Ross, Brand, and Sachs

I can't see what all the fuss is about.  I just listened to the YouTube recital of the banal radio show.  All I heard was a pair of "drunken teenagers" having a giggle to each other.  The audience wasn't even a part of it.

Yes, the messages were not nice, but Brand should have been fired for a bad radio show, and Ross should have been fired along with him.  This is public service broadcasting.  Neither were providing one.

Come to that the team in the gallery should have yanked them off the air at once, but were probably afraid of the great stars, or had the mixed fortune to work for a production company owned by one of them.

Pity about Ross.  His weekend show was gently amusing, but he is not essential to the continuance of life as we know it.  Brand is just bizarre.

Norton PC Checkup - Adobe, you SUCK

Every time Shockwave Flash has an update, Adobe shoves Norton PC Checkup onto my machine.

I don't want it, I hate Symantec and Norton, I don't allow their trash near my machines and Adobe just raped me again with it.

This Norton PC Checkup installs itself, unannounced.  So it must be a virus!  Great.  Norton is now a virus peddler.

Ok Adobe, Symantec, listen up:  Shoving your software onto our machines is vandalism.  We don't want it, you cost us time and effort to get rid of the crap and you do your reputation no good at all.

If you actually run this can of worms all that happens is that it runs to end of job and then tries to sell you some Norton crap.  Spam Spam Spam!

Now I have to go and delete your goddamned software again.

Anyone also fed up with this invasion can leave a bug report at http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/contact.html?showtab=tab_feedback

How Porn Sites Lead the Way in Web Marketing

Now that I have your attention you need to see that I am deadly serious.  Porn sites do lead the way in web marketing.  And, for a great many years, porn sites were the only profitable e-Commerce sites anywhere at all (source: Gartner).  In the current terrifying financial climate, with jobs at daily risk because news media have insisted that we have a recession, marketers have to get it right more and more.

And the porn sites give us all a major lesson, a lesson that just cannot be ignored.  The message has to get all the way into the boardroom.

Let's cut to the chase.

Product Positioning

How is your product positioning carried forward into your web presence?

The porn industry knows how to do it.  They segment very carefully into gay, lesbian, bisexual, transsexual, and heterosexual.  They sub segment into various special interests.  You're going to have to use your own imagination here.  This is meant to be office friendly!

Their segmentation is simple, and they position sites well within that segmentation.  There is no point in putting a tubby ladies site where slim gentlemen are expected, and no point in misleading domain names either.  Hot Sluts are found at, unsurprisingly, 'hotsluts'.  There are gay gentlemen at 'hotmale' (interestingly close to 'hotmail', that one!).

What you see is what you get.

How does your web offering compare?  Have you even considered a domain name that reflects your product or service, or are you labouring under the misapprehension that 'Bloggins-and-co' is going to float anyone's boat?

User Experience

Go and look at your web site, especially at landing pages.  Has someone gone to town with an ever so exciting self absorbed spiel about your company, product or service?  Or does the page drag you easily in to the site as a willing conscript?

Have you dared look at a porn site yet?  I don't care about your sensibilities, whether you find it disgusting, whether you love it, whether you think it should be banned.  This is research, so get over it.

Broadly there are two types.  Yes, I've looked.  Get over that, too!  

One type has thumbnail galleries that either lead to more galleries, or to useful sites.  I'm really not talking about the thumbnail gallery sites, though you may have to click a lot of those to get to the type I want you to see.

The other type, the one I'm aiming you at, is the site that is selling its wares directly from the front page.  There's a strong marketing message there.  "Come in and we have your fantasy!" And they reinforce it with free samples.  Yes, there really is something for nothing.  And, if you like what you see, you can give them your credit card details and get much more inside.

Don't give them your credit card details.  Do have some sense, especially from your office computer!  Some of these sites just want to get hold of your credit card and spend your money in fraudulent transactions, but loads are genuine.  And why not?  It's good, profitable business.

Now, compare what you've seen to your web site, to your landing page, to your online shop.

Does yours do what the porn industry does?  Do you present your wares in a truly appealing manner?  Have you seriously thought about driving people to the outcome you want like the porn industry does?

Make no mistake, someone who needs land drainage equipment to drain a wet, muddy and unproductive field has a higher need to buy that a visitor to a porn site, but you still have to excite them!  Why buy your drains?  Can they have a sample?  Do you have any videos of installation, before and after pictures of mud versus productive crops?  Is there a newsletter they can sign up to?

