The Cloud and Clean Air

The bleak financial climate has tempered everybody’s optimism about the years to come a little bit, but I still think it’s worthwhile to take a peak into the future.

The discourse surrounding cloud computing and virtualization has been far too focused on the obsolescence of the old IT dinosaurs. The biggest story is not whether Google Docs kills Microsoft Office, or whether the browser replaces the desktop OS, or whether a company maintains its own physical servers or pays Amazon by the drink for access to computing horsepower and storage.

These are all historic developments, of course. But it’s the office itself that will undergo the biggest transformation. If all my productivity apps are housed on the grid, then what is the office but a very expensive space in which to gather together and draw on shared bandwidth? I have a 20 megabit/second pipe furnished by my cable ISP, which is lying dormant at home right now, running at 0% of its prodigious capacity. If there is no machine, no piece of software, and no connectivity in the office that I cannot match or even exceed at home, then why am I not at home on my comfortable couch writing this blog?

In the last two hundred years, the rise of heavy electrical machinery, the assembly line, and the other trappings of mass production have sundered the ancestral link between living space and working space; one could easily work as a scribe or fuller from one's basement in the Middle Ages, but only companies, with access to broad pools of capital, could maintain machines like the newspaper press. Yet the online grid obviates not only the need for traditional IT, but also the need for the office itself. Remote, individuated production is possible again. Additionally, it eliminates the need for white collar (and, perhaps eventually, for blue collar) home-to-office transit. If the computing grid wipes out rush hour, it becomes the single most powerful tool in the war against climate change.

On TV, you’ll see two candidates for president fulminating about America’s dependence on foreign oil. If they were truly paying attention, they would realize that reducing this dependence may have much less to do with solar panels and wind turbines, and much more to do with Google’s server farms.

Update: Of course, there is also the darker view: rather than leading of a florescence of "working from home," the cloud may lead to more people being literally sent home. As Nicholas Carr incisively states, "when we take into account the economic forces that the World Wide Computer is unleashing--the spread of the increasing-returns dynamic to more sectors of the economy, the replacement of skilled as well as unskilled workers with software, the global trade in knowledge work, and the ability of companies to (crowdsource) and harvest its economic value--we're left with a prospect that is far from utopian."

Web wide task completion. Where do you stack up?

Following up on Michael Whitehouse’s post last week’s about how the American financial crisis is negatively affecting task completion on the websites of financial service providers, we’re unveiling Q3 task completion scores for all the other major verticals represented in the 4Q family of users.

- Entertainment websites lead the way, with a task completion score that leads the pack by 8 points.
- Task completion is three points above the average on automotive sites. Good news for car manufacturers at a time when gas prices are still at historical highs and North American vehicle sales are slumping.
- Hospitality sites are feeling the pinch generating by the credit crunch, fear about job security, and high commodity prices. For a lot of people, anxiety about the future is mitigating the desire to travel and those who do are increasingly shopping for steep discounts.
- Cost sensitivity and lack of economic confidence are also playing a role in the lower-than-average task completion scores for Retail and Consumer Electronics. These will be the bellwethers to watch in the lead-up to the holiday season. Last week, the NRF forecasted that 2008 holiday season sales would rise 2.2%, far below the 10-year average lift of 4.4%. The challenges facing multi-channel and online retailers will only be exacerbated by low task completion.
- The Web Analytics industry clocked in with the fourth lowest score. C’mon guys and gals, we play in traffic for a living and are swimming in metrics...we’re supposed to know what makes our visitors tick. We can do better than this!

So, how does your site stack up against your industry? Let us know by commenting on the blog or posting your stories in the 4Q Community Forum. If you aren't measuring task completion, then sign up now for 4Q at www.4qsurvey.com. This metric is a crucial measurement and beginning to play an increasingly important role in website optimization. It cost you nothing to capture. Bigger question..what does it cost you not to?

Wall Street Crisis Seeps over onto Financial Companies' websites

The subprime mortgage crisis has morphed into what many are calling the greatest financial crisis to face America since the Great Depression. Whatever your feelings are on the mortgage/credit/financial crisis raging on Wall Street, its implications for Main Street USA, and the controversial $700 billion dollar government bailout plan, it’s manifestly clear that a new era has begun for financial companies, one in which their collective reputation as fiduciary stalwarts has evaporated, leaving them to contend with the twin dragons of heightened government scrutiny and unprecedented skepticism, if not outright suspicion, from people on the ground.

