Tinsology

Anyone who has ever had an email account is probably very familiar with the “Do not reply” email. They can take the form of notifications from your bank, reminders to pay a bill, a newsletter, or just plain spam. Generally the read a little something like:

Please do not reply to this email. This mailbox is not monitored and you will not
receive a response.

Usually this is followed by some instructions to follow if you have a question or concern. I imagine at some point in the history of automated emailers someone decided that they did not want to receive any reply from their users via email, or at least from email directed to the address in question, and everyone blindly proceeded to follow this example. That is what contact forms and support email addresses are for correct? To a certain degree this is true. Having to monitor another email account (or more) for support questions would only exacerbate things in the nightmare that is customer support. So the solution is to toss out any incoming email to these accounts and direct users to ask their questions via support form or an alternate email address.
In my mind this is a cop-out. Consider what you lose by doing this. In most cases if I suddenly have a question after receiving an email from my bank, this question is with regard to the message I just received. If I were able to just hit the reply button the original message would be right there on the bottom of my message. If I am to use some other means to ask my question I might forget to include it or decided that it is of no importance.

In addition to this there is the hassle of the alternative process. I have to go to my bank’s website, find the support form, fill out all the necessary information which in my case means first and last name, date of birth, account number, social, and email address (twice). Believe it or not this is the case even if I’m logged into my account. This is a minor inconvenience, but the process introduces the chance for user error. If I put the wrong account number or some other typo occurs my question might never get answered or I might be asked to do it all over again. If I were able to just hit reply all of this information could be derived (automatically) from my email address.

The problems don’t stop there. Often it is the case that support forms ask you to choose the department or type that your question falls under (i.e. is it a billing question, a technical question, etc.). Sometimes the lines between question categories can easily be blurred and submitting a question to the wrong department could potentially increase the response time. It takes x time for person A to get to your question, if A is not the right person to answer the question then it is redirected to person B. Your wait time is now x + y. If you were able to just reply to the email the type of question would be determined automatically and directed to person B. Your wait time is now just y.

Obviously the ubiquitous “do not reply” emails are no the result of someone failing to realize that it may be convenient for the user. The problem is that it complicates things for the support team. Or it least it appears this way at first glance.

Wouldn’t this mean monitor additional email accounts? There is no reason why any person working in support should have to monitor an email account; there are better ways. A properly implemented support system would make the source of the message, whether it be an email or a form, transparent.

It is important the users be directed to the website so that they can find answers in our FAQ or knowledge base before inundating the support system. The solution here is to replace your “do not reply” messages with links to places where the user can find answers. Additionally this gives you the opportunity to serve specialized questions and answers based on the content of the message. Ultimately, users asking obvious questions or questions that have been answered many times in the past is unavoidable.

What about emails containing sensitive information? A user may inadvertently expose their private information to the support team by hitting reply. The solution here is to be careful about what information you put in an email. I am not suggesting that Do not reply emails should be done away with entirely. If it is absolutely necessary to put sensitive information into an email (password resetting for example) then it is appropriate to use a Do not reply address.

I’d like to conclude this entry by imaging a support system with Do not reply (almost) eliminated. Image the support system for a web hosting company. There are three support departments: Billing, accounts, and technical, each of which has an email address. There is also a Do not reply address used exclusively for password resetting. There is a support form which asks the user to select the appropriate department. Finally, there is a knowledge base containing common and previously answered questions. The knowledge base also has a feature that allows it, given a question or some other block of text, to attempt to find similar questions that have already been answered.

When a member of the technical support team accesses the support system, they see only questions for their department, both from the support form and from the technical department email account. The same is true for the other departments.

If one of the departments sends out a notification, whether it be automatic (bill is due, a change to your account, etc.) or manual (planned downtime, a new feature, or some other announcement), before the message is sent, its content is passed to the knowledge base which determines common questions and answers relating to the content of the message. It selects a few and appends them to the message. The message is then sent. If the user has a question regarding the message they have the option of hitting reply and having their message (original message and all) sent to the correct department.

After hearing some noise about Google having updated page rank, I got curious and decided to check the PR of this site. I launched this site shortly before the last update, when it was assigned the rank of zero. This time around, to my surprise, I found that the index, as well as one other page was ranked 4. This was surprising because I have not made any deliberate effort to increase the rank of this site. I got bored of submitting to directories, stopping after about 20, I haven’t purchased links, spammed blogs or forums, or consulted with an ‘SEO Expert’.

So, how then, did I accomplish this feat? Did I discover a secret SEO technique? Did I go down the street to my local Google building and hold them up at gun point? If I had a secret I’d tell you. The reality is that I have been focusing almost exclusively on my content. At times, actually, it seems to me that that IS the secret. Whenever I see people asking how to increase their page rank, I see responses like “get more backlinks” and “post your links on forums”. I never see someone respond “improve the quality of your content”.

I don’t claim to all of a sudden be an expert on the topic, nor do I intend to brag up this ‘accomplishment’. My point is that spending time dropping links, submitting to directories, and sending fruit baskets to Google should all be secondary to improving your content. It is important to understand that high page rank is a symptom of high traffic. If  I, for whatever reason, wanted to catch the flu would I focus on giving myself a headache and inducing vomiting? No. I would go to the hospital, get down on my hands and knees, and start licking some floors. The same thing is true of page rank and traffic (not the licking floors part). Artificially increasing PR by spamming links will not lead to increased traffic.