Call to Action

Porn is pretty simple, but, oddly, the call to action is diluted by the free sample.  If we're analytical we know that a porn site can be satisfying without a purchase, without the call to action being followed.  But sex therapists tell us that the same porn pictures and videos lose their impact over a short period, and thus the seeker will want more.  And, if the sample is liked, they will buy more from that site.

Your call to action isn't diluted in that way.  Land drainage is not, of itself, fulfilling in the same way that porn samples are! But look at the strength of the call to action on the porn site.  Yours has to be just as strong.  You have to show why your land drains are not only exciting, but essential, and why they have to be bought (or a survey ordered) now, this minute.

So study the pornographers and see what they do.  What pulls their customers in?

So is there a problem?

Well, yes.  Porn is inherently sexist, and viewed as socially unacceptable by the supposed moral majority.  Checking this out in the office and bringing it sensibly to the next marketing meeting is quite an interesting challenge.  

Marketing teams have a healthy mix of men and women and all sexual orientations and preferences because, although the sales team would disagree, the marketing team is human! But you can't, as a chap, show a chappess a porn site (or vice versa) without being accused of sexual harassment.  Nor can you instruct a colleague to go and look at a porn site without being laid open to an accusation of sexual harassment.  You can't do it easily at work because there is a porn filtration and logging policy, and you can't do it at home because your other half will probably not approve!

At least you've got an excuse now!  "I was reading this very interesting blog.  It told me about porn sites and marketing."  And what you do is you show them this blog, not the porn site.

And then you look at optimising the experience

Google is the Downfall of Language

"Yes, it's stylistically better and has content. but mine has better SERPs"

Open rates, Click Thru Rates, do we care?

I've been prompted to think about this by an excellent article by Le'Nise Brothers in iMedia Connection.  I like her thinking, and I said so in the comment under the article.

We indulge ourselves in meaningless statistics when we send email campaigns.  What do we really need to know:

• Bounce ratio
• Whether the Call to Action was strong enough
• Whether the Landing Page followed through and created a positive outcome
• Positive Outcome ratio

That is it, pretty much.  There are fine and fancy statistics we can bandy about, but the basics come down to Return on Investment.

So why do we care about them?  Let's look, in turn:

Bounce Ratio

I care because I care passionately about the cleanliness of my database.  Too high a bounce ratio  means I am likely to be flagged as a spammer at some point.  Since my database is meant to be permisisoned, 100% permissioned, bounces are things I am allergic to.  Ok, we do know that we wait for a couple of bounces before we take action, but, at that point, action we take, and we kill the records that are bouncing.

The logic?

If it ain't getting through it's pointless to have it on file.

Call to Action Strength

The only way I know of measuring this, apart from using focus groups, is by looking at Click Thru Rates, CTR.  The only reason I care at all about CTR is to measure the strength of the call to action.  I don't care about Open Rates, they're false anyway, and, in the global scheme of things, CTR is pointless, but it shows what happens when we tweak.

We do tweak?  Please tell me that we tweak?  With Permission based Marketing we have the ability to do many small, rifle targetted, specialist campaigns.  And we can tweak.

So run a sample of say 500 names.  Check CTR.  Tweak.  Check CTR.  Re-tweak, etc.

CTR goes up, the tweak worked, down it failed.

Positive Outcome

We only perform marketing to get a positive outcome.  My favourite is a sale!  And sales happen either with a direct call to action or an indirect one such as brand building.

You can measure both.  You can measure both against the various different tweaks in a campaign.  CTR has a place in this, but a back office place.  If you get a lower CTR but a better set of outcomes, a paradox, but not an impossibility, guess what?  

Yup, you run with the campaign that produces the better set of outcomes.  CTR goes out of the window.

A positive outcome comes from a landing page that reflects and enhances your Call to Action. Remember, you lose 20% of folk with every click.  They've clicked once to get to your landing page.  At least 20% of those are going to abandon right now.

Test different Landing pages.  Measure the results.  Tweak and tweak again.

Don't worry about fancy stats that show length of time spent on the page, they probably had an incoming call!  Worry about path taken to reach the outcome.  It needs to be short, sharp, simple, and inviting.  And, if you've no idea how to do that, look at a porn site.  Seriously!

If you can't work out a good landing page after you've visited a selection of porn sites, frankly marketing is not for you.

Do I have a conclusion here?

Yes.  Good marketing is not about good ideas.  Good marketing is about processes and process control.  Good marketing is about constant feedback loops to measure the success of a campaign.  And, in today's hair raising market conditions, good marketing is the precise and rifle targetted campaign that hits my hot button and excites me about your offer.  We're back to porn sites, then!

