High Holy Mass of Contradictions

I'm utterly addicted to this site. I thought I'd share it by including the link for the refer-a-friend deal they have set up: a $5 credit at redtagcrazy.com for both of us if you find something you like enough to buy.

I haven't bought anything yet. I'm hoping they'll have some vegan/sustainable/bamboo/whatever kinds of items at some point, and then I'll spring on it like a mama leopard with hungry babies on an injured gazelle. You know what I mean.

Don't say I didn't warn you, though. It's even more addictive than Woot, because they give you an estimate of how long it'll be before the next sale. Now that I think about it, it's like a Woot-off every day. Seriously, I'm finding myself checking back nearly every 30 minutes all day.

As if Twitter, Facebook, email, and all the blogs I try to keep up with aren't sucking up enough of my time.

OK, one more peek at what's selling now, and then off to do anything more productive.

By somewhat popular request (OK: two people), I’m capturing the Twitter song here in my songwriting blog.

I’ve been trying to do better about keeping the content of this blog related to Honey Bowtie Music, meaning Karsten’s and my writing, our pitching & publishing, and our life at our home office & studio, so I wasn’t planning on doing any kind of post PubCon follow-up here, but hey! this is relevant to songwriting. It’s some of the only writing I did while I was in Las Vegas, so it counts.

The story is: on Wednesday afternoon, I was taking a break in my hotel room, watching the #pubcon search feed in Tweetdeck burn up while everyone chatted about the “5 bloggers and a microphone” session, when I noticed that Kate Morris tweeted:

#pubcon someone needs to write a country song about losing love for twitter!

Fearing that there might not be too many other songwriters in the PubCon crowd, I felt it my duty to respond to the call.

@katemorris Just for you: “A hundred forty letters / And spaces in between / Isn’t near enough room / To say what you really mean” #pubcon

@katemorris 2nd verse: “It’s getting kind of silly / How everyone I meet / Instead of asking if I blog / Now asks me if I tweet” #pubcon

@katemorris I’ll let the rest be crowdsourced. It’s more the Nashville songwriting style to collaborate anyway. #pubcon

Only the rest never ended up crowdsourced, since everyone was caught up in what was going on the session. I mean, how wrong is that? Paying attention to the panelists instead of Twitter?

So if you attended PubCon and you end up here after searching for blog posts about it, here’s your chance: take a swing at writing additional verses in the comments. This is not limited to PubCon attendees either. My Nashville buddies, long-time net-friends, and songwriting colleagues are all encouraged to play along. I’ll update the post with the song’s progression, and it will be ready for performance by March in Austin.

Everyone who comments with additional verses gets songwriting credit. As we say in Nashvegas, “add a word, get a third.”

So who’s up for some cowriting?

Originally published at Sticky, Sweet, & A Little Overdressed. You can comment here or there.

Amazon has been doing some tinkering again, this time to their Account page. This set of tweaks was long overdue. They didn’t change the functionality of the page; just its organization and readability. But I noticed, as I hit my account this morning for the first time in a while, that it made a big difference in the confidence I felt approaching the page that I was about to find what I was looking for.

Big results like that out of organizational changes are priceless. Studies I’ve done in the past have suggested that if the customer feels that she can easily find what she’s looking for in her account page or section, she’s more likely to visit that page more often with minor questions. But if that page or section is difficult to navigate, she will avoid it, will use customer support channels more frequently, and will generally feel less confident in the site as a service. Clearly this has tremendous implications to customer lifetime value, so from an ROI standpoint, the Amazon account page is probably well justified.

But I haven’t even told you my favorite part of the redesign, yet. It’s on the FAQ page they put together to explain where everything is and why they did it. In answer to the question “How did you decide on this design?” they provide this answer:

We consulted the foremost experts in the field: our customers.

Well played, Amazon. This customer appreciates the effort.

see also:
Amazon site redesign
Amazon email mishap - “please fill in”
Amazon cart “saved for later” items gone?
Update from Amazon.com

Originally published at Sticky, Sweet, & A Little Overdressed. You can comment here or there.

From the Sitening blog:

Sitening LLC, a bright, growing web marketing agency has hired Internet veteran Kate O’Neill as Managing Director.

Sure, sure, I’m excited about “the focus we’re going to be able to apply” and joining “such a talented group of web professionals.” Whatever. The real reason this rocks is this:

Dude. Coffee goes high tech. I like it.

Originally published at Sticky, Sweet, & A Little Overdressed. You can comment here or there.

These aren't related (I don't think), but on Friday someone broke into our car window (annoying, but not that big of a deal really), and yesterday I started getting sick again, presumably from my thyroid acting weird (very annoying, and increasingly a big deal). Nothing much more to say about those, I guess: the first is already repaired, and the second will be handled soon enough by surgery and medication. I hope.

