Multivariate Testing with SiteSpect, the Magic Black Box

Multivariate Testing with the magic black box: PROS

• It doesn't require page tagging
• It can be set up "behind the firewall" in your data center
• It can also be used as a hosted service
• Implementation consulting is available directly from SiteSpect
• It starts at a lower price point than many other enterprise-grade options

The interface for setting up and reporting on basic experiments is also about on par with everyone else's. It's when you try to go beyond the basics that can be done with any multivariate testing system, including the free ones, that things start getting more complicated.

Multivariate Testing with the magic black box: CONS

If you've seen other digital do-it-all magic boxes, you know there are some catches. Whether the catches with this one are showstoppers for you will depend on how you want to integrate Multivariate Testing and Targeting into the way you do business.

• If you want to do anything than other basic "content slot" tests, such as run multivariate tests on dynamic elements, you'll need to develop and debug regular expressions. This means a tech resource will need to be in the middle of the setup of each test, either your own or the vendor's hourly consultants
• The hosted configuration requires you to re-route your web domains, sending your traffic on a detour through the vendor's data center
• Using SiteSpect "behind the firewall" requires installation and management of hardware in your data center, creating a single point of failure
• Load balancing and session management is, as they say, non-trivial.

  For example, let's say you arrive at the site and the load balancer assigns you to magic box #1. On your next click, the load balancer assigns you to magic box #3. Magic box #3 doesn't know you so it gives you yet another version of the page and so on.

  You can "peg" visitors to the first magic box they hit, but now your load balancing and failover isn't doing either of those things.

  All load balancing and failover is handled automatically by the tag-based vendors.

• It only supports limited experimental design options (full factorial and Taguchi)
• They're all about e-commerce sites
• SiteSpect is a small private company with no financial transparency

YouTube’s Show & Tell Site For Marketers Thu, Jul 22, 2010 (2 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5) 7 Comments

I’ve just been sent a link to what I believe is an almost undiscovered land within YouTube, well, by undiscovered I mean I’ve never seen it (have you guys??) and for an official YouTube run channel, it’s clearly almost non existent with only 60,000 views since going live back in December 2009.

This is home to the the best creative marketing examples on YouTube and shows everything from viral videos through to annotations and brand channels.  The official channel has some of the biggest viral hits complete with case studies, agency comments and client feedback.

There is some great content in here, and some completely missing, work like the Samsung 3D TV Game On YouTube misses out while Old Spice is of course in there. So who’s actually seen the YouTube show & tell site before or have I been hiding under a rock for the last 6 months? I’m hoping they will update it more often and back date with some of the great campaigns they’ve missed! Click here to check out the YouTube show & tell site. (thanks Stevo!)

Show and Tell is a good thing.

Starbucks Social Strategy Keynote Mon, Jul 26, 2010 (8 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5) 11 Comments

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Hello there! If you are new here, you might want to subscribe to the RSS feed or my daily buzz emails for updates!

If you are interested in Digital & Social Strategy you’ll want to bookmark 25mins to watch this video (or flip through the Slideshare pres below), it’s the keynote presentation by Alexandra Wheeler (Digital Director of Starbucks) that opened the recent Social Media Influence 2010 conference in London. And for those of you who don’t know, Starbucks was the first consumer brand to reach 10 Million fans on Facebook… you thought it was coke right?

Starbucks are arguably the worlds leading social marketers having been ranked #1 in online engagement, #1 on Facebook and the #1 Tweeted brand (until OldSpice came along I’d say!), this presentation by Alexandra provides insights on how Starbucks paved their way through social and the creative opportunities that it brings through empowering fans and helping the global community. One of the key points I pulled out of this presentation is around the importance of the content surrounding the conversation, lots of people preach it’s all about the conversation, but let’s not forget that being able to back that up with tailored, meaningful or fun content is what helps to complete the experience…

Great information

Two nights ago, I was a Vancouver Tweetup to network

with local Twitter users. There I met Anthony Caridi of KasuFunding.com. Anthony had a great vision. His goal was to run an online social media campaign to raise funding for the Make a Wish Foundation.

Make a Wish is a great organization that grants a child’s wish every 40 minutes. Most of these children are very ill and many are suffering from life threatening illnesses. Their stories are both heart warming and gut wrenching at the same time (read some recent wishes here). Being a parent myself, Make a Wish is a charity close to my heart.

