Lairig Marketing

Websites To Beat 30-Second TV Spot In Race for Obsolescence

(Note: this post does not apply to e-commerce and media-related websites)

Now that everyone has the perfect website standard down pat - the top nav, the left-hand nav, the footer nav, the rotating main-area flash with the four promo call-outs below - it’s clear what a waste of time it’s all been.

Website content a mile wide, and eight miles deep, 99% of it uninspiring, noncustomer-centric, dated, noninteractive. For what purpose? To serve a relative handful of visitors, without distinguishing those who are there for the first time and those who are there for a repeat visit? Your garden-variety 30-second TV commercial is far more engaging than your garden-variety website.

You can see the comScore data for yourself, and how the traffic falls off as you move down the top-50 domains. Better yet, look at Hitwise data that shows the top 10 sites controlling 25% of all web visits.

Or this recent study, by Yahoo and Media Contacts (yes, yes, bias alert, but still), which found that of the approximately 85 different websites the average person visits in a month, only about 1.5 actually translate into high-engagement experiences.

If the future of Marketing, of the world, is an engaging digital experience, then websites as we know them are toast. Microsites, landing pages, in-banner interactivity, and widgets will rule.

If you don’t believe it, delete 20% of your web content and see if anyone notices. Recall my post on IT industry partner portals - rated poor year upon year by the user community.

The future is about interactive strategy, not website design. It is miles beyond SEO and SEM. To that end, it involves a good three months minimum of strategic thinking.

Given the time of year, and the current point in the economic cycle, now seems like a good time to put on those thinking caps.

Now, excuse me, while I go watch that damned “Saved by Zero“ spot again.

Social Media ROI - Eyes, Meet Wool

Just like the Twitter world, the general social media arena is threatening marketers. “You MUST be doing something with social media or your brand will be toast!” Indeed, none other than Wal-Mart, who has the economy by the cajones, is asking a few agencies to answer the question, “If we gave you FORTY MILLION dollars, what kind of social media strategy would you develop for us?”

Since the scolding hasn’t been enough, as evidenced by a senior P&G marketing exec giving the thumbs down to Facebook, as well as a recent survey of CMOs showing low uptake on social media marketing, the dial has been turned up on the “return on investment” side of the coin.

A model for calculating social media ROI was posted on MarketingProfs a few days ago. Over a dozen paragraphs, and not a whiff of quantifiable “R” or “I.” Simply set an easy-to-reach qualitative objective with tenuous connection to financial outcomes, ignore the denominator, and call it an ROI success. Yet, there were over 20 comments applauding this apparently groundbreaking guidance.

It’s easy to pick on theory. How about something real world?

Last week New York Times…[praised] the success of the newspaper's Facebook advertising campaign…"The goals…were to increase our number of Facebook fans; raise awareness of NYTimes.com as an interactive news center; and engage the Facebook community in a conversation about the election outcome.."

Note the lack of numbers.

[Fans] could also send virtual gifts: a Times front page with "Obama Wins"…The gift was sent to more than 400,000 people. The exposure also helped quadruple the number of New York Times fans…[which] "far exceeded our 2008 goal of 100,000 fans."

Ahhh, some numbers. But, not so important, because…

…"greatest success of the campaign…is that our fans continue to rapidly grow… into a powerful, free word-of-mouth network that we will leverage for future marketing messages."

No harm in all that, for sure. In the meantime, though, the Times has achieved junk bond status with its third quarter performance.

Let’s see what this Facebook stuff did when fourth quarter is reported. The Times definitely needs some “R” for the “I."

A Solution to The Twitter Dilemma

A post by Jodi McDermott on The Metrics Insider last week got me thinking about how we might solve that pesky question keeping every marketer up at night: Should our company use Twitter as a way to forge new customer relationships and/or improve existing ones?

From out of nowhere, in no time, Twitter has become this decade’s Google. It reported six million registered users as of October. And there isn’t much limiting its upside. Whether it ends up making money like Google, however, is a hot topic of conversation.

Just as hot is the discussion of whether a marketer should jump into the Twitter pool. (People seem to have a lot of time to twitter about Twitter.) McDermott’s post was a comprehensive set of suggestions for evaluating a company’s involvement with Twitter.

While most pundits seem focused on the Twitter “buzz” about your company that you can monitor and jump in when needed (or not, such as with the recent Motrin-gate), I was intrigued by McDermott’s discussion of the opportunity to look at your own site stats. In essence, why not treat Twitter like another source of traffic to your site, and analyze it as such?

Same as any other source - how much, how often, length and depth of engagement, clicks-to-action (if applicable), correlation to timing of Twitter campaigns, etc. It should be pretty evident in a couple weeks whether your company should be active or passive on Twitter.

