Marketing Type

links for 2007-03-30

For anyone wondering why my bookmarks popped up on MarketingType this week: their appearance is the product of an experiment using a new Del.icio.us feature called "Daily Blog Posting" that automatically publishes new bookmarks as blog posts. It's a nifty trick, but I'd much rather see the ability to auto-post a limited set of tags. That way, MarketingType could publish bookmarks I tagged 'Marketing' and not those tagged 'Gardening.' My most recent bookmarks:

• Brits Behaving Badly: Entertainment & Culture: vanityfair.com
  Funny story about Brits living in NYC.
  (tags: funny)
• New Project: ChapelHillNeighbor.org
  (tags: chapelhill community)

links for 2007-03-29

• Herbaceous Perennials & Shallow Water/Bog Plants
  (tags: gardening ponds watergarden)
• XML-Sitemap Generator
  Generates site maps in XML for submission to Google. Free tool
  (tags: sitemap google webdesign seo)

Hacking Amazon's Book Rankings

For intrepid authors seeking to market their own books (a growing number by anyone's measure)  here's a blog post from the Wall Street Journal's Numbers Guy chock-full of useful links: Cracking Amazon.com’s Best-Seller List

[Re-posting to the Self-Publishing Group on Google]

Pay-per-ACTION

The big marketing news today, courtesy of Search Engine Land, is this: Google Launches Pay Per Action Ads. Interesting. And not yet available to everyone, by the way.

Marketing Miscellany

• The Blooker shortlist showed up on the Amazon.com Bookstore Blog. While I no longer track Lulu-related news very closely, it's obvious that the announcement of the shortlist has so far produced a nice, long ripple effect in the blogosphere.
• Although deadlines loom, I still have not decided whether to attend SES NYC or Danny Sullivan's new gig, SMX in Seattle. When it comes to spending money, I am capable of a truly incredible degree of procrastination.
• Enjoyed coffee recently with Eric Holter of Newfangled Web Factory in the neighboring town of Carrboro, North Carolina. Eric started the company in 1995, which is ancient history in this industry. His agency has quite a bit of experience and offers web design with a built-in content management system.
• Scot Wingo, noted eBay Strategies blogger and CEO of ChannelAdvisor, was also generous enough to invite me to share coffee recently. In addition to being surprisingly approachable for a guy trying to run a company with several hundred employees in five cities (while blogging and raising a family to boot), Scot struck me as a very bright, focused guy.
• If  you happen to be (or know of) a WordPress expert and you run across this blog entry, please drop me a line and introduce yourself. I'm particularly keen to find someone really good in the UK.
• It has become fashionable to depict Google  -- with its professed philosophy of 'don't be evil' -- as a modern arch villain. I'm not really inclined toward that sort of thinking, but I am also genuinely inspired by this sort of thing: an announcement that Google Apps (email, calendars, etc.) will now power the entire educational systems of Kenya and Rwanda. If that works, it will put their elementary and secondary systems leaps and bounds ahead of ours in terms of the available communications infrastructure.

Online Media News

There are a few interesting pieces in today's issue of MediaPost's Online Media Daily, including:

Viral's Not For Just Anyone: 50% In Survey Rate It Fad For The Lucky Few
by Laurie Petersen
You say you want an Evolution? Viral marketing may be on the lips of a lot of media people in the wake of successes like the Dove campaign, but 50% of respondents to a MediaPost/Dynamic Logic survey say it's not something any marketer can or should try to pull off. - Read the whole story...

Metacafe Teams With Bochco For Video Confessions Channel
by Gavin O'Malley
Online video startup Metacafe is attempting to bring a little gravitas to the world of consumer-generated media with a video confessions channel created by Hollywood producer Steven Bochco. - Read the whole story...

Podcast/Blog Ad Network Focuses On Boomers
by Tobi Elkin
Personal Life Media, a blog ad and podcasting network for socially-conscious boomers, launches today with 15 custom-created shows on topics for "cultural creatives" ranging from life coaching to green living to sex. Entrepreneur Susan Bratton is behind the venture. - Read the whole story...

NetRatings Results Reveal Plenty of Net, Income
by Joe Mandese
Media research services can be healthy, high-margin businesses, but online audience researcher NetRatings' 2006 earnings results go a long way toward explaining why research giant Nielsen Co. opted to acquire the balance of NetRatings. - Read the whole story...

Brightcove Partners With Video Analytics Start-Up
by Shankar Gupta
Internet TV company Brightcove this week is expected to announce a partnership with Visible Measures, a start-up Web video analytics firm that just closed a $5 million round of venture funding. - Read the whole story...

