Biznology Blog: July 2008

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July 31, 2008

Any Team Can Have a Bad Century

I am a Chicago Cubs fan. There, I admit it. For those unaware, the Cubs this season are celebrating (?) their 100th year without winning baseball's World Series. I even have a T-shirt that says "Any team can have a bad century." This year, the Cubs are in first place, with the best record in the National League, but Cub fans know that July is often the peak of a Cub season. (One rumor is that CUBS is actually an acronym for "Completely Useless By September.") Why am I telling you all this? Because Internet marketers can learn something from Cub fans.

Cub fans are a strange breed. None of us ever remember when we were on top, but we are still optimistic. Every year, we say to ourselves, "This is our year!" Some years, like this one, it's easier to say that with a straight face then others.

Internet marketers need to take the same attitude as Cub fans. None of us have enough confidence to say we have the very best Web site in the world—if there was a World Series for Web marketing, we'd never win. But we need to have that same Cub fan perspective, where we optimistically look to improve every day.

As Internet marketers, no matter how many numbers we watch, we never win. No matter how many visitors you attract with your outstanding search marketing or social media or e-mail, you could always have done more. No matter how persuasive your copy that made so many people click, it wasn't 100%. Regardless of how high your sales are, they can always be higher.

And when you are on a losing streak, you don't get to cancel the rest of the season. You need to go out there every day and do your best, even when the results are not there. Just like most of those Cub seasons.

In some ways, this can seem relentless, overwhelming, and sometimes a bit depressing. You need to try a lot of things to find one that works. You need to be willing to make errors (just like those Cubs). And you'll do it all out in public, which can be a bit embarrassing.

It would be nice to be able to avoid all the pain that goes with this stuff, but like just doesn't work that way. The only way out is to decide you aren't going to show up for the game anymore.

So, we need to remember what former Cub Bill Buckner once said, "There's nothing wrong with this team that more pitching, more fielding and more hitting couldn't help." And that is what we need to remember as we do Internet marketing. There's nothing wrong with our Web site that more visitors, more clicks, and more conversions can't help. There's no World Series to win, but we can make it better every day.

I am sending my monthly newsletter a day early, because, as I usually do, I'll be taking most of August off. I'll probably post a blog or two, but not every day as usual. Fortunately, I have recruited a few other bloggers who will begin regular contributions to Biznology, starting tomorrow, so while posts will be lighter in August, we won't dry up completely.

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 3:04 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

July 30, 2008

Internet Marketing Forces You to Confront Reality

My dad once told me that he believes that stale cake has no calories. (I think that he has a similar rule for ice cream scraped from the inside lid of the container.) He's kidding, of course, but when he talks this way, he's really speaking to a desire in all of us to get what we want with no costs. In this case, we'd like to be able to eat cake and ice cream while not gaining any weight. And while we might accept that eating delicious desserts would pack on the pounds, we'd like to think that some food wouldn't have those costs. We do the same thing in Internet marketing.

One of the best things about Internet marketing is that much of it is free. Traditional advertising is quite expensive, so you'd spend a great deal of time poring over the benefits of a potential ad campaign. You'd ask lots of questions. You'd really have to convince yourself that it is worth doing.

Because Internet marketing is free, we sometimes skip the step of asking if we ought to do something at all. Our biggest competitor just launched a Facebook profile, so we should, too. A new social network just came out, so let's get all of our consultants to build profiles there. One of our customers asked us why we don't have a blog for our customer service, so let's assign someone to that.

In a sense, this is better than what you hear at companies too afraid to do much of anything, but it might amount to so much stale cake. It costs you something—people's time and attention—and maybe it doesn't taste very good.

Posted by MikeMoran at 9:30 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

July 29, 2008

Why Search Marketers Can Safely Ignore Cuil

Don't look now, but another Google killer has just been released. I know, I know, we've seen all sorts of attempts before, but several people writing to me told me to review Cuil, because this one is really different. But is it? I don't think so. Read my post at Search Engine Guide, "Why Search Marketers Can Safely Ignore Cuil" to find out why.

Posted by MikeMoran at 3:18 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

July 28, 2008

Reasons to Avoid Social Media

David Meerman Scott has a good post on Web Ink Now that discusses how we try to find reasons to avoid the inevitability of social media. David talks about how we tend to use our own experience ("I don't read blogs") or rely on flawed polls (many people don't know that they are using RSS feeds when they look at Web pages) to decide whether social media is "taking off" yet. David's insight reminded me of a similar experience I had recently.

