BlobFisk.com

Large websites spend a lot of money on online marketing. Millions upon millions spent on ad buys, keywords buying, affiliates etc. It’s primary purpose is to drive traffic to a site – lead generation, in sales speak. Sadly, and this is a topic for another time, a fraction of what is invested in getting people to a site is spent on making the site experience more enjoyable!

More and more, brands are investing in campaigns that will go viral – that will spread around the internet by word of mouth, and generate buzz, inbound links, and ultimately, sales. Some of these, as I’ll outline below, have been phenomenally successful at achieving these goals.

What is it that makes these so effective? I believe that it’s emotion. These campaigns reach out to you on an emotional level and engage with you that way. It makes people want to watch them again and again, and it makes them (to quote Seth Godin) remarkable – people want to remark on them, they want to talk about them and share them.

To me, I find that an incredibly compelling brand experience. Let’s have a look at some of the ads that make this emotional connection, and what the brand got out of it.

Cadbury Gorrila (2007)

• 14.5 million youTube views
• 53k youTube shares
• 40k Facebook likes
• 5% revenue growth in 2007

Old Spice Guy (2010)

• 2 of the videos have over 25 million youTube views
• @oldspice Twitter account has over 90,000 followers
• Responded to tweets with personal video:

• Most viewed youTube channel in July 2010
• 1 million Facebook likes
• 107% sales increase for body wash over July
• 55% increase in sales over previous 3 months

Oh, and you know you’ve made it when Sesame Street parodies you!

This video: 6 million views / 232k shares / 460k Facebook likes

BlendTek (2007 – present)

• 117 million youTube views
• ” The campaign took off almost instantly. We have definitely felt an impact in sales. Will it Blend has had an amazing impact to our commercial and our retail products.”
• BlendTek now has as many inbound links as Whirlpool

Evian Roller Babies (2009)

• Over 60 million youTube views
• #1 on youTube / #1 on viral video chart
• Over 450,000 facebook fans
• World record for most viewed online ad
• Top of IAB viral ad chart / #3 on viral chart

T-Mobile Dance (2009)

• 27.5 million youTube views
• 143k youTube shares / 20k youTube comments
• 220k Facebook likes
• #1 on viral video chart
• 22% sales uplift

The ‘making of’ t-mobile dance is also worth a watch:

This video: 2.3 million views / 7k youTube favourites

T-Mobile Welcome Back (2010)

I always get a tear in my eye when I watch that video. Without fail. That’s an incredible level of emotional engagement, which accounts for thees numbers:

• 7.9 million youTube views
• 132k Facebook shares
• 13k tweets
• 689 blog posts

Some of the numbers around these virals are incredible. What I don’t have it the number of inbound links they resulted in, but with that level on engagement (not just views, but like and shares) it would be another big number. The fact that BlendTek has more inbound links, on the back of the Will it Blend campaign speaks volumes. On top of these numbers is the brand presence and value increase that virals like these give.

These ads make you smile, make you laugh, and maybe even cry. They are fun, exciting and quirky. They concentrate on emotion, and they use that emotion of build engagement with their brand and product.

I work for a travel company, and this is exactly what travel brands need to do. Travel is fun and exciting, and travel is an emotional activity. We can share this emotion online, in the same way that these ads do. By sharing emotions we can engage with our customers in a more personal way.

This isn’t just travel specific. I believe that to truly engage with people, to truly engage with customers, we need to build an emotional relationship with them. This relationship then fosters brand loyalty and sales. The loyalty point is very important, as commercially, it’s far more expensive for a company to get a new customer, than it is to keep an existing one.

I believe that, as the people who create customers experiences, we should aim to create and craft emotional experiences for our users. Websites that excite people, apps that make people smile, experiences that delight. That’s my vision for the products that I have for the products that I’m working on now.

Naturally this can’t just be done on one channel – build emotional connections with customers has to be a cross-channel activity: online, in store, advertising, marketing etc. All of these need to be reaching out in the same way. By doing this brands move away from user experience at a channel level, to customer experience at a company level.

The final word has to go to the Old Spice guy!

Sources:

• http://viralvideochart.unrulymedia.com/
• http://www.brandrepublic.com/News/784573/Gorilla-ad-works-its-magic-sales-Cadbury-bars/
• http://socialnomics.net/2010/07/22/old-spice-guy-paraodies-social-media-penthouse/
• http://www.unrulymedia.com/case-studies/t-mobile-dance.html

On February 1st I spoke at the inaugural LightningUX event on the topic of how we, in the user experience community, speak to business. This is my attempt to try and convert my outline notes to a blog post.

User experience is a rapidly maturing industry, and now, more that ever, we user experience professionals are in high demand. Companies want a UX function, and say that they want to be more user focussed. However, much of the time companies have difficulty in fully realising the potential that our discipline can bring to the table. I think that we UXers also often struggle to get the level of authority that we feel we need, in order to successfully our user experience vision.

