Friday, December 19, 2008

Summary from SES Chicago

Following is a summary of the key findings taken away from the Search Engines Strategies conference in Chicago last week.

  • Social Media and Video dominated the conference; as search marketers move forward from traditional key phrase, text-based search into making sure they can be found in the so-called Web 2.0
  • Content is once again confirmed as being king; it’s crucially important as the core source for all search marketing, social media exposure, viral propagation, and web-based public relations. Quality content serves as the basis for user interaction as well as the technical indexing aspect of all search engines.
  • Local-type clients need to take control of their exposure in Local Search (i.e. Google Maps/Local, Yahoo Local). They should maximize representation on a variety of channels, including Flickr, YouTube, and Facebook/MySpace whenever possible.
  • Keyword-driven search is still important but the paradigm is shifting. Companies need to monitor, and optimize, their exposure in the broader social media scene. They need to periodically scan blogs, Facebook/MySpace, social tagging engines (i.e. Digg, delicious, etc.) and reviews/comments on local search engines to see if they are being discussed, either positively or negatively.
  • Universal Search combines web pages with video, blog, etc. entries to list on Search Engine Results Pages. Thus those non-web page elements are very important to maximize exposure for your key phrases and categorizations.
  • Optimizing any web page but especially landing pages is easier with free tools like Google Optimizer. One should consider implementing a more rigorous protocol for testing pages to see what is most effective in achieving your conversion metric.

Specific tactics we might recommend for clients:

  • Monitor social media, blogosphere, etc.
  • Optimize client exposure in the broad interactive space by implementing or disseminating good quality content, such as press releases, white papers, blog posting, etc.
  • Optimize local search engine listings for appropriate clients
  • Check and take control of local listing
  • Create product or service reviews
  • Post videos of any kind on You Tube/Yahoo Video
  • Post photos on Flickr
  • Create Facebook pages
  • Create opt-in communication programs
  • Test landing/interaction pages and iterate for better conversions

Tuesday, December 9, 2008

Search Engine Strategies Chicago
Lawrence Lessig and the “Copy Wrong” Laws

I have been attending the Search Engine Strategies Conference in Chicago this week as I am wont to do this time of year. Things got off to a rousing start with a very interesting keynote address from Lawrence Lessig, legendary Internet rights proponent and Stanford professor. He basically extended some of the themes from his book Remix and exhorted us all to activate with our elected officials on behalf of change to copyright laws.

I am a Lessig fan from back in the day and can remember reading his columns in Wired. His presentation was very smooth—in particular, his slide show was very dynamic and sync’d closely with his speech. I imagine he has presented it more than a few times. However, I came away vaguely dissatisfied.

In general I agree with the need for copyright reform as a central part of resolving the hubbub surrounding the music industry. Music companies cannot realistically enforce their interpretation of copyright laws in the digital age; still, it is arguably immoral for people to take and pass along somebody’s creative output without some sort of compensation for the artist. There has to be some common ground, and Professor Lessig paints an evocative picture of modern mash-up artists and children alike being branded as criminals in the heat of an outdated legal structure that is no longer applicable. His solution, broadly speaking, is to evolve the law to allow more explicit, and more enforceable, categorization of use (i.e. professional vs. amateur) and intent (art vs. commerce).

I guess that I feel he underestimates some aspects of the issue and overestimates others. I’ll start with the latter first.

He made a pretty big deal about “remix” artists, those who use existing copyrighted material to create something new. From obvious musical examples, like sample king Girl Talk or legendary remixes like the Grey Album from Danger Mouse, to more obscure You Tube darlings who pair up political footage with a clever soundtrack, he argues persuasively that these artists deserve to be allowed to make their art. These are the artists that must be protected by copyright revision because that is the wave of the future.

I think he oversells this concept and undervalues the “original” artist (to coin a phrase) who creates his or her own, original art. In the future, there are still going to be people who compose their own music and lyrics, and record their original art without using sampling or remixing. Even in the future, there are going to be talented artists who do it the old school way—inventing new music rather than piecing together snippets of old. I’ll go so far as to say that they will remain the dominant type, even at the amateur level. For every user of Garage Band remix software, there will be 10 users of Pro Tools and their own mic or Final Cut and their own camera.