I don't want to identify the conference or the research firm, because I don't have any need to embarrass anyone, but it was a moment of denial of inevitability on social media. I was getting ready to present to a prestigious conference on public relations when the prior presenter went through some original research that sought to allay the fears of the traditional publicists in the crowd by showing that social media had not really caught on yet. There was a lot of misinformation passing for insight, but my favorite was:

90% of word-of-mouth marketing still occurs offline.

Calling this misinformation is not exactly fair, because I don't doubt that it is true. I had no reason to question the research methods of the study, or the researchers' competence or honesty. Let's stipulate that it's fact, in the absence of evidence to the contrary. (See ma, I coulda been a lawyer.)

The problem with this statement is the conclusion that most people draw from it:

Social media is not important [yet].

And that conclusion is completely wrong. The reason that it's flawed is that it equates the impact of online and offline word-of-mouth, which makes no sense.

Think about it. The last time you passed along a tip offline, how many people did you tell? One? Two? Contrast this with online word-of-mouth, where you might post a comment on a blog post or a review of a product or an e-mail to a long list of folks. How many people saw that opinion? Probably more than one or two. Perhaps thousands.

So, rather than counting the number of occurrences of word-of-mouth marketing, we should instead be looking at its impact. But for those of us looking for reasons to avoid social media, we'll find them, as David pointed out and as I experienced at that conference. If your competitors remain in denial, this strategy might work for you, but I guess I wouldn't count on that.

Posted by MikeMoran at 4:51 PM | Comments (10) | TrackBack

July 25, 2008

Friends, Acquaintances, and Followers

I have lots of friends. Well, at least Facebook tells me I do. I don't think I've ever asked anyone to be my friend on Facebook (certainly no more than a handful if at all), yet I have 117 friends. Honestly, they are more like acquaintances, and some of them I don't really know at all. I mean, I couldn't pick them out of a lineup, much less tell you their names or anything I know about them. It got me to wondering about how we use social networks—and how some people use them very differently from me.

117 is not a really big social network as Facebook networks, go. I have 285 contacts on LinkedIn, which isn't very much, either. I have 234 followers on Twitter.

But that's because I am a passive networker. I accept every invitation that comes my way and I hardly ever send one. My social networks are not much more than an extension of my address book—just a way to keep in touch with people in case I need to contact them again.

But that's not how my daughter uses Facebook. She has a tightly-knit group of real friends that she knows offline and she organizes a lot of communication around that. So one difference is whether you use social networks for personal networking or business networking, but I wonder if another difference is generational.

I use e-mail and instant messaging as electronic ways of keeping up with people, rather than social networking. My daughter rarely uses e-mail. But in a few years (fewer than I'd care to think about), she'll be entering the work world and I wonder how she'll dice up her social networking then. Or maybe she won't have that work/personal split that I do.

I think I am missing something about social networking. It took me a while to warm up to Twitter, and even now I doubt I am doing great things with it. But I treat all social networks as though my acquaintances are followers rather than friends. As I embark on a change in my career where I will be working more than ever with social media (even purporting to be some kind of quasi-expert), I wonder whether I need to change my pattern in social media to learn more. It's something that I am definitely thinking about, and people who know me (my real friends), know how dangerous that can be...

Posted by MikeMoran at 5:55 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 24, 2008

When Will U.S. Mobile Web Usage Take Off?

Tim Peter has unearthed an interesting study on Web usage for mobile phones, which leads him to the conclusion that people use their mobile phones to surf the Web in similar ways that they use their computers. In some countries, Web usage on mobile devices far out-paces that in the U.S., and the question remains, why? Why is it that U.S. cell users use their phones to access the Web so little?

In some ways, the phones have been the culprits. Clearly, mobile phones with tiny monochrome screens were unusable, but most people don't have those old phones anymore. And the high usage of the Web by iPhone owners shows that a really nice device really matters, even if Apple and AT&T are only now getting off that pokey data network onto 3G.

So, bandwidth is up. Devices are better. It's safe to say that anyone who wants to use the Web on their phone could pony up the money and get that access. So it must be the money.

The $200 for the devices is likely not the inhibitor, given how much people pay for other devices they use a lot less, so it must be the high cost of the carriers. Look at it this way, if Internet Service Providers charged by the megabyte in 1998, do you think the Web would have taken off? It's the all-you-can-eat model that drove people to use the Web and to use always-on connections without giving things a second thought.

But as long as carriers are charging by the minute or the megabyte, or have some limit to the amount that you can use before the whopper charges kick in, people will be careful about how much they browse on their cell phones. Even after the carriers begin offering all-you-can-eat plans, expect it to take a while for the general public to realize they could change their plan and start using their phones the way they use their computers—anytime they want.

