“In a world where no one experiences a commercial they don’t want to, do you really expect people to listen to what you tell them and be sold to every third minute?  You’re dreaming.”

I can’t admit that I’m not guilty of ad avoidance.  Working in advertising, I should probably feel a little guilty about that, but I don’t.  We are exposed to so many ads in a typical day (up to 625), can we really blame our audiences that try to avoid them?  Pain avoidance is human nature, and some advertising can be mighty painful.

With the increased amount of advertising that is thrown at us across an increasing number media channels, relevancy is everything to advertising success.  Ensuring that your ad is front of the right person at the right time should be much easier, given the increased amount of adjustable variables; audience information, flexibility over placement, channel, type, media format, and the additional functionality that new technology has given us.

Relevancy is large contributor to the success of any given advertising.  Being exposed to irrelevant ads can grate, but being bombarded with them day after day after day after day can really become an irritation.  For me, being aware of the targeting potential of some networks, it grates even more.  Advertisers throwing money on blanket ad campaigns with little to no targeting really gets my goat up.

When working with clients, I’ve always worked hard to ensure any advertising is as targeted as humanly possible.  Why should irrelevant consumers be exposed to ads that they have almost no chance to respond to? All this does is irritate the consumer and drive up advertising costs.  And, over time, this irritation builds up and turn into ad avoidance.  Working in a media where ads are being randomly thrown to people just seems like madness.

I can understand that ‘traditional’ media has major problems with targeting because of the way the media is delivered.  Sure, they can target by program type and time of day, but in general you’ll be exposed to a lot of crap ads you really don’t care about simply due to the fact it’s a one to many delivery channel.  Sky is a little better with across specific channels, but it’s still very generic.

I don’t however forgive ‘new’ media to the same degree.  Targeting is getting better with some services, but is still based on guesswork and still has miles to go.  With websites taking in a plethora of information about it’s users (age, interests, education, employment, ‘pages…’) there’s really no excuse why their delivered advertising should ever be as irrelevant as other channels.  Streaming music services are able to log everything you’ve ever listened to and how much.  They are able to know your exact music tastes down to a tee, so why am I being advertising Celine Dion albums when all I listen to is drum and bass?

I really like advertising, let’s just get it targeted, eh? Can you imagine only ever seeing ads relevant to your interests? How nice would life be where every piece of advertising you see is something personal to you, that you’d actually consider buying?

Since the recent rise in popularity of Spotify, I’ve had a few discussions with people regarding the business models it uses. I’ll assume you’re familiar with how it’s advertising and charging model works; get the service for free and get ads, or pay a monthly premium and receive the service ad free.

It’s an interesting approach, and one of the first major media services (that I know of) that allows it users to pay more and get the service ad free. Some websites also offer this option but not many. And those that charge for content through paywalls typically still feature advertising, albeit of a lesser degree.

Personally, I think it’s a great idea and hope that it will shape the future for many other paid services – though I have some doubts about whether it will benefit advertising.

TV subscription services such as Sky and Virgin charge for content in the same way, but their services feature advertising as well – you pay a premium for the service, and are still advertised to.  With the rise of the Spotify model, I know more than a few people who are becoming annoyed with that TV model – it’s almost creating a mindset for subscription services of “I’m paying for a service, why should I have to receive advertising too?”

Radio works in the same way, but is always free.  I’m sure  if they were to introduce a subscription service, you’d expect it to be ad free.  Cinema? You pay for your ticket but still get 30+ minutes of ads before a film, fair?

And the BBC, well they just charge anyone that has the potential to view the service as they maybe viewing it, and can function advertising free. Not a particularly fair model, but I’ll come onto that in some later discussions.

I think the Spotify model works great, and on tv subscription services could work well, it could almost be the future of content delivery.  I don’t however think it will be able to be delivered (at least not in the close future) – simply due to the technology that will be required and the cost.  With Sky requiring you to pay a premium and them receiving revenue from advertising to make their business profitable, I’d imagine they’d need quite a high subscription charge to make an ad free model affordable.  Upwards of £100 a month? Who knows.

Either way, I think the Spotify model is great and a subscription model that I hope a lot of other media providers consider.  Pay a subsciption, get the service ad free.  I also think a lot of people, particularly on what’s considered ‘over-advertisied’ services such as Sky, would take it up.

I don’t think it’s particularly beneficial for advertisers though, as it reduces their audience size and the amount of advertising people are exposed to.

You could argue if we make advertising more targeted and exposure people to less in general, then we’ll see it perform better, and I think that’s the key.

Less frequency, more relevancy.

One thing that’s been an ongoing irritation to me has been the take-up of Twitter by a lot of my close professional working friends.  That take up being practically zero – a few dabbles within the system, only to then add to the more than 60% of users that quit using the service within a month of joining.

Even more frustrating has been the fact that the major reason for them leaving is usually something along the lines of “it’s just like FB updates – rubbish”, “I’m really not interested in celebs”, or “I really don’t want to know what you ate for dinner last night.”  Generally, a misunderstanding of the potential the system has for use outside of the lifestyle/celebrity crowd, and the usefulness it brings to work, networking, & news (a fact not generally touted by users or Twitter themselves).

