The online marketing expert blog

The Freegle logo

Way back in 2004 I heard about an idea called Freecycle which was stunning in it’s simplicity: instead of throwing an item you no longer needed into the tip, where it would only end up in landfill, why not offer it to someone else instead?

If they wanted it then they would have to come get it… - and that’s it: I said it was brilliant in it’s simplicity, didn’t I?

I loved this idea - partly because it could only be made to work on the web.  Trying to imagine how this idea could be implemented in an offline model only makes my head hurt: it absolutely has to be accomplished online.  Imagine maintaining a printed list of 25,000 people, with 500 or more messages between them every month, offering items, posting adverts for items wanted and also notifying the group when an offered item had been taken.  It makes me shudder to think the amount of time, effort and paper that would be needed to do this in the real world.

So: I looked on their website, fully expecting there to be a Birmingham group already created, but to my surprise there was none - so I created it.  After a few years the UK groups fell out with the parent US ones and parted ways and changed names to Freegle.

So - how did such a group using the most primitive social media tool around - Yahoo groups - get 25,000 people to sign up and consciously avoid sending stuff to landfill?

• Moderation, moderation, moderation: we have a full time group of volunteers who moderate the site and provide guidance on the rules and etiquette to new members, and even more importantly stop the scammers and spammers taking over.
• A truly excellent core idea.. - in other words, compelling content
• A way to accomplish a worthy goal that was simply not possible in any other way but online.

Another hat I wear is that of the official Bryan Talbot fanpage webmaster.  This is a site I run voluntarily and have done so for over 14 years.  It is a labour of love for me: Bryan’s work had a huge impact on me and I wanted to help publicise it better.

Over the years I have learned almost everything I know from running this site because it is a site I care about and one that I make sure is updated every 2 weeks come hell or high water.  In fact, one irony is that I have yet to work on any professional site that has more pages than this fanpage!

Bryan recently asked me to upload a few scans of his artwork onto the site and sell them through PayPal.  He said I could have a commission on each one sold which is our usual arrangement, and so I launched the online sale.

In the 2 weeks since the launch of the artwork sale, he has sold four pieces of art at a total revenue of £1,090 and a total cost of £20 monthly hosting and £40 for my commission.  That means that in 2 weeks the site has made 18 times its monthly costs - for hosting - of £20 and has in effect paid for it’s whole year’s worth of hosting.

Why has the artwork sale been so succesful? -

• site longevity and ease of finding: I started the site so long ago it has come to dominate the field - there is no one running a competitive site, it is number one in Google for the search term “Bryan Talbot” and it is the only place people tend to go to for information on Bryan and his work.
• correct and appropriate use of social media: the Bryan Talbot Facebook fan group has over 250 members and the Bryan Talbot twitter presence has 93 followers: the sale was announced on there and was soon retweeted by other comics fans on Twitter,
• an exceptional product: Bryan has a huge reputation in the comics world and his artwork has to be seen to be believed: there is a massive fanbase interested in the collectors items that are his original artwork.

If you have anything at all to do with online marketing then you are well aware that more visitors to your site is almost always a good thing.  More visitors means more chances of selling, or more adverts and more clicks and therefore more profit.  If you get more visitors year on year then you can justifiably use this as evidence that your site is getting better over time.

If your conversion rate is stable (and in my experience imp[roving a conversion rate is a lot harder than improving the number of visitors you get) then your hard cash outcomes of the site will improve in line with the number of visitors.

However, we online marketers have a guilty secret that we don’t like to let those outside of the industry know about: we cannot even agree on what constitutes the most basic metric of our entire industry!  We still have no accepted, industry-wide definition of what a visitor is!

Why? - well, because it is actually a ferociously hard concept to define categorically and there is room for legitimate debate.   However, compare this with the offline world and accepted industry definitions abound: there is the Audit Bureau of Circulation for print, RAJAR for radio and BARB for TV.  Here in online marketing though, we cannot even decide what a visitor actually is!

Some analytics tools decide that if a session - or a “visit to a site” to normal English-speakers - sits idle for 15 minutes then the next click constitutes a fresh visit to the site.  On other tools the period is 20 minutes: on other tools the concept of sessions is ignored.  Just to think about this for a moment: if you visit a site and then get called away on a phone call, or go and make a coffee then 15 minutes can very easily elapse between clicks: and yet you would be counted as two visits to that site!

A better metric is of course that of “absolute unique visitors” used by Google.  Characteristically Google adopt a very thoughful approach: when using their free analytics tool you have to embed a snipped of code on every page on your site: the Google analytics engine therefore knows precisely how many times each page gets downloaded and so on the issue of literally unique visitors can be very precise.

