Biznology Blog: June 2010

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June 30, 2010

What's a Facebook fan worth?

I've had a few clients ask me recently what a Facebook fan is worth. I hate seeing the crestfallen looks on their faces when I tell them, "Zero." They are immediately puzzled, however, because they know that I am an advocate of using social media for marketing. So, I quickly explain that it doesn't provide any value to your company to have a fan, but what you do with a fan can have great value if you take advantage of this new relationship with the company.

Let me explain myself. If you think about it, most Facebook fans are already your customers. Sure, there might be fans of the iPhone that have the "wrong" carrier. Perhaps many fans of BMWs can't afford one. But these products are the exceptions. Most people who become Facebook fans of products or brands were real-life fans long before. And customers. So what is the value of these customers becoming fans? Probably nothing. They liked you before and they like you now. Now that they "like" you on Facebook, will they buy more?

The real answer to what a fan is worth is what you make of it. How do you market to these fans? Do you offer them insider deals? Do you give them sneak previews of new stuff? What do you do to make them feel special?

It's those tactics, not the fact that they are fans, that have value. In a sense, a Facebook fan is no different than an e-mail address. That e-mail address is worth nothing if you don't have some valuable e-mail marketing tactics that make it worth something.

There's one firm I know that has an even bigger problem. By the time people become their fans, they are not just customers—they might be former customers! Graco Baby has a legion of loyal customers who are likely to become Facebook fans. Hey, I am one of them. Each of my four kids used our Graco stroller, among other Graco products. But what is it worth for me to become a fan of Graco? Not much. My youngest kid is 12. We bought our last stroller 18 years ago.

So how can a company like Graco make use of Facebook fans? That was a tough problem to think through. [Full disclosure: I am the Chief Strategist at Graco's social media agency, Converseon, although I had noting to do with the great idea I'll explain here.] The real issue is that the people you want to market to (first-time parents) couldn't possibly be fans of your products (yet) but by the time they do, they don't need to buy any more.

So, Graco came up with an innovative solution. Last week, they launched a different kind of Facebook fan page, called "I Love My Baby Bump." It reaches out to expectant parents as a place to connect and get information. The people who "like" that page are probably the precise target market that Graco is looking for, which helps get Graco's brand and expertise in front of the right people. What Graco does with these fans will answer the question of what each one is worth. Special offers, mailing lists—Graco has a chance to treat these prospective customers in special ways.

I doubt that any of this costs all that much. The idea is what mattered. I can even imagine a success here being something that Graco can build on—could they create a similar Facebook page around adoptive parents? Perhaps there are even more ideas here, but you get the point. No matter what kind of business you have, merely setting up Facebook fan pages doesn't get you anywhere. Any marketing approach starts with segmenting the right people and doing something that keeps them engaged and eventually buying from you. Facebook doesn't change any of those rules, but sometimes it takes more creativity to know how to apply them.

Posted by MikeMoran at 2:37 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

June 29, 2010

T-Mobile Curates Web Content

I had the pleasure of speaking at the same private client event as Dennis Haugan, the Senior Director of Web Marketing Strategy at T-Mobile USA, the American wireless arm of telecommunications giant Deutsche Telekom. Dennis spends his days improving customer experience across a wide variety of digital properties, including e-commerce, self service, product microsites, official social sites (on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and mySpace), and retail interactive portals. Dennis was kind enough to consent to an interview that includes his innovative approach to curating social media and other Web content. I think you'll enjoy it.

MM: Your role seems really interesting. For someone who might might not understand what you do, how do you explain it?

DH: Well, beyond my parents, for whom I have yet to find an effective way to explain what I do, I often describe my role as a digital chef or a digital conductor. I tend to use the chef analogy more because of watching Top Chef too often, but I feel my job to get the right digital content at the right place and time to help our shoppers and customers get the information they need to make their decision. I look at things such as online advertising, paid and organic search, social media, and Web site and retail portal merchandising as ingredients. I need to put the right combination of these ingredients together to make an effective experience. You can think of it as creating the right dish in the case of cooking or music in conducting.

MM: How would you describe the concept of curating content? It is not something marketers grew up doing.

DH: You're right, we did not grow up really thinking about the combination of content, from a marketing communications standpoint. We would look at copy at the individual piece level, not always the collection. I think with Web and digital content, the consumer was the first one to curate content. They used search to seek out a collection of content, both corporate-produced and user-generated, in order to make an informed decision. While they expected inconsistency in user-generated content, they did not expect the company's own content to be inconsistent. I believe inconsistent company content undermines consumer trust in the company. I think the consumer feels overwhelmed because there is too much digital content on a given topic, and they are seeking assistance in pulling it together, which opens the opportunity for companies to curate content. Early in my career, I led the B2B marketing efforts for McCaw Cellular (later AT&T Wireless) and I learned quickly that when dealing with big companies and their buyers, you don't give them conflicting information across your sales team, your presentations, or your marketing materials. Seeing the impact in that marketing and selling environment trained me to think broadly, across all touch points. The same holds true for existing customers. Conflicting information generates calls to your centers because the customer feels the only "true" source is a call center employee.

MM: How has T-Mobile used content curation to cope with the changing landscape in tech media coverage?

DH: I would say, to start, that there is a lot more coordination between our PR group and our marketing communications teams at both a campaign and a social listening standpoint. In wireless, things move fast. We have a lot of invested customers who are passionate about the technology—that means a lot of readers, which in turn means a lot of tech media coverage. We are lucky to have products and services that garner so much consumer and resulting media attention. It is a race to the Web for breaking product news, so you have to be ready to go quickly. By curating content up front for a product launch, we become the single source with the broadest array of information about that product. So it is easier for consumers, customers, and the press to come to our product sites to get early information, and since we use RSS feeds to bring ongoing information in, you can get robust product information(demos, videos, etc.) while still reading the latest highly-rated blog site comments. Having the best content at launch means my sites fare well for search also.

MM: What's your favorite content curation story at T-Mobile?

DH: I am not sure it has happened yet, to be honest, but we are on the right path. It is not an easy migration from silo view of campaigns/projects and media to a curated view of content at the lifecycle stage. The curation, up to this point, I am most proud of is our Sidekick site which, after years of taking a curation approach, behaves like a community of product evangelists, which is the best outcome you could want around a product. I used our Sidekick site as an early test bed for innovation; it was the right product and right customer base to experiment with. We got a ton of learnings from this site over the last few years and a lot of that has been worked into our experience design approach.

