Biznology Blog: April 2008

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April 30, 2008

Using the Internet for Global Marketing

I had the chance to speak to 150 folks belonging to the World Trade Center (yes, it's an organization) yesterday in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania on the subject of marketing your business globally. I've appeared there twice before and am always struck by the mix of local businesses (large and small) and foreign embassies promoting trade with their countries. You can download my slides on Internet Marketing Trends, but I wanted to talk a bit about what I heard there and what I told the audience.

Rick Andrews, head of international marketing at Hershey, the candy company, gave a great opening keynote on how Hershey has expanded internationally. His talk was full of good advice for how to reach emerging markets in traditional ways. Clearly, Hershey can't market chocolate bars to Chinese and Indian consumers unless they engage the local distribution channels and mass media. Rick explained to the audience how they selected their markets to focus on the growing South American and Asian markets, avoiding the saturated European market that has little growth and entrenched competitors.

After listening to Rick, it was clear to me that Hershey knows what it's doing. It was also clear to me that most businesses, especially smaller businesses, have no hope of emulating Hershey. Not because Rick's advice was wrong—it was spot on—but because most small businesses can't afford the market research, the distribution, the local feet on the street, and the advertising required to expand internationally the traditional way. The traditional way still works, of course, but there are new ways that are accessible to more businesses.

In my closing keynote for the conference, that's what I talked about. The Internet allows many small businesses to expand internationally because most of what you do is free. It takes time, creativity, and energy, but not much money, which puts it within reach of many businesses.

Now, not every business is primed to expand using the Internet. As I've written before, small businesses must specialize to succeed on the Web, and international success is no different. In fact, the broader the appeal you want geographically, the more narrow your niche must be.

You must also ensure that your customers are online. It's more than looking at each country's Internet penetration statistics—your customers might be online when most of the country isn't. (This is true for many B2B opportunities.) Or you might reach customers through mobile even though they have no computers at home. Research your specific target market in the country that you are considering.

But don't stop your research at Internet access. Use the Internet to understand what your customers' problems are in your new targeted market. Because you can't afford expensive focus groups and traditional market research techniques, use Web 2.0 conversations to see what customers are talking about. What complaints do they post on message boards? Who are the bloggers for that industry in that country? What ratings and reviews do existing competitors get? This customer feedback is all available for free and will help you learn how to position your product to meet needs your competitors don't. That helps you specialize even more.

You also need to have a business that can handle being marketed from a remote country. Your Web site must be your marketing and sales vehicle to do things really cheaply. If not, you are back into the more expensive sales rep/distribution network models that have been out of reach for many businesses.

If your business fits the above criteria, then the hard work begins. You must craft a Web site that can sell in the target language and currency. You must ship direct. You must have customer service to handle problems. And, most of all, you must make your site persuasive and trustworthy.

If you can do all of that, you have a chance to expand overseas for very little money. Try it in one country and see how it works. You might find your way to new markets that fatten your bottom line.

Posted by mikemoran at 2:49 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 29, 2008

Marketers Becoming Web Marketers: Get Out There

Yesterday, I enjoyed a return engagement at the Online Marketing Update at the University of Virginia's Darden School for Business in Charlottesville. (You can download my slides that describe how Web marketing is still marketing.) Just as with my first appearance in October, I was struck by the great mix of attendees, ranging from well-known speakers to marketing professors to real business practitioners and MBA students. They promised the students that they'd learn as much from their colleagues as from the speakers, and I did, too.

I had lunch with a marketer from another large company like me, and we commiserated about how difficult it is to stay focused on what's going on outside our companies when so much is happening inside. If you work for a large company, you might have noticed the same thing.

It's easy to talk yourself into spending the bulk of your time leading fellow employees and influencing colleagues to get your company to do something, instead of getting out in the world and finding out what's going on (and what your customers want). This is a classic "big company" disease, but I've seen it in many medium-sized companies, too.

This kind of insularity has never been good for a company, but it is even more dangerous now, in such a time of change. If you've found yourself caught unawares of big changes in your customers' tastes or new techniques, maybe you're not putting yourself out there enough.

It was a good conversation, and one that I probably would not have had if I was in any other place yesterday. It's also one that probably no one else at Darden had yesterday, because they found people to connect with on their problems.

Not everyone can come to a program like this at Darden (but do it if you can). If you can't, you need something else. You need to find a place where people have similar problems to yours. You need to get out and talk to your customers. You need to be reading what is going on in your profession.

If you don't—if you just spend your time talking to others within your company—then you're just hearing reflections of what you said yesterday. Remember that you need to keep your mind open if anything new is going to get in.

Posted by mikemoran at 11:48 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

April 28, 2008

Software as a Service (SaaS) is a Mesh

Everyone is talking about Microsoft's Live Mesh, a new way to connect data and applications inside your computer to other devices on the Web. While everyone else talks about Microsoft today, I'd like to remind people that Google has staked out some interesting ground already.

Microsoft tries to bring PC applications online while Google, meanwhile, has been trying to bring the Web offline, which is another way to do essentially the same thing. Not content with waiting for HTML 5, when browsers will cache online apps for offline use, Google has been pushing Google Gears, which does the same thing but is available today.

Google appears to be building its own apps, but also relying heavily on partnerships with leaders in SaaS. While last year there were rumors that Google would buy Salesforce.com, what has emerged is a more complex series of deals that have brought the companies into strategic alignment. Perhaps these small alliances are a harbinger of a merger to come, but Google might want to make similar alliances with other vendors and remain more neutral.

Salesforce.com clients can already benefit from AdWords spots that automatically lead to a contact form that can be tracked by their Salesforce.com system. Google can also display Salesforce.com information from within its Google Search Appliance. Salesforce.com has supported Google's OneBox initiative and is featured prominently as a partner.

Salesforce.com has its roots in CRM, but has been working to expand to a SaaS platform through its AppExchange marketplace, now backed by its Force.com SaaS platform environment. Now, Salesforce.com has added Google as a partner to its SaaS platform, a major coup.

This month, both companies announced some clever integration between Salesforce.com and Google Apps, so that office application activity is trackable within the Salesforce.com system. The integration itself is offered free, but Salesforce.com charges for Google Apps support, nicely solving Salesforce's problem of how to make money on this and Google's problem of how to provide support to businesses that demand it. A win-win-win for Salesforce.com, Google, and their customers.

So, what's next? An ad-based model for a free or low-cost Salesforce.com offering? Another big partner, such as Intuit, who has been signing up so many small businesses to QuickBooks Online? Whatever it is, SaaS (and other forms of cloud computing) will continue to make headlines, and Google will make as many of them as Microsoft.