But what happens when you visit a site at home ancd then go back there once you arrive in the office to complete the purchase? - there is no software invented that can track that pattern: two visits from two seperate IP addresses at sepatrate times - and yet all the same person.  The way sites try to get around this of course is to get you to regerst at the site and create an account and log-in each time you visit.  Visitors though hate this: it is another hoop to jumpt through and yet more information garnered about you by yet one more company.

So the queastion is: how can we as an indsutry aspire to any degree of professionalism whilst even the most basic metrics we use to measure success remain uncertain and subkect to change?  We need a solid, stable, published set of definitions - but in an industry as fractured and profitable as ours this is not going to happen any time soon.

So: as a self-proclaimed ethical online marketer, how do I get round this problem?  In several ways:

• by never measuring “hits”: a hit on your site constitutes a single interaction with the server: each page, each image, each chunk of javascript is a hit: one page can equal 10, 20 or 50 hits: as such it is a truly meaningless stat.
• by using the absolute most pessimistic stats possible: Google’s “absolute unique visitors” stat yields even lower numbers than their number of visitors stat: and so I find it much more plausible.
• by drilling down to what is truly meaningful: when I sit down with a customer and get to an agreed definition of what a unique customer is, I then use that as the basis for the calculation of the conversion rate.  To me conversion rate is far more significant than the raw number of visitors as it measures your visitors behaviour after they arrive at your site and are exposed to your content - and not before.
• and finally by that ultimate, undeniably arbiter: cold hard cash.  How much money does the site make?  Is it making more money than it cost? - is it therefore delivering return on investment?

Last Friday I was delighted to be asked to talk at a Procuring Social Media Event by my former employers, Birmingham City University at the Coffee Lounge in Birmingham City Centre.

It was a very well run event, with a nice format: attendees split into 4 groups and then rotated around the 4 tables where us “experts” had installed ourselves.  I didn’t want to create a presentation in advance, as I find them prescriptive and didactic and so I positioned my session as “Everything you ever wanted to know about social media but were afraid to ask.”  The people seemed to like it - apparently I got a good rating in the event feedback forms!

I specifically set out to jargon bust and give honest answers: people were interested but confused and wanted to know what social media could do for them.

If the nice people over at BCU put on another event I will plug it here too!

I am currently following the online debate about real world accessibility at the Hello Digital conference, initiated by Alison Smith.  In summary: an otherwise excellent conference failed to provide a sign language interpreter as promised and a profoundly deaf attendee felt unnecessarily excluded.

Now: the question is - will the Hello Digital organisers actually put their hands up, admit that they got it wrong and pledge to do better next time?  This is the heart of effective online PR: nothing you do goes unnoticed by the online crowd: all your faults and cock-ups will always be dragged into the cold, unforgiving stare of the Twiterati.

So: don’t hide or evade - don’t even try.  Put your hands up straight away and admit you fouled up.  Then - if you really know what you are doing - enlist your harshest critic to keep an eye on what you do, and tell you where you could do better.

Now: acheiving this requires a certain number of pre-requisites that I am not yet aware if Hello Digital have in place:

• they need to be monitoring the online discussion and participating in it even after the conference has closed;
• they need to have the power and authority to get online and join in the discussion;
• they need to know that they need to put their hands up and admit to the one thing that went wrong in an otherwise well-run, well-delivered day;
• they need to understand that this is how PR works in the hyper-connected world.

I cannot wait to see how this all turns out…

Edit: yes they can! within a couple of hours, Digital Birmingham had not only been on the ball enough to notice all of this kicking off, but had gone to the original blog posting and posted a full-blown apology.  You have got to give them credit for this:allow me to voice a “well done”.  The only possible way for them to do any better is to illustrate how they would handle the same situation differently in future - but that can legitimately be worked out over time.  The important thing was the apology, and they have done that, and done it handsomely too.

I went to the Hello Digital Conference at Millennium Point on Wednesday of this week, and I had an excellent time.  Sion Simon the minister for Creative Industries was there, as well as David Rowan the editor of the UK edition of Wired.

On the day the Twitter trend for the relevant hashtag of #hd09 went ballistic and it was one of the hot trending topics of the day.  I networked with a lot of people and spoke to some old contacts and generally had a great time.

Then I read the Pesky People blog by Alison Smith who is profoundly deaf and I saw her genuine anger at being excluded from the event due to the fact that there was no sign language interpreter provided for her.  Now let me be clear; this seems to be a lone oversight on the part of the organisers in an otherwise excellent day - but they do deserve the berating Alison delivers and it drove home the issue of accessibility into my skull with a sledgehammer.

