What Is Your Social Media Hub?

Sergio Balegno, Research Director for Marketing Sherpa, is a recognized thought leader in Internet marketing best practices. He gave a superb guest lecture in my social media marketing class last week. There was one thing in particular that he articulated much better than I’ve been able to do. It has to do with organizing your ‘traditional’ Internet and social media marketing around well-defined hubs.

It’s clear that any Internet marketing effort needs to have an activity hub. In the early days—before social media—it was equally clear that the hub was the website. All marketing efforts, PPC and display advertising—pointed there and Internet marketing objectives were achieved there. Objectives might have been driving traffic to retail stores, providing content for customer acquisition and retention, conducting ecommerce, or others as appropriate for the enterprise marketing strategy. Whatever the Internet marketing objective, the website was needed to achieve it.

Enter social media and our efforts to understand how to integrate these networks effectively into our marketing strategy. What is the correct centerpiece of for this marketing element? Social media efforts can point back to the website, and sometimes that may make sense. But often the efforts on public networks are best pointed back to the corporate blog. Sergio used as an example the Cisco Collaboration program that I wrote about last week.

Why should social media point to the blog and not to the website? The main reason is that blog content can—and should be—updated frequently with content that supports the social media efforts with precision. By its very nature, website content is updated less frequently and often is less precisely targeted to particular user segments and/or interests.

That led me to a second ‘ah-ha’ moment--the importance of recency in achieving prominence in search engine results. I hadn’t updated my thinking from the era (a couple of years ago) when things like keywords, number of incoming links, and number of clicks were only determinants of rankings in organic search. Here’s a summary of rank determinants; click through for a mind-numbing list from seo experts. With the addition of things like news, images, and videos search results pages provide the most current as well as the most relevant content. Search any current event and see for yourself!

The take-away is this: Your website is the hub of your ‘traditional’ Internet marketing. To be direct, it’s where you can sell things or acquire sales leads. An increasing number of the people who become leads or customers are going to find you, learn more about you, and develop trust in you through social media. The blog provides timely content and connects to activities like your YouTube channel and other social networks. It points readers to your website for conversion when their time is right. Their time, not yours! That makes your blog the hub of your social media marketing.

There’s still a lot of work to do in integrating all this activity. But a clear understanding of this key principle is necessary to an efficient strategy with marketing effectiveness!

Widgets for Content Distribution

My fascination with widgets has been documented from the early days. About a year ago I wrote about Google gadgets and suggested that marketers check them out and see how they work; they can be DIY. If you search widgets on the blog search bar at the top of the page, you’ll find more widget posts, most about marketing campaigns that have a widget component.

Whatever you call it—and Hubspot’s Inbound Marketing term is one of my favorites—marketers have to get the word out and bring people back to their website (or blog) for information or action. For most websites, search is primary in generating traffic. Another important way to bring traffic to your site is to get content out with links back to your site. Widgets are perfect for that; see the McKinsey widget on the sidebar of this site.

Last week’s post on applications and widgets emphasized some of the large players in the space. Can a small blog/a small website use this technology cost-effectively? The answer is “yes.” “Free” is more difficult.

This aspect of the subject came to mind when I received an email from Wowzio.com about a new hosted widget service that’s the brainchild of former Yahoo! social media and software powerhouses. I was interested and checked it out. They have a good explanation of white-labeled widgets. It’s a hosted service, so there are charges. It’s still in Beta, so they are offering free services for personal blogs. I took advantage of their offer, requested and invitation, and took the widgets for a trial run.

The way it works is simple. You provide your blog or website address. They make some connections on the back end and send you a link to your widget page. At present, they have six widget templates from which to choose, as the graphic shows. The “Customize This” link leads you to a page that lets you size the widget and choose background colors. Then it gives you embed code. Even better if you have a blog on a standard platform like Blogger or Typepad, you simply click the button for the platform and it inserts the chosen widget on your blog. Then you configure the sidebar content as you want it. I tried tag cloud and live activity widgets and they showed up on my blog, just as Wowzio said it would. Look at the right sidebar; they are interesting, fun to look at. The content distribution issue is that, if you want to Grab This widget, you can put it on your own blog or website, just like I put the McKinsey widget on mine. Your content has just been made available to readers/visitors of other sites!