But it isn’t just on the balance sheets and on the stock exchange floor that these financial companies have taken a hit. The damage seems to be seeping over onto the web, as well. Website satisfaction and task completion for financials running 4Q have fallen markedly in the last few months.

The graphics below show how the industry-wide task completion index has fallen by 4 points since July, while the industry-wide aggregate satisfaction score has dropped by 3 points.

This is a telltale sign that site users are paying close attention to the foibles and failures of these financial services providers and that perceptions of site effectiveness are suffering accordingly. The data above yet again demonstrates the powerful link between brand equity and site perceptions. While it is far from being the most important or urgent story to emerge out of this mammoth crisis, the data above is evidence that interactive marketers in the financial services industry might soon be losing just as much sleep as their investment banking peers.

4Q Results: Web-Wide Task Completion Slips in August

As an update to a previous post and to reemphasize the value of listening continuously to the voice of real visitors in real situations, we’ve gone ahead and mined our 4Q respondent database to calculate web-wide task completion rates for the last two months. As loyal readers of this blog (we know you’re out there!) know, we’re firm believers in the fact that task completion is the most useful heartbeat metric to determine visit success. The cagey interactive marketer identifies the primary reasons for his/her site’s existence, translates them into task that visitors can accomplish, and then tracks and trends this simple and beautiful metric over time.

Task completion is the conversion yardstick for the other 97% of website activities that don’t involve buying. But web-wide task completion dipped by 2 points in August, as the chart below illustrates.

So, what’s going on? Here’s where 4Q makes it easy for us to figure out the answer to this question. Task completion isn’t just a dry, lifeless metric that sits idly on a corporate dashboard; it’s living, breathing indicator of site health, and it ties directly into actionable insights. We analyzed and coded a random sample of the open-ended reasons why visitors didn’t complete their primary tasks.

Among the top culprits, we found three familiar and nettlesome issues:

1) Lack of sufficiently detailed information (20%). Some representative examples of actual commentary:
- “Information was limited. Styles typically found in the stores not indicated. I was pre-shopping and was unable to make a list of items to look for when I visit the store.”
- “There wasn't enough info about the surrounding area to let me know what entertainment there is in the area.”
- “Although the basic information is very comprehensive there was little specific information on the impact of this issue in Northern Ireland.”

2) An inability to locate a specific item/product (19%). Some representative examples of actual commentary:
- "I wanted to find out if I could sell my old golf clubs but you did not have the kind of clubs I have and the other clubs I do have you did not have the prices on them.”
- “Not all products are available to buy online…also that the products that are not available to buy online do not have there prices listed?”
- “I was trying to get the podcast for the online sermons but was unable to do so.”
3) Ineffective site search (11%). Some representative examples of actual commentary:
- “From my search on this site, I could only find one bed per unit. We needed 2 beds in a unit, not 1 bed & 1 sofa bed.”
- “I typed in the synonyms I wanted to search for, but all they gave me was an error message.”
- “I was searching for easy reading study bible for an incarcerated person. Trying to determine if Jesus' sayings in red. I could tell on some others I couldn't.” (This one was just so quirky, I had to include it!)

Given the similarity and overlap between the top 3 gripes, it’s obvious that site owners have their work cut out for them. Quite simply, internal site search is failing too frequently, products aren’t readily retrievable, and there’s an overall paucity of product information. Interactive marketers: get to work!

iPerceptions/4Q do Vegas - Shop.org and BlogWorld Expo

Next week, we're hitting up Sin City to attend both the Shop.org show and BlogWorld Expo.

You can find myself, Account Execs Michael Gerstel and Jeff Talajic, and our CEO Jerry Tarasofsky at Booth 138 at Shop.org at the Mandalay Bay from September 15-17. I'll be attending BlogWorld Expo at the Las Vegas Hilton on the 20th and 21st, so if you'll be there, email me at smorris@iperceptions.com and we'll set up a time to meet.

Looking forward to forging some new relationships... hopefully what happens in Vegas next week won't have to stay there!

eMetrics Industry Insights Day Report

eMetrics just put out a summary and analysis of the presentations delivered at the Industry Insights Day portion of the 2008 eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit in San Francisco.

