Jonothan Stribling

The other day I had a healthy argument with an old school marketing guy about uneducated consumers in a commiditised market.

His contention was that uneducated consumers still exist online.  Like marks in an old style side show they wander blindly through the buying process and good businesses make good margin from them.

This worried me a little.  I think that the Internet has made it so much easier to find information about products and pricing that novice Internet users can become very well informed consumers very quickly. The newbie might not be a gun online marketer but they have a very clear understanding about what constitutes good value and the Internet makes it easy to them to make a comparison.

Also,  I hate the idea of thinking consumers are stupid. It is too easy and doesn’t help you market to them.

I reached out to twitter for feedback and the feedback was that there are more and more newbie consumers online which I reckon proves my point.

@thelostagency noted that targeting these users with a different user experience can drive massive increases in conversion. He also commented that:

@jonstribling problem is that business is not usually tailored and even optimised for that newbie experience

@monkeytypist disagreed tweeting

@jonstribling if you define “educated” to mean “aware there’s a better value option always”, then that’s plainly rubbish.

I think that understanding the consumers  better means understanding them intimately, their concerns, their values, the pain-points, their buying behaviour. And once you do this you patronise them by thinking of them as uneducated. Once they become ‘real’ you can then target them better using all sorts of online marketing strategies including search.  Ultimately they will compare the value you’re providing with your competitors online. Your chances of retaining them as a customer may depend on you understanding them better.

What do you think?

Photo credit

I was reading in The New York Times about how Google is now a media company and it struck me that the Internet gives every business the opportunity to be a media business or at least think like a media company.

Firstly, what is a media company?  A media company is a business engaged in the production or distribution of media.  Most sales,  leads,  and opportunities result from their media activities.

News Ltd is an obvious example of an old style media company trying to make it in a digital world. 

Google can be seen as a new style of media business as can telcos like Telstra who increasingly depend on the distribution of digital content to lock in subscribers.

So how can any business be a media company?

Get a website

If you have a website you need to produce great content to delight your visitors, rank in search engines, and build fans. If the content is good enough then people will link to it increasing your popularity.

Get a twitter account

As you know Twitter is a great way to communicate with existing and potential customers. To build fans you can’t be all business though,  you need to entertain,  amuse, or inform. When you get this right you are well on your way to being a media company.

Get a Facebook page

With 500 million users Facebook offers an easy way to reach people and let them connect with your brand.  As with twitter there needs to be a good reason for people to be interested.  Hold a competition, build a game,  get customers to send photos or videos of them using your products, or ask questions.

Make a video

YouTube is an amazing place to discover Justin Beiber or that new chick,  watch a monkey fall over,  or discover how to build a retaining wall.  Making a video of how to do something related to your product,  introducing your business,  or doing something crazy to delight your customers. It is easier than you think and doesn’t need Hollywood production values.

With an audience of billions the web makes it easy to extend your reach with simple but high quality media and content. In a competitive marketplace it could be what elevates you above your competitors. Start to see yourself as a media business and the rest will follow.

When you’re one of the cool kids, it is pretty easy to forget that not everyone is in the cool club.

In fact, some people are so far removed from the cool club that they haven’t heard of Twitter, social media, ecommerce, WordPress, Android, the Nexus 1, or the RunKeeper iPhone application.

But generally, every human living in an advanced economy who can read has heard of Google and Facebook.

We’re so connected these days that it is easy to forget that there are a bunch of people who are not connected; who are yet to realise the liberating potential of the Internet.

And they know it. They know that no one uses the big yellow book to find a glazier or carpet cleaner. They know that their kids are doing things online that they might enjoy, that might make simple stuff easier but they haven’t made their move yet.

They are scared, intimidated and worried about looking stupid.

And all the cool kids reckon they are “stupid”. That’s why they are cool and not stupid, they are good at trying new stuff, seeing trends, labelling stuff.

Nothing online scares them. Except comic sans, fuscia backgrounds and being marketed to.

