Thanks for the comment. Yes of course we agree these are just some of the secrets regarding SEO and improving your rankings.

Nevertheless, I hope you and I can agree that these are important ones and one needs to keep these in mind when trying to leverage a blog's traffic.

Thanks for sharing and I hope I can read your next comment soon here on another post.

Thanks for sharing this, it suggests that our expectations may be too high.

But in some ways, maybe Deborah has a point as well, we may not only expect too much but be spreading ourselves to thing… being involved in more than 3 networks.

Who can do a blog, run a Facebook group, participate in 5 Xing and/or LinkedIn groups and have enough time for close friends and family?

So maybe less is more …?

Thanks for sharing.

I find your comment very helpful:

“So in a sense as we gain trust, even if for a time our blog is simply observed, and our community grows, we increase the momentum and the reputation of being a community that is in a real but virtual conversation THAT can go offline and turn into more than the online dialogue.”

But I also find that your comment about LinkedIn rings a bell for myself. I have unsubscribed myself from various LinkedIn groups (applies to Xing as well).

This is simply because I do not have enough time to do justice to some of these groups. Being a member requires time and not being able to give the time to a group seems unfair. So it is better to unsubscribe than not to participate at all.

Deborah, thanks for sharing.

My experience is limited, but as I have tried to develop meaningful connections on twitter, I've had to work hard and to accept slow, but gradual progress. On my blog, even more so. I can only imagine the hurdles that one would have to overcome to establish, maintain and grow a group of involved, interested and interesting people who share a common focus. My hat is off to you.

As far as lurkers go, I tweeted something the other day and a fellow who has been following me for months replied to me about it. It was the first time I had heard from him, but he had been paying attention to me, at least a little, all along. That's too easy to forget.

Thanks for providing the forum!

Recently, I unsubscribed from over half the Linked In groups I was part of because I wasn't even scanning the daily digests of posts and yet it was requiring me to take energy to acknowledge I didn't have time to read the abstracts and delete the email of the daily digest.

I find with Social Media becoming a part of my daily activities, I have become more discerning of what I read, where I comment and when I tweet about something. In the name of quality over quantity so to speak. For the online presence I may have is intended to emulate the face to face impact I can have. Authenticity, Consistency and Congruency being two guiding principles of how I like to work, be and suggest that my clients practice marketing wholistically.

It's simply more impactful in my experience.

As always I appreciate your posts for how thoughtful and well prepared they read Urs!

Thanks for this comment. I find your comment about lurkers particularly interesting. For my own benefit I tried to define it saying:

“Lurking can be defined as passive participation of group members which enables them to get to know the group better by learning the social norms, identifying the active contributors, and building trust before switching to active participation.”

@TheCR (Rachel Happe) stated that lurkers have a great deal of value to a group or a blog:

“Reading an initial post on a new blog is the start of building a relationship and trust. Different people have different 'lurker hurdles' before they feel comfortable participating.”

I think Rachels is right in her previous comment made on this blog. Moreover, the same applies to social network groups on Xing or LinkedIn. People have to feel comfortable (e.g., with the topic, language) to jump in and leave a comment.

To me it seems everybody would like to achieve:

1 — keep the group growing steadily with new members BUT
2 — get an ever greater number of lurkers to dip their toe into the water and start participating

Put differently, keep the number of lurkers as small as possible while moving new members quickly from a state of lurking to active participation. Being personable and friendly surely helps while having your friends comment makes it easier to add your own five cents to their contribution made in one of the group forums.

I agree…you know I do…”What successful groups have is members that post thoughtful questions to generate real dialogue and thereby advance the collective knowledge of the community.”

And yes, regular and thoughtful contributions can really make a difference.

And a group will undoubtably always have a CORE of participants. Makes me think of the first time I heard the principle of the Bell Curve explained in a college economics class and it made sense to me then and holds true in my continued experience.

Thanks and I look forward to your next insightful comment on our blog. Always helps to get people like you to ask the 'real' questions and point out some weaknesses in one's reasoning. Helps my learning a great deal. Thank you.

