Gerry McGovern – iStart keeping business informed on technology

Understanding social top tasks: what Cisco learnt

Jennene Kelly — Mon, 18 Jun 2018 11:33:24 +0000

Why do customers follow Cisco on Facebook, Twitter and community forums? That’s the question Cisco wanted to answer in order to better tailor the content they provide on these platforms.

The basic conclusion from the study was that customers use social media resources to advance their careers. Many Cisco customers are engineers.

They need to be updating their skills, gaining or renewing certifications. And social media is the platform where they can connect directly with brands and their peers.

We compared the social media top tasks results to the Cisco.com website using a study we conducted in 2010. Cisco.com is an enormous website, getting almost 250 million visits a year. The top tasks for Cisco.com were:

1. Download software, Firmware, drives, patches, and updates
2. Configure / set-up a product (tech guides, notes, how-tos)
3. Troubleshooting (bug fixes, diagnostics, guides)

We have done many top task studies over the years for technology companies and the top tasks we found for Cisco keep repeating themselves.

There are patterns out there when it comes to customers’ top tasks.

In the survey, these five social media tasks got as much of the vote as the bottom 35 tasks:

1. Network design (best practices, peer recommendations)
2. Configuration, installation, set-up, deployment
3. Training
4. Events (webcasts, seminars, Cisco Live)
5. Certification (requirements, renewal, status)

In contrast to the Cisco.com top tasks study, training, events, and certification bubbled to the top of customer tasks.

“Resoundingly, we learned our visitors are very focused on their career advancement,” states Leslie Lau, social media manager for Cisco. “They do this by learning from Cisco experts and keeping up with the latest news and technology developments. An effective way to quickly find the people and most up-to-date information is to connect directly with Cisco via our social media channels.”

Configuration is the only top task that appears both in the social space and Cisco.com. Of course, it’s not that one channel is exclusively for a particular task. You might discuss configuration in a community and then get more configuration information from the main website. You might find out about latest training and events on Facebook but then sign up on the main website.

Many tasks will have overlap and that’s why channels should not exist in isolation. The social space affects the traditional website space and vice versa. They are interlinked and dependent on each other. So, we need an overall strategy that focuses on tasks such as training and makes sure that no matter what channel the customer interacts with, they can complete their top tasks in a quick and easy manner.

So, what does Cisco do with this sort of top tasks data? According to Leslie, “It’s important that we incorporate what we’ve learned into what we do every day.” That involves measuring the “ability for your users to complete their tops tasks on the social channel”.

ABOUT GERRY MCGOVERN//

Gerry McGovern is an expert in customer-centric technology, and a five-time published author. He helps large organisations become more customer centric on the web. His clients include Microsoft, Cisco, VMware, IBM, Atlas Copco and Tetra Pak.

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Collapse of trust and digital transformation

Jennene Kelly — Mon, 14 Nov 2016 22:03:07 +0000

Governments, brands, institutions, experts are all facing a crisis of legitimacy. Digital is an accelerant in this collapse and in the making of a radically different world. How do we navigate this historically significant transformation?

The anchors of society are loosening. The traditional certainties are fading. It’s getting harder to know the present, let alone predict the future. People are aware that they are faced by enormous change but a growing number of them are no longer turning to traditional institutions in the search for certainty and answers. Religion, politics, brands; fewer people than ever believe.

There is nothing firm or certain about digital. A mountain is a mountain. It might not be there in a million years but it will be there tomorrow. A mountain of data can be quickly deleted, stolen, processed, moved. In minutes, a digital mountain can be gone.

We have never been more connected and disconnected. Paradoxes abound. Contradictions are the norm. It’s called the World Wide Web, yet it seems to create these ever-tighter tribes of like-minded people making like minds even more alike.

Trust, regarded as an essential glue for society, is collapsing all around us. Except for the elites. This small group trusts the institutions of society much more because, of course, they have done very well by these institutions. The incomes of the top 10 percent have grown dramatically over the last 30 years, and the incomes of the top 1 percent have grown stratospherically.

Meanwhile, in many societies, the middle class have become the new poor. The old poor face a world of diminishing choices and opportunities. The vaunted Millennials are better educated and poorer. They are the first generation in modern times that have less financial opportunities and job security than their parents. That truck and taxi overtaking you will soon be driven by a robot. Artificial intelligence is only getting started. The knowledge workers will not be immune to the march of the algorithms.

And yet.

And yet on a global basis, humanity has never been healthier or wealthier. More of the world is at peace today than has ever been in human history. Ordinary people everywhere have digitally transformed. They have embraced digital tools and they are using and innovating with them at a phenomenal pace. There is a world out there—within the many other worlds—of savvy, highly connected customers who are looking for genuine quality and real experiences.

Digital transformation has not occurred for most organisations. Most have fallen severely behind, with often appallingly-designed enterprise digital systems. It used to be that organisations led and invented the future. Today, it is ordinary people who are the inventors, the innovators, the leaders. The clever companies organise around their customers. They don’t seek to invent new experiences, but rather use digital as a looking glass, to see deep into the experiences that are already happening, and design so as to make these experiences deeper and richer.

Trust in institutions is gone and will probably not come back. Trust in ourselves and in our network has never been stronger. Complexity is unpredictability. What the future holds can just be guessed at. And digital transformation of the customer means that they have more power today than they ever had.

ABOUT GERRY McGOVERN//

Gerry McGovern is founder and CEO of Customer Carewords, which has developed tools and methods to help large organisations identify and optimise their customers’ top online tasks. He has written five books on how the web has facilitated the rise of customer power.

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Ashley Madison and the power of traditional marketing

Jennene Kelly — Sun, 30 Aug 2015 22:19:25 +0000

Even after the personal data of its many millions of subscribers had been published on the Web, the Ashley Madison website pretends as if nothing has happened. On its homepage it boasts that it has “over 39,915,000 anonymous members!” It crows about its discreteness, trustworthiness, and security.

Ashley Madison feels that it can ignore the elephant in the room, the fact that its members are no longer anonymous, and that its vaunted security was completely breached. It hopes its members will ignore this reality because these members have always bought the dreams and illusions it’s been selling.

