I often give the advice of studying web leaders and learning from what they are great at. For instance, Amazon is unrivaled in the ease of navigation, findability and user experience. For user acquisition, onboarding and funnel optimization - Groupon and Living Social are as good as it gets (see more here).
But as Groupon tries to grow its product offering and business - it is encountering the common problem of *too much*. How do you keep the experience simple, clean and therefore optimzied with too many offerings and too much noise? It is effectively the inverse of my "In the River" concept.
Here's the example of a recent Groupon. Notice all that's going on:
- the Groupon itself (the primary focus)
- an expanded promotional unit for "Groupon's Getting Personal!"
- Holiday Groupon Gifts
- Groupon Now!
- the referral program
So in addition to the primary Groupon, the user is exposed to four programs: Personal Groupon, Groupon Gifts, Groupon Now!, and the Referral Program (which has been around from the start). That's a lot!
I was introduced to Maker's Mark Amabassador Club by my friend Chaz Yoon (LivingProof.com, previously a colleague at eBay). Chaz described it as one of the most unique and compelling "VIP customer" programs.
VIP program is a bit of a misnomer... since anyone who registers qualifies as a VIP. But registration alone signifies user activity and allows Makers Mark to continuously engage with fans.
What do ambassadors get?
- To start, their name etched on a barrel of premium whiskey that is aging. Photos during maturation are included. The concept of buying my own personalized whiskey is strange and fun.... and effective. I will certainly buy my own whiskey!
- Access to deals, events and special products (similar to wine clubs)
- A really unique holiday gift... which has to be relatively expensive to create and deliver. It's brilliant.
So how does this apply to you?
1. It doesn't take much to make customers feel special. Just some creativity and fun.
2. VIP programs can apply to more than just your highest spenders.
3. In a world of competition, differentiation comes from product, branding and customer relationships.
I rarely visit Foursquare.com (it's one of those destinations that is almost entirely mobile). Nevertheless, Foursquare is doing very interesting stuff on its .com and is clearly focused on using the web to build out deeper content, directories, etc. So I visited Foursquare.com and this was the above-the-fold module I was first presented with.
There isn't much ground-breaking - or even truly unique - about it. But it is highly relevant to a theme I have been thinking & talking a lot about recently: active user experience and optimization.
What does this awkward string mean? In short: so much attention is paid to new user experience (registration, conversion, onboarding, etc) that current users are somewhat neglected. Of course active users are not neglected from the a product experience - but the same care with which newbies are onboarded should be given to active users. Conversions don't stop after the registration flow:
- vistor >>
- new user >>
- active user >>
- highly engaged user >>
- super user (top 1%)
Back to the seemingly ordinary screenshot I included. It prompted this post because of the care that is given to driving deeper engagement and networking:
1. Tailored for the destination
First, Foursquare understands that the act of networking is more efficient / powerful on the web than on mobile
2. Drive to a specific action
They also realize that the more friends the better: notifications, engagement, virality, etc
3. Lots of opportunity
And that I have 889 Facebook friends on Foursquare (wow) - yet am only connected with a handful of them
4. High converting design
So they present this to me boldly, using the Facebook Facepile and a big, bright green Find Friends button.
Again, this is a minor example - but it speaks to the care with which Foursquare is thinking about driving activity as much as they are about new user onboarding.
I always have to preface posts like this because Facebook is constantly testing new formats / features and it's hard to tell what I see vs. what other people see. In other words, if it's new to me it might not be new to you. So apologies!
As Facebook ran out the real-time ticker, it was clearly a move to drive continuous engagement and alter the usage of the core feed. One of the consequences was that the ad units that had sat in the upper right column shifted down ... way down. Not great for advertisers paying premium (and ramping) prices.
But, as shown below, that has seemed to allow for yet another ad format to emerge. This one looks a bit like Twitter's sponsored post. Sponsored stories / actions appear in the ticker and are noted as "sponsored" (ever so slightly). When expanded, those stories have standard actions (ie Like, share and comment). Obviously the goal is to drive engagement (and then charge for each interaction). Simple but very smart and effective.
And its yet another ad format - but this time, it's fully integrated into the normal usage pattern and can generate more than base CPMs. For instance, in the example below I could theoretically like the brand, comment, and/or share. Imagine a cost-per-interaction model. Advertisers would of course be excited as it leads to sharing and virality..
Here's the Google+ right column. It's getting awfully crowded / busy and its one large promotion for Google+ functions / features:
- Google's universal notification header
- a floating YouTube search tool (when clicked it expands and plays videos in a mini-browser)
- my friends and suggested uesrs to add to circles
- Google+ invitations (although anyone can now register)
- ability to start a Hangout (Google+'s best feature)
- ability to create a Google+ page
- Google+'s "Games" center and links to popular / featured games
I am not sure how I feel about. Clearly it differs from Facebook and that's in part because Google is still fighting for adoption and engagement. For instance, it is more beneficial for Google to promote tools than it is to insert ad units. However, this is essentially a vertical-ized version of the horizontal navigation bar that rests atop every page. It's cluttered, redundant and frankly ineffective at doing what Google wants it to do: drive deeper usage. For all the criticism that Facebook's Ticker has received, it is clearly a more powerful usage driver than this is.