The NEW New Yorker

Thanks to a sidebar link on mistersugar, I now know that The New Yorker -- up until now possibly the most technologically backward major magazine in circulation --  has finally launched web site worthy of the label.

I should explain that I am a longtime New Yorker reader -- fanatic, even. For the last few years the magazine has been virtually the only offline media I've touched. Its lack of sophistication on the web has bothered me, as much from a disgruntled marketing sense as for any other reason.

Even before now there have been signs something was afoot. First they made available incredible DVDs containing the magazine's first 75 years with scanned page by page archives complete with the original advertisements. Then they updated the offering and bundled it all on a portable harddrive. That proved to me someone at the magazine was thinking about the big picture. Now, finally, a web site with an RSS Feed (look for it soon in the Salutor sidebar) and the promise of an upcoming inclusion of searchable archive. I am floored.

I have always suspected that the real problem lay with CondeNast, the half-witted corporate parent of The New Yorker. Small signs of their vast incompetence remain:

1) I am not only a New Yorker subscriber of fifteen years, but have volunteered my email address to them on more than one occasion. In the past, providing my email address to The New Yorker website has led, not to receiving stimulating New Yorker related material and advertisements, but to spam for other CondeNast  publications like Glamour. Why on earth would they not, by mail or email, find some way to announce to me that they have a new website?

2) In my haste to test their new marketing smarts, I attempted to (re-)give the new New Yorker site my email address. In the screenshot below, note that on the first page (left) of the site they offer a single form-field newsletter sign-up (note that this is an email marketing 'best practice'), but that when I fill it out and click enter I am taken to a second page (right) with a number of required fields -- one of which is MY BLANK EMAIL ADDRESS.

My guess is that the smart web team designed the first page, and the imbeciles at CondeNast got the hand-off on the second page.

Seth Godin Shortlisted for Blook Prize

Seth Godin's latest marketing book has been shortlisted for the 2007 Blooker Prize in the nonfiction category:

Small Is the New Big: and 183 other riffs, rants, and remarkable business ideas
by Seth Godin -- sethgodin.typepad.com

The Blooker -- the world's first literary prize for blooks, or books based on blogs -- is one of the ideas I helped develop and launch before I left Lulu, the prize's sponsor. Congratulations to Jason, who continues to do a great job of managing the contest.

Human Search

In an appropriate follow-up to my previous post -- the bit about the Church of the Algorithm -- below is a story on some of the folks who are placing bets on the opposing idea: that human subjectivity, harnessed collectively, will in the end offer a superior filter for information than any algorithm.

Wikipedia founder says to challenge Google, Yahoo (Reuters)

Note that one of Wales' backers is Amazon.com.

Is it me, or are we seeing the evolution of a new strand of Manichaeism?

Google@Work in Richmond

Update: 3-09-07.  Neither I nor my laptop battery are cut out for live-blogging, I fear.  What follows is an expanded version of yesterday's post.
_________________________

In another lame attempt at live-blogging, I'm currently in Richmond, VA, listening to Cyrus Mistry, a Product Manager for Google Enterprise, hard-sell the Google Search Appliance, a small, easily-installed box that gives search inside a company the speed and intelligence of Google itself. He makes two excellent points:

• Back in the old days, 70% or more of the data within an enterprise was structured and thus easily searchable: the content people created required fixed fields of data (name, department, etc.). That equation has changed radically: the content being created by employees and teams within organizations now exhibits much greater variety: web pages, blogs, presentations, podcasts, docs.
• Most of the innovation taking place right now in web applications is in the consumer realm: Flickr, YouTube, FaceBook, etc. Software innovation for businesses (jabbing at Microsoft) has stagnated. That leaves a big opportunity for Google to step in. [And makes me wonder if Google has considered buying Salesforce.com.]

The other general sales pitch was simply for Google Enterprise, the same suite of applications available from Google to all of us, but with high level implementation support. As mentioned in a previous post, I'm a big fan of Google's mail and calendar applications, and the new start-page and domain administration tools (including Blogger and Google Docs & Spreadsheets) effectively allow anyone to establish a sophisticated Intranet in no time.  [See my start page.]

Interesting to note that the Enterprise sales team does not mention Blogger as part of the suite of tools (afraid to scare business customers?), but every department within Google is now, as far as I can tell, using Blogger as a communication tool for development work. [You can view feed of posts from all Google blogs here.]

