Archive: May 2009

With over one billion iPhone apps downloaded to date, it’s no wonder brands are itching to get facetime with consumer smartphones. Tom Martin, President of Zehnder Communications, wrote an article for Ad Age that asks a critical question: Should these branded apps be toys or tools?

While the safe and obvious answer would be “both”, Martin takes the stance that practicality should trump novelty every time. From the source:

Toys (read game-type applications) don’t really do anything to sell your product. And in the case of those silly Facebook apps that let me toss a sheep or buy someone a beer, my total interaction time with the app is mere seconds. Is that really helping to convert me or reinforce my loyalty to your brand? I think not.

Martin goes on to explain that tools don’t get tossed aside. People don’t get bored with tools. They provide solutions, not distractions.

Take the highly practical Bank of America’s ATM locator. Or Kraft’s iFood Assistance app, which sold for 99 cents and made the iTunes Top 100 Paid Apps list. And let us not forget the infamous Burger King “Whopper Sacrifice” Facebook app, which turned out to be one of the most controversial (and innovative) coupon delivery methods of all time.

While this all sounds well and good, the life expectancy of apps is still frighteningly short. According to a report earlier this year from Pinch Media, only 5% of those who downloaded a paid app were actively using it 20 days after purchase. The fall-off was even steeper for free apps. Add an incredibly crowded app marketplace to this consumer finickiness and odds for success start to drop.

So brands are left wondering whether they are “sinking the boat” on bad bets or “missing the boat” by letting opportunities pass by. I say build something practical and let the market tell you if it’s a tool or just another toy.

Last year I wrote a post about SolutionSet’s local, non-profit work.  A number of the sites have been launched since then, and we’ve done some more great work for some deserving organizations.

We’ve had a long tradition (well, as long as the company as the company is old, that is) of working on pro-bono projects or discounted projects.   As the person responsible for the company and it’s overall financial health, I’ve often been asked why we do so.

• It feels good to do good - supporting worthy projects and causes creates a better work environment for all involved as they can feel like they are contributing
• Some of our most creative work comes out of these projects as they are not mainstream, corporate work
• If we can make things work for non-profits with little technical staff and shoestring budgets, think of what we can do for our corporate clients
• We meet great people and hopefully help them do their jobs.  Those people tend to talk to other people and refer us - the only way we do business development
• We live in the community and making it a better place is better for us

So with that being said, here are some of the projects that we have worked on over the past 3-4 years that have been pro-bono in full or part.  We appreciate the trust that each of these organizations has placed in us.

• 11th Hour Project http://www.11thhourproject.org
  •  Complete website design and development
• American Land Conservancy http://www.alcnet.org/
  • Complete website design and development
• Bay Area Interactive Group http://www.sfbig.com/
  • Complete website design and development
• Champion Charities http://www.championcharities.org/
  • Identity development, website design and development
• Commercial Alert http://www.commercialalert.org/
  •  Website development (in conjuction with Method)
• Congregation Kol Emeth http://www.kolemeth.org/
  •  Complete website design and development
• Congregation Beth Jacob http://www.bethjacobrwc.org/
  • Complete website design and development
• Day Workers Center of Mountain View http://www.dayworkercentermv.org/
  • Complete website design and development
• Dillons List http://www.dillonslist.org/
  • Identity Design / Print Design / Web Design
• Joint Venture Silicon Valley Network http://www.jointventure.org/
  • Complete website design and development
• Ohlone Elementary School Coming Soon
  • Complete website design and development
•  Palo Alto Adult School http://www.paadultschool.org/
  • Complete website design and development
• Palo Alto Black and White Ball (2006 & 8) http://thepaloaltoblackandwhiteball.org/
  • Campaign Design / Print Design / Website Design and development
• Palo Alto Friends Nursery School http://www.pafns.org
  • Complete website design and development
• Peninsula Open Space Trust http://www.openspacetrust.org
  • Print Design / Website design and development
• Proof Recipies http://www.proofrecipies.com/
  • Identity Desgin / Print Design / Web Design
• POST : Mindego Hill http://www.gomindego.org/
  • Print Design / Website design and development
• POST : Rancho San Vicente http://openspacetrust.org/lands/rsv/
  • Website design and development
• San Francisco Olympic Bid Website http://www.sanfrancisco2016.org/
  • Complete website design and development
• San Francisco Symphony http://www.sfsymphony.org/
  • Complete website design and development
• SFMOMA Art Think http://sfmoma.com/artthink/
  • Website development (in conjuction with Method)
• Stuart Foundation http://www.stuartfoundation.org/
  • Identity, website, and print development

We attended a webinar today, with the scary (but motivating) title “Get Ready For Combat This Holiday Season - Winning The Battle For Market Share In A Ruthless Economy”. Sucharita Mulpuru, Principal Analyst at Forrester Research doled out some recommendations for getting your eCommerce act together for holiday ‘09.