So, it’s with that in mind that I’ve taken it up to put together a Twitter guide for the professional newbie; how it can help with news, connecting within your industry, how helpful it can be for day to day working and how you can incorporate it into your professional life – without being bombarded with the latest celeb scandals and other irrelevant information.

I’ve split the guide up into parts to make to a little easier to take in.  In this first part, I’m just going to outline the various uses of Twitter (plus some examples) just to straighten out the myth that it’s not just a Facebook updater.

One common assumption that people struggle with is realising what Twitter really is – the most frequent description I hear from the  non-believers being that it’s  just a ‘Facebook Updater’ network; only being a slice of Facebooks functionality and not worth looking into. Wrong!

It really is different things to different people, and that’s one of the reasons it’s so good – it’s that flexible you can use it for all manner of functions.  It’s generally described professionally as a ‘microblogging service’.  I’ll go into how it can be used shortly, but personally, I view Twitter predominately as a combination of 3 main tools;

1. RSS Reader; to deliver articles & news straight to my feed.
2. Messaging & discussion program; to have conversations online with anyone who has a twitter account – whether they know me or not.
3. Blogging tool; a place to post my thoughts and findings to anyone who’s following me – and hopefully get feedback on those or start a discussion.

It’s a constantly updating feed, with information from everyone I’m following; whether that be finding out what someone had for breakfast (generally not my area of interest), knowing what’s getting discussed in Westminster today,  finding out the latest footy scores, or getting help with an Excel problem that’s got me stumped.  It’s such a useful program, this is one of the reasons once people get hooked on it, they come to rely on it as a tool for all these needs in one place.

OK, so how do these functions relate to practical uses, especially for a working professional? Here’s just a few examples…

• Breaking News – If you’re a news junkie, Twitter will probably be your new best friend.  Regardless of if it’s breaking world news, business news, funny news, or specific news about your industry of work, with a little investment you can get all the relevant information as it happens, straight to your account.  Twitter news outlets are notorious for getting news out there before things come onto the main commercial channels, so you’ll usually know about things before they go public – and by tailoring your followings, you can get just the useful news that matters to you.  You can easily cut out anything that start to become irrelevant.
• Tip, Tricks, Articles & Links – Any online information relevant to your industry and your place of work.  Be it the environment, politics, retail, stocks, healthcare, and on and on… There are some great providers our there – both individuals and organisations – that publish some really useful information.  Articles and publications from your industry, new developments across businesses, on the job tips, and information that can be hard to hunt down through search engines alone can all easily be sent straight to you Twitter feed if you’re following the right accounts.
• Networking & Help – Once you’re setup with an account you can send a tailored message to anyone else on Twitter; and if they follow your feed, you can send them a private message.  This functionality gives the program excellent social appeal.  You can speak to leaders in your industry that you would never have been able to reach previously.  You can get involved in discussions with them, speaking to a range of people across the world that work in your area – something that’s never been available before and you’ll find after a while it really start to change the way you communicate. Problems with a project? Struggling with some programming? Twitter can be a great resource for help too, rather than digging around on support forums, sometimes sending out a tweet to a few select people can yield wonders in return.  Meeting experts around the world that work in your area is a great experience, really opening up communication channels across industries.  And because it’s persistent, you can have conversations over several days if you’re ran off you’re feet.

More to come in part 2…

Probably one of the best games I’ve played from the Android market – World War.  I’m not going to go into too much detail, you can find a few full reviews around the web. Though it is highly addictive and is the perfect game you can drop in and out of a few times a day, keeping your army together and fighting off the commies!  You don’t need to stayed glued to the screen or have lighting fast touch response, so it’s practical while you’re on the move.  And it even work well on a standard GPRS signal if that’s all you can get out in the sticks.

It’s a mobile MMORPG and  is one of the best I’ve found.  Yes, it’s a lot like those html stats based games of the mid 90′s, when you could drop into one at school and build your mafia army up, waiting for your cash and mobs to refresh on the hour (remember?), but on mobile works brilliantly.

If you want to hook up and conquer the world together get me added! My id’s ERM7C8.

I’ll see you on the field!

Oh, and most of the criticisms of the linked review have now been addressed through updates.

9.5/10

It’s not been too mad in recent months to be honest, since the arrival of the fabled Bounce Rate measurement in Google Analytics (and it’s common inclusion into almost any Web analytics analysis done today), there was definetly a small panic movement as to “omg omg omg! My bounce rates are higher than 20% and my site is soo b0rked and my sales are flying downhill!”

Well, that really isn’t the case.  Before you go and get too worried about your bounce rates, don’t worry too much.  In fact, as has been said before on the web and as I’m mirroring here – High Bounce Rates Are Not Always Bad. In fact, on some sites…they’re a good thing.

If your site is a blog or information providing site such as Wikipedia, with lovely SEO and lots of nice direct SERP links to topical pages, then you will have high bounce rates and that will be good!  It will mean people are landing exactly where they want to be, fulfilling their need and then leaving.  People searching for information about a topic, store opening times, where to find you, prices, or any other action that can be fulfilled all from one page will be happily getting this and then leaving. Clocking up a bounce for you.  But it’s ok!

If you’re a retailer and trying to lure then into the site with promises of discounts and gold however, then it’s probably not so good.  Stronger call to actions needed and yada yada yada…But just remember, please -

High Bounce Rates Are Not Always Bad – Sometimes They Are Good!