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Encouraging Keen Readers

Peter Simcoe — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 14:59:33 +0000

The web is full of content ranging from interesting and valuable insight to all the way through a sea of bland generic information and detail to outright lies and cynical speculation. Keeping up to date with information and making the most relevant information available through various channels to your audience is crucial to firstly, respect, secondly, attention and third and most importantly, customer / reader loyalty.

Existing Example

For the benefit of providing a good example for this article, we will take the example of a client of mine – Torse Ltd – as they have a particularly tricky dilemma in the way they present information to their current and potential future customers. Torse Ltd is an energy broker based in Nottingham in the East Midlands of England. Their ongoing struggle is with 4 aspects of providing information for their customers:

Dealing with the tarnished reputation that energy brokers and similar services have across the UK. Torse Ltd happen to be an honest, straightforward, straight talking company with a loyal customer base. However, when dealing with potential customers they must wrestle with the generally corrupt and devious reputation these type of services have acquired.
Providing a detailed and customised individual response to the energy requirements and recommendations for each client, ensuring that the right energy contracts are provided for them. This means that it is very difficult to create an online energy assessment form where ‘one size fits all’ – a contract is assessed and finalised using human judgement and experience. The problem here is that on initial impressions Torse are then at a disadvantage because they cannot offer an immediate web based answer to the question “how much can I save with Torse?”.
Generating high quality and useful output from the media channels available to the company. The energy market is a notoriously fluctuating beast with sensitivity to changes in world affairs and economics. Keeping up with all of this and generating good quality content is a difficult task.
Producing content that is relevant to business owners with varying degrees of knowledge and understanding is a skill that requires a deep understanding of the activities, motivators and range of knowledge that your audience will have and providing a medium level of depth for the majority whilst catering for those who need to know more about specific aspects of the subject to make an informed decision by providing access to these. The browsers and HTML were designed for this purpose amongst others.

Opportunities

Website static content

Generating web content describing your aims, services, products or even terms is usually at the very least a time consuming task, but is also usually a very difficult task in that taking the principle of not wasting potential clients time – you want to provide the least complexity that provides maximum results. Almost every product or service we use has a level of complexity beyond our desire or need to know and so we pick and choose the elements we read to ensure we know the most in the shortest time. This is where it becomes tricky – where do people begin to switch off and either lose interest or experience information overload?

News items and dynamic content

Quality news items for the purpose of blog pages on a website, or even in a PDF newsletter, are tough to write – no matter which sector you work in. Why? Because a really good news item delves into a subject that is either brand new or provides a different perspective for consideration whilst reaching directly to the audience. If you are writing bland, generic, self congratulatory news items for the sake of writing then you are doing more harm than good both in terms of your time and effort and the reputation you are trying to establish – provide news items clearly targeted for your audiences needs, aspirations and expectations and provide a unique style or perspective to ensure that they begin to pick you out from the wealth of web pages clambering for attention. Essentially, do alot of in depth research and ensure you can be bold, daring and get your facts right all at the same time!

Short messages and pointers

I am really talking about the power of Twitter here – limited and overrated as it is, it does have a place. It is the marketing answer to a quick heads up about the latest goings on in a company and if written intelligently, can provide the public and followers with an insight into completed projects, upgrades, new offices, news items worthy of attention – communication that your audience wants to hear that could impact upon or benefit them or communication that relays your honesty and commitment to a specific product or service.

Other websites recommending your services

Carefully selected partnerships or lists of ‘friends’ can really be an advantage in sharing good quality sites – the visitors of one site are recommended to the other sites of a similar or ‘of interest’ nature. These are often found in a footer or sidebar of a website and almost act as mini-ads for the partners / friends. Facebook has not been mentioned here yet and for many in business to business based services it is not an appropriate or particularly productive channel in my opinion.

Affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing on the web has the potential for increasing traffic and sales from your website via groups of people online who are given the task of selling your products via blogs, adverts, links and other methods familiar to those browsing the web. However, I personally think that in certain circumstances this can lead to the web being populated with biased reviews and misleading or exaggerated information. Why? Well, if you are paid to review a product or can make money from people buying a product or service you are more likely to write a dishonest or misleading review unless you have the ability to only sell those products or services that you rate the highest. Affiliate marketing is a method that works but there is no doubt it is open to abuse and tends to populate the web with exaggeration or misinformation.