Posted by mikemoran at 3:11 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

April 25, 2008

Computers Don't Work

I always like to remind people that they will be far less frustrated with technology if they just remind themselves of a simple truth, "Computers don't work." I myself was painfully reminded of this when my blog was unceremoniously knocked off the air the last two days by a problem I still don't understand. But it helps us to remember that technology, while something we all depend on, is amazingly fragile. It's best to think ahead about our technology dependencies, so that we are not overly dependent on one outage becoming a crisis.

On Wednesday, I was in the middle of writing a post when I started getting server errors from Movable Type. We hadn't changed anything, so I wasn't sure what was wrong. My wife asked me if I had checked the permissions (no) and she found that our permissions for the MT script were revoked. I opened a ticket with my Web host, Lunarpages, who responded with an e-mail explaining that the script was turned off because it was consuming three gigabytes of memory on my little old shared server plan.

Three gigabytes of memory sure seemed like a lot to me for a script that was being run a few times a day by one person. (I am old enough to have written programs that ran in four kilobytes, so even the concept of megabytes still seems like a lot to this fossilized coder.) I clearly understood why they had to turn it off—it might have taken down the server if left unchecked. I was seeing reports of spam comment attacks around the Internet and wondered whether it was related.

But I didn't know what to do and neither did Lunarpages. My wife and I were the ones who originally installed Movable Type, so it's not their problem to fix what's wrong. So, in the face of such fragile technology holding my site together, I did what any good techie would do, I turned to more technology. I began doing Google searches that turned up nothing promising. Then, almost in desperation, I turned to Twitter.

I began to Twitter about the problem (here's my handle), at first to just explain to people why they weren't getting the normal daily post, but also realizing that someone might help. I received some helpful information, but then got a surprise—an e-mail reply from a Movable Type product manager offering to contact Lunarpages to help out (which he did). I haven't pieced together the whole story of what was wrong and how it was fixed, but they eventually isolated the problem and turned the scripts back on.

As a customer of these companies, I walked away feeling impressed. If Lunarpages had not been on the ball, my whole site could have been taken down by this problem. And even though it wasn't their responsibility to fix the program I installed, between they and Movable Type, that is what they did. I sure had no hand in changing anything on my site to make it work. I was also impressed that Movable Type is monitoring us Tweeple to try to help. (I've asked if they'd like to do an interview to explain how they do it and what the results are, so stay tuned.)

But I also found the need to calm myself down during the whole thing. When you have so many subscribers that you think are waiting for your golden posts each day, it feels like a crisis to be off the air. But it's not.

I don't want to trivialize the problems involved in Internet marketing or minimize the real frustration that all of us feel when things don't work. I felt it myself. But I did realize that I needed to take a chill pill and let people help me (and even be grateful to them afterwards that they did so much they didn't have to do).

After all, if folks didn't read my fabulous posts for two days, I bet they found something else to do with their time. Nobody died. No one went out of business. It was just part of living in an imperfect world, and the technology parts of the world are far more imperfect than the rest, I think. We're still marveling at the fact that Frankenstein moves at all and we haven't focused on how god awful ugly he is—yet.

So, don't be so reliant on any technology to the point that an outage for a day or two is really a crisis. If you are that dependent, you need a backup, because eventually it's gonna fail. What would you do if your blog was out of commission for a couple of days? Or your laptop died? Or you Web site got hacked? Or your e-mail provider went out of business? Or you dropped your Blackberry down a sewer grate?

Think about it now and make it less of a crisis then. And just remember that computers don't work. Be happy every day when some of this stuff works out and don't stress over when it doesn't. Because sometimes it won't.

Posted by mikemoran at 12:48 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 22, 2008

Simon Says, "Be Creative"

My son Dwight entered a room with mirrors on each opposing wall, fascinated by the sight of an unending set of his own reflections. And he did what nine-year-olds tend to do: he started making motions in the mirror and watching "all the Dwights" copy him. But then, with a twinkle in his eye, he straightened himself up, and in a commanding voice intoned, "Simon says 'Put your hands on your head,'" while making the motion himself. He nodded approvingly at the other Dwights, and then, while making a new motion, commanded, "Put your hands in the air." Without missing a beat, he pointed at the other Dwights and yelled, "You're all out!"

Funny? I thought so, but then again, it's my kid.

But it got me to thinking about how often I run into "Simon Says" cultures in the corporate world. Not long ago I presented to a very large company about how to improve their Internet marketing. During the presentation, the ranking executive continually interrupted me to tell me either that what I was saying was wrong, or that it was obvious.

Now, if I thought it was wrong I wouldn't say it. (Obviously.) If I thought it was obvious it would be wrong to say it. So, clearly I wasn't pleasing this executive in this presentation. (Let's call him Simon.)

The funny thing, however, is that the rest of his staff appeared to be listening with rapt attention, and afterwards they went out of their way to tell me how helpful it was and how much they appreciated my help. I found it strange that none of them had attempted to say these things during the presentation, when it would have been quite helpful. Simon probably made the event less helpful for everyone there.

As I gained more experience with this company, I found that Simon was attempting to create a "Simon Says" culture. He had tried to hire people just like him and then commanded his reflections to do his bidding. And when they all did something that turned out to be wrong, that was their fault, of course.

I wish this was something that I came across rarely in large corporations, but I find it far more often than I would like. Powerful personalities play Simon in their organizations and command the rest to take certain actions. I often hear it said that Simons are good at running organizations where "command and control" is paramount, but I don't think there are many jobs like that left, and I find Simons in a lot more places than those.

Increasingly, we don't need commands. And we certainly don't need anyone telling us, "You're all out" when we make a mistake. We need to be creative in the face of changing circumstances. And we won't be able to "do it wrong quickly" if we are put out of the game the first time we are wrong.

Lest I appear overly critical, I need to admit that I have caught myself behaving like a Simon at times. I have been the person who is sure that he is right. I have been the one ordering people around and then frustrated with them when things don't work out. I hope that I have caught myself in time, mostly because people were brave enough and kind enough to let me know that I was screwing up.

What about where you work? Are you a Simon sometimes? Is that working for you? Or are you finding that people are not as creative and as freewheeling as you'd like them to be. If people don't "think outside the box," maybe you need to stop sitting on the box.

Or maybe you work for a Simon. If you do, you might need to decide to confront Simon when it's important, or you might want to go find a new game to play. Because it's only a matter of time before an unreconstructed Simon tells you, "You're out."

Posted by mikemoran at 1:36 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

April 21, 2008

Search Marketing on the Cheap

The great thing about search marketing is that it doesn't cost much money. The problem is that you need to know what you are doing. To help close that gap, I wanted to highlight some tips from my recent article in Revenue Magazine on Skinflint Search Marketing which provides a subset of the advice of the Skinflint Internet Marketing section of my Web site. (If you subscribe to Revenue Magazine—it's free—you'd have seen this article in print several months ago—it's just been posted online last week.)