In a series of compelling presentations, the cast of presenters covered the state of the industry and posed important questions about where it is headed.

The comprehensive report includes coverage of:

- iPerceptions' unveiling of the first wave of golden nuggets from 4Q
- Stephane Hamel on the importance of WASPs
- Jupiter Research's John Lovett on the future of the web analytics industry
- Exact Target's Ryan Warren on e-mail marketing metrics
- Yahoo's Bob Page on optimally dealing with galaxies of user data
- Factor TG's Margaret Coles on marketing mix methods
- Hitwise's Heather Dougherty on shifts in internet usage
- Jim Humphrys on the results of the WAA's web analyst survey
- "Mind-reader" Joseph Carrabis' utterly remarkably Q&A session

You can download the Insights Day report by clicking here.

Is Google Buidling the Ultimate Panel?

Let me get this out of the way first: I love Google’s new Chrome browser. I love its design, its speed, and its stability. I love the way it mashes together and seamlessly melds the address and search bars. I love the way it mines my history and spits back at me, in a handy, speed-dial format, the sites that are most indelibly imprinted onto my daily browsing routine. I’m using it side-by-side with Firefox now as my webtop app (FF still has the huge advantage of the open API for browser plug-ins), but my browsing future looks Chromy.

Still, I’m really curious about one thing. When you download and install the browser, Google asks you to opt-in or opt-out to sharing anonymous usage statistics with them. The nominal usage for this data is to help identify engineering flaws, by parsing through crash reports. But might Google not also be putting in place the world’s most robust online panel?

When Google Labs trotted out its Trends for Websites, it disclosed that its traffic estimates were based on “aggregated Google search data, aggregated opt-in anonymous Google Analytics data, opt-in consumer panel data, and other third-party market research.” Can we now add “anonymous, opt-in Chrome browser-level data” to that list?

Recently, there was some talk that Mozilla could leverage its installed Firefox base to construct a huge opt-in sample that would produce more accurate traffic and usage stats than the existing audience measurement players. Has Google beaten its (formerly?) close buddies at Mozilla to the punch?

Comments from Industry Leader Confirm Trends in iPerceptions' Travel Data

Richard Anderson, CEO of Delta Air Lines, spoke with the Financial Times online about the effect of persistently high fuel prices on capacity and profitability in the airline industry. As of this writing, crude oil for October delivery has risen to $116/barrel on the NYMEX. Although the price of oil has fallen from its peak of over $150/barrel, it's "still too high for all sectors of our economy," as Mr. Anderson correctly points out. With hurricane season in full swing and mounting uncertainty about the geopolitical intentions of energy giant Russia, the price doesn't look like it's about to soften anytime soon.

When asked whether he had observed measurable softening in the travel industry, Mr. Anderson replied as follows:

"The US economy is slowing as we speak and what you're seeing is a change in business travel patterns, and the business travel patterns are changing in two ways: fewer people going on trips and, second, trips being booked further in advance of the day of flight, to save money by advanced purchase of tickets. So, we're seeing some softening in the domestic economy."

This less-than-rosy picture of the travel industry aligns completely with findings from our surveys. In fact, we recently found that the average number of nights spent in a hotel each year plummeted 28% between January and June 2008 among leisure travelers and by 25% among business travelers. When asked why they were scaling back, consumers overwhelmingly cited budget concerns originating from escalating gas prices.

It's only going to make the equation that much more difficult for interactive marketers in the travel industry. Shrinking wallets means the advent of interactive Darwisnism, where only the strong sites survive.

Visitor Intent – What’s your guess?

This e-mail was waiting in my inbox bright and early when I came back from vacation last week:

Dear Jonathan,

I love 4Q! I think it’s such an easy way to start the conversation about measuring site effectiveness, and it’s a great way to challenge some dearly-held assumptions at the HIPPO level.

I only have one problem. When I look at my “purposes of visit,” I’m seeing that 70% are selecting other. This has got to be a mistake! I had my user experience team spend two weeks to come up with the list of purposes of visit. There’s no way our brightest minds can’t identify what 7/10ths of our visitors are onsite to do!

Help!

Best,

In Love with 4Q

(Ok, that’s not her real name, but we had to redact it to protect the innocent!)

I was stunned at first. Was 4Q broken? Was there something wrong with the database? First, we checked the technology. Scripts in place across the site? Check. Answer tags rendering properly on the survey screen? Check.

