June 2012 - Otis Regrets... or not

Best practices (and not) for recovering account passwords online

Barclaycard forgot password page — Barclaycard Ring MasterCard “forgot password” page

[THIS POST HAS BEEN UPDATED.] Yesterday I mentioned a problem I was having with the Barclaycard Ring MasterCard “forgot password” page. Today I’m taking the extra step of showing the page because this is something I don’t think has a lot of customer service advantage. They’re using the same page whether you are setting up a new online persona OR you have forgotten your password in which case you simply have to choose a new username.

What else could Barclaycard have done? Send an email at the user’s request, with a unique URL that expires after a few hours. That way the account is secure, but the user stays in control of it. This is the nearly universal practice, and it’s interesting to see an exception and mull the pros and cons.

Requiring a new username is particularly onerous for Barclaycard Ring because it’s supposed to be a social networking community. If I change my username, what happens to the badges and contacts I’ve built up under my old username? But I think it’s not a very good practice in general, and this big international bank must be somehow very stretched for programming resources.

While I’m at it, here’s another not-best practice: confirming the new (or old) password by sending out an email that contains exactly that password in unencoded text. Yikes! What if I’m reading my email in Starbucks or an unsecured wireless hotspot at the airport? Even if I’m in the comfort and sanctity of my home, I’m still going to have to delete that email now. The merchant or marketer probably thought they were doing me a favor by sending me a handy reminder. In contrast to Barclaycard, this is one we’ve all seen, probably several times. Don’t do it.

UPDATE July 3: got a call from Meagan in the Barclaycard digital marketing department and she had a little difficulty reproducing the above page on a test account; possibly I had done something like enter the wrong password too many times that caused the system to “clear out my account”. What I should have seen was a reset page with my security image and with her help I was able to get to that. More important, she and I discovered that if, instead of creating a new user name in the screen captured above, I entered my current one (after confirming who I was with the challenge info above) the system would accept it.

The GOOD news was that when I finally got into my account my screen name had not changed at all; must be different from the username the system recognizes. So all my badges, if I had them, would be intact.

Meagan says this is the password reset procedure used for all Barclaycard products but she does understand how it might be a good idea to present it differently (and tell people they can keep their current username if they like) for the Ring cardmembers. Will be interested to see what they come up with.

I’ve activated my Barclaycard Ring MasterCard!

The card is in my hands, and I’m excited to be using the first crowdsourced credit card. Well… actually I’m reacting to the message on the card carrier document I received that begins “Are you excited? Because we’re excited.” This represents one of my pet peeves about advertising copywriting. “Excited” is a result. I will get excited if you give me reasons to get excited. Unless you are selling certain products which are beyond the purview of this blog, getting excited is not a benefit by itself.

But let’s move past that. I’ve now registered the card on the Barclaycard.com website where I find the top level page shown here. The circles on the left are badges you can earn for such things as referrals, getting paperless statements and participating in the community. You also have a “ring” next to your profile that gets brighter with increased participation and there are different levels of participation as well. (Right now I’m Bronze, having just signed up.) I have a client who operates a similar sponsored community and this seems to follow the same best practices. The recognition options are too complicated for you to make a plan for progressing through the ranks, which is exactly the idea. You just get busy and over time your profile is festooned with badges and awards and presumably additional functionality will be revealed.

In my previous post on this card I described my perception of it: a rewards card with a low interest rate, in which the rewards program is determined in part by the community. I misunderstood. In a blog post called “Barclaycard Ring, where are the rewards?” product manager JaredY says there aren’t likely to be any rewards because at the low interest rate (prime + 4.75% which currently makes it 8%) and no annual fee, the bank can’t afford them.

The cardmembers are fine with that. So far the comments are almost universally positive. These early adopters (at present there are just about 1000 active cardholders, according to JaredY) love the idea of the card, love the low APR, love the option to donate some of the “Giveback™” to charities, and aren’t particularly concerned about the way that Giveback is calculated. One poster stated that he just liked being part of the community, and any reward at all was a bonus (sort of like belonging to your local grocery coop, maybe).

Today I’m going to put this plastic into action. Stay tuned…

UPDATE: There’s currently an issue on the barclaycardus.com website that is going to be a problem in building the community. If your password is not recognized and you click on “lost your password?” the only option given is to pick a new user name; you can’t get a “set a new password” email as with most sites. If I can’t keep my user name then it’s going to be a lot harder to establish my identity in the community and accumulate badges. (Another issue is that the password for the new username is not recognized either; hopefully this is just a temporary glitch.) Will update again if this is fixed.

Is that an advertising specialty in your pocket?

What’s the difference between a premium and an advertising specialty? A “premium” is something that has perceived value to the recipient and can be used as a sweetener when you’re asking people to give you contact information or take some other action. An “advertising specialty” is just that, an ad: a tchotchke with a name, logo and contact info imprinted on it that is useful enough or novel enough that the recipient will not immediately throw it away.

Offer a premium when you want to boost response for a marginal or unknown product so people who would otherwise ignore you will click, call, or return the reply form. These days the most common b-to-b premium is probably the “free report” delivered electronically. For physical delivery, the good old Amazon or iTunes gift card reigns supreme.

