Biznology Blog: June 2007
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June 29, 2007
Web Analytics an Hour a Day
If any of you don't read Avinash Kaushik's blog, Occam's Razor, add it to your RSS reader now. But I have an even better idea for you—buy his book, Web Analytics an Hour a Day
I have to tell you that, while I like reading Avinash's blog, I knew that his book was for a more general audience, so I didn't expect to learn a whole lot. I thought that I'd be reviewing it mostly to recommend it to my readers, but I found a number of nuggets that were new to me.
The biggest thing that became clear to me is that I have given short shrift to qualitative analytics. I am a big fan of quantitative analysis, and I refer to it often, but Avinash is very persuasive about getting to the "why" behind the numbers. So, it's not enough to know what customers did if you don't know why. I think I've glossed over that a bit and maybe that's been a mistake. I've always said that if you keep tweaking your site and looking at what customers do (quantitative) then you'll eventually lurch into the right answer without ever knowing why. Avainsh is showing me that there are simple survey-based approaches and other approaches that give you more information on which to base your site changes, getting you to the right answer faster.
Avinash does his usual stellar job on demystifying Web metrics, championing less-popular but very effective measurements such as bounce rate, while helping folks to see why we should pay less attention to some popular metrics. A lot of my writing is directed at marketers so that they understand why it's important to take the direct marketing approach when on the Web. Avinash takes things one level deeper so that your analysts can stop sending you reports and start answering your business questions.
If you're serious about data-driven marketing, you must read this book. Avinash explains practical implementations that lead the way to taking action to improve your marketing. I can't recommend Web Analytics an Hour a Day
Posted by mikemoran at 9:01 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 28, 2007
"Thank you for your patience"
I love trains. Whenever it makes sense, I prefer to take a train rather than a plane—I find them more comfortable, more relaxing, and it's easier to read or use my computer than with a plane flight. So, I love trains. (Did I mention that?) Except last night, when I was thanked for my patience about 15 times. But I wasn't patient.
I was actually quite impatient. The Amtrak train taking me from Boston to New York broke down multiple times before Amtrak broke down and sent a "rescue" engine. A four-hour trip became almost seven hours. I missed the last bus back to New Jersey by 15 minutes and had to pay $120 to take a cab home.
So, honestly, I wasn't being patient. I wasn't screaming and yelling at the crew. I did not appear agitated. But I wasn't patient.
I was resigned. I was tired. But over and over through this saga, the crew kept thanking me for my patience. I know this is a nicety, but it started to get on my nerves. After hours of sitting on an empty track, I wanted someone to say something besides "thanks for your patience."
I wanted them to say, "This is a horrible experience and we are doing everything we can to fix it. I hope that there's no one on this train taking their first ride on Amtrak, because we are far more reliable than this. To make it up to you, we're giving all passengers a coupon for $50 off their next fare." Instead, I got a free snack pack containing trail mix, crackers and "cheese food." And I was endlessly thanked for my patience.
What does this have to do with Internet marketing? A lot. If you talk to your customers like you are using a loudspeaker and generically thank them for their patience, or their business, or any other platitude that we've been trained to have roll trippingly off our tongues, that's not real. That is not the way to build a relationship. That is not the way to show you understand—really understand—what the experience is like for each individual customer.
I'd like less generic marketing messages and more real gratitude. Or empathy. If "our customers drive everything we do" (you know you have a sign like that hanging in the lobby), can't we at least treat them as individuals with feelings and needs? I'm not blaming Amtrak for what happened last night—anyone can have a bad night. Machines fail.
But I thought the way they communicated was symptomatic of the herd mentality of customer relations. Just give everyone the same message delivered over and over again just as the policy book says. I'd have liked it better if someone had said, "I hope you never have a worse train ride than this one." Or "We want to make this up to you." Or just walked through the car asking customers exactly how they were being inconvenienced instead of just apologizing for some blanket inconvenience.
Is your company able to treat your customers as individuals? Do you personalize your Web site? Do you know what each small market segment really wants? Do you pay attention to what your customers say on the Web and to what they do? Do you change what you do in response? If not, you'll find that your customers will need to be a lot more patient with you and you'll be thanking them for it more than your competitors do.
