Apr 21
“I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We’ve created life in our own image.”
- Stephen Hawking
I think I respectfully disagree with Hawking about whether these ‘lifeforms’ are all malevolent. You could certainly argue that the algorithms and search index bots created by the Googles of the world are in fact very similar to viruses: They travel the web from link to link gathering as much information as possible and transmit that information back to a private company that profits from it. Is this technically different from a virus that travels to your hard drive and transmits your personal information back to someone whose intent is to profit from it? The intent is the same but the word ‘personal’ is where the difference lies. When you get personal you break the law.
There is a lot of debate among online marketers about the tracking of individual behavior on the web. Behavioral targeting and retargeting use your surfing history to assemble a profile of what you’re interested in and then use that profile to serve up ads that they think you will be interested in. These ads appear in sites you are expected to surf to. For advertisers these ‘targeted by intent and relevance’ ads are far more valuable than taking a shotgun approach to a campaign. So is your privacy being invaded? Are they related to malicious viruses? Again, no, because they only know your IP address, not your identity.
This is where the line is drawn in the sand in online marketing. As long as they can’t identify us personally these techniques should be legal. To use personal information we must have opted-in or given permission for that use. As regulators look at the world of personalized marketing online this should be the standard benchmark for defining the difference between legitimate targeted marketing tactics and spammy illegal attempts to acquire personal information without permission.
Apr 12
This is pretty crazy.
If you place a form on your web site Google can now enter any possible combination of information, radio button choices, checkboxes, etc., and index the results that come back for the form. They call this accessing the ‘Deep Web’, that part of the web that, until now, could only be accessed by a human entering information. It is deep in the sense that they now index all the possible underlying data in an online database that is not protected by a security layer (at least that’s how I read it).
Implications? Optimize those forms and your results pages and make sure they return relevant results or you might get purged.
And, BTW, dump your Microsoft and Yahoo stock- they are not even on the same planet with these guys.
Apr 09
Seth Godin, marketing guru and savant of small things, writes about how inbound calls are the most important and most ignored aspect of marketing. I couldn’t agree more.
We did an SEO/SEM campaign for a client that was completely focused on developing highly qualified inbound leads. The criteria was simple: Get potential customers to visit their site, then pick up the phone and call for more information. A secondary goal was an email request.
One of my first actions in planning this was to call the number on the website and experience what a prospect encounters… and it was not good. First, a person did not answer- I got a phone tree. My options did not clearly include ‘talk to a rep’ as the first option. When I did get to that option, I got voicemail.
A new customer for this business is worth 5-6 figures minimum revenue in the first year. Many become long term partners. An inbound call is a serious indicator of interest yet this otherwise savvy business was placing impediments every step of the way for that caller.
Our response was that before we even work on lead gen, they needed to dedicate a phone line and a live person to answer that line 24/7. This can be done with a call center whose script is to determine the caller’s physical location and connect them with the appropriate sales rep for that territory. The sales rep is trained that calls from this source are serious prospects that must be contacted within hours, at the latest (leads are time sensitive and rapidly get stale, often within hours).
Even before the lead gen work was done this change made a significant difference in sales volume. As much as I believe in the power of online marketing, the power of great service is far more important. Put the two together and things will explode.
Apr 01
If you’re doing search marketing, including SEO and SEM, for your site(s) then you need to understand multivariate testing, the science of choosing various page elements, ad copy, keywords and other variables and testing them against a control. Your control is basically a combination of these elements that so far is your steadiest performing combination.
Jonathan Mendez is far deeper into this testing than I am and has begun a series of posts that go into how multivariate testing works into detail. This is complex stuff, but if you take the time to start learning and applying it to your search campaign, the payoff can be huge and the knowledge you gain will be a major business asset.
The days of pretending that there is some kind of separation between ‘branding’ and measurable direct marketing are over- everything is measurable and the results don’t lie. Traditional agencies and marketers take note: The creative director who ignores this reality in favor of amorphous ‘creativity’ is going to lose you clients.
If you’re a business owner this eliminates the old “I know half of my advertising budget works, I just don’t know which half (sorry, can’t find the attribution- if you know it please comment)”. With sophisticated testing, analytics and conversion tracking you can know exactly what dollars/creative are working and which are not.