Because Ashley Madison has an even bigger problem. It was estimated that about 9 out of 10 of its members were men. What’s more, Gizmodo reporter Annalee Newitz found out that the vast majority of these female members weren’t real. After extensive analysis, it was discovered that of the estimated 5 million female members, only 12,000 of them belonged to actual, real women. “Those millions of Ashley Madison men were paying to hook up with women who appeared to have created profiles and then simply disappeared,” Newitz wrote.

So, how did Ashley Madison approach this ‘woman’ problem? If you look at its homepage you see a picture of a very attractive woman inviting you to become a member. Promote the very thing you are not. Turn your greatest weakness into your greatest strength through marketing. Sell the illusion because that’s what people want to buy.

This old and constantly repeated central idea of advertising and marketing has most definitely worked. It works for Coca Cola, who package their obesity drink in handsome fit bodies. It worked for Marlboro as they sold their cancer sticks with the rugged, outdoor Marlboro man. Did you ever see an ad for a car where the driver was stuck in heavy traffic? No, they’re always whizzing around the empty streets of Rome or Paris, or crossing a shimmering desert.

The core product of traditional advertising is illusion. And where you have sad, old men desperate to have an affair, it still works. And there are many other areas where people are desperate to buy the dream rather than the product. Traditional advertising will work there too. But due to the Web and the availability of information, there are an increasing number of areas where traditional advertising simply doesn’t work anymore.

Sarah Parmenter gave a presentation at An Event Apart in Washington DC where she showed two types of photographs that were being used to promote a hair salon. One type was taken by a professional photographer while the other was more amateur. The professional photograph got 1 like and 0 clicks. The amateur photo got 79 likes and 521 clicks.

We all know about banner blindness. (You are as likely to get hit by lightning as click on a banner ad.) Increasingly, we are also finding that traditional hero shot imagery actually reduces people’s trust in a website. Deceptive advertising has been used for so long that more and more people are not simply becoming immune to it—they are becoming allergic to it.

ABOUT GERRY McGOVERN//

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Urgently required: a department of the customer

Jennene Kelly — Tue, 07 Jul 2015 00:40:37 +0000

Consider most organisations: there is a department of selling to the customer; a department of marketing to the customer; a department of communicating at the customer; there is even a department of dealing with customer complaints – but there is no department OF the customer. None of the other departments really care about the customer. None of them see it as their job to keep the best interests of the customer in mind. Not one is the champion and defender of the customer when marketing or sales says ‘we need to publish this ad banner’, or ‘we need to force them to sign up to this content’, or when someone in pricing wants to milk loyal customers by increasing the prices they pay.

In most organisations there is simply no department that is there just for the customers. All the departments are lined up to sell something to or get something from the customer. Support is only there for those customers who are really in trouble. I’ve been in so many meetings over the years where the voice of the customer (or the voice of the employee, for that matter) is rarely, if ever, heard. There might be one or two isolated voices, but they’re not listened to and instead are often seen as troublemakers.

I remember once sitting in on a presentation where a group of marketers were presenting new product ideas and programmes. Almost in unison, they said to the web manager: “And we’ll be coming to you to get a banner on the homepage.”

Said homepage was a cluttered mess and most of the web manager’s week was spent fighting off requests for banners and other marketing and management ego content.

This website had a carousel for its banners. The web manager readily admitted that it was useless, that in fact it was counterproductive. But he said the reason it stayed was to keep marketing and management egos at bay. “They like interactive things,” he said. “Things that move and are flashy and dominate the page; and you can essentially deal with five ego requests in the one space.”

“[If] you’re just an entry-level position,” a customer service representative who worked for a home security company recently stated. “You just do what you’re told.” Does it make sense that the employees who interact directly with customers have so little value to the organisation?

More than 70 percent of salespeople, responding to a Dreamforce 2014 Conference survey, said their companies have lost a customer or sale due to poor performance or reputation related to customer support.

According to a report in the Wall Street Journal in February 2015, 74 percent of executives state their top 2015 priority is improving customer experience. Yet, Forrester Research has found that “only 25 percent of customer experience (CX) professionals say their company’s CX programmes actually improve customer experience”. We need a radical rethink. The old organisational structures are simply not fit for this Age of the Customer. We need a Department of the Customer that has real power to champion the needs of the customer, to fight for their rights.

These are exciting times. Yes, they’re challenging, but there aren’t too many periods when the nature and structure of the organisation is forced to change. And this is one of those periods.

ABOUT GERRY McGOVERN//

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Things we can still learn from the electrical revolution

Jennene Kelly — Tue, 07 Apr 2015 02:09:57 +0000

Imagine it’s the early twentieth century when electricity is all the rage. Companies are hiring chief electricity officers and the hottest topic for boards is how to develop an effective electricity transformation strategy.

“Everybody’s going electrical,” John Lowe, the CEO says to his newly appointed chief electricity manager, frank. “We can’t be left behind. We have to go electrical.”

“I agree, Mr Lowe, but we can’t simply go electrical for the sake of it. We have to think deeply about this. It’s more than just replacing oil lamps with light bulbs.”

“But it’s a no-brainer, Frank. Let’s just put electricity in the factory and replace those smelly, dangerous oil lamps.”

“Electricity should make us rethink the factory, Mr Lowe. Have you ever wondered why our factory is beside the river?”

“No. All factories are beside rivers.”

“There are two reasons. One is transport. One is power. With electricity we have power. Transport is shifting to trains and soon it will be roads.”

“And what does that mean, Frank?”

“It means that we don’t have to have our factory beside a river anymore. We can have it inland, near a railway station. Land is cheaper inland, and we’ll be closer to the new transportation hubs.”

“That’s an interesting idea, Frank! Wow! This electricity thing is big.”

“We can also build our factory flat, with just one story.”

“But that doesn’t make sense.”

“It doesn’t make sense in the context of water power, Mr Lowe. Water technology dictates that your factory has to be tall and slim, but with electricity we can be wide and flat. That will allow us to more easily design production lines. It will make for the more efficient movement of raw materials within the factory.”