I’ve started the ball rolling with a $20 donation. I ask you to do the same and use your social network to spread the word. The goal is not to have a few big companies cut big checks. The goal is for all of us just to donate $20 and invite a friend. Through the power of our online social networks, blogs and Twitter accounts we hope to prove that a whole bunch of little contributions by a large community can make a huge difference. Click through below to learn more:

Great example of how a bunch of little things can add up to a lot

Posted 11 June 2010 17:06pm by Meghan Keane with 1 comment

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OPEN Forum, American Express's community platform for small businesses, has been widely praised. The site focuses on spreading news and information among small business owners, even if they're not American Express customers. This year, the company is working on more initiatives that go "beyond payments."

I caught up with AmEx SVP Mary Ann Reilly to talk about the company's 2010 plans and how digital and mobile is changing the way AmEx does business.

OPEN Forum doesn't have a clear ROI directive. Is that going to change any time soon?
OPEN Forum started — in its 1.0 iteration — as a concept to bring live events online. What we learned was that the cocktail party before the actual event was actually more worthwhile for people. We constantly heard from users, "You have this large base of small business owners I'd like to do business with." There was a desire and need for small businesses to have content and education and they wanted to be connected to other small business owners. We are measuring our goals, but our goals are about engagement. We're not focused on the number of unique visitors and the time spent on the site yet. We'd run into trouble if we tried to measure right away.

What have you learned from OPEN Forum?
What came out of Open Forum have been a lot of interesting learnings. Small businesses gave us permission to go beyond payments and have been very vocal about telling us what they need. They have been saying "We think you could help us with this." 

We want to continue to help small businesses grow, instead of trying to push products and drive profitability. We have such a large marketshare in small businesses, but the economy has a big impact on the payment space. If we can grow the pie, we grow. We're helping our businesses grow their business. We're also helping them drive revenue and improve cash flow, which diversifies revenue for us beyond payments.

What are some of the learning you've found?
One issue is that people wanted to get paid faster, and we've been able to deep dive into that space for small businesses with AcceptPay. Most small businesses are still using paper invoicing, which we saw as a big opportunity. We went out there with a beta for friends and family for feedback early on.

Another thing we learned is that it's not about educating on the product - it's about educating the customer. We had created how to videos for AcceptPay. It worked you through the product and how it worked. But the feedback we got from customers is that they wanted to know what it was going to do for them. We didn't have the customer impact in there. So we created a new video (available here), of a customer interacting with the product and what it's done for his business.

What is AmEx doing in the mobile space?
We think mobile is very important. For us, it's the next shiny object. We have a desire to move quickly. We're talking with our small business customers on what they want in the space. They have a unique set of needs compared to individual consumers.

We're creating an AcceptPay app, because we've heard from customers that there's a need for getting paid faster. They want to know what payments they receive that day and send out invoices on the go. That's launching shortly, and we're going to continue to get feedback from customers. We want to move forward in the mobile space in a way where we are creating similar experiences for things that customers have said they need access to on the go. We want to create those right tools for where they are when they need them.

What about something like Jack Dorsey's Square? Do you see new mobile payment companies as competitors?

Companies like Veriphone and Square are doing interesting things. I don't think it's  <!-- /* Font Definitions */ @font-face {font-family:Times; panose-1:2 0 5 0 0 0 0 0 0 0; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:3 0 0 0 1 0;} @font-face {font-family:Cambria; panose-1:2 4 5 3 5 4 6 3 2 4; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:3 0 0 0 1 0;} /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-parent:""; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:Cambria; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} @page Section1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.Section1 {page:Section1;} --> necessarily a winner take all thing. I think Square is a great concept and we'll see where it go. Especially in the small business space, mobile has a lot of potential. Imagine being a plumber and being able to get paid immediately. Also, as an AmEx customer, getting your points is critical to your business. They're building a point bank to help to fund their businesses. For small biz owners to be able to buy supplies at point of sale where people don't normally accept credit cards, that's a big deal.

But it's a space that's very open. I don't think we have to be creating our own technology. There will definitely be partnerships in mobile. For instance, PayPal accepts AmEx. By virtue of that they are a partner, but they're also a competitor. There's something about that that makes it an interesting model.

What are some products outside of cards and payments that we might see from AmEx soon?
AccetPay is a big one for us right now. Another tool is InsuranceEdge, which is really the first of its kind. It's a platform that allows small business owners to search and compare different insurance quotes in real time. This is the type of thing that is typically done through an agent and there's not a lot of transparency.