Quick impressions that confirm my impression of the Google mindset:

• A young, smart product manager who seems incredibly pleased with himself but utterly oblivious of his audience. Over and over, he interrupts himself to bark at his team members, "Time? Time? How am I doing on time?"
• The Google team is obsessed with speed and usability. The number one reason more people use Google is its speed.
• Obsession with relevance. The Enterprise team runs relevance tests "all the time." They have complete confidence that Google delivers the best results. It does.
• Church of the algorithm (see this  previous post). Asked about an issue related to incomplete meta-tag entry in documents, one Googler went off on a tangent about why people would always fail to correctly categorize information. In a mock whisper: "You can never rely on people. You can trust algorithms."
• "Some people worry about Google having access to all their mail." The presenter brushed past this as if addressing a child fretting about bogeymen. I love Gmail, but his tone made me wish Cory had been in the audience.
• "We use 100 algorithms" to determine relevance. And KFC uses "11 secret herbs and spices" in its chicken.
• I asked about Page Creator (which in the case of  my account is still broken, by the way) and when it might be given commerce features--something that might compete with Yahoo Stores. The speaker alluded to the add-ons that have been developed by third parties, and to Google Checkout, but otherwise seemed anxious to move on. My guess is that this is coming down the pike.

Pump Up the Google Base

Google's service for listing items for sale, Google Base, has so far shown no sign that it will evolve into an eBay- or CraigsList- slayer. But Google is on the right track with its latest move to add thousands of real estate listings to Google Base, as reported by ars technica: Google gets deeper into real estate listings

When we sold our house last summer, I undertook four main approaches to market the listing:

1) Paid local alternative real-estate company My Dog Tess to list the house in the MLS.
2) Listed the house on Raleigh's CraigsList, linking the ad to a simple web site describing the house and including photos (using the free Google Page Creator  application).
3) Created a Google Base listing.
4) Ran targeted AdWords listings on global searches like "Chapel Hill house for sale," and local searches for phrases along the lines of "for sale by owner."

We ended up in the enviable position, two weeks later, of having three couples bidding against one another on the house. One of the three buyers came through CraigsList, one through a Realtor, and the third through word-of-mouth.

No offers or showings (that I know of) arose from the Google Base or AdWords listings. But the potential is there once real estate buyers and sellers become more broadly aware that these tools exist, and they would be made especially potent by Google's extensive (and expanding) mapping and imaging technology. 

My suspicion is that the only reason Google hasn't yet purchased the real estate web site Zillow.com is that it will roll out the same functionality very soon.

 

 

Marketing Events: What is useful?

Put yourself in my shoes for a moment. You are a fledgling agency with a limited budget for travel and events. If you spend money to attend a high-profile national event for marketers you need to be able to guarantee two types of return on the investment:

a) Education. The event has to offer  practical, detailed information in individual sessions that you can apply immediately on behalf of your clients. The big picture stuff is fun but the bottom line consists of increasing your skills and expertise.

b) Networking. Who else will attend the show? Potential clients? Partners? Employees? You need to be able to walk away from the show with useful new contacts. [Of course if you are me you may be too introverted to hobnob with the in-crowd, but there's always virtual networking with the people you've met or heard speak in person. I'm pretty good at that.]

Having said that, here are three shows I'm considering attending. If you happen to have attended any of them or have any thoughts to toss my way on this topic, please email me.

• OMMA Online Media, Marketing, and Advertising Expo (Hollywood) March 19-20, 2007. Attendance cost: $1,195 [I've never attended.]
• Search Engine Strategies, NYC. April 10-13, 2007. Attendance cost: $1,745 [I attended two years ago and found useful, but did very little networking.]
• Search Marketing Expo (Seattle). June 4-5, 2007.  Attendance cost: $995. [Worth noting that this is a new conference being launched by Danny Sullivan, the founder and former chairman of SES (above). The NYC show will be the last of the SES shows that Danny will program.]

Podcast of Cory Doctorow's lecture at Duke

Cryptonaut, of the RandomSignal podcast, has posted a recording (.MP3) of Cory Doctorow's recent address at Duke. Thanks, Jason!

(my previous entries on this topic are here and here)

Google lets advertisers block delivery by IPs

Previously I've written that Google drives its advertisers up the wall because it offers them so little influence. That's true: trying to reach Google as an advertiser is akin to (what I imagine to be) the experience of an average Catholic writing to the Vatican. But a brief story in the WSJ today reminds me of an important caveat to that characterization, which is that Google systematically (in its own time) addresses the demands of advertisers by introducing new features. Here are two good examples:

Google Gives Advertisers More Say on Placement (WSJ - subscription)
Google to enhance tools to fight click fraud (ITWorld - free)