Roughly a month ago I started serving Kontera, in-text, ads. Based on a month of use here are my impressions of the platform:

Ad Relevance

I found that the ads were relevant only to the term selected for the link, meaning that the ad served was based on the word or phrase in the link. This being the case, often times the ads were irrelevant to the overall content. For example, if I wrote a post about login systems, or otherwise mentioned login systems. the word system could be selected as a link to an ad about air conditioning systems.

Revenue Generated

Before I go into detail, let me mention that I do not generate a lot of ad revenue, nor do I expect to. If I break even on the domain costs and hosting fees I’m happy.

I did generate some revenue, and I imagine on a site with more traffic that revenue could easily be significant. What money I did make, however, was far less than was I make on my AdSense ads. I also found that in spite of the fact that the kontera ads are in-text and the Google ads are outside of the main text, the AdSense ads received more clicks. If I had to guess as to why this is, I would say it is because visitors to this site are well aware of what those ads are and for the most part arn’t interested. I imagine the relevance of the ads that I discussed above also plays a factor in this.

Intrusiveness and Conclusion

I personally don’t find in-text ads to be overly intrusive. After some thought, however, I decided that having users mistakenly click what they think to be relevant links and instead be served an ad is not worth the amount of revenue generated. I found that the ‘traditional’ banner ads were more effective and relevant.

Yesterday I read some comments by someone who was upset that Widgetbox modified their policy to prevent the inclusion of ads in the widgets submitted to their directory. The author claimed that this change in policy was uncalled for. All of the ads he inserted into his widgets were easily removable. People were getting these widgets for free so it should be his right to insert his own ads into them, right?

If you are a developer or publisher you might be inclined to agree with the author. If you are more often a user of such applications you might disagree. Though the author, justifies himself by claiming the ads are easily removable, some among us, however, go to great lengths to keep ads or links within their applications from being removed. The problem, in this case, with portable web applications is the source is always available. The solution to this, too often, is to obscure the code in order to prevent users from modifying it. What about users modifying it in good faith though? I personally respect a developer’s right to include a link in their free software. This does not mean that I don’t sometimes need to make changes to the source code.

A larger problem than this is that this behavior contributes toward our conflicted viewpoint regarding ads. We both love and hate ads. If ads were a person they would be the ex-girlfriend you’re still attracted to but know you dont’ get along with. As publishers we put ads in our content, but as users will fully ignore them. How many people have sites containing ads, but also have the firefox plugin that prevents ads from being displayed? At the same time we want people to click the ads on our sites, but are unwilling to even look at the ads on others’ sites.

This conflict is most severe for tech oriented sites. If you have a tech site, your users (most likely tech people) are ad blind. Most likely a person can read this entire post without knowing what the ads even say. Ad placement plays a factor in this of course, but even when the ad is right in my face, I don’t give it a second thought. In fact, I think that intrusive ad placement as well as flashing, animated, or worst of all, ads with sound contribute to a users unwillingness to even notice your ads.

The tech oriented portion of the Internet is a special case of course. I went to a conference a couple years ago and heard a Microsoft representative claim that the ads on their mail service were not meant for us. Us refers to us at the conference: tech people. As a niche, we don’t generate ad revenue. When is the last time you went on someone else’s site and clicked an ad? When did you even read them? Without looking, do you know what any of the ads on this site say?

So what is the solution to this problem? Is it even a problem? If you’re a publisher in the tech niche you might be concerned that your users are experiencing ad blindness. I’ve already pointed out that more intrusive or attention getting ads are not the solution. The only thing you can do is give ads a chance. I encourage you of course to ignore intrusive ads as they are part of the problem. What about discrete ads placed in good faith, by tech people hoping to pay the bills or earn some pocket cash off an ad supported app? I’m not telling you to click ads. If you are a publisher or developer who uses ads in their work, I’m telling you to read the ads. See what they’re about.

This brings us back to a question I asked earlier. Does a developer have the right to insert an ad into an application that is meant to be used on someone else’s site? I think the answer depends on the method and the goals. If your ad subtracts from the content of your app or its users site then the answer is no. If your purpose is the generate ad revenue then the answer is no. We need to get over the mentality that ad revenue will make us rich. Even if you make is significant amount of money from ads, you should realize that credit does not belong to the ads, it belongs to the content.

I just read an excerpt from an interview with Michael Lynton, the CEO of Sony Pictures. To quote him,

I’m a guy who doesn’t see anything good having come from the Internet. Period.

He backed up this statement by arguing that the Internet feeds the mentality that people “can have whatever they want at any given time”.

For the typical person, day to day use of the Internet is fairly trivial. Read the news, check Facebook, play a game, look up a BBQ chicken recipe, check Facebook again. While this may be true, you don’t have to think too hard to determine that the near instantaneous access to information offered by the Internet has had a more than trivial effect on our lives. Apparently, however, the comforts created, the improvements to quality of life, and even the lives saved as a result of this innovation are negated by the negative impact of piracy.

I personally don’t see how someone can make a statement like that, unless he completely misspoke or is just completely ignorant of the reality of things. Does he really think that the Internet has created such a huge problem that all of the good stemming from it is not worth mention? I’ll accept that the Internet has caused more problems then it has solved when Michael Lynton can’t afford a golden toilet seat. Until then I’m going give the same amount of merit to the opinions of Sony CEOs as I do to: people who claim aliens abducted them, people who don’t believe in medicine, and people who communicate with the dead. I draw this comparison based on the fact that their opinions and statements are all grounded in about the same amount of reality.

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