Posted by mikemoran at 3:44 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 18, 2008

Search Consultant Comparison Engine, SEMCompare, Answers Blog Critics

Internet marketing experts often advise companies to open up their marketing to embrace ratings and reviews, but the search marketing industry has been in an uproar the past few weeks when SEMCompare set out to review search consulting companies themselves. Some accused search agencies of not being able to take their own medicine, while others pronounced SEMCompare fatally flawed because it is susceptible to being gamed in a highly competitive industry. I decided to interview two leaders of SEMCompare to see what they had to say.

Matt Alland, Director of Business Development, and Boris Mordkovich, Director of Operations, responded to my questions by e-mail. The picture that emerges is of a nascent operation that is still finding its way. To their credit, they seem to be paying attention to the critics and trying to make changes to improve the service—time will tell if they can improve it enough to win the critics over. Let's hear what Matt and Boris have to say.

Me: How do you describe SEMCompare and what is its relationship is to Search Marketing Standard magazine?

SEMC: SEMCompare is a new platform for people to share their past or current experiences with various search engine marketing agencies. It gives people the ability to post reviews of the firms they've worked with or read reviews posted by other clients. We strive to become a research destination for anybody considering hiring an SEM agency, whether they already have somebody in mind that they want to research further or they are looking for a few potential companies to consider.

In terms of its relationship to Search Marketing Standard, SEMCompare is a fully separate entity. While it was created by some of the same people, its run with its own staff as an independent company.

Me: How did you get the idea for SEMCompare? How is it different from the Marketing Sherpa report that tracks search marketing firms?

SEMC: We actually got the idea from our own visitors. We were constantly approached by people asking us if we knew anything about this or that SEM firm or if we could recommend somebody to them. Ironically, many other people also approached us and shared the experiences they've had with various search marketing firms—good and bad.

It was difficult to be on the sidelines and see that there was quite a bit of information out there, but people had no way to share and communicate it to each other.

All of this seeded the idea for what eventually became SEMCompare—a platform for people to share their experiences about various search marketing agencies.

The concept of the site is quite different from the Marketing Sherpa report or other ranking sites out there. The problem that we saw with the existing ranking systems is that it was never quite clear what those rankings were based on. In most cases, they hire somebody that never actually worked with any of these companies to rate them. It's understandable that the criteria will always be somewhat subjective, but even then—it's very difficult to gauge the performance of a company while being on the outside.

We felt that only the actual clients of SEM firms had the insight and knowledge on the performance of a particular firm, so we wanted to design our platform on that. At SEMCompare, we do not praise or criticize any companies—rather we provide a forum for people to evaluate companies themselves.

Me: How many firms do you have ratings for so far?

SEMC: At this point, we have approximately 175+ firms in our database and the number is increasing. One interesting observation is that there were a lot of smaller—boutique or local—SEM firms that were reviewed that many people never even heard of. So, hopefully, this will help some of those smaller, but quality firms to get the visibility and exposure they deserve.

Me: Given how competitive the search marketing business is, do you have any safeguards in place to prevent ethically-challenged SEOs from boosting their own ratings or slamming the competition?

SEMC: Absolutely—that's one of those things that keeps us up at night. But it is something that we take very seriously and tried to address on many levels.

Just to give you a few examples:

• In order to submit a review, you need to use and verify a corporate-based email address. In other words, we do not accept any reviews from @gmail, @hotmail and such. This feature is useful because it prevents SEM agencies from submitting reviews for themselves (on behalf of their clients) because they would not be able to verify the submission. It also makes it more difficult for somebody to post a negative review for somebody else.
• We require a company name and a website URL for every review that's posted. The company name (along with the full name of the reviewer) is posted right next to the review itself. You mentioned a concern about SEO companies slamming their competitors. By displaying the company name of each reviewer, each SEM company can see whether the reviews have come from their own clients and if not, they can dispute it.
• We have developed and put in place a fraud-checking system that prevents people from submitting multiple reviews. If an agency or somebody attempts to submit multiple reviews for themselves or their competitors, all of them will be caught and will not be posted.
• All of the reviews are manually approved by our staff. If anything suspicious is submitted, it will be investigated further before going live.

We realize that our system is not perfect, but it was important to start somewhere and work your way from there. So, over time, through feedback of our users and the industry, we'll continuously improve it.

Me: You've come under some criticism from the blogosphere. How do you respond to what people are saying?

SEMC: The response from the industry has actually been very helpful. Based on the feedback, we discovered and implemented a few things that the community felt would be necessary for this site to succeed, such as removing the anonymity of the posters, creating an ability for SEM firms to respond to reviews (still in the works), and so on.

Additionally, based on the discussions, we decided that it would be best to collect more information from the reviewers in order to provide the context and background for the reviews.

For example, we plan on collecting additional information, such as the length of the contract, industry of the reviewer and so on. Somebody working with an SEO company for 2 months can have a very different experience than somebody working with them for 2 years and we want the reviews to reflect that.

Me: What is the business model for SEMCompare?

SEMC: Our business model is powered by a separate side service on the site called VendorMatch. This service connects businesses looking to hire an SEM firm with the agencies that are right for them by allowing people to submit requests for proposals. We generate revenue through the partners that participate in this program.

We wanted to come up with the best business model that would not affect the quality and credibility of the reviews and we felt that this makes the most sense. It's important to note that VendorMatch is run separately from the reviews section and any vendors participating in the program do not get any special treatment when it comes down to the reviews.

Me: How does it work?

SEMC: We have a lot of visitors coming to the site that haven't yet selected any SEM firms, so we wanted to make their research process faster. Through the "Match Me" section, they have an option to get matched up with up to 5 companies simultaneously.

They fill out a detailed questionnaire outlining their specific project needs and, based on that, our system matches them with up to 5 firms that best fit their needs. Those firms review the request, put together a proposal and contact the user.

Me: Do you have any plans for adding information about a company's certifications or other factual data?

SEMC: Yes. We're always looking for new ways to make the site more useful to our users. As the site grows and expands, we would like to add more ways to give consumers insights into the thousands of providers out there.

While the site has started with the premise of just being a review platform, we would like to take a broader approach and make it even more useful for people to compare and evaluate companies. We plan on adding more information about the firms, such as the number of their employees, location, certifications, interviews with the top executives, and so on.

Me: Why should people looking for a search marketing consultant use SEMCompare?

SEMC: For those people that have already decided on potential SEM firms that they are considering, they should use SEMCompare as a research tool to learn what the past and current clients have said about those particular firms. It shouldn't necessarily be their sole determining factor, but it can definitely play an important role—especially if there is a trend among multiple reviews for that specific company.

On the other hand, people that want to hire an SEM agency, but don't have any specific ones in mind, can use our VendorMatch service to get matched up with multiple firms at once. It makes the process easier, faster and can actually save them money.

At the end of the day, we want to help visitors get background information, learn more about the companies and make a better, more educated decision.

Me: What do you see as your biggest challenge?

SEMC: One of the main challenges right now is to get more reviews into the database. So far, the response has been quite encouraging, but there is still a way to go.

