The Commerce360 Blog

Google Checkout is amazing for two simple reasons. First, it's incredibly easy to sign up and to use in a real live store (I tried it at Levis). Second, in a full 10 years of the ecommerce phenomenon nobody else has managed to get a universal wallet right.

On the first point, I give them credit. I've not been particularly impressed with most of the Google add-on apps. To me they've all been a transparent attempt to create stickiness for a site (and business model) that had very little at the time of their IPO. I don't particularly think minimalist software works as well as a minimalist UI. And far too many of these services have rolled out only to languish without significant (although much needed) improvements for long long periods of time.

But at the same time the company has been spitting out services (email, IM, blogging, etc.) and bribes (picassa, earth, analytics) they've also been creating a monster 'game over strategy' that must have lots of monopolists in Redmond turning green with envy.

I find the fact that despite many attempts a universal wallet hasn't been done successfully thus far fascinating. Microsoft tried. Bill Gross tried. The credit card companies tried. Even the spyware kings at Gator (now Claria) tried. I'm sure there were dozens more.

But nobody ever made it stick. And the result is we all have 20-200 password accounts at retailers across the internet, have to retype our address and credit card numbers endlessly, and favor places where we already have accounts (like Amazon) over other smaller retailers because it's just more convenient to shop using an existing account than to open an new one for every purchase.

You only have to try Google Checkout once to know this is how online commerce should work. No account sign up (at the merchant), no credit card re-entry, and you can even make a purchase and prevent the seller from getting your address (bye-bye lots of spam and 'special offers'). So the new questions become: A) can they convince enough merchants and consumers to participate, and B) what kind of evil is Google going to with your purchase history and the power to 'direct' massive percentages of the online transaction volume.

The answer to A depends a little on the technical difficulty of the integration, which I haven't read any comments on yet. (Update: Here is one experience with very basic integration.) Looking at how it works on the sample sites and knowing that the millions of online retailers out there have millions of different systems and many of these probably aren't easy to modify due to complexity or the fact that the guy who wrote it is long long gone, I think this isn't a slam dunk - but assume they'll build steadily, leveraging the Adwords relationship (and economics) and the fear that will soon set in that adwords without the little cart will either loose clicks or ranking.

On the consumer side, they're going to need those merchants pushing it, plus a long sustained campaign of both word-of-mouth and probably even actual advertising. Despite inside-the-blogosphere fawning, most Google add-ons have faired rather poorly.

The potential evil is the palpable concern across internet today. (Update: See Dave Winer on this issue.) Will they use this to drive to a CPA (revenue share) model for top segments in adwords? (Om thinks so) Will they use the aggregated purchase data to choose markets to go into with Google-direct selling vehicles? Will they punish non-checkout advertisers in ways beyond withholding the Google-checkout icon? And of course the big one, will they just make so much damn money getting paid for the advertisement and getting a % of the transaction that the rest of us have to hate them, at least a little, because they're winning so damn big?

With Google Checkout they have a system where they make money off the front (advertising) and back (transactions) of the ecommerce process. They’ll ‘own’ the masses of sellers (advertisers) and buyers (checkout’ers). They clean up and leave the messy work of selecting inventory, persuading visitors to buy, shipping and providing customer service to others. Nice work if you can get it.

Update: Some good thoughts on GC from Traffick. And BusinessWeek looks at Google's string of non-hits.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 10:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (2)

Last night at One Manhattan in NYC we hosted an event to celebrate our recent progress and success. Clients, friends and partners in attendance included Linkshare, Omniture, Signature Days, WhiteFence, RichFX, Register.com, SortPrice, Spree, Future Now Inc, and Darling Design Group among many others.

Kathleen Lindsay of Spree gets the 'driving distance' award, coming in from Philadelphia to be with us, and Howard Kaplan of FutureNow get's the 'reverse door-prize' award for giving up all the copies of 'Waiting for Your Cat to Bark' that he happened to be carrying, because our CEO Lucinda Holt grabbed them to give to some new clients.

A big thanks for putting this great event together is due to Stephanie Agresta, our VP of Affiliate Marketing, shown below with Norman Silverberg, of Register.com (left) and James Yu from LinkShare (right).

We've posted some more event pictures on in our Flickr account.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 1:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Our friends and partners at Omniture went public today, and we congratulate them. BusinessWeek takes a purely rear-view-mirror financial view, while TheStreet.com provides some more thoughtful analysis.

Commerce360 is an Omniture Platinum Level Partner (although they still have our old Precommerce Group logo on their site), and we've been actively using SiteCatalyst for almost two years. Our decision to use and (to the degree possible) standardize on SiteCatalyst and their SearchCenter product has been based on both the technical capabilities of the product and the business requirements of this kind of partnership.

