An interesting development for Facebook group as Techcrunch reports the coming introduction of being able to sort your friends into groups and send appropriate messages to them:

It shows the steady maturity of Facebook from a college network to a full on world network, where friendships, business contacts, family and other types of relationships need to be more fully described. And this is also as much about privacy as it is about organization - users will be able to limit the information that certain friend groups receive

I am trying my first foray into group messaging with Facebook today with the Truly Scrumptious Group. The owner Claire Killick (my wife) is already reporting that people are actually booking appointments by messaging her in Facebook. As the Facebook messaging becomes more comprehensive, there is every chance it could become the e-mail application of choice for many people.

Of course, it needs to fit the profile of customers. I can’t see it working for [say] a ball bearing manufacturer.

That said, with the right business model, and with the news of friends sorting, there is even more value in being able to target messages to specific groups of people, if you can sort them easily and quickly, ie. customers, prospects, suppliers, friends, etc. and, as a small business, the low cost of zero makes it a worthwhile marketing tool to explore. More to follow…

Garri at Holiday Pad commented on my recent post about creating appropriate signage on your website:

Yep, and how many times have I visited holiday rental sites in the past few years to be told, quite emphatically, that my IP is logged and I’d better watch out, or else!

It made me think about the power we have as web masters. Web stats give us information about IP addresses, repeat visitors, etc. to the point that if I actually have spoken to someone, I can see who they are and if they come back.

This proliferates when using e-mail marketing. Using Campaign Monitor, which I do, you can actually see if someone has read your e-mail, which links they looked at and who unsubscribes, etc. (if they open your mail as HTML that is).

I actually demonstrated this once to a client, explaining the ethical issues and the need to allow people to unsubscribe. He actually said that they would call the people who unsubscribe to find out why and see if they could change their mind. This misses the point.

What you do with the information you can get, only pays dividends if you look at the bigger picture. Stats are great for finding generic patterns that can help you make changes to the way you do things. Singling out individuals gets you nowhere.

It also scares your customers if they know how much you can see. I know one client who unsubscribed from our company newsletter when she found out we could see what we could.

Sometimes, it’s best to keep these things from your customers. Make them feel like friends, not like enemies!

I was on a course last week (The Human Element) at a pretty classy business venue, the kind that has a very plush foyer and makes you stand up straight as you walk in.

In the toilet was a sign that bugged me all week and on Friday I worked out what it was.

How polite can a notice be when the instruction is an order and CAPITAL letters are used? I felt a bit patronised considering the location and the type of person who was there (me being one of them).

Now, this post isn’t about my sensitivities, it’s about the need to create the right message:

• For the right audience
• At the right time
• In the right language

How many sales must lost and call-to-actions ignore simply because they use the wrong words in the wrong way.

I am dying to try the Facebook Flyer Pro advertising with a chance to set some targeted adverts on Facebook and only pay for the click-throughs. Starting at approx 5p per click (10¢) it seems a great platform to experiment with.

Facebook Flyer Pro allows for a different type of targeted advert than Google pay-per-click (currently) inasmuch that is profile related rather than search ‘keyword’ related’ (see diagram).

The problem is, and it’s a known problem (I had a reply to my querying e-mail), the Facebook system simply won’t accept a credit card coming up with a ‘field entry’ error on the entry page - one after the other - and I know my card is okay.

I am assuming it’s a UK problem as Rod on Innovation Creators talks about his experience with the platform (he might not have used Pro but I can’t get that to work either).

Come on Facebook - sort it out - I have dollars to give you.

Feedburner is a great tool for sharing your blog feeds and allowing subscribers to read your articles the way they want.

I have also discovered by accident (it’s probably been there for months) one of the Publicize tools within Feedburner called BuzzBoost,which allows you to take that feed and simply insert it onto another website as HTML.

A bit like I have with my own…

On the high street, retailers spend enormous amounts of money getting their customer experience right. But, this doesn’t necessarily translate to the web, for large and small online retailers. Here’s three big problems highlighted this week…

Failing To Provide Contact Details

In a recent survey by E-Consultancy:

• 60% of UK online retailers provided no telephone number on their website
• 43% displayed no business address
• 39% had no contact email address
• 30% of sites profiled provided no telephone number or email address

To reinforce the importance of these failings, they highlight a recent UK survey suggesting that 50% of shoppers wouldn’t buy online without contact details.

No Delivery Options

Highlighting the same survey on Retail Bulletin, 11% of online retailers provided a free postage or delivery service while 15% mentioned offering a next day or Special Delivery service. Of the delivery companies named on the websites Royal Mail services (including Special Delivery) was identified in 17% of cases.

One of the big problems with have with our online shop is deliveries. The costs to us as a retailer are quite high and because of the unreliability of the postal service we moved over to registered post at an additional cost. Because we offer free delivery on orders over £30, we need to make sure it gets there. But, it is amazing how many customers do not take responsibility for the delivery at all.

We have had customers contact us that they have not received the parcel leaving us to chase it, only to find out that they weren’t there to sign for it and a note had been left by Royal Mail. This sometimes results in having returned post, only for us to have to pay again to re-deliver the products.

The new version of Boomerang from The Escape should allow us to explore different carriers, but as Jacqui mentions on The Escape Blog, some carriers are becoming more inflexible in terms of their services.

I Can’t Find The Checkout

You’d be surprised how obvious (or not) a problem this is, especially with third party tools and payment systems. I was sent to a shop last week and didn’t know where to start even looking for products.

[it’s actually funny because as I write this article, I just zipped back and there is anchor text in the main body but last time I just couldn’t see it. I wonder how many customers they loose through that?]

Bob Chieffo has some ideas how you could improve this.

We often hear about giving people choice, especially to encourage debate and deliver variations of opinion; even to offer customers choice. Let’s face it, we’d all rather make a choice, even if our choices are limited.

Sometimes though, as a business, as a supplier, or even in personal interaction you just need a ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Encouraging a direction response from another human being can sometimes be hard in those instances, in fact Seth Godin’s example would certainly make a hetrosexual wearer of jeans think long and hard about what they wore with the request…

When I was in college, a local human rights group posted up signs around campus one Monday. They read:
On Wednesday
Wear Blue Jeans
If You Are Gay

It does very much force the issue though. As the asker of a direct question you may not get the response you wanted, which is worth bearing in mind before getting too brash, but at least you’ll have an answer. And, the very brashness of the question is the thing that would have forced out a reply, rather than a fence sitting situation.

With the ‘chosen one’ now departed and the football club with the deepest pockets in the UK, if not the world, looking a little lost it makes me wonder how much freedom and power money actually gives you in business.

Here you have a football club owned by a man with so much money that Chelsea is almost like a hobby and he has placed such high expectations on what he expects in terms of success that, in my opinion, they won’t ever be enough. He keeps throwing money at it to get the ‘best’ but it’s not working. Sport is about preparation, tactics, optimisation of performance and, in the case of football, teamwork.

Compare it to my team, Arsenal, who sold [arguably] their best player during the summer and have a team often referred to as ‘kids’ at the moment. Arsenal actually made a profit of £10 million in transfers over the summer and from what I have seen of them this season, they have created the best Arsenal ‘team’ I have seen in a few years. All that, without the big-name signings and throwing too much money at it.

Part of the fun for me of running a business, running a campaign for a client, or creating a new website are the restrictions. Yes, I might battle like hell against them at the time but it adds to the excitement, creates the challenge and adds to the value of the return.

How much effort gets lost because money is the cushion to fall back on; how much creativity lost, and innovation?

You could argue that money gives you the room to take risks but any business needs to take risks and the risks where money is involved usually revolve around the spending of the money, rather than return.

I love this headline tool at the Advanced Marketing Insitute that allows you to enter a headline and find out the emotional marketing value (EMV) of the words you use.

This headline gets 50% with me having tweaked it from it’s original 16.67% of “Write headlines that draw people in”

Through a meeting with a prospect last week, I was sent a PDF with some SEO charges of a competitor - Blimey!

In our work at The Escape, I am NOT happy unless a website we built has been made search engine friendly as a matter of course - correct tagging of pages (meta title, H1 heading and meta description). I would feel like I haven’t done my job fully. Not all clients get or appreciate this but I have my own standards.
But, to see that some companies charge for this - £35 per page! That’s based on you supplying the info. It’s an extra £150 per page for the research. So, if you had a ten page website with half the pages needing optimisation, that’s £925. Plus £125 to submit XML site map to Google.

Like I said, at The Escape, we do this as a matter of course and, it doesn’t mean I am right. Over-delivery on web projects is something I am currently happy to do, especially for people who recognise this but maybe this is where additional revenue can be made?

It is hard to justify the added value of search engine optimisation because there are no guarantees making it quite a hard sell and, at the end of the day, that value is only realised if results come. Client mindset still says the results are based on visitors, rather than my view - defined call-to-actions.

That’s why I get confused on the issue I guess and, based a few meetings I have had recently, so are clients.