Ashley Freidlein podcast transcript
Interview with Ashley Friedlein of Econsultancy
Speaker key:
PB: Paul Blunden
AF: Ashley Friedlein
PB: Hi, I’m Paul Blunden from Foviance, and welcome to our podcast on customer experience, with a particular focus today on Twitter. Today I’m joined by Ashley Freidlien, founder and CEO of Econsultancy, a community for digital marketing and e-commerce professionals that provides training and events. Ashley, I really appreciate you taking time to talk with me today. I don’t know if you have read New Media Age recently, but they’ve been giving quite a lot of column inches to a debate that’s going on about whether digital’s relevant at the moment – what’s your stand on that one?
AF: Well …
PB: Are we all wasting our time even debating it, frankly?
AF: Well, kind of, I mean I think that it’s one of these things that, yes, everything is going to become digital, most things already are digital, so in one sense it’s going to become irrelevant in the foreseeable future, that it’s just going to become part of life, part of marketing. At the moment, there’s huge changes happening within big brands and organisations where they’ve got silos and ways of working and corporate structures which are being battered by the internet and things like social media, which means they’re having to wrestle with things and call them things, I think, to try and get their heads around it, but over time I think the digital thing might well go away; however, as a sort of word that has any meaning at all, and if you talk to what I can now call “young people”, being not one of them, it just to them sounds stupid really, it’s just not something that they even think about, because it just is what it is, but that said, if that were the case, and I should be a bit worried running a membership organisation that’s supposedly about digital marketing, but I think the point is that the skills and learnings and necessary kind of 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, there’s still going to be search marketing in however it turns out, and affiliate marketing and email marketing and user experience and interface design – it’s a whole, whether it’s a sector or an industry again is in debate, but it’s not going away, it’s only growing, it’s going to keep changing, so somebody’s going to have to help people figure out what works and what doesn’t, and obviously that’s what we’re trying to do.
PB: Indeed. Obviously digital has supported the growth of social media, and we wanted to talk about your Twitter experiment and what’s been happening on the home page. For those people who don’t know, perhaps you could bring us up to speed with what you did.
AF: Yes, well we started out just covering Twitter as the hot new thing, and as with most of these things, we’re always keen to experiment on ourselves, partly because it’s fun, partly because we can fail, and it’s actually more interesting probably if we fail at it, but we can also publish the results, and it hopefully makes it interesting reading, and we’re trying to practice what we preach, which is actually quite unlike most publishers, to be honest, and we don’t always do a great job of it, but we’re not afraid to kind of experiment. So we went into doing the Twitter thing not really knowing quite necessarily what would happen, but so yes, you’re right about Twitter, then we set up an Econsultancy Twitter account, so it’s like a corporate effectively version, which essentially republishes via the Twitter API any blog posts we put up, and then we also as individuals in the company, most of us have our own personal Twitter accounts, most of us use it for professional reasons, although in a slightly more informal way, and so we have a bunch of Twitter accounts, and then the next thing we saw, a pick up in followers and referred traffic and things from that, and we also, and I guess this is one of the learnings we might come back to, but it was the kind of qualitative insights, so the comments and things that people said on Twitter about us, specific things or general things, were really interesting, and were not things that they said to us direct, or via email, so we were actually sort of tuning into insight that we were not otherwise getting or hearing.
So we thought, and because a lot of it was good, we thought well, let’s put on our home page, we have a feed that searches for the text string “Econsultancy” on Twitter and automatically publishes that on our home page, so the idea is being, it’s kind of radical, along the sort of radical trust lines or radical transparency, that rather than us shout about how great we are and you must read this article, we would let our readers, users or anyone be on our home page, because it’s not controlled by us. So hopefully, if they’re saying good things, there’ll be a greater degree of trust and credibility, because it’s not us saying it, it’s other people saying it, which is a much better and more powerful endorsement than us saying it. So that was the kind of, I guess, the experiment was to see if we allowed mentions of us, good and bad, on our home page – what would that do for our conversion rates, our traffic, our inbound links, PR, so yes, that was the experiment – see what happens!
