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Archive for August, 2008
Dan Heath Morning Keynote – SES San Jose 2008
Thursday, August 21, 2008
The last keynote of the conference on the last day and it is once again moderated by … … you guessed it Kevin Ryan and features Dan Heath co-author, with his brother Chip, of Made to Stick – Why Some Idea Survive and Others Die.
From the Made to Stick site;
Why do some ideas thrive while others die? And how do we improve the chances of worthy ideas? In Made to Stick, accomplished educators and idea collectors Chip and Dan Heath tackle head-on these vexing questions. Inside, the brothers Heath reveal the anatomy of ideas that “stick” and explain sure-fire methods for making ideas stickier, such as violating schemas, using the Velcro Theory of Memory, and creating “curiosity gaps.”
It’s a great book and I am looking forward to the keynote.
Dan starts off the talk with examples of urban legends such as the Great Wall of China being the only man made object viewable from space. Another one is that you have to drink 8 glasses of water a day, you don’t. You need to consume up to 8 glasses but you get most of it from foods such as fruit. He also sites the ludicrous example of the KFC story that they had to change their name to KFC because their chicken isn’t actually chicken. I still laugh whenever someone repeats that to me.
What’s the point of all this? These are all ideas that stick
Aesop’s fable of the Tortoise and the Hare, written 2500 years ago is still being told to this day. Many, many things were written 2500 things ago yet this idea has stuck.
So why do ideas stick? The Heath brothers have found 6 key factors for sticky ideas and that they must have the following;
Simple
Unexpected
Concrete
Credible
Emotional
Stories
Dan breaks down a couple of those points;
Simple
On Decision Paralysis Heath is making that case that if a user is given too many options their ability to make a good decision is greatly reduced. This brings up the need for landing pages and having a product or service as a champion of that page. If you have thousands of products then pick a category and champion that on a page. Never put too many things on one page and expect that your site visitors will want to sift through all of your products when they only want one.
Noting Pandora.com(damn you RIAA) Heath points out the ease of use that Pandora has. When you get to the site all they ask is a song or artist and then they tailor a radio station that fits that song or artist. This is done by the Music Genome Project which has broken songs down into identifiable markers.
Heath states that you need to be simple in creating an idea, don’t be complex. Your idea must be easy to understand and when it comes to slogans he notes Quebec city and their idea of being ‘France without the attitude.’
Emotion
Your message must create an emotional spark inside a user. Effective campaigns can elicit an emotional response but not get on their nerves. The correct emotional response should make people feel prideful when talking about it. Don’t Mess With Texas is one such campaign. Texan’s(I know, I live there) are extremely proud of being from Texas and if someone ever messed with it you would git yer ass whupped. Their original flag said ‘Come and Take It’ on it so this campaign was extremely effective; in 5 years litter was down 73%.
The state didn’t use scare tactics by threatening to triple fines for littering instead it tapped into the very root of every Texan’s pride and turned them into littering vigilantes. If you littered in Texas then you weren’t a real Texan and in Texas it has always been Texas first, America second.
The campaign is shear brilliance and when studied makes you bang your head and think ‘Man, I wish I thought of that’
Concrete
You need to get people off the fence and siting examples of profiles from Match.com and the lack of message in their profile headlines. Some use simple ones like ‘Hey…’ and others have used more complete ones such as ‘Athletic math nerd seeks someone to hum Seinfeld intro with.’ The latter states who they are and what they like.
Another example shows vertical profile listings with short headlines. One in particular states; "The guy above me is married and the guy below me is a stalker." This is someone who knows the game of Match.com and knows how to draw attention to themselves.
Set yourself apart but do it differently than the competition. Of course, this is a very tricky thing but research can help you choose the right campaign.
One key element in a lot good sticky messages have been the Positive-Negative such as Don’t Mess With Texas or a company in Australia that stated "We don’t want to be first and we don’t want to be third." There are other examples of this type of positive-negative themes but it is basically positioning yourself against the competition.
For more information please contact the Search Engine Marketing Team at Schipul – sem@schipul.com
Social Media Analysis and Tracking – SES San Jose 2008
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
The third Social Media panel of the day is moderated by Marshall Sponder of Monster.com and features Breanna Wigle of Military Advantage, Edmund Wong of ICrossing, Todd Parsons of the Allen Parson Project, Dr Evil’s giant Space Laser, jk he is with BuzzLogic.com and Rob Key of Converseon
The topic at hand is measuring and tracking your Social Media campaigns.
First up it’s Rob Key pointing out the 5 of the top 10 most popular sites are Social Media sites.
When building a Social Media Strategy you need to Listen->Engage->Measure/Optimize according to Key. To expand on that this will help you deliver a great user experience on any level.
You don’t have to invent a Facebook to take part in Social Media, you can join networks such as FB that have already been invented and although you might feel your service or product isn’t a very good fit for these mediums you would be surprised to actually find your competitors there already
Do you want to out step your competition or dive blindly into something that they have already done? The key to effective business planning is to always be ahead of the curve.
Key is now talking about using Tag Clouds to identify the keyterms or words that people are using to either find you or words that they use when they talk about you online. Collect these terms and create a Tag Cloud to see what terms are used more.
Tag Clouds are an easy visual that lets you see the ‘weight’ of a word. If one word is used more than any other word it will look larger in a Tag Cloud
Create your own Tag Cloud here
Tag Cloud Visual from Wikipedia
Breanna and Todd are up next presenting together on the May 2008 launch of Military Defense and Acquisition Journal on the web. They wanted to find the influencers in the marketplace that drove conversations. Buzzlogic came in to help them not only find but isolate that data in order to manipulate it to give them a better marketing campaign.
Their first step was finding the conversations about the Military. They then used the keywords they found for the Military and targeted blogs that were already having conversations about the Military. Using this new campaign they were now able to measure the incoming traffic using analytics and noticed that the Buzzlogic ads performed 6.2% better than any other advertising they were doing.
Edmund Wong rounds out the panel with an ongoing case study in utilizing Social Media. They had a high-tech client facing brand and sale challenges. Clients of the high-tech company were dissatisfied with technical problems and iCrossing worked to identify , monitor and develop an engagement strategy to help the company solve their problems in a productive way.
To get an idea on where the company stood in the community they monitored online forums and other forms of ways that their clients would voice their concern. Once they had this data they were able to address the areas of concern from their client base and not what someone in the company thought.
For a company that is experiencing ‘Flaming’ or people speaking badly about the company online you need to address this right away in a very ethical and transparent manner. Online forums are an amazing search tool for Long Tail search terms and in this new world of online Public Relations Google is not only a way to search for something but it is also an online PR management tool. If you are experiencing anyone flaming you get on Google and see if other people are having a conversation on the same topic
Yes Social Media is a little tricky and needs some high level analysis but if used correctly it can help you expand your brand into areas of the world it may have taken you years to get into in the past
For more information please contact the Search Engine Marketing Team at Schipul – sem@schipul.com
