Marketing Type

John Edwards is good and so is his marketing

[Reposting from Salutor.com]

Via Triangle-area political blogger Ruby Sinreich of LotusMedia, I'm tickled to discover that part of the web strategy of the John Edwards campaign is a charmingly ambiguous slogan, "John Edwards is good."

This marketing is also good for a couple of reasons:

1. The slogan's ambiguity allows individuals to inhabit it with their own meaning.
2. The assertion intrinsically conveys a positive message, which suits Edwards' apparent temperament and strengths, such as they are.
3. The simplicity of the phrase is reminiscent of that other great political slogan, "I like Ike."

Another compelling aspect of the strategy, apart from its appeal to the young and web savvy (is that a soap opera title yet?), is that no one appears to have tried to stake a proprietary claim to the slogan. It is not really clear, in fact, what if any role the official campaign might be playing.

This not only strengthens its appeal to web savvy, creative commons, "influencer-types," it keeps a positive message from being compromised by negative associations that would accompany trying to enforce exclusivity. People can, as Ruby points out, really make it their own.

By way of illustration: I like Edwards even though I don't particularly agree with him on several issues. . . . My positive feelings toward Edwards arise from two (arguably silly) things:

• His wife, who is likable and in every way speaks well of his character.
• A comment he made in response to a set of questions during the last election about his favorite way to spend downtime, which was something along the lines of "sitting on the couch watching Scooby-Doo with my kids."

These small details made me feel as if I might actually enjoy having the Edwards to a backyard cookout, a sentiment for which during the last election John Kerry offered nothing comparable. It is interesting but not relevant to my feelings toward Edwards that an old friend of mine, Matt Gross, is apparently advising the campaign on Internet strategy (no doubt he is one of many). For what it's worth, I also like John McCain.

Singing for your sup-PR

This sounds an awful lot like the sort of thing our team did for Lulu over the past couple of years: a pitch-perfect example of unconventional PR from Yahoo in the form of a singing news program. "Yahoo! News to tilt to a lilt" (The Hollywood Reporter) [For the record, the Naked News was taken]

I suppose this stunt accomplishes the purpose of keeping Yahoo's name in the memetrackers as Google rolls out yet another set of powerful, free gizmos, but in the end Yahoo is never really short on buzz. They make, and have always made, very savvy acquisitions (Flickr, del.icio.us), and they associate themselves with terrific content. Where Yahoo! has failed and continues to fail is in delivering a better core product: search and advertising tools.

Google Wants To Make Running A Business Cheaper

Today Google officially launched Google Apps, the bundle of services that it hopes will compete with Microsoft and the stranglehold MS Exchange and Office have on businesses. While the bulk of this functionality has been available from Google for months, the official launch is still big news in the technology world. It should also come as big news for anyone thinking of starting a business because Google's bundle of services can drastically reduce the technology investment you need to get an organization up and running.

Bug-Eyed Marketing has taken advantage of Google's domain management services for the last five months or so. The email application, which is basically Gmail at your own domain with a customizable webmail interface, is brilliant: much better and easier to manage than email services at any company for which I've ever worked. Just this week I added email aliases -- essentially mirrors of our existing email accounts -- at Bug-Eyed's new domain (which I should point out is no more ready than our current domain for public use). Yesterday I also began to trick out a Bug-Eyed gateway page for all our accounts. It, too, is superior to anything we ever managed to devise at my last company.

The Apps sign-up page also introduces a promising new domain acquisition service from Google. Although I'm not sure what the cost will be, I would love to move my business (I have 63 registered domains) away from GoDaddy, an interesting but in the end unavoidably slimy company.

Google Calendar, another element of the bundle of services, is also easy to use and in my opinion better than most commercial products.

Google Page Creator, which I considered using to build the Bug-Eyed Marketing site but ended up using just as a temporary placeholder, is on the other hand NOT ready for prime time. Not only is it terribly restrictive and incompatible with many of Google's other services for web masters (including, bizarrely, the AdSense program), but it has shown serious stability problems in my experience. I did use Page Creator to make a simple for sale page with photos when we sold our house this past summer, but the application is not nearly robust enough yet to use as a real commercial web site. It certainly offers a quick way to post simple pages, which can be handy, but is not nearly up to snuff at this point.

Google Docs & Spreadsheets (formerly Writely) is supposed to be the big competitor to MS Office. I've tried hard to use this application in my day to day work since it launched last summer, but apart from occasionally offering superior version control on documents with multiple remote collaborators, I still rely on the much more powerful software installed on my computers for spreadsheets complex documents and presentations--either Office (on my laptop) or OpenOffice (on my desktop). OpenOffice, which is an open source (and thus free) set of applications, has about 95% of the functionality I use in MS Office. I like it a lot and recommend it to other business people without reservation, something I can't say about most of the other open source apps I've tried.