Other media types

If there are other methods for communicating your message then these may be attractive to returning viewers. Creating episodes of video content, a series of exhibition or a podcast can ensure that returning readers find something of benefit to them each time therefore increasing the real value of the site.

Measuring Success or Failure

The key to keeping customers interested in coming back to the example site, www.torse.co.uk, is to make it of value to the reader. How do we measure what is of value to customers? There are various tools and techniques that could be employed to establish where customer value could be attributed:

Web Statistics

There are many ways of obtaining webstats including the use of Google Analytics and most web hosting companies will have their own statistics generators from log files on your site. How are these useful? Well, you can establish where people are spending most of their time and which pages tend to get overlooked. Then it is a case of analysing whether it is because the information is buried or simply not of interest. Once these trends have been analysed it is down to the analyst to provide insight as to recommending change, removal or redesign of a page.

Voting via Google +1, Digg, Stumble Upon [or other]

Allowing your readers to easily “like”, “+1″ or “digg” a news item, page, gallery or portfolio could generate a whole raft of interest from other sites designed to highlight or promote popular news items, useful websites and those pages that are of particular interest to internet groups. The traditional “like” system on Facebook is currently facing a small but growing challenge from Google’s +1 and with Google having such dominance over the web, it is important to take note of this development.

Direct feedback via survey email or phone

This has to be handled fairly delicately in many ways so as not to annoy your existing / potential clients or even use data you have access to in the form of email addresses, phone numbers or addresses in an illegal or inappropriate manner. Sending simple customer surveys through phone, email or even postal channels can provide an insight into what aspects of your content were useful to them and what they as readers or customers would like to see on the site in the form of articles or frequently asked questions. In many instances a guide to content can be found by assessing the enquiries made via web forms or phone and looking at how these can be covered on the website to answer these questions.

Increase in sales

Another indicator of success can be an increase in sales. However, attributing this to web content can be a difficult task though using tools such as Google Analytics, iMapt and other similar tracking tools can provide an insight into the popularity of your content and consequential activity. Paid for tools such as iMapt do provide additional insight into activity on your site and in some cases provide live warnings when someone enters the site.

Conclusion

Web content should be very carefully researched in terms of what your audience need to know to enable them to make a purchase or agreement to use your services. The methods for assessment listed above should provide guidance as to the value of certain sections of your site. Where appropriate, senior members of the company should play a reasonably large part in writing text, selecting images or at the very least proof reading prior to release [if a marketing 'expert' does the majority of creation] – no-one knows more about the company as a whole than those involved directly with its running. A copywriter could be consulted for additional evaluation of your content, further distilling the message to something direct, meaningful and making conversions to purchase or sign a contract an easy and informed decision.
There are both free and paid-for tools available to make assessment on how your existing and potential customers are using your content. These should be used in conjunction with a process of content distillation to assess points at which customers pursue or abandon your message. Just because people are moving through your site does not necessarily mean they value what you have to say.
Use external affiliate networks and telemarketing companies with care – they can do more damage if not correctly vetted in that their interest in receiving commission and further work from the companies they are promoting could lead them to exaggerate, omit or make misleading claims about the benefits or terms. I’m not against using external resources in this way but remember that an external company will never have the same dedication to your company principles and ideals as you even if they say they do.

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Google vs Mark Hillary

Peter Simcoe — Sat, 22 May 2010 15:46:22 +0000

Here is the email I’ve just sent to Spencer Kelly, the BBC Click presenter after watching their report on the copyright battle between Mark Kobayashi-Hillary and Google.

Dear Spencer,

I have just watched your 22 May BBC Click article about Mark Kobayashi-Hillary’s struggle with Google and the YouTube copyright issues he was presented with leading to the suspension and removal of his YouTube account. I understand Mark’s point regarding freedom of speech and the ability to present arguments on the web but to really understand why Google had a problem with his content I would need to see exactly what was written, featured or even implied in his articles as a blogger and YouTube clips as it is not in Google’s interest to create negative publicity like this. I am suspicious that there is much more to this than presented in your show such as some of the fine detail that we were not made aware of that would offend such an internet giant – we did only really hear a superficial argument on either side [probably for legal reasons] but the implications of what was said were very serious.

