Tech-bite

With today's website tracking software and services you can find out a lot about the people who visit your website. You can learn where they're from, what kind of browser they're using, how long they stayed on your site, and a whole lot more. But what all this high tech intelligence won't tell you is what kind of people they are, and how likely they are to be transformed by your Web presentation from viewers to customers.

Your ability to convert website visitors into clients depends on your ability to find the soft underbelly of their subconscious desire. After all, if someone is happy with what they've already got, they don't need you, but if they were truly one hundred percent happy, they wouldn't bother coming to your website. Therefore every visitor that comes to your site is a potential client whether they know it or not.


The Setup's The Thing

Your website presentation has to find that annoying little subconscious scab just under the surface and pick at it until it becomes a full blown irritation that fosters discontent and a desire for change. That discontent is your opening to make your value statement.
We refer to this process as The Setup. Like any good presentation you cannot, or rather should not, just blurt out how great you are, but rather you have to set the scene. Like any good story, the punch line, moral, or payoff only works if it is properly setup. Far too many website presentations suffer from premature pitch climax.

The ability to transform viewers into customers requires patience. Entrepreneurial companies tend to view the setup as a waste of time, and they fear losing viewers before they ever get to the so-called "good-stuff." But without a proper setup, an audience is just not primed to accept what you have to say.

You can't sell anybody anything unless they understand they've not been getting everything they need and deserve. That understanding creates dissatisfaction with your competition and opens the audience's minds to what you have to provide. In short, the setup needs to touch a psychological nerve.

The Customer Is Always Right - Not Quite

We've all heard the expression, "the customer is always right." The fact is the customer is not always right, and in many cases they don't really know what they want or what they should have; and sometimes even when they do, they resist it because of a variety of misinformation, misunderstanding, self-doubt, and preconceived notions of conventional wisdom. It's your website presentation's job to set visitors on the right path.

Being The Expert Inspires Confidence

You're supposed to be the expert in what you do, and if you are, you need to have the ability to dig deeper into what people really want, need, and desire. I am always reminded of friends of mine who hired an interior decorator to furnish their new home. The decorator asked them what kind of furniture they liked. They answered that they were looking for Colonial, to which the decorator answered, "No you aren't. What you want is Country French." And after he showed my friends what he was talking about they quickly agreed. The decorator knew his business and understood the clients. Yes the clients liked the idea of the homey Colonial look they'd seen, but not being furniture experts they didn't understand what the options were, and what kind of furniture best suited their lifestyle and budget, while still providing the homey rustic but comfortable aesthetic they wanted. Customer satisfaction is about providing what the client really wants and not necessarily what they say they want.
Learn How To Communicate So Audiences Get It

Let's face it; we all like to read about how the digital revolution has opened up the business world to more audience influence, but the fact is people are influenced and manipulated and desires created through marketing and advertising as much as ever. How many website owners actually benefit in any meaningful way from social networking and search optimization, or do they do it because it's expected and promoted by proponents as the tactic du jour.

If you think a particular song you like is played on a thousand radio stations because it's good, or even because it has a following then you are living in a fantasy world. If you thing the vast majority of viral videos produced by corporations go viral all by themselves then think again.
Audiences are being manipulated and transformed into customers all the time, not because companies responded to what the public says, but rather to how the public reacts to various communication and marketing stimuli. What's truly incredible is how bad companies are at doing it. With all of the television industries' research into viewers, they still fail to deliver consistent quality programming that people want to watch. Every Fall new shows are yanked faster than a Nolan Ryan fastball, but the same crappy commercials live-on for what seems an eternity. Television viewers are a captive audience and if they want to watch their favorite show they have to tolerate the commercials (PVRs aside), but the Web is different. If your website presentation stinks, no one is going to stick around to absorb the smell.

Web Television Convergence Has Arrived

If you think of your website presentation as nothing more than a digital brochure, you're already behind the curve. Welcome to the Web on TV.

All you need is a laptop computer or one of the new gaming consoles attached to your big screen TV to access the Web on television. And as network programmers scramble to get their acts together more and more people are opting to spend their television time on the Web. Kind of makes you rethink what kind of website presentation you should be offering. It's time to start thinking of your website as your business channel and the content on it as programming. It's the future and it's here, now.

Who Visits Your Website?

Before website visitors can be transformed into clients, we have to understand who they are in terms of their mental outlook or frame of mind when they first arrive at your home page.

1. Accidental Tourists
Accidental Tourists are website visitors who find their way to your website by serendipity. Your company's link may have come up in a search for something mentioned on your website, but not something that's a core element of your business. But just because these people didn't really intend to visit a site like yours doesn't mean they're a waste of time. Perhaps they hadn't ever thought of using your product or service, or perhaps they didn't ever realize how much they really wanted what you have to provide. If your website presentation is exciting, meaningful, and entertaining you at least have the chance to plant the seed of desire for your product or service.

