Newer! Bigger! Better!

This blog, that is!

I'm combining forces with Squarevox associates J. Sean Branagan and Maureen Rogers on a new group blog, The Opinionated Marketers. This will be the last post here; I'll be continuing to blog over in our new digs.

Sean and Maureen are two of the brightest people I've had the pleasure of working with, and I'm really excited that they're jumping into the blog world with me. So head on over, see what they've got to say, and join in with your comments!

Time to Go Organic?

What works better - organic search optimization (tweaking your web site so that you come out high on search engine results) or sponsored search (pay per click programs, like Google Adwords, where your message appears next to search results)?

ClickZ reports on a new study that indicates the two techniques produce similar results:

If you gathered the opinions of 100 paid search practitioners, and compared that to 100 organic search optimization experts, you'd find persuasive arguments for each method being superior at driving conversions. A new study from WebSideStory will justify the arguments of both sides.

The study looks at traffic and conversion data from 20 business-to-consumer e-commerce sites during the first eight months of 2006. Paid search had a median order conversion rate of 3.4 percent, while organic search results produced a conversion rate of 3.13 percent. The data set included more than 57 million search engine visits.

There are arguments to support both sides, Rand Schulman, WebSideStory's CMO, told ClickZ.

"On the one hand, because you control the message of paid search, you'd expect higher conversions. On the other side, because people value the 'editorial integrity' of organic, you'd expect higher conversions," he said. "Ultimately you need to do both. I think the eye-opener here is that neither side has a significant edge."

The findings match my own experience working with both kinds of search marketing. There's a credibility to organic search that sponsored search can't match; sponsored search, however, lets you get immediate results and lets you control exactly what you spend and where you appear.

Also, sponsored search self-selects for people who want to spend money:

There are many factors on both sides of the argument, which ultimately balance each other out, according to Dana Todd, executive VP of interactive agency SiteLab and president of the Search Engine Marketing Professionals Organization (SEMPO).

"Most visitors are not looking past the top three paid search ads, and the top three organic results. At that level of quality sites, you'd expect to see conversion rates that are close," she said.

In addition, organic search's higher volume of clicks, which tends to be 1.5 times higher than paid search volume, is balanced by the recognition by users that paid search ads are ads, which leads to a self-selection by users who have a commercial intent to their search, Todd said.

Bottom line: do both. But watch out for two common mistakes:

First, remember that organic search isn't a one-time effort. Too often, companies spend some time optimizing their sites, see the results, and stop. Keep monitoring your search results, because new sites are always appearing and everyone else is spending time optimizing their own sites, and if you don't stay on top of it, your results will drop off.

Second, make sure you (or anyone you pay to do search optimization for you) are using white hat, not black hat, techniques. There are a lot of ways to trick search engines; they'll give you some quick results, but if you're caught (and you probably will be eventually), you'll find yourself blacklisted from search engines. There are, unfortunately, a lot of consultants out there who promise great results by using these techniques; it's a risky approach and I don't recommend it.

Abandoning Your Leads to Die

MarketingProfs has a nice piece on a classic marketing danger zone: handing inquiries off to the sales team.  The most important cautionary paragraph:

If you merely dump prospects on sales without first agreeing on the meaning of "lead" and then qualifying each prospect based on your definition, you and sales may end up at loggerheads when supposed leads don't become actual customers. At the very least, you'll confirm any assumptions on salespeople's part that you can't help them turn leads into cash.

Amen. Dealing with the issue goes well beyond that warning, though.

Remember how salespeople think: they need to be focused on closing deals, because they are trying to hit a monthly or quarterly quota. If you give them an inquiry from someone who isn't ready to buy - and that will be most of the inquiries you can get - they will follow up a couple of times, and then chuck it, usually complaining about the crappy leads they get from those stupid marketing people who don't understand how to bring in business.

Worst of all, that person might buy something - in six or nine months. Probably from a competitor.

If you try to handle this by just doing more "acquisition" marketing - getting yourself out there in  front of everyone all the time - you will do better, but the price will be a lot of money on marketing and a lot of wasted time sorting through the raw inquiries to find the near-term buyers.

A better approach - look for the real value of that inquiry. It's an invitation to start a conversation. And as a marketer, that kind of conversation is what you're good at.

Not a "please buy now" conversation, but a "tell me about yourself!" conversation. Think of it as a first date. You're not going to pop the question yet.

But you can keep the conversation going until that prospect is ready (or you figure out that she or he never will be).

You can do it through mail, email, seminars, surveys, white papers, newsletters, blogs, podcasts... in fact, through almost any communications medium.

They key, though, is remembering that your salespeople don't have the time, need, or (often) skills to manage that conversation. That's your job as a marketer.

And when it's time to pop the question, that's when you have the "meet the family" moment of introducing the prospect to your sales team. You'll be far ahead of competitors who haven't been having that conversation. And your sales team will be happy because you're giving them something to help them make their numbers.

Blog to Blog Advertising

Here's an interesting approach to blog advertising: on Techmeme, sponsors pay to have their latest blog posts appear in a "sponsored post" section on the site.

As ad models go, I like this one. The sites that are sponsoring Techmeme are likely to be of interest to some of their readers, and rather than run gimmicky banners, they're just putting the blog posts themselves up. It's almost like a formalized, for-pay blogroll.

