Minimize cognitive load by building on existing mental models and reducing the need for users to remember things from one part of text to another.
Source: Legibility, Readability, and Comprehension: Making Users Read Your Words | Nielsen Norman Group
“The goal of Facebook Instant Articles is to keep you on Facebook. No need to explore the larger Web when it’s all right there in Facebook, especially when it loads so much faster in the Facebook app than it does in a browser.
Google seems to have recognized what a threat Facebook Instant Articles could be to Google’s ability to serve ads. This is why Google’s project is called Accelerated Mobile Pages. Sorry, desktop users, Google already knows how to get ads to you.”
Source: How Google’s AMP project speeds up the Web—by sandblasting HTML | Ars Technica
“Speeding up the web” is a wonderful sentiment, but Google, Apple, and Facebook are well aware of the impending transition to a post-mobile computing interface that will transform how we see and interact with advertising.
Google AMP, Facebook Instant News, and Apple News are stop gaps to make a few more dollars on a rapidly transitioning medium (web advertising) as it exists in its current state.
“It’s all about the data. Under the hood, the Amazon store has a few unusual features. Every book has a shelf tag that includes a capsule review from the website, a star rating, and a barcode. There are no prices listed. To get the price, you scan the code with the camera of your smartphone and the Amazon app. If you don’t have a smartphone or the app installed, an associate can do it for you. This brings up the product page for the item you’re looking at, with full reviews, specs and pricing.”
Source: Amazon’s Retail Store Has Nothing To Do With Selling Books – Forbes
Price is the main motivating factor in most purchasing decisions under $50, so it’s interesting to see that Amazon is trading off that variable with the need to scan a code with its app on your smartphone in order to give you the information.
There’s a very good reason Amazon wants to do that, of course… if you have the app installed on your smartphone and use it in their store, they are able to (in relative real time) offer up a more customized, or personal, shopping experience to you based on what Amazon knows about you. If you’re online in 2015, that’s probably a good deal, especially for Prime members with Echo’s and a long purchase history like me and my family.
Variant pricing will initially surprise consumers. “What do you mean he gets to buy that Star Wars book for $2 less than I do?” will be a common refrain. Amazon knows my wife and I have a little boy due to arrive any moment now (or they should based on our recent purchases), and they know I’m a Star Wars fan based on my Amazon Prime Movies streaming, and purchase of toys and collectibles for our kids (*cough* … ) or the frequent amount of times our 5 year old asks Alexa to play the Imperial March from the soundtrack.
So, psychologically there’s a great deal more involved with a purchasing decision than price point.
As we move towards a cash-free and digital transaction based economy (thanks, Apple and Android Pay!) and continue to contribute both our data and our purchasing habits to recommendation engines, it will be more economically efficient to move towards a market where goods and services are based on context and situational awareness (Uber’s Surge Pricing, for example).
“Showcase Stores” such as Best Buy get this. Even the weekly grocery store discount ads in the newspaper circular (for us old folks) will follow this lead and require an app or an interface not based on universal pricing in order for the “cost” of something to be displayed. Our nearly automated financial markets full of nano-second timed transactions carried out by bots are already there.
Time for advertising and marketing to catch up.
It’s going to be a fun decade ahead.
“Hey Alexa, play my Beatles mix. And order more newborn diapers.”
“CHURCH: Stop preaching downloaded sermons from other preachers. If you found it online, so can the congregation. People want to hear your take on God’s Word, not a re-heated sermon from someone else.”
Source: Bigger Fixes Nothing (7 Unexpected Steps Toward Church Health) | Pivot | A Blog by Karl Vaters
Saving these for later… and for clients.
So true.
“Looking forward, we feel this is best seized by taking on new opportunities to fully realize our vision for ebooks. With that, we will be taking steps to sunset the existing Oyster service over the next several months. If you are an Oyster reader you will receive an email personally regarding your account.”
Source: oysterbooks
Hmm… never a good post to make on a Friday night before Halloween… I wonder if it was poor uptake, Amazon Kindle Unlimited, or just market economics of the ebook subscription model?
“Part of this will entail a shift in advertising to permission-based advertising: asking the consumer whether she wants to see an ad — which would be asking her if she wants to receive information — for a particular brand at the current time. The consumer will have the choice: yes, I’m in the supermarket and I want to see the weekly specials; or no, I’m driving and I only want to receive breaking news that’s relevant to my family. She would no longer be forced to page through or scroll through irrelevant ads to reach what she needs.”