The question is: how do we change this? How do we ingrain ourselves more into ‘the business’ and get that magic seat at the table?

Use language that the business understands

99% of the time the people that sign off on budgets, be it project or departmental, are business focussed. They are finance people who have little to no knowledge of what we do, how we do, or why we do it. Indeed, it’s been my experience, that in corporate environments it’s not unusual for UX to be met with a degree of cynicism. That we magic up wireframes! That we conjure up designs!

Case and point is the resistance that we often meet when trying to get budget for research. A request often meet with replies like “Ask us, we know everything about  our customers.”, or even worse, “You’re the UX person – you should know all the answers, why do you need to do research?”.

To overcome this we need to show that we are on the same level as the business. That we understand their needs and goals. This is, I believe, how we will begin to overcome the impression that we sit in an ivory tower, expounding our user centric mantra!

This starts with the words we use.

The words we use are important

By framing what we do in business centric rhetoric we can start the process of convincing the business that we understand them. Now, I’m not saying that we don’t understand them, I’m just saying that we need to do more to convince the business of this. So that we move away from being seen as purists, talking in ‘fluffy’ terms about users’ needs and goals, and that we come across as the shrewd, business-focussed UX professionals that we are.

So, let’s start by talking more about customers (instead of users). And when we want to talk about improving the user journey , let’s talk about conversion optimisation. Let’s talk about persuasive selling, effective merchandising and presenting cross-sell messages as something useful to users (rather than the brute force approach many eCommerce sites take).

The words we use will reassure people that what we want to do has their best interests at heart. When we explain that we want to marry the needs of the user with the needs of the business, using business rhetoric, we subconsciously put the emphasis on the business side. It’s persuasion design and reassurance in practice! I’m not for one second saying that we shouldn’t use our own UX language, just that we need to frame it in a more business focussed vernacular.

The perfect mix for success

We, in UX, sometimes feel dirty when we start becoming more business focussed and use business-babble! That somehow we’re prostituting ourselves, a sullying the purity of our discipline. We’re not! When we talk about  a fantastic user experience, and putting the customer at the heart of what we do, framed in the language that the business speaks, we gain a new credibility. People stop and listen and begin to realise the opportunities that we can unlock for their business.

We’re also an incredibly passionate bunch of people, so committed to what we do. This passion, with our credibility, combined with our business focussed approach will take us to the next step of maturity as a discipline.

And as we develop our UX vernacular, framing it in a business speak, UX and Customer Experience will become a more integral part of every serious business.

So, along with credibility, there is another huge advantage to be got from crossing these two streams. We all look at the budgets that marketing departments have with envy, and lust for even a small part of that.As we become a little more business focussed, I believe that we will become as influential, if not more, as marketing is today, and will be given the budgets that we deserve. I could be provocative and say that as another plus,  we can  actually deliver tangible and measurable outputs! But I won’t!

On the back of this, one of the team here has started compiling a list of UX words and how we could business-ify them. Once we’ve got a critical mass I’ll post them here. Can you think any of the top of your head?

Thanks to Andy Birchwood for the use of the image of me speaking.

I love Seth Godin – if you don’t already, I recommend that you take a look at his (short and inspirational) Seth’s Blog. Here’s a talk he gave at TED on marketing that sums up why Seth is so great!

I recently gave a presentation about personas, and specifically how they can be used throughout a project lifecycle to ensure the highest quality. I thought I’d share that presentation with you. I’m a big fan of the approach to presentations advocated by Garr Reynolds in his book Presentation Zen. When I present my slides have no more than 1 – 3 words on them. That way people listen to what I’m saying. I also tell people that I am happy to share my slides and notes with anyone that would like them. My notes tend to be bullet points only, that way when I speak I’m not reading, I am working from my brain and it’s more of a conversation with the audience. This conversational tone is more engaging (I hope). Anyhow, on to the presentation!

Life before Personas

This is my vision for how life must have been for users before Personas came into widespread use. A barren desert with users wandering forlornly around the worlds of the internet and software. Stumbling around looking for an oasis of usability and accessibility!

It stuns me when I think that Personas really came into popular use after Cooper’s The Inmates are Running the Asylum. Things must have been (and were) pretty bad before that. Thankfully though, Personas are coming more and more into widespread use. There is still, however, some fear and reluctance towards their use.

Primarily this is down to the cost and time it can take to create them, and in some cases a failure to see the great benefits that they have. I think that we, as user experience professionals, need to be better at communicating their value and selling their uasefulness. Primarily we need to be able to demonstrate that the cost and time spent has far more value that just the Persona itself. More

Be Kaler Blake from Aquent Recruitment sent a link to the UK UPA to her slides from her presentation on UX in times of recession. I found them interesting and thought I share them with you!