Usability is a very broad concept, and we stay very focused on conversion optimization… so we do Usability concepts to generate hypotheses worth testing. You clarification has helped me see this more clearly.

Best regards,

Raquel Hirsch

Thanks for your comment, I really appreciate the feedback. I am not sure if I miss the point with A/B testing totally althought if I do I have done it wrong for the last 20 years and that would be terrible for our clients if it were this way. I think some of your comments may have been triggered by my lack of communication skills.

Hence, let me make an attempt to clarify some issues. You state:
“If you define a conversion objective, testing will allow you to find a variation that improves your conversion rate, no doubt about that. It may not “guarantee the best solution for design and copy” – but you are very likely to get an improvement on what you currently have – before you run your next test and improve on it! “

My response would be that it is not always possible to assess things as a simple challenge of improvi8ng the conversion rate. For instance, designing a website like ours does not mean that all we want is that people sign up for http://My.ComMetrics.com (upper right button) but we also want them to read the material and do a few more things.

“If you “ask your clients for feedback” only outliers will respond. Do you want to hear nice things or do you want to convert more web visitors and increase revenues? “

I disagree that only outliers will respond. If you have created a level of trust with your clients and associates, call them up, visit them and do a structured interview to find out why they made the choices they did.

The above structured interviewing will reveal a ton of information simple A/B testing (multivatiate or not) will never give you. This does, of course as you point out as well, not absolve you from designing a methodologically sound A/B test in the first place. We surely agree on this one.

“”A/B tests can tell you how the bounce rate of those shown design A compares to design B” – the bounce rate is a poor metric of success. Infinitely better to use a tool like GWO and measure actual conversion actions.”

Totally agree with your statement above…. I apologise if my comment might have suggested that I rely on the bounce rate only.

I especially recommend your case studies

===> http://www.widerfunnel.com/proof/case-studies

Thanks, Raquel for sharing your important insights and giving me a chance for clarifying may point due to the lack of my communication skills.

However, with respect, I think you are totally missing the point of A/B/n (and multivariate, for that matter) testing.

If you define a conversion objective, testing will allow you to find a variation that improves your conversion rate, no doubt about that. It may not “guarantee the best solution for design and copy” – but you are very likely to get an improvement on what you currently have – before you run your next test and improve on it! More info here http://www.widerfunnel.com/our-process/ab-split...

If you “ask your clients for feedback” only outliers will respond. Do you want to hear nice things or do you want to convert more web visitors and increase revenues?

“A/B tests can tell you how the bounce rate of those shown design A compares to design B” – the bounce rate is a poor metric of success. Infinitely better to use a tool like GWO and measure actual conversion actions.

To succeed in a Conversion Optimization strategy you need an air-tight process. Here is an example of one: http://www.widerfunnel.com/our-process/website-...

Interested in case studies? Go here: http://www.widerfunnel.com/proof/case-studies

Thanks,

Raquel Hirsch
WiderFunnel Marketing Optimization

Thanks so much for your comment.  I agree with what you state and would add that successful A/B testing requires that we control for:

- mediating AND
- moderating

variables.  Failure to do so will cause us a lot of problems because we may no longer be sure what caused what.

Another concern I have with much of the A/B testing is that whilst there may be a correlation between factor X and Y, it does not mean that X causes Y. In other words, just because people dislike the color yellow does not mean this causes to dislike them design A and thereby lets them choose B instead. It is possible that something much more important triggered this decision.

Accordingly, unless we digg deeper we will not find out what causal relationships might exist.  In turn, A/B testing is not a cure all as many people might want us to make believe.  It takes a bit more to get the design or web shop that serves your clients' needs best (PS: consider cross-cultural differences as well.

Thanks so much for sharing. Please have a look at this blog post where I try to further explore these important issues you raised.

Using great visuals = Failing your customers

But maybe I was not clear in my explanation, we used both A/B testing and then interviews to find out more.

A/B testing is not an exact science so I am not sure if using the word “proof” is correct in this context. Maybe what we can say is that one failed to disconfirm the null hypothsis (Design 1 and 2 are the same) or one was able to reject it.

