Stunning Facebook Pre-filled Form Results
In the past week, I’ve been testing out Facebook’s pre-filled registration form plugin, which lets users who are logged into Facebook have their data conveniently pre-filled for them. After all, the less people have to type in, the better, right?
Here’s an example of the old signup form and popup:
Pretty bland, but straightforward.
Here’s an example of the Facebook-based one:
Much sexier. The copy is still the same, explaining the benefits, but you get the Facebook look and feel, as well as some social proof and much less to type in. Note that I’ve used the same code in both the site signup form and popup.
I predicted significantly more conversion from the Facebook-based form and popup for my newsletter. After all, it has social proof, it has convenience, it has a nicer look and feel. Let’s see side by side how the pop-up and regular form did on a week over week basis.
Well then. For my site, for my audience, for this period of time, Facebook’s pre-filled registration form and popup performed 21 times more poorly than a regular, boring, plain popup and form. This stunned me. Even though the past week had double the site visitors and more attention than most weeks on the blog, this result is fairly shocking.
Is it because it feels invasive? Is it because Facebook didn’t respond in a timely manner to a Javascript API call? I’m not sure. I tested the form mechanism repeatedly when I set it up and the system accepted the data and passed it all the way through to my CRM, so I know it wasn’t a technical glitch on my part. Without additional testing, I probably won’t know why this failed so badly, but I’m not going to test any more for right now, as these results are fairly conclusive for me. Farewell, Facebook-based popup and newsletter signup form.
The moral of the story? Always be testing. Just because it’s on the front page of Mashable or Techcrunch doesn’t mean it’ll do you a bit of good, no matter what your social media expert friends say.
As an aside, this is one of the reasons why you should encourage your employees to maintain personal sites, blogs, social media accounts, etc. If I had done this on Blue Sky Factory’s corporate website and reduced inbound lead generation by 2,100% in a week, I’d be looking for a new job. Instead, I just have fewer subscribers on my personal list, and with luck, they’ll come back when I write another useful blog post and I’ll catch them then, and the company incurs no substantial harm.
How has Facebook pre-filled registration form stuff been working for you? Similar results? Dissimilar results?
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How to distill content curation for real impact
How do you cope with the flood of information that swamps your inbox, blog reader, and mobile device every day?
How do you find and isolate all the good stuff, separate the wheat from the chaff, and use the information you’re receiving to actually move the needle?
The same way that you get the good stuff out of crude oil, weak brews, and perfume herbs: distillation. If you slept through high school chemistry class (or were interested in an entirely different kind of chemistry, as many of my peers were), distillation is the process of heating a raw material to extract a chemical based on its boiling point, then condensing the distilled product separately. Cognac, for example, is distilled wine from high-quality ugni blanc grapes. It’s distilled twice in copper pots, then aged for two years before being sold for consumption.
The same process that works for cognac works for content curation. It’s not enough just to subscribe to a bunch of blogs and read a bunch of tweets, not if you want to take all of the information you receive daily and make it useful. Here’s the process I use on a daily and weekly basis; feel free to modify or adapt it for your own needs.
I start every day with my blog reader on the iPad. I’ve subscribed to about 2500 different blogs across a spectrum of topics, and each day I hit the main topic areas, such as economics, marketing, social media, development, etc. I skim through rapidly, looking for bits of information and data that catch my eye, read into articles that do, and then share them via Google Reader. I do this specifically on the iPad because it lets me focus better on just reading the news with no other distractions.
If that were all I did, I’d still be swamped with information, since I share 20-30 different articles a day, if not more. The first distillation pass is what I cull out for #the5 on Twitter every day. Of those 20-30 articles, which 5 of them are the most worth sharing? Some days, that’s easy. Some days, that’s a very tough call. But forcing myself to distill out only 5 different pieces of information makes me focus on the stuff that’s truly important to me, stuff that I’d want to really remember. One of my general rules of thumb for stuff in #the5 is that if I didn’t learn something, I don’t share it.
The second pass of distillation occurs weekly, as I prep each Tuesday night for a recording of Marketing Over Coffee. I actually subscribe to my own #the5 tweets as a separate RSS feed so that I can see just the most important articles of the week that I thought were good enough to share. I’ll star key items in that feed so that I have a very compact list of stuff that should be headline discussion topics and then bring those with me every Wednesday morning when John Wall and I record the show.
The final stage of distillation, the stage where I know something has got to be kept or else, is when I take distilled items out of this process and put them into reference tools like Evernote or Instapaper, ensuring that I have them on hand for when I need to reference them later.
This three-phase process wasn’t automatic or something immediately contrived. It just evolved that way as the amount of information thrown at me increased, and this was a handy way of filtering it down until only the gems were left. It’s probably not right for you and your information processing style, but I hope it gives you some ideas and inspires you to try multiple levels of content curation to distill out the things that you really need or want to remember and learn.
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Cause and effect
Does this sound familiar?
- Why are we so bad at metrics?
- Why are we so easily fooled by shiny numbers that don’t mean anything?
- Why is it so hard for us to understand what metrics are telling us?
The answer might surprise you. In the world of statistics, there’s a brainbender called the Fundamental Problem of Causal Inference, which states:
There’s no way to directly observe cause, only correlation.
That is to say, you can see whether things are related using data with any number of analyses, but there’s no known way to look at a pile of data and understand cause. Cause cannot be seen just by looking at numbers. Statisticians and metrics experts are fond of saying that correlation is not causation, citing examples such as a relationship between piracy (real pirates) and global warming. Over the centuries, piracy has declined, and the world’s climate has been changing. If you blindly assume that correlation means causation, then you’d draw the seemingly logical conclusion that pirates cause global warming and fewer pirates means less global warming.