Then, we checked the database. Maybe records were getting deleted by mistake, and the “others” were being over-represented in the reporting tools. So, we watched the responses as they came in, but everything looked sound. Not only were visitors opting to select “other” at an amazing rate, they were actually being quite verbose when asked to write in their exact purposes…and the reality, is that these bright minds on the user experience team who had determined the purpose of visit tags for this particular survey, had no clue why people were coming to the site. They apparently couldn’t even guess.

Understanding visitor intent is critical to establishing site goals. Let me put this another way: if I don’t know why people are on my website, then how can I determine if my site’s doing a good job? I can follow the metrics I think are important, but without the user-sourced data, I’m simply projecting my own biases. And if web analytics has taught us one thing, it’s that the days of assumption and conjecture have passed us by.

To that end, we’ll shortly be taking our own medicine and running a 4Q survey on the 4Q site. And we’ll be transparent enough to tell you if 70% of our visitors reject our pre-define buckets and opt to speak for themselves!

Where are web analytics searches coming from?

Google’s Insights for Search is a really neat tool for understanding the regional interest of search terms trended over time. In the last week, bloggers have been playing around with the tool to get a reading of the popularity distribution of the major social networks (see here, for instance).

I started playing around with it a little bit and found some interesting data about the geographic distribution of keywords related to our industry. To understand the charts below better, consider that Google’s search volume index is their proprietary measurement of a search term’s regional interest. I looked at the US for this exercise, and I started the ticker running at January 2007.

Here’s what I found:

Search term = “Web Analytics”

The regional searching interest for web analytics was pretty well distributed across the US, with a slight bias towards the West Coast and equally strong interest in New York. The preponderant state in terms of searches for web analytics is Utah, the home state of a certain large clickstream vendor. Hmmm.

Search term = “Voice of the customer”

Unlike the search term web analytics, voice of the customer seems to be a term in use only among the most technologically savvy.

Search term = “Customer satisfaction”

Happily, the value of satisfying customers seems to have obtained a healthy level of traction across the country, with notable strengths in Wisconsin, Indiana, Georgia, Maryland, and Massachusetts.

Search term = “Satisfaction surveys”

But interest in satisfaction surveys doesn’t enjoy the same equitable distribution, and is largely confined to the east and west coasts, with pockets of strength in the Midwest. There’s a giant hole in the center of the country: people are clearly interested in customer satisfaction here, but they are perhaps not taking the necessary steps to measure and thus operationalize it.

This is just a taste, and one could easily think up a dozen other search terms of interest. My little study is far from exhaustive, but it’s interesting and eye-opening data nonetheless.

Top Concepts in the Web Analytics Blogosphere - May and June 2008

We’re all obsessive web analytics blog readers (and bloggers) here. We’ve all spent many a working hour soaking up the insightful musings of Avinash Kaushik, Jim Sterne, Manoj Jasra, Ian Thomas, and many others. But we’ve all longed for a way to imposed semantic structure on the chatter and buzz, on the heated analytics debates and the asynchronous optimization musings. We’ve yearned for a way to hold a mirror up to the community and have it reflect the aggregated substance of our conversations back to us.

Today, we’re thrilled to publish the results of our deep-dive open-text analysis of web analytics blogs for May and June, 2008. Using our proprietary text analysis algorithm, our researchers have quantified the top themes and the dominant concepts that 30 of the leading lights in the web analytics community are blogging about. In addition, we’ve crossed popular themes with one another, in an attempt to determine collinearity and concordance. The result is the first ever open-text analysis of the web analytics blogosphere, which contains a plethora of insights on what the smartest people in the space are saying.

Three impactful findings that leaped out at me were:

- All the furor surrounding engagement seems (perhaps mercifully) to have died down. The tricky concept, which was on every bloggers’ mind earlier in the year, was present in only 1% of all total concept occurrences in May-June. There’s still no consensus on whether engagement is just an excuse or whether it represents the unified field theory of web analytics. But it looks like the blogging community has moved on to other hot topics.

- One of these hot topics is social media measurement. Here’s where the technique of concordance becomes helpful, as it helps us to outline what topics are being mentioned in conjunction with one another. When bloggers were musing about metrics, they were glossing on the application of measurability to social media platforms in 64% of the cases. This speaks to the metric maturity of the more well established online verticals, as well as the need to define consensus on just how the hell you go about measuring success on sites like Facebook, Last.fm, and Friendfeed.

