Google Android G1 Phone: Increased Battery Life

Here are a few unscientific proven steps you can take to maximise your Google Android G1 smart phone battery life. It may well work for other Android mobile/cell phones  but until I upgrade (or get a free one through the post) I won’t know!

Firstly, like many smart phone owners I began by downloading loads of cool Apps and doing lots of unproductive stuff like using 3G to watch funny YouTube videos, connecting via the Wireless card just because I could and checking emails and of course Tweeting from the Android G1. (My previous phone being a Sony Ericsson Cybershot – great for calls and photos).

After completely draining the battery on the first day (initial charge was around 12 hours) I soon realised that this wasn’t too practical; yes I liked the fact that my underground tube journeys or longer train journeys would not be as boring anymore yet I still needed to be able to make calls with it too!

Step 1 – 3G is Wrecking my Mojo

After some research I found that the most battery draining feature was actually the 3G Internet browsing option. Apparantly it requires more power than Bluetooth and the Wireless Network card. It is far more superior in speed to the 2G network but this comes at a price.

Whilst 3G enables faster internet browsing, really, what difference does this make to background applications? If you’re on a data plan then 3G will of course download quicker but it will still download the same amount of information as 2G so unless your network operator is charging by the hour, you won’t gain too much.

Besides, I’m on a UK network on which I pay a small monthly amount for unlimited (loosely speaking) Internet usage via 2G and 3G.

Now what I do is to default my connection to 2G, and switch to 3G only when I really need it (like when using Google Maps or checking in on work emails).

Step 2 – Radio Silence

If you’re not actively using Bluetooth, disable it. Same goes for GPS and the Wireless internet card. I use Bluetooth in my car so its switched on when I enter and switched off when I leave. I use GPS for maps, simple switch on and off. Finally I use the Wireless card at home and I only switch this on when I need it.

Great, already increased battery efficiency by around 40% I reckon! (don’t quote me, I made that up).

Step 3 – Exposing the Undercover Sync

Another battery drain is background sync. What is it? It will sync your email, calender and contacts amongst other things via the internet. Unless you’re constantly updating things and *need* your G1 synchronised (I currently don’t) then switch this to manually update. This includes things like weather Apps, Twitter and partially pointless Apps like moonphase (did I say pointless? I did download it afterall… I mean sometimes useful).

By reducing the number of background sync items  you save your battery life 2-fold; firstly by reducing your internet usage but also in reducing your CPU usage by not having these items burning your CPU whilst on standby.

Step 4 – The Terminator

What a cool intro to step 4. Actually it is nothing more than closing applications that you were running. Since many of the G1 Apps do not have a simple ‘close’ action to close the program down, it will sit as a task on your Android consuming small amounts of memory and CPU (which wastes your battery). By installing a simple app like the fantastic Task Manager App (free trial version, worth paying for) or the freely available, yet basic TasKiller App you can ensure your G1 is running optimially by closing down apps.

Step 5 – Smaller Tweaks

And finally here are a few other things you can do to improve battery life. Again this is based on my experience with the G1 so you may have differing results.

a) Reducing the screen brightness will save battery. I’ve set my back-light to 0% which means I have a slightly dimmed view of my screen but as I’m now used to it, I don’t notice it until the sun is shining on it, when you do need to turn the back-light up (i.e. using Google Maps on the street!).

b) Ensure any Apps you stop using for example when the trial is finished, are not consuming your CPU. I installed a trial of an email client which when expired, still continued to request updates. Delete the App or upgrade it if you use it!

c) Set your screen timeout according to your usage. Mine is set to 30 seconds which is more than enough. If I’m browsing the map for directions I’ll use the handy Toggle Settings desktop widget to quickly set the screen to ‘never timeout’.

d) Ok some sarcastic person would probably write this so here it is; to save maximum battery, don’t use the phone. Heck, turn it off. Not highly practical though hey?

e) Or perhaps buy another phone. My old Nokia lasted 5 days. It made calls. Period. However I don’t want to ‘just’ make calls I want to surf the ‘net, take pictures, write a blog and check twitter updates whilst reading an e-book from my phone.

The Results

There you go. Some if not most of this has probably already been covered off seeing as though the Android G1 is now at least a year old (G2 looks great, though I love the keyboard on the G1). Let me know if any of this works on the G2!

