Ashley, I don’t know if you’ve read New Media Age recently, but it has given quite a lot of column inches to a debate about whether digital is relevant at the moment – what’s your stand on that one?

Everything is going to become digital, most things already are digital, so in one sense the label ‘digital’ is going to become irrelevant in the foreseeable future. Digital is just going to become part of life, part of marketing. At the moment, there is a huge change happening within big brands and organisations where they’ve got ways of working and corporate structures which are being battered by the internet and social media, which means they’re having to wrestle with things and often call them ‘digital’ in order to try and get their heads around it.

I think the skills, knowledge, tools and techniques to do the job aren’t going to go away – and they keep changing. So it doesn’t really matter what you call it or how it will turn out, search marketing will remain. And affiliate marketing and email marketing and user experience and interface design. It’s going to keep changing, so somebody’s going to have to help businesses figure out what works and what doesn’t – and that’s what we’re trying to do.

Obviously digital has supported the growth of social media, and we’d like to hear about your Twitter experiment and what’s been happening on your home page.

We started out covering Twitter as the hot new thing. We are always keen to experiment ourselves, partly because it’s fun and partly because we can publish the results. We’re trying to practice what we preach, which is actually quite unlike most publishers. We set up an Econsultancy Twitter account and started doing the Twitter thing not really knowing what would happen.

We have a feed that searches for the text string ‘Econsultancy’ on Twitter and automatically publishes that on our home page. Rather than us shout about how great we are, we let our readers, users or anyone else be on our home page, uncontrolled by us. If they’re saying good things, there will be a greater degree of trust and credibility because it’s not us saying it. That is a much better and more powerful endorsement.

I suspect a great deal of trust came from putting up the bad as much as the good?

Yes, and thankfully most of the bad has been about specific bugs on the site. It’s useful to spot those because a lot of people can’t be bothered to phone up, and they don’t send emails because they think emails disappear into a vacuum never to be responded to. The stats bear that out – most companies don’t reply to emails at all, let alone within any sensible timeframe. With Twitter you can just sort of vent your frustration because it’s only a very short amount of text. It’s easy to mouth off, which is why we capture a lot of opinion – it’s much more honest that way.

Have you seen any changes in what people have tweeted before and after tweets were made public on your home page? Has it toned people down?

When we first did it people realised that, by mentioning Econsultancy, they could get on our home page, so they were just doing silly things to get on the home page and sure enough they did. But they did it once or twice and then got bored of it, and everyone pointed out that it was a bit of a waste of everyone’s time, so actually that’s pretty much gone away. It doesn’t really work as a link spamming technique anyway because we only show the five most recent tweets on the home page, so you’ll very quickly go off the page.

The next step was to adapt our blog articles with a button saying “Tweet this”, which means if people clicking on it are logged in to Twitter, it automatically creates a tweet of the blog post title and a shortcut URL directly to that article. Essentially it is a way of marketing a particular article you are reading to your followers on Twitter; a sort of viral marketing thing for us. Having made it easy to do, currently about 60 or 70 percent of tweets are from people reading our blog posts and retweeting them or tweeting them to their followers. It is very nice and we think that it is a more powerful form of endorsement because it’s them marketing to their peers and followers, not us.

Do you think Twitter is an effective viral form for any brand, or does it particularly work for brands like yourself that are in the information industry?

I think that it depends a little bit on your target market. It is particularly powerful for us because most of our users will know what Twitter is and most will be comfortable with the notion of some button that they can click on; they’ll understand what it is doing and probably how it’s doing it. It’s an equivalent of the “email this to a friend” in the early days of viral marketing. I think different platforms will work variously well, depending on the nature of the proposition and the market. Some people might really like Netvibes, iGoogle, RSS, some Facebook and some Twitter.

Does it worry you that because social media buttons are easy to put onto web content, brands will be faced with a blog post and 15 different buttons for doing different things?

I think it is the paradox of too much choice, and as you know, that has always been a tricky user interface challenge. On the one hand people supposedly want choice; and power users want dashboards and big long lists. On the other hand, some people want extreme simplicity. If you look at Web 2.0 sites, part of their success was the fact that they typically did only one thing and they did that one thing very well, but it was extremely simple. So I think you have to balance the two. You want to make prominent the things which people most use, or are most likely to want to use, and you want to have all the other options accessible. It becomes a question of how you do that balancing within a page.

What’s next for the Twitter experiment – do you have any plans?

Yes, there are a couple of things. Firstly we’d like to roll out ‘tweet this’ across most of the pages of our site; that’s easy for us to do because we’ve already done it for the blog. The other area I think is interesting is live events. At ‘The Future of Digital Marketing’ we had a hash tag, #FODM, and people at the event would be tweeting using the hash tag. Then we correlated feedback about the event in real time. We didn’t display it live on a screen because I think it’s too distracting; we had about 700 tweets during the event.

