Coupon Code (from xkcd)

The always excellent xkcd has turned his attention to couple codes, allowing the Scientific Marketer to run its first guest entry. Hat's off to xkcd's Randall Munroe.

Quickly and Easily

Cartoon Index

• Quickly and Easily Volumes (15 September 2010)
• Exceptionally High Call Volumes (13 September 2010)
• 371% (14 August 2010)
• Teasers (07 June 2010)
• IVR Master Control Panel (24 February 2009)
• Bastard (04 05 2008)
• Do Computers Dream of Electronic Forgiveness (21 Deember 2007)
• Kafka (19 December 2007)
• Another Crazy Dreamer (28 November 2007)
• Rate Plan (27 September 2007)
• Controls (03 September 2007)
• The Two Controls (26 June /2007)
• Uninformation (14 May 2007
• Target Marketing (14 May 2007)
• Suspicion (18 April 2007)
• Demand Suppression (08 March 2007)
• Warranty (27 February 2007)
• Response Model (23 February 2007)
• Response (16 February 2007)
• Credit Scoring (14 February 2007)
• The Many Parents of Success (12 February 2007)
• The Curse of Dimensionality (11 February 2007)
• Rejection (11 February 2007)
• It takes a computer (10 February 2007)
• Triggered comparison shopping (9th February 2007)
• Deadbeats (7 February 2007)
• No (6 February 2007)

Exceptionally High Call Volumes

371%

Teasers

How can someone who writes a blog with the title The Scientific Marketer possibly argue against companies doing everything possible to capture the details of the people who view their content. Surely, the first rule of "scientific marketing" has to be to collect data, for without data there is no science. Right?

A lot of companies, particularly those in the direct marketing industry, seem to take it as axiomatic that you should lock up content and make it available only to people who register with you. The (supposed) "benefits" range from the obvious (you get some contact details to use or abuse) to the more subtle (it acts a sort of qualification; only people who are seriously interested will bother to sign up). It might also be regarded as a benefit that you place a small obstacle to your competitors seeing your material, if that's something you wish to prevent.

The clearest disadvantage of the approach is the risk that some genuine prospects will be put off by the process. Indeed, even if they do register, some people will be annoyed at having been made to jump through hoops. Less obviously, there is a different sort of qualification that the company is denied—the self-qualification of people who bother to contact you as opposed to those you call simply because they filled in a form (often against their will) to gain access to some of your content.

But perhaps the most important disadvantage is that your content becomes almost invisible, so you become harder to find. Search engines adore content, and making the full text of papers available on-line makes people who are looking for specific things much more likely to find them even if they don't know your company. Similarly, people are much more willing to link or otherwise refer to content that is publicly available than to content that is accessible only after registration.

So there are significant pros and cons to hiding content, and clearly each case needs to be considered separately on its own merits. Nevertheless, when I started Stochastic Solutions, I took the decision very early that the company would, as a policy, make content available without registration by default. I can't prove that this has been advantageous, but my strong sense is that, over time, people are becoming ever more reluctant to register before there's an obvious reason for being required to do so.

To connect this back to something I do have real and quantifiable experience of, one of the core lessons from looking at incremental response and uplift modelling is that negative effects in marketing are real and much more wide-spread than is commonly believed. I'm always amazed that anyone is surprised by this, given that almost all of us are daily annoyed by various marketing, but most marketers seem to feel that their own messages will be at worst neutral.

Self-delusion notwithstanding, it's hard to believe there's anyone who, when clicking on a link that promises access to some interesting content, doesn't feel some measure of disappointment or irritation when taken instead to a registration form. Should our intrepid surfer submit to the unwelcome interrogation, even the most sanguine is likely to be less than happy if instead of then being taken immediately to the content, she instead gets a message saying that a link will be emailed or (worse) someone will call. People increasingly expect and demand instant gratification, and most are going to feel suckered if even after jumping through hoops there is another level of delay in being granted access to the content they seek, even if it is in the noble cause of filtering out m.mouse@disney.world, competitors or other undesirables.

So think carefully before locking up content. It may be absolutely the right thing for your business in your situation, but on balance I suspect that most demands for early registration—especially for marketing content—actively undermine the very success that they're trying to generate.

Miró is Coming

It has been pointed out to my by more than one person that the Scientific Marketer has been eerily quiet of late. I can only apologise for that. I'm not going to do anything so rash as promise, but I hope to return to something like normal service.

Anyway, there's news. Miró is coming.

Actually, that's quite big news.

But what is Miró?

It seems to be an anagram of ROMI (Return On Marketing Investment). Coincidence? (Yes; but not an entirely unhappy coincidence.)

Or does it Miraculously Increase Return On, . . ., something? anything? (It can. Well, maybe not miraculously; but measurably.)

Could it be one of those clever-clever recursive acronyms? Miró is ROI Optimizing. Miró Implements Randomized Optimization. Miró is Ridiculously . . . opportune? (No.)