Perhaps they’ve improved battery life on the newer versions of the Android phones but in any case, I’m now getting 3 days usage from my Android G1 which includes perhaps 1 hour talktime a day, 2 hours Web usage and other apps. Not bad me thinks.

Recommended Apps List to Help Save your Battery

• Task Manager (monitor and close apps)
• Toggle Settings (quick on/off actions for popular settings)

What are your experiences? Have I missed something off the list? Or perhaps you’re not experiencing the same level of battery karma as me?

Depesh

Time for Twitter?

Like many people out there, many thousands of people, I’ve been using Twitter now for a while and it is getting to that point where it is no longer something ‘fun’ to check up on to see what’s going on, but actually quite a burden and time consuming to keep tabs on! There are some great tools out there like TweetDeck and HootSuite (which I use, more on that later) which help to manage Twitter but it has become quite difficult to find the time.

The reason email is so successful is because you can queue the emails to read later as a recipient; I’m finding this difficult with Twitter. To the extent that I’ve stopped following some good Twitterers like Guy Kawasaki due to the mass of updates they make which makes tracking difficult!

I’m still following Mashable but that’s on the borderline too – where is the line drawn between being useful and being a burden?

When I first joined Twitter, it was great to see short excerpts on what other people were linking to like articles and releases. It is a shame that the most simple of things become difficult. Just look at the number of issues Facebook is having right now. I read a report that the sign-up rate is slowing down and the return rate (i.e. logging back on) is dropping, both signs that people are not interested like they used to be.

And this is when the playing field starts levelling and other, possibly better, innovative players enter the market. Just look at MySpace. Still going strong yet with a fraction of the market it used to have.

So am I still going to use Twitter? Damn right. But perhaps not as often as I’d like or as often as I’d used to.

About those Twitter tools….

TweetDeck - I like to use this to keep tabs of Tweets. It sits on your desktop and alerts you when a Tweet arrives. You can also create vertical windows within the application to keep tabs on conversations. In addition you can also log into your Facebook account though I’ve not found that feature too useful.

HootSuite - A fantastic little tool primarily due to 2 things; you can use its URL shorting service, which gives you access to click-stats and you can monitor/Tweet from more than one Twitter account. Great if you have a personal and business one!

There are loads of other tools out there but hey, here’s 2 for starters!

Depesh

WordPress Expired Post Notification

Having been working on a WordPress site for someone I’ve brushed up my PHP skills and enjoyed using a powerful blogging-cum-content management system, which to be honest provides a great deal of flexibility and control yet delivers intuitive ease of use.

So the latest problem was on how we could set a date for certain posts to automatically ‘expire’ in as far as having a notification appear within a tag/categories (archives) listings page or within the blog post itself.

The easy thing was to learn how to use ‘Custom Fields’ to set any data you wanted attached to the post. We were already adding dates, so that for example, if we required the article to expire at the end of June, we could simply enter 30/06/2009, and display this as a message on any page where the post was shown:

$expiry = get_post_meta($post->ID, “expiry”, true); //eg 31/03/2009 = 31st March 2009 (UK date format)

then in the HTML, enter:

<p>This post expires on <? echo $expiry; ?> </p>

So what happens when the post has actually expired? Your message would be a little out of date; ‘.. post expires on’ needs to become ‘.. post has expired’.

This seemed easy enough. Using PHP’s built-in function to convert any date string into a set of numbers which could be easily compared, I set about doing just that. However a few hours later I just could not get it working. The problem? I’m in the UK, and the function I was using, ’strtotime’, expects the date string in US format!

UK format = dd/mm/yyyy

US format = mm/dd/yyyy

So, here is the final solution I came up, perhaps you’ll find a good use for it too!

1. Get the expiry date from your post Custom Fields (this has to be within ‘the loop’ in WP)
$expiry = get_post_meta($post->ID, “expiry”, true); //eg 31/03/2009 = 31st March 2009

2. To check for a valid date I’m only checking that the string has a forward slash
if(stristr($expiry, “/”) != “” ) {

3. Get today’s date as MM/DD/YYY
$todays_date = date(”m/d/Y”); //eg 05/06/2009 = 6th May 2009 – need this as ’strtotime’ expects US date format

4. Convert this into a ‘time’ format, which makes comparison of absolute numbers easier (number of seconds since 1970…)
$today = strtotime($todays_date); //eg 123456789000

