Inset, a box titled Strategic Thinking, MORE TH>N contains excertps from a conversation the journalist and I had a few weeks ago.

It looks like the article is not (yet?) available online. The scanner is still in a box as we’re in the middle of moving house to Brighton. The low-light iPhone snap is unreadable but it is as good as i can do for now.

The credit crunch is pushing shoppers online on the premise of wider reach and deeper savings. As you read this, people who may be new to online shopping are hitting your site, wallet in hand. How do you make sure it is you they end up ordering from? And how do you prompt higher basket values and more frequent purchases?

You could do worse than trying my latest coinage: Automated persuasion. Traditional persuasion architecture techniques address site effectiveness issues by setting commercial goals and applying user centered design techniques to the creation of a commercially effective user experience. In essence, you tell users what the site does and ask them how they’d like it to do it. If applied thoroughly, these techniques are sure to increase your site’s ability to sell as well as the value of each sale. However, applying these techniques thoroughly requires big commitments in terms of time and resources and any change introduced as a result of applying persuasion techniques is liable to input bias (the personal opinions of the users involved) and erosion (the change in attitudes by users over time as a result of long term market development and abrupt external discontinuities such as the current credit crunch).

You can, therefore, invest a lot of money and time in studying a few users and risk timing it wrong, or you can find a way to protect yourself. Input bias can be removed if all of your visitors contribute to the study. Erosion can be eliminated if the study never ends. So, you need a never ending study with universal reach. Impossible? Prohibitively expensive? Actually, much the opposite, thanks to the latest multivariate testing platforms.

Step 1: Collect information. You could let the web evolve: seed a large number of variations, run them all and let the best one win. Or you could collect data about the parts of the site/page/funnel actually contributing to your objectives, and in what way, and target your experiment to those. Collect your figures by running a few static combinations in parallel and comparing results against a large portion of control visitors. You’re not really looking for detail, just an indication of which elements have a high chance of materially affecting your results.
Step 2: Explore. Create as many variations as sensible with the elements identified in the previous step. Don’t test variations that break the brand, the design or just plain look wrong - not in the first few iterations anyway. As the number of variations increases you’ll want to move away from static measurement to a dynamic measurement platform. The free Google Site Optimizer or a similar tool will greatly help accelerate your results in this phase. Leave every combination of variations running for a day or two, then remove the losers and introduce further variations of the winners, and new designs, into the pool. You’re not looking to come up with the definitive design, just to understand how elements on the page tend to relate to each other.
Step 3: Automate. Use business rules derived from the previous step to feed a conversion optimisation engine (i.e. Optimost). The system will start from a set of well performing designs and learn how different groups of customers react to each, using your business rule to develop your designs over time in order to maximise the KPIs you set it. This is not a time-limited test: this system will be running your site all the time, for all your visits.

Conversion optimisation is no magic wand, and the tools still have to mature to a point where their use doesn’t conflict with a site’s accessibility or SEO requirements. Additionally, it is crucial to start from an informed (Step 1) and effective (Step 2) position. No amount of testing is going to make a bad site work well. But it can make wonders to squeeze the last drops of value out of every single visitor hitting a well-designed site. In a marketplace where often the winners take all, this slight edge may be all that stands between you and world domination.

I am quite pleased at the positive reception my contribution got. Happy that the topics I chose were interesting and my style didn’t get on the way of the main message. I was trying a fresher, more dynamic approach today: no text-heavy slides, no script, just a couple of notes about the structure of the talk. I was depending on my ability to elaborate the points as I spoke. I’m happy to report that the gamble paid off and that everyone seemed very pleased with the result. I had the session just before lunch -never an easy spot- yet managed to get the very large audience gripped in their seats, showing no signs of wanting to head for the food trays! It all felt rather good. Well done me.

