One of the best aspects of blogs is when they provide a 'backstage pass' and in that regard Poynter.org is a great site for a news junkie. But the organization also does some interesting research, and a week or so ago they came out with this study about how people read news stories online.

While the study was on news stories, it does strongly suggest that despite rumors to the contrary, people will read long copy online - presumably assuming it is relevant and compelling.

When readers chose to read an online story, they usually read an average of 77% of the story, compared to 62% in broadsheets and 57% in tabloids…

In addition, nearly two-thirds of online readers read all of the text of a particular story once they began to read it, the survey revealed. In print, 68% of tabloid readers continued reading a specific story through the jump to another page, while 59% did so in broadsheet reading.

The research also found that 75% of print readers are methodical in their reading, which means they start reading a page at a particular story and work their way through each story. Just 25% of print readers are scanners, who scan the entire page first, then choose a story to read.

Online, however, about half of readers are methodical, while the other half scan, the report found. The survey also revealed that large headlines and fewer, large photos attracted more eyes than smaller images in print. But online, readers were drawn more to navigation bars and teasers.

Some good thoughts and readers comments over at GrokDotCom.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 9:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Why is online marketing so misunderstood? From the broo-ha-ha over whether or not SEO is rocket science to yesterday’s BusinessWeek article declaring the end of paid search marketing (unless you’re a mega-corp) to the discussion of re-branding affiliate marketing to the idea that we’re all off in our analytics expense allocation by 900% - it’s clear there is not a universal definition or agreement or understanding of what-in-the-world we’re all doing.

In many ways it isn’t surprising. Traditional marketing has a long history, full of experience and academic study and debate. Traditional marketers studied this history, received undergraduate and graduate degrees in marketing, and then served apprenticeships (in many cases) at branding and marketing ‘factories’ like P&G. By the time someone gained responsibility or a big fancy VP of Marketing title, they could easily have had 10-20-30 years of experience in a field that had seen consistent but not monumental change since they began.

Online marketing, on the other hand, has been invented in real-time over the past 10 years, and the technical and social environment in which it operates change radically every six to twelve months. The elders have six to ten (or twelve in a very few cases) of experience and vast majority of practitioners have only three to five. We’re an industry in kindergarten (and often act accordingly) with nothing but a few slightly older siblings to show us the way.

Continue reading "Marketing Without Context" »

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 8:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The difference between “doing the right things and doing things right” is one of those phrases that has been stuck in my head for a long long time.

The way I originally heard/learned it was connected to the idea that you had to know when to do each, and that usually it was first important to do the right things (ie get going even if things aren't perfect) but that at some point it became urgent to actually do things right (deliver full quality or potential).

The prevailing wisdom has long been that in business you have to execute to perfection to really win. But in reality you’re better off doing a poor job delivering something that people really want, than a great job at something in which they have little or no interest.

The entire internet has largely been an example. It was initially slow and painful, with limited content and dropped connections – but people came in droves. Remember the first year of online video at the size of a postage stamp? MP3 files largely killed hi-fidelity because small and transportable made ‘audio resolution’ far less important. And online shopping is the king of them all – a very difficult process and often frustrating experience in the early years (and sometimes today) yet compound growth at 25%+ per quarter or more for years on end.

When recently reading some of the classic marketing books, I was struck by how it seemed many online marketers where fighting up-hill battles because they hadn’t stopped to consider or implement sound marketing principles. They were just rushing around buying keywords or optimizing pages and then considering their results only in light of the quality of their keyword buying or landing pages – they didn’t stop to consider that maybe their product was unappealing, their pricing was uncompetitive, or their value proposition was poorly communicated.

There’s a term I heard once and have never been able to find again – maybe it’s terminal point – which is the name for the point in time when a plane is definitely going to crash although it hasn’t yet hit the ground. In other words, after that point, there is nothing that can be done because prior actions have sealed fate (mathematically). There can be a terminal point in business too, when there is no keyword or promotion that is going to save you.

Seth made me think about all this with his post on strategy vs tactics.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 10:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Yesterday, Philip Kotler and Peter Drucker told us that marketing is finding opportunity, influencing demand, attracting response, creating value, and profitably dominating markets in the process of creating customers.

While that may be the world’s first mash-up definition, I like it. It reflects what I continue to learn – marketing is not a step or an activity, it’s a process.

It’s not a perfect definition, however, because while it captures the broad concepts well it basically ignores a whole set of fundamental marketing tasks – segmentation, targeting, positioning, the famous four P’s (product, price, place, and promotion) and the almighty branding. Plus it lacks any suggestion of what Kotler calls control (feedback, evaluation, revision and improvement).