Before I go today, I want to ask for feedback from you. I've apparently been running the lamest contest of all time, because I have just one entrant. The prize is good—a free two-day pass for July 19th and 20th to the Internet Strategy Forum Executive Summit worth $300. I got lots of A-list bloggers to link to the contest, so I think people saw it. But something is stopping everyone. Let me know what it is so I can do better next time—I'll try to get the next one right. Uh, thank you for your patience.
Posted by mikemoran at 9:28 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
June 27, 2007
Product Demo 2.0
How many of you sell products that require salespeople to visit customers to provide a demonstration? If that sounds like your company, you've probably written off the Internet for that. Perhaps you use the Web to explain your product and to have prospects contact you, but you still need to to send that sales rep to the demo. Until now. Check out how some companies are doing Product Demo 2.0.
What exactly does an in-person demo do for you? It puts a real person in front of your customer who can notice what objections are raised and meet them. It puts someone knowledgeable in a position to demonstrate the value of the product and the problems that it solves. Clearly in-person product demos drive great value, but they are very expensive.
Some companies are doing product demos on YouTube. Check out how IBM demonstrates a new way of developing Web applications, called QEDWiki. Now does a video demo work as well as an in-person demo? Of course not. But it's much less expensive and it can be seen anytime the client wants to do it.
After the video demo, the client must follow up to contact the company to get questions answered, so expect that a higher percentages of clients viewing video demos will drop out of the sales cycle. But think of how many more people will see the demo—who cares if the percentages are lower? You'll likely get more leads than you did the old way.
You might think this is only good for software, but it's not. Perhaps you've heard of the funny "Will It Blend?" videos for Blendtec blenders. Blendtec has dramatically raised their sales by showing funny demos of blending IPods and other household objects as feats of strength.
But while those videos have attracted attention as a viral marketing technique, know that Blendtec shows
standard Blendtec demos on its Web site, as do many other companies. Do you demonstrate your product on the Web? Why not?
Posted by mikemoran at 2:55 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 26, 2007
Web Marketing for Consultants
I had a chance to speak to the NJ Coast IEEE Consultants group today, showing them how to juice up their Web marketing. Consultants are experts in their specialty, but for most it ain't marketing. Marketing seems like a foreign language—especially Web marketing. It's hard to know what to do, what to measure, or even how to start. If you know a consultant, share these charts on how to take on Web marketing.
Posted by mikemoran at 10:37 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 25, 2007
Big Companies Change a Lot
After speaking in Chicago on Friday, I spent a delightful couple of hours waiting out flight delays. (Yeah, I don't think I've written that sentence before, either.) I was hanging out with fellow speaker Chris Silver Smith, with whom I swapped life stories. When I mention that I've worked for IBM for over 28 years, Chris said something insightful—"Wow, that's a lot of change."
And it has been a lot of change.
Most people don't react that way. Most folks say something like, "I could never work for one company for that long." But Chris worked for Verizon for ten years and knows that when a company is big enough, you can change jobs within the company every couple of years—it's not really like working for a small company for many years.
And Chris was right about the amount of change. The IBM I joined years ago was a very paternalistic (maternalistic?) culture, where excellence occurred but was not really rewarded. IBM famously promised lifetime employment—no layoffs—rarely firing anyone even for incompetence. When it came time to give out annual raises, I used to joke that they'd rather give ten people a dime than one person a dollar.
IBM's near-death experience in the early '90s caused it to modernize its approach to emphasize value to the customer rather than value to its own employees, a wrenching but needed culture change. The IBM I work for now is a better fit for me, because it puts up with my idiosyncrasies in return for the value that I bring. The old IBM rewarded conformity to an extent that left me feeling unrewarded.
Looking ahead, I see that big companies will increasingly be buffeted by external events and will need to be as adaptable as IBM has been during my tenure. Time was that big companies were so big and powerful that they could ignore market forces and technological change for a period of time before it became a crisis. I believe that the window of time for being out of touch is closing—external forces catch up with you faster and faster these days.
The cool thing about economics is that when your company gets so big that it forgets how to do anything, economic forces start shrinking the company until it is forced to remember again. The new forces that democratize marketing—all that cool Web 2.0 stuff such as blogs and podcasts and product ratings and the like—make it harder to stay out of touch for any length of time. Your customers will bring you back into line quickly, no matter how much your company might like to ignore them.
