adam qureshi

It's good to make your website or application as beautiful as possible, but not at the expense of usefulness

Sun, 20 May 2012 12:56:12 -0400

BEAUTIFUL DOES NOT ALWAYS MEAN USABLE

It’s good to make your website or application as beautiful as possible, but not at the expense of usefulness.

“Did you ever come across a product that looked beautiful but was awful to use? Or stumbled over something that was not nice to look at but did exactly what you wanted?” These questions are asked by Javier Bargas-Avila, a senior user experience researcher at YouTube.

In May 2012 YouTube published results of a study where they had “created four versions of an online clothing shop varying in beauty (high vs. low) and usability (high vs. low). Participants had to find and buy a number of items in one of those shops. To understand how the factors of beauty and usability influence final users happiness, we measured how much they liked the shop before and after interaction.”

“The results showed that the beauty of the interface did not affect how users perceived the usability of the shops,” Bargas-Avila continued. “Participants (or Users) were capable of distinguishing if a product was usable or not, no matter how nice it looked. However, the experiment showed that the usability of the shops influenced how users rated the products’ beauty. Participants using shops with bad usability rated the shops as less beautiful after using them. We showed that poor usability lead to frustration, which put the users in a bad mood and made them rate the product as less beautiful than before interacting with the shop.”

Ease of use is a tsunami tearing across the world. In our own studies we see again and again that if the customer can’t quickly and easily complete their task their impression of the website or application falls off a cliff. “So, John, you didn’t quite manage to book your flight to Dublin on our site, but could you please tell us how well you enjoyed our content? And did you like our new look and feel?”

“What people want most from their smartphones, tablets, home theater and home appliances is simplicity,” according to the Ketchum global study of 6,000 consumers published in May 2012.

“The most surprising finding in the study is the overwhelming desire for simplification,” said Esty Pujadas, partner and director of Ketchum’s Global Technology Practice. “It seems counter-intuitive when technology is always about being bigger or better or faster, but the data show that what people really want is to understand how all of these devices can get them to their desired experience easily. Manufacturers need to use less so-called jargon monoxide and communicate more about the human experience, not just about the object.”

Organization and professional ego often work against simplicity. Over the years I have heard very many senior managers say that they want their website to have the wow factor. Unfortunately, at a management level vanity sometimes trumps sanity. Designers are often beautiful people. They dress well and they want their websites and applications to be seen to be well-dressed.

Beauty is highly desirable but simplicity and usefulness are the overwhelming fashion of our age. Just because it’s beautiful does not mean it’s useful.

SOURCE:www.gerrymcgovern.com

Bridging the content management chasm

Mon, 14 May 2012 10:41:07 -0400

BRIDGING THE CONTENT MANAGEMENT CHASM

There is a chasm between those who create content and those who consume it. The Web allows us to bridge that chasm.

I once knew the editor of one of the world’s most prestigious magazines. He told me how over the years the magazine had invested millions of dollars and countless hours in trying to understand exactly what was read in each issue.

They came up with all sorts of convoluted formulas, but they ended up throwing all of them out. The decisions on what got published remained an art. It rested on the shoulders of those with many years of experience and a keen understanding of their readers.

But these brilliant editors still felt pangs of doubt and uncertainty. They often learned anecdotally that a story deep in the magazine, gained far more interest than the story they decided to lead with.

With the Web, it has become much easier to find out which content is working and which content isn’t. This will have a dramatic impact on the professional lives of those who produce content.

For too long, the producers of content have been divorced from the consumers of content. Marketing people have created product descriptions without knowing if customers actually understood or reacted positively to what they wrote. Human resource professionals have written policies without knowing if staff actually understood the policy after reading it.

This chasm between the producers of content and the consumers of content has led to huge quantities of marketing waffle and unintelligible policies. Thousands of people today are involved in creating content that is not just useless; it’s counter-productive and a tremendous drain on time and efficiency.

