Will Marlow | wm

Some things get better as they get older.  Like the book in this picture, which my minister lends to every couple she marries.  She lent it to me and Amy, and if we find passages that are meaningful to us that we want to include in our wedding ceremony, we'll put a new sticky note to mark the section and jot notes about it.  As we look, we'll get to see what other couples chose to include in their own wedding ceremonies.  You couldn't buy a book as valuable as this.  There's only one like it, and it took about 20 years to make.

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Some new bloggers make the mistake of modeling their blog posts on newspaper op-eds or, even worse, on long-form magazine pieces.  The problem is that a blog derives 100% of its credibility from the author, whereas a newspaper or a magazine derives its credibility from lots of sources.  For example, every time you pick up a newspaper, you know that an entire team of writers, editors and fact-checkers were working together to produce the product that you're holding, and you also know that if they consistently fail to adhere to some commonly accepted journalistic conventions (story structure, ethical-sourcing), the publisher and the investors will fire the team that produced the content you're about to read and replace them with new reporters, editors and fact-checkers.  Even though we all know that many newspapers fall short of our expectations, we still grant them more credibility than we grant to solitary bloggers who produce all their own content by themselves.

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If you are serious about using the Internet to communicate with customers, alumni or donors, you also need to be serious about measuring your success.  If you don't measure your results, you have no way of knowing if you're improving, and you'll have no way of knowing if you should do more of the same, or more of something else.

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Split-testing, or A/B testing, is one of the most important concepts in designing new features on a website.  Anyone can do it for a very small amount of money (if you know how), but I wanted to share a real-time example of split-testing in action.

   

Click here to download:

Facebook_Is_Doing_Split-Testin.zip (115 KB)

Facebook is currently testing a new user-interface, which means they may be gearing up for a major overhaul.  My fiance (Photo A) logs into Facebook and sees the new layout, while I (Photo B) login to Facebook and see the old version.  Facebook's analysts will measure the clicks of group A and compare them to group B, and if the analysts determine that group A is more productive or optimal against its metrics, they'll implement the changes for all of Facebook's users.  Click the images above to see the different layouts that Facebook is testing.

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A lot of people think (or hope) that one of their ideas or marketing materials will somehow "go viral," but most people don't put much time into thinking about what actually causes something to spread virally.  Without doing too much math, here's the basics of how something spreads virally: You start with your initial userbase (let's say it's 100 users).  A percentage of your userbase (for easy math, let's say 10%) will invite 10 people to check out your idea or product. Of those 10 invites they send out, let's assume 10% accept the invitation and become new users.  You add these new users to your original userbase.  But you also should assume (for easy math) that your attrition rate is 10%, so you subtract 10% from your initial userbase.  This represents one wave of viral growth that will then repeat itself to continue the trend.  (In this example, of course, you're losing the same number of users that you're gaining.)

But here's how it gets tricky: you can assume that your viral growth will get worse over time, because in the second, third, and fourth waves of growth, you can expect more and more invitations to go out to the same people, which means your conversion rate (which started out at 10%) may plummet as invitations reach people who are already users, or who have already rejected invitations.  So people begin adopting it at a lower rate, while your attrition rate is likely to stay the same.  This means that each wave of growth is smaller, until eventually it stops.  As Andrew Chen explains it, each "new batch of users needs to exceed the previous batch in order to "go viral."

What can you do with this information?  Well, the most important thing you can do is set measurable goals for viral activity to guide your decisions and planning to avoid wasting time and resources.  If you know what you're looking for (adoption rate; conversion rate of new users; attrition rate of your base over time; the size of the universe of users), you can actually measure the factors that have the greatest impact on your success and you can learn how to improve results over time.  Like most useful things, viral activity isn't guided by one enormous X-factor that either is present or absent.  If you know the rules, you can make it happen.

PS - If you want to go deeper into viral models, follow this link to read Andrew Chen's stuff.  I will return to this topic periodically, and I hope my posts are helpful on this subject, but if there's a better place than Chen's blog to go for an in depth, technical analysis of viral products and marketing, I'm unaware of it.

Will Marlow co-founded AlumniFidelity to help his clients reposition their fundraising to benefit from Web 2.0 technology and marketing techniques. He’s working with clients such as UVA, the College of William & Mary, the University of Oklahoma, Bowling Green State University, Randolph Macon College, and he loves nothing better than a thorny marketing challenge.  Email him at will@alumnifidelity.com.  