On the technical side, it's the extensive capability to customize SiteCatalyst to specific client needs that we find the most beneficial. Our favorite features include:

• The virtually unlimited support of custom variables for traffic, commerce, and 'success' events
• The ability to highly customize reports (changing visible data columns, defining calculated metrics, defining custom A|B comparison timeframes)
• The many available methods of accessing data and reports (bookmarks, dashboards, email alerts, site overlay, desktop player, and excel-integration)
• The ability to 'subrelate' just about any data element - meaning you can see sales revenue sorted by traffics source with a secondary sort on products sold, or see revenue by product category with a secondary sort by campaign.

On the business side, the company and people of Omniture have been consistently impressive. Growing a sales and support organization as fast as they've been growing, and with the technical depth of a product like theirs is very hard. As a personal 'worst case scenario' for sales or support people who aren't up-to-snuff, I have only complimentary things to say about the many people we've worked with at Omniture. Someone there knows how to hire and/or train for a software and service organization. They also know how to stock and operate a hot tub at 1am, but that's another story...

There are plenty of challenges for Omniture. I could (and have) written feature request lists a hundred miles long, scaling their infrastructure to maintain performance needs to be a priority (they handle more analytics page tracking than all other competitors combined, so it's a big job), and there are dozens of very important 3rd party integrations that really need to be a priority (athough their new API should help spread the workload on that one).

But most importantly the senior team has the right philosophy about what web analytics is and how it needs to become a unified marketing dashboard. They're attacking the problem in a substantial way appropriate for the size and complexity of what lies ahead. I'm glad to see the capital markets provide them with additional resources, because I'm highly confident that the tools and capabilities we'll see as a result will benefit all online marketers (or at least those of us who are Omniture users) in both the short and the long term.

We really believe analytics is the driver of great online marketing, and I look forward to writing a lot more detailed posts about how we use SiteCatalyst and SearchCenter to drive marketing programs for our clients.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 9:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

There’s only one idea in Chapter Six of ‘Waiting for Your Cat to Bark’ but it’s a whopper: While you are busy ‘Selling’ your customers are busy ‘buying’. By taking the time to recognize the differences between these processes you can dramatically enhance your ability to provide these people with solutions – which will cause them to choose to stay longer and ultimately purchase more.

I’ve often said that websites need to serve three masters – customers, search engines, and the marketing dept that pays for them. It should be designed to serve them in that order, but that very rarely happens. Marketers generally dictate site content and design by applying their ideas of a web-based sales process or information system. But as the book points out:

Your sales process is about you and your goals. Customers will engage with your sales process only as long as it provides relevant answers to the questions they ask, and helps them accomplish their goals.

By default, your sales process probably does neither of these things. Like most PowerPoints it assumes you have someone strapped in a chair and they’re going to be forced to listen to your logical progression through the highlights and priorities as you see them. This is really just the other side of the ‘visitors arrive by choice and leave anytime they want to’ point made in Chapter 5. If they won’t stay just because you’re selling, the only option is to stop selling, or more specifically adjust your selling, so that it aides and aligns with their buying.

Forget the PowerPoint. Walk into the room and ask “what can I tell you?” Answer any question they have, in the order they ask them, in as much or as little detail as they require.

It isn’t obvious how to do this on a website. (Although interestingly that is almost exactly what the Google interface does, in theory anyway.) So instead you have to figure out what they want, and before that who they are, and then how different ones of them vary, and thousands of other things. It won’t be easy, but if you can do it you can ironically ‘sell’ a whole lot more stuff.

Turns out selling is just like Global Thermal Nuclear War – the only way to win is not to play.

:: This is part of a chapter-by-chapter review and commentary on Waiting for Your Cat to Bark, by Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg with Lisa Davis. Read the original review here. Reader comments are welcome.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 10:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Late Wednesday evening I ordered a few copies of 'Waiting for Your Cat to Bark' for a client from Barnes & Noble specifically because they promise 'same day delivery in Manhattan'. But since the power of word-of-mouth and customer referrals is so central to the theme, I feel compelled to warn you that it doesn't always turn out that way.

My order was placed in the wee hours of Thursday the 22nd. It should have been an easy 'same day delivery' as they literally had the entire day. The web site even reported status as 'scheduled for delivery 6/22'. When our client informed me late on the 23rd that the books had not arrived, the real fun began. Three phone calls and four B&N people later, they still had no idea why the order wasn't delivered, and little indication it would get there by close of business business (and it happened to be a Friday). After some prodding, they offered to schedule a Saturday home delivery, and I can only hope that made it. 'Guarenteed Same Day Delivery' turned out to be '3rd day delivery if you call us three times and make sure it happens'. Next time, I'm back to Amazon and suggest you just start there.