We’ve talked previously about the pros and cons of using giveaways to boost response. Those points are still valid and deserve a second read. The topic is on my mind because of the recent Advertising Specialty Institute trade show, nicely covered in today’s Wall Street Journal.

It’s heartening to know that in our jaded era, people will still go out of their way to get something for nothing. Even the White House is getting on the bandwagon: after promoting a “Stop Swag” program to keep federal agencies from spending tax dollars on giveaway junk, the Obama re-election campaign has done an about face and is hawking such items as the “I meow for Michelle” cat collar (yours for a $13 donation).

The most popular item at the ASI Show? USB thumb drives in every imaginable configuration. This is a tchotchke hunter’s dream: cheap enough to be a trade show giveaway, yet valued sufficiently that you can use it as a premium. If you do use USB drives, be sure to put some of your content on there, if only a few pdfs of your brochures. (Great task for a summer intern!) The recipient will see the files every time they use the drive and they just might open them out of curiosity.

Should you ever turn down business as a copywriter?

When I started freelancing, a couple decades ago, a wise old art director counseled me: never turn down work. Even if you’re super busy, stay up all night to get it done or offload it to a fellow creative and hopefully mark up their work. After all, you never know which new client might become your bread and butter or, conversely, if your current bread-and-butter client might go belly up tomorrow.

And I do try to stay hungry. But recently I’ve been turning down a bit of work. Part of this is a hunch we are headed for good times. Freelance creative are the canaries in the coal mine, first to get laid off in a recession but also first to know when companies think they better get cracking to stay competitive. And that’s what seems to be happening right now. Buy U.S. equities, dear reader. Buy Facebook like I did last week. (Though not at the IPO price obviously.)

And, another part of my reasoning is quality of life. I’m trying to get some traction on a fiction project, which uses the same brain cells as my copywriting. At the end of the day, when I’m trying to get the attention of David Ogilvy at that great water cooler in the sky, do I want to admit I didn’t get my novel finished because I decided to take on yet another few hundred $$ project? Not to mention my kid’s in the Little League playoffs and we are looking pretty good over here.

Both my turn down projects this week had to do with budget contractions. When times are good, prices start rising all over the place (the $3.47 deck pieces I wanted at Home Depot rose to $5.94 in the space of a month, for example), and it’s natural to get aggressively defensive.

One client wanted to redefine a project to pay less for work we’ve already agreed to. There’s a line item for A, and a line item for B, but the assumption is you’ll get both and I do research and prep with that in mind before I ever type a word. Now this client wants to only pay for the “A” portion which makes it a loser for me since the prep work is the same, so I’m outta here. Have to finish current projects but asking to be excused from future ones.

The second contested budget was much, much larger… an entire website. This is always a leap of faith because you don’t know how the pages will shake out when you estimate and hopefully pick a per-page number that averages out (same with catalogs by the way). With a new client, you also don’t know how finicky they will be and how complex the revisions. So I added something I thought was pretty generous, which was an offer to write 10 pages of the client’s choice at the per-page rate, charge nothing for my startup research time, then after that we could decide if it make sense for both of us.

Client instead wants a deal of some kind, which I can’t offer because my deal was my deal. This could have occupied me late into the night for much of the summer. Instead I’ll be baking baguettes, following the capers of my protagonist (a 19th century Quaker with a terrible problem) and maybe watching Logistics One finally get the best of Staffing in the Saratoga American Little League. Maybe I’m crazy, but maybe not.

Are you a “Buckeye” copywriter? You should be.

My colleague Russell Kern sent back some copy with the request that it be made more “Buckeye”. Which, on investigation, means more plain spoken, middle American… you know, Buckeye. As in Ohio State Buckeyes. And he flattered me by saying that “of course Otis is a Buckeye copywriter.”

Well, guess I wasn’t, at least in this instance, but I try to be. It is rarely a good idea to use anything but plain language in your copywriting. Remember that anything that trips the reader up is likely to send them toward the delete button or recycling bin, not the reference desk. Don’t use words a sixth grader wouldn’t understand. And don’t use complex sentences and grammatical constructions and expect the reader to parse them for you, because they won’t. They’re too busy getting past your unwanted promotional message to the next thing in their lives.

The late John Caples used to keep a Sears or Montgomery Ward catalog on his desk, just in case he ran across a product that was unfamiliar to him. Those catalog copywriters were Buckeyes for sure. They were selling to Midwestern (often immigrant) readers ordering items sight unseen, and their clear descriptions were what built these companies.

There are exceptions, as always. Selling luxury goods, which people want but don’t need, seems to benefit from a few unctuous words they can roll around to make themselves feel special. Health advice can be bolstered by a bit of sternness and a professorial tone. And financial writing often requires an extra level of formality. But even in these instances, it’s never a bad idea to be plain spoken in your core message.

If you’re a copywriter reading this, you almost certainly came from some other discipline like a study of English literature. You’re probably a very good writer and would love to sell a story to the New Yorker or get your screenplay produced. But your reader doesn’t give a crap about any of that or about you in general. They just want to buy products and services that will make them feel better or make their life easier, and your job is to describe those benefits without letting your college degree get in the way.

Be a Buckeye. (But not Woody Hayes.)