“In order to continue to improve our products and deliver more sophisticated features and performance, we are harnessing some of the latest improvements in web browser technology,” the good Google person told me. “This includes faster JavaScript processing and new standards like HTML5. As a result, over the course of 2010, we will be phasing out support for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 as well as other older browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers.”

Why couldn’t they have just written:
“Over the course of 2010, we will be phasing out support for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 and other older browsers.”

“Thank you for your inquiry,” the fye.com auto-generated email that was impossible to reply to stated. “To assist in providing you the quickest answer to your inquiry, please see the Help Section of fye.com.” Hello? Sorry, fye.com, but that’s not the quickest way by any means. It is, however, the cheapest way for you to deal with support. Why be so dishonest with your language?

I had to call my broadband company today. “Your call is important to us,” the voice said as I waited on hold. Is it indeed? If my call was important to you then you’d answer it. You wouldn’t put me on hold and you wouldn’t insult my intelligence by saying “Your call is important to us.”

Do organizations actually test their lies, deception, spin, and half-truths on customers? Does it really work? Or does it instead annoy and irritate customers?

I was staying at the Royal Lancaster in London and I wanted to sign up for broadband. I clicked on the link. “Welcome to the The Royal Lancaster,” Thank you for choosing us to serve as your “home away from home”” And it went on and on and on. “Whether for work or pleasure, we are pleased to introduce our industry leading in-room high-speed Internet services amenity … It’s Easy to Use … We hope you find this service exciting and valuable.” When I clicked “Continue” I was then told the price. £17 for one day. Yes, £17.

“We are delighted to inform you that the Guest Elevators are currently undergoing a complete refurbishment,” the sign outside the Hilton Edinburgh elevator told me. And me, I was absolutely delighted too, thrilled, and jumping for joy as I carried my heavy bags up the stairs.

I remember reading about a study of house selling in the book Freakonomics. Seemingly, in for-sale ads the following words were associated with houses of genuine quality: “granite, state-of-the-art, corian, maple, gourmet.” Poor quality houses, on the other hand, had these words associated with them: “fantastic, spacious, !, charming, great neighborhood.”

I saw an example of this one day when I visited a house for sale that was advertised as: “Fantastic and rare opportunity to acquire this beautiful 7 bedroom detached home. This property has got it all!” As the sales agent quietly said to me, “The only thing you could do with this house is knock it down and start again.”

Here’s a radical idea: Tell the customer the truth. They can handle it.

The Christmas 2009 airline-bombing attempt in the USA showed what can happen when there is too much information and too little skilled analysis. “It’s clear now that there were multiple signs in recent months that Abdulmutallab was a potential risk,” Bruce Crumley wrote for TIME in January 2010, “but they were simply lost in the unmanageable flood of information the U.S. intelligence and security agencies are designed to produce.”

As President Obama stated, “This was not a failure to collect intelligence, [but] a failure to integrate and understand the intelligence that we already had.” U.S. authorities are forced to sort through a massive flood of intelligence on a daily basis. “Connecting the dots becomes more difficult when multiple streams of intelligence empty into several different lakes,” the TIME article pointed out.

As one spy official put it, “Basic details can now get overlooked as surveillance becomes more technical and computerized and people wait for a warning beep to sound.” Basic details such as the fact that the would-be bomber paid cash for a one-way ticket, and that he didn’t check in any bags.

Ours is the era of the information Big Bang. I think it’s an absolutely wonderful time to be alive. Information has been whipped away from the grasp of the elites and delivered into the hands of the masses. Information is power and power has been distributed.

However, as with any explosive event there are challenges that need to be faced. I thought I’d be used to it by now but I am still often stunned at how badly most organizations manage their websites.

Take, for example, the web ‘management’ approach called distributed publishing. The theory was: buy the tool, train people to use it and watch them go. What happened? Each division or department that the publishing tool was distributed to sought to publish to the website with the absolute minimum resource input. If ever there was a disastrous non-strategy it is distributed publishing. It led to website junkyards full of vanity publishing and out of date garbage.