I think he underestimates the power of money in this equation, too. He seems to imply that change will come in ready fashion if we can just update the laws. The fact that record companies literally can’t prosecute every single violator (there are just too many) leads to the conclusion that, if presented with a reasonable alternative, they will readily accept it. I tend to think that both the industry behemoths AND current popular artists are going to continue to fight the sampling/mash-up/digital download trends because of the money involved. For some artists (does Metallica still fit this bill?) they will never agree that they have to relinquish their notions of fair pay for their work. Songwriters will fight for residual rights and ASCAP payments, no matter if the forced payment of such will bankrupt many interactive music providers. They would rather, it seems, kill the golden goose than allow it to change and become a series of golden sparrows with smaller, although more numerous, golden eggs.

To me, that’s what the new technology represents: the true democratization of music as a commercial medium. The barriers to entry, which have been smacked down lower and lower ever since the punk DIY movement, are now essentially eliminated not only for the high-quality recording of music but its marketing as well. Now it is easy and cheap for artists to get their music to fans and be compensated for it. My italics are meant to underscore that in previous eras, distribution of music was a complicated and logistically expensive business that required proper financial resources and industry expertise. Now, however, it is easy for an artist to get a web site and post mp3’s and even to get their music into a 99 cent download compensation model. Thus they are able to reach everybody in the world, although most will not. The point is that they control their own avenues of promotion and distribution and thus will reap an exponentially higher margin of return on revenues, especially compared to their major-label contemporaries who are still being exploited by the suits.

There will still be stars in the future, popular artists who sell significant units, despite the explosion of niche artists or smaller average levels of sales. They will still sign with established music companies because that is an easier way than doing it all yourself, and they’ll make a lot of money (but not as much as their record company, and at a lower percentage of revenue than their independent cousins). Their reach and the sheer numbers of what they do will be lower, on average, than previous stars—there will be no more Elvis, Beatles, or Sinatra. Still, in comparison to their peers, they will sell the most. They may not make themselves as much money, though, as will those who control production, creation, distribution of their own product.

How do we make money? Provide artists tools and services to enable them to make and sell their music. Or perhaps figure out a way to help consumers filter through the exploded universe of content to find what they like and what speaks to them. Or maybe develop and market a “Rock Star—Manage the Tour” version, because that will be a key way artists will make money in the future—touring.

Thursday, July 31, 2008

Viral Marketing and B2B

By now we are all pretty familiar with viral marketing efforts in the Business-to-Consumer advertising and marketing space. In particular, the posting of video clips on YouTube has exploded along with the popularity of the site itself. Most of us have seen the “real” videos generated by consumers that serve as unintentional marketing tools (Mentos comes to mind), as well as the popular clips that are proved to have come from professional agencies (Ray-Ban sunglasses tossing, for example).

The whole idea of buzz marketing or viral marketing has reached both apogees of unqualified success (some feature film campaigns spring to mind) and perigees of unintended disaster (such as tying up traffic in Boston, getting the police to think you are a terrorist threat, negative PR, and being fired). That last point is a key aspect of viral marketing, I think—you can’t really control it. Like chaos theory suggests, there can be unintended consequences which far outstrip your ability to plan and control. To paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, you need to be ready to handle the unknown unknowns.

For those reasons, B2B doesn’t really seem conducive to viral marketing at first glance. Business buyers, certainly including design engineers or purchasing authorities, do not make impulse purchases. Their buying decisions are very considered and based around specifications and similar hard data. They seem unlikely to be moved by buzz or any kind of groundswell of interest. Likewise, B2B clients tend to be risk adverse and very interested in controlling their own messages, in part because their customer community is much smaller than the general retail market. A percentage-based negative impact can really damage their sales.

Because the target market is usually pretty narrow, dissemination of the “virus” is also a challenge. Opportunities for chance encounter, enthusiasm, and evangelism of the viral objects or objects are limited. Another way to put it is that general distribution methods that are acceptable for B2C are too diffuse for B2B. If only design engineers can be “infected” then you won’t have a contagion unless you can expose a bunch of them to your viral efforts. Fortunately, professional groups are now connected via many of the same interactive tools and social media (email, blogs, forums, YouTube) used by the general digerati populace. Because engineers use the web and can access YouTube, like everybody else, it is full of clips related to the demonstration of specific products or training in processes. It’s there for the appropriate audience, no matter how small—the Long Tail in action.

