Tag Archives: communication

All change

15 Apr

We’ve recently undergone a big change so I thought I’d make a few notes on how we went about it.

The Motley Fool used to comprise a mixture of personal finance and investing content. It was decided to separate this content into two specific sites – investing would be the main area of focus for The Fool and personal finance would be the main offering from the other site.

Initially, the challenge for us was to develop a new name and brand for the new site – I’ve written some details about how we did this here.

We also needed to communicate the change to our users and here is how we did it.

By the time we needed to begin communication, we had already put up a temporary site in order to build link equity and it looked like this:

lovemoney-temp-homepage1

As you can see, it was pretty basic, but featured comparison tables – Lena’s speciality, which are key to the site in terms of revenue and article churn, which contributed to the freshly updated content that Google loves. Carl also started a blog which added a nice human touch to the site.

On The Fool site, meanwhile, the messaging was done through the About Us section:

transition-about-us1

Emails also went out to our customers explaining the change.

A few weeks later, we moved to the second phase of the change. This involved changing some areas on The Fool site to incorporate the lovemoney.com site and make it clear to customers that lovemoney.com is the new offering from The Fool, whilst emphasising the differences in focus.

Here’s what the homepage looked like before:

fool-homepage-before5

…and here’s what the homepage looked like once the details about the new site had been added:

transition-homepage

As you can see the homepage gives significant focus to the new site, which is all part of the signposting and managing user expectations. There were also tool tips, written by Sara, which floated above the article titles on hover over, explaining that they were being sent to a different site.

The About Us page was also updated to outline the forthcoming changes:

transition-about-us2

Then the next step was the launch of lovemoney.com. For this, we built a new site in the background which featured all the bits from the original lovemoney.com site plus a registration box for people interested to learn more about the new features, new navigation including a top bar for comparing products and extra bits like home and car insurance. This is what it looked like:

lovemoneyhomepage1

Then, on April 1st, it blossomed into the current green and luscious looking site. Profiling details, comments on articles and Q&A were also added to this release:

lovemoney-homepage2

Of course the grass/growing concept is related to the ‘nurturing’ philosphy behind lovemoney.com.

I think a nice ‘paradise’ background would also look good as paradise is probably quite a nurturing place.

Love lovemoney.com!

7 Apr

lovemoney-homepage1

Ta da! lovemoney.com, our sparkling new site went live recently.

And it’s not just a pretty site.

It’s designed to help users grow richer and offers useful tools  which aim to motivate and support users to get their finances in order.  With personalised content and tools like Q&A, the idea is that users will be able to get access to  relevant content that will help them get to where they want to be financially.

As it will be a site that people use as a tool, the challenge is to make sure that it’s easy to use, with logical user journeys and clear messaging.

This is still very much a work in progress with new bits being added regularly and I think that will keep it looking and feeling fresh as the grass in the background.

Carl has been tweeting about the site and we’ve had some positive feedback from users. What do you think?

Commuter blogger

23 Feb

monday-to-friday

Saw this ad on the tube and thought it was quite interesting that they had put this ad together in the voice of a blogging commuter…guess it’s an acknowledgement that there are engaging blogs for every niche group out there – grumpy commuters (like me) included!

Twitter as a survey tool

18 Feb

guy-kawasaki2

Liked this use of Twitter as a way to compare one site with another.

Be useful when developing new applications/designs….

Thoughts about video

15 Feb

This video is great – it’s 4 minutes long which is a relatively long time to command a user’s attention but as the information and ideas are condensed and presented in an engaging way, it conveys  information more quickly than, say reading about the topic for the same amount of time.

Video is also good for ’humanising’ communication and forms a solid component of the social media wave that we’re riding – topics my colleagues Sara and Lena have written about respectively - it’s also an alternative platform for interacting with an audience, so we’ve been looking at how video is used and asking questions about the format that type that works best so here are some of the considerations we came up with

  • Length – watching a video requires a commitment from the user, so they need to be persuaded that this is going to be a good investment of their time. Again consistency in quality is a factor here, as is setting expectation by offering a summary of the content and perhaps providing some kind of predictable format – such as a certain type of video on a particular day of the week for example or perhaps by publishing schedules.
  • Identifiable types of videos for different topics e.g. commentary, interviews, reviews, so users can look out for the types of video they prefer.
  • Clear benefits - why should the user watch the video? The advantage of watching the video over doing the alternative should be clear e.g. it may be more convenient to watch a product review rather than read a long article to find out what the expert thinks
  • Advertising – where are the opportunites for sponsorship? On the same page as the video, a ticker tape in the video and an ad in the actual video before and after it takes place? Advertising in the video itself has lots of opportunites for additional exposure because a lot of videos are now begin made available to be embedded in other content. Chris Brogan mentioned a video on the LA times website that allowed him to embed it in his own blog.
  • Traffic - how is the video going to drive traffic to the site? Which urls are promoted, verbally and/or visually and if so, where and when, should they be clickable? Should the video be used as well as or instead of an article? The Sun embeds video into their articles as a supplement to the story.
  • Comments – how can users can respond to the video? Gary Vaynerchuk has a nice commenting tool on his videos, where the audience can comment but along with the ticker tape ads, they can make the site a bit too busy, but there’s the option to turn the comments off if you want to.

Measuring clickthroughs and adapting according to the results will fine tune the video offering and with the online video audience looking set to increase over the next few years, levels of video activity are likely to increase in line with this.

 

video-stats

Meep meep!

11 Feb

 

road-runner1

 

 

After having a bit of a blogger mental block today, I wondered exactly how fast bloggers need to blog?

 

Do they need to churn out several posts a day or is one post a week adequate?

 

 So I found this article which looks at that exact question and loosely identifies two different types of blogging – one where the posts are longer and more thought out and another where the posts are short, quick and designed to spread information quickly.

 

It seems that for business purposes, speed and relevance is everything but the quality of the copy also has a big impact on the search engine ranking. Social media applications are also supporting the speed of blogging by only allowing short updates.

 

But for me it seems that the nature of blogging gives the author the freedom to offer readers choice. They can choose to offer some immediate quick insights or longer, more thoughtful pieces or maybe even a combination of the two.

 

I suppose it depends on whether readers expect to receive posts of the same length all the time, or whether they would be happy reading posts of different lengths and what they do with them.

 

The subject matter must also be a driver in dictating how quickly the post needs to be published.

 

Also, the aim of the blogger affects the regularity of the publishing. For example, blogging for business should aim to generate more regular posts than a personal blog.

 

One of my daily reads, Zen Habits  consists of quite long posts which I like to get absorbed in during the morning. However, the topics are quite timeless, so there isn’t a need for immediacy of information. It’s the regularity that’s important. When Leo, the author, is away, for example, he recruits guest bloggers.

 

However, I also read Seth Godin’s blog and his style of condensed writing means that I can quickly skim 2 or 3 posts.

 

Chris Brogan uses a variety of lengths in his posts.

 

So I guess I the consistency of the blog posts has made me adapt my reading habits to the blogs.

Communication

30 Jan

lovemoneyblog1

At work, we are currently in the process of separating out our offering and it’s been really interesting to see how it’s been communicated out to our customers. On the new site that is being launched, there’s a blog which has detailed the stages of the site launch. It creates an informal commentary of what’s going on when the nature of the work means that it’s ongoing and difficult to pinpoint a time when it’s ‘complete’. So customers get reassured and accustomed to the change in plenty of time.

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