5. convert our UK date format from our blog post to US format by spliting the contents into an array then putting back together again in US date format
$expdate = explode(”/”,$expiry);
$expiration_date = date(”m/d/Y”,mktime(0,0,0,$expdate[1],$expdate[0],$expdate[2])).”\n”;

6. Convert this into a ‘time’ format, which makes comparison of absolute numbers easier
$expiration_date = strtotime($expiration_date); //eg 1234567890001

7. Now compare the 2 numbers! If your expiry date value is higher than today’s value (i.e. it is further from 1970 than today) then your blog post is still valid!

if ($expiration_date > $today) {
//place your code here for valid posts
} else
{
//place your code here for expired posts
}

If there are any better, streamlined ways of doing this please drop your thoughts!

Why Bounce Rate is not a KPI…

When discussions around Bounce Rate began years ago and became popular, it was seen by many, including myself as a great gauge of how well landing pages were performing. Role on to 2009 when conversion is the key note on many brands agenda, how much does Bounce Rate really tell you about your landing page?

• “My bounce rate is low, the landing page must be doing really well”

Is it really? There are 2 sides of the coin. If you bounce rate is low and, say, your sales from that page or sign-ups are doing well (you’d need to define well) then it is probably safe to assume that your bounce rate being low is a good thing.

So how about a low bounce rate and not so good sales figures? Perhaps your bounce rate is low because when a user lands on the page, they have no idea about your product proposition and need to click various links to find out what whether your product is right for them.

What do you do about this?

First things first, how many page views do you have from that page? How much time was spent on the site from that page? A recent website I analysed had a fantastic bounce rate of 3% however had numerous 2 page visits lasting less than 10 seconds! Therefore whilst of a sample of 100, one could assume only 3 left without progressing further, tallying up the 2 page visits lasting less than 10 seconds showed that in fact the real bounce rate, based on this theory was closed to 40%. Eeek! Whilst we’re not concerned with actual numbers in this analysis, the key is that 40% paints a completely different picture to 3%.

The fact that the bounce rate is so much higher shows that this website has fantastic potential, because users are willing to try and find what they’re looking for, even though they did not see what they expected initially.

Matching intentions with relevant content


Analysing search terms that drove visitors to this website was a good start. Search terms help greatly to understand user intentions. If searching for “help with my ipod” this is easily different to “games for my ipod”. Based on this and grouping the types of intentions (information Vs product Vs whatever) you can tailor your landing page to delivering as much of what the customer wants as possible. You’ll rarely capture every single intention but a little effort could well help ensure the user gets what they want.

• “My bounce rate is high, my landing page is not working!”

Is this really true? Well you’d think so, based on the discussion above. What if your marketing department were working so hard on driving visitors to the website that, lets say, 1 in 4 that received the marketing material were not potential customers? Simply put, you might expect a 25% bounce rate from the landing page in question. Lets say another marketing piece is highly targetted with 100% potential visitors. In this instance, a 25% bounce rate is not so good…

What can you do about this?

First of all, understand the context of your landing page and it’s purpose. If the landing page is part of new guest acquisition marketing, then you may expect a higher bounce rate than a repeat customer landing page.

Secondly if you’re trying to get someone to buy from the landing page as opposed to sign-up for enews, ensure the proposition and journey is clear and relevant.

Traffic targetting

Here’s something else worth considering. If your bounce rate, on a really well-set landing page seems generally high, are you targetting the right traffic? If you sell Apple iPods and get traffic from people searching for Apple Macs then whilst your marketing might be driving lots of traffic, is it the right traffic?

The other side of bounce rates that many do not comprehend is that a higher bounce rate for a given page can be a good thing! If your landing page is optimally setup,then those that would have clicked further to find out more without understanding the proposition, will now leave your website and contribute to your bounce rate. Perfect for going back to your marketing team and asking them to work a little harder on targetting the right customer!

So why is Bounce Rate not a KPI? Because any KPI that needs context and further analysis to understand the result is not a Key Performance Indicator, it is simply a Performance Indicator.

Depesh

Controlling the mass of Tweets in Twitter!

Being new to using Twitter I’ve finally managed (as others have already done) to find a tool to aggregate Twitter feeds – TweetDeck! There are probably loads of similar tools out there but this seems the most popular with fellow Twitters!

Any other good ones out there?

I’m tweeting! Twitter’s growth and possible fall…

Twitter – what is it all about? I’ve been thinking that for the past year. Why waste time sending 140 words or less!