PhysOrg.comGoogle Apps vs. Microsoft Office
PC World - 3 hours ago
Google has let people with domain names use Gmail as their e-mail solution for awhile, and a free version of Google Apps (under the what-a-mouthful name ...
Small firms offered premium Google Apps ZDNet Asia
Businesses to buy into Google Apps Premier Edition? ZDNet.com.au
DecisionOne Becomes a Google Apps Premier Edition Services ... CNW Telbec (Communiqués de presse)
Computerworld Australia
all 395 news articles »

A Reporter I Am Not

Well the battery on my laptop didn't last long enough to do any lucid reporting from Cory's lecture at Duke this afternoon, but I'm pretty sure writing and listening intelligently at the same time are to me what walking and chewing gum are to the protagonist of all the moron jokes. I found the material to be quite interesting and Cory is a bright, engaging, and provocative speaker who is also quick on his feet.  I found myself in agreement with him about 65% of the time (net neutrality, the idiocy of filtering Internet access in public libraries, the misguided nature of most regulatory attempts to address the uglinesses of the web), in disagreement with him about 20% of the time (absolute rejection of all attempts to establish reliable id systems, disdain for the crime-prevention capacity of public cameras, equating all governmental attempts to manage citizen information with Fascism), and confused perhaps 15% of the time as to what he was talking about (I think I mentioned that confusion is never far from me).

There were a number of bits of Cory's presentation that bear repetition, but without having taken notes I won't try to relate them just yet. Fortunately a former colleague, Cryptonaut of the Random Signal podcast, recorded the lecture and hopes to post the file soon. If so, I will return to the subject and offer a link and a few specific highlights for the curious.

Also worth noting that addressing Richard Lucic 's e-Commerce class again this year on the topic of Internet marketing was fun. Richard also teaches a class at Duke on new media in which non-technical students learn to cobble together podcasts, vlogs and the like. There's a great need for basic training in this area for sales and marketing folks in the private sector, many of whom have gotten the message that communicating with customers using new media and social networking is worthwhile but who just don't know where to start. It's great that his students are getting a chance to dabble in this stuff.

Privacy and Risk

So I am sitting at the Cory Doctorow presentation at Duke and, as is the fashion among bloggers (mostly bloggers of a more dedicated variety than I), I thought I'd jot down a few impressions as the event unfolds, live. For as long as my battery holds out at any rate.

First impression: Cory is probably around the same age as me, if not a bit younger, and looks much as his publicity photo depicts him. I had time to say a brief hello since we've never met in person, and he began almost immediately  talking over my head about a new configuration he's planning for his laptop/desktop synchronization. It's not hard to talk over my head of course.

Cory starts by reading, for comic effect, a typical IP disclosure clause from a contract that if taken literally would restrict one's very ability to think. He follows that with a quote from Mark Twain, which is an auspicious way to begin a lecture.

He's segued somehow into cognitive therapy -- which he seems to be in favor of -- but somehow I missed the transition. Now he's describing efficiency experts and the human desire for self-improvement.  I gather the connection is the application of information collection and analysis to the goal of improving one's life from an independent, rather than an institutional, standpoint. Now collaboration.... It all makes sense. He is, after all, first a science fiction author. Second an activist. As long as L. Ron Hubbard doesn't creep into the discussion, so far, so good.

Suggested Reading: Online Marketing

Below is a short list of suggested reading for folks interested in Internet marketing. This list is specifically intended for a group of Duke students to whom I'll be speaking later today, but you can be sure it will evolve over time.

• "The Long Tail," an essay published by economist and Wired Magazine editor Chris Anderson in Oct. 2004 and later adapted into a book.
• Excerpt from All Marketers Are Liars (PDF), the book by Seth Godin. You might also want to see a video of Seth speaking at Google HQ on the same topic.
• "Giving It Away," a column by Cory Doctorow from Forbes.com
• Time Magazine's Person of the Year: You.

Custom Kleenex

Here's a nifty idea from Kleenex, a brand I would not expect to find on the cutting edge: Create your own Kleenex tissue.

The MyKleenex idea is similar to, but a lot fuzzier than, a stunt we pulled a couple of years back (while working for Lulu): a line of Print-on-demand toilet paper for which authors were invited to have rejection letters from publishers custom-printed onto rolls of TP.

Should Kleenex have wished to go after a bit of PR for their site, I might have suggested marketing boxes of tissue to jilted lovers boasting the most unflattering possible images of their exes. The TP idea for Lulu may have been a bit contrived (the sales guys went ballistic) but it certainly generated buzz, as I am reminded by this archive post from Grumpy Old Bookman, a popular book blog.

[If you really want custom TP,  by the way, don't go to Lulu. Try JustToiletPaper.com. Or get your RSS subscriptions printed for convenient bathroom reading with the RSStroom Reader.]

Cory Doctorow at UNC and Duke

I have belatedly become aware that novelist, copyright reformist, and BoingBoing blogger Cory Doctorow is scheduled to speak on Thursday at both UNC and nearby Duke.

