Category Archives: digital media

July 25, 2014 · 8:42 am

Pretty/Useless

This Foodie Friday I have restaurant marketing on my mind. That’s the result of some close encounters with restaurant websites.

English: 0

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

From time to time I’ll check out places to eat in cities where I’m heading. Of course I use the review sites as a first source of recommendations.  Inevitably if a few places seem to be of comparable quality and hold potential I’ll go to the establishment’s website to do a deeper dive on the menu.  This is where things begin to break down in a couple of ways and there are some broader points which come out of the experience.

Many of the sites are beautiful.  Clearly, someone spent many hours creating a multimedia site complete with music that plays while you experience the site, flash movies that auto-play, and dozens of pictures of happy customers.  Unfortunately, most of these sites are painful to use and are a huge waste of money.  I’ll go even further to say that they do more harm than good.  In the case of restaurant sites, no one cares how the site looks.  Visitors want information, not to be entertained.  They’re pretty and useless.

Think about it.  Why do you visit the site?  Probably, first and foremost, to check out the menu.  Many of the sites I visit force a download (it’s easier to update one file than several pages of the site) and some of those downloads are huge.  Next, I may want to make a reservation so I need to know where the place (Google Maps link!) is and some means of doing so – a phone number or a direct link to Open Table or whatever service the place uses.  Finally, the hours they’re serving and maybe a listing of the specials would be good.  That’s it.  Designers need to focus on the business goals and not on “pretty.” The most important factor in the design of a website is that the website makes it easy for users to find what they want.

The problem isn’t restricted to restaurants.  If you’ve built a site and not had a discussion with the design and coding team about business goals for the site, target audiences, analytics you’ll be using to measure activity and success, or how you’ll be marketing (SEO implications), you’ve missed the mark.   Unlike the restaurants with crappy sites, there probably aren’t lots of review sites driving people to your business (most review sites contain a modicum of the critical information).  Maybe now is a good time to take a look at your site through a visitor’s eyes?

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July 8, 2014 · 9:36 am

Let’s Get Physical

Usually on TunesDay we talk about a song and that’s the title of the post.

CD

(Photo credit: grytr)

Today, however, we won’t be examining any old Olivia Newton-John songs and will, instead pose a question.  When was the last time you bought a piece of physical media? A CD or a DVD is what I mean. Well, this TunesDay we’re going to answer that question as well as have a think about what it all means. Maybe we’ll throw in a little point about statistics while we’re at it. Ready?

The good folks at Nielsen Soundscan and Nielsen BDS have some news for us about the amount of musical content consumption over the first six months of the year:

For the first six months of 2014, sales of albums are down 14.9% vs. the first six months of 2013. Vinyl AlbumSales and On-Demand streaming continues to show strong gains – Vinyl LP sales are up 40.4% and overall On-Demand streaming up 42% over last year, with on-demand audio up 50.1% and on-demand video up 35.2%.
 
Wow!  Everything old is new again – look at vinyl.  Here’s the statistics lesson – vinyl grew from 2.9 million albums sold to 4 million.  Yes, it’s up 40% but it’s a tiny percentage of all the content sales (maybe 2%).  Always put numbers into context – on their own they can be pretty deceiving.
On to the bigger point.  Once the music industry stopped fighting consumer demand and allowed the changes brought about by digital technology, I think they got a better picture of what was good and bad in terms of the music they were selling.  Album sales, both digital and physical, continue to fall.  As a heavy consumer of music I can tell you that there was nothing worse that spending $15 (in the old days) on an album to get the 2 great songs you wanted to hear.  That changed with the iTunes model of single track sales and the broader point of letting consumer buy just what they want is not lost in that.  Maybe that fall is about the inability of artists to put together a great album?
What stands out to me in this report is the continued growth of on-demand streaming – Spotify, Pandora, and others.  Audio on-demand streams grew 50% and unlike our vinyl example, the numbers are significant – almost 34 million streams up from just under 24 million.  Assuming each stream is one song, that’s 10 times the equivalent number of albums (10 tracks to an album) as were actually sold.  I suspect a good chunk of that music wasn’t new – the long tail at work.  So we’ve gone from consumers having to buy a physical product which continued excess materials (for which they had to pay to get what they want) and needed to be stored someplace (you should see the piles of records and CD’s in my house) to choice as to buying specifically what they want with no storage issues to paying just to hear what they want without owning or storing anything.  The content is the same, the business model radically different.  Maybe something in there points to a trend in your business?
Some might look at the Nielsen numbers and think music is in trouble.  I think it’s pretty healthy as long as we’re focused on the business music is really in now.  What do you think?

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July 7, 2014 · 9:33 am

Task Surfing

Think about how most of us live our lives these days.

surfing like a fox

(Photo credit: monkeyc.net)

If you’re like many folks you might feel as if there aren’t enough hours in the day to get your job done, to consume all of the content that appeals to you, and to sneak a meal in there every once in a while.  Part of what’s going on in media is that content providers are learning how to reach consumers in a timely manner, giving them access to the programming consumers crave across all platforms and devices at any time and without delay.  That same thing is happening in online commerce as well.

When we all started on the web 20 years ago, it was a novelty.  There weren’t a lot of sites, and not a lot one could do on the internet anyway so we surfed.  We followed links around from place to place taking it all in much as one wanders around a new neighborhood trying to get acclimated.  In the ensuing decades, that’s changed.  We live our lives on the web, and we do so through many more devices than were possible even 15 years ago.  We’re no longer newcomers to the digital neighborhood.  Which raises a question.

Why does it seem as if many designers are making art instead of commerce?  Why does it seem as if many sites are designed to be lovely interactive experiences but which obfuscate or delay the completion of the task for which the user came to the site in the first place?  Online shopping isn’t a recreational activity in my mind and I know there is research that supports that.  Most people shop or otherwise interact with a purpose.  How many webmasters keep that in mind as they build in splash pages, allow screen overlays to pop up, or otherwise the user’s path to completing the task for which they came?

No one web surfs any more and stops to notice a lovely design.  They surf the tasks which need completing.  There is a side of me that thinks high conversion rates with low time on site is a perfect representation of where we want to be as  consumers get to the places they want to go and act without delay.  What do you think?

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