Biznology Blog: July 2007

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July 30, 2007

Should Small Businesses Ditch the Web?

A reader, Ikey Benney, has some very strong opinions on how Internet marketing has failed small businesses. He goes so far as to say that his small company is halting all Internet marketing. Is he right?

Hey, I work for a really big company, IBM, so maybe I am no one to talk, but the small businesses I talk to tell me the exact opposite story. Ikey's comments, made yesterday on this blog, reveal a common misconception on how Internet marketing ought to work.

Ikey claims that small businesses "cannot get top 10 positions in order to get traffic and and sales" and backs up the claim, saying, "Just type the major keywords like: business, advertising, camera, online shopping, computer and tell me who you see in top 10 positions? Are they small businesses, individual website owners or big corporations?"

The answer to Ikey's question, in general, is that large companies do tend to snare those high-profile terms more than small companies do. But isn't that because they match them better? What small business is a better match for computer than Apple Computer? Looking at the most popular keywords misses the point entirely.

Small businesses don't typically match broad search terms because they don't have the breadth of product offerings to do so—they aren't the right matches. But what if we search for terms that really do match small businesses?

I wrote a blog a few months ago on how someone took a free Squidoo lens and got a number #1 ranking in Google in just a few weeks for "bergen county psychiatrist." Not "psychiatrist." But she didn't want the top ranking for psychiatrist because she lives in Bergen County, New Jersey and that is where she wants to get patients from.

Ikey also says that small businesses can't afford the huge per-click costs of paid search, but geotargeting, which allows any business to identify the geographic area for the paid search query makes it possible for any small business to buy search ads just for the small local area they serve.

Ikey thinks I am in denial about how big companies have taken over Internet marketing, but I think I have my eyes open. Small companies can compete in Internet marketing much more easily than in offline marketing that requires deep pockets. Did anyone see Blendtec's viral marketing campaign? I had never heard of them before and they now are found on the first page of Google results for "blender"—ahead of all other commercial listings.

In offline advertising, they could never afford to run more advertising than larger blender competitors, but on the Internet they can compete on an even footing for a far smaller budget.

I understand that money always helps—it helps on the Internet too. But in offline marketing, money is a far more potent force than it is online. Free online techniques such as search marketing and social media marketing level the playing field to a far greater extent than in the offline world.

While you're thinking about your Internet marketing, there's one more day to win a free copy of my new book. Enter the content by tomorrow with your Do It Wrong Quickly success story and get your chance to win.

Posted by mikemoran at 10:02 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

Robert Scoble Interview

I was honored to be interviewed by Robert Scoble when I was in Portland for the Internet Strategy Forum Executive Summit. The interview is not as long as some of Robert's great interviews (I had just 15 minutes before my speech), but I thought it was worth sharing with you. And if you don't subscribe to Robert's Scobelizer blog (I think there is one of you left), it really should be on your must-read list. Robert enjoyed the idea that he was talking to an IBM Distinguished Engineer about marketing—I hope you do, too.

Posted by mikemoran at 7:46 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 27, 2007

Google Site Search for $100 a Year

I have been travelling so it took me a little while to write about Google Custom Search Business Edition. The name is a mouthful (sounds like the name of one of IBM's products) but the price won't give you indigestion—just $100 annually for up to 5,000 pages. So what should a Web site owner think about this offering?

Before I give you my opinion, remember that I work for a competing product, IBM's OmniFind search engine. So take my views with a pillar of salt. But here goes, anyway.

For small sites with limited technical skills, it seems worthwhile. You can set up the colors of the interface to match your Web site with no programming experience, and you just need to know enough to drop a snippet of code in the right place on your Web page. There's no server to set up, so even sites with shared hosting can play. There are also free choices, such as Rollyo, that do a good job, but with less control over the appearance.

If you have some technical skills, however, there may be better choices. Even those folks saddled with shared servers can use a free Yahoo! API to give themselves a hosted site search. It's worth remembering the drawbacks of a hosted search service, however. You can't ensure that all of your pages will be spidered and you can't ensure they will be spidered quickly as they change.

If you follow the tips in our book and in the Skinflint's Guide to Search Marketing, you can ensure that most, if not all of your pages are spidered into that search index. And you can use Sitemaps to give yourself some control over how frequently the spider visits. It's not the same as having your own search engine, though. If you want more control, you probably need to go a step further.

If you have dedicated hosting or own your own server, you can consider IBM's OmniFind Yahoo! Edition, a free search engine (plug, plug). You must be savvy enough to be able to administer a server, but if you can, you get a free search engine that you have total control over. And it tops out at 500,000 pages, not 5,000 (or $500 a year for up to 50,000 pages from Google).

Google's new offering seems valuable for those with small sites and no technical skills. Site search keeps getting easier and cheaper for site owners—what's your site search like?

Posted by mikemoran at 9:38 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

July 26, 2007

Want Google to Talk to You?

When I speak to audiences, I sometimes get questions about how a search marketer would ever know that something is wrong. If you hired the wrong search optimizer and your site has problems, why doesn't Google tell you what's wrong? Now they can.

There aren't a lot of details yet, but Google is using Webmaster Central to communicate with site owners. So, we'll see exactly what Google decides to personally contact people about, but their blog talks about contacting site owners for violations of their terms of service (search spam), such as using hidden text.

Google says they will expand the kinds of communications they provide through their Webmaster Message Center in the future. Marketing Pilgrim has a few good suggestions of what they should tackle next.

Something else that is very helpful is a simple understanding of which pages you have indexed (and which ones are blocked). Yahoo! Site Explorer is very helpful for that.