I was intrigued, so I asked for an invitation for the natural history blog I edit. It has many beautiful images, so the photo gallery widget was an obvious choice. It’s lovely, but it’s far enough down on the sidebar that it’s below the bottom of some posts, meaning many readers may not see it. I need to work on the sidebar design more and see if I can move it up further without decreasing some of the important subscription and search items—all of which are widgets of one kind or another!

Wowzio enters a space similar to other app platforms like Kick Apps, which has been around for awhile. They have a lot of explanation about how it works and there’s a link for pricing at the bottom of the home page that gives you an idea of what these services run. I don’t see doing this one myself. It really would take a developer, but from what I’ve seen that would be a one-time cost of a few thousand dollars, depending on your location (and how busy free-lance developers are!). Wowzio doesn’t seem to have set a price for small business customers yet, but that will certainly be forthcoming.

The critical question for a small business is whether it’s worth a hosting fee—say $100—each month plus a developer if you need one to create the widget.

I think there’s a pretty simple answer. Do you have content that a clearly-defined target audience would like to include on their own blogs or websites? That would be content that is relevant, engaging and continuously updated.

If you have great content, you may be ready for a widget to distribute it. If you don’t, you need to be working on the content. Great content always comes first!

Now It's "Inbound Marketing?"

I’ve found myself several times lately explaining (with an exaggerated air of patience) that now many people are referring to “Inbound Marketing.” I hear the term frequently, although Hubspot whose blog has that title, might like to lay claim to inventing it. In any event; they have a good post that gives their definition. Mine is simple. It’s necessary to get your message OUT to your target audience—wherever they are these days, and use those messages to bring people to your website to do whatever you want them to do there.

Is Inbound Marketing the new marketing paradigm? It well may be. Take a look at this chart from Hubspot. They characterize the outbound side as a sledge hammer, the inbound side as a magnet, and that a great communications metaphor. Look at that chart from a business perspective. Everything until you get to email (the only digital entry, you’ll notice) is expensive — some of it terribly expensive. On the inbound side, much is low in direct costs, although not low in expenditure of time. The exception on the inbound side is SEO. A lot of visibility is free—think tagging your blog posts. Some is relatively low cost; with PPC ads you only pay for the clicks you get. Website (and maybe blog) optimization can be quite expensive, primarily because it takes a professional to do real SEO. But note that there are other routes to visibility, a broader term. And in terms of email, it’s really outbound/inbound. Email links bring people to your site to take action.

I was also struck by Jeremiah Owyang’s recent post on organizing for social media. His hub-and-spoke concept was reminiscent of my metrics conceptualization, although in a different content.

So put these concepts together and what do you get? My concept of inbound marketing!

The spokes are meant to be categorizations, not a complete description of what’s out there. Take social networks, for example. I didn’t have room for MySpace, LinkedIn and many other popular socnets, so I just settled for “etc.” There are a lot of “etcs” in other categories also.

The strategy imperative is clear. No business can sit back and wait for customers to come. Without at least search visibility, they won’t. Firms have to get their message out to where potential customers are—remember the quote about teens and newspapers yesterday? These short messages have to be appealing enough to entice people to the website (or a blog can be a hub also) for additional information that will incite them to the desired action.

All of that shouts STRATEGY!!! None of this is going to happen by accident. If you’re still at the “we should have a Facebook page” stage, back off and develop an Inbound Marketing strategy that fits your target audience and your marketing objectives.

It will be time well spent!