These included:

Site Experience - Your site availability should be above 99% (during 2008 holiday season, the average hovered around 96%), key content should load in 3 seconds or less, language should be the language that the consumer uses (not internal widget-focused language, as good as that might make you feel), and “add to cart buttons” should be prominently displayed. In summary, your site should be available, fast and easily understood by the shopper. Sounds like a no-brainer, but how many times have you been flummoxed by looking for the “add to cart” button?

Shipping - We can’t really talk about online holiday shopping without talking about shipping, right? According the Ms. Mulpuru’s data, shipping is one of the biggest cues for consumers, highly correlated with conversion rate. And the prediction is: this year more than ever, since consumers are going to be extremely concerned about value. So get that shipping cost down, even if it means raising the cost of products to offset the cost of shipping. Further, expose the cost of shipping early and often in the shopper’s session. One of the biggest reasons for shopping cart abandonment is “surprises” at the end, like shipping costs.

Check-Out Experience - With shopping cart abandon rate 50% and higher, there’s lots of room for improvement. A good recommendation: test your check-out flow i.e. single screen check-out vs. multiple-screen. If you’re a regular reader of this blog, then you know we’re gigantic fans of “data not assumptions”, so get your test on while you still have time to optimize before the holidays.

While we’re all basking in the afterglow of the Memorial Day weekend, it may seem too early to get started on holiday site planning. But it is never too early to implement tests, check your basics, and make a plan for improving on them. Any one of the three things above could eat up most of your time between now and the start of the holiday shopping season in October.

Not sure how I acquired a taste for government reports, but the FTC’s Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsement and Testimonials in Advertising is a real page-turner. Seriously. This is incredibly relevant stuff for anyone working in the commercial persuasion industry.

First released in 1972, these guidelines are responsible for fine print hits like “Individual results may vary” and “Paid actor”. The Commission recently decided it was time for some updates that consider paid blog endorsements and other social media “sponsored conversation” tactics.

[In case you’re looking for examples, Jeremiah Owyang of Forrester Research maintains a running list of sponsored conversations—reads a bit like Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Hollywood blacklist.]

While the channels are changing, the basic question for marketers remains the same: If consumers know that an endorser has a financial interest in sales of a product or received gifts from the product’s producer, is this information likely to affect their assessement of the endorser’s credibility?

Forrester analyst Sean Corcoran established rules marketers should follow when using sponsored conversations, including educating everyone involved on the FTC guidelines, mandating absolute disclosure and transparency, and ensuring authenticity:

This is the real power of working with bloggers—to get them to talk freely about your brand with their community, not to use them as a megaphone to spin your message. If you’re not comfortable letting go of your brand then sponsored conversations aren’t for you (and you may want to revisit your overall social media strategy).

Corcoran goes on to explain that both the marketer and the blogger can be held liable for misleading or false statements made by the blogger about the brand. So not only will you have to wear a Scarlet Letter for being involved in a blogola scandal, your competition’s lawyers will be standing by ready to strike. Probably best to just play by the rules.

There’s a saying in golf: “Drive for show, putt for dough.” Booming drives might wow the crowds, but they account for only a fraction of your total strokes. It’s the humble putt that actually determines whether you win or lose.

This sentiment transfers to the world of online marketing, with social media, banners, and the like as the “drives” and email as the “putts”. A study from Shop.org (the digital division of the National Retail Federation) found that email has become the consistent winner for online marketing programs. From Ad Age:

The study shows that 30% of retailers are spending less than originally planned on their web business overall while 24% are spending more. Of those spending less, more than half said search spending is being affected, while about a quarter said affiliate marketing and social marketing are taking a hit. By contrast, only 4% of retailers said budget cuts would affect email marketing. Of those increasing investments, email marketing will be the beneficiary at 65% of retailers.

The study also revealed that email was the retailers’ most successful marketing tactic in terms of ROI, which should get the CMOs out there salivating.