Between Google's and Yahoo!'s tools, Webmasters have far more information than ever before about how the search engines view their sites. If your Webmaster is not taking advantage, alert them to do so today.

Posted by mikemoran at 12:21 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 25, 2007

Does Second Life Need a Second Life?

Wired Magazine has pronounced Second Life dead. This is the inevitable backlash against anything that draws a great deal of hype, but in this case I think there are legitimate questions to ask. Is Second Life merely a way for the traditional brand marketer to seem cool while doing the same old stuff?

I suspect for some that it is. When Pontiac uses Second Life for marketing, I can't help but wonder if putting a replica of a real car in a virtual world is the least cool thing there. If marketers want to be in Second Life because their customers are there, that smacks of the same old advertising that we do in print, on TV, or on billboards, for that matter. It also smacks of delusion—Wired says that only 100,000 Americans venture into Second Life each week.

So what is Second Life good for? My company, IBM, sets up events where people can interact and see presentations, which I think is a good experiment. But as I wrote recently, I wonder if private virtual worlds might actually serve these purposes better. You get the ability to talk to your customers by name, you know who you are telling your secrets to, and you can measure everything they do—those are qualities that marketers cherish that Second Life struggles to fulfill.

I think the main reason to be in Second Life is to experiment. Looking for immediate payback may miss the point—you really need to learn how to operate in this new kind of environment, regardless of whether Second Life will take off and be that mainstream marketing vehicle or not. Something will come along (or more likely, dozens of somethings) that will allow people to interact using these virtual techniques. Marketers need to learn how to operate in those worlds and experimentation is the only way to do it.

Because it is experimentation, however, you might want to figure out how to do it for as low a cost as possible. Maybe, like with most bouts of irrational exuberance, it's not what marketers are experimenting with, but instead how much cash they are blowing along the way. Marketers who can get most of the learning while keeping most of the cash in their pockets are the ones who will truly be rewarded. So, can you experiment in private virtual worlds for a fraction of the price? I'd love to hear from someone who is doing that.

Speaking of hearing from folks, I have heard from just one person entering my latest (failed) contest. If you have a success story to pass along of how to "do it wrong quickly," please let me know so you can win a free copy of my book.

Posted by mikemoran at 11:52 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 24, 2007

Personalized Search Hits a Bump in the Road

I've written before about personalized search—several times. I think it is the biggest change to come to search marketing since pay-per-click. But what once promised to be a marketer's dream of knowing eternal behavioral histories of every searcher is being sharply curtailed. Each week another search engine announces some retrenchment due to privacy concerns. (Here's a good recap of recent personalized search privacy announcements.) What's going on?

Simply put, the search engines have not made a case to average searchers as to what's in it for them.

Personalization is a dance between the marketer and the customer. The customer has information to give and the marketer wants to get that information to use it to provide more targeted (and hence more lucrative) offers. The better the targeting, the higher the response.

But why should customers give up the information? They'll only do so if they see what they are getting. In a talk I gave last night, I got a question from the audience—Why would anyone register at a site? I turned the question around on her by asking whether she has ever registered at a site, and of course she had. Even someone who is dead set against giving up information sometimes sees value in providing that information.

What the search engines are doing is no different from what Amazon has always done. Customers happily register with Amazon to get the convenience of one-click and the personalized recommendations (even if they like to complain about them when they are wrong). Customers see value in this and have rarely questioned the privacy implications of Amazon looking at every move they make on the site.

Is it because the benefits are made explicit by Amazon? Customers see exactly what they get.

Personalized search has so far hidden the benefits. I wonder if the best way to proceed would be for search engines to explicitly note certin results that come from personalization. This is tricky, to be sure, because every part of the relevance ranking algorithm has an effect on results, but perhaps Google and company could make an effort to note those results that were largely driven by personalization and put some kind of icon on them.

Or maybe they could spur advertisers taking advantage of personalization to improve their offers and to note that they are personalized. So, if an advertiser is taking advantage of demographic knowledge or search history to present an offer, why not present an excellent offer? 10% off now! And show that the ad is a result of sharing personal information?

By taking these steps, the search engines would be making the value of personalization explicit to the searcher. If the searchers believe that they are getting real value for giving up their privacy, they may do so willingly.

Search engines are retrenching because searchers are complaining about privacy, but my opinion is that complaints about privacy are usually about lack of value—if searchers understood the value they might be happy to give up the privacy. Because the value is so vague, they are more concerned about what they are giving up.

I wonder if some smart search engine will try this. It would be interesting to see what happens if they do. Until then, expect to see more vague privacy fears until search engines wise up and give back some of the value they are getting from personalization.

Posted by mikemoran at 11:03 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 23, 2007

On Genius

I mentioned last week that I spoke at the Internet Strategy Forum Executive Summit in Portland, Oregon. Conference speakers know that you'll sometimes see reviews of your speeches in blogs afterwards. So I was happy to see one entitled "Mike Moran is a Genius" but I think it would come as a distinct shock to people who know me well. But behind that humorous title is something that I think is worth thinking about.

I think we could all look like geniuses if we listened to our customers more. And responded to what we heard. In fact. it is amazing how smart you look when you do what your customer really wants.

So, as flattering as it is for someone to think I am a genius, I think what I am proposing when I say "do it wrong quickly" is that it is OK not be a genius. It's OK to admit that what we are doing is probably wrong. And it's OK to try it anyway.

