Category: Customer Experience

Customer Experience

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Downtown Chicago Marshall Field’s Rally Sunday

200px-Marshall_Field's_logo.svgCHICAGO – You’ve seen me write about the Marshall Field’s name change in the past. I only have one thing to add at this time that should send a chill down your spine:

I’ve learned that certain merchandise that was once carried by Kmart, yes Kmart, is now carried in the landmark Marshall Field’s store that is presently labeled Macy’s.

There will be a rally at noon Sunday to bring back the great name of Marshall Field’s, prior to the NY Gaints game against the Bears in downtown Chicago (60602).

Jim McKay had this to say about the Black Friday Marshall Field’s protest:

How successful was it? Over 8,000 leaflets and over 1,300 buttons were distributed on State Street over the two days. Friday’s distribution exceeded our previous busiest day (Saturday, December 23, 2006) by roughly two-and-a-half times! Part of this was due to an unprecedented number of shoppers on State Street. Another part of this was simply those former Field’s shoppers who came to check out what was happening in the building that used to house their favorite store and were unhappy. They came in droves to get leaflets in buttons. At more than a few times, people stood in line to get leaflets and buttons from us. A couple of times, the lines were 10-12 people wide, although 5-7 people wide was more typical. That’s right–people waiting in line for buttons that say, “Forever Marshall Field’s” and leaflets explaining why it is important to continue boycotting Macy’s until Marshall Field’s is restored in service and quality as well as name. It was quite unprecedented. What’s more, there were those who picked up a leaflet or button or both and then came back minutes for even hours later with other family and friends to get more.

Amazingly, it appears the movement to bring back Marshall Field’s seems to be growing stronger over time in Chicago!200px-Marshall_Field's_logo.svg

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Remember to 301 Redirect If You Own Your Domain Typos

I typed in facebooks.com this morning by accident. Got a dead page. So I looked to see if it was registered and sure enough it was. I’m completely amazed they aren’t 301 redirecting the typos that they own for user experience and other purposes!  

Registrant:
 Facebook, Inc
 156 University Ave, 3rd Floor
 Palo Alto, CA 94301
 US

 Domain name: FACEBOOKS.COM

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Death of Blog Search Part 3 – Technorati Cuts Data

You’ve seen me talk about this before. Now the new CEO not only hasn’t fixed the Typepad duplicate counting problems, there are dozens of links that aren’t being counted. It is cutting the most useful asset. Historical data. Nobody cares about the past 6 months worth of links – total links and the historical reference of long tail terms matter much, much more.

I’m not going to rant about it, others have quite well…

Techcrunch

Kevin Burton

Zoli’s blog

Deep Jive Interests

WinExtra

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Seth Godin Keynoting Search Engine Strategies Chicago and His New Book Meatball Sundae

In advance his upcoming speech at Search Engine Strategies Chicago, Seth Godin held a intimate conference call in regards to the conference and his upcoming book Meatball Sundae.

At first I was thinking this would be a long speech, it was in actuality a short, crisp presentation followed by a spirited, fun and playful question an answer session. It far exceeded my expectations and Kevin Ryan should be commended for having this type of community event.

Now onto a discussion of his new book, Meatball Sundae. The foundation for a new economy is being built. The past several years have laid the foundation for a new industrial revolution.

Told the detailed story of Josiah Wedgewood and his high standards for pottery.

There are 14 main themes occurring right now in the world – though there are many smaller and industry specific trends playing out. These 14 trends are (I typed them fast in a live blog situation so I might not have them exactly right):

– Direct communication with customers is creating massive change

– Individuals can amplifying their voice and become a critic – these are not hassles to be dealt with. The answer is building an organization that thrives and survives on this…

– Having an authentic story is vital

– We don’t have attention spans anymore (why are you still reading this post? 😉 )

– The new marketplace long tail – very few organizations are embracing it

– Create innovation – If you can describe a job it can get done by somebody cheaper

– Google and the shredding of information and bundling

– Noise and infinite channels of communication

– Consumers can talk directly to consumers without the middleman or company

– The changing balance of scarcity and abundance – it’s hard to imagine people being bored

– Big ideas can reach many people quickly

– The shift from how many to who – the idea of being on the today show instead of a blog is higher value is over

– Democratization of the wealthy – the gap between the rich and poor is getting wider but the rich is going up

– Gatekeepers are more important as they distribute information yet less important as you can go around them easier than ever

After the short speech on the trends there was a free for question and answer session…

Is your marketing out of sync?