Actually its more of a social notification tool. A great way to receive up to the minute thoughts and opinions on anything out there!

http://search.twitter.com is probably the most useful part of it, since you can search for ‘real-time’ discussions.

If you wanted to search the news as it was written or recorded at a particular point in time, you could search ‘Obama Iraq’ in a search engine to see what was written.

Alternatively you can search Twitter and find out what is being discussed, RIGHT NOW. That’s right now as in your time, as you’re sitting there reading this, not my time, at the time I’m actually writing this. Great thing is the last post I just read is going to be different to the one you will see on the same topic. They are the latest in the long list of discussions (following his speech today on withdrawing from Iraq). A discussion is dynamic.

In summary, Twitter is fantastic for leveraging the here and now, what the online world is thinking or writing about any one thing. Can’t fit it into 140 characters? Not a problem, Twitter compresses long URLs into shorter ones to fit! Google sees the value of this…

For me the next big platform is how Twitter turns this profitable. A subscription service would no doubt alienate most users, advertising may annoy many but who knows? Is Twitter about to take on Google to some level? Google did, after all, make a bid on Twitter which was rejected. A wise decision? Perhaps. One thing is for sure, Google thinks it is important enough to spend time on! Is Google about to launch an app which is the same, but better? Will it try another takeover bid?

For all that’s great about Twitter, I think it needs a big injection of Google (that is, Google’s technology):

We’re sorry, but something went wrong.

We’ve been notified about this issue and we’ll take a look at it shortly.

Sorry? You have probably 10m users and you’re sorry? A simple search repeatedly brought up this error, it is not the first. Twitter just cannot cope with the amount of traffic it generates. This is where Google really could add value. Many don’t think it is right for Google to monopolise, but for me, the simple Web user, I love Google! iGoogle, Google Maps (and mobile), Google Analytics, Trends, Web Optimiser – the list of useful apps Google provides is vast. Yes competition is healthy but if Google continues to provide such fantastic services whilst being arguably number one then I’m all for it!

Depesh

WordPress Multiple Tag Concatenation

Having used WordPress for over a year now I feel the time is right to share some tips I’ve found when creating pages, blog posts and mini-websites using WordPress . Some if not most are probably already being blogged but if not this may be of some use to you.

Combining Multiple WordPress Blog Tags for ‘Hybrid Pages’

I recently encountered the need to be able to segment my posts, to make them easier to categorise and hence link to allow visitors the ability to view relevant posts. Ever landed on a blog website and not known where to start when confronted by a long list of blog posts? Not very user friendly. Now if I create a post tagged ‘Customer Journey’ and another one called ‘Information Architecture’, someone visiting the website may want to filter out anything irrelevant aside from anything to do with ‘User Experience’ lets say.

There are a few options.

1. Let the user conduct a search (though we all know WordPress search is not the greatest…)

2. Add the tag ‘User Experience’ to your posts

3. Categorise your posts into ‘User Experience’

All 3 are viable options. However, with WordPress I discovered you can link to tags using

/tag/[TAG]

where the [TAG] is the single tag you wish to use; ensure you concatenate words using a hyphen e.g.

/tag/Customer-Experience

Will link to all posts tagged “Customer Experience”

However the smart guys at WordPress allow you to add 2 or more tags together e.g.

/tag/multi-channel+social-media/

which will search for all posts containing “multi channel” AND “Social Media”. Each tag is followed by the ‘+’ symbol. (currently nothing matches up!)

Finally if you wish to search for posts containing either keyword,

/tag/multi-channel,social-media/

hey presto, you’ve now searched all posts containing either tag using the comma as a separator. Clever? I think so…

The potential for this is three-fold

1. Improved Usability - you can of course categorise your posts, but with ever changing post topics and varying tags you may have the need for ’short term campaigns’ in terms of creating links to post categories to help users find information. Instead of changing categories you can simply choose which tags to point to. E.g. I’m blogging about holidays. As holidays are seasonal, I wish to now link to all beach holidays I’ve written about, in Europe that are ideal for families. Next month I wish to link to blogs related to winter holidays, in Europe ideal for families. Whilst categories would do the job (ensuring each and every post is categorised under ‘European Family Beach Holidays’ and ‘Winter European Family Holidays’ accordingly) it would be extremely time consuming should you wish to then also link to ‘Spanish Beach Holidays’ from your menu. Instead you can concatenate the tags and create links to all related posts.
2. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) – For SEO purposes, creating links is fantastic. You can use your keywords, which are called keywords as you expect this to be usable by your users. In the same way search engines will look upon your link text, link URL, title and body content quite favourably should you keywords match all the way down to content. Used as a menu link this signals to the search engine that you consider it important and so may your users….
3. Blog Fluidity - Static menus are always a must for usability when it comes to designing a website. Blogs are far from static so you do at times need ways to link to the most relevant posts at a higher level and this is where concatenating tags is extremely useful.