I'm also posting this directly in LiveJournal, you may notice. I've been working out my posting strategy for my LJ and the honeybowtie.com blog, as well as the new one I'm about to introduce, which has more of an interactive marketing focus. I want to keep the two blogs more topical, which means I think I'll be posting more of my non-topical observations here.

[And I just posted this by accident. Clearly I need to re-familiarize myself with the LJ posting tools. ;) ]

Just wanted to add that as many people's online presence gets to be more fragmented for the SEO benefit, not to mention the personal/professional delineation most people want, I suspect there will be a lot of this back and forth, changing strategies. It's an evolving process. So please bear with me. :)

I'm not ready to announce the new marketing blog yet, but here are the other relevant places where I spend time if you want to keep up with me:

The Bee Hive (http://www.honeybowtie.com/blog/)
Has been serving as an all-purpose blog, but increasingly, I'd like to start using this to capture my observations about songwriting, the creative process, the music business, etc.

My personal Twitter account (http://twitter.com/kateo)
Where I do a lot of my intermittent chatter. If you're not using Twitter, consider it. I find it's a good outlet and a great way to feel connected to friends throughout the day without needing to have specific IM conversations or whatever.

My work Twitter account (http://twitter.com/magazines_kate)
Where I chatter intermittently about work projects, complain about productivity issues (like, say, Twitter ;) ), and muse about marketing and e-commerce. It's not always as boring as it sounds, I swear. ;)

My FriendFeed account (http://friendfeed.com/kateoneill)
If you want to subscribe to an aggregation of my online activity (and/or anyone else's, for that matter), this is a great tool. It's always passively in use for me, and I use it actively off and on, mostly when Twitter is down (which is mercifully less common than it was a few months ago). If you haven't checked out FriendFeed, it's a pretty neat way to keep up with people who are spread out all over the web. Like me. :)

My first article in Circulation Management’s “Monday Morning Expert” column is now up on their web site:

Can’t believe anyone believes a word I say with a promo picture like that.

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Originally published at The Bee Hive. You can comment here or there.

I got email this morning from an editor at Circulation Management asking for clarification on some of the points from the presentation at the Circulation Management show in Chicago a few weeks ago, and since I was writing up some thoughts for her, I thought I’d put them here, too. Enjoy!

Behavioral Targeting: Six Easy Ways to Get Started

1. Read your reports for meaningful segments

   Chances are, you’re already collecting data that, when analyzed and applied, could optimize customers’ experience as well as your revenues. Most analytics platforms can tell you about new vs. returning visitors, and can usually further break the latter group down into first-time buyers vs. repeat customers. Chances are also pretty good that each of these groups is behaving somewhat to very differently on your site, and if you don’t figure out what works best for each, you’re leaving money on the table.

   

2. Traditional direct response tactics still work

   Behavioral targeting and marketing approaches are heavily borrowed from the domain of direct response. Meaningful segments, appealing offers, and consistent remarketing are all part of a well-rounded practice.

3. Focus on your easy-to-segment audiences

   Sometimes you can spot a useful segment, but actually breaking it out for targeting purposes may be trickier than you expect. (Geotargeting falls into this category for many sites). Unless you’re a black belt behavioral marketer and there’s nowhere else to turn for optimization, you probably have lower-hanging opportunities to pursue. Think in terms of both providing the biggest returns and taking on the least daunting setup to find the hidden treasure on your site.

4. Start wide and optimize campaigns

   It’s likely that you can realize substantial gains in your success metrics by thinking at a high level about audience characteristics, and then monitoring more granular groupings for meaningful patterns. Most of the groupings you follow in any given campaign won’t perform in a way that bears statistically significant differences to your control group, but the ones that stand out can always be segments in a future campaign.

5. Match message with media and audience

   The beauty of online marketing is the wealth of data and control you can exercise over context. The content you display on your site and in your ad networks can be adjusted based on any number of factors. Look for opportunities to tighten your message and your call to action based on context.

6. Test, test, test

   The key lesson in all of this is: it depends. It depends on your audience, it depends on your site, it depends on the time of day, the time of week, the time of year, and so on. The only way you’ll know what works for any given audience for any given situation is to test it. And test it, and test it again. Invest in a testing platform and process that provides you with the flexibility and the visibility to act quickly and learn quickly, and it will pay for itself many times over.

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Originally published at The Bee Hive. You can comment here or there.

I got an email response from Amazon customer service:

Thank you for writing to us at Amazon.com.

I’m sorry for the trouble you had with your shopping cart.

I’ve reported the problem, and our technical team is working on taking care of it right now.

Often these errors are corrected after only a short time, so please try again after two or three days.

I understand that this might be causing you lot of inconvenience. Please understand that we are doing our best to resolve this problem, but technical glitches cannot be predicted and at times it is unmanageable.