New Site for News and Brand Monitoring

Over the weekend I set up a new (another, actually) personal page. I had seen a notice about Ogilvy’s The Daily Influence site, and a look suggested it was worth taking for a trial run. I’ve had my Yahoo! start page for many years, and I have no intention of giving that up. I am, however, often surprised when I ask groups how many have a personal page—a lot don’t, so this one might be worth a try.
I liked their social media page—a lot of familiar sources and a few new to me. I added this blog so it would be on the page with the rest. As a news source, I was perfectly happy, except that I wished I could somehow put a link on my Yahoo! page, although it’s not really configured for that. Maybe I can add a widget; I’ll have to work on that.

What I didn’t pay enough attention to in the beginning was The Listening Post feature. Thanks to a review by Melissa Daniels drew my attention to the reputation monitoring feature. I tried that out and was impressed. In the Twitter box I put this blog. A search always produces a lot of noise, because DIY Marketing is a common content phrase these days. I entered the name of a non-profit I work with in the YouTube search box and found more videos than I knew about even though I do pay attention.
So I’d suggest that the news pages are potentially valuable, but the reputation monitoring is more so. At the same time, a comment on Melissa Daniels’ post pointed out that there’s a good list of free tools on Mashable and some of those may be more robust. But for the small business or the beginner, this all-in-one place may be a great time saver and/or an eye opener to the important world of monitoring your brand online.

Product Reviews = Online WOM

There’s not much doubt that word of mouth in general and product ratings in particular affect online buyers/researchers. I’ve noticed two developments in this space in recent days—a product called Bazaarvoice Stories™ from the services firm Bazaarvoice and a notice that another ratings services provider, PowerReviews is testing review services for small retailers. Both seemed worth investigating.

Customer reviews are a powerful engine of ecommerce, and I’ve written about their impact several times (1,2). I checked out Marketing Charts for what's new on the subject, and this is what I found:

• The importance of online reviews to offline purchases
• The impact of online WOM
• Both UK and US consumers find product reviews helpful in their purchasing process.

At a micro level it’s worth asking what some firms are doing to encourage reviews and product stories and what impact are they having. This headline from the WSJ’s MarketWatch site caught my attention—for obvious reasons!

Leading Retailer Encourages Customers to Tell Other People About the L.L.Bean Products They Own; More Than 13,000 Reviews Submitted to www.llbean.com Within One Week

Wow!

You’ll find interesting case studies at both Bazaarvoice and PowerReviews. A study at PowerReviews led me to an in-depth academic study with food for thought. IT professors Alanah Davis and Deepak Khazanchi from the University of Nebraska Omaha analyzed purchase data in a study published in Electronic Markets and available online. They started out with a fairly complex concept of how online WOM affects purchasing behavior. They performed a causal analysis using number of reasonable variables like the volume of reviews and the degree to which they are positive on actual purchases in a number of product categories. A number of independent variables were not significant in influencing purchases, leaving them with a simpler and provocative concept.

It’s not surprising that the number of product ratings and the number of product views influenced product awareness. It’s also not surprising that visual cues (including ones that are user-submitted) influenced product expectations while the product category itself affected both awareness and expectations. What’s most challenging to marketers you cannot see in this graphic (see page 135 in the pdf). Marketer promotion dropped out of the model as it had no statistically significant impact on purchases. Ouch!
The paper is worth reading for a good literature review as well as the authors’ reasoning process and statistical analysis, which are accessible to the lay reader. Actually, it’s worth reading alone for Sebastian’s review (he looks like a wonderful Basset Hound) of his big doggie bed! Your customers have creativity—and a sense of humor—that ought to be tapped!

It’s always a bit dangerous to take a short quote from a complex academic study, but this one is worth it:

One of the most important implications for practice is the idea that e-commerce companies need to have a strategy of combining efforts to increase product views and the volume of comments on specific product pages. This research also points out the value in allowing reviewers to upload product images, probably boosting the cognitive consequence of expectations about a product. (page 140)

That’s pretty straightforward. We need to be bringing more visitors to our product pages and, once they are there, encourage them to write reviews and upload their own product images. Think Sebastian.

And think how much cheaper this strategy is than all the marketer promotion that had no significant impact on purchases in this study. Note, however, that I said that carefully (I hope). Something has to be done to bring visitors to your pages. Once they get there, however, don’t just talk to them; engage them in the process. At this stage of the purchase process, user content is more powerful than marketer content.

Ask Users to Help Design Site?

From the mid-nineties, when many of us became active on the web and interested in its marketing uses, the question of successful website user experience has been front and center. It’s hard to do, but a lot of people—think Dr. Jakob Nielsen as well as others—preach website usability. Web marketers make extensive use of metrics to understand what content is most popular on their site.

Both are good things. Designing a site for usability should involve a substantial amount of user research prior to and during the construction of the site. That includes asking people what they expect the content to be on various proposed pages of the site. Note, however, that even the research suggests a pre-conceived idea of site structure. Metrics require a site that is in operation with content available. Baynote provides an interesting example of mining user data to better understand content needs, but it’s still after the fact.

What about asking users for suggestions in the early states—perhaps before you even develop the concept statements and concept pages for your site? When I found the DoubleClick ad in the eMarketer newsletter yesterday, I thought “what an interesting idea. Aren’t there other people doing similar things?”

Not as far as I can see. There was a lot of buzz about the “Chrysler Listens” program earlier in the year, and it’s still on the site. According to the Auburn Hills (Michigan) Globe and Mail they have recruited about 5,000 members to their advisory board and are instituting other “listening” programs. This program appears to be mostly focused on product satisfaction, for obvious reasons. VW has a program called “What the People Want” that focuses on popular culture. To me the whole thing seems a bit lame, but it’s drawing traffic, and I have to admit that I’m probably not in the target audience demographic.

So DoubleClick’s program seems pretty unique. The advertising campaign is based around “Three Questions”—answered by a DoubleClick staffer or an outside expert. The viewer can even volunteer to be the outside expert—interesting touch.
Notice the Help Shape our Site box on the main (landing?) page. When you click through, you get 3 serious questions about what you’d like to find in the new “Nerve Center.” I’m always looking for data about our industry, so I answered the questions and submitted my thoughts. They thanked me politely, but didn’t promise anything specific, which probably makes sense in this situation.

How will they analyze the suggestions they are getting? Some type of content analysis, I imagine. That could be a very interesting foundation for site design—content categories suggested by users.

This will be interesting to watch. It’s also interesting to speculate on the impact of Google’s recent acquisition of DoubleClick on this program. But the key point is that DoubleClick is asking users to help frame their new site, apparently well in advance of actual site development. A really provocative use of the interactivity of the Internet!

A Mother's Day Card from Charity:Water

It's always fun to open up the email box on Mother's Day morning and see what's there. This year in addition to the expected there was a lovely surprise from one of my students. Dave had sent me a card announcing a donation of $20 in my name to Charity:Water. Not only was it a nice gesture; it was viral, encouraging me to send another card. When I clicked through I found that I could designate my donation for any one of three countries. If I didn't care to make a designation in the time allotted, the choice would be made by Charity:Water. I didn't send the ecard, but I did match Dave's donation, so the single card actually raised $40.

On the donation page (and throughout the site) there's a statement of Charity:Water's uinique value proposition--100% of the donation goes to a fresh water project. How do they do it? They have separate channels for donations to support the running of the organization and they seem to get numerous in-kind service donations also. The focal point of their fund-raising is actually a $20 bottle of fresh water, which we in developed economies take for granted, but according to the site, 1.1 billion worldwide do not. A man who used to sell $350 bottles of vodka to nightclubbers though he could sell $20 bottles of water for a cause, and he was right!

Charity:Water is the creation of Scott Harrison. As the story goes Scott came to New York as member of a rock band and soon became a successful fixture on the New York nightclub scene. Tiring of that, he looked for a greater purpose. His first step was to volunteer on one of the Mercy Ships. He returned to found Charity:Water. It's clearly a charity of the Internet age. They have found multiple ways to engage visitors in the work they are doing, providing a great deal of rich content and giving an opportunity to select a project in a specific location. Look at the projects page to see ways in which they keep donors up to date on projects they've sponsored, including using Google Earth to pinpoint the location of wells they have provided.