The usefulness and reliability of the site increased when the companies listed have multiple reviews written about them. After all, with multiple reviews, you can discover certain trends in the performance of a particular firm and make a more educated decision.

Me: What are your plans for the future?

Well, it would be nice to buy out Google one day.

But more realistically, our goal is to make SEMCompare the go-to source for search marketing firm research. We think that there is a place for a review site in this industry and that it can deliver a lot of value to the consumers. So over time, we'll work to become that type of a destination.

Me: Thanks, Matt and Boris for taking the time to explain your story to my readers.

Posted by mikemoran at 2:18 PM

April 17, 2008

Marketing Research 2.0

I enjoyed speaking today to over 150 people at the Marketing Research Association annual meeting in Philadelphia on the subject of Market Research 2.0 (slides can be found here). We discussed how market researchers should be expanding into user generated content and Web metrics, so they can help companies sort through the news from the noise in market information. As usual, I learned something when one of the participants asked me a question at the end of my presentation that I had never considered before. I hope you are interested, too.

It was such an incisive question that the first time around I didn't even understand it. (Some expert, huh?) A market researcher stood up and asked, "What role market researchers play in attracting user generated content, specifically ratings and reviews?"

This was a new idea to me.

Now, I am familiar with companies offering incentives to get the ball rolling. In an interview for my book, David Seifert, Director of Direct Marketing Operations for outdoors retailer Bass Pro Shops, explained how they offered a discount coupon in return for a customer review in the early days of seeding their site. But market researchers know that incentives can be fraught with danger. (Nothing ever seems to be fraught with happiness.)

Market researchers understand that incentives, done improperly, can lead to the wrong people providing feedback. Or worse, they can lead to people providing any old feedback just to collect the incentive. Market researchers struggle with offering just the right incentive every time they conduct a survey or a focus group. The incentive must be just good enough to attract the right people, but not so good to attract the wrong people.

And here I was standing in a roomful of people who do incentives for market research for a living. Of course they have something to contribute. If you are figuring out how to jump-start your user-generated content, you could do a lot worse than to ask a market researcher to give you advice on the proper use of incentives.

Posted by mikemoran at 8:07 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

April 16, 2008

Tracking Offline Sales Back to Your Web Site

When I speak at conferences and other events, I frequently discuss how businesses without shopping carts can track their offline sales back to their Web sites. Only by doing so can these businesses truly know how much their Web site is worth, and by extension know how much to invest. Similarly, they can't know whether any individual change to their Web sites was an improvement or a regression without a way of keeping score. Most Web sites don't sell online, so if you've been struggling with how to tie offline sales back to the Web experiences that spawned them, read on.

In my talks, I help people to see that tying offline sales back to the Web is not a new problem—it's one marketers have struggled with for years. When you read an ad in a magazine that says to call this number and "Ask for Alice," do you really think there's an Alice? No, "Alice" is just the code name that tells the marketer which ad prompted the call, so that credit can be allocated and the best-performing ad venues can be repeated.

Likewise, the Web gives you similar opportunities. Auto manufacturers let you build your own car, choosing the exterior color, the leather interior, the GPS system, whatever you want right up to the point where you blow your budget. Then, you can print it out and bring it to your local dealer and say, "How much for one of these?" The car dealer marks down that you brought in the printout so that if you end up buying a car, the Web channel gets credit.

The key to tying offline sales to online activity is to find something people are willing to do. Why do customers willingly configure their cars online and bring printouts to the dealer? Because most people will do almost anything to spend less time interacting with a car salesman. If your customers actually like your sales people, you might have to offer them a discount coupon they can print from the Web or some other enticement.

Obviously, if your customers are willing to fill out contact forms with a phone number or an e-mail address, you can tie them to the Web. But many companies struggle when the customer decides to pick up the phone.

IBM sprinkles "Call me" buttons throughout the site, where pressing the button alerts the IBM phone specialist for that product to call the customer back, thus tying any resulting sale back to the Web. But you might guess that is a very high-tech and expensive approach that is beyond the means of most marketing budgets. What is a more low-tech approach?

I've often remarked that an easy way to tie offline sales back to the Web is to display a phone number on your Web site that appears nowhere else. That way, anyone who calls that number can be safely assumed to have come from your Web site.

But reader David Brooks, President of SPS Group, challenged me to go further. He reminded me of schemes that go far deeper than a single phone number for your entire Web site. As David put it, "While many people suggested a dedicated 800# for the purpose of tracking leads, a dedicated phone number allows you (at best) to track down to the channel level, not campaign or keyword."

David pointed out how online jewelry retailer ice.com has instrumented all of their paid search campaigns with a unique code that is passed along in a parameter in the URL as the searcher visits the site. If the searcher buys online, that code is captured and the metrics system knows which keyword converted.

But the interesting twist is what happens if the customer does not buy online. When ice.com displays any page on its site for that searcher, it also displays that tracking code, like so:

Why do this? Because if the searcher decides to call ice.com on the phone to complete the purchase, the operator asks for the code, so that purchase is tracked back to the keyword. Any JavaScript programmer could take this idea and produce a similarly simple script for your business:

Using this kind of technique could track your sales at the search keyword level, but it could be extended to any marketing tactic, ranging from banner ads to e-mail campaigns. Now remember, this only works if your operators ask for the code and your customers are willing to provide it. For ice.com, this code doesn't seem much different than being asked for the catalog number of the product they are buying, so customers don't resist this behavior.

For other kinds of businesses, you might need to treat that code as a "special offer," where providing the code results in a discount. Or, as David suggests, you could have the operator ask for the code to determine "where you are on our Web site." For many businesses, this might be enough to get the tracking you need.

If you have a different kind of business, you might need to be more clever. If, for example, you are selling a pricey B2B service, you don't want a phone interaction that resembles buying something from a catalog. But you could use this same JavaScript trick to track your customers anyway. Instead of displaying a code at the bottom of the page, you could have the JavaScript generate a different phone number for different keywords or different campaigns, for example.

This could be difficult or expensive in some situations, but if you own your own PBX you could certainly set aside a block of numbers for this. As an alternative, you could generate a single phone number with an extension and use the extensions to track different keywords or campaigns. The extensions don't need to really exist, but customers will dutifully enter them into your phone system for you to capture and then route them on to the same old phone center as always. David pointed out that Mongoose Metrics and VoiceStar have systems that generate phone numbers on the fly based on keywords and campaigns.

But why even stop there? Depending on your business, you might want to track individual people so that you can see what their exact session activity was on your Web site. Instead of generating a unique code for every keyword, you could generate a unique code for every visitor. If you have a very high-margin, low-volume business, this kind of tracking code be worth the time. Or maybe you have a high-powered personalized marketing approach that allows you to look at patterns of activity that resulted in conversions so that you can improve your experience over time.