- Despite the heightened buzz surrounding social, bloggers aren’t losing site of ROI just yet. Conversion was the leading concept associated with the terms “website,” “visit,” and “track,” suggesting a dedicated collective focus on site outcomes that lead to healthy bottom lines.

These are just three things that stuck out to me. There are many other “aha!” findings in the report, including the surprisingly low amount of chatter on the topic of integration and the ubiquity of bounce rate. We’ve taken a snapshot of the blogging community for this report, but future reports will include trending analysis and should yield even greater insights.

Please click here to download a copy of the report. Happy reading!

4Q: Open-Ended Insights on Website Satisfaction and Task Completion

Although all 4Q results are deeply meaningful, we believe that the real golden nuggets of insight emerge within the open-ended commentary. It is here that visitors are allowed to praise the site and vent their frustrations unimpeded. It is here that visitors are able to denounce, in no uncertain terms, the barriers to task completion.

We have run two months’ worth of 4Q open-ended data through our sophisticated natural language algorithms and outputted the results in the charts below:

This is the first in a series of reports, which will help shed light on the state of website satisfaction and web-wide task completion.

The goal of this exercise is twofold:

1) to draw out the top reasons why respondents are not able to complete their primary tasks
2) to highlight the top themes that emerge in positive open-ended commentary

The Web is an inherently noisy medium. As such, any attempt to analyze open-ended commentary in an unstructured way is bound to lead to failure. Painstaking ad-hoc coding efforts can often be exercises in futility. This report builds on iPerceptions’ patented, best-of-breed algorithmic approach to open-text analysis.

Some noteworthy findings from the first two months of data were:

1) The advent of the summer holiday season pushed the twin concepts of “reservation” and “book” into the online customer vocabulary. The 4Q family contains sites for which online hotel reservations, rental car reservations, and resort reservations are critical revenue streams. The overall thrust of the commentary right now is neutral.

2) Website owners should not neglect the importance of effective site usability and navigation. Page loading latency, inefficient internal search results, and buried calls-to-action can all get in the way here. Ferrying visitors to exactly what they are looking for goes a long way towards ensuring they complete their tasks and surf away satisfied. Judging from the fact that “look for” trended as the second most popular negative concept, it looks as though site owners might be dropping the ball on this one.

3) The nasty downturns in the economy and the ever-rising costs of fuel and other commodities are contributing to declining satisfaction with price points across the 4Q family of sites. Significantly, the presence of the concept “price” in the positive open-ended stream fell by close to 50% from May to June. This will be a key indicator to watch during the summer, as it ties in closely with the concepts of booking and reservation.

We’ll be running and disseminating these reports on a regular basis going forward. As I mentioned in my last post, trending is key to good analysis, and the modulation of positive and negative respondent opinion will yield us a lot of insight into where the web is headed.

4Q now captures voice of customer in 16 languages

We have some exciting news!

4Q is just about ready to go global! We've completed our first round of survey interface translations into 15 new languages, which are:

Canadian French
European French
Latin American Spanish
European Spanish
European Portuguese
German
Dutch
Danish
Swedish
Norwegian
Italian
Traditional Chinese
Simplified Chinese
Japanese
Korean

For now, as you may have noticed, the actual 4Q site is available in English, French and Spanish. We will be adding new languages to the site itself, but the survey interface is already set to go in the languages listed above. At any one time, you'll be able to run your 4Q survey in 6 of any of the above languages.

Not only have we rolled out the survey translations, but we have a couple of highly-requested product updates to announce as well.

First, we've rolled out the ability to create an unlimited number of surveys and manage them all within your one account. Second, you can now adjust your purpose of visit selections (found in question 2) for surveys you've already submitted and may already be live with.

We’re announcing these developments on our forum and blog first so we can get as much feedback as possible from our existing and engaged 4Q users. If you notice any oddities or errors in our translations, PLEASE let us know at 4Q@iperceptions.com.
Once you’ve taken a close look at these translations and provided us with feedback, we’ll roll them out publicly.

If you have any questions at all about the new languages or features, don't hesitate to reach out at 4Q@iperceptions.com.

Now, get your multi-language surveys up and let's work together to take 4Q global!

