We’re hiring!

Pure Visibility is looking for an enthusiastic, responsive individual to join our sales team. This part-time position will support our existing sales team by acting as a first contact for incoming sales leads, someone to help us qualify new opportunities and promote our product offerings.

Details on the open position can be found at: Sales Representative description

To apply please send your resume and cover letter before October 10, 2008 to: jobs@purevisibility.com

This week, the MIMA Summit–that’s the Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association–invites bloggers to respond on additional topics of interest to internet marketing companies large and small. Such as Topic #2: Speaker Leah Buley asks, “What’s the process for creative brainstorming at your company? Who gets involved with creative exploration, and how do they do it?”

“Creative brainstorming”. When it comes to a typical day at Pure Visibility, what doesn’t fall under this heading?

Creative brainstorming as it happens here could be applied on the individual, small group, or entire group level. All three happen on a regular basis.

The individual level looks most like a person staring at a computer, surfing the web with an expression that is maybe more thoughtful than usual. Nothing too exciting there. Depending on the person, he or she might be 1) taking occasional long longs out the window, 2) eating chocolate, 3) drinking a caffeinated beverage, 4) listening to music, 5) leaving the computer to take a walk around the block.

(Note: If you work here and do not feel your brainstorming process has been adequately described, please respond.)

We are a very collaborative company, so there is plenty of collective brainstorming at quarterly strategy meetings. Additional problems and potential opportunities alike are addressed during productization meetings, daily stand-ups, monthly strategy meetings, and weekly meetings.

Some of these behaviors are motivated by Mastering The Rockefeller Habits, a book which helps companies define themselves and achieve success through consistency and goal-setting. Check out this post on the main points of Mastering the Rockefeller Habits.

But we have other company-wide “secrets to creative brainstorming” as well…

Brainstorming Secret #1: The color-scheme that dominates not only this blog’s skin but also our office environment. In addition to the blue, orange, and green, we also have walls painted yellow and purple. Do they work in inspiring creativity? We are still A/B testing that.

Brainstorming Secret #2: A wii system. What could be more creative than video games?

Brainstorming Secret #3: A crystal ball in one of our conference rooms. Co-founder Linda Girard, who is “futuristically talented” according to another great book, “Strengthsfinder”, may even provide an online video tutorial on this very blog one day, instructing others on how to use this prop.

Brainstorming Secret #4: Whiteboards. This one is not a secret as most offices have them. It is also unclear whether the object itself actually inspires creative thought, or just accompanies it. But at least one person here has an attachment to the whiteboard, and so I will mention it.

Have time to read a blog post? What if I told you in just a few short minutes you could walk away with increased knowledge of persuasive design techniques?

B.J. Fogg, a well-known researcher in the land of web design and info architecture, who’s been influential in discussions of web credibility, is also the author of a book on Persuasive Interaction. In short, “captology” as he calls it, is the idea of computers as persuasive technologies.

One interesting idea Fogg suggests is using cause and effect to persuade potential customers to convert: Fogg uses the example of how using curve of a simple graph symbolizing the growing nest egg of a customer can be juxtaposed with an image of one of the luxury perks, such as a hotel or yacht, that could result of the savings. I like this idea, but immediately begin thinking of other ways to show cause and effect online. Before and after type pictures are one obvious idea. But not everyone responds to pictures; some like hard facts, some like charts. Is there a “best” or “correct” way to use cause and effect?

An email newsletter I came across this week emphasized this same idea, cased as describing a service based on its benefits, rather than the logistics of what it entails. Reading it I imagine “fluffy” web copy, the kind that harks of empty promises and turns me off personally as a consumer. Thus as straightforwardly effective as the idea sounds, the same quandary presents itself: how can I speak to a variety of potential consumers on the same page?

