Bruce

What lesson to take from this? Two:

1. Understand the risk – what’s bigger, pot or a guy who’s a hero to millions, a dedicated athlete, symbol of American pride, and winner of 8 (EIGHT) Olympic gold medals?

2. Understand your audience – are they the kind of people to connect closer to their idols when they do something that humanizes them (for example, make a mistake)?

The backlash against Phelps’ critics is amazing – and in today’s self-publishing, easy-to-access soapbox that can reach millions instantly – you have to be very very careful which side you are on.

What’s interesting is that “Web 2.0” connects directly to society’s true sentiment by accessing individual commentary.

So understand your audience and balance the risk with this insight to ensure you find yourself on the winning side of the marketing game.

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People are Googling your organization and keywords related to what you do. Are they finding you? Once they find you, they Google you to learn more about you from other sources. What are they finding there?

This talk is about building more (higher quality) traffic and ensuring that traffic converts through establishing the expert presence with a golden reputation.

Your reputation is priceless – don’t let it be left to chance. Experts are respected, experts who are validated and recommended by others, receive more business. It’s that simple. The perception of your online reputation is critical and you must learn how to take ownership of it.

Learn how to use on the Internet to dominate search engine rankings for your keywords and your organization’s name at the same time. This talk will expose the powerful concepts of Web 2.0 – where giving more means getting more – to market your site. You will learn how to position your organization as an expert in its industry/sector and dominate search engine visibility using wikis, blogs, forums, social bookmarking, and other Web 2.0 sites.

Who should attend: Corporate, Start-ups, Government, Non-Profit, and Small and Medium sizes Businesses; any organization looking to the internet for marketing and communications – that’s you!

Tags: SMO, PR 2.0, SEO, SEM, Authority Engineering

Technical Expertise required: Low

http://theclimateisrightfortrains.com/

I came across this URL on print recruitment campaign targeting university/college students in a magazine a client publishes.

First of all, the site is awesome. I love the design. Unique use of space.

The site takes great advantage of the widescreens. On my 1920×1200 22″ screen the site looks awesome. On my 1280×768 12″ laptop screen it looks great. It reduces well to < 1024 as well. Kudos and high marks for use of screen real estate at the same time as maximizing horizontal space on the new wide format.

Clicking on any one of the menu items brings up some beautiful photography and a little two line pitch. Nicely done. Great copy, pulls well, I was immediately intrigued.

So far so good!

But… here is where the site totally fails.

You click on the link to learn more and it takes you to a page of scrolling text.

First of all I’m not a big fan of internal scroll bars, but in an all Flash site that is well dimensioned, it can work. Second, the page is 2-3 pages of scrolling text. What the hell? I went from beautiful images of trains and a gorgeously designed website, to text. Honestly, you can write the most profound copy that would change my life forever, but no one will read it. You just set yourself up for failure.

But I read it. On my 4th visit to the site and just to write this blog entry, I read it. And you know what? The copy is fregging interesting. It’s snippets of articles and quotes that lead you to original sources flogging trains as green commuters. Great stuff – well it could be great stuff, except it’s badly used.

Honestly, how hard would it have been to put in some <Prev | Next> and made those pages into a slide show with a few lines of text, some great supporting photographs and actually PITCHED the information.

And here’s the clincher. Ok, here’s your scenarios “so I’m a student and I couldn’t care less about trains except to get my home on breaks. I’m an engineering student and i never thought of getting into trains, cause it was a dead technology.. I’m more interested in aerospace and Virgin’s new airline… or hybrid/hydrogen car technology, etc.”

Ok, so now you’ve convinced me trains can be cool and appeal to my youthful idealism…

Where’s your close Bombardier? Where is the “come work for us, cause we’re a great company, we’re green, we’ve been green for a long time cause we build trains. See – trains do rock, and green has been the colour of our blood, our ethos, and we want YOU to drive the next generation of mass transportation vehicles to make this world a better place…”.

You’ve hooked with this website, you’ve then just as completely fallen over. You have to close the loop.

I can totally ignore the buried copy, but seriously where is your close?? “I AM A STUDENT AND I WANT MORE INFORMATION ON WORKING FOR BOMBARDIER’S MASS TRANSIT DIVISION! Oh well. Time to check out the latest YouTube video and see if anyone posted anything new on my Super Wall…”

Lessons for everyone else:

• Great design – use it for inspiration
• Great use of horizontal screen real estate
• Nice use of photography and copy
• Internal scroll bars are ok in this scenario – but are too narrow
• Mouse scroll wheels don’t work on internal scroll bar, this is doable, do it!
• NO CLOSE! You have to close the loop. This is like an e-commerce site that has convinced you to buy but no BUY NOW button. Don’t make the same mistake, think through the whole loop – intrigue, entice, inspire, and CLOSE.

