What you say, and what they hear

Whenever I am writing emails or talking to people, I try my best to make sure that what I write or say is easy to understand. A message that is misinterpreted will most often cost you extra time and effort to solve gracefully. Practising this mindset continuously will of course improve your own communication skills over time, but it will most definately also make you realize whenever someone else fails to deliver a precise message – one that can not be misunderstood.

In general 2 things exist in communication “what you say” (and your own understanding and context of that), and “what the recipient hear” – which can be something completely different. Gary Larson, one of my favorite sketch/comic artists, already immortalized this basic rule of life [image link] (copyright restrictions might apply for the image). This also covers the problem that even despite your best efforts to deliver a clear message, maybe the recipient will still misinterpret the content.

 

Today i saw a real life example of something which probably made sense to the communicator, but which is easily misunderstood by the recipient. Basically this is a big example of what can go wrong in communication. I don’t think i need to explain further…

 

 

Normally things do not go as awry as in the advertisement above, but it serves as a reminder to carefully consider what you say or write before you execute.

 

So why am I reminding you all about this? Well basically because in online marketing, you have many options to deliver messages (also ‘bad’ messages), one is to do A/B testing (aka ‘split testing’ or ‘multivariate testing’) where several versions of a message can be defined and displayed to different visitors in order to track which option returns most conversions.

This is one of the basic features in Sitecore’s Online Marketing Suite (OMS) by the way. Imagine that you are releasing a new product and you put a big message on your front page. Normally this will get attention directly, but if you re-phrased it a bit, maybe it would get even more hits. To test this, simply create a few versions and deliver them randomly to all visitors. Over time, one option will prove better than the others, and then you should obviously select this as the only option (and stop the A/B test). This concept is covered in a 2-3 minute video that was recently released on the Sitecore website. The video titled “Increasing your website conversions” is available on this page: http://www.sitecore.net/Products/Resources/Tours.aspx

We are also currently inviting people to attend a webinar about OMS, which will also cover how Sitecore deals with A/B testing. To read more and sign up, please see: http://www.sitecore.net/en/News/Webinars/2009/OMS-Webinar-December-09-Europe.aspx.

Post DMF 2009

One week ago I attended the DMF aka Digital Marketing First expo in the centre of Brussels. The reason for attending this show as an exhibitor, was based on our experience there in 2008 as visitors. Back then my colleague and I were quite baffled at the extremly nice exhibitions. Clearly many top agencies in Belgium regarded this event as "the place to be".

So with that in mind we deciced we simply had to be part of DMF this time around. And I am sure glad we did. Apart from networking with our existing partners (Uniway, The Reference & LBi), we got a few nice partner leads to take home. We also met with existing customers who are really great advocats of Sitecore. Stephen Delvoye from Bekaert is particularly satisfied, and certainly does not mind telling people how great he think Sitecore is. Marvelous!

As mentioned in the previous post, we had Mark van der Wal from Pectora co-host our booth. This was a great combo for us, as Pectora have already delivered some nice Sitecore cases, and since the theme of the event was mainly marketing oriented. Pectora delivers a Sitecore/InDesign integration which can help companies control content and assets across print- and online material. Mark being the nice guy he is, added great value to the show.

On the downside I have to admit that our booth came a bit short of some of the others. The guys from Emakina built a whole giant black box (almost a house actually) where they invited people in for a talk. LBi had a huge bar very nicely set up as well, while a lot of other creative companies clearly had been spending big bucks on the event.

Of course the important part of going to an event such as DMF is both to be seen, but also to make new business. On the latter part, I will be busy for quite a while.

One thing is for sure, see you at DMF next year!

CM Innovation 2008, what a show!

On December 4th, the annual CM Innovation event took place at Brussels Airport in the Sky Hall. This event is hosted by CMS Channel, an association of Content Management professionals and analysts.

Sitecore International sponsored the event as Global Sponsors and as a result we had one of the largerst booths, just in front of the area where most of the sessions of the event took place. To top that off, we also had the opening keynote speaker session at our disposal. My colleague Sri Carlyle and myself went one day in advance in order to setup shop.

The keynote was done by Lars Fløe Nielsen, one of the founders of Sitecore. He did a very great job, talking not about features and hot-buttons, but about how to navigate the tech crunch. A topic which dealt with the current global financial situation, and why this is not the time to save money, but to spend money for easy gain of marketshare. The presentation covered a recent customer case, including their calculations of cost savings, and increase in revenue based on improved focus on their web platform. The keynote received some great feedback, and also resulted in an interview with a local IT magazine called Smart Business Strategies.

This really kicked off the event, and our booth was packed for the rest of the day with interested people and partner prospects. I'm glad we had some reinforcements from our Dutch office in the shape of Alex de Groot, otherwise we simply wouldn't have had time to talk to everybody.

To spice the show up a bit, we brought some nice prizes to win from our customer Royal Copenhagen (see case study). Something which made the 3 people who each won a gift quite happy by the looks of it. Thanks to Christian Daems from CMS Channel for helping us handing out the prizes.



After the tradeshow closed, it was time for the annual CMS Awards show. Sitecore had a few cases submitted to the awards, and we ended up winning the Silver Award in the category "Web 2.0" for the Thomas Cook solution done by our partner The Reference.
I'm the guy that is all smiles in the right hand side of the picture, next to Anja Capelle from The Reference.

The Award ceremony also came with a nice dinner arrangement, and a Belgian radio celebrity who controlled the turntables to get the party started. I left around 11 pm, after quite a bit of networking and dancing. All in all it was a very good event for us, with many interesting leads and positive feedback. We will definately be present at the upcoming WebScene event which will take place in the summer of 2009.

 

Till then, enjoy a few pictures from the CM Innovation event.

 

Sri Carlyle just after we had setup our booth and added the prizes from Royal Copenhagen.

 

 

 

 

 

Lars Fløe Nielsens keynote had quite a big audiance and gave us a lot of positive vibes throughout the day of the event. Thats me standing in the back checking out the setup.

 

 

 

Alex de Groot giving a demo at the Sitecore booth. In Dutch of course.