5 Tips on Being a Consultant

This is my first time being a consultant. So take this all with a grain of salt and be glad that in this economy, there is still a need for strategists.

Here's a list of what I've noticed are critical to successful consulting.

1) Schmooze with a smile
2) Keep everyone on your team in the loop.
3) Over-communicate.
4) Learn Powerpoint and SmartArt function like your life depends on it. In fact, it does.
5) Get published, and speak your way into seminars.

Mashup: Rich Internet Applications and Web Analytics

Can they collide?

With the explosion of RIA sites in recent years, a visit no longer begins and ends with pages loads - rather, we have had to come up with ingenious ways of measuring a visitor's "engagement" and "conversion path". Using the traditional web analytics toolbox, analysts have been able to leverage "event based tracking" (such as is available through Google Analytics and most enterprise-level vendors). This has proven to be a tricky road, and deriving actionable insight is highly dependent on defining the right macro and micro level experiences and events to track.

What has been your experience in RIA analytics? Have you been able to build an engagement model that steps past the limitations of the traditional WA toolset?

The Importance of Site Search Analytics for e-Commerce

Executives can't get enough of case studies. Why? Because they like to hear how others in the same vertical/industry/boat have failed in an endeavor and then rattle off at least 3 reasons why their own business is going to succeed and why they have an upper hand.

I was tasked with making a case for why a previous ecommerce client needed to invest X dollars into building a better site search engine. The following is my case study on "Company 734" (alias) that I presented to my client.

"Company 734 and Site Search" (so exciting, I know.)

The Business

Company-734.com began in 1990 with the idea of extending their reach of the brick and mortar brand online as many of its competitors began launching simliar retail eCommerce websites. The main focus was to attract the Baby boomers who were beginning to adopt the idea of the web as a new way of shopping. Through this initiative, Company 734 strove to better service online shoppers while preserving its brand.

Company 734's recent marketing strategies have included partnerships with comparison shopping sites such as CouponCabing and DealSea. On average, 85% of buyers coming from comparison shopping sites used promotion codes to make a purchase. Versus all other shoppers, these promotion code users were three times more likely to make a purchase, and their average order value was $20 higher, resulting in a positive $11 ROI [Figure 1].

Promotion code usage dropped significantly when other channels of traffic were evaluated, especially among the loyal customers, who received promotion codes weekly through email newsletters.

Considering the higher conversion rates of segments that had easy access to promotion codes, it was in Company 734's best interest to have their codes front and center in all marketing channels.

The Challenge

Compared to all customers, loyal customers of Company-734.com were unable to locate the best promotion codes for their purchase, exhibited by their lower site search usage as compared to other segments' site search usage. To counteract this, the content team published codes weekly onto a "content" page, but weekly promotion code usage did not rise as a result.

The analytics data showed that customers were not able locate promotion codes. Searches including the word "Coupon" and "Promotion Code" were trending upward month over month as the holiday season approached. At its height, "Promotion" -related search terms accounted for 20% of all site search but generated 0% conversion. The majority of these searches were coming from loyal customers.

The Technology

After initial research it was determined that iNile, Company 734's eCommerce platform provider, had built a basic site search engine that could only index product pages. This meant that the Promotion code content page that was published as a means to fix this problem was not showing up in search results. To further exacerbate this problem, iNile's system was unable to show available promotion codes at checkout, though this is not best practice for eCommerce sites, it would have been a workaround until the advanced site search engine was built.

Assuming that customers who were seeking promotions on-site act the same way as customers who came to the site with a promotion code (visitors from CouponCabin and other comparison shopping networks), this technical failure carried an opportunity cost of $5,425 in lost revenue, or 1% of annual revenue [Figure 2]. With consumer spending trending downward month over month, this opportunity to gain incremental revenue could not be ignored.

The Results

iNile's development team provided a workaround for their site search by building an "intelligent" redirect system. The content team would upload a batch of search terms - variations of "Coupon" and "Promotion Code" - and when a visitor entered a string that matched the batch, the Promotion Code content page would be served in place of the normal Search Results page.

Within a month after implementation, conversion from the "Coupon" and "Promotion Code" search terms and variations increased to 3% from 0% - a 300% increase. Average Order Value from these search strings was 15% higher than the site average. The growth in conversion was the impetus the content team needed to further optimize their search term batch that triggered the intelligent redirect. After 1 week of optimization efforts, the conversion from "Coupon" and "Promotion Code" related search terms grew to 4%.

The end result was that the segment of visitors who were searching for Promotion Codes once they got to the site outperformed the comparison shopping segment in terms of Net Revenue [Figure 3]

Next Steps: Building a Better Coupon Strategy

With the success of this site search project, Company 734 is now building a more robust shopping cart where there is much more flexibility to display and add multiple promotion codes. Customers can layer available deals in different product categories.

Mashup: Neuromarketing and Web Analytics

I love the smell of libraries. The muted tones of a library. The prehistoric librarian sitting behind the desk who types with a pencil eraser.

