Wales spoke about the power of one and how both content creation and consumption within Wikipedia exist to empower an individual.

It occurred to me during his session that Wikipedia has the potential to become a very powerful trends analysis tool. Wikipedia is already providing an interesting cultural view of content consumption – for example: well over half of all Japanese language articles viewed are related to pop culture; and the French and Spanish do a good deal more ‘reading’ about sex than English or Americans.

Thinking about trends analysis further, we know that history is typically written by the victor and that at numerous points in our past masses of content has been lost – yet for all it’s digital fragility and theoretical transience, Wikipedia seems to have attained a stage of relative content permanency.

For me, this is an opportunity to measure and map our perception of ourselves and of our history, but we shouldalso commit to tracking this change over time.

Currently, 87% of content articles on Wikipedia are created by males. While not surprising, Wales said that it is a priority to correct.

As a strategist I see a long term role for Wikipedia – where it can observe itself and thus make comment on social change and human attitudes over time.

Wikipedia is full of articles that once written and agreed should theoretically have no need for change, however I suspect they will. Any change to these types of articles will reflect a change in our own (global) collective attitude or social viewpoint. Wouldn’t it be interesting to track the aggregate attitude to content as the nature of content creation changes, for example plot the changes as the percentage of female content creators and administrators increases to 25% and then onto 50%.

There are endless changes that will occur that will impact and in some cases rewrite history, politics and religion being the two most obvious.

Instances of change documentation have already commenced. James Bridle has created an encyclopaedia of the US / Iraq War, but the difference is the entire encyclopedia is a time based view of how the war was documented within Wikipedia and how the nature of the content evolved over the duration of the war.

Check it out: http://booktwo.org/notebook/wikipedia-historiography/

This is definitely an exciting and unprecedented time for knowledge and it will be the first time creation of records can be easily tracked and visualised as the changing beast it is and the distortion of our history will be better understood.

I love the web!

SPAM is no longer black and white. Grey mail shows us how emails must continually evolve to provide value to the subscriber.

Grey mail is legal but (let’s say it) annoying email. Top annoyances are email frequency and content irrelevance.

To help the average person manage the volume of email they receive email providers are creating smart filters that will change the way your email is consumed.

Soon automated mailbox filtering will become standard, so those who are tailing on the end of old school ‘batch and blast’ emailing you should sit up and take notice.

Gmail’s beta ‘Gmail priority inbox’ and Hotmail’s ‘SmartScreen’ both use types of user classification to categorise emails such as social updates and newsletters then automatically categorise them as they hit an in box.

Most companies will need to change their email planning and deployment practices if they wish strong ongoing results.

Without going into unnecessary detail I can tell you that if you do not start planning how profile data, behavioural triggers and dynamic content allows your emails to become individualised and inherently more valuable your email will not get viewed and you will notice a massive decline in email ROI before the end of 2012. If you do not manage to evolve how your emails change to meet the needs of each individual then your email will be too easily de-prioritised by mail auto filters and you will loose contact with your customer or prospect.

This is not meant to be a post of doom; in fact more mature email marketers will notice a lift in email traffic quality albeit they will also experience a decline in open rates and traffic volume. Email recipients will view emails when they want or need to and these new tools will help them locate and consume email content in context, the end result being clicks will be more intentional, but hard won.

To stand out and become successful, those wanting to maintain successful email programs will learn how to provide the best service at the time when the recipient wants it so the recipient thinks of their email and knows where to find it when the need arises.

According to Turban et al. (Authors of Electronic Commerce 2008) “Customer service is a series of activities designed to enhance the level of customer satisfaction – that is, the feeling that a product or service has met the customer expectation.”

I would get little argument if I said that the sales experience and in particular the (prospect) new customer experience, should be guided by the same definition. In that sales experiences should result in the confidence that a product or service expectation will be met!

Yet, few would be able to show how their online sales programs actually meet prospect expectations. …ohh they can show sales or conversion events alright…But how would you know if you should have received more sales if expectations were better met?

Most at this point would run to their stack of industry benchmarks, but!…What if nobody was measuring presales service expectations and opportunity loss?. I would suggest those who are, would be doing little to share their insight.

JBA’s experience tells me that approximately 50% of those who abandon check-out forms do so not because of form complexity etc, but because of product selection anxiety.

Service centric thinking, as such is not new to the online industry. So why then are we struggling to define and include satisfaction measurement metrics within our overall planning and optimisation processes?

So, how would one best define and measure the satisfaction level of a prospect?.

Peer referral scores, such as NetPromoter are good survey based data, but are like trying to describe an iced doughnut without mentioning the hole!

These scores should only be used as a comparative sanity check, to behavioural data, which is the true view of current satisfaction.

A service centric mindset would see you adding another timeframe and level to your reporting.

This enhanced would assess channels and campaigns based on their impact on the active percentage of the base, maintaining profile relevancy, accuracy of predictive behaviour and the tracking and understanding of all support and attrition related trends.

All these points help maintain the business investment and do well in illustrating opportunity loss, but also are the truest view of satisfaction.

This enhanced data is the hole in the doughnut, as these online sales trends measure the quality of service you have committed to providing a prospect and provide a real benchmark for growth.

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Case in point: Groupon, which offers time sensitive deals. A great deal leverages the emotion of greed, and a short timeframe in which to make a purchase leverages the emotion of fear. The result: lots and lots of sales that probably wouldn’t have happened under any other model. See our post on Social Demand Generation for more detail.

Needless to say, consumer inaction is a problem for us as a business. If you can’t convince potential customers to make the decisions that lead to them becoming customers, everyone’s 2011 will be a tough year.

The following posts will explore how we drive more sales from the same spend by turning indecision into action.

For those not familiar with the concept, it is simple: