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Archives for June 2010

What Makes for Effective Investor Relations Sites? Part 19: Help Your Most Frequent Visitors

There is a business rule of thumb known as the 80/20 rule which holds that 80% of effects come from 20% of the causes. For example, in retail, it is quite common to see that 80% of a store’s sales come from 20% of the items offered in the store. (Technically the rule is known as the Pareto Principle, after the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto.) I have not seen any studies as to whether this principle holds for web site visitors, but given how widespread the application of the rule is, I see no reason why it should not. In which case, it makes eminent sense to make life easy for your website heavy users.

If a person is coming to your investor website multiple times, why not to let them set up what information they wish to receive in a single spot. You can do this by allowing visitors to set up their own personalized page with the links to the information they want to update.

This is something that Centrica, the UK energy company does. Set out below is a screenshot of a page they make available to web site visitors which allows customization of content.

Centrica

A quick perusal of the site (shown below) shows that the company lets visitors choose from a large range of subjects – over 20 – to achieve the mix of information desired.

Centrica

As a finishing touch, once the data has been set up to feed to the personalized page, the site allows the reader to customize the look and feel of the page. For example, boxes can be dragged and dropped to suit the viewer’s preference. Certain feeds, such as the Presentations and Financial results boxes allow the reader to edit the number of events they wish displayed. The effect is to achieve what marketers call mass customization – a mass-market product such as a web page, which can be tailored to the unique needs of each user.

Overall, it’s quite slick. It should allow the 20% of a company’s website visitors that account for 80% of the screen views to get the information they want quickly and easily, avoiding the frustration involved in chasing around on a web site looking for data. And you never want to frustrate your best customers.

In this series:
Previous post: What’s Your Strategy?
Next post: Annual Reports

Cinderella’s Career


Cinderella

As everyone knows, Cinderella worked hard while the stepsisters just lounged around.  But her industry was not appreciated!  At best she was ignored, at worst ill-treated . . .

Sometimes it seems as if the corporate Careers site needs a fairy godparent.  In many cases Careers is the hardest working part of the company website, since it not only promotes the employer brand and woos prospective employees, but also provides job-search functionality, gathers online applications, and may even carry out testing and pre-screening.  Yet the Careers site often receives very little attention or appreciation within a company, and even less from the HR establishment at large.

So it’s nice that the annual ERE.net competition includes a dedicated award for the “best” Corporate Careers Website, and also considers the Careers site in the Employer Branding and Best Function categories. Analysis of this year’s winners and finalists is in four parts—start here and follow the links on the right of the ERE.net screen. But you’ll have to go back to Part 1 every time, as the links only appear on that page . . .

Also on ERE.net, another excellent checklist from John Sullivan, this one on authenticity in recruitment messaging.  Many of his points relate to the Careers site, so the article is well worth a read.  But you’ll have to wait (or hunt) for the Part 2 that’s promised by the title “Part 1”!  At least I couldn’t find the second installment . . .

If you noticed a theme developing in those last two paragraphs, right again.  Although the ERE.net website is home to a lot of good material, it’s not a great exemplar of online organization and user-friendliness.  Seems like another case in which a hard-working website doesn’t receive the attention it deserves!

Finally, there’s the question of what happens after Cinderella leaves the ball.  Suppose that every corporate Careers site on earth were magically transformed to perfection, today.  What next?

One hopes that Cindy herself lived happily ever after—but that will not, cannot, should not be the fate of any website.  Technology moves on, really fast.  For example:  Intuit, which created an extensive and expensive all-Flash Careers site last year, may already be regretting that it didn’t choose a more mobile-friendly development approach.  (And the site is also quite slow, at least on my desktop.)

HR guru Kevin Wheeler writes that our current model of corporate recruiting is doomed, as companies progressively outsource non-core functions. So what does that mean for the Cinderella website?  Stay tuned.


(That’s Cinderella rethinking her career plan in an 1865 version of the story by the Brothers Dalzell.)

Calculating the Value of Facebook Fans

currency-chartA recent study by Syncapse and Hotspex analyzed 20 top brands on Facebook and the activities of their Facebook fans in an effort to calculate the value of each one of those fans.  The average value of each fan is valued at $136.38 according to the study.