Small companies have always been this way, but I think Web 2.0 is forcing a small company mindset on even the largest firms. If you work for a big company, are you listening to your customers? Are you reading the message boards? Do you watch where they go on your Web site? Most importantly, do you change what you do in response?
As Chris says, that's a lot of change.
Posted by mikemoran at 8:28 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 22, 2007
Search by the Numbers
Another day, another conference. This has been a busy week for me, and next week will be the same. So apologies that my daily blog this week has been little more than posting my presentations. I am in the Windy City today (and when I talk it gets a little windier here), talking to the American Marketing Association on how to plan and monitor your search campaigns using metrics. Check out my slides for Search by the Numbers.
It was fun to meet Stephan Spencer, Neil Patel, and Alan Rimm-Kaufman, who told me a great story about the head of retailer J.C. Penney, who described his prototypical customer as "Too little time, too little money, and two little kids." It made me wonder whether I understand IBM's customers as well as that—I think I don't.
Before I let you go, please don't forget to enter the contest to win a free pass to the Internet Strategy Forum Executive Summit. The two-day pass for July 19th and 20th is worth $300. Robert Scoble has just been added to the speaker list that already includes Cammie Dunaway, the CMO of Yahoo!.
I've gotten some great publicity for this from bloggers across the Web, but so far I have only one entry (which at least makes it easy to choose the winner). If you want to make that decision tougher for me, all you have to do is send me your worst horror story of someone who just wouldn't experiment—who refused to "do it wrong quickly." Enter now.
Posted by mikemoran at 12:55 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 21, 2007
Creating Your Search Marketing Business Case
I was lucky to be on another great DM Days panel today (along with Pat Daloisio and Heather Lloyd-Martin) on planning your search marketing program. I did the kickoff pitch, on putting together your search marketing business case. If you're wondering how to justify investing in organic and paid search when you don't know what it's worth, check out my slides.
Posted by mikemoran at 7:27 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 20, 2007
Punishing Yahoo! for Not Being Google
The headlines blare an age-old story, where the designated grown-up brought in to grow the high-flying young company has been sacked, replaced by the original founder. Can Jerry Yang restore Yahoo! to its glory days? It worked for Apple, but will Yahoo! be equally fortunate?
I think that question is flawed.
Yahoo! is actually a highly successful company that has one big problem—it's not Google. I once thought that this was a problem only in the financial markets. I thought that Yahoo!'s management knew that it could be highly successful without beating Google at its own game. But when the CEO is forced out, that shows you that this is more than an image problem—it's affecting the company's strategy.
Now I am not smart enough to know whether Terry Semel was doing a good job or a bad job. But I do know that Yahoo! is a winning company with tremendous assets. And they've beaten Google in several important areas, with FlickR and Yahoo! Answers. And while they are a distant #2 in search, they have maintained that position when companies like Microsoft have seen their share eroded significantly. Yahoo! looks like an underachiever only when compared to Google.
Now that doesn't mean that Yahoo! can't make more of its assets than it does. I have always wondered why Yahoo! wasn't the first to a deeper personalized search, but Microsoft beat it there in paid search and Google is quickly outstripping Yahoo! in organic search, as both competitors create search results that are customized based on what is known about the searcher. Because Yahoo! has a much deeper relationship with many of its searchers than its competitors do (because of its lead in mail and other Internet content properties), you'd think that it would have more personal information at its disposal and could do a better job in personalization.
And perhaps it will. Yahoo! is a strong company right now but it suffers from having even greater potential. Unfortunately, I am reminded of baseball manager Casey Stengel, who once remarked that "Potential means you ain't done nothing yet." Yahoo! has done a lot, but it suffers in comparison to Google. To me, we'd be better off evaluating Yahoo! on its own merits rather than as Google's kid brother. There's plenty of room to succeed on the Internet without being Google, and Google hasn't shown a strong ability to move beyond search yet. No one should underestimate Google, but I think we are in a period where we are underestimating the value of what Yahoo! does well.
So often we cover these companies as though business is winner-take-all. It's not. Certainly, anyone would rather be #1 than #2, but if the next CEO of Yahoo! accepts being #2 to Google in search (while still investing and improving there), while taking advantage of Yahoo!'s other competencies, we might all start to see that Yahoo! has a pretty nice business going. Maybe this is the perfect time for someone new to take the reigns because expectations have now been dampened. The conventional wisdom is that Yahoo! has failed because it's not Google. Maybe now it can be the best Yahoo! it can be.