Jeez, this isn’t a process it’s an entire little universe.

The Marketing Management Process, Adopted from Kotler on Marketing (click to enlarge)

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 11:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

One year later and I’m still pondering the meaning of Marketing. Even more surprisingly, I’ve been re-reading “Kolter on Marketing” and this time I think it’s sinking in.

I’m trying to understand Marketing because it increasingly seems a prerequisite to effectively executing online marketing. That may seem obvious, but I don't think I'm the first or only 'online marketer' to skip the pre-req's.

That and the fact that every time I hear someone use the word in a sentence, I increasingly feel like Inigo Montoya – a strange accent comes over me as I resist the temptation to say those immortal words: “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

Peter Drucker has provided my favorite overall definition of Marketing (he called it the process of creating customers) but the Kolter book is full of useful definitions that cover the subject from all angles which cumulatively provide a more complete picture. Here are the ones I’ve take note of:

• Marketing is demand management
  Influence the level, timing, and composition of demand in pursuit of the company’s objectives.

• Marketing is about value
  Understand, create, communicate, and deliver perceived value.

• Marketing is about opportunity
  The art of finding, developing, and profiting from opportunities.

• Marketing starts with a desire to attract a response
  Gain someone’s attention, interest, desire, purchase, referral.

• Marketing has the main responsibility for achieving profitable revenue growth for the company.
  Identify, evaluate, and select market opportunities and create strategies for achieving eminence if not dominance in target markets.

I should immediately make clear that I’ve edited and paraphrased most of these for my own reasons, so if you want the real list go buy the book.

So if the meaning of Marketing is up in that list somewhere, what does online marketing mean?

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 10:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Yesterday (Tues) was another day at Shop.org and a very different set of impressions. Nothing contradicting yesterday's comments, just a different piece of the elephant.

First, this is my first shop.org and I have to say the crowd is impressive. The membership bias and high ticket, along with a virtual lock-out of vendors who aren’t exhibiting or speaking results in a crowd of serious ecommerce brands with the vast majority sporting well-known household names. Comparing the attendees here with those (on average) at shows like SES or AD-Tech is like comparing the audience at the symphony with the crowd at Wrestlemania.

Second, the keynotes were both very interesting and impressive (Kelly Mooney of Resource Interactive and Author Barry Schwartz) and today (Weds) was Seth Godin, (although I couldn’t make it today) so let’s just call that 3 for 3.

Third, the trade show booths were somehow more relevant and interesting than at either SES or Ad-Tech, although I can’t quite put my finger on why. Certain exhibitors clearly appear at all of these shows – like the analytics vendors and larger agencies and marketing shops – but the dozens of rather sleezy ad-network were replaced with a host of hosted commerce vendors and the increasing array of hosted component solutions (from opinion services like BazaarVoice to research firms like Forsee Results and others).

The sum of these three attributes – well chosen guests, intelligent ‘sponsored’ conversations, and a professional atmosphere – created an environment that really worked in terms of facilitating the kind of networking that shop.org is really meant to foster. At the many breaks and social events everyone is just plain eager to jump into rich and relevant discussions. This ‘offline social networking’ was productive here in a way you usually only experience as much smaller (and even more exclusive) events.

One more good thing: the show hosted extensive ‘birds of a feather’ sessions where three or four dozen topics were targeted at one round 10-12 person table each. I found that these produced very effective small group discussions which nicely bridged the ‘listen only’ format of the panels and the many one-on-one cocktail party conversations. In fact, with slightly more effort (on the part of the show organizers) I think an entire 3 hour session with the chance to change tables every 45 minutes would be much more effective than (yet another) afternoon of panel discussions. Sort of a slow-motion speed dating for online marketing conversations – or un-conference meets big-conference.

Tomorrow I’ll try to square yesterday's complaints with today's positive review.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 10:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

You're one of the largest retailers in the country of a particular luxury item, yet when management finally allows you to venture into cyberspace they provide resources for all of two bodies worth of internal staffing, and when the internal IT team get ahold of the site design produced by a major outside agency they refuse to even discuss the project with marketing until they deliver it - full of changes.

Or you're in marketing at a major software company and your job is to share great pre-sales content with your online retail channel - only they won't take it because if you give it to them they want to be paid as if it's advertising.

How about this one. You head a large equipment and apparel retailer and find the quality and suitability of the e-commerce platform licensed from one of the two largest software providers in the world is so problematic you have to slowly replace each component with open-source and 3rd parties components, leaving a system with far from the power and flexibilty you really need.