However, it certainly seems that some tactics would be effective and could transfer well from B2C, especially when you consider that most B2B marketing is pretty dry and features-based, rather than engaging and brand-based. An attention-getting device by its very nature attracts attention; the key is to inject enough hints of substance that the user is willing to follow the viral trail back to a web site that contains the substantive information needed to move forward towards a purchase decision.

Our agency works with a number of clients that develop highly-engineered products for use in manufacturing or other industrial sectors. In the past several months we have created a couple of fun videos intended to generate some buzz, if you will, within the industrial markets occupied by our clients. These clips are very different from the usual marketing efforts within the manufacturing and industrial plumbing sectors, respectively. Through viral distribution we are hoping to build viewership and create a broadened awareness of our clients and new products. We seed interest via targeted emails and trade journal advertising; success is marked by traffic to the supporting web sites which then provide some of the detail and substance that is actually needed by design engineers in order to make their purchase decisions.

These videos certainly stand out from the pack in the all-too-gray world of B2B marketing. Hopefully others will think so and be prompted to find out more about our clients and their products.

Siemens CNC Eye Team Investigates
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PA-qdHbWdf4

Powers industrial plumbing products: Angus and Ziegfried, Dynamic Duo Exposed
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3UMWuWij6g

Wednesday, May 28, 2008

Brand Awareness in the Interactive World

Not Just Telling the Story

When brand awareness is the goal, it's sometimes easy to implement PPC as a "go to" for increasing awareness quickly and effectively. But, paid search is just one part of a broader, long-term brand awareness campaign.
--Search Engine Land (http://searchengineland.com/080527-130411.php)

This is actually a decent graphic they put together describing the elements that might go into a brand awareness campaign in the interactive world, focused around Paid Search primarily but also involving Social Media and Search Engine Optimization components.

I have a problem with the concept of brand awareness in the interactive channel. Although I happily accept that a brand represents the interaction, or at least the promise of interaction, between the customer and us the provider, and I also accept that web sites and other components should be a part of that brand, I nevertheless argue that the web is a special circumstance that is different from every other aspect of marketing, sales, and communications.

The web is a user-driven medium. The user calls all the shots, goes where s/he wants to go, and can refuse to be guided (much less led) to anyplace that s/he does not want.

The web is also a practical medium. Users come here because they need to find something, or get something done, or otherwise accomplish some sort of task. They rarely are willing or interested in having any sort of scripted experience, unless they are playing a game or watching a video clip or presentation. And even then they can depart in the blink of a mouse-click.

Thus brand interaction online takes on a much more pragmatic description than in other circumstances, including the actual use of the product. One has to be keenly aware of this difference in planning the extension of the brand vision into the interactive channel. If I may repeat myself from earlier rants, the web is NOT television or print. You cannot try and GRAB attention and/or force people to sit through your communication vehicle, because they won’t. However, if you have information or a tool or a functionality that helps them with their problem, as your product presumably does, then you can extend the brand identification properly. It’s when marketers try to squeeze a non-web experience out of the web that they run into trouble (and users run FROM their site).

One must also be aware of supporting the brand properly in the interactive space. If a brand’s identity is associated with service and efficiency, then presenting a clunky interface with slow load times and poor usability will sabotage it. Likewise a site that look straight out of Web 1.1 is not going to support a product that wants to exude bleeding edge hipness.

So I go back to the Search Engine Land graphic and my quibbles with it. In many ways, the idea of a brand awareness campaign in the interactive world seems counterintuitive, especially in the B2B space. Still, if one assumes that the core of any such campaign is a kick-ass, highly functional, extremely user-friendly site (or tool or functionality) that meets a user’s needs and solves some of his/her problems…then obviously you want to get it out in front of the right audience.

And there is no doubt, the self-selecting nature of search is the perfect vehicle for that.

I am not so sure about the “use social sites to promote your brand through video or other media” part of it, though. Did the dancing chicken really promote the Burger King brand? Or did it just get a lot of attention?