We can measure how our customers respond and then try something else. After a number of these iterations (maybe a very high number), we may eventually lurch into the "right" answer—and look like geniuses.

So, thanks Ben, for that highly complimentary blog entry. It just makes me think about how all of us can look like geniuses by trying things. When they don't work (they usually won't), then we try something else.

On a side note, one place where I am most definitely not a genius is in setting up contests. My first contest drew exactly one entry and my second one, which times out on August 1, has so far (wait for it) one entry. So if you have a story on how listening to your customer made you look like a genius, please pass it along—you may win a copy of me new book. If you can tell a story of how you were able to do it wrong quickly, enter now.

Posted by mikemoran at 12:03 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

July 20, 2007

Does This Stuff Really Work at IBM?

While I am in Oregon, I took the time to stop at the IBM Beaverton lab, where I did a reprise of my presentation at the Internet Strategy Forum conference. When I talked about how to "Do It Wrong Quickly," a few skeptical folks asked, "Are we really doing that here at IBM?" It's a good question and it deserves an honest answer.

It isn't always easy at IBM. I spent eight good years at ibm.com, but it took quite a while for us to get the right metrics in place to measure what we do. In fact, some of the metrics that we really need on conversions are still not available for every single part of our two-million page Web site.

And some areas of IBM still want to deliberate too long over everything before trying something new. IBM isn't perfect.

But we are really trying. We've made great strides in recent years to run more and more projects based on measurable outcomes and I think it shows. It's not easy to organize thousands of people across numerous business units and 90 countries to do anything. much less something that requires culture change. But the change is happening and the ones adopting the new ways are proving successful.

And that is about as good as it ever gets. It's OK that the culture change isn't total, that it is ongoing. and that it gets a little better every day. Because you can do your culture change wrong quickly too. You don't have to wait for perfection to do anything—just make sure whatever you change (culture or anything else) is a little bit better than it was before, or else throw that change away and try again. That's all that "do it wrong quickly" is about, anyway.

Posted by mikemoran at 9:27 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 19, 2007

Marketing 2.0

I spoke at a great event today in Portland, Oregon, the Internet Strategy Forum Executive Summit. I'd never been to Portland before, and I really enjoyed this extraordinarily livable city. It was great to get in front of 300 Internet marketers and share a stage with luminaries such as Robert Scoble. My pitch was yet another preview of my new book, Do It Wrong Quickly, called Marketing 2.0.

Posted by mikemoran at 11:53 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

July 18, 2007

What Semantic Search Isn't

You may have heard the term "semantic search," but do you really know what it is? Some people have very big ideas of how computers will understand the meaning of text, but today's semantic search falls far short of that. Regardless, what's possible today is still very useful.

To understand how hard it is for computers to really understand the meaning of text, let's not look at understanding entire documents or even paragraphs. Let's not even look at sentences. No, let's start with something extremely simple: noun phrases.

Here's a simple noun phrase: bath soap. It has a simple meaning, too—soap used in the bath. Let's look at different phrase now—wood soap. It means soap used to clean wood. And one more: glycerine soap—soap made of glycerine.

Three noun phrases about soap and the modifying noun means something different each time. It's not easy for software to interpret them correctly, as you might imagine. I don't think you'll see software that can correctly interpret most noun phrases for quite awhile.

So what kind of semantic search is possible?

Today's keyword search can be vastly improved using mere part-of-speech analysis. Consider the law enforcement officer looking for a report on someone driving a Neon car. If it is an old Neon, it was a Dodge Neon. Newer models are Chrysler Neons. It's likely the police reports that should be found contain neither the words Dodge nor Neon. So how do you do a keyword search? Searching for "neon" alone finds neon signs, neon lights, and other spurious results. Searching for "neon car" likely finds nothing.

Enter semantic search. With a semantic search facility, looking for "neon car" causes the system to look for occurrences of the word "neon" that denote cars. Simply knowing that a car is a noun eliminates almost all spurious results ("neon" is a modifier in the phrase "neon lights"). A bit more smarts, such as looking for forms of the word "drive" in the same sentence improves the results even more.

So even though semantic search is a big idea, practical implementations exist today to improve search results. Does your search facility have the smarts that semantic search proivides?

Posted by mikemoran at 2:06 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

July 17, 2007

That "I Don't Know" Thing

Yesterday, I wrote about the importance of approaching things each day on the job so that you do what you think is right—my belief that doing good is good business. After thinking about it more, I think I want to add an example of a moment in my life when I was feeling pressure to do something that I didn't feel comfortable with and what I decided to do.

This happened to me many years ago—I was working for IBM's Research division at the time. It was during the bad old days when IBM was starting to lose its grip on its customers and a few sales teams might have started to forget about IBM's real core commitments to its customers.

I was leading a team of researchers producing an IBM product, and I was visiting a customer who had been promised an early version of the software. An impatient customer. And a very large IBM customer.

Unfortunately, the project I was leading had been delayed—the software was taking longer to perfect than we had anticipated—and the customer was not happy. I was being brought in as this top notch researcher who could answer all the customer's questions about this technology and the project.

As I had breakfast with the sales team, I could see that they were very worried. They had built me up to the customer as someone who was a renowned expert in this area and the customer was loaded for bear. I was warned that they would have dozens of people arrayed around me peppering me with the toughest questions, because after the slip in schedule they needed me to prove my credibility.

Above all, they told me, "You must appear to be an expert. Don't let them ever see you get rattled or thrown off-stride. Just handle everything even if you have to baffle them with BS." Well, this wasn't me. I started to tell them that I thought I could impress them doing things my own way but the senior manager cut me off with a glare, saying, "I know what my customer wants and I paid to bring you here to give it to him and that is just what I expect you to do."