MM: How has the aggressiveness of tech media in leaking secret product plans changed the way T-Mobile communicates about products internally before launch?

DH: You must write your internal communications as if they were external. In this day and age, with everyone being a self publisher and editor of Web content, you have to anticipate that what is published inside might eventually make its way outside.

MM: How do you deal with bloggers and other press who consistently leak product details, but get them wrong?

DH: We run listening reports and do outreach to provide the correct information. The net is that the blogger wants to communicate the right information, because it is in their best interest to do so to maintain the respect of their readership. We time the initial launch of our product microsites to align with the press release, thus they have all the key product details right at product announcement. You have to draw a line in the sand or else you have no date to work with for any product launch. Anything published or speculated about prior to launch is suspect as to its accuracy.

MM: I've heard you speak about taking a broad look at ROI across many marketing tactics. How does this square against the current trend in the industry for specific attribution of sales against particular tactics?

DH: I think I would have a much harder time converting folks to a content viewpoint instead of a pure media silo viewpoint if, in fact, attribution for the sale has been solved, but it hasn't, from what I can tell. You will always optimize at the media level, but I think you have a bigger opportunity when you truly break down these silo walls and you look at how well the mix of media elements is working for you. Often, each media element is optimized independently of the other, and often the ownership and thus the ROI lies with many together, thus you may actually be optimizing against each other. I think a good example of how the two really need to work together is paid search and organic search. And now that search engines value social content so much, you have social mixed in there as well. Consumers today use search as navigation, and it seems to be the unifier of online advertising, social, pr, and onsite merchandising/publishing. The consumer cuts across our media silos, so we need to also. And I believe that your media has to work for you beyond generating awareness and increasing consideration—it needs to support the product throughout its life cycle.

MM: What do you see coming next for marketing at T-Mobile?

DH: Customer Experience Design. I have been evolving the thinking about how we create digital content and how we bring it together for the consumer. I have had to change culture and break down some very solid silo walls in order to get us to a unified way of thinking about digital content, so for me what comes next is to truly begin putting this design approach into production for digital web and retail. I have visions of broadening beyond to other channels once we succeed with these two!

MM: What do you see coming next for this whole space in the industry in the long run?

DH: I think you will see broader adoption of a digital content curation approach. I think it will start out on the Web site digital screens but I see it moving to all digital screens, including retail, wireless phones (of course!), internal retail, and customer care screens. In the end, it is all digital content served up across many digital screens. I think we over-complicate things sometimes with technology silos, so breaking it down to common elements across multiple touch points enables a common view, something many folks struggle arriving at.

MM: Thanks, Dennis, for taking the time to explain these interesting initiatives to my readers.

Posted by MikeMoran at 1:35 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

June 28, 2010

How do you know what is search spam?

Most people try to play by the rules, but I got a question last week as to exactly what the rules are. I think that's the wrong question. The rules for what constitutes search spam (violations of the search engines' terms of service) change all the time, but that's not the point. Rather than looking for a point-by-point enumeration of what is OK and what is forbidden, you should instead focus on the philosophy. If you don't understand what the sniff test is for whether something is worth doing or not, read my latest post on Search Engine Guide, "How do you know what is search spam?"

Posted by MikeMoran at 4:22 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

June 25, 2010

Local Search with Google Makes One Think - A Lot

by Frank Reed

I am knee deep in a project for a client that is designed to take their national presence and represent it locally (in Google primarily) through making sure their 28 local branches are found in local searches. It's an interesting process and is not as easy or clear-cut as it sounds. The project, in fact, has made me wonder just how many companies like my client exist out there. My suspicion is that there are more than I can imagine.

The company I am working with is not small (about $100 million in revenue) and has a leading position in its industry. What has happened, though, is very normal for mid-sized companies with small local offices. The bulk of the marketing attention and dollars has gone to branding campaigns and product offerings (through co-op and marketing development funds—MDF) that promoted the company but not its locations.

Their CMO is a sharp guy who runs a very lean shop and has decided to make sure that the people who are responsible for the day-to-day sales and service get some local play, especially as it relates to search marketing. Search engine results pages (SERPs) for local search have become increasingly competitive. Part of that reason is that the local 7-pack which gives a map and 7 Google Place Page listings have taken up a lot of the first page SERP real estate above the fold. That means more competition for less classic blue-link search results. Here is a 7-pack for the uninitiated.

As a result the local Place Page listing is a critical component of local search. Google says that 1 in 13 searches now have a local map. That's a lot of searches. Since these listings are associated with a picture (the map) they become the prime place for local searches to be vetted.

So where do you begin with this process? First, you have to look and see what Google already has in their database for each location. This is important to know because you can then determine which locations have already claimed listings and other valuable insights. In this case, there was only one claimed listing in the 28 markets, which is not as unusual as you might think. Most businesses don't realize that they need to claim their local listing in Google and other search engine databases.

Once that was done, we needed to create an individual landing page for each branch within the company that had unique content pertaining to that branch. Why unique content? Because Google is not very keen on seeing the same thing said about a branch office in New York City as one that is located in Helena, Montana. Everyone knows that those markets have virtually nothing in common. Well, Google knows that too, so it is important for Google and for the Web site visitor to get local information that is important to them specifically. Google rewards this approach. Also, it is good to have the page listed as the destination URL for the Place Page listing. Don't send everyone to your homepage so they could possibly get lost on your site before getting their information. Instead, send them to a page with a clean URL (such as "www.thecompany.com/thecity") and with nice HTML text so everyone can get the information they are looking for.

With those pages ready, we could now do a bulk upload of the branch information to Google using their template. This would speed the verification process and avoid more than a few logistical headaches. Once the listing are in the Place Pages index we can then go in and have the other unverified listings removed, since we have supplied Google with the most up-to-date and accurate information regarding each and every local branch office. What has been done essentially is that we have helped Google clean up its database and everyone wins.

So you think it's over now? No, it's not. Now we have to go and optimize each Place page with video, images, and specific data to further "localize" the listing and increase our chances of being found in the local 7-pack of results when local searches are performed for the company's products and services.

If it sounds like a lot of work, well, it kind of is. It's not rocket science but it's not easy-peasy either. If your company has a situation where its local Place Pages in Google have not been claimed and optimized, you need to follow this process pronto. With the increase in mobile devices and search, local will only get bigger as time passes.

For more information about what factors most influence rankings in this environment, visit this gathering of local search experts. It'll answer many of your questions.