Thursday, April 17, 2008

Thinking Outside the Box (or Banner)

“…’banner blindness,’ which describes the tendency of the eyes to ignore content—whether ads or noncommercial information—contained in banners on web sites…(banner ads) ‘aren’t very well-suited for the web’ and are ‘holdovers from a way of thinking best applicable to other, older media.”
--Jakob Nielsen, quoted in Advertising Age, March 17, 2008


Spurred by Advertising Age’s recent “Digital Issue” I find myself trying to brainstorm new and different ways to use interactive strategies to market B2B products and services.

Let’s pretend there is no legacy of advertising tied into this, no history of traditional media that has hardened into calcified ways of telling stories and reaching consumers. What could marketing look like without any preconceptions or expectations?

Disease-state Sites
Does your product or service solve a problem? Then create a problem site. Pack in all the possible information you can about that problem, add links to resources that explain or address the problem, create case studies about the different way people have solved the problem, include data about how widespread the problem is, and oh by the way include a small mention of how you solve the problem. Here’s the key, though: you have to be honest and complete about the problem, you cannot only feature your own solution. Enough visitors will follow your link and see what you have to say as long as they accept the genuineness of the site. The second they think you are sand-bagging and/or prioritizing yourself at the expense of them, the consumers, then they are gone and never coming back. BE CLEAR about your sponsorship, don’t try to be sneaky. Once the site is up, spend some time and money promoting it via channels that are effective, i.e. search marketing and online classifieds.

Facebook for Engineers
Is there a community of users of your products? Then build a site that addresses them and their needs. If you sell to electrical engineers, create a site that helps them across the board, not just where your product is concerned. Allow them to talk to each other, even at the risk of slagging you. Help them connect with each other. Facebook for engineers? Sure, why not? And of course you are the sponsor, but do not try to control them or steer them in any direct way, and do not try to be sneaky.

YouTube
Tape fun stuff related to your products. Put them on YouTube. Tell customers and prospective customers about it. If they see and hear it first from you, that elevates your perceived expertise and could make you a preferred provider.

Crazy Social Media
OK maybe you can’t generate a Flash Mob at the IMTS show to do something wacky, but maybe you can use those tools of communication to suddenly drive people to your booth. Everybody carries a cell phone, almost everybody can receive text messages, maybe you could build a database of your customer’s mobile phone and send a group message all at once promising them something if they did something. Bring a friendly crowd to your booth, and nothing draws a crowd like a crowd, so quickly you have people at your booth who otherwise might not stop by. Figure out the digital equivalent of the guy in the sandwich board, prowling the streets and hawking to passers-by.

Be Prepared for Smaller Reach, but with Higher Value
You are never going to get web traffic that matches the eyeballs who watch a Super Bowl ad. You cannot shotgun via the web in the same way you can in traditional media. However, you must realize and be prepared for the fact that the traffic you DO get is already pre-qualified and primed to be interested in what you have to say. This is a higher-value reach, but it is also more fickle and easily lost.

What do you need to make a sale? You need three basic elements: something to sell, somebody who needs that something, and circumstances that allow that person to decide to buy it (i.e. he has to know about it, the price has to be right, and he has to have the money and the willingness to spend it).

Traditional media is about trying to create those circumstances. Get the message out to as many people as possible. Some of them will meet the criteria, or can be convinced to meet the criteria, and then they will go and find your product to purchase. Others won’t, and your efforts will be wasted on them.

In the interactive space, nobody finds you unless they want to. They may or may not know you, but they want what you have to offer. Pretty much all you can and should do is make sure they know about you. Then make darn sure you are ready when they get to you, or else you will lose them forever.

Monday, March 10, 2008

Taking the Plunge

OK I am finally joining Twitter. I have a deep-seated revulsion towards the trendy and the ephemeral, and I worry that Twitter will be both, but I have decided to take part in a social revolution (of sorts) while it is actually happening. Normally I am very late to anything hip; music is a classic example: I just purchased the Death Cab for Cutie album, the one with “Crooked Teeth” and “I Will Follow You into the Dark.” By now I have to suppose that they are no longer considered cool, having transgressed into popularity, and are wallowing in the backlash. I did the same thing with Rage Against the Machine; by time I finally bought The Battle of Los Angeles, they had broken up. That’s better I suppose than when I went through my Bob Dylan phase—nothing like being into an artist some 40 years after his first record came out.