Before I let you go, please don't forget to enter the contest to win a free pass to the Internet Strategy Forum Executive Summit. The two-day pass for July 19th and 20th is worth $300. Robert Scoble has just been added to the speaker list. All you have to do is send me your worst horror story of someone who just wouldn't experiment—who refused to "do it wrong quickly." Enter now.
Posted by mikemoran at 6:24 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
June 19, 2007
Search Marketing for Direct Marketers
I was lucky to be on a great panel today (Detlev Johnson, Jeannette Kocsis, Heather Lloyd-Martin, and Lee Odden) on social media marketing. I did the kickoff pitch, on a subject that I love—why direct marketers should get search marketing. The short answer is that it is all about response. The long answer is in my slides.
Posted by mikemoran at 9:43 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 18, 2007
How Do You Track Offline Sales?
Often when I speak to groups, I ask for a show of hands. "How many of you have a shopping cart on your Web site?" Rarely do even ten percent of the hands shoot up. That's because most Web sites are designed to convert offline, leading to the question of how you can track those sales back to your Web site. Google Analytics and other Web metrics systems don't do it. Well, Google came up with at least one answer a few weeks back, and I am finally getting around to blogging about it.
Google has entered a partnership with Salesforce.com that includes sales performance metrics. For the uninitiated, Salesforce.com operates a Web-based Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. Among their many features, CRM system help you track sales—even offline sales. It's hard to tell from the press release, but it looks like the CRM dashboard can be used to track sales back to your Web activity.
If so, this would be a boon to marketers of almost any business. If you don't have a CRM system, but you need to track offline sales back to the Web, this might be one to watch.
Posted by mikemoran at 9:56 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
June 15, 2007
I Did the Contest Wrong Quickly
Some of you noticed that I put a contest up yesterday for the story about the worst marketer—the one who most needs to learn to do it wrong quickly. (Thanks, Marshall for telling others about it.) But I realized that in putting together this contest, that I did it wrong quickly without even planning to.
First, I had an idea for a contest, but it was different from this one. I thought I'd ask people to contribute success stories where they did it wrong quickly and fixed it. But, in talking to Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg, they advised me that people don't always want to talk about themselves—it seems like bragging, or their company doesn't allow it—but people love to vent about things that went wrong.
So I changed the idea. I had talked to someone and they gave me some feedback about what was wrong, and I listened. If I had just kept mulling it over without sharing it with anyone, I'd have probably gone with my original idea (and maybe I'll do that one someday), but this one seems better to me.
Then I thought about how to implement the idea. As an inveterate IT person (not sure what a veterate IT person would be, but oh well), I started listing off how the system should work. You need a way for people to post entries that other people can comment on, but can't change. And I didn't want to have to authorize them ahead of time to be allowed to post. And I didn't want the same people posting over and over again.
So, I assumed that I could find either a wiki or a blog that could be set up this way. I quickly found that all blogs are designed for the authors to be known ahead of time, so I turned to wikis. I spent hours comparing wikis hoping that if I was lucky, not only could I find a wiki that met my requirements, but one that was hosted and free.
No such luck. I never found any that could do what I wanted (or at least not without a lot of programming). So I decided to do it wrong quickly. I posted a Web page and will have entrants e-mail their stories to me and then I will post them on a blog that everyone can comment on. It's more manual work and less sexy than what I wanted, but it will basically work. And for a two-week contest, I didn't want to do that much work. (If anyone has a better idea for what I could do, I'll fix it.)
So I posted everything last night, and this morning Steve Gehlen contacted me and told me that I hadn't used the correct name of the conference whose winning ticket is the contest's prize. (Oops.) That isn't a stellar example of "do it wrong quickly"—that's just carelessness—but I could at least fix it quickly with no major damage done.
Now, I could have just given up on the idea because I couldn't do it right. Or I could have slaved over it for a while to make something happen in a few weeks. But I think this way is better. I'll put it out there, let people tell me what's wrong with it, and fix it if it makes sense. The contest is up faster, it's better than if I kept it to myself, and I can easily fix things I got wrong. Sounds like a good subject for a book...
Posted by mikemoran at 9:23 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 14, 2007
Do It Wrong Quickly--the Contest
Earlier this week, I let readers know about my new book, "Do It Wrong Quickly". I talked about my motivations in writing the book, one of which is to respond to people who feel that they can't do things wrong quickly where they work. "You don't know my boss," they tell me. Well, here's your chance to tell me all about your boss and win something in the process.
