I’m about to break an unwritten rule of social media. I’m going to talk about what I had for lunch.

But I’m not going to bore you with a Twitpic and a quip about the chili con carne I brought in Tupperware from last night’s dinner (though it was delicious). I’ll save that for a Tweet or Facebook status. Because the lunch I want to talk about today was the one I served—on a daily basis—back in college. (Hey, it’s Thanksgiving Day, how can I not write about food?)

To those of you who know me well — or have talked to me for more than 35 seconds — you know I managed a sandwich shop during college. It wasn’t just another part-time job where I gave a part-time damn. To me, it was a calling. And it was the first business I ever truly took seriously.

I cared about the cleanliness. I cared about the customers. And I cared about the sandwiches we slung to hungry lunchtime regulars who entrusted us with satiating their appetite on a given day.

We didn’t just view ourselves as people who provided sandwiches, we viewed ourselves as the people who were handing people the only lunch they’d have that day. They only got one lunch, and they shared it with us. They counted on us. They trusted us. They knew that we would deliver. And it was the only reason they kept coming back.

You Only Get One Lunch

Don't leave a bad taste in their mouths.

Our rallying cry (sometimes a moan) was “they only get one lunch today. Don’t make them regret coming here.” We valued our customer—not just their money and their time—but their quality of life. With the “they only get one lunch today” mantra, innovation was generated on the part of the employees. We wanted to find creative ways to go out of our way to make the customer feel like they made the best decision of their life that day.

Sure, we had corporate best practices we needed to follow, and there were rules and regulations and “ways” we were supposed to do something, but nothing raised the bar like our mantra. Employees would try to out-do each other so they could tell the story of how they made a customer’s day. It wasn’t in the rulebook; it was in the underlying value of what a sandwich can do for someone’s day that drove us. We built a lot of regulars this way, and drove up comparative sales 25% year over year, for all you ROI nerds and haters out there.

Our customers knew that we took their lunch seriously. We weren’t just throwing something together to get them through the line. We wanted to blow them away. We wanted them to have the best damn sandwich they could possibly have.

Real Marketing Makes Them Eat Every Bite, and Come Back For More

Every day, when a reader follows your search engine listing, your link, your social media post, your link in an email newsletter, they’re making a decision to trust you. They trust that your content will—and should be—the best content they’ll consume at that given time.

There are plenty of other places they could be at that moment, but they chose to spend it with you. Don’t make them regret it. Give them something that will fill them up, that they’ll cherish every bite of. That they’ll tell their friends about. Give them the best content they ever had.

And if you can’t do that, you’re probably in the wrong business. You’re probably not going to please everyone all the time, but at least let them know that you’re trying your best to blow them away.

The ones that get it will come back. And that’s how you’ll know you’re doing your job.

Raise your hand if you have visited a website in the last week and found yourself frustrated with the experience of searching for the information you wanted? How did that make you feel about said company? Did it ultimately find what you were searching for and think to yourself, “Are they trying to hide this stuff from me?” With their focus locked tightly on the snazzy marketing verbiage, flashy logo, and awesome three level drop down menu they might have overlooked a less tangible element of the website … the user experience.

Your website’s user-experience (sometimes referred to as “UX”) is directly related to the perception your visitors have of how useful and efficient your site is in providing them what they want. Because everyone’s perception can be unique this means how a person feels about their experience on your website is subjective. The good thing is there are some best practices, trends, and standards that can help you avoid frustrated visitors and help them find the information you want to get in their hands.

Here is a quick list of a few things that contribute to a poor user-experience:

• Cryptic navigation: The language used in the primary navigation doesn’t provide any clear idea of what you might expect to find when clicking.
• Large dense blocks of content: There is a ton of content on each page with little-to-no headings, paragraph breaks, changes in color or placement making it look like a big block of text.
• No clear hierarchy of information: When you first arrive on a particular page it looks flat and nothing draws your attention. You cannot tell what is more or less important in the content and on the navigational elements.
• Inconsistent messaging: The information or language used to link to another page does not provide a clear expectation of what should be found on the next page. The overall look and feel of the site changes dramatically in style and structure so that your visitors have to re-aclimate themselves to it.

Anything on this list strike a chord? Have you experienced something here? Maybe your company’s website is an offender of one or more of these?

In this article I am going to take a step back and first tackle how you can help pave a clear path for your visitors even before they ever reach your website. In order to do this we have to understand what is in the minds of our visitors or customers. I will follow up in a part 2 of this article and focus directly on your website itself and how you can reduce the friction points that may be causing your visitors to frown the entire time they use your website.

What is your visitor’s mental mode?

Understanding what is in the mind of your visitors is hugely important to knowing what information to provide them and how to visually present it. To start the process ask yourself two questions:

1. Where will visitors to my website come from?
2. What will visitors be looking for?

In an ideal situation you would have the opportunity to answer these questions during the initial planning stages of your website. If you are beyond that stage then don’t fret. The great thing about websites is, with a bit of effort, you can go back and tweak your pages as needed to make them more effective. But where should you start the process of creating a better experience for your visitors?