So, I think it will take a couple of years for usage patterns to change. It will take that long for people to learn about the new plans, to get around to upgrading their phone to something that browses the Web well, and to start using it the way they want to. Mobile Web has always seemed a couple of years away, and it still does, but if the carriers get serious about making Web browsing affordable, it might finally be around that corner this time.

Posted by MikeMoran at 2:01 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 23, 2008

Small Businesses Need the Internet

As the U.S. economy continues to cause businesses to worry, they are more and more open to trying something new. Small businesses, especially, have been slower to adopt Internet marketing than larger ones, probably just because they can't afford to be trendy, but small businesses are beginning to move to the Internet. When they do, they often feel overwhelmed and disappointed, especially with search marketing. If this sounds like something you've struggled with, check out my post on Search Engine Guide called "Small Businesses Need the Internet."

Posted by MikeMoran at 9:28 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

July 22, 2008

Social Search Just Got Serious

I've written in the past that these upstart new search engines won't unseat Google, and nothing about Delver changes my mind. However, I do think Delver is worth watching, because it might show us the way to a new level of search relevance through its interesting implementation of social search. What Delver is doing is important and I believe you'll see the mainstream engines take notice at some point, either by acquiring Delver and its social search counterparts, or by implementing such features itself.

I really like what I see from Delver—Webware has a nice review of Delver if you haven't heard of it.

Until now, social search engines have depended largely on your friends signing up. Delver doesn't. It finds the information about your friends automatically. This is a critical feature for social search. Just as relevance took a massive leap forward when directories (that you had to sign up for) gave way to search engines (that crawled what was already out there), so will automatically identifying friend patterns make social search a serious feature that no search engine will be able to ignore for long.

For search marketers, the implications are clear. With each step forward, the onus on your content being truly helpful and relevant increases. So, in the days of directories, your Web site only needed to be good enough to slip past an editor—after that your description and title determined how you were found. When crawlers begain grabbing all content, it was critical that your site be able to be indexed and that you optimize keywords on your pages. When Google pioneered link analysis, suddenly your content needed to attract real people who would link to your site. As blended search has added images and videos to search results, you needed your site to go beyond textual content.

Social search will up the ante even further. Social media marketing will now become important to raise your search results, just as link-building did in the past. Links have always been good ways to draw traffic to your site, but Google's embracing of link analysis raised the value of links by affecting search ranking, too. Similarly, social media is important as en end in itself, because it draws traffic to your site—now it might start affecting search rankings on top of its intrinsic value.

As with blended search, it will take a few years for social search to have massive effect—it will start small. Some areas have more affinity for images, podcasts, and videos than others, so those keywords will be affected first. Social search only works when the searchers have friends with online activity. For some segments of the population, use of social networks, blogs, and other social media remains relatively low, so keywords that skew to those target segments will be affected by social search last.

But Google could decide at any moment to make a deal with FriendFeed and suddenly the floodgates would open. Woe to the search marketer waiting for that day, because it is too late once Google moves. The time to move is now, especially if your searchers use social media already. Anyone targeting people in their teens up to their thirties should be thinking about gaining social media visibility now, both for its own value and the value for search marketing to come. If you waited for blended search to become reality before investing in video, you paid a price. Don't pay another one for social search.

Posted by MikeMoran at 4:03 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 21, 2008

There's Too Much Internet in Internet Marketing

Tomorrow I am going to drive for a few hours to install a new computer for my in-laws. We ordered it delivered to our house. My wife installed all the software and moved all the files. Tomorrow, I will install it, because I don't think they could even transport it and plug it in. Well, that's not true. I think they could do that, but I have no confidence that it would work. There would be something we overlooked about their Internet connection or some other difference that we couldn't simulate at home that will scotch the whole deal. Technology is still too hard for the average person.

We've all heard the stories of people asking why you press the Windows "start" button when you want to turn off the computer, but my mother-in-law had an equally interesting question: "Why do they call it wallpaper if you put it on your desktop?" I had no answer for her.

But the real answer is because we love to make things complicated. Things remain difficult because we allow them to be. We put up with it. I do, too, which I was reminded of on Friday when posting to the Search Engine Guide blog.

First, some background. Bill Hunt and I wrote our book on search marketing in 2005, and a centerpiece was a way to project the real business value of search marketing. One of the linchpins of that process was the Yahoo! (nee Overture) Keyword Tool, which provided the monthly demand of any search keyword for free.

Fast forward to 2007. Our book is broken. Yahoo! first stopped updating its numbers and then allowed the URL itself to die, throwing up 404 pages instead, all with no official announcement. For a while, Bill and I thought that it was just a mistake, but after a while we realized that we needed to come up with an alternative tool.