Breakfast was a lot quieter after that.

Later that day, as I stood in front of a faintly hostile group of customers firing tough questions, I found I was able to handle them all honestly, even though some were uncomfortable. But near the end of the session, I got a question completely out of left field, one that had nothing to do with my field of expertise or the project. It wasn't a dumb question—just one I had no way to answer without a big bluff or an outright lie.

I paused for what felt like a lifetime, and then simply answered, "I don't know." I told the questioner that I would be happy to take his business card and find out the answer and get back to him. As I did this, I could see the senior manager in the back of the room doing a slow burn. If you could kill someone with a look, I'd at least have been maimed.

The rest of the session went on as it had, as I kept answering questions as best I could. After it was over, several people lined up to ask me private questions. As they each left one-by-one, the only people left in the room were the IBM sales team (including my buddy the senior manager) and the decision maker (the big boss) for the customer. The IBM senior manager was still eyeing me, just waiting to let me have it when there were no customers in the room.

Mr. Decision Maker asked me a few more questions, but then said something I will never forget. "We get a lot of so-called experts in here that can talk a blue streak but I never know when they are making it up as they go along. But when you said 'I don't know" to that one question, it made me realize that you must really know everything else you talked about. It made everything else you said credible." Then he thanked me and left the room.

I was left eye to eye with the IBM senior manager, who looked as though someone had let the air out of him. He was no longer unhappy—he seemed thrilled because he knew that my visit had accomplished exactly what he wanted. I now awaited what he would say to me, sure that he now could see the value of being honest instead of always having some new trick up his sleeve.

The senior manager grabbed my hand, shaking it excitedly, and said, "That 'I Don't Know' thing was amazing! I would never have thought of such a clever gimmick! I am going to have to remember that one. I'm going to tell all the other experts we bring in here to use that, too."

If you fast forward to today, you'll still find people who look at honesty as just another gimmick. Those are the folks that are dead set against allowing customers to post ratings and reviews on your Web site because of "the risk." Then they decide that they'll post fake positive reviews to make sure the products look good. Then they find out that customers actually buy more when there are a few mild bad reviews. And just at the point that you think they'll stop posting fake reviews and be honest enough to let customers post their own reviews, they come to the conclusion that they need to post a few fake bad reviews too.

It reminds me of the age-old advice: "Customer relationships are based on sincerity; when you can fake that, you've got it made." Personally, I think that we're better off working for companies (as I do) where these kinds of stories are rarities rather than everyday occurrences. But we all get to decide every day whether we will stand up for our principles, even in small ways like in this story, or whether we'll cave in to the pressure to make compromises for short-term benefit. I think we would all sleep better at night if we really made the tough choices, and we'd have stronger relationships with our customers by treating them the way they should be treated.

Posted by mikemoran at 6:37 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 16, 2007

Good Business

Is doing good good business? I have always wanted to think so. And when I read a post a month ago by Seth Godin on Responsibility, it made me think about these issues again. So go read that post and all the great conversation it precipitated. (I'll wait right here for you.) It's taken me, however, a while to get my thoughts together, but I finally have.

I think that Seth is absolutely correct about what he is saying—we all need to believe in what we do. He believes that it would result in a better world because we'd produce fewer things that are harmful (I do, too), but I think there's another reason too—we'd all just be a little more passionate about our jobs. We'd all do better work.

Maybe it's just me, but I see too many people who spend lots of time at work but aren't terribly happy. Now I understand that we all need to put food on the table, but I think too many of us stop when our monetary needs are satisfied, rather than other needs. If you market a product, you need to believe in it—to think it really is something that helps people.

But it goes beyond marketing and beyond products. Everyone should believe that they are doing something good on their job. If you feel that the only way to sell your product is to mislead your customer, that's a problem. If you feel you must mistreat workers to keep costs down. Or pollute the environment.

I don't mean to come off as a Pollyanna here. If you are the most hard-bitten business type ever and won't be swayed by any ethical or moral arguments, or any calls to be passionate about what you do, think about this. The Internet is holding up the biggest flashlight of all time on everything companies do.

In the past, you needed to be a big company doing something egregious to be newsworthy. Now a hate site can be set up for free that reveals your sins and gets a top ten placement on Google. A blogger can disclose bad behavior on the smallest scale. And it's no consolation that the blogger has just 100 subscribers when they are your best customers—the ones most likely to spread the word to the rest of your customers. It doesn't matter that the group that set up the hate site are "a bunch of nuts" if they have their facts.

So, if doing good sounds too expensive for you, try calculating it against the new expense of doing it the old way. Because the old way depends on secrets and those secrets get harder to keep every day.

Posted by mikemoran at 12:05 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 13, 2007

Second Life Meets WebEx

Most B2B marketers use WebEx, or some other electronic meeting program, to meet with their customers. And most marketers are at least dimly aware of Second Life—some marketers are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy an island and construct a presence in that virtual world. To me, there is a big gap in between the way we collaborate with existing customers and the way we attract new customers—that's what I want to explore today.

Some of you might find the comparison of WebEx and Second Life odd—they don't strike you as even being in the same realm. But I think they are very related. Let's look at their real-world counterparts.

Second Life is a virtual world, they say—a community of people that interact with each other. To a marketer, Second Life is a place to be just because customers are there. So, you can have a presence in Second Life that attracts attention no different from having a billboard on a busy highway. But Second Life can be much more than that. It can be like a mall kiosk where you can show your message to a individual customer in an interactive way, or it can be a virtual showroom or branch office, where customers can interact with your personnel live the same way they would call on the phone and chat. Or you can put on seminars.