The Web is important. The Web is very important. For an increasing number of organizations, the Web is critical to success. We need to seriously raise the standard. Anybody can put up a document. It requires precious little skill to write boring, vain, unreadable, organization-centric content.

It takes a whole other level of skills:
1. To reject such organization-centric content.
2. To commission content that will help customers complete top tasks.
3. To organize top-task content in a way that will make it easy to be found and to make sure that tiny task content does not disrupt searches for top task content.
4. To review and remove out of date content.
5. To connect the right dots (to link well).

There is no greater skill a web professional needs to develop than the ability to create quality links. Many websites do not need more publishing. Rather, they need more linking of content in appropriate task journeys. Linking is a complex skill because it requires you to see the task through your customer’s eyes.

Too much intelligence to blame
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1952203,00.html

I am a customer of a number of banks. I judge these banks, at least partly, by the experience I have with them online. I used to really like the National Irish Bank experience. Then they ‘improved’ it, making it more secure. And this of course is the problem at the heart of security. You can make a process so secure that even the people for whom it is designed can’t use it without huge effort.

Now, when I go to the National Irish Bank homepage I often get a ‘page not found’ error. Usually when I refresh the page that little Java icon appears. I enjoy spending time watching it swirl round and round. It reminds me of coffee. Then I get an ‘error on page’ message. I refresh again and I actually get to the homepage.

It used to be that it remembered my User ID. Not anymore. Now I have to go get it and paste it in, because it’s long and I can’t remember it. Then it requires my password, which I can remember. Next I get to a page where I have to enter a special security number from a card they’ve sent me. It’s annoying and such a waste of time. It now takes me at least three times longer to get into my account. Once in, however, it’s a really excellent experience, well designed and intuitive.

Bank of Ireland, on the other hand, is easy to get into. However, the subsequent steps are really clunky. The National Irish Bank interface has a feeling that it was designed for human beings. The Bank of Ireland interface feels like it was designed for robots. Whereas the National Irish Bank immediately shows me balance information for my main accounts (a top task), here’s what I have to do on Bank of Ireland to get such information: click on a link called ‘Accounts’; click on a link called ‘Select All Accounts’; select an account from a list; click on a different link called ‘Accounts’ (Yes, there are two links called ‘Accounts’); select ‘Transactions’. It’s a real pain, a big waste of time.

Halifax Ireland is positively primitive. You can’t even transfer money. This is a top task for sure and if in 2010 a bank won’t even allow you to transfer money online, then it loses a huge amount of credibility and trust.

This isn’t usability. This isn’t interface design. This is branding. This is marketing. This is advertising. This is management. And you know what? I’ll bet senior management in all these banks could not care less about my online experience. In fact, I have rarely, if ever, met a senior manager with more than a passing interest in the Web. They think this stuff is technical - something you give to the IT department.

Where customers spend their time is where you build your brand. Organizations need to stop trying to use traditional advertising techniques to create false images. For an increasing number of customers, you are your website. It’s about time senior management woke up to that fact.

“Brand advertising, the kind you’re used to seeing on TV and in print, isn’t nearly as big on the Internet as the search ads dominated by Google,” writes Peter Kafka for the Wall Street Journal in January 2010. “But that’s got to change, as marketers realize that traditional advertising works on the Web, too.”

“The above is an article of faith among a certain kind of Web publisher,” Kafka continues. “And some of them are even paying for studies to prove that display ads–basically all the ads you see that aren’t part of search results–really do work on the Web. Except when they don’t.”

Kafka goes on to cite a study carried out for Yahoo that found that brand ads have some impact on those over 40. For those under 40 the impact of these ads is nearly zero; no impact.

What has happened to branding? How has such an important word been hijacked by such a narrow interest group? Whenever I hear branding being talked about these days I know I’m about to enter fairyland. Otherwise sensible people start talking gibberish and lose all track of reality.

