I have been talking to the owners of dollspace.com about potentially working together.

This has led to a mild breakdown on my side due to it suddenly hitting me that I am not only NOT a teenage girl, but I know NOTHING about them. We have kicked into serious market research mode and spent half of Emma’s birthday Pot luck dinner quizzing people about online doll creation, avatars, sparkles and slideshows. It’s, like MySpace, totally beyond me.

Last night, post lack-of-concentration tantrum and pre freedom (which led to me wandering a beach in bare feet at all hours of the night and now having no voice), I made an internet doll.

I think I kinda got it.

What I am beginning to understand about teenage girls (outside of this weird fascination with growing up waaay to quickly and then offsetting that with playing with dolls online), is that they are vastly different from anyone who is NOT a teenage girl.

Usability doesn’t matter so much.

I am sad to say my doll is nude because I literally didn’t know how to dress her. I didn’t understand the wizz bang widgets that kept popping out everywhere. She is lucky to have a nose because adding her face had me stumped for 10 minutes. I am wondering if teenage girls like the fact that they have to spend the first week on the site learning the site. It makes it exclusive.

Your content is NOT king. Theirs is.

Initially I was appalled at the content on some of the websites I looked at. But then I realised the people adding it were the teenage girls. This is a boy free zone, there is no one to impress, the website owners aren’t putting words in their mouths, they come up with it on their own. I believe that the freedom to ‘own’ the website and make it theirs is key to teenage girls. You just can’t control their space. Which is probably why the hideous layouts on MySpace are so popular. No corporation told those people what their site should look like.

Girls will be girls

Despite all the media messaging, social pressure and everything else that is telling girls to grow up quick, they wont. If they LIKE dolls and fashion, they will hunt down ways to get involved in them. This actually reassures me a lot. I also like how the doll websites have dolls of all sizes and colours, big noses, small noses, weird eyes, silly expressions and everything that people tell you you shouldn’t be. (Don’t use my doll as an example, I fell into the trap of wanting a petty one). Unlike work related applications, this stuff is there for fun.

It was the first time in my life I’ve signed up for a user account and faced the fact I am too old to have my date of birth recognised. It was the first time I have played with dolls for years. And despite my embarrassment at admitting this, it was actually quite a hoot. I suspect this will become the new office fad.

How many people respond personally to comments they get on their blog?

One person who is super good at replying by email is Rowan Simpson, who not only replies, but totally smashes open the myth that YOU are too busy to reply personally (Rowan was one of Trade Me’s Founders and has invested a good chunk of his money and time after the sale into other businesses as well as a growing family) – if he’s not too busy to blat out an email, I guarantee you aren’t either.

I always rave to people I know about how cool it is that he took the time out of his day to respond, especially because I already feel like I get a massive amount out of just reading his blog, so I just thought that it may be a good idea to tell the whole world.

Rowan, I apologise if you now get inundated with comments from my millions of readers who want to test out my email theory ;)

It did however, get me thinking about how blogs can be a tad impersonal and it’s always nice to send a quick email as well sometimes to let people know you’re not just doing it to boost your readership or to backlink to your blog etc etc. It’s just good etiquette.

If you haven’t yet been to Do Some Good Now… go now!

We’re less than 100 people away from helping train our first mason in Burkina Faso, which is uber exciting.

Big companies ALWAYS shock me with how useless they are. Big companies pay a fortune for someone to come up with a marketing strategy, but forget to analyse who they are before hand. This results in me seeing massive banners, tv ads and sponsorships everywhere proclaiming one thing, then interacting with the actual company and experiencing just the opposite.

Take my favorite large company Vodafone for example. If you NEVER met anyone from vodafone, you would be under the belief that Vodafone was full of hip young things who are so clever and cool that while they are out skateboarding and surfing and at dance parties, they come up with super cool ways to help you make the most of now.

When you walk into a Vodafone outlet however, you come face to face with some angry young person who clearly doesn’t give two hoots about how you make use of your time because they wont even bother to look at you for the first half an hour (I was actually wondering today if a Vodafone store would be a good place to catch up with friends – all this space to sit in and you are invisible to the people actually working there).

And aside from the girls they dress in tiny little dresses at various events (and I’m only including them because I suspect the boys love them), you could hardly call the people you come into contact with as ‘cool’. I’m fairly certain none of them have EVER been surfing and the seeming inability to hold a conversation makes me think they don’t have many friends to practice on. This may seem really rude, but my take on the Vodafone marketing speel is that it relies on being the ‘cool’ company. Therefore it actually is important to have fun, approachable people in their shops – I have nothing against uncool people, but they simply don’t belong with Vodafone – this is the image they have built.