This seems so basic, but so underleveraged. Where are the case studies on Twitter-sourced traffic? We need these more than we need to know how many “followers” your brand has, how many times Zappos posted last week, what political candidate was most “Tweeted,” the percentage of negative sentiment about Wal-Mart yesterday.

Like any other source of traffic, of visitors, of potential or existing customers, until you can separate it from all the others and stand on your own two feet with your own insights and assessment, you’ll constantly be drawn toward a great sucking sound…

Social Networking Goes Big. And Tall. And Deep.

You can join ‘em - Facebook and MySpace that is - or you can beat ‘em. That’s what a couple of new social networks are trying to do.

First up - Bold XL , the network for men of a certain size. Or as it calls itself, “a lifestyle resource created by and for the big man.” The fine print shows this as the property of the retailer Casual Male. So it is obviously not the first of its type.

But it is off to a better, more engaging start than a lot of what else is out there. The main difference? It is focused on the person, not the product. And it is tailor made (no pun intended) for self-reflective humor Here is a sample comment in response to a blog posting about how inappropriate it is to set out wicker furniture when a big guy is coming to visit:

“How about the cacophony of crunching that is emitted at the slightest movement? It’s as if each twig is screaming in pain.”

On the downside, the frequency of postings is sparse, and the one image on the site looks like a normal-size model (see pic on left). Unless Casual Male gets some serious help from a social media guru like BL Ochman, this thing will sink under its own weight soon (pun intended). Too bad.

Second up - Meet the Boss , a very serious and value-added network for C-level executives in the financial industry. This one comes from GDS International, a UK-based B2B publisher. The company reportedly kept this in beta for over a year until wide-scale release a couple of weeks ago. It was worth the wait, and should be a learning for anyone who believes that the shorter the timeframe from idea to launch, the better the chance of success.

Meet the Boss has leveraged the right technology for the right audience - calendaring, video and privacy key among them. It is a best practices field trip.

Meet the Boss will never get the volume of traffic Facebook will, of course. But I‘ll bet you dollars to doughnuts it will extract sponsorship CPM that would make Mark Zuckerberg’s ears bleed. Facebook has maybe two years at best under current course and speed.

And B2B media? It just had a puff of life-saving breath blown its way.
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FUNNY STUFF…The Linux group focused on mobile phone software has named itself the “The LiMo Foundation.”

Adobe’s “User Generated Content”

Nope, that headline is not a duplicate from yesterday. It is a complete fluke that 12 hours after posting “OnStar’s User Generated Content,” I came across another example.

The good news for Adobe is that the maker of design software did not have to spend a dime to ask customers for some “content” on how they feel about the Adobe brand. Without being asked, Adam Meisel and Erik Frick launched a site called DearAdobe.

The site is beautiful in its simplicity, albeit a bit buggy. A visitor can click through a random series of “gripes” previously submitted by others and, in a manner of speaking, vote it up or down, or flag it for correction/clarification. Anyone can add a new gripe about Adobe software performance, pricing, updates and so on. As of Tuesday night, the top-ranked complaint - “Why does the Acrobat Reader take two minutes to launch, and require updates twice a month, just to display PDF pages?” - had 225 votes.

At first blush, if you were in Adobe’s marketing department, you’d think “uh oh I’m dead meat.” But then you see that Meisel and Frick are actually pro-Adobe and are trying to do a little crowdsourcing. On the site’s blog they ask:

“Why not create a forum for people to vent? Who knows, maybe Adobe will listen.”

And?

“The site hadn’t been up for 48 hours when staff from Adobe first contacted us and the response has been very positive. We’re currently in touch with a couple of people at Adobe and working with them to craft all the gripes here into something they can use and hopefully take to heart.”

I have two predictions:
1) Adobe management will resist the temptation to try and commandeer the Dear Adobe website.
2) By Friday, ten braindead CMOs will have asked their underlings “how can we build one of those sites?”

In the meantime, Web 2.0 giveth, and Web 2.0 taketh away. And sometimes you get lucky, like Adobe, and it giveth back again.
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MORE DATA YOU SHOULD KNOW…By 2005, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics found the average American worker born in the later years of the baby boom had worked for 10.5 different employers by age 40.

Getting Social, and Commercial, With Lurkers

A new data point for social media has arrived. Congratulations to the person who originated it, for the “fact” has spread like wildfire across the Web. Goes something like this:

99 of every 100 people reading a blog or visiting an online community are lurkers.

Whether it is a scientific, usable data point is up for debate. But here’s the funny thing. Based on my own experience with this blog, I’d say the number is absolutely spot on.

The connotation for an online lurker is not as sinister as in the offline world. You are an online lurker if you read blogs or content in online communities but don’t post or otherwise interact. Academics are studying what some are labeling a phenomenon, to understand it and, I would imagine, to proffer remedies.