“That’s amazing!” Electricity is going to change how we work, what we work on. It’s going to radically reshape business and the economy. We have to move away from the river, move inland.”

Right now, a lot of organisations have digital transformation strategies and chief digital officers, but simply making what you have digital is not a digital transformation strategy. Turning print documents into digital PDFs is most definitely not a transformation strategy. Digitizing everything and putting it online is not clever.

The revolution that digital is driving should force us to rethink everything. Digital is flexible, malleable, adaptive. Digital is not physical. It lives in the network. It is cheap and getting cheaper. It is small and getting smaller, which means that it will be everywhere and in everything. Digital is the network and everything that has something digital in it (whether it be humans, fridges or cars) will become part of the network.

Digital is an abundant resource and the more abundant it becomes the more powerful and all-embracing is its network and reach. This makes digital a real challenge to traditional organisations that are built on physical principles of managing scarcity and exerting power through proprietary tools that allow them to organise better. Ironically, most citizens are better organised today than most employees. The customers have better tools than the employees, and, of course, there are far more of these customers.

So, if you are still working by the river, thinking that all you need to do is get electricity in, think again. It’s time to move inland. It’s time to move to the network.

ABOUT GERRY MCGOVERN//

Gerry McGovern is an expert in customer-centric technology, CEO of Customer Carewords and a five-time published author. He helps large organisations become more customer centric on the web. His clients include Microsoft, Cisco, VMware, IBM, Atlas Copco and Tetra Pak.

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Why customer convenience trumps experience

Jennene Kelly — Wed, 03 Dec 2014 04:22:29 +0000

You’re out of coffee. You have two choices. Ask your neighbour or drive to the local convenience store. Your neighbour, John, is nice but boy does he love to talk. You drive to the convenience store.

We don’t always want to engage. We don’t always want an experience. Sometimes, we just want to get things done as quickly and easily as possible.

“Why is usability so often ignored?” Derek du Preez asks in an article for diginomica in June 2014. Derek writes about the problem that thetrainline.com had where there was “a 30 percent drop off between the shopping basket and payment. As a result, thetrainline.com tested the introduction of guest purchasing, where users didn’t require their login details to make their purchase.” By not forcing people to login, thetrainline.com increased its gross margin by more than £1 million per year.

Amazon has known for a long time that the further away they pushed the login process the more they sold. If you make it simpler, people buy more. If you make it simpler, people stay with you longer. Reducing hassle increases sales.

So, why don’t more organisations get usability? Because they often measure the wrong things. Like satisfaction, engagement, interaction, relationships, loyalty. So much marketing and branding hyperbole.

“Feeling overwhelmed, consumers want support – not increased marketing messages or “engagement” – to more quickly and easily navigate the purchase process,” Corporate Executive Board (CEB) stated in a study it published in 2012. “Brands that help consumers simplify the purchase journey have customers who are 86 percent more likely to purchase their products and 115 percent more likely to recommend their brand to others.”

In a study of 7000 consumers, CEB found that only 20 percent want a relationship with a brand. In a study by Havas Media in 2013, over 90 percent of Western consumers said they wouldn’t care if most brands disappeared. Brands and marketing has a hugely inflated view of how important they are in the lives of customers. It’s time to get real.

“Our research indicates that the impact of simplifying purchase decisions for consumers is four times stronger than the favoured marketing strategy of engagement and is the number one driver of likelihood to buy,” said Patrick Spenner, managing director at CEB.

CEB has even produced a book on the topic, called The Effortless Experience. In it the authors state: “Customers want ease. Getting back to their busy lives quickly matters more than anything. The greatest driver of disloyalty is the amount of effort you require your customers to put into their service experience. Customer effort includes repeated contact, repeating information, channel switching (e.g. starting online and ending up on the phone), transfers, policies and procedures, and the general hassle factor that most service interactions create.”

In 2013, The Temkin Group found that IT professionals were 55 percent more likely to buy from tech vendors who made life very easy for them. Only four percent said they planned buying from vendors who were very difficult to deal with.

Today, time is more valuable than a Rolex watch. To save time in a hassle-free way is the best gift you can give the busy, stressed customer. Focus on increasing convenience for customers. Seek to reduce the effort they have to make to do business with you.

ABOUT GERRY MCGOVERN//

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Busy people need help, not interruptions

Jennene Kelly — Wed, 19 Nov 2014 19:57:04 +0000

For weeks Disney stalked me. On webpage after webpage I visited I got this horrendous ad for Disney resorts. It was in bright colors and swirled constantly. It literally hurt my eyes. It helped me develop a deep dislike of Disney.

Seemingly, this was one of these “interest-based” ads. But I have absolutely no interest in Disney. I don’t have young children and I don’t long for my childhood, but some system decided that I needed to go to a Disney resort. There was an “AdChoices” link beside the ad and I clicked on it several times and tried to opt out. It didn’t work but I expected that.

“Banner ads didn’t always suck,” writes Joe McCambley of The Wonderfactory. “I should know. I helped create the first one. My children tell me that’s like inventing smallpox.”

McCambley goes on to say that the original banner ads were useful. However, “before long, content and utility were corrupted by the only thing big agencies understood: reach and frequency,” he states. “We were back to delivering what TV spots, radio spots, and print ads had delivered for years: sales messages. The rest, as they say, is history.”

McCambley stresses that the web is about doing things, and that the mobile web is even more task-focused. He quotes Google’s Eric Schmidt, then with Sun Microsystems, who said way back in 1998 that “Customer service is the killer app of the web”. So true. According to McCambley, “Brands such as Google, Zappos, Amazon, eBay, and others win because they ask ‘How can I help you?’ instead of ‘What can I sell you?’”
According to McCambley, “Advertisers and their agencies, for the most part, don’t know how to be helpful.” And this goes to the heart of the matter. “Get rid of the marketing department!” Chris Baylis of Tribal DDB Amsterdam bluntly states. “Marketing departments have become self-serving entities and run the risk of no longer reflecting the company’s interests.”

