Breakfast is on us!

The ubiquity of digital technology means social reputation can now be created — or destroyed — in a matter of days, and we are only at the very beginning.  The question on everyone’s lips is: how do we leverage this extraordinary power?
Join us on Wednesday the 31^st of August 2011 at Pendolino Restaurant & Café at 9am, and we’ll offer you some answers.

Crucial intelligence for your business

You’ll hear the results of our latest research into social collaboration, the inexorable rise of reputation indexes and the implications for meeting the needs of your future customers in our changing world.

We’ll also prove why the retail sector (of both goods and services) stands to benefit more than most from adopting and using collaborative Internet solutions. In doing so, we’ll walk through several case studies — illustrating the success of those who got it right, and the key mistakes of those who didn’t.

Topics will include:

• Why organisations must engage in online collaboration to survive and succeed
• Key consumer behavioral concepts
• Predictions for retail in 2015
• How to employ behavioural design to boost collaboration
• How to cross-fertilise your campaigns and generate a critical mass of interest
• The critical position of reputation indexes and how to use them to leverage group reputation

Not simply another seminar, this two-hour briefing will be conducted in an intimate roundtable environment conducive to generating real discussion with ample opportunities to ask questions and bring thoughts to the table.

Seats are limited.  To RSVP call Kieran on 02 8405 6807 or e-mail kieran@houseoflaudanum.com Alternatively, if you’d like to get in touch to organise a private briefing for yourself or one of your colleagues then please contact Zina directly.

Someone asked me the other night what a QR code was (pointing to it on the connectarts ticket). That’s the beginning of the problem right there.

(QR codes are black and white square or circular graphics designed to be readable by a machine similar a barcode. They often encode links to websites).

The next is the required hardware and software to interpret them. You need a smart phone with a camera and a free piece of software to decode it. I have tried decoding many QR codes with several different phones and 5 different software tools. The only one I have successfully decoded was the connectarts one. I used Goggles (which is Google’s pattern recognition service–designed to recognise faces and architecture–similar to Shazam is to music).

The final problem is if your phone is flat you can’t write it down (although you could try).

URL shorteners are a group of web services that take a long URL (like http://houseoflaudanum.com/navigate/howtos/short-urls-and-qr-codes/) and convert them to something more manageable (like http://goo.gl/pTqjf). They came into their own with the Rise of Twitter and their 140 character tweet limit.

There are a couple of things to look at with URL shorteners. The style of redirect they use (301 or permanent redirect and 302 or temporary redirect) which determines whether Google likes them or not (SEO wisdom suggests that permanent redirects are favoured). Whether you can access their usage statistics. And their longevity–whether the company is here for the long term (ie: not tr.im unfortunately) and whether the links will be reaped (deleted) after a period of time.

You can also run your own URL shortening service. Organisations such as the Powerhouse Museum make great use of their own shorteners.

Often you will find that links that you tweet are shortened automatically anyway. Twitter had a relationship with bit.ly but now uses the http://t.co wrapper (not shortener) instead. These may or may not be associated with your activity, via your Twitter account details, which will determine whether you have access to the statistics or not.

You can intercept this process and make some adjustments (if you have time). The first is you can shorten your URL with your preferred service thereby giving you access to statistics. The second is that you can add an analytics campaign code so that you can attribute traffic using transiting that URL to a particular offline campaign (note: You should be doing this with QR codes too). This will allow you to determine the efficacy and cost-effectiveness of that particular campaign.

If you’d like to know more about using short URLs or QR codes in your offline (or online) promotions please contact Zina Kaye.

“When we pop a photo up on Facebook, we will see a sales spike that is directly attributable and that’s pretty exciting.”

The Australian Ballet case study at Connect Arts

On the face of this we might assume that social networks + compelling picture = money. While this might be part of the story it is not the whole picture.

Conversion

The missing component is `conversion` or the ability to convert traffic into goals (or KPIs–key performance indicators). In this case the goal is ticket sales. Although you might have a lot of eyeballs captured by a picture like this without a path to the checkout the traffic generated is not performing well. Its like sale shopping at Myer with all the tills closed off.

If we were to look at the Australian Ballet scenario what we would hope to see is a clear path from their facebook presence to the checkout. This would be a simple matter–include a link directly to the booking page for the current performance that clearly encourages visitors to buy. Some shopping cart products even allow you to construct a link (that can be used anywhere on the internet) that adds a particular product (including its various attributes) to be added to a cart and the visitor directed in to the checkout part of the workflow (rather than the cart–the usual precondition for checkout). For example this link on my website that adds flowers and chocolates into the checkout lane of my favourite florist.
http://grandiflora.net/cart/add/…

Even if we don’t want to take it that far, getting these eyeballs to where they can see the buy button is the best way to convert them. Make sure that you take them to the relevant page (rather than the front page where they are likely to bounce) and ensure that the `call to action` or buy button is above the page fold (where the screen on a laptop would cut the page vertically–like the fold in a newspaper).

To take this one step further and make the whole thing work well in offline media (TV, posters, print media) all I do is tag the link with a campaign code and shorten it with a tracked URL shortener. See these two posts about that.

Campaign codes and Google Analytics
Short URLs and QR codes

Tune your content

We’ve taken this methodology into the wild with an international performance company. They mentioned that they had noticed traffic spikes after a particular TV series each night that it aired. A week in advance of the company’s appearance on the show we created a page about that TV show and the company’s long history of involvement in it. A very informative and well written piece supported by user contributed video (via YouTube) and images from the media. All broken links that we found in the wild that referred to this involvement we repaired and directed to this page. And this page had two clear calls to action. One to buy a ticket–another to book a workshop. All of this we monitored carefully with Google Analytics goal tracking to ensure that the traffic spike that we expected converted into sales.

Analyse, debrief, rinse and repeat

Four weeks later after the series finished we wrote up our report. We compared the final four weeks with the preceeding four weeks (during which the show was also on air and the company had had involvement).

If you would like us to help you tune your presence for conversion please contact Zina Kaye. She will be happy to talk to you.

For Sydney florist grandiflora’s recent redevelopment we’ve built a gorgeously designed Drupal theme incorporating custom Drupal & Ubercart modules. The site is lavishly illustrated with photographs by Gary Heery, designed by the lovely Yolande Gray with a timelapse of a magnolia opening by Ian Hobbs. Needless to say Saskia and all the flowers are loving the new site!

Store keepers can now sell seasonal flowers that are on the floor today. With a couple of clicks roses are out and tulips are in. Photos from the morning markets go up straight away to Twitter where they are syndicated to the grandiflora blog. Customers can log in to the site and create reminders for their future special events – never forget another anniversary! Still underway are a social style guide to help the staff communicate their brand effectively and an upgrade to their electronic profile including forthcoming EDMs.