In that regard, I describe how we use additional information to get a better handle on the reason why Design 1 was favored over Design 2.

What we found was that sometimes it is a little thing such as the font that leads to the rejection or acceptance of a design. Re-testing with a changed letter font may then result in Design 2 being favored over Design 1. Put differently, just because the font is not ideal with Design 2 does not mean it is weaker than Design 1. A classical A/B test will not tell us why people preferred Design 1. In fact, after changing the font things may be different.

In our case, why throw the baby out with the water when a small tweak or adjustment can allow us to use a possibly better design that was rejected using a classical A/B test.

I hope that helps clarify my post above and I appreciate you taking the time to share your experiences and thoughts. Look forward to your next comment on our blog. Thanks again and have a nice weekend.

You have this interesting piece of information which you can directly apply or you can A/B test against your existing version.

I prefer the latter case because no proof is higher proof than an idea succeeding in the wild (and not just in customer's mind).

Again, A/B testing is a methodology – you have to wiggle your grey cells in order to come up with hypotheses and usability tests, feedback, expert opinion can be a great source for those hypotheses.

Thanks so much for sharing this comment with our readers and me.

I certainly agree that the quality of your hypotheses is an important matter and will help one to figure out things with the A/B testing. In fact what I hear you point out is that if you start of with a bad research design …. using A/B testing will not be as helpful as it could be if one would have done one's homework better.

But even then one can confirm or disconfirm one's hypotheses with A/B testing only. I still found that with our clients (corporate suits) coming from different countries (many's mother tongues is not English) A/B testing was not sufficient by itself.

And yes, maybe it just means we don't know enough about A/B testing…. but what the phone and person-to-person interviews told us is that in some cases, throwing the baby out with the water was not needed. Instead, a small tweak here or there made a design that had lost against another using A/B testing win the contest.

Dan, I hope you comment again soon because your thoughts surely enrich the discussion and help me sharpen my own ideas.

Thanks for your comment. The one statement that got me thinking for sure was:

“The test verifies that the research has been properly applied to the design and that it works for the masses.”

I agree wholeheartedly with what you are saying but I must also point out that it must work for my targeted audience…. and that may not be the masses but those 1000 or 10,000 people I want to reach.

Unfortunately, I still feel that the greatest weakness with A/B testing is that it will not give us insights about _why people dislike something_ more than another design.

Without understanding the why, however, it is difficult to improve the design. To illustrate, based on our kind of clients it is obvious that they prefer a more conservative design. As well, they appear to not want to be confused by too many whistles and bells.

But some of these things we found out only by intereviewing them and asking these people to explain to us what made a design less useful for them than another they had chosen.

But I agree, without A/B testing we would have never gotten that far in the first place. But I hope you can also agree that A/B testing by itself may get you to run down a dead-end. In other words, it is better to use a multi-method approach (e.g., A/B testing and interviews) than just a single-method approach to find the best design for your webpage or blog.

John, thanks so much for sharing and I look forward to your next comment

Thanks for an interesting and thought-provoking post, especially as I thought you almost asserted that A/B testing causes bad web design. It got my attention and made me read on.

I think you, and the comments on your post, make some useful points. A/B testing is a tool and in itself won't necessarily lead to better design, just less sub-optimal design.

However, I think where we would agree is that A/B testing is good for testing hypotheses as to whether or not a particular page can be improved by another variation(s). In my view, web analytics taken in its broadest sense – including qualitative research – should encourage the development of hypotheses.

A/B testing then provides a means to quantitatively prove that A beat B or vice versa. It is the quality of one's hypotheses, and the richness of your research to generate these hypotheses, that will ultimately determine how useful a A/B programme is.

Dan Croxen-John
Applied Web Analytics

Of course a design which was developed with strong research should preform well; but that is what A/B testing is for. The test verifies that the research has been properly applied to the design and that it works for the masses.

Please don't muddy the waters and make it sound as if A/B testing needs to be suplimented because it doesn't if it was properly designed with the right metrics assigned.