We have another product coming that will help small businesses in the marketing space very shortly. I won't say anything more, but watch for it, we're very excited for that.

Good article and concept.

Social Media Marketing Best Practices

By Jeffrey Hayzlett
Chief Marketing Officer at Kodak

Why do I take the time to use social media like Twitter and Facebook? Because in today's media landscape, it's vitally important to be where our customers are. Kodak has always embraced this marketing philosophy, and today that means being active in social media.

The exciting thing about social media is it offers the opportunity to engage in two-way conversations with customers. What better way to know how to best serve your customers than to hear directly from them? Social media has enabled new ways to initiate conversations, respond to feedback, and maintain an active dialogue.

Kodak has pages on Facebook as well as three of our own blogs. The blogs start conversations and have a direct, positive impact on Kodak’s search engine rankings. Kodak also receives more than 11,000 mentions in other authors' blogs every month in the form of product reviews, opinions on products, rants, fan mail, and more. We directly participate in many of these conversations to ensure our customers know we're listening and to share answers and additional insights.

Podcasts produced at Kodak are available for free download at iTunes.com, as well as Kodak.com and YouTube.com. We even have our own YouTube site where we post videos about our products, commercials, and events.

Twitter has recently become an important part of Kodak's social media activity. We have seen very tangible returns from using Twitter, including media coverage, sales leads, increased consideration, and direct product purchases.

If you are thinking of getting started in social media, first give some thought to these basic questions:

• Why do I want to participate in social media?
• How can social media improve my business?
• How will social media be incorporated into my overall customer experience?

Once you have solid business answers to these questions, and you decide to engage, I suggest you follow these basic steps to best practices:

• Set up profiles on Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter social networks. Use your own name instead of an obscure nickname that can be construed as spam. Keep it short, and add a profile photo when you set up your accounts. Nothing says "newbie" more than having a blank face inserted by Twitter or Facebook.
• Start listening with applications like TweetDeck or Seesmic. You can watch conversations on topics you care about, including your company name, competitors, etc. If you see people's "tweets" you find of interest, click on their profiles and see what other tweets they are making. If you find them engaging, "follow" them. This will be the start of building your network.
• Be real. People who come on too strong with marketing messages or misrepresent themselves are not well liked. Think of the conversations you have in your daily life. What's interesting? Boring? Overbearing? Genuine? Above all, be social.
• Add value. People will want to know about your products and services, but put them into context. Share your observations on the industry, trends you are noticing, and links to things you like and dislike.

Given the reach of the Internet, it's important that when you use these various media, you follow some basic procedures to protect yourself and your company. At Kodak, we developed a social media policy for our employees to follow. We also developed a social media guide for our partners and customers. It includes our social media policy that can be adapted for your own company, tips from Jenny Cisney (our chief blogger), and places to find us online.

I strongly believe that participation in social media can strengthen your brand and your connection with customers and key influencers. Networking platforms like Facebook and Twitter, news-sharing and bookmarking sites like Delicious and Digg, and photo- and video-sharing sites like Flickr and YouTube can be exciting new avenues for communication in your professional and personal lives. Used responsibly, they provide an effective way to keep abreast of new trends and topics and to share information and perspectives.

It's well worth the time invested.

Great .pdf at the bottom of the article.

The three most important elements when starting out with marketing on the internet is to 1) define success and 2) know your target audience 3) listen to your customers.

Once you form a foundation for your web strategy, the execution becomes easy. The goal is to constantly test and use different campaigns from Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to email marketing in an attempt to achieve business objectives.

I often hear business owners talk about wanting to increase sales and generate leads but fail to define what success look like to them. In order to define success, you must first realize your current state of business from an analytical and financial perspective. Do you have any existing data to help you take the pulse of the business? What kind of financial (Return on Investment or ROI) and non-financial (business impact) objectives and metrics are available?

Without real knowledge of your true costs, you run into a potential misconception of what your real ROI is. Understand that ROI includes not just how much you pay for web hosting or your overheads, but also other costs associated with running the entire campaign such as, cost of time working on the campaign (broken down into average hourly wages), amount of labor burden costs (cost consisting of all indirect labor costs incidental to operations), SEO costs (monthly or accordance with your budget), email marketing costs, technology infrastructure costs etc.