There are two important non-profit strategy issues here. First is the business model, in which all publicly-solicited donations go to the work of the cause, not to a blotted, overpaid administrative structure, which we've seen too often in recent years. Second is the way in which they use the web, not just to solicit donations but to keep donors informed in a very personal way. Not all organizations are going to be able to copy the business model. All non-profits should look at the way Charity:Water uses the web today and watch for continuing developments as this organization grows. It is clearly an organization to watch--both for the good work they do and for the exceptionally effective way in which they do it.

Personalization--Part 1 - The Front End

The CMO Council has just released a study of personalization, covered in Marketing Charts yesterday. The Council surveyed over 700 senior marketing and executive officers in companies around the world to learn how they gauged the impact of personalization and the extent to which they were using it.

Personalization is hardly a new topic to marketers. Direct marketers have been using it for years, especially in mail marketing. Some has been good and effective, some has been silly or downright awful. You’ve seen it all. Even reasonably well done, personalization does work. The carry-over to email marketing is obvious. According to the CMO Council:

• Spending on direct-mail advertising (an integral part of personalized communication applications)shows no sign of abating; investments by marketers totaled $58.4 billion in 2007, and that figure isexpected to increase to more than $70 billion by 2011 (source: Winterberry Group).
• More than $3 billion was spent in the U.S. alone on e-mail marketing (source: EmailInsider).
• Yet, an overwhelming 56 percent of marketers believe personal communications out-performs traditional mass market delivery; digital, database-driven channels (email, web, contact centers)reportedly offer the most upside potential for engaging in customized communications (source:The Power of Personalization)

What exactly does personalization accomplish? According to the report it improves customer retention and loyalty by increasing conversion, close and action rates and increasing website traffic. I’d add another outcome; used creatively personalization can increase the chance of a communication going viral. Here’s a global example, a Dutch politician to be precise. This is apparently the politician, Jan, standing under a sign with the recipient’s name, Eelke. The political email included the usual “send it to a friend” with a twist. When you forwarded it to the friend, the name of the recipient showed up in the sign, according to the Dutch marketer who sent me the example. That is a creative—effective—front-end use of personalization!

I define "front end" as all the activities that lead up to a sale--all the things we do to attract the attention of customers and put them in a frame of mind to take action. The action can be a visit to a website, a request for information, sale of a product or service, or in this case support of a political candidate.
In spite of its effectiveness, marketers are not making extensive use of personalization according to the survey (download the report from the CMO Council). Not because it doesn’t work, but because their organizations and their back-end systems are not with the program.

So tomorrow, the back end of personalized marketing.
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Is the Engagement Metric Evolving?

Microsoft’s announcement of its new Engagement Mapping metric at the IAB conference this week created additional buzz around what was already one of the hottest online marketing topics of the moment. And not just this particular moment—it has been ongoing for awhile. Last summer ARF Chief Research Officer Joe Plummer defined it this way, "Engagement is turning on a prospect to a brand idea enhanced by the surrounding context." That’s an interesting concept, but it doesn’t give me any guidance as to how I could measure it.

Several marketers have proposed approaches to measuring brand engagement, especially online. Forrester has a concept that includes four factors--involvement, interaction, intimacy, and influence. That appears to combine attitudinal and behavioral measures, and that would be a strong approach. The public information makes it clear that it requires both online and offline data. That doesn’t make it cheap, but it makes it comprehensive, which is essential.

Brand Keys offers measures of engagement that are category-specific. Their measure relies heavily on customer expectations of brands in the category. They publish a list of highest-scoring brands in various categories each year.

Nielsen//NetRatings has changed its key measure of web traffic from page views to time spent on the site. They tout it as a better measure of engagement, and it certainly beats page views, which have well-known problems. However, that goes back to an old academic argument on the definition of brand loyalty (is engagement a precursor to loyalty--I think so). The argument is that loyalty is more than repeat purchase behavior—that can be just habit. True loyalty—and I suspect true engagement—requires understanding of attitudes as well as behavior.