I'll also point out that the online ordering process at B&N doesn't make the Manhattan delivery option very clear. It tells you the book qualifies for 'free same day delivery' but still offer you four shipping options without making it clear that you don't have to choose any expedited delivery.

I know the Eisenbergs have sold a lot of books through BN.com. I hope someone there grabs a copy and reads it.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 12:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

But why is all of this effort necessary? In Chapter Five we get a concise answer: "Behavior, particularly in the self-service environment of the Internet, is voluntary, participatory, and goal-directed." In other words, everyone who visits your site can leave quickly, easily, and anonymously. This is speed dating without the obligatory 60-seconds. It's all about them, and the second you're not satisfying their needs, they're gone.

This shouldn't be a surprise to anyone. We've all heard about the milliseconds it takes to form an impression of a web page, the eight seconds we have to load the page into the browser window, and hopefully seen the stats on our own websites which clearly show that the majority of users just don't stay very long. Even more, our own behaviour usually proves the point - how long do you stay at a web site that doesn't immediately clearly address the reason for your visit?

Yet websites are still, by and large, designed from the inside out. The process generally starts with 'what do we want on our site?' and proceeds to 'how does that look?' and generally never get around to 'what are our visitors trying to do?'

I found myself in three different meetings regarding new website designs this past week - one as an observer, one as a reviewer, and one as a potential provider of Persuasion Architecture services. There were very top flight design firms involved in all three sessions, and while neither space nor confidentiality rules allow full descriptions, I can assure you that 'what would the customer do?' is not the question driving site design decisions today.

The fact that visitors are in control of their stay on your site is obvious and yet still largely ignored. But as the earlier part of the chapter describes, this isn't the only area where 'consumers' have taken grabbed of the joystick. In a reprint of an amazing blog post, the book points out that customers now control everything from price to brand to distribution methods and beyond. While this control is not literal, the dramatic changes in influence provided by the ability of consumers to more easily gather and share information is undeniable. The chapter goes on to illustrate all kinds of ways that this influence is being used and refined, even quoting the CEO of Procter & Gamble who admitted in a year 2000 speech that 'the consumer is boss".

In the movie Groundhog Day, Bill Murray takes Andie MacDowell out on a date. It doesn’t go very well. But he gets the chance to try again and again and again (without her knowing), and each time he learns something more and changes his actions so that the next time the date lasts a little longer. After many tries he makes it all the way to morning.

This is exactly how websites and online businesses should behave. Realize the customer is in charge. Take your best shot. Measure the results. Tweak, change, adapt. Listen very closely to learn what it is they really want. Try again. Measure again. Repeat until you get to see the morning light.

Of course, you can shorten the process and improve your odds by knowing something about your prospect/customer/date before you begin, and most people could improve their listening and analysis skills. As ‘Waiting for Your Cat to Bark’ continues, attention turns to improving those skills.

:: This is part of a chapter-by-chapter review and commentary on Waiting for Your Cat to Bark, by Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg with Lisa Davis. Read the original review here. Reader comments are highly desired.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 11:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Oh-My-God-Did-You-Hear-What-Google-Did-Now crowd is gaga today about Google testing a CPA program, even though I first informed the blogosphere of this program a full two months ago. But my petty credit aside, let's look at what this really means.

• First, this is an obvious move. They had done CPC, they had done CPM, it didn't take a genius to figure out that CPA was next. I had even suggested, to some people in the position to do something about it, that Google should have purchased Linkshare when they were for sale a few months ago, as that would have gotten them very significant infrastructure to really do CPA right.

• Second, there is no right or wrong in CPA, CPC, CPM - they can and will all exist together and different buyers and sellers will be attracted to each. All the discussion of any killing the other is 'who needs radio now we have TV' all over again.

• Third, as for Google Adsense CPA really impacting ValueClick or Linkshare, as some have suggested that's very nieve. Sure some of what happens in those networks is simple 'link distribution' but the programs generating the vast bulk of the revenue are much more complicated in nearly every way - diversity of offers, range of creative, value added content produced by the affiliate, tiered or negotiated commision rates, etc. Google creates a mass-market simple system, but at least initially it won't change the high-volume side of the affiliate world.

Funny that this should break today, as I had lunch at the Linkshare Symposium at Chelsea Piers in NYC, and had dinner with Linkshare Founders Stephen and Heidi Messer in Philadelphia along with many other Internet Capital Group Alums. I'll try and post more about those two events tomorrow.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 12:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Do you ever get the idea that the marketing department in certain companies has no connection whatsoever with the development, sales, and customer service organizations. Airlines and phone companies spring quickly to mind as examples. They’re heavy advertisers (not so much anymore for the airlines) who work to build all kinds of images and associations that go immediately out the window the second you’re forced to talk to someone who actually works at the company.