But there wasn't any. We contacted several companies with paid tools to get their help, but all were either unwilling or unable to help. Bill's team eventually developed an arcane procedure that turned free click estimates from one of Google's paid search tools into estimated keyword demand, which I posted a couple of weeks ago. It wasn't perfect, but it was free and it was better than nothing.

Then. a commenter pointed out that the long, convoluted procedure we outlined was in many ways unnecessary, because Google had a free tool that directly predicted clicks, without all the steps we had shown. Google was not in the habit of making traffic estimation easy, so both Bill and I wondered if this was a mistake (and would be taken away), but then Google announced it was committed to helping people estimate keyword demand, so I made a note to simplify the procedure, which I did on Friday.

But in my haste, I hadn't noticed that Google announced something far better than I had dared hope—it was providing not just click data but keyword demand data, with none of the calculations needed before. And it was all free.

But we had spent so many months ripping our hair out trying to find this kind of tool, that I didn't even recognize it when it fell in my lap. So, I dutifully posted the simplified procedure I intended to all along, totally missing what Google had really announced. I was so used to things being difficult that I couldn't even recognize it when they became easy.

I was accustomed to it being difficult. I had accepted that no one was going to help.

Well, the great thing about blogs is that someone pointed out my mistake immediately and I corrected the procedure to the new, easy way today. I apologize for my carelessness in missing what was going on, but it's fixed now.

But I realize that I have been too accepting of all the complexity, too willing to deal with the pain and difficulty instead of demanding better. I don't know if I can change overnight, but I am resolving to expect more and to reward the companies that deliver it. Just because I am an engineer doesn't mean I like to work harder at technology than anyone else does.

Posted by MikeMoran at 7:52 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

July 19, 2008

Skinflint Keyword Estimation Redux

In June, I wrote a post on estimating keyword demand, based on a procedure Bill Hunt and his team worked out. But we found a way to streamline the procedure and Google has announced that it is supporting traffic estimation, so I decided to write a new post on Search Engine Guide on free keyword demand estimating.

Posted by MikeMoran at 5:17 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 17, 2008

Does Second Life Need to Get a Life?

I had a chance today to speak to the Internet Strategy Forum Summit West (Conference 2.0, Pro). In addition to being the conference with the longest name, it has a great roster of speakers—and me. You can look at my slides on Internet Marketing by the Numbers, but you really missed a great event. Charlene Li kicked off the morning, galvanizing the audience with excerpts from Groundswell, which I will be reviewing soon. We also heard from Disney, Intel, and Nike, but Geoff Ramsey of eMarketer stole the show with a romp through Web statistics, including a puncturing look at Second Life.

Geoff had the audience in stitches when he showed the Second Life statistics of millions of registrants vs. the number that had actually logged on in the last month. He showed that Second Life had fewer monthly residents than the city of Portland, where the conference was being held. He carefully noted that Second Life monthly residents are lower than Portland monthly residents. "At least I assume that Portland residents are here each month," he cracked.

His advice to marketers on Second Life parallels mine. Experiment if you must, but do it cheaply. Don't spend tens of thousands on something speculative. I've been a big fan of private virtual worlds, which provide the same glitz of Second Life with an easy to calculate return on investment.

Do it wrong quickly, yes, but also do it cheaply. The pace of iteration in Internet marketing depends on each decision being not just fast, but almost free. Otherwise you start taking huge risks, just like with traditional marketing, and being wrong is not an option.

Posted by MikeMoran at 11:39 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 16, 2008

Plagiarism Is Productivity, Right?

I had majored in accounting, which was seen as vaguely sinister by the other programmers that I worked with 25 years ago. I had never learned computer science, so I asked the others to let me copy some of their code for sorting records or performing some other common task. These computer science graduates were shocked, because they had learned programming in school, where copying was also known as cheating. But I told them that, in real life, plagiarism is productivity. Unfortunately, that doesn't apply to catalog marketing.

This was brought to mind when I spoke to a veteran catalog marketer who has been dutifully copying the manufacturer's descriptions into their print catalogs for years, and saw nothing wrong with doing the same thing on the Web. I know that it's productive, but this kind of plagiarism has consequences.

First off, while reusing manufacturer's content was common practice at one time, many manufacturers now copyright their material and look askance at it being copied without permission. That's a legal risk that you should be aware of, but if you are getting legal advice from me you have bigger problems than copyright infringement.

No, you want marketing advice from me, and I'm here to tell you that from a marketing standpoint, copying the manufacturer's content, even if you have permission, is a dubious practice. Perhaps you've heard of the ominously named "duplicate content penalty," where Google and other search engines try to show just one version of content in the search results. So, if you have the same text as the manufacturer on your product pages, only one will make the search results. (Hint: It will probably be the manufacturer's.)