A smooth user-experience starts before someone visits your website

Is your company is using Facebook social ads to drive traffic to your site? Then you have only a sentence, an image, and a heading to provide context about what information your website offers. That context sets the visitor’s initial expectation as to what they will get in return for clicking on the ad. Will it be what they were hoping for or is it something completely different? A common approach to tackling this is to create unique landing pages for each set of visitors with the intent on targeting your message and keeping continuity between the referral source (in this case it is a Facebook ad) and your website.

There are a variety of other ways your visitors might be faced with a link to your site and a choice to click. Depending on what it communicates and what context it provides the user-experience can start off on good or bad footing.

Here are a few other sources that might refer visitors to your site and some questions to think about:

1. Search engine result:
   When a page on your website shows up in search engine results does the page title and description they see accurately tell them what they will find if they click on it?
2. Social Links:
   When you tweet out a link to an article, contest, sales page, etc… does the accompanying sentence or title tell others what they will see once they click? Can the same be said for links posted on your Facebook business page or on YouTube videos that provide a link back to your website?
3. Traditional advertising:
   Is your website mentioned prominently in your radio, television, and print ads?  Should each of these channels point to your homepage or would a unique landing page provide a better experience?

The example below is an ad from one of my favorite online resources, Lynda.com.

This Facebook ad by Lynda.com clearly communicates what to expect if I click the ad.

Figure 1.

Clicking on the Facebook ad (figure 1) brings you to this Lynda.com landing page (figure 2). Note that the word “WordPress” is used multiple times on the page (I placed a red dot next to each). The visitor never feels like they clicked something by mistake. For those wanting to learn more about what Lynda.com offers related to WordPress they have 3 links from this page directly to the collection of WordPress training videos (seen in figure 3 below) .

Figure 2

Figure 3 continues the experience by providing a list of all they have to offer related to WordPress.

So far we have discussed how to smoothly transition new visitors to your website from other places on the web. By understanding where they are coming from, the context the referring source provides and what is being communicated on the web page you direct them to you will be able to better craft the content of your website.

In part 2 of this article (coming soon), I will cover what to consider when designing your site and crafting your content, no matter where your visitors are coming from. Until then I would like to hear your thoughts on the subject. Have you ever had your time wasted by a bad user-experience?  Tell me about it in the comments.

Editor’s Note: This guest post is from Olivia Coleman who typically writes on the topics of online colleges and universities.

We’ve all heard the benefits of using storytelling to further engage consumers with your brand. But does it work? According to a fascinating Miller-McCune article published a few months ago, a very specific storyline appeals to American consumers in particular. And that’s the narrative of the proverbial underdog.

The article cited a study conducted by Harvard researchers, which found that consumers are much more likely to purchase products from companies who incorporate the underdog tale in their products and profiles. The underdog story, researchers noted, had a few things in common external disadvantage, along with a sense of passion and determination. Even more interesting than these findings was that consumers picked the underdog regardless of their socioeconomic background, suggesting how deeply the underdog ethos is ingrained in our national mentality.

Although these findings aren’t necessarily surprising, I was particularly interested by the fact that, although the article makes no mention of storytelling specifically, the notion of the underdog depends on solid storytelling techniques. The companies cited which use the underdog theme all do so through their company “story” Clif Bars, for example, note on their wrappers, “In 1990, I lived in a garage with my dog, skis, climbing gear, bicycle and two trumpets”

Going one step further, social media is a vehicle that is particularly suited to storytelling techniques, especially when it comes to incorporating the underdog tale. Why? Simply because social media in itself is, in many ways, a set of platforms that grew from humble beginnings. What was once a set of tools created by average people that average people used to air personal grievances and triumphs has now exploded into a space where both individuals– perceived “underdogs”– and larger corporations and organizations communicate. Successfully communicating with consumers means connecting with them by demonstrating alignment with their perceived identities.

Of course, the key to successful social media marketing is approaching consumers through genuine interactions. Social media is about people, and people crave personal stories that aren’t necessarily wholly focused on the product, but rather on the people behind the product and their desire to create value together with their customers.

David Kennedy, a marketing specialist and blogger, hits on many of the same ideas in his article, “Why New Media Favors the Underdog.” Kennedy states, “Technology is full of underdog stories that started somewhere small. People love that type of story. It encourages the kind of thinking that says anyone can succeed with the right idea. It’s why the idea itself, and the story behind it, is my favorite idea in new media.”

In the final analysis, companies that want to further their brands through social media should look to storytelling especially telling stories of their origins and thus connect with their customers on a very intimate level.

Olivia Coleman is a freelance writer who primarily writes about online colleges and universities, but who also has an affinity for social media, college life and  internet marketing. She welcomes your comments via email olivia.coleman33 – at – gmail.com.

Related articles

• Consumers love underdogs (scienceblog.com)
• George F. Snell III: The Case for Brand Storytelling (hightalk.net)
• Underdog Branding always Wins in Tough Times (hbswk.hbs.edu)
• Standing Out: A Few Ways to Make Your Blog Unique (tjantunen.com)

Editor’s Note: The following is a guest post from Anthony Piwarun, an interactive strategist and search marketer from Milwaukee, WI.