Branding has become all about organizational narcissism, vanity, ego and self-delusion. It’s all about what the organization wants (needy child that it is), where the organization wants to go, what excites the organization (or certain senior managers in it), what the organization wants you to do. Branding doesn’t care about you, the customer. It sees you as a target, an entity it must convince to do what it wants.

A number of years ago, I remember buying books from Amazon. After I added a book to the basket I was brought to a page that had a huge ad for jewelry. I was taken aback. What does this have to do with buying a book, I thought? Amazon was ‘excited’ to tell me that they had just launched a new jewelry store. I wasn’t excited. After a while I noticed that these disruptive branding ads that were unrelated to the task I was seeking to complete had disappeared.

What I learned much later was that these branding ads had not just annoyed Amazon’s customers; they had negatively impacted sales and overall customer satisfaction and loyalty. Amazon had listened and removed the disruption.

When it comes to marketing and communication we need to measure both satisfaction and dissatisfaction, both positive and negative action. Sure, if you put a big ad for jewelry in front of 100 people you’ll get 2 to click on it. And if you make it really annoying and intrusive, you might even get 5 to click. But what about the 95 that didn’t click? To get those 5 clicks how annoyed did you make the 95?

Amazon has a great brand and tremendous customer satisfaction because it cares about the 95. It listens, measures, responds. I’m loyal to Amazon because I feel it’s an organization that pays attention to my needs.

Traditional marketing is about getting attention. Web marketing is about paying attention.

Are Web Ads Only for Oldsters? Yahoo’s Disturbing Study
http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20100112/are-web-ads-only-for-oldsters-yahoos-disturbing-study/

According to a survey published in December 2009, Americans have a pretty dismal view of the 2000s. It has been voted the worst decade in living memory. “By roughly two-to-one, more say they have a generally negative (50%) rather than a generally positive (27%) impression of the past 10 years,” the study states. “This stands in stark contrast to the public’s recollection of other decades in the past half-century. When asked to look back on the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, positive feelings outweigh negative in all cases.”

However, there is a bright spot in an otherwise dim decade. “The major technological and communications advances are viewed in an overwhelmingly positive light,” the study states. “Clear majorities see cell phones, the internet and e-mail as changes for the better, and most also view specific changes such as handheld internet devices and online shopping as beneficial trends.”

So, do we love technology? Do we love HTML and Flash and JavaScript? Do we love reading off computer screens, and long for the tactile touch of the well-designed keyboard? Are we yearning for robots?

Hardly. What the Web reflects is empowerment and connectedness. The Web has probably led to an increase in negative attitudes to other things because it allows us to go behind the spin, advertising and propaganda. Thanks to the Web we’re not so easy to fool, manipulate or mislead.

The Web allows us to check out for ourselves, to communicate more easily with our peers and find out what they think. The Web makes us more powerful. It allows our voices to be heard more. That’s why we love the Web.

That’s the shift, the change we can believe in. It is the movement of power from organizations to individuals and the groups these individuals may form. Because another thing the Web does is make it much easier for individuals to form effective groups. Like the group of people who stayed at Hotel XYZ and what they think of the service they got. That’s why we love the Web.

We love the Web because we can compare prices for insurance, vacations, cars. We can compare universities and political candidates. Most organizations hate being compared and ranked. Many organizations don’t even want to give you the price on their website. They’re going to have to.

Amazon has the highest level of customer satisfaction of the 40 largest US ecommerce sites, according to an American Customer Satisfaction Index survey.

Customer satisfaction matters. Customers who are highly satisfied are 65 percent more likely to buy online, according to the survey. They will also tell their friends about the good experience. And what drives satisfaction? A good price, a wide selection, and a website that’s easy to use. In December 2009, online spending was 15.5 percent higher than in December 2008.

This is the age of the empowered, cynical, skeptical, hype-resistant customer. It’s a great time to be a customer and it’s a great time to be a customer-centric organization

Pew survey
http://people-press.org/report/573/#

Amazon Tops in Customer Satisfaction
http://www.ecommerce-guide.com/news/news/article.php/3855836

Ryanair represents the rise of the rational consumer. The rational consumer is much less open to manipulation by branding than previous generations of consumers.