2. Brain Pickers
Brain Pickers show up at your site with little intention to buy anything, in fact they're there to pick your brain and find out how to do what you do for themselves. But if you're truly an expert at what you do, you at least have the chance to show these people that what you provide is special, and doing it right requires a company with your skills and resources.

The combination of the Internet, the Web, and technology has democratized business almost beyond recognition. Today the small, nimble, clever adaptor has the competitive advantage over their bigger, slower moving, 'we've-always-done-it-this-way' competitors; but the confluence of the Web environment and digital technology is one thing, how to use it effectively is another. Not every trendy social networking gimmick, user generated irrelevance, and pointless viral voyeurism is a productive business communication tactic.

The Day Dinosaurs Died

Like the dinosaurs that once ruled the world, the giant behemoth corporations that once dominated the business landscape have become fat and lazy, relying on muscle rather than brains, on statistics rather than understanding, and on technology rather than insight.
As these companies got bigger, they became top-heavy, corrupt, and stagnant, throwing their weight around rather than innovating and adapting. Oh yes, the big boys are still around, still doing what they've always done, jumping on every trend 'du jour' promoted by the 'blogosphere' without any real understanding of what it can accomplish, but hell, they figure if they throw enough you-know-what at the wall some of it is bound to stick, or so they hope.

But the handwriting is on the wall, the giant Internet meteorite has already hit these corporations right in their balance sheets and they are tumbling into irrelevance. The list of extinct corporate giants grows, and the march to Chapter 11 continues unabated.

So how does the smart, fearless, innovative thinking, business decision-maker take advantage of the Web's ability to even the playing field? The answer lies in their ability to use the Web as a persuasive communication medium.

Persuasive Communication

The Web is really a very simple concept: it is a place that allows you to communicate your message to your audience. What could be simpler, but like anything democratic, it's messy: a jumble of the very good and the very bad, and a whole lot of mediocre in-between. And in today's overcrowded Web-centric business environment there is little room for the mediocre.

In the final analysis all marketing, branding, positioning, advertising, and public relations is about communicating a persuasive message that attracts attention, generates interest, stimulates desire, triggers experiences, produces memories, and prompts action. And what Web-enabled communication tool gives you the best chance of delivering that kind of persuasive message? Web Video.


Persuasive Web Video Communication

The Web has some of the most effective creative video presentations you would ever want to see, and it also has some of the worst.
Easy-to-use and relatively inexpensive technology has created a plethora of do-it-yourself efforts. Some DIYers do it because of cost, others do it because of ego, and some just figure they're smarter than the people who do it for a living; and in some cases they may be right. Not all professionally produced Web-video is created equal. If your Web-video team is not pushing you to be bold with a focused, defining, differentiating message, then you've hired the wrong people.

Communication intended to persuade is a complex undertaking, one that requires a better understanding of how messages are communicated than it does the technical production issues. When people watch a video, what they see is far more susceptible to both intended and unintended nuance than a simple face-to-face conversation.

Every Move You Make, I'll Be Watching You

"Every move you make; every vow you break; every smile you fake; every claim you stake; I'll be watching you."

- From the song 'I'll Be Watching You' by The Police

Everything a person does or says is a sign, not just a communication of the obvious intent but also of the underlying subconscious subtext. In person, people have a built-in monitoring system that filters-out irrelevant verbal and non-verbal distractions, glitches and eccentricities, but on your website, in a video, those performance issues get magnified and can destroy your entire presentation.

In his book 'Messages, Signs, and Meanings' Marcel Danesi states, "Humans convey over two-thirds of their messages through the body, producing up to 700,000 physical signs, of which 1000 are different bodily postures, 5000 are hand gestures, and 250,000 are facial expressions."

If your website lacks a video presentation, and instead relies solely on text communication, you are handicapping your business's ability to persuade, convince, and convert website visitors into clients. And, if you do have video on your site, but it's not producing the intended results, perhaps the verbal communication is in conflict with the nonverbal message, creating confusion and distrust rather than confidence and understanding.

Forget all the things you think your website should be doing; its most important and most critical purpose is to deliver an effective communication to your audience.

A Recipe for Web-Video Communication

Persuasive Web-video communication is a complicated process that involves numerous creative and technical talents, as well as psychological insight into performance issues: scripting, casting, producing, directing, editing, music, and sound design, all complemented by communication psychology, emotional resonance, and business savvy are required to create effective presentations.

Ingredient One: Attract Attention

Job one is to get people to take their hand off the mouse and pay attention; it's the equivalent of someone yelling, "hey you" in a crowded room, everyone stops and turns to find out what's going on.

Mark Hughes author of "Buzzmarketing" suggests six criteria that provide the hey-you-pay-attention affect: the taboo, the unusual, the humorous, the outrageous, the remarkable, the secret, and the titillating. Which of these criteria you choose to use depends on your brand image, your audience, and your message.

All these elements individually or in combination can produce the stop-look-and-listen effect you want as long as they are appropriate for your target audience.

Ingredient Two: Generate Interest

Sarah Wood of Unruly Media, a company that specializes in paid viral seeding points to high value relevancy as an additional key ingredient; it's what turns the viral-for-viral's sake into a purposeful, persuasive, viral marketing communication.

