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Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (http://www.mturk.com/) is billed as “Artificial Artificial Intelligence.”  Amazon’s intent with the service is to connect tasks with workers who can perform the task.  Frequently the task is one that is simple for a human but complex to program.  One of the better examples is Amazon’s own iPhone application that allows you to take a picture of something, then creates a Mechanical Turk job to pay a person $0.10 to find a link to that thing (or the closest possible to that thing) on the Amazon store.

Other people have used Mechanical Turk for interesting little side projects, such as Andy Baio (of Waxy.org) who used Mechanical Turk to supplement data from Wikipedia in his quest to map out the years represented in the samples from this year’s Girl Talk release, Feed The Animals.  Later, Andy wondered how much it would cost to get Mechanical Turk workers to take a picture of themselves and post it to the site.  Someone else used Mechanical Turk to write a book about cats.

The particular problem I wanted to solve was testing the availability of a site from a wide range of locations.  There are services that will let you do this, but they tend to be geared towards long term testing or simple screen captures from a limited range of IP addresses.  I wanted to see proof that the site had loaded from 25 different locations around the world.  My budget was $30.

First I set up the Mechanical Turk job.  You can do these as “one-off” jobs or have code use the API to spit out repetitive jobs constantly.  I went the one-off route and created a simple webform that asked 4 questions.  The form looked like this:

Once the form was ready to go, I added $30 in funds to our account and told the Turk to offer the job out for people at $1 each, with each person only able to complete the task once, and with a 2 hour time limit.  The time limit was because I was simultaneously capturing all the internet traffic sent to the website during the test, in case anyone reported an error.  If so, I’d have a little more insight into exactly what problems were occurring.  When the batch was finished, 16 people had taken me up on the offer.  The results are delivered in spreadsheet format.  An excerpt is below.

What we were able to show from the test is that people from 16 different IP addresses (spread all over the world) were able to hit the target website without problem.

The wake left by the international financial crisis has caused some general anxiety among marketing professionals, and with good reason. Traditionally a downturn in the economy means cutting marketing budgets. And this time, according to a recent survey by MarketingProfs, the financial crisis is causing immediate 2008 budget cuts and already affecting the 2009 budgets of its members surveyed.

But some of the biggest names in branding, (including Procter and Gamble, who survived the crash of the 1930s) are suggesting we do just the opposite. As the shock wears off, a voice of reason is emerging that encourages companies to stay on track, but use dollars carefully. For some companies, this includes increasing, or at least maintaining, online marketing budgets. (In the interest of full disclosure, I should say that as a writer I depend on healthy marketing budgets for my own livelihood. I offer this information based on what experts and surveys suggest the current trends are.)

At the recent annual Association of National Advertisers conference, Stuart Elliott at the New York Times listened in on presentations by head marketers for companies like Hewlett-Packard, Coca-Cola, and General Mills. Here’s what they had to say:

“It’s incredibly important to be risk-takers in the economic climate we’re in,” said Michael Mendenhall, senior vice president and chief marketing officer at Hewlett-Packard, when “people have a tendency to pull back.”

“In economic times like these, you don’t hunker down and go in the bunker,” he added.

Companies such as Coca-Cola, reported to have the strongest brand recognition in the world, aren’t backing down either. Joseph V. Tripodi, chief marketing and commercial officer said,

“Don’t go to the ledge. Don’t let the urgent overwhelm the important.”
“It’s very easy now to panic, and we cannot panic,” he added. “Invest in your brands now, especially in these dry times. The easiest thing is to shut down, and that’s the worst thing.”

Brand recognition is one thing, but getting consumers to buy is another. General Mills is fending off the economic downturn with a new “Home is calling” campaign.

“Right now, given where America is, people need to go back to the comfort of home,” said Mark Addicks, senior vice president and chief marketing officer at General Mills. So a new campaign for the company’s Pillsbury brand will carry the theme “Home is calling.”

And if General Mills is right—and I have a sneaking suspicion they are—people are going to be reaching out for more ways to access information about our products and services from home or office. “Home is calling” may sound corny, but if you were a grown up in the nineties, you’ll remember the undying DIY movement was sparked by the backlash against the excesses of the 1980s and gave us cocooning and internet shopping. I don’t know about you, but the feelings “coming home” evoke in me, especially when thinking of our troops overseas, makes me want hot flaky biscuits.

Whether your company intends to decrease spending or not, before you slash and burn across the board, you may want to consider preserving your web marketing budget or even moving more money into it. Web-based marketing can give you more for your dollar, and give nervous CEOs and CFOs measurable results as opposed to the sometimes ambiguous results from other marketing avenues. At the same time the MarketingProfs survey showed a decrease in both 2008 and 2009 budgets, 60% said they would be increasing their online budgets with 85% reducing their use of traditional marketing vehicles.