Best wishes and don't forget that even if you are a huge international business, a lot of business happens locally. If you are not giving your local listings (Place Pages) in Google the attention they need you might be leaving money on the table.

Posted by FrankReed at 10:41 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

June 24, 2010

Win in Social Media by Treating Employees Right

I was flipping through a copy of Fast Company when I saw another one of those quotes. You know the kind I mean, where the CEO talks about how treating the employees right ensures that they treat the customers right. Some of them are just saying what people want to hear, but this particular quote was from David Pickens, the president of the highly successful Olive Garden chain of restaurants. Pickens summed it up nicely with, "It's very difficult for the experience of the guests to exceed the experience of the staff."

You've probably seen lots of service companies talk the same way. Home Depot swears that their employee stock program is a big part of what helps their employees care about their company rather than the company.

So what does this have to do with the Internet? Plenty. You might not realize it, but social media is turning every company into a service company. Think about it.

You're never going to have a blogging department. You're going to have employees that blog on top of their day job. Maybe it's that engineer in product development talking about the new technology coming along. Or that veteran sales guy who has forgotten more customer problems and solutions than most people will ever know. That's who you want writing your blog posts. How do you get them to write things that make the company look good? Treating them well seems like the least you can do.

You're never going to have a Twitter team, either. Or a message board department. If you expect your customer service team to check to see what complaints are popping up online, you might need to treat them nicely.

Of course, you don't have to treat anyone nicely. You can just order them to hop to—get on those message boards and monitor those tweets and write those blogs. Then you can sit back and see what happens. But it might not be pretty. Forced social media looks forced. Instead, allow your happy and enthusiastic employees to let their attitudes shine through.

Posted by MikeMoran at 1:17 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

June 23, 2010

What are you optimizing your pages for?

SEO, as you know, stands for Search Engine Optimization, and you might rightly expect that SEO is about optimizing pages to appeal to search engines. And you'd be right. Increasingly, however, I am finding that clients believe so fervently in SEO that they aren't actually optimizing their pages for sales. If you are falling into the trap, you'll likely regret looking so narrowly at SEO.

This was all brought to mind by interactions with two different people the last few days who each are concerned about the same thing—search traffic dropping to their sites. When I dug into the situation further, I found that neither had any idea what kind of sales they were generating from their sites. One, in fact, knew that the page that had recently dropped in search rankings had an extremely high bounce rate, so they couldn't have been selling very much.

Now, for both of these people, the lack of sales was not a crisis, but the drop in search traffic and the drop in search rankings was a crisis. It was hard not to chuckle at how times have changed.

I guess you've been in the search business a long time when you can remember when you had to prove every nickel that would come in because we did this new SEO thing. No one believed it would work and no one wanted to do it.

And look at us now. Now there are people walking around that have such a rabid belief in SEO that they think it is an end in iteself—that high rankings or even high traffic is some kind of magical elixir. It's not.

Getting people to the front door of your Web site isn't the end of the game. Unless you are optimizing your pages to actually sell things, online or offline, you're not ready for SEO. In fact, if your Web site stinks, you should probably try to have as few people find it as possible. If you don't know why you want people coming to your site, then figure that out first. Once you know your site can sell stuff, then it makes sense to use SEO and any other means at your disposal to drive as many people there as possible.

Posted by MikeMoran at 1:29 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

June 22, 2010

A Life of Purpose

by Janine Swenson

I have fallen woefully behind in my communications with extended family, friends and professional colleagues since returning to work in a full-time position. It seems, I don't have a moment to spare, to reach out to connect with my social network. Whatever the manner to stay in touch, whether face-to-face for coffee or lunch, talking on a land-line or Skype, texting with a cell phone, sending messages with e-mail, Twitter, or Facebook, answering questions through LinkedIn, sharing Google docs, IM'ing on an iPad, or shouting over the backyard fence, yodeling, sending smoke signals or any other methods there may be to communicate, I have not been using them.

That's how much I have failed to communicate.

So much so that when a long-time friend sent me one of those sappy e-mails about friendship and how much your life matters—it was called, The Butterfly Effect...How Your Life Matters—for a moment there, I think I actually teared up while reading it.

I must have been thinking about how I am so self-absorbed with my own needs, wanting a time to relax, to read the paper or a book, to watch a favorite taped television program, time to prepare and enjoy meals with my family, or some extra sleep. How could I live a life of purpose when I am so self-absorbed while others have been trying to reach me?

The e-mail went on, "With a little perspective you too can live a life of permanent purpose. ...When you know that everything matters—that every move counts as much as any other...Your productivity and financial success will soar to new heights..."

I couldn't agree more. So excuse me while I go join my family for a glass of wine while we talk and sit outside under the starry night on the first beautiful evening of summer 2010.

To partially quote the butterfly effect e-mail, "with a little perspective you too can live a life of permanent purpose. ...when you know (what really) matters!" I'll connect with my social network another time. Tonight, social networking starts at home.

Posted by JanineSwenson at 7:21 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

June 21, 2010

Is Your SEO Strategy to Barely Avoid Spamming?

When you drive your car, do you set out to go as fast as possible without getting a speeding ticket? So, you might judge that you can go 10 miles per hour above the limit without the cops picking you out to be pulled over? If you take the same attitude to the search engines' terms of service, you're making a big mistake. Trying to do anything you can get away with will probably not turn out well in the end, because very few have the skill to pull it off. To learn more, read my latest column in Search Engine Guide, "Is Your SEO Strategy to Barely Avoid Spamming?"

Posted by MikeMoran at 5:14 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 18, 2010

The Truth, the Whole Truth, and Nothing But the Truth

by Frank Reed

If there was ever a time in human existence where the truth is more elusive, please fill me in. Everyone today has the opportunity to appear like someone else. Everyone and everything can create a persona that may have little to do with who or what they really are. As a result, it is becoming harder and harder to tell fact from fiction and truth from lies. This is the new culture we are living in, so what does it mean for marketers?

Good question. It depends on what kind of marketer you are. If you are one that is not opposed to stretching the truth (or completely avoiding it), the time has never been better to convince people you're something that you're not. Of course, this is a true short-term strategy because once you are revealed for your true character, you are done. This is how it should be in this case. It appears that many people are more gullible than ever but once it has been discovered that they were duped, then the indignant backlash is swift and intense.

So where does the real opportunity lie in this environment where the ability to lie and to get away with it has never been greater? It can be found in telling the truth and having complete transparency around your products, services, and offerings. Many people who come from marketing before the days of the Internet fear this concept, because it used to be that spin control could actually be controlled. Now, in the era of connectedness we all live in, you really have little control over your messaging. That's a scary prospect unless you have the right point of view.