Are traditional ad agencies and traditional marketing departments in bed with each other in a marriage made in hell? In many organisations the ad agency and marketing department seem to be comforting each other, doing the same old things, putting up big banners and small banners, and trying to think of something really ‘cool’ that will make them relevant. It’s like a death embrace as they spiral towards irrelevancy.

“You can skip this ad in 15 seconds,” Baylis writes. “Your article will be ready to read in 5, 4, 3, 2…1. Welcome to the world of advertising, a world of endless interruptions where brands, at best, try to borrow your attention for a few moments, and at worst, steal your time … Which means agencies are increasingly providing window dressing for their client’s ailing business models and not helping them face the challenges of the modern shared and networked economy.”

The future is about being useful. People know what they want when they come to the web. Don’t disrupt, interrupt, distract or annoy them. Help them succeed at completing the task they came to do.

ABOUT GERRY McGOVERN//

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Why content is both the solution & problem in self-service design

Jennene Kelly — Mon, 15 Sep 2014 23:58:36 +0000

First, a few definitions. By content I’m essentially talking about words; both the words in the text on a page and the words in the navigation and search results. During years of testing people’s attempts at completing tasks online we have found that the right words are the single biggest contributor to task success.

By self-service I’m essentially talking about the web, where we go to do things on our own. So, we are not interacting with another human who is directing us through a task. Now, it might be that if we get stuck on a task, we then open a chat with someone. That can still be considered as self-service.

Not every task is suitable to self-service. The optimal self-service task is one where there is high demand and the task is relatively simple and fast to do. The more complex the task is and the longer it takes to do, the more suited it is to a phone or faceto- face interaction.

Task complexity has many aspects. What are the implications of getting the task wrong? Could the person suffer major consequences from a financial, health or personal perspective as a result of doing the wrong thing?

Self-service encourages speed and impatience. It is not necessarily good for decisions that require reflection. I recently had a chat with Tom Loosemore, who is Deputy Director at the UK Government Digital Service. He was talking about divorce as a task, which throws up some interesting issues. Do you really want to make divorce easy to do online? “Get divorced in three easy steps?” There are many tasks where it really is better to talk to a professional or to pause for a while and contemplate.

Another problem is that complex tasks tend to require large quantities of complex content. Most of this content was historically not written for ordinary people but rather for the professionals (doctors, lawyers, HR specialists) who did the advising. Making all this content easily available online may in fact lead to worse outcomes, rushed and incorrect decisions.

Complex tasks also tend to be done infrequently. Self-service thrives on high frequency, repeated tasks. If you only do something rarely, it’s usually better to get help from someone who does the task all the time.

Complex tasks tend to be what I call tiny tasks from the point of view of demand and frequency. However, they are far from ‘tiny’ from the point of view of content. Some years ago Liverpool City found that far more content was being produced for their customers’ tiny tasks than for their top tasks.

Simplification of complex task content may not be the answer if it increases the risk of people seeking simple solutions for complex problems. Also, high volume complex content seriously impacts search and navigation, often smothering the content for the top tasks.

When it comes to self-service design, content is both the solution and the problem. Publishing the right content is a significant management challenge that most organisations haven’t even scratched the surface of.

ABOUT GERRY MCGOVERN//
Gerry McGovern is an expert in customer-centric technology, CEO of Customer Carewords and a five-time published author. He helps large organisations become more customer centric on the web. His clients include Microsoft, Cisco, VMware, IBM, Atlas Copco and Tetra Pak.

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Getting rid of website bloat

Jennene Kelly — Thu, 10 Apr 2014 22:29:19 +0000

Historically, the Norwegian Cancer Society worked in silos when it came to managing its website. “A specific example of where there was a lack of collaboration in the old website was skin cancer,” Ida Aalen, senior interaction designer at Netlife Research explains. “In the ‘about cancer’ section you could read about skin cancer, but the section about ‘prevention’ also had pages about what skin cancer was. And neither of these linked to each other.”

This, of course, led to duplication, confusion and content bloat. By focusing on top tasks and becoming highly collaborative, the number of pages on the society’s website has been reduced from more than 5000 to approximately 1000. The way content is managed on each page has also changed. There is now a core focus on the top task of that page (symptoms, for example). The other more contextual information is linked to on other parts of the website.

Collaboration can only be successful if a strong management model is in place. “The new management model, where it is clearly stated that the whole editorial board is responsible for the entire website really helps collaboration,” says web editor, Marte Gråberg.

The old distributed publishing model allowed 45 people to independently contribute to the website. Now, six people oversee and control the site. Not all of these people are full-time. There are roughly three full-time equivalents (FTEs) actively managing 1000 pages. That’s about 350 pages per FTE. We have found over the years that a fulltime web professional can manage somewhere between 200 and 500 pages.

The departments no longer own the content. They’re sources. For many years, distributed publishing has been the preferred model for website management. Give control to the department / author, the thinking went. They know their own content better than anyone. Distributed publishing was also cheaper because you didn’t need a central team. In other words, you didn’t need to hire professionals.

However, distributed publishing has major weaknesses.

It can result in silo-based publishing and thinking. There is no overview of everything that is being published and this leads to organisationcentric writing and duplication as different silos create the same content.

Many content authors like to publish their own content. This can result in a content explosion that causes confusing navigation and search. Also, as the site grows bigger it becomes harder to manage and review.

The new model strictly controls what is published: “If people want to add something to the website,” Ida states, “they need to write down their answers to the following five questions:

Who’s the target audience?
Does this content cover some need or task for this target audience? Which?
Does this content cover a strategic goal for The Cancer Society? Which?
Describe how you imagine this content will be found and used by the user.
Why is the website the right channel for this content?”

Collaboration across functions and disciplines is key to maintaining content quality and ensuring that a focus on people’s needs is kept front and centre in everyone’s thinking. Duplication of content is greatly reduced because the team is constantly discussing what they are doing and sharing ideas and insights. There is now a holistic view of the website, rather than the old silo-based view.

