation Kindle reader.

Tags: Amazon, e-Books, iPhone, Kindle, Lexcycle, Marketing Strategy, Stanza

Family Ties Draw Older Generations into Social Networking

In a recent study by research firm Anderson Analytics, social network participants from age 13 to over 65 were polled on their reasons for joining social network sites like Facebook and Twitter.

All groups had a significant number of participants who considered social networks “fun” and declared an interest in connecting with friends. However, a more pronounced difference between the generations was evident when it came to using these tools to connect with family members.

Just 27% of Generation Z (13-14 year-olds) saw family connections as a draw, where 51% of the over-65 group said keeping in touch with family was one of their reasons for joining.

Invitations also play a stronger role in the older age groups. 46% of Baby Boomers and 60% of the over-65 group said they joined because an invitation had been sent to them by someone they knew. Invitations played a much smaller role (under 30%) for users under 30.

Tags: Baby Boomers, Demographics, Facebook, Internet Marketing, Social Media, Web 2.0, WWII Generation

Google Wave Conquers the Internet

They’ve dominated search, made paper maps obsolete, and captured a huge chunk of the world’s email inboxes. Now Google wants to own internet communications on a brand new platform of its own invention.

Google’s Next Wave in Internet Communications

Google Wave is a highly collaborative mix of email, shared documents, instant messaging and more, with elements of blogging, social media, photo sharing, project management and issue tracking all thrown in.

The technical aspects of this new tool are very impressive. Not only has Google built its own interface for Wave, but they are releasing an extensive open API that allows developers to access Wave as a communication protocol within their own web-based applications.

If you’ve ever shared a document via Google Docs or a WIki, you’ll immediately grasp the workflow. But Wave starts as casually as an email. It then becomes easy to branch off into a multi-threaded conversation all bound together by the glue of the wave. Clicking individual paragraphs allows you to respond to only that point. Adding new users gives them access to the entire conversation.

Taming the Document History

Such a dynamic framework could easily become confusing, as conversations outgrow their original intent. Mike Elgan at Computerworld seems ready to dismiss the entire project for that reason.

After bouncing stuff back and forth, and after people comment on various parts of the thread, adding commentary at the top, bottom and middle of the original message, clarity about what’s old, new, moot or relevant seems unlikely.

Addressing that concern is where Google created one of the product’s most innovative features. By using the “Playback” function, users can see the entire history of the wave, step by step. Playback can show the progress of the entire conversation, or can be filtered to show only actions of a selected type or by selected users. If you’ve ever been added to an email thread after more than two people have chimed in, it’s not hard to imagine how much more quickly you’d be caught up if playback were available. It’s also a big step towards clarity when compared to most wikis’ “version history.”

Extending Wave’s Reach

The open, extensible nature of Wave means photos or text you attach there can be automatically published to your blog, and updates in either place are immediately reflected on the other. That immediacy translates when collaborating with others, too. As you make edits or type new information into a wave, anyone else who is sharing that document at the same time can see you typing even before you hit enter, for a high-speed workflow similar to instant messaging.

The product is still in its infancy, and won’t be released to the public for some time. Still, there’s considerable enthusiasm about the developer preview. TechCrunch gave a positively glowing review of its vision and ambition.

Opening Web 2.0 to Customers, Partners, and Even Machines

Without releasing Wave into the wild, it’s difficult to predict what forms it will take once real users begin to work with it. The demo video gives an excellent picture of the kind of interaction that’s possible between human users. But the potential for a revolutionary transformation of workflow comes in the ability to let non-human applications and processes join the conversation. Dion Hinchcliffe at ZDNet imagines Wave giving IT systems like personnel, customer and resource management a seat at the Web 2.0 table:

Literally while participants are busy typing and collaborating, a wave can be receiving support from back-end systems such as HRM, CRM, ERP, and so on to provide data, context, and other just-in-time support. Many businesses could benefit enormously from seamless business data integration such as customers, orders, and so on, never mind the deeper possibilities of contextual business processes leveraged directly in the collaborative activities of workers.

A Perfect Fit with Google’s Long Term Strategy

From a strategic standpoint, this gives Google the potential to claim an entirely new space in internet information sharing. Compared to search, maps and email, where they took existing systems and improved upon them, Wave represents an entirely new collaborative model.