I want to take a chance to thank e-consultancy for the opportunity. It’s been a great day, and to top it off they’re taking me sailing in a couple of weeks! I guess what Brent said of himself during his slot could also be said of to me: I am a spoiled brat…

Direct insurers talk about aggregators in the same way that corner shop owners talk about Tesco. They’re the enemy - voracious entities bent on world domination, trampling everything in their path. They take advantage of consumer preference to squeeze competitors until they go out of business and suppliers until their margins are paper-thin. As is the case with Tesco, consumers have a very different view:

Aggregators are just one example of intermediator: a consumer’s dream bringing convenience, price transparency and wide reach within their grasp. As a result, most people in the UK today use an aggregator when shopping for car or home insurance. Using an aggregator, the process of comparing insurance quotes becomes scalable: that is, the same effort is required to compare 2 or 2000 prices. That places them in an enviable position - scalability is a discontinuity: a dramatic change of far reaching consequences from which it is impossible to recover. Things will never be as they were before. Prior discontinuities include the printing press, antibiotics, the Internet… you get the picture. Of course the impact of intermediators can’t be compared with antibiotics. The supermarket is a much more appropriate example, hence all the talk about Tesco.

Direct retail brands are right to be worried: a discontinuity fundamentally changes a marketplace, upsetting the status quo and introducing a great deal of risk and uncertainty. Established direct brands -particularly insurers - don’t like risk, but wherever there’s uncertainty there are opportunities. For direct brands that are quick to adapt to the new shape of the market, the sky is really the limit: Intermediators make the buying process scalable. In a scalable market there is no gravity, no restrictions on market share. It is now possible for a winner to take all. So, what’s the winner-to-be to do?

• Brand must understand and accept the main implication of the discontinuity, that there is no way back, to avoid wasting time exploring impossible scenarios. Intermediaries are now part of online retail’s DNA.
• Accelerate our understanding of the new situation: look for similar events in the past (supermarket?) to use as reference model, but
• Don’t be blinded by the reference model. What is different this time around?
  • Transactions are completed on the brand’s website.
  • Regulatory environment.
  • …
• Develop an aggresive change plan. If nothing is like it was before, neither should you.
• Go for it! and do it quickly. If the winner takes it all, the second may take nothing.
  

• Ecommerce just continues to grow in the USA
  Latest US figures show eCommerce growth in adverse economic climate
• 2 good articles on the basics of Affiliate Marketing
  Best Affiliate Marketing programs and Affiliate Marketing Sales tips. Useful intro to Affiliate Marketing for non-eMarketers now that it is quickly becoming the biggest opportunity area in online marketing
• Another entry level article: 7 questions to ask yourself before starting a business blog is a very basic primer for businesses planning to start a business blog. It’s a bit late in the game -today’s companies should be more concerned with Google’s disregard towards their Intellectual Property. Useful nonetheless if someone is now considering the issue of business blogging in isolation
• Taking advantage of the recent attention to SEO on the back of Google’s recent policy changes: this press release on keyword competitive index mashes up SEO, Web 2.0 and other buzzworthy keywords. An excellent example of buzz marketing generating attention for what looks like a product devoid of any value

Cashback sites are blood-sucking parasytes. I’ve recently said that much. In the financial services market they increase cost per sale while adding no value to merchants. They don’t put your brand in front of users that would otherwise not buy from you, nor do they encourage more repeat purchases or higher average basket values. They live off your top line, effectively charging a premium for access to the wallets of those customers you have acquired through your existing marketing activity. They incentivise churn and commoditise the market. They’re evil.

It doesn’t have to be that way. As ever, there has to be a silver lining. While current usage trends offer little hope of offsetting marketing costs against cashback spend today, explosive growth in other mediated channels would indicate that over time customers will use cashback sites as their preferred shopping interface, diminishing the need to spend in other channels.

Google’s algorithms provide today’s shoppers with a proxy for trust. Customers perceive Google as a reputation management system, not just a search engine. Cashback sites users’ have got a much better proxy for this today: their trusted cashback site. While the headline feature of these sites is the fact you get money back, a much interesting feature is the fact that they run extremely lively forums. Their users like to talk about what they buy and will not think twice of thrashing a bad experience or recommending a good one.