But I digress, which will be much easier now that I am twitting. I suspect I will become one of those zombie-like texters, oblivious to the world around as I periodically work my thumbs over my cell phone. But since I don’t have a MySpace page, or a Facebook entry, nor do I post videos to YouTube or tag content via Digg or deli.co.us, I suppose this will have to be my one serious entry into the newest world of social media. (This blog, needless to say, doesn’t count.)

I have resisted the so-called Web 2.0 for so long because my Internet, the one used for business-to-business marketing, does not seem to mesh well with these newfangled gadgets. Clearly I am no Luddite, but a healthy reserve towards the new or the hip is important in my place in the marketing world. We do not need to be early adopters, since our audience is not. Only when a technology or capability has become accepted, well-known, and widespread do we employ it on behalf of our clients.

Still, Twitter seems irresistible. Quick hits of updates; a micro-blog of near-real time. How cool is that? It’s like a web cam without pictures, and without being tied to the PC (although yes tied to the cell phone, but that goes everywhere regardless).

So I guess I will give it a try. Maybe I can be more timely than with my blog.

Monday, January 21, 2008

New Year Resolutions

Resolved, for 2008:

  • Pay less attention to banner ads and more attention to landing pages.
  • User! User! User! Keep the focus on the user.
  • No web sites without specific goals.
  • Get better clients

Banner Ads and Landing Pages
It is a frequent and cardinal sin, the tendency to buy online banner space but link it to an existing, non-specialized page on the site. First of all, if you can actually get anybody to click on a banner ad you should consider him or her a beautiful prize, a rare specimen that should be treasured and coddled. Goodness knows you won’t see too many of them. But most often, they are shunted off to the home page or at best a product page that seems to be completely disconnected from the banner that brought them there. What are they likely to do? Get the heck out of dodge—why waste their time on a site that doesn’t even make the effort to guide them to the specific topic in which they have demonstrated their interest. We need to maximize the experience of the user who DOES click through and get him or her the info they need, perhaps guiding them carefully, so that they remain interested in proceeding along the buying cycle.

I intend to spend more time worrying about the user who lands on the site, rather than how the banner ad looks as it animates, streams video, or pops up into a large size.

Focus on the User
It’s not about you, the seller. It’s about your customer, your client, your web site user; so quit making your site all about you. It should be about the user, what s/he wants and needs and has to be able to do in order to buy something from you. Even in today’s age, web 2.5 or whatever you want to call it, too many sites are basically org charts and catalogs. They contain tons of info about the company and its products, but very little about how those products can help the users or how the company can solve the users’ problems. I pledge to make sites that are all about the users, because those sites will prosper.

Goooooooooooal!
Whether or not you follow Latin American soccer and are familiar with the long, drawn-out call from Andres Cantor or other Spanish-language play-by-play announcers, you can certainly understand the importance of the goal. And yet so many web site planners have no clear objective in mind. Their sites can pack a lot of information and features, but to what end? Any web site should have a particular goal as a central part of its plan, whether that is to generate leads or make an online sale or guide users to a particular download or sign them up for a newsletter. That will not only provide a success metric, to help determine whether your site is doing what it should, but also help shape the content and the language and even the way of thinking about the site. I really want to help my clients understand this and to incorporate this planning into any new site effort in the New Year.

And finally…
I really need to get better clients. And I mean no disrespect to our current stable when I say this: our agency is full of “old iron” companies that have been around a long time, compete in closed markets where the amount of business is fairly constant, and have competitors that are also well-established and not particularly innovative. These clients are happy to trudge along with traditional media and marketing approaches that vary little from year to year. It is a hard sell to get them to think about the interactive channel in new ways, and difficult to demonstrate the value of expanding and refining their web approach when they remain convinced that “customers don’t use the web” and “our customers all want to pick up the phone to deal with us.” After a certain amount of effort, one is no longer interested in pounding that proverbial brick wall, and the desire becomes overwhelming to seek out new clients who do understand the value of interactive and who can in fact think about their business in new ways and allow us to help determine solutions that can leverage the enormous power and capability of the web.

So I resolve to find new clients, like I do every year.

Best wishes for a happy and healthy 2008!