Email is just about as quick and nimble as it comes, and your program should reflect that. If you (responsibly) use past purchases and other trackable behaviors to segment your file and customize your content, your emails will turn from a pest into a welcomed guest. Oh, and don’t forget about those subject lines. Important stuff.

Shar VanBoskirk over at the Forrester Blog for Interactive Marketing Professionals has put some numbers behind the somewhat vague statements we’ve noticed some of our marketing colleagues making of late. These statements go something like “television and radio advertising are dead” and “interactive advertising will displace everything” and so on.

We like hearing our esteemed colleagues opinions, but you know what we like more? Facts. So thanks Shar for posting the data from your presentation at Forrester’s Marketing Forum. From the source:

Direct Mail and print are suffering the most loss to interactive tools. According to our survey, 40% expect to cut direct mail budgets, while 35% will decrease newspaper spend and 28% will slash magazine money in order to spend in interactive media.

We believe that DM 2.0 requires a mix of connected offline and online direct marketing strategies and tactics to drive transactions. When direct marketers focus solely on “in the mailbox”, they’re missing the opportunity to continue the story online (closer to the point of sale, on a marketer’s website), and they also miss the opportunity to reach their prospects across all channels. We’re happy to see that marketers are planning to move the direct mail money around, to include both parts of the equation.

The full Forrester report will be available in June.

In my last post I mentioned that we were planning on using Silverback combined with screen sharing software for our next round of usability research. Well, to follow-up, the testing went really well. We set up one conference room for the moderator, which included a MacBook pro with an additional external webcam and Silverback, Skype, and GoToMeeting software installed. Then in a second ‘observation’ conference room we set up a PC and large screen monitor with Skype and GoToMeeting. With this set up the observers could see the participant’s facial expressions via video from the external webcam on Skype and their screen interactions via GoToMeeting. In fact the setup could allow clients to real-time remotely view the sessions. In addition, Silverback installed on the moderator laptop captures picture-in-picture video and screen interactions. Of course, you could use Morae by TechSmith, which allows for remote viewing and robust video editing, but that comes at a price and the whole idea was to provide our client with the best bang for their buck!

Recently I was given the task of creating a ClearSpring widget that, in the simplest sense, submitted a form via AJAX to a lead generation management site that only accepted POST responses.  I built the widget using jQuery and I assumed that I would be able to submit the form using JSONP (”JSON with padding”) given that it allowed for cross-domain support.  Beginning with version 1.2, jQuery has had native support for JSONP calls. Developers can now load JSON data from other domains if you specify a JSONP callback, which can be done using the following syntax: url?callback=?.  jQuery automatically replaces the ? with a generated function name to call (see below code as an example). Sounds simple enough, right?

Unfortunatly not.

Though JSONP solved the problem of sending data to a remote server, I was still unable to submit the collected information in the necessary format.  This is where the proxy comes in handy.  After battling with the “Access to restricted URI denied” JS error for about an hour I came up with a solution using jQuery’s serializeArray(), JSONP and a php proxy. I was able to send the form data to a remote server as GET variables and then sift through the data and submit the answers via php’s cURL.

JavaScript

var _this = o.data._this,
    params = _this.s.form.serializeArray();
jQuery.each(params, function(i, field) {
    if( field.value.replace(/ /,' ')!='' && field.name=='q_11_email') {
        $.getJSON("http://brainspark-cs.web5.solutionset.com/proxy.php?callback=?", param);
    }
});

PHP Proxy

define ('HOSTNAME', 'http://now.eloqua.com/e/f2.aspx');
$session = curl_init(HOSTNAME);
$postvars = '';
while ($element = current($_GET)) {
    $postvars .= key($_GET).'='.$element.'&';
    next($_GET);
}
curl_setopt ($session, CURLOPT_POST, true);
curl_setopt ($session, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $postvars);
curl_setopt($session, CURLOPT_HEADER, false);
curl_setopt($session, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
$json = curl_exec($session);
header("Content-Type: text");
echo $_GET['callback'] .'('. json_encode(array('json'=>  $json )).')';
curl_close($session);

The success message from the remote server is then put into a JSONP format by the proxy server and sent back to the broswer.

This allowed me to make cross-domain AJAX POST requests and submit the user’s responses in the correct manner. Though there are a few drawbacks to using JSONP like the lack of error handling and possible security vulnerabilities it certainly has its advantages. Fortunately using jQuery’s native JSONP support and a proxy allows for the data to be double checked for a successful submission to the final remote server thus adding additional security and error handling that would not have been feasible if a proxy was not utilized.