In February 2004, Facebook launched itself as a unique and innovative way to help college students keep in-touch with their recently graduated counterparts across the country. Seven years later, and now no longer exclusively for college students, this burgeoning website with more than 500 million users has become a full-fledged social networking platform. As Facebook’s popularity, and reach, has grown, so has the likelihood that members from your target audience will be on Facebook.

This in itself has expanded the opportunities advertisers have to market their products or services efficiently and to the appropriate audiences. You have, literally at your fingertips, a whole new level of online marketing ability. On top of this, Facebook’s advertising platform is easy to use. The analytics dashboard will help you to better integrate this into your overall marketing strategy, allowing you to track and measure your investment. The following guide will help you to lay the foundation of a successful Facebook marketing strategy.

Identify Your Goals

In order to measure the success of return in Facebook advertising, you must fist establish your advertising objectives. Before you even create your ad, decide what your intended end-result for these efforts will be. This goal does not have to be complex; in fact, some of the goals I’ve seen in the past have included: generating revenue, increasing cost per sale, or simply promoting your brand by maximizing visibility. Setting a clear goal before undertaking the advertising action will allow you to accurately measure your return and decide if it has been worth the time and resources.

Design and Develop

Ad Copy and Creative - Once you have indentified your Facebook advertising objectives, it is now time to create the ad itself. Facebook advertisements appear in the far right hand column of the screen, after the user navigates away from the newsfeed.

Facebook ads are composed of a headline, brief copy and imagery to go with your theme. The imagery should be compelling and on-topic. It is strongly recommended to use imagery featuring a person’s headshot when advertising online. Headshots they tend to perform better than an object or lesser-known brand logos. In terms of copy, titles can be up to 25 characters in length and the body copy of the ad can be 135. Keep your copy short and to the point; hence the importance of the imagery.

Landing Page – After clicking on your advertisement, the user is taken to a landing page where they will decide whether or not they will buy your product. Facebook ads can link to either a Fan Page or an external website. Based on my experience in managing online ad campaigns for numerous clients, I have found that an external, campaign-specific landing page is more effective than linking to your brand’s Fan Page. In addition, it is essential to keep brand messaging consistent between the creative and the landing page. If your ad uses a logo or object as imagery, add it to your landing page so the user feels confident that they clicked on the right advertisement.

Target Your Audience

One of the many useful features of the Facebook advertising platform is the ability to target your advertising to specific segments. On Facebook, it’s possible to target:

The ability to target your audience using this much detail can make advertising even more effective than PPC or traditional online display advertising. With a well thought out goal (think: step one) and proper targeting, you’ve already qualified traffic to your landing page.

Define Cost Structure

Defining goals, developing effective creative, and targeting your audience is standard procedure when launching any new advertising campaign. Where advertising on Facebook — or anywhere online for that matter — differs from traditional media buying is in the cost structure. There are two ways to manage your ad spend when running media on Facebook:

• Cost Per Click - You pay every time a user clicks on your advertisement. It doesn’t matter whether your ad was served 100 times or 1 million times, you only pay for every click.
• Cost Per Impression - You pay for a set number of impressions, or, ad views. This is measured in multiples of 1,000 and is called a CPM or “cost per million” ad spend.

Choosing a price structure that’s right for you is critical to the success of your campaign. There are a few things to keep in mind: if your goal is to simply increase brand recognition, and you don’t have any commercially-tied reason to drive traffic to your landing page other than to promote your name, choosing a CPM model would be the most cost effective. If, however, your success is measured by the number of sales you get via the landing page, starting off with CPC and calculating return is your best bet. If you’re interested in learning more about the geeky metrics behind choosing a model, be sure to look at an article I wrote on choosing CPM or CPC for Facebook advertising.

Launch, Measure, and Repeat

After deciding which cost structure is best suited to your goal, it’s time to launch. Facebook allows you to regularly monitor your ad via their dashboard under the “Ads and Pages” tab. Here, you’ll get detailed information on metrics such as bid cost, the number of clicks, average cost-per-click, and more. Narrow down your dashboard by selecting monthly, weekly, or even daily statistics, and dig deeper by exporting reports into csv format and analyzing historical trends.

After running your ad for a few days, revisit your creative concept. Tweak your copy or swap the image, then run both the original and updated advertisements concurrently. This will allow you to determine which advertisement works best for your audience. Even after you find an advertisement that works for you, understand that this too will constantly need to be tweaked and updated. Doing so will help to ensure your audience does not become too used to your ads, keeping it fresh and noticeable.

As with any online marketing campaign, the key to success lies within careful observation and analysis. Monitoring impressions, click-through rate, and conversions is only half the battle. To make the most out of your Facebook advertising dollar, you need to act on your observations and tweak the campaign to limit cost and increase ROI.

Anthony Piwarun is an interactive strategist and search marketer from Milwaukee, Wisc. In his free time, he moonlights as a WordPress designer dedicated to helping startups and small business build their brands by developing user friendly, conversion-oriented websites. Read more on his blog, follow him on Twitter, or learn more about his seo consulting services.