Maximize the value of 4Q - listen continuously!

With all the excitement in the air surrounding the imminent 4Q global language launch, it's a good time to talk about the value of continuously listening to your site visitors.

A significant chunk of our 4Q community is using the survey as a continuous monitoring solution. (Applause!) But there are some users who have turned 4Q on to take a quick snapshot of visitor satisfaction and then promptly turned it off, with a plan to take the next dipstick reading in a couple of months. While insights gleaned from a snapshot approach are certainly actionable and valuable, the real power of 4Q can only be unlocked through a commitment to continuous listening.

Measuring customer satisfaction is truly a process, not an event. There are several key reasons for this:

1) Trending provides context. If you have a task completion score of 68% today, what does that mean relative to the week, the month, or the year? Are you riding the crest of an upward wave, or are you sinking down into the nadir of dissatisfaction? Only trending can provide you with that insight.

2) Continuous listening reduces the effect of seasonal biases or marketplace shocks. So, you have a satisfaction score of 91%? That's amazing. But what if you are a car site and you took that reading right after you populated your pages with information on new models? You probably experienced a bump up based on fresh content, but it's not indicative of the true pattern of customer satisfaction.

3) In an information economy, where the vicissitudes of customer opinion are legendary, the last thing you want to do is rob yourself of valuable sources of information about your site and your brand. Continuous listening can function as a crucial early warning system, allowing you to respond to problems before they cause long-term damage.

I'll refer back to Duff's seminal blog post from September 2006. Duff argued,"Knowing what drives customer satisfaction, past, present, and looking forward is the most powerful decision support possible, but it becomes a reality only as a process not an event."

So, if you're running 4Q and thinking of shutting it down, consider leaving it on at a lower invitation rate. And if you've already shut 4Q down, don't be afraid to turn it back on. Your account settings will remain the same and the insights will still be there waiting for you!

As always, don't hesitate to jump feet first into the Forum and share your 4Q continuous listening success stories.

iPerceptions Demonstrates Continued Thought Leadership in the Hospitality Sector

Over the past year, iPerceptions has been demonstrating its thought leadership in the hospitality sector through a series of articles published on HotelExecutive.com. The pieces have all been focused on empowering interactive marketers in the hospitality space with the necessary tools to optimize their websites and gain those crucial lifts in satisfaction, conversion, and loyalty.

The full-text articles are available here. Registration is required to view the articles. The following pieces have been published thus far:

The Wired Hotel: Pleasing Your Higher Frequency Website Visitors

Synopsis: Discusses the importance of designing the website so that it looks and feels like a second home for the most committed and frequent visitors.

The Wired Hotel: Catering to the Casual Visitor

Synopsis: A follow-up to the piece above, now looking at how a site can be setup to be as intuitive as possible for first-time, infrequent, or seasonal visitors.

The Wired Hotel: Making Booking Painless

Synopsis: Outlines some of the most effective strategies for making the online reservation process as smooth and streamlined as possible, in an effort to discourage abandonment. Also outlines visitors' suggestions to that end.

The Wired Hotel: Hassle-Free Hotel Locators

Synopsis: Help! I'm stuck in downtown (insert city here) and I need to book a hotel room. This article covers the importance of making hotel locator tools as responsive as possible for those scrambling to find a place to stay at the last minute.

Also, keep an eye out for the following upcoming articles.

July 2008 - The Wired Hotel: The Price is Right

Synopsis: This article will examine the importance of assuring the visitor that the price he or she sees on a hotel site is the best one available in an era of ultra-competitive online travel agencies.

September 2008 - The Wired Hotel: Business or Pleasure?

Synopsis: Understanding the attitudinal distinctions between business travelers and leisure travelers is of paramount importance. This article will trace which parts of the site are most important for the former and which are most important for the latter.

The Faces of iPerceptions (and web analytics) - Michael Gerstel

An interview with iPerception's Account Executive, Michael Gerstel. In this short interview, Michael comments on the latest web analytics trends and shares his thoughts on how to make survey results relevant, meaningful, and actionable.

Enjoy!

SJ Answers Your 4Q Questions!

As 4Q gets closer and closer to going global, iPerceptions' Marketing Manager, Sarah-Jane (SJ) Morris, responds to the latest 4Q Forum posts and discusses upcoming survey upgrades.

