Clark's Spot

I’ve been away from Who Is Listening for a few weeks as I take a series of courses on public presentation and marketing management. Both courses gave me stuff to mull over – and some fodder for future posts. But I wanted to mention something now that was covered in a class in the past week.

The idea of Who Is Listening is that the way the message is framed is important. It isn’t enough to say it – you have to say it in a way that connects with the audience. This is no less true in video as it is in audio.

New GM appears to want to be more responsive and transparent to the consumer. (Comments about the American consumer/taxpayer being a de facto owner and entitled to transparency are fine. Go ahead and add comments below.) The company is launching an online suggestion box. It has a website dedicated as the home of its blog collection. And it launched a spiffy new commercial detailing how new the New GM is going to be.

The commercial has attracted commentary from the blogosphere (who believe it is cliche), journalists (who pen how the mighty have fallen), and wrestling fans (who don’t like the final line). Nevermind the spoof ad that has more views than the actual ad on YouTube.

The problem with the commercial? Watch it and take a look at some of the images. Tattered American flag. Hockey player pinned to the ice. Lots of unsold vehicles. Some of the images invoke thoughts of worn, old, outdated, and defeated. That’s not the message GM should want to convey.

It’s important to think about more than who is listening – or in this case, watching. You have to think about what they hear and see as well. Make sure that is in line with your message.

About six weeks ago, I wrote about how a monthly e-newsletter was key to driving traffic to a blog and website where I worked. A few days later I was reminded of the Pareto Principle – also known as the 80/20 rule. The monthly e-mail doesn’t drive that much traffic, but I’m a sucker for a quick analysis and measuring the ROI is always a great thing to do. That led me to try to compare a few numbers to quantify how big an impact the e-newsletter gives.

Quick disclaimer. My six months of numbers are a little dated – the last quarter of 2008 and first quarter of 2009.

The e-newsletter, web page, and a blog received the majority of views during each month so I just looked at those sources. I left the e-newsletter numbers out as well because I wanted to understand whether the e-newsletter really increased the number of web page and blog views. So I focused on those two numbers. And I looked at the six-day period from when the e-newsletter was sent. Over the course of the typical 30-day month, those six days are 20 percent.

A copy of the e-newsletter was kept on the website and many articles were posted on the site as well. While each open and click could be listed as a page view, I only measured hits on the index page. The newsletter offered the chance to go to my organization’s “home page” a link to the index page – and a number of people did so. In the six days after an e-mail (20 percent of a month) we always had more than 20 percent of our monthly hits – as high as 34 percent in the final month that I tracked. The main web page generated 29.5 percent of its hits in the 20 percent of the month after an e-newsletter.

This trend was even more obvious in the blog hits. We launched the blog on WordPress.com in September, added a link to our web page late in that month, and began to promote the blog in the e-newsletter in October. The concept of visiting the blog was new to stakeholders throughout this period, and the monthly e-mail provided a great reminder and driver to the blog.

During half of the months studied, the blog received more than half of its page views in the 6 days immediately after the e-mail. While this isn’t an 80/20 split, overall the blog received 49.7 percent of its traffic in the 20 percent of the time following an monthly e-mail.

Content was likely one of the main reasons the blog fared better than the web page in the days after the e-mail. But the takeaway is the same. When planning communications, include something regular to provide your audience with a gentle reminder that you’re there. E-mail is deleted too easily and too regularly – especially when you lean too heavily on it. But e-mail is low-cost and unobtrusive enough that it can give your readers a push to get more information about you.

It happens every day during my commute. I don’t take a highway or expressway during my drive, but I cross the interchange of an expressway at the edge of downtown. A few blocks from the expressway is a bridge construction project that’s taken out one another way into downtown.

Between these two inconveniences (they’re minor – this isn’t a major metro region), you’ll a dozen drivers jockeying for position. You’ll have traffic heading on and off the expressway. There’s always a truck from a distributor pulling out to block traffic. You’re likely to hit a parent stop in traffic lane to let a child out for school.

The rest of the drive is fairly empty. All of the congestion is in a really small area. That small patch of roadway determines whether I’m early, on-time, or late. The majority of the trip has no impact on the final results.

I was thinking about that as I drove to work yesterday. I knew that I’d spend the day writing and coding a monthly e-newsletter.

Research might suggest that e-mail is losing effectiveness. It’s too easy to delete (if it isn’t marked spam). The addresses in your list eventually go out of date. The information is scanned and discarded compared to interactive websites, social networks, and online communities.

(Disclaimer – we don’t spam, everyone has prior relationship with us, we process unsubscribes and opt-outs, etc.)

I’ve found our monthly e-mail is the largest driver of traffic to each of these other channels. The website hits go up. The blog views skyrocket. The clicks on Twitter and Facebook pop. It’s the reminder to our stakeholders to check in – using whichever program or format you’d like – to the institution where I work.

In other words, the three-day window of e-mail opens has a huge effect on the month traffic. What have you found?

Thanks to lynac on Flickr for the photo.

When I created this blog, WordPress was proud to give me some statistics about how popular its blogs are. This is one of 148,129 new posts created today.

Stats are all over the place about how many messages a person receives in a normal day. Lots of studies have talked about this saturation.

How many people are receiving the messages? How many of the 37 million-plus words written on WordPress or its platforms (as of my writing this) are read?

That’s what this blog is (now – updated 11:10 p.m.) about.

In a time of user-generated content, can all of the stuff being created actually be meaningfully consumed? How – without spamming everyone who’s a friend, connection, or follower – can I get my message distributed. And am I sending the best message to them?