So what exactly is that point of view? It's one of telling the truth and being accountable. While we are more gullible than ever before, we are also very forgiving for those who are truly repentant when business goes bad. The logical outflow of that is being able to tell someone that you screwed up and then doing your best to right the wrong. It's actually very refreshing.

Here's a quick example that comes from the world of sports that I hope will inspire us all to face our mistakes and shortcomings with dignity and class rather than "pulling a BP" and doing whatever it is they are doing.

On June 2, 2010 Detroit Tigers pitcher Armando Gallaraga was one out away from pitching only the 21st perfect game in Major Baseball history. At this point, first base umpire Jim Joyce was about to become both infamous and famous all at once. Joyce's blown call on what should have been the final out of the game cost Gallaraga his place in history by taking away his perfect game.

What followed, however, showed what life is truly about in the end. Rather than throwing a fit, Gallaraga accepted the call with just a quick smile. It was shown by replay after replay that the call was wrong but it was the call. It couldn't be reversed. After the game, Joyce, who was just last week voted the best umpire in baseball by the players according to ESPN, faced Gallaraga and apologized.

The next day, they met at home plate for the exchange of lineup cards and Joyce became teary-eyed when he was face-to-face with Gallaraga. Gallaraga's response to all of this can be summed up in this from the Sports Illustrated article "A Different Kind of Perfect",

"When I saw him," says Galarraga, who needed only 88 pitches to complete his gem, "I was like, 'Oh, my God.' He was red, like a tomato. He hugged me right away. Not even one word."

Then Joyce managed to say, "Lo siento [I'm sorry]." He started to cry.

"I took something away from him," Joyce says, "and if I could, I would give it back in a minute. He just looked at me and hugged me, and I couldn't talk after that. My emotions got away from me."

Says Galarraga, "He tried to talk. He'd say a couple of words. 'You were perfect, I was not.' I felt so bad. I didn't feel bad for me. I felt bad for him."

Umpire Jim Joyce's reaction to everything that has gone on?

"His smile is burned into my memory," Joyce told SI three days later. "I am absolutely enthralled with the way Armando has handled this."

What these two men exhibited was grace and humility. These are things that are in short order in the world of social media gurus and experts blowing their own horns more loudly than those silly things from this year's World Cup soccer matches.

How will you stand out from the din of the masses who just want to make sure they are heard and ultimately sell you something? It looks like being honest and humble will look very different in this new age of marketing. I, for one, am excited by this trend. I sure know that I could use some grace in the things I have screwed up along the way. Let's face it we all can.

Here's to marketing with the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

Posted by FrankReed at 8:37 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 17, 2010

Calling Attention to Yourself

I always wonder whether I am doing the best job of marketing myself. Yeah, I know I do a better job of marketing myself than anyone else does, but you know what I mean. In my business, there is no shortage of opportunities to get attention, but most of them require a lot of attention. So, I've been forced to decide what things to spend my time on and what to do less of. Your business might be different than mine, but you are still faced with the same question of where to focus time and resources. Internet marketing is cheap from a money standpoint, but it costs a lot of time and energy.

So, I made a list of the things that I do to call attention to myself:

• Write blog posts. I post to this blog every working day, but I do take several weeks off each year. In the last few years, I've tried to lessen my load by sharing this space with other writers. The quality hasn't suffered but I don't pay them, so some contribute more sporadically than others. I've thought about redesigning the blog and launching it on its own site, but I never find the time. I'm hoping to do it by partnering with someone else, so we'll see. I also link from my blog to other places on the Web where I write, so that gets me more exposure, too.
• Write books. I have two, but I am overdue for another. I've had the idea for two years but I am only one-third of the way through the writing. I wanted to finish this one without being committed to a date by a publishing contract, but I am finding that the lack of deadline is causing it to always slip lower on the list. I've decided that I am going to be a lot more aggressive about this the rest of this year, but it means I have to reduce other things I am doing.
• Public speaking. I once spoke more than I do now. I used to speak mostly for free or for travel expenses, but now I usually charge. I'm speaking less but I think that was one of the things I needed to do. I know that less exposure from speaking might hurt me in other ways, but I needed to cut something, so free speaking that requires travel is something I do only a few times a year now.
• Updating my Web site. The blog forces me to keep adding content, so that's good, but my Web site looks downright dowdy because I haven't had time to redesign it. I broke down and hired people to redesign it and I have someone recoding the HTML now. I am able to do these things myself, but not as well as others and it isn't worth my time. I liked doing it but it is something I had to cut out so that I could do other things.
• Tweeting. I tweet a few times it work day. Others use Twitter a lot better than I do (certainly more frequently than I do), but I think it has helped me some. I am finding that I use Twitter the way others use Facebook—communicating with individuals as much as sharing what I am reading or what I think about an issue. People who know me expected me to be funnier on Twitter but I get nervous committing jokes to 140 characters because I don't want to upset someone who doesn't get the joke. I am trying to do my few tweets a day, but I always have to remind myself to do them. Twitter doesn't come naturally to me the way it does to some people. (I might just be old.)

In looking at this list, I can see why I feel so busy all the time. These activities take a significant chunk out of every work day. I know that they work, because people keep calling me to ask me to speak or do some consulting. But I sometimes wonder whether trying to do all of these things spreads me too thin, where if I cut one out I might do better. Everyone likes to talk about how Seth Godin blogs but doesn't do Twitter, for example.

But I don't feel like that makes sense. I think I want to juggle them a bit longer and see how it works, knowing that something new is always around the corner, looking to steal my time. (I've resisted FourSquare so far.)

I am interested in knowing what others think. I've got thousands of blog subscribers and Twitter followers, and have sold tens of thousands of books, and spoken to hundreds of people at a time several times a month, so calling attention to myself is working to at least some extent. I don't have to compare myself to the real giants in our business to feel successful, but as a marketer, it helps for me to think about what I am doing once in a while. I hope it helps you, too.

Posted by MikeMoran at 11:00 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

June 16, 2010

Is marketing more than a trick?

I'm a bit hesitant about writing this post, and I took great care in crafting the headline, because I have had a bad experience writing about this subject in the past. But I think it's too important not to talk about, because we live in a world where marketing has been reduced to nothing more than mere technique. A trick. And I think marketing can be a lot more than that. So, if you've been feeling more like a magician than a businessperson while doing your marketing, then maybe this is the post for you.