These are just three of the stories I heard last night at one Shop.org cocktail party. What we now call Online Marketing (i'm committed to replacing that term) has some serious issues. Yes there are billions of dollars being transacted and earned, great strides have been made to build a stable and workable environment over the past 10 years.

But a look anywhere inside finds that what looks like a maturing industry is really something of a troubled pre-teen. The body is changing in strange and unexpected ways, clothes that seemed to fit when we got them now look silly and out of place, heads are filled with a strange mixture of brilliance and confusion, we just aren't prepared for the situations we find ourselves in, there are a lot of stupid things being done in the name of making friends and being popular, and our parents just don't understand us.

I attended three panels yesterday, including the one I was on, and I don't think they helped very much. Heading back right now hoping to find more parental guidance. More thoughts tonight.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 8:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Kathy Sierra challenges the difference between pre-sale and post-sale activities / effort / communications / seduction techniques. It strikes to the heart of her premise that 'creating passionate users' is a marketing technique, and should be budgeted as such. I'd like to add another piece to the puzzle - the 'during-sale' phase.

What Kathy called 'before' is really best represented by the intense amounts of time, money, and energy on spent on attracting, contacting, interrupting, or even conversing with people. But the comparison of resources allocated to those lead generation activities vs those invested in the actual buying/selling process is where the trouble starts. The horrible stuff that happens after the sale is just the icing on the cake!

Think about the money spent to buy highly targeted paid search terms which send you to generic home pages where it's your job to dig through the navigation to find what you want. They take the time and spend the money to be exactly where you want them in terms of the search, then drop the ball immediately as you engage to try and buy.

Now consider the rich media ad that takes you to a website where you can't find answers to dozens of your actual questions so you wind up back at Google trying to find reviews, tech specs, or other stuff that really should have been right there waiting for you. The disproportion in spending between demand generation and website architecture and content is insane. As the Eisenbergs have said, why spend so much time trying to fill a bucket full of holes?

The tricky part is trying to figure out why marketers do this. They may not yet realize that customers are their best evangelists, but surely they realize that prospects aren't yet customers. Why abandon them so early?

I believe the Eisenbergs (again) have the answer. Marketers sell, customers buy, and rarely the twain do meet. Sellers think the glossy features and benefits brochure is a winner. Buyers look at it and instantly generate 5-50 more questions. Sellers are proud of their snazzy new web page, yet lots of buyers don’t get a warm fuzzy feeling from it (ie, they leave) because it lacks testimonials or awards. Others leave because it's too cold and impersonal. In these cases and many others, failure to consider the buying process and address the needs – step by step – of those to whom you’re selling results in the abysmal conversion rates everyone is used to.

We’re in the middle of a Persuasion Architecture process for a product which helps ease some of the side effects of chemotherapy and other cancer treatments. Today a lot of time was spent digging into the differences between how doctors and nurses (and the different personality types of each) interact with the website and product information. Every time we do one of these it’s just amazing to see the massive number of absolutely critical pieces of information that it forces you to include on the site that would have otherwise NEVER even been considered.

Yes, this requires allocating time, people, and dollars. In our experience it generally comes to between one and three months of the paid-search spend of those we work with. So instead of working with a leaky bucket, they take a month or two off (metaphorically) to create something that’s nearly water-tight, and then go back at it. While the rest of the world saves that money and just tries to put more water in faster hoping somehow they can out-run those holes. (Note this wasn’t meant to turn into a Persuasion Architecture commercial - but you can call us if your bucket is leaky).

Kathy’s post covers people who are seduced fast and hard enough to make it from the dangling of the shiny thing to the purchase on the steam of the shine alone. She’s 1000% right that the post sale experience counts too – as is always pointed out when someone asks a crowd how many people saved their iPod boxes (vs their boxes for almost anything else.)

But before you go improve your user manuals and packaging, stop and look at your website and all the places people trying to buy from you are getting stopped. Work on disappointing them less while they’re trying to buy and THEN get around to disappointing them less after they’ve bought.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 12:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Great interview with Seth Godin over at Blog d'Kawasaki. Done in support of his new book, which is apparently a greatest hits reprint of blog and other columns, both the questions and answers are worthy of your time.

My favorite of the 10 questions, has Seth relating his theme of storytelling to the Cluetrain idea of conversations:

Question: What is an example of company that created a brand by conducting a dialogue with customers?