Earlier this year Kevin Mannion wrote a three-part article (1, 2, 3) for MediaPost’s Metrics Insider Newsletter that gives an excellent summary of efforts to date. He references the work of Eric T. Peterson and Avinash Kaushik, both prolific writer/speakers on metrics issues. Mannion’s analysis of this body of work produces an engagement metric with six components. They are:
Loyalty: how often visitors return to a site over a long period of time.
Recency: how frequently visitors come to a site within a narrow time period.
Duration: how long visitors remain on the site.
Click Depth: the degree to which visitors view site content.
Interactivity: the kinds of actions visitors take with content (downloading content, viewing videos, attending webinars, posting content, etc.).
Subscription: the extent to which visitors register for services or content.
In the third installment he gives an example of how this metric would work. Note that it is all behavioral; to be specific it is all based on online metrics. That means it is based on data that online marketers currently can access.

That brings us full-circle to the Microsoft Engagement Mapping platform. According to Brian McAndrews of Microsoft, “Our Engagement Mapping approach conveys how each ad exposure — whether display, rich media or search, seen multiple times on multiple sites and across many channels — influenced an eventual purchase. We believe it represents a quantum leap for advertisers and publishers who are seeking to maximize their online spends.” I can visualize what such a map would look like and how useful it would be, especially to the multichannel e-retailer.

It doesn’t solve the metrics issue, however. Engagement Mapping is all behavioral—more a measure of impact than engagement in my mind. If engagement is indeed an attitudinal state that is manifested in brand behavior of various types—both on and offline—we still don’t have a metric that truly captures the concept.
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Quarterlife--New Incubator For Programming?

Did you see the first episode of the new NBC series last night? If you’re anywhere close to my age, you probably didn’t unless you just stumbled upon it as I did. Actually, I knew that the first series to have originated on the web and move TO television was to be aired, so I stopped and took a look.

To me, while there was no obvious story line there was the usual navel-gazing andtwenty-something angst. It’s interesting, though, that the first episode prominently featured Dylan’s video blog as sort of a centerpiece of the social interaction.

For all of us who didn’t know, the webisode series debuted in November on MySpace. It got media attention because seasoned Hollywood producers were behind it. About the time it debuted on the Internet it was picked up by NBC for a broadcast series. The interplay between broadcast TV, Internet and the writers’ strike is interesting. The timing made the independent content attractive; how much pre-planning went into that I do not know.

The series had its own website, quarterlife.com. Here’s what it says about the series today. There’s lots of video, a community, and a dozen or so channels on which users can post UCG and discuss subjects ranging from art to love. The ones I looked at seemed to have active content.
With the debut of the TV series the show has a page on the NBC website where, among other things, you can watch full-length episodes.

The package has a clear target audience—young, creative professionals. It has interesting cross-promotion between web and television. What is says about the future of programming on both screens (until/unless they converge to become one) is less clear to me. It occurs to me that the Internet may prove to be a faster, lower-cost way to test story ideas. If television is first, will movies be far behind?

It’s an interesting new wrinkle in the already-chaotic new media world!
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The Super Bowl and New Media--One Last Time

It’s the Monday morning after and most of the pundits are working on Super Bowl ad reviews. My interest was UCG content, and I also watched for ads that were designed to drive traffic to websites.

Of the UCG contests I listed on Wednesday, the only winner actually played during the game was Doritos “Kina: Message from Your Heart.” Doritos introduced it by saying they were offering her a large stage, and as far as I’m concerned she represented the brand better than most of the celebrities that were ubiquitous (obnoxious?) in the agency-produced ads. The Upper Deck winner apparently made it to the game, but not to the advertising slapdown. Hope the KFC winner enjoyed his big party; the players followed league rules and didn’t engage in “hot wings dance”—thankfully. The NFL invited text messages to vote for MVP during the game, not an innovation, but engaging nonetheless.

