Here’s a cool story about how using social media for customer service created a happy customer and generated positive earned media for Samsung Canada. The company treated Shane Bennett as an individual and reaped the rewards. I wouldn’t be surprised if this earned Samsung a customer for life and a lot of public goodwill.

This follows the playbook Dave Kerpen outlines in Likeable Social Media, which argues that this sort of public customer service is exactly how to use social media. Kerpen’s book is a must-read for those looking to take their social media programs to the next level.

Daniel Burstein posts a video from my talk at the 2012 Optimization Summit.

Here’s Burstein’s summary on the Marketing Experiments blog:

• Put yourself in your customer’s shoes
• Try testing unbranded microsites that tap into your customers’ motivations and are focused on engaging your audience before you send them to your conversion goal (Can help with viral marketing)
• Challenge best practices with testing

What best practices do you think need challenging?

Kyle Wiens explains why he won’t hire people who use poor grammar:

Applicants who don’t think writing is important are likely to think lots of other (important) things also aren’t important. And I guarantee that even if other companies aren’t issuing grammar tests, they pay attention to sloppy mistakes on résumés. After all, sloppy is as sloppy does.

Do you agree?

Should you follow “best practices” when designing your online fundraising campaigns?

Not according to a presentation I gave yesterday with Tim Kachuriak at the Marketing Sherpa Optimization Summit in Denver.

Our presentation explained how we optimized The Heritage Foundation’s online fundraising pages by directly questioning longstanding online fundraising best practices.

In fact, as MECLABS president Flint McGlaughlin said at the summit, “best practices on the internet are typically pooled ignorance.”

Tim and I posed a direct challenge to online fundraising best practices:

• We boosted average donation without adding incentives or premiums. Instead, we simply asked for larger gifts.
• We improved e-mail click-throughs by not asking for a donation in our fundraising emails.
• We increased online revenue by adding a second, separate call to action on our donation page.
• We added more e-mail signups by engaging users in a conversation and not asking them to sign up on the homepage.
• We debunked a key branding myth by running an effective, unbranded fundraising microsite.
• We demonstrated that ** placing the call to action below the fold **can increase conversions.

Here is our slide deck.

We closed our presentation with this video showing how not to create a culture of optimization.

What best practices have you found to be faulty?

Over at Future Fundraising Now, Jeff Brooks argues that online fundraisers shouldn’t scare off donors with long copy:

On the web, keep your copy short, simple, repetitive and easy to read (short paragraphs, short sentences, small words). Zoom ahead to the action you want readers to take. Skip the philosophical foundations — you can get to that later if you manage to stir them to action now.

Last fall, we decided to test this for ourselves at Heritage.

Our control page featured a donation form above the fold with 85 words of introductory copy:

Our treatment, with a revised design, included fully 886 words above the form to explain the value of a membership donation to the page’s visitors, who are almost universally prospective donors:

The results? The treatment, with almost two printed pages worth of copy, increased revenues by 274%. It wasn’t even close.

Brooks is half right, especially the points about simplicity and readability. A detailed history of your organization, for instance, may be out of place on a donation form, though a list of major accomplishments is certainly in order. Long blocks of text may discourage people from continuing the process, so these should be broken up with bullets, headers and graphics. Your copy should in all cases be readable, scannable, and jargon-free.

Brooks falls short, however, in prescribing a particular length of copy. Forcing your copy into short form for the sake of shortness can be counterproductive. Short copy poses a challenge in that it limits your opportunity to explain your value proposition. The real challenge is getting the right copy rather than copy of any particular length.

When writing donation page copy, keep in mind your audiences and their motivations. One of your current supporters may not need much encouragement to open his wallet again, though you certainly can’t take his giving for granted. A prospective donor may need more selling than a current donor, so you should explain what it is you do and why his donation will make a difference. Donors on mobile devices may have different needs altogether.

Most importantly, remember that you, the fundraiser, are not the target audience. Remember also that your intuition may not be correct. Test to find out what works, and particularly challenge the conventional wisdom. Direct mail fundraisers used this technique to discover, to their continued surprise, that long letters perform better than short, to-the-point letters. But this is not true in all cases.

Have you found that copy of a particular length works better online? In what context?