Understand Your Costs and Metric

Once you have a true total cost of you running the campaign, you can run those numbers against your traffic and sales conversion rates to identify your ROI.  Here is an example of how you can create a simple metric chart:

Assuming I get those numbers, with a quick glance the data shows that by spending 3 times amount of money on this campaign, the result returns 8 times more sales with the cost per sale reduced by more than half. This is a high level overview to help you define your goals for each metrics. Again, watching your real cost of the campaign will bring clarity to your true profitability.

Using Google and Twitter to Identify Your Customers Online

Once you define your goals and know what success looks like, the next step is defining your customer profiles then search for them online. For starters, you should at least know the age demographic, income level or occupation. After you know who your typical customer looks like, you need to find where they are online and what they’re talking about to get a step closer to engage them.

This is where you should be looking at using some free online tools to help you gather useful data.

Let’s look at using a combination of Google and Twitter to find your customers. As an example, I’m going to assume that you own a local retail apparel store and you want to drive traffic to your store.

First you should come up with a list of keywords that people are searching on Google.  The simple and fast way to do it is to use Google Keyword Tool and Google Insights for Search.

Google Keyword Tool

Google offers the keyword tool so you can search and find what popular keywords people are searching around your products or services.  I’ve used the keyword “evening wear” and as you can see, it returned all relevant keywords and the volume of searches for the past 12 months.  Feel free to make adjustments to show the data in different ways (I’ve sorted the list by Local search volume) and how much people are paying for those keywords.

There is no doubt that “evening wear” is the most popular keyword locally. This indicates that most people simply put in the keyword “evening wear” so if you want to target a narrower range like “evening wear tops” you will have less competition for the same keyword.  Click on Add and you can create your list (will be displayed on the right) and when you’re done adding, you can export the entire list in text or excel format.

Google Insights for Search

Once you have a basic list of keywords, head over to Google Insights for Search to compare search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, time frames and properties.

Now you can take popular keywords you’ve found and insert them into the search term area, and you’ll find more information about your keywords. Unquestionably the keyword “dress” out paced all other keywords I’ve insert (evening wear, women’s shoes, handbags).  And you’ll also find that New York is the place where people search most for dresses.

Play around with the different settings and you can also export the results in excel format.

Google Wonder Wheel

The Google Wonder Wheel was introduced to simplify and arrange search results. It’s basically a pre-defined mind mapper which helps the user get all the related search results in a wheel shaped like display.

Simply go to Google.com and input your search term, click on the “show options” link and find the “Wonder Wheel” link on the bottom left to get your search terms mind-mapped.

Once you get to the Wonder wheel, you can explore around the related keywords and it’ll expand into another wheel.

I went ahead and clicked on the “discount evening wear” and the most popular and relevant keywords associated with discount evening wear shows up. This is another great way to narrow your search term down to what your customers may be looking for in order to personalize the message.

So if I’m running a promotional campaign or sending out newsletters, I could use content such as:

“Discount designer evening gowns perfect for cocktail parties or formal events!”

Or combine with my findings from Google Insights,

“A night out in New York? Checkout our discounted cocktail dresses from BCBG! Available in plus size directly from Macy’s.”

Combining Google with Twitter

Since Google have no problem indexing Twitter’s data, you can now use Twitter’s search engine to find you target customers using keywords as well as conversational phrases.

First go to search.twitter.com and click on advanced search and start looking for conversations phrases around what people would say when they’re looking for clothing. The example below shows a search for people saying “what should I wear” within 100 miles of Los Angeles, CA.  You can also leave it blank for broad search to view everything around the world, perhaps you have an online store so tracking both local, geo-targeted search and broad search make sense.

As you can see, the search result would return a stream of conversations with people saying “what should I wear.” You can take a moment to scan over the conversation, perhaps follow those individuals, checkout their profile and “listen” in on their dialogues.

However, you don’t want to spend all day reading people’s conversations, and searching for the same phrases every time.  This is where Google Reader comes in handy. Google Reader is a great tool to aggregate all your RSS feeds into one place and it also has some analytical capabilities.

On your Twitter search results page, find the RSS feed icon on the top right hand corner, right click on it and copy the link address of the feed.

Then open your Google Reader and click on “Add a subscriber” and paste the link into your Google Reader to start building a collection of feeds around your target search phrases.

Once you’ve added the feed into your Google Reader, wait for a couple of days for the data to aggregate before you can start analyzing it (ideally you want to have at least 30 days).  You can start checking the data by clicking on “show detail” on the top right hand corner.