Sometimes it seems as if we all want to know what the "angle" is in Internet marketing. I once wrote a blog post on the Search Engine Guide Web site called "The All-Time Top-Secret Search Marketing Trick" and told everyone that there were no tricks. You have to do old-fashioned hardworking marketing of having what your customer wants and persuading them that you do.

Instead of people liking this column, I got several flaming comments about what a bad post it was, including one accusing me of faking a positive comment by writing it myself! They were infuriated that they had been lured into reading the post by the headline promising a trick and yet there was none revealed.

That's how powerful this pull is to find the secret. The inside angle. The trick.

But what I hope to convince you of is that the trick is something very basic. The trick is truly valuing your customer. The trick is really trying to give them what they need--the right information to answer their questions, the right offer that fits their budgets, the right product that solves their problems.

And, somewhere, in the dim recesses of time, this is what marketing once was. Often we treat marketing as though it is mere promotion, when that is but one of the vaunted "Four Ps of Marketing." We need to remember that the other three involve having what our customer wants, where they want it, and at the price they want it. Marketing is a lot more than trumpeting our wares.

And it doesn't have to be about tricks. Marketing need not be about fooling people. If you really have what your customers want, you probably don't need to fool them. Just tell them.

Posted by MikeMoran at 6:02 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

June 15, 2010

IBM Buys Coremetrics as the Analytics Battle Heats Up

IBM doesn't make too many mistakes, but I thought it made a big one four years ago when it sold off its SurfAid Web analytics business to Coremetrics. Today, IBM reversed course in a very smart move when it swallowed up Coremetrics to tap into its customers' growing need for Web analytics. And while IBM getting back into the Web analytics game is a big story by itself, it's a bigger story when you look at what this means to the Web analytics industry.

Google in some ways took the air out of the Web Analytics business with its purchase of Urchin, later christened as the free Google Analytics tool. Google Analytics is a great Web metrics system that is probably used by more than half of all Web sites. It does the job and and at an unbeatable price. At the time, many analysts claimed that there would be no room in the market for paid analytics, but there are reasons that more companies still want to be in this space, even against a free competitor:

• They want to use the data. Adobe acquired Omniture in a surprise move, because they seemingly had no need for such a capability, but Adobe knows that to compete with Apple and with Google, they must figure out how to support advertising where Web activity information is crucial for behavioral targeting, personalization, and a host of other activities that can keep Flash relevant.
• Their clients want the data. IBM sold off Web Analytics but now they are buying Business Intelligence. Since IBM sold off SurfAid, they have acquired Cognos, marking a new seriousness about BI that was missing before. Nowadays, no BI company can afford to be without Web Analytics.

IBM is making a very smart play here. Web Analytics can no longer be confined to the Web. The need for Web activity to flow through to the rest of the enterprise is vital, and so is the need for BI companies to be able to report on Web activity just as they do any other number in the firm.

But for IBM, the decision was probably even easier, because its strong position in Web application and commerce servers (with WebSphere) and in content management (from its Filenet acquisition) means that it has many ways to use Web analytics software than just through BI. This is the rare situation where a single acquisition can have a good effect on several businesses, making the price something that can be amortized across value in more than one place.

Google Analytics is just fine for a small company that wants to track Web activity. Even some large companies can use it to great effect. But companies that want to get serious about being data driven need to look at Web analytics as a part of a larger BI activity.

Does your BI vendor need to own its own Web analytics solution for this to happen? I'm not sure, but I know that it's a lot easier to pull off if they do. As IBM watched much of the market hand its data to Google, and watched Adobe siphon off another big chunk, they have no way of knowing how easily they will be able to tap into that data in the future. Buying Coremetrics assures them of a way that their clients can keep their data and allows IBM to analyze it for them.

Posted by MikeMoran at 3:26 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

June 14, 2010

Why optimizing your pages for search doesn't work

SEO stands for "search engine optimization," so you can be excused for thinking that optimization is the most important thing for you to do. And it can be, but the problem is that you need to know what you are optimizing for. Too often, we optimize pages for the wrong thing, which doesn't work all that well, as you might expect. If you want to understand the missing step that can cost you dearly, check out my latest post on Search Engine Guide, "Why optimizing your pages for search doesn't work."

Posted by MikeMoran at 7:07 AM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

June 11, 2010

Content Is Bigger Than I Thought

by Frank Reed

This week, I spent two days in New York City at the Interactive Advertising Bureau's Innovation Days "Content Conquers All" event. It was essentially two full days of looking at everything content related that could be imagined. As a result, I came away with more than just an impression that content is much bigger than I thought. In fact, if you would like to look at Internet marketing and the Internet business in general, literally everything is content.

From the images on your site to the forms used to collect data and everything in between, it is all content. Content is the consumable piece of your Internet presence. So my question is "Just what is NOT consumable on the Web?" It all is because it needs to be viewed and digested and it is also something that can be revisited and re-viewed and re-digested. I don't know about you but I am seriously expanding my definition of content.

Also, beyond content being the thing that the search engines can latch on to, it is the thing that people, as in your customers and prospects, latch on to. In the end, that is the most important fact to remember. Sure, it's good to appease the engines, but it's more important to engage your customer or prospect.

Surprisingly, it looks like the world in general is just catching on to this concept. After years and years of lip service to the idea that high quality is the most important thing, it looks like the brainwashing is complete.

How so? So much so that there is considerable push back on content farm concept whose leading players are Demand Media, Yahoo's Associated Content and AOL. This push back has created an interesting effect. All three of these content generators are working hard to position themselves as producing high quality content, not just content for content's sake.

AOL is doubling its current staff of 500 actual journalists to supplement the 40,000 freelancers they cull content from. The claim of an average of 8.8 years of journalistic experience for these new hires goes well beyond the $5 per article model that was becoming the norm. Demand Media bragged about their platform to ensure quality. Maybe the message has gotten through?

Of course, talk is cheap. In fact, talk is the lowest quality content because it can be twisted and maneuvered at the blink of an eye. Oh, and it is usually forgotten or turned upside down due to our memory's limited capabilities. Actions will speak in the new world order of content generation. Let's see what these mass content generators actually do.

What are you doing to make sure you are competing in this area? How do you define content? Tell us in the comments.