The basis of the question seems rooted in people’s differences when it comes to preferred levels of specificity and presentation-types. A little research turned up Dave Young’s great resource on tailoring web design to different types of decision makers. The video uses a 4 quadrant grid to dichotomize fast versus slow decision makers as well as emotional versus logical ones. My dissatisfaction with over-generalized web copy describing benefits results from being a fast, logical decision maker. I want anything I’m going to read online to be quick to get to the facts.

One question that still lingers after watching Young’s video relates to whether there is any risk in combining so many types of content in a single page/site. I am thinking both of the example contractor’s site that Young uses, and Fogg’s example above of the graph in conjunction with the picture. The latter combines not only symbolic and realistic representations, but also emotional and logical ones. It is a fact that many people are scared of numbers and graphs. Is there a chance that some emotional folks will be scared off by certain charts, or numbers displayed too prominently? On the flip side, I do feel there are limits to how much “soft” marketing content I can handle before I am scared off.

Examples of sites that go to far in combining types of content would be appreciated!

As any sales person can tell you, just because it’s a lead doesn’t mean it will be a sale. The quality of that lead has a huge impact on what will happen at the end of the line. The problem is, of course, that for many high-value, complex products, the time lag between a lead and the ultimate sale can be so long that it is very difficult to identify what worked and what didn’t. By that measure a lead on a website is probably not a key performance indicator.

So what does a company do if it wants to use a website to increase qualified leads? We recommend going one step deeper and tracking the number of leads make the cut after qualified by an internal sales member. Salesforce, which is our CRM tool of choice, calls this step an opportunity, so we call it the opportunity conversion rate.

The reason that opportunity conversion rate is such a useful metric is that opportunities are a source of rich feedback for the sales process. Internal sales teams are the meeting point between sales leads and the external sales team. Their position as a negotiator between leads and sales staff creates a real understanding of what a lead is, and how either it or the sales process can be improved.

You can move the needle on opportunity conversion rate by either changing the nature of the leads you get, or changing how they fit in their sales force.

If you want to change the nature of the leads you get, this will probably require a change in the keyphrase markets you’re targeting and the content of the website. Leads of poor quality can give the marketing team insights into how to improve the website so that better qualified leads are brought in through that channel. The better qualified the lead, the higher the opportunity conversion rate will be.

Although this may seem like the easier path, the truth is that a good website reflects essential understandings of the market a company is trying to reach, and is a process that often takes a surprising amount of time. A more short-term solution can be to modify the sales process so that the vetting of leads from the website better reflects what those leads are.

For example, a sales team might be configured to manage well-qualified, late stage leads, perhaps from referrals or through specific government contract processes. In this case, the leads coming from the website might be far too early, because they came from technical buyers and researchers trying to identify options for their executive team to assemble budgets. In this case, the sales team might be trained to qualify these leads and send them material that will provide deep answers about the product and its capabilities, with a plan to do a follow-up in a month. These changes could reduce the number of unqualified, early-stage leads taken on by the sales force, which would in turn give them more time to hunt down and close more mature deals.

Ultimately the best metric is one that can be easily measured and is closely tied to the marrow of the business goal, so once the strategy for improving the sales process has been identified, the KPI can push into web-based metrics, which are fairly clear, easily collected, and closely tied to the outcome of marketing efforts.

Here at Pure Visibility, blog authors have a rotating schedule. Last week, I wrote a commissioned article per request of a co-founder; upon publishing time, I found myself hesitating.

Hoping that any potentially offensive reading would be lost in translation, I asked a co-worker, “Think I could publish my blog post as administrator?”
His puzzled look told me he didn’t quite see what I was getting at. “Sure, but …?”
My awkward attempt at explaining that the post was not congruent with my (entirely self-perceived) blog reputation followed. My blog screename, containing my last name, had inspired a minor narcissistic crisis.

This anecdote is brought to mind by the MIMA Summit’s recent call to bloggers for responses to a list of questions in preparation for upcoming event. The question: “The influx of people using social networking on and off the job has led to an always on, casual online environment. Have you adapted you customer service model to respond? Who has a public voice in your company? What are they saying?”

