How to destroy your reputation with 'web presenters';
What's more annoying than automatically playing video content? Flash sales people.
I've visited a number of websites recently wanting to find out some more information about products and services, only to be frightened into leaving the site and pitying the owners—mostly due to their use of poor quality, unthought of sales people. People come to your website to avoid being harassed by sales people.
The greatest thing about the Internet;in my humble opinion;is the ability to find out information about a product or service to empower one's self as a consumer, being able to successfully avoid being pestered by three sales people within thirty seconds of walking into a store. These flash presenters are not only fruitless in their attempt to a message, by they also defeat the entire purpose of having a website.
The salubrious act of avoiding these sales people is something we as Information Superhighway empowered users choose to avoid, and being forced to makes us downright mad.
When consumers visit a website they're generally looking to do one or more of the following things:
- Locate technical information on products
- Compare one or more items
- Locate reviews on products to find out what others thing
- Discover the location and contact details of the store/s
When confronted with a flash video that automatically plays, takes up bandwidth and encourages the user not to use the website for any practical purpose you've effectively wasted money on an 'ornamental' website.
And what's the proposed benefit to using this Flash web presenter? That a user can save 25c on a local phone call. Something that a number of users wouldn't find useful, because they're probably more inclined to want to write the number down.
'But how can I engage my users effectively?' you ask.
Surprisingly a number of people still fail to realise is that the point of having a website isn't the ability to say 'yes' when confronted with the question 'do you have a website?'.
The point of having a website is to enable your potential customers to arm themselves with an arsenal of information on the business, its people and most importantly the products and services on offer. Its the ability to save money on unnecessary television, radio and newspaper advertisements.
So what can you really do to ensure a higher conversion rate and a more successful website? It's simple, all you need to do is:
- Have nice accessible content
- A clear and direct navigation
- Prominent and obvious contact details
- Plenty of easily scannable content (comparison matrices are great)
- Reduce the amount of content obstruction
- Write regular news/blogs on what you're offering
Most of this will not only aid in converting your users to potential buyers, but will improved the reliability and respect of your brand. There is also a large chance it will improve your SEO and the return on investment on a website will pay off a lot faster than offering users a free call.
Comments
While video tutorials, and video chat are bigger than ever and people posting personalised videos of themselves on youtube are beyond a joke you are saying that having a real live person talking to your website visitors will "destroy your reputation".
Your statement on the home page says it all "Hello. My name is Grant-I am from the internet". The point you need to remember is not everyone is "from the internet". I am just curious as to where you get your information from, because our real world studies, stats and clients actually contradict pretty much everything you say?
Sure, not everyone likes a person jumping up on their screen but that really depends on your traffic type and target audience.
Take this site for example, it holds no reputation, nor credibility to me whatsoever, nor would it to, say my mate the deisel fitter. If you were to personally appear on the main page in video presenter form introducing yourself and welcoming NEW visitors to your website or lets say for example I clicked on the about section and you popped up and talked to me about yourself I really can't see how would that destroy the reputation of this site further but infact I would bet money on the fact it would do the opposite.
You are a project manager who specialises in "Interactive Media" yet condemn the use of video presenters who not only encorouge interactivity but engage people on a much more personal level than a bunch of simple SEO'd text links or a W3C compliant paragraph of text could ever do.
The internet is no longer made up of web developers, super geeks and gamers, it is made up of real people, who have difficulty sending email or writing a document in word.
Website visitors, website owners, and yes even seasoned experience webdeveopers love video web presenters, I know this for a fact. Web presenters will increase conversions on some websites, and increase reputation, and credibility aswell. This I also know as fact.
When Bob the plumber calls us up and has butterflies in his stomach and can't contain his excitment about walking around on HIS OWN 3 page "ornamental website" who are you to tell him, "Sorry Bob that's a bad idea".
While some people may not like web presenters as you have made clear you don't, and all the best but condemning or making wild claims about an industry and market you know nothing about is pretty close minded.
Oh and you may want to ask Bell Medias or Chris (the guys picture above) permission before using his photo.
Thanks Vince
I would absolutely love to see real world statistics on the conversion rates for websites that you're offering media services to.
We recently implemented something similar for a client and the most feedback we got was that it was quite 'irritating', and 'why must it autoplay?'. Feedback from people just like 'Bob the Plumber' as well.
I must apologise if my entry comes across as being directly defaming websites that use video. The message I was trying to convey was that whilst engaging many forms of media to reach your target audience, no one thing should be more prominent than the other.
I think it is exceptionally important for a website to be well composed, easy to navigate and far removed from being forced down a users throat--which in my opinion video presenters do just that.