That marketing (and selling) can only work if there is a connection (if not actual symmetry) between that which is promised and that which is delivered should be obvious. But it must not be or else why would so many companies do so many things to disappoint, and even enrage us, every day? The management of these companies is often accused of having their heads stuck somewhere, but it turns out it wasn’t the place we were all thinking.

According to the Eisenbergs, these people have their heads inside a bottle, and the thick colored glass from that bottle is warping their perspective beyond recognition. It’s a great metaphor and captures both the reasonable issues – that all kinds of competing issues and pressures impact decisions, and the unreasonable results – the penny saving decisions that infuriate mega-dollar customers.

We’re challenged to take the customers’ perspective when making decisions. They’re not thinking about your budget limits or staff shortages, they don’t know (or care) who screwed up the design or manufacturing. It’s an interesting simple test for corporate decision making: what would the customer do? (Bumper stickers anyone?)

Applied to website, forgetting to ask WWTCD (or WDTCW – what does the customer want) leads to low conversion rates. Low conversion rates lead, in most online marketing organizations, lead to a desire to drive more traffic. Huh?

Like the proverbial man who loses his keys in a dark closet but chooses to look for them in the living room because ‘the light is better’, almost all online businesses attempt to improve sales by getting more people to the site and not by converting a higher percentage of the people who are already coming. The reason is that it seems easier. There are known ways to drive more traffic: Optimize your pages! Buy more keywords! Create more partnerships! Until now, there wasn’t a known and reliable process to improve conversion rates, so most sites skipped it.

The math is relatively easy, as the book points out. Doubling revenue requires either doubling inbound traffic (at the same quality rate) which is difficult and expensive in almost every case, or improving conversion rates by a modest amount. Improving conversion rates has a cost, but it’s hard to imagine a case where it’s even a small fraction of the cost of doubling traffic – and of course the benefits of better conversion rates apply instantly to all the traffic you already have, so the payback should be very quick and the dividends will keep on coming for a very long time.

Given that it is the essential conversion point for this book, it would be easy to argue that the point here is dramatically understated. To me this is the jump-up-and-down-insight. IT MAKES NO SENSE TO SPEND 95% OF YOUR TIME AND 95% OF YOUR BUDGET DRIVING MORE AND MORE PEOPLE INTO A PROCESS WHICH (at best) IS 5% EFFICIENT. Of course, most online marketers don’t do this – they spend 100% of their time and budget driving more and more people to sites which are less than 2% efficient.

As a whole, Waiting for Your Cat to Bark explains a lot about how this became the norm, defines a process and method that can alleviate it, and highlights the many indirect benefits in terms of better customer experience. It’s an overwhelming presentation that will make those already inclined, and some of those with an open mind, completely change the way they look at the role and development process for web sites.

But in my experience the core economic benefit – that Persuasion Architecture is a method of dramatically increasing profits – is for some reason the hardest to convey (despite powerful and plentiful evidence), and often doesn’t seem to be the driving or even primary deciding factor in adoption. It sometimes seems like convincing people to give up smoking, when you have to point out, that in addition to avoiding death, you can also save some money and keep the brown spots off your fingers and teeth.

After making their economic case, the book points out that values which are ‘fuzzy but real’ are less valued than ‘cold hard facts’ and that is part of the problem. The benefits of PA can be measured on the whole over a long period of time, but even then it’s difficult to pinpoint which element and why the change occurred, and the environment is full of other influences that it could be argued, make precise credit hard to claim.

Perhaps that’s why the first half of the book comes at the idea of consumer experience from so many angles. If we can accept that our communications will be more effective if developed and delivered from an ‘empathy-based’ perspective (ie give the people what they want) then change can be motivated just on the basis of wanting to be heard.

Using ‘cold hard facts’ we’ve always found that bounce rates (the number of people who leave your web site after seeing just 1 page) and what I call failure rates (the people who leave after 3 or less pages) are always the most compelling. To definitively see that people are coming to your site and almost immediately leaving makes the stark point that something is very wrong with your site. Changing the site to address the needs the visitor brings entices them to stay. Marketers inherently want people to stay, to hear their stories and read their copy. I’m not sure I ever realized it before but I think they want that more than they want the revenue. In any case, this is where we’re leading – towards a process that ‘models interactivity through empathy’ and keeps people at our sites longer.

And oh ya. In marketing terms, you get to live a lot longer and die a lot less frequently.

em>:: This is part of a chapter-by-chapter review and commentary on Waiting for Your Cat to Bark, by Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg with Lisa Davis. Read the original review here. Reader comments are highly desired.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 9:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

There is no doubt that Google - the technology and the phenomenon - helped the internet. As the web grew they made it easier to manage, they took search seriously at a time when everyone else gave up on it, and for a while there in between web 1.0 and web 2.0, they almost single-handedly kept the hype of the internet going. But these days they have a lot to answer for.