First off, to unpack a rather vague query. Possible interpretations of this question read:

• Have you instituted a policy to handle online customer service communications during non-work hours?
• Do you have a profile on X representing your company? (where X is any number of social networks)
• Do you have a policy to handle communication from customers/potential leads who initiate contact thru X?
• Do you monitor the public online activity of your employees in non-work hours?

To answer the questions posed directly, around here, everyone has a public voice via this blog. Is that a good thing? Yes and no, I imagine. We are also a small company though, and until we have the resources to specialize enough to have a full time writer, it will have to do. What are they (the public voice of the company) saying? Nothing shocking, obviously, seeing as rules have not yet been put in place to monitor this. We have a few profiles on social networks, but again, the rules dictating their use are not so strict, if existent.

In a company where communication is good and/or employee motivations are aligned with company ideals, what the public voice of the company says should not differ from what any one else would say if given the choice. As social networks and off-hours online interactions pose a potential threat to the company’s unified front, companies might spend more efforts not on policing behavior but rather on aligning beliefs.

More interesting than the straightforward answers to this question are the forces that inspire it in the first place. What is it that has changed in the last 20 years, causing employees who may have avoided all thought of work after hours in the past to feel so compelled to answer, say, the stray business-related emails that trickle in on the weekend?

A big part of the change is no doubt related to our changing perceptions of the office space. Phone and computer were once two different mediums, and both grounded firmly in a physical office for most people. Today, the two have united for many businesses, with a large portion of work communications occurring online, and the environment that serves as conduit being portable and ubiquitous. It takes far more self-control now (for some of us at least) not to work during off-hours. Here at Pure Visibility, for example, we work on Mac laptops that we tote home with us (most of us) and use as our primary computers both for work and personal business. On the weekend and every evening, I fire up my computer to check on something non-work related, but am confronted with the files I saved to my desktop before leaving work, or I login to my email and am confronted with work emails, which have been forwarded from my work address. To constantly be switching from promptly answering communications and tackling tasks required during the workday to exerting the will power to keep myself from answering them, all within an environment (desktop picture, etc) that my eyes see and my mind perceives as being exactly the same, is difficult to say the least.

As environments become conflated, so do identities. “I am no longer just Mike outside of work, I am Mike from Pure Visibility” says a co-worker, describing a situation that is the perfect converse of the blog crisis above. The record left by online social networking means we are always representing the company.

“La perruque” is the french term for personal business done on company time, which no doubt spiked upon the embracing of the internet in many an organization. Michel de Certeau writes in his book “The Practice of Everyday Life” that la perruque is a tactic used by the masses to subtly resist the powers that be. The real question is, What is the french word for the opposite, the subtle influence on employee identities exerted by the business, even the off hours?

Hal Varian, Chief Economist for Google, Berkeley Professor, author of the awesome book Information Rules and amateur Sam Eagle impersonator, tears down a white paper by an SEM company that predicts that the deal Yahoo made to serve Google ads will cause a 22% increase in Yahoo PPC bid prices. Varian asserts that the defects in the paper’s methodology make its conclusions about as legitimate as a $50 Rolex.

Whew, I’d hate to be those guys. The thought of going toe to toe with Varian is terrifying. But Professor Varian’s critique of the study does nothing to address advertisers concerns that changing the bidding structure will impact the price of advertising on Yahoo keywords.

Ask Jeeves partnered with Google to serve ads on Teoma and other products back in 2002. They determined whether to display an Ask Jeeves ad or a Google ad by the $$$$ they’d receive. Expensive ad goes to the top. Makes sense. Professor Varian says that Yahoo has a “strong economic incentive” to serve their own ads rather than Google’s; full share vs. partial share of profit. He also points out that Google and Yahoo won’t be able to see one another’s bid prices.