My guess is that this model of advertising on blogs will turn out to be a higher value form that the search ads and banners that are more commonly seen (and therefore command higher prices).

Another interesting feature: in order to advertise with Techmeme, you've got to have a blog. If you don't "get" blogging, your money's not welcome. It works as a built-in quality control feature from the point of view of Techmeme's readers; anybody who sponsors the site must be clued-in to blogging to even be there.

From Starbucks, a Lesson in Thinking Like a Customer

Over at StarbucksGossip.com, a blog that exists solely to comment on Starbucks, there's been a little debate raging about customers who make their own iced lattes.

Scanning the coffee menu at Starbucks on Fourth Street in Santa Rosa reveals that the cost of a tall iced latte is $2.45.

Don't want to pay that much? Order a shot of espresso and a cup of ice — at a cost of $1.35 — and use the milk at the condiment bar to make your own latte. That's a savings of $1.10.

Is it stealing? Some say it is.

Some of the baristas find it particularly annoying:

At starbucksgossip.com, many of the more than 400 posts on this topic said customers are taking unfair advantage of the company, which for the month of August reported revenue of $617 million, up 21 percent from August 2005 revenue.

"The condiment bar is called a 'condiment' bar for a reason," a barista wrote. "The milk should be used as a condiment, not the base of a beverage."

"I have to say that this is a sucky thing to do," another barista wrote.

A lot of companies would look at the money lost of DIY lattes, get worried, and come up with some kind of irritating scheme to lock up the milk or turn the store employees into latte police. Starbucks, to its credit, did not:

In a statement released last week, Starbucks sided with customers.

"Customization is a fundamental attribute of the Starbucks Experience," the company said in an e-mail statement. "We provide condiments to our customers so they can make their drinks to their liking, and we appreciate their patronage. We trust our customers to make the choices that are right for them."

The statement reflects the company's "Just Say Yes" policy, another way of saying the customer is always right.

Starbucks knows what its selling. The coffee is good but not great. What brings people in is the desire to go to Starbucks.

With the margins on those eighteen-syllable concoctions that are more like candy than coffee and the add-on sales of CDs, mugs, coffee machines, and the like, they can afford to lose a little on the DIY-crowd. What they can't afford is people who don't like going to Starbucks, because then the whole business falls apart. This kind of thinking is one of the reasons they're so fantastically successful.

Don't annoy your customers over the little stuff; recognize what makes them want to do business with you, and you'll find plenty of profitable ways to sell to them. If you damage that fundamental relationship, all the smart products in the world won't help you.

Infect the Language for Fun and Entertainment!

Most of us who communicate for a living have found ourselves cursing the way language gets abused in the corporate world.

We've all seen how horrible words and phrases spread. One day someone told me he'd been "tasked with" something, and I thought, "What a strange, contorted way to say you've been asked to do something." A week later it was everywhere.

And so they come and go and come and go. Remember when "tiger teams" were all the rage? How about "templatize?" "End-to-end?" "Turnkey?" "Clicks and mortar?"

Buzzwords usually have one of two important features:

1. The buzzword (or buzzphrase) means something, but it's something that's already expressed more clearly and simply by ordinary English. ("Anne tasked me with re-envisioning the corporate presentation!" vs. "Anne asked me to look at the corporate presentation and recommend some new approaches to it.")

2. The buzzword actually describes some new concept, but quickly gets applied to everything in sight. (See "Web 2.0.")

Generally, they are born, they annoy millions, and they either fade away or we all get used to hearing them. What can we do?

Well, here's a very funny story about how you can fight back, or at least entertain yourself while the language degrades: create your own stupid buzzword and release it into the wild to see how far it can go!

By any other name

Missouri City, Texas, a suburb of Houston, has some problems. It's not considered a particularly desirable location; its main roads are a morass of not-too-high-end chain stores and restaurants; it's not attracting any particularly interesting development. And so city leaders are thinking the solution is to change the name of the city.

Some of the motivation here is, I'm sure, irritation that neighbor Sugar Land, just up the road, is considered a highly desirable suburb of Houston and was recently on one of Money magazine's inane lists as one of the best places to live in the US. If you drive along Highway 6, you can barely tell that you've crossed from Sugar Land to Missouri City; the same set of stores in similar strip malls along a traffic-choked road just keep repeating themselves.

Here's something interesting, though; Missouri City has a large African American population, and in 2000, Black Entertainment Television called the place a "model city" for African Americans.

That's a point of differentiation from Sugar Land, which to many folks around Houston epitomizes bland suburbia.

There's a point of differentiation that Missouri City's leaders could start with to figure out how to position their community as a desirable place to live, work, or invest. Is it the right one? I'm not sure, but it's a better starting point than changing the name and hoping the perception follows.  

Word Inflation

Remember a few years ago when every product and service became a "solution?" You no longer bought laundry detergent, you got a garment cleaning solution. You didn't just buy clothes, you bought a wardrobe solution!

Okay, I'm exaggerating, but just a little. "Solutions" are so much sexier than products, so everyone suddenly was explaining why what they sold was a solution to a problem. Even when it was just a product- often a well-understood, valuable, useful product (whose identity was suddenly getting lost under the weight of solution-speak).