Most significant is the fact that it's still far to easy to get lame or even completely fake pages into the index and the search results, and that they themselves help monitize these fake pages, which further encourages their creation. In other words, while Google says their goal is to provide access to the world's information, but what they are simultaneously doing is encouraging the creation of non-information on the largest scale in the history of humanity and then allowing that non-information to compromise their primary goal of clearly organizing the real information.

Nothing could prove this more clearly than this paragraph from a blog, prefectly enough, called Monitize:

Check out this site: search of eiqz2q.org — depending which datacentre you hit, you will see between 3.8 and 5.5 BILLION RESULTS. Even worse… the domain is EIGHTEEN DAYS OLD. That’s right, in under 3 weeks, one person has managed to get one domain 5 billion pages indexed in Google. And they are ranking, too. That particular domain has an Alexa ranking of under 7,000. Another domain owned by the same person, t1ps2see.com, has between 1.7 and 2.4 billion indexed pages and an Alexa ranking of under 2,000… after 4 weeks. Coincidentally, the sites also have 3 blocks of Adsense ads on each page. I wonder how much that one person is earning per day with billions and billions of pages indexed and ranking?

In english, this means that one person has created about 5 BILLION pages of essentially gibberish filled with nothing but text and links that make him money, and in less than a month become one of the top 10,000 most visited sites on the internet (according to the highly inaccurate Alexa, but it certainly means there is traffic being generated).

And he did it ONLY because Google (and I'm sure the other engines) take in his worthless pages and put them in the search results AND give him paid links to put on those pages to earn money off the people that Google sends him. You don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to wonder if Google may be encouraging their employees to spend 20% of their time on hobby-projects in order to slow down their progress in actually fixing these problems.

Of course, the Google Adsense monitization side of the equation isn't the only way the monitize junk pages. There are any number of networks that will pay sites for links generated from visitor clicks. And while the Monitize blog reports that Google Adense were on these pages, I can't see them now so perhaps the publicity has gotten this guy cut off. But rest assured there are hundreds if not thousands like him.

The problem has many dimension, and I'm sure there are many at Google who honestly try to police both sides of this equation. But as I'm sometimes fond of saying, the best you can do is not by definition good enough. It certainly isn't in this case.

BONUS LINK: Read about yet another way to buy links and have junk content created all over the web.

UPDATE: Google claims some of this is a counting error.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 9:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Our partners at Omniture announced yesterday a new tool to improve the quality and complexity of tracking user behaviours in Flash applications. (Read the new release).

It's called Omniture ActionSource, and per the release:

Historically, developers have had to manipulate data through both JavaScript and ActionScript in order to generate Web analytics reporting on their Flash-based applications. Not only was this two-step process complicated and cumbersome, but the integrity of the data could be compromised during the translation process from one language to the other, rendering unreliable results. With native ActionScript tracking, Omniture ActionSource eliminates the programming communication barrier—capturing data directly from the source to provide true and accurate metrics, while also simplifying the analysis processes. Because ActionSource is independent of any JavaScript interaction, this method not only provides precise and easy reporting, but also enables the portability of applications across Web properties. AutoTrack, a key feature of ActionSource, allows Omniture customers to measure Flash activity without the need to code individual elements of the Flash application. Omniture AutoTrack can listen for click action to determine if the click is related to a button or movie clip activity, then automatically capture and send that data for reporting—something no other solution has been able to accomplish.

According to Clickz, the technology also enables Omniture's site overlay technology, ClickMap, to disply the clicks within Flash applications.

The way the web is presented is changing radically, as video proliferates (increasingly in flash players) and AJAX ads more dynamism to how pages behave. It's great to see Omniture dramatically addressing the evolving needs of analytics users.

{Hat tip to Random Analytics}

Bonus Link: Next Generation Web Analytics.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 12:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The power of Waiting for Your Cat to Bark’ is the breadth of the information it synthesizes and the depth of the insights and observations it provides along the way. Chapter 3 is a showcase, running through the entire history of commerce (in just four page) and bookending it with insightful views on how consumers experiences shape their buying processes.

Experience is certainly a buzzword these days, but the concept often sounds empty or like just another hype-driven fad. Here its meaning is applied more literally with a breakdown of our total consumer experience as a combination of our product experience, our buying experience, and the 3rd party information we gather about our product along the way (to the degree these impact our perceptions). If I buy something and love it, but went through hell to get it, that weight remains. If I buy something great easily and along the way learned that most other people who have it really love it, that helps me feel even better about it and that impact lingers.

