Legendary Links

eConsultancy writes that Content is king, but for brands, there’s too much of it. “As content volumes increase and third-party distribution platforms become the primary means through which digital content reaches consumers, brands will have to get to grips with the fact that embracing content creation will not be a panacea.” Also, don’t miss out on eConsultancy’s excellent Periodic Table of Content Marketing

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Take note of these 9 principles for your next eCommerce site redesign:

1. More iterative redesign approach.
2. Stronger UX research to validate assumptions and solutions
3. Increasingly specific definitions of “success”.
4. Clearly defined baselines, targets and time bases for goal & KPI improvement
5. More analytics & research resources to identify problems & validate solutions throughout the redesign process.
6. Clear definitions of key segments the site needs to serve (and clear hypotheses for serving those specific segments).
7. Greater understanding of “mobility” and “omni-channel” behavior and recognition of key use cases for adaptive experiences.
8. Increased pressure for measurable improvements immediately at re-launch (as opposed to generous “bake in” periods).
9. A desire to reduce the “cost to serve” websites, wherein many manual, time-consuming site sections & activities will be called into question.

This comes from the Ecommerce Site Redesign Survey of over 200 eCommerce leaders by Sam Decker.

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Learn What Advertising Can’t Do from the estimable Jeff Sexton

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John Hagel offers us this nugget about Return on Attention (“ROA”) in his post The Demise of Advertising Business Models:

“Here’s the thing. As vendors become more adept at increasing return on attention for their customers, their need to advertise is likely to diminish. If they are more and more helpful to their customers, word of mouth will spread among customers and they will flock to the vendors who can improve their return on attention. And, it won’t be just word of mouth among customers. On the product side, curators are likely to emerge to help customers sort through the ever-expanding variety of products and services given deep expertise in certain categories of product and services. On the customer side, I have written about the emergence of trusted advisors who will invest in deeply understanding us as individual customers and become more and more helpful to us in recommending products or services we may not even have asked about.”

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If you’re quietly changing the world or you are just trying to you’ll find this post, When You Change the World and No One Notices, encouraging.

“Three points arise from this.

1. It takes a brilliance to change the world. It takes something else entirely to wait patiently for people to notice. “Zen-like patience” isn’t a typical trait associated with entrepreneurs. But it’s often required, especially for the most transformative products.
2. When innovation is measured generationally, results shouldn’t be measured quarterly. History is the true story of how long, messy, and chaotic change can be. The stock market is the hilarious story of millions of people expecting current companies to perform quickly, orderly, and cleanly. The gap between reality and expectations explains untold frustration.
3. Invention is only the first step of innovation.”