PB:: I guess, you mentioned trust there – I suspect a great deal of trust came from putting up the bad as much as the good?
AF: Yes, and thankfully it hasn’t been too – most of the bad has been specific sort of bugs, so things on the site which haven’t worked, and that’s useful to spot those, because again you find that, I think a lot of people don’t believe, or they can’t be bothered to phone up, and they don’t send emails because they think they’ll kind of disappear into a vacuum and they’ll never get responded to, which the stats bear that out – most companies don’t reply to emails at all, let alone within any sensible timeframe, whereas with Twitter you can just sort of vent your frustration, because it’s only a very short amount of text, it’s just easy to kind of mouth off, which is why you capture a lot of that, and it’s much more honest.
PB: Have you seen any changes in what people have written before it went live on the home page and afterwards? So has it toned people down, has it raised them?
AF: I think, when we first did it, what we got, and we occasionally get it now, is when people realised that, by mentioning Econsultancy, they could get on our home page, that there was a sort of fame academy, X Factor thing, where they just were doing silly things, to go, “Ooh look – if I say “Econsultancy”, I can get on the home page”, and sure enough they did, and “Ooh look – if I say “Econsultancy”, and link to my site, I can get …”, so it was just a sort gaining the system, but they did it once or twice and then got bored of it, and everyone just pointed out that it was a bit of a waste of everyone’s time, so actually that’s pretty much gone away, and it doesn’t really work as a link spamming technique anyway, because we only show the five most recent on the home page, so you’ll very quickly go off the page, and actually technically at the moment, the way it’s done is pulled in via Java scripts, doesn’t even exist on our page, so the link wouldn’t, Google doesn’t see that stuff anyway, so it doesn’t work.
But now a lot of the, because the next evolution once we’ve done that, seem to work, the next step, and this is what we’re seeing now much more on the home page, we created this thing, so initially, the initial incarnation is what people were saying about Econsultancy at all, just on that text string, what we added in next then for our blog articles was a button saying “Tweet this”, which means if you click on it, then you’re logged into Twitter, it automatically creates, the text in the tweet is the blog post title you’re looking at, and it creates a shortcut URL directly to that article, so it’s a way of essentially marketing a particular article you’re reading to your followers on Twitter, so it’s sort of a viral marketing thing for us, a slightly lazy form of tweeting maybe, because you can just click a button and you’re done, but we’re seeing, when we originally put the thing on our home page, there wasn’t any of that; now probably about 60 – 70% of the tweets are clearly from people reading our blog posts, and retweeting them or tweeting them to their followers, but again that’s a very nice, and we think a more powerful form of endorsement, that it’s them marketing to their peers and followers, not us, but because we’ve made it so easy to do, people do do it, and because we’ve looked at our analytics, we used to have a ‘digg’ button there, like a digg this, and then at the footer we have a kind of ‘stumble upon’ and ‘delicious’, and all those sorts of things, and we’ve kind of looked at our analytics and it was interesting that the delicious and stumble upon were kind of doing OK in terms of referring us traffic, but digg never got us anywhere, none of our stories got enough diggs to make it into the fame league of digg, and I think that digg is probably great maybe for consumer/celebrity news kind of weird things, landing on Mars or whatever it is, but for a niche B2B publication, which essentially we are, it’s probably not the best thing to do, so we’ve got rid of the digg button and now use the tweet this button, or use Twitter, and a lot more of our customers and prospects are early adopter internety types, are classic Twitter acolytes, so that’s been much much more powerful.
So we haven’t done this yet, but we’re looking at rolling that out across the website, so that at the moment you can only tweet an article, but for example, if we’ve got an event coming up or a training course, anything basically which people are looking at, and they think, “Oh, this is good – I’ll just tweet this and it’ll go out to my followers”, it’s just a way of, a form of viral marketing I suppose.
PB: And obviously, it seems to be very effective for you, and we’ll talk a little about ROI maybe in a moment, but do you think it’s an effective viral form for any brand? Or does it particularly work for brands like yourself that are in the information industry, if you like?