Alistair Darling and Gordon Brown follow Adolf Hitler to Economic Neverland

It's official.  The UK is to build its way out of recession in the same way that Hitler built Germany to fake prosperity in the 1930s.  Adolf built autobahns.  Dear Darling and Gay Gordon are to build major public projects.

Stand by for inflation like we have never seen before!

Whatever happened to "holding your nerve"?

How we market ourselves

For the first time in quite a while I've logged in to Friends Reunited.  They have a wonderful new facility (shows how long ago I last logged in!) that suggests people you might know.  And it suggested quite a few people I might know.  

For reasons that are obscure to me it suggested I might know the nephew of my best man from 29 years ago who is my son's godfather, and who has vanished off the face of our part of the earth. Luckily I recognised his surname because I've never met him, so I've asked what happend to his uncle.  There were a good few people I've never heard of and have no understanding of why they were presented to me, but that's Ok too.

But one was a surprise.  And that leads me to the traces we leave behind us, our personal marketing profile, and the way we can be tracked down online even when we never expected it.  I make no secret of who I am, nor does he.  My name is relatively unusual, and so is his.  Search for me and, because I'm active online, you find loads of results.  Search for him, and, because he is not active online, you get a very few results.

The surprise?  That was because of the nature of Fiends Reuntied.  They've reunited loads of school sweethearts, allegedly broken up loads of marriages because of it, and this is similar to that.  No, we were not juvenile gay lovers.  Instead it was quite the reverse!  This august gentleman today was yesterday's unpleasant bullying little shit.  He made my life a misery daily between the age of 7 and 13 because he found me an easy target.

I'm not about to turn up on his doorstep to demand satisfaction!  I've sent him a message to say hello.  Heck, he probably grew out of it!  But the point I think I'm making is that we do not always know the results of marketing.  His marketing himself on FR will not have produced the result he anticipated.  He is now "in touch" if he chooses to be, with a man who is not the little kid he used to beat up.  And he is not the kid that used to do the beating.  But his name reminded me of it, for a brief moment with great discomfort.

Symantec gets annoying - SPAM Installation is bad marketing

I took a very conscious decision never to allow Symantec or Norton (same thing!) products near my computers again.  So why, when I updated Flash, why did a Norton product arrive?

I've run the Norton Removal Tool yet again.

This is not good marketing.  And it arrived without my consent.  I view this as a SPAM installation.

When Customer Service is all for the vendor's benefit, Marketing goes out of the window

I am a percussionist.

Look, less of the jokes like "Did you hear about the drummer who got locked into the bass player's car?"  It isn't time for Drummer Jokes.  This drum I'm beating is about Customer Service, and how good marketing is wiped out by bad customer service.

I'm making quite a collection of idiotic customer service.  Elizabeth Glagowski gives us a good example.  I've lost count of the web hosts I've migrated through over the years.  I'm collating my experience with Western Digital at present over the really useless support they're giving me on my MyBookWorld backup drives.  That will come here another day.

But Amazon, at present, takes the gold star of useless support tales.

I can't quote the emails because they're in German.  Well, I could, but I won't.

Amazon support is by web form.  You fill it out, they email you an answer of sorts, and you can then not reply to the email because, wonder of wonders, there is no way to get your reply read.  At least Western Digital are better than that!

With Amazon you have to go back to the web form and fill out another question.  Continuity of conversation is hard, almost impossible.  But when asked why, this is what they say (translated and paraphrased):

We used to have an email reply service, but we had to turn this off due to high volumes of SPAM

That is, of course, ridiculous.  Their system can easily be set to disregard any email that does not have a ticket number.  With Amazon it seems that Customer Service is subservient to expediency.

If you are going to go into business, even in what was then a new and unique way, you have to gear up to service the customers, and to do that in new and unique ways.  Turning off a system because someone was intimidated by levels of SPAM is not good service. 

Banks, Service and the Financial Crisis

Like any sane person, despite knowing intellectually that Gordon "my bottom dentures are too uncomfy for words" Brown will not let any retail customer lose their savings, I don't trust him nor any other politician.  I've just sold a house preparatory to buying another, so I have rather too big a sum of cash in my bank to feel content with leaving it to chance.

So I'm opening bank accounts to take advantage of the £50,000 savings guarantee that Gordon and his Darling have created.  And my service experience varies.

Abbey, part of Santander:  5 minutes on the phone to open the account.  Minor issues afterwards to actually pay money in, took two branch visits and 5 calls to offshore and heavily accented call centres, but that is now done.  Rating: Almost Excellent.