Thanks for your patience while we fix this problem and thank you for shopping at Amazon.com.

[…]

Best regards,

Muzeeb
Amazon.com Customer Service

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Originally published at The Bee Hive. You can comment here or there.

I’ve seen some cool wordles, but it wasn’t until a friend posted one she created using a recent research paper that I got inspired to create one of my own. This wordle uses my “manifesto,” which was a 37-page, 6,889-word document outlining a proposed strategy for how we at Magazines.com interact with our customers to optimize lifetime value.

No surprise that “email” and “customers” are the prominent words for a visualization of a document describing, essentially, how best to communicate with our customers.

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Originally published at The Bee Hive. You can comment here or there.

I don’t know about anyone else, but I’ve been using that “save for later” feature in my Amazon cart for years, and I frequently go back days or weeks later and purchase items I’ve set aside. One of the best reasons to do it that way is that Amazon provides messaging in the cart when an item’s price changes, whether it increases or decreases. So it’s a great way to check in on what items are on sale and go ahead and pick them up. But today when I logged in, my cart appeared to be empty.

I sent Amazon customer service an email about it, but I’m curious: does anyone else out there use that feature, and if so, is your cart empty too?

What gives? That’s a pretty jarring experience for me as a ridiculously loyal Amazon customer. If they’ve done away with it for whatever reason, I’m going to have to rethink my loyalty to their site.

Edit: See my update.

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Originally published at The Bee Hive. You can comment here or there.

Yes, they screwed up by announcing they would take away the Profiles feature. But then, when it became clear that customers were upset with the announcement — and by upset, I mean ready to cancel their accounts — Netflix retracted their decision, and sent one of the best apology emails I’ve seen.

We Are Keeping Netflix Profiles

Dear Kate,

You spoke, and we listened. We are keeping Profiles. Thank you for all the calls and emails telling us how important Profiles are.

We are sorry for any inconvenience we may have caused. We hope the next time you hear from us we will delight, and not disappoint, you.

-Your friends at Netflix

Short and sweet, and to the point. “You spoke, and we listened.” That’s the essence of managing customer experience, even when it happens a little after it could have. Well done, Netflix.

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Originally published at The Bee Hive. You can comment here or there.

Web-forward people, particularly iPhone users, what’s the next thing after Quicken? Mint? Wesabe? Quicken online? I’ve tried all of these, and I have some complaints about each. Quicken no longer affords me the convenience it used to before I had an iPhone, when I used Pocket Quicken on my Treo to record expenses as I transacted them and could sync them up back at my laptop whenever. Now I have a stack of receipts piling up and no motivation to do anything with them, but I miss the granular visibility I used to have into my finances when that system was working well for me.

So what now?

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Originally published at The Bee Hive. You can comment here or there.

We’ve just launched a promotion on Magazines.com that spotlights titles printed on recycled or sustainably harvested paper. Earth Day wasn’t originally on our seasonal marketing calendar (silly oversight) so we pulled this together on very short notice, and I’m proud of us for making the effort.

http://www.magazines.com/ncom/mag/main/earth_day

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Originally published at The Bee Hive. You can comment here or there.

After reading Mike and Jon’s laments about being “off the grid,” I did a little ego-surfing on Google Maps street view, and, hey whaddya know, we’re on it. They must have driven by before our transom and sidelights went in on our doorway, so it looks a little unfinished, but we’re there!

So, um, yeah. That was really important to determine. And now back to work.

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Originally published at The Bee Hive. You can comment here or there.

CNN Money, that is.

Omniture put out a press release about some of the success Magazines.com has had using their Test & Target (formerly Offermatica) tool, and it got picked up on CNN Money’s Marketwire.

And look!

“When specifying our testing and optimization goals, we wanted to deliver more personalized content to different types of people who visit our site. We just needed an easy way to do it,” said Kate O’Neill, director of customer experience at Magazines.com. “With Omniture we have one platform used by marketers for both testing and targeted content.”

And:

“Everything you think you know and every intuition you have as an online marketer can immediately be tested so you can determine if your marketing is working or not,” said O’Neill. “Omniture Test&Target has brought reliability to our marketing campaigns.”

Woot!

Update:

Also picked up in techrockies:
Omniture Signs Magazines.com

AND in the Huffington Post, complete with a really cheeky video “explaining” what Omniture does.:
Omniture Works Its Mojo For Magazine.com (Luckily, Magazine.com redirects to Magazines.com. Whew!)

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Originally published at The Bee Hive. You can comment here or there.

I’m not one to take glee in others’ misfortunes - schadenfreude just ain’t my style. But there’s something about this email mishap from Amazon in my inbox this morning that just made me giggle, and it’s not the likelihood that someone in Seattle has just lost a job. Maybe it’s the idea that even in a company as big as Amazon, where the job functions are no doubt as specialized as insects in the rainforest, where filling in a few lines of text in an email is probably the bulk of what someone is paid to do on a daily basis, that this kind of thing can still happen. It amazes me.