But even if duplicate content penalties did not exist (and I am glossing over exactly how they work because this is the more important point), you still are advised to write your own content. Why? Because if you're selling the same products with the same content as the manufactuerer (and doubtless others copying the manufacturer's content), how can you differentiate? The only thing you can compete on is price.

And it doesn't take an accounting major to tell you that the Internet makes it very easy for shoppers to compare prices, so there's only one winner on price. It seems like differentiating your marketing gives you better odds than that.

Posted by MikeMoran at 10:05 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 15, 2008

Correct First, Then Easy

It's timeworn advice: Make it easy for the customer. Be easy to do business with. Staples has driven it's whole brand image around that easy button. And, like most advice, it's correct a lot of the time. But I was watching my wife install some software recently (yeah, we really know how to have fun as a couple). and it occurred to me that there's something more fundamental than easy that we need to focus on first.

You've all seen the screen I am talking about. It's the one near the beginning of the software installation process that says, essentially, "Do you want to do the standard installation or the customized one?" Or "Do you want the easy button or do you want to be in total control?" They don't always use the same words, but they basically are trying to ask, "Are you someone who just wants this to be easy or are you picky about what we do with this install?"

And, at first glance, that seems like a perfectly reasonable approach. But I don't think it is. Oh, sure, it's reasonable for the folks that want the easy button because they are incapable of anything more, but what about for those plenty capable of performing the customized install? Just because we are able to do it, does that mean we have to?

Well, yes. You see, there's no information about what you get with the easy install. It could be that I am perfectly happy with the easy install, but I will never know that because all I am told is that it's easy. I'm not told what I actually would get.

And this, folks, is the problem with easy. Easy only works if it's perfectly clear that the right thing is being done. When the right thing is being done, then of course you want it to be as easy as possible. But if you care about the right thing being done, you shouldn't be sentenced to the hard way. Now, understand that I am not looking for all the details—just a basic understanding of what features the easy version gives me vs. what I miss out on.

It's like the fast food places where you go in and order a cheeseburger and they say, "Do you want everything on it?" Now, it's easy to ask for "everything" but what does "everything" include? If you don't know, that isn't an easy question at all. Now the reason that this can work is because you have repeat customers who learn what "everything" is.

Software installs have no repeat customers, we hope. You install it once and then you don't do it again until the next release (which has a different installation process anyway, most of the time). So there's no learning here. There's not much value in an easy button where I don't know what I'll get when I press it. It's only useful for people who are incapable of deciding any more than whether to press the button. Yes, I want to help those people have an easy experience, but I like things to be easy, too.

Ask yourself if what you've done to make things easy for your customer are truly easy. Is it totally clear to the average customer what the easy option does? Or is it the marketing equivalent of "Trust me"? Think about whether you can simplify the experience without obscuring what the customer gets.

Posted by MikeMoran at 9:07 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

July 14, 2008

PR 2.0 in the Pharmaceutical Industry

I was honored to give the opening keynote at the 4th annual ExL Pharma Public Relations & Communications Summit. If you're interested, take a gander at my slides on how PR folks can leverage their storytelling skills on the Web. But that isn't what interested me, because I have heard myself speak once or twice before. What I enjoyed was the panel discussion where one participant made the most honest statement about pharmaceutical PR I'd ever heard.

She was speaking to other PR professionals, which might have made her more forthcoming, but maybe she's just the plainspoken type—that would be very refreshing. Anyway, she said, "We've realized that the old message that drugs are expensive because of all the research was not resonating with the public."

I'm so glad she said it, because that's a message that I never liked either, as an outsider to the industry. What I always heard was, "Our drugs cost too much so that we can pour the money back into research to create new drugs that also cost too much." (Ok, I admit to a certain streak of cynicism at times.)

So where did that "we do it all for research" story take the Pharma industry? A study was quoted this morning that trust in the pharmaceutical industry was above the tobacco industry. Gee, I should hope so. Not a lot of feel-good stories coming out of Big Tobacco, I wager.

Pharmaceuticals could be so much more. In the short time I was at the conference I heard about companies fighting AIDS in Africa, easing the flow of free drugs for the poor, and agonizing over how to answer patient's questions without affecting the doctor-patient relationship. These are all great topics to be discussing in public. And I'd be a lot more interested in those subjects than about how expensive it is to do research.

From what I heard today, I'm hopeful that the pharmaceutical industry is starting to break free from the constraints of lawyers and regulators to do whatever it can to reach out to patients. Yes, each country has its own constraints and marketers must abide by them, but I loved the spirit I saw today that said "Let's think outside the bottle." (All right, all right, I was the one who said that. Yeah, I'm sorry.)