Answer: You don’t know many either, do you Guy? Ahh, we agree! I think that while markets are conversations, marketing is a story. Starbucks creates conversations among customers, so does Apple. The NYSE makes a fortune permitting people to interact with each other. But great marketing is storytelling, and if you’ve been to a Broadway show lately, you’ll notice that audience participation is discouraged. That doesn’t mean that great playwrights don’t listen! They do. They, like great marketers, listen relentlessly. They engage in offline conversations constantly. They poll and they do censuses and most important, they have true conversations with small groups of real people. But THEN, they tell a story.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 10:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It's easy for brand and marketing communications to get so wrapped up in subtleties and details that the core message gets lost or subsumed. Websites (and trade show booth) are two common examples where it’s often possible to stand there and stare and yet be unable to figure out ‘exactly what do they do?’.

One of the nice components of what I’d call ‘web 2.0’ design trends is a focus on simplicity and clarity – often centered around a clear central service statement. Today I came across a prime example at San Francisco based Mule Design. Landing at their site your eye is instantly drawn to a perfectly clear and simple declaration of their purpose. (click the image to enlarge)

The statement itself is followed by an equally clear qualifying statement, at which time users should be fairly clear if they’re in the right spot or not, and can then move onto taking in the other elements of the site’s navigation and information.

Does your site make it this clear exactly what you do?

BONUS: A list of web2.0 companies and their traffic volumes. From here you can go see what a whole bunch of these sites look like, and hopefully see the design trend I mentioned.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 4:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

There is an interesting thing about the following bit of news, which in-and-of-itself matters to almost nobody: "Jason Calacanis has offered $12,000/yr to up to 50 people in return for their 'social bookmarking' rights."

Jason is offering to pay (formerly volunteer) critics for their work, and hire them away from his competitor. Both of which are smart. You can read the details elsewhere, but if he's right about the impact the ROI will make this one of the least expensive marketing programs in internet history. It's interesting because of how it continues to blur the line between amateurs and professionals, the step it takes towards valuing 'user generated content', and the formalization of buying friends to influence people. Despite all this, it's hard to see a rational argument against it.

Think about some simple related actions. For example, how much would it cost to get the Quarterback, Prom Queen, Top Geek, Biggest Pot-head, School Wierdo, Debate Team Captain, Girl-most-likely-to-become-a-porno-star and 10 other influencials at every high-school in America to move their MySpace pages to a new service? Wouldn't that be a great investment? Would MySpace make a counter-offer?

In recent years we've seen all kinds of bribes go directly to consumers - cash-back sites, free-ipods, point-programs of all flavors. Why shouldn't influencers share in the bounty? As a marketer, there's an acceptable cost of customer acquisition - who cares where the money goes?

Of course, there are serious implications in terms of trust - which is a frequently discussed topic in the world of word--of-mouth marketing. But in any case, the pace of radical changes in the roles, rewards, and power-base of nearly every player in the marketing sphere continues to accelerate.

>>> Some good posts on the Calacanis offer and its ramifications : Rough Type, Thomas Hawk, Read/Write, TechCrunch, Business 2.0, HMM

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 12:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The goal of establishing a 'relationship' is often cited as the goal or justification for many old and new online marketing techniques. The deservedly revered ClueTrain Manifesto famously said made 'conversations' another goal. I've never really stopped to think about the differences between them (which may explain a lot about me) but in marketing terms, this post about anonymity as it occurs in those two situations made me ponder just that distinction.

The world is a much better place when vendors and customers can engage in quick, reliable, secure, semi-anonymous transactions.

Explaining the remark on Rough Type, the author further said:

"semi-anonymous" was meant to indicate knowing enough about the customer so that the transaction can occur, e.g. you need to know that the customer's credit is good, but not that he's the guy who watches only three Netflix DVDs per year.

He is making a specific point about the distance a customer might want, which is a perspective marketers don't often consider when throwing these terms around.

Playing with the metaphor further, a conversation lasts only as long as it's mutually beneficial. A relationship almost always has periods, if not what seems like eternities, where that is clearly not true. So it's not surprising marketers want to establish relationships, but it's probably a lot more practical and realistic to focus on conversations first. Especially since a relationship of any kind that doesn't at least start with some good conversation is questionable to begin with.

There's a lot to be said against taking any of the marketing metaphors we use too literally, but the power of specific words, in practice, is undeniable. At the moment 'conversation marketing' is my favorite summary of the Cluetrain-and-beyond approach to creating customers. The links above brought that into a little clearer focus.

PS: I coincidentally ordered a copy of a book called 'Conversation Marketing' just two days ago (and I like their blog), and will report back as to how this sways my thinking.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 10:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Google Checkout is amazing for two simple reasons. First, it's incredibly easy to sign up and to use in a real live store (I tried it at Levis). Second, in a full 10 years of the ecommerce phenomenon nobody else has managed to get a universal wallet right.