So if I’m selling something, I should really care about and manage all three aspects of the experience – product, process, word-of-mouth. How many manufacturers and retailers really consider and put time and energy into all three of these? How many measure and reflect on their impact on sales and lifetime value? Not many. What if they did? This isn’t an easy problem, many products have horrible sales channels and the manufacturers have seemingly given up on them. Frequently of course, the internet itself is the chance to change the buying experience, because it’s so much easier to have deep product information, allow users and experts to share data and support each other, etc. It’s also allows word-of-mouth to be tracked and measured, and to some degree influenced, much more easily than in the offline world. This topic should be a book in itself.

Another huge idea tossed off in just a sentence is that confidence is what really needs to be established in order to close a sale. Jeffrey once explained this to me suggesting that I think about something that I had initially shopped for and not purchased, but later decided to buy. What was the difference between the two efforts? In the latter I had achieved sufficient confidence – in all the aspects of the purchase which might include the item, the seller, the financial terms, the alternatives and required accessories, etc. This begs the question of what could the initial seller have done to provide me with the confidence that would have triggered the sale? The broad answer is that they could have thought about all the items a buyer like me would need to be confident about before committing and provided a deliberate effort to ‘get me there’ on all of those issues.

Once they show how friction has been removed in the buying process through the years, the current state of the ‘experience economy’ is revisited. The culmination of centuries of progress in selling is less selling friction, which leaves the buyer’s needs as paramount. The observation is made that ‘buyers crave information.. but sellers remain stingy’. Then comes another very important statement:

Publishing all the information the customer needs to feel confident presents unlimited opportunities for resolving the friction that prevents buying.

When working on some of the first online stores nearly a decade ago, our basic sales pitch was that the internet would free marketers from the picture-price-paragraph limitations of paper catalogs (and the know-nothing retail sales people of the world). But even today a great many online sellers offer exactly no more information than that, and very few really aggregate everything an information hungry buyer needs to get them comfortable (ie confident). Unlimited opportunities indeed.

The final point is one we’ve heard before but I personally lacked the confidence to buy before – that the whole experience bundle is what now dictates success or failure, not just the product or service itself. This chapter sold me by defining experience so clearly up front and then marching through the ways friction has been removed to leave buyer-side issues as the major remaining barriers in most purchase decisions.

Sellers who want to use this insight to restructure how they compete for customers - and hopefully that includes everyone reading the book - are reminded that experience is a subjective accomplishment. I take this to mean that this won’t necessarily be easy and that there won’t be a universal solution. It’s also a continuum, with ongoing improvement a much more realistic goal than perfection.

Three chapters in and we’ve been shown how and why the people, processes and goals of marketing have changed. OK, time to start thinking about how we need to change. That’s what’s next.

:: This is part of a chapter-by-chapter review and commentary on Waiting for Your Cat to Bark, by Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg with Lisa Davis. Read the original review here. Reader comments are highly desired.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 12:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Today is Web Analytics Weds, which means that there are get-togethers for the analytically-minded in cities all over the globe (Analytics Weds List). I'll be trying to attend the New York City meeting tonight, but coincidentally (I hope it wasn't intentional) the first Omniture user group meeting is also tonight in NYC (W Hotel in Union Square, 6pm) so not sure yet how I'll allocate my time.

We've been Omniture SiteCatalyst users for about two years, and prefer it over the other packages because of the level of customization it provides in terms of both data collection and reporting. We just moved our own site and this blog onto SiteCatalyst yesterday, after previously using Google Analytics for about six months, and IndexTools for about 18 months before that. I still use Google Analytics on 3 other sites, and still have other personal IndexTools accounts which I've used for years.

My impressions of Google Analytics have always been pretty poor. I had some experience with Urchin (the company and technology that became Google Analytics) and found it servicable if not impressive, but am constantly confused by the Google Analytics interface - I could create dozens of posts for thisisbroken.com on the interface foibles. In addition, it always seems like I can't get there from here - find basic data that I'm used to getting from an analytics package. Like if I view the referer list I see domains but not the specific URLs which I'd like to follow back to see the inbound links. Or if I look at Daily Visitors I can't figure out how to see visitors by the hour. I could go on and on.

So I was surprised yesterday to find two things. First, the Unofficial Google Analytics blog, which in tone and content sure makes GA sound impressive, and this post from Aninash Kaushik that basically says if the right person use GA properly you don't need higher end packages (like Omniture).

At the moment, I'm still not convinced because I've spent a pretty fair amount of time trying to like GA and am just entirely unimpressed. But I'm going to spend some time reading and playing and see if these two can convince me or if I can write an authoritative contrarian post as to why the cost and features of Omniture are a good investment.