But you should approach that number with caution.

One of the biggest challenges for big corporations trying to implement social media marketing strategies is calculating the elusive return on investment (ROI) of those efforts.  My position on social media marketing ROI is a bit different than the traditional ROI metrics that we’ve all learned over the years as we calculate response rates, lift, and all those other easily quantifiable success metrics that have been developed over the years.

However, social media marketing is still in its infancy, and the traditional hard metrics that marketers use to justify budgets to corporate executives don’t really apply to social media marketing.  Instead, social media marketing is more closely aligned with brand building.  Both offer incredible value to an organization, but that value is difficult to measure in hard numbers.

That’s where what I call the shift from calculating Return on Investment as the form or ROI to Return on Impression as the form of ROI is necessary to evaluate social media marketing success.  You can read my complete post about the new social media marketing ROI on the Yahoo! Advertising blog, but I’ll recap the highlights here:

  • Calculating the success of social media marketing depends more on soft metrics than hard metrics.
  • Those soft metrics can be valued in two forms of impressions: eyeballs and perceptions.
  • Eyeball impressions are the quantifiable half of the impressions soft metric and refer to the number of times branded content or messages are actually viewed by the online audience.
  • Perception impressions are the immeasurable half of the impressions soft metric and refer to the added value that your branded content and messages deliver to the online audience and how that content and those messages affect their perceptions of your business, brand, and products.
  • If your social media marketing success or failure is measured solely by click-throughs or actual direct sales, then you’re heading down a path that will never allow you to fully leverage the power of the social web in generating word-of-mouth marketing, brand advocates, brand guardians, and brand loyalty.

What do you think about calculating hard metrics related to social media marketing initiatives?  Does relying on hard metrics give an accurate reflection of what’s happening or is it doing a disservice to the intrinsic value of social media conversations to rely on hard metrics alone as it does with brand valuation?  Leave a comment and share your thoughts.

Image: stock.xchng

Economic Indicators: Pink Ties and Trash

economic indicator: pink tie

I must admit, I follow announcements of official indicators that measure where the economy is going. These are very involved data gathering and analytical endeavors. Currently they give no definitive picture.

I started to think that there might be other measures that are not compiled, yet might give less analytical but subtle indicators that would give an unofficial account of where the economy is headed. Then I found this article  “Economy: These Below-the-Radar Indicators May Signal Growth” on Bloomberg BusinessWeek. Seems that there are some uncommon economic indicators such as–

  • diesel fuel sales at roughly 7,000 truck stops across the country–climbed 3.1 percent in May from April, the largest monthly increase since February 1999
  • train shipments of waste and scrap materials–increasing at the fastest pace in 16 years
  • electricity usage and the service economy, ( this is compiled by the Edison Electric Institute releases weekly represents certain aspects of the service sector, such as office and retail space). Richard DeKaser, president of Woodley Park Research in Washington, D.C. says–

“When you’re filling up office buildings, and office buildings are working overtime—and the same for retail stores—that’s a good proxy for those sectors.”

This indicator for the week ended June 5 was up 10.8 percent from the same week in 2009.

  • While the the typical employment data is dismal, optimism in recent data concerning temporary workers. The May 25 report by the American Staffing Association showed May staffing employment up 3 percent from April and up 19 percent from a year earlier.

Then there is this article published by Forbes: “Uncommonly Clever Economic Indicators”. These indicators are a bit more interesting–

  • pink ties Bob Allsbrook, chief economist for Regions Bank, in Birmingham, Ala., looks for wisdom in neckwear–specifically, pink ties. … “Since the start of the summer(2009), I’ve seen lots of men wearing pink and fuchsia colored ties,” he notes.
  • the size of restaurant trash bags : Americans are eating out again, and that’s a good sign. You can see that trend in the size of the garbage piles behind restaurants
  • denim jeans sales –NPD market research firm says

    “Jeans are a relatively cheap investment and one of the first things consumers buy when the economy starts to bounce back. … denim sales have already started to pop: For the six months from January to June, denim sales jumped 5.3% to $7.6 billion vs. the same period in 2008.”