Seems like a fool’s errand.

The motivations seem to me the same online or offline. When you go to a town hall meeting, it’s the same few people speaking. When a stoplight stops working in town, only one or two motorists will bother to call a municipal department - the rest will sit in the resulting mile of traffic day after day. There are a billion more examples. Apathy, time constraints, lack of resource, fear, who knows?

This became of interest to me when I read an excerpt from Marketing Sherpa’s (www.marketingsherpa.com) 2008-09 Business Technology Marketing Benchmark Guide. One of the many interesting topics it looked at was the sources IT people use to get information prior to a purchase of technology.

Of close to 350 respondents, the top choice for what Marketing Sherpa called “interactive” information sources was online user communities at 45%, far ahead of other venues such as webcasts and trade shows.

There is a new article out every day by some social media “guru,” saying your company must start blogging and getting involved in social networks. Based on the Marketing Sherpa study, you’d think the guru was a genius. But I’ve yet to see one of these folks address the lurker issue.

The Web is now the media of choice, right? The one that is most accountable, where “every click can be measured," right?

The next time your social media consultant hands off a strategic recommendation, make sure you ask him/her what the strategy is for lurkers. My guess is you will see more dissembling than a politician caught with a “wide stance.”

Our Misunderstood Youth

I found another interesting news item about our supposed “turned off to traditional media” youth (therefore everyone in newspapers and magazines and radio should kill themselves blah blah blah).

Alloy Media + Marketing, which would seem to have a vested interest in following this emerging line of thinking, actually found out something quite remarkable. The company surveyed 1,200 college students from 550 universities and found:

- 82 % say they read their college newspaper in the past 3 months
- 76 % say they read their college newspaper in the past month
- 92 % say they read their college newspaper in the past month (campuses w/dailies)
- 55 % say they read their college newspaper in the past week
- 79 % say they read their college newspaper in the past week (campuses w/dailies)
- 20 % say they accessed their campus newspaper online in the past 30 days
- 73 % of readers say they look at the advertisements in their college paper
- 61 % of readers say they "tell a friend" about something they saw
- 36 % of readers say they continue to research products or services online after reading it in print
- 90 % of readers say campus news is top of mind (entertainment-related news, sports and current affairs were other top areas of interest for students)

To get more context, I took a look at the biennial Pew surveys on news media consumption. (Too bad we are just two months from the next release.) From 1996 to 2006, Pew shows traditional news consumption down across the board - all media, all age groups. Interestingly, online newspaper site usage is increasing more with those over 30 years of age. And for the 18-29 range, the percentage who “read a newspaper yesterday” seems to have bottomed out at around 24%.

I don’t think we are going to zero in print. As always, it will be about content. But more than ever, about distribution: when and where. That’s for the newspapers to solve.

For marketing, the killer app still needs to be invented. Everything put on the table thus far has been incremental and tangential to the real readership issues.

I am nowhere near smart enough to solve it. All I can do is paraphrase - while others see print newspapers declining and say why bother, I say…why not bother.

It’s 10 AM - Do You Know Where Your Children Are?

A company called e2Campus has been doing landmine business selling emergency notification systems to colleges across the U.S. Formed in late 2003, its basic proposition is to provide “mass alerts” when an emergency takes place - to students, teachers, and administrators - to get them (hopefully) out of harm’s way. The more-recent campus shootings at Virginia Tech and Northern Illinois have motivated many a college to get on board with e2Campus, and the company claims to have over 500 customers.

The safety alerts can be sent in many ways, but cell phone “text blasts” are most common. According to a 2006 Pew study, more than 70% of 18-to-29-year-olds own a cell phone, of which 92% text message. So it would seem logical to think of this as a perfect storm - a compelling solution delivered in a way today’s youth most often communicate. You would guess the “opt in” rate for students with cell phones might be near 100%, right?

Guess again.

Then guess again. And guess again. And guess one more time.

As of a few weeks ago, e2Campus reported the sign-up rate for students was a meager 39%.

This article has some interesting student explanations as to why some haven’t signed up.
http://spectator.seattleu.edu/news/story.aspx?ID=24850
P.S. Many schools are attempting to backstop text alerts using Facebook.

Anyway, I couldn’t care less as to the reasons for such low participation. My point is this. Next time you read an article like this one:
http://www.latimes.com/business/custom/admark/la-fi-teenphone23-2008may23,0,2679094.story

…that includes embarrassing commentary like this:
“…[teen girl‘s name] receives daily text messages from Seventeen magazine about fashion, including tips about what to wear to the prom. She planned to take the magazine's suggestion to wear a brightly colored outfit and be prepared for "dress malfunctions." ‘When the texts recommend a certain look that sounds good, I will try it…’ ”

…compare it to the e2Campus sign-up rate, then tell me how far you think this country is from collapsing in on itself, sort of like a black hole.

