Geojoey's Weblog

Viral marketing doesn't exist

I had a fun brainstorm with the management team of a local (Seattle based) online business today. One of the things I mentioned in our chat and something I've believed for some time now is that viral marketing doesn't exist.

One dictionary definition of "marketing" is: "The total of activities involved in the transfer of goods from the producer or seller to the consumer or buyer, including advertising, shipping, storing, and selling." Viral action involves a transfer from a customer to another customer. The only thing you do is to facilitate that transfer.

Because there is no direct communication between you and this new prospective customer, I believe that the 'marketing' part of 'viral marketing' is a misnomer. One should instead refer to 'viral mechanisms' if you're going to have any sort of useful communication about all things viral.

It's also more helpful to think about the viral propagation of your product, service or message in terms of creating viral mechanisms rather than viral marketing. Thinking about viral marketing will have you trying to find ways to get your customers to force your brand down their friends throat. The first thing you'll come up with is the "tell a friend about us" link on your website. Have you ever clicked a "tell a friend" link?

The original viral mechanism was Hotmail's email signature offering you a free email account. It was an ad that was happily sent along with every email sent via Hotmail. That viral mechanism is an integral part of Hotmail's value proposition.

Here are some other examples of sites where you participate in some viral mechanism to extract maximum value:

• HotOrNot.com - Post your photo (or a hapless friends photo) and then tell your friends: "Check it out! I posted his photo!" - on HotOrNot.com
• YouTube - post a video and tell everyone you know to check it out - on YouTube
• Blogger - Check out my latest blog post - on Blogger
• LinkedIn - To get any value from a social networking site you have to have a network. Invite your friends and end up with a self maintaining list of those you invited and those they invited. Yay, self maintaining contact lists! I don't think much of sites that purely offer social networking. MySpace rolled personal webpages and blogs into social networking which is why they killed LinkedIn and Friendster.

Sites that facilitate communication of some sort are often inherently viral. Sites that offer one way communication are not. Here are some examples of sites that aren't viral:

• Job search engines (I know, I used to run one which was one of Time's top 50 websites of 2005)
• Retail sites like Amazon.com and Wine.com (I worked for eToys.com)
• News sites like CNN and the BBC (I worked for the Beeb too)

To test if you're truly viral, ask yourself the following question: "Does extracting value from our web application require our users to communicate our existence to people they know?"

If the answer is 'Yes!" then viral mechanisms are an integral part of your value proposition and you can stop reading this dry stuff and do something more productive.

Mark.
Founder & CEO, Geojoey.com

Ajax Usability with Google Analytics

This is the second in a series of tech articles I'm writing which draw on my experience designing and creating Geojoey. The first article was "Why 100% Ajax?".

Have you ever noticed that when you ask a friend or family member what they don't like about  your web application, the first thing that comes out of their mouth is an apology? It's usually in the form of "You know I think your site rocks and I know you guys worked really hard on it so I feel really bad saying this and I don't want you to take it in the wrong way but....."

Human interaction is complex. There are layers of politics upon emotions dampened down with subtlety with the constant line noise of distraction and digression. It's amazing we can transmit any raw data between ourselves at all.

Think of the application you use for email. Perhaps it's Outlook, Gmail or Hotmail. Now answer the following questions off the top of your head without looking at your email application:

• Which button do you click most often in your email application?
• What is the last thing you do before you leave your email application?
• How much time do you spend on average using your email application each session?

If you don't know these answers, your users won't either.

When I was consulting in London, Anderson Consulting had a usability lab they rented out at 25,000 GBP (about $40,000) per day. The lab had cameras on each PC, keystroke loggers and all the bells and whistles. Users were brought in to use a clients application or website and their actions were monitored.

Think about how you use your web browser at home or at work and then think about how you'd use it with 3 people and a camera looking over your shoulder. I'll hazard a guess that there are slight variances in your usage patterns.

The best, and possibly the only way to gather meaningful usability data is while your users are busy using your application in their familiar environment with their own machines, their own screen resolution, with their own spyware pre-installed and on their own time.

How to measure Ajax content performance

There are a variety of tools available to measure content performance on websites. You can find out which web page is the most viewed, which page is the most popular entrance point and what is the page the causes most of your users to leave your site. But what if your site 100% Ajax? What if it's all on one page and your content is loaded dynamically?

Google Analytics provides a Javascript function that lets you emulate a page load or hit. It's called urchinTracker and it looks like this:

urchinTracker("/pagefilename1" );

If your website uses Ajax, you can call this function when a click or an application even occurs.

