Central Perk

luni, 5 august 2013

Seth's Blog : Q&A: Purple Cows and commodities

Q&A: Purple Cows and commodities

Earlier in this series, I wrote about the failure of Survival putting me at the end of my publishing rope, publisherless. Then I self-published Purple Cow (the original, now-out-of-print edition came in a milk carton) and the self-referential marketing, combined with great reader buzz, got me back into the good graces of the publishing world. That wasn't my goal, but in retrospect, it had a big impact on my output as an author.

Josh asks, "How do you turn something that is considered to be a commodity into a Purple Cow, when the lowest price is the only thing that seems to matter to customers?"

If you tell me that price is the only thing that matters to customers, I respond that nothing about this product matters to them.

When something matters to you, you talk about it, care about it, research it, tweak it... If all that we've got to care about is the price, then the price is the discussion, not the item itself.

Businesses have worked overtime to turn things into commodities, telling us that they sell what the other guy does, it's the same, but cheaper. No wonder we've been lulled into not caring.

Every time you say, "all they care about is price," you've just said, "they don't really care, they just want to get the buying over with, cheap."

The thing is, it doesn't have to be a commodity if you don't want it to be. It's easy to forget, but before the smartphone, cell phones were treated as a commodity as well. Nucor figured out how to turn steel from a cheap commodity into something worth caring about. Not cared about by everyone, but cared about by enough buyers. And that's the opportunity in every industry, in every segment, for any product or service that has become a commodity.

No, you can't magically make it interesting to all. But yes, with enough effort and care, you can find those that are interested enough if what you create that they'll choose to talk about it.

And if you can't, go make something else. Something that people will choose to care about and talk about.

We sell commodities by choice.

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Having a CAPTCHA is Killing Your Conversion Rate

Posted: 04 Aug 2013 07:28 PM PDT

Posted by tallen1985

SEOs can occasionally find ourselves guilty of focusing on just the following few things:

Links
Rankings
Fun cuddly animals that Google keeps releasing from its algorithmic zoo

Quite often we are heard muttering that user experience isn't really our problem. We are all about the above three points. However, as the job of SEOs continues to become broader, requiring a greater number of skill sets, I think user experience is something we can all work on. Besides, surely if we focus some of our energy on this, we are going to end up with much happier users, which in turn will result in higher conversions.

There are various ways to work on improving user experience, and of course, conversion rate optimization also plays a part. Today, I want to focus on one specific part of user experience â€" CAPTCHAs (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) â€" and why I think they suck.

CAPTCHAs ask frustrating questions

When you encounter a CAPTCHA, you are being asked the question,"Are you a robot?" It's like asking a customer who is about to enter a physical store, "Are you a thief?" before you allow them to walk through the door. So we used to flood our users with these "questions:"

And from there we have now moved to this:

Literally every time I see one of the above it makes me wish that this was on a nearby wall:

CAPTCHAs act as a barrier between you and your customers

Back in 2009, Casey Henry wrote a great post on CAPTCHA's effect on conversion rates. He highlighted the fact that with CAPTCHA turned off, a company's conversion rate would increase by up to 3.2%. It's worth noting that the CAPTCHA type used in this test was based on the more traditional word format. That 3.2% is a pretty big potential gain for a whole lot of companies.

Traditional Word Format CAPTCHA

CAPTCHAs are not a solution, they are a problem

At the beginning of 2013 it was announced that Ticketmaster was finally ditching its traditional CAPTCHAs. Ticketmaster proceeded with an alternative system by SolveMedia. The system presents users with an image or video, the user then has to type a phrase associated with that image. In the video version of the product, a descriptive phrase will appear which the user then has to copy into a box below. If they are not willing to do this, they need to watch the video for a certain amount of time (similar to YouTube advertising) before continuing.

Right now, companies are producing variations of novelty products aimed at helping us to stop spam from landing in our inboxes. Many products claim they are aimed at improving the user experience by making this easier for humans. They come in a variety of styles, ranging from completing a simple sum to those that are image-based or even gamifying CAPTCHAs (such as Are You Human).

Yet all of these "solutions" create the same problem. I, the user, am trying to complete a purchase, fill in a form, or even just submit a comment. And you, the website, keep putting this frustrating technological barrier between myself and my goal, just so you don't have to sort through a few items of spam.

Another major concern is that these products aren't particularly user-friendly for those who are blind or partially sighted. Some simply offer the same audio CAPTCHAs (and problems) that we have been experiencing for as long as we remember.