Lloyds TSB: 45 minutes to open the account.  And the appointment started 10 minutes late. Rating: Poor.

Nationwide: Not a bank, but a Building Society.  10 minutes to open the account and deposit the money.  Rating: Excellent.

Barclays: Things went slightly wrong and the chap who was due to complete the account opening was off sick today, but they got the job dine, though asked me if I'd mind doing some shopping for half an hour while they solved it.  I didn't mind.  They solved it.  rating: Almost excellent.

So I've spread my risk, gained four new banks, two of which I've banked with before and left because of unusually poor service (Lloyds and Abbey), and have wasted a lot of time taking care of something that Gay Gordon and Dear Darling could have done for me by offering 100% deposit guarantees, like Ireland has.

And four new banks have wasted a lot of time, too, because they know that the cash is with them on a very temporary basis until the house purchase goes through.

Is it Legal to Test on Live Data?

This comes up again and again.  When I was a programmer, many years ago, working for the then Police National Computer Unit and coding in Burroughs Extended Algol, we tested systems in a test harness while coding them, and with heavyweight batches of test data during system integration and acceptance trials.  We did not test on live data because we had no need to.  And we had no need to because there was sufficient funding in place to let us create highly complex test data that tried out every nuance of the system.

But commercial systems often test on live data.  And that, frankly, is unlawful unless there is a both Fair Processing Notice at the point of collection of the data that states that the data may also be used for system testing, and also a "purpose" notified in the UK to the UK Information Commissioner that data will be used for testing in addition to all the other uses.

There's an excellent guide here that goes into good detail about this, summarising it as:

To comply with the DPA in the area of application testing and development, the most straight forward solution is to anonymise or de-identify the information. Software products can provide an effective solution to such anonymisation, whilst retaining the integrity and usability of data for the testing and development environment.

In those circumstances where ‘real’ data are used, the quantity of such data should be reduced to the bare minimum needed for application testing. Where testing is to be carried out by a third party supplier, the supplier should be vetted on its security procedures and contractually obliged to ensure that appropriate technical and organisational security measures are in place.

I do not see the need for the first sentence of the  second paragraph.  It's a walk in the park to anonymise data, not just to meet the needs of the law, but to meet the very human needs of anyone accidentally identified because their data escapes into the wild!  Here's a simple example:

Take the table with personally identifying information and sort ONLY the field holding the surname into a->z order.  Now sort ONLY the forename field into z->a order.  Split any email address field at the @ sign and trash the portion before the @.  Take the field with the first line of the address and transpose it by 73%, then sort the town field into a-> z order.  Your data is now anonymous, but with real, ordinary field contents.

If you can use any data record to identify a living individual after that then the file had far too few records in it for testing purposes anyway, and you should have made the data up in the first place.

It's a matter of common sense, isn't it?

Update, 7 October 2009: Wow, almost to the day and this comes up again!

Information Commissioner's Office demands encryption of mobile devices

Really this is very late.  How anyone can think of letting sensitive data escape into the wild because the device was not encrypted when one can buy pre-encrypted external disks, pre-encrypted USB memory sticks etc is beyond me.

When I'm working with clients I make a point of never, not ever, loading their data onto any of my own devices, and also making sure that, unless correct safeguards are in place, their data never leaves their premises in my possession.  Luckily I am not a data management organisation!  I consult on marketing and on privacy.

ComplianceAndPrivacy.Com has picked up the Eversheds e80 article onthe UKIC's demand for encryption.  A small extract says:

Demonstrating the increasing appetite of the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) to take enforcement action, Virgin Media Limited is the latest organisation to be held to account for a breach of the Data Protection Act 1998 (DPA). The breach seems to have occurred earlier this year following the loss of a compact disc that was passed to Virgin Media by Carphone Warehouse. The disc contained personal details of various individuals' interest in opening a Virgin Media Account in a Carphone Warehouse store. 

In this instance, the ICO has not gone straight to issuing an enforcement notice (by contrast to the treatment of the Liberal Democrat Party last week), but has instead obtained a formal undertaking requiring Virgin Media to undertake certain steps to improve its security measures. The breadth of the obligation to use encryption will surprise many organisations.  

Virgin Media is required, with immediate effect, to encrypt all portable or mobile devices that store and transmit personal information. Further, the company is to ensure that any service provider processing personal information on its behalf must also use encryption software and this requirement has to be clearly stated in all contracts. We suspect that in practice not many organisations expressly state this in their contracts. Most - if they deal with security at all - will contain the generic security language contained in the seventh principle of the DPA.