The climate might be right for trains, but it’s not for recruiting using this website. Too bad, it’s a beautiful design…

So what are the approaches that should be used if the spot ad is dead? Here is a list to start with:

Interaction, interdependence, grass roots initiatives, multi-channel interactive media, conversation catalysts, customer driven feedback cycles empowering iterative product development, automated tracking and recursive real-time changes and so on.

Ok, so what does all that stuff mean?

Interaction is the key to engaging customers. It was difficult to do 10 years ago, but we now have the technological capability, via Internet and wireless (and other), to automate interaction with our customers. Better still, it allows us to build a relationship not just between an advertiser and the target audience, but, and this is the most important step – between the target audience members themselves.

Look at the success of MySpace. Its success rocketed when it became a venue for like-minded music lovers to find each other and support their favourite indie bands. You had overnight indie band sensations. There are countless stories of 4 guys in a rock band that had been doing evening and weekend gigs while choking down 40 hour a week day jobs for the last 5 years. They had fans, but they were scattered. 20 fans here, 50 there, another few over that other town. Through MySpace they were able to consolidate their fan base, associate themselves with a genre, and the fans spread the word about their music. A month later, all the day jobs were quit and instead of selling 3000 albums a year, they were selling 20,000 self pressed. All of a sudden they could make a decent living off their own music – live their passion.

So what does music bands and MySpace have in common with big brand advertisers?

It is a simple lesson in consolidating your passionate fans in a given market segment and empowering them to tell your story FOR YOU.

This is the TRUE interaction – it’s not about brand-X shoving another message down customer-Y’s throat, it’s about encouraging customer-Y to meet other customer-Y’s so they group together, and in numbers they have a voice, and that voice can be empowered to expand the brand. The collective voice of the brand loyalists turns them into activists – and they voices should be listened to closely.

ASIDE — I love how big brands spend so much money on market research. Wrigley’s did it recently trying to figure out what kids want in a pack of gum. The outcome? That kids tie their identity with the things they have in their pockets, the clothes they wear, the music they listen to, and the activities they engage in. Conclusion – let’s make a cool package for the gum so it looks good when you pull it out of your pocket and put it down next to your cell phone and iPod. Wow, staggering! They should have bought me a cup of coffee and I would have imparted the same wisdom while proving my point with a hundred case studies of other companies that did exactly what they did, but for shoes, shorts, shirts and so on. I’ll be using Wrigly as a case study for my clients when they ask me what kids want. Save them a cool mil or two. Anyway…

Ok, so what does that have to do with the original topic? Well market research is skewed. You’re picking a random assortment of your target audience to get a sense of what your brand should do, say, be. Honestly, how do you get anything but average results from the approach? I can prove it to you statistically if you want. It’s a simple relationships between the larger your human sample size the further your return will approach an average value. What do I mean by average value? I mean you’re going to design a product that is average and entirely forgettable.

Instead look to the LOYALISTS! They are your fan base, your market, they are the early adopters and those who will vocally judge your product. They are the people who others seek advice from when looking at buying your product, cause they know the category so well. They are the ones who will trumpet your cause for you. They will do an infinitely better job at selling it than you can ever do. You just can’t have the same relationship with their peers as they do (friends & family!).

INTERACTION people. It’s not just about you and your audience, but creating a circle of loyalty around your brand, and have them trumpet your greatness!

Next post – a bit more on interdependence…

Had a chance this week to hang out with and listen to George Parker of the infamous Adscam. Intriguing, entertaining and always crass, George has unique insight into the ad industry. Listening to his talk and getting the benefit of several hours of conversation have allowed me to focus my ideas on the ad industry and its evolution.. to what end? For how to position our firm when pitching..

The ad agencies of today, especially the 500lbs goliaths in the industry, will have to transform or they will fall.

A combination of technology and consumers over-dosed on ads will bring the nirvana of the last 60 years of advertising to a halt. The days of producing 5 million dollar TV spot are dead. This one-way channel of ‘telling’ a consumer is dead. Big dollar TV media buys are dead.

TV ads are losing their effectiveness, especially among the youth. Usage stats clearly point to reduced watching patterns, digital recorders are programmed to skip commercials, on-demand movies, downloading TV shows, etc. are replacing traditional broadcast advertising driven business models. The networks are moving to change their distribution and funding models, I’m sure they’ll figure it out – they produce the content, and most of that is still being consumed.

So now what about the agencies that produce the ADS!? Big shiny TV ads account for over 75% of revenues at most agencies. If that budget gets cut in half and half again, where does that leave them? Where does the money go?

They have to shift to new models. They need to hire new thinking, new types of marketers. They have to start thinking MARKETING channels, they have to be TECHNOLOGY SAVVY, and they have to think COMMUNICATION strategies rather than just rapid spot advertising.

So what are the alternatives to tv spots? Let’s start instead with the approaches…?

Interaction, interdependence, grass roots initiatives, multi-channel interactive media, tracking, conversations, feedback cycles, iterative product development, and so on.

