David Gammel's Web Strategy ReportTM
Volume 1, Issue 4: Relevancy, Context and Velocity
Thoughts On Strategy: Relevancy, Context and Velocity
- The messages you send online have the best chance for successful impact when high relevancy is paired with the appropriate context and velocity.
- Relevancy refers to how valuable your message is to your chosen audience. Does it matter to them? How does it help them?
- Context refers to the greater experience of which your message is a part. If someone is looking at a page about X, are you offering a complementary message to that topic? Is it being communicated in a context that reinforces the core message?
- Velocity refers to the speed with which the message is delivered. A message on a web page has relatively low velocity, in that you have to wait for the recipient to come and get it. E-mail has higher velocity and a text message, which impacts their cell phone directly, has about the highest.
- For your most important messages, think about relevancy, context and velocity. Keying those three attributes to your message will improve the likelihood of success.
- Barack Obama offering to notify people about his pick for vice president via text message is a strong example of pairing relevancy, context, velocity and message to good effect.
- A more mundane example is provided by Kimpton Hotels, which e-mails discounted room upgrade offers for unsold premium rooms to registered guests a few days before their stay. It is a brilliant way to get some revenue from extra inventory while offering additional value to their customers.
Case Study: Dell Makes Money with Twitter, Maybe
This is my last Dell example for the year, I promise!
Business Week reported this Spring that Dell had grossed over half a million dollars in the past year via Twitter, the micro-blogging/text messaging service. A source at Dell told Business Week that this revenue was generated by sending discount codes out to people following Dell twitter accounts.
However, the key to Dell leveraging Twitter as an additional revenue channel has nothing to do with Twitter, cell phones or texting. It has to do with keeping an open eye for opportunities to leverage one of their core strengths.
Dell has a long and successful history of selling discounted, refurbished, equipment. You can search their database of available stock and sign up to receive special discount alerts via e-mail to save even more money. They have an entire infrastructure for promoting and selling equipment in this manner.
Adding a Twitter account as just another way to issue discount codes and specials simply leverages their existing capability with a new tool. No company without the existing promotional and fulfillment infrastructure could hope to do the same thing profitably on Twitter.
The best way to get value from social media tools and approaches is to pair them with your core strengths. Dell added additional revenue by cleverly adapting a new social media tool to their existing goals and strengths. If it hadn’t worked out, the worst they would have lost was several hours a week of an employee’s time.
High Geekery: APIs and Magic 8 Balls
Many of you probably remember the Magic 8 Ball: a black ball with a window where answers to your questions would slowly and magically appear after a good shake. The answers were usually rather unsatisfactory, however, such as “Not sure at this time” and “Check back later.”
APIs are like the Magic 8 Balls of the Internet, although they tend to provide more valuable information. API stands for application programming interface. APIs were created to enable one program to request, receive and submit data with another program in a standardized way. They have also been applied to web-based applications. If you are working on integrating your web site to an internal database, chances are there are one or more APIs involved.
The process is like one program asking a Magic 8 Ball for an answer: the asking program doesn’t care or need to know how the answer is generated, just that it is supplied in a way that it can understand.
Social media applications often make extensive use of APIs as well. You can set up your Facebook profile to grab and display the latest update from your Twitter account, even though they are completely separate applications offered by different companies. This example closely approximates the value of a traditional Magic 8 Ball, however, unless your Twitter updates are particularly insightful.
APIs continue to create and drive a lot of innovation opportunities online. Be aware of what capabilities your systems support in this regard and use it as an evaluation criterion for others you may chose in the future.
New Offerings from David
New Keynote Speech
I attended an exclusive program with Alan Weiss last week on developing and marketing keynote presentations. Six of us worked and practiced our presentations to enhance our skills and the sharpen the content of our presentations. I have found that spending time with life-long learners such as this group is the best way to continually develop my skills and knowledge as well as the value I offer to my clients.
The keynote I developed at the program is titled: The World on Your Web Site: Generating Cross-border Business 24 Hours a Day. This presentation is appropriate for any audience that serves, or aspires to, international markets and wants to ensure their web site is contributing maximum value to those efforts.
Contact me at +1 (410) 742-9088 or david@highcontext.com to explore options for how we can work together to help your staff or audience create dramatic results online with their international audiences.
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