SG: They should say how change your marketing (what you do) so that it’s in sync with what the market demands.

Why don’t most companies get it yet?

SG: I spent many years selling advertising. People buy TV advertising, it’s fun and it’s not measurable. When the Internet came along and they went running to Yahoo! to buy ads that aren’t measuring. Google and Overture were used by small business people in the ad. The choice is Superbowl ads that don’t work and measurable ads that are harder to make work. It’s naïve to hope that they will shift in a month or a year. They will eventually have to shift. The prices will continue to go up. People still applaud the commercial not the SEM.

(At this point the Gmail javascript froze all of my browsers. I had to reboot and relaunch. OF COURSE THIS WAS THE MOMENT KEVIN RYAN CHOSE TO ASK THE QUESTION I SENT IN – SO I’LL HAVE TO WAIT FOR THE AUDIO THERE.)

Where do you find thoughtleaders to lead organizations and instead of hiring people with “experience”?

SG: I wrote a post on a similar topic about the loss of relevancy of credentials today. Basically, there are two types of leaders qualified to do this:
– People who have managed change before
– Idea people who don’t necessarily know better

How do make a corporate blog work?

SG: Blogs don’t reach people, people reach blogs… You need to be quick and candid. It’s all about change and being iterative in nature.

Everyone attending SES Chicago will receive a copy of Seth’s book. I look forward to continuing our conversation and maybe even hearing his answers because Gmail’s javascritpt won’t be interfering with his in person appearance!

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Sexy Social Media Revolutions Emerging – Forrester Consumer Internet Conference 2007

There were a few critical points in Charlene Li’s speech and then Christie Hefner’s speech that I want to get to. But before I do an overview of Charlene’s speech.

New term POST

People

Objectives

Strategy

Technology (notice how this is listed last? Charlene pointed out that this is on purpose! In other words don’t execute until you have things thought through!)

Mantra: Embrace your customer to turn revolt into reformation

Ask yourself: How do you turn (customer) revolt into revolution?

Hopefully both speeches will be online later.

What was the high point of the speech for me that told me that a revolution was taking place at Forrester?

It was when Charlene pointed to a technology adoption benchmarking slide and then put a red X through it saying “don’t pay attention to that”!!!!

What does this mean to me? It means that benchmarking it starting to die due to the increased cycle times and shorter shelf life of information. I’ve long felt that you can’t benchmark your way to the top. You have to lead and take risks. To lead and take risks you must have the top generalist thought leaders of our times on your team. People who understand things like search engine optimization as a strategic tool, social media, bottom up communities and cultures, defining a defensible data model from the start and who practice customer listening for their innovation.

After Charlene, Christie Hefner gave an amazing speech about the history of Playboy’s brand and demonstrated how it’s always been customer focused dating back decades and how it’s embracing the demise of the one to many media model. I hadn’t been aware of this but Playboy has had a mobile presence since 2002! Wow.

She also talked about the brands usage in search and have it’s a frequent search term. In fact a quick check of Google trends indicates a large lead in search volume for Playboy over the New York Times.

Her speech was fascinating from the historical side, yet the brand of Playboy is softening as it’s constantly evolving, Charlene’s conversation was far more disruptive and unnerving to many of the people seated around me. Yet it became clear to me that Playboy is a company that has lived many of today’s social media principles long before they were fashionable.

In in the end, it’s all about building a bottom up culture that has the executive support to constantly innovate. Most people don’t get that yet and if they do it’s even more unlikely that they view customers and other stakeholders as critical to success. We are just starting this journey and I can’t wait to participate fully in the fun parts of this revolution to come!

fcf07

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SES San 2007 Jose Day 1 – Universal & Blended Vertical Search

Moderator:
Chris Sherman, Co-Chair, SES San Jose
Search Engine Marketing Speakers:
Greg Jarboe, President and Co-Founder, SEO-PR
Sherwood Stranieri, Search Marketing Director, Catalyst online
Bill Slawski, seobythesea.com
Erik Collier, Director of Product Management, Ask.com
David Bailey, Engineer, Google
Tim Mayer, Vice President of Product Management, Yahoo! Search

Quite likely the busiest session of the day to the fullest house. One can’t help but notice that if Greg Jarboe had gone to Google and designed Universal Search himself he likely couldn’t have designed it to play into his strength areas in news and pr related issues. The implications and transformation for universal search are still evolving, but they are clearly changing the landscape. One other thing that became clear from this event was that Ask is becoming a serious contender in this marketplace.

