Category: The Marketeer

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The Marketeer

Over the Wire

So a friend of mine was talking about press release strategies and some shrinky dink was giving him a hard time saying that PRWeb is not a news service. He asked me for some clarification and I decided to kill two birds with one stone by posting about it.

Disclaimer: All of the below is my opinion and bias, I probably have 50% or less of the facts – ha, like that’s ever stopped me from complaining about stuff… If I have something totally wrong perhaps somebody like David Meerman Scott might chime in. His opinion may be much like mine, but I’m sure he would have the real facts.

OK, weasel words behind us, here’s what I’ve been told, true or not…

Back in the days before the trucks of the interwebs were delivering all this information through the tubes to The Google, it was a lot harder to get Press Releases in front of reporters and news organizations. Before the web there was a network that would publish news, a private service that people would pay to get their message into, and organizations who needed news would subscribe to it. They had a great network and it was the only one in town. The sales managers looked down and said “It is good.”
This is tied into Associated Press in some way but I’m too lazy to wikipedia it now (and as Chris Penn said this week in Marketing Over Coffee, I can’t be sure that the wikipedia page wasn’t written “by a chimp”, or maybe it was monkey…). I don’t know much beyond the fact that people paid to subscribe to it to get news out of it, and others subscribed and paid to put their news into it.

By the time I was beyond a Rookie there were only two news services – BusinessWire and PRNewswire. As far as I know they are still the big guys. You have to pay an annual membership for the right to send them your press release and push it out (put it “Over the Wire”). I haven’t done this in years but I remember it being less than 10k for the subscription and then there’s a huge menu of pricing for who you want to send it out to. You could pay over a grand and send it to the world, or all kinds of slices from as grand as “High Tech” which is basically East and West Coast, all the way down to paying less than $200 to hit only radio stations in Cleveland.

Enter the Internet. PRWeb springs up and says we don’t need all that crap we’ll just push it out to the web and it will go everywhere, screw you and your private network too (my words, not copy taken from the “About Us” page on their website). In comparison it’s dirt cheap, the last one I did was a one-time flat price of $75.Yes, these are flight attendants, they used to call them stewardesses

So from my perspective, if you are old school and believe video games are the downfall of American society and you still have your Secretary print your email for you to read, then you can say that PRWeb is not a news service because they are not charging you 10x the cash for the same Google juice, and to use a private network that is vastly inferior to the internet (actually that’s just me being obnoxious, I know they both utilize the web extensively now). You could also make the case that these wire services get more attention from the press, but the articles I see in the NY Times and the Journal are just as often getting tips from blogs and websites.

Somebody stop me if I’m being stupid…

Categories
The Marketeer

The Case for The Holidays

JaegerAs much as I want this blog to be a dignified treatise on Marketing, I was astonished at the runaway success of The Case for Drinking, a post which, in summary, covers Marketeers as social alcoholics. As much as it pains me to drag this blog down, Thanksgiving is hell for the monthly numbers so your faithful servant is here to deliver.

Drinking and the holidays go hand-in-bottle, and that’s because, in one of my brother’s greatest quotes: “I drink until the pain goes away”. Between shopping, business, social and family functions, end of quarter, and worse yet, end of year (you haven’t moved your calendar so Q4 ends in Jan? You poor bastard….) you’ve got a stress headache that delivers more pressure than a tray of Ex-Lax brownies (Post on World’s Greatest Holiday Pranks coming soon in the Ronin Marketeer riding the bicycle to hell series).

The best part of blogging is I can leave these absurd run-on sentences in. I just pray you understand whatever I’m typing.

Where was I?

Oh yes, the most venerable of holiday traditions – The Company Party. Success at the holiday party is actually incredibly simple – here’s the 6 steps:

  1. Always introduce spouses.
  2. Make the normal conversation with guests same as at the office.
  3. Thank the hosts (the organizers and the C-Level people or owners, principals, whatever you call the big kahunas.)
  4. Don’t Eat
  5. Don’t Drink
  6. And for the love of all that is holy, don’t dance.

Of course you won’t follow this list and that’s why we have HR departments. If you must drink, here are some tips. If you must eat, Jos. A. Bank makes a wonderful line of stain resistant clothing, that is all my wife allows me to wear.

If you have to dance at a corporate function it better be your job, otherwise I’ve got two words to describe your future career path: fry station.

In summary, sit back and enjoy a drink as you reflect on how much of your soul you traded this year. Remember that you can always buy chunks back with charitable donations, or better yet just doing some good.