Until the Web came along we never had a way to identify the useless content. How do we do this? For starters, it is now cheap to ask customers to complete top tasks on the website. The best results are achieved if the customer is at home or in their office, and we are conducting the test remotely. (There’s lots of cheap, quality software to capture their voice and screen movements. We use GoToMeeting.)

Web content exists within the context of a task; something the customer wishes to do. By measuring the ability of the customer to quickly and easily complete the task, we measure the quality of the content. Because the better the content the faster and easier the task will be completed.

We can also have rating systems imbedded in our webpages that allow customers to rate the quality of the page. If our content is more news-oriented then we can track how much it has been viewed; whether it is being blogged about; how much it is being linked to; how much it has been tweeted.

As content creators we have lived in a vacuum too long. It will be scary, certainly, to find out whether what we write is actually useful or not. But it’s hugely exciting too. We can now figure out what works and do more of it, and figure out what doesn’t work and stop doing it.

Source:Customer Carewords

In about 6 months, the word “TUMBLR” will eclipse...

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 10:33:18 -0400

In about 6 months, the word “TUMBLR” will eclipse “BLOG” in google popularity!

what users want from a website

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 10:14:45 -0400

what users want from a website

How to choose the right web metrics

Sun, 22 Apr 2012 11:27:22 -0400

There once was a business-to-business website that sought to bring buyers and sellers together. When it started out it had a simple philosophy: Have as many sellers as possible and the buyers will come.

Its web team focused on getting as many sellers signed up as possible. They had signup targets every month. They met them. Within six months the website boasted thousands of sellers. They had an aggressive search engine optimization strategy that brought lots of visitors to the site. But these buyers weren’t buying. The website was a flop.

A few years later the organization decided to try again. This time the metric became: get as many leads as possible for our sellers. They defined what a lead meant and put a monetary value on it.

The new web team focused on quality, not quantity. They worked with the sellers to ensure that they were describing their products and services in a way that buyers could easily find and understand. They had less sellers on the site, but the ones they did have were of a higher quality. It was a lot of work but it paid off. Leads started flowing to the sellers and the website became a success.

The first attempt to launch the website was measuring inputs: how many sellers can we get? The second attempt was measuring outcomes: how many leads can we get for our sellers? There is a world of a difference between the two.

It’s easy to measure inputs. It’s harder to manage outcomes.

I’m sure you’ve heard the management mantra: If you can’t measure it you can’t manage it.

Just because you can easily measure something does not mean you should manage it. Sometimes we choose to manage things simply because they are easy to measure. It’s easy to measure the number of visits or page views, but that is rarely an effective management model. In many situations it can be a disastrous management model as it encourages bad practice.

The original web team was obsessed with getting sellers. It didn’t matter how poor quality they were. It was all about maximum volume in minimum time. They managed what was easy to measure and easy to do. It doesn’t take a lot of talent to fill a website with garbage.

It’s much harder to measure leads. There are different types of leads. You have to work with your sellers a lot more. There’s often education and training involved. While any junior person can add a seller to a website, it takes a professional to reject a potential seller, explain to them why they were rejected and what they need to do to be accepted.

The buyers who came to this website were there for a reason: to find a quality seller. The fact that they contact a buyer is good for both parties. Of course, you can take this type of metric further. You can begin to measure how many leads turned into sales. And then how many of the buyers were actually satisfied with what they bought.

Measuring outcomes is hard, but does that mean we shouldn’t do it? Measuring inputs is easy, so does that mean we should do it? Are we saying to ourselves: “I don’t have time to do it right, but I do have time to do it wrong?”

SOURCE:www.gerrymcgovern.com

THE AGE OF DATA: DATA

Sun, 01 Apr 2012 12:32:29 -0400

If you’re part of a large website then understanding human behavioral data will be central to the advancement of your career.