ABOUT GERRY MCGOVERN//

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People think ‘products’ when trying to solve problems online

Jennene Kelly — Tue, 25 Feb 2014 00:45:17 +0000

If the battery of their iPhone 4S is performing slowly how do customers go about solving that problem? Some will think of support and troubleshooting first. Others will think of the product first. They’ll want to get to the homepage of the iPhone 4S and then look for support.

In fact, for a great many tasks, customers want to first and foremost get to the homepage of the product or service they have (or are thinking of buying) and then look for the installation guide, the pricing, troubleshooting, software download, etc.

Cisco calls this the ‘product is the hub’ concept and it involves unifying all content, tools and resources for any particular product into a more singular experience for the customer. As its customers were observed trying to complete tasks it became clear that they expected to find a single product ‘homepage’ where they could carry out all the top tasks for that product.

Continuous testing research gave Cisco “strong evidence that our customers are ‘product-centric’ when they come to our site,” explains Bill Skeet, Senior Manager of Customer Experience for Cisco Digital Support. “This means that when they are looking for support information, they start their task with a product in mind. They expect to find everything about a product in one place and don’t want to have to go to a multitude of pages. They don’t care which organisation created it or who published it. Thus, they desire a product ‘hub’ page where it’s one-stop-shopping for the information for a particular product.”

This has major implications for technology company websites particularly. Often, information about the product is siloed in many different places. We have product pages whose objective is to ‘market’ the product. If you dig you will find product information in the communities site. In fact, across the social media spectrum you will find bits and pieces of information about the product. You will find software downloads in the software download section. You will find documentation in the documentation section. And who knows what you’ll find in the incredibly named ‘knowledge base’ (a top candidate for the title of ‘most meaningless phrase ever invented’).

For customers trying to solve problems these information silos make up a Kafkaesque landscape of dead ends, false paths and wasted time. And here we come up against the Simplicity Paradox: The simpler you make it for the customer, the more complex you make it for the organisation.

It is much easier and cheaper for an organisation to leave things in information silos. Why? Because they reflect the way the organisation is structured. There is a marketing department, there is a support department, etc. Even within marketing, for example, the social media team is often separate from the website team. And there are different systems managing all this information. They don’t interlink or integrate.

Creating a seamless, integrated experience for customers will result in higher task completion, more sales and greater loyalty, but it will come at the cost of greater organisational complexity.

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What content farms teach us about content

Jennene Kelly — Wed, 15 Jan 2014 21:37:12 +0000

One craze a few years ago was the content farm. However, as Andrew Wallenstein wrote in 2013 for Variety, “The future of the so-called “content farm” looks bleak as its search-centric biz crumbles.” Wallenstein focuses on Demand Media who, when it went public in 2011, saw its market capitalization soar to more than $2 billion, “sending the then-5-year-old firm’s value briefly past that of the New York Times Co. Compare those heights with where Demand finds itself today, having plummeted to roughly a quarter of its peak value. Revenues for the most recent quarter were down year-over-year for the first time since that IPO.”

Demand Media is a “content farm.” It rose to fame and fortune by identifying popular searches and creating cheap content and domain names to match these searches. You know when you search for “3D blu ray players” and the first link is from 3dblurayplayers.com and you click on it and find nothing but ads for 3D blu ray players? Demand Media make money off you clicking on those ads. You know when you want to learn how to do something and you end up on a badly written ‘how to’ page that’s next to useless? Chances are a Demand Media content mule wrote it. It was an extremely profitable business model for a while because it gamed the search engines.

But Google was watching. It didn’t like the content farms because it knew that people hate search spam as much as email spam. It started heavily penalizing these spam websites, causing their rankings to tank and their business models to crumble. Within a short period, traffic to Demand sites had dropped by 40 percent, and the stock began to dive.

To stop the traffic plunge, Demand shifted strategy and focused on trying to improve the quality of their content. Ironically, this had a negative effect on revenue, because as Wallenstein writes, it decreased ad click-through, since people were reading the articles instead of the ads.” That’s interesting, isn’t it? When Demand improved the quality of its content, less people were clicking on the ads.

This is a real catch 22 situation for those who hope to make their money purely through content. The better the content is, the lower the click rate for the ads. People only begin to notice the ads when they are dissatisfied, when they no longer want to read on. It’s a classic rock and a hard place dilemma for publishers. Not enough people want to pay for quality content and if you want to make enough money through ads you have to dumb down the content and make the page irritating. In fact, the more irritating and low quality the page is, the quicker people will click away, with hopefully enough clicking on the ads (even if it is by accident). Of course, if you follow this strategy you poison the value of the brand in the long term. People visit your website, find crap, click away and say never again.

So, what’s the solution? For starters, we must accept that the traditional publishing and advertising model does not work well on the web. (Unless you want to spam people, that is.) Content is not an end on the web. Content is an enabler. You make money off what content enables people to do. You make the content free and you make your living off what people do with your content.

www.gerrymcgovern.com

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Why do organisations hate their content management system?

Hayden McCall — Fri, 09 Aug 2013 11:26:37 +0000

I sat in a boardroom meeting recently listening to an IT director explain how they were going to go about purchasing a new content management system. The old system was a disaster. Everybody hated it.

The IT director carefully explained the process they were going to go through. How they were going to select vendors, what the preferred technology was, etc. At some point another director interjected: “Do we actually know why we want this new CMS? Do we really know what we want to do with it?” Such novel questions! The response was total silence.

It is still true – to a frightening degree – that technology is bought for its own sake. It is bought because it fits into already existing IT systems. It is bought because of some new, cool features. It is bought because it ticks each of the many boxes in an enormous, unwieldy ‘kitchen sink’ Request For Proposals. It is bought because there is a belief that technology is transformative in and of itself.

“Too often, management naively believes that new tools only will improve practices but I find that is rarely the case,” JoAnn Hackos, president of Comtech Services, states.

Something is seriously wrong with the process by which organisations commission their content management systems. In all the years I’ve been doing this I can’t think of an organisation that was genuinely happy with what they have. Many of the systems are usability nightmares with tortuous processes for creating, editing and, particularly, deleting content.

