John Allsopp

Professionally engineered Internet solutions for humans

Twitter and the Haiti Earthquake: 14 January 2010: You may know that I'm working on a way to organise Twitter by geography. For me, Twitter has worked best locally. Again for me, rather than trying to broadcast spammy sales links, Twitter is about building relationships and that's a little easier if you happen to bump into the people you've met on Twitter when you're wandering around town one day. Plus, of course, you have at least one thing in common if you live in the same place.; We all know, too, that Twitter seems to add something to 'live' events. The downside of news coverage is that basically if the news crew isn't there, it isn't news.; Right now, over 24 hours after the Haitian earthquake, the airport is still closed. There was rumour of its control tower being damaged. So no TV crews (or anything else).; TweetCloser however provides recent tweets from people in Haiti. Apparently, yes, there are some working Internet connections. Ham radio is playing its part too.; I know about the airport because of Twitter. And people are tweeting that basically they've seen no helpers in the capital Port-au-Prince all yesterday. No medics, nothing. And every other building has collapsed. Lots of dead people.; Now the lists of missing are going up.; I'm not, btw, saying that Twitter replaces good journalism .. by no means. Journalists establish their facts and prioritise what they know. But we've been starving journalists for a while now, devaluing them, so there aren't as many of them around as there used to be.; Apparently the airport is hoping to open today, so we'll start to see coverage on the news. But for now, Twitter is doing alright, and particularly TweetCloser, because it organises Twitter by geography.; Port-au-Prince - Petitionville - Leogane - Jacmel (the epicentre) - Pignon
Thank God Stephen Fry's gone: 5 January 2010: What really irritated me about him was his becoming a lauded spokesperson for gadgets and technology. If Stephen Fry can do that, then all that matters is celebrity and we deserve the hell we've made for ourselves.; As an ex technology PR chap, I know there are incredibly insightful and hard working technology journalists out there .. people like Davey Winder. Stephen Fry should not be our most well known technology reporter. That. Is. Wrong.; At least there's John Naughton in The Guardian/Observer (not sure which). He introduced me to Wikipedia.
Adding video is easy (and worthwhile): 4 January 2010: Marketing by numbers: I bought myself a Flip Video Camcorder and, not really being a gadget guy, I really fell in love with the packaging, presentation and design of it.; But because it's so easy to carry, it goes where I go. I'm just hoping for my day on Channel 4 News when I get to video a bank job.; It comes with its own software and plugs directly into your computer, which reads the software on the camera and gives you a point and shoot way to just simply upload your videos to YouTube. It's really childs play.; I noticed for one client they were selling products that moved in a particular way. Yet all you saw on their website was still pictures. So I popped over with my ridiculously amateurish Flip camera, took a thirty second ridiculously amateurish video, uploaded it using my old and knackered Windows machine I only use as a doorstop, and they put the video on their product page. Including putting on my coat, walking there and back it and taking my coat off again it probably took an hour.; Now, people who search for that product in Google who end up on my client's site, they look at 3.15 times more pages, spend 2.44 times as long on the site, and whereas before we didn't sell anything, now the page converts at 17%.; We also have a third more traffic to that product page.; All that from one ridulously amateurish video.
The possible effects of good copy: 4 January 2010: Marketing by numbers: I don't know if this is true, but it's what the numbers are telling me. For an online shop whose sales lift over Christmas, I improved their text for two products, including more keywords, basically. I thought I was writing to make the pages more findable and expected to be able to show that the pages were now being found for a wider range of search phrases.; That didn't obviously happen. Actually I've gotten distracted and didn't quite check but it wasn't obvious if it happened.; We didn't even get more traffic to those pages. Well, we got 35% more, but that was 2% less than the site overall, so that growth was purely because of Christmas.; What did happen was visitors arriving on keyphrases I targeted looked at 33% more pages on the site, and spent .. 8 times more time on the site. Actually over Christmas the time people spent on the site dropped, so compared to normal, it was 10 times more time on the site. Which means .. they read my text (and weren't reading what was there before).; I find that very hard to believe, because I really don't think I changed the page 'that' much. But that's the thing. Small changes can have a big effect. Changing a headline can make all the difference. When you study the great copywriters, you can see how mesmerising good text can be.; So there you go. I might be able to get people to spend 10 times more time on your site, hopefully leading them to buy something. Try me.; Oh, we did get first position in the search engines for one product name search and a rise from position six to three for the other main product.
Facebook ad example: 4 January 2010: Marketing by numbers: I placed a Facebook ad for a client to promote their Facebook Page about one of their products which, interestingly, ranks higher than their product page on their website.; Back on the 27 September they had 5 fans and now they have 32. The ad cost £74 for over half a million displays (impressions), 208 click throughs and those extra 27 fans (if all came from the ad) so costing £2.74 per new fan. I didn't optimise the ad, it was just a quick, cheap test. The client pulled the idea before we'd made enough to test the numbers. Ideally I'd want more like 200 new fans before we could say whether it's worth working on or not.; People who visit my client's website from this Facebook page are converting into enquiries at a rate of 10%. The volume's not there, but that's a good rate.; We've had interaction on that Facebook Page. And those 208 people who saw what we do and over half a million people who possibly saw our ad, they must count for something in the same way as you think when you place an ad in a magazine about the circulation. Even a classified ad in a 500,000 circulation magazine would cost more than £74.; I doubt ads that cost ten or a hundred times as much get subjected to this much scrutiny. I know there's always pressure to tie marketing spend to results, that was there even back when I started in 1981, but it sometimes feels like those systems that can be measured by their results aren't given their due. They are quickly and easily dismissed by the results they willingly show. Whereas a magazine ad .. "ah, well, you can't measure the results, but look how many people we reached with our message".; For my money, if you can measure the results in this detail, you have a fighting chance of making it work because you can improve it, see the difference, and keep improving until it's profitable, then keep improving until it's very profitable while starting other ads and campaigns using the income stream you've generated.; There was always the rule about magazine ads that says someone has to see your ad nine times before they buy, and they only see one in three ads in a magazine. Ergo you have to print the same ad in the same magazine twenty seven times (over two years in a monthly) before you can begin to measure the results. I don't know if anyone thinks that way any more. But I certainly think that if you put a marketing activity in motion, part of the benefit is what you learn from the results. If you plant an apple tree, then change your mind and want a lawn so cut your tree down before it fruits, the fault isn't in the apple tree, it's in your approach.
WTF is this?: 1 January 2010: This is a perfect example of assuming too much. I'm in the UK and have no clue what the NPR is. Landing on that page, I need context, it's not enough to see music and artists, I need to know who is providing the website so I can put it in context.; I think that's a function of our brains being linking engines. Memories connect or they don't get remembered. Knowledge (some say intelligence) is memory. So we get frustrated if we can't gather hooks ready to hang new information on.; Imagine I read the first blog on that page which, as I write, starts "I wrote and recorded a piece for NPR's 'Morning Edition.' You can read the text below and listen to the audio version beginning today at approximately 9 a.m. ET." Well, I'm really having to work here. NPR's Morning Edition? That's in quotes, so it's the name of something. Could be a newspaper, but it mentions audio later. And ET. That's an American timezone is it? All that's hard work and if I get something wrong, I've got to trawl back through everything I just thought I'd learned and re-remember it filed correctly.; There is an "about NPR" link right at the bottom which is pretty much where the BBC puts theirs and that's fine. But that doesn't tell me what Monitor Mix is. What's the goal of Monitor Mix? Just so I know. I need to know so I can file it correctly in my head.; Without context, I'm gone.; Happy new year :-)