If you hand out feedback forms at an event or a training session it is a nightmare trying to get people to fill it in. But now everyone – and certainly our lot – have mobile phones and smart phones and they are all geared up to tweet. So we’re looking at using Twitter as a sort of reviewing platform. We want reviews, not necessarily ratings, but reviews about our events, about our reports and about our training. Twitter can allow people to do quick reviews. I haven’t seen anyone doing this yet, but it strikes us that there’s an opportunity to do it. The reason to do it is in the same way that user ratings and reviews increase conversion rates for online retailers – we would hope that the same social persuasion factor would work for us.

Thank you Ashley for taking the time to speak to us. The full podcast is now available for download from the Foviance website.

A the time of this posting, Twitter experienced severe downtime, the culprit has been confirmed as a “denial-of-service attack”. Read more from Econsultancy.

Update: 7th August, Twitter still suffering.

Back to July /Aug newsletter

Last week I was over in San Jose for the Emetrics Marketing Optimisation Summit for three days of input and output on all issues around digital analytics. As usual there was a wide variety of content to absorb and a breadth of issues to discuss. As I sit and write this at the airport on my way home (got to meet those ClickZ deadlines…) I get a chance to reflect on some of the key themes that came out of the conference.

This was my fifteenth Emetrics conference in the last six years on both sides of the Atlantic, so I have had the chance to see how the event has grown and developed over the years. Whilst some of the fundamentals remain the same (such as how to get analytics embedded into an organisation), the debate has moved on. I attended sessions covering mobile analytics, social media measurement, voice of the customer programmes, marketing mix modelling and data integration.

One of the sessions I found most interesting was from Joe Megibow from Expedia. Megibow outlined how they have invested huge amounts of time and effort into integrating their various sources of customer experience feedback, specifically OpinionLab and TeaLeaf. This gives them the ability to link comments left by users on the site with their actual sessions, so they can see the comment and then replay the user’s session to more fully understand the user’s experience that led to the comment. The integration is interesting but what was impressive was the detailed analysis that went into understanding and solving very specific customer experience issues. Megibow certainly washed some of his dirty laundry in public by taking us through a number of examples of how they had uncovered problems with the site through the voice of the customer, the impact that the problems were having on the customer experience and the steps they had then taken to solve them. What struck me was the fact that often these were very small specific problems affecting perhaps a relatively small number of people but when you added them all together they were having a significant impact on the user experience. In fact Megibow said that since they had embarked on this systematic programme that conversion rates were being steadily improved but that the major success had been “winning the cultural shift of listening to customers, institutionalising analytics in the business and executing against the outcomes”.

Putting customers at the centre of the company’s strategy was a theme taken up by Greg Dowling from Nokia as well. He took us through the challenges of developing and implementing a global measurement strategy for a business that is looking to develop consumer data as a strategic asset. These challenges that had needed to be addressed included the lack of a common language around metrics, the fragmentation and quality of the data, the lack of competencies in certain areas and the fact that data and insights were not part of the business processes. Anybody who works in a large global organisation will probably recognise one or more of these challenges. Over a two year period Dowling and his team had worked to address the challenges and is his words “behavioural data is at the heart of our relationship with customers”.

One of the tough parts of implementing the Nokia measurement strategy had been around getting the mobile analytics strategy sorted. This was taken up in more detail in a further session by Dowling and Gary Angel from Semphonic. I touched on the issues around mobile analytics in my last column but in this session I really discovered how tough it is at the moment to get decent data on user behaviour on mobile devices, let along integrate that with the same users’ behaviour on the fixed web. All the issues that impact our ability to measure on the fixed web 10 years or so ago plague the mobile web such as the data collection methodologies and browser standards. There are challenges around visitor identification and measuring mobile applications usage. However given that it’s expected that by 2012 more mobile phones in the world will be accessing the internet than PCs it’s clearly an area that organisations need to start to address and given the evidence I saw in San Jose, the sooner they start to think about their mobile measurement strategy the better.

Having said that, there is still a ways to go for many organisations in term of sorting out their fixed web measurement strategy and WebTrends contribution to the debate was the release and publication of their Digital Marketing Maturity Model (DM3). This model provides a framework against which organisations can assess the maturity of the measurement capabilities on a number of different dimensions. I haven’t had the chance yet to look at it in detail, so something for next time. Till then…

It is an interesting concept in these frugal times, but is it one that is going to provide an insight into how to break into this untapped market? I am not convinced. I think it is a novel way to while away 5 or 10 minutes but that’s really as far as it goes. The most interesting thing about the site is what it highlights – the value of 5 dollars around the world. But of course communicating value it is not always as simple as displaying a picture of what it’s worth. Others have tried to highlight value in different ways, Boden for example have a formula that purports to measure the value of their clothes: value = price (£) / times worn.

However, highlighting the value in what we do as an industry is a different story. Companies do not always realise that investing in usability or the user experience can reap huge rewards. But I think, to be fair, a lot of companies are coming around to this way of thinking. However, with all the belt tightening and credit crunching that is going on at the moment, some have opted to try and save by cutting spending on evaluations. This could well be to their detriment as more prudent companies recognise that now more than ever is no time for cutting corners when you are trying to get an edge in a competitive market.