IBM is putting on conferences and seminars in Second Life, which seems very similar, in some ways, to a WebEx Webinar. Oh sure, there are avatars and other niceties in Second Life, but slides are slides and talking heads are talking heads.

What's the real difference between Second Life conferences and WebEx Webinars? I think it is mostly the relationship with the attendees. Second Life lends itself more to the pop-in, the person who has no relationship and who might even prefer to be anonymous. Second Life has more of a tendency to be like the booth in the trade show—no schedule, no time commitment—just show up when you want and stay as long as you like.

WebEx Webinars tend to be more structured. You need an invitation to come. You must register and tell who you are to be there. You must do it in advance. You tend to have a relationship with the customer, either before or after the event.

Suppose there was something in between? Something that allowed the pop-in and that had the rich interactive experience of Second Life with the relationship aspects of WebEx? I saw something that fits the bill yesterday, called Unisfair.

Unisfair allows a business to set up events—one-time events like Webinars or days-long events like trade shows that can be "manned" months after they conclude—where people can show up and stay as long as they like, but they are not anonymous. They are invited to a secure area where they have the richness of a virtual world but also the control of an experience out of the public eye.

Take a look at these screen shots from an event held by National Instruments this past May. In years past, the company held a 15-city road tour, shipping equipment, people, demonstrations, signs (you get the idea) hither and yon. This year they held a virtual conference instead, which attracted more attendees (900, who stayed almost three hours on average) and cost less than the shipping costs for last year. You can see from the screen shots of the entrance area that it has the Second Life, avatar, virtual world kind of feeling, but it is a fully-contained, private virtual environment where the event manager can control who comes in and can track the movements and activities of each attendee.

The conference area screen shot looks a lot closer to a Webinar, however. You can use video, audio, animation, or any mode necessary to get your message across.

In April, Hewlett-Packard used Unisfair for its OpenView User Group conference, running 24 hours a day to "follow the sun" and serve attendees in 97 countries. Brent Arslaner, Unisfair's Vice President of Marketing, says that its events are different than flesh-and-blood conferences, but that some marketers have found that attendees are "more frank than in a virtual environment than for in-person events." Perhaps it's because they are more focused in using their time well while they sit at their desk, so they get to the point faster. Maybe it is because they feel more able to break off the conversation at any point. Unlike trade shows, marketers can make busy high-level people available to "work the booth" while sitting at their desks doing other things, a far cry from the entry-level folks you often find in real-life trade shows. Regardless, interactions are more detailed and more focused online. "It will never replace face-to-face," says Brent, where body language and other social situations allow different evaluations to be made. But private virtual worlds appear to be claiming an important middle ground amidst real-life events, Second Life islands, and Webinars.

One reason is cost. These events clearly cost less than real-life events and they probably cost less than buying an island and paying an agency to set up a public Second Life presence. Another reason is metrics—measuring anything in Second Life is a huge issue at the moment. (Marshall Sponder has written frequently on this subject.) Private virtual worlds get the metrics built in, similarly to the way every trade show has a way to capture and count attendees and business cards at booths.

As marketers, we need to be aware of each of these emerging ways to interact with our target markets and understand the strengths and weaknesses of each. It seems to me that private virtual worlds have some strong qualities that will help them carve a niche in the savvy online marketing plan.

Posted by mikemoran at 11:15 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 12, 2007

Keeping Search Fresh

When I read Jill Whelan's excellent High Rankings Advisor newsletter last night, she had a surprise from Google: a way to tell search engines when your page is out-of-date and should be removed from the results. Don't know why you would use this? For many search marketers, it is a godsend.

Here's why.

Many Web pages are time-sensitive. For example, your company may be sponsoring a Webinar on July 27. There's no point in showing that page on July 28, right? So you remove that page. Simple, right? Well, no. That page is still in the search indexes generating search results which result in "page not found" on your site.

That's a bad experience for searchers and doesn't do much for you either.

You get the same problems for the page for your March Madness sale. On April 1, it's April Fool's for the search engines, because your page is found but can't be displayed.

Anytime you have a time-sensitive page, merely removing it from your site doesn't help until the search spider comes back to your site and sees it's gone. Only then will it come out of the search results—days or even weeks later.

Google wants to solve that problem by giving you a new tag to use on time-sensitive pages that alerts Google to throw away the page after a certain date. Called the "unavailable_after" tag, Google has not yet announced when it will be supported and no other search engines have followed suit with their own support.

For some marketers, it's a good idea to use that tag. The marketers who will benefit are those that would still retain that search result position, but get a better page in there (one that still exists). That way instead of showing a page that will not be found, Google will bring in another page from their site that might get customers to buy something.

But what about when taking your page off the results screen results in some other company's page going up in its place? Why would a search marketer want to cede that space? I don't see why savvy search marketers would want to do this, personally.

A better approach would be to change the content of the page to something that is still a good answer to the question, but is currently valid. So update your Webinar page with a podcast of the completed Webinar, or with a schedule for when that topic will be done again. Update your sale page to show your "everyday low price" for your product or show your current sale. Sometimes there isn't a good match, but often there is—don't just take down the page.

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Do you have a success story for how you did it wrong quickly? Enter my latest contest and win a copy of my new book, called (wait for it) Do It Wrong Quickly, coming out this fall.