With the ability to submit data across domains easily, creating dynamic and content rich online widgets is easier than ever.  For addition information on JSONP and its inclusion in jQuery I suggest reading IBM’s “Cross-domain communication with JSONP” (http://snipurl.com/hgjot)

KFC wanted America to focus off the fryers and sample their new grilled chicken. An “Unthink KFC” TV campaign aired. Restaurant signage was hung. And then they brought in Oprah (aka the grand hen of promotion) to announce this finger-licking offer: Two free pieces of grilled chicken, two sides and a biscuit to anyone who downloaded a coupon within a two-day period. Emily Bryson York of Ad Age gives a chronology of how this offer spun out of control:

KFC’s offer sent the chain skyrocketing to the No. 1 topic on Twitter. By Wednesday, blogs began reporting “riots” at New York City KFCs. On Thursday, local news crews interviewed fuming customers getting turned away in other markets, including Chicago. Consumers complained about rude service, and media complained about a PR team that seemed asleep at the wheel. By Friday, the day after KFC pulled the promotion.

Big giveaways don’t always crash and burn. Denny’s announced a free Grand Slam breakfast promotion during the Super Bowl and came out big winners. Bryson York chatted with John Dillon, VP of marketing at Denny’s, about the right way to hold an orderly giveaway:

Communicate, communicate and then communicate some more: Denny’s executives toured the restaurant system, talking to franchisees and staff about the coming promotion. They also held town-hall meetings to share ideas.

Energize the staff. Happy front-of-the-house folks are a critical component to a positive guest experience. Denny’s goosed enthusiasm among wait staff with its first-ever Super Bowl ad.

Keep it simple. Make the offer clear and easy to understand. Hold it on one day and within a set timeframe. And make sure it supports an overarching brand strategy.

Pray for the best but prepare for the worst. “We did as much modeling as we could to plan through different scenarios,” Mr. Dillon said. “But at the end of the day, you don’t know what to expect.” Before the event, Denny’s shipped thousands of rain-check coupons to its restaurants, just in case.

Don’t hurry, or don’t do it. Denny’s planned its giveaway months in advance, and it took different forms throughout the process. But the planning paid off. “We heard of a couple of restaurants that ran out of syrup,” he said.

Giveaways are an excellent way to get buzz and foot traffic. Just be prepared for both.

KFC wanted America to focus off the fryers and sample their new grilled chicken. An “Unthink KFC” TV campaign aired. Restaurant signage was hung. And then they brought in Oprah (aka the grand hen of promotion) to announce this finger-licking offer: Two free pieces of grilled chicken, two sides and a biscuit to anyone who downloaded a coupon within a two-day period. Emily Bryson York of Ad Age gives a chronology of how this offer spun out of control:

KFC’s offer sent the chain skyrocketing to the No. 1 topic on Twitter. By Wednesday, blogs began reporting “riots” at New York City KFCs. On Thursday, local news crews interviewed fuming customers getting turned away in other markets, including Chicago. Consumers complained about rude service, and media complained about a PR team that seemed asleep at the wheel. By Friday, the day after KFC pulled the promotion.

Big giveaways don’t always crash and burn. Denny’s announced a free Grand Slam breakfast promotion during the Super Bowl and came out big winners. Bryson York chatted with John Dillon, VP of marketing at Denny’s, about the right way to hold an orderly giveaway:

Communicate, communicate and then communicate some more: Denny’s executives toured the restaurant system, talking to franchisees and staff about the coming promotion. They also held town-hall meetings to share ideas.

Energize the staff. Happy front-of-the-house folks are a critical component to a positive guest experience. Denny’s goosed enthusiasm among wait staff with its first-ever Super Bowl ad.

Keep it simple. Make the offer clear and easy to understand. Hold it on one day and within a set timeframe. And make sure it supports an overarching brand strategy.

Pray for the best but prepare for the worst. “We did as much modeling as we could to plan through different scenarios,” Mr. Dillon said. “But at the end of the day, you don’t know what to expect.” Before the event, Denny’s shipped thousands of rain-check coupons to its restaurants, just in case.

Don’t hurry, or don’t do it. Denny’s planned its giveaway months in advance, and it took different forms throughout the process. But the planning paid off. “We heard of a couple of restaurants that ran out of syrup,” he said.

Giveaways are an excellent way to get buzz and foot traffic. Just be prepared for both.