Kick Start: a hair-raising problem

19 November 2008
Page 1 of 2 : single page

Photo credit: Anthony Geernaert

Hair salon owner Jose Bryce-Smith is looking to revamp the websites for her salon and range of dyes and hair care products. Is online video the answer? Does anyone want to see Hugo Weaving get his hair cut?

The panel

Jonathan Crossfield, Netregistry. Expertise: web content
Owen Lansbury, interactive designer. Expertise: online video
Shonagh Walker, lifestyle and beauty writer. Expertise: beauty products and services
Host: Josh Mehlman

Starting a conversation

Josh: Tell us a bit about the business and what you are trying to achieve through the website.

Jose: We’ve got two businesses: the first is a hair salon in Paddington and the second is a hair product company.
The salon’s unique selling point has always been that we use ammonia-free, natural dyes and products. We’re redoing our Atlantis Hair salon website at the same time as launching our Original & Mineral website, which is a range of ammonia-free colours and hair care products.

We didn’t have a big budget and we wanted to get the message of the brand across in a unique way. We want to create an online community of salon owners who use the products and to start a conversation with us and each other.

Jonathan: Social media sites can be very hard to get rolling in the first stages. If you go to the site for the first time and only two people have participated, you are less likely to come back than if there are 100 people talking on a regular basis. How will you get people to participate initially?

Jose: So the idea was to do videos, like a confession booth… ‘I’m Jose. I’ve been ammonia-free for the last seven years.’ We will have forums where people can post why they are interested in ammonia-free colour. There are a lot of myths around it – you know, it is not as permanent, it can’t do blonde as well.

Shonagh: I think that kind of interactive web content works extremely well. Perhaps a forum or chat room where members or visitors can swap ideas on trends and opinions on the latest looks of celebrities and the like. A Q&A forum is also good. Ask the experts – perhaps have a senior stylist do a live chat once a week, or a colourist live chat.

Jonathan: Is there enough material to keep a conversation going for as long as you need on the bulletin board?

Jose: Hairdressers are highly passionate and creative people who like to give their opinions.

Who cares about hair colour?

Josh: Is the aim of it to get more salons to stock your products or is it to get consumers to buy the products from the existing stockists?

Jose: I think it’s both. It’s good for consumers to have a place where they can get more information. Once they see it in a magazine then they can understand the brand and who is using it. But as well, hairdressers are very interested in which other salons are using it and their opinions.

Hairdressing is very technical, particularly on the colour side, so we’re going to include some formulas and things that hairdressers will be able to relate to.

Shonagh: Consumers are really excited and passionate about hair colour! Especially those who colour at home, which we aim to stop, unless they’re using one of Jose’s colours. Hair colour is one of the biggest aesthetic issues that concern women. I am frequently and endlessly asked about colour – how to get it, how to care for it, what products to use or how to correct bad home colour or even a salon colour that wasn’t what you expected.

Making video go viral

Jose: Will the videos get the message out there?

Jonathan: Video is fast becoming one of the biggest things online. I read recently that people under 35 watch on average two hours of streaming video a week. Your video idea definitely has legs because it is what a lot of people are looking for online. But it also means you are going into a very busy marketplace where there’s millions of videos. You have to make sure yours does not get lost in the shuffle.

You can submit your videos to sites like Digg, Twitter or Facebook and have links back to your website.

The aim is to get your video off the site and as far out there as possible, in a way that people will know where it originally came from so they will hopefully come back.

Owen: There’s no definitive secret to why viral videos take off online beyond being a good laugh. Most marketing-driven viral videos fail because they’re too conscious of pushing the product.

The most successful example in recent years is the video of someone breaking in to an air force base and spraying “Still Free” on President Bush’s plane. It was a brilliant, million-dollar hoax that caught the media’s attention because it was topical, controversial and had no blatant product tie-in. It totally captured the counterculture essence of the brand behind it. OK, so Jose doesn’t have a million dollars, but it was the idea that was captivating as opposed to the complexity of the production – the ‘wow, I can’t believe they did that’ moment.

Host with the most

Jose: Is it better to host the video on our own site or through YouTube?

Jonathan: Hosting your own video can be expensive. Most hosting packages limit how much information you can store on the server and also how much can be accessed each month. If you get a lot of people watching a video that is a couple of megabytes in size, that quickly uses up your quota, whereas a web page is a handful of kilobytes.

Some businesses fall into trouble because they don’t understand the differences between those file sizes and they whack a video onto the site. If the video is popular, suddenly they’ve got a huge hosting bill they didn’t expect.

A lot of sites host their videos with an external company like YouTube. Of course, with that you have a YouTube logo in the corner of every video, unless you pay. There are similar services, such as Viocorp which is based in Sydney, that do video hosting but they are more expensive.

Owen: Viral video is all about handing over control of your campaign to the masses. Once it’s on YouTube and successful, there’s no pulling it back in. If you use a corporate hosting service, the illusion of it being an authentic video is diminished, but you have more control.

Attracting consumers

Jonathan: Is the goal of the website going to encourage people to visit the offline store through a store locator or are you going to offer sales through the site as well?

Jose: We’re not going to sell through the site at the moment. We have other sites that sell for us, so it’s not something we’re looking at. We really want the customers to go to a salon. We mainly have the online presence for people in areas where we don’t have stockists. We have 60 stockists in New South Wales but only one in the Northern Territory, to give you an idea.