Chris Crosby

I received an email today from a friend that is Director of Marketing for a large (Fortune 100) company. He is looking to conduct an internet marketing campaign for the vertically focused products that his department is responsible for. He asked for insight on running pay-per-click ads with the major search engines. It occurred to me that as common place as I thought this knowledge was, its still rather tribal. So I thought the following nugget of dialogue may prove useful to some folks. Call it my “spoils of a misspent youth”…

The first section is his email:

Hey – hope all is well! 

I have a quick question –

Rough figures: what does it cost to do geographically based search engine optimization on Google, Yahoo!, MSN, etc?

It’s an amount per hit, correct?  What is the range for this?

Working on some budgetary stuff for work – and I have no idea about this.

Is there a cost to set this up, or how does that piece work?

THANKS!!!!

Here is my response:

SEO:Google and Yahoo are pay-per-click (it’s been awhile since I’ve looked at MSN). So you don’t pay anything to set it up. The pay-per-click stuff is basically auction style. You enter your keyword or phrase (like “i-phones suck because Croz doesn’t have one”), and then enter your top $ per click. The popularity of the search term will drive the price of the click. You have the ability to set-up different “campaigns” comprised of different keywords and set budgets and ads for each.

For example, in the Latigent days a top bid for a popular term like “Business Intelligence” would have cost me north of $5 a hit because all the big dogs were also bidding on it (broad terms like these will drive higher volume, thus a higher budget and generally a much lower conversion rate). But “Cisco Reporting” or “Call Center Reporting Software” cost me $.10 a click and I got much more targeted hits (you also have the option of filtering these down based on geography (I learned to run ads ONLY in the U.S, Canada and Europe as they proved to be the only profitable markets). Lower cost per click + lower traffic + higher conversion rates = insane ROI.

You can spend as little or as much on pay-per-click as you want, depending on your goals. If you just want to end up in the top spot for big search terms so that you have broader presence, prepare to spend a lot. But by niche focusing, I spent a couple hundred bucks a month and drove nice revenue and (cult) market exposure from it. The epitome of the “long tail” in action…

Cheers,
Chris

I heard an interesting podcast the other day that described how Sam’s Club is going to save somewhere north of $20M a year in shipping and cooling costs by changing over to square milk cartons. What struck me about this wasn’t that Walmart is looking for ways to save money, but rather the significant impact derived from a rather simplistic, yet innovative change to a product and design that one wouldn’t normally consider ripe for transformation.  This started me thinking about the innovation process and where ideas like this come from in an organization. I believe there are many aspects to the progression of innovation in a corporation including: culture, processes, policies and executive leadership. But for this post, I’ll focus on the people side of the equation.

I’ve categorized people (as it pertains to Innovation) into three buckets:

• Mercantilist - “This is the way we do things here", "Its the way we’ve always done it." They typically spend more time defending the Kingdom, and exporting the status quo vs. importing fresh ideas. These people will rise to the maximum level of meritocracy. 
• Town "Cryer" – "This sucks", "I don’t really like…" They are happy to tell you everything they think is wrong, and seldom any ways to make it better. This group can at least identify that the existing process doesn’t work, but when they do come up with a new idea its masked by their negativity. They will occasionally pop their heads up into the Innovator category, however will most likely not find themselves in leadership roles, and will mull around wondering why people stopped listening to them. 
• Innovators - "What if we tried this?", "I have a crazy idea.." Innovators see “problems” as opportunities and are constantly churning new ideas and solutions. The word "can’t" is a foreign concept to them. Not only are they not afraid to test new things, they listen to others’ "crazy ideas" with zeal. These people will ultimately rise about the fray and become your most valuable assets.

Now, your mission as manager is to seek out the innovators in your organization and make sure they have the tools to keep dreaming. Innovators are needed in all levels of a company, not just management. How many times has an engineer come to you and said "I think we can improve this product if we do xyz"? And "XYZ" just happened to be the secret ingredient that set you apart from your competitors. Encourage all people on your team to think bigger.