Related articles

• 7 Tips to Mastering Facebook Advertising (socialmediaexaminer.com)
• Should You Advertise on Facebook? (brighthub.com)
• How to Advertise a Business on Facebook (thinkup.waldenu.edu)
• 10 Facebook Advertising Tips For Brilliant Marketers (allfacebook.com)
• CPM vs CPC: Which Should You Use For Facebook Ads? (allfacebook.com)
• Facebook Advertising vs. Google AdWords (searchenginejournal.com)

What Does Your Business Give Away

Giving stuff away is nothing new to business owners. Remember S and H Green Stamps, where you collected stamps given away at gas stations with the hope of amassing enough stamps in your booklet for something from their gift catalog?  Fast food restaurants have toys for the kids meals, retailers have sales all the time, with some having way too many. Not to mention cereal companies have had free gifts inside since the beginning of time. And, for those of us old enough to remember, there was the famed Cracker Jack “Toy Surprise” inside. That was a pretty big hit for me as a kid, although I didn’t really care for the Cracker Jacks all that much.

Whole business models today are based on free. Chris Anderson of Wired magazine even wrote a book entitled Free: The Future of a Radical Price which examines the rise of pricing models that give products and services to customers for free. In it, he made some startling observations. While some of Anderson’s ideas are radical, it is hard to debate the impact of free today with things like Wikipedia, Facebook and Google, all of which are based on the concept of being free.

Think about Craig Newmark, who single handedly brought the newspaper business to its knees with Craigslist, which is free to use. All it took for the newspaper industry to buckle was a centralized network of online communities featuring free online classified advertisements with sections devoted to jobs, housing, personals, for sale, services, community, gigs, résumés, and discussion forums.

How does the small business owner make sense of the free model?

In the rental business, when apartment operators start to see vacancy rise, the “One Month’s Free Rent” banners go out. Since rental fees are my core business, I have never been a free rent guy. The valuation of free rent in the customers eye evaporates at the lease signing. To a large extent, the same logic applies in retail with a sale everyday. The average sale just isn’t special or noteworthy.

Expanding the shelf life of free

By accident, we at Urbane Apartments stumbled on to something when asking the question, “How can we actually get back value for giving something away?” In our case, we created a non-traditional Co Work Office Space in an underutilized clubhouse for the typical nomad that was working from Starbucks or Panera Bread. Our first thought was to charge for desk space and create a bit of extra income for resident events. What unfolded for us was a whole new corridor of opportunity.

The word about the free co-work space quickly zipped through the local community, and we suddenly had a a group of folks talking about us, tweeting about us, posting pictures on facebook and checking in on Foursquare to see who else was at the space that day. Local civic groups followed up wanting to rent the space for different charity events. The local news stations got wind and did feature stories. The point being, we could not afford the type of local PR we received. And while our newfound evangelists weren’t talking about our apartment rentals directly, we were part of a larger conversation. The overall value to our business was overwhelming.

So think about creative ways that you can expand what you are giving away. Think about what your competitors would give away, then push beyond and find something that might just be more compelling. As we’ve learned, everything free is not created equal.

What has worked for you? What have other businesses given away that has made you take pause and pay attention? Please share in the comments.

Partnership marketing has been around for a long time. It wasn’t uncommon for Bill Smith’s Plumbing Service to get ad dollars from a big brand such as Kohler for Yellow Page ads if in fact Bill Smiths Plumbing carried Kolher bath and kitchen plumbing fixtures. The ad sort of gave Bill Smith’s plumbing a leg up as being a quality contractor due to the brand association with Kohler. However, the ads were ads, one way marketing.

That model worked pretty well until consumers changed the direction of how they shop, or, more specifically, how they start their search for what they are shopping for. Channel Advisor states in a White Paper, How Consumers Shop Online:

Eighty one percent of consumers begin their product searches with Google and 11 percent begin with Yahoo. (This should convince you how important it is for your site to be listed on Google Local, as well as appear high in the Google search engine results.)

A New Way to Partner: Sharing the Audience

Big brands and local brands are still interested in you and your business. Mike Whaling from 30 Lines Marketing summed it up nicely during an interview on a partnership marketing project they are doing for a client, University Village.

Partnership marketing has traditionally been about sharing advertising … now it is more about sharing audience.

University Village, a student housing provider in Columbus, Ohio, tailored a VIP program, where they negotiated deals and discounts with local venders for their residents that align with their brand and target demographic. The cool spin to this is that they incorporated  a social media element by adding Foursquare buttons to each of the ads.

Our own company (Urbane Apartments) recently partnered with Vitamin Water and Sharpie Pens during a local festival to create Hydration Galleries, and landed on Sharpie’s Web Site;

Our friends at Urbane Apartments coordinated an area of R&R for attendees of Michigan’s Arts Beats & Eats fest over Labor Day Weekend.  Sharpie hopped on board with the great people over at vitaminwater to put this event into action.  Transforming one of Urbane Apartments’ into, what was known as a ”Hydration Gallery,” fest-goers were invited into a “chic lounge atmosphere” to cool off, rehydrate with delicious vitaminwater and create works of art with Sharpie Markers on easels that were set up around the lounge, all the while enjoying tunes provided by Livio Radio.