Announcing "Do It Wrong Quickly" the contest.
I'm looking for stories—tell me about your boss (or your colleagues or anyone else) who just doesn't get it. They won't experiment. They're stuck. They won't try things. They're blocking your progress and everyone else's. They really need my book.
So here's the prize. I'll pick the top three stories sent to me—the most egregiously ugly situations caused by indecision, inaction, or just plain stupidity over how marketing must work today—and I will send that boss a copy of my book.
I will also send the submitters of those top three entries a copy of my book, too. And for the submitter (not the boss) of the winning story, I'll provide a free ticket to the Internet Strategy Forum's Executive Summit in Portland on July 19th and 20th worth $300. I'll be speaking at that conference along with Yahoo!'s CMO, Cammie Dunaway with other excellent speakers on the agenda. (Thanks to ISF's Steve Gehlen for making this excellent prize available.)
So send me your tired, your poor marketers yearning to market for free. The Internet offers untold possibilities for doing things a new way, and similarly limitless ways to screw that up. If your boss thinks that the Web is just like TV or just like print or just like anything else, tell me. If your boss wants to debate every decision endlessly to reach the dreaded consensus, tell me. If your boss won't try anything new, tell me. The winning story will be the exact opposite of what works in Internet marketing and will result in the maximum damage to a campaign or a company's marketing program.
The stories don't need to be long but they do need to be true. I'll post the entries the way you write them, so use your discretion as to how revealing you want to be. You are responsible for what you say and submitting your entry gives me the right to publish them as I wish. (I'm not accepting submissions from people who work at my company, IBM, because I don't want any appearance that I'd favor those entrants in choosing a winner.) Thanks in advance to everyone who takes the time to submit—good luck.
Posted by mikemoran at 11:16 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 13, 2007
Global Marketing 2.0
I had a great time today presenting at the Reaching Out to Your Global Customers conference in Lancaster PA. I met a number of local businesses looking to enter world markets as well as Washington-based diplomats charged with business development for their countries. I presented the keynote address on Global Web Marketing 2.0, so peek at the slides if you did not have a chance to attend. These slides give a nice introduction to my new book.
Posted by mikemoran at 11:28 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 12, 2007
Are You "Customer-Facing"?
Last week, I posted about how big-company marketers must influence other employees within their company to make the most of the new Internet marketing opportunities. But someone commented to me, "Well, not everyone must be influenced, right? I mean, not everyone is customer-facing." So it made me wonder just who is "customer-facing" in Web marketing?
"Customer-facing" seems to me to be just another piece of business jargon that may be wearing out its usefulness. Another person once lamented, "I'm not considered 'customer-facing,' so does that mean that I am turning my back on our customers?" I advised him to "just show a little shoulder."
You see, with Internet marketing, just about everyone is customer-facing.
Anyone in your company can be a blogger. Or haunt the message boards. Or optimize your Web pages for search. Or record a podcast.
So, maybe it is an overstatement to say that absolutely everyone is customer-facing, but everyone potentially is. Don't let your competitors swarm your customers with their employees while you sit back and think marketing is for the marketing department and sales is for the sales department. Decide to become customer-facing today and to start recruiting the rest of your company, too.
Posted by mikemoran at 7:57 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
June 11, 2007
Do It Wrong Quickly: the Musical
Regular readers know of my penchant for advising marketers to "Do It Wrong Quickly"—to spend more time experimenting than trying to prove each step is the right one. Internet marketing is not about whether you get it right on the first try (you won't); it's about how many tries you take, because one of them is eventually bound to be right. But no, I didn't turn it into a musical.
I did however turn it into a book.
Bill Hunt and I have been immensely pleased about the response to our first book, Search Engine Marketing, Inc., so it emboldened me to write another—this one a business book aimed at marketers and other folks trying to use the Web to grow their businesses.
"Do It Wrong Quickly" (the book, not the musical) is easy to summarize, so here goes. Because marketing is no longer a message-controlled monologue by the marketer, and is now a conversation with the customer, marketers must listen to what customers say and must watch what they do. Moreover, this customer feedback forces marketers to change their marketing in response. And the faster you can make changes based on what customers say and do, the more successful you'll be.