Posted by FrankReed at 11:10 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

June 10, 2010

Self-promotion, Internet style

I had dinner last night with Frank Reed, whose writing graces this page each Friday. Somehow the conversation got around to self-promotion, a dirty little hyphenated word that no one really wants to admit to, but that we all must do to be successful. Frank and I admitted to each other that neither of us is very good at self-promotion, being old enough to have been profoundly uncomfortable with our various pre-Internet forms of self-promotion. (Many of us even refer to those who are good at it as "shameless" self-promoters.) But in thinking about our conversation, I think that both Frank and I are actually good at Internet-style self-promotion, because it stems from helping other people.

I told Frank the story of how I became a Distinguished Engineer at IBM, a situation that required self-promotion if ever there was one. When I first became aware of such a position, I (perhaps grandiosely) thought that I was qualified for the position in every way, but I had one impediment. I needed to collect letters of reference from other Distinguished Engineers. There was just one problem: I didn't know any.

I was advised to just start calling a few up and ask them to write a letter for me. This struck me as incredibly awkward, and not at all the kind of self-promotion I am good at. So, I chose another, more Internet-age appropriate method, sending helpful e-mails to Distinguished Engineers when I came across information they would be interested in. And to ensure that I had such information, I set up elaborate Google Alerts for each of my targets.

It worked like a charm. Soon, I had no shortage of Distinguished Engineers who knew who I was, thought I was on the ball, helpful, and were now willing to vouch for me. Last night I realized that this is exactly what we must do on the Internet.

Self-promotion must take the form of helping others first to be effective on the Internet. Someone who approaches me listing off credentials and ending with a request for a relevant job opportunity might succeed, but someone who helps me out a few times is guaranteed to get my attention in a job hunt. Similarly, on the Internet, putting out helpful information is what stamps you as an expert.

And the good new is that it isn't uncomfortable. I make sure this blog has a post in it each day, for example, and I think this information helps those who read it. When people contact me telling me they have been reading my blog and now, "Could you do some consulting?" or "I have a speaking event that you'd be perfect for," that is the result of successful self-promotion, but a kind that has done nothing but help people all around.

Self-promotion has a bad connotation, but perhaps the Internet will turn it around. If you focus on helping others, what you do will rarely feel uncomfortable and it will probably work better than anything else. Helping is the new selling.

Posted by MikeMoran at 6:12 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 9, 2010

Are you fighting social media?

I got a phone call yesterday from the company that services my central air conditioning unit each year. They had called a couple of weeks ago saying that they wanted to come between 8 am and 11 am yesterday, so we made sure someone would be home. But yesterday morning, they called and said they'd come in the afternoon. I told them that we couldn't be there in the afternoon, precisely because we'd arranged to be home in the morning as they had requested. And she started arguing with me that we had it wrong and that it was written down for afternoon "in her book." So I asked her if she'd rather spend time arguing about how this happened or solving the problem we both have. If this sounds like a silly question, it is, but it's how many of us approach social media.

Too often, I run into people who are fighting social media or, worse, fighting in social media.

Have you been asking yourself why you have to respond to all these anonymous people out there? Are you just plain uncomfortable interacting in social media? Have you told yourself that it's not worth your time?

These kind of defensive reactions are normal. Human beings are programmed to master things, so being thrust into a new environment where you don't know what to do is unnerving. It's natural to ask some hard questions about whether you need to endure this discomfort. And, truthfully, social media is not for every business. If you don't know why you are doing it, you probably shouldn't be.

But I run into many businesspeople who know they should be doing it but just don't want to. They resent the situation they are in, much like the woman from the air conditioning company. She is stuck dealing with something that most likely she didn't cause, and it's uncomfortable. Her first reaction is to deny it, to push it away, to blame it on someone or something else, even the customer.

I see this reaction to social media all the time. People marginalize the folks complaining in social media as unimportant ("Who are they anyway?") or unrepresentative ("Just a few nuts") or unfair ("What are they expecting anyway?"), something they'd never do if a living breathing customer complained to their face. They'd never react this way to a live customer even if they did not know the customer, even if the customer didn't provide a name, even if the customer seemed to have an unusual point of view, and even if the customer didn't seem very fair. If your priority is to serve your customers, you might need to be part of social media. However, if your priority is your own comfort, it's fine to stay away.

But even worse are those companies fighting in social media. It's a battle you can't win, because you are fighting in front of your other customers, who are more likely to take the side of their fellow customers than yours. I've seen companies lambasting their own customers on message boards, which does far more harm to their reputation than any customer's complaint did.

These businesspeople would never have a full-blown argument with a customer in their store with other customers around, but they fire off angry missives on a public message board without thinking. In social media, it's best to stay calm, no matter how angry someone else appears to be. Act like the well-trained call center representative. Fighting in social media makes both parties look bad. The problem is the angry customer is likely anonymous or doesn't care how he looks, while you care a great deal.

Businesspeople who rise to their own angry defense when faced with a complaint are under the false assumption that proving they were right will save their reputation. In fact, the argument itself dooms their reputation, because other customers get to see you when something goes wrong, and it's not pretty. Better to see you correct a "mistake" that might not be yours than to prove you never made one. Sometimes I think that "being right" is the real priority here, rather than customer service.

To the air conditioning company's credit, the woman quickly agreed that regardless of how the mix-up had occurred, that she'd try to move some appointments around to get to us in the morning, which she did. If you're still fighting in social media and fighting with social media, perhaps you should move a few of your priorities around, also.

Posted by MikeMoran at 7:32 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

June 8, 2010

Why you think you have nothing to say

Do you write a blog? Tweet? Post videos on YouTube? Do you do anything to spread your knowledge to your customers? Most people don't, and when I ask why, they say, "Because I have nothing to say." If this sounds like you, then you need to read my latest post on Search Engine Guide, "Why you think you have nothing to say."

Posted by MikeMoran at 8:39 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

June 7, 2010

Will the World Cup be the next social media frenzy?

by Aaron Kim

The upcoming 2010 World Cup in South Africa is being touted by FIFA and Twitter representatives as the event to slash all previous records in social media traffic. That's a tall order, considering the US elections, the Beijing Olympics, the Oscars and even the Lost series finale were nothing to sneeze at in terms of frantic online real-time activity. Regardless of whether or not that bold prediction will be realized, the next 30 days of soccer madness will certainly bring a new way of experiencing the most widely-viewed sporting event in the world.

On June 11, the ball starts rolling at the Soccer City Stadium in Johannesburg, marking the first time the World Cup is held on the African continent. It's also the first time the popular tournament will be testing the open waters of Facebook and Twitter. Zuckerberg's social networking service opened to the general public only in September 2006, and most people had never heard about Twitter when France's Zinadine Zidane infamously headbutted Italy's Materazzi in the finals four years ago. Social media was already pervasive back then, but mainly in the form of blogs, wikis, podcasts and video sharing.