Remember that building this into something that easily flows as part of your customer interaction is the most important thing. If customers don't take the action, you don't get the tracking. (Thanks, David, for contributing so much to this post.)

Posted by mikemoran at 1:45 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

April 15, 2008

Ikea Will Annoy You for $5

No, that's not their latest marketing campaign. It's something that over the weekend I learned is Ikea's company policy. Now maybe it's not fair for me to single out Ikea, because maybe any retail store would act the same way under the circumstances, but I don't think I would run a business this way. If you have a few minutes, sit back and I'll tell you a customer dissatisfaction story.

I have four kids and my daughters have the "good" bedrooms, because they don't have to share the way their two brothers do. But their rooms are small—my youngest daughter is in a 10'x9' room with a tiny closet. So she asked (nicely) if she could get a loft bed with a desk under it. I was hesitant until I saw that some of them are made of metal and don't cost $1000. We went to several stores, finally ending up at Ikea.

I had only been in an Ikea once before and I found it a bit strange. For the uninitiated, they have a path that you follow to walk through the store, so you have to look at everything they sell even if you just came in to buy something specific. (Yeah, I know they have shortcuts that let you knock some time off your walk, but it's still kind of weird to me.)

Ikea also sports a big sign when you walk in that explains how to shop there. Maybe it's my user experience background, but that seems like a red flag to me that you're doing something wrong. Like my granny used to say about a joke, "If you have to explain it, it's no good."

But I could overlook all of that quite easily if my daughter found some inexpensive furniture that she liked. In addition to the loft bed and desk, she needed to compensate for the woeful lack of closet space with an armoire or a wardrobe (or some other fancy name for a closet you buy from the furniture store). She's turning 13, so I know from the experience with her older sister that clothes will soon begin to multiply.

So, Ikea isn't my favorite store, but I told my daughter that "I will love Ikea if they have the furniture you like and it fits into our budget." They did. We picked out the desk/bed and the wardrobe and then went through the rigmarole of finding the warehouse and locating each bin for the myriad pieces we needed to lug onto the carts and push to the registers. Then we endured the self-checkout where we had to move around these immensely heavy boxes to scan them. It was a chore, but I told myself that we were at least saving money. (I do think I need to factor the subsequent chiropractor bills into our savings.)

Then we pushed two heavy flatbed carts out to the car and loaded up. While loading up, we discovered that we had two bags, not three, of the set of hinges for the armoire doors. We knew we had picked out three from the bin and we had grabbed one bag and scanned it three times (it said so on the receipt), but we could only find two bags. One of them must have dropped off the cart somewhere.

So, silly me, I went back to the service desk to let them know of my mistake, expecting they'd let me pick up a third $5 bag of hinges. But the person at the service desk was unmoved by our plight. She dutifully inspected the receipt and called security to see if anyone had turned in a bag of hinges from outside the store. I tried to explain that we had no idea whether the bag had fallen off after we left the store or while we were inside the store.

She became quite interested in this fact, saying that she needed to know whether it had fallen in the store or outside. I couldn't figure out why. I explained that we only have two bags and we paid for three, so it doesn't really matter where it fell.

She said that it did matter a great deal, because she has no way of knowing how many bags we had. She first suggested that we bring in the two bags to prove we didn't have three already (it was hard for my daughter to keep a straight face at this point), but eventually realized that wouldn't prove a whole lot. I offered to her to come out and look at my car so that she could see we have only two bags, but she told me that was impossible. She further went on to say that because I used self-checkout, there was no way to verify what I had bought. (So, because I saved Ikea money by using self-checkout, then I get tagged for the errors. Sweet.)

I was getting frustrated at this point and said, "Look, we just spent $739 in your store, so why would I be wasting my time trying to get a $5 bag of hinges?" She replied that "Ikea doesn't care how much you spend." (I think that would be news to Ikea's management.)

At this point, I thought it would be a good time to talk to her manager, but I realized that I was just getting upset and would be wasting even more time over $5, and it wasn't worth it to me. But I decided to tell our erstwhile customer service person one more thing: "I just want you to know that it's really stupid to annoy a customer that just spent $739 over a $5 bag of hinges." And she then said to me, "It's OK that you are mad."

At this point I was flummoxed. It wouldn't be OK with me if my customer was mad over $5, but she thinks it's perfectly fine because she has obviously been trained that it is more important to follow procedures than to use her common sense. See, I know it is possible that I come from a long line of hinge thieves who cleverly cover their crimes by purchasing hundreds of dollars of other items, but I suspect that there are more likely scenarios.

Like maybe I lost this one bag of hinges.

But I gave up at that point and trooped back to the bin in search of another bag. They were all out, which seemed like the capper to the whole story, at least until we got home and unloaded the car. Would you believe it? The third bag of hinges had been there all along, but we'd missed it when we were loading the car.

So, Ikea had annoyed me over nothing. They left me with an enduring memory of their mistrust for me and it wouldn't have cost them a dime. Because any company that had believed me and given me the $5 bag of hinges would have seen me race back to the store and return it when I found the original bag. If they had trusted me, I would have repaid that trust and I would have had an extremely powerful feeling of loyalty. It's just $5, so it's irrational, but I know myself.

But instead, Ikea has annoyed me for the sake of $5. So my first impression of Ikea is that they don't trust their customers and they don't lift finger one to make things easier when something goes wrong. They are more attached to their procedures than their relationships.

So, ask yourself what would have happened in your business in this situation. If a new customer that you did not know needed to be cut some slack, would your employees do that? Or do you have procedures against that? Would employees be rewarded for making the customer happy or punished for letting a customer "put one over" on them?

You need to ask yourself what's more important to you and make sure your employees know what you want. Otherwise they might be told that you don't care how much they spend and that it's OK that they are mad.

Posted by mikemoran at 4:02 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

April 14, 2008

How the Web Affects Advertising

I was lucky enough to appear on the Advertising Show on the radio last evening, discussing some of the important concepts that advertisers need to understand as they transition from traditional marketing to Internet marketing. The show has been posted for replay—I appear after the first segment for the remainder of the show (about one-fourth of the way through). I hope you enjoy it.

Posted by mikemoran at 2:20 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 11, 2008

Is Your Business Radically Transparent?

Andy Beal and Dr. Judy Strauss have a new book out with the great title Radically Transparent. It's a must-read for anyone concerned about their reputation, in these days of online conversations that can lift up or submerge your brand image in a matter of minutes. Marketers, PR folks, and just about anyone who works on the Internet need to understand the ideas in this book. I read it a couple of months ago as a preview copy that Andy sent me, but I wanted to get the published version in my hands before writing this review. It's everything I expected it to be from the preview.

There are lots of different kinds of books. Some are best at the big idea, but are short on tactical details. Others are chock-full of practical advice but lack real-world examples. It's rare to see a book that can execute on all three.