It's the simple scientific method of verifying the hypothosis but you need all of the other research that you described to feed the hypothosis; but in the end the results for the test will speak for themselves.

I am not sure but maybe I did not communicate properly. I felt that worst was that Toyota seemed to have failed to anticipate that the press wanted the CEO to answer questions during the press conference in English. Neither did it seem that he had been prepared for these questions by Toyota's corporate communication team.

Social media can exacerbate the problem (e.g., see the confusing information provided to Toyota drivers depending on which Web page they visit). Else it can also be used effectively to leverage the message.

Thanks so much for sharing.

PS. I will have something about the Pepsi refresh project next Wednesday: Pepsi refresh project – apologize and learn NOT (2003-03-03).

I definitely agree with you that social media can and must play an important role in how such a product recall is being handled. In fact, Toyota could have done better in how it used social media. As importantly, how top management was being coached and prepared for facing the press and the public does not even seem close to optimal from where we stand.

One explanation for these apparent mishap could be culture. Maybe these cultural differences might have played an important part how this challenge was being handled.

For instance, Mr Toyoda speaks capable English, having earned an MBA at Babson College in Boston. As well, he worked for several years at Toyota's California joint venture, now being closed.

Unfortunately, it seems as if the head of the world's biggest carmaker fumbled a request by foreign television crews to make a statement in the language. Worse than his halting response was the fact that no one at Toyota seemed to have anticipated the demand and need to address a global audience.

The above illustrates that Toyota headquarters' corporate communication and marketing professionals may have given Mr. Toyoda the wrong advice. In fact, their more insular approach instead of a global response strategy may have exacerbated the damage to the company's reputation and corporate brand.

Thanks again for sharing and I hope we can all learn a few ropes to skip from Toyota's apparent mistakes.

Toyota can probably increase the PR and marketing budget and they think that was it. I hope not, but I think they do it.

Sure you can increase your advertising and marketing budget ever more. Nevertheless, Toyota's reputation has been and continues to be further damaged.

This can also be a huge opportunity to build a fan base by openly and honestly talking about it using different social media platforms, without requiring a huge budget.

It appears as if Japanese companies have not entered the social media era like many others did.

But they are in good company. For instance, the German company Jack Wolfskin has not learned much from its mistakes and how social media could help either.

I'm interested when people are stop playing “ostrich”, putting their heads in the sand.

Thanks so much for your comment responding to my remark about theToyota webpage. You stated:
“… fails Usability 101″ part is a bit short. What are the arguments that support such statement?”

Here is what we did before making this conclusion:

Asked some Toyota users a question like “Here is the weblink for the Toyota homepage in your country, please try to find pertinent recall information pertaining to your Toyota model.”

What we found was that out of 7 people only 2 (tech savvy) were able to find the information. First they tried searching for recall or Rueckruf, etc.

But the search on these Websites failed to give them the webpage they needed. Our 2 tech savvy users discovered the ticker just above the 4.4% (red text). The ticker had 5 or so messages flashing by in altering order. One of these pertained to the recall and if fast enough one could click on it and get connected.

Conclusion
I agree, using 7 people is not a representative sample but it was a quick way to test that my own difficulty in finding the information I needed was not just my problem.

One of the tech savvy users wanted to know more about the computerized power-override system to possibly be added to all new Toyota cars globally. As you know, of course, the mechanism cuts the vehicle's engine if the brake and accelerator are pressed at the same time.
Apparently this is a situation that could occur if, for instance, a driver attempted to brake when the throttle was jammed open by an external object or mechanical failure. Some other car makers already use this system.

Our tech savvy user could neither find information on the German nor Swiss Toyota site. She felt that since Mr Toyoda had been quoted in the media referring to this a few days back, she should be able to find information about this change on the official Toyota web pages.

Thanks so much for asking me to clarify this issue, I hope I did with the above response.

Respectuflly,
Urs

PS. Just to mention, your latest blog post is worth reading for all our readers – insightful as usual:
===> http://www.kaizen-analytics.com/2010/02/measuri...