Whatever the package is, it's clear that web site analytics needs a lot more time and attention from online marketers. Nearly every client and prospect we talk to is under-utilizing the tools and capabilities, which means making decisions on less than all the available information. I was glad to find the list of analytics bloggers on Eric Peterson's site (although his list leaves off the great Matt Belkin) and have added them all to my RSS reader and look forward to reading (and writing) more on this subject in the very near future.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 10:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

“Congratulations!” Elvis Costello famously wrote in the liner notes to the re-re-issue of Goodbye Cruel World. “You’ve just purchased our worst album.” Chapter Two of Waiting for Your Cat to Bark is a quick riff on branding then and now, and brought that quote to mind because I think it’s the weakest in the book, but as with Costello I’d say the weakest is still better than a lot of people’s best.

In this case, it’s just a bridge, establishing some foundation and a flow of ideas that later chapters are built on. It can be summed up in three quotes which offer possible or partial definitions of branding:

• The need to establish and sustain name recognition and associative benefits.
• More about what you do than what you say.
• The experience has become the brand.

I've been of the opinion that brand is a synonym for reputation, and nothing here really changes my mind - although the discussion of how brands choose to play against Maslow's pyramid does begin to convince me that perhaps it's really a combination of image and reputation.

In any case ‘branding’ is changing, and for people who don’t read or think about this every day I’m sure the ideas are illuminating. Brands no longer have control because anyone with a keyboard and good writing and/or SEO skills can influence brand perceptions, and the sheer quantity and velocity of inputs is beyond just about anyone’s control. Those are radical changes from 10 let alone 20 or 30 years ago.

I think my beef with the chapter is that the case for the importance of branding to persuasion, or the significance of the impact of persuasion on branding, never seems to get made. So while the chapter helps paint the picture of the environment that we’re in, it’s one of the few threads the book creates that doesn’t seem to ever get tied off appropriately. (Someone please jump in and explain what I’m missing here.)

As a reader, however, these seven pages fly by, are filled with ideas and issues that set you into the frame of mind necessary for the rest of the book. And the book takes off fast from here, so buckle your seatbelts. This was the calm before the storm.

:: This is part of a chapter-by-chapter review and commentary on Waiting for Your Cat to Bark, by Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg with Lisa Davis. Read the original review, and the Chapter 1 review. Reader comments are highly desired.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 12:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The important idea delivered in the first chapter of Waiting for Your Cat to Bark is, as Bob Dylan so compellingly sang, ‘Things Have Changed’. [mp3]

[Note: This is the first of a chapter by chapter review - if you haven't read it yet, you may want to read our overall review of the book first.)

Using the famous Pavlov experiments in conditional reflexes and reinforcement as a simple metaphor for the rise and fall of traditional marketing, the argument is made that consumers no longer respond to stimuli in the same quantity and intensity as they once did, primarily because they’re now more savvy, have more access to information, experience and define brands differently, and now require more complex and personal interaction to motivate action.

The Pavlovian argument doesn’t last long, however, as the book title’s payoff comes quickly with the assertion that people are more like cats than dogs anyway, with the chief distinction being our desire to please ourselves rather than whomever is stimulating us.

And then comes the book’s thesis:

Interactivity has changed the nature of marketing. Marketers must now reach beyond their traditional roles of raising awareness and driving traffic, and extend themselves into the more intimate world of sales and customer relationships. They are now responsible for creating powerful ‘persuasive systems’ that anticipate and model customer needs, personalize information and process to meet those needs, and then measure the return on investment for every discrete process in that system.

• “Interactivity has changed the nature of marketing.” That covers a lot of ground. Yes, a conversation that is different than an advertisement. Beyond interactivity the quantity has also changed, as has the control of when and where – as pointed out earlier in the chapter. And if the nature of something has changed it makes sense that we’d have to do it differently.

• “The traditional role was raising awareness and driving traffic.” A simplification to be sure, but certainly how a lot of it was done. Sometimes it was nothing more than bell ringing. I find it interesting that this is (I think) one of only two references to the concept let alone the phrase ‘driving traffic’ in the whole book. A sure-fire best-seller on online marketing that isn’t about driving traffic. That sure makes the point.

• “The more intimate world of sales and customer relations.” Here’s the hard part. You can’t mass produce intimacy, so this is going to take some real work. (They admit as much, but being smart fellows not until chapter 29 – the end of the book.) We can’t hide in marketing anymore and leave sales to those other guys. Customer relations, wait isn’t that a totally different set of people? Now I’ve got to do all that? Darn this is going to be hard. What happened to the good old days when I could just make pretty pictures and be clever?

• “Creating ‘persuasive systems’ that model needs and personalize to meet those needs.” Here it is, the core of the core. This is what the book is really about. Not entirely how to do it, but as much why you really really need to do it. To bad we all need so much convincing. I mean it makes sense – someone recently wrote (I think it was Hugh Macleod) that if people talked the way ads do they’d get slapped (sorry, just looked and can’t find the link). The Eisenbergs on the other hand are advocating actually thinking about the person to whom you’re communicating and then tailoring the communications to that person. So what’s the opposite of getting slapped? A sale?