Greg Jarboe –

Universal search is the biggest event since “Florida” update. 70% of what I used to know is now obsolete. The patterns are not yet clear in personalization.

News results ranked #4 if you searched for the term iPhone on June 29

In the #8 position, was a Youtube video. We don’t know if it was done on purpose.

July 17, Rupert Murdoch – news with image – brings up a whole new reputation management – be prepared to optimize images.

Early chapters of Henry Potter were leaked, the blog results are on page one of results

Investor relations now is moving to the front page of Countrywide. Few companies have complete control of their brands now on Google.

Unflattering images of Hillary Clinton and that vast right wing conspiracy is building links to unflattering results.

Blogs on Hurricane Dean already on front page. Images will likely come next.

All of the rules have been rewritten – how do I research this? Focus on the upper left links. News seems to be on the top left all the time. Search remains #1 way journalist find information about a company.

Newsknife and Google News Report – be checking this. Your PR people aren’t ready for that yet. If you are not giving a jpg file in a release, start now.

Google News right now doesn’t do video news. Likely to create that.

Social mapping tools can help identify most influential bloggers. In certain categories they show up.

A couple of years ago there was vertical creep session here at SES – I now rank for that term. Not a good thing.

You can’t afford to ignore Universal Search Today

Google is making specialized or vertical content more visible through Universal Search

Sherwwod Stranieri, Catalyst Online

This throws a lot of  curves into the theme. Ask 3D and Google cut new paths.

Conventional web pages that once rank well are going to move around maybe down. Other things will move updates.

Number of videos is significant in the Youtube world. Are the search engines using comments as an indicator?

We are looking at it as search marketers. Showed client example.

How to look at it: Google PR, Y! Page links, keyword phrases in tags.

Videos ranking correspond well with views, comments, etc.

Bill Slawski

Why does news, images and video show up there.

I’m not sure I see this all as a revolutionary concept. How do we get out content into our results.

Showed examples of screen prints from each engine for the word spider.

Showed the Google patent, oddly looks quite different than Google’s universal search does now.

Google acquired several Infoseek patents.

Discussed Onebox and log file data.

Ranking in Vertical databases – how do you rank for that vertical?

User behavior – key value pairs, be certain definition and being defined. Questions and Answers work the same way. Html formatting may play a role.

Enhancing the user experiences.

David Bailey – Google
Technical lead for the vertical search.

What are our goals?

Make google.com the search box of first resort.

Display special features for special results

Keep it fast. Keep it simple. Above all, keep it relevant.

Showed example: origami crane

This will continually improve and extend to more result types.

It’s still about the web.

But: think about creating quality content in other forms. Expect similar SEO guidelines to apply.

Create quality content, describe it well and we’ll see what happens.

Tim Mayer, VP Product Management

We are transitioning to a better optimized user experience

Freshness and user intent became relevancy issues.

News, local and other verticals – the possibilities are infinite. Federation plays a role.

Some implantation examples:

Music Artist Shortcut

Movie Shortcut

Hotel Shortcut Inline

Consumer Electronics Shortcut

As we go forward, it’s going t be more about the intent of the searchers.

Eric Collier, Director of Product Management

“We are the scrappy innovator of search.”

Ask.com 3D: SERP Design

We moved the content up top and removed the top links.

Large jumps in user satisfaction seen in both the site analytics and surveys

Increase in vertical channel usage

Starting to see a reduction of multiple query sessions around the same keyword term.

Expect to see a larger percentage of SERPs with blended results

User location will play a larger roles in SERPs

Expect to see fewer web results in SERPs

Blogs, Images and Video results will take online reputation into account when ranking

Pay attention to other search drivers

Other coverage of this important session:

RB Digital Boots

Rustybrick

AIM Clear Blog

Lee Odden’s Toprankblog

Bonus coverage:

Lee Odden interviews Tim Mayer