CAPTCHA is built for advertising, not users

The key difference for me with image-based products such as SolveMedia and Minteye is that they seem to act as another opportunity to push an advert in front of users. In some cases they force you to watch an advert just to progress to the next page.

Users don't want to see adverts even when they are "subtly" placed around a beautifully designed page. Yet, more and more we are moving away from giving the user a choice about viewing an advert to the point where adverts are forced upon them (ahem...YouTube).

So people must be ditching CAPTCHA, right?

Despite statistics like those shared by Casey Henry, the fact is that the use of CAPTCHA is actually on the increase. Perhaps for many webmasters this is just becoming common practice, almost the norm. After all, it's a quick fix that means we, as webmasters, no longer have to worry about dealing with spam.

Figures from Drupal's usage statistics show that they alone have nearly 200,000 people using one of their variants of CAPTCHA. This is a barrier to a more fulfilled user experience that doesn't seem to be going away.

https://drupal.org/project/usage/captcha

"CAPTCHAs are designed to be easy for humans but hard for machines"

...according to a study carried out by Stanford University into the use of CAPTCHA by humans. Yet, by testing more than 1,100 people, gathering 11,800 completed surveys, and studying 14,000,000 samples from a week's worth of data from eBay, they revealed just how difficult CAPTCHA has become for humans.

The study showed that, on average:

Visual CAPTCHAs take 9.8 seconds to complete
Audio CAPTCHAs take much longer (28.4 seconds) to hear and solve
Audio CAPTCHA has a 50% give-up rate
Only 71% of the time will 3 users agree on the translation of a CAPTCHA
Only 31.2% of the time will 3 users agree on the translation of an audio CAPTCHA

With around 1% of the audience currently using audio CAPTCHA, this is potentially a huge market to lose.

So what is the solution?

There is a time and a place for CAPTCHA. For some sites, it may be unavoidable. However, any solution that is extremely effective rapidly becomes widely used, and as such, becomes a target for hackers.

There are some really simple solutions already out there that will help to reduce the amount of spam you receive but won't interfere with your user experience.

Akismet

Akismet provides an effective defence that has no impact upon your users. It comes as a variety of plugins and is generally easy to implement on your site. Akismet monitors millions of sites, constantly learning new methods to beat comment spam.

The honeypot technique

Essentially, the honeypot technique is used to hide a field on a form from the user. If this field is then filled in, the chances are pretty high it was by a machine. The major downside to this method is that the form could be accidentally completed by a visually impaired user. Therefore, it might be useful to also label the field with something such as, "If you are human, don't fill in this field".

We still ultimately have the problem that whatever we do to ensure a user doesn't fill in the form, a malicious script could perform its own interpretations by learning which labels mean that a field should be left alone.

However, the key benefit to this method is that the user isn't getting punished by being asked to complete something that is irrelevant to their actions.

Is it time you ditched your CAPTCHA?

I think we need to focus on what creates a better experience for users by asking ourselves the following questions:

Is the amount of spam you are receiving really worth potentially losing conversions?
If the answer is yes, is your CAPTCHA friendly to all users, including those who are visually impaired?
CAPTCHAs are for robots, not for humans. Unfortunately, anything one person can code to try and prevent robots from entering a site is something another can find a way through. The real consideration is, are we just shoving our problem with spam onto our customers?

When it comes down to it, CAPTCHAs lead to a negative experience on our sites. They frustrate users, damage conversion rates, and they are not particularly friendly to visually impaired users. Most of all, it is shifting our problem onto our users. That's definitely not right. Getting rid of CAPTCHAs will not only improve our users' experiences, but it will also improve the web as a whole. This should be the beginning of the end of the CAPTCHA. If you have a CAPTCHA, I urge you to remove it now!

What do you think?

Image credits

http://gizmodo.com/5980361/ticketmaster-is-dumping-awful-captchas

http://www.richgossweiler.com/projects/rotcaptcha/rotcaptcha.pdf

http://www.maggiesnotebook.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Bang_Head_Here_25.jpg

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Seth's Blog : Colors or numbers?

Colors or numbers?

As soon as we measure something, we seek to improve the numbers.

Which is a worthwhile endeavor, if better numbers are the point of the exercise.

The other path is to focus on colors, not numbers. Instead of measuring, for example, how many people click on a link, we can measure how something you wrote or created delighted or challenged people... You can see the changes in emotion, or dignity improved or light shed.