Cashbacks are a brand’s social play. Cashback sites have grown entirely by word of mouth, they have a large audience of commited visitors and hold some of the largest collections of user generated content. Cashbacks, it turns out, are very successful social media sites. For years now we’ve been looking for ways for commercial organizations to exploit social media. We’ve tried advertising on Facebook next to nazi propaganda. We’ve tried throwing the brand book out of the window, concocting silly characters and creating profiles in MySpace for them. Heck, we’ve even tried grabbing land in Second Life - land that must surely lie now covered in cobwebs, waiting for the switch to be turned off out of mercy. I think we’ve finally hit gold. Cashbacks are still infant, wild and parasytic. But I have changed my mind about them and so should you. With the right nurturing and guidance, cashbacks could become the online marketer’s weapon of choice in the world of social media.

The time is now. Cashback sites will remain when Facebook is long gone. Think about it. What would you rather get as a thank you for spending some of your ever-shrinking free time, a poke or £50? A few years from now, when Facebook is just a distant memory and Third or Fourth Life once again fail to make a dent, cashback sites will still be going strong and those of us brave enough to support them -and learn to work with them- from the start will have turned the relationship to symbiosis, and will be in an enviable position to benefit from their staying power.

I’m a Renaissance Man: skilled in Marketing, eBusiness & IT and possessed by a keen commercial appetite, I have always found myself at the crossroads between corporate functions. Many corporate structures pre-date the Internet and organizations typically find it difficult to get their different departments (Marketing, Sales, IT, Product development, customer service, etc) to work together. There’s were I come in: wearing the customers’ hat, pulling resources into a virtual group, getting people across different functions to work together and embedding the practice of eBusiness into companies rarely set up to make the most of their online channels.

I recently came across this quote from Bill Buxton at Microsoft:

The renaissance is over - the problems are far too difficult for any one individual to have sufficient knowledge to advance them. On the other hand, the renaissance team is possible and our only hope is the collective - the cross disciplinary team. Engineering and computer science, interaction design, ethnography, marketing and sales.

My initial reaction was dismissal: engineer speak -I thought. Don’t they like to sound like they’re saving the day? Then I read it again, and I got it. I’ve spent so much energy making people work together: people from different backgrounds, with different goals and incentives, with wildly different skills and attitudes…

I have been building Renaissance Teams! Teams that have been consistently successful at adding remarkable value to the organizations that asked me to set them up. Temporary, project-centered teams have worked wonders for me, but if corporations are to go full-on down this route, implications are profound: they’ll need to restructure themselves radically.

Companies must reshape away from a structure that clusters similarly-skilled people together, instead grouping diverse individuals around shared goals. eBusiness departments are best placed to lead the charge: we’re typically the youngest function. Frequently, tiny resources force us to beg, borrow and steal talent internally. We also have some of the most accurate measurement around: we can clearly define, measure and refine our goals and activities based on what customers and markets do.

The corporate world has not yet started this journey -indeed, it has not yet realized this is a journey it must set off on. Opportunities will be huge: small teams bursting with a rich set of complimentary skills are ideally suited to the quick pace demanded of today’s companies. They are also best able to intimately understand their customers and to create products and services that are truly unique - that feel truly personal to those customers. These teams must be tight-knit, their members expert practitioners of their own trade. Renaissance Teams demand top-notch people full time: top talent rather than a flexible pool of resource. Dedication and passion, not scale. Is this something an outsourcing arrangement or an agency are likely to be able to provide?

Will companies rearrange themselves to take advantage of this opportunity? Will large services organizations adapt or dissapear? Will something else, hitherto unpredicted, be the real catalyst to change? I’m not sure yet. In the meantime, I’ll remain a builder of Renaissance Teams. I’ve yet to see one that doesn’t deliver great results.