Ok, I’ll expand on these.. on my next post.

Herein lies conjecture – mine; write me, as I’m always interested in hearing yours.

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Keeping your skills sharp and up-to-date is a requirement for any industry you’re in, but the Internet takes this to new levels of chaos. The technology evolves so rapidly you have little time to breathe and master your art before the next wave hits. So what to do?

Let’s start with what NOT to do – the worst thing you can do is stand still. Never stand still – how dull is it to pause, to rust unburnished..

We like to stay informed on the bleeding edge of the technology curve, but scale back a year for actual development, sometimes two-three years depending on the type of client and their accessibility requirements. You want your web technology to be as widely accessible as possible. Unless your business model is specifically targeting early (technology) adopters, you want to let the “masses” catch up so you are half-sigma away from the average Internet user.

Here are elements to keep in mind:
- Technology platforms (PHP, .NET, Ruby on Rails, Java, etc) – are they fads or trends?
- Plug-ins such as Flash, Quicktime, and so on – what’s the best way to showcase your media? Who’s using it? How fast do upgrades get pushed out? What’s the user adoption rate?
- Bandwidth – low connection speed alternatives to your site content, do you need them?
- Screen resolution – what is the average screen resolution?
- Browser compatibility – what browsers will your users be using? IE, Firefox, Safari, or ?
- Accessibility requirements (font size, screen readers, etc.)

As with anything, plan for success. You’ll need to define your target market not just with demographics, but with a technological profile.

Bruce

I do have one major gripe…

Very few presenters really brought their talks back to business fundamentals.

Mr Speaker: How do I use what you just talked about
to further my business goals (make money!)?

Nothing summarized this better then on the last day while attending a talk about how Web 2.0 ideas such as blogging, video and pod casting, user generated content, and other such attributes can be used in the SMB market. How do you, as a small business owner, actually USE this stuff yourself?

About half way through someone finally asked that “So, how do I use this for my business!?”

The loudest applause I had heard yet… FOR THE QUESTION!

And to my great and utter disappointment, it was not answered. Don’t get me wrong, the guys on the panel new their stuff, they were passionate, they GOT IT. But they couldn’t make it concrete. They couldn’t bring it back from esoteric philosophy to physical representation that a business owner could understand, and more importantly, APPLY.

To some extent this was true for almost all the talks.

So now that I’m done bitching, I’m going to do something about it. My next few posts are going to be best-of summaries of the ideas I learned and how to apply them for SMBs and the enterprise.

Stay tuned.

Yeah. I said this to a prospective client last week. They were asking for a quote on making some extensive modifications to their site; ex. they wanted to change “Services” to “Our Services” – that was just the tip of the iceberg… it got a lot worse.

So I went through their requests to get a quote together. Actually all I had to do was read the home page and it set the expectation. The home page was all about them. This is who we are. We do this, we do that, we’re so great, as Elaine would say, yada yada.

I shouldn’t have been surprised though, they weren’t marketers, probably genius scientists, but not marketers. It’s really no fault of theirs, most websites are ego-centric.

Most websites are built to celebrate a company’s own grand illusion of themselves. I know I know, you’re going to say “well we have to sell ourselves.” Yes. Of course, BUT…

There is a big difference between selling yourself, and having a prospective client take interest in what you can do for them.

Ah. There’s the rub! What you can do for THEM. Not what you can do. Not only what you’ve done, but what’s in it for them!

How-to? Here’s a start:

• Change the language from I and We to You and Your.

“Our Services” “Our Clients”

could become

“Serving You” “Your Peers”

Remember the 80′s anti drug campaign: a guy holds up an egg, “This is your brain.” he then cracks it into a sizzling frying pan, “This is your brain on drugs. Any questions?”. Do you think that line would have had the same impact if they simply said “This is a brain. This is a brain on drugs.” the first is emotionally compelling because it’s speaking directly to you, the second is logical and a nice metaphor, but forgettable.

• Every time you write a line of text, think about your audience. Each line of copy must have a reason for being, don’t waste words ‘such as’ ‘therefore’, ‘furthermore’ and so on.

• Use images wherever possible to explain complex ideas.

A friend of mine used two sets of simple images set in a line (comic strip style) to explain the entire theory of how free radicals damage skin, and how acupuncture solves the problem. You get it in 20 seconds. He’s explained it to me for 2 years and I never got it until I saw the images.

A website is part 1 of a conversation with a prospect. Imagine meeting someone for the first time and saying “hey, how are you? Good, great. Well let me tell you about myself… So enough about me, why don’t you tell me what you think of me?”

That how most websites are set up. It’s funny, but it’s true.

Who’s your website an ego boost to? You or your prospect?

Oh, and after my blunt and straight forward review of the site to the prospect on the phone? Well he told his CEO and they then asked to come in and meet in person to get quote on a larger marketing and positioning strategy. Hoorah.