And it’s not solely the vendor’s fault. One vendor told me that they would love to make their system simpler but that they would not survive in the marketplace. “Organisations may say they want simplicity, but they buy complexity,” he told me. “The more complex it looks – and the more packed with features it is – the more impressed they are.”

So something is seriously wrong in relation to how many organisations buy technology. And this problem has been around for at least 15 years and doesn’t seem to be getting much better.

Organisations need to have a much clearer idea of what they actually need. What is really, genuinely critical. (What are the publishing top tasks?) There also must be a much greater focus on the content professionals who will have to use the system on a day-to-day basis. (A surprisingly neglected group, sadly.)

Information overload or content bloat is often a hallmark of content management systems. One of the key selling points is often that you can distribute publishing throughout the organisation. But distributed publishing is often a disastrous strategy as it allows content amateurs to flood the environment with low quality content.

This is exacerbated by the fact that a great many content management systems have extremely poor review and deletion processes. (A typical CMS is like a digestive system with no capacity to poop.)

The web has turned millions of organisations into accidental publishers, whose strategy has often been to buy technology to deal with this. But that’s no strategy. Strategy begins with a purpose. What is the true benefit to us – and more importantly – to our customers

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Convenience trumps security

Jennene Kelly — Mon, 24 Jun 2013 22:27:37 +0000

“During the 1990s, a ‘cypherpunk’ movement predicted that ubiquitous, user-friendly cryptographic software would make it impossible for governments to spy on ordinary users’ private communications,” Timothy B. Lee wrote for the Washington Post in June 2013.

Today, there’s plenty of software that can withstand NSA snooping but nearly nobody uses it. Why? Because, “consumers have overwhelmingly chosen convenience and usability,” Lee writes. “Mainstream communications tools are more user-friendly than their cryptographically secure competitors.”

Convenience is the brand equity of our age. In an increasingly complex world we will pay a premium for things that are easy-to-use. The most precious thing we have is our time. The harder things are the more expensive they are.

I have an account with Danske bank. It used to be very easy to login but a couple of years ago they made it more secure and now there are multiple steps. I hate it. It’s the equivalent of going through airport security every time I want to check my account. However, once I do get past the tortuous login, most things are very well designed and easy to use.

I have another account with Bank of Ireland. It has a simple login, which is great, but from then on its interface is like something you’d discover during an archaeological dig. I have a great manager at Bank of Ireland, who is always extremely helpful. I have told him that I would move all my business to his bank if only the online banking were easier to use.

Like many Irish banks, Bank of Ireland has gone through very difficult times during the financial crisis. Senior management has obviously decided not to invest in improving the online banking. I suppose the logic is that they can’t afford to.

It reminds me of a conversation I had with an executive at Irish airline, Aer Lingus, many years ago. The airline was in serious financial difficulties and a new CEO had just been appointed. He relentlessly focused on making the online booking process easier for customers. Within less than three years, online bookings rose from 3% to 73%, which helped put the airline on a much more solid financial footing.

Making things convenient for customers makes good business sense. It delivers tremendous return on investment. So, why don’t more organisations focus on convenience?

Organisations are generally very good at measuring costs, but they are usually very poor at measuring the value that derives from making customers’ lives easier. The new Aer Lingus CEO recognised that the old policy where customers were only allowed to buy return flights was inconvenient. He asked that customers be allowed to buy one-way tickets if they wanted.

He was told that that would be a very expensive thing to do. However, he had calculated that the extra value (more bookings) would be greater than the extra cost. He was proven to be right.

In the short term, creating simplicity for the customer almost inevitably involves creating complexity and extra costs for the organisation. We need better management models that allow us to measure the value.

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Quality search requires quality people not just algorithms

Jennene Kelly — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 21:18:51 +0000

There is a paradox happening today. Google is seen as delivering an indispensable service for modern life. Apple’s Siri and IBM’s Watson are becoming better and better at getting us the right answers. And yet within most organisations there is close to zero investment in helping either customers or employees find things quickly.

I work with large organisations and I always end up asking them how many dedicated resources they allocate to search management. Zero. Zilch. Nada. On the rare occasions that there are some resources allocated they are nearly always technical.

It’s a strange situation. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a major part of marketing. It’s about helping organisations get found in Google and other search engines. But organisations have a blind spot when it comes to helping customers find things using their own search engines.

Partly it’s down to the belief that once you buy a search engine you’ve solved your problems. The idea that we need dedicated resources to optimise findability is not yet understood.

Google has always tapped into the human element when it comes to improving findability. “Google uses human helpers in two ways,” Steve Lohr writes for the New York Times. “Several months ago, it began presenting summaries of information on the right side of a search page when a user typed in the name of a well-known person or place, like ‘Barack Obama’ or ‘New York City’. These summaries draw from databases of knowledge like Wikipedia… These databases are edited by humans.

“Other human helpers,” Lohr continues, “known as evaluators or raters, help Google develop tweaks to its search algorithm, a powerhouse of automation, fielding 100 billion queries a month.”

Scott Huffman, an engineering director in charge of search quality at Google, explained, “There has been a shift in our thinking. A part of our resources are now more human-curated. Our engineers evolve the algorithm, and humans help us see if a suggested change is really an improvement.”

But Google has always depended on the social web. When it originally launched, its secret weapon was linking. The more links a page got the higher it tended to rank. Links are like votes. Links are created by people.

Now, let’s go back to SEO. There are millions of searches every month for SEO services and Amazon lists almost 3000 books that mention SEO. There is an army of SEO people out there working very hard to create webpages that are as findable as possible by Google. So, again, we have a human-machine interaction.

According to Steve Lohr’s article, “Twitter uses a far-flung army of contract workers, whom it calls judges, to interpret the meaning and context of search terms that suddenly spike in frequency on the service.” In the presidential debates when Mitt Romney mentioned ‘Big Bird’ in the context of cutting funding for public broadcasting, the term ‘Big Bird’ spiked in search behaviour. The human experts helped immediately steer these searches away from Sesame Street and towards political topics.

Organisations are really missing out on the major benefits that arise when their customers and employees can find things quickly. To embrace the opportunity we need to invest in findability experts.