What is the value to your business for landing on a larger brands web site?  A really big glass of Google Juice! Small business could never afford that type of exposure in the past. You must carefully choose your partners, though. It is paramount to align yourself with like demographics that add value, or likeness to your audience.

We would love to hear your feedback or experiences on any partnership marketing projects you may have tried. There is as much value in what didn’t work, as what did. Please share in the comments.

A hypothetical (but not that foreign) situation:

Bill is the greatest potter in the world. He uses magic power to mold the clay into whatever shape he wants just by staring at it. So, not only does he make the best pottery in the world, but the way he makes it is absolutely freaking amazing.

The power of social media marketing to build a business

Bill enjoyed decent pottery sales before his methods were known. But his profits multiplied by a factor of at least 1000 when people learned how he made it. Who wouldn’t want to see real live magic?

Every week Bill makes pottery before a live audience. At first he just had a few spectators. But as they told other people, who told their friends, and so on, someone started making videos of Bill at work, posted them on YouTube, and started talking about it.  His audience grew and grew and grew because Bill’s work was so darned amazing.  Bill eventually had to start renting a football stadium because so many people wanted to see the experience.

The power of an authentic, human experience shared via marketing

It’s a simple, understated performance, by the way.  Bill gets up and does his amazing thing with the pottery.  Then he stands up, smiles and says “Thank you all for coming.  I really appreciate it.”  He signs autographs for a while and then goes back to his humble studio and keeps plugging away.

Not only is the pottery selling for vaults of money, but people are paying Bill to see him make it in person. He’s the rock star of pottery. Every Hollywood celebrity wants a custom bowl made by Bill. He is buried in profits.  AND, he still gets to do work that he loves to do.

What isn’t marketing?  Not much.

Now which parts of the above are marketing? All of them.

• Marketing is making the best darn pottery in the world.
• Marketing is making the best darn pottery in the world using magic power.
• Marketing is broadcasting and sharing the experience of the most amazing pottery in the world being made by magic power.

Here’s the thing, though. Bill would probably still be making the greatest pottery in the world and he’d be much less affluent if no one had seen how he could do it. If the world at large didn’t know about Bill’s ability to use magic power to make the world’s greatest pottery, then it would just be the greatest pottery. And there aren’t that many pottery connoisseurs around in the 21st century.  But social media allowed some fraction of the experience to be captured and shared with the world.

Meet Richard – The Anti-Bill

Contrast this with Richard (most people call him Dick), another potter.  He copied Bill’s magic power secrets early on, mastered the  social media channels earlier and tried to do the very same things as Bill, but in quite a different style.  On the surface, he used many of the same tools.

How did Dick make out?  We’ll come back to him in a moment.

Social media are one set of many media channels

Prior to the Internet, the Web and social media, it would have been extremely hard for Bill’s (or Dick’s) story to spread unless the news media or the entertainment industry found it quirky enough to take an interest. Who knows, maybe the story would sell some ads? But unless you got the attention of the mass media powers that be, there was virtually no way that a story like Bill’s could spread and grow on its own in the pre-Internet era – it would have been shot down as a hoax. Amateur video, on the other hand, gave the whole thing authenticity.

Today it’s much easier for you to be a Bill than ever before, at least in the sense of spreading your message across a large swath of the world. Social media channels have been extremely helpful for entrepreneurs of all sizes to tell their stories to the world. Some companies have done a great job at it. Many haven’t done as well.

But it’s no longer a question of if you use social media to tell your story. Now it’s a question of when and how.

A very bad way to use social media

Some people are still skeptical about allowing businesses to use free Web services as a means of connecting with the world (read:  sell stuff and make money in the process). There’s still plenty of ways to screw it all up, though.  Remember Dick?  Well, Dick forgot that the wonderful part of the experience wasn’t him.  The experience was supposed to be about seeing him make incredible pottery with magic power.

Instead, viewers were bombarded with pro-Dick propaganda, advertising for unrelated products, and special guest appearances by celebrities that were intended to boost Dick’s profile – and ego.  Once people caught on to the fact that Dick was only in it for the fame and the money, his audience (and buyers) disappeared.

Now he can’t sell any pottery. Because, on top of everything else, Dick wasn’t even a good pottery maker.

You’ll probably be upset at the way Dick used social media.  But what about Bill?  He delivered on his promises and he was respectful.  He was also human.  Would you really berate him for using free services?  I don’t think I could.

Conclusion:  Use social media with care (or, you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear)

So we have two ways of using social media channels to market yourself:   one good, one not so good.  But without the channels, the potential to grow just wasn’t there.

I think that Bill would agree that social media was good for him.  I think that Bill had a good approach to using the media with respect.  And staying human to boot.  Alas, poor Richard did not do so well.  He forgot about why it works.  And he failed miserably.

The moral of the story: In the world of social media, don’t be a Dick.

Think about your favorite restaurant.  That place you go when you have some extra time, maybe a little extra jingle.  Not the place you take the visiting in-laws (unless you actually like them, but then that would be an oxymoron), but the place you take your BFF or closest couple friends.  The guys who know how to complete your lame movie quotes or Seinfeld one-liners.