A cell phone can tell you the exact time, but it can’t tell you how to exactly spend it.

America’s Most Wanted - “Social Media” Pioneer

UPDATE:
In my closing to the original post, I said "The show is closing in on its 1000th capture, and I’ll wager that milestone will be struck within ten days." Excuse me while I pat myself on the back. It's done. #1000 - identified by an amw.com visitor 3 hours before the criminal's episode even aired! Hats off to everyone at America's Most Wanted on its 1000th capture! Here's to 1000 more.
http://www.amw.com/Fugitives/brief.cfm?id=52753

ORIGINAL POST:
About a year ago, a company by the name of Hitwise came out with a list of the Top Ten network TV shows as measured by Internet traffic.

[A quick aside - for all you privacy nutcases out there, wouldn’t you be surprised to know that a handful of ISPs send your search data to Hitwise EVERY DAY for analysis.]

I remember how even Hitwise expressed surprise that one of the top-ranked shows was America’s Most Wanted. Since then, the show’s website continues to be a top-five finisher week in and week out.

If you are a lunatic, fanatical viewer of AMW as I am, you know not to be surprised. The show got its start in 1988, and was a rarity in promoting an 800# as its “call to action,” specifically for viewers to leave tips on featured criminals. Of course, anyone today watching American Idol or similar “voting” shows would wonder “what’s the big deal about that?”

In the late 90s, AMW set up a clunky website which allowed people to leave tips online. The site was mentioned each Saturday night broadcast as an alternative to the 800#, again a rarity at the time for any television show.

The site was redesigned (if memory serves) early 2000s, with more interactive features added over time, and referred to repeatedly during broadcast. Let’s be honest - America's Most Wanted's web site (http://www.amw.com/) will win no awards for design, navigation, or performance (just try and use that “back” button). But it has taken a run at just about every social media tactic out there, some of them long before “Web 2.0“: e-mail newsletters, discussion forums, online video, blogs and widgets.

For a show that only draws enough TV households to place in the 50s via Nielsen measurement each week, it is amazing that over a twenty-year history AMW has averaged one capture per week. I’ll proffer that the site has played a major role.

The moral of this story? Sometimes you don’t have to be pretty to be “social.” And sometimes a grind-it-out strategy works, if you’re not afraid to try. Nor afraid to fail.

You’ll hear a lot about America’s Most Wanted soon. The show is closing in on its 1000th capture, and I’ll wager that milestone will be struck within ten days.

You can have your Facebook. I’ll take America’s Most Wanted, a thousand times over.

Intel’s ITopia: This Ain’t No Party

I decided last night to show my Marketing Strategy class Intel's new ITopia campaign as an illustration of interactive strategy. I made two big mistakes:

- I didn’t look at the campaign beforehand
- I trusted the New York Times Stuart Elliott

Here’s the link to Elliott’s article about Intel’s $50 million campaign to promote itself to IT folks as “as the problem-solver for the people who solve the computer network problems for others.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/28/business/media/28adco.html

By now I should know better. Dear Stuart has not printed an opinion in about four years. His Intel piece reflects his strong interviewing skills, but he obviously didn’t go look at the ITopia marketing materials. Someone should have done it for him, because they would have come back and said, “Wait, don’t print this. This ITopia stuff is sh*t!”

No sooner had I finished telling the class that microsites and landing pages were the most prominent way to go with online marketing nowadays, I link to the ITopia “site” stuffed within the main intel.com architecture.

“The main focus of our campaign is the interactive nature of the relationship we’re trying to build with I.T.’s [sic]…listening to what they have to say…[and] creating forums on the discussion boards for I.T.’s [double sic] to talk among themselves.”

Go here (www.intel.com/itopia) to see how Intel missed by a mile. About 80% of the page looks like any technology vendor product page, miles of text about specs and features. Way off to the left is a tiny video, and a small bit of text that asks for the visitor’s submission “what is your IT Utopia?” And a little more tiny text at the bottom for "Ask the Experts." One single page.

The only other site aspect mentioned in Elliott’s article is here, http://communities.intel.com/
Once again, Intel has stuffed the campaign within an existing architecture, a discussion board, featuring “ITopia” as one topic among many. Here you can read the “IT Utopia” submissions. Everyone who has contributed so far is named “guest.” No one is interacting with anyone else. You can’t even vote for “best answer.”

Finally, “Ask the Expert” is a single-threaded list of discussions, making it nearly impossible to tell who is addressing which question.

I had to apologize to the students last night and promise a better example next week.

By the looks of it, I’d say Intel probably exhausted about $38,750 on coding and creative. If I were the Intel CFO, here is the memo I would send out today:

“Dear ITopia Team: Where the f*ck is the other $49,961,250 ?!?!?!??!”