Source: Notification: The Post App World Revealed – Ad Tech Daily
I’ve been doing a ton of work and research in what comes “after” mobile… meaning, what advertising and marketing looks like now that our mobile devices are being used more than our laptops and desktops.
Your iPhone will look dramatically different in a few short years. I don’t mean the physical part. I mean the part you’re interacting with at the level where you once opened an app to check your latest Facebook Like notifications or new emails. There will be little-to-no reliance on that grid of apps that you belovedly call your homescreen.
I’ve been using my iPhone and Android phones this way the last few weeks and it’s been transformative. I could never go back to relying on opening apps from a homescreen to receive, process, or even create information (more on that soon).
Google, Apple, and Facebook all understand that the “future” (as in the next few years) will be dominated by notifications.
Just to think, Twitter had it right with Track all those years ago. Shame they double clutched the ball.
Native / content – advertising / notifications win… adblockers plus notifications plus better ad technology means branding and advertising will conflate. It’s going to be wild. Put on your VR helmets!
Discovery marketing = notifications.
Amanda Palmer did an AMA on the /books subreddit yesterday on the topic of her book The Art of Asking, so the Thinking.FM hosts pulled a Superfriends on Friday night and recorded 90 minutes of thoughtful discussion about Palmer’s tactics and the nature of the artist in an age of self-promotion.
I think it’s an interesting conversation that anyone seeking to go out on a limb and chart your own path (whether as a businessperson, artist, speaker etc) should consider:
“On this special episode of Thinking, Sam is joined by Elisabeth, Thomas, and Merianna (the other Thinking.FM podcasters) for a roundtable / Superfriends discussion of whether or not Amanda F. Palmer is a marketing genius. Along the way, they discuss the right and wrong ways to promote yourself whether you’re an artist, musician, author, professor, or civilian.”
“It feels weird admitting this, too: We as a Buffer marketing team—working on a product that helps people succeed on social media—have yet to figure out how to get things working on Facebook (especially), Twitter, Pinterest, and more.
And that’s super scary to admit.”
Source: We’ve Lost Nearly Half Our Social Referral Traffic in the Last 12 Months
Brutally honest (but incredibly smart) post by the Buffer marketing team. If you don’t know, Buffer is one of the services out there that allows you to easily share your content from one place to another by hooking everything up together. It’s a great service (I use competitor dlvr.it here but I do use Buffer with a few clients).
So often I have these sorts of conversations with existing or potential clients that have to do with the dwindling returns on using Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn to try and get more pageviews back to a site or newsletter.
Part of the problem has to do with the nature of metrics and how things are changing, part has to do with the maturity of social media, and part has to do with the realization of businesses that if you really want to get a vast number of clicks back to your site, you’re going to have to pay for them (organic reach via social is all but dead if you’re not willing to invest in a social media manager or a consultant like me… just saying). Social media has changed and evolved. Social media is not an umbrella. You can’t blast out a post to Twitter and Facebook and wait for the clicks to come.
… and you shouldn’t be waiting for clicks.
I have this conversation with website build or revamp clients almost daily… It might sound odd for someone who runs a web marketing company to say that website design really doesn’t matter as much as you think it does. But it’s true. Focus on the other aspects of your business and stop worrying whether your site has too much white space.
The expectations of people visiting your site and our collective notions of web design have changed to the extent that “pretty” isn’t necessarily “better” due to the speed of your page and the experience (content) your site offers (particularly on mobile).
Sergio Nouvel has a good write up about this with more salient points:
“This switch from web design to experience design is directly caused by the shift from web pages to digital products, tools, and ecosystems. Web pages are just part of something much bigger: mobile apps, API’s, social media presence, search engine optimization, customer service channels, and physical locations all inform the experience a user has with a brand, product, or service. Pretending that you can run a business or deliver value just by taking care of the web channel is naïve at best and harmful at worst.”
Source: Why Web Design is Dead | UX Magazine
“We estimated that on an average American cell data plan, each megabyte downloaded over a cell network costs about a penny. Visiting the home page of Boston.com every day for a month would cost the equivalent of about $9.50 in data usage just for the ads.”
Source: The Cost of Mobile Ads on 50 News Websites – The New York Times
I’d venture to say that local TV and news sites have even more ads than boston.com and “cost” you more in data downloads each month. There’s a reason local news stations are eager to promote their content on Facebook and why most engagement and comments happen there rather than on their own sites.
If your business, group, or church site is loaded with plugins, images, and unnecessary animations (especially Flash), you’re already likely being penalized by Google in organic searches as your site is not as mobile friendly as it should be.
Keep that in mind when you open your own site on your mobile device.