Yesterday Living Social ran a promotion with McDonald's: $13 for 5 Big Macs and 5 large fries.
With 15 hours to go, they have already sold ~260,000 deals... which equates to 1.2 million Big Macs.
~35,000 people shared the deal via Facebook (~13%).
I remind you: the deal *still* has 15 hours remaining.
What's this all mean?
Of Big Macs alone, Living Social sold:
763 million calories
44 million grams of fat
60 million grams of carbs
and 31 million grams of protein
When you add in the fries, the total dent is:
1.39 billion calories
and 76 million grams of fat
I logged into Starbucks' wifi this morning and was presented with the below screen. I find it fascinating that Starbucks has an ad for "full behind-the-paywall access. Free." This strikes me as very much an industry term that is neither:
- well known
- consumer friendly, or
- flattering for the content providers (WSJ, ESPN, USA Today, NY Times)
Editor’s note: Guest contributor Andrew Machado is the founder of Open Home Pro, which empowers real estate agents to give their clients a new type of experience when shopping for a home with just an iPad. Open Home Pro is a Dogpatch Labs Palo Alto company.
As I read Joseph Puopolo's article regarding the WWE/The Rock and Social Media this weekend I was taken aback to see one key name missing from the article...Amy Jo Martin. She carries with her 1.2 million Twitter Followers, has beaten breast cancer and most importantly she's humanizing brands.
Amy founded Digital Royalty which works with great brands like Fox Sports, Nike, but most importantly people like Dwayne Johnson, Shaq and Dana White to improve their social media presence. Her team has developed some extremely clever uses of social media over the years and I wanted to highlight three of them.
1. Hunt For UFC
Over the last few years the UFC has not only grown it's business ($465 million in ppv revenue in 2010), but if you look up their CEO on Twitter @danawhite you'll see he is insanely active on twitter. Nearly 12,000 tweets from him. To put that into perspective that's nearly 2x my Twitter volume and 3x Ryan's.
Why is he so active? Because Twitter is a platform that allows Dana to not only grow his business but it allows him to "humanize his brand".
My favorite of their social media strategies is #hunt4UFC where they give away UFC merchandise and tickets in random locations simply by having Dana tweet out clues about where they are hiding. The video clip below is especially powerful. You get to see what happens within 60 seconds of the tweet hitting twitter.
2. Shaq's Retirement
A lot of people saw Shaq's original video on Tout detailing his retirement. In fact over 500k of you watched it within the first 3 hours, but of course the real magic behind all of this was Amy who is seen in the video above with Shaq before he drops the video.
My favorite part of Shaq's retirement was not only did fans find out first, but he leverages social media to remove the red tape thats usually involved in an announcement like this. Instead of seeing a press conference clip on Sportscenter, fans got to hear it first from the man on an overcast day in Miami.
3. Team Bring It
Wait didn't I just see that t-shirt on Facebook. I uttered these words to myself as I watched The Rock roll on out to the WWE ring on RAW wearing his Boots To Asses shirt we had seen previously that morning on his Facebook page.
Previously and probably my favorite of The Rock's social media innovations was when he took to YouTube to do a "shoot" interview about John Cena to increase buzz about their rivalry. It's filmed in a way that feels real, raw and resonated with viewers (500,000k). It's 11 minutes of pure unedited bliss.
As brands continue to adopt great tools like Instragram, Tout, Facebook and Twitter they'll need to continue to find innovative ways to leverage each platform. Social Media presents brands with an entirely new, more visceral way to interact with their customer.
This week we learned of Facebook's internal project (code-named Buffy) to build a Facebook Phone. Much of the tech press laughed: it's too late! It's too crowded! Facebook isn't a hardware company! And so on.
Let's not assume failure for three reasons.
For most people (which may well be outside silicon valley). Imagine walking into Best Buy, purchasing the phone and walking out with a directory of people, contacts, phone numbers, emails, updates, etc.... simply by logging into your phone. That's really, really powerful. A stub of that already exists through their app and it's a function I use all the time when seeking phone numbers:
2. Core apps are already popular and/or easily buildable. Facebook's Messanger app is currently #2 in iTunes (think SMS). Facebook is #5 (and the experience would be tremendously better if natively integrated). Other popular functions can all be at the app level:
- photos: sharing, filters, etc
- contacts: really, really powerful
- email: messages + hooks to Gmail, Outlook?
- music: app ecosystem will support through Spotify, Turntable, Rdio, etc
- calendar & events: hooks into Facebook events + opportunity to build out calendaring tools
- games...
3. Pricing. Remember why Android took market share so rapidly: pricing pushed towards zero, undercut Apple and allowed them to reach a wider audience.... an audience who is probably more attracted to and a better fit for a Facebook Phone.