“Data, in my view, is a transformative new currency for science, engineering, education, commerce and government,” Farnam Jahanian, head of the National Science Foundation’s computer and information science and engineering directorate told the New York Times in March 2012. “Foundational research in data management and data analytics promise breakthrough discoveries and innovations across all disciplines.”

Big data is the latest buzzword. We are currently experiencing a data flood. So much data that it’s hard to organize, analyze, interpret. This is a huge challenge, and a massive opportunity.

It’s nothing new. The wave of data has been rising every year. In some way we could say that Big Data is associated with Information Overload. It’s all the result of our dramatically increasing ability to record and store.

Communication is about the transfer of information. There are two forms of information, formal and informal. The informal kind is the one with which we’re most familiar. In earlier societies, when a baby was born the neighbors came and everyone smiled and thirty years later probably only the mother could remember what the baby looked like.

Today, information is becoming more and more formalized. A baby is born, the neighbors come with their cameras and there are photos, videos and blogs on the Web and in lots of other places. There is a human record like there has never been a record before.

The Web is the great laboratory of human life. It is the ultimate library of human existence. Often it feels like a library with the lights turned out and all the books on the floor. How do we make sense of all this data?

If you don’t make sense of this data your competitors will. Or your colleagues will and their career will advance and yours won’t. Big Data is like an extra super powerful brain. It can help you know what is really happening, not what you think is happening or what your boss thinks is happening.

The Age of Data gives us a great big window into the world of our customers. Websites are meant for people to use. We now have an idea how people use. What they ACTUALLY do rather than what they say they do or what we think they do.

Right now, we’re doing a project that involves examining how employees sort tasks into classes. The software (by Optimal Workshop) allows us to get far more people to do the sorting than we used to get when we did this sorting manually. We get much richer data.

From this analysis we come up with a level one classification but we don’t stop there. We then ask employees a range of top task questions and ask them where they would click. We aim to place tasks in the exact place employees would click at least 90% of the time.

Data is your friend. It can help you make better decisions. This is the Age of Data, the age of evidence and facts, not opinion and gut instinct. Embrace data and your career will thrive.

New U.S. Research Will Aim at Flood of Digital Data
http://gerrymcgovern.newsweaver.ie/4sr5owq5ts3fnqwh0fvw3q?email=true&a=6&p=22856315&t=20986245

SOURCE: gerrymcgovern.com

Is there such a thing as content strategy?

Sun, 26 Feb 2012 14:03:02 -0500

Strategy is defined at a senior management level. Good content can help implement that strategy.

I believe in the power of web content, particularly words. I have spent my career of nearly 18 years encouraging organizations to take content seriously. And what’s the most important thing I’ve learned? Don’t talk about content.

If you want to get paid more, don’t talk about content. If you want more respect, don’t talk about content. If you want to make progress in your web career, don’t talk about content.

I love content. My best friends are writers and we can spend hours and hours talking about the minutiae of writing. It’s good fun. But it’s one thing to talk about content to your friends and peers and entirely another to talk about it to senior managers.

Yesterday evening I had a conversation with a senior manager. It lasted about three and a half minutes. It was for a large intranet. I talked about employee productivity, efficiency, being task driven, helping them do their jobs better, get products out the door faster, be more flexible and adaptive. I didn’t mention content once. “Send me a proposal,” he said.

If we get this contract much of the work will involve choosing the right words. We will do extensive research to understand the employee tasks. We will come up with a large task list, perhaps as long as 500. We will work for perhaps 6 weeks to shorten that list under 100. And practically all that work will be around the choice of words.

But I didn’t tell the senior manager about this because I know he has absolutely no interest in it. He just doesn’t care. I have found that not alone does he not care but if I started talking about this content stuff, he’d lose a lot of respect for me.

Isn’t the first skill of the content professional to have empathy for your audience, to understand what they care about and communicate to them in their language? Most senior managers should have an organization strategy with which they are charged to implement. We need to tell them about how we can make them more successful by helping them implement THEIR strategy.