Posted by mikemoran at 1:04 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 11, 2007

A New Way to Personalize Your Web Site

I've talked before about multivariate testing, an exciting technique for optimizing your Web conversion rates. Multivariate testing tools perform this alchemy by substituting different graphics, text, or other elements on pages show to individual visitors to your site, testing which combinations result in the best response. If you think that sounds cool, wait until you see what these tools are doing now.

Offermatica, one of the three most popular multivariate test tools (along with Optimost and Google Website Analyzer), is announcing a new feature today called Affinity Targeting. Instead of using the ability to dynamically swap out content only for testing, Offermatica now allows marketers to use it for personalization, based on business rules.

The newest buzzword in Web marketing is "behavior targeting" and Offermatica's Affinity Targeting makes this technique something the average marketer can control.

Direct marketers are familiar with using recency (how long since your visitor has bough something) and frequency (how often do they tend to buy something) to segment their best customers. Offermatica puts similar techniques at the disposal of the direct marketer to decide which content to show on a page. For example, marketers can design rules based on how recently and how frequently a visitor has looked at a particular product category to decide which promotions to show.

Check out these screen shots from the same URL at musiciansfriend.com—shoppers who have in the past shown a propensity for examining guitar equipment are assumed to be guitarists who should see ads for guitars, while those who favor keyboards would be shown those ads. The rules defined by the marketing folks at Musician's Friend decide which ad to show based on which areas of the site the visitor has been in before, assuming that guitarists looking at the guitars should be shown a guitar ad the next time they come back to the home page, for example. But it's dynamic—if a "guitarist" starts clicking on keyboards, then eventually the algorithm will start showing keyboard ads in other parts of the site.

Because Offermatica already integrates metrics from WebTrends, CoreMetrics, and Omniture, and because it works with mainstream content management systems, many companies can take advantage of this capability with little system integration costs.

Chris Duskin, Offermatica's Director of Product Marketing, explained to me why Offermatica's approach trumps existing techniques for personalizing content based on business rules: "The marketer is in control. They determine what information they want to use and where."

Time will tell whether this is a breakthrough in ease of use for personalization, but clearly that kind of breakthrough is coming. Personalization that requires programmers to integrate the results of Web metrics systems, cookies, and the business rules that pull content from a content management system are daunting, even for companies with well-funded IT infrastructures. And, they are not usually resilient enough to change as quickly as marketers need them to.

Offermatica's approach based on the fast-changing needs of multivariate testers offers the promises of speed and ease-of-use to adapt marketing tactics in this fast-changing Web 2.0 world. As Offermatica rolls out its new capability, I'd love to hear from real-world marketers as to whether it delivers on its promise.

Posted by mikemoran at 8:48 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 10, 2007

Searchers Spend More

It seems like you get a new study each month that shows that people who search are people that buy. They may buy online or they may buy offline, but they buy. And the newest research shows that they spend more than people who don't search—10% more in the case of home electronics buyers. So what does that mean to you?

You might read that and say to yourself, "I knew it—searching causes people to spend more. They read more information and buy more stuff or more expensive stuff." That might be true, but it could also be that people willing to spend more tend to do more research. The truth is undoubtedly somewhere in the middle.

But it doesn't matter.

What does matter is what you do about it. Regardless of whether searchers buy more or big buyers search more or both, you need to ensure that you have the information available and findable that cause people to make decisions to buy your product. For your business, what is the kind of information that gets customers' attention? That overcomes their objections? That persuades them to buy?

Think about what the truly distinct differentiators are for what you sell. And remember that the real marketing definition of a differentiator is something unique about your product that customers care about. What do your customers care about? How do you get their attention about it and get them to believe what you are saying? That's what gets them to make a purchase decision, whether it is on the Web or offline.

Too often, marketers shy away from providing the most attention-getting and persuasive information. Do you have information on your site about the problems that your product solves? Not just specifications and fancy features, but real problems? Do you tell stories of how these problems were solved for real customers with your product?

What this study really tells you is that people who buy more do so because they have better information. Whether they were predisposed to buy more and thus needed to research more, or whether they researched and learned more, this causing them to buy more, your job as a marketer is the same. Provide the rich, persuasive content that explains the value of your offering to the customer and make sure they can find that content.

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Do you have a success story for how you did it wrong quickly? Enter my latest contest and win a copy of my new book, called (wait for it) Do It Wrong Quickly, coming out this fall.

Posted by mikemoran at 7:30 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 9, 2007

Could You Get a #1 Search Result?

I've often joked to audiences that I can get them a #1 search result for their Web site as long as they let me pick a search term obscure enough. I can get the top spot, but it won't actually bring them any business because no one searches for that term. But search engines so rarely agree on #1 results, that you may actually have it within your reach for valuable search terms. If you typically use the same search engine for all your searches, it might surprise you to learn that search engines rarely agree on what the top results are. What's more, that trend will only accelerate as time goes on. If search engines don't provide the same answer to the same question, how can that be good for a search marketer? Read on.

First, let's understand what the search study, released last month, really says. Out of almost 20,000 searches studied, the top four search engines agreed on the top result less than 4% of the time, and never once agreed on all top three results (regardless of the order of those results). Just four years ago, the search engines agreed on the top result nearly twice as often.

So what does this mean to a search marketer?

At the very least, it means you have more chances to win. If you think about each #1 result for a search term as having one winner, you have more winners when the search engines disagree. If you already have the #1 result in Google, this is bad news for you, but most of us don't, so it provides hope.