(In the words of long-lost Brittney, click the image below to embiggen.)

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Originally published at The Bee Hive. You can comment here or there.

I’m not even going to pretend for a second that I don’t think this is super-cool:

“We found that the page with highest rate of entering and then exiting quickly was our homepage,” says Kate O’Neill, director of customer experience and product development, Magazines.com. “And it was happening at such an alarming rate. We needed to find a way to engage people, so we started experimenting.”
[…]
Magazines.com will continue to test to see how they can personalize and cater to these segments in the future. “In the coming months, we will take yet a closer look at segmentation. We want to be able to give our customers different channels to explore and offer them what they might be looking for in real time. It’s all about customizing the user experience,” says O’Neill.

And I’ve been asked to speak at the Circulation Management conference in Chicago in June.

No lie, this is fun stuff.

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Originally published at The Bee Hive. You can comment here or there.

Clearly, Microsoft looking to acquire Yahoo! suggests a direct run at Google. And I’ve heard rumblings from people over the years about various Yahoo! products being superior to their Google counterparts: Y! mail, for instance, lead Gmail in innovations for quite some time before Gmail started catching up again late last year. And I’ve heard only good things about Yahoo!’s User Interface Library, though I personally haven’t spent a lot of time investigating it.

But MS and Yahoo! both have struggled to capture the public’s imagination nearly as much as Google continually does. It looks like a long shot to me. But if I were making the decisions at MS, I would absolutely do it. If nothing else, Yahoo! is a far less hated brand than almost anything Microsoft owns. Heck, that’s got to be worth millions all by itself.

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Originally published at The Bee Hive. You can comment here or there.

We got talking about Twitter etiquette at the Geek Breakfast, and I decided I was going to do a post about the emerging dynamics of being polite while micro-blogging.

Jackson seemed to think that was pretty ironic, though, since I’m apparently violating the #1 rule of Twitter etiquette: don’t post daily recaps of your Twitter updates in your blog. Or at least don’t make it the only content you post for a week or more.

In my defense, I said, I’ve been modifying my Twitter updates since I started doing that so that they’d be somewhat more substantive. That got a mumble of support, but the message was clear: daily Twitter summary posts do not make up for real blog content.

OK, so there’s rule number one, and I’m public enemy number one, and now that we’ve got that out of the way, let’s move on to number two, shall we?

The ability to track topics is one of Twitter’s most useful features. I track several keywords, and when I find myself reading updates from the same people multiple times, I decide that they must be worth following. I don’t just start following them, though — I send them a direct message letting them know I saw their posts about magazines, say, or songwriting, and am now following them. So far no one has acted like I’m stalking them, and most of the people I contact that way end up following me back.

So rule #2 is: before you follow someone you don’t know, send a message and let him or her know why you’re following them. If nothing else, this will let the other person know what content is most interesting to other people, and that’s always handy to know.

Alright, so there are the first two rules: one of which I’m bad about, and one of which I’m good about. What would you add to the list?

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Originally published at The Bee Hive. You may comment here or there.

I have a magnet on my desk with the message “always make new mistakes.” When I saw it at Wild Oats I bought it because, at the time, I was involved in several projects at work that felt like instant replays of projects from my distant and not-too-distant past.

But even now — and in fact, every day — it comes in handy as a reminder that making mistakes can be extremely valuable, just as long as you learn from them.

Last year, I managed the redesign of our web site’s checkout function to allow new customers to pass through without having to register. When we finally launched it to 100% of our audience, it had a glitch that prevented many users from being able to check out at all. In one day, that error cost the company about $17,000.

Luckily, we resolved the issue and re-launched, and the checkout process has been successful, certainly earning back many times what it cost that day. (The CFO jokingly asked me that day if he should just take the $17K out of my paycheck, and I said sure, as long as I get to keep what I bring in, too.)

Today I realized that even while redesigning the checkout, I completely overlooked a similar process on the site that is totally inconsistent with the way we handle checkout and very probably confusing as hell for our users. I mean, of course there are loads of things wrong with our site — we’re working on a complete overhaul, but it will be a gradual process — but the two processes in question are areas that I personally touched last year and attempted to optimize, apparently blind to how unnecessarily different they are.

It’s always tempting to beat myself up at a realization like that, and think what a terrible job I’ve done. But I haven’t done a terrible job — I’ve incrementally improved two important areas of the site, and now the right thing to do is to make them work well together.

I have another desk-top adage in the form of a cardboard sign with an image of Snoopy and, in German (I found it in Germany 15 years ago), “As long as you learn new tricks, no one can call you an old dog.”

Woof.

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Originally published at The Bee Hive. You may comment here or there.