Instead content professionals want a content strategy, user experience professionals want a user experience strategy, IT professionals want an IT strategy, and senior managers, of course, have (or should have) an organization strategy. This silo-fication of strategy does not lead to a better customer experience.

I am well aware that Kristina Halvorson has done excellent work in promoting the importance of quality content, and that she very much stresses the need for content strategy. However, I would argue that content is strategic, not strategy.

To me the essence of strategy on the web is customer centricity. The Web is about the rise of customer power. Social media is just one example of that. Is the organization truly going to focus on and organize around the customer? That’s the key strategic question. How do we frame content in that context? So, it’s not about content but rather about culture, because as the great Peter Drucker once said, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.”

Attribution: www.gerrymcgovern.com =(my hero)

How to advance your web career

Sun, 19 Feb 2012 16:55:19 -0500

How to advance your web career

By Gerry McGovern

To earn more money and get more respect, you need to become a manager of tasks, not a manager of technology, and certainly not a manager of content.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the years is that content gets no respect from senior management. Associating yourself with content is a guaranteed way to ensure your career goes nowhere.

The phrase “content management” is an oxymoron in most organizations. At best, it relates to the process of buying fancy technology that will hopefully ‘manage’ the content automatically.

Look what happened to knowledge management; a cousin of content management. Knowledge management became data management. It was about finding the cheapest way possible to store lots and lots of stuff that just might be of some use at some point in the future.

I heard a great definition of a knowledge manager once:
My mother doesn’t understand what I do.
My boss doesn’t understand what I do.
I don’t understand what I do.

The library might have lots of books on leaders, but leaders rarely start out as librarians. The people who become CEOs are sales people, accountants, and technicians. And what do they all have in common? What they do has a quantifiable, measurable impact on the success of the organization.

If taking a content approach is the wrong way to manage your website, then taking an IT approach is even worse. IT is essential but it is a tool, not a management approach. Managing from an IT perspective encourages lots and lots of projects with lots and lots of features and lots and lots of complexity.

We need a new type of manager. Someone who understands the value of content and IT, but who is relentlessly focused on helping customers quickly complete tasks.

What the task manager does can have a quantifiable impact on the success of the organization. A government task manager can show that they are delivering better services to citizens. An intranet task manager can show that they are making other staff more productive. A university task manager can show that they are bringing more and better qualified students to the university.

I know lots of talented people working away at web content trying to do the best job they can. The problem is that it doesn’t really matter to the organization whether they are doing a good job or not. 500 words of content is not measurable in any quantifiable way that means anything to a senior manager.

However, quality content is crucial to task completion. Without content, there would be no Google. Without content, there would be no Amazon. Without content, there would be no eBay, no Twitter, no Facebook.

So, why don’t ‘they’ (senior management) get it, you ask? How come your intranet is run on a shoestring? How come your public website is still dependent on the hand-me-downs from print? How come there’s not enough resources to remove out-of-date content?

Because talking about content is talking about costs. Talking about customer tasks is talking about value. Identify your customers’ top tasks. Then measure your success based on your customers’ ability to quickly complete these tasks. Becoming a task manager is how you will advance your career.

Attribution:www.gerrymcgovern.com

Why are ugly websites so successful?

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 12:17:58 -0500

“Techmeme has redesigned,” Gabe Rivera founder of the popular technology news site wrote in January 2012. “Drudge Report is now indisputably the web’s ugliest news site.”

I use Techmeme all the time. I find it an excellent news website. It’s a collection of well-selected links to important issues in the technology industry. It doesn’t look pretty but it works fine for me. Asides from the quality of its stories it also has black text on white background and a fairly large size, legible font.

Gabe Rivera claims that Drudge Report is “the web’s ugliest news site.” That’s probably true, as well as the fact that Drudge Report is one of the web’s most influential and most highly trafficked websites. Again, it’s a bunch of carefully selected links laid out in the most basic manner possible.