I’m sure there are other ways (e.g. using the ?tag= parameter) however in building strong, usable URLs I’ve found search engines and users alike get on well with this method!

There are some other enhancements I’ve made on other WordPress installations, such as displaying the tag query ‘meaningfully’ and creating specific page layouts depending on tags used and I’ll aim to blog these at some point…

Depesh

The InterWeb – Past, Present and Future

As I sit on this Virgin Pendolino train from Manchester to London a few random thoghts occur.

How amazing life is, with an entire ‘real life’ network of people, actions and thoughts. How could such a thing have simply evolved over time, without a more powerful existence to guide it.

Secondly, and unrelated, was how beautiful the British countryside really is and without the train journey I’d have probably never seen it.

yorkshire-countryside-uk

So this is a web log about the web so I thought of them in context to the InterWeb. For those that are not familiar with the distinction between Internet and Web, the Internet is the train and train track, the Web is a collection of all the destinations reachable via the train. The InterWeb therefore is my generalisation of both. Back to the topic…

The InterWeb as we know it, knew it and theorise it to become was not invented, in the same way as life as we know it was not. They
evolved over time. Such is the nature of our Universe that everything evolves, within the constraints of the environment.

However every now and again, just like the fish jumping out of the water, things need to evolve outside of its inherent constraints. Ask a cool sounding ‘Futurologist’ what the Interweb will look like in 5, 10 or 20 years down the line and you’ll hear lots of fanciful, some plausible thoughts including discussions on Web 3.0 (or the next big leap in web). However evolution cannot be mapped or guessed. At best we can guess but quite often we’ll be way off the mark. Just ask those born in the early 1900’s about the year 2000. It never happened that way… – but how could they have possibly known?
What did happen was technology. Technology has always existed. Who knew the power a transister would afford us, in the early days of its existence? No one did and know one thought to think about every possible application. Instead the technology acted as a catalyst to the evolution of computing into the device you’re reading this digital text from.

The future of the InterWeb is unknown. Will the train tracks change to allow us to take different journeys? Maybe new trains will enable new ways of working and thinking. Perhaps the entire structure of websites will change. Perhaps social media really is that catalyst for the evolution of web, maybe its the iPhone. What’s certain is that we as humans are full of endless possibilities. What limits us is the environment that we live in. We await the next catalyst to set off the next stage of online evolution – however I very much doubt anyone will be able to predict it.

In the meantime I reflect on this train journey and doubt, within the limitations of what I know and understand today, whether the experience of visualising the beautiful scenary can ever be replaced by anything digital, whether it be the next gen Google Maps or a new Virtual World gizmo…

What do you think this new online world looks like? Will we even get close to seeing the Matrix in real life? How much could we improve and globalise Second World? What’s the future looking like for Social Media?

Social Media & Customer Reviews – Subjective reasoning and what to do about it

Tripadvisor & Online Travel Agents (OTAs)

“Hotels.com will be integrating TripAdvisor hotel reviews on all of its 31 web sites across Europe, the Middle East and Africa. The inclusion of the reviews is part of the brand’s mission to help its users choose the best property for their travel needs.”
http://www.hotelmarketing.com/index.php/content/article/hotelscom_includes_tripadvisor_reviews

Whilst Online Travel Agencies (OTAs) are quick on the uptake, their philosophy into Social Media is pivoted around ensuring the customer receives the right accommodation based on their preferences. Travel agents are far more promiscuous in their promotion of individual hotels or holiday providers thus the TripAdvisor model suits OTAs better than it does the independent hotels.

Brands cannot hide from the Social Media space due to the global reach of TripAdvisor; embracing TripAdvisor within a brand’s e-commerce strategy has yet to prove itself across the sector to be beneficial; moreover brands are looking for ways to manage their online social status whilst maintaining their integrity. Ventures include Facebook ‘fan’ pages, YouTube video groups and bespoke social media solutions giving the brands a closed control on their online PR.

