Apple Survey Fail
Uh, what?
That's a rather complicated question for a voluntary survey - I'd imagine most people giving up at this point.
Or in the words of my friend who sent this to me,
This is like a test!
I'm founder and tree-planter at Curiousforest.
In my previous life I played violin in a symphony orchestra, worked at one of the world's largest advertising agencies, then started and sold a popular recipe website.
Is Flipboard Legal?
Interesting discussion over at Gizmodo:
Flipboard, the new iPad app that renders links from your Twitter feed and favorite sites in a beautiful, magazine-style layout, has a problem: it scrapes websites directly rather than using public RSS feeds, opening it to claims of copyright infringement.
It is something of a paradigm shift - bringing convenient scraping technology to the masses. We've had this technology since forever of course, but at mainstream levels of consumption there is nothing much for publishers to be happy about having their content stripped of their ads and massaged onto a different platform. After the initial euphoria dies down ("wow this is pretty!"), Flipboard and their content partners will have some tough questions to ask each other, I'm sure.
I've set up a survey gathering preliminary feedback about Flipboard. If you've tried it out, why not post your opinion? Survey results are revealed after contributing:
Social Norm vs. Market Norm
An excerpt from the excellent Predictably Irrational
My good friends Uri Gneezy (a professor at the University of California at San Diego) and Aldo Rustichini (a professor at the University of Minnesota) provided a very clever test of the long-term effects of a switch from social to market norms. A few years ago, they studied a day care center in Israel to determine whether imposing a fine on parents who arrived late to pick up their children was a useful deterrent. Uri and Aldo concluded that the fine didn't work well, and in fact it had long-term negative effects. Why? Before the fine was introduced, the teachers and parents had a social contract, with social norms about being late. Thus, if parents were late — as they occasionally were — they felt guilty about it — and their guilt compelled them to be more prompt in picking up their kids in the future. (In Israel, guilt seems to be an effective way to get compliance.) But once the fine was imposed, the day care center had inadvertently replaced the social norms with market norms. Now that the parents were paying for their tardiness, they interpreted the situation in terms of market norms. In other words, since they were being fined, they could decide for themselves whether to be late or not, and they frequently chose to be late. Needless to say, this was not what the day care center intended.
But the real story only started here. The most interesting part occurred a few weeks later, when the day care center removed the fine. Now the center was back to the social norm. Would the parents also return to the social norm? Would their guilt return as well? Not at all. Once the fine was removed, the behavior of the parents didn't change. They continued to pick up their kids late. In fact, when the fine was removed, there was a slight increase in the number of tardy pickups (after all, both the social norms and the fine had been removed).
This experiment illustrates an unfortunate fact: when a social norm collides with a market norm, the social norm goes away for a long time. In other words, social relationships are not easy to reestablish. Once the bloom is off the rose — once a social norm is trumped by a market norm — it will rarely return.
If you want more where this came from, another couple of books I recommend are Bad Science by Dr Ben Goldacre (lots of interesting information about placebos and controlled experiments) and Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. Personally I love reading about these kinds of social experiments. Bonus points if the conclusions can be applied to a business or strategic decision making context.
Goodgecko Features Update!
Thank you to all who participated in the Premium Features survey, where we asked what kind of features you would consider upgrading to a PRO Account for.
So we have a few new features to announce...For All Accounts (inc. Free):Social Sharing ButtonsYou now have the option to add social sharing buttons to your surveys, to help you get more responses. The option can be found with all survey options, at the bottom of the Create Survey / Edit Survey page. For All PRO Accounts:SSL Secure Surveys
All PRO Account surveys now have SSL switched on by default, for extra peace of mind. Your response rate may increase too - survey-takers often look to see if a page is secure before responding.Redirect After Completion
PRO Account surveys now have the option to redirect to another website after the user completes the survey, so you can seamlessly redirect a user back to your website. The option can be found with all survey options, at the bottom of the Create Survey / Edit Survey page.So what's upcoming? I don't want to give too much away... but one of the popular choices in the "what would you consider upgrading for?" question on our recent survey was "some kind of automated way to gather survey responses". We're going to be hard at work on that, for what will be a major new feature of Goodgecko :)
Sign up for a Free Account!
Customer Acquisition
Part of the challenge of customer acquisition for Goodgecko is that by nature, survey apps have thousands of different uses.
Therefore, simply talking about a survey app's features / benefits is far too generic an approach for customer acquisition in 95% of cases. You won't effectively address the specific pain point of your landing page visitors.
That's why I've rolled out survey-specific landing pages that try to address a specific pain-point. This recognizes that visitors aren't necessarily looking for a survey app, but they are (for example) looking for a way to create a customer service feedback survey.
Remember that Twitter survey I did from a while back? I found out that most of my followers want me to post more links to interesting content (and less about things I'm eating!). This is super valuable information and I'm trying hard to act on it to make my followers happier :) If you think you could benefit from information like this, why not check out the Twitter survey landing page below:
In summary - improve customer acquisition by segmenting customers and addressing specific pain points. Start with a generic home page and then drill down until you're talking to a customer one-on-one.
MVP vs. Dry Test
The definition of MVP has become far too broad for comfort. Lets try to call a spade a spade.