Obviously, not all #1 results are created equal—you'd rather have the top result in Google, who handles 50% of all searches, than in Ask.com, which tops out around 3%. But it's better to have the #1 result for 3% of the searches than for none. What this survey is saying is that more sites have a chance for top rankings than you might think.

More interesting than the fact that results differ is why they differ. Obviously, differences in each search engine's relevance ranking formula is a big factor, but sometimes the engines differ just because they have indexed different content. If one search engine favors more video results than another, then videos have a better chance of breaking through on that search engine. This aspect of search differences got a huge push when both Ask.com and Google went to integrated search results (Google calls it universal search) that inject many more kinds of content in the results, beyond the traditional list of Web pages. Blogs, podcasts, video, and more now dot the search results.

Search marketers would be wise to take advantage. If you can create really good answers to questions—very compelling content–you have a much better chance of breaking through now than ever before. The search results are more varied than ever and you can be the page at the top of some search engine somewhere.

In addition, personalized search is creeping up—at that point different searchers will have different results for the same search in the same search engine. Think about how many more chances there are for that top result.

Chris Anderson's Long Tail caused search marketers to focus on more rare search terms in the quest to get top results. This study, and the trend to personalized search, shows that there is a long tail of searchers, too. Search results are becoming fragmented, favoring search marketers whose content is the perfect answer not just for a search term, but for a search term for a particular searcher in a particular search engine.

Search marketing is becoming less a winner-take-all business (get the #1 result for the popular term across all search engines) and becoming more a game of very targeted marketing. Is your search marketing strategy ready for the change?

Posted by mikemoran at 4:13 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 6, 2007

How Do You Make Online Panels Easy?

Yesterday, I wrote about online panels, giving my opinion that online panels are great but that you ought to use them to answer questions about why customers did something, not try to find out what they did. Online panels are becoming easier than ever to set up, so there's no reason to hold back from doing one of your own.

I didn't know much about online panels a few months ago, but I've had several folks help me learn more since then. Because online panels are so much cheaper than focus groups, you can ask the same kinds of questions to many more people, so you can get quantitative results at a fraction of the cost of large-scale focus groups. You could, of course, get quantitative results from surveys, but well-designed online panels let your customers interact with each other, as they can in focus groups, so you get the best of both worlds.

But it might seem daunting to set up online panels. Fear not.

I recently reviewed a demo from Vision Critical, who provides online panels through a tool called Panel+ Pro. This tool (and I am sure there are others out there) allows marketers to easily create a branded secure portal where you can invite participants to individual studies you want to conduct. You can create surveys and see the results right online. Or you can invite respondents to interact with each other in a forum.

Regardless of what you want to find out, resist the temptation to find out what people do on your site—use your Web metrics system for that—but if you thought that getting underneath your customers actions was beyond you, well, it's not. If you need to find out what is causing the behaviors of your customers, you can do it without a whole lot of work.

In fact, you can "do it wrong quickly"—maybe creating an online panel will be your entry in the latest contest. Think about your entry today!

Posted by mikemoran at 5:16 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 5, 2007

How Do You Use Online Panels?

A while back, I wrote about online panels, a kind of focus group on steroids that companies are using to both lower their research costs and to scale survey data to be more quantitative than typical focus groups. These online panels allow more participants than focus groups, offer better representation of your target market, and scale as easily as surveys, usually at lower cost. What's not to like?

Nothing, if you use online panels properly.

My worry, perhaps unwarranted, is that old-time marketing folks will mistake an online panel's ability to answer the "why" question for an ability to answer the "what" question. In other words, I mistrust people to tell you what they will really do in all situations, but I do trust them to tell you why they would do something.

We know that people don't always do in real life what they say they will do when questioned in an artificial situation. They may be embarrassed to say they don't know what they'd do, or feel uncomfortable saying what they would really do, or perhaps they don't know. As an example, no one surveyed would ever tell you that they prefer to click on more pages to get the right answer, but in reality they sometimes do. We know from tracking real users that people prefer several "easy" clicks—ones that require little thought—to one very painful click where they must read a lot and then take a guess at the right thing to do next. But they would always tell you on a survey that they prefer fewer clicks; we know what they really do only by watching clicks from real users on live sites.

So use online panels for what they are good for—brainstorming ideas or getting to the "why" behind what you know people do. But use real activity tracking to see "what" people do. Let your metrics system prove what people do in real life and then use online panels to find out why they do—between them, you'll have the information you need to identify areas for change and change them. Because in the old days we had no mechanism to find out "what" customers were doing, I don't want us to sieze upon online panels as the only information we need—let's use all the information available: both activity and survey data.

Posted by mikemoran at 9:43 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

July 3, 2007

A Do It Wrong Quickly Success Story

Reader Anna Green challenged me to write my own success story to illustrate just what kind of entries I am expecting for my new Do It Wrong Quickly contest. So here goes.

You Can't Plan a Guess

Back in 1999, I was given the assignment of improving the site search facility for a Fortune 10 Web site and found that the search results were worldwide, even though we knew that searchers wanted results primarily from the country site they lived in (that information was in their own language and sold products using their currency).

Many searchers looked for product information and got back the wrong stuff. Imagine that you are looking for a brand name product but get back information in a language you don't speak, priced in money you don't have, that uses an electrical plug you can't use. You're likely to shop somewhere else.

The simple solution would be to show the pages for the right country at the top, showing more generic pages lower in the list (in case the country pages don't answer the question). The problem was that the pages were not tagged with the country they were from, so changing the search engine to look for pages tagged with the right country would eliminate most of the right answers from the search results. (If you tell the search engine to find pages tagged with a certain country, but 80% of the pages that really belong to that country are not tagged, those 80% won't be found by search when they should be.)