Why did you choose restaurant X?  What makes it special?

Maybe it’s the handy valet or the great view.  The local suppliers, free-range meat, or nods to the diet du jour on the menu. It could be the funky interior or the layout just made for comfortable conversation.  You may have made the pick because of the interesting fare and prompt, thorough customer service.  The relaxed atmosphere or music may be your thing.  Or it may be the right combination of good food and reasonable price.  I just hope it’s not because you’re one of those people who like to drop a Benjamin for what amounts to a cup of frou-frou food on a sauce-drawn miniature plate. Puh-leeze!

The fact is, there’s a secret combination of ingredients working together to create a certain chemistry that just works for you (hopefully those that you’re entertaining, too), and likely many other diners like you.  That certain elusive je ne sais quoi that Micky D’s doesn’t capture, even with extra props for the new fruity smoothies.

You’ve had good times there, eaten good food there, taken refuge there when nursing a few wounds (I completely agree, you *should* have snagged that promotion.).  Some of the rational benefits of your choice are getting folded into some of the emotional accoutrement.  Things get melded together.  The restaurant is much more than simply a place to snag a sandwich.

When rational benefits meet emotional responses, transformative developments take shape for business.  Making and keeping a believeable, consistently achieveable (through a focused model, regimented training, tested process, and feedback loops) brand promise will play out in earned credibility.  The kind that spreads organically.  If you mix in “surprise and delight” variables often associated with service – being greeted by name, receiving special accommodations, garnering personal attention, and exclusive or special occasion offers – and a business can rise above a mass of peers.  It can attract and fulfill a clientele ready, willing, and able to spend $20 on the lunch that wasn’t.  Lunch at your favorite restaurant with your best girl friend who needed a pick-me-up isn’t lunch. It’s soul food.

A business intent on building lasting affinity with customers will recognize that success is sometimes not about achieving scale, but rather about delivering special.  I’ve paid extra for that.  And I’ve referred friends with confidence, too.

What about you? Where have you dined recently – or received any personal service – where you felt the brand was really paying attention to the details, and the front-line staff knew how critical it was to execute according to the secret recipe?

Image of Comme Ca from Zagat.

I don’t watch a ton of TV, but I do have a few favorite shows. I love AMC’s new series, Rubicon. I watch a lot of Top Chef with my five-year old, because he likes cooking and I like Padma. I generally catch Bri-Wi when I’m home.

So here’s a test: I’m going to name five shows, and I want you to rank them in order of popularity. Ready?

NBC Nightly News
Top Chef
American Pickers
The Closer
Mad Men

Where would you go to find this information? Why, the folks at Nielsen, of course, who measure this sort of thing. Here’s what they had to say (ranked by estimated total audience for last week):

The Closer: 7,209,000
NBC Nightly News: 7,170,000
American Pickers: 4,866,000
Top Chef: 2,898,000
Mad Men 2,312,000

Any surprises to you? I was actually most surprised by The Closer – I knew it was a hit, but those are pretty good numbers for a cable show. Now, all of these numbers are estimates, but they are reasonably good ones – the folks being measured worked with Nielsen to come up with a solution that benefited everyone – not a “black box,” proprietary algorithm, but a good, solid sampling methodology. Why bother? Well, knowing how many persons watched a given show at least demarcates the boundary for how many of them saw a given commercial message, and that’s a pretty important thing for both the networks AND advertisers to know.

Here’s another question: if The Closer is three times more popular than Mad Men, why would anyone advertise on the latter when the former has a significantly greater audience? Again, a simple answer: both parties measured something that matters – the composition of their audiences – so that products and services that were more appealing to Mad Men audiences (like the Chase Sapphire card) were shown during Mad Men. Context is an important part of engagement, and it’s all in the service of optimizing a limited ad spend. Again, all pretty proven and basic stuff here.

So, a third question: Which of the five shows is the most influential? What do you think? Let’s say for a moment that you believe Mad Men is the most influential TV show on my list. Influential how? Influential to whom? And in what context?

What does influential even mean?

By itself – nothing, of course. Influence requires an actor, action(s) and a context. Mad Men is arguably not more influential than The Closer, but Mad Men might resonate more strongly with you, and that resonance might make you more receptive to other things by association. That receptivity, in turn, is measurable in both overt and subtle ways. Did Mad Men influence me to change my Twitter avatar for a while? Definitely. Did it influence me to start smoking? Definitely not. Did it influence my martini consumption? Maybe. OK, definitely. You get the point. (The same is true of people, by the way. Is Barack Obama more influential than my wife? If you are married, you know this is a trick question.)

Devoid of a specific context, actors and actions, how would you arbitrarily measure whether or not Mad Men is more influential than, say, American Pickers? You could hazard a guess (let’s say, “3X,” which I’ve rectally derived), recite a few anecdotes or perhaps provide some other qualitative measures. You could total the mentions of both shows on various social media platforms, and even index them, if you’re clever. But there’s no way to check your work. Despite decades of measuring reach, frequency, demographics, psychographics and now engagement, there isn’t a Nielsen “Influence” rating. There isn’t an influence rating for a very simple reason – it would be really hard to figure out correctly, and figuring it out would net you very little in return. It isn’t a salable metric. All that matters to the advertisers on Mad Men is this: how many people saw my ad, who were they, and what happened as a result.