There has been an abundance of posts recently on entrepreneur communities talking of Minimum Viable Product. Posts such as this one. Posts that talk of their new startup's "MVP", which is nothing more than a landing page in front of a registration page (to test the market potential of an idea). Tim Ferris, Eric Ries and no doubt the respective cults of, would condone this as superb MVP-ing as is often discussed on their blogs. You're all doing it wrong. I'm here to help clear this up:
When You Create a "Fake" Landing Page to Test The Market and Capture Customer Info...
This is called Test Marketing, or a "Dry Test". It is not a new idea, it wasn't invented by the web crowd, and small companies to large multinationals have been doing it for decades. It is useful for testing the initial viability of a product or service on a macro level and is a cheap, accessible form of testing for all kinds of companies - not just technology companies.
When You Create a Beta Product That Early-Adopter Customers Can Use to Give You Feedback and Improve the Product Through Iteration...
This is an MVP. Notice how in this case, you've created an actual product. That's what the P stands for in MVP. It is almost exclusively associated with software companies because thanks to low costs of development / infrastructure coupled with agile methods of product iteration, there is little risk involved in delivering an MVP to a customer base and then quickly improving on it. Rather less so than say, trying to deliver an MVP and then improving on it if yours is a physical, manufactured product where iteration cycles are slow and costly.
One of the key differences between the two is the stage of the customer life cycle you are testing with your approach. The cycle goes Reach, Acquisition, Conversion, Retention (and sometimes includes "Loyalty" at the very end).
With a Dry Test, you can test Reach and Acquisition - are people interested in your product? Can you be heard over a competitors marketing efforts? Do people talk about your product's upcoming launch?
With an MVP, you can test Conversion and Retention - what features do your customers want that will help them stick around (or pay more)? What do your customers think are the best and worst aspects of your product? Is your pricing right?
You cannot test those latter questions on an unqualified group of visitors to a fake landing page. They need to be users (or even better, paying customers) of a product to give authoritative feedback about a product that will influence a feature roadmap beyond your MVP.
You can jump straight to building an MVP or you can Dry Test, then build an MVP. And now, hopefully there won't be any confusion about what to call it.
Singapore
I will sum up my trip to Singapore with one picture.
(approximately 2 mins before this pic was taken, there was a heaping plate of Tian Tian Chicken Rice)
Improve Your Scent
Scent Trail is a bit of an abstract term, but it's a very important concept in web marketing. A strong scent trail produces higher conversions.
In a nutshell, a Scent Trail is the ongoing visual / verbal cues you give to a user, while getting them to perform the action they came to do on your website.
A user can be easily distracted away from your conversion funnel (and ultimately away from your website) by confusing them or not showing them what they want to see - a strong scent trail prevents this from happening.
A scent trail's fragility is most obvious when the user's journey takes them across different media e.g. banner ad to homepage to payment gateway. In a medium sized organisation it's likely that from start to finish the user will be at the mercy of several different departments (copywriting, tech, marketing, banner ad design, UI design...) so taking extra care over the scent trail is of vital importance.
To demonstrate, here's an example of a weak scent trail:
The banner ad is effective in driving traffic, but the landing page is generic, doesn't clearly reinforce the offer / benefit from the banner and the call to action is different.
Here's an example of a stronger scent trail:
There is a stronger relationship between the banner ad copy and the landing page title and content. The call to action is similar in wording to the banner button.
Psychologically it is beneficial for web marketing teams to think hard about scent trails, since it forces everybody to put themselves in the shoes of the user. Instead of focusing on what we want the user to see or do, we must think about what the user needs to see or do.
Ultimately it is a question of relevance - making the landing page, the call to action, the catch copy more relevant to the user based on the exact circumstances of their entry.
5 Things to Check
- Make sure there is consistency. Colours, copy, design should flow logically cross-media from banner to landing page (to infinity and beyond).
- Make sure your landing page quickly answers questions raised by the ad copy (e.g. exactly *how* much more nuts??)
- Make sure your landing page clearly reinforces the offer made in your ad copy.
- Avoid taking the user away from the scent trail (e.g. external link) - try to resolve user's problems in-page.
- Make sure the user's next step is obvious.
Have fun with improving your scent!
Goodgecko!
Remember that Twitter Survey I posted a while back? It had questions like this:
- What kind of Tweets do you like best?
- Do you think I Tweet too much or too little?
- What would you like me to Tweet more about?
If you think you'd be interested in hearing the answers to those questions from your own followers, give Goodgecko a try :)
Goodgecko is Curiousforest's new flagship product. It's a tool for creating online surveys. It's super beautiful, super easy to use and best of all - it's free! No more "14 Day Trial" limitations - Goodgecko comes in a generous Free Account flavour which will always be free, and a Pro Account flavour for when you're ready to upgrade.
It also comes with a set of templates to help you get started with your next survey, so if you want to try out the Twitter survey all you have to do is...
- Sign Up Free on Goodgecko
- Choose "Twitter Follower Feedback" from the EZ TEMPLATE menu
- Customize the survey if you want (add / delete questions, change the colors) and then Tweet the link!
Have fun - I hope you get some good feedback :)
View of a Bun
From Bund to Bun. I'm sure someone can tell me the Chinese name for this. It's a warm bun filled with salted butter and covered with a mysterious sugary powder. It is shamefully perfect as a food that hits all the right spots.
Sent from my iPhone
Posted from 上海市, China