To me users should never be thought of as stupid. Rather, it is the marketers, designers and developers who make them feel stupid who are, well, stupid.

So many conversations in the tech, social, online communities concern the known world of tech, social and online.

It strikes me that it is a bubble where the people listening are the same people talking who are the same people publishing aphoristic thought bombs who are the same people reading the aphoristic thought bombs who are the same people thinking of the next aphoristic thought bomb.

It is exhausting, and to a complete outsider completely meaningless and uninteresting.

And because the same people are building the tools and selling the tools and dreaming up the next tools, the kids not part of the cool club are forgotten.

They are left to find their own way with poorly written copy, small fonts, poor documentation, badly handled errors, and unclear instructions.

And for anyone running an ecommerce site, a blog dependent on advertising, a remarketing program, or an online community dependent on user engagement and re-engagement this is not good for business.

Whilst Australia has high number of Internet and mobile users, future growth will come from people changing their habits and behaviours. This means they will go online, start booking stuff and buying online, connecting with friends online.

It is up to the people working to build online experiences on Internet devices to make this journey as easy as possible and remind all users that it is never the user, it is always the tool.

This means talking to people who you might not talk to often to find out how they use the Internet and if not why not.

This means looking outside the closed network for cool kids and digital hipsters to identify wants, needs, desires, fears and anxieties.

It means making sure that your website works for them and meets their needs.

It means having a presence in Google and Facebook which are two of the most common first steps online for a new user.
It means giving a voice to some members of the community who need it most by showing them how to setup a blog and start publishing.

The promise of the Internet and web 2.0 is social transformation for the better and we need to strive to make sure this promise can be delivered.

Once upon a time there was a Hollywood star called Tom Cruise who had the world at his feet.

He was famous, rich and in love with a beautiful young woman called Katie. Being rich and successful, woman loved him and men envied him.

Then one day late in 2005 whilst talking with talk-show host Oprah, Tom celebrated his success and the joy of life by dancing a jig on her sofa; by jumping the sofa.

Tom’s fans were appalled and ashamed for him. This irrational exuberance was not the Tom they loved and respected, it was a freaky guy who seemed to be more than a little self-absorbed. Gradually Tom’s fans turned away from him and stopped seeing his movies.

Jumping the sofa, much like jumping the shark for TV shows, was the beginning of the end of Tom’s glittering career. It represents the moment when his star had reached its ascendant and began to fall.

Tom had misjudged his audience and sent out the wrong message. He had the wrong idea about what people expected of him.

Jumping the sofa is pretty easy to do online.

All you need to do is veer off course into the ridiculous – unintentionally.

Change your argument halfway through a blog post.

Go off on an tangent about how there was this guy I went to school with who is now working in Amsterdam and reckons it is one of the greatest cities in the world, not for the drugs but the people.

Oops.

Get your developers to build something without talking to your customers.

Send an email campaign to the wrong customer.

Display the digital camera landing page to someone who clicked on the Ipod advertisement.

Launch a new product without talking to your customers or your market.

In fact it is easier to jump the sofa online than it is in real life (metaphorically of course, you could be jumping on your sofa right now and no one would care).

The easier it is to publish, the easier it is to be ridiculous, comical and absurd – and to turn people off.

There are quite a few examples of jumping the sofa online. Here is a very short list.

Facebook privacy policy change

In January this year, Facebook modified their privacy policy and automatically opted people out of the extra privacy setting that removed a user’s content from being displayed in search engines.

This shocked and dismayed Facebook users as it was a significant breach of trust for fairly transparent commercial reasons.

People need to be able to trust that the online spaces they populate with personal information. Facebook jumped the sofa and betrayed this trust.

Microsoft Vista

Microsoft Windows Vista was launched with a bang in 2006 and very quickly fizzled as users complained about bloated and slow software, random crashes, and pointless steps that made it harder to do things.

Under pressure to release a new operating system after significant market share gains by Apple, Microsoft focused on the flashy unimportant stuff like phat icons and forgot about the things that make an operating system a pleasure to use.

