Dell Makes a Smart Move

After getting bitten in the butt by an irate customer who had a bad support experience, Dell has decided to pay attention to blogs.

The moral of the story: you ignore grassroots media like bloggers at your own risk. Bloggers can turn one angry customer into an icon and get all kinds of news coverage about your bad support. Dell's doing the right thing by putting some resources into paying attention to what people are saying about them outside of traditional media channels.

Beware Blog Confusion

Here is blogland, we tend to assume that everyone understands blogs - from the basic idea of what a blog is to how they work, how users navigate on them, and how to search them and make use of blogrolls and other links. But as a recent study from Catalyst Group Design shows, if you are planning to use blogs as a marketing tool, that could be a major mistake.

In the study (download the PDF here, dramatically titled "Net Rage," Catalyst concludes that:

Even assuming mainstream interest, current blog design standards – at least in terms of navigation, nomenclature and taxonomy – are a barrier to consumer acceptance. In fact, the design of most blogs can incite “net rage” (in the words of one test participant).

So what is the problem?

• Participants in the study weren't sure that they were looking at blogs, or what that meant.


• While viewing a Business Week blog, participants didn't understand that they were looking at something different than the standard content on the magazine's web site.


• The commenting process was very confusing. Users weren't sure whether their comments would appear right away, be held for moderation, or be considered for inclusion by an editor.


• Lower level pages caused particular problems, as users did not realize they were part of a blog.


• Users weren't sure how to find older posts or use archives.


• Users weren't clear what the blog's home page was or what its purpose was.


• RSS - forget it. People didn't understand it.

What does this mean for marketers? Before you launch of a blog with a marketing goal, you need to understand who will be reading it. If it's a blog-savvy audience, the usual blog formats will probably work fine. Otherwise, expect confusion.

You will need to modify the usual blog templates to make navigation crystal clear. You will need to clearly mark blog pages as part of the blog, not your web site. You need to explain how commenting works. You need to make it easy to find older posts and get back to the main page.

The blog signifiers that many of us take for granted have yet to take on meaning for mainstream audiences. This doesn't mean blogging should be discarded as a marketing tool; but it does mean that you need to pay attention to usability issues that might not be important for a blog designed for readers more familiar with the medium.

Failure

Back in the day - you know, the pre-internet day - every direct marketer had a sad tale of disaster that had happened to them, or to a colleague: the campaign that got destroyed by a stupid mistake. The mailing to 500,000 consumers - with glittery creative and a great call to action and an irresistible offer - turned out to have been printed with an incorrect postal indicia, and never got to the mailboxes. Or the paper wasn't strong enough and everything got shredded on the way. Or the 800 number was wrong.

Two of the funnier ones from my own world (both someone else's errors, I've escaped disaster thus far):

1. While I was working for a software vendor, we learned that someone hawking breast enhancement surgery on late night infomercials had gotten their 800 number wrong and was giving out ours instead. So our inside sales team started getting calls from people wanting the surgery.

2. A colleague worked at a company that created a very high end brochure to send to potential clients. So high end that it was bound in a really cool metal cover. Except that the edges of the cover were kind of sharp, and the potential clients for their very expensive services were getting cuts when they opened the packages.

NetImperative reports on a more mundane kind of failure: the web site that isn't there when someone clicks a link to respond to your campaign. It's the 21st century equivalent of the botched reply card or incorrect phone number. The numbers in their study are quite shocking: site failure affects three-quarters of campaigns.

How many users can your web site handle? What would it take to make it stop working? If you do large-scale campaigns that use web response forms, you'd better know that. You can start by having a good relationship with your IT director - the kind of relationship that means you'll get honest answers about the issues, and not be told that it will be fine as he or she moves on to the crisis of the day. (There's always a crisis of the day in the IT department.)

NetImperative says only 22% of those surveyed even involve the IT department in their campaigns. No wonder there are so many problems.

Your web site failure will be a funny "I learned my lesson!" tale over drinks five years from now, but when it happens, it won't be amusing. Do your homework. Involve the technical staff. Make sure that your investment pays off by not missing the last step!

PR Abhors a Vacuum

From Wired News, a story about internet darling Google exhibiting some extreme foolishness on the PR front.

In a story about the wealth of information about individuals that's available via Google, CNET News.com writer Elinor Mills gave an example: she used Google to come up with all kinds of personal information about Eric Schmidt, Google's CEO.

In response, Google is refusing to talk to anyone from News.com. As a result, every News.com story that involves Google - and that's a lot of stories - includes a note reading, ""Google could not be immediately reached for comment. (Google representatives have instituted a policy of not talking with CNET News.com reporters until July 2006 in response to privacy issues raised by a previous story.)"

This makes Google seem like they've got something to hide. And one wonders if Google is paying sufficient attention to a brewing PR problem with respect to private information available via their search services.

Clamming up is almost never the right response when dealing with the press. If Google was upset about the information on Schmidt included in the original story (and that's not unreasonable) they should be talking to News.com about the problem. Instead, their voice is going to absent from a wide range of stories - which means that other companies, including Google competitors like Yahoo, will be there to fill the space.

Google is generally respected as a very smart outfit. This kind of silliness is rather surprising.