The questions we ask change the thing we make. Organizations that do nothing but measure the numbers rarely create breakthroughs. Merely better numbers.

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duminică, 4 august 2013

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Bernanke Wants 2% Inflation in a Deflationary World; Who Pays the Price?

Posted: 04 Aug 2013 05:55 PM PDT

PEW Social Trends research shows a Record 21.6 Million Young Adults Live in Their Parents' Home

Here are some clips from the fascinating PEW study.

In 2012, 36% of the nation's young adults ages 18 to 31 the so-called Millennial generation—were living in their parents' home, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data. This is the highest share in at least four decades and represents a slow but steady increase over the 32% of their same-aged counterparts who were living at home prior to the Great Recession in 2007 and the 34% doing so when it officially ended in 2009.

A record total of 21.6 million Millennials lived in their parents' home in 2012, up from 18.5 million of their same aged counterparts in 2007. Of these, at least a third and perhaps as many as half are college students.

The steady rise in the share of young adults who live in their parents' home appears to be driven by a combination of economic, educational and cultural factors. Among them:

Declining employment: In 2012, 63% of 18- to 31-year-olds had jobs, down from the 70% of their same-aged counterparts who had jobs in 2007. In 2012, unemployed Millennials were much more likely than employed Millennials to be living with their parents (45% versus 29%).
Rising college enrollment: In March 2012, 39% of 18- to 24-year-olds were enrolled in college, up from 35% in March 2007. Among 18 to 24 year olds, those enrolled in college were much more likely than those not in college to be living at home – 66% versus 50%.
Declining marriage: In 2012 just 25% of Millennials were married, down from the 30% of 18- to 31-year-olds who were married in 2007.

Percent of Married Millennial Declines

Long-Term Changes in Young Adult Living Arrangements

Household Formation

Married Residing in Own Household Plummets

Since 1968, age at first marriage has increased by nearly six years for both men and women. Consequently, the share of young adults who are married and residing in their own household has plummeted since 1968. In 2012, only 23% of Millennials were married and residing on their own as household head or spouse, a precipitous decline compared with 1968 when 56% of 18- to 31-year-olds were married and on their own.

End PEW

Fed Policies Exacerbate Trend

Bernanke wants 2% inflation in a deflationary world. Wages have not kept up with inflation as Fed policies exacerbate the trends.

The result is apparent. Everyone pays the price, but especially Young adults who cannot afford to get married, and they certainly cannot afford a house.

The Fed wants home prices up to help out the banks, but what about the new household formation? And what about student loans and the ability to pay those loans back?

And think about how cheap money allows corporations to borrow money for next to nothing to buy technology to replace humans with hardware and software robots.

Trends noted by PEW and predicted in this corner at least six years ago are structural long-lasting trends.

Those expecting a huge pickup in inflation, a spike in US GDP, or a big boom in housing based on misguided perceptions of "pent-up housing demand", fail to understand how Fed boom-bust and bank-bailout policies preclude such outcomes.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com

Magazine Ad Revenues Plunge; Google Collects Half of Mobile Internet Ads; Cannibalization of Ad Market

Posted: 04 Aug 2013 04:15 PM PDT

Is the advertising pie growing, shrinking, or simply being redistributed? Let's start with a look at PEW Center research that shows News magazines hit by big drop in ad pages.

In a difficult advertising environment for the magazine industry overall, newly-released numbers from the Association of Magazine Media (MPA) show the nation's news magazines being hit particularly hard.

Total consumer magazine ad pages dropped 4.9% compared with the first half of 2012, according to MPA data for the first six months of 2013, released July 9. But the drop in ad pages for five major news magazines—Time, The Economist, The Atlantic, The Week and The New Yorker—was far steeper, a combined 18% in the first half of 2013 compared with the same period a year earlier. In one indicator of the difficulties facing news magazines, Newsweek—which saw ad pages decline by 60% from 2002 to 2012—discontinued its print edition at the end of 2012.

While these numbers highlight a difficult print advertising climate, they don't tell the whole story. MPA President Mary Berner says magazines are increasingly generating digital revenue. Initial industry monitoring of digital advertising revenue for some magazine iPad versions found that sales increased about 25% in the first half of 2013. Berner called those gains "encouraging" and added that later this year, about 100 magazines will begin reporting some digital revenue results. In addition, some news magazines, most notably The Economist and The Atlantic, have begun diversifying revenue streams with such initiatives as events, conferences and creation of niche content.