Microsoft jumped the sofa by focusing on pretty graphics and slick marketing at the expense of features that enhanced how people experienced the product.

Aol. logo

The merger between AOL and Time Warner is a great read about hubris overcoming commercial reality. Ten or so years later AOL Time Warner has demerged and AOL has relaunched as Aol., a content and media network polluting the Internet one crappy article at a time.

The story of Aol. is one of jumping the couch so high that a business that had 30 million ISP customers in 2001 is now a media company. Aol. is a great lesson in evolving with the market and listening to customers even if there might be some short term costs.

Google Buzz/Google Wave

Everyone loves Google. Sing it with me. Everyone loves Google.

The Google brand is so strong that they threaten to launch a new product and the Internet goes into meltdown chasing “exclusive” invitations so they can be among the first to get tell their friends about how great Google is and how Google are the next Google.

Sadly, most of these releases are overblown hyperbole. Google Buzz was an exception. Linked to GMail, Buzz had real potential to allow multiple conversations all easily indexable, searchable and findable.

Unfortunately Google forgot to listen to user concerns about privacy and automatically added email and chat recipients as followers in Buzz. This was fine except the follower lists were public.

The fallout was massive, providing “evidence” to many people that Google didn’t care about privacy.

To their credit Google fixed the problem very quickly and proved why they are one of the strongest global brands – they listen to their customers and admit when they haven’t.

These are just a few examples of how some brands have jumped the sofa online by getting caught up in their own hubris and not listening to their customers.

The Internet makes it easy to listen and even converse with your customers. Get online and research your next decision before jumping the sofa. Talk to your customers. Take a moment to think about what you’re trying to achieve.

Have a really good think before you climb up on the sofa and make like Tom Cruise. And if you still want to, then go right ahead.

When I first discovered Google, it was a revelation. I was using a combination of Alta Vista, Yahoo, Dog Pile and luck to find what I wanted and Google returned the right results super fast.

Fast forward to now and Google know more about me than my mother. I use Google Apps for jonstribling.info mail, Google AdWords, Google Docs, Google Maps, Google Trends, Google Books and more.

That is a lotta Google!

A few years back, I started to get upset about the lack of choice in search engines. It’s not that Google do a bad job, they do an amazing job. It is just that as a consumer choice makes me feel better, it makes me feel in control, rather than as a passive victim.

Google are so good that it can seem that there is no viable choice in search. This is not good for consumers.

But hang on, I hear you say, what’s the problem? Google are cool.

Well they sure are. They even have a corporate motto, “Don’t be evil”. They couldn’t possibly be bad with that kind of positive “let’s do some good” attitude?

Wrong.

How can a corporation that is obliged to provide a return to shareholders and demonstrate continual (and impressive) growth effectively guarantee that they’re not being evil?

It sounds like a load of BS to me.

More importantly though, it also raises the hoary question: What is evil?

• Is censoring information about Tibet and Tianamin Square in China evil?
• Is the unauthorised scanning of books evil?
• Is the collection and analysis of users searching and browsing evil?
• Is having a monopoly evil?

So what is evil anyway?

Evil is a limit defined by culture. Evil is beyond that which we can comprehend and justify as part of a complex set of cultural practices and beliefs. Evil is not, in my view, an absolute measure. It is defined and understood through culture.

What is understood as evil in Afghanistan is quite different to how evil is understood in Australia or the US.

Some ethicists contend that this kind of relativist approach to ethics is plain wrong, that an absolute limit is required to be able to judge right from wrong and truly recognise evil. But this removes any cultural specificity from the equation.

How else can you explain suicide bombers?

The bomber thinks that killing themselves and hundreds or thousands of strangers is a sure fire way to enter heaven. Which brings us to the real reason that some folks believe in an absolute ethics and that is, god; sorry God. The god botherers are so desperate to believe in an absolute all-knowing, all-powerful entity that they reckon good and evil are absolute concepts.