In a just-released survey from eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit more than 64% of respondents say the current economy probably won’t affect their overall marketing budgets, but most report plans to increase or maintain their budgets for Email (83.6%), Online Advertising (77.2%), Keyword Search Campaigns (75.5%), Social Media (61.8%), and Video Advertising (38.2%). eMetrics’ analysis states,

“34.5% of respondents’ marketing budgets are negatively impacted by the economy but only 10-15% of respondents are cutting budgets on online channels. This would suggest that confidence in online marketing effectiveness continues to grow.”

According to the survey web analytics have become increasingly important to senior management.

“Web analytics helps us maximize the effectiveness of our shrinking marketing dollars by pointing out our strengths and weaknesses and providing an actionable roadmap to our most impactful ROI channels online. Tough times really do call for tough measures.”

You can download the entire survey results from the eMetrics web site.

However, if you don’t have a strong web presence yet, all the analytics and optimization in the world will not meet your customers where they are. So perhaps the best advice I’ve seen in the past few weeks on how to stay afloat in tough times came from Erik Sorenson, CEO of Vault.com, Inc., at the CNBC Executive Careers blog:

“If you are web-based and need traffic, power up your search engine marketing. If you’re brick and mortar and need traffic, focus on outdoor or radio advertising, or whatever provides the best value for your dollar. And if brand awareness is the goal, concentrate on those channels that work best and cut the rest if necessary to gain efficiency.

Take a look at which companies are branding and marketing themselves when you’re surfing the Internet, watching TV, or reading the paper. They are working to drive whatever revenue is out there now and they’re positioning for the recovery. Think of it as accelerating through the turn.”

Web usability expert Jakob Nielson just released a new study that I think every marketing manager with a company website ought to pay attention to. It’s about your company’s About Us page.

The study, released last week, follows up on an earlier study done five years ago and looks at 63 websites from large, medium and small companies, government, and nonprofits. You can read the executive summary on Nielson’s Alertbox website or download the whole thing for a reasonable price (compared to most studies like this) if you want to see the dirt on the company sites with usability problems or see examples of good About Us pages. But here is some of what he says about putting your best face forward on these important pages, along with some of what I’ve seen of this in my own experience.

“On each site, we gave users one open-ended task: evaluate the organization. We also gave them several directed tasks, such as to find out who runs the organization, what community or social programs the organization contributes to, and when the organization was founded.”

There was some good news and some bad news on these tasks. First, usability for those pages had actually increased by (what Nielson calls) an acceptable 9% in five years, but the bad news was that when users were asked to find out what the organizations actually do success rates went down from 90% to 81% in the last five years. Apparently, a trend has emerged where marketing execs are more interested spewing “marketese and blah, blah” about what they do, than being clear.

I do a lot of research via company websites and I see this type of mistake a lot. They usually say something like, “We deliver you the most innovative solutions in multiple languages to give you improved outcomes and a more impactful position in a unique marketplace within all industries.”
What!? But what do you do? It kills all your credibility to be so vague that you appear to be trying to be all things to all people. Nielson has this to say about credibility:

“Trust and credibility are major issues on the Web, where even the biggest company exists as only a few words and pictures in a browser window. The most deceitful and unethical company can look as good as a company with a long history of community involvement and honest customer relationships. Explaining who you are and where you come from does matter, as do simple things like providing management biographies and photos.”

Nielson, gives some great free advice in his executive summary. For example he suggests web designers have a homepage link that simply says About Us or About Company Name since this is what most users are accustomed to. In his study users had trouble deciphering the meaning of nonstandard terms like  Info Center or other descriptors, so it’s best to use what is familiar, rather than trying to be different.

And it’s important to be sure the content on your About Us page says clearly who you are, becuase as Nielson says, this is pretty much the content you want all other content based upon, so it’s important to nail it down tight—without the marketese and blah, blah. He then goes on to recommend a hierarchical structure for the rest of your About Us information (more free advice):

“We recommend providing About Us information at 4 levels of detail:

• Tagline on the homepage: A few words or a brief sentence summarizing what the organization does.
• Summary: 1-2 paragraphs at the top of the main About Us page that offer a bit more detail about the organization’s goal and main accomplishments.
• Fact sheet: A section following the summary that elaborates on its key points and other essential facts about the organization.
• Detailed information: Subsidiary pages with more depth for people who want to learn more about the organization.

Nielson explains the effectiveness of this approach through a good example (Alcoa) and bad example (US General Services Administration).  Search these yourself and see if you don’t agree.

This is just an overview, so if you want to read the study information that supports these ideas, or you need some type of metrics to convince your boss, you might consider reading the entire report, but Nielson’s exec summary has even more valuable information than I can talk about here. So, I’ll leave you with Nielson’s bottom line on this:

“The Web is very depersonalized, but from our earliest usability studies, we’ve seen that users like getting a sense of the company behind the website.

Having a good About Us section facilitates this understanding. Clearly stating what you do helps customers understand your site as a whole. Of course, your overall site is what ultimately represents your organization to users. People look at product pages and read the site’s content when they’re evaluating an organization as a possible vendor, business partner, employer, investment, or (in the case of charities) donation recipient. Communication isn’t restricted to About Us. But dedicating an area to providing users with facts about your organization and its history and values helps pull all of the site’s content together.”