Radically Transparent is one of those unusual books that can give you the executive summary of a big change in the world, explain how you know how big it is for you, tell you what you can do to take advantage of this new world, and illustrate those points with scores of stories from real businesses grappling with this sea change.

You don't need to be an Internet expert to care about this book—it takes you step-by-step through what you need to know, whether you are a small business or a large corporation. The authors show you what is happening to cause this shift in the way we talk about companies, and take you through the tools you can use to monitor your online reputation, and more importantly, to influence it. There's even a chapter that helps you take these steps for your personal reputation.

Many good books get written each year—books that are important for some segment of marketers to read. This is one that every marketer should read. My advice is to read it now, before you need it, instead of after some crisis has befallen you. Because if you and your company are not aiming for radical transparency, it's just a matter of time before your customers force you into it.

Posted by mikemoran at 2:00 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

April 10, 2008

When You're Google, Knowledge Really Is Power

I seem to be writing about Google a lot lately because I keep seeing small things that I think will add up to big things. Recently, I discussed Google's strategy, noting all the ways that Google can learn activity information about Web surfers. I got an e-mail today, as a Google Analytics user, that gives me a reason to share my data.

Dear Google Analytics users,

We are writing to let you know about a change in our service offerings. If you have logged into your account recently, you may have noticed that you can now choose to share your Google Analytics data. By providing data sharing options, we hope to provide you with transparency, control, and new services based on your preferences.

To learn more about data sharing settings, visit our FAQs: http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?answer=87515

We're also happy to announce industry benchmarking as the first new feature available to those who opt to share their data. Benchmarking lets you compare your metrics against industry verticals.

To enable this optional new feature, an administrator on your account will need to make the following selections on the Google Analytics data sharing settings page:

1. Log into your account. You'll see the yellow data sharing settings box on the Analytics Settings page.

2. Click the "More data sharing options" link within the yellow box.

3. Select the second checkbox to specify that you want to share your data "Anonymously with Google products and the benchmarking service". You can also choose to share your data "With Google products only" to take advantage of advanced Google advertising products and services as they become available.

The industry benchmarking feature is currently in beta. Once you have enabled benchmarking, it may take up to two weeks before the categorized, aggregated and anonymized benchmarking data shows up in your reports.

For more information on the benchmarking service, visit our FAQs: http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/topic.py?topic=13909

In addition to the new benchmarking service, opting to share your data will also enable you to take advantage of new advanced Google products and services as they become available. We think these services will offer greater insight and sophistication to users who have opted to share their data. However, if you would prefer not to use these services, simply specify on the settings page that you don't want to share your data.

Sincerely,

The Google Analytics Team

If you follow the link in the letter, you'll find that there are new enhancements coming to the free Google services, such as Google Analytics and Google Website Optimizer. What I am learning, as I read this letter, is that Google is a lot smarter than me.

I've speculated in the past that as personalized search takes hold, Google will have a chance to sell search marketers data about where their pages ranked for certain queries, because Google is the only one who will know. I was thinking way too small.

Google's game is much smarter, because they are asking for something both more valuable and easier to agree to—quite a powerful combination. They want more data, which they "pay for" by providing you with more data that you want. Why do I expect that giving more data will be the price I pay to find out my average personalized search rankings?

My suspicion is that use of the data is more valuable to Google than anything they could get away with charging for it. The additional insight into surfer behavior and the knowledge of which pages on a site are more popular and which conversions seem to be most popular—it's a treasure trove for personalization, behavioral targeting, and probably other stuff that doesn't even have a name yet.

And I found myself willing to share my data because it doesn't cost any money and because I am genuinely curious about what information I am missing. I think many others will, too.

Posted by mikemoran at 1:59 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 9, 2008

What PR Professionals Need to Know About the Web

I was lucky enough to do the lunch keynote at the Bulldog Reporter Media relations Summit yesterday, with 500 PR professionals in attendance. The keynote was on What PR Professionals Need to Know About the Web (in addition to a panel session on social media), and there was some coverage here and here and here. But I found the other sessions to be quite interesting and I wanted to share my thoughts as I listened to the other speakers.

Robert Scoble did a great breakfast keynote—I jotted down several interesting ideas he had. He showed the attendees twittervision, where different Twitterers have their comments mapped from wherever they are in the world. He had some slides done with SlideRocket. But the most interesting thing I saw was what Robert called "a TV station in your pocket" when he pulled out is Nokia camera and started transmitting live video over the Internet through Qik.com.

Later in the day, Brian Kaminski of iProspect and Lee Odden of the Online Marketing Blog gave a great session on drawing traffic to your Web site.

Brian previewed some research on the clicks associated with blended search results pages, such as Google Universal Search. Brian showed that of all the new kind sof content added to the blended results page, news stories get the most clicks (38%), with images second (31%), and videos drawing 17%. Brian indicated that the dispartity in click rates is partially due to more news and image results than video results—he expected that video clicks will increase when more video results are shown.

Lee Odden followed up by emphasizing to PR pros how important search marketing is to public relations. He showed how half of all Web sites visit a corporate Web site or an online newsroom at least once a week. That's why it is so important for PR folks to optimize these content assets. Lee had a great chart that showed the different online PR techniques listed by Push and Pull. Push techniques include sending your content to wire services and RSS feeds, and having people pitch the stories to reporters and even directly to customers through social networks. Pull techniques include search-optimized press releases, your online newsroom, social media techniques, and traditional media coverage.

From the questions I got yesterday, PR pros seem willing to take a few chances to try things the Web way.

Posted by mikemoran at 6:03 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

April 8, 2008

Can You Handle Professional Embarrassment?

He looked like a busy businessman, nattily dressed in an expensive suit, carrying just a briefcase onto the short early morning flight from Charlotte to Raleigh. He was obviously going to a business meeting, probably with a customer. He was likely not thrilled to sit down next to someone with a young baby in his arms, expecting her crying might interrupt his work. My friend laughed a little as he remembered what enused as he held onto his little girl.

The flight was a rocky one—the turbulence made it feel a lot longer than the half hour flight time—and it was apparently too much for that little girl. As her father held her, she picked up her head, looked that businessman in the eye and proceeded to lose her breakfast all over him.

Oh my. My friend was, of course, apologetic, but that was probably cold comfort to that poor businessman, whose day has now taken quite a turn. He is in no shape to meet with the customer, has no change of clothes, and no time to fix the situation. One way or another, the customer will see what happened to him, which is embarrassing.

How would you handle that situation?

It's uncomfortable to even think about. You could call the customer and hope to delay the meeting to later in the day while you buy a new suit. You could dump your suit jacket and try to clean off your shirt and pants as best you can to get there on time, but you'll have to explain that this isn't your idea of a new cologne. Or quickly head to a dry cleaner or a laundromat to do your best to at least get the stink out. (Febreze anyone?) Maybe you can think of something else.

How many of you would cancel the meeting, because the whole situation is so uncomfortable?

