Author Archives: winterSmith

Slaying the credibility trolls

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Sonia over at Copyblogger has a great piece on “The #1 Conversion Killer in Your Copy (And How to Beat It).”

What makes people almost buy? What makes them get most of the way there, then drop out of your shopping cart at the last second? What makes them stare at your landing page, wanting what you have to offer, and yet, ultimately, close the page and move on to something else?

It turns out there’s a hideous troll hiding under the bridge. Every time you get close to making a sale, the troll springs out and scares your prospect away. Get rid of the troll and your copy will start converting better than it ever has before.

The ugly, smelly, dirty, bad-mannered troll is prospect fear. And it’s sitting there right now, stinking up your landing page and scaring good customers away.

She does a great job of explaining where the “conversion troll” comes from, and she’s 100% correct. If you’ve grown up in this society, you have probably have a degree of well-justified trepidation about trusting the claims of those trying to sell you something.

I’d go her one better, though, because I feel like the principles she’s articulating when she says that “[t]rustworthiness, transparency, credible authority, lots of high-value content, and just plain old decency are your best weapons” apply to a lot more than the point of sale. Continue reading →

When goals attack! Setting objectives that work for you, not against you

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We can probably agree that it’s good to have goals. In business, especially, it’s good to know where you’re going and to have some mechanisms that help you chart and evaluate your progress.

Increasingly, though, we’re presented with more and more evidence suggesting that our goal-setting can easily go awry, and with dramatically counter-productive results. If you’ve read Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner’s outstanding Freakonomics you probably recall their investigation of teacher-fueled cheating on standardized tests, for instance. While most of us would agree in principle that our educational system should adhere to the highest standards possible, it’s clear that something went badly wrong in that system. If you know any teachers, you may also have heard (in tones ranging from quiet exasperation to unbridled rage) how goal-setting is failing in other places, as well, and for many of the same reasons. Continue reading →

Desperate times call for … measured thinking

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As the poet Robert Burns put it, “The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men / Gang aft agley.” The common military iteration of the sentiment says that no plan, however well devised, survives contact with the enemy. And former heavyweight champion Mike Tyson explained, in the least poetic fashion possible, that everybody’s got a plan until you bust him in the mouth.

There’s a lesson in here for businesses, even those that aren’t involved in actual combat: Nothing wreaks havoc with strategic planning quite like hard times. We’ve all got a plan, a vision, a dream, but these plans have to navigate whatever reality throws at us, and the more adverse the conditions the harder it is to stick to the course.

One of the biggest problems is that when things aren’t going well, any temptation becomes more alluring. Continue reading →

Unleashing a Green stampede within America’s energy industries

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windturbines_greenWhile on the campaign trail, Barack Obama made greening America’s infrastructure a huge priority for his administration. As noted in the Los Angeles Times, Obama planned

to spend $150 billion over the next decade to promote energy from the sun, wind and other renewable sources as well as energy conservation. Plans include raising vehicle fuel-economy standards and subsidizing consumer purchases of plug-in hybrids. Obama wants to weatherize 1 million homes annually and upgrade the nation’s creaky electrical grid. His team has talked of providing tax credits and loan guarantees to clean-energy companies.

His goals: create 5 million new jobs repowering America over 10 years; assert U.S. leadership on global climate change; and wean the U.S. from its dependence on imported petroleum.

He’s currently battling Congress for the appropriations required to turn his vision into reality, and the resistance from Capitol Hill raises once again a question that’s been bouncing around the office here for the last six months: why not revise the tax code to make wind, hydroelectric, solar and other renewable technologies “like-kind” with traditional fossil technologies? This would allow energy companies that wanted to transition into green energy to employ Section 1031 Like-Kind Exchanges, thereby speeding the switch-over considerably. Continue reading →

Bad Business 201: answer the phone

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A few months ago I was in job-hunt mode, and during that period I had chats with a number of companies around Denver (mostly PR and Marketing agencies). In August I accepted a new position on the client side, running a wide range of marketing and PR stuff for a locally based financial services firm.

One of my very top priorities (along with assisting the VP of Marketing with a full-blown rebranding and heading up a complete redevelopment of the corporate Web site) was leading the search for a PR agency. I’d talked to most of the shops in town while doing my job search, so I had a decent idea what was out there, and a couple of the places I had talked with struck me as strong possibilities for my new company. So I put them on my big list and then called them to see if they were interested. Continue reading →

Bad Business 101

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My company is in the process of a major Web redevelopment, and I’m the point guy on the project. Among other things, it was my job to identify, solicit and make the hiring call on the vendor. I’m happy with the company we wound up with, but as the letter below indicates, it was an odd and frustrating journey. The names have been changed to protect the guilty.

_____

Hi Jeff. I wanted to get back to you on your recent bid for our Web redevelopment project. We felt like XYZ Interactive represented an outstanding development resource, and in the end I was convinced that you were the most capable vendor we solicited. Additionally, you came in with the lowest bid.

However, we decided to award the business to another vendor. Continue reading →

Shout out: the Balaya blogger’s conference

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I wanted to take a second to say hello to all my fellow bloggers participating in today’s Balaya conference in Savannah. I’m joining from Colorado via Skype and Tick-It, and am looking forward to learning more about developments with the company’s new social networking platform.

What I’ve seen so far suggests that Balaya has some interesting new ways of integrating the social media experience in ways that improve things for bloggers, users and advertisers.

I’ve written about Balaya before, and suspect I will be again…

The smartest shopping cart that ever lived

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MediaPost reports this morning on an interesting new survey from TNS, which says that “sixty percent of shoppers across the globe believe that they will be able to pay for purchases using just their fingerprint by 2015, rated top by 25% of shoppers.” Never mind the chill that should send down the spine of anyone who values their privacy – we’ll deal with that another day. For the moment let’s have a look at what people expect from The Future®.

Continue reading →

Ad recall?

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Greg Stene, who’s an ad guy and a professor specializing in creativity (and one of the smartest people in general that I’ve ever met) has some interesting thoughts on advertising recall (or the lack thereof) in a new post over at Scholars & Rogues. A snippet:

Secondly, simply because one can recall an ad, doesn’t mean it has had a positive influence in brand preference. Certainly, there is the facile argument that you can’t choose a product if can’t you remember the ad – but that is so disingenuous in its suggestion that the rest of the world (friends’ recommendations, past experience, competing ads we may remember, etc.) has no greater profound effect on our product choice.

A good read from one of the brighter (if lesser known, so far) minds in the world of advertising.