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Posts Tagged ‘jimmy wales’

What Jimmy Wales Taught Me About The Importance Of Timing

Posted in Marketing, tagged , , , , , , , , on 21 December 2010 | Leave a Comment »

Content is King.

 

This fact is often touted by those in marketing, especially those in the online marketing world. Producing content online will get you found by potential clients.

 

And if Content is King, we are told, then Consistency is Queen.

 

It is not just about producing the Content, it is about producing new content consistently so that (1) you train your followers to look for your newly published content every day / week and (2) so that the search engines keep coming back and crawling more and more pages of your website, giving you more and more chances to show up in results.

 

I completely agree with the King and Queen. But now I would like to add a third, the Prince.

 

If Content is King, and Consistency is Queen, then I believe Timing is Prince. If you publish your Content at the right time you have an even greater chance of being found online, because you have published at a time when people are searching your terms, and so are tapping into an even deeper well.

 

For example, I previously wrote a post comparing being a Social Media Marketeer to being Harry Potter. I published the week the new Harry Potter film was released in cinemas and, as more people were searching the term “Harry Potter”, I ended up with visitors to my blog I wouldn’t have had previously.

 

However, Harry was in the ha’penny place compared to Jimmy Wales.

 

It is Jimmy Wales and my recent post on A/B testing that has brought the importance of Timing home hard for me. Those of you who read the recent post will know that I was discussing the Wikipedia banner ads, which are showing Jimmy Wales’s face and asking for donations. These banners have been running for several weeks, but it seems to be only in the last week or so that people have really started to get fed up with Jimmy staring out at them from the computer.

 

And my proof?

 

Below is a list of the top searches that have been sending people to my blog over the last week:

 

  • jimmy wales annoying
  • jimmy wales is annoying
  • jimmy wales annoying face
  • jimmy wales banner
  • wikipedia annoying donation
  • wikipedia jimmy annoying
  • jimmy wales annoyning wiki ad
  • jimmy wales irritating
  • wales wikipedia a/b testing
  • wikipedia annoying jimmy wales
  • jimmy wales annoying wiki
  • wikipedia jimmy wales annoying

 

So I appear to have tapped into these extra visitors by blogging about Jimmy Wales exactly when people were talking about him. Sure, my post may have shown up in the search results if these terms were being searched for a few months down the line, but would my new visitors have found a several-month-old blog post as interesting as a freshly published one?

 

Thank you Jimmy, for teaching me the importance of Timing!

 

 

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Is Jimmy Wales Annoying You? – The Importance Of A/B Testing

Posted in Marketing, tagged , , , , , , , on 14 December 2010 | 4 Comments »

Most of you will be aware that Jimmy Wales is co-founder and promoter of Wikipedia. Those of you who use Wikipedia will probably have noticed Jimmy staring at you a lot of late . . .

 

Jimmy Wales Banner

 

On 15th November 2010 Wikipedia launched their annual fundraising drive, with a goal of $16 million.

 

To reach their target they have been using banners on the Wikipedia site to appeal to users to donate.

 

Now several people I have spoken to seem to find Jimmy’s gazes pretty annoying.

 

However.

 

Those smarties at Wikipedia did their homework.

 

They didn’t just slap Jimmy’s face on a banner and stick it on the site. They did, and are still doing, some very extensive A/B testing of various banners to find out which ones are performing the best.

 

They discovered that graphical banners performed 100% better and so decided to use those instead of plain text.

 

They have been using Jimmy’s photo as well as photos of other editors on the banners.

 

And the data doesn’t lie . . .

 

Even where some of the other editors’ photos were getting a higher click-through-rate, Jimmy’s photo was outperforming all other faces in terms of the amount of revenue generated. His banner donation rate was not only consistently beating the others, but by a significant margin.

 

Until 7th December that is.

 

For the first time Jimmy’s banner was overtaken  by the Lilaroja banner.

 

Lilaroja Banner

 

This is interesting as it highlights the importance of continuous A/B testing.

 

A lot of companies don’t A/B test landing pages at all, and those that do generally do it once or twice and give themselves a pat on the back for a job well done.

 

However, what Wikipedia shows us is that while one version, in this case Jimmy’s banner, outperformed all the others consistently for the first few weeks of the testing, other banners are starting to outperform his now.

 

This is possibly becuase people are becoming annoyed by Jimmy’s face, and seeing the new faces are drawing their eyes afresh to the appeal, whereas they had started to tune Jimmy’s banner out. A fact Wikipedia would have missed if they had stopped their A/B testing a week ago.

 

Take home message?


Test. Test. Test. and Keep Testing. What worked in the beginning might not work forever.

 


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