Brands

In communication with TripAdvisor, the following brands were cited as examples of successful TripAdvisor integration:
• http://www.kkhotels.com/en/hotels/london/k-k-hotel-george/traveller-reviews/#startposition
• http://www.libraryhotel.com/ (scroll down)
• http://www.novotelstkilda.com.au/explore.html

The latter 2 examples show the more moderate embracing of the Social Review stratosphere.

It seems for many, TA raises more questions due to the very diverse range of views expressed. The key to customer reviews is the personal nature of the reviews and the particular experience of the user.

A “25 to 34” year-old couple visiting Hotel X may describe the hotel as “being surrounded by rotting seaweed” and commenting “wish we had saved the money and gone to Resort X just down the road”  is in stark contrast to the same hotel regarding “some of the negative reviews on here”.  After booking his break and then checking TripAdvisor,  Mr Smith  (a fictional character) states “[I was] somewhat worried about what to expect but gladly, I was not disappointed”. On the “rotting seaweed” he commented “the area is not the best area in the bay but for what I paid for I was very much impressed! Oh – and I’m a usually miserable 38 yr old so take this as praise! ”

Would you visit Hotel X? I’m sure a vote on this would be split at best, most perhaps siding not to stay at Hotel X.

Mr Smith rated Hotel X at 5/5 whereas Mr Jones rated Hotel X at 2/5. Both had contrasting experiences.

Delving deeper, Mr Smith is a middle-class office worker who spent the weekend at Hotel X for the location and enjoyed the accessibility and comparitively cheap price.

Mr Jones however is a Financial Director of a large law firm and expects much more class from a hotel. He thought Hotel X was more a hostel than a hotel and will probably fire his PA for booking Hotel X! Does this now change your perception?

From past experiences and analysis into customer reviews it has become a dangerous haven for many brands. Whether you’re a hotelier, retailer or financial institution these facts are hard to avoid:

• Customers are more inclined to post a review when they’ve had a bad experience
• Customers are likely to post a review if they’ve had an exceptional experience
• Over 80% of online consumers trust, or use online reviews before making a purchase (apologies I do not have the reference at hand for that figure..)

If 2% of your customers have a bad experience, a further 2% have an exceptional experience and the remaining 96% had a good experience, how would this impact your brand? Would 80% of potential customers trust 2% of your actual customers meaning you lose business to a competitor? Food for thought…

To control or not to control…

The fear for brands with ‘uncontrolled’ customer reviews is the openness of interpretation. Without ‘some control’ on how the feedback is portrayed to the end-user, the branded website hosting 3rd party reviews such as TripAdvisor could well become a PR and Guest Liaison nightmare with more time spent negating the negative reviews. What Tripadvisor does extremely well is in leveraging social power to provide consumers with a great insight into destinations amongst other things. The damage this has on brands is that when you’re the owner of Hotel X, TripAdvisor to some extent doesn’t really care (at time of writing!) what the customer wrote as long as it is clean and honest. Now whilst the manager of Hotel X can go online and respond to comments, how many people will already have been put off, and will continue to be put off even if the Hotel X manager states that this is a one off..

Contextual Reviews

Tripadvisor are used as an example due to the fact that they are arguably the number on travel destination review website in the world! However this is by no means a dig at Tripadvisor. In fact Tripadvisor do currently attempt to provide context to reviews; whether this is enough I don’t know.

An alternative approach to a situation like this is to consider a bespoke solution, tailored towards your brand’s product, allowing categorisation of context for the review. How old is the reviewer? What was their expectation? How could their experienced have  been made better?By leading the customer you can ensure they cover as much of the good as the bad and allow the viewer to firstly make up their mind as to “whether this customer is like me”.

This can be placed against your brand’s own criteria for with some openness on who they’re targeted towards using subtle yet distinct copy. If your hotel is a budget hotel with a USP of  “the best budget view of the bay” then make sure customers see this when they see the reviews.

In summary the Internet world is ever-changing and sooner or later more and more brands will realise the potential business they’re losing out on by not embracing it. I can only hope brands start to realise that it is not really as scary as it sounds, with a little insight and know-how!

What do you think?

Use your customers to define your web strategy

So often I hear of web strategies taking a top-down approach from the business, trying to translate (a quite successful) traditional “offline” (that is, not online) strategy and developing this online.