I found myself watching for ads that were designed to drive viewers to web sites. It reminds me of the golden days of direct marketing in which a classic question was, “If it contains a 1-800 telephone number, does that make it a direct-response ad?” The answer to that is a resounding, “No;” the ad must have an explicit call to action in order for it to be direct response.

The same is true of listing your URL in an ad. It doesn’t qualify as direct-response but it’s still a reasonable thing to do as brand building. The usual suspects—GoDaddy with its teaser on the rejected ad and Sales Genie with its free sales lead offer—have drawn huge traffic in the past and surely did so last night.

The Tide ad in which the interview was disrupted by the talking stain was pretty bad. I took the bait and visited MyTalkingStain.com. Another contest, but this one is fast paced with daily prizes. It’s an application of mashups—pun intended. Another that had a direct call to action, even though I thought the commercial was uninspiring, was Sunsilk shampoo. It turns out that the tie in with the commercial that opened with Jane Russell and Marilyn Monroe (young women even know who they are?) is a chance to become a “new international icon” by posting your hair-care story on MySpace. Well, maybe. . .

Because I found so little that was inspired or inspiring, my favorite hands-down was "Clydesdale Team.” How can you loose with a goal-oriented horse, a dog, and one of the most inspirational movie themes of all time? The one I disliked most was the first eTrade spot, which ended with the baby throwing up. Appropriate, I thought. It was closely followed by the Coke commercial that parodied political season. Neither James Carville or Bill Frist are particularly appealing personalities and the idea they would bond over a Coke is ludicrous. Actually I agreed with Bob Garfield who didn’t like most of them—does that make me an old curmudgeon? Seriously, Garfield's video has some social commentary worth thinking about in the struggle to be heard over all the advertising noise.

If you missed anything, AdAge has all the spots posted. MSN has them all and a contest to boot. Nielsen will do a webcast on its ad reviews today at noon. And all the rest of us self-appointed pundits will continue to pontificate for some time to come.

But enough’s enough. It’s time to get back to the serious business of a new media age in which our audiences are looking to us for more than the same old thing. For my money, they didn’t find it on the Super Bowl!
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Do These Blog Policies Make Sense?

A post on CNET news caught my eye a few days ago. I read Business Week online and in print. I’ve used their material in textbooks—with permission, which they are notoriously slow to grant). I’ve probably linked to their material on this blog. (No, I don’t ordinarily read user agreements.) I do, however, assume that online publications are happy to have links because they attract more people to the site.

So imagine my surprise when I read the CNET article which in turn referenced a post on the Gawker blog. This quote captures the issue perfectly:

Gawker points to the example of SmugMug CEO Don MacAskill, who writes in his blog that after being interviewed for a feature story in BusinessWeek, he was expressly told not to link to the story. "Yes, that's right, an ad-driven publication doesn't want us to drive traffic to them," he says in his blog. In addition, he was urged to review the company's user agreement. Mr. MacAskill also has critical words for the LA Times in his post.

Note how many links to various online publications have been generated by this dialog. As you well know, every time you follow one of these links you’ve upped their traffic and advertising rates. Why doesn’t any online publisher want that?

But I did check the user agreement and the Gawker post is exactly right. This is the item in the BW user agreement. Note that it does not say I can’t copy it (it’s well within the 100-word limit for direct quotes with attribution but without permission), but it does say that I can’t “deep link,” which is a link to any page except the home page. And every Internet marketer knows that if you want people to find things, you don’t just dump them onto your home page!

2. use or attempt to use any "deep-link," "scraper," "robot," "bot," "spider," "data mining," "computer code" or any other automated device, program, tool, algorithm, process or methodology or manual process having similar processes or functionality, to access, acquire, copy, or monitor any portion of BW.com, any data or content found on or accessed through BW.com, or any other BW.com information without prior express written consent of BW;
Source: BusinessWeek Online Terms of Use

The BW policy is even more ludicrous in the context of a subsequent announcement by editor John Byrne. He says BWOnline is going to use a new reader engagement metric, the ratio of comments to stories on the site. One assumes they can also use the metric for individual stores as one gauge of the most popular topics. So why would the publication shut off one source of traffic to their pages—and therefore potential comments? Beats me!

