Twitvertising?

This week, I realised that Twitter is in danger of SPAM. Or will it be an enrichment? How Twitter can be used for targeted advertisement.

This week, my car needed a checkup. Since I do things digital as much as possible, I made the appointment with the garage by internet. That went quite well. Because I needed to transport quite a lot of stuff, I asked for a bigger car. I have a Volvo V50 myself, and they gave me a Volvo XC70 AWD T5. That's quite a car! I was very happy, 'cause the stuff I needed to transport was so much, that it hadn't fit in my own car. It just fitted in the XC70. I was happy with the car, because it still was very fast and had no problem with the weight.


After I returned the car, I tweeted this message:

"Today I was happy: car was serviced and the temp car was a brand new Volvo XC70 - happy me!"

...Image my surprise - yes, I really was surprised! -  When I got this reply:

That means Dealer24x7 is running an engine to search tweets about car brands, and then replying to it! How brilliant is that!

Of course it can mean, that if more -and also sleezy- companies and advertisers start to do this, Twitter might get flooded with advertisements. I wonder what happens. What I know for sure: Twitter will live on for some time...

Customer Experience and User Experience

"The customer is always right"

"Know thy user, for he is not thee"

A marketeer looks differently at an online customer than a web designer. A Usability Analyst looks differently at an online user than a web designer. So do marketeers and Usability Analists look the same way at an online user?

In the real world: they don't. But I think they should. We all know that a website is not a pure technical thing, neither a pure marketing and sales thing and neither a pure user thing. These three forces work together and since the beginning of the internet, the technical forces always been stronger than the others and in the last few years the marketing and sales force has become one of the strongest forces: we need return on investment!

Lately, organisations start to realize that Usability of a website is very important. If your website is not usable they will leave. And even worse: if your competitor's website is more usable, they'll use that one because the User Experience is better!

And a good user experience is the basis for a good customer experience. For a good customer experience you need to look at the whole customer life-cycle. Huub Esten, my collegue at Capgemini says: "You need to be the best in one part and at least as good as the others for the other parts of the process". Especially when your company does online business, awareness of Usability and User Centered Design is key.

In his latest "Alertbox", the Usability guru Jakob Nielsen told about a research where they found that if your webpage has about 111 words on it, about 50% will be read. With more words that percentage drops fast. So tell that to the marketing people: your customers will read only half (or less!) of what you need to say to them.

References:

• "Wat doet de Customer Experience Methodiek?" (dutch), Telecommerce Magazine, Jaap van Sandijk
• "How little do users read?", useit.com Alertbox, Jakob Nielsen

Measuring and ranking Rich Internet Pages

Does the current model of measuring page popularity, based on the number of page hits fit the single page interfaces RIA applications have? Answer: no.

Nielsen/Netratings (Global leader in internet media and market research) are currently going to change their way of measuring page popularity.

For more information on this, use the following links:

Marketing Pelgrim: The problem with measuring time spent on a web site

The New York Times: Nielsen Revises Its Gauge of Web Page Rankings