I thought about this endless human desire to use high-power words when low-power words work just fine when I saw this Houston Business Journal headline about Marble Slab Creamery:

Marble Slab Creamery unveils new marketing strategy  

Interesting headline, I thought; an ice-cream store is not someone you expect to be changing strategies that often. Their previous strategy seemed to be making really good ice cream from natural ingredients and then opening up retail outlets in high traffic locations where people could buy it. A darn good strategy, I'd say.

So what's their new strategy? Well, it seems to be making really good ice cream from natural ingredients and opening up retail outlets in high traffic locations where people can buy it.

What they have changed is their signage and collateral. According to the article, they did this after doing research on their customers - which tells me they are smart people, and this isn't an "I'm bored with the old stuff!" move (it does happen, folks).

You can reinvigorate a brand with that kind of move, and I expect that's what the good folks at Marble Slab are doing. Good for them.

But it's not a strategy change. It's an adjustment to how they execute tactics that support their ongoing (good) strategy.

Why is this important? Because your marketing can fair for different reasons. If Marble Slab's strategy was off - say, they were focusing on natural ingredients while the market has decided that processed chemicals were hot (who know?), or they were focusing on their own retail stores but discovered they could do much better by locating themselves inside of grocery stores, or they were focusing on urban locations but it was the suburbs where the ice cream was being bought, they'd need a strategy change.

But if you're falling short because you've got a good strategy but you're not implementing it well - say, the customers aren't getting the right message from the ads, or the colors of your stores make people lose their appetite - you've got a different problem requiring a different solution.

Make sure you know where your problems are, and attack them at the right level. Otherwise you're likely to spend lots of money on pretty creative work to support a failing strategy - or change a good strategy because you weren't executing it properly.

(And when you're hiring a marketer to fix things, ask about strategy and tactics and make sure she or he knows the difference!)

I don't want to be too hard on Marble Slab; it sounds like they know exactly what they're doing, but somebody writing a press release got overly excited and thought that saying that they made some branding and graphics changes was less exciting that talking about "strategy," and didn't really understand the difference. That won't affect their bottom line; it just makes for some amusing reading in a business publication.

(Here's a free and utterly non-strategic tip for Marble Slab, though, in case someone there finds this blog: your home page has no title. Look up in the title bar of your browser window. That's going to play hell with your search engine placement - your web folks should know better, so go tell them to fix it.)

But enough marketing talk - I want some ice cream.

Web 2.0 Buzzword Bingo

The world is abuzz with talk about Web 2.0. Everyone wants to have a Web 2.0 business model and Web 2.0 applications and be talking about how their activities are part of the Web 2.0 mindset.

While it's always interesting to watch buzzwords take route and - occasionally - become useful words, this one is a particularly loosely defined term.

And if you're thinking, "I'm really not sure what Web 2.0 is but at this point, I'm too embarrassed to ask anybody," take heart - you are not alone. A good place to start is the Wikipedia Web 2.0 article, which tells us:

Web 2.0, a phrase coined by O'Reilly Media in 2004, refers to a supposed second-generation of Internet-based services — such as social networking sites, wikis, communication tools, and folksonomies — that let people collaborate and share information online in previously unavailable ways. O'Reilly Media, in collaboration with MediaLive International, used the phrase as a title for a series of conferences and since then it has become a popular (though ill-defined and often criticized) buzzword amongst certain technical and marketing communities.

The article then gives some characteristics of Web 2.0, most of which frankly don't differentiate it from Web 1.0 (or 1.5 or 1.9.2 release 3, or whatever the hell it was we all must have been using a little while ago).

Do I sound skeptical? If so, it's because I am - most buzzwords become ways to make something ordinary sound new and sexy, and I think Web 2.0 is one of those.

Most of what's being called "Web 2.0" appears to be applications and ideas that have developed incrementally over the years, now wrapped up with a big digital bow. I could cross from skepticism to cynicism by adding, "so that they can provide fodder for marketing new books and conferences," but I'm actually not that much of a cynic about this stuff.

Take a look at this Wired News article about the best and worst "Web 2.0" applications. Don't worry about who's a winner or loser, because the list is quite idiosyncratic; look at what's considered Web 2.0: sharing your photos online (how groundbreaking!). Various forms of social networking. A browser that's not supposed to keep history or caches.

This ideas may be good, bad, or ugly; what they aren't is anything that suggests that kind of big change that sticking a "2.0" after something indicates. They are the same ideas that have been driving the web forever - sharing information, connecting people, and so on - getting more useful (hopefully) as technology, business models, and knowledge about how people really use these things improves incrementally.

So if this is the Web 2.0 world, we got there by leaving the Web 1.9.8 world behind, and the Web 2.0.1 world is probably already arriving.

All that said, if you're a marketing or communicator, it might not matter - because somebody is going to ask you about your organization's Web 2.0 strategy, and you're going to have to answer them. So read up on what Web 2.0 is, and isn't, and ideally you'll have an answer that satisfied today's buzzword compliance standards... but doesn't leave you with an embarrassing quote hanging around in a year or two when a new buzzword has left Web 2.0 in its grave.  