There are a number of ways to stay ahead of the game – analytics can help you measure success and failure and point to areas that cause users to drop off, not to mention understanding who is visiting your site and why. If this is carried out both pre and post user testing, its real value is clear. By combining analytics with user testing or an expert review you can get a more holistic view of your online offering. For cross-channel insight you can think about throwing emotional research into the mix. If your belt tightening is starting to make you feel the pinch maybe it is time to consider some of the above!

It goes without saying that the iPhone and in particular the App Store has revolutionised the mobile market. It has opened up the possibilities of mobile computing that were promised before (WAP anyone?) but never materialised.
The gaming industry obviously wants to get a piece of the action, however Apple’s refusal to allow ‘play for real’ applications in its store has become a major barrier. It’s clear from the popularity of ‘play for fun’ apps such as Apple’s own Texas Holdem game that there is huge demand from iPhone users (myself included).To get around the problem, gaming sites have been making iPhone friendly pages and trying their hardest to direct users to them. Since getting my iPhone I’ve been trying lots of these sites out and have come to the conclusion that there are 3 key factors behind what makes a good site.

Firstly, the layout and design of iPhone sites can be designed very similarly to real apps, which is great, as in the short space of time apps have been around, some helpful design conventions have emerged. Ensuring your site conforms to these conventions ensures that users will learn how to use it very quickly. Betfair’s iPhone site does this really well with the exception of having the ‘home’ button where the ‘back’ button is normally on an app. This frustrates me greatly when I use the site as I still continually hit it by mistake.

Performance is the second major factor in the user experience. A number of casino sites I’ve visited have failed badly in this regard. Sometimes the spin will take less the 4 or 5 seconds to complete, other times it takes over 30 seconds and then crashes. Having tried these games several times over the course of a week on both 3G and several Wi Fi networks the problem remained. It should go without saying that this has a major impact on the user experience. Mobile gaming is all about quickly opening up a game and playing for a couple of minutes whenever the opportunity arises. If you don’t have confidence in being able to do that you simply won’t play. On top of that, would you be willing to place real money on a site that isn’t stable?

Finally the third issue is security, sites need to be secure without over doing it. Users will want to quickly access sites without having to enter their usernames and password every time. At the same time there needs to be some level of security as if you lose your phone you don’t want the person who finds it to be able to access your account. Some sites automatically disconnect when you leave the browser however this is annoying if you are just quickly answering a call. The best approach I’ve seen is the use of a short pin number. It can be quickly entered and provides enough security without hindering the user experience.

Together, we can crack the mystery of cookie deletion. If users are routinely cleaning out cookies, you could find that you have significantly fewer unique visitors than you previously thought. Indeed, a study by Jupiter Research in 2005 concluded that 10% of users delete their cookies daily, 12% do so monthly and a whopping 17% remove cookies every month. Our own studies with WebAbacus have compared the number of randomly generated permanent first-party cookies with the number of registration IDs, which is a good way to tie cookies to real people. The ratio over a month has been about 1.179 cookies per ID, but this has been increasing year on year, suggesting that more people are deleting their cookies on a regular basis. Further investigation is clearly needed.

Cookie blocking is a related issue. First party cookies are those set by the site the user is visiting, and they tend to be considered more trustworthy than third party cookies, issued by another site such as an advertising provider. Our preliminary figures suggest around 0.2% of visits are blocking first party cookies. Additional research is need to compare this to third party cookies, and to broaden the sample size. It’s not always possible to use a registration ID to increase the accuracy of web analytics, so it is essential that websites can understand the margin of error in cookie-based statistics.

Most web content is free to view, often funded by advertising placed against it. With the rise of the Firefox browser, which is easy to customise, there has been concern that more internet users would block advertising using plug-ins such as Ad Block Plus. Some media sites are blocking Firefox users altogether, but with ad blockers becoming more widespread for Internet Explorer, this will no longer be viable. Some sites suggest that 10-15% of their visitors use ad blocking, but our own preliminary figures suggest around 1.2% of visitors are blocking adverts. We would be interested in hearing from companies that would be willing to help with further research, including those that do not run advertising.

The final wonder of the web is tabbed browsing, which has become more popular with the growth of Firefox and the introduction of tabs in Internet Explorer. Opening content in tabs enables users to hop about the site more easily and read some content while other content loads. From an analytics point of view, it means the clickstream recorded can include illogical leaps between unlinked pages. By noticing differences between the page referrer and the previous page downloaded, it can be possible to tell whether the current page was requested in a tabbed session. Further research is needed to work out how many people use tabs, and what effect it has on how they navigate websites.

As I said, you’re invited to participate in this research. Data can be collected using WebAbacus, results will be fully anonymised, and traffic levels will remain confidential. If you’d like to learn more about what’s involved, please email me without obligation.