SJ covers the following hot topics:

- Implementing 4Q on HTTPS and secure connections
- Google AdWords and 4Q layered invitations
- Implementing the layered invitation
- What's on the radar: upgrades and languages
- Using 4Q on Blogger accounts
- A special shout-out to an active 4Q user

To contact SJ for any other 4Q questions, please feel free to post in the Forum or e-mail her directly at 4q at iperceptions.com.

Michael and Jon talk Internet Retailer and Ad-Tech

The iPerceptions team has been rather busy of late traveling across North America (and beyond) hitting up the show circuit. Recently, several members of our sales team attended the Internet Retailer show in Chicago and the Ad-Tech show in Miami. One recent Friday afternoon after pizza, we decided to see if we could go viral and filmed ourselves chatting about these respective shows and their outcomes. Take a look at this video featuring our own Senior Marketing Analyst Michael Whitehouse interviewing someone who you've surely met if you've been to any of these shows, iPerceptions Business Development Manager Jon Zell.

4Q - 3 Months and Going Strong!

It's been 3 months since we rolled out 4Q. Jonathan's blog post got it all started and the momentum grew from there. On the eve of the launch, we were so excited, and yet there was a pervasive sense of the unknown deeply rooted in all of us. This had never been done before, and though we were all optimistic, we were taking a leap of faith and hoping that the web was ready for such a progressive approach to tapping into the voice of the customer.

We're 3 months in, and all of our most optimistic projections have been surpassed. Thousands of site owners are now utilizing 4Q to make sure their websites don't suck. Hundreds of thousands of datapoints have been collected, each representing the unique and important voice of a real website visitor. The community of 4Q users now runs the gamut from the Fortune 1000 all the way down to small sites tucked away in the Deep Web. But they have all come together in their commitment to listening and acting, and they have filled the 4Q Forum with almost 250 posts, containing suggestions, eureka moments, and wonderful success stories.

June is a big month for 4Q. Our translation and tech teams have been working around the clock and we're almost ready to roll it out in close to 20 languages, covering every continent on earth. In the near future, site owners will be able to speak a common language of customer satisfaction that will bridge cultures and reach across the world!

How transparent can you be?

The Internet, and more recently the explosion of the Web 2.0 phenomenon, has inverted the social physics of information. Power comes not from your Rolodex anymore, but from how many bloggers link to you...and the paradigm shift is expanding....The new breed of naked companies also discovers that once people are interested in you, they're interested in helping you out - by offering ideas, critiques, and extra brain cycles. Customers have become working partners.

In a recent sales meeting, one of our business development reps raised the concern that in our online survey at iperceptions.com, we ask visitors how familiar they are with our competitors, and we ask them to rank some of the obvious similarities and differences in both the companies as well as the comparing online experiences.

To a marketing guy like me, this is valuable for two reasons; one, the competitive information is priceless. I am able to gauge market awareness of competing solutions as well as improve the areas of weaknesses, and emphasize the areas of strengths when it comes to recognition of brand values and value propositions. The second, is that it helps iPerceptions spread the message that we are an ‘open’ company.

Winning business is important, and in the end, points on the board are everything, but perhaps almost as important is to build awareness. I just want companies to be aware of what tools are available to them, and I want them to be listening to the voice of customer. I am less concerned about with whom they get involved from a vendor perspective. I believe prospects will do their own due diligence and choose the vendor that fits their objectives, culture, needs, etc…in the end, the better solution will rise to the top of a quickly maturing market.

I tried to explain to the team that we want the business that wants us. We want to encourage prospects to look at the competition. We want to be forthcoming, honest, and sincere, and we want to win the business on the merits of our solution, service and value.

To a sales guy, this is an extremely threatening concept. How can you point potential clients to the competition? Isn’t that just stupid?

We were recently in a competitive situation with a fairly large prospect (now client). After an intensive selection process, we were awarded the business, and our VP Sales placed the usual call to the decision maker to find out why (we always want to know why we were or were not given business when it comes to a competitive bid).

The gist of his response was this: “Both solutions met our needs. They were close in price and the decision was not an easy one to make…at first. But your competitors spent 20% of the time pitching the value of their own solution, and 80% of the time putting yours down. It was a turn off, and spoke to their integrity…”

Clearly, the open and honest approach works. Be nice, have integrity and be forthcoming, and may the most transparent company win.