In fact, almost any use case for an influence measure is really a proxy for something else you’d rather measure: a purchase, an increase in loyalty, a shift in awareness or attitude, or the movement along a continuum from awareness to consideration to information-seeking to conversion. So we measure those things instead. Where influence may matter is with a specific life group – are we “moving the needle” with empty nesters? Young wealth acquirers? Recent retirees? In every case, however, a measure of influence is really a measure of something else (“the needle”), and that measure is meaningless unless it is accompanied by a context.

Influence is a derivative – an abstraction that’s exponentially more difficult to ascertain than the more useful measures it’s meant to amalgamate. To make meaning of “influence,” I have to know more than a simple number – I have to be able to know something about you - quite a bit, actually.

Here’s something about me: my Klout is 39 out of 100. My Tweetlevel is 60 out of 100. My Twitter Grade is 100 out of 100.

What do you know about me, now?

What are these numbers proxies for?

Related articles by Zemanta

• Measure your Influence Level in Twitter (crenk.com)
• Influence is Bliss: The Gender Divide of Influence on Twitter (briansolis.com)
• Measure your social networking Klout (money.cnn.com)
• I calculated my Klout Score and all I got was a chip on my shoulder (techvibes.com)
• How can you measure influence? (simplyzesty.com)

Two pressing needs in digital marketing analytics are estimating ROI and improving conversions through better web metrics. I’ll be talking to you about both in the weeks to come.

The first focuses on optimizing the flow of qualified traffic. The second looks at optimizing what you do with that traffic. Both lead to better online profits.

Let’s actually start with the second one: conversions. To improve your site’s “close rate,” you first have to acknowledge that it’s a lot like running a bricks-and-mortar store — even if what you’re trying to “sell” is the action of subscribing to an e-newsletter or downloading a whitepaper.

You, as a hypothetical shopkeeper, can improve close rates by enhancing your store displays, experimenting with new offers, plus a hundred other tweaks to the “content” of your store. In other words you’d optimize your store’s content the way a web content manager adjusts page content.

Both of you would be doing it for the same reason. You’re trying to improve interest levels in order to get higher conversion rates.

Measuring consumer interest on a web page

For years I’ve been working on a single metric that focuses on visitor interest levels. It scores web content (text, graphics, video and audio) on its ability to cause people to be interested during a key phase in the sales cycle, when consumers are not yet ready to buy. In doing so, I’ve tried to address a galling problem in web analytics: digital window shopping.

Today we have a lot of knowledge about what people do once they arrive at a site. Modern web analytics allows us to see exactly what pages someone viewed before they converted. That’s very nice, but this work is driven by a deeply flawed assumption: That everything a visitor needed to know to decide on the purchase was acquired right then, during that singular user session.

The problem with optimizing content around conversions is that usually it’s only a small minority of people who convert on their first visit. Instead they visit, look at a page or two, think about it, and then come back once, twice, or even more times — all before they take an action! To add even more complexity, they may use different computers each time, or even a smart-phone visit or two.

Say goodbye to tracking people over time via cookie files!

People need to become comfortable with your offer, and see how the benefits outweigh the costs. This takes time.

Image from Wikimedia.org courtesy of Creative Commons

My solution forgets about conversion for the moment. It assumes that before visitors go further into the purchase process, they first become interested. Years ago I was surprised to find that there is little devoted to this important part of the online sales process, so I set about creating a metric of my own.

This metric isn’t arrived at by surveying users, but by measuring their behavior. That means standard web analytics systems can come up with this score fairly easily, even the free Google Analytics.

(However, it only works for sites with tens of thousands of web visits every month, and extracting the most value from the metric requires a site where content managers can archive and later revisit past versions of the pages they manage.)

Paying attention to the nose prints

I first published something on this metric, called “content interest index,” on my blog.

Back then I struggled to describe what it measures. Now I talk about storefronts and display windows …

You, the shop keeper, can look out your storefront and watch prospective customers pass by. If you display merchandise in the window, you can count how many people look in briefly before continuing their walk past.

That’s basically what a page view does. It tallies up visitor attention. Which is a good first step; Attention is essential to any sale, and it’s the “be-all and end-all” of traditional advertising. But any bricks-and-mortar retailer will tell you that glancing in a window is one thing. Actually purchasing something is entirely different.

Once consumers come into a store and talk to a sales clerk, they’re two stages deeper into the sales cycle. They’re just one step away from a purchase. You might say that they’ve entered a “conversion funnel.” Most sales floor retailers study their in-store conversion funnels as closely as online marketers do. Like us, they try to keep them tuned up and humming along. In both worlds this is the manipulation of consumer “desire” (used in a marketing sense — see my blog post for an elaboration).

But what about that important stage between looking in the shop window (attention) and actually negotiating with a sales clerk (desire)? That crucial middle step is what my content interest index measures. It’s analogous to counting the nose prints on the store window, and comparing how many smudges you find on the glass immediately in front of each product displayed there.

