May 2008
1 post
How do we know what we want?
March 2008
1 post
The Customer Odyssey: Semantic and Episodic Memory
The online decision making process is a strange beast. Sometimes I’m pretty spontaneous and buy stuff straight away after a single website visit (a single customer journey). Sometimes I prevaricate, make selections online, change my mind and leave, come back, add to basket, get distracted, check out another website, check my bank account, leave the website, a week later return and then...
January 2008
2 posts
Is your website from Venus or Mars?
The old maxim that ‘men are from Mars and women from Venus’ has been explored in relation to the build of websites before i.e. How Men and Women View Images Differently but it occurred to me the other week to conduct my own highly scientific experiment to see if I could gain an insight into the difference between the sexes that I might find useful when building and refining a website. The...
October 2007
2 posts
The beauty of connectedness
A number of different circumstances have recently come together to make me realise the beauty in feeling connected. I’ve re-established connections with a lot of old friends in the last few years through various social networking sites but I’m talking about a different type of connectedness. There is something very satisfying about having everything together and working well. I’ve just updated...
Physicality and the poetry of online
Don Norman has recently been emphasising the importance of the physical and its return to prominence, through devices like the Wii. Physicality of a different but obviously connected sort has been playing on my mind for quite a time. How do we capture taste, touch and texture in the digital environment? Clearly these things are physically impossible on a simple web page or an RSS feed. But that...
September 2007
1 post
A time for disengagement?
There are times in the hectic world of digital media when I crave disengagement and I strive for something more poetic. My career and day-to-day work can seem like a frantic scramble to realise the potential of my activities before I need to move on to the next thing. As a result I often find little space to pause for contemplation and reverie. As a student studying Fine Art the activity of...
August 2007
3 posts
Death of a comrade
This morning Dave Hallsworth died aged 78. My thoughts are with his wife Elsie and their family. It is eighteen years since I first met Dave. Easily the oldest member of the political group I travelled with, his enthusiasm and passion belied a man half his age. I’m sure there were many words used to describe him during his lifetime by friend and foe. Here are a few that I will use to remember him...
Tony Wilson RIP
Tony Wilson died today. I met the guy a couple of times, on the second occasion he was chairing a panel I was speaking on, at an arts event in Manchester. I can’t recall exactly what the theme was but I do remember thinking he was a complete tosser. He was arrogant, didn’t let anyone else get their opinons across and made me look stupid by cutting me off and not allowing me to explain...
July 2007
1 post
The value of the last mile, “what does it take to...
Vilfredo Pareto’s principle, otherwise known as the 80/20 rule*, is one of those ideas that just keeps popping back into my head. For me the rule has become a bit of a metaphor for stating that things just aren’t as easy as you thought. i.e. “you can concentrate on the easy big things but that real power and the real difference is made by the small”. Let me explain. I’m currently having a loft...
June 2007
2 posts
Mini-poll: Will Facebook rule the world?
My Facebook Dilema
Mmmm. Facebook. By the time you read this you’ve probably already read the articles talking about the phenomenal rise of the ‘Social Utility’ that is Facebook. In fact I’ve been slightly surprised by the slow up-take of writing about it. Perhaps all the mainstream journos are too busy updating their profiles and poking their pals. [Update: Interesting blog post on the fadish nature of social...
May 2007
2 posts
10 Tips for Online Persuasion →
I’ve started to make a collection of persuasion ‘nuggets’ that can help towards those difficult website conversions. I thought I’d share a few on my blog.
“If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid”
– Epictetus
April 2007
8 posts
Do you set your Alarm Clock for Online Engagement?
How do you start to develop a relationship with a customer who ordinarily might only visit you and your website infrequently? An essential part of customer engagement is regular interaction. But let’s face it not every website demands regular attention, so what can we do? Well how about Alarm Clocking? Alarm Clocking is a term I hadn’t come across before its mention on Captology.tv [View the Alarm...
Do you WILF?
I certainly know that I do. WILF is an acronym for ‘What was I looking for?’ (It’s probably a bit more media friendly than ASS - Aimless Surfing Syndrome). The term WILF was coined by moneysupermarket.com following a survey undertaken of the online habits of 2,412 adults in the UK. The abundant choice online, and the accompanying distraction that choice offers, results in us...
Podcast: Persuasive Solutions for Demanding Times
Persuasion is one of the most important constituents of any online engagement strategy. This is a link to an audio recording of a presentation I did at an exclusive breakfast briefing last month. You’ll also find a copy of the visual part of the presentation available here. Technorati tags: Persuasion, Customer Engagement
Avoiding Trade-offs in a Persuasion Window
Recently I’ve been following a debate kicked off by Don Norman on the value (or lack of value) in simple design [Simplicity is Highly Overrated]. Today a post called Simplicity: The Ultimate Sophistication by Joshua Porter at User interface Engineering (UIE) caught my attention. Talking trade-offs Porter talks about trade-offs. Situations where customers are presented with two similar items...
Employee engagement podcast →
Only 1 in 3 employees are engaged according to research published by the CIPD. For me employee engagement is an important part of cutomer engagement but it tends to get slightly ignored in the online world which is usually overly focused on acquisition. Many of the same principles of relationship building, communication and dialogue apply and benefits in terms of evangelism can often be massive. ...
Designing real experience
I’ve just caught the end of a TV programme called War Stories on BBC4. It included a talking head from Dominik Diamond that I found interesting. He was talking about the ability to bridge the experience gap between generations by using interactive games. The example used was that of the D-Day landings. What it was like to participate in the Battle of Normandy, in 1944, has been accurately...
March 2007
6 posts
Adobe does engagement →
Interview with Bruce Chizen on the value of engagement. He is not really saying anything drastically new, the important thing is that Adobe understand that they need to reorientate the way they position their products so that they can be seen as relevant to the changing business environment.
Photos make websites more credible →
More on the importance of credibilty as a prerequisite to persuasion. Comments on a study by BJ Fogg
Microsoft: Partnering for the Future
I’ve just come back from a roundtable at Microsoft’s Cambridge Research Centre where I had the opportunity to discuss some of the issues that I have been researching within the cScape Customer Engagement Unit. The morning was part of Microsoft’s Partnering for the Future project. Organised by Steve Clayton and Claire O’Halloran in the UK Partner Group. The roundtable was...
“Repeated interactions that strengthen the emotional, psychological or physical...”
– My definition of Customer Engagement