What do people really want from an airline? “Affordable, safe air transport from A to B,” Michael O’Leary, CEO of Ryanair, recently told the Wall Street Journal. “It’s a commodity. It’s not some life-changing sexual experience, which is what the other high-fare airlines have tried to convince you that it is.”

In the past, branding has been very good at getting us to believe that taking a flight from Dublin to London is a spiritual, emotional experience. We are irrational at heart and very willing to believe such rubbish, and that allows companies to charge ridiculous prices for their products and services. It’s emotional exploitation and traditional consumers fall for it big time.

The rational consumer thinks that flying is like riding a bus. They are not shocked when they are forced to pay extra if they bring more bags. They are not disgusted if they have to pay to use the toilet on the plane. They are not outraged by the idea that buying the cheapest ticket means they might have to stand. They are rational. They weigh the cost against the benefit and make a rational decision, not an emotional one.

The emotional customer is outraged, shocked and disgusted by the very idea that you would have to pay to use the toilet on the plane. Because we all know that access to toilets is guaranteed by the UN convention of human rights. We all know that aircraft manufacturers don’t charge for the toilets on their planes and that toilet paper manufacturers are non-profit charities.

Ryanair charges you 100 Euros for the flight and one euro to use the toilet, while another airline charges you 150 Euros, but you can use the toilet as much as you want. The rational consumer chooses Ryanair.

The Web has been a major reason why Ryanair has grown from being a tiny regional airline to being the world’s largest carrier. The Web is a rational place. Many of the Web’s greatest success stories (Google, Amazon, Progressive) are built on rational propositions of value and usefulness, rather than branding propositions that emotionally manipulation the irrational consumer.

Because it sells cheap flights, Ryanair has allowed families to have more vacations. It has helped families get together more often. But because humans are deeply irrational and emotional, Ryanair has a terrible brand image.

Are you happy when, unannounced, a company you buy things from sends you a free gift? You shouldn’t be. What it in all likelihood means is that the company is price- gauging you.

The Web reflects a new era in consumer behavior. The rational consumer does more research, more comparison shopping. They are less impulsive and more considered. They place more trust in their peers than in the brands. They are increasingly skeptical and cynical. They are increasingly averse to warm, fuzzy, emotional words and images.

When you say things on your website like “we care” or “it’s simple”, the rational consumer thinks: “If you have to say you care, it’s obvious you don’t, and if you have to say it’s simple, it’s obvious it’s not.”

In an age when time is the most valuable resource of all, it is vital to lead with the need, to answer the question as quickly and concisely as possible.

Your laptop keeps crashing. It’s driving you insane. You’ve waited for ages on the phone for support and have given up. In desperation, you send an email. Here’s the reply you get:

Dear customer,
Thank you for your feedback. We are continuously working to improve customer satisfaction. Your feedback supports us in doing just that.

Doesn’t it make you feel good to know that the company that sold you this awful laptop is continuously working to improve customer satisfaction and that your feedback is supporting them in achieving that objective?

You’re in a hotel room. You plug in your battery charger for your cell phone. There’s a puff of smoke and you get an electric shock (at no extra charge). Shaking, you pick up the phone and ring reception.
“I think I’ve just been electrocuted!”
“Dear guest,” the receptionist begins, “Thank you for your feedback. We are continuously working to improve customer satisfaction. Your feedback supports us in doing just that.”

You’re not feeling well. You start searching the Web for a variety of symptoms. You arrive at a page on a government health website. It begins:
“Welcome to the health section. Your health is important. Good health helps you flourish as an individual, a citizen, a family member, a worker and a consumer. It’s not nice to be sick.”