High value relevancy is based on the connection made through your video presentation. If your video doesn't resonate in some way, you will lose your audience. Resonance can be established through the performers' personality, the delivery of the dialogue, the scenario presented, the subject matter discussed, the point-of-view perspective, and/or the emotional content.

A new microblogging website, Yahoo Meme, similar in style and functionality to Twitter, was soft-launched in Portuguese in May. They have now launched a Spanish version. But what is unusual is that the word "meme" was first introduced by controversial British ethologist and evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene to discuss "elements of cultural ideas, symbols or practices that are transmitted from one mind to another through speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena..." That doesn't sound a bit like Yahoo.

Just as in the 19th century, when Thomas Huxley was known as "Darwin's bulldog" for his tenacious defence of Darwinism, Richard Dawkins has played a similar, modern-day role when talking about evolutionary principles and explaining the spread of ideas and cultural phenomena.

Analogous with the above, you may have noticed that Yahoo's Meme closely follows the etymology of the Greek word "mimema" for "something imitated" and that instead of a sweet little bird tweeting, it has a dog - admittedly not quite the image of Huxley the bulldog, but a dog nevertheless - barking "wow" in Spanish. A dog? Don't you think it would have been more appropriate to have used a cat that could have ruffled Twitter's feathers a little, like Yahoo Sucatash?
According to Wiki, examples of memes are tunes, ideas and catch-phrases. But now, microblogging? Yes, Yahoo has introduced its own version in Spanish and Portuguese offering similar features to Twitter. At first glance it seems like another clone where users can populate with text posts, music, videos, photos and links to MP3 files, and with a repost rather than retweet button, but is it really an exact clone?

According to readwriteweb.com, "After using Meme [see http://meme.yahoo.com] for a while, it doesn't quite seem right to call it a Twitter clone. Instead, Yahoo Meme is really more of a back-to-basics microblogging service that feels a lot more like Posterous or Tumblr than Twitter."

It must be said that releasing the beta in Spanish was a bit odd. However, according to The Summer Institute for Linguistics Ethnologue Survey (1999), the following are the top languages by population: Chinese, Spanish, then English, so to opt for Spanish would appear quite justified. But why was it cloaked in such secrecy? Do they think they are closing in on rival Twitter? Unlikely as yet, as Yahoo's Meme does not have an API, so third-party developers are unable to write any web tools for it.

Perhaps my adherence to the Messrs Dawkins and Huxley analogy was too abstract as Yahoo's description of its new "meme" insists: "Today, a 'meme' on the internet is popularly understood as a fever and became content that is played by everyone."

Not quite what Richard Dawkins had in mind, as in explanations about his original "memes", were that they "propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation. If a scientist heard, or read about, a good idea, he passed it on to his colleagues and students. He mentioned it in his articles and his lectures. If the idea caught on, it can be said to propagate itself, spreading from brain to brain." Does this mean that Yahoo's "content that is played by everyone" is the same thing as an imitation of Twitter? One wonders.

As things go, not everything is well at Twitter. Not only has Yahoo started to imitate its service but there has been yet another DDoS attack and they are said to be in litigation for patent infringement from TechRadium, a Texas-based technology company.
Not that this should be taken as a legal precedent, but it does raise some eyebrows as to how far users can legally tweet. According to TechRadium on the National Law Journal's website: "Alerting the public about a fire, hurricane or traffic accident on Twitter is an unlawful tweet."

So does that mean that the use of Twitter to post hurricane updates will affect Chevron and Shell or that the Los Angeles Fire Department is in trouble for posting alerts about fires and road closures?

George Borkowski, chairman of the intellectual property practice in Los Angeles, said Twitter "is likely to challenge the validity of the patents, claiming that the technology is too generic or too obvious to warrant a patent." Borkowski also claimed that as the technology "was already out there, so there's nothing truly novel about the patent."
These three major assaults on Twitter must have its board a little nervous as, yet again, and for the third day running, the formatting of Twitter was all over the place on all browsers on my Mac. During my various research forays, however, I did stumble upon Yahoo_Meme on Twitter, which is a little cheeky to say the least. It only has one tweet pointing to the Portuguese beta.

However, add to that the already competing services such as Friendfeed, a real-time feed aggregator which consolidates posts from social media/networking websites and RSS/Atom feeds; One Riot, a real-time web search engine used for locating news, videos and blogs; Tumblr, a blogging platform that allows users to post text, images, video, etc, where users are able to "follow" other users; and SPNbabble, which supports the OpenID standard for a single sign-on between many different websites using a common password for each.

Besides the problems with Twitter internally, it seems by coincidence that it is being "hunted by the pack" from all these possible angles. But is it the legal connotations that have confused us in the TechRadium case about what our understanding is regarding the law and what is permissible to microblog? That question seems to be in the lap of the courts (certainly not the gods if Richard Dawkins has anything to do with it) - and alongside it, a process that could potentially take years to settle.