One major challenge is that there is no real guidance on what is deemed to be secure, say critics of the UKIC.  "Not so," say I.  "There is nothing to criticise."

We are required by the 7th Principle to take relevant steps to keep data safe.  There is no getting around it.  Data must be secure.  Period.  So, while it's on your premises there must be access controls, and when it leaves your premises there must be access controls.  And this includes encryption when transmitting data files by email.

None of this is rocket science.  All of it is common sense.  So why do so few people use common sense?

I wonder if it has anything to do with Company Policy?

And, if it has (0.9 probability) then that policy has to be changed.  You need a real Data Privacy Policy embedded in your Human Resources Policy Manual, with disciplinary action inherent in breaches of that policy.

And you need to get wise and buy the encryption.

Or will your organisation be the next one to hit the media for having a laptop stolen?

Let's manufacture some news and sell advertising

Am I alone in being totally fed up with the news media at present? "We" just rescued the banks because everyone wanted the banks to be rescued. People are nervous about their savings, me included. So now we have a rescue package, pretty much globally.

Much of the financial crisis has been caused by news media anyway, talking economies down.

Now the same media, happy that it has its teeth into something, is whining about the amount it will cost the taxpayer to perform the rescue it was screaming for a couple of days ago!

I have news for them. We don't care. We want it all to get back to normal. We're mostly ordinary folk with ordinary lives and aspirations. We accept the cost as part of insuring our future. And we hate media bully boys who try to run the economy instead of even bad governments.

True marketing genius

In the run up to Christmas how can you generate fast and large word of mouth demand at low cost for your high tech products and make kids badger parents for them?

And how do you do this so that the school approves and encourages it?

Well, if you are Apple, you run school field trips!

Pure genius.

Trident Insurance's Viral Campaign

Bless them, Trident Insurance, a UK insurance broker by the look of their website, have created a viral marketing set of adverts on youtube.  And it's pretty clear they aren't going for the gay pound or the grey pound!

The first is a steamy(?) session with a couple in front of a blazing fire!  The second is, well, bouncing babes with bouncing boobs!

The thing is, they must be popular coz they're damned slow to load.

So, no dog saying "Oh Yes", then.

But will these sexually thrusting videos get your juices flowing enough to ask for an insurance quote?  Will they become a decent viral campaign?  Come to that, will the Advertising Standards Authority be happy with them?

Peter Jones - Dragon - Makes Sense

The BBC Breakfast Show today had Peter Jones, he of Dragons' Den, the very tall man with loads of money, as a guest.

He's the first person for ages who has made sense in the current headless chicken financial climate.

His view:  Yes, we could have a short recession, if only we'll stop doom and gloom and talking the markets down.  While the conditions are serious at present they are not impossible unless we all cause them to be impossible by getting into a doom spiral.

Not that I have any influence, but he's right.  But good news doesn't sell advertising space in media, does it?

Share traders just want any news to make the market move one way or the other.  They make money by buying and selling.  Boom or bust is all the same to them.

I don't suppose we should read anything into the fact that the US election for which of the two imbeciles should be president is only a few days away and we have a US generated financial crisis, should we?

Ah no.  That would be as fanciful as any other conspiracy theory.

Marketing during Financial Meltdown

I follow the blog at 1 to 1 Media.  Today they have an item about how banks shoudl handle themselves in the current financial climate, When I Want to Hear From My Bank, They're Not There. It deals with whether banks should tell us how safe they are at present.

I have my doubts in the current climate.  I thought you might be interested in my reply there:

My bank is an online retail bank, part of HSBC, thus likely but not certain to be safe. It would be very easy for it, exceptionally easy, to email me to give me information that is relevant to my contract with them.

But would I believe the message?

I am being pounded with news items saying how bad it is and thatit might(!) get worse. I do not understand the reason why it's bad. I'm neither stupid nor ignorant, I just do not understand it.

That's because no-one has ever explained why the system is choosing to melt itself down. And I think that's because people do not know. We've even had the Illuminati trash dredged up on a forum I contribute to!

What we do know is that traders are buying and selling shares. You can't sell a share when no-one is buying, so some folk are selling and others are buying at low prices, and the traders are making a profit.

In the midst of this weirdness what good or harm could a statement from my bank do? "Methinks she doth protest too much!" comes to mind. Good old Lady MacBeth.

Would you like to hear from your bank right now?  If so, what do you want them to say?