Blogs Influence IT Purchasing

KnowledgeStorm and Universal McCann have released a study of IT professionals that finds that they read blogs and get technology information from them, and that they use RSS. This isn't exactly a surprising finding, but it is interesting to see someone trying to measure blog readership in a specific business demographic.

Syndication technologies (RSS and Atom) seem to be stuck in the early adopter phase, but this study found that 31% of respondents use feeds. Interesting but again, not surprising; this is a group where you'd expect to find more early adopters.

I'd take some of the statements in the announcement with a grain of salt (like the use of the word "proves" in the headline and breathy proclamations that blogs are "the perfect forum" for IT professionals), and read this is another indication that you need to be thinking about how blogs fit into your arsenal of PR and marketing tactics - particularly if you are marketing to IT buyers.

This study follows an earlier KnowledgeStorm/Universal McCann study on podcasts, and an upcoming study on wiki technologies is promised.

Winning Arguments vs. Winning Customers

Early in my career, I worked for a small company that made medical equipment. One of our product lines was a relatively low-tech item used during surgery to prevent a common complication. It was a cool product - a simple, non-invasive technique that replaced expensive pharmaceuticals with potential side effects and could save people's live.

The product wasn't developed by the company; we'd bought it (before I was there) from its inventors, a local doctor and lawyer. The lawyer stuck around in a sales/product development role under contract to us. He was a smart, passionate guy who believed absolutely in his creation and spent his days out evangelizing for it as hospitals.

And sales of it has steadily increased; it was a profitable item for the company.

Sounds great, right? Not when you peeked under the covers.

Our biggest competitor was a large medical manufacturer who came out with a very similar product that included some extra features. The features made it complicated (and far more expensive), and the clinical benefit was questionable. We had a ton of peer-reviewed studies showing that our simpler, cheaper version did everything that theirs did; they had one or two papers suggesting the opposite. This being peer-reviewed medical research, nobody was endorsing anything, but our stack of studies from respected medical professionals was pretty impressive.

The company had never looked at market share - they just watched the sales come in and were happy. This isn't unusual in a small family-run outfit like that company. But when our new head of marketing (first ever in the position) went and did a little research, she found something troubling: sure, our sales had been increasing nicely, but the overall market for the product had exploded. So as we watched nice year-over-year revenue increases, our market share had plummeted from more than 50% to under 10%.

That's a prescription for disaster, because the market was showing signs of consolidating, and you don't want to be a tiny little player in a consolidating market. Her recommendation was that we just exit; we were completely outgunned from a marketing standpoint, and she thought it made sense to sell off the business (a small part of the company's overall revenues) while it was profitable.

Needless to say, the clashes began. Our inventor was a typical entrepreneur: smart, committed, and absolute in love with his product. He was also a lawyer: that meant he was in love with being right and winning arguments. Those are great skills for a lawyer.

For a marketer, not so great. Our approach to the market was one that you could defend in a court of law, but not so successful in the marketplace.

The product and pricing decisions were quite sensible, unless you happened to be buying the product. The up-front price was high, but the ongoing costs for supplies very low. You'd save money. But if you were a hospital, buying supplies was much easier than buying equipment, so despite the money that would be saved, it was very hard to get it through purchasing.

Then there was our communications. The inventor sent out endless newsletters to the medical community highlighting studies that demonstrated our product's value. Great, right? Well, not when you're telling surgeons, "You are all wrong in choosing that other product" (and that was the tone of the newsletter).

Surgeons really, really don't like being told that they are making a bad medical choice by a lawyer. Or a marketer. It doesn't matter if you have enough clinical studies to fill an ER from one wall to the other; they are the surgeons. (Interestingly, nurses were very eager to hear what the studies said.)

At trade shows, it was typical to have surgeons come up to our stand and say, "That doesn't work." If you tried to offer them copies of some of the clinical literature, you'd get a patronizing "Oh, that's so cute, the non-doctor thinks he knows something" smile and the surgeon would walk away, saying, "No, it really doesn't work."

We had our advocates, to be sure.

Looking back through the lens of experience, it's easy to see where we went wrong. We picked the wrong fight. We tried to convince doctors that they were wrong, and that's a doomed strategy.

What we should have done was stop trying to win the argument and win the market battle instead. We should have leveraged the surgeons who understood the product's benefits. We should have made better use of the nurses, who were the ones dealing with cost issues and sitting on hospital purchasing committees. (The inventor, showing some professional snobbery, liked talking to surgeons but thought the nurses were just, you know, gals in white uniforms.) We should have marketed directly to hospital purchasing staff, whose influence was already on the rise. We should have talked to insurers.

Instead, we went into an unwinnable argument with the moral clarity of the faithful... and the market consolidated. Sales started to level off and drop. Eventually, my former employer sold off the business. The big competitor dominates to this day.

Being right isn't all it's cracked up to be. It feels nice, but if you want to succeed in the market, you need to understand stop worrying about being right (though not settle for being wrong!) and let go of arguments.

The goal isn't to prove people who don't buy your product wrong. It's to find the ones who will buy it, because it's the right choice.

Rewarding your customers

My SO just made Platinum on Continental Airlines' Elite program. For the first 2/3 of the year, he was "commuting" from Houston to Paris, so the miles added up. For both of us - I didn't go as much as he did, but I did make four trips to France, and so I hit Gold (the middle level of their three elite tiers) a few weeks ago.

And it's funny - when you hit Silver, Gold, or Platinum, you get a package with your new frequent flyer card in the mail. The exact same package, no matter what level you're at.

When I hit Silver, I got a mailer that contained my new card, some drink tickets, two name stickers to put inside your luggage (in case it's lost and the tags are missing) and an explanation of all the Elite levels. When I hit Gold, I got the same package with a gold card. And he just got the very same thing with a Platinum card.

"Four drink tickets?" he said. "I've flown 75,0000 miles with them so far this year. I've squashed my butt into economy for all that time. They should at least have a note in there thanking me for spending so much goddamn money with them."

"For all those miles, you should get a free drink on every flight!" I said.

You do get different benefits at different levels. For example, when you Silver, you get a 50% bonus on your miles (fly 1,000 miles, get 1,500 deposited to your account.) At Gold that goes up to a 100% bonus, and he now gets 125% bonus as a Platinum flyer.

And then there's the best benefit - the first class upgrades. You wind up farther up the list to get bumped into first class as you advance through the tiers. If you fly a lot, that's not a small thing. I was in first class both ways on my last trip to DC, and let me tell you, it made me very happy. It's nice to get off a plane not feeling like you've been living the life of a veal calf for the last few hours.

Platinum flyers are their very best customers. These are people who, like my SO, are constantly hopping onto planes. And they send out a package that makes them feel like... nobody special. ("I've flown from Texas to the Middle East and all I got was a stupid drink ticket," the t-shirt could say.)

If you're going to reward your most loyal customers, make them feel rewarded. Otherwise, what's the point?

Where Are You Sending Them?

 Let's take a quick look at a basic, but often-forgotten, element of email marketing: the landing page.

How many times have you clicked on a link in an email ad (or a banner ad or sponsored search listing, for that matter) only to find yourself on a page where you just don't know what to do next? What you're experiencing, of course, is an advertiser who thought about their ad copy, the design, the placement - everything they needed to in order to get you to click - but didn't follow through and make smart choices about what would happen next.

This article from ClickZ about landing pages is a great summary of the basics. Print it out and stick in on a wall in your work area. Even experienced marketers something forget about these things, as some clicking on ads will show you.

You're investing time and money in getting potential customers to click a link - don't lose them! 

Physician, Heal Thyself

Or marketer!

A local marketing organization is having a lunch meeting I want to attend next week. Like good marketers, they have an email list to distribute meeting announcements.

I clicked on the link for registration in the email and found myself on a web page with a registration form... for last month's event.

Hmm. There was an email address for inquiries, so I wrote a quick note asking how it could register.

It bounced. I went back to the web site and there was a phone number to call. I called it.

I got a phone company recording telling me that the number had changed.

We've all had these days, so I don't want to beat up on them too much... well, yes, actually I do. If you launched an email campaign with a landing page that went to the wrong form, an invalid email address, and an incorrect phone number, how would you explain that to your boss or your client?

And this is a marketing organization.

Getting Blogging

PR giant Edelman has an interesting blog portal on their site. It's a link to blogs and podcasts written by Edelman staffers.

Some are part of the Edelman site; some are hosted offsite. They are written by a wide range of practitioners within the firm and from around the world (some are not in English).

It also include a link to get RSS feeds for the blogs.

It gives site visitors a quick look at the expertise they are hopefully getting when they become an Edelman client. I haven't seen anything quite this comprehensive on another firm's site. I'm curious what kind of traffic and readership it gets.  

It's a good example of a firm embracing new media and technology.

Morality, Ethics, Marketing

Let's take a brief break from the day to day marketing issues to think big thoughts.

Nearly every business activity has ethical implications, and marketing has more than most.

Seth Godin recently tackled some of the ethical questions of marketing in a blog post called "Marketing Morality."

Your marketing changes the way people act.

Not completely. Of course not. You can't get babies to start smoking cigars and you can't turn Oklahoma into a blue state. But on the margins, especially if your product or service has some sort of archetypal connection to your customers, you can change what people do.

Now it gets tricky. It gets tricky because you can no longer use the argument, "We're just giving intelligent adults the ability to make a free choice." No, actually you're not. You're marketing something so that your product will have an edge over the alternative.

Everyone knows about milk. The milk people don't need to spend $60 million a year advertising milk in order to be sure we all get a free choice about whether to buy milk or not. No, they do it because it makes milk sales go up.

What a huge responsibility.

If you're a good marketer (or even worse, a great marketer), it means that you're responsible for what you sell. When you choose to sell it, more of it gets sold.

I have no standing to sit here and tell you that it's wrong for you to market cigarettes or SUVs, vodka or other habit-forming drugs. What we do need to realize, though, is that it's our choice and our responsibility. As marketers, we have the power to change things, and the way we use that power is our responsibility--not the market's, not our boss's. Ours.

The morality of marketing is this: you need to be able to stand up and acknowledge that you're doing what you're doing. "By marketing this product in this beautiful packaging, I'm causing a landfill to get filled a lot faster, but that's okay with me." Marketers can't say, "Hey, the market spoke. It's not my decision."

I've never believed the canard that advertising is just about offering information. It's nonsense, and we al know it. It's about making people do things. As Seth notes, there are limits on one's ability to do that, and good marketers are keenly aware of them... but we should never pretend we're not trying to influence behavior. Because if we make that argument successfully, we've just argued our way out of our jobs.

And like Seth I'm not going to lecture anyone: just make sure that you are comfortable with what you do.

One of the marketing issues that fascinates me is what our marketing activities do to the cultural environment in which we operate. I'm a marketer, but I'm also a person who lives in the world we create, and like many other people I find the intrusion of marketing into everyday life troubling. There's the obvious stuff, like telemarketing calls and endless badly-targeted direct mail. There's spam. And of course there's also the appearing of ads everywhere from over urinals to on eggs.

As I marketer, I understand why it's done and that it works, but as a member of society, I hate it. And so I found this item from Wired News rather interesting.

Using symbols and slogans and logos to sell a product or a company has been around for as long as there have been products and companies to sell. But selling, like so much else in this increasingly hyper and over-hyped world of ours, has mutated into something uglier -- call it consumer marketing.

Technology's march only serves the beast. Each advance (if advancing is what it is) diffuses the way we get our information. If we now have 3,089 ways of taking in news and information, the marketing swine will find 3,089 ways of shoving their "buy this" message down your throat, whether you want to hear it or not. There is no escape.

With hundreds of thousands of marketers out there, clamoring to be heard over the din of their collective, orgiastic whoring, you can't read anything, watch anything or go anywhere without a ceaseless assault on your senses. The message, regardless of how subliminal, never varies: Buy this, own this, drink this, drive this, wear this, be this. In order to be cool, you must consume consume consume.

The irony of a writer complaining about "marketing swine" in a piece that appears on a web page that is able to exist because of the surrounding advertising is not lost on me. But the irony doesn't mean he's wrong.

It should tell us something that someone whose paycheck doesn't bounce because of ad revenues resents advertising so much. In the same piece, there's a link to this page, which tells people how to get logos off of their cell phones.

With some risk of damaging the phone. Think about that: there are people who so resent the appearance of a corporate logo that they will risk damaging an expensive piece of electronics to rub it off.

That, too, should tell us something.

Am I suggesting that we all renounce our evil marketing ways and change careers? Of course not. I'm simply suggesting that, like all good businesspeople, we should never forget the implications of what we do - and for marketers, that means asking if our exciting new marketing channel is something we really want to live with.

And, in practical terms: if people hate it that much, how well will it work?

Are Corporate Blogs a Fad?

Recently my SO said, "If I hear one more person talking about corporate blogs, I'm going to throw up."

I suspect there are a lot of people who share that opinion. In part that's a healthy suspicion of hearing something touted as the latest hot new marketing channel. Usually, these things are a bust. (Remember Pointcast?)

In part it's a reaction to the many really bad corporate blogs out there, which are just standard web content reformatted to look like a blog, but with the same tired institutional voice and heavy sales-pitch content. It might look like a blog, but it misses the point.

The UK-based CIO Jury at CNET.com recently weighed in on the topic and concluded that no, they are not a fad - though not without some dissent.

With companies increasingly using blogging to communicate both internally to staff and externally to clients and customers, 10 of silicon.com's 12-strong CIO Jury IT user panel said corporate blogs are more than just another technology fad that has found favour among senior managers.

Christopher Linfoot, IT director at LDV Vans, said: "Like all new technologies corporate blogs are often misapplied but there are valid applications, usually employee communication and not external. We do have a couple in use here in the former category."

But another member of the jury said:

Nic Evans, European IT director at Key Equipment Finance, said: "Personally I think corporate blogs are at best just a 'jeans day' version of more formal communications and at worst more benefit for the ego of the blogger than their potential audience."

The article also notes some of the difficulties of corporate blogging:

But corporate blogging also throws up issues of how censored or moderated the content is. Rob Wharton, CIO at Colt Telecoms, said: "Blogs are popular because they tend to represent personal opinions and personality rather than corporate messages. Therefore we need to take a great deal of care to ensure appropriate use so we don't devalue the blog concept, whilst avoiding mayhem in what essentially needs to be a controlled message."

Your challenge, of course, is taking care not to miss the boat on what could be a vital new communications tool, while not spending too much time on something that may not pan out. The truth, I suspect, is somewhere in the middle (as is so often the case): there are good uses for corporate blogs, but we're likely to see lots of misapplication of the concept while the right and wrong ways to use blogs gets sorted out.

Instant Feedback, Like It Or Not

From Guy Kawaski's blog comes a discussion of how online reviews change the dynamics of business:

Ilana DeBare of the the San Francisco Chronicle wrote a terrific piece (9/3/06) about this phenomenon called “Amateur reviews changing approach of small businesses.” Check it out by clicking here. She starts off with a story of how a new restaurant thought it could work the kinks out during the first thirty days only to find out that customers were already criticizing the place on Yelp after the first weekend of business.

The article points out one of the problems with online reviews: there's no quality control. Anybody (including a competitor) can say anything.

Monitoring these kinds of online review sites should be a part of your regular media monitoring, particularly if you're in a market where such reviews can be influential.

In reviews, as in all other things, there is value in expertise. It's empowering to let everyone become a reviewer, but I wonder how useful these sites are for customers in the long term. As I read Kawasaki's blog and the SF Chronicle article, I thought about reviews for a local high end Latino restaurant that I found while looking for its address.

Here in the land of Tex-Mex, other Latin dining options are kind of limited - and people's inexperience with them showed in the reviews. Many of them complained, "they didn't give us chips and salsa when we got there, and they had no burritos!" Not surprising since it wasn't a Mexican restaurant, but is it fair that this led to negative reviews? (I had a great meal at the restaurant in question, chips or no chips!)

The nice thing about professional reviews is that the reviewer is somewhat more likely to know what he or she is talking about...

Low Tech Wins

Yesterday I had one of those really annoying automotive experiences: one of the power windows in my car fell off of its track and into the door. Whoops!

Because my car is a Volkswagen, nothing like this is easy. My trusty neighborhood mechanic told me to take it to the dealer - VW windows are insanely complex. So I called the only VW dealer in the inner loop area of Houston, where I was told I could have a an appointment... next Thursday.

Remembering why I stopped taking the car to them in the first place, I asked, "Is there any way you can get me in sooner? It's a real problem not having a window!"

"No sir, I'm sorry."

This is the problem with that dealership: they are part of a group of dealers in the area, and when you call to make a service appointment, you don't seem to get anyone at the actual dealership; you get someone sitting at a computer who cannot do anything that computer won't permit her to do.

I made the appointment, pulled up the VW web site, and started checking who had service hours on Saturday, and making calls.

My car is now at another local VW dealer - not a terribly conveniently located one - but one who could actually help me.

When I called, I spoke to someone sitting there in the service department. I explained the situation and she said, "Hold on!" After a few minutes she came back and told me sure, they could do it for me today, as long as I got in first thing.

Because they are apparently less slick that the first dealer, she could walk over to the service area and ask, "Can we squeeze in this guy with a window problem tomorrow?"

Automating things and centralizing things is a great way to save money. Of course, if you do it in a way that makes your front-line staff unable to respond to customers helpfully, you'll probably lose whatever you've saved. Not every customer is going to have the standard needs. If you can't respond to something as simple as getting someone in faster than normal because they have a special problem, you're not going to have happy customers.

(A funny side note - whenever you use that first dealer's online service appointment form, you get a fast response - from the sales manager, eager to help you buy your new VW. I told them about this twice but they never fixed it. Duh.)

I have no intention of ever setting foot in the first dealership again (this was just the latest in a long line of annoyances with them). And while I might buy another Volkswagen, it certainly won't be from them. Hope that centralized appointment setting is saving you big bucks, guys.

Who Writes the Manuals?

Seth Godin recently linked to a post on Kathy Sierra's blog about user manuals, and why marketing should be responsible for them. That led to an immediate response from Darren Barefoot disagreeing.

They're both right. Sort of.

From Kathy:

Why do so many companies treat potential users so much better than existing users? Think about it. The brochure is a thing of beauty, while the user manual is a thing of boredom. The brochure gets the big budget while the manual gets the big index. What if we stopped making the docs we give away for free SO much nicer than the ones the user paid for? What if instead of seducing potential users to buy, we seduced existing users to learn?

Let's take the whole damn ad/marketing budget and move it over to product manuals and support. Let's put our money where our users are. If we're in it for the short term, then sure--it makes sense to do everything to get a new user, while doing as little as possible once we've got them. But if we're really in it for the long haul--for customer retention and loyal users--then shouldn't we be using all that graphic design and pro writing talent for the people we care about the most? Our users?

From Darren:

There’s a reason why words like ‘glossy’ and ’slick’ have negative connotations. Because they imply shallowness, which isn’t something you should aspire to in a user manual.

It’s hubris to say, as Kathy does, that “shouldn’t we be using all that graphic design and pro writing talent for the people we care about the most?” Ah right, so there hasn’t been any design or ‘pro writing talent’ applied to that area yet? And marketers are the saviours? Right.

User manuals get a bad wrap because companies don’t devote enough resources to them. That money should be spent on thoughtful tech writers, trainers and support personnel who can make compelling training and support material. It shouldn’t be spent on applying lipstick.

Kathy's central point - that user manuals should be part of the experience of making customers passionate about, and committed to, our products - is absolutely right. But, as Darren points out, the way to do that isn't prettier manuals (and that's how I read Kathy's suggestion that we spend more on designing and printing manuals, especially given her "brochures - slick and cool vs manuals - black and white and boring" comparison graphic).

All successful communications should be designed with the user's needs in mind. The user of marketing materials is trying to make a purchasing decisions. The user of the manual is trying to accomplish her business tasks with the product. These are different things. Accomplishing them requires different skill sets.

Seth says, "can I propose a team effort?" That's the right approach.

As I read all of this I though back to my days at a company that made analytical lab equipment. We redesigned all of the marketing materials (they needed it badly). We made them more customer focused; we made the terminology used in them more consistent and clear; we did a really good job at it.

Then we looked at the manuals - which were boring and not that pretty - and my reaction was just like Kathy's.

After some, er, heated discussions with the tech writer who was responsible for them, s0mething became clear: our users didn't want pretty manuals. Our manuals sat in binders in laboratories and were consulted when someone needed details on exactly how we were determining results for tests, or when they needed to know maintenance procedures for the equipment.

They needed simple line diagrams, not sexy photos. They needed clear instructions on how to make the damn thing work so they could get through all the samples that needed to be tested, not information about why our techniques were the best around. They already knew that; that's why they bought our stuff.

Here's what we did do: the tech writer started reviewing the marketing materials to make sure that we weren't saying things that would make a lab tech on a purchasing committee snort in derision. And I started reviewing the manuals, so that I could make sure we weren't changing terminology after they bought the equipment, or undercutting our marketing messages.

The result, I think, was better manuals and better brochures. (This was pre-web - boy, I feel old suddenly!)

There's an element of marketing to all communications with your customers, including documentation, but not everything is primarily a marketing task. Have some respect for what the documentation folks do, because it's a specialized and important skill that you probably don't have. But don't ignore what they are doing, either.

Team effort - it can be a beautiful thing.

How to Avoid Talking to Customers

Every now and then I come across a company using their web site so poorly that I just have to point it out - as a "don't let this happen in your business" warning. Today's is from Time Warner Cable. I encountered it while looking for help when my cable internet connection was acting up.

After trying to get help through their online chat feature (which didn't work) I clicked "Contact Us" and got the page above.

On that page I learned that Time Warner's world revolves around me, that they have a commitment to me, and that serving me is their number one provider. They are going to work to provide the best service in the cable industry. Their customer service reps are available 24/7. Their employees are dedicated and highly trained. They guarantee that they will show up on time. I was buried in an avalanche of promises, commitment, and feel-good verbiage. 

Here's what I didn't learn: the phone number to call them for help.

Which was, of course, the only thing I wanted.

Yes, more clicking eventually turns up a number. But a customer looking for a way to call and say "something is broken" is already annoyed (I sure was!) and if you want to make them happy, don't tell them how much you love them. Tell them how to get help.

Time Warner: give the copywriter the afternoon off, and make the contact page a list of ways to contact you. It's really that simple.  

Everything Old is New Again

On his blog the other day, Chris Baggott of ExactTarget talked about the benefits of email marketing in terms of reaching long tail customers - those that might not be your biggest customers, but whose aggregate purchases are significant:

The Long Tail of Email Marketing now gives us the ability to leverage unique data with the low cost and reach of integrated email to make it easy for marketers to talk to everyone as if they were the most important customer or prospect on the planet.

Email is being segmented based on every imaginable data attribute from size to industry to sale rep relationship…even to timing of messages. Take a look at your own email program. Are you still using email as “cheap paper” to send newsletters or using your data in combination with email to drive real Long Tail relationships?

Chris is right, and I'm not knocking him here - but I had to chuckle when I read this. Because what Chris is talking about is exactly what Seth Godin talked about as the promise of email marketing - in 1999.

Godin coined the term "permission marketing" and talked at length about how email made it possible for marketing messages to be highly relevant to customers. Most marketers ignored the "relevant" part and looked at email as "cheap paper," to use Chris's term. (They also generally interpreted "permission" to mean "you didn't scream at me so I can bombard you with messages" or "you didn't catch me when I tricked you into 'opting-in' on a web form," but that's another story.)

The result - the hurdles are higher than they ought to be for today's email marketers, because consumers are used to getting tons of junk in their inb0x (even from companies they know). Still, it's nice to see marketers finally getting back to the original idea of how email could make marketing more efficient for us and more useful for our audiences.

Careful What You Ask For...

Have you read about the recent email promotion that Starbucks released, then canceled?

They sent email coupons for a free coffee to employees in the Atlanta area, and asked them to forward them to family and friends. Of course they went far beyond that, and Starbucks canceled the promotion and stopped honoring the coupons.

Understandable, but that leaves front line employees in their store having to explain to customers that no, that coupon in their hand is not going to get them a free coffee. Very bad.

When you plan a coupon promotion or rebate, think about how it's really going to work - and if it's going to work a bit too well. Better to put constraints on it that keep it in line with your expectations than wind up in the unfortunate position of telling customers you're going back on your word. (Because it doesn't matter if technically that's not what you're doing - that's how it will look to customers.)  

UPDATE: On the other hand, when your customers make this kind of mistake, you can jump in and take advantage of it - just as Starbucks rival Caribou Coffee is doing now.

Somebody Said Sorry

I received this email the other day:

We're sorry.

We accidentally sent you an email message on August 29. The email message was mistakenly sent to some individuals who had previously signed up with the Chicago Tribune Web site or another Web site operated by Tribune Company, but had also requested to be unsubscribed from commercial email communications.

We are taking every measure to ensure that this does not happen again.

We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience or annoyance.

Yours truly,
Alison Scholly
General Manager
Chicago Tribune Interactive

I remember getting the message; I was surprised that I was getting spammed by a major newspaper.

This kind of thing - a simple apology for screwing up - is so rare. And that's too bad, because my opinion of the Tribune just went up.