So this is where we’re left after just one brief chapter. The theory that all we’ve got to do is let people know that our products exist (in some way that elicits fear or desire) and they’ll come running with wallets in hand is exposed as obsolete and/or fantasy. The former inmates are now in fact in charge, as our brands are ‘defined by their personal experiences’ and they’re ‘attentive only to information that matters to them’.

In just six pages the dogs have become cats and the control marketers had is gone. The stage has been set. Let’s see where it goes from here.

:: This is part of a chapter-by-chapter review and commentary on Waiting for Your Cat to Bark, by Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg with Lisa Davis. Next is Chapter Two. Reader comments are highly desired.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 2:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In 'Waiting for Your Cat to Bark', Bryan & Jeffrey Eisenberg with Lisa Davis have delivered the manifesto for the next 10 or 20 years of online marketing. In this brief yet sweeping book they convincingly argue that marketing success is now driven by how well you understand your customers and create a ‘persuasive system’ to scratch the very personal itch that each of them brings when they visit your website.

Their argument is built from the ground up, as they effortlessly march through the history of commerce, human psychology, the basic processes of buying and selling, the way brands interact with experiences, the role of data in all of this, comparative business models, and even a surprising argument against personalization.

Historically, the book argues, sales were lost due to the relationship between the friction of the buying process and the confidence (or lack thereof) of the buyer in the ability of the purchase to satisfy them. Since the most significant forms of friction are now virtually gone – we can easily discover, research, obtain, and transact – marketers now can gain the most leverage by working to increase the confidence of their prospects about their prospective purchase.

This is where Persuasion Architecture ™ comes in, and the final chapters of the book provide the most cohesive description yet its principles and methods, including the core concepts of personas, scenarios, and (their brand of) wire-framing. Many readers will find themselves torn between the feelings of exhilaration in finally having a logical framework on which to create effective websites, and the deep-in-the-stomach dread that comes from knowing that your current site is really a complete and utter piece of crap, entirely disconnected from its visitors and their goals.

I first read ‘Waiting for Your Cat to Bark’ on a cross-country airplane flight about two months ago. It was the first time I can recall wanting a flight to not end. There are so many important ideas and implications in this book that my head was spinning. Re-reading it to write this review did not diminish the impact. This is a huge work that demands further discussion and investigation.

As such, I’m going to dive deeper into each chapter and the many themes inside this book over the coming weeks. My idea is to write about one chapter a day, starting on Tuesday when the book is officially released. I hope the comment system here and the blogs of readers will serve to drive the discussion everywhere it deserves to go.

Further discussions notwithstanding, if your business has a website, I strongly recommend you click your way over to 'Amazon' to order your copy of "Waiting for Your Cat to Bark". This is an important book that should be read by anyone in the business of marketing.

UPDATE: To learn more, here's an interview by Mike Grehan with the Eisenbergs, both written and in 30-minute MP3. [Via SEObook]
Another podcast interview with Bryan Eisenberg from Duct Tape Marketing

:: Here are links to the Chapter specific review: One, Two, Three, Four, Five (more to come).

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 2:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)

Startups are in a constant state of evolution, so often the milestones just go rolling by, almost unnoticed and certainly undeclared. But there are some changes that by their very nature are both notable and widely broadcast. We've completed two of those changes this week - a new name and a new office.

Our name is now Commerce360 Inc. The result of a long hard struggle for both inspiration and an available domain. The name was first suggested by our own Joanne Kondan, and suits us well as we attempt to cover 'all the angles' in providing online marketing services to our clients. Our cool new logo is from the team at Voveo.

The Pre-Commerce Group existed for almost exactly two years prior to this change, was in many was the 'beta version' of the company we are now, and will continue to grow into in the near and long term.

Our new offices are located at 4060 Butler Pike, Suite 110 in Plymouth Meeting PA 19462. It's a great ground-floor suite in a 'Class-A' building, which finally offers room for everyone and plenty more for those coming soon. We were supposed to take posession of this space several months ago, which means there are several interesting answers to the question 'where were you before here?'. In any case, a big thanks to everyone on the team who worked hard and helped keep us going and growing despite very-much-less-than-optimal conditions.

The six months that led up to these changes have included quite a few other significant accomplishment too, including:

• Hiring nine new full time employees
• Closing our first round of financing
• Substantially growing our client list and revenue base

For these and everything else I'm not mentioning, great thanks go out to our clients, friends, associates, contractors, employees, investors, and whomever else I'm forgetting.

Naturally, we have grand plans for the future, in terms of many more changes and accomplishments. Keep watching this space and we'll try and note them as they go rather than saving them up for another bi-annual update.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 9:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)