Thus, most of the online impressions around that play developed not instantly, but minutes, hours, and days after it happened, and they were particularly prominent in YouTube, the big social media star at the time. My favorites--but perhaps NSFW--are the Coup de Boule song and this compilation of 114 parodies of the unusual, err, interaction.

Furthermore, most of us were still passive small screen spectators of the games, with mainstream media being the intermediaries between the athletes and the public. Now, several players have their own Twitter accounts, and are already commenting on what's going on in the last days before the kick-off. I compiled a Twitter list of players—including some of the stars left out--in case you want to take a peek at their thoughts before and during the competition. Some teams, such as England and Spain, already banned the use of Twitter and Facebook, but others like Brazil and The Netherlands are ok with it.

Perhaps the most interesting bits won't come from the players themselves, but from the people close to them. Shortly after the game where Real Madrid was eliminated from the UEFA Champions League on March 10, Kaká's wife retweeted a post by one of his advisers calling Madrid's coach a "coward". Social media guidelines are not easy to enforce outside team boundaries.

If you are into social media, but not into soccer, you must be asking by now: why do I care about all this World Cup nonsense? You should care for at least two reasons. First, it will provide all of us a better opportunity to understand the reach and importance of Facebook and Twitter outside North America. Some reports indicate that nearly 50% of Twitter accounts and one quarter of Facebook users hail from outside the US. All the previous events driving high traffic in Twitter and Facebook were wildly popular with Americans and Canadians. As both the US and Canada have traditionally not been major soccer markets, we can for the first time observe the extent to what the rest of the world embraces the two services. Furthermore, the instantaneous nature of the play-by-play reactions and the unprecedented volumes will allow a much closer reading of regional differences in the use of social media, something that the Oscars or Lost can only give us a glimpse of. The "world game" has never been this worldly.

Posted by AaronKim at 7:49 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

June 4, 2010

Why won't certain companies adopt social media?

by Frank Reed

Social media is growing. We all get that. The rate of adoption is often a skewed measure depending on who has been asked. The social media "professional" has the nearly automated response of "Everyone does it! It's easy! It's cheap! It's great!" Someone more firmly rooted in reality will say that many companies are having great success using social media for lead generation and other business needs, but that not everyone is on board yet. In fact, the really courageous ones will say that social media is not for everyone. Social media heresy? Maybe, but I don't think so.

At any rate, there is a very interesting segment of businesses that deserves extra special attention with regard to social media. These are companies that are in industries or verticals where social media adoption has been slow for many reasons that run the gamut from "not enough time" to "What's social media?" and all stops in between.

Some of these categories are listed below with a rating we'll call the Social Media Adoption Opportunity (on a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being the equivalent of a snowball's chance in hell and 10 being "Let's start right now!"). This rating will reflect just how open they might be to getting involved in social media for their business.

Traditional Marketers. Companies that have been around long enough to have the "Flywheel Effect" in place (read the business classic by Jim Collins "From Good to Great" for more flywheel theory). Success is a result of many years of doing the right thing, doing it well and possibly doing it without any real promotion other than traditional word of mouth. These marketers have hit their critical mass and move forward on the momentum that has been created. They are, however, smart enough to know what is a true opportunity, fighting through any roadblocks to ensure continued success. Social media adoption opportunity: 8

Fearful Marketers. This group has heard all the commotion about social media as a tool to do business into the future but has fear around the unknown, fear about job security, fear of failure, and fear in general that have all kept them from pushing the envelope in their organization. This group offers a "glass half empty" mindset to anything they are unfamiliar with, so social media will be fraught with issues rather than opportunities. Social media adoption opportunity: 3

Stuck Marketers. Many people confuse this group with the traditional marketers, but that's not the case. This group has the attitude that "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." They are comfortable with what has worked for them over time and are resistant to anything that might threaten the marketing stalwarts they have relied on for years. This group will, however, be moved to change if there is compelling evidence presented to them that simply cannot be denied. Social media adoption opportunity: 5

Relationship Marketers . This is an interesting bunch that is more common than we might imagine. This group has been working with a specific agency or account representative for so long that they wouldn't know how to move to another option for fear of offending their long-term vendor or hurting a personal relationship. I have heard stories where companies stay with vendors out of pity (I am not making this up, honest) rather than make a business decision that would benefit the company. Healthy relationships are good but when they exist at the expense of good judgment and common sense then there may be trouble. The hope for social media adoption here is when leadership changes so do the long-standing relationships. Timing is everything with this group. Social media adoption opportunity: 6

I realize that this is not painting a picture of "low hanging fruit" for social media adoption and integration. The truth of the matter is that these companies make up a rather large percentage of businesses in the U.S., so there is both need and opportunity. Can that need be turned into action? That's the $64,000 question.

I believe that until these marketers get on board, social media will be limited in its scope. This is very different than limited in its success. Success using social media for business benefit is already proven many times over. But much like the search marketing industry, the prospects for growth will be determined by when the early adopters and influencers have run their course, and the larger group of marketers listed above decide to play or stay.

What do you think? Do you know any companies like these? If so, what will it take for these marketers to make the jump into what many believe is a significant part of successful marketing efforts in the very near future?,

Posted by FrankReed at 5:12 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

June 3, 2010

The Joys (and Dangers) of Crowdsourced Marketing

It almost sounds magical--a system with an on-demand supply of incredibly cheap labor (pennies for many tasks) that is available by simply posting a request on a Web site. Amazon's Mechanical Turk and other crowdsourcing sites have revolutionized the way companies do intensive manual labor on computing tasks. So, you might want to consider using crowdsourcing for your Internet marketing jobs. But when you do, you also need to be careful about how you do it, lest you give away too much information to your competitors.

First, some basics. For those unaware, crowdsourcing is a fantastic resource that allows businesses to tap into the cheap labor pool of students, the home-bound, the unemployed, and anyone who wants a flexible part-time job. All you must do is break down your job into a very simple repetitive task that can be done in a few seconds or a minute, post that task on Mechanical Turk or one of its competitors, and sit back and watch as the tasks come back completed.

