We offer website evaluations on the Mint Digital site. I thought it might be interesting to occasionally share them:
This site feels busy. I like the ‘Hotel of the Month’ - this is the content on the front page that works hardest to demonstrate what Accessatlast is about.
Here’s a few areas I’d work on if I was thinking about improvements:
1. The main blurb on the front page should be shorter. The bit of the blurb gets your message across: “Our website contains accessible hotels for the disabled, elderly and infirm. The disabled hotels are visited and assessed by wheelchair users so you can be sure that they are suitable”. I’d think hard about what else is needed.
2. As I understand it (and I may be wrong) your site is primarily about helping people find accessible hotels. It is always stronger to demonstrate what you do than the tell people. With that in mind, I’d be tempted to put the Accessible Accommodation finder on the home page.
3. I was a bit confused clicking on ‘Hire’. I assumed I was going to get a page that would let me hire AccessatLast as a consultancy service. Instead I came to page invited me to fill in a questionnaire.
After chatting to Matt, our aims for the new Business Bricks site were:
- to keep something of the old site’s home-grown feel but, at the same time, to make a better structured site that felt more professional
- to showcase Matt’s great writing without design getting in the way
- to make something that felt solid like, um, a brick
What how have we done? A step forward for Business Bricks? Or have we blown what used to be brilliant? We’d love to hear your thoughts…
The Click #003
I asked a good friend for his feedback on our new Mint Digital site.
Commenting on the people page, he blasted:
“Why are you telling me what you do at the weekend? I don’t give a sh*t about that. I want to know you’re clever enough to minimise my expenditure on your times and materials, creative enough to come up with an interesting solution and focused enough on ‘making it sell’ to be professional.”
I thought everyone agreed that the web is changing the way companies communicate. I took it is read that people want to do business with people, humans want to connect and the web is a great way to make this happen.
Maybe I’ve read too much Seth Godin and got carried away on internet hype.
The Innocent website, which everyone seems to like (well, a couple of clients recommended it last week) is stuffed with personality. Roll over staff faces and you see what they looked like as toddlers. The press section starts: ‘It’s not for us to blow our own trumpet, but… parp parp.’
It works for Innocent, but maybe they are a winsome exception?
Google is a model of professionalism. Occasionally they raise an eyebrow, letting their geeky brilliance shine through. Install the Google toolbar and you are told: ‘Please read this carefully, it’s not the usual yada yada‘. Click on an empty spam folder in Gmail. It says: ‘Hooray, no spam here!’
To communicate a firm needs to show its personality. You’d think I was strange if I introduced myself by saying: “Hi, I’m Andy. I have an unrivalled commitment to quality and professional integrity. I aim to be number one worldwide!” That’s how many corporate sites kick off.
The web makes honesty more cost-effective. Corporate happy-talk and big lies (like ‘Gillette: the best a man can get’) seem hollow. Personality and truth resonate. Saying “Noam has a world record for playing in the world’s longest football match” won’t close any deals for us. But you can’t read it without thinking of Noam as a human being.
And that’s a start.
Make yourself a smooth-riding, pimped-out, date magnet. Over 134 billion options to choose from.
Check our Overhaulin’ game. Enjoy!
Post you ride in the comments —>
We tend to steer our clients away from Flash. It is hard to update. Its flexibility makes it easy to create an unusable mess.
Sometimes you see a great example of how to harness Flash’s power. Like this: http://fes.jfn.co.jp/entrance.html
The Click #002
VIRAL MARKETING WAS A BUZZ phrase in the dot com boom. It’s out of favour now. That’s a pity because it’s still a useful concept.
Viral Marketing means getting people to pass along your message. The thinking is that you are more likely to be persuaded by a recommendation from a friend than a corporation. It’s not a new idea. Advertisers have attempted to seed word-of-mouth campaigns since the 1920s.
(Enthusing hairdressers is one technique that proved successful. They’ve got time to chat and have a wide variety of customers, making them highly contagious. Another is planting rumours on university campuses just before the end of term. Students disperse and pass on the gossip, making it believable in the wider population because ‘everyone’s saying it’. Karl Rove has used this technique to spread dirt on George W. Bush’s rivals.)
In theory, the web makes viral marketing much easier (if you like something you can easily email 10 friends, and they can easily email 10 friends, creating an epidemic of favourable publicity). In practice, it is hard to get right.
1. Traditional Viral
Traditional viral involves making a bit of gee-whizz content (usually Flash or a video clip) that is so gee-whizzy that you just have to forward it on.
It is hit driven. For every success, there are tens of duds. If you subscribe to Chinwag viralmonitor you’ll see a bunch of duds, and the odd gem, float past.
Channel 4’s Gay-O-Meter is a hit. It connects with a forgotten playground taunt in the back of your brain. It is funny. When you are finished, you have an incentive (of sorts) to send it on: ‘The Channel 4 Gay-O-Meter has calculated that Andy is 26 percent gay! Find out just how gay you are: http://www.channel4.com/gayometer.’
For big business, traditional viral is cheap. It costs, say, 1% of a TV campaign. If a viral ads gains traction it will be seen by something approaching a TV size audience. And that audience won’t be making a cup of tea, going to the loo or snogging. They will be opening an email, thinking ‘Why did my friend James send me this? Wow, how cool.’
For a medium-sized business (i.e. any business that wouldn’t run TV ads), it is comparatively expensive and very, very uncertain.
If traditional viral only makes sense for big business, what other options are there?
2. Refer a friend
Your current customers’ friends are a great source of new business.
Cheap calls firm TalkTalk offers you and a friend £20 each if your friend signs up. Organic foodies Abel & Cole gives you a bottle of olive oil for a referral.
3. Competitions
The Click reader Pravin Shah runs CityFruits.com, a fruit and flowers delivery service. He’s got a spark for creating competitions with a viral element.
He runs a reverse auction. If you make the lowest unique bid during the week, you win a bottle of vintage champagne. It’s free to play and you can enter as many times as you want. There is one condition. For each entry, you have to submit a friend’s email address.
Off this, Pravin gets 50 new email addresses a week, each one a personal recommendation.
4. Blogs
Blogs are online diaries. I thought they were a fad but they are going mainstream. The FT recently published an article offering ‘Words of Advice for Corporate Bloggers‘ (subscription required, free if you enter your credit card and then remember to unsubscribe within 14 days. If you don’t fancy the hassle, try this Fortune Magazine article).
Done well, they put a human face on a company’s communication. Done very well, other bloggers link to you, raising your profile almost effortlessly.
To make a blog work, you’ve got to find a niche. The best bit of advice when I started The Click (which is a newsletter about to morph into a blog) was don’t write about website design. That’s why I concentrate on making websites that change minds.
Andrew Goodman does it well. He runs a successful blog on search engines: www.traffick.com. This blog establishes him as an expert in the field and drives business to his online marketing consultancy: Page Zero.
Conclusions
So, what are the lessons?
A viral campaign might sound easy but it isn’t a free lunch. All successful examples have a touch of ingenuity at their heart. They perform a judo role, taking a consumer’s momentum and directing him or her in a way that promotes your firm.
The good news is viral marketing is cheap to try and easy to get started.
The bad news is that this means there are lots of other businesses competing against you.
You need to try different ideas. Test them and tweak them. With luck, you’ll find one that works like magic.
- Noam Sohachevsky, Mint’s creative director, has been locked in a dark room with a towel round his head. He is desperately finishing off a new viral game for Discovery USA.
- Mint Digital has been commissioned to make new websites for Lovell Consulting and The Nursery.
- New Business Bricks website due to launch ’sometime next week’.