Looking over the past decade, from 2003 through 2012, the overall ad pages for news magazines (excluding Newsweek) dropped by 36%, from 7,848 to 5,008. But within that time frame were several shifts in trajectory. A major drop-off in ad pages occurred from 2008 to 2009 (17%.) Ad pages stabilized from 2009 to 2011, growing at a modest 1%. But then another downturn occurred as ad pages in 2012 dropped 13% from the previous year, followed by the 18% decline in the first half of 2013.

Google Take Home Half of Mobile Internet Ads

eMarketer reports Google Takes Home Half of Worldwide Mobile Internet Ad Revenues.

Google earned more than half of the $8.8 billion advertisers worldwide spent on mobile internet ads last year, helping propel the company to take in nearly one-third of all digital ad dollars spent globally, according to eMarketer's first-ever figures on worldwide digital and mobile advertising revenues at major internet companies.

Ad Revenues in Dollars and Percent of Market

After making nearly half a billion dollars worldwide on mobile ads last year, Facebook—which had no mobile revenue in 2011—is expected to increase mobile revenues by more than 333% to just over $2 billion in 2013, and account for a 12.9% share of the global net mobile advertising market.

eMarketer estimates that Google made $4.61 billion in mobile internet ad revenues last year, more than triple its earnings in 2011. This year's mobile revenues will be up a further 92.1% to $8.85 billion.

Combined, three companies—Google, Facebook and Twitter—account for a consolidating share of mobile advertising revenues worldwide, as other players, such as YP, Pandora, Apple and Millennial Media, see their shares decrease, despite maintaining relatively strong businesses growing at rapid rates.

Cannibalization of Ad Market

My friend "BC" who sent the links surmises ....

"The decline in magazine ad revenues is approximately the same as the increase in Internet and mobile/social media ads; therefore, the net increase in ads is a wash, i.e., cannibalization of the advertising market. Companies earning their revenues from ads will now be in a zero-sum competition for no growth of, and later a falling number of, ad dollars hereafter."

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com

Seth's Blog : Words are hooks, words are levers

Words are hooks, words are levers

There's a debate raging in my town over whether or not to replace the existing planted-grass school football field with what used to be known as Astroturf. One side has already won a crucial victory: the local paper calls the new alternative, "turf."

Turf is what we call a racetrack, or half a fancy dinner (surf and...). Turf is short and punchy and feels organic. If they had called it 'plastic' or 'fake grass' or 'artificial turf', every conversation would feel different before we even started.

What to call the new diamonds that are being manufactured in labs, not dug out of the ground under horrible conditions? Some want them to be called 'artificial diamonds' or not diamonds at all. Others might prefer 'flawless' diamonds (because they are) or 'perfect'.

Is it a 'course', a 'group' or a 'club'? It might be all three, but the word you choose will change the anchor and thus the leverage that word has going forward. Are you a 'consultant', an 'advisor' or a 'coach'?

Engineers and doctors and other scientists seem to think they're skipping all of this when they use precise, specific language. But the obvious specificity and the desire to scare off untrained laypeople is in itself a form of leverage.

For politicians and others that want to re-invent the language for their own ends--you can work to plant your hook anywhere you choose, but if you torture the meaning and spin, spin, spin, you risk being seen as a manipulator, and all your leverage disappears. If your hook finds no purchase, you have no leverage.

On the other hand, the great brands (Pepsi, Kodak, etc.) planted words that meant nothing and built expensive fortresses around their words, words that now have emotional power.

The only reason words have meaning is because we agree on what they mean. And that meaning comes from associating those words with other words, words that often have emotional anchors for us. This isn't merely the spin of political consultants. It goes right to the heart of how we (and our ideas) are judged.

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luni, 5 august 2013

Seth's Blog : Q&A: Purple Cows and commodities

Q&A: Purple Cows and commodities

More Recent Articles

Having a CAPTCHA is Killing Your Conversion Rate

Having a CAPTCHA is Killing Your Conversion Rate

CAPTCHAs ask frustrating questions

CAPTCHAs act as a barrier between you and your customers

CAPTCHAs are not a solution, they are a problem

CAPTCHA is built for advertising, not users

So people must be ditching CAPTCHA, right?

"CAPTCHAs are designed to be easy for humans but hard for machines"