We need to think about these questions because Internet marketing is forcing us to do things that might seem uncomfortable. We need to try things that we are not sure of. We need to be willing to be wrong on a regular basis. We must even live with the idea that occasionally we'll be very embarrassed over a particular dumb idea.

None of this is comfortable.

But so long as we keep reaching for our own comfort, and avoiding the experimentation we need to do, we'll never learn how to succeed at this newfangled Internet marketing. We'll never get past the embarrassment of not knowing what to do, or of doing it wrong. We'll never get to the benefits that come from getting feedback from our customers on what's working and what's not.

So, I know that you might want to cancel the meeting, but it's probably the worst idea of all of them right? If you'd like to cancel the Internet, I understand how you feel, but it's probably the worst idea of them all.

Staying out of Internet marketing just because it's uncomfortable just cedes a slew of customers to your competitors. The marketers who can handle discomfort know that sometimes the customer will see them covered with the Internet equivalent of baby barf. But it's better than not being seen at all.

Posted by mikemoran at 4:52 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 7, 2008

Are You Ignoring Internet Yellow Pages?

Frequently, when I talk to a small business person who has not yet begun any Internet marketing, I hear the same lament, "I heard it costs a lot of money." I always wonder who is saying these things—perhaps the Yellow Pages salesperson or the print shop that does the trade show brochures? It sure doesn't mesh with what I see every day, which is that Internet marketing is often cheap or even free. Today, let's focus on one more cheap Internet marketing tactic, the Internet Yellow Pages, in the latest addition to the Skinflint Guide to Internet Marketing.

Posted by mikemoran at 2:12 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 4, 2008

Micro Conversions, Mini-Conversions--Just Measure It

If you don't read the Occam's Razor blog by Avinash Kaushik, you don't know what you're missing. He had another great post last week, to help people identify how to measure more than Web sales as the conversion on their Web sites. He calls them micro conversions, to contrast with the macro conversion that a Web sale represents. I think he has a number of great points in the post, but I want to contrast his thinking with my own, in case my perspective feels a bit more comfortable to you. Whichever way you want to work, we both agree that you should focus on lots more than Web sales to judge your Web site's value.

Avinash is correctly pointing out that too many sites measure nothing more than Web sales, page views, and visitors—giving you a woefully incomplete view of your Web site. He goes on to suggest that we distinguish between micro and macro conversions, where macro conversions are sales and micro conversions are other important events that might or might not lead directly to a sale.

I think this has a lot of power, but might be overly complicated. I've advocated that we think about the best thing someone can do on our site to lead to a sale as our Web conversion. It might be a Web sale, if you have an e-Commerce site, but it could also be filling out a contact form, or calling a phone number found only on the Web site, or walking into a dealer showroom with a coupon printed from the Web. It depends on your business whether your Web site is designed to sell online, sell offline, or just pass a lead to your sales force, for example.

Whatever your Web site is designed to do, that is your Web conversion. And it has a revenue (and profit) value that can be calculated. Sticking with revenue, to keep it simple, if your Web conversion is an actual online sale, then the revenue value is equal to the amount of the sale. If your Web conversion is for the Web visitor to call a special phone number to order by phone, then you know every call to that number is a Web conversion, and if 70% of the callers buy something, then the revenue value of your Web conversion is 70% of whatever the average sale amount is. So, if the average phone sale is $100, each Web conversion is worth $70.

You can do the same thing for contact forms. If, for every e-mail contact lead you get, your sales force follows up to close 20% at an average sale of $10,000, then every time someone submits an e-mail contact form on the list, you can consider the revenue value of this act to be $2,000 (20% of $10,000).

I would consider all of these Web conversions to be macro conversions, in Avinash's terms. But, as he points out, you can do more than that. You can also track the smaller conversions that lead to these macro conversions—he called them micro conversions and I have been calling them mini-conversions all these years, but the point is the same.

In the diagram above of the Web Conversion Cycle, the mini-conversions are Learn and Shop, which lead to Buy. You can count how often people land on your Learn pages (the ones that explain the problem and different ways to solve it) and the Shop pages (the ones that compare one solution or one product model against another). For products that demand technical support, you can think of the Use step as a mini-conversion, too, in that sometimes the right way to solve a problem is to bring the customer back to the Learn stage. ("I'm so sorry that your laptop is booting so slowly. Because it is five years old, you might want to consider upgrading to a newer model if that is in your budget. Or maybe you could try adding more memory.")

Where Avinash's post really shines is looking at registrations, social media, and other types of what he calls micro conversions. They don't have any clear lead-up to a sale (online or offline). I think it's very instructive to see some ideas of how companies are treating these hard-to-measure interactions and I applaud his thinking here.

Bottom line is that you need to measure the bottom line. Whether you call them micro conversions or mini-conversions is a lot less important than the fact that you are measuring events with real business value. No matter what system appeals to you, it's critical that you measure more than page views and visitors—pick something better and start measuring it today.

Posted by mikemoran at 2:31 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 3, 2008

Behavioral Targeting or Online Stalking?

This has been a rough week for behavioral targeting, a promising advertising technique that uses activity data to display more relevant ads than the old generic banner ads. In theory, this should be good for advertisers and consumers, but this week has seen a firestorm in the UK over the actions of three leading ISPs and a behavioral targeting company named Phorm. This is a cautionary tale for marketers. When activity data is used without permission, behavioral targeting is perceived as online stalking.

In case you haven't followed the story, three of Britain's ISPs are being accused of violating British law by using customers' activity data to target personalized ads. British Telecom, one of the best known names in the industry worldwide, has received the biggest black eye, accused of testing Phorm's behavioral targeting system with at leasts 18,000 customers. (Other sources report gusts up to 30,000 customers.)

BT asserts that the test was legal, but observers have had trouble understanding how that could be true. The reporting indicates that British law demands such use of activity data (such as browser surfing histories and search histories) be disclosed, but the ISPs do not appear to have done so.

Clearly, this is a public relations fiasco for the companies involved, because they've gotten no benefit from using the data in this way while taking hits from the blogosphere and the mainstream press for what they've done. What can marketers learn from this story?

First, although it's obvious, obeying the law is kind of recommended. Now I have no idea if any laws were actually broken, but in a sense that isn't even the point. The truth is that laws vary from place to place and when you market on the Internet you are subjected to the laws of anywhere your customers come from, which could be anywhere in the world.

You probably need to go beyond the law because your image can suffer even if you've broken no laws. Imagine if it is eventually found that no laws were broken in this situation—I think it's clear that a lot of reputation damage has been done.

So what should companies do? Perhaps the safest way to handle this with a strong opt-in policy, rather than merely disclosing terms in something no one reads. And pinning the opt-in to receiving the service at all seems onerous from an ISP. (Perhaps there's a way of using what I call an opt-in straddle, also.) Making this optional would seem to serve everyone. If behavioral targeting works as well as I think it can, I believe that consumers will gradually decide they like getting these offers the same way some look forward to receiving their favorite catalog. When the attention is welcome, it suddenly isn't stalking anymore.