Did I mention how much I like the holidays?

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Brain Buster Email Marketing Productivity Booster SEO and Paid Search

Ron’s Predictions

My Inbox is also my To-Do list. If there’s a message that is part of an important project it stays in the box until it gets done. This can be a great productivity booster – many times if I am unsure about the importance of a project I leave it in the inbox. If I don’t remember what it was about by the time it hits the bottom of the box (or if the original requestor hasn’t asked about it in the 4 months it took to get to the bottom of the inbox) that’s an alert that perhaps that TPS report (re: Office Space) wasn’t that urgent, or it’s time for me to get to something I have been putting off.

I had started kicking a project around in the Summer that is moving again. As part of the first attempt to start this project I had asked some social media luminaries to give their opinions on some marketing techniques and whether they are gaining ground or dying.

As most social media consultants are full of crap and/or have an aversion to real work, I only received a response from Ron. His response has made it to the bottom of the inbox, and as he had the courtesy to respond I cannot let decent content go unused (and Ron – if this is still your opinion you could cross-post to this and skip writing on Thanksgiving day!).

I asked:

Is eMail dying?

1)email is not dying — yet. Email is something that is very popular for
people over a certain age. The younger folks don’t use email. They
text message, instant message, send bulletins, etc. I don’t know what
these folks are going to do when they need to get a job and the job
requires email. Perhaps that’s the only place that they’ll use it.
Or perhaps, they’ll be the catalyst for bringing in the email
replacement technology.

I agree, email is starting to slide from peak profitability, but will be profitable for a long time.

Is corporate blogging on the rise?

2)Blogging = Transparency — and so far, most companies still do not
have the intestinal fortitude for such openness. And it’ll get worse
before it gets better. Just wait for the first lawsuit where
Sarbanes-Oxley is invoked against a blog posting:-)

It’s interesting to me how blogging is growing from smaller companies and working it’s way up. The fewer layers of bureaucracy, the easier it is for blogs to grow. If your company has a culture of red tape, your bloggers can’t grow through the concrete sidewalk.
The growth of marketing departments as publishing companies:

3) Every Organization is a publishing Organization: always has been.
It’s just that the company’s customers became publishers too!

Always has been, but now every company has the infrastructure to spread further than only where trade magazines used to tread.

Online Video:

4)Online Video — The big news this year in Online Video is that
AppleTV, while not a perfect device, is a wormhole hole in the
Cable/Satellite space-time-continuumJ I can now get video podcasts
and YouTube videos into my livingroom. This is a major Crossing The
Chasm requirement.

My head hurts and I feel pity for Network TV execs. Between iTunes, Apple TV, Slingboxes, DVRs, etc. Things are only going to get messier. Can I have Heroes back on iTunes please?

Snack Media:

5) Online Video Attention Span. Back to the younger generation.
These kids have the attention span of a gnat. They want their
content quick and brief. What’s interesting, with YouTube, is that us
older folks may be being retrained. I no longer have the patience to
sit down and watch a 1 hour show”

Feeds:

6) RSS Feeds — Syndicate everything! RSS feeds are just starting to
show up in not traditional publishing areas like corporate websites
who syndicate the MOST OBVIOUS yet LEAST IMPACTFUL piece: their press
releases. More companies will start to experiment with RSS Feeds next
year.

I think this area needs a quantum leap – Feeds alone can’t cross the chasm. Maybe Google Reader will continue to spread. Why’s this stuff not in Office?

Mashups:

7) RSS Feeds + Mashups. The release of Yahoo Pipes, Microsoft Popfly,
and Google Mashup (plus apps from Intel and IBM) offer great
opportunities for companies that are looking to take advantage of the
growth of RSS Feeds. If companies decide to “Syndicate Everything,”
these fledgling tools may become more of a necessity to help filter
the information torrent.

Wow, I’d forgotten all about Pipes. If only there were more hours in the day.

8) SEO isn’t Dying…it’s Already dead! “Black Hat” SEO is dead.  Never bet against the
House and never bet against Google.  Their business is predicated on
matching search results to good content.  Produce good content,
frequently, on a site that stays around for a while and Google will
reward you handsomely.
I think SEO is becoming more respectable as it’s evolving into copywriting.

Thanks Ron!

Categories
Brain Buster The Marketeer

The Wrong Ladder

For the life of me I can’t remember if I first read of it in Covey’s 7 Habits, or the Covey Time Management book “First Things First“, but I’ve always loved the analogy of The Wrong Ladder.

So many times in life you are working as hard as you can but eventually you start to go off track in regards to your ultimate goal. You are climbing the ladder as fast as you can, faster than the competition, only to realize the ladder is up against the wrong building. This ties into beginning with the end in mind, one of Covey’s habits – you have to start from your ultimate goal and work backwards. Otherwise you might find yourself at the top of the wrong ladder.

The ladder has many implications. If you can convince your competition to climb the wrong ladder you may not have to climb at a pace that will cost you your marriage, children, whatever.

The holiday break is a great time for a strategy check. If you have not read 7 Habits, that’s the best advice I can give you. Otherwise, stop worrying about the next rung and make sure your ladder is leaning on the right building.

Categories
SEO and Paid Search

AdWords and AdSense Primer – Questions from Ron Amok

My friend Ron sent over a question asking for clarification on this post from Google – they are doing placement targeting and CPC for placement targeting. What does this mean? Here’s a play by play to get you started.

Back in the dark ages of Google Adwords (like 2 months ago), there were two places to run your ads. You could buy words that would show your ads when people searched for them in Google. In other words – if you bought “Donuts” and somebody searched on Google for “Donuts” your ad would show up on the right side of the Google Search Engine Results Page (or SERP for the hardcore insiders).

This is grossly simplified, there are a lot of things that go into whose ad shows up and where on the page, and there’s a bidding process along with a determination of the quality (read – spamminess) of your ad.

The next step was to provide this same functionality to websites other than Google – and thus was born adsense (keep in mind I am not a Google historian, I have no idea about these timelines really, I have a tough time remembering breakfast, never mind when this stuff rolled out. For a great history of Google check out John Batelle’s “The Search“).

Adsense allows other websites to run the same ads that show up on the Google SERP. For example if you scroll to the bottom of this page you will see a bunch of google ads, some of them may even include “Donut” “SERP” or “Help with Google Adwords”. For having Adsense on your site Google pays you. I’ve had it running for a year and I think I’ve made 72 cents or something. I don’t care because I did it to learn, but there are people who live comfortably just doing lots of this.

Once Adsense went live, Adwords users had the opportunity to have their ads run outside of the Google site (don’t worry if you are getting confused, I’ve been running with this for about 3 years now and I still have a hard time keeping Adwords and Adsense straight).

Just to make things interesting the payment model was changed. For ads that showed up on Google SERPs the advertiser was charged each time an ad was clicked – cost per click, or CPC. For ads showing up outside the Google SERPs you would pay per impression (each time the ad appeared whether it was clicked or not). This is the model is common in the newspaper and magazine industry, and is called cost per thousand, or CPM for those of you with Latin skills ( N.B. – just to get more Latin on your ass – once in a great while you will still see MM around being used for Million, that’s a thousand thousand to your homeboy Caecilius).

Hell, where was I… You’ll notice that sales guys love CPM because if you are selling ads it gets expensive quick and it doesn’t matter how much the ads suck or how much readers ignore them. As a result there are many Marketeers that see this as wasted spending.

Originally you would only vote yes or no on sites beyond Google, this could cause problems if your ads show up on sites you don’t want them to – such as an Army recruiting ad showing up on the website for the San Francisco Gay Pride parade… etc. Eventually the functionality was added to include/exclude certain websites (URLs). I haven’t played around much deeper than that, I’m not sure how good the tools are out there to determine where you want to be.

With this latest announcement you get more granularity, you don’t just have to show up on the Daily Planet, you can choose just the Daily Planet Sports Page. They’ve also added CPC pricing to make it easier for people to test it without blowing their budget. There’s some huge opportunity here, every Pizza shop should lock down all the searches in a 5 mile radius for Pizza, same for Funeral Homes, Florists, anybody whose business is Geo targeted.

Hopefully that answer gets you on track, for more commentary on Google check out this week’s Marketing Over Coffee, and feel free to send any additional follow up questions, or request for clarification on the above.

For more information this link to the Adsense blog can then lead you to their help center and learning center, both great resources.

Categories
Great Marketing

American Express Members Lounge

This weekend, after the pulse pounding Michael Bay-esque software development conference, my dear wife dragged me off to the mall for some shopping (as in – she shops, I sit around and do nothing). Luckily I had a secret weapon in my arsenal. I had received a postcard earlier in the week from American Express telling me about their new members lounge at the Natick Collection (the new X-tra snooty name for what we used to call “The Natick Mall” or worse yet, just “The Mall”).

Some direct marketing actually got through to me – go figure. The lounge is very cool. American Express LoungeIt reminds me of the clubs at the airport that keep out the dirty cake-eating civilians, to create an oasis of peace and quiet for the business traveller.

I was greeted at the door and my card was run through a handheld scanner. This granted me access to the inner sanctum. It’s a room about the size of the average store in the mall, brown leather seats sort of like restaurant booths, 3 drink stations with water, lemonade and one of those multi-coffee, latte, chai, hot chocolate machines.

They wrap gifts for free and have their own bathroom. Only 2 things bothered me, one was the lack of wireless service, but they do have 3 Macs connected to the web. The other was that I can’t believe that there are people who can complain about the types of coffee offered in the machine. Here’s a great new service, all kinds of free stuff and a great place to hide, and some people can still find stuff to bitch about.

Screw them, the staff here is friendly even to those dolts. My time is up, the boss called. Shopping’s done.Loungin'

Categories
Great Marketing

Big Rich and the Milk Bones

One day we were walking the dog and a big contractor truck drove by and honked his horn. The driver was on the side of the vehicle farther away from us and I could see him throw something over the roof of the truck towards us on the sidewalk. I caught one of the Milk Bone dog biscuits and the other hit the ground right next to Hannah, the world’s greatest dog.Hannah

This happened a few times and it was always great to see the dog freak out over the bones from heaven. On Thursday we saw the truck at the local convenience store and noticed that Big Rich has a tree service. We had a tree in the backyard that was threatening to take out the back half of the house so he came right over to look at it. The short version of the story is that by the time I got home from work that night the tree was gone with no indication it had ever been there except for a stump.

There’s also a picture on my fridge of Big Rich with Charlie Daniels (signed by both). That’s pretty cool, and I wouldn’t call any of it traditional marketing.

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Brain Buster The Marketeer

What is Utterz?

So I was called out on twitter this weekend. I posted:

“Sorry, I can’t see any value in utterz… anyone…. anyone…”.

All I’ve seen are posts in Twitter that link to the Utterz recordings. In true new media style I got a twitter back from the founder!

“simedia @themshow fan of your blog. how can we improve utterz to provide the value you’re seeking?”

And I’m stuck. As I refuse to be someone who just complains about things on the web, I’ve painted myself into a corner and have to put up or shut up. The good news is that I was at a conference at MIT for the weekend on software development (yes, I know, the non-stop excitement of the new media rockstar lifestyle), so I did have time to set up an account, take the tour and test drive.

My initial befuddlement was viewing Utterz as some kind of twitter add-on, a MyChingo variation (which is called Mochilla now maybe? I can’t keep this stuff straight, I’m just a simple caveman…).

After a short run I’m thinking it’s a Twitter replacement – a similar tool for the content producer, but with greater functionality. The question then becomes how will these two brands compete? One thing is obvious, that Mitch Joel hit on earlier this week – there’s a lot of funky things going on with cell phones becoming more powerful multimedia devices and it’s time to start playing around to see what kind of trouble we can get into.

If you’ve done anything cool on this front your comments would be appreciated.

Categories
Geek Stuff Graphic Design

Friday Night Fights!

Clarence was asking where the hell I’ve been so I had to break out the HUGE GUNS for FRIDAY NIGHT FIGHTS!:

I haven’t seen anybody show these off, I hope I’m not recycling. Your eyes do not deceive you – that’s The Greatest vs. The Man of Steel (getting spanked by the Dynamite Right!). This was a DC Giant Size from the 70’s that hasn’t been reprinted because of the legal rights to the images. The cover has over 100 celebrities including such 70’s-tastic stars as Sonny Bono, Jimmy Carter, Frank Sinatra and Telly Savales.

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The Marketeer

In Defense of the Thought Leader

Christopher Penn proposes deep sixing the term “Thought Leader”

I agree that the term is lame (it really doesn’t involve leadership – much like podcasting not requiring an iPod), but I think it does define a very specific role: a person in a company who is an expert in the field who blogs, speaks, and presents about the industry and future trends in general rather than just pimping their product. These actions give their company credibility and increase the perception that they are truly experts at what they do now, and will continue to be experts into the future.

These types of people generate a competitive advantage over companies that don’t have any thought leaders.

With this definition there are no thought quarterbacks or generals leading on the field, but there are experts on football who have their own shows that give out in-depth analysis about the sport and get paid for it. There are retired generals who speak on news shows and write about what war really means, and they usually get paid to consult.

I think the bottom line is that the terms consultant and analyst are overused, tired and worn out. Thought Leaders are New and Improved!