And because the message is so simple to summarize, for a long time I wasn't sure it needed a book. But people asked me a lot of questions about this message that I couldn't easily distill into a blog entry. Or even a few dozen blog entries. They asked me:
- Why is the Internet any different than every other marketing opportunity that ever came down the pike? I have been in marketing for 20 years and things change ever day, so I don't know why I have to change everything I do now.
- How exactly do I listen to customers? I understand that my customers might be talking about me, but I don't know how to keep up with them.
- Do I need to listen to all of my customers? Some folks on the Internet seem like they'd never be satisfied no matter what a company does.
- Why is watching my customers important? When I go to a Web site, I often click around without getting anywhere, so I don't see why anyone would want to watch that.
- How do I watch what my customers do? Every month I look at the Web metrics report, but I never know what I should do about all that data.
- How do I know what to do? Everyone knows we have a million problems here but they each have a different idea of which one to tackle first.
- Why do you insist that we do it wrong? I don't know about you, but we try to do things right at my company.
- How do I get the "quickly" part to happen? It takes six months to change a font on our Web site.
- How will doing one thing quickly really help? Our Web site is so bad it just needs to be redesigned from the ground up.
- Besides the new Internet companies like Google and Amazon, are there any 20th century companies that are doing this? My company has lots of offline marketing efforts that aren't going away.
- How do I get my boss to agree to do some experiments? You make it sound easy, but you don't know my boss.
- How do I get my company to try things that could be wrong? "Taking a shot at it" is not part of our corporate culture.
- How can anyone really tell me what to do in Internet marketing? It changes so fast that by the time you've figured something out, there is always something new to take its place.
And those are merely a few of the questions I've been pelted with the last few years. They reflect what's on the minds of smart marketing people struggling to make the transition to Internet marketing. Maybe struggling with the ideas. Maybe struggling with the execution. But struggling, nonetheless.
Now if those questions seem interesting, wait until you see the answers. And that's why I wrote this book. Because all of those questions have answers, and a lot more questions have answers, too. The book tries to answer them.
If you've heard about Web 2.0, but were waiting to hear about Marketing 2.0, wait no longer. Uh, well you have to wait until September. But you can preorder now—I suggest preordering a copy now for you and 100 of your closest friends.
Posted by mikemoran at 12:26 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 8, 2007
Big Company Marketers Must Influence
I was talking to the Web team for a large multinational company today, emphasizing the importance of setting up governance to make sure that the entire company mobilizes around their marketing efforts. At one point, they stopped me and said, "No, we don't have to do that because we have the whole team here." Unfortunately, unless it's the CEO talking, that's never true.
Too often the problem that we are trying to solve in big companies is so large that it hurts our brains to even think about it. We naturally cut the problem down to size because that gives us control. We want to shrink the challenge to something that is within our sphere of control.
The bad news is that Internet marketing never works that way.
Take search marketing. The person who spoke to me today manages a large team that controls the IT infrastructure, including Webmasters, content management systems, and the real guts of what makes their Web site—worldwide. But that's only a fraction of the folks that need to make search marketing work.
What about the rest? The writers that put the words on the site. The translators that produce the pages in other languages. The product manager that names the product. The marketing person who decides the core messaging. All of these folks (and many more) have key impacts on the success of your organic search marketing. And nobody controls all of them in a worldwide enterprise, except the CEO.
Your job is to influence them. To rewrite the processes that define their jobs. To evangelize the importance of what you want them to do. To develop operational metrics that check up on them. All of these actions (and more) influence people you don't have control over.
And it's not just search marketing. You need to do the same thing with all Web 2.0 marketing. You'll never have a blogging department. You can't outsource it, either. You need to get your whole company (or big chunks of it, anyway) to take on these new marketing approaches.
Nobody can do it with command and control. Just as marketers have to give up message control to settle for influencing conversations, they must also realize that they don't control marketing within their company on the Web—the smart ones influence it.
Posted by mikemoran at 12:57 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 7, 2007
Personalized Search: The Elephant in the SEO Living Room
Gord Hotchkiss put into words what I have been feeling: search marketers are paying far too little attention to personalized search. If you've looked at the baby steps that search engines have taken towards personalization and told yourself, "Well, no need to worry about that yet," think again. This may be your last chance to take action before the tidal wave.
