Would You Use Augmented Reality?

The latest gimmick seems to be AR – Augmented Reality – which Wikipedia defines as “a term for a live direct or indirect view of a physical real-world environment whose elements are merged with (or augmented by) virtual computer-generated imagery – creating a mixed reality.”

Take a look at this example from Zugara:

Even Esquire Magazine is experimenting with AR:

The technology is certainly eye-catching and interesting but I’m not sure yet how it’s going to drive business. Some questions I’m asking myself are:

Will it encourage people to spend more?
Will it encourage people to have a conversation with the company?
Will it encourage people to have a conversation ABOUT the company with their friends?
Will it encourage people to spend more time on the company’s site and come back more often?

The first example above has people trying on clothes using AR. I don’t think a gimmick like that is really going to help many people buy clothes but it MIGHT help in the decision process and it MIGHT keep you on the site a while longer than you usually would. Having an app like that on your site might set it apart from your competitors sites enough that people will talk about you on the nets but I can’t see it how it will encourage people to have a conversation WITH a company about their products more than usual. And it might increase return rates, but I’m not convinced about that either. I think its one of those gimmicks that, once you’ve played around with it for ten minutes, you’ve seen everything you want to see – at least on THAT site. Another site with a new AR app will still be interesting.

What about the Esquire approach? Is there something in here for print media? The examples used in the Esquire teaser look like they would cost a small fortune to produce. So they better be delivering results, either for the magazine’s sales or for the magazine’s advertisers. I might buy a copy of this edition of Esquire to play around with it, but again I doubt that it’ll have a lasting impact unless they can find an application for the technology that is lasting.

As I said over and over in my presentation at the Social Media conference in Melbourne last week, the best way for businesses to use social media is NOT about gimmicks. It’s about creating an ongoing conversation with and about your company. Gimmicks might get you a few minutes of attention spike, but then what? Unless, of course, you use that attention spike to let people know that there is an ongoing conversation that they can participate in. That makes more sense. But you have to make sure you have the fundamentals in place before you play around with viral tactics and, let’s be honest, 99.999% of businesses in Australia don’t even understand what the fundamentals of social media taste like yet.

Ralph Lauren FAIL

So, instead of responding to their legal threat by suppressing our criticism of their marketing images, we’re gonna mock them. Hence this post.

Listen up – this whole “we’re going to sue you for criticizing us” tactic doesn’t work any more. It didn’t work for Aussie software company 2Clix and it won’t work for Ralph. What it *will* do is show them up to be thin-skinned and turn a bunch of people against them. Oh and it will toxify their Googlerank (it’s already starting). Just like it did to 2Clix. Of course, it probably won’t send Ralph into liquidation, like it did to 2Clix, but it won’t do them any good, either.

Your Googlerank is one of your crown jewels. How people perceive your business when they Google it should be at the forefront of every marketing manager’s and Chief Executive’s mind. Don’t mess with it.

Negative Feedback Is Good For Business

It’s not the most detailed or scientific study I’ve ever seen, but this article on CNNMoney points out that, at least from this one example, getting negative feedback via your social media activities can be good for business. I’ve had personal experiences where companies I’ve had sub-par dealings with have noticed my negative review on Twitter, then contacted me, offered to make good, and in doing so have turned me into an advocate. We all know that life is perfect and it doesn’t matter which company you are, things are going to go wrong sometimes. What matters is how you handle those situations. If you care enough to turn a negative customer experience into a positive one, then you tell everyone watching that you are the kind of company that they can trust to make things right. So the lesson is – don’t be afraid to give your customers the opportunity to tell you what they really think as long as you’re ready to genuinely make them happy.

Video Testimonials Create +200% Conversion Rate

As a follow up to my post last week about using video testimonials, I discovered this July 2008 report on the Marketing Experiments site that claims an increase in conversion rate of +200% from using video testimonials at critical high anxiety points in your site.

Their conclusions:

Testimonials played a significant part in increasing the conversions in this radical redesign test. The size of the conversion lifts correspond to the different treatments (smaller gain from the text testimonials, larger gain from the video clip).

What factors made these testimonials more effective?