I don’t want to be accused of using ironic in the wrong sense like our friend Alanis Morrisette, but it does strike me as ironic that Vodafone shops are so full of high-tech gadgets and information about 3G and wireless internet and clever things you can do with technology these days, while in the middle of it all two bored looking people struggle to write your problem down in one of those tiny notebooks you use to write your spelling words in at school. Once again, using glass on your table tops and minimalist branding only gets you so far in convincing your customers that you are at the cutting edge of technology. When you are faced with a problem management tool that is not only decades only and inefficient, but surpassed by basically every low-tech company around, suddenly those big modern, open spaces just look as empty as the promises Vodafone makes about who they are.

My point is. Vodafone clearly doesn’t care (what are we going to do? Switch to Telecom?) But you should. If you can’t live up to what your marketing says about you, rethink your marketing strategy.

Once you have established who you are, EVERY INTERACTION ANYONE HAS with your company should reinforce that. Want to be seen as fun? Well have fun with your customers, chat with them, discuss awesome ideas you have for what you’re helping them with. Want to be seen as professional? Make sure no one within your company is ever rude to your customers and deliver everything on time. Want to be seen as cool? Hire people who are unique, have quirky clothing and interests and the ability to chat casually with random passers by.

Vodafone has the pleasure of my rant because they do this to me time and time again, but you do see it everywhere. While words CAN convince people about what you are for a while, eventually people will see through them and you’d better either have a monopoly on your market or ensure what’s behind them holds true. Otherwise, your customers WILL leave you, and they probably wont even bother telling you why. So don’t just go to a branding company and get them to decide who you are (not that any half decent one should let you do that). Put in the ground work, think about what makes you different and never swerve off that path.

Greenpeace is holding a ‘name the whale’ competition (finishing today our time so tomorrow for the rest of the world). One of the whale name candidates is ‘Mr Splashy Pants’, from the sounds, this was only an option because ‘it was too funny to leave out’… However some fan of the name ‘Mr Splashy Pants’ caused no end of controversy when they set out on a one night attempt to make Mr Splashy Pants the most popular choice for the poor whales name.

In one of those mysterious twists of fate, websites with some of the largest viewership on the internet saw the sudden spike in votes and wrote about it… Now the full story has come out and the internet has gone crazy with a campaign to name the whale Mr Splashy Pants.

You may already know this, but what I love about it, is that that Greenpeace through the power of having something a little quirky have created a massive viral marketing campaign around their campaign to stop the killing of whales by Japanese whaling boats. People are currently:

• Wearing Mr Splashy Pants t-shirts
• Joining a Mr S.P Facebook group
• Sticking a Mr Splashy Pants bumper sticker on their cars
• Revising their logo – Check out Reddit

Mr Splashy Pants has ALREADY done more for Whales already than he could ever have been expected to do. However just imagine the global outrage if the Whalers harpooned him! I’m seriously wondering if I hope they do because if they did, he would be making the ultimate sacrifice to ensure that once and for all Whaling is made illegal worldwide. If Mr Splashy Pants became a victim of the harpoon, we wouldn’t stand for it.

Whatever you think about the tactics Greenpeace uses to make the world a fairer place for those with no voices, you can’t help but congratulate them on being some of the leading lights in viral marketing and exploiting the internet to their full advantage – So join the campaign and don’t forget to vote

Sometimes, it takes me 5 pages of documentation and a lengthy chat to decipher what it is a particular business actually does. I figure if I don’t get it, then chances are the viewers of the website I build for them wont get it either.

Sometimes I feel thick because I have to ask a potential customer so many questions, part of me just wants to nod along and pretend I know what they’re up to so they’ll feel comfortable spending money with me. But another part of me figures that if a business is making me feel dumb and intimidated because I don’t get what they do, surely they aren’t marketing themselves very well.

Publish a five word summary puts in very concise words one of the biggest things I think we offer our customers and WHY we think it’s so important.

I realised this very early on after starting a blog – the 5 word summary of what the blog was about appeared in every review and directory listing people gave us. They just copied and pasted it. We made it so easy for them to spread the word about us, they just did it (I just realised that we’ve somehow deleted that summary, I’ll put it back up tomorrow)

I also notice it when talking to people about what we do. If I give the 5-15 minute explanation, people often get a polite but entirely bored look on their face. Most people just don’t care about the inner workings, they just want the 5 word summary. If they get your business in 5 words – especially if they know nothing about the industry – they feel smart. They like you AND they can tell their friends about you.

So, what’s your five word summary?

I went to Victoria university. Their website was a well known example among students of a black hole of information – you knew it was all in there somewhere, it was just virtually impossible to get to it. It was begging for an update, so I was happy to discover that very recently it had undergone a re-design.

The new site looks nice, but I feel like the point of the redesign was missed a little. It’s not actually much easier to find stuff. I realised quickly that I had ‘learned’ the old site – I knew where that random link to the graduation information was off by heart so had taught myself how to get to it. The new site, I had no idea.