Posted by MikeMoran at 7:11 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 11, 2008

Why Marketing Needs to be Scientific

One day, back when my daughter was four, we told her that she was going to the dentist, and she got so excited. It seemed an odd reaction, but we never questioned it. After all, considerably less sometimes brings excitement to kids that age. As we walked out of dentist's office following the appointment, she brightly asked, "OK, so where is the birthday party?"

We were a bit puzzled at the question, telling her that there wasn't any birthday party, which disappointed her, as you might expect, and then we set to wondering why she made that connection.

It was only later that we realized that six months before, when she had her very first dental appointment, that she immediately went from the dentist's office to a birthday party. So, her toddler mind had connected those two events as tightly as any other cause-and-effect she had observed. She had decided that all dental appointments conclude with birthday parties (which might actually be a better incentive to see the dentist, now that I think of it).

Why do I bring this up? Because it shows how human beings strive so hard to make sense of the world—we're wired for it, which is how a four-year-old can do it so naturally. Even when faced with complete coincidences, we humans try to connect things into a sensible pattern. Unfortunately, a lot of events are random—noise, essentially—and don't fit into any pattern.

And Internet marketing is no different. Without applying some rigor to what we do, we're likely to connect a lot of birthday parties to dental appointments. And we'll keep repeating the equivalent of trips to the dentist in our marketing for quiite awhile—which can be rather painful.

To prevent us from drawing lots of dubious conclusions, we need to use scientific methods. We need testing. We need to separate the data from the noise.

But how do you do that?

• Decide on your metrics. Your favorite might be return on investment, but if it's profit or revenue instead, fine. Just pick your success factor ahead of time and rigorously measure it after every marketing decision you make.


• Let your metrics be your guide. This, for many, is the hard part. When you do something really cool and the metrics tank, stop. When that campaign you just love fails, kill it. When the dumb idea the intern came up with takes off, do more of it. If you regularly feel embarrassed and stupid about what the numbers tell you, then you're doing it right.


• Super-charge your metrics. Don't settle for "change then measure" testing. Use A/B testing to pit two alternatives against each other to choose the best. Or, better, use multivariate testing to try out dozens, hundreds, or thousands of alternatives to pick the very best. The testing is easy—the hard part is coming up with all those ideas. But think about how much faster you'll find the best one.

Metrics aren't perfect—they can certainly lead you astray sometimes, when you rely on small sample sizes or you just get plain bad luck. But more often than not you'll be led in the right direction, which our feeble human brains can't compete with. Save your brain for analyzing what the metrics say rather than doing correlation analysis. Then, it will be time to throw a party.

Posted by MikeMoran at 6:49 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

July 10, 2008

Do Site Searchers Want Just One Answer?

Jared Spool is one of the few user experience pros who focuses on Web site search. And when he says something, I pay attention. His post yesterday crams into one article more about site search behavior than most people will ever know. But I have one disagreement with him. It's rare, but it happens.

Jared says that his research shows that people using site search want just one answer rather than a list of great search results. I'm certain that he is interpreting his research correctly, but I wonder if there might be some selection bias at work. Here's why I say that.

My friend Andrei Broder worked with a few other luminaries years back to identify several different types of searches: navigational, informational, and transactional. This was a great insight, because it was generally thought that all searches were informational—the searcher desired a screen-full of useful search results to choose from. Andrei and colleagues proved that some searches are attempts to do something (transactional) or go somewhere (navigational) and they typically need the right result at the top.

And many Web site searches do require just one correct answer, as Jared points out. But not all of them. In my work at ibm.com, I noticed that the most preliminary searches often were informational ones. Someone might search for "e-mail archiving case studies"—they don't want to get just one. Now, sure, if you have a page on your site that lists every blessed e-mail archiving case study, that would be a great #1 result, but you usually don't have that kind of aggregation page for every possible query.

Searchers would not want your "Content Management Case Studies" page as #1, even if that list included every e-mail archiving case study, because it also includes too many other irrelevant case studies. Instead, searchers would love a list of case studies that match the query. They could scan through that list and click several results, drinking in that practical information they crave.

If I am right, then why did Jared's study show otherwise? It might have to do with sample bias. When search tests are defined, they often focus on popular queries. Those queries are far more likely to have a single page that aggregates the information in one place, simply because so many people are interested in the subject. I suspect that if unpopular, unusual search queries were studied—and those queries are the bulk of the volume—you might see a different result. I can't prove it however, so I'd love to see more information about what kinds of queries were tested.

Jared is smart to tell folks that not all queries are informational. He might even be on solid ground to say that most are not. I just think that a good portion of them are.

So, do listen to Jared. About almost everything. But just understand that some searches are informational searches, where a rich list of choices is exactly what your customer needs.