Both of my predecessors in the job decided the best way to fix this problem was to embark on a company-wide page tagging campaign. With a couple of million pages, this was a difficult task and a slow one. Neither person had come anywhere near succeeding, and they were considered failures at the job of improving search when they left.

Many meetings had ensued over how to tag the pages, but no real consensus emerged. Small countries that had only a few hundred pages said they had only one person responsible for the Web site and had no time to spend days tagging pages. Large countries with dozens or hundreds of Web employees said they had no time to encode tens or hundreds of thousands of pages. No one could figure out want way to write a program to accurately tag the pages. Studies, task forces, and meetings continued to search for the right answer, but no one could agree on it.

I resolved to find an easier and faster way of solving the problem than hand-tagging two million pages. I first looked at the URL patterns of the pages, hoping to see that all country pages used a similar pattern. Many did, but many did not. Dozens of different patterns existed for pages within the same country, with some important country pages that had no real pattern. And we had no pattern at all for US pages—there was no way to tell a "global" page from a US country page. It seemed hopeless to come up with a set of patterns that would work perfectly.

Tagging the pages was the right way to do it, but slow. Coming up with an all-encompassing set of URL patterns would be a right way too, but seemed impossible. I decided to do it wrong quickly.

I convened a meeting of the representatives of the Web sites for each country. I showed them the patterns that I had discovered and my team created a tool with which they could add more patterns for their countries. I set up a test search server that respected those country patterns and they quickly saw that the search results were better, even though Web pages from the wrong countries still often showed up in the test search results.

Each time someone found an erroneous result in the test, we added that pattern to its proper country list. So if we were searching within France pages and found one from Canada, we added the pattern of that page to the definition for Canada. Over a period of a few weeks, the results became remarkably good, as we continually updated the now complex set of patterns each time we saw an error.

That still left the US. We decided to create a similar set of patterns to define all "global" pages (pages that were considered to be good answers for every country), and to treat as US pages every page that did not fit any of our other patterns. So, any page not identified as a country page or a global page was treated as a US page.

We launched this new search facility within a few months and left the feedback mechanism in place, so that country representatives could forever maintain the URL patterns to tweak their country results whenever they saw an error. Our customer searchers loved the new precision of finding just the pages within their countries, with surveys telling us that 5% more searchers found what they were looking for—this for a minimal investment in people's time, almost no technology, and no costly content changes.

Although it seemed like a dumb idea to some at the time because it was not the "right" way to fix the problem, doing it wrong quickly made a huge difference. The patterns that made up each country's URLs were not planned, so we couldn't plan how we were going to guess what they were. We just had to experiment—we had to do it wrong quickly and then fix it.

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So that's my example of a "do it wrong quickly" success story for my new Do It Wrong Quickly contest. Yours doesn't have to be this long, but it should have some of the same elements. You should go after a real problem that requires experimentation to be solved really well and you should show that it worked. Now your problem could be as simple as having sales lower than you wanted—it need not be as specific as mine. Thanks in advance for your submissions.

Posted by mikemoran at 7:00 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

July 2, 2007

We Have a Winner and a New Contest

We have a winner in the first Do It Wrong Quickly contest. It was a far easier decision than I had anticipated, because I got exactly one entrant! So, I think I probably did this contest wrong quickly. Now it's time for me to dust myself off and try again.

Thanks to all who gave me feedback on my first contest—I hope this new one seems better to you. It focuses on success stories rather than ratting out the boss, which folks said is more likely to generate response. So, have a gander at the newest Do It Wrong Quickly contest.

For those on the edge of their seats, here is the sole (and winning) entry to our first contest:

Just because it's in the budget doesn't mean you can spend it

I used to work at a company where although I was the Advertising Director on paper, I was not allowed to direct or otherwise make any decisions. I had to filter through hundreds of vendor calls, proposals, and ideas, choose the ones I thought would give us the best ROI and CPL, and run them through the VP of Ops (when he wasn’t travelling) who had the final say of yes or no. It took me over a year to learn that 1.) if anything had a cost of over $500 he’d veto it, 2.) if it was not a direct lead-generator he’d veto it, 3.) if it wasn’t a “traditional” advertising source (TV, radio, or print) he’d veto it, and 3.) he’d routinely pull advertising in sources with poor conversions, and 4.) was fond of saying “just because it’s in the budget doesn’t mean you can spend it” (WTF?).

In a series of bad decisions over a 60-day period, he had pulled the print lead sources from an entire market for “poor conversions” after 2-week runs without getting any quality feedback from sales, cut spending for the media sources that were converting to save money, and would not entertain any alternative endeavors for indirect lead-generation. Finally, we maxed out our Internet lead-generation quantity because he capped our CPL too low. 2 weeks later, I was the one fired for non-performance and was told I wasn’t doing my job.

To date, this has been the best example of “Do It Wrong Quickly” that I have experienced in my professional life. It certainly taught me a valuable lesson on how NOT to plan, observe, and make decisions based on feedback and data.

Posted by mikemoran at 3:20 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Search Marketing 2.0

I know, I know, calling everything 2.0 is the flavor of the month, so color me guilty. But I did it for a reason (not like usual) because it's Web 2.0 that is in many ways causing Search 2.0. Don't know what I mean by Search 2.0? Then check out the July Biznology newsletter to see what's happening in the big picture of paid and organic search trends.

Posted by mikemoran at 3:00 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack