The pulse of Alexander Interactive

A recruiter in New Jersey got ahold of my contact information last year. He called and managed to learn from me that I do some of Ai’s hiring. I did not choose to use him for any of our staffing.

Since then, he has called me reliably, every two weeks, to see if I need him yet. Last fall I got tired of his calls and told him, flat out, to please stop calling. We have no relationship and his repeated attempts to wear me down were not working.

He ignored this request and keeps calling. Today was his most recent ping. I now recognize his phone number on caller ID; I don’t pick up when he rings me and I delete his voice mail without listening. And still he calls. (It’s been so long that I feel like I blogged about him once before.)

What percentage of a user base gets worn down by this tactic? Is it worth alienating a high percentage of a potential consumer segment in the hope of finding a sale?

I’m sure my recruiter/stalker has found that repeated calls work on some people sooner or later, but in the meantime, I’ve memorized his name and sworn never to work with or recommend him. Is that good business?

This is a good thing for an online marketer to consider before buying email lists and defaulting signups to opt-in.

G’day mate! I am pleased (and a wee bit freaked out) to be flying to Sydney tonight to participate in Online Retailer, Australia’s leading ecommerce conference. With more than 4000 confirmed attendees, Online Retailer looks to be compelling and exciting.

I hope to be part of that excitement, as I am presenting at the conference on the ROI of user experience. It’s a frequent topic at Ai and one I’m looking forward to sharing. I am also doing live site critiques, my stock in trade at the Internet Retailer conferences, and joining in several other discussions and events.

If you’re in Australia, drop me a line, or swing by the conference and see for yourself.

I called US Airways the night before a recent business trip to ask about a travel detail I couldn’t find online. (I’m not name-checking US Airways just to pick on them; it’s part of the story.) Their customer service is obviously outsourced to an overseas location–I had to call twice, and both representatives had trouble speaking clearly and understanding my question.

But this isn’t about offshoring, or customer service reps whose native tongue isn’t English, which doesn’t offend me. (I certainly couldn’t administer tech help in Hindi.) Rather, it’s about training.

Upon completing my second call, the US Airways CS rep said to me, “Can I help you with anything else today?”

“No, that’s it,” I replied.

“Thank you,” she continued, “for calling Use Airways.”

Use Airways. I headed to the airport the next morning still shaking my head about the woman who doesn’t know her employer’s name. Shortly after taking my seat on the plane, a flight attendant got on the PA system.

“All electronic devices must be turned off at this time,” he said. “If you do not turn them off and put them away, we will return to the gate and deplane you, and you will have to rebook on a later flight.” (Emphasis his.)

My seatmates chuckled at his earnestness, but I just thought about my phone call. In the span of a few hours, I encountered two different but striking examples of poor training and comprehension by consumer-facing employees.

My trips on US Airways have largely been pleasant and comfortable. But what is the brand impact of these employees’ mistakes? How many other people notice what I notice, and book their next flight on another carrier?

Airline flight attendants routinely say, “We know you have a choice.” What they–and their management team–need to say is, “We know you notice. And we’re trying our hardest.”

Tired: “the elevator pitch.” Also: escalator pitch, Reader’s Digest version, treatment, etc.

Wired: the Twitter pitch. Call it the SMS pitch if you prefer. It’s the new “25 words or less”–give me the summary in the length of a tweet.

Modern, timely, fun. Plus the first ten times you use it you’ll get to explain the term to your audience and lighten the mood of the room.

Welcome to Ai 2010!

The new alexanderinteractive.com website is a contemporary new home and showcase for Ai. With simple navigation, big images, proud data points and loads of case studies, Ai’s new site matches the standard of excellence we bring to our client projects.

This site has been a long time coming. As the cobbler’s children have no shoes, so too did we have a patchy old website. Dating to 2006, our company site had received one light refresh in four years, despite several attempts to do more.

We actually got a lot of compliments on our site—as befits our sensibilities, the old Ai was user-friendly, fairly intuitive and full of friendly plain-speak. But we needed something that matched the style and utility of our more modern work. Thus the new Ai, with its wide pages, new copy, and clean, inviting layouts.

Feel free to explore everything the new Ai site has to offer. We’re proud of our new home. C’mon in.

Alexander Interactive, having recently relaunched the Internet Retailer website, is pleased to be attending the Internet Retailer Conference & Exhibition 2010 in Chicago. The conference is shaping up to be a great one and we’re excited to be there.

You’ll see Ai on the expo floor in booth 356, where we’ll be giving live, on-the-spot critiques of attendees’ websites. We will be around the conference all week, and around everyone’s necks, too–look for Ai on the IRCE lanyards.

And, of course, visit the Ai-designed internetretailer.com for conference news and updates.

PSFK has published a report (disconcerting, damning or riotous, depending on your station) showing that many top luxury brand websites don’t function on the iPad. (That image above is the Prada home page.) Given that Apple buyers are often luxury product consumers, this is a glaring omission for some of the world’s strongest brands.

The iPad is a reminder that the web is now rapidly moving away from the “build a website, let it run” strategy. A growing diversity of web-enabled devices is going to force companies to build websites that make usability the prime directive. The direct problem is the use of Flash, but the real issue is the lack of universal accessibility.