“our customers do such and such, so the website needs to do such and such”

Consumers use websites in different ways. Individuals use the same website in different ways. They use different websites in different ways. Customers use call centre, bricks and mortar, online in different ways. If you walk past a shop and see some nice jeans in the window, what do you do first? Take a closer look? Check the design and picture yourself wearing them? Check the price tag?

What next? Walk into the shop? Walk away? Ok so you like them and you walk in. You see the sign post for ‘Men’ and find the ‘jeans’ section. You see the jeans that were on display and take a closer look. You like them, you find the correct size, you try them on, you buy them. Now imagine how you would do this online; you display an ad banner targetting men, 20-35, with images of jeans. The user clicks. They land on your website. But there aren’t any jeans on the homepage. So the user clicks the ‘Men’ link. They find the jeans section. They view the image of the jeans. They like them (that zoom-in and pan feature worked!). They select a size. The purchase them. Sound ideal? Well that was a highly idealistic journey comparison and research will find that it is just not that easy.

So my comparison with the shop window was an ad-banner. The ad-banner is competing with other ads just as a shop-window competes with other shops. Once they come closer, perhaps the shop-window is comparable with your website homepage? That’s where the comparison ends. Once you walk into the shop, in a matter of seconds you can pan around and get a good feel for the ambience of the shop, the type of people the shop attracts, the lighting used, the music played and of course, the types of garments on sale. All in the space of a few seconds. If the music is hard-core rock, what’s your interpretation of the shop? What if the music is classical? There are so many different touch-points in a bricks and mortar environment that cannot be reproduced online. Ok so your website has ambient music. I don’t browse with my sound on. Do you? Does your customer? So when they land on your website, do they know what kind people are attracted to your website/brand? Can the sense the quality? Do they feel they belong as they might by walking into a shop? Can they quickly scan the homepage like they might a shop and get a feel for what you have?

Using your customers

I’m an advocate of consumer feedback. It sounds so simple yet so many continue without it. Converse with your customer. Ask them why they’re here. What is their impression of your website? Do they understand your brand/website? Don’t second guess your customers! Your analytics package (you have one right?) will tell you what, but not why.

Part of setting a strategy is understanding why people come to your website. Understand why they are on your website and compare this with what they actually do. Spot the opportunities.

There are many ways to model this; find out why they’re here. Here are a few tools to get you going: http://4q.iperceptions.com/ and http://www.edigitalresearch.com/ – and get a good consultant to interpret the data.

Match this against your KPIs to determine how closely you really are serving your customers and to identify opportunities. Collect feedback. Read it, action it.

The bottom line is your website has a purpose

Your commercial website has a purpose. Your business has a goal. Your job is to meet business demand, online. Your business thinks they know what you need to do with your website, you’re a ‘techie’, you know this online stuff so you need to make it happen. What you need to do is to actually push this back to the business. Find out why people visit your website and action this insight. So you sell furniture. Your business wants to sell more online and reduce the call centre burden. Your boss wants you to make it happen. You create a website, with a shopping cart and product info, the perfect shopping portal! Your marketing team are doing great, 5k UVs/day in 3 months. Money is rolling in. Your share of business is 10% and things are looking good! A year on and you’re still at 10%. 18 months and nothing has changed. Revenue is up, as is the whole business but your share has remained constant. So what’s wrong? Your website is good, your marketing is good. But people are not buying online. Find out why! If you’re attracting a fairly constant stream of traffic to the website (and assuming they’re not ‘bouncing’) then they’re interested in your product, to some extent. Survey them!

Ok so survey’s are not 100% perfect due to their self-selecting nature but it will give you a good insight into what is really happening on your website. Perhaps most people visit your website because of that fancy new tool you developed to allow your visitors to plan their new living room? Perhaps they visit to view the products before calling to place their order? Perhaps there just is not enough information on your website to allow them to qualify their needs? What if 20% of those that visited intended to buy but only 2% of them convert on any given day? Potential? Is the data correct?

Your website strategy

Your website strategy will be made up of wide-ranging tactics, insights, plans and deliverables but if there is one thing for sure, involve your customers. Find out what purpose your website has for them. Don’t assume they’re going to fall into line and act as your business wants them to act. Getting your business demands and customer needs to meet 50:50 is a big task but with a little insight, you can make it happen
Depesh