If you don’t believe in god then you have to accept that each ethical limit is defined by a complex set of factors including culture.

So back to Google.

Is Google evil?

No, not when you stack it up against Nuclear and non-nuclear weapons manufacturers. Diamond miners exploiting poor Africans. The Indonesian government’s actions in West Paupa. Blackwater, the US contractor making bucketloads of cash from the war against terror. Dick Cheney and Hannah Montana.

Google are simply very successful at indexing, storing and analysing data. They do it better than most and have built one of the go-to sites on the Internet. By being successful Google have put themselves under the cultural microscope, so that every action, every success and every misstep is analysed and studied and criticised.

As a multi-national corporation, Google might do stupid, even evil things sometimes, like almost every multi-national corporation, including Greenpeace. This does not mean that Google, or Greenpeace, are being evil.

Selling my personal information to the CIA is evil.
And I don’t think they have done that.

Censoring information for a totalitarian regime is evil. And yes they have done that.

How I stopped worrying?

The great thing about the Internet and capitalism is that there is something great around the corner that will make Google look a little old fashioned.

In 2010 Google have been playing catch up to Bing, Wolfram Alpha, Twitter and Facebook.

Networked lifestreams are a huge threat to traditional search and the ad supported model and it is not obvious that Google know what to do.

Perhaps the threat is Bing, Wolfram Alpha, Twitter. But it’s more likely something we don’t know about yet. Something that is being built by a couple of super smart hard working PHD’s in their garage right now.

The point is that history tells is that nothing lasts forever.

And hopefully that includes my Google search history.

When I was in Romania about 10 years ago I had some drinks with a local Optician and a Romanian rock star. We enjoyed many drinks and Raresh, the Optician, invited my girlfriend and I back to his apartment after the bar closed.

Raresh lived in a Soviet style apartment that was very very clean. It was disturbingly ordered. All that was missing ware the plastic sheets to protect the furniture.

He hated Romania and his low socio-economic status. He declaimed “I hate my country!” and told the rock star that he wished he has his life.

The life of an Optician was not a comfortable middle-class life in Romania. It was a life of struggle and worry.

As a result Raresh hung out in the bar where we met him.

The man did know about taxonomies though. He asked us if we wanted to listen to some music and handed us a collection of exercise books that contained a hand-written index of his collection. It was a magnificent thing and Raresh’s logical ordered mind was wonderfully evident in the careful scrawls of music from the 60s, 70s and 80s.

Each entry contained a code which mapped to a tape in his collection. It was better ordered than my Ipod. And by hand!

The desire to organise and classify is a uniquely human activity. Imposing systems on a chaotic world makes us feel like we’re in control, that we’re managing to keep our heads above the water that threatens to drown us in a beautifully fluid and disorganised way.

It is also how we expect to find stuff on the Internet.

We visit a website looking for a trace, a scent of something that relates to our need. Clothing, shoes, belts, books, musical devices, portable storage devices. Each might relate to something that we’re looking for, something that makes us think “yeah, that’s it”. And then we click a link and somewhere someone pours a Gin and Tonic happy that there’s been a micro-conversion.

Finding the right words to describe the right stuff or the right actions is the key to conversion.

The great thing about Google’s AdWords is that it reduces all the fluff and bubble of the creative process to a headline, 2 descriptions and a display URL. No pictures, no logos, no pictures of babies smiling coyly at the camera; just good old fashioned words.

The only tricks you can play are with words and the right words can deliver lots of clicks.

Too often people get obsessed with the glitz and forget the words that order the chaotic disorganised world of their buyer.

I reckon start with the words and add the sparkle later. Test the words in AdWords or Yahoo. Test them on your customers.

Like Raresh, build a beautiful framework to structure the world of your buyer.

Raresh wasn’t distracted by the colourful tape cases, they were kept hidden until his visitor had made a choice.

I like to think that Raresh is happily married now with kids and a business thriving as the Romanian economy improves.

He deserves it.