You’re in Dublin’s O’Connell Street and you don’t know how to get to Grafton Street. You stop a Garda (Irish police).
“Can you please tell me the way to Grafton Street?”
“Welcome to Dublin,” the Garda begins. Why is he welcoming me to Dublin, you think? I’m already in Dublin. “It’s not nice to be lost,” continues the Garda. “And that is why as part of our duties as Garda Siochana, that’s Irish for Guardians of the Peace, just in case you didn’t know … Well as part of our duties we are trained to give directions so as to show the friendly face of law enforcement …”
“Thanks very much, Garda.”
“Don’t walk away. I haven’t told you yet about our intensive training and how we are continuously working to improve customer satisfaction …”
“I was only joking. Really, I don’t want to go to Grafton Street at all. In fact … I need a coffee. See, coffee shop right in front of me. I have to go in. Goodbye.”

Recently I was thinking of changing my mobile phone provider. I wanted to know if I could keep my number. Here’s the reply I got.

Dear Gerry,
Thank you for contacting O2 Customer Care by email. I’m delighted to hear that you have decided to move to O2, you’re only a few easy steps away from signing up as a customer. Just to advise you, you can move your existing number with your current network to O2.

It’s not easy being in customer support. We customers are demanding and highly impatient. Often, we are annoyed because something has gone wrong with a product we bought or because we can’t find the answer we need on the website. So, please get to the point.

All I needed was:
Dear Gerry,
You can move your existing number with your current network to O2.

I’ve seen some powerful ads about drug use on UK television recently. They don’t pull any punches. At the end they advise you to go to a website. Do you know what that website is called? No, not “drug-abuse.co.uk”. The website is called talktofrank.com. Who is Frank?

90,500 people in the UK used Google to search for “drug abuse” in October 2009. 33,100 searched for “drug testing.” 22,200 searched for “drug treatment.” 18,100 searched for “drug rehab.” 14,800 searched for “drug free.” 6,600 searched for “drug awareness.”

In October 2009 over 200,000 people searched for help by using “drug” in their search terms. There were also a huge amount of searches for words like “cocaine” (800,000 in October) and “cannabis” (800,000 in October). The “Talk to Frank” phrase was searched for by 60,000 people which, considering the extensive TV advertising, is not very impressive. The talktofrank website does do very well for a lot of the search terms, so at least it has a quality search optimization strategy.

However, the talktofrank website and campaign reflect classic old school communications and marketing. First and foremost it is a campaign. It is about being cool and getting attention. It feels that it would be boring to call a website “cocaine.co.uk”.

The whole psychology of old school pre-Web communications and marketing is about telling you something you don’t currently know or getting you to do something you don’t really want to do. The marketer and the communicator set out with the aim of achieving the organization’s objectives, not yours.

Government says that drugs are a problem. Government comes up with a policy. Government hires an advertising agency to promote that policy. Advertising agency creates a campaign and campaign website. Campaign does well. Budget is exhausted. Campaign ends. Project complete. And another website falls into decline.

The Web is where you give attention, not get it. People on the Web are already engaged. Someone who wants to buy a Ford Mondeo does not accidentally type “drug rehab” into a search engine.

There are millions of people out there who need help with a drug problem, and they are actively searching for help. The Web communicator must be absolutely focused on those who want answers. They must ensure that those who want answers actually get them.

This is much more boring work than planning and launching a campaign or redesign. It’s about continuous improvement of a website based on the testing of top tasks with real people. It’s about grinding it out by testing a link with 10 or 100 variations of a phrase.

Think about it. There are lots of people on our website right now whose attention we already have. Will they leave satisfied? There are many more searching for things that we have. They don’t need to be convinced. They are already on a journey to complete a task that we can help them complete. Let’s help them be successful. It’s a massive opportunity.

Yes they did. It was the sound of them clicking on the Back (I’m outta here and I won’t be back) button. I’ve been doing this web thing since 1994 and I still make this awful, most basic mistake. I forget that real people—yes, real people—actually visit and try to do things on my website.

Managing a website is like living inside a torture chamber. It is the greatest torture of all because it is an environment without empathy, without any meaningful feedback. Do you really think those crude, meaningless statistics about page impressions, visitors and hits are anything other than crude and meaningless?

Behind these cold, lifeless statistics lie the experiences of real people. Yes, real every-day people visit our websites and try to do real things. And most of us who work on the Web have absolutely no idea as to whether they’re successful or not. That’s surreal.

An attendee at one of my workshops was trying to explain what he had learned to his seven-year-old son. His son looked at him with bored eyes until he had an idea. “How do feel when you go to a website and you want to play a game on it and it asks you to sign in?”
“I don’t like it,” the son replied.
“Why?”
“Because it wastes my time!”

It wastes his time. A seven-year-old. Conscious of time. I have spent quite a bit of time watching and listening to people use websites over the last couple of months. Yesterday evening I listened as a Turkish professional told me again and again about how valuable their time was and how the website in question was wasting it.

Again and again, people talk about their time. I don’t ask them. I ask them to carry out top tasks on the website, and they just start talking about their time. They get so annoyed when they feel their time is being wasted.

When they click on a link and are brought to a page that’s different to what the link promised, that really annoys them. When they use basic search terms and get useless search results back, that really annoys them.

Watching people try to carry out top tasks is a harsh lesson. You would be amazed at the amount of times they fail or give up or get the wrong answer, thinking it’s the right one.

Nobody sets out to create a cruel and unusually punishing website. We don’t deliberately set traps in our forms so that customers trip and scream. We don’t start sentences with the sole intent of writing meaningless gibberish.

We do all these things and much worse because we don’t see our customers using our websites. We lack empathy and feeling for our customers because we’re not watching them try to do what they came to our websites to do.

Observing our customers is intrinsic to web success, and it’s so basic. We need to understand their tasks and know whether they are successful or not in completing them. What could be more basic than that?

The Web is not free. It charges customers their time. Successful websites deliver the most value for the least time.

Google is the benchmark for success on the Web. Google is obsessed with time. Your time. Google is all about helping you find stuff quickly. Practically everything Google does has speed as a priority.

There are now voices within Google that say that how fast a website loads should have an impact on its ranking. “Historically, we haven’t had to use it in our search rankings, but a lot of people within Google think that the Web should be fast,” says Google’s Matt Cutts. “It should be a good experience, and so it’s sort of fair to say that if you’re a fast site, maybe you should get a little bit of a bonus. If you really have an awfully slow site, then maybe users don’t want that as much.”

Google’s search engine understands the web customer much better than, say, the Microsoft Bing search engine does. Who on earth in Microsoft decided that it was a good idea to have a great big ‘branding’ image on the search page? What on earth have pictures of baby whales got to do with a search for “cheap flights new york”? This is classic old-school brochure-design marketing thinking.

Old-school marketing is about getting customers to do things. Web marketing is about helping customers do things. There’s a world of a difference. There is a school of marketing that sees the customer as irrational and therefore easy to manipulate. This school is constantly trying to come up with clever ways to make more money by fooling customers.

Bernardo A. Huberman came up with one of these classic old-school marketing strategies in his book, The Laws of the Web, where he advised organizations to design a website that “changes its link structure to lengthen the path traversed by a given user, thereby making him visit many more pages. For example, if a short route (in the number of clicks) exists to a given page, one may wish to turn that off if the user is statistically likely to visit more pages in between.”

On the Web, the game has changed. The power is now with the customer, not the organization. The Web is a rational space. It is where customers go to make better decisions, get better deals, solve problems, connect with others, make their opinion heard.

Recently, I watched a branding expert practically jump up and down on stage shouting “people are irrational, people are irrational.” He was all about finding subliminal tricks to influence behavior. And he told us in hushed tones that he had come up with a brilliant idea for websites. Use sound! Yes, when someone visits your website, this branding expert would have a jingle play, with a warm, sexy voice saying “Welcome to our website.”

According to traditional branding theory you are so irrational that all a website has to do is play a sound and you will go all warm and fuzzy and buy their most expensive product. The Web is a rational space. We’re not fooled so easy. And we don’t like spending too much of our time.