The growth in broadband mobile networks has led to rapid adoption of web access by consumers. Smartphones are nearing 20% of the American cellular marketplace and are expected to reach 30% soon. Ai clients saw growth in mobile traffic as high as 600% over 2009 alone.

The iPad is the latest and most profound bellwether in this usage shift. Contemplating how to service users with 1.5″ BlackBerry screens was one thing; dealing with iPad users, with their 1024×768 screens and just-like-a-laptop-only-better expectations, is entirely another. And while the iPad may be just a first step in an evolution, a million unit sales in a month suggests someone found the keys to the steamroller.

Computers are not going away; manufacturers shipped 68 million of them in 2008 alone. More important is the fragmentation of the marketplace, which, years after homogenizing almost entirely in Internet Explorer for Windows, is now an open landscape. Four different browsers have substantial (greater than 3%) market share. And dozens of devices are now displaying web pages in displays ranging from 320 to 1920 pixels in width, both with and without Flash.

The requirement for 2010, then, is to adapt to the fragments. Good websites need to actively identify visitors’ platforms and deliver user-centric results–not just the Amazons and Facebooks of the web, but the many small- and medium-size sites that encourage exploration and engagement. As platforms continue to diversify, creating flexible, accessible sites is a must.

I was struck this weekend by the positioning of a question in the New York Times Magazine’s Ethicist column. A person was referred by her doctor to a lab partially owned by said doctor. The doctor didn’t disclose his stake, and much hand-wringing about the omission ensued.

Based on the phrasing of the question, Randy Cohen’s ethical guidance was firm: “That’s why a physician should not send patients to facilities in which he has a financial interest. It is neither prudent health policy nor good medical ethics to put a doctor or a patient in such a position.”

But the inverse is also true. Patients should want to go to facilities in which the physicians have a financial interest. The doctors have a vested interest in providing their customers with the same professionalism and quality of care that they give in their own offices.

This is true in any industry. Think about hair salon that opens a spa, the deli with a catering business, the ad agency with a media buying arm. Businesses create corollary interests for financial purposes, yes, but the implied message is one of consistent performance. Indeed, that’s often the hook behind the sale.
The error in the Ethicist column is therefore about the omission, not the referral. How might the answer have been different if the question were phrased this way (my edit in bold):

“A specialist recommended that my wife get a CT scan and suggested that she use a lab in which, the physician clarified, he had an interest. She wasn’t required to use that lab, and there was no reason to question its quality or his calling for a scan. I’m O.K. with this lab — I say you either trust the specialist or you don’t — but my wife is not so sure. What do you say?”

Suddenly the question shifts from cagey profiteering back to trust. As the questioner remarks, if the patient (client, party-thrower, CPG marketing manager) trusts the adviser, the recommendation of a related business can be more trustworthy, not less.

All businesses can benefit from this transparency, ecommerce sites among them. A strong parent company or sub-site can give added validity and confidence to customers. Don’t hide facts when they’re not worth hiding; empower people to make well informed decisions. Providing knowledge can build trust and boost the bottom line.

Interesting point from Scott Porad on optimizing page load times. Hint: it’s not about the images; it’s about the http calls.

In other words, the frequency of visits as a factor in reducing empty cache visits is counteracted by the frequency that a site’s content is updated. Of course, this makes sense because unless a site updates it’s content frequently users don’t have a reason to return frequently.

The bottom line: reducing HTTP requests continues to be most important for improving site performance.

Scott found a research report that notes 20% of users have no cache, making local caching a moot point. (I know this first-hand; on my creaky old Windows box at Clarins, I set my own cache to zero, because it minimized the internal RAM and hard drive needs and sped up page rendering.) More important, especially in this era of Ajax, is to minimize server requests, which create the bottlenecks.

Considering Google’s new inclusion of site speed in PageRank this is going to be a key performance metric in 2010, and one to monitor regularly.

The news that Twitter is getting into the advertising business has exciting implications for companies ready to harness real-time conversations for ecommerce activity.

Companies with products and services to sell will be able to tap into the immediacy of conversations on Twitter and provide targeted offers in real time. Frustrated with a travel booking? Post a tweet and watch as a travel agent enters your tweet stream. Bouncing around ideas on which shoes to buy? Watch an ad for Zappo’s appear at the perfect moment.

If executed well, it’s the kind of advertising that consumers might admit to enjoying. More relevant than display ads and less intrusive than mobile, Promoted Tweets–once the kinks are smoothed out–could be downright useful.

Consider: C.C. Sabathia of the New York Yankees pitches another great game and completes his no-hitter. People (including, probably, this author) are tweeting rapidly about the feat, starting in the middle innings and hitting a crescendo around the end of the game. As the volume hits its max, Steiner Sports (an Ai client) inserts ads into the chatter: “Buy Sabathia’s game-worn jersey from his no-hitter! Get details now.” Instantly thousands of people are tuned into an item that might appeal to them at the moment of its maximum appeal. It’s search marketing for conversations.

Twitter’s conversations are essential, of course, and Promoted Tweets will have to be obvious without being intrusive. With the right execution, though, they will be huge.