It looks for those people who are so interested in a product or offer that they “leave a mark” — something we can measure and compare.

So what?

This is especially important online because we’ve seen that prospective customers visit our web sites with far more frequency that most people would (or could!) visit a bricks-and-mortar store. To say this another way, online consumers can visit with an interest that is strong, but shy of converting, many times before they finally convert.

“Nose prints,” both real and virtual, are behavioral proxies for interest. When reported properly, the virtual kind (expressed through content interest index) can serve as a coaching tool to those content managers responsible for the key web pages surrounding your site’s conversion funnels.

My next post will talk about how content interest index is generated by watching behaviors that include sending content to a printer, emailing it to a friend, and social media sharing.

When you’re trying to build your company’s brand, one clear focal point is the marketplace and another is the target consumer.  An often overlooked (or under considered) leg of the stool is your work force, and subsequently, everyone those people know. Internal branding. Do your plans for steadily building a sustainable brand place enough weight on those internal audiences so crucial to your success?

One of my favorite quotes related to branding is from Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com.  When speaking of a company’s reputation, the legacy under recursive construction, Bezos said something like “Your brand is what they say about you when you’ve left the room.”  The “they” in that sentence being any audience or segment and the “you” being the company, the brand.  The guys in charge.

The way I see it, small business needs a better understanding of the role internal audiences play within the branding infrastructure, the manner in which their perceptions lead them to do their jobs, and the way they embody the brand on their own accord.

The brand beneath the surface

A brand is a living, breathing organism.  It experiences failures, successes, and everyday trials.  While the vast majority of small business resources are placed behind developing and promoting the brand externally, that approach discounts the value held by employees.  We need to cross the streams.  The very people that solve the problems, deliver the goods, negotiate manufacturer pricing and code the site can offer unique perspectives if only they’re asked.  Their individual roles means they have a direct line-of-sight to the customer not held by anyone else (more so if they’re old-timers or have had lateral or successive roles).  These people are a gold mine of information that can help:

• Surface flaws in process or procedure (create value through efficiency or increased ease of use)
• Identify barriers to purchase (functionality, policies, taxonomy, etc.)
• Define future marketing communications strategies (bet you don’t know what those guys in the other room know. Ask.)
• Spark innovation (brilliant ideas come from everywhere. Don’t be myopic and brainstorm with the same staid group)
• Solidify personal ownership, end-to-end (give ‘em the complete picture, how their role affects the whole)
• So, you think smugly, you’ve already asked their opinion?  In a SurveyMonkey poll in Q4 2009?  You see where I’m going with this. After you collected the information, did you do anything with it?  Or does the cross-tab function in your Excel only work when it involves tangible assets like inventory?  In this case, not only are you missing out on valuable, relevant, and timely insight but you’ve also probably sent a poor message to those who bothered to participate.

The brand within each of them

If you aren’t tapping into your paid assets (so to speak) to find out what you don’t know, then chances are you’re not giving sufficient thought to how well those valuable assets live and breathe the brand (see above).  While admittedly some people want to clock in, do a job, and cruise on home, most people truly want to be part of something bigger than them.  I’m talking about the people out there on that floor, in that warehouse, in those cubbies – they’re ready to be emotionally invested in their work.  Are you walking blithely by, oblivious to those folks just waiting for a rally cry?

Building your internal brand is more than the logo’d coffee mugs and calendars that nOObs get handed on day one.  The gear may be flags they can carry out into the field, but that stuff holds little meaning if the tools and training (read: mentorship programs, career development training, joint efforts between HR and marketing, and leadership that walk the talk) establishing internal brand culture isn’t in place.  When the purpose, the meaning, isn’t there, then it just becomes a job and subject to all the vulnerabilities inherent to anything perfunctory.

The brand on the street

Your employees buy groceries, run to the post office, and play Little League with a bajillion people.  These people, as people will, ask your employees “So, where do you work?” and “How do you like it?” If you had to guess, what do you think the responses would be to the latter?  Answers can range from the practical “The pay is fair.” or “The benefits are good.” to the more telling responses invariably leading to … wait for it … wait … culture.

If people in authority micromanage, it speaks to the culture.  If there’s inequity in employee perks or disproportionate leniency for some, that speaks to culture.  If one guy is allowed to be a loudmouthed crude jerk or another gal only fills openings with her cronies or hand-picked recruits (irrespective of true qualifications), that speaks to culture.   As the boss, you may not always hear about such things but if they’re happening, you can bet money the rank-and-file are talking and commiserating.  And they’re telling their friends.

The point

Systematically, purposefully building an internal brand-centric culture as part of a comprehensive strategy can lead to heightened customer-focused actions and stronger bottom-line results.  What are you (or your employer) doing to develop the relationship between employees and the brand?

Related articles by Zemanta

• Your Culture Drives Your Brand (paulisakson.typepad.com)
• The 10 Point Plan to Build an Internal Community of Brand Loyal Fans (successful-blog.com)
• Branding In 30 Seconds (conversationmarketing.com)