I appreciate your feedback, and would be happy to discuss this with you in person as well.
Grant
Grant, without knowing who with, and how you have implemented it I can't make assumptions on why you had a bad experience.
How were you able to get feedback, people/vistors phoned in, sent emails complaining? Also what sort of numbers are we talking about here, 1 client with a few thousand uniques and over what period of time?
We have options not to autoplay built into our system but clients always choose to autoplay the video atleast once for their new traffic.
The numbers I am talking about is 100s of business, from plumbers to doctors to companies like Virgin, Gotalk, and educational institues such as TAFE NSW.
Burn. I'd love to see some actual statistics from both sides on this one. Until then it's just a "mine's bigger than yours" game of flame.
I'd suggest the actual breakdown is between the marketing focus groups where clients/customers display what they would like in a company website and the actual application of that by the company developers.
My current employer has just gone through a similar process and the outcome is quite ridiculous.
Whilst the focus groups did give us some good ideas about what it is our customers want in our website the interpretation of that by the business and subsequently the development guidelines the website has been designed upon ... are frankly useless.
We now have a new website that is overloaded with content, options and yes, flash animations. Navigation is a nightmare. Usefull information may as well not be there for it's lack of accessability. Our customers cannot be seriously happy with the result (we will see in about a week). But we did meet all the requirements set by marketing!
Endgame: if you are not "from the internet" your job should have nothing to do with deciding the direction of your company on the internet.
Website? "Yes we have one." It is shit.
Thanks P
It seems that the corporate world is acting largely on what they've heard rather than what they know—which is leading the general web population into ill thought out ideas and practices.
With my experience working with large companies, government departments and even small businesses it seems that most of the people making the decisions aren't informed consumers and rely largely on the service provider to point them in the right direction.
When these people only speak to the one biased agency it generally ends in a website that is very niche in its target.
My particular gripe with flash presenters is that the idea is similar to out dated ideas businesses used to approach their target audience—by stating things that they think the user wants to know—'great service, good value, smiles' and other such notions.
I would encourage clients to think outside of the box and ask them:
Why are users coming to your website?
Is your website going to convey you message immediately?
Does brand integrity matter?
In all reality I can't see flash video presenters solving any of these issues, as no one likes sales people.
Web content needs to be interactive, simple and not impose on the user, so that the user can:
Get information quickly
Be able to reference content easily
Locate the details of a service and its provider quickly
Just because a lot of people are doing it, doesn't make it right. The public denouncing of standards compliance clearly demonstrates a lack of knowledge on the Internet and its usability.
I use the Firefox addon Flashblock to stop those nasty flash applications from chewing into my bandwidth.
Thanks 'Hello'
I wonder how many people actually do the same thing. It would be interesting to know if this is a potential risk for actually forking out money on flash presenters, to only have the majority of them blocked by adblockers.
I am also curious if any of the videos, such as Bell Media's, have been added to any of the adblocker lists.
Grant
Hi Grant
Interesting opinion.
Having owned a small business for 23 years I've learnt that you can never please all of the people all of the time. Given the same product some customers think it's brilliant and others threaten you with their lawyer, it really is like that.
We have a site that is aimed at the older person (I am one by the way) www.cineconversions.co.uk it works very well and the UKs leading magazine for people over 50s have put a link on their site. It's as basic as sites get. We also have a web presenter site which also does well www.thewebpresenterpeople but I know that web presenters are annoying to some people.
The worse thing to have a on a site if a form to fill in without a phone number, I'm off them like a shot as I know I'll have a sales person hassling me for the next 10 years. Web Design companies are the worst for this.
Claire
Thanks Claire
Ultimately I think that automatically playing video in any format is as obtrusive as obtrusive gets and isn't all that great for the users experience.
This covers all forms of autoplay flash video as Sydney's leading newspaper SMH are discovering at the moment.
The thing about the Internet is that it has empowered users with choice, and the ability to dynamically decided what they want to view, how they want to view it and why.
It is quite an old–media way of jamming things down a users throat due to a lack of choice and understanding of what the user actually wants.
Sure—by all means—use flash to help convey your message; but don't force your user to digest what you have to say.
There are much simpler ways of engaging your audience, like clearly providing your contact details so that your users can call you.
Grant
Grant, thank you for your article, I haven´t considered all the facts mencioned in your lines.
For some people who develope websites, web presenters are a fancy tool to explain things, but can also be intrusive. Maybe it is a resource to be used with a planned justification and clear objectives, not only like a an adicional effor to sale more.
Keep us posted with this rich content.
Best regards from Mexico
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