* Their proximity to aspects of the process that created anxiety — the last two pages of the registration process and submission of personal information.
* Their authenticity, particularly the video clip, helped prospects relate to real customers and see their own problems being solved.
* Their tone helped lend a more personal feel to the registration process; this tone was also reflected in changes to the copy and calls-to-action.

Video vs Text – Straight from The Horse’s Mouth

Today I’ve been doing some research on video testimonials. Do they work? And if so – why aren’t more websites using them as part of their marketing strategy?

The Research

I remember meeting an academic at some networking breakfast somewhere in the late 90s and we ended up talking about video conferencing. I made the comment that I didn’t need or want to see someone’s face when I was talking to them. This guy (obviously thinking I was a retard) pointed out that all of the research indicates that a very significant component of our communication is non-verbal. That’s how we communicated when we were still hairy little monkeys fighting over the large black monolith that appeared suddenly on the Serengeti. We pulled faces. We smiled. We snarled. We raised a hand.

So I went looking for research this morning to back that up. This is the best that I could find:

Humans intuitively grasp the power of images to convey meaning, as can be seen in the old  adage that values a picture at a thousand times the value of a word. Research in the past two decades has proven what we intuitively know: our brains deal with images differently than print (Merringoff, 1983). Words are processed in the neocortex where the higher thinking capability of the brain resides. Pictures, however, are handled in the limbic system, rapidly, and trigger instinct, emotion, and impulse (Bergsma, 2002). Because brains are programmed to remember experiences that have an emotional component, television has a powerful ability to relay experience through the emotions evoked by images (Noble, 1983). Television, of course, offers information in multiple forms: images, motion, sound and, at times, text. The richness of these forms of information benefits learners, by enabling them “…to learn through both verbal and visual means, to view actual objects and realistic scenes, to see sequences in motion, and to view perspectives that are difficult or impossible to observe in real life” (Wetzel, 1994). Early fears that these multiple channels might overtax the viewer’s capacity for comprehension seem to have been unfounded, and now most researchers agree that “…when presented together, each source provides additional complementary information,” thus increasing the chances that comprehension will take place (Kozma, 1991). Watching television may seem a very simple act, but it actually involves a rather complicated thinking process. Like any communications medium, the content of television is composed of symbols, in the form of discrete units of information. As literate humans our cognitive task is to decode those symbols. But with broadcast television, the symbols are more transient, more fleeting than with static media like books or pictures. Thus, television offers a “window of cognitive engagement.”.

(from the report Television Goes to School via the Corporation for Public Broadcasting)

Okay, that makes sense. So video seems to work in a learning environment. But what about for marketing? Back in the early 90s (before I discovered the interwebs) I made corporate videos for a few years. Clients would spend $50,000 – $500,000 to make a slick video that we would run off onto thousands of video cassettes (kids, ask your grandparents what a ‘video cassette’ was). These videos would tend to be very high end and shiny, more like television commercials. What about videos produced with a much smaller budget, like video testimonials?

Exhibit 1: MyHome

MyHome is a New York based full service design and remodeling firm. They could have settled with writing the same basic marketing information on their site that I’m sure all of their competitors have – you know,

“We are a full-service, owner operated construction firm with an outstanding team of trained remodeling professionals and our own crews of skilled trade professionals. We promise quality and service – and we keep our promises…. zzzzzz.”

But instead they have video testimonials from happy clients. Check out a couple of the video testimonials on the MyHome site.

I don’t know about you, but these work for me. They are unscripted, natural, compelling. When I watch them, I think “these people seem genuinely happy with their MyHome experience”. If the same testimonials were written as text on the site, I don’t think they would have anywhere near the same impact. I can’t tell from text whether it was written by a real customer or someone in the marketing department. With a video, on the other hand, I think I can tell pretty easily if the person speaking is the real deal or a fake.

I also don’t think these would work anywhere near as well if they were scripted. I don’t believe someone who is reading a script (well, unless the person reading it studied under Lee Strasberg). Most people reading from a teleprompter sound flat and fake. To see what I mean, check out these examples. I think these are genuine customers who had a good experience, but they are obviously reading prepared statements and it just leaves me cold.

Exhibit 2: Case Doctors

Production values don’t seem to matter much in terms of credibility, either. Check out these videos on the Cash Doctors site. The audio is a bit soft, lots of background noise, most are shot in a park. None of that seems to matter. My immediate emotional response is “these people are happy customers, Cash Doctors worked for them”.

Videos are Social Objects

Although I wouldn’t typically classify video testimonials as “social media”, they can be social objects. They can be passed from friend to friend, via email, Twitter or Facebook. They are probably unlikely to go viral (unless there’s an unusually great story involved), but they can work for a client as a sales tool. And we all know that word of mouth is the most powerful form of marketing, especially in this era of DIGITAL word of mouth on social networking platforms. So why not make it easy for our customers to tell their closest thousand friends/contacts/followers exactly how much they enjoy doing business with us?

It carries so much more weight when it comes from the horse’s mouth. (And if you want to know where that idiom comes from, watch the below clip!)

If you have any good or bad examples of video testimonials – of if you have a different perspective on their utility in marketing – let me know in the comments section!

2 Million More Australians Go Social in 2009

Comscore recently released the results of their study on social networking usage in Australia, which found that more than 70 percent of Internet users in Australia visited a social networking site in June, up 29 percent from the previous year:

Nearly 9 million Australians visited a social networking site in June, making it one of the most popular content categories on the Web. Facebook led as the most visited social networking destination with more than 6 million visitors and growing 95 percent from the previous year. MySpace Sites ranked second with 3.5 million visitors, up 5 percent, followed by Windows Live Profile with nearly 2 million visitors. Twitter witnessed the most substantial growth, surging to 800,000 visitors in June, up from just 13,000 visitors a year ago. Orkut also achieved significant growth reaching 252,000 visitors, up 607 percent.

As Newlight’s digital strategy guy, I’m constantly talking to clients about the importance of these numbers. And I’m still hearing people say things like “I don’t know where they get the time to use Twitter” or “people who live on Facebook have no life”.

Well those things may be true. Maybe you’re right and years from now you’ll be able to say “I told you so”. In the meantime, whether you agree with it or not, your customers are spending an increasing amount of their time on Facebook and Twitter (and, by the way, less time reading the newspaper, magazines, listening to radio and watching TV) and if you aren’t communicating with them on those platforms every day, then perhaps your competitors are.

By the way, have you protected your brand on those platforms yet? We’ve had a number of clients go to set up the Twitter page for their company or product, only to find out someone beat them to it. And it could be a long, expensive slog to get control of those brands back.

Don’t let that happen to you.

Having a Facebook and Twitter account for your company are a good start, but if they aren’t part of a comprehensive and forward-looking digital strategy that incorporates an understanding of social media marketing, they probably won’t be very effective. There are some great examples of companies using social media marketing to actually drive sales. Come along to one of our upcoming pizza and beer nights and we’ll show you how they did it.

The Three Spheres 2009

Jeremiah Owyang (@jowyang) has updated his “Three Spheres of Web Strategy” for 2009.

Click on the image for Jeremiah’s breakdown of what’s important in 2009/2010 for each of the spheres.

We’re going to be running a few free beer & pizza nights for clients over the coming month where we’ll be talking about digital strategy, looking at some examples of things people are doing well, things that don’t seem to be working, and talking about what we think is going to be important over the next 12 months.

How old is your site?

We know there are some of you out there that wouldn’t like to admit it, but if your website is more than 4 years old and not been updated since, then it’s way past its’ sell by date.

Put yourself in your customers’ shoes – when you’re looking for a service or product, what is the first thing you do? yes – go onto the internet and check out the website. so if your website is the first point of call to most of your customers, then shouldn’t this be the most interesting and compelling sales and marketing device you have?

Even if you had your website re-designed or the content updated last year, does that really effectively inform your customers about what your business is doing now? what would your customers think when they view ‘latest news’ and the most recent item is dated 6 months ago – would they take your business seriously? when you buy a magazine or newspaper it was published the day or week before – that’s what makes it a compelling read.