Jordan Golson at Salon accuses Google of climbing to “new heights of arrogance” in what he sees as purely a vanity project.

I’m sure Mr. Golson thinks his pragmatic view is a better way to do business. But he ignores Wave’s contribution to Google’s overall goal to own all the information on the internet, and doesn’t see how powerfully Wave could contribute to that effort. Boiling Wave down to its potential for immediate revenue generation is short-sighted at best.

By providing free services like Gmail, Maps, Docs, Analytics and Earth, Google extends their reach into the way people think about Google’s integration into the internet. What’s more, they encourage users to load their servers with information which those users are then dependent upon Google to retrieve.

In each of these projects, Google opens new doorways for users to interact with information on the internet. And in each case, Google holds the keys to the door.

When that is the overarching goal, a few salaried workers’ time spent on a project like Wave is a minor expense. Finding a revenue model to make each project self-supporting is the kind of short-term business model that most other companies would use. That approach would stifle innovation and detract from the long term focus. That’s the reason most other companies are not Google.

Learn More About Google Wave

To learn more about Google Wave, the video of the Google i/o presentation is a great place to start. There’s also an excellent collection of articles at Mashable.

What do you think about Wave? Is this a tool you’re excited about trying? Do you think your answer reflects how entrenched you are in traditional email, or how comfortable you are with multiple points of presence, such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and others? I’d love to get your comments below.

Tags: Google, Marketing Strategy, Web 2.0

Don’t Tell Me How To Use Twitter

There is no shortage of articles on how to make the most of social media when building your brand, your online presence, and your relationship with your customers.

A lot of it is really good. It’s exhilarating how immersive and potent these tools are for reaching out to one another. That excitement has inspired some very smart and talented people to give away tomes of valuable wisdom.

But where the best advice can work wonders for your company’s PR, Marketing or Customer Service, there are no real rules for individuals. Unfortunately, this leaves the door wide open for half-baked and even mean-spirited “experts” who try to bully others into following their own invented code of conduct.

One of the most famous cases is the “Cisco fatty.” If you’re not familiar with the story, Connor Riley (@theconnor) interviewed for an internship at Cisco, and upon receiving an offer tweeted:

She quickly got a nasty response from @timmylevad at Cisco. And her tweet was widely publicized as an example of abject stupidity and naiveté concerning social media.

Except she hadn’t even applied for the job, and it turned out to be outside her professional field. Her tweet was meant as an inside joke to her very small audience of followers who already knew she’d be turning it down. It’s easy to see how a Cisco employee would not be amused, but @timmylevad unleashed a public castigation in an effort to enforce his own rules on how Twitter should be used.

Ms. Riley herself makes a particularly cogent observation about how someone with 45 followers, all of whom she knows in real life, may treat Twitter differently than someone with over 500.

If that’s the way TIm Levad wants to maintain his Twitter feed, that’s great for him. Depending on his goals for the platform, it may be exactly right. What I’d like to see quashed is the idea that anyone has the authority to tell anyone else what their approach should be, particularly if the rules they are trying to impose are an effort to move people towards more sanitized and less human communication.

Jeffrey Zeldman is a legendary designer, blogger and independent publisher. His work has long been a guidepost for standards-compliant design, and his website A List Apart is a voluminously rich resource for anyone who makes websites. Due to his well-deserved internet fame, nearly 21,000 people follow @zeldman on Twitter.

Recently, Zeldman was scolded by a Twitter follower who expected more “value” from his Twitter stream. In this critic’s farewell email, he accuses Zeldman of letting his “ego take over,” because he dares to tell jokes and give his reaction to movies he’s seen.

In response, Zeldman rightly refers to A List Apart, his blog, and his free downloadable books where the disappointed unfollower can get the “value” he seeks. But he vehemently rejects the “mass-media channel” approach to Twitter. Jeffrey Zeldman is a real person, who has every right to use Twitter to connect with people and build relationships as a human being, and not just as a name-brand for web standards.

All the best advice for companies in the social media sphere seem to point toward more human communication and away from monolithic press release broadcasts. To push individuals in the opposite direction runs counter to the best of what social media has to offer.

Tags: Cisco Fatty, Low-Fiber Tweet, Social Media, Twitter, Web 2.0