Mid-campaign blues

Our daily production meeting quickly turned into a crisis management exercise, triggered by the analytics review of the day. Stats and figures are merciless and tend to reduce the bullshit level to zero. Fewer people seem to be interested in our rebranding and repositioning exercise as days go by.

(The number of visits to Bluesponge.com had first increased tenfold when we started the campaign but it now tends to get quieter.)

Our first reaction was to find someone to blame – we’re only human after all – and we can’t help but notice that what we consider our close and direct environment of partners, friends and collaborators did not really join and participate in helping us create a buzz out of this campaign. Not as much as we would have liked to say the least.

Even though we got some really pertinent and motivating comments on the campaign’s site these last two weeks, a quick tour of the team members regarding the feedback they got up to now is crystal clear. The friends and colleagues in the industry do not seem to get our point to its full extend  – or worst, they don’t get it at all.: From “Your new design is really minimal isn’t it?” to “Hum. I’m not sure I get it” and “well… this is plain ugly guys!”

What we consider to be obvious and part of the game – of course, we’ve been immerged in the whole thing 24/7 for over two weks – is far more obscure for most people and it’s only normal. How can we make sure everybody gets that the design side of things is still missing? The site is NOT designed at all YET. We get along live, and from scratch most of the time. We kind of knew we’d get to this point around mid-campaign… a messy and confusing prototype.

A few of us are really starting to think the whole process is somehow dangerous to Bluesponge’s future or at least potentially counterproductive.

This is when it becomes important to focus on the initial goal of what rebranding is all about: optimizing Bluesponge’s business development by positioning the company on the market of hi-level decision makers.

We believe this can be achieved in two different stages (see Day 13). A 28 day campaign will first ideally create a buzz and reach our public of geeks, designers, strategists and other experts and get them interested – or even involved – in our makeover. Then, and only then will our message be sent to our core target audience and show them how inspired, daring and successful we’ve been for 28 days. Some kind of a campaign on the campaign.

That being said, different kinds of reactions were popping around the conference table last night.

On one side the ‘website first’ folks convinced that the priority should be put on making sure the new website is up and ready for March 1^st , including our portfolio to match our business dev. needs.

Another significant portion of the team believes we should work on perception and intelligibility of the campaign. The current state of the site is really messy and difficult to understand to say the least and that explains the poor results of the last 48 hours in terms of traffic. The same bunch thinks that the real campaign will start after the first 28 days, when the campaign itself will become available for a case study. In order to become interesting enough to be a relevant and genuine case study, a project has to be original in its original approach (check) and, in an ideal world, prove to be a success in the end (suspense!). We have to try and improve both quantity and quality of both traffic and word of mouth as hard as we can.

Quality is somehow here already: since day one, the average period of time spent per visit is from 3 to 4 minutes. Not bad at all for that kind of site, with little content and absolutely ‘designless’.

( average time spent per visit: 3:39 mn)

Seeding, temporary ergonomics strategy, increased in site readability, written warnings, temporary emergency design … A lot of potential solutions pop around the table. Whether advocating the inevitable – if not necessary – temporary chaos inherent to this kind of exercise, dreading total failure or focusing on whatever happens after February 28, everyone is looking for a solution.

The only sure thing is that there is no way we can demobilize any of our programmers or designers teams to work on ‘patching’ the situation, on polishing what’s already online.

On top of making sure current other projects – real ones, for real clients! – are on track, we will have to make a decision and stick to it. The design proposals from Studio FEED won’t be here for at least another couple of days so we have to be smart, efficient and … insightful for the remaining two weeks of this 28 day marathon.

We could also decide to look at the analytics figures for just what they are: stats for weekend days following amazing results on Thursday, thanks to a article on the campaign in Infopresse.

So. Genuine crisis or simple mid-campaign blues? We should know soon. Here. Live.