Customer Experience Is Personal, But Difficult, For That Reason

Forrester Research analyst Harley Manning points out that "customer experience is personal. It comes down to a pilot who holds a plane, a phone agent who makes a problem just go away, or a barista who anticipates a customer’s order."

He's right, of course. But any executive, product manager or operations manager knows that even good advice has to be qualified when put into practice. "Personal" activities do not scale very well, by definition. They are "one-to-one" events. So the problem for many providers of goods and services is how much money and time the organization can afford to spend to really "personalize" a product or experience.

In many cases, in fact, organizations really cannot afford to do much of anything without destroying their profit margins. That might explain why some businesses routinely get lowish markets for "customer experience," "satisfaction" or "customer service." And there are times when a firm has to invest more heavily in such interactions or risk market failure. Most mobile services firms, and Sprint in particular, have discovered that truism in recent years.

But lots of firms probably struggle with the margin implications of "personalized" experience, except for providers of digital goods, where software can be used to highly customize and personalize many aspects of experience, with the end user actually doing the tailoring. Experiences built around physical products are a harder problem, by far.

But even there, as the saying goes, more of the value and experience of most products these days is embodied in software. And some of us would include the content wrap-around to a product as a "software" enhancement. You might include "frequently asked questions" and user forums, blogs about "how to get more value from your product" and so forth as part of the value wrap-around that, if not completely "personal," create a more-personal, more human, "higher touch" feel about a product.

In that sense, content marketing is about more than lead generation or branding. Content marketing can be part of the way a product that is hard to support in a genuinely "high touch" personal way, can be made "more personal."

Customer Experience Is Personal

Twitter Could be Driving 4 Times More Traffic Than You Think

Twitter might be driving 400 percent more traffic to your content site than you believe, despite what your analytics packages are telling you. Most web publishers measure where their traffic is coming from using an analytics package such as Google Analytics, Omniture or Core Metrics. Read more here.

These were good packages in the pre-social media world at helping figure out who was driving your traffic.
Today they’re wrong. Terribly wrong, argues venture capitalist Mark Suster.

Since figuring out which channels or sources are referring traffic is a very important part of determining how a brand allocates its marketing, content creation and other budgets, the answers about referring traffic matter.. It is almost certain that Twitter is driving much more of your referrals than you think.

Referrer analysis is based on the outdated metaphor of the web as a network of links between static pages that could only be navigated by browsers, say execs at awe.sm, which creates and sells analytics apps.

Today’s web is built around social streams and other APIs that are consumed by desktop clients, mobile apps, and even other web services, all of which render referrers obsolete as an attribution mechanism.

awe.sm was built for the modern Web, a network of people, not pages, to track the results of Tweets, Likes, emails, and other sharing activities, no matter what path they follow.

The awe.sm app was built to know with certainty where each link was originally shared, in addition to all the places where it was ultimately clicked (referrers). This approach gives us a unique set of data that demonstrates just how misleading referrer information can be.

The referral traffic one sees from Twitter.com is less than 25 percent of the traffic actually driven by Twitter.
"We looked at awe.sm data from the first six months of 2011 spanning links to over 33,000 sites, and the numbers were surprising," the company says.

Some 24 percent of clicks on links shared on Twitter had twitter.com in the referrer. About 63 percent of clicks on links shared on Twitter had no referrer information at all, and would show up as ‘Direct Traffic’ in Google Analytics.

Some 13 percent of clicks on links shared on Twitter had another site as the referrer (Facebook.com or Linkedin.com).

Twitter is the quintessential modern web service. All the ways to consume Twitter, even Twitter.com, are just clients for the Twitter API, so the failure to effectively track it using such an outmoded methodology as referrer analysis should come as little surprise, awe.sm says.

When a user clicks a link in any kind of non-browser client, from Outlook to a desktop AIR app to the countless mobile and tablet apps, no referrer information is passed for that visit and your analytics software basically throws up its hands and puts the visit in the ‘Direct Traffic’ bucket.

The assumptions behind this fallback behavior show just how arcane referrer analysis is. If a visit didn’t come from another webpage (no referrer data), someone must have typed the URL directly into their browser address bar.

If you’ve spent the last few years wondering why the proportion of ‘Direct Traffic’ to your site has been on the rise, the answer is the growing usage of non-browser clients, especially on mobile. And since 66 percent of Twitter consumption is happening in desktop and mobile clients, it’s safe to say that a lot of your ‘Direct Traffic’ is actually coming from Twitter.

Google hastens Google+ Corporate Account Efforts

Google is accelerating a test of corporate accounts on Google after "thousands upon thousands" of businesses applied for a place in the program, a Google executive said. So far, Ford appears to be the only brand that already has gotten an account.

The company plans next week to choose who'll get into the test and announce their names soon afterward, Christian Oestlien, a Google product manager, said in a Google post last night.

But if you want your company, brand name, school, or celebrity pet to have a place on Google sooner rather than later, you'd better act fast. Google is closing down its applications form on Friday, he said. Read more here.

Brands can apply to be a part of this test until July 15, 2011.  Google says it will close the applications process on Friday (July 15th) at 6pm PST.Apply here, if you can get through. Demand seems to be crashing the server.

Google hastens Google corporate account launch

Spotify Music Streaming Service Launches in U.S. Market

Sometimes Being Second Can Help

2008 was a Mobile Device Inflection Point, Apparently

It appears as though 2008 was noteworthy in several respects. It was the year the global "Great Recession" hit. It also seems to have been the year for big changes in the global mobile phone business.

Notably, it seems to have been the year that the iPhone began to stamp its leadership on the device market. It also seems to have been the year that prior successful feature phone strategies began to unravel.

Read more here

83% of Execs Predict Wide Mobile Payments Adoption in 4 Years

About 83 percent of 1,000 executives surveyed by KPMG in the financial services, technology, telecommunications, and retail industries believe that mobile payment will be widely accepted by consumers within four years, compared to only nine percent who see them as mainstream today. In fact, 46 percent believe mobile payments will be mainstream within two years.

Approximately 72 percent of the executives predict mobile payment to be reasonably important in the future, with specialist online systems building on its leading position as a payment method, and mobile banking and near field communication (NFC) gaining significantly greater traction than today. In addition, 58 percent said they a mobile payment strategy is already in place.

One should typically treat all such forecasts with a bit of skepticism. There is a tendency for observers, no matter how well informed, to overestimate impact in the early part of a new business development of this magnitude. But it suggests a rather broad consensus that something important is growing.

But the results also indicate how much the new ecosystem is bringing formerly disparate industries into cooperation and competition. Typically, disruption occurs when some online service or application threatens to displace only one existing business and set of providers. Mobile payments, and the wider mobile commerce business, has leaders and attackers in multiple industries, perhaps in  five or so distinct fields, having to protect or grow their existing profiles. That will lead to a chaotic and complex adoption path.

The other unknown is whether the business, obviously a scale game, will result in just a few large ecosystems, or whether a common core of platforms will allow many niche providers to become established.

The survey took place in the Americas, Europe, Middle East, Asia/Africa, and Asia Pacific, involving 970 business people, including 250 in the U.S., in primarily the financial services, technology, telecommunications and retail industries.

Read more here.