Simon Griffiths Blog

I went into Woolies yesterday to see all the staff dressed in orange shirts and flogging the benefits of their new everyday rewards cards. Essentially these allow you to move your petrol discount off those annoying vouchers pinned to the fridge, that you never remember when you need them, into a card you carry with you.

Sounds like a great convenience for us consumers. When I got home clutching my new card I saw that you had to register your contact details, date of birth etc. to use the card. In actual fact if you check their terms and conditions you actually don’t have to register. This is really not made clear however in their form and their is much emphasis on registration.

So for Woolies what is the advantage of an optional registration system. Well the end result of registering is of coarse that they can track your spending, and target you with offers which are more relevant to you. This is obviously a master marketing move. If they see me buying cat food, for example, they know I own a cat, so could target me with advertising for cat litter, pet insurance etc. The same goes across the board for babies etc. You buy something, they can target you more precisely. 

For customers this can be viewed in a couple of different ways. Firstly it is a privacy nightmare. Do you really want Woolies to know, and potentially be able to use and even sell detailed information about you. Start getting junk mail on something related to pet insurance? Probably Woolies have sold your details to an insurance company! 

The alternative view is that they should target you with ads and offers that relate only to you. This  means that you will get less spam/junk mail that is not relevant to your lifestyle. You may even be able to make some savings based on this. 

My personal opinion….I won’t be registering. I value my privacy a bit more than a few cents or dollars here and there. I would advise you to do the same. 

I have seen an article on Voice biometrics as a factor in multifactor authentication a couple of times recently.

It is true that this would be a great method of authentication, and that it solves the problem of customers losing security tokens such as those offered by Verisign. However I am not too sure of the security implications. Recording someones voice is unobtrusive and relatively easy these days, and once it has been recorded you don’t know you’ve lost it. The advantage of tokens is that you do know. So in many ways losing tokens is an advantage!

I should also mention that the tokens are now quite unobtrusive. The new one on offer is the size and thickness of a credit card. I haven’t seen it myself but I hear it just fits into the wallet.

Another way of doing this “something you own” factor of authentication is via mobile phone SMS. That really is a good way as most people phones are with them all the time.

In short I would say voice has significant advantages, over the current system, and used in conjunction with say cookies would be pretty secure. However tokens also have advantages as explained above.

Lastly you have to look at the run out cost and how it effects you. A voice system would be high initial cost and low operating, and tokens low initial but higher operating (if your not charging customers for lost ones as would expect banks to do).

The company I work for have had me working in marketing for some time (7 years or so), and we have traditionally marketed to our customers, potential customers, and to our internal clients in a more limited way. However in recent times we are being asked more and to market to the community in general.

This of coarse could be the sign of a growing company, but interesting the reason for our efforts are to recruit worker from local schools around Brisbane.

It seems strange to me, coming from a position where I left school in the 80′s, to have companies trying to recruit, rather than just ‘sticking a job in the paper’.

I guess this is a sign of the times, where skilled workers are very hard to find, and even harder to retain, but my feeling is why go after the school kids, who will always be like that. Why not chase mothers with school age kids? Offering them positions to fit in with dropping off and picking up seems like a sensible way to get and retain good staff.

I came across this as a discussion point from the boagworld podcast, and thought that it was somethning I could comment on. The reason I think I might be able to add to this debate is that unlike most of the people speaking on it, I work in a marketing department that happens to be geeky enough to design, code and write our own sites. We are therefore creating the complete site including copy.

Okay have said that, as usual there seems to cases for and against arguing that the copy is part of the design. As I see it these are as follows: -

Cases for copy being part of web design

• The style of the copy should match that of the design. It is no use having a very corporate looking site, and then using informal language in your copy. Equally an eclectic looking site should not be written in a formal style.
• This is the most important one for me…SEO. Your content needs to be written in such a way that it is both attractive and easy to scan and read, as well as being search engine friendly. Meta descriptions, headings  etc also need to match the content. This is not an easy job, and is certainly not something that you can just re-use content from your brochure, or sales letters and plonk it in. It is also something that in my experience, requires a bit of experience, and enough time to research how to make the most of your heading, what you can and cannot do etc.
• The copy should also be brief and pointed. Something us marketers sometimes have trouble doing. It should also be largely ‘sales talk’ free. One way to quickly lose a web user is to pitch to them!
• Keyword research allows the correct search terms to be targeted rather than terms that are used by the company.

Cases against copy being part of web design

• A big problem is often that the web design company will have no experience in the particular product or service on the website. The only way to get them up to speed on it would be some level of product training, or providing notes or other promotional material that they can base their copy on. However in our experience copywriters only rarely do a good job, and writing in a web style may mean that it looks worse than it actually is. In general us marketing types like to word things certain ways to match our customers requirements, and there is often good reason for that.
• Use of material. This is also a big one. To be honest I hope this objection is dying out, but many old school marketers don’t want their information re-used or re-purposed in ways that they are not totally aware of.
• Terminology. This can be an issue if particular language is often used at a company. I run across this frequently at the company I work for. My favourite terms I have managed to cut out in the last few years are ‘double return flat face gutter’ and ‘full length butt hinge’. I’m sure these are important to our designers, but to most of our customer, this means nothing. However in many cases certain terminology might conflict with key word research.

Conclusion

So what would be my conclusion from this? In my opinion the advantages of having copy as part of the web design process far outweigh the disadvantages. A good copy writer should be able to take content given to them and repurpose it so that it hits the correct keywords, is more scannable, and still meets the marketing requirements (if those are made clear to them).

The third point I made up in the againsts, is really a for if you turn it around. Company specific terminology should not be used on a website, more generic terms make things easier to understand and opens up the site to a far wider audience of clients which may not have dealt with you before.

Do I think this will happen quickly? Probably not! Traditional marketing may not quite get the web yet, but try selling your services to companies that do, or alternatively companies that don’t have a large enough marketing team to do it themselves. Once you have a few under your belt, you will probably find that you can get others by reference.