Just like Craig’s List, another website whose homepage is dominated by links and not a single image. A very ugly website. Ebay, Amazon, Twitter, Facebook and Google are not much better in the visual design area.

Did ugly visual design help these websites become more successful? The accepted wisdom in the web design industry is, absolutely not. Most web designers would say that Craig’s List and Drudge Report would be much more successful if they had a more pleasing visual design. There are studies from, for example, Stanford University, that state that the visual appeal of the website significantly influences people.

However, in the research we’ve been doing over the years we have found that visual appeal is rarely a major factor for the customer. The accuracy, up-to-datedness and completeness of the information are critical issues. The clarity of the menus and links is hugely important to people, as is the quality of the search.

But I think there is a deeper reason why people prefer ‘ugly’ design. When I was buying a camera recently I did a lot of research. I learned to avoid most content from the camera manufacturers, particularly videos. These manufacturer videos that claimed to explain how the camera worked were mainly re-purposed TV ads. They were beautifully produced and were really irritating and content-free. They were utterly useless. A hundred times better were the really badly produced YouTube videos by expert photographers who were actually using these cameras.

When we watch people try to complete tasks on websites we notice that often the more visually appealing something is, the more they ignore it. If it looks like marketing or an ad, then people dismiss it as having low value or credibility.

In the eyes of many customers, ugly equals authentic and credible. Ugly helps you get the task completed quickly without any fuss or distraction. Ugly is going to give you the details. Ugly is not hiding anything. Ugly does not waste your time on surface images and trivial jargon and hype.

In about the last 100 talks I have given to web professionals I show them two alternative registration pages that were tested. One page was 40% more successful than the other at getting people to register. That is an absolutely enormous difference in effectiveness. I ask the audience of web professionals to choose which one was more successful and practically every time, 80% of them choose page B. Page A was 40% more successful. Page B was prettier, a nicer visual design. Page A was uglier. But time and time again, ugly gets the job done.

Author: www.gerrymcgovern.com

You don't need a mobile strategy

Sun, 20 Nov 2011 10:43:42 -0500

Mobile is a platform. It is a tactic, not a strategy. What you need is a strategy for the connected customer.

If a Norwegian man is sitting on the toilet reading the news on his iPhone, is he mobile? Well, research indicates that one of the most favored places where Norwegian men use their phones is on the toilet. iPads are used a lot on the couch but the iPhone is more popular in bed.

Mobile is not necessarily mobile. It is flexible, convenient, fast, and private. Pictures of sexually transmitted diseases are often accessed through mobile devices. This could be because mobile is particularly favored by young people. It could also be because a phone is more private than a computer. A number of people might have access to the computer you use, for example.

I’ve read that mobiles will be used a lot this Christmas, particularly for last minute gifts. That implies that people using them may need advice on what to buy, because by definition they will not be buying for themselves.

“Desktop copywriting must be concise. Mobile copywriting must be even more concise,” Jakob Nielsen writes in his article ‘Mobile UX Sharpens Usability Guidelines.’ We need more than content reeducation according to Jakob. “The feature set should be much smaller for a mobile site than for a desktop site.”

However, the customer is not always in a hurry. Some people read more on their smart phones than they read on websites. So, one of the most important links any mobile website can have is a link back to the main website.

A major weakness of organizations is that they behave reactively rather than strategically. “We need a mobile app.” “We need to be on Twitter.” “We need more video.” “We need to blog.”

Web strategy is far more about psychology than technology, blogs, Twitter or any other forms of content. The more people use the Web to live their lives and do their jobs, the more web professionals need to invest in understanding human behavior. This is because the Web removes the human touch points, the opportunities to observe, the empathy zones.

There is so much we learn when we are physically in the presence of our customers. If I were hiring a web professional the greatest attribute I would look for is empathy; the ability and desire to put yourself in someone else’s shoes. A web professional should have a service heart.