Posted by MikeMoran at 6:33 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

July 9, 2008

Search Marketing Is a Roller Coaster

We all want to be in control, but search marketing is a roller coaster ride, where you really need to let go for it to be a worthwhile experience. If you've always had trouble letting go of control, perhaps that's what preventing you from really succeeding at search marketing. Check out my latest blog entry at Search Engine Guide, "Search Marketing Is a Roller Coaster."

Posted by MikeMoran at 8:43 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 8, 2008

Efficiency or Effectiveness?

We all have trade-offs to make in our businesses between the efficiency of doing something the best and the effectiveness of doing the best thing. Obviously, we'd always want to do the best thing the best way, but we are often forced to choose. This was brought to mind the other day as I drove down a local highway and saw a truck transporting a house. You've seen 'em with the "wide load" sign on the front, taking up two lanes of the highway. And it got me to wondering what kind of delivery experience this is for the customer. I can almost hear the phone call...

"You must be home between 8 and 6 for the delivery, ma'am."

(Pause.) "But you have my home. That's what I'm getting delivered, remember?"

"Uh, yes, ma'am. We understand that it is a bit of a hardship, but it's the only way we can efficiently deliver our products and keep our costs low."

"So you want me to sit on a vacant lot all day?"

"Yes, ma'am. And can you give me an alternate number to reach you in case no one answers your home phone..."

OK, this is silly, I admit. But it never seems silly to us when repair services or appliance delivery companies think we should block out our whole day just to accommodate their efficiencies. Yeah, I know efficiency is important. And I can understand that with the price of gasoline and wages to the drivers rising all the time, efficiency is even more important in some ways than it used to be.

But how many people would use the first repair service that promised to be there when you wanted the guy there? How many would even pay more for that? How many would absolutely be loyal to that company from then on because their time is so valuable?

Efficiency is great, but too many businesses are pursuing the same old customer-unfriendly (but efficient) ways as they have for 100 years. They are just waiting for someone to come along who offers a better deal. Because efficiency saves money but effectiveness grows revenue. Do you blindly reach for efficiency every time when you should be evaluating the trade-off between efficiency and effectiveness?

Posted by MikeMoran at 4:42 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

July 7, 2008

Am I Helping a Spammer? Yes!

First off, I should say that I didn't mean to. But it has given me some pause to see what happened. It's not a big thing, but it is a little embarrassing because I try to be squeaky-clean, which means looking squeaky-clean to others, too. The best way to look ethical is to be ethical, but sometimes you can be careless and look bad even when you're not. Let me tell you what happened to me.

I'd like to start by explaining why this is so important to me. I've written at length with Bill Hunt in our book on search marketing, and even more deeply in my second book and in this blog, about being an ethical marketer. It's a big part of what I stand for. So, I don't want any association with spam and any other kind of unethical marketing. I've been wrongly accused of being a spammer in the past, which I scream bloody murder about (maybe a bit too loudly, in retrospect), and it has sensitized me to avoiding anything that might look wrong.

So, I was a bit taken aback when I was scanning my Google Alert and saw this story on how I have been attacked by spam links on my blog. At first, I thought, "no way," but upon further review, Scott Allen's story is totally correct.

Scott never accuses me of being part of any spam scheme because he knows that I had nothing to do with it, so I am not concerned that anyone would get the wrong idea about me. (OK, in my paranoid mind, I am a little concerned.) But it sure does make me look careless, probably because I was careless.

I am very careful in some ways. I have a human detector on my blog to stop all robot spam comments and I manually approve each and every comment that goes there. So, I must have approved the three identical comments on that blog entry that Scott pointed out. I just approved them far enough apart in time that I didn't remember seeing them before.

That's where the carelessness comes in. I though that I could just look at each comment individually and decide whether it was spam or not, but I clearly can't do that. I forget what I have seen before and approve it again if it seems to be on subject, which this one was. I actually try to post comments that seem a bit odd to me because I don't want to censor folks unless I am rather sure they are up to no good.

But it certainly looks embarrassing to see three identical spam comments in the same entry. At first, I thought I should just delete them as quickly as possible, but then I thought that it would mess up Scott's perfectly good story, because people would link to my blog and the spam would be gone. It would look like Scott was inaccurate when he is right on.

But then I thought that leaving the stuff out there just makes me look clueless in front of more and more people, and it in fact rewards the spammer every day it is out there. So that doesn't seem great either. I thought about it over the weekend and decide to post this piece and then link to it from that same blog post with a comment of my own.

I think it's instructive to write about all of this, however, because it shows the kind of problems you can have when you run a blog, which I urge many of you to do. Even if you do your best, you might sometimes be attacked by spammers, and they'll win.