But neither company has detailed how their ad services will be integrated. Advertisers make higher bids for Google than Yahoo; it’s not unreasonable to speculate that Google and Yahoo might adopt a bidding model that would result in advertisers driving up prices on Yahoo keywords. There has been no information on the workings of the bidding system that demonstrates that this won’t occur.

Here’s Google’s press release about the agreement to provide ads for Yahoo. http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/06/our-agreement-to-provide-ad-technology.html

Here’s Yahoo’s press release on the same subject.

http://yhoo.client.shareholder.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=316450

Search Engine Watch Article about Google deal to provide ads for Ask Jeeves
http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=2164921

Last week’s Google privacy update, reveals that the company will anonymize IP addresses after 9 months, down from 18 months. Check out this NPR: On the Media piece about privacy concerns arising from Chrome and other Google services.

Google VP of Search Products and User Experience and Ninjitsu, Marissa Mayer, asserts that Google is better qualified to choose privacy settings than end users, that data storage involves balancing privacy concerns and the utility of usage data for product development, that Google is very open about what user information they collect and retain, that ISPs really have a whole lot more data than Google does.

My favorite line is Bob Garfield’s stinger, “Does Google believe, institutionally, that all the discussion of privacy concerns is actually stifling innovation of your algorithm and other technological development…or do you kind of get why it’s important to all of us?”

Right on. I work for an Internet marketing company that exists mostly because of Google and the ads and search results it serves. Because Pure Visibility is an AdWords and Analytics partner, we get to communicate our successes and concerns with reps at Google. I know a number of Googlers personally. I’ve had a really nice time at lectures at the Google Office in Ann Arbor. None of this precludes my wariness about Google’s effect on my privacy online.

By Christmas this year, I’ll have been a Gmail user for four years. During that time, I’ve sent and received several thousand emails. Google has used the “concepts” in emails I’ve written and received to show me thousands of ads for products and services that might interest me. I’m pleased that I don’t get too much spam, I love how searchable my mail is, and I feel confident that my data won’t be lost. But even after four years, I remain concerned about the decision I made to exchange access to information about me for the privilege of using Gmail. I look forward to looking deeper into Google’s privacy policy and writing about privacy and advertising on the web in future posts.

Check out Bob Garfield’s blog for Advertising Age
http://adage.com/garfield/

Visit the Google Privacy Center for detailed information about the use of your personal data by various products. The videos are pretty good, explaining what data the company collects and why; not too much technical detail.

http://www.google.com/privacy.html

March 2007 Google Privacy Policy Announcement
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/03/taking-steps-to-further-improve-our.html

September 2008 Google Privacy Policy Announcement

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/09/another-step-to-protect-user-privacy.html

“Social media”, in its short history as a phrase, has been applied to a range of technologies, entities, and relationships. The ambiguous nature (not to mention using the word ‘social’ in business or technological environment) can make the initial decision of whether to expand a web strategy to include social media a difficult one for companies.

A recent post by Alex did a good job of differentiating the social network from the internet community, at least as far as the common understanding goes. A social network as most people use the term is a place where users can create profiles for themselves (or for their business) and connect to friends. Like interests can play into connections that spring up between individuals who’ve never met, but generally the emphasis is on friendship and relationships. Contrast this to an internet community, which can be envisioned as an environment dominated by die-hards, whether they are die-hard techies, golfers, gamers, knitters, or dog-lovers.

Yet another layer of the ‘social’-net is social bookmarking, tools that allow a user to create an account, and then cast a ‘vote’ for any websites, blogs, images, videos, or other online content that they enjoy by tagging it with a term or phrase that describes it. A user’s bookmark collection can be viewed publicly, and used by online searches who are looking for items tagged by certain terms can use the bookmarks to find relevant content.

So why should a company care about social networks and communities, especially when times are tight and advertising dollars must be carefully tracked?

The influence of social networks in people’s lives is hard to dispute. Tupperware became a household name, and multi-million dollar corporation, because housewives tended to have large social networks. New technologies arise and quickly gain popularity, thanks to internet forums devoted to geeky interests. Decisions about where to stay when going on a trip, where to eat, what brand of shoes to buy, are surprisingly based on the opinions of others: research reveals that “consumers report being willing to pay from 20% to 99% more for a 5-star-rated item than a 4-star-rated item (with variance depending on type of item/service)”.

Imagine a potential customer of any product or service. If considering something new, they will need information, which they connect with in multiple stages. They will seek out websites and other sources while researching and planning a purchase. At this stage, they draw on what they know and refine their goals based on the information they find. If it’s a trip being considered, they will gather input from reputable, information rich sites, plan routes and calculate driving times. If its a service, they will refine their expectations of the service based on provider websites, as well as testimonials, videos and reviews by past consumers.

During the planning process, people talk through ideas and exchange stories with friends, family, and coworkers, but they also communicate with people they don’t directly know, via online discussion boards and social networks. Their conversations will be reflected online when individuals post status messages and queries in Facebook and Twitter, upload pictures and videos to MySpace, Facebook, Flickr and YouTube, and write in message boards and their blogs.

The best part of social media is that it costs less than other advertising media! The smart way to generate attention-getting messages that people will place trust in is to leverage the social networks themselves, and let the members of a site do the messaging. It would be extremely expensive and challenging to create marketing messages as numerous, varied, original and compelling as those that people will independently author on social networking sites.

Ready to get started? Learn more about Pure Visibility’s Social Media Strategy.

Imagine a world where every human being on the planet has access to the Internet. Even countries where poverty today threatens their existence….what would the power of sharing knowledge with these people do – who could never dream outside of what they already only know.

Yesterday on NPR, I heard that a startup group, called O3b Networks is purchasing 16-low-earth orbit satellites with the help of Google, Liberty Global and HSBC. This venture will bring Internet service to three billion people in Africa, Asia and South America!

I wish I could see their expressions as they see Google for the first time!

Yesterday I wrote a post about how one theme in Lakoff’s book “Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things”, the way that categories display prototype effects, can be applied to web classification schemes.

The second major takeaway from Lakoff’s theory of categorization, the status of basic-level categories, requires some understanding of what is so unique about Lakoff’s approach to category theory. Lakoff bases his assertions on an understanding that categories as we create them are embodied, that is based in our experience before any conceptual activity takes place. This is fundamentally different than the standard understanding of categories as abstract containers. Our ability to perceive gestalts combines with experientially-based structural ‘schemas’ to create categories. The schemas, specifically “Kinesthetic Image Schemas”, are directly-understood concepts and/or relations like link, part-whole, container, up/down, source/path/goal … Together with gestalt perception they form the complex concepts that are human categories (which Lakoff calls by a similarly heady term, “Idealized Cognitive Models” or ICM’s).

So where does the basic-level category come in? Well, a study done by an anthropologist named Berlin in studying the speakers of Tzeltal living in the Chiapas region of Mexico found that plants and animals was categorized at a level that corresponded to the genus level of scientific classifications. Analysis of other societies has been consistent with genus as the level at which humans are most likely to turn to name an item; sub and superordinate categories are then created around above and below this middle level of the hierarchy. See this article for a little more information, or just read the book!

This phenomena can be attributed to the fact that human capacities for perception are utilized in the same way, with gestalts playing a big role. Lakoff breaks down the basic category into four aspects:

Perception: overall perceived shape; a single mental image; Gestalt.
Function: interaction with the world.
Communication: Shortest, most commonly used terms; first words learned.
Knowledge Organization: Most attributes of category members are stored at this level.

So, back to information architecture. Often methods for designing a classification scheme for a website are divided into top-down and bottom-up methods. What Lakoff’s book suggests is an entirely different approach, centered around the basic level category, or the middle of the hierarchy. From there, a designer could move up and down to create the higher and lower levels.