Think about how much Google shook up the paid search world by adding clickthrough rates to the paid rankings. No more bid jamming and other tactics designed to secure a certain spot in the rankings or manipulate the bids to your advantage. It took a while, but now all the paid search engines use some variant of a hybrid ranking algorithm that is much harder to game.
That's exactly what personalized search will do, too. It will make the system so complex that it is much harder to game. Search rankings are dead—it's just that no one knows it yet. Any tricks designed to rank #1 are in jeopardy, because the ranking algorithm is about to undergo the biggest change ever.
This time, it's personal.
If you thought that a Google algorithm update shakes up the search marketing world, you ain't seen nothing yet. What will happen in a world where there's no #1 result? There's my #1 result and your #1 result and everyone else's #1 result. In a personalized world, every searcher can get a different slate of results for the same query. Google is saying to each searcher, "You're unique, just like everyone else."
You, the search marketer, will be left asking, "For how many searches was my page #1 yesterday?" And only the search engines know. So after years of not knowing how to monetize organic search, here finally is the answer. You'll need to pay the search engines to find out where you ranked. Maybe they'll sell you more information about the searchers to help you segment them. How much would you pay to find out who your searchers are where each one saw your page, and which of them clicked on you?
If your search marketing is built around ranking #1, it's time to go back to basics. It's time to understand what your conversions are, how many people are converting, what search keywords they are using, and how you can tweak your keywords and your Web site to make those conversions go up. Because rankings are about to disappear, whenever the search engines want them to.
Start thinking about how your approach to search marketing must change, because you'll be ready when it happens while everyone else is lamenting the change to the algorithm. This isn't your ordinary algorithm change and you don't want to be caught short.
Posted by mikemoran at 12:16 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 6, 2007
How Do You Teach Internet Marketing?
As someone who writes frequently about Internet marketing, I think of my audience as one of professionals—folks who already understand marketing (and probably Internet marketing) who want to keep up with the latest ideas. But what about new marketers, such as college students studying marketing? How are they learning Internet marketing? I learned marketing from a textbook, but can Internet marketing be learned that way?
No, says Elaine Young, marketing professor of Champlain College. At Champlain, they've even diced up the senior marketing into a series of one-credit courses highlighting the latest marketing tactics. I'm sure they still use books, but Elaine emphasizes the need to use the Internet to learn Internet marketing.
But the most striking part of her post talks about how students use the Internet for fun, but are floored to get a job interview through Facebook. Unlike veteran marketers who are adapting to Internet marketing as a new tactic for accomplishing age-old marketing goals, college students are coming from the opposite perspective. They are veterans at the Internet, but are adapting to its use in marketing.
So many people talk about cross-functional teams, but maybe cross-generational teams are the next big thing. Veteran marketers can team with young Internet-savvy types who are green at marketing. Maybe it's so obvious that everyone is doing it already, but I haven't seen much of it. We've always had older marketers working with younger marketers, as in any profession, but are any companies actively recruiting college students and placing them in teams with senior people to attack Internet marketing?
Posted by mikemoran at 10:01 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
June 5, 2007
The Coming Out Party for Ask.com
Google is #1 in search, but it's not because of their innovative user interface. You'd have to be a real search geek to see much difference between today's Google and Alta Vista circa 1997. Enter a search query, see a list of ten results. But Ask.com is ready to try something new. Is it better?
When you first look at the new Ask.com interface, you see this is not your father's search engine. There are no ads on the right side. The left side offers options to refine your search and the right side offers related information, with the middle columns reserved to familiar-looking search results, paid and organic.
Ask.com promises that the beauty is more than skin deep— each searcher's search history will drive the search results in a personalized way. New interface, personalized response—it certainly sounds worth checking out, so I did.
My initial take is that the interface seems well-tuned to popular search queries, such a "Paris Hilton" as shown. In addition to the typical celebrity pieces, there are links to new stories and videos similar to the way Google does with OneBox and Universal Search. Ask is more aggressive than Google in showing different kinds of results—my suspicion is that more searchers will find what they are looking for more quickly with Ask.
So what should search marketers do? For now, nothing.
For one thing, it's not clear how many queries can get the special "Paris Hilton" treatment. Here's a query for a not exactly unknown term, "social media marketing." The right column is blank and the left column offers little in the way of refinement options.
