Play strength off strength
Posted by Duncan on October 2, 2008
In school, I was always drawn to extracurricular activities, sometimes to the detriment of my academic pursuits. At university, in business school, one of the organizations I joined was SIFE. And while I learned about business, event planning, what I took away from SIFE that set it apart from other organizations was presentation skills.
SIFE is setup such that each chapter spends their year planning and executing projects that aim to hit six SIFE criteria- aimed at applying business skills to improve social problems. Each year teams compete against each other by presenting what they’ve achieved to a panel of business judges.
The SIFE team I belonged to was pretty serious, and a little competitive, so we took the presentation pretty seriously. Each year we put together a presentation team that comes together to try to present the projects in the best possible light. The goal here is to get what the speakers say, the visuals on screen above them, and what’s written on the annual report working in concert to convince the judges.
And so, we learned to move from listing bullet points on a PowerPoint slide to creating scripts and visuals that complemented each other: important points emphasized by the visuals, and video and photos providing an emotional connection to the projects in a way a script never can. Add in some financial information on a smartly designed annual report, and we’d achieved the trifecta.
This is the lesson that I took most from SIFE: use each medium available in the way that best supports your message, and fits with the medium’s advantages.
I’ve tried to carry on this lesson to all forms of communication: at MedicLINK, I’ve applied it to the Google AdWords advertising that we’ve started to ramp up in the past month. We are now running banner ads across Google’s content network, aimed to create a positive impression of Eyesistant. We’re also running text ads on Google searches.
In the spirit of testing we aren’t running one version of these banners, but two. Which slogan works best? So far, it looks like “eye care” has a slight lead in clickthrough results.
Sidenote: This week, my SIFE team is representing Canada at the World Cup in Singapore, where they are competing against teams from 47 countries.
Pursuing your vision
Posted by Matt on September 30, 2008
Remember your first real job interview? It’s normally full of cliché questions like “what are your weaknesses?” (I work too hard. I’m too much of a perfectionist. Sometimes I work too hard that I forget to eat.) But the question I dreaded most was “Where do you see yourself in five years”? I didn’t know where I wanted to be in five months let alone five years. My response was an uninspired “I haven’t really thought about it.”
After I got the job, my boss told me it had weighed heavily against me. In hindsight, someone applying for a position that involved evaluating the strategic goals of companies, should probably have set some goals for himself.
Similarly, it’s important for an optical store to set goals. And not just “maintain the status quo” goals, but good goals that require creativity, experimentation and tracking in order to be achieved.
For example, If your goal is to attract five new customers a week then you might try some new advertising. An ad in ABC Newspaper might generate two new customers the first time you run it (you know this because you ask each new customer how they heard about you before they leave). Intrigued but not satisfied, you run your ad in XYZ Newspaper the following week, but only generate one new customer. You then decide it must be the ad, not the newspaper, that’s causing you to come up short. After some brainstorming, you create a couple variations of your ad and one of those variations generates four new customers. After another slight tweak you achieve your goal, then start to think, “now how can I get to six?”
Whether it’s generating new customers visits, improving recall conversions or increasing average sale value, achieving your goals requires a lot of trial and error. Unfortunately, tracking results while working towards your goals can be time consuming and difficult if done manually. Eyesistant helps by allowing you to input and track the performance of your strategic initiatives automatically. Spending less time on tracking means you have more time to spend coming up with creative ways to achieve your goals.
Have a particularly effective strategic initiative, or an interesting interview story? Let us know by leaving a comment.
Informed decisions
Posted by Duncan on September 18, 2008
As you may have noticed, we’ve recently launched a brand new version of the Eyesistant website. And while we loved the old green design, it was a little bit loud. So, we’ve set this up to hopefully better communicate what we’re all about.
I say hopefully because I learned a pretty valuable lesson about the web while working at MedicLINK last summer, on my final work term in a Bachelor of Commerce program. At that point, I’d been building websites on the internet for a while- over five years. I’d read quite a bit of the literature- A List Apart, read the lessons of Long Tail, saw the birth of AJAX, and generally came to share many of the viewpoints of the influential people driving the web foward.
I considered myself to be pretty well informed guy when it came to the web.
But, I still needed a work term report topic. So, I eventually settled on the idea of doing some quantitative testing on the Eyesistant website- specifically a multi-variable test on the download page. This is one of the more important pages on the website, because our goal is to get potential customers to install Eyesistant and play around with it. We’re pretty sure if we can convince them to actually compare it to our competitors, they’ll see that it’s better.
So, I took my best shot, and designed a new download page that I thought would convince more people to download. It was easier to use, presented the download form above the fold, and I was convinced the test would prove my experience right.
My page resulted in 22% less conversions.
So- while we’re convinced that this new website is an improvement, we’ll be working hard to make a whole lot of improvements over the coming weeks. We’d love to hear what you think in the comments. And, if you play close attention, you might just notice a split test or two now and again.
New Eyesistant Interface in the Works
Posted by Matt on September 17, 2008
One of the things we’ve been working on over the last quarter or so is updating the Eyesistant main screen and interface. We’re doing it for two reasons;
-
When we developed the original Eyesistant we constrained the interface size to fit on a 800×600 resolution monitor.These days 800×600 monitors are pretty much obsolete, so we’re increasing our form sizes to give us more real estate to work with. This is particularly evident on the main screen where we’ll be able to allocate a lot more space for the Inbox and Outbox features.
-
We feel that the interface needs to be updated/freshened up to better reflect the Eyesistant brand.
So, below are a couple pictures of the direction we’re going. Any other color schemes that you think would be nice? Let us know by leaving a comment.
The new Eyesistant main screen in green.
New Eyesistant main screen in purple
Welcome to the Lab
Posted by Duncan on September 12, 2008
It’s high time that we here at MedicLINK show the world what happens behind the doors of our office in St. John’s, Newfoundland. And that doesn’t mean we’ll be showing you the photos or telling you the stories from the last office party (though in truth: it was a great laugh). So what sort of things will appear in the Lab? Well, we have a few ideas, but we’d love to hear what you think… so if you’ve an idea, leave it in the comments.
- Ways to use Eyesistant to improve your business… creating promotions with the target marketing tool, segmenting customers, or evaluating the return on various promotions.
- What’s changed in each release of Eyesistant, how you can make the most of what’s changed, but also behind the scenes: why we’ve made the changes.
- The technology industry as it influences us… the past few weeks there’s been quite a bit of discussion about Google’s new web browser, Chrome, and what it means for the web.
In short, we hope to write about things which interest us, and hopefully interest you too.
|
Recent Posts
- Play strength off strength
- Pursuing your vision
- Informed decisions
- New Eyesistant Interface in the Works
- Welcome to the Lab