• Cory Doctorow at UNC, Chapel Hill campus, Thursday, February 22, 2007 ,2 p.m, Wilson Library [more from Paul Jones]
• From Myspace to Homeland Security: Privacy and the Totalitarian Urge , Duke University, Thursday, February 22, 2007, 5:00 p.m., Love Auditorium

Unfortunately I'm going to miss the first event, which looks to be fairly informal, because I'll be speaking on the subject of marketing at an ecommerce class at Duke the same afternoon. I hope to make the lecture at 5, however.

A Strategy for Viral Marketing

 Here's a link to a new Marketing Sherpa case study called, "How to Make Your Technology Brand Famous Via Podcasts, Blogs & Games: 12-Month Viral Marketing Plan."

There's no advice to be found here that can't be found elsewhere. But while the article offers no surprises, it does reiterate something that I find myself struggling to find (polite) new ways to explain to companies all the time: viral marketing is not something that should be treated as a single-purchase item. For most folks, building buzz for your brand is a long-term proposition. The single requirement is not CA$H so much as it is ENGAGEMENT. Of course engagement requires a lot of time as well as a particular kind of personality. And we all know time is pretty much the same as money, especially for busy entrepreneurs.

UselessAccount.com

The inimitable Jeremy Wagstaff, who writes the WSJ's Loose Wire column (from Jakarta, I think), offers an entertaining interviewette [subscription] with Jim Whimpey, (alleged) founder of a new service called UselessAccount.com:

Loose Wire: I see. So after the user signs up, what do they do next?

Mr. Whimpey: We live by the philosophy "less is more." Once logged in, users can edit their accounts, perhaps even occasionally forget their password. A huge focus on editing your account is what sets us apart.

Loose Wire: I see. But in terms of the actual service? What is it?

Mr. Whimpey: Er, it's an Account Creating and Editing Experience.

I think I may have signed up for this at some point, but I'm not sure...

Yahoo! on the march

The WSJ reports today that Yahoo! continues its aggressive strategy of becoming the definitive new old-media company by pitching advertisers on moving more of their marketing spend away from television to the Internet: Yahoo Tries to Protect Turf from  TV Rivals (subscription).

I don't disagree in principle, but the differences between the strategies of Yahoo! and Google remain striking.

Google places its faith in the idea of a dispassionate, all-seeing power that elevates no one, predicts no winner, and offers no special access. It's an amazing, cult-like vision of an absolute democracy whose order is kept by pure reason, by algorithms that police the state like omniscient robots. Google is maddening to advertisers because they can exercise so little control over it. And yet, it is Google where the vast majority of the ad dollars are spent.

Yahoo!, on the other hand, stays busy spinning and predicting, placing bets here and there, trying to use the Internet to deliver a new, better model of the strategy television networks and movie studios and publishers have used to enrich themselves for almost a century. Yahoo! tries to create content, to identify hits, encourage one group over another and to sell advertisers on their ability to manipulate audiences. From an advertising perspective, I used to gnash my teeth over their damnable humanity when I would compose a series of search ads that upon submission were placed into an invisible queue that was reviewed, in a leisurely fashion, by idiots who would send me an automated notice days later informing me that my chosen search terms had been deemed to be insufficiently related to the page I was advertising. They were mistaken, but they were human. I remember getting one of these reviewers on the phone once and having him attempt to lecture me on the importance of relevancy when an identical ad to the one in question was converting searchers into new customers on Google at about 7% (which is high for those unfamiliar with search engine advertising). Add to that the fact that I had probably been managing paid search ads about twice as long as the young man I was chatting with had even been in the workforce. Google, for all its many maddening qualities, has never been that stupid.

Something else that crossed my mind as I read the WSJ story above is the affirmation of a sense (inspired by my previous, very limited, dealings with Yahoo!) that they have too many executives. This is, I am sure, a problem Google will acquire soon enough. [disclaimer: I own shares of Yahoo!, but wish I owned shares of Google.]

Ecommerce for dummies

A new Typepad widget is available from ProStores, one of the companies that allows anyone to set up a web site to sell stuff. A number of other companies offer a similar value proposition, among them Yahoo!, but this is interesting for several reasons.

• ProStores is owned by eBay, a company that owes its success to having enabled individuals and small businesses to sell things. This could be seen as an evolutionary step beyond that--and the model that could actually replace eBay to some extent.
• At the 'Advanced' level ($74.95 a month) ProStores enables you to sell subscriptions and digital things as well as physical things.
• They are offering a Typepad widget, which will easily enable bloggers to sell things at a step above the current CafePress standard.
• Also interesting is the fact that this can be seen as an attempt (Google-style) to disrupt one of the many thriving businesses that have grown up around eBay: ProStores offers distribution  management services similar to ChannelAdvisor, a successful company here in RTP.