What are Norwegian men doing with their smart phones when they are on the toilet? What do people typically do when they are on the couch? Do the tasks change when they get into bed?

SOURCE:www.gerrymcgovern.com

If customers get the first click right they have twice as much of a chance of completing their task than if they get it wrong.

Sun, 06 Nov 2011 13:34:32 -0500

Nobody likes taking a wrong turn, particularly when it’s your first turn. If you have travelled 10 kilometers in the wrong direction, then it feels like you are travelling back 20 kilometers.

Linking is the foundation of the Web. It is its key distinguishing characteristic. It is what makes the Web the Web. The essence of linking is navigation. The essence of navigation is helping someone get someplace. A link is a signpost, a promise.

That most important skill by far that any web professional can have is link design. The most important aspect-by far-of link design is the choice of words.

A 2010 study by Webusability found that, “participants were about twice as likely to succeed if they selected the correct response on the first page with which they had to deal … In addition, those scenarios that had incorrect first clicks tended to take longer to complete, and required more page views.”

Commenting on the study, Measuring Usability stated that “Few things affect task success more than the navigation of the website. If users can’t find what they’re looking for, not much else matters.”

Another research paper, published in 2011, states that when people are on the Web, “The main attention is paid to the starting and ending documents. They should be designed well.”

You can’t have good search if you don’t have good navigation. The quality of search results is directly dependent on the quality of the navigation. The better structured the environment, the better the search results will be.

The best navigation is focused on top tasks. The best navigation is simple. It has as few choices as possible. Thus, you must focus on the highest demand tasks (top tasks). Great navigation is exclusive. Each link is absolutely separate and distinct.

Let’s say you have a support problem. You see these links: FAQs, Tools, Resources. Which one should you choose? This is an example of the most basic mistake in navigation design: overlapping links.

Design the top level of your navigation in isolation. Base it on your top 20 tasks. Then test it with about 20 top task questions. Ask a minimum of 20 people what their first click would be based on the navigation you present them. You can do this manually using the simplest of wireframes. However, the simplest way we’ve found of doing this is by using Optimal Sort from Optimal Workshop.

Aim for a 90 percent first click success rate. Keep tweaking your navigation until you get that success rate. Design downwards. Get the first level right then work on the second level. Measure the success of your design based on task success. Most of what you will be doing to improve success rate will involve changing words.

source:www.gerrymcgovern.com

Content management solutions: Gerry McGovern

http://gerrymcgovern.newsweaver.ie/h0nv0mbx1i8fnqwh0fvw3q?email=true&a=6&p=18660025&t=20046995

"A Year in New York" Video Essay Flaunts the City's Beautiful Side

Sun, 06 Nov 2011 09:50:56 -0500

"A Year in New York" Video Essay Flaunts the City's Beautiful Side:

Enjoy this lyrical interpretation of New York City, shot and edited by talented videographer Andrew Clancy. Not only does “A Year in New York” give you a good look at the city and its vast array of people and sights. It demonstrates the gorgeous quality of expertly-framed HD vide…

Protecting Your Online Reputation: 4 Things You Need to Know [INFOGRAPHIC]

Thu, 03 Nov 2011 15:41:58 -0400

Protecting Your Online Reputation: 4 Things You Need to Know [INFOGRAPHIC]:

You don’t have to be running for president to care about your online reputation. Almost everything you do online is easy to track, especially when you’re using social media sites. This infographic shows you how to manage your “e-reputation,” perhaps saving you some embarrassment, or even your car…

createthegroup: Are Luxury products without overt branding the...

Wed, 19 Oct 2011 15:08:22 -0400

createthegroup:

Are Luxury products without overt branding the new mark of exclusivity?

The appeal of living large hasn’t disappeared but it seems the logos associated with lavish lifestyles have. When it comes to statement accessories, brands as diverse as Victoria Beckham and Céline are whispering their exclusivity amid a growing consensus that “anonymity” is the key to being recognised.