And, as a sidelight, who's sitting back with a box of popcorn watching this unfold? Google. As I've said before, I believe that Google is going slow on personalization, letting others make the missteps before a consensus emerges on the acceptable way to handle privacy concerns, country-by-country, if necessary. At that point, Google will use its considerable activity data and its advertising reach to create an extremely valuable behavioral targeting network that raises minimal privacy concerns. It's just a question of when Google believes that it knows how to do this without risking a backlash like the one sweeping Britain this week.

Posted by mikemoran at 12:26 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 2, 2008

Social Media in Regulated Industries

Lee Odden just published a great article about social media marketing that he asked me to contribute to, but it got me to thinking about the objections that I often hear. Some companies tell me the "reasons why not" when it comes to their social media plans, and one of the most common is government regulation. So, what if you are a financial services or pharmaceutical company? You are already laboring under many constraints in your advertising due to government regulation. Must you rule out social media?

No one would ever mistake me for a lawyer, but my advice is to those in regulated industries is that social media is a huge opportunity for you. To my knowledge, the existing regulations cover what your company says in public. So, you need to squeeze a mountain of fine print into the bottom of your print ad. You need to hire the guy who speaks at roller coaster speed to say things like "Offer can be made only by formal prospectus" and "If pain persists, see your doctor."

But what regulations exist about what your customers can say?

I don't think there are any. So, if your customers are talking to other customers, then you're home free.

Now, depending on your industry, you need to dress up this advice a bit, because regulated industries almost never call their customers "customers." So, you can think about clients or investors or (my favorite) "the insured" if you are in financial services. Or "doctors" or "patients" if you are in pharmaceuticals. But the point is that you can use social media to get unregulated people to pass your message around.

The trick is to persuade them to do it.

The easiest way to convince people to talk about you is to follow Seth Godin's advice to be remarkable. If you really surprise people, they will pass the story along. But that's probably not so much about marketing—it's about customer service, quality, and a bunch of things that marketers don't have much influence over.

What can marketers do to get customers to pass along stories to others? They need to think like public relations folks. PR people know how to talk to the media to get them to pass along your company's message. They know they need an interesting angle to a story—not some copy ripped from your company's catalog. You need to do the same thing with your customers. Pass along a story worth retelling and it will be passed on.

But it's more complicated for regulated businesses. You can't always just dump your story out there and wait for Digg nation to take over. Because you are regulated about what you say in public, it's not easy to craft an interesting story that gets by your legal department.

So, engage with your community. Find ways to converse with them in private, either offline, by phone, or in e-mail. In many countries, regulations for private conversations are less onerous than those for advertising. Why not reach out to some of your most influential customers and invite them to a conference where you discuss your latest insights? Or provide an insider Web site where you provide information you don't give everyone else? How about a private wiki where you share information and the customers can comment and update?

Using social media doesn't solve all regulatory problems for marketers, but they might provide some opportunities that elude you in your normal advertising. Of course, you should be very careful not to mislead or otherwise take advantage of customers who are listening to you—that provides a backlash of its own. But if regulatory constraints are keeping some of your best messages under wraps, social media might offer an opprtunity to share them.

Posted by mikemoran at 4:31 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

April 1, 2008

The Importance of Site Search

Recently, two people I really respect disagreed on the significance of Google adding site search boxes to their search results pages. One thought that showing ads for competitors when someone is doing a site search was the ultimate bait-and-switch scheme, while the other said it's no big deal. Who's right? I don't think it matters as much as a bigger problem—why site search is an opportunity for Google in the first place.

Over two years ago, I wrote about Google's threat to your Web site's search, but at the time I was talking about Google's toolbar. If you don't feel like reading that old article, the basic idea is that most Web sites have such horrible search facilities that many searchers use Google's toolbar to execute a site search instead of using the site's built-in search. Some marketers might ask, "Who cares?" The truth is that you should care, because there are so many ways that Google can lead people away from your Web site on that results screen, the main one being that ads to your competitors might appear there.

Fast forward to 2008 and let's pick up last month's controversy. Google, as shown below, has begun placing site search boxes on the results screen. And just as with the toolbar, people who have already decided they want your site will see paid search ads for competitors on that site search results page.

Alan Rimm-Kaufman pointed out that showing these competitive ads was clearly not what the searcher was looking for and Google should just cut it out. Andy Beal thinks critics are overreacting, especially because Google seems to be allowing companies to opt out the site search box.

Now, you should know that I have shared the stage with Alan at a number of venues and I highly respect him—I'll be joining him again at the Darden Online Update at the end of this month. You should also know that I have that same respect for Andy Beal—I even gave him a blurb for his excellent new book, Radically Transparent. So who's right?

I think they are both right. Alan has a point that Google is showing seemingly irrelevant results and Andy is right that anyone who leaves your site because they saw an ad is not your most loyal customer anyway. But I think there's a larger point here.

Site search is generally awful.

Jared Spool once found that site searchers find what they are looking for just 34% of the time. And that was the average—you'd expect half of all sites to be worse. Some site search facilities are nothing more than random Web page generators.

If we had decent search results for our Web sites, there'd be no reason for Google to have a site search button on the toolbar. Google would have no incentive to waste precious screen real estate on a site search box on the results screen, either. It's a much more natural action to search in Google, click on the best result to go to the site, and then figure out where to go next, which might include a site search.

But we've systematically taught customers over the years that they can't trust our Web site's native search facility. They might get lousy results (or none at all) and it wastes their time more than it saves time. If we all decided to fix our site search results, Google's attempt to inject itself between us and our own Web site's visitors wouldn't work. It's only our inadequate site search experience that makes this an issue for search experts to discuss at all.

So what are you doing about your site search? We often focus on the technology itself ("Which search engine do you use?") but successful sites also take two other simultaneous approaches:

• Top-down. Determine the most popular queries for your Web site's search and ensure that they provide correct results, as explained in "Improving Your Web Site's Top Searches."


• Bottom-up. Optimize every page on your site, so that you provide good results for even the most unique queries. You can borrow a page from search marketing to improve your site search, by making sure every page is indexed, and that every page has its content optimized.

If you expect site search technology to work by itself, you're certainly disappointing your customers and driving them to use Google to search your site. If you treat incremental improvement in site search with the same importance you give to experimental marketing for everything else on your site, you'll be doing everything you can to drive searchers to your site search facility instead of Google. After all, don't you use eBay's search? And Amazon's? Teach your customers to use yours, too.

If you receive this newsletter once per month but are left wanting more, you could be reading these rants every day. Sign up for the daily Biznology blog as an RSS feed or by e-mail and other options.

Posted by mikemoran at 1:39 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack