Don't Be Dumb in 2006

Whenever anything interesting comes along - like, for example, blogs - someone is going to try to figure out how to make money off of it. That doesn't bother me. When it's a way of communicating, someone is going to try to figure out how to use it to sell stuff. That's not inherently bad - if they know what they are doing, and have some respect for the medium.

After all, I'm a marketer too; this is what we do for a living. But the resulting blog needs to be interesting, provide something useful to readers, and so on.

Recently in my inbox for my personal blog I found this:

Hey there,

I just started a new Houston apartments Blog and I was wondering if you would put my blog on your blog site. I would also like to have your blog on our site. Please let me know if this is possible.

Stephanie

An apartments blog? What is there to say about apartments? I clicked the link and looked. It's not really a blog. It's a bunch of apartment listings, but they are all formatted like blog posts.

So you have a post for Whispering Bayou Pines Place - 2 bedrooms cheap! Then the post for Bunny Fuzz Trail Villas - conveniently located somewhere way beyond Beltway 8! And so on.

Oh, and dear Steph's address is at an apartment locator service.

This is what we call "poor use of a new medium." I suppose someone could make an interesting apartment blog, though I'm not sure quite what that would look like. This is not what these folks have done.

If they were looking for my advice, I'd say, "Why on earth would anyone read this? Only someone looking for an apartment would, and they'd want to go to your site and see what you've got, so why don't you just make a good apartment listing site, do some search engine optimization on it, and maybe some sponsored ads on Google?"

One of the most troubling aspects of our profession is the tendency of dumb marketers to turn interesting things like blogging into annoying garbage. It's already begun with blogging, which is likely to go the way of permission email - a great idea that is poorly implemented and becomes far less useful than it could be.

So here's a New Year's resolution for marketers: don't be stupid. Don't take any method of getting in front of a customers as an invitation to bombard them with bad marketing. Don't spoil the potential of things like email, blogging, and podcasting by misusing them. As the Google folks (somewhat hypocritically) say, Don't be evil.

And have a happy new year.

When Email Gets Ugly

It's an sad fact that too many companies don't think much about email marketing until they really need something to happen and fast. For retailers, that's often the Christmas season. Sales aren't quite what they should be? Need to get some orders quick? Okay, ratchet up the email marketing!

Unfortunately, it often doesn't work; or, if it does, there's a price to pay. Here's a comment on holiday season email from the blog of someone who's not a marketer; he's just somebody who buys a lot of stuff online. Read it and see the problem with suddenly shooting out lots of messages when you've been using the email list lightly all year.

Here's the really interesting part: the two retailers he's complaining about, Brookstone and Red Envolope, are not "junk mailers." These are companies he likes and he's been buying stuff from. But they're turning him off with the sudden end of year rush.

The messages he's been getting are not, he tells me, anything particularly relevant. Yes, he's a regular customer of both companies, so they're not completely irrelevant. But neither are they something useful. For example, if Red Envelope sent a message saying, "Click here to get a list of everyone you bought gifts for last holiday season; you'll find suggestions of items those people are likely to enjoy based on your previous gifts, and we'll give you a discount if you order in the next week," there would be some value to it. Instead it's a slightly desparate "hey! look! more stuff!" approach.

Note this line in his blog post: "I am so sick of seeing them in my inbox. Yet I cannot mark them as spam since I buy stuff from them and don't want purchase-related messages trashed." Congratulations to these retailers: they've taken a regular customer, and made him wish he could filter their messages as spam without missing something important.

I can guarantee that other customers just marked them as spam anyway, or have simply stopped opening and reading their messages.

This isn't the promise of email marketing: closer customer relationships that yield more sales and more profit. Marketing that deepends customer relationships. No, this is email marketing as a new way to annoy people. It's not likely to pay off.

Shopping

Any time you try to find products and prices online you learn interesting things about good and bad web sites.

Some thoughts from this morning's adventure:

• You can't see what Staples has for sale without giving them a ZIP code first. Irritating.


• Just try to find pocket folders at any of the big three office warehouse stores. Good luck.


• If you have a catalog, turn it into web pages. If the first thing I find on your site is that I have to download a 100-page catalog in PDF format, I'm going right back to Google to find someone else's web site. You've just lost my business.


• If you sell a lot of different products, don't design an inquiry form with required fields that don't relate to all of them. People like me will enter nonsense information with a note in the comments field that says, "All of that was a lie because I couldn't put the right info in your form." And you're already looking bad.

It amazes me that years after the web became the first stop for information for purchasing decisions, so many companies are still so terrible at using it.

You Needed Research for That?

It's good to check out seemingly-obvious assumptions with research. But when I read that WPP Group's Mindshare has made the amazing discovery that the ability to skip commercials is a key feature for DVR buyers, it was hard to react with any thought other than, "No kidding."

Broadcasters have said that this is not an important feature - it's the ability to time-shift that matters. Well, of course they said that. They need to sell ads. They're not going to tell their advertisers that lots of people are skipping the ads.

That doesn't change reality, though.

PowerPoint from Hell

You can't work in marketing without making presentations. You cannot, alas, make presentations without PowerPoint. But you should have a look at Really Bad Powerpoint (note: links to a PDF file) by Seth Godin.

I don't agree complete with what he's saying; there are some appropriate uses of "traditional" PowerPoint. But for 90% of the presentations I've had to sit through, I think his approach would have been the right one.

Enjoy!

Making Yourself Valuable

I tagged this post on Duct Tape Marketing for comment a while back...

I have mixed feelings about what John is saying here. Yes, it makes sense to provide ongoing services to your clients and integrate yourself into their marketing activities. It gives you staying power.

On the other hand, there's a danger to controlling too much; you can get resentful clients. If they feel like they're being held hostage, things can blow up in an unpleasant way.

So what's the right mix between being part of ongoing activities - and hanging on to information and processes that make you hard to replace - and giving the client the freedom they need? I think you need to be very sure that they know you're adding value every step of the way in order to avoid that "hostage" feeling. I've got no clear cut answer, but pay careful attention to your clients and what they are thinking about you.