Posted by MikeMoran at 10:21 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

July 3, 2008

Looking for Bloggers

I've been toying with the idea of opening up my blog for regular contributors, so readers can get a voice other than mine and get it more frequently than I am able to write. With the travel and vacation that I take, I want to continue to provide information to you even when it gets too hard for me to do it personally. So, if you're interested in becoming a regular contributor to this blog, I'd love to get a guest post from you. It could turn into a regular writing assignment that might get your work in front of a larger audience than you could attract right away on your own blog. Don't feel compelled to write in the style or on the exact subjects that I do, but I do want you to write about Internet marketing. Unfortunately, I can't offer you any salary for your work, but I promise that if you do a good job, someday I will double your pay. Head to the Contact Mike Moran page to get in touch with me.

Posted by MikeMoran at 7:20 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Free ticket and discount tickets for Internet Strategy Forum Summit

I'm still on the lookout for that winning case study for a free ticket to Internet Strategy Forum Summit in Portland, Oregon on July 17. I also received an announcement of an online ticket that you can purchase, so if you can't get to Oregon, I wonder if the organizers would honor the ticket online. Content ends July 6, so get that case study to me. It might be worth a try. And check out all the details of the contest—you can also get a discount on a ticket even if you don't win the free one.

Posted by MikeMoran at 7:13 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Interview for BtoB Magazine

I know that I usually do one (usually substantial) post each workday, but I am doing something different today, with a few short posts that clean up some stuff that I wanted to alert you about. And I am taking tomorrow off for the U.S. holiday, so next meaty post will be on Monday. Anyhow, I thought you might be interested in an interview I did with Carol Krol for BtoB Magazine on how B2B marketers can use search marketing and social media marketing. She accelerated my departure date from IBM (it's not until September 1), but she captured everything else quite nicely. So, if you don't like the article, it's not Carol's fault—I really said all that stuff.

Posted by MikeMoran at 7:05 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 2, 2008

Treating People Like Potatoes

If you find yourself losing your temper and otherwise treating employees, or colleagues, or suppliers like they have no feelings, you might be losing them mentally. They might noy be doing their best work for you. They might be tuning you out. They might not be telling you the truth. Learn more about how "People Are Like Potatoes" in my post this week on Small Business Answers.

Posted by MikeMoran at 10:47 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 1, 2008

Ratings and Reviews for B2B Marketers

Back in May, I wrote about how B2B firms have avoided ratings and reviews and challenged you to take part in a survey about the subject. Christian Carlsson has graciously offered to share the results in this month's newsletter. But before we get to that, I would like to thank everyone for their best wishes in light of my announcement yesterday. It's a big change for me, but I intend to be writing this same old blog for a long time.

Let's dig into ratings and reviews for the B2B marketers—Christian sure did. He's kindly made available a presentation that summarizes research he performed for his dissertation. If you've got the time, check out Christian's research on "Ratings and reviews for the business user." I'll summarize what I thought were the major points below.

You can sometimes go wrong reading too much into some kinds of research, and counting on the opinions of 75 people (in this case) might not seem prudent to you. After all, who knows whether those folks are representative of the larger population of all B2B buyers? But I think that some of the results of this survey are so overwhelming that they are persuasive.

I'd like to highlight a few of those findings that persuaded me of their veracity. First, if you look at chart 12, it reveals exactly what we thought to be the case, that ratings and reviews are used far less for B2B products than for B2C products. For example, 40% of respondents have used them more than 10 times as consumers, but barely 10% of the same people have done so as B2B customers. Similarly less than 5% have never used consumer reviews but almost 40% have never used B2C reviews even once.

So, one possibility is that people would not be persuaded by B2B reviews, but chart 14 shows that buyers find them among the most persuasive information available, and chart 18 shows that 58% have removed a company from consideration because of bad reviews. And chart 24 shows that 60% have used reviews to influence a B2B purchasing decision. To me, the most compelling chart in the deck is number 25, which shows that 93% of business buyers find ratings and reviews to be valuable.

Again, it is possible that these 75 responses are not enough to persuade you beyond a shadow of a doubt (if doubts in fact cast shadows). But 93% of almost any population tells B2B marketers that ratings and reviews are worth considering for your site. After all, if I told you that changing your ad copy would persuade even half of your target market, you'd do it in a blink. So, if even half of your customers (much less 93%) are waiting to be persuaded by ratings and reviews, why aren't you offering them?

Before I go, I just wanted to remind you that I've still got a free ticket to the Internet Strategy Forum Summit in Portland July 17. (And I can offer 15% off the registration if you don't win the free ticket.) Check out both offers—I hope to see you in Oregon this month.

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 9:06 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack