Thanks to everyone that to time to talk about Social Media and Marketing at Podcamp Boston. Here’s a link to the slide deck, please contact me if you have any other questions.
Transcriptions were also mentioned in the session. My first choice is www.transcriptlibrary.com, if you give Shelly a call please tell her that I sent you.
Having worked with a scoring system for a couple of months, I’ve been watching closely to see what I can learn about how to set it up properly. I was fortunate enough to catch a great session at the MarketingProfs B2B event earlier this summer, and I have a co-worker that has hooked me up with a few recent articles. Some of the more interesting points:
Now to get on to email campaign A/B testing…
The countdown is on for the Social Media Roast of Scott Monty. Come join us for a steak dinner and a chance to berate Scott. If you are unable to make it to Boston, feel free to send over any text, audio, or video you want to send. Depending on the virtual response we may add to the online side of the event, but we are limited by the tech infrastructure of Ken’s Steak House…
At a recent conference I was discussing a party for Scott Monty to celebrate his new position at Ford. A flash of creativity created the first ever Social Media Roast.
You are cordially invited to attend dinner on Friday, July 11th at the luxurious Ken’s Steak House (Home of the Famous Salad Dressings), in scenic Framingham, Massachusetts. Your $50 ticket gets you a steak and all the drinks we can afford, and the right to mount the podium and insult Scott in any way you think will be amusing.
If the idea of a roast is new to you, check out this classic, though dated clip from Dean Martin’s series:
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To attend you must purchase a ticket from eventbrite.
It’s not Spy vs. Spy. It’s different.
I’ve only been to one SEO Event, as it’s much easier (faster, cheaper…) to do my research online. Recently there’s been a lot of chatter about one of Danny Sullivan’s events that some felt went too far into Black Hat Territory. I found a response that said “Guess what suckas! There is no White Hat!” of course I paraphrase.
For n00bs (new people, to you n00bs), most believe there are two ways to do better in search engine results: White Hat – being “honest” and not doing Black Hat – making changes to your site, or getting links that have nothing to do with the user experience, and are done solely to score higher in the engines.
Jason Calacanis deployed some f’ing astonishing Ju-Jitsu a little more than a year ago, stating that SEO was all BS. He issued a challenge made a lot of important points and said that SEO is “pissing in the community’s well”, based on his image of what the future would be (and I think he’s on the mark). The beauty of it all though is that it both validates the business model and drives traffic for his new venture Mahalo. A beautiful example of participating in social media and leveraging community. It’s not possible to buy or fake that kind of hype – but kids, don’t try this at home, you’re watching a professional stuntman here.
Ok, so all that said… What to do? From what I’ve seen I think the wild west days are over. The web has become a communtity and the search engines are the law enforcement professionals. Black Hat has become like any other life of crime – it can provide benefit, but the downside is that you are always at risk of being found out and crushed. The truth is that you have your business on the line and the law enforcement people have no emotional involvement whatsoever. The guys that tweak the search algorithms come to work every day and think about how to tighten it up.
This will continue for years, people going to work and the corporate bureaucracy, patching holes at a slow pace, but crushing everything in their path. And it’s just like these cold case shows on TV, you may get away with it today, but 3 years from now they come up with a new way to examine the evidence and you get the cuffs.
Don’t take on the risk of Black Hat until you’ve exhausted everything possible from White Hat. Building an easy to navigate site with lots of great resources that the rest of the world can’t help but link to is a great way to build traffic that you can work on and never have to worry about waking up one morning and finding your site banished and traffic wiped out. This is becoming less and less of a technical function (making sure your html tags are properly formatted) and more of a copywriting one.
Wear the black hat if you have no long term plans for the domain. There’s a reason why PPC (Pills, Porn, Casinos) excel at black hat – if they have to close down spankme.blackjack.bluepill.com that’s not a big deal, if you have a legitmate URL with your company name the stakes are much higher.
There are many people who can make money off of exploiting weaknesses in the search engines, but like most neighborhoods where the exploitation gets the attention of law enforcement, you probably don’t want to hang out there.
I had an interesting example this week where the concept of One-to-One marketing crossed with some of the reading I have been doing on preferences. In one-to-one marketing the goal is that your database is so rich that every single person can get a message tailored to them specifically. I first came across this term in ’98 or so, and Peppers and Rodgers were doing a lot with it.
Cross this with recently reading Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational and Barry Schwartz’s the Paradox of Choice last year and I found an interesting thing:
I get a daily email from a local lunch place. It has the specials for the day that everyone gets. I noticed that I look at the specials and if I don’t like any of them I go somewhere else. If I do see something that looks good I’m more likely to go there. Here’s the crazy part – every time I go there I see something I like better, or I hit the salad bar. I never actually buy the specials. So even though the email about the specials influences my choice to go there, it has nothing to do with my purchases.
The solution is to patch the disconnect – if they could get to my purchase records they would see that they could send me the same email every day: “Hey John, the seafood salad is fresh and cold on the salad bar and your Nantucket Nectars Half and Half is waiting for you” and that email would never discourage me from going there.
Something to think about as you craft your copy.
This weekend I finished a couple of photography books I had been trying to get through, and even got to take some night shots:
The Secret was lying around and I thought I would check it out to see what all the hype was about. The first thing that struck me is that it is a very slick piece of marketing. Everything from matching some proven tactics to make it a best seller (very short and easy to read, lots of images), plugs for the DVD, and even the glossy pages and graphics to make it look like it’s an ancient book on parchment that was pulled from some tomb, rather than bought at Wal-Mart last week.
I agree with the content, I think that a positive attitude is the biggest difference between those who succeed and those who fail, so I can’t argue with the book. If you need this book, it will probably help you. It reminded me a lot of some of Tony Robbins stuff without all of the “boring” research and study that proves his material on improving performance.
Basically you ask the universe for stuff, maintain a grateful state of mind and you’ll get what you ask for. There’s also some great points about not being against things, always work for things (don’t be a Yankee hater, be a Red Sox fan). This is a subtle change but it does make a difference, the classic example is the caddie planting the seed of negativity in the golfer (it’s an easy putt as long as you don’t leave it short). We see this all the time and we know that subconsciously it makes us feel better. Everyone will choose to be pro-life or pro-choice, but nobody would want to work with the pro-death, or pro-totalitarians. Another key reason why marketing is as much art as science – based upon our irrational behavior of our opinions from the name of the group, not who they are or what they stand for.
One thing that struck me was that this material crosses over readily to religion. Many religions ask (pray) and are thankful (reverent), but religion was not mentioned at all and I could only come up with three reasons why this would be the case:
There are a lot of discussions that could spin out of number 3, but a key for me is that a church involves a community, while The Secret is content to leave you home alone asking the universe for money. Something about that doesn’t strike me as the best course of action.
I also liked the closing line “May the Joy Be With You”, there was no mention of Yoda as a source…
A special deal for all the Ronin Marketeers out there – get MarketingSherpa’s brand new B2B Lead Generation Handbook and save $200 off the rack rate.
Just a data point – I’m getting a lot of inbound traffic from Microsoft Live. That’s a huge surprise to me. The good news is that it’s from keywords I really like. I may give them a 7 day test to see how I like it.
If this is your first time checking out the auction results you can start here for the whole story.
The dust has settled and the results are in. Here’s the tale of the table:
How about that Tiger Woods. Yes, you read it right – FREE SHIPPING. And the final graph:
Some interesting observations: Jaffe was able to pull in the views, but Brogan turned them into bids and dollars. A bummer for me having picked him as the winning horse. I’m not surprised that Brogan took the day, but I didn’t think that Verdino would beat out Jaffe. No real reason for that other than my opinion of who’s got the buzz. Obviously I’m not the guy to ask about that.
Thanks to all of these guys for taking a chance and putting themselves out there it give me something to think about, and congratulation to Jennifer for a great campaign, leveraging egos to create cash from nothing is a masterful move!