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Management practice lags behind tech innovation

Jennene Kelly — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 04:51:37 +0000

Rarely do I find organisations where senior management is truly engaged with the web. The web is still seen as some peripheral entity that is somehow disconnected from the core business. Why should that be the case as we enter 2013?

Organisations are slow to change; and the larger the organisation, the slower it is. For example, the reason we tend to have large, useless branding banners on homepages is rarely because the web team wants them, but rather because senior managers want them.

And senior managers want them because they reflect the style of marketing they learned in business school.

The web is rarely measured. Oh, yes, people will talk about hits, page views, time on page, engagement, and all those vague, volume-based, generally useless measures, but very few organisations collect useful management metrics.

The essence of the web is self-service. It’s about customers doing things for themselves. Great websites help customers do things for themselves easily and quickly. So, you would think websites would be actively measuring how easy and quick it is for customers to do things. Not so.

Dimension Data’s Contact Centre Benchmarking Report 2012 surveyed 637 contact centers in 72 countries across Asia, Australia, Europe, the Americas and the Middle East and Africa. The report found that, “few businesses have implemented systems to gauge their customers’ experience of non-agent, self-help channels. ”In other words, few organisations measure the true potential of the web.

“The large-scale failure to apply management information systems across new channels, and the subsequent absence of cost measurement activity on every channel outside of the telephone, is staggering,” Andrew McNair, Dimension Data’s head of global benchmarking, stated. “Only 27.9 percent of internet; 19.4 percent of web chat; 9.9 percent of social media; and 6.1 percent of smartphone application contacts are being measured. Only 14.6 percent of participants have any plans to impose measurements.”

Where is management? Absent. Completely absent.

Management today pays lip service to the web but doesn’t engage. It doesn’t think strategically about the web. It’s all tactical. We need a new content management system. Tactical. We need to be on social media. Reactive. We need more engaging content. Tactical. Where is the strategy?

It needs to be stated: the web can deliver value. Huge value. For one organisation we dealt with the cost of completing a task by phone was $30, whereas the cost of completing the same task online was $1. In another, the phone was costed at $15 per task completion while the web cost $1. The web is significantly cheaper than other channels if done right.

A 2012 UK Government report estimated that, “moving services from offline to digital channels will save between £1.7 and £1.8 billion a year.” However, it went on to state that, “The vast majority (82 percent) of the UK population is online but most people rarely use online Government services.”

Why is that? Because for years we have been focusing tactically on technology and content. We need genuine management engagement. Real strategy that is focused on the customer. With the web, we are sitting on a goldmine but we are managing it like a coalmine.

ABOUT GERRY McGOVERN//
Gerry McGovern is an expert in customer-centric technology, CEO of Customer Carewords and a five-time published author. He helps large organisations become more customer centric on the web. His clients include Microsoft, Cisco, VMware, IBM, Atlas Copco and Tetra Pak. www.gerrymcgovern.com

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The perils of search engine optimisation

Jennene Kelly — Mon, 10 Sep 2012 21:12:03 +0000

If Google wanted to get found in Google would it have the homepage it has? No. It would have a homepage with lots of content on it. This content would repeat keywords such as “search engine.” For example, a classic SEO statement would be: “Search with our search engine. We are the best search engine to help you search.”

The above is clever SEO but dumb content. But variants of this dumb content are being produced by a great many sites in order to “get found”.

Let’s get back to Google. Today I searched for “search engine” on Google.

The first result was for Wikipedia, then came Dogpile, searchengine.ie, DuckDuckGo, Bing, etc. The Google search engine didn’t appear until the third page of results, which means it might as well be sitting on top of Mount Everest from a search findability perspective.

The Google homepage is absolutely atrociously optimized for search engines, but tremendously well optimized for people who search. The Google design is focused on what the customer wants to do, which is to search and find stuff. Google is not focused on getting itself found but on helping customers find.

Strangely, many websites don’t have that focus. What needs do you satisfy? How well do you satisfy them? These are vital questions to answer.

Yes, it’s important to get found. But what happens after you get found is crucial. From a customer’s point of view, finding a particular website is just the first step in completing a task.

Google wasn’t always popular. Once upon a time it was a totally unknown website run by two students. Its strategy to get found was based on being useful. That’s by far the best philosophy. Let’s focus much more on helping people be successful once they get to our website.

That may mean doing the exact opposite of what many SEO tacticians tell us to do. I have seen many examples of when 80 per cent of the content got deleted from a site; sales jumped, support calls dropped and general customer satisfaction rose significantly.

There’s no point in bringing lots of people to your website if they are going to feel frustrated and annoyed when they get there. You must focus on helping them do what they need to do as quickly as possible. That very often means reducing pages and then stripping as much content as possible out of the pages that remain in order to simplify them.

Of course, it’s not always about removal. I have worked with websites where they didn’t have enough content in particular areas. The larger point here is that we should not focus on the content itself. If Google did that it would have a content rich homepage that would be terrible to use. And if that were the case, we wouldn’t be talking about Google because nobody would be using it.

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You don’t need a mobile strategy

Jennene Kelly — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 20:59:25 +0000

While many New Zealand businesses suffer at the hands of global and domestic economic uncertainty, the ICT and hi-tech industry is a beacon of resilience and growth for the country’s economy.

If a Norwegian man is sitting on the toilet reading the news on his iPhone, is he mobile?

Well, research indicates that one of the most favoured places where Norwegian men use their phones is on the toilet. iPads are used a lot on the couch but the iPhone is more popular in bed.

Mobile is not necessarily mobile. It is flexible, convenient, fast, and private. Pictures of sexually transmitted diseases are often accessed through mobile devices. This could be because mobile is particularly favoured by young people.

It could also be because a phone is more private than a computer. A number of people might have access to the computer you use, for example.

I’ve read that mobiles will be used a lot this Christmas, particularly for last minute gifts.

That implies that people using them may need advice on what to buy, because by definition they will not be buying for themselves.

“Desktop copywriting must be concise.