On the first point, I give them credit. I've not been particularly impressed with most of the Google add-on apps. To me they've all been a transparent attempt to create stickiness for a site (and business model) that had very little at the time of their IPO. I don't particularly think minimalist software works as well as a minimalist UI. And far too many of these services have rolled out only to languish without significant (although much needed) improvements for long long periods of time.

But at the same time the company has been spitting out services (email, IM, blogging, etc.) and bribes (picassa, earth, analytics) they've also been creating a monster 'game over strategy' that must have lots of monopolists in Redmond turning green with envy.

I find the fact that despite many attempts a universal wallet hasn't been done successfully thus far fascinating. Microsoft tried. Bill Gross tried. The credit card companies tried. Even the spyware kings at Gator (now Claria) tried. I'm sure there were dozens more.

But nobody ever made it stick. And the result is we all have 20-200 password accounts at retailers across the internet, have to retype our address and credit card numbers endlessly, and favor places where we already have accounts (like Amazon) over other smaller retailers because it's just more convenient to shop using an existing account than to open an new one for every purchase.

You only have to try Google Checkout once to know this is how online commerce should work. No account sign up (at the merchant), no credit card re-entry, and you can even make a purchase and prevent the seller from getting your address (bye-bye lots of spam and 'special offers'). So the new questions become: A) can they convince enough merchants and consumers to participate, and B) what kind of evil is Google going to with your purchase history and the power to 'direct' massive percentages of the online transaction volume.

The answer to A depends a little on the technical difficulty of the integration, which I haven't read any comments on yet. (Update: Here is one experience with very basic integration.) Looking at how it works on the sample sites and knowing that the millions of online retailers out there have millions of different systems and many of these probably aren't easy to modify due to complexity or the fact that the guy who wrote it is long long gone, I think this isn't a slam dunk - but assume they'll build steadily, leveraging the Adwords relationship (and economics) and the fear that will soon set in that adwords without the little cart will either loose clicks or ranking.

On the consumer side, they're going to need those merchants pushing it, plus a long sustained campaign of both word-of-mouth and probably even actual advertising. Despite inside-the-blogosphere fawning, most Google add-ons have faired rather poorly.

The potential evil is the palpable concern across internet today. (Update: See Dave Winer on this issue.) Will they use this to drive to a CPA (revenue share) model for top segments in adwords? (Om thinks so) Will they use the aggregated purchase data to choose markets to go into with Google-direct selling vehicles? Will they punish non-checkout advertisers in ways beyond withholding the Google-checkout icon? And of course the big one, will they just make so much damn money getting paid for the advertisement and getting a % of the transaction that the rest of us have to hate them, at least a little, because they're winning so damn big?

With Google Checkout they have a system where they make money off the front (advertising) and back (transactions) of the ecommerce process. They’ll ‘own’ the masses of sellers (advertisers) and buyers (checkout’ers). They clean up and leave the messy work of selecting inventory, persuading visitors to buy, shipping and providing customer service to others. Nice work if you can get it.

Update: Some good thoughts on GC from Traffick. And BusinessWeek looks at Google's string of non-hits.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 10:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (2)

On the old blog, I wrote several posts on the definition of 'Marketing', and I have the same interest in finding a good definition for the world 'Brand'. An article called 'F*ck. Love. Brand.' over at UX Mag (User Experience) take a look at the sacred and the profane aspects of this question:

Catholics believe that there is no difference between God The Father, God The Son, and God The Holy Spirit, to them there’s just God. God is all three, and all three are God, they call this the Holy Trinity.

Similarly in business we have, The (company name) Brand, The (company name) Culture, and the The (company name’s) Customer Experience. Yet all of these simply make up The Company. Like the religious reference above, they’re one and the same.

The word brand is a generic term that I believe should never be used in a non-generic sense. I don’t want people discussing the Missing Link brand (culture, or customer experience) for me, they should only ever be discussing Missing Link. Internally and externally, there is and should be no differentiation.

He goes even farther in his conclusion, arguing in effect that the company and everything it does is the brand. That may be more true than some narrow definitions, but seems like a cop out to me. For now I'm sticking with the idea that a brand is a reputation, the sum (or prevailing mass) of what people think about a company (or a person). From there it's relatively easy to understand how different business actions or decisions will impact a brand, or not impact it.

I don't think that's the ultimate definition though. Any more ideas would be appreciated.

Posted by Craig Danuloff at 9:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)