I am going to ask Alison to check the accessibility of anything audiovisual we produce here at M Consulting: if you don’t have a particular disability it is almost impossible to imagine life with it - and consequently almost impossible to design a website or run a conference with genuine accessibility.

Another key differentiator between online and offline marketing is that in the real world people find it much harder to be rude to people face to face.  Unless you are really angry or incredibily self confident, most people do not just say “shut up!” and leave when they get bored, annoyed, irritated or patronised.

This all changes when we get online though: suddenly we are insulated from whoever we are dealing with by a screen - and we know we are never likely to meet them - and so we are free to act on our impulse of just not tolerating anything that gets in our way.  We become task focussed to an insane degree, and if a site in any fashion gets in our way - bang; we’re gone.

We have no problem in leaving a site and never returning, and yet we would hardly ever in the real world tell a salesman to just shut up and get out.  Online we only care about getting our objectives completed… - and to make a succesful site you need to remember this.

In previous posts I have detailed some of the organisational obstacles in the way of online marketing - such as why aren’t there any Directors of Online Marketing? - and having thought even more about it, I have come to the conclusion that online marketing is such a new field that most existing marketing directors (who are almost always offline marketing experts) are scared and initimidated by the new field.

Anyone who is an expert in their current field absolutely hates to be made to look like a newbie in any related field.  So people who have invested a lot of time, effort and expense to become experts in their fields and more importantly to get seen as experts in their field will absolutely hate online marketing simply because they are not experts in it.

As a result they denigrate and marginalise it for perfectly understandable reasons - but nevertheless they are still marginalising it.

My solution to this issue is (I hope) characteristically direct: stop requiring them to be experts in a field they are not and give responsibility to people who are experts in online marketing… - just separate the two disciplines as they are so fundamentally different as to be utterly unrelated apart from the word “marketing” in the title.

Consider:

• offline marketing is a megaphone monologue: it works on the assumption that if you shout the same message often enough it will get through: it is interruption marketing, actively trying to impinge on customers consciousness
• online marketing on the other hand is about permission: your best customers actively seek you out - they come to your site and are interested in buying from you: the best sites ask you what you want and then give it to you
• offline marketing is fundamentally an ego-driven activity: people in it design and create and take decisions based on their experience and expertise
• online marketing on the other hand is about removing your own ego from the equation and asking “what is best for the customer here?” - and then testing that concept and implementing the results and iterating.

But as long as we insist on masters of one discipline needing to be seen as masters of both we are asking for trouble.  From now on I cannot refer to marketing without qualifying it with one of it’s two constituent sub-disciplines of online or offline…

…. - and why don’t more companies follow suit?

Charlie Brooker’s latest posting about how  to get people to pay for online newspaper content where he says that all that’s needed is for  ”someone [to] perfect a system of universal online micro-payments once and for all”

Argh!  What does it take to kill this meme?  There are micropayments systems everywhere online!  The problem is not that there is some technical barrier to implementing them - it’s the fact that it is yet one more thing demanding you take time and pay attention: the problem is cognitive not technical!

Imagine the scene: there you are, deeply engrossed in the latest edition of your favourite paper and you click on a link, and up pops a message saying “this article will cost you 1.25 pence to read: do you want to continue?” - and your train of thought is shot: suddenly you have to switch mental tracks and stop thinking about what you were reading and what you were about to read and make a decision as to wether you want to cough up that amount of cash.

And there’s the rub: it is the making of a new and totally unnecessary decision that annoys people: you can only make so many decisions per day - and being forced to make them where you didn’t have to before is profoundly distracting.

Micropayments have been tried before and they have failed before.  As a model for payment for content they just don’t work.

Sorry Charlie!

One of my favourite (almost definitely apocryphal) quotes of all time is “I know half of my advertising budget is wasted - I just don’t know which half” as it sums up all of the issues with offline marketing.

In a time of recession therefore it strikes me as logical that you should be investing in online marketing more than offline, for many reasons:

• Online marketing is inherently more measureable than offline marketing: you should never be in a position where you are unable to prove direct return-on-investment for any activity you undertake.
• Online marketing is there when people want it - but it does not try and batter them into submission with what I call the megaphone-monologue model of interruption offline marketing.  Visitors to your website are like customers in your shop standing there with their wallets open, saying “how much for the blue one?”.  Time is the single most precious resource online: if you go out of your way to give your visitors what they want (whilst making sure that in so doing you are still making a profit) then you will only make more money.  One of the inherent problems is websites run by offline marketers that think that they still need to shout at their visitors when they arrive.  Here’s a hint: when someone comes to your site you already have their attention! - stop shouting and give them what they want, not what you think they want.
• In a recession you want to be able to market to the widest possible area - and online marketing is by definition global.