Looking quickly through the site to try to understand who and what they were catering for, I started jotting a quick list of what I think are the building blocks of a successful website. It is by no means complete, but based on the things I think the new VUW site does well and not so well.

• Use menus to break the areas of your website up into large chunks. People use navigation only when necessary so keep your main menu small (only a few links) and prominent. I can then quickly get to the broad area I need to.
• If you have a big site (with more than 2-3 layers of content), have a search box. I can avoid a long path to my goal page, if I can quickly search for it.
• Too much small text in small chunks is confusing, especially when it looks the same – I ignore it. Maybe I assume they are ads? Clearly separate different content and give it some space and size!
• I think 4 columns may be a bit much. It’s too busy and hard to separate the content out, so makes me head back to the menus. Keep it simple, 2-3 columns maximum and keep the main content area a lot larger than the ‘module’ bars so I know where I’m meant to be getting my information from.
• Completely understand the REASON why someone is there. What are the things most people are trying to get to? Make sure it is as easy as possible to people to achieve their most common tasks. All information was not created equal. Do visitor requirements change over time? (i.e with a graduation ceremony coming up, make graduation prominent, at other times, leave it more ‘hidden’

I have been a web designer long enough to know that behind even the ugliest of sites lies some very successful companies. A lot of people just don’t see the web as a marketing channel and have an ugly looking, amateur website as their only online representation. That’s like sending your five year old along to a sales meeting. Not only does it look unprofessional, it actively puts customers off!

I realised this fact with a bang when i was looking for a company to print tshirts for PlanHQ. I looked at quite a few websites and to be frank, they all looked like they were run out of some 12 year old’s garage and I had absolutely no faith that I would actually get anything for my money.

In the end, I actually went and visited the premises of a business BEFORE committing to purchase – this is someone who’s normally happy buying anything online. It struck me that t-shirt printing sites all had several things in common:

• They didn’t understand google. It is very hard to search for a t-shirt printing company, I had the nagging feeling there were a lot more out there but I would never be able to find them.
• T-shirt printing companies didn’t simplify their product. I just wanted a few t-shirts printed, I didn’t want it to feel like a very complicated, high risk task! I wanted an easy process (choose a t-shirt, submit your image in this format at this resolution, pay your money, wait 2 days, get your t-shirt couriered). That was, in the end how the process worked where I went, but honestly, you would never have guessed (the place I went to didn’t even have a website)
• T-shirt companies don’t understand the importance of beauty This is pretty frightening as I trust them to make my clothes look cool. Ugly sites put me off! Even though I know it’s psychological and a website is often no reflection on a company (!), I still was put off even calling most of the places I found.

T-shirt companies are not alone

A lot of other companies are in the same boat, but t-shirt companies are such an easy example of businesses that could totally take advantage of the web. If I was a t-shirt company that printed corporate tees, I’d ensure people could do it all online. Otherwise, every time someone wants a batch done it takes hours out of their day. They simply cannot afford to do it!

T-shirt companies could easily make my life easier by embracing the web. If I could find one half-decent site I would switch my business to them in a flash. Seriously.

I’ve recently subscribed to another email newsletter that I REALLY enjoy – gone are the days where these things are mainly spam, Get to The Point is ‘Small business secrets in 60 seconds’… One topic daily that gives you a little ‘ahh cool’ moment when you read it.

I have been buying a lot off stuff off Trademe recently. This uncovered an interesting phenomenon. Trademe works on a feedback system, when you make a trade, you offer feedback on the other party, the buyer or the seller. This raises or lowers their trust profile and affects future sales.

A fairer marketplace

The theory behind this is that it creates a far more honest marketplace… You have to be fair or else everyone knows about it. The thing is, now everyone is so worked up about their feedback, it’s actually created an environment of suspicion.

A weird side effect

I bought a phone for my flat, I sent an email to the seller requesting pick up details and got a reply. I then sent a further email requesting bank account details and trying to confirm a pick up time. They didn’t get it. The next thing I know, I’m being sent an email accusing me of being a ‘time waster’ and questioning if I ‘even want the phone’. Which I found fairly shocking. The issue was resolved with a fast phone call, but it seemed a weird reaction. When the truth was discovered, the opposite occurred and they obviously were a little afraid that I would turn on them!

My boyfriend had a similar issue when trying to buy glasses. After weeks of communication, the glasses never arrived. Eventually his money was returned and he wrote polite but firm piece of feedback which questioned if maybe the glasses were ever sent. The response was immediate and viscous. He is now the angry owner of feedback that claims he is a scammer.

Freakonomics

I’m quite new to buying on Trademe and I actually found myself AFRAID of not picking something up on time or not contacting the buyer immediately. It actually became surprising stressful.

I’m reading Freakonomics at the moment which is a book all about incentives, but also shows how everything has unintended side effects. This was one particular one I’d never considered arising from such a perfect sounding solution to trust int he marketplace.