Mechanical Turk is by far the most popular and famous crowdsourcing site, but you should know that it is restricted to the U.S., so folks in other countries might want to look at CrowdFlower or other sites. So, while I will refer to Mechanical Turk a lot, most of what I say is just as applicable to other crowdsourcing sites that might be more appropriate to what you are doing. For example, 99Designs is a site that allows you to crowdsource any graphics design task from a full Web site makeover to a logo, offering a prize for the winning entry.

Let's take a marketing example for crowdsourcing on Mechanical Turk to see how it works. Everyone talks about how important it is to do link building for organic search marketing, but who has the time to do it? I know a restaurant chain that needed links to its local Web sites for each restaurant location. Now, a highly paid marketing person is never going to find the time to research the right local directories, blogs, newspapers, restaurant sites, and tourism sites for the 52 cities those restaurants are located in. Maybe you could wait for summer to arrive and find an intern to do it. But it's faster and cheaper to post the task on Mechanical Turk to list the URLs and e-mail addresses of 20 sites in a particular city that meet the criteria. For that you might pay 20 cents a site. Maybe $1 a site if you are feeling flush. If this seems cheap, you should know that many tasks pay just one or two cents.

I'm not kidding. Many of the tasks are that easy to post and get gobbled up that quickly. So how can you beat coming up with your list of link targets for a couple of hundred bucks over 50 cities? It sounds too good to be true, but it is true.

You might want to be careful about one thing, however. Mechanical Turk postings are public, so they can be mined by your competitors trying to figure out what you are up to. For a while, a Mechanical Turk tracking site was up that showed the hottest requests and what company posted them, but when I checked today the site was down.

So, think before you post. Provide the absolute minimum detail about what you need done. Not only with this provide more security for you, but it simplifies the task, which allows it to be completed more quickly and allows you to pay less.

Be careful about how you identify yourself. Obviously you shouldn't misrepresent your identity, but it can't hurt to avoid using your company name if it is the kind of task you wouldn't want your competitors to know about.

In general, the risk of exposure to competitors is extremely small compared to the value of on-demand cheap labor. If you haven't thought about how to use crowdsourcing for your marketing, your competitors might already have.

Posted by MikeMoran at 3:59 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

June 2, 2010

Does the Internet show the true colors of your business?

I see you all the time. Small business owners that open their Google Alerts each morning wondering if this will be the day that some customer popped off in front of hundreds or thousands of people. They are waiting in dread for some nutjob to post that awful review that undoes years of work in customer service. If you are living in fear of a bad Yelp review, maybe you should check out my latest post on Search Engine Guide, "Does the Internet show the true colors of your business?"

Posted by MikeMoran at 3:09 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

June 1, 2010

Why Google Doesn't Sweat Phone Apps

You've seen the ads: "There's an app for that." There does seem to be an app for just about anything when you own an iPhone, so you'd think that Google might be worried about Apple's big lead in the important mobile marketplace. But I think they aren't very worried. I think that things are going just as Google has hoped. Read on to find out why.

Google's business is based on advertising, so they are unlikely to miss an opportunity as big as mobile advertising. So, when they saw the big lead that Apple has jumped out to, it had to give them pause. But not for long.

Google's Android operating system just reached one million units sold, and did it faster than the iPhone did. And Android has already passed iPhone in the number of units sold in the U.S., although Apple still has a big lead in other geographies. And Android apps have been gaining rapidly, too.

But that's not the real reason that Google isn't worried about apps. The latest technological development isn't happening in a lab or a garage. It's happening in a boring old standards committee. The HTML5 standard sounds like just about the most uninteresting thing imaginable, because, after all, who think about HTML? But it has huge ramifications as to how the mobile world shakes out.

You've already heard about some of the fallout in the ongoing war between Apple and Adobe. Apple, in trying to control its platform, does not want Adobe Flash apps running that can run on the iPhone and on any other device. They want apps on the iPhone application programming interfaces (APIs) only. So, Apple has loudly backed the new video standard in HTML5 as a way of freezing out Flash. You might think that APIs are just some tech junk that no one needs to understand, but as a marketer, you are a lot about what the standard format for content needs to be. Apple wants Flash to lose to H.264, which is part of HTML5.

The names of all these things are not important. What is important is which companies will be on the winning side of these battles. Google has pointedly voiced support for both HTML5 and Flash. But that isn't the biggest change coming with HTML5.

Apple's approach to support HTML5 cuts both ways. HTML5 is full of new features beyond video support, not the least of which is the ability for Web browsers to run offline applications. That feature is critically important for computer applications such as e-mail and calendars, but it sets the stage for any phone application to use a browser instead of needing to use the phone's app APIs. This could potentially loosen Apple's grip on the iPhone, because an HTML5 browser might create an experience as good (or almost as good) as a native iPhone app.

If this happens, and I think it will, it plays right into Google's hands. Google has an open platform in Android that will continually innovate in its support for HTML5, and Google is uninterested in lock-in on the apps. Google just wants a cut of the advertising, no matter what phone people use. For Apple, it's tougher, because Apple is dependent on the hardware and software revenue to a much greater degree than Google. Apple also makes a lot of money on iTunes, but rivals are emerging there, too, and having HTML5 support on the iPhone gives those rivals a gateway into the IPhone market.

HTML5 is far from a death knell for Apple, but it is clearly a shift away from proprietary experiences into one that it is more open for innovation without any need for the handset maker or the carrier to approve of the capability. Where today, Apple and the carriers have a lot of say as to what works and doesn't work on an iPhone (and by extension, on iPods and iPads), HTML5 breaks that power.

Google, who never tried exercising that kind of power over Android, can only be smiling. Certainly there are other issues in pursuing a more open strategy--Microsoft and Intel dominated PC sales but also suffer from a more fragmented market and a more difficult user experience because of the openness. Apple's seeming rigidity in controlling hardware and software has resulted in better user experiences far sooner than would have occurred in an open market.

But Google isn't counting on having a necessarily better experience. Google is betting on cheap, on choice, and on getting a slice of every transaction, not on selling the best hardware, software, and content experience. Who will win? They probably will both be wildly successful for a long time to come, but Google probably has fewer worries about the way the world is trending than Apple does.

For marketers, the lesson is to pay attention to the way things are evolving. If you bet all your budget on an iPhone app, it might give you a temporary edge, but paying attention to the more standard way might give you more leverage in the long run. Proprietary methods are in decline in most parts of computing, so pay attention to which marketing is on the side that is gaining traction. Often the innovations begin with proprietary technology, but then shift to something more open. As marketers, we must remember that these winds can shift quite rapidly, so we must always keep on top of the trends.

Posted by MikeMoran at 3:43 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack