ExperienceCurve by Karl Long

I was very interested to notice the other day that an “unknown” browser is now the number two browser consuming my site. I’m pretty sure that the bulk of “unknown” browsers are rss readers.

Oh, and the “unkown” platform is beating out the Mac’s, damn it, and I use a mac, so you know i’m probably the number one visitor here Boy, if it wasn’t hard enough to get companies to support the mac. See Zeldmans comments on the daily show’s motherload mac fiasco

UPDATE: the survey is done and you can download it here

Dr Nora Barnes of the University of Massachussettes Dartmouth, is doing a study on blogs, and as opposed to some student study, Dr Barnes seemed to have some nice credentials. Chancellor Professor of Marketing and Director, UMD Center for Marketing Research. I don’t know what it means, but it sounds pretty legit
Here’s the stated goal for the project:

and email it to Dr Nora Barnes

Feel free to pass this on as the more bloggers that respond the better, maybe even add this tag to any posts about it: umass_blog_study

Tip of the Hat

Threadless.com is a T-Shirt company and it has some of the coolest, most beautiful, original T-Shirts I’ve ever seen. Not only that, almost all their designs are “award winners”, in other words Threadless.com is an ongoing T-Shirt competition, in which its customers submit designs and its customers vote on designs they like and if that wasn’t enough its customers also submit photo’s of T-shirt sightings, phew. In this case though customers is almost inaccurate, i mean, they are psudo employees.

Take a look at this frequently asked question:

Because Threadless offers a serious cash prize for winners $1500 + $500 worth of credit with Threadless, they get some serious entries from a lot of great designers. For designers that win they get plenty of publicity from it as well.

The interesting thing about this model is it brings up lots of questions of trust, money and ownership. In other-words Threadless only works because of the very high level of trust between the people submitting designs and the people running Threadless.

It is interesting to look at because companies that want to build deeper relationships with customers, and take advantage of WOM, “consumer generated” content, and other more valuable interactions must build trust. Without a fundamental foundation of trust attempts at this kind of marketing will either wither and die, or backfire entirely.

Here are some things that I think help build trust:

• Authenticity - an amorphous term I know, but just try and be genuine, stay away from traditional marketing superlatives and hyperbole
• Transparency - not only talk about what’s happening, what your doing, make feedback and your responses transparent
• Humility - be more human, don’t try and be perfect, and don’t pretend you are either
• Constancy - in visual look, action, words, and behavior

I’d be glad to hear more ideas for how to build trust, I find it a fascinating topic.

Other reading on trust:

• Trust Tools For Tough Times from MarketingProfs
• Web Users Judge Web Sites in Blink of an Eye
• Brand Integrity or in Laymans Terms Don’t F@#k This Up
• ecommerce | Trust & Trustworthiness
• The Stanford Web credibility Research Center
• The Hierarchy of Customer Experience - Design Management Review

Originally Published on CustomersOnFire.com - Micromarketing & Microbrands

Read the article at Trendwatching

hat tip

Big TV Campaign - Several Million
Slick Web Site - $15,000
Trying to look like a blog - Priceless

No matter what response the guys at mastercard are getting with their “Write Your Own Priceless ad”, they could have spent about 10% of there budget and got 100 times the responses if they had used the viral nature of the web, blogs, and social software. Even GM executed their consumer generated content campaign better than this.

The call to action from the TV commercial drives people to the priceless.com website that seems to be a confusing combination of “blog like” articles, the “film festival”, “promotions” and of course the ability to enter the competition to “write your own priceless commercial”. There aren’t even any examples of entries that I could see.

I’m sure they would argue that they didn’t want to write a blog, hence the reverse chronology of weekly articles that are strewn with links (to products you can buy with mastercard I assume), oh and with a “tell a friend” link at the bottom. Ha, tell a friend is a half hearted attempt by someone to make it “viral” (as I’ve said before). Of course because they haven’t got comments, or trackbacks, or tags, or flickr photos they can’t take advantage of all the traffic that they are driving to the “priceless.com” site from their, admittedly lovely commercials.

I’m sure many people would be able to give me some numbers that make all the money dumped into this campaign a success, but answer this one question, why is it when I do a search on google for “priceless” Mastercard isn’t even on the front page?

I think it’s because no one cares.

Now I think this is a very funny “priceless” spoof:

Originally published at - customersonfire.com - micromarketing & microbrands

I don’t know where I first read about the shoelace factor, but it is an important thing to think about when it comes to customer experience. It is the aspect of the experience that breaks when you need it, and this week i’ve had two great examples of it. First, pretty basic and not really a high faluting “experience” thing, but my air conditioning is broken, and the only reason I turned it on is because Florida doesn’t have a spring, it just moves straight into summer.

The other shoelace factor was more of an “experience” issue, and that is Comcast “On Demand” and the clue to the shoelace factor is right there in it’s name On Demand. Where everything will be in my control, and the TV will bend to my very will.

Well my problem is that my horrible comcast DVR didn’t record the Sopranos as it was supposed to last night, that was a horrible moment, but of course, I thought, I have On Demand and I know the HBO On Demand has the Sopranos on it. So go to On Demand, and the Sopranos is there, but it’s last weeks episode. Hmm, that sucks, I guess maybe i’ll wait until tomorrow. Of course now it’s monday evening and i’ve checked On Demand again, and of course, it’s still last weeks episode. What a great introduction to “On Demand”. The irony of this is that by all marketing measures I’m a satisfied customer to comcast, i’ve been with them a year or so, I pay my bill mostly on time. They just don’t realize how fast I would bolt something better came along, I mean like a rat from a sinking ship fast.

Another example of the shoelace factor, of a company I once called who’s “customer support” line was disconnected. I just called their sales line to let them know, and they were a little suprised. They must have been thinking how great there product is because they were getting no support calls.