Is it an acronym at all? Has the Scientific Marketer (and Stochastic Solutions, whose product it will be), gone creative and decided to branch out into software for budding artists? (Readers of this blog will appreciate that artistic talents are not top of the list for the Scientific Marketer.)

Is there a coded message? Marketing is Really Optimization, perhaps. (Well it is. But . . .)

All will be revealed over the coming months, when the intention is to make snippets of Miró functionality available (free!) as web applications. For those who dislike teasers, my apologies for engaging in such low behaviour.

In the meantime, I can confirm is that Miró is software that will, in time, be marketed by Stochastic Solutions in some form. I can also confirm that it's real, not vapourware. In fact, it has been used in various forms for over a year by two clients for production work. It's been in the works since January 2008. But it's not finished. (Well, when is software ever finished? What I really mean is that even at version 1.0 yet.) I can also confirm that it's cross-platform (most Unix/Linux, Mac and PC platforms are supported) and tries very hard to be standards-compliant, so the only organizations who won't be able to use it are those whose IT departments mandate Internet Explorer as the one and only web browser. (Actually, even they can use it; it's just that its web functionality will be at best compromised, and at worst fatally non-operational. So if you work for a company with such an IT department, start lobbying them to authorize at least one standards-compliant browser now. The list is long and rich—Firefox, Opera, Safari, and Chrome all fit the bill, and though I haven't tried recently, I suspect Konquerer and friends will as well. Your life will be better with access to one of these anyway.)

Stochastic Solutions will be looking for early adopters and beta testers at some point over the next 12 months or so. I'll put a form up somewhere for people to register if interested. There will be attractive terms for early adopters and testers, but it will be a closed programme, with only companies meeting fairly strict criteria qualifying.

I can also confirm, that one of Miró's interfaces is a command-line interface.

A what? Didn't those go out with the ark? Did you really say a command line interface? Didn't you get the memo??

Yes, it's true. Miró has—among other things—a command line interface. I can reveal that one of Miró's commands is cartoon, which as you may realise, isn't necessarily promising for a command-line interface. But the boffins over at Stochastic Solutions have been working an it, and I can now proudly present the first ever (acknowledged) public output from Miró.

This is Miro, version 0.2.16.
Copyright (c) Stochastic Solutions 2008-2009.
Seed: 1251628773
Logging to log/2009/08/30/session005
Log started at 2009/08/30 11:39:33.

[1]> cartoon

+------------------+------------------+------------------+------------------+
|  HAVE YOU SEEN   |   ACTUALLY, I    |   NONSENSE! I    | BUT I CAN PROVE  |
|    THE SALES     |  THINK YOU'LL    |  SPENT MILLIONS  |  IT. I HAVE A    |
|     FIGURES?     | FIND 93% OF THE  |   ON THOSE ADS.  |  CONTROL GROUP.  |
| THAT'S ALL DOWN  | EXTRA SALES CAME |  YOU CAN'T TAKE  |             |    |
|  TO MY ADS, YOU  |  FROM MY DIRECT  |  CREDIT FOR MY   | BASTARD!    |    |
| KNOW! BRILLIANT! |   MAIL PIECES.   |      SALES!      |     O       |    |
|    /             |            \     |    /             |    o        |    |
|   ___     ____   |   ___     ____   |   ___     ____   |   ___     ____   |
|  /   \   /    \  |  /   \   /    \  |  /   \   /    \  |  /   \   /    \  |
| | O O | | o o  | | | O O | | o o  | | | O O | | o o  | | | O O | | o o  | |
|  \_=_/   \_==_/  |  \_=_/   \_==_/  |  \_=_/   \_==_/  |  \_=_/   \_==_/  |
|    |       ||    |    |       ||    |    |       ||    |    |       ||    |
+------------------+------------------+------------------+------------------+
http://scientificmarketer.com/           Copyright (c) Nicholas J. Radcliffe.
                          All rights reserved.

Command completed in 0.0010 seconds


Job completed after a total of 11.7506 seconds
Logs written to log/2009/08/30/session005
Log closed at 2009/08/30 11:39:33.

So there you have. I'll be blogging about some of Miró's more mainstream and obviously useful capabilities over the coming months. And, as I say, hopefully releasing bits of functionality as web apps.

Off-topic Afterword

I should also mention that although I haven't been blogging here as the Scientific Marketer, I have been involved in a very exciting start-up called Fluidinfo, whose product, FluidDB launched as a "private alpha" last week, and I have been blogging about that at About Tag. Unfortunately, FluidDB is quite hard to describe succinctly, but we think it's going to change the world. Briefly, it's a online database based on tags, giving anyone the ability to put small (or large) amounts of data into the world in a structured and sharable manner. The founder, Terry Jones, has a blog piece called Kaleidescope describing ten different ways of looking at FluidDB. If you're interested in a glimpse of a possible future, you might want to check it out.

IVR Master Control Panel

Bastard

Do Computers Dream of Electronic Forgiveness?

Kafka

Another Crazy Dreamer

Rate Plan

Controls

The Two Controls

Uninformation

Target Marketing

Suspicion

Demand Suppression

Warranty