In the midst of Jared Spool’s gadfly-esque “UCD never worked, maybe we should retire it” opening plenary at the IA Summit was a rope prop. The rope represented the number of visitors to a website. It had a knot to show the small percentage of visitors who are customers and another for the even smaller percentage of big spenders/ultra-fans. Jared suggests that a smart business person doesn’t worry about the huge percentage for whom the website clearly isn’t working and just focus on selling a little bit more to those ultra-fans.
Fair enough.
But oddly not everyone in audience is just trying to make lots of money. I was reminded of this in a recent presentation from the BBC’s marketing team about audience segmentation. Like any other organisation we have a segment of highly passionate fans but, as the presentation made clear, the BBC cannot just up-sell to our the high approvers. That’s not public service.
So BBC IAs have to think about the whole rope, I’m afraid.
Jared M. Spool | 03-Jun-08 at 2:47 pm | Permalink
Hi Karen,
I’m pretty sure that if you try to think about the whole rope, you’ll just go insane.
The portion of the rope you need to focus on doesn’t need to be just the high approvers. It can be anyone who, if you improve their experience, you’ll see tremendous downstream effect.
The point of the exercise was to demonstrate that by focusing on a small group and making their experience ideal, you see immediate returns and you improve overall experience for everyone involved.
I’m betting that, even though the BBC has a large and diverse audience, there are still a tremendous amount of folks who wouldn’t benefit from any real improvements to the site. These are folks who come very infrequently and whose needs are pretty much already met.
Such as an individual who is not a UK taxpayer, lives in a foreign country, and is only interested in the one page of story that they found on an aggregator site. It’s not clear that focusing on their experience will buy the BBC, your team, or your users any further benefit. However, if you improve the story presentation for avid readers, who are frequent visitors, and rely on the BBC as their main source of news, the individual above will probably reap some benefit.
I’d recommend you avoid trying to think about the whole rope. That will only yield a mediocre experience all around.
– Your favorite Gadfly
R, Titus | 06-Jun-08 at 11:12 pm | Permalink
well I have to agree with Karen, and disagree with Jared… sort of. At the end of the day, you have to focus on something to do anything, you cannot boil the ocean, (although we do have this R&D arm which might be working on that right now, in fact, they’d probably succeed too as they seem to be quite bright)
But back to the point; our job is 100% reach at the bbc, that means we cannot afford to alienate parts of our audience, even as we improve the experience for those parts who are low or high approvers.
Its one of the reasons we’ve moved to a more personalized approach to our content. Rss feeds, widgets, personalization identity (great preso on Slide share on this FYI).
On the whole, and consideration, she’s right – we have to focus on the WHOLE ROPE, even if we pay a bit more attention to the parts with the biggest knots in them from time to time.