Like Bamboo In The Wind

In 2000, the book “The Cluetrain Manifesto” was published and signaled a change in the way that smart web marketers thought about the upcoming web 2.0 revolution. Cluetrain presaged a shift from a playing field controlled by the marketers to one controlled by the consumers themselves. Among the 95 theses they presented, the rule that really stuck was “Markets are a conversation”. This single thought alone is enough to end all prior concepts about web design and herald a new approach to web marketing.

            The paradigm of web-design developed in the 90’s and still used by most companies looks more much like the approach that civil engineers take getting ready to build a 50 story high-rise. Every link, word and image planned to the finest detail. Of course there is nothing wrong with planning, but the question is, what that plan is based upon. Most likely it is based upon what the designers and website owners want, not specifically what the website visitors want. Remember…Cluetrain said “Markets are a conversation”, and the rigid structure of a 50 story building is NOT a conversation, it is concrete and steel and meant to last unchanged for half a century.

            This desire to control every detail of a website is an extension of the business owner’s desire to control the conversation, to control the playing field. The funny part about this is that at no time in history has the sales process been a one-sided conversation. Now, somehow the internet was going to allow business owners to tell the story THEY wanted to tell in the way THEY wanted to tell it; and still be successful. This approach only worked in the 90’s because websites themselves were so new and unique. Once the number of choices increased a thousand fold, people ceased to read or care about the “about us” page.

            Flash forward to 2011. We are using Live On Page to hold an adaptive and flexible conversation with website visitors. We avoid hyperbole and “ad-speak” in the video spokesperson scripts in lieu of real conversation tone and grammar. If you were to write, word for word, all of your conversations from a day of speaking with co-workers, that written conversation would look terrible on paper. However, it is the way humans speak to each other. Cluetrain predicted the inevitable success of the Live On Page scripting model when they wrote that marketing would be done in human voice.

            Just like the designing of a website, business owners will often script their video spokesperson to say things like “welcome to our website, I hope you feel comfortable and browse around. You will find lots of information in our website, feel free to contact us”. Can you imagine Neiman Marcus spending millions on a structure, millions on advertising, a huge payroll on service employees, PR, marketing, etc. Then imagine that the script above is what their sales staff uses on the sales floor to try and motivate people to buy.

            In a website you only have about 5-10 seconds to grab someone and keep them in the site, do you really want to spend that 5-10 seconds saying a worthless greeting that everyone of us would ignore. The area of our brain that predicts stuff is very good at moving your attention away from the predictable to look for the unusual. Are you starting to get it? Video spokesperson scripts and written content that sound like a brochure doesn’t work. If it looks like a brochure, sounds like a brochure, or reads like a brochure…guess what? It is a brochure! When was the last time you willingly read a brochure? A brochure is not a HUMAN conversation. It is a pile of sales hype and ad-speak. It is a blatant self-congratulatory, self-aggrandizing document that is NOT about the visitor; it is about the company. Remember the old “What’s In It For Me” (WIIFM) principle, it must be your religion to survive the new web marketing world.

Using A Celebrity Video Spokesperson

Using A Celebrity Video Spokesperson

            The use of celebrity spokesperson videos on the internet is an entirely new service offering. It was pioneered by Live On Page, who offers this elite product to some larger companies. These companies are realizing that hiring a recognizable celebrity might be outside their marketing budget for broadcast TV, but they can easily afford to hire the same celebrity for the more limited exposure on their website. This can give credibility and implied endorsement instantly.

            Since the real challenge in any website is to get the visitor to awake from their search-and-bounce stupor, the use of a celebrity video spokesperson might be the ultimate secret weapon. The use of Live On Page video spokesperson leads to a typical 30% decrease in bounce rate from the home page, a 50% increase in visit length and 50% increase in the number of pages visited. Of course all of these results rely on the believability and conversational tone of the script and actor skill.

            Online marketers spend money and time attacking the issues of bounce rate, visit length and pages viewed. However, all three of these parameters are altered when the site effectively and quickly communicates it’s main purpose and the most important actions and options available to the visitor. In other words, effective communication can solve all of these issues.

            To build a site with this strategy in mind, the design centers around the core conversion goal for the site. The video spokesperson scripts and deployment is then built to enforce this core goal for the site and usher visitors along this path. When compared to traditional web design, this is completely upside down and yet it is the design strategy that makes the most intuitive to every person in terms of their own experience searching the web.

            While celebrity actors may not be cost effective for smaller businesses, they still offer the promise of instant credibility and differentiation. When a small business owner can have a famous person stand on heir site, they are certain to stand out from everyone else. The only remaining question is whether the website gets significant traffic. Entertainment media is switching to the internet on sites like Hulu and Youtube. Shows like “The Guild” are entirely viewed online. As the public’s attention shift more and more to the internet, Celebrities will need a new venue to leverage their recognition and companies will need new methods of leveraging celebrity endorsement. A company would never be able to purchase a celebrity to stand at the doorway of their brick and mortar location as a greeter, as Live On Page video spokesperson. but they can hire a celebrity to stand at the doorway of their virtual storefront and do exactly the same thing.