Mark’s argument in the programme was that the musicians themselves had encouraged him to feature their content on his YouTube account. This simply does not stand up against the fact that mainstream musicians, artists and performers are usually under the management, both legally and artistically, of bigger corporations who will not stand by and allow certain global and political issues sit comfortably beside footage of their performers in whatever context. I would think that as a visiting lecturer to Universities and many significant companies and institutions presenting his understanding of “globalisation, politics, and the technology issues” [probably attached to a significant hourly rate of pay], he would be aware of the exact implications of his actions and therefore it should come as no surprise as Google is a company like any other – it wants to make money and protect it’s interests like any other. Should someone use their “free” blogging or other tools to question the business methods or policies of some of Google’s partners [both current and potential future deals] or affiliations then it would be understandable that it would react with strong disapproval and potential removal of an account that breached standards in any way. From some limited experience, Google does usually give people reasonable opportunity to remove or adjust their accounts accordingly and so this makes me think that Mr Hillary may have overstepped the mark in other ways.

Of course, I do not know the fine details of Google’s disagreement with Mark but as I said, Google [or any other global company with a reputation to uphold] would not do this sort of thing lightly considering the extent of other ‘dubious’ copyright content on YouTube and the web in general.

Keep up the good work!

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What is an RSS Feed?

Peter Simcoe — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 12:49:47 +0000

Manual

The traditional view of surfing the web is that a user looks at different Unique Resource Locations [URL]s or, to put it simply, visits different websites on the Internet to find out the latest information, updates and news from that site. This can take many hours of your week as you find the news page, maybe login or even refresh the current pages seeking the latest and greatest in your field of interest.

Automatic

Now reverse that idea and consider RSS feeds. RSS feeds transmit changes to content such as latest company news, latest world news from the BBC, latest images on Flickr and other relevant information to the feed you subscribe to. This will save you many hours of trawling through your favourite sources of information only to find that there was, essentially, nothing of interest or new.

Technical

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication [and can occasionally be know as Rich Site Summary]. It relies on the website in question having a suitable ‘Feed’ or file containing the information a Feed Reader can understand. The data in one of these Feed Files is usually in a special .XML format and contains a news title, summary and sometimes a thumbnail image to give the reader a suitable overview of the information they will be directed to. This is useful because a Feed Reader can easily compile a series of news titles into a very short amount of space for selection rather than the user trawling through page after page of old or irrelevant news.

If you are looking at a site that is compatible with a Feed Reader or Aggregator then you will see a link with this logo next to it [with the word 'subscribe'] or you will see the same logo in the URL bar at the top of the browser. Clicking on either will present you with the subscription window. If you really want to find out more technical details then Wikipedia’s RSS article gives a fairly accurate and useful summary.

Subscribing

If all this is sounding a little too complex – here is a suggestion: GIVE IT A TRY. Its easy to establish an RSS feed link especially if you are using Mozilla Firefox or Internet Explorer 8. It is recommended that you take the following steps to set up your Feeds:

1. Find yourself and easy-to-use aggregator. Google Reader does a good job of storing your feeds in one easy to manage area within your Google Account. To create an account [and a Google Account if you don t already have one] then go to the Google Reader Sign Up page. This will guide you through the process.

2. You will need to find yourself a website that has an RSS feed. This website has an RSS feed you can subscribe to and keep up with the latest news. To do this either click on this site’s feed link [or copy and paste www.design-design.co.uk/feed/ into your Google Reader account] and follow the instructions to save the feed to your browser window or Google Reader.

3. Login to your GOOGLE ACCOUNT > MY ACCOUNT > READER to see what feeds you have subscribed to and see the latest news.

4. If you know the address of the feed from other sites you can copy and paste this into Google Reader. If you want to try this – open a new TAB or browsing WINDOW and type in www.bbc.co.uk. You will then see the RSS orange feed link. Click on this and add it to your Reader account or a link in your browser favourites which will then update each time you open a browser window. One more useful tip is to organise your Feeds so that they appear on the main browser window by going to BOOKMARKS > ORGANISE BOOKMARKS > drop feed into BOOKMARKS TOOLBAR [Mozilla Firefox]

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