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2007
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Marketing, tourism bc
Analytics driven creative through multi-variance testing
Part of our marketing philosophy is to ask people to do something in our communications, usually with the website as the call to action. It is therefore extremely important to create effective landing pages where people can follow through. A percentage point increase in task completion can make a huge difference in the overall results of a campaign.
A landing page needs to follow through on a call to action, should be relevant to the message, re-enforce it, be credible, desirable and usable. Some of this you can test easily, others not so much within the time and budget available. I’ve stated once in a meeting that I prefer a blank landing page over a aesthetically pleasing landing page if it produced better results. OK, I was a little fictitious but the point is that what matters are results, not personal opinion or preference.
Multi-variance (or A/B) testing is something we have employed for a while now with good results. Try two or more different options to a design, measure the results and roll out the one with the best results. Then use that design as the starting point for further iteration. If you have the traffic, and the right (agile) people and processes, this can be very effective. What you end up with is a design that very much driven by analytics, not personal opinion.
Last spring we used Google’s Website Optimizer to automate the process with great results. Joel, Eric and the rest of the team did a great job and Google wrote up a case study and published it on their website.
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Travel & Tourism
Canada-e-Connect Conference and Awards
Jens from the Canadian Tourism Commission is organizing the Canada-e-Connect Conference conference in November in Vancouver. I’ve spoken to Jens a few times about it and it looks like there will be great content by interesting speakers. Make sure you read the blog for updates, background info and related content.As part of the conference, the first Canadian e-tourism awards will be presented. If you are in the travel and tourism business, or if you are a traveler with a great story, photo or film, make sure you enter.
If you plan to attend the conference, make sure you drop me a note. I’d love to connect with some of my readers.
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personal
A week in Amsterdam
08.18.07 | Permalink | 2 CommentsI’m in Amsterdam for a week with my friend Steve. Just a quick break to visit some friends and family and show Steve around. It’s nice to have somebody with you who’s never been here. Makes you appreciate everything more. We’re staying at my Mom’s house at the moment. The first night, Steve suffered through an organized attach by my Mom’s four cats. One after another they decided to wake him up at periodic intervals while one of them tried to stare him down non-stop. It worked, we woke up at 4am (or was it the jet-lag?). We spend they day in Amsterdam were we walked around the city. We watched the sunset on the beach in Noordwijk (how romantic..). The next night Steve got the upper hand on the cats and slept for 15 hours uninterupted (so did I I).
A geek and a photographer at the start of their “Canadian Klootzak Tour”. That can’t be good…
Life imitating art.
Busted. You can’t get a geek away from his email.
Steve brought a camera from the 60’s for special back & white shots.
Amsterdam’s red light district in two words: sex and drugs
People in Amsterdam are strange, everybody that knows me will probably agree.
We also ran into my buddy Darth.
A break from our marathon walk on a patio at a canal, around the corner from the Anne Frank house. We opted not to visit due to the 300 person line-up. -
Links
Week in Links
Marc Andreessen points to an excerpt of Frans Johansson’s book The Medici Effect that explains why brainstorming is a bad idea. Hmmm, I think it depends on the context of the problem that people are brainstorming about, the intellect and skills of people involved, and the size of the group.
Google uses crowdsourcing to create maps In India. Fascinating and incredibly smart.
Lastminute.com promotes carbon offsets. We’re going to see a lot more of this very soon.
Google’s viral campaign to promote Gmail.
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Internet, Marketing, tourism bc
Results of HelloBC.com’s User Generated Content strategy
08.02.07 | Permalink | 2 CommentsIt’s been a few months since we implemented the first phase of our User Generated Content strategy. I thought this would be a good time to share some results.
Since we integrated HelloBCBlogs.com into our HelloBC.com website in March, we’ve seen a rapid increase in traffic to our blog entries. In July, we received almost 200,000 blog pageviews. The blog entries help us in our SEO efforts; 5% of our organic Search Engine traffic lands on a blog entry. We also have over 1,000 subscribers to our RSS feed.
The entries from travelers is showing a steady climb and we’re approaching the 300 mark. We were aiming for quality first; tips and information people can do something with. All entries are tagged with a community and an activity. This allows us to present relevant blog content alongside our official information. Between our staff, visitor centres and traveler entries, we cover almost 100 communities in BC and over 80 activities so far, for a total of 350 community/destination combinations. That makes for a great diversity of content, so it’s working out very well.From a User Experience perspective, the blogs are fantastic. The average pageviews for a blog visitor is 4 times that of an average visitor. Qualitative research conducted in some key markets proved that our unique strategy to position blog entries alongside our official information on the same page is working beautifully. It adds a layer of credibility and insider information consumers really appreciate. Our traffic patterns confirm this as well, many visitors will move back and forth between official information and blogs.
