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Gulltaggen claims “Norway’s premier event for digital marketing” (presentations by Seth Godin and Chris Anderson to mention a few) and it was held on the 28th and 29th of April. There’s also a steady stream of #gulltaggen tweets. We’ll give a quick recap on two talks: building successful websites through understanding what users want to achieve on your site and how marketing changes from a mass focus to the spreading of ideas.
“The Long Neck” with Gerry McGovern
Gerry’s presentation focused on page views and content productions as our traditional view of site effectiveness. But what about user satisfaction?
Microsoft’s Excel web site had around 11 000 pages. All pages were searchable in major search engines and they were adding more and more content to ensure that they cover every aspect of Excel. A long tail focus, but what about the majority of users: The long neck?
The majority of users might be interested in how to do a basic sum of values in excel, but queries on Google would present a page on the INSUM function, a far more specialized aspect of Excel. Thus, content was beginning to clog down their web site. Page views were rising but user satisfaction was declining as users were constantly running into dead ends within the enormous amounts of pages.
The solution was to simply start removing content; a concept highly unpopular in many organizations where countless hours have been placed in content production. The web site has to focus on its core message – what does the majority of users need to do online when entering the your web pages? Looking through support records and behavior analysis to find out the most frequent actions users want to take on your site. If you are not covering your users basic needs – how can you start focusing on the long tail?
As a result page views went down drastically, another unpopular concept with senior management – but user satisfaction went up! Shouldn’t we be measuring satisfaction over of page views?
Other examples were campaign pages (Hillary Clinton, John McCain) where the pages are focused around the single most important aspect – contribution.
“Marketing, Leadership & Being Remarkable” with Seth Godin
Seth’s presentation circled around the concept of the “purple cow”. How can organizations keep on making average products for average users? People have seen cows and “cows are boring” Seth continues, but a purple cow would gets everyones attention.
Seth claims that something is fundamentally wrong with todays mass marketing model on line – where organizations are constantly trying to interrupt users in order to get their attention, examples being banner and popup ads. The Internet is about attention giving , not an attention taking, and only by getting your users permission can you successfully push your ideas at them, avoid the spam filters and make the stories spread.
The Internet is not TV on a laptop but a tool for the spreading of ideas.
- Seth Godin
The ideas are what made recent Apple products so successful. The ideas that people want to talk about, and show their peers that they are using Apple products. Apple started out with a small group of engaged mac users. Apple had permission to tell these people (aka the “fan boys“) about their new products. These people would in turn acts as marketeers for Apple products, thus spreading the idea.
Seth had several other good stories in a frantic hour of a web-streamed talk both amusing and enlightening. However, I must confess that I occasionally find cows quite amusing.
Some links:
- Gulltaggen and on twitter: #gulltaggen
- Seth Godin’s blog
- Gerry McGovern
U think it is great that ideas are being spread, but people need to learn to discern which one worth investing in, every idea is a potential risk anyway.
There are people who spread new ideas, and stay up to date with what is going on, and there are those who just had one idea that was appliable to something specific and work, and then they spend the rest of their life trying to extend or apply that idea to other things.
To me seth is a member of the first kind and
the long tail guy of the second one.
Thank you for your response Mariana. Very interesting observations, I’ll keep this in mind, but I’m not too familiar with the history on their ideas. Are you arguing the importance of quantity of ideas? That one cannot follow up on a single issue (eg, the long neck), even if it is still a pressing issue (for many web sites)?
From my point of view, long neck is highly relevant seeing as I’m working in a content producing environment (news paper). On the other hand, following Seth’s blog is different as there are so many ideas discussed, keeping it interesting, but frequently less relevant.
I am stating that there is a huge amount of a ideas nowadays importance which is in part consequence of the quantity of information availability and accessibility (I notice I haven’t been clear, sorry ).
a)keep up to date with inventions, changes, news, paradigm changes and so on.
as a framework for their new Ideas.
b)Try to frame actual reality (without understanding it deeply) according with the ideas they have that where important.
Completely agree about your observation of the low importance stuff in Seth’s blog. Didn’t occurred to me before, cause I usually follow him and enjoy doing that. But he is type (a)Stays up to date with what goes on and creates based on that.
Instead the Long tail guy (b) is trying to extrapolate the one big idea he once have to modern times, and not keeping up to date with what is going on.
Sorry Hope Ï have been clearer this time, I notice I need to practice my skills.
You can also check the history of technological inventions, Nicholas Carr book IT doesn’t matter is pretty interesting, and also what people saying about memetics nowadays (Invented by Dawkins, about the transmission of memes or ideas).
Feel free to write to me and I can lead you to some other technical things. You can also check my last post about Streams in my blog.
Best Regards