Evaluate where you fit into the categories above. Are you fostering an environment of risk and creativity? You never know when the next big or small idea will pop-up that can remake a product, or an industry. Will it be yours, or that guy in the cube down the hall that never talks? Will you recognize it, or dismiss it?

Think its crazy? Someday we’ll all be reminiscing about the days before Milk Cartons were Square…

A big cheers to one of my favorite start-ups, DimDim (see blog post here). They just raised $6M in capital. Nice work guys. It demonstrates what’s possible if you come to market with a viable product in the right niche and execute well.  These guys didn’t come out of the gate as a “Web 2.0″ company trying to boil the ocean. They started small and grew organically through partners and beta customers until they worked out the bugs and kinks. My guess is that these guys will continue to execute well and get acquired by someone looking to get into the collaboration space to augment their existing apps (Google anyone?)

Here is a useful article for any software company considering using open source components in your applications. I can tell you from personal experience that if you think getting acquired is part of your exit strategy then you need to pay attention to what open source code may find its way into yours, because your acquirer certainly will. If you’re not planning on getting acquired, its still a good idea to understand what your legal exposures might be.

My suggestion is to make sure you document any third party (even commercial) code and how you’re using it across your applications; and then have an attorney review the appropriate license agreements.

Speech Recognition is about identifying what people are speaking.

Speech Analytics is about figuring out what people are saying.

I noticed yesterday on weather.com that the temperature here in Boston was a lovely 92 degrees F, but the Heat Index reflected that it felt like 98 degrees F. This sent me on a tangent that I think is analogous for the call center.

Can a customer interaction look like one thing to you, but feel like something else to your customer? Let’s say that your trusty ACD report shows you that a customer’s handle time was 300 seconds, and 300 seconds happens to be your Handle Time Goal. That would seem acceptable, right? But what if 200 of those seconds the customer was on hold? How would that variable impact the customers perceived experience? Or hypothetically the call was answered in the goal of 20 seconds, but that was only after spending 2 frustrating minutes in the IVR?

The heat index takes variables like humidity and wind and makes a relative, plus or minus, adjustment to the absolute temperature value to reflect how it is actually perceived by people. Sound like a reasonable approach?

If it seems like I’ve been harping on customer experience measurement lately, its because I am. Stick with me here…

I’m out at a customer site this week and overheard the following conversation from the Workforce Management Team:

The difference in customer experience between 93% Service Level and 100% Service Level is negligible. But the difference in staffing cost to us is huge.

Now, I’ll spare you my full rant about Service Level (you can find it here) but I think this is indicative of a larger perception and education problem in the call center industry. Simply put: Service Level is NOT a measure of Customer Experience. It’s an opaque metric.

Let’s assume for purposes of this argument that the service level goal is 93% calls answered within 20 seconds. By decreasing the goal from 100% to 93% you’re saying that it’s okay for 7% of your customers to sit in queue for longer than 20 seconds. Logically, and most likely what the Workforce Manager was thinking, the effect on customer experience by being answered in 19 seconds vs. 21 seconds is unnoticeable. However the real impact to Customer Experience between 93% and 100% is actually immeasurable from Service Level alone. You have no way of knowing how many of the calls in queue longer than 20 seconds were answered in 21 seconds or how many were answered in 20 minutes and 21 seconds.

Try explaining to the irate customer that listened to hold music for twenty minutes that his difference in customer experience was “negligible”.

DimDim just announced a new version of their open source collaboration suite. Imagine WebEx or GoToMeeting, but thin-client and open source. These guys are the real deal. I spoke with them early on in their venture as I was looking at embedding collaboration into the Latigent BlueVue Architecture. Needless to say we got acquired so that didn’t happen.

DimDim has a free hosted offering which I’ll probably test out for a non-profit I’m working with. Although, they should really partner with somebody like http://www.freeconferencecall.com/ to integrate free voice conferencing in as well (currently they support VOIP via a headset plugged into your PC).

As compelling as free web conferencing is, hosted web collaboration is a rather commoditized market. However, there OEM/ISV approach could be hot. The ability to embed web collab right into applications (like I wanted to do w/ Business Intelligence) could create a new market segment.

Call it Pervasive Collaboration.