AF: I think it’s probably, I mean it’s particularly powerful for us, because most of our users will know what Twitter is, for starters, and will be quite comfortable with the notion of some button thing that they can click on, and they’ll understand what it’s doing and probably how it’s doing it. So I think that it depends a little bit on your target market, I mean the notion, it used to be, it’s sort of like an equivalent of the “email this to a friend”, in the early days of viral marketing that was, everyone said, “Put email this to a friend on all your web pages or in your mails, forward this on”, and so was an active way of encouraging people to pass it on, and that became the sort of “share this” button which was things like the delicious, and tagging, social bookmarking and tagging, this is just a form of that, I guess, but as we saw with digg, which didn’t work for us, probably for different brands, depending on their target market, there are different tools and techniques which are likely to work better or less well, depending on the sorts of tools that the actual user base, customer base, tends to use. So some people might really like the Netvibes, iGoogle, kind of gadget, widget thing; some might like RSS, some might like the kind of Twitter, some might like delicious, some may Facebook – some of the more consumery, are more likely I think to be in the sort of Facebook space, so applications to share and distribute a brand’s content or messaging via a social networking platform like Facebook; LinkedIn, more for B2B professional side of things. I think probably there’s a, different platforms will work variously well, depending on the nature of the proposition and the market.
PB: Are you using Google Analytics to measure the performance of Twitter as well, and what that’s done for you?
AF: Yes.
PB: So what sort of results have you seen since running it? And how long have you been running Twitter on the home page?
AF: How long – I can’t remember exactly, but it must be about four months I imagine now.
PB: Yes, I thought so – what have you seen, in terms of results?
AF: Well we measure Twitter and then we have within Google Analytics created a category which we roll, which is called, I can’t remember whether it’s social media or social networks, but it rolls up not just Twitter, but various other sites like digg and Facebook and things under that kind of social media/social networks name, so that we can compare it as a channel, it’s not really a channel, but we call it as a channel to say they’re going to be compared to, so you can compare it against say natural search or affiliates or email, so other forms of digital marketing, and there’s a whole, we’ve got on a site a presentation with all the detailed data, but the short story is that we get a lot of traffic, so it’s about our, in fact Twitter alone I think’s our fourth biggest referrer of traffic now after Google, natural, email and Google paid search, so the two forms of search and email, so Twitter’s next, as a domain it refers the next biggest chunk of traffic, which is bigger than any of the other LinkedIns or whatever.
So just from a pure numbers, from a volume point of view, it’s quite high, which is good in terms of generating page views and things, which we can monetise via advertising, but that’s not, our core business model isn’t really that, it’s more the subscriptions membership, training and events, so what we’ve seen is, it’s good for referring a volume of traffic, but the value of those customers, as measured by their propensity to convert to pay us money for say memberships and things, is lower that most of the other digital marketing media, so it drives lots of interest and buzz and traffic, but not many sales, and if this seems to be reasonably consistent with other people we’ve talked to, say we’re in the kind of B2B niche, publishing niche, so that different businesses may experience it differently, but broadly speaking, lots of people seem to be saying, yes, social media great for generating buzz and traffic and PR and things, but the nature of that traffic is maybe a little bit lightweight in terms of the, again if you look, and this is true for us, at the average number of page views per session for example, it’s lower on average than other digital media, so often what you see happening is, someone will mention something on Twitter, which is mentioning a specific article, someone will come through, look at it, and then hit back and they’ll carry on doing what they were doing, which is fine, but the challenge therefore is that, from a return on investment perspective, if you were to measure, again there’s questions of cost, which is an interesting one, slightly harder for us to put a cost to this, because a lot of it we’re kind of doing anyway, but the value of the people we get from the social media, as measured by sales, so the dollar value excluding advertising, isn’t very good, but the volume is quite high.
