Full Sterne Ahead
by Jim Sterne
April, 2000
Full Sterne Ahead contains the mostly monthly musings of Jim Sterne, author, speaker, and Web marketing consultant to business and industry.
Welcome to the April, 2000 issue of Full Sterne Ahead.
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This month I check Web development prices in Resource of
Note, hit alt-ctrl-del in While I Was Out, take the full
measure of your Web site in the Crystal Ball, take a
cognitive skills test in The Big Idea, identify the cost
of a customer in You Can Do It, click on One Of My Favorite
Buttons, and get deep into the M-word in Silly Sighting
of the Moment.
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RESOURCE OF NOTE
----------------
This month we have a runner-up.
If you've ever been in sales, you'll enjoy www.salesautopsy.com
You've heard tons of successful sales stories. Sales
managers beat 'em into you, salesreps brag about 'em,
books glorify 'em.
This site is NOT a journal of successful sales adventures.
It is the opposite. Here you will read about disaster -
what goes wrong when you sell. Here you will discover
the best of the worst of these experiences.
This almost went into the Silly Sighting of the Moment, but
I used to be in sales - this is a resource. Oh by the way,
they sell sales consulting.
The first-place Resource of Note for April is the newly
revamped NetB2B site and especially their Web Price Index.
Oh, yeah, they have lots of Web marketing news, weather,
business and sports, but the Price Index is the best thing
in the world when somebody asks me, "How much does it cost
to build a Web site?"
After I hit them with, "How long is a piece of string?" I
send them to www.netb2b.com/webPriceIndex to find out for
themselves.
The Web Price Index benchmarks how much marketers can expect to pay for Web services by asking site development firms.
The participating developers are sent the descriptions of
services, and return the prices they would charge their
clients to develop the projects. The results are then
aggregated into the median, high, and low prices.
Nifty.
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WHILE I WAS OUT
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We were sitting on the tarmac, all 267 of us, waiting to go
to Frankfurt. Just waiting. They never tell you what you're
waiting for, they just make you wait.
Then the power went off.
This was not one of the flight attendants learning the
difference between the reading lights and the cabin lights.
This was not one of those quick switch overs from external
to internal power. This was a total, complete, pitch dark,
silent-as-the-tomb, blackout.
After thirty seconds people were clearing their throats and
shifting in their seats. After a minute, there was the rising
hum of myriad murmurs.
Then the lights came on.
"Ladies and gentlemen, you undoubtedly noticed that we've
been playing with the power on this aircraft. It seems we've
had a very serious alarm in the cockpit telling us that our
landing gear doors would not open."
The passengers were grimly silent.
"Seeing as how they *are* open and we're resting on our
landing gear at this very moment, the pilots thought they'd
try something you probably do every day - they rebooted
the plane.
"In a few minutes, all of the systems on the plane will have
woken up and re-introduced themselves to each other and we'll
be on our way. Thank you for your patience."
The whole flight I was thinking about that old joke,
If Airplanes Ran On Operating Systems
It's no joke.
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THE CRYSTAL BALL
----------------
In his white paper, PQ: The Personalization Quotient of a
Website, Kamran Parsaye, offers up "a framework and a theory
to measure how personalized a system is in terms of the
Personalization Quotient (PQ) and illustrate how the theory
can be used to improve e-service."
To translate for those of us who do not speak PHD-eese, Kamran
came up with a formula to measure just how personalized any
particular Web site really is. He differentiates between
customization, individualization, and group-characterization.
Customization is where you tell the site the stocks you
want to track, the type of news you want to see, the
colors you want set on your screen, etc.
Individualization goes beyond this fixed setting and uses
patterns of your own behavior (and not any other user's)
to deliver specific content to you. E.g. if you have
clicked a lot on finance related items but not on sports,
it will show you more financial news rather than sports
news, without your asking for it.
In group-characterization you receive a recommendation
based the preferences of people "like" you, e.g. books
may be recommended to you based on books ordered by
people with similar interests. Approaches based on
collaborative filtering, case-based reasoning, etc.
focus on the group- characterization measure.