But even if Ask can apply this new interface far more broadly, it will take a long time for Ask to pick up momentum. Ask must innovate to grow, yes, but the amount they need to grow to be taken seriously as a major search engine is huge: Consider that they'd need to grow their market share by one-fourth to grow even one percentage point in share, according to Hitwise.
So, keep an eye on Ask—they've long been known for innovative approaches. Even if Ask doesn't pick up market share to sidle up to the big boys, you can expect that their cutting edge ideas will find their way into the user interfaces of the majors if they seem to work.
Posted by mikemoran at 9:30 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 4, 2007
Google Scoops Up FeedBurner
If you've been following the news, you've probably already heard about Google's purchase of FeedBurner. FeedBurner offers many services to RSS publishers, including advertising within feeds, which many have speculated as the impetus for the Google's interest. Clearly that's a factor, but I wonder of there is another motivator, also.
As interesting as FeedBurner's advertising service might be to Google, their stats might be their most important asset. FeedBurner is the leading feed aggregator, so publishers can redirect their subscribers through FeedBurner to estimate the number of subscribers to their feed. Why would Google care about knowing how many subscribers each feed has?
- To upgrade Google Analytics. A key conversion for many Web site owners is a subscription to an RSS feed. Now, Google Analytics could tap FeedBurner to recognize that conversion event.
- To upgrade its relevance ranking. With Google now integrating blogs and other new media into its new universal search results, Google could use FeedBurner subscription numbers as part of its relevance ranking—blogs with more subscribers might tend to rank higher, just as Web sites with more links do.
- To combat spam. Splogs (spam blogs) pose a thorny problem for search engines. Sometimes they can be identified because of poor content, but suppose Google knows a blog's subscriber count? You'd expect splogs to have almost no subscribers—one more data point for Google to chew on to ban splogs or downgrade splog rankings.
Time will tell exactly what Google is looking for in its acquisition, but it's clear that several reasons exist—as a FeedBurner publisher, I am very interested in seeing how Google integrates FeedBurner's capabilities.
Posted by mikemoran at 9:56 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 1, 2007
Internet Marketing is Mostly Perseverance
A few months ago, I told the story of Imran Khan, who emigrated to the United States from Pakistan at age 30 and has risen to CMO of Internet lending powerhouse E-LOAN. One of my readers asked me to fill in even more of the story. In my original post, I mentioned that Imran had sent out 500 resumes without landing an internship offer, but I never explained how Imran got his first big break.
So, as curious as my reader, I caught up with Imran again and asked him to fill in the details. It turned out to be a great story.
Imran described how he and a few fellow students palled around together, visiting numerous Internet companies while trying to ask presenters good questions so they were remembered come internship time. Imran ruefully recalled, "By the time I came up with a good question, and translated it in my mind to English, the speaker was always gone."
One day, Imran's gang decided to visit Hewlett-Packard, which thrilled Imran not one bit, because he knew that his lack of a green card meant that HP would never hire him as an intern. Still, Imran always makes the best of any situation, so he dutifully approached the speaker after his presentation, along with his buddies.
Each of his friends posed carefully chosen questions designed to impress, asking about HP's product strategy or e-services initiative, but when it came Imran's turn, he asked a different kind of question: "Do you compose music?"
HP's Director of Global Business Development paused, gazing at Imran, finally answering, "yes." Imran had somehow connected this man to a distant memory he had watching a musician on Pakistani television years earlier.
"I have one of your CDs," Imran said.
That man became Imran's "guardian angel," he said, eventually getting Imran a part-time contract position at HP (because Imran could not be hired as an intern). Imran's typical hard work turned that position into a permanent job and he was on his way.
Imran is still working hard, using techniques such as multivariate testing to find every small edge in his marketing campaigns. Imran is a perfect example of what marketing has become. If you work harder than everyone else and you take advantage of everything you do get, good things will happen. Imran got the job, but he also showed the character that causes him to this day to out-work the competition to tweak every last decimal place of response rate out of his marketing campaigns. If you don't give up, you'll eventually get your break. Work smarter and harder.
Posted by mikemoran at 12:17 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
Which Media Are the Social Ones?
Social media is the flavor of the week, with social media marketing dominating conversation of any cutting-edge campaign. Just what tactics constitute social media and how do you tell them apart? Find out in this month's Biznology newsletter.
Posted by mikemoran at 12:13 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
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