It makes about as much sense as this statement, attributed to Target:

“Unfortunately we are unable to respond to your inquiry because Target does not participate with nontraditional media outlets,” a public relations person wrote to ShapingYouth.

The owner of the ShapingYouth blog had complained to Target about an ad that it found demeaning to women. As I write this the original New York Times article (free registration required) has drawn 102 comments—pretty engaging! The comments show a fascinating divergence of opinion about whether blogs should be accorded the respect routinely given to traditional media outlets. Interesting and provocative!

Both Target and BusinessWeek Online seem to have policies that are counter to their best interests as a customer-friendly retailer and as an online publication that thrives on reader traffic. It might also be noted that the New York Times achieved a ratio of 102/1 on this particular article compared to the 23/1 average ratio quoted in articles about Byrne’s announcement. I did look on the Business Week site and couldn’t find a press release or other description of the policy—but then I couldn’t have linked to it anyway!

Enough bashing! There is a lesson here for all who participate in the new media space. The lesson is to be sure that all our policies are aligned in ways that promote our success instead of creating barriers to success.
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When Marketers Listen to the Voice of the Customer

When marketers do listen, it’s gratifying. Why do I also feel that it’s unusual? Amazon just sent me an email announcing that they not only received my suggestion, they acted on it. Now that is really unusual!

The story goes like this. In June, after 2 years of hard labor, I delivered myself of the second edition of my Internet marketing text. It was published by Thomson Custom Publishing (now Cengage), which had purchased the original publisher, Atomic Dog. Does that suggest some of the angst?

As part of their standard marketing effort, Thomson sent an announcement to Amazon containing basic information—things like the ISBN number and a brief product promo. That appeared to go up promptly—Thompson is a huge publisher and one assumes that Amazon pays attention. However, they still didn’t have a cover image up a couple of months later. I thought that made the book look like a mediocre also-ran.

All the publishers I’ve worked with seem to regard the workings of Amazon as somewhat mysterious. Maybe it's because textbook publishers are focused on their sales/college bookstore channels. But I’m an Amazon Associate, so I decided to see what I could do.

So I submitted a cover image. I had to do that in the “customer image” section, but at least there was an image on the product detail page. I was still disgruntled that there wasn’t an image on the main results page. So I signed into my Associates account and asked them to insert the image on the main page. The email went off into the black hole that swallows emails in automated systems. I assumed that would be the end of that. And checking back every few weeks seemed to confirm my pessimism.

Imagine my surprise when I received this email—on the Columbus Day holiday, no less—let’s hear it for automated email systems! Not only had they placed the image on the main results page, they reminded me I could do more.

They had already paired this Internet marketing book with a respected database marketing book. Customers had purchased it with titles on related subjects. There are publication details and the editorial material submitted by the publisher (not shown).

After the Editorial Reviews is arguably the most important section on the page. It allows any customer to tag the product. Below the tags customers can suggest searches (“include this product in searches for ‘interactive marketing,’ for example”). This requires the customer to sign in, and includes the customer name in the rationale for including the product in that keyword search. For sure, the tags direct search traffic to the product. Does activity like this also move the product up in the Amazon search algorithm?

Then there is the standard product rating function. After that they solicit customer reviews. That now includes video reviews—and they recommend a video cam you can buy to record your reviews—and your life. Good job!

Then they offer a customer discussion forum and a beta offering called Amapedia Community that looks truly collaborative. They provide relevant customer-submitted book lists – Listmania! and end with some links to related books and promotional offers.

Amazon gives customers a lot of opportunity to contribute content. In doing that, they give themselves a lot of opportunity to listen to the customer. All that content feeds into the Alexa search engine in one way or another. And I believe their description when it says the search engine has “ranking algorithms that learn from customer behavior.”

Something they are doing or something I am doing—or more likely both—is working; the book is moving up in the rankings on relevant keywords!
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