Then he wanders off into world where only mathematicians dare
to tread and uses terms that cannot be repeated in a family
newsletter, much less be reproduced in ASCII. But you can take
a look at the whole thing at: www.novuweb.com/pqwebsite.htm
or where I first found it at:
http://www.personalization.com/soapbox/contributions/parsaye.asp
And what's in the Crystal Ball? Glad you asked.
Everybody is used to Generally Accepted Accounting Principles.
They help you measure the bottom line. But where are the
Generally Accepted Web Success Metrics? The Crystal Ball
suggests that new ways to measure what you're doing online
beyond hits and clickthroughs is going to be critical.
Dot-com company valuations, internal funding for new Web
initiatives, and Web ROI in general, will all be hinged on the
ability to hold a mirror up to nature and say, "Lo!" or even
"Foresooth! Thy Website hath a ponderous Personalization
Quotient and a fantastical Click-to-Close Ratio, Horatio!"
Where will such yardsticks come from? Watch this space.
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THE BIG IDEA
------------
Why on Earth does Web navigation have to be so hard? Why
do designers insist on sacrificing usability for art? It
doesn't have to be that way.
For a series of in-depth, breath-of-fresh-air, both-feet-on-
the-ground articles and insights into how to make your site
easier to use, there is no better resource than
www.useit.com from expert/guru/consultant Jakob Nielsen.
But for a real eye-opening experience in how the human brain
works, check out a company called Information Mapping. This
firm has been applying cognition studies to computer display
modalities for decades (more than three). Besides useful
courses and training sessions, they've hosted a nifty little
Web application that immediately shows you what their
approach can do for you and your information.
It's the "Show Me" Demo. It's a test. See how quickly you can
find a specific piece of information in a memo. A memo's not
a Web page? Think again. It's all about being able to find
things fast. It's about comprehension.
I love the "Show Me" Demo because it proves just how hard/easy
it can be to find what you want.
What's The Big Idea? Use the unique abilities of the Web to get
your point across. The "Show Me" Demo is such a wonderful example. Go take the test, see the difference, and then see how much money your company can save by using their methods.
The "Show Me" Demo makes my little marketer's heart go pitty-pat: www.infomap.com/method/showme
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YOU CAN DO IT
-------------
If you're a Dot-Com and your burn rate is high because you're
building your customer datatbase - fine. Have a good time.
But at some point, the following paragraph from The Industry
Standard has to wake you up from your G1992 Nicolas Feuillatte
Grande Cuvée Palmes d'Or(three-liter) wishes and Beluga dreams:
Less than 5 percent of e-commerce site visitors buy
something. But companies spend an average of $250 on
marketing and advertising to acquire one customer. The
gross income from a typical customer (after operating
costs are deducted from the money the customer spent)
is $24.50 in the first quarter and $52.50 in every quarter
that he or she is a customer. But two-thirds of buyers don't
make a repeat purchase - so the typical e-commerce firm
doesn't make money off of the average customer.
www.thestandard.com/research/metrics/display/0,2799,13016,00
What can you do? Determine how much you can afford to spend
to acquire a single customer who acts, on average, like your
other average customers. Then figure out the best way to buy
those customers. Here's a hint: It might be through direct mail.
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ONE OF MY FAVORITE BUTTONS
--------------------------
The "Make Bullshit" button at
www.dack.com/web/bullshit
Did I say this was a family newsletter? It is!
You just haven't met my family...
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SILLY SIGHTING OF THE MOMENT
-----------------------------
The latest craze? Wireless of course.
The latest domain names to hoard?
www.m-domain.com/page2
(Hint - if you highlight the text as if you were going to do a
cut-and-paste, then you can actually read it...
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How about you?
I'm interested in what is on *your* mind. What issues are
you facing these days? Drop me a line.
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This newsletter is going to be better if it reaches more
people. You can help. The Net is a powerful word-of-mouth
mechanism, so if you know somebody who might like to be on
the receiving end, please point them to www.targeting.com
or have them send a message to subscribe@targeting.com.
And I'll bet you know what will happen if you send a
message to unsubscribe@targeting.com.
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Full Sterne Ahead contains the mostly monthly musings of
Jim Sterne, author, speaker, and Web marketing consultant
to business and industry.
Copyright 2000 - Target Marketing of Santa Barbara
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