I think the interesting one, which we don’t know fully the answer to yet, is the natural search impact or not, so we do know that SEO natural search, which basically means Google, is by far the biggest driver of new traffic to our website, and still is, dwarfs social media, including all of them rolled up, by a scale of at least ten to one, so however excited we might get about this, it’s still nothing, even in our audience – Twitter has definitely not yet replaced Google as a search tool, and it probably never will, apart from for certain things. So actually for us, the big win, were it to happen, is that what social media does, and we do see this happening, is something will go on Twitter, people will tweet it, retweet it, but as a result some people will then blog it, and write an article on it with links and things, those are definitely valuable for natural search optimisation, so in a sense you could see Twitter as a kind of seeding mechanism to get to influential people, journalists and things, who then create articles, who then link to us, which drives direct traffic and indirect traffic in the form of improved natural search results. It’s quite hard to kind of absolutely correlate the two, so we can measure direct traffic from Twitter, but to what degree are all the links we’re getting in Twitter helping our natural search rankings – that’s much harder to say at the moment, but if we could prove that, and a lot of social media activity at the moment, the business case for it is basically a search one, a natural search one, but there’s not many case studies out there I’ve seen which conclusively improve the link between say getting loads of retweets on Twitter, and that improving your natural search rankings.
AF: And what’s next for the Twitter experiment – do you have any plans?
AF: Yes, well there’s a couple of things: firstly, say possibly rolling it out as that kind of “tweet this” across pretty much all the pages of our site, so if someone wants a way of emailing this to a friend type thing, they can, because that’s easy for us to do, we’ve already done it for the blog. The other area I think it’s interesting, which we’re going to experiment with, we’re already doing this at events, so live events, so you’ve probably been, I see Twitter’s being used at events, so we had an event recently, The Future of Digital Marketing, so we had a hash tag, #FODM, and people at the event would be tweeting using the hash tag, so that was a way of then correlating the feedback in real time about the event. We didn’t display it live on a screen, just because I think it’s too distracting, far too interesting, and we had about 700 tweets for that. Now again if you hand out feedback forms at an event, or you do it at training, it’s a nightmare trying to get people to fill it in, because they go away and say, “Yeah yeah, I’ll fill it in”, and they never do, whereas pretty much everyone now, certainly our lot, have got mobile phones, probably a lot of them iPhones or certainly smart phones, so they’re all geared up to tweet. So we’re looking at using Twitter as a sort of reviewing platform, so ratings and reviews are obviously a big and established thing within certainly retailing, but we want reviews, not necessarily ratings, but reviews, comments, about our events, about our reports, about our training and things. Now the way we can pull that, so if we say had a training course, for example, and said, right, the hash tag for this training course is – whatever the first letters of the training course are, you can then use that and at the end of the day just do your quick 140 character maximum thoughts on the course, we can automatically pull that through to the training course page, or we did it with the events, we can do it for our reports as well, so if you’ve just read a report, no-one bothers to email in, or you might get the timing wrong, so we’ve experimented with emailing people, to say, “Can you give us feedback on the report you’ve downloaded?”, and they might say, “Well, I haven’t actually read it yet”, so whereas if we actually embed in the report itself a thing saying, “Once you’ve read this, give us some comments on using this hash tag”, and then we can just pull it through. It’s not bulletproof, because no-one owns a hash tag, so it’s possible that someone else might use it, in which case we’d be displaying rubbish, and we need some kind of quality control mechanism, but essentially the idea of using Twitter as a way to allow people to do quick reviews of stuff and automatically pull it through, I haven’t seen anyone doing that yet, but it strikes us that there’s an opportunity to do that, and again the reason to do it is in the same way that ratings and reviews increase conversion rates for retailers, that we would hope that kind of social persuasion factor, that if I’m looking at a training course or looking through a report and think, am I going to buy this? – then if there was comments there, indeed even some bad ones, it would hopefully increase the trust, although, the likelihood of someone to actually buy, not if they’re all bad, obviously, but I think, assuming that there are good ones, and the overall thing is positive, that that could work well, so as a kind of feedback bit of review, live almost reviews, I think that could be really interesting.
PB: Well Ashley, thank you very much for giving up your time to participate in the interview today. It’s very much appreciated and I’m sure our audience will have enjoyed hearing your views and getting your insight.
Thank you for listening to the podcast, please come back to Foviance.com shortly to download our next podcast in our expert series. Thank you very much.