  • corporate hotel cancellations — cancellations for corporate meetings and events declined substantially. However, major event planners are booking space for 2010, 2011 and even 2012.

This article includes other interesting metrics such as shopping bags and Christie’s wine auctions.

Want to find out where the economy is headed? Put on a pink tie, get in your diesel truck and drive behind some restaurants.

The Global Talent Picture


Globe

Warm off the press:  Manpower Inc.’s 2010 Talent Shortage Survey.   After checking in with more than 35,000 employers across 36 countries and territories, Manpower found that:

Although the current global economic situation has increased the number of overall job seekers in labor markets worldwide, there is still a notable talent shortage in many countries and industry sectors. So the immediate problem is not the number of potential candidates. Rather, it is a talent mismatch: There are not enough sufficiently skilled people in the right places at the right times.

The biggest gaps are in Japan (76%), Brazil (64%), Argentina (53%), Singapore (53%), and Poland (51%).  In the Americas overall, 34% of employers are challenged to fill some positions, but that’s down a bit from 2009, and still a little below the global average.  North American employers are in much better shape than their South American counterparts, with only 14% having problems in the U.S. and 21% in Canada.  Whether North or South, technicians are the hardest to find, with secretaries/admins in the second position, followed by laborers and sales representatives–and those top categories remain similar across other regions as well.

As for Europe overall:  Ireland (4%), the United Kingdom (9%) and Norway (11%) are doing just fine in the talent match department, but in Italy, Germany, France and Greece 20-30% of respondents report gaps, with Sweden, Spain, and the Netherlands all hovering in the teens.

Although the report includes a category for the Middle East and Africa, it seems to be empty—i.e., there is no information included for any country in those regions except South Africa, where the talent match gap is reasonably small, at 16%.  On the other hand, Asia and the Pacific are above the global average, with high numbers across the board for a regional average of 41%.  That’s a substantial increase of nine percentage points over 2009.  Japan’s sky-high number leads the region, with Australia and Hong Kong also problematic at 45% and 44%  respectively.  Bright spot: India at just 16%.

World of Work’s Newsline offers this analysis from Manpower chairman and CEO Jeffrey A. Joerres:

Employers have gotten more specific about the combination of skill sets that they are looking for, not only seeking technical capabilities in a job match, but holding out for the person that possesses the additional qualities above and beyond that will help drive their organization forward.

Job seekers who want to be competitive will have to develop higher skill levels, Joerres concludes, as companies look for ways to do more with less.  Uncomfortable reality:  The employment future could include both an increasing number of unfilled positions and a rising level of unemployment.


(Our brightly colored globe is an “orthographic projection, centred on 40 degrees S, 170 degrees W, with shoreline data from GSHHS.”)

Nielsen Charts World Cup Perceptions from 7 Countries

As the World Cup got underway, Nielsen published an interesting blog post last week that shows what people are talking about online related to the sporting event in seven different countries: the United States, the United Kingdom, South Africa, Australia, Spain, Germany, and Italy.  You can take a look at the United States and United Kingdom charts below, and follow the link to read the full article (complete with all the charts) at the NielsenWire blog).

worldcup-buzz_united_states

worldcup-buzz-uk

In the United States, two things stand out as particularly interesting from the Nielsen chart.  First, the U.S. team was not the most talked about team in the U.S., and second, the power of David Beckham continues in the U.S.  Even though he’s out of the World Cup due to an injury, people are still talking about him — a lot.

Otherwise, most conversations within each country are about the teams and players from those countries, which is not surprising.  However, it’s not the conversation topics that I found most interesting in this post from Nielsen, but rather, it was the way the charts clearly show segmented conversations based on geography.  That’s some cool data that businesses should be gathering and applying to their own brands.

Let’s face it — marketers always have to show visuals and hard numbers justifying the various initiatives they need to secure budget dollars for each year.  Wouldn’t a chart like these help executives who still don’t fully appreciate the value of online conversations about brands get a better perspective?  It’s just another tool you can put in your marketing toolbox to help build the case for social media marketing investment.

Charts like these prove that people are talking.  As marketers, our job is to find ways to leverage those conversations and keep them going.