We see room for improvement. We’d like to see more consumer interaction with our blogs for example. People don’t leave many comments, but a fair number of people rate the entries. We have some ideas to further evolve the blogs with the goal to grow it into an online community. I’ll share some more details when I can in the future.
See also my previous post about our User Generated Content strategy.
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Marketing
How to use DM to destroy your brand
We used SkillPath Seminars to train one of the members of my unit a while back. Since then, we have been bombarded with DM pieces; all hard-copy, almost all irrelevant to our needs. I’m guessing 2 or 3 pieces a week. When I received the one in the picture below I had enough of this complete waste paper (and my time).
I sent the following email to SkillPath:To whom this may concern,Please remove me from your Direct Mail list. The volume of irrelevant
communications is beyond all proportion. This is a complete waste of
paper and has destroyed your brand for me. Have you ever heard of email
marketing?Preferred Customer #: *********
VIP #:***********Sincerely,
William Bakker
Director E-BusinessI received the following reply the next day:
William,I have made the requested changes to our mailing list. I do want to let you know that our brochures are preprinted
and you may continue to receive these until the preprinted supply is exhausted. This may take
3-4 months depending on the volume of mail received. I apologize for the inconvenience. If there is anything else I
can help you with, please let me know.Thank you,
[Name]
e-care Coordinator
SkillPath/CompuMaster/HRCSkillPath’s solution to this customer service issue is to keep sending stuff for 3 or 4 months to an already annoyed customer. What a perfect way to destroy your brand.
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Links
Week in Links
A lot of old business models aren’t working anymore. The music industry is a good example. Prince is a great example of somebody who embraced the new reality and created an effective new business model. [The Once and Future Prince – NY Times]
Chip Health, a professor at Stanford Business School, explains about conventional wisdom and how to ideas stick. [IT Conversations]
“Hotmap shows where people have looked at when using Virtual Earth.” [MS research – Hotmap]
“Call it the 105% Rule. From a word-of-mouth perspective, it’s virtually impossible to discuss an experience that is 5% better than the norm on all dimensions. People don’t talk like mystery shoppers, reporting diligently on each relevant feature. People talk about the exceptions, the unexpected, the highlights.” [Fastcompany – Give ’em Something to Talk About]
A second screening in Vancouver for the documentary Helvetica has been announced. Fonts and type is a bit of a low-engagement hobby and I’m looking forward to it. [Helvetica Film Website], [get tickets here]
Sheryl Sandberg leads Google’s advertising business. One of the best content I’ve seen in a 10 minute presentation. About the old advertising ‘interuption’ model: “It’s goal wasn’t to be useful to the user, it’s goal was to get the advertiser your attention, even at your own expense.” About Google’s advertising model “We wanted to our ads to be as useful as our search results”. [Supernova Conference]
And for fun. The best YouTube video I’ve seen this week.
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tourism bc
Job opening at Tourism BC
Are you passionate/obsessed with the internet? Do you think about the user first in any online deliverable? Do you always want to make things better? Do you know how to use analytics to drive results? Do you know Search Engine Marketing? Are you agile and do you believe that team=product? Then we want to talk to you! Check out this job posting for our online marketing specialist.
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Links
Week in Links
The best stuff I encountered online this week.
The fascinating BBC4 4 series documentary The Century Of the Self examines the rise of consumerism, advertising and Public Relations in the 20th century, starting with Freud’s psychoanalysis.
Episode 1
Episode 2
Episode 3
Episode 4How Seagate learned to package like Apple. Opening a product package should be an experience onto itself. Apple gets it, others are starting to follow.
Google sponsored a project in the Master’s program at Carnegie Mellon University’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute to rethink and reinvent online social networking. This is the next phase of social networking.
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Internet
Book Review: Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder
I attended Dr. David Weinberger’s keynote presentation (22MB, PPT) at the Information Architecture summit in Vancouver last year. It was a preview of his Everything Is Miscellaneous book. The presenation was very inspiring and thought provoking so I was looking forward to the release of his book. And I wasn’t disappointed. I expected a book about Information Architecture (a passion of mine) and library science, but it provided much more.
The theme of this book is that in the 3rd order of information (digital), the constraints for categorizing information in a single structured way has become irrelevant. In the digital order, information can be placed in many places, often without the need for any categories. Information is democratized, and conventional experts are replaced with the wisdom of crowds; no longer is information pre-filtered by editorial boards, but post-filtered by the users of the information, by their own definitions of authority.
The book provides the reader the history of cataloging knowledge, starting with Aristotle, analyzes traditional authorities like the Dewy Decimal system, all the way to the current folksonomies. New ways of managing and retrieving information and knowledge are challenging the conventional wisdom that everything in the world can and should be neatly organized. This new way of thinking is not only applied to knowledge management but can be applied in other areas as well, such as the way organizations are structured.
Dr. Weinberger’s blog is worth subscribing to.
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William Bakker's Destination Marketing blog
William Bakker is Chief Strategist at Destination Think!. These are my personal thoughts.