You’ll see data for the last 30 days, time of day and day of the week.  Depending on how you look at it, you can see which day of the month people start talking about your search term.  Maybe it’s the end of the month, everyone got paid so a discussion about shopping starts; or perhaps everyone goes out on Thursday evening in LA so on Wednesday people are talking about what to wear for Thursday.  The time of the day is a good area to gauge when these people log on to Twitter to talk about your search term.

Another good use of these data is to figure out when to send out your coupons, promotions and newsletters so your message arrives when people’s minds are on your product or service.  Remember, personalized messages delivered at the right place at the right time are key ingredients to conversion.

Search Twitter Profile Using Google

Another method to find your target customer on Twitter is to search through people’s Twitter profile using Google.  Go to Google.com click on advanced search and put in

intext:”bio*love shopping”

and you’ll find a list of people that indicated they “love shopping” in their bio on Twitter.

Basically intext:”bio*xxxx” tells Google to search for text within the Twitter bio section. So replace xxxx with whatever you like that matches to what your target customer may put in their Twitter bio.

Now that you know from your Google Insights that shoppers in New York have the most interest in searching for dresses, how do we target people who loves to shop and lives in New York?

This is what you put in

intext:bio-*-love shopping intext:location-*-NY

Notice that there is a minor tweak to the search input. You will need to add – in between the * mark.  So intext:bio-*-xxxx intext:location-*-xx where the xx is now searches within that state.  Give it a try and you’ll find extremely targeted individuals

I don’t usually do detailed step by step posts, but I had repeatedly explain this to many business owners and marketers so I  thought to share some of my tips to help you find your customers online.  I hope you find the above information helpful and it’s a very useful way to build your customer segmentation list.

Amazing step by step, can't wait to try this.

Facebook More Popular Than Google? Let the Ad Wars Begin

BY Kit EatonToday

According to the latest Hitwise analysis, Google's lost its crown as the most-visited Web site in the U.S. last week. The new king of Web site traffic is, of course, Facebook. In the future, technohistorians may marvel at this event.

During the Winter holidays there were a few momentary spikes in traffic which placed Facebook on the top, but if you check out the graph of the long term trend shown above, you can see Facebook's meteoric rise is now on target to meet or beat Google. And if that curve continues on its trajectory, which it may well do for a while (its market share is 185% up over the same week in 2009, for example,) Facebook will become number one by a huge margin, versus the tiddly little 0.04% separation it currently has above Google's 7.03% share of average weekly market share.

Over at Inside Facebook they're pondering if the early-February revamp of Facebook's user landing page is partly responsible, since it emphasizes Top Stories over a real-time stream--which is something users may prefer. But if you peep at Facebook's market share curve, it's not a smooth linear climb, and the gentle oscillations in increasing market share are more probably representative of slight changes in Facebook's popularity or appearance in broadcast media. Besides, it seems that Facebook continues to attract more members, and sees those members interacting more with the site, pretty much no matter what it does to redesign its services.

What can we learn from the fact that people are visiting facebook more than Google? Is Google's core business as a search engine at risk? No. Google search is a tool, and one that's getting smarter day by day--its future business is guaranteed. Facebook does have a search ability inside the site, but what's really driving users to Facebook in droves is that it's a genuine phenomenon. Social networking is still riding that "oh you should try this, it's new and cool" wave and the site itself has reached a critical mass of user numbers whereby if you want to contact almost anyone, odds are that they have a Facebook account.

This doesn't mean that there aren't serious implications though. Facebook is now in a position to leverage those user visits to seize control of the online ad-placement business from Google--advertisers will begin to do the math and work out which site will get their ads in front of more eyeballs. And while Web 2.0 has been with us for a while, the fact that more people are visiting Facebook than Google indicates that this interactive revolution has really changed U.S. Netizen's online habits.

Can the trend continue?

Truly remarkable the power of social media and the internet.

O’Reilly Webcast Social Business: Taking “Social” to the Core of Your Organization

Categories: Social MediaPosted on January 29th, 2010

A few weeks ago, I was invited to join a discussion with Joshua-Michéle Ross (O’Reilly ), Stowe Boyd, thought leader, and Peter Kim (former colleague at Forrester, now at Dachis Group) on the topic of social business.  Listen in, as there’s not really a lot of content on the slides to focus on, while you go about your work, driving, or workout.

Good discussion, what are the conclusions for your business other than trying?