Flip through the Barneys New York autumn handbag catalogue and it’s clear that the less-is-more approach has permeated the luxury accessories market – a move that Daniella Vitale, the store’s executive vice president, says is intrinsic to the Barneys DNA. “Historically, our clients have always responded to a more subtle, beautifully crafted product,” she says. “[It’s about] expression through details, exquisite materials and things that are not so identifiable.”

WHAT MAKES SOMEONE LEAVE A WEBSITE ?

Tue, 13 Sep 2011 01:03:00 -0400

Source: What Makes Someone Leave A Website?

night out!

Sun, 11 Sep 2011 13:02:28 -0400

night out!

5-Minute Guide to Getting a Job in Social Media [INFOGRAPHIC]

Fri, 02 Sep 2011 14:31:27 -0400

5-Minute Guide to Getting a Job in Social Media [INFOGRAPHIC]:

Are you looking to get a job in social media? Of course, we’d highly recommend jumping into this lively line of work, but the field is highly competitive and there are lots of people looking. This infographic from online training software company mindflash.com can help you stand out from the crow…

Noodlers Infographic on typography

Thu, 11 Aug 2011 09:45:29 -0400

Noodlers Infographic on typography

startupquote: Ideas are commodity. Execution of them is not. -...

Tue, 09 Aug 2011 11:42:09 -0400

startupquote:

Ideas are commodity. Execution of them is not.

- Michael Dell

THE CHANGING ROLE OF MARKETING

Tue, 09 Aug 2011 11:41:11 -0400

Marketing has become everything you do. Everyone in your organization is a marketer.

In classical management thinking, marketing, advertising and branding were often separate from the product and company. This is a particular type of thinking best associated with what is called Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG), but has become popular for all types of products and services.

For many FMCG goods there is essentially no difference between competing products. So, marketers are employed to invent a difference. They do this through association and repetition; essentially psychological and emotional manipulation and trickery.

Sometimes it’s about story telling. You tell a funny or interesting story to the consumer and they repay you by buying your product. In many ways, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. Exciting, funny stories and fantasy make life interesting. We pay a little extra not to be bored.

The problem is that this sort of marketing has become commonplace. Marketers think that this is marketing and branding in general, rather than the product-specific type of marketing it really is. So many marketers dream of having big ad budgets. They think that their heroic marketing is convincing those who have absolutely no interest in your product that they now absolutely MUST have it.

The Web reflects an empowered, engaged consumer who sees past many of the traditional marketing tricks. “At the end of the day, customers no longer separate marketing from the product—it is the product. They don’t separate marketing from their in-store or online experience—it is the experience. In the era of engagement, marketing is the company,” Tom French, Laura LaBerge, and Paul Magill write in a July 2011 article for McKinsey Quarterly.

Kristin Zhivago is one of the smartest marketers I know. In her new book, Roadmap To Revenue, she states: “Stop trying to “sell” and “market”. Instead, start to figure out how to make the purchase easier for the customers who would benefit from your product or services.”

This is an essential point. A few days ago I searched for “digital watches”. Did I want to buy a car, jeans, glasses, house, gloves, pension plan? What were the chances of a big banner ad trying to sell me home insurance? Here’s what I wanted to buy. You’ve guessed it, yes, I knew you would, because you’re very clever and perceptive. What I wanted to buy and what I did buy was a digital watch.

There’s a growing number of consumers out there who know what they want to buy, or at least have a very good idea. Many of these customers judge your brand first and foremost based on your service, not your product or fancy advertising. Part of this service is the self service simplicity of your website. How easy is it to use? Does it give real answers to specific questions?

At Zappos they state that, “Customer service isn’t just a department. We’ve been asked by a lot of people how we’ve grown so quickly, and the answer is actually really simple… We’ve aligned the entire organization around one mission: to provide the best customer service possible.”

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