All these things lead me to ease up on purchasing books and borrowing them instead. Anyway I tend to read books in less than the 28 day borrowing policy, so we're covered in that area.

The booklist this month centers around my recent interest in Neuromarketing. This field melds scientific data with known customer behavior models. Why it interests me is it bissects the field of Web Analytics. Click here for the Wikipedia def of this field.

The books I'm currently perusing:
-The Secret of Scent, by Luca Terin
-Why Choose This Book? by Read Montague
-The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and other stories, by Oliver Sacks
-Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are
-Neurosciencemarketing.com blog

Why Neuromarketing??
I hit a chord in my brianiac side when I learned about the following true story:

The collision of Neuroscience and Marketing was brought to the masses in 2004 when Read Montague, coined the father of this field, gave a blind Coke and Pepsi test to test subjects. His experiment first tested their taste receptors for the ability to differentiate between Pepsi and Coke. He hooked his subjects up to fMRI machines and the results showed that his subjects' brain patterns were similar when tasting Coke and Pepsi, and that his subjects' preferences were about equal for Pepsi and Coke. However, when he primed his subjects with the brand of the soda they were about to taste test, their brain activity showed that their emotional response was the main indicator of which brand they ultimately chose as their favorite. That's why Coke won out hands down. Most of the subjects' first memorable experience was with Coke and knowing that their sip was of Coke triggered their "preference computation" to choose Coke as the winner in the taste category.

This excites me. I can't say how many times my facebook profile has said "in retail therapy" because there really is a mental high that I experience from buying something for myself. It's also stunning to know that especially in the online experience, we can hone in on our customer's preferences by testing which factors will trigger the emotional reaction that causes their "preference computation" to purchase a product. Will it be the color of the background in the product image? Will it be how the products are displayed on the Category pages? Or can it be as simple as the type of font you choose to display the prices of your product?

The invention of the functional MRIessentially made this field possible to study on a larger scale.
Functional MRIs run off the traditional MRI machine, but scan the brain at low resolutions but at a faster rate. Thus it can tell with good accuracy when neural activity increases or decreases in specific areas of the brain. So you can run through a set of 5 photos of a particular product taken from different angles and let the fMRI tell you which one activates the most emotional part of the brain, which may indicate which shot to use when persuading your customers down the conversion funnel.

Personally, I find that the fMRI methodology could be intrusive and can change the results of the experiment. If you can picture yourself in an MRI machine, or have actually had an MRI done before, you know the kind of claustrophobic environment you are subjected to. In this kind of closed quarters, I'm sure that my brain is upset by the claustrophobic environment I'm in and can't fully focus on the task at hand. I'd like to see a more practical neural activity scanning machine, maybe a hat? that can do this type of task and report back equally precise amounts of data as the fMRI machine.

Good stuff, right? I'm pushing pieces from Web Analytics and Neuromarketing together to see where they would fit.

Flash Support, Coming to a Smartphone near you!

I was not in attendance at ADOBE's MAX conference, but I did monitor the buzz coming out of the conference that was relevant to my profession. I did not, however, notice this little tidbit...

Flash 10 "light" will be supported on most smartphones by early 2010 (now!!!)

How did I miss this juicy tidbit? I don't know. But you can read the buzz on Cnet and directly from Adobe's website

CNET Blog post (Feb 15 09): http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13970_7-10164745-78.html
Adobe's Press Release (Oct 5 09): http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/pressroom/pressreleases/200910/100509AFPforMobileDevicesandPCs.html


The best part?
My phone, the Palm Pre first gen, will be updated with Flash 10.1 built in to the webOS update coming in February 2010!
Am I such a nerd for saying that I can't wait to see HBO.com on my phone? What will I do until then!?!?

Here's the link to read up on the Palm webOS update: http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/pressroom/pressreleases/200910/100509AFPforMobileDevicesandPCs.html
~_~

Social Media Technographics

After tons of user interviews, self-reports, panels, and analytics, Forrester has segmented its Social Media Webosphere into 6 main categories.

Creators – You represent the pinnacle of the social media experience. You are on online consumer who regularly publish blogs or articles online, maintains a web page, uploads video, and engages in microblogging (Twitter and such). You and your peers are the most active participants and posters of content on the web.

Critics – You typically react to content posted online that you did not create. You post comments on blogs and forums, post ratings and reviews, or edit wikis. One in four American adults is an online critic.

Collectors – You are an elite content consumer of social media sites. You may not actively participate in forums, but will monitor and follow conversations throughout a variety of sites using tools that aggregate them for you. You thrive on information and use such tools as RSS to aggregate important content, tag pages or photos for organization and ease of finding, use social bookmarking such as Del.ic.io.us, and participate in low intensity social activities, such as voting on Digg or Reddit.

Joiners – You primarily participate in or maintain a profile on a social networking site. You may just join to see other profiles, but rarely, if ever, participate. Most of your activity on social network sites is prompted by your peers after long periods of inactivity.

Spectators – This group consumes what the other produce. This includes blogs, online videos, podcasts, forums, and reviews. Almost half of online Americans comprise this group.

Inactives – These are non-participants. As of 2007, 41% of Americans are non-participants.

Which group best describes YOU?

WIRED Throwing Biometric Super Bowl Party

WIRED Throwing Biometric Super Bowl Party

Awesome post from Roger Dooley of the Neuroscience Marketing Blog on Wired's attempt at understanding your biometric response to each Superbowl Ad.

I didn't need a scan to know that the KGB commercial got my heart rate up. Even Momma Dukes sitting next to me was laughing by the end of that Sumo commercial! What is KGB anyway?

Watch the commercial here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4T2LH1yEbAQ

Mashup: Google Trends and macroeconomic conditions of the world

Reading Huffington Post today, I came across an interesting article that used Google Trends to point out weird corollaries in search terms and the even weirder things that people are searching for in high volume nowadays. ((HuffPost Article: Outrageous Trends))

The beauty of Google Trends is that it aggregates all search terms that people are entering and shows you a comparison of any terms you like. As an SEO professional, it proved helpful for understanding volume and popularity of a concept's individual keywords. But this tool has some other great uses too. I present here my own take on Google Trends - it allows you to have some insight into what is happening in the world, what excites people, and in general the current state of people's minds.

Concept: Content Consumption

I put in "Blog" "Book" "Television" and "Mobile" and here are the results. How illustrative this chart is, showing that blogs and television trend inversely to each other, that blogs didn't become popular until 2006 (when it hit 1.00 on the volume index, which is Google average) that Books have made a comeback in the past year, and mobile continues its slightly increasing volume in the past 5 years.

Blog, Book, Television, Mobile Search Trends

Concept: Ailments

Seems that AIDS is on people's minds when its in the news (World AIDS Day) but that cancer is more commonly searched and blips higher when there is a celebrity who has died (Farrah Fawcett, Edward Kennedy, Patrick Swayze). Strangely enough, if you look close enough at the chart, Doctor and Cancer trend inversely to each other, while "Cure" continues to be a lesser searched word. We'll have to wait for the Cure and the Cancer line to dissect each other, hopefully in the near future.

AIDS, Cancer, Cure, Doctor Search Trends

There are millions of concepts such as "Ailments" and "Content Consumption" that can show bizarre and insightful trends. What are some concepts that you would like to see a popularity contest between keywords?

And as a side note: My little synopsis here begs the question - what types of insight can world policy makers gain from using this?

Measuring Your Social Influence

There are so many social network outlets nowadays, how do we know what percentage of the social media pie we are influencing?

There have been attempts at measuring individual platforms but I have not yet found an umbrella measurement tool that actively incorporates measurement of activity from the established big 4 (twitter, facebook, myspace, and youtube) along with emerging social media platform activity (actively indexing these new platforms).

The need that I've noticed lives with entrepreneurs who use social networks as a free and easily shareable marketing solution that is managed usually by someone who doesn't have time to directly segment and report on the highest value social networks from which their customers are being referred. It is not only tedious, but inept comparatively, because each platform has a different "influence" and "value" yard stick.

And also the algorithm is tricky to build. I've given some thought to what the social influence tracker should account for, and here are some of my thoughts.

Should it be adaptable to say the medium of your choice? If you're actively engaged in twitter but are only an observer on facebook, but your social influence calculator is showing that you have more fans and friends on facebook than you have followers on twitter, should the algorithm point out this imbalance in your social media concentration?

Emerging networks. Can this tracker follow upswings in usage of your brand name of social networks that you are not currently on? Let's say you have not claimed your business in foursquare, and that you don't even know what foursquare is, but last week a user created a listing for you and now there are 100 unique check ins. Your tracker should constantly be patrolling new social networks for your brand name and alert you when you are not active on a social network that your name is emerging on. It should also gauge how relevant this new network is for you. Is this new network relevant to the other networks that you are actively engaged in? If it's random, the algorithm should send you an alert but not suggest you be on it.

Your Second Life. How often are the "things" (links, pictures, blog article, status updates) interacted with by your friends/fans/followers? Who are your most loyal users? Are there any multichannel users who are interacting with you from multiple networks? The social media measuring tool should have some way of counting how many "generations" your content has gone through, and be able to segment out the attributes of content that is most shared, and likewise, the attributes of the social network users who are most likely to share.

Smart Keyword Lists. Let's face it. Keywords are the primary key to getting your information out there. If you're using high volume keywords in your content you are likely to be searched up in these social networks. Wouldn't it be fantastic if this social media measurement tool could "suggest" to you on a daily basis what keywords in your industry are "buzzing" right now based on Google Trends, Google External Keyword Research tool

Strategy Suggestions: One step further to leverage the smart keyword lists is for this tool to suggest content that you could be building on, new content that seems relevant to your brand's mission statement, and could recommend the social networks that you should seed your content on?

There's a lot to chew here, and I believe there's an emerging idea for an uber platform that could tell you your social influence in a flash. Illustrate your opportunity versus your current visibility. It's like a mashup of SEO strategies with Analytics analysis tactics, layered onto the Social Media networks.

If this tool were built, what would you like to see as a feature?

-Cindy