Geojoey is 100% Ajax and when I first discovered this feature of Google Analytics I got a little too excited. I attached it to all sorts of application events. I looked at the data and realized it was meaningless because there was too much. What I really wanted to track was our users interactions with Geojoey.

So the approach I took is to call urchinTracker() any time a user interacts with the application - and only then. Almost everything you do in Geojoey generates an urchinTracker() call.

Because Ajax applications load components dynamically and don't really fit into the traditional page-view model, I used a convention to track application interactions. Everything goes under the '/click' URL. So if a user clicks a link to see the newest experiences on Geojoey, the following function will be called:

urchinTracker("/click/globalNewest");

My convention is also hierarchical, so if a user is adding an experience and they click the link to start a GPS import, the following is called:

urchinTracker("/click/addExp/startGPSImport");

In Google Analytics, this convention becomes very useful when using the content drilldown feature. To find it go to All Reports > Content Optimization > Content Drilldown. You can browse this hierarchy and see what the most features are when a user is using a certain part of your application.

Lets take the example of a user adding an experience on Geojoey. Here's what the pie chart looks like:

The top 3 most used features for the date period I selected are shown. Number two and three are the submit buttons that the user clicks if they're adding or editing an experience. But number one is the ability to import a GPS track. 4 and 5 are the links a user clicks on after they've imported a GPS track to zoom to the beginning or end of that track.

This is very valuable data for us because it shows that the ability to import a GPS track is popular on Geojoey and perhaps we should grow that feature or talk about it more in our marketing messaging.

If your site is 100% Ajax, it's important that you do make calls to urchinTracker periodically. If you don't you won't get meaningful data on how long users spend on your site or how many visits you get per day.

Analytics provides a variety of ways to view your contents performance. Once you've set this up, go to All Reports > Content Optomization, Content Performance, to view this data.

Analytics also provides a host of information on your users platforms. The graphs below show some of the data we have gathered over the last couple of days from Geojoey:

Google, the company, are data obsessed. Every decision they make is based on data. The question is always "What does the data suggest?". You should take this approach too and Analytics provides more data which is a Very Good Thing™.

A detailed discussion on how to use Analytics is beyond the scope of this document. The help documentation is here if you'd like to learn more.

Drinking our own Kool-Aid

The management of Geojoey is still road trippin. We're halfway through a drive from Denver to the OC and decided to stop in Vegas for a couple of nights. Hey! Our business is to reveal the best experiences on Earth, so we're hard at work here! We caught Carrot Top at the Luxor and then hit the poker tables for a couple of hours. Kerry will add Carrot Top tomorrow. You can read about my poker experience here.

Happy Thanksgiving

We're just chillin in Colorado with family for Thanksgiving. Wherever your travels have landed you, we wish you a happy Thanksgiving!

Mark & Kerry
Geojoey's Founders.

Geojoey on Backpackers.com

Geojoey made an appearance on Backpackers.com this morning. Here's an extract from the article:

So, if you’d rate climbing the Sydney Harbour Bridge or going freediving at Jorge Greko as some of the wildest experiences ever, head over the GeoJoey and tell the world that it is so.

Encounter with a shark - Experience of the day

gabs posted an experience about two sharks in Thailand named chip and chop.

Howzit

I might live in Seattle but my soul will always belong to South Africa where I grew up. So it's kinda nice to have ZA bloggers chatting about us. Howzit to the guys at Chilibean.co.za.

Crazy Cariocas BMX Jumping - Experience of the day

Some crazy Brazilians have gotten hold of Geojoey and posted a BMX ramp they built on Lagoa Lake in Rio de Janeiro. Check out the photos of backflips and tabletops.

More geojoey press

Vivek Puri who runs StartupSquad did an interview with me yesterday and a writeup about Geojoey today. It's always great to chat to fellow geeks and I must admit it was one of the more fun interviews I've done.

If you're interested in emerging technologies and companies, keep an eye on StartupSquad.com.

Wanfu Lake Dragonboat Race - Experience of the day

Awesome experience posted by montanatrail today. Here's an extract:

I was part of a US Dragonboat racing team that was invited to race in China, complements of the China Government. All of our expenses and arrangements were taken care of by them. They were trying to promote tourism in anticipation of the olympics coming up.

We were put up at the ShuCheng Hotel in ShuCheng along with other western teams from Portland, Oregon, Australia and England. Teams from Malaysia, Taipai and China were in a older hotel. The town has about 1,000,000 people but no vehicles are allowed.

Click here for the full experience.