Mobile copywriting must be even more concise,” Jakob Nielsen writes in his article ‘Mobile UX Sharpens Usability Guidelines.’ We need more than content re-education according to Jakob. “The feature set should be much smaller for a mobile site than for a desktop site.”

However, the customer is not always in a hurry. Some people read more on their smart phones than they read on websites. So, one of the most important links any mobile website can have is a link back to the main website.

A major weakness of organizations is that they behave reactively rather than strategically.

“We need a mobile app.” “We need to be on Twitter.” “We need more video.” “We need to blog.”

Web strategy is far more about psychology than technology, blogs, Twitter or any other forms of content. The more people use the Web to live their lives and do their jobs, the more web professionals need to invest in understanding human behaviour. This is because the Web removes the human touch points, the opportunities to observe, the empathy zones.

There is so much we learn when we are physically in the presence of our customers. If I were hiring a web professional the greatest attribute I would look for is empathy; the ability and desire to put yourself in someone else’s shoes. A web professional should have a service heart.

What are Norwegian men doing with their smart phones when they are on the toilet?

What do people typically do when they are on the couch? Do the tasks change when they get into bed?

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What we can learn from Yahoo!

Jennene Kelly — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 23:24:05 +0000

Carol Bartz, CEO of Yahoo, stated in 2009 that “My fortunes are tied to my pages.” Yahoo has lots and lots of pages and lots and lots of page views. It lives in a pre-Web world of pages, pages, pages. It is the ultimate Cult of Volume website.

In 2010, TechCrunch asked Carol Bartz: “What is Yahoo?” Her reply was that “Yahoo is a company that is very strong in content. It’s moving towards the web of one. We have 32,000 variations on our front page module. We serve a million of those a day. It’s all customised.”

Firstly, it’s very hard to make money directly out of content on the Web. Content is an enabler, a facilitator. You can find ways to make money from other people’s content, but creating your own content and trying to make money directly from it, that’s not easy at all.

Bartz claims that Yahoo is customized, that it’s moving towards the “web of one.” When I went to Yahoo today I saw a big banner ad for a mobile phone plan that I definitely don’t want. This plan in no way meets my needs. Is that customisation? Yahoo has an awful lot of good things going for it, but its business model and philosophy are very much pre-Web. It’s concerned with using visual advertising to sell people things they don’t want.

This traditional advertising approach thinks that the ultimate achievement is to be so clever, unusual, funny or just downright weird that it will grab your attention and headlock you into buying stuff you had no intention of buying.

A great many people avoid display banner ads like the plague. To counter this, the ads are designed in increasingly deceptive ways, with all sorts of tricks to gain clicks. But customers are becoming better and better at simply ignoring these irritants.

These traditional brochure-ware banner ads used to sell at a premium. But Yahoo is finding it more and more difficult to get a good price for them. “When Yahoo does not manage to sell the available space on its premium pages at a guaranteed high price, it channels the space as Class 2 display into the ad exchanges, where it is sold at much lower rates,” Randall Stross wrote in the New York Times in August 2011. “In the second quarter, a significant portion of its Class 1 display space in the United States market failed to sell.”

The result? Yahoo’s has basically been in the doldrums since 2003. It has recently been having a very tough time, dropping 20 percent since July 19. Yahoo has an old world view of the customer.

It buys into the belief that the customer is there to be marketed at and advertised to. Sure, that model still has some value. If you flood a page with banner ads you’re bound to get some clicks.

Focusing on pages and content is tactical.

Focusing on what people want to do on pages is strategic. Traditional marketing is about getting attention. But web marketing is about paying attention.

For more information: www.gerrymcgovern.com

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The web is critical. The web team is not.

Jennene Kelly — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 22:18:17 +0000

You change how your website is seen within your organisation by changing how you measure it. Up until now most websites are measured based on inputs (content, technology, traffic). But to measure real value you must focus on outputs: What does the intranet help employees do? What does the website helps customers do?

Web teams are sitting on a goldmine but they’re managing and measuring as if they had a clapped out coalmine.

According to a McKinsey report, “From 2004 to 2009, the internet’s contribution to GDP in mature countries averaged about 20 per cent.” That’s quite astonishing. Really. We really are talking about the engine of the future.

So why do a great deal of web teams lack power, respect and resources? Why are a great number of people who create content for websites the most junior employees the organisation can find? Two reasons.

The web is still relatively new. Most managers are not trained in web management. They’re an older generation.

They see the Web all around them but still don’t allocate nearly enough time to thinking strategically about it.

You’ve a 10,000 page website and you’re adding another 200 pages every month. That’s not an achievement. That’s a tragedy.

Secondly, most managers who want to get more involved don’t know how to. They don’t have the right metrics. Talk to a typical manager about technology and their eyes glaze over or they get scared. I once talked to a senior government official and he told me that whenever the word ‘technology’ came up in meetings his colleagues’ first impulse was to crawl underneath the table. These managers felt bullied by the techies with all their fast-talking, fancy jargon. And invariably the deliverable was a way over-budget, way past deadline, unusable system. But they were afraid to show their ignorance so they just kept signing off on the budgets. That attitude is changing. Managers today are much less cowed by the technology complexity sell.

Senior managers in particular have no respect for content. They see it as a low level commodity and I see no sign of them developing respect anytime soon.

Content is strategic but it is not a strategy. Content is critical to the success of any website but it is not something to communicate to management. They don’t care about content. To them it’s nothing more than a cost.

We have to communicate value. You’ve installed SharePoint. Big deal. You haven’t created any value.

In fact, you might end up destroying value. You’ve bought Google search. Big deal. You’ve achieved nothing. You’re now on Twitter and YouTube. So what? No value creation. Zilch. Nada. Nothing.

You’ve a 10,000 page website and you’re adding another 200 pages every month. That’s not an achievement. That’s a tragedy. Until we move away from measuring the inputs we have no hope of either achieving value or communicating it.

As web professionals we have to earn respect in the rough and tumble of organizational politics. Respect follows value and value must be measured based on what our customers do on our websites.

Don’t measure the technology. Don’t measure the content.

Measure the use. That’s where the true value of any website lies.

For more information: www.gerrymcgovern.com

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