Category Archives: strategy

A Concept Restaurant

Palermo district in Buenos Aires.

When recessions or economic downturns hit, restaurant owners can turn to creative solutions to survive in such a tough-at-the-best-of-times industry. (You might remember some of this appearing in North America, too.)

I thought this pitch on the sandwich board that otherwise might tell me what the specials of the day are was well done:

“We give you food, drink and good service …  You pay what you want, without pressure and prejudice… enjoy yourself.”

The restaurant looked like a very fine choice for a great dinner out. It also looked like this was no longer a gimmick to keep people coming but an actual business model a la 2011.

What do you want from the web?

I’m preparing training material for a client: “How your Web Presence Can Help You Build a Stronger Profile”.

The point of view I am taking is what it really means when your audience can do everything your organization can do online. Think about it: individuals possess the power of the printing press without the cost of printing and distribution. All they need to figure out is how to create content and attract audiences. That of course, is the hard part.

And yet, much of what goes online leaves me with a back to the future sort of feeling.

  • Facebook: Social (Connecting and sharing with your friends)
  • Youtube: TV (Broadcast yourself)
  • Flickr: Photo journalism (The eyes of the world)
  • Twitter: News (What’s happening?)
  • Podcasting: Radio (video) by everyone

That’s why the training program will focus on providing an understandable thought framework, and then demystify some of the voodoo – like SEO, UXD (yes, that means user experience design) – to empower my client to think smart and make good decisions as they strengthen their web presence, purposefully and without running off in all directions.

My basic message is that online marketing is about connecting with the right people where they are in ways that are meaningful to them. The enabling aspects are tried and true concepts:

Online channels are about dialogue and conversation; they work because of relevance to the audience and timeliness; and, most difficult of all in this engineered world they demand authenticity.

Social Marketing – Evaluating Programs

A British Medical Journal article on Interventions to reduce unintended pregnancies among adolescents: systematic review of randomised controlled trials concluded that “Primary prevention strategies evaluated (1970 to 2000) do not delay the initiation of sexual intercourse, improve use of birth control among young men and women, or reduce the number of pregnancies in young women.” The study reviewed the “effectiveness of primary prevention strategies aimed at delaying sexual intercourse, improving use of birth control, and reducing incidence of unintended pregnancy in adolescents.”

I found particularly interesting a study finding that “four abstinence programmes and one school based sex education programme were associated with an increase in number of pregnancies among partners of young male participants. There were significantly fewer pregnancies in young women who received a multifaceted programme , though baseline differences in this study favoured the intervention.”

In short this study from June 2002, points to the challenges of developing effective and long-term strategies to affect behavioural changes in the intended direction.

Social Marketing – Constructing a Message

 

Numerous studies cited for instance in Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein point toward a deliberate, effective message construction for social marketing campaigns that aim at changing behaviour. For instance, in experiments it has been shown that behaviour can be modified by not merely emphasizing the nature of a problem, but by offering a positive message. (Example: a sign that reads “Many past visitors have removed the petrified wood from the park, changing the natural state of the park,” was far less effective in preventing visitors from removing artifacts than this positive message: “Please don’t remove the petrified wood from the park, in order to preserve the natural state of the Petrified Forest”).  

Similarly, a message focused on how many people are engaging in an unhealthy activity have been shown to be less effective at motivating the desired behaviour than one that emphasizes how many people are already doing things right. This type of message can aid in correcting social misperceptions and boost the healthy behaviour. (Example: “20% of Montana college students drink too much alcohol.” versus the much more effective “Most (81%) of Montana college students have four or fewer drinks each week”).

Again in a similar vein, a neuroscientific study reported on in Buy-ology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy by Martin Lindstrom showed through bran scans that explicit non-smoking messages, for instance the explicit depictions of the effects of cigarette smoking found on Canadian cigarette packs, and explicit messages like smoking causes lung cancer or smoking kills do little to keep smokers from smoking. On the contrary, brain scans showed how these messages in fact stimulated the craving in smokers, suggesting they may well be achieving the opposite results.

Social Marketing Or What it Takes to Change Behaviour

This is the first in a series of posts I will write on social marketing over the next few days. 

Recent research on the effectiveness of social marketing campaigns has demonstrated that some campaigns aimed at changing behaviour produce superior results while others based on the same message premise fail to meet objectives. Steering people toward healthy choices, it appears, has to go beyond the typical methods of raising awareness of an issue and highlighting rational strategies for changing behaviours. This may well be of particular importance in activities that are essential to human survival, such as sexual reproduction or food consumption, yet also hold significant health and social risks.

Therefore, it may not a matter of categorical change, but of discriminating change. A level of emotional intelligence should be appealed to and fostered through a variety of methods in order to achieve the desired behavioural changes. Research suggests that a large number of decisions are made every day in an instinctive, automatic manner, learned over time and reinforced in many subtle and explicit ways. Advances in neuroscience, in particular the ability to examine information processing and decision-making through brain scans, have enabled more clarity in how these processes might work. 

Website code and Competitive intelligence

I recently came across a piece of code on a web site I was checking out in preparation for my SEO seminar.

Programmers used green comment text as a way to distinguish notes to the programmer or reminders, from code that makes the site work. These notes do not show up as content in the graphic interface of the web site. If you want to see what sort of “conversations” and notes programmers leave behind when building a site, simply look at the source code and scroll for the green bits.

Now, imagine a company in a highly competitive field having this sort of programmer’s annotation about a future product in the code. This could well be a major issue if a competitor receives advance notice of future actions, just because a programmer wanted to identify a placeholder for a future product on the web page.

While I find this interesting from a competitive intelligence perspective, it raises another question: when you approve your web site, do you ever actually look at the code? Have you considered the liabilities that inadvertent disclosure can bring to your company? Do you have any sort of quality assurance and brand protection process in place re: coding? And, in earlier posts I talked about the importance of meta tags and title tags – so: what is your quality assurance process to make sure these search engine optimization aids are in place and make sense from a brand and messaging architecture point of view?

SEO – keyword thinking

No doubt, the most important part of your web site is what it says to the human visitor. However, when you write your site with SEO in mind you should evolve a keyword mindset: Humans categorize and we use keyword concepts to make sense of the world and the web.

Keywords are also the driving force in search engines. That’s why in addition to weaving these important words and phrases throughout your web site, you need to ensure that the coding aspects of the site are considered.

Here’s the source code view of my web site (if you click on the image you can see it larger)  at www.strategicmoves.ca. Note the underlined elements:
– Description and Keyword meta tags
– Title tag
– Image alt tags
These tags exist in code only and should support your actual content. They are useful in ensuring search engines interpret your site correctly.

Consider this question: how do you make keyword thinking an integral part of web development?

For instance, do you task your creative writing team and technical web team with creating these tags as each new page is written? Who writes your description, keyword, image tags- your writer or the developer? Who determines the title tag – and are they in tune with your brand strategy?

I always recommend that the writing and web teams work closely together from the outset and involve the client to ensure the best results for the users. I say for the user because SEO is about users and positioning yourself effectively in the content of search engines.