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I was recently invited to Boston to give a talk at the Annual Meeting of the Association of Collegiate Honor Societies about opportunities to engage members using the Internet.  My friends at The National Society of Collegiate Scholars invited me, and I'm very excited.

I love talking to groups of people who work in industries that are undergoing intense voluntary change.  Change is frequently unpleasant, and for that reason it's generally avoided.  Once an organization or an industry realizes that changes are necessary, and embraces the changes, it means that the opportunities presenting themselves must be enormous.  And that's an exciting time.  Right now, it's a very exciting time to help people modernize their fundraising

We've all seen newspaper stories that talk about the disappointing results of online fundraising, but those stories are all about aggregate results. And we're still at the stage of social media fundraising where lots and lots of people aren't doing it well, which means aggregate results don't tell the story.  The individual successes, like the way Charity: Water uses Twitter, or the way ActBlue uses fundraising pages, or even in the private sector when Dell sells $6.5 million in merchandise via Twitter -- all of these successes show that there are tremendous opportunities to accomplish your goals using online tools, which makes it a very exciting time to be in this business.

I'm looking forward to speaking in Boston, and seeing what I learn from the audience

PS - Even though I stand by my statement that we're still at the stage where aggregate numbers don't tell the full story, the aggregate numbers are beginning to tell a positive story.  For example, in four days, more money was donated to help the Haiti via text message than was donated in all of 2009 by that medium.

Will Marlow co-founded AlumniFidelity to help his clients reposition their fundraising to benefit from Web 2.0 technology and marketing techniques. He’s working with clients such as UVA, the College of William & Mary, the University of Oklahoma, Bowling Green State University, Randolph Macon College, and he loves nothing better than a thorny marketing challenge.  Email him at will@alumnifidelity.com. 

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Yesterday on the fourth annual "Data Privacy Day" (a Microsoft-invented holiday), Microsoft released a study that showed two interesting things: (1) 70% of employers have admitted to rejecting job applicants after finding negative info about them online, and (2) 86% of employers said that positive online information can increase a job applicant's chances of getting hired.

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I once heard a great story about someone who accidentally sent an email containing embarrassing personal information to the wrong recipient.  The information in the email was potentially embarrassing to the sender, but it wasn't John Edwards-scale traumatizing, and the sender decided to use an interesting tactic to deal with the error.  Rather than contact the recipient and explain the error, or ask that the recipient to delete the email without reading it, she simply sent the recipient 20 more identical emails - with the embarrassing sections omitted, of course.  This way, the recipient read the most recent email and assumed they were all identical, and deleted the rest without ever noticing that the first email contained a unique section.

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(This is the second of two posts on getting your organization quoted in news stories.  Click here for the first post in this series.)

The second step to getting your organization quoted in the news is pretty easy.   All you need to do is: (a) read the newspaper and (b) keep a record of the names of reporters who write stories that you wish you were quoted in.  If you’re disciplined about clipping only relevant news stories and saving the names and contact information for the right reporters, you’ll quickly have a powerful list of journalists to talk to.

Some people get cocky with their press list.  They indiscriminately blast out mass emails to reporters, newscasters and producers, hoping that they’ll get lucky and find an interested reporter, and sometimes they do.  But this strategy will rarely result in a productive, long-term relationship with a reporter, a relationship in which the reporter relies on you for information, tips, and quotes when she needs to quickly produce a story.

To get that type of productive relationship, you should think about what you can do for the reporter, not just what the reporter can do for you.  So, take all the data you’ve been compiling on your industry that I discussed in the last post, and build your talking points around the data.  Once your data begins to tell a story, that’s the moment you should pick up the phone to make phone calls.  Since you’ve been diligently reading the newspaper and saving relevant stories, you’ll know exactly who will be interested in the story your data is telling.

For example, if you wish you had been quoted in the controversial Washington Post story from April 22nd about the supposedly dismal results of Facebook Causes (written by Kim Hart and Megan Greenwell), you might call them up and say something like: “I know you are interested in stories about philanthropy and technology, and I thought you might be interested in taking a look at some of the data we have been collecting about our online fundraising results.  Our data shows that 25% of our donors have interacted with us on Facebook, but if you look only at our new donors, over 75% of them reached us through Facebook…Not only that, but both numbers have increased 2% a month for the last six months.  The data shows some other interesting trends that I’d love to talk to you about…”

That’s the type of conversation you want to have with a reporter who covers your industry.  If you do it enough, and if you provide honest and accurate information that you can back up with data, you will earn long-term trust and attention.

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