It may seem obvious that correlation is not causation when you look at a pointedly absurd comparison like pirates and global warming, but things get much muddier when you start looking at data like marketing metrics. Why? Most often, the questions asked of marketing are causation questions, questions that begin with “Why?”:
- Why is our lead volume up/down?
- Why didn’t this campaign deliver the results we wanted?
- Why isn’t social media working for us?
Marketers facing these sorts of questions have to turn to what’s on hand, which more often than not is… a pile of data that at best will provide strong correlation but give no indicators of causation. We can answer what, but not why. One of the most cited, problematic forms this problem takes is in attribution. Marketing software records an activity or series of activities about a lead, but all of that information fails to note causation. For example:
- You attended a webinar.
- You downloaded a white paper.
- You replied to us on Twitter.
- You liked us on Facebook.
- You attended one of our conferences.
- You visited a blog post, filled out a form, and became a customer.
When we respond to the why questions, the data can mislead us! What gets “credit” for the conversion to a lead? The blog post, in most marketing automation systems. What actually caused the conversion? You might have actually made up your mind when you read the white paper. You might have been waiting until you had the budget to buy, but your mind was made up a year ago.
How do you solve the problem of causation? How do you get the real answers you’re after? There are only two known valid solutions that don’t involve quantum mechanics and manipulation of the space-time continuum: testing and surveying.
Testing is fairly straightforward. If you know what effect you’re looking for (conversion to a lead, for example), you can set up a variety of causes and see which cause generates the effect you’re aiming for. Testing has its limits, of course; it’s impossible to rewind time and do an A/B content split on surprise television coverage about your company, but for most forms of digital marketing, some testing is possible.
The second method is surveying. Nothing is simpler yet done less frequently than asking a customer how they heard of you or what made them decide to buy your product or service. Make this an integral part of your sales and marketing processes and you’ll gain a much clearer picture of what’s actually influencing the minds of your customers.
What good is all of the data if it can’t prove causation? Throw the data out, right? Wrong. All of the metrics, all of the numbers, all of the correlations are good at telling you where to ask questions. They’re good at helping refine opportunities for testing, opportunities for surveying, opportunities to investigate previously unknown or unimagined connections between different marketing methods. If you see Klout scores and email open rates correlating, you now have a new question to ask of your customers. If you see visits to a landing page and a URL you don’t recognize as the referring source, you now have a new opportunity to investigate. Data has its place, its role in marketing, and data is very good at hinting at new lines of inquiry.
Use your data to understand what. Use your testing and surveying to understand why. If you can do both well, you’ll have a much more complete picture of your marketing. Oh, and if some social media expert, marketer, guru, or scientist makes the bold claim that their metrics product answers causation, demand them to show you how they’ve overcome a centuries-old statistical problem that dates back to David Hume in the 1700s.
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Talking book marketing with Steve Garfield
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I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Steve Garfield on his show, SGTV, recently. We talked about PodCamp, the book, and how I did the marketing for it, as well as a few other topics.
Steve’s a great interviewer for a couple of reasons. He does his homework, which is wonderful – there’s nothing better than talking to someone who knows what it is you’ve done and why they’re talking to you. He’s also a rarity (unfortunately) in interviewers in that he’s not constantly interrupting you to interject his own opinions.
Here’s the segment. In total, it’s about 20 minutes long.
Part 1
Part 2
Thanks again to Steve Garfield for the great talk. You can find him at SteveGarfield.com and @stevegarfield on Twitter.
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Weekend Foodblogging: Spicy Bacon Onigiri
If you’re not familiar with the traditional Japanese dish onigiri, you’re missing out on one of the handiest portable foods there is. Onigiri date back at least to the 11th century, if not older, and were a food used by many Japanese, especially in the military, since they stored and traveled well. Onigiri are traditionally rice balls filled with some salty food to act as a preservative, such as pickled plum or bonito, but since modern technology has given us refrigerators and such, the need to restrict fillings to preserved items is somewhat less mandatory.
This recipe is, as far as I know, original. That’s not to say that putting bacon in things is an original idea, but this application isn’t something I found at a restaurant and tried to imitate. It’s fairly straightforward to make and is wicked tasty.
Filling:
- 2 strips of finely chopped, crispy thick-cut bacon & the rendered fat
- 1 tablespoon of finely chopped fresh parsley
- 2 tablespoons of mayonnaise
- 1 tablespoon of panko Japanese bread crumbs
- 1/4 teaspoon or to taste Sriracha chili sauce (adjust depending on how spicy you like spicy)
Onigiri:
- 1 full pot of cooked, cooled short grain white rice, ideally sushi rice
- 1 package of nori seaweed sheets
Instructions:
- Cut the nori in half diagonally with a pair of scissors.
- Take all the filling stuff, put it in a bowl, and stir very well.
- Form rice “patties” with your hands that are about a half inch thick and about 2 1/2 inches across.
- Take a small spoonful of the filling, put it on one patty, put a second on top, and mould into a ball or triangle shape, depending on how traditional you like your onigiri
- Fold the triangular piece of nori around the rice ball when you’re ready to eat. (don’t put it on in advance or it gets soggy and nasty)
- Enjoy!
The filling is something that should be a little sparse but spread across the tongue as you chew; that’s why I make this with two rice patties instead of the traditional method of putting an indentation in the rice ball and filling it. Using two flat patties lets the filling spread out a little more and be more present in every bite.
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