~David Ogilvy, legendary advertising copywriter
Verizon just sent me a customer survey, which I completed– it was just 2 questions. Once I’d finished it I was asked for my permission to use my comments on Verizon forums and to customize my name for display purposes. Novel way to populate a forum, don’t you think?
Forum content, Twitter feeds, blog posts, discussion boards– these social content machines are being rapidly assimilated into contemporary search results as part of efforts to synthesize “real-time” with static results and content. So when a user/customer goes online to search for various Verizon topics, he or she may see a variety of reuslts, ranging from those delivered via the main Verizon website to those delivered via Verizon Forum.
For anyone doing business on the web, or off for that matter, and who has not yet read Mark Penn’s book Microtrends, then I 
suggest you get thee to a bookstore or the local library or get it on your Kindle or reader…however you might get it–get it.
A microtrend, according to Penn, is:
…an intense identity group that is on the rise, with needs and wants unmet by the current crop of companies, marketers, policymakers, and others who would influence society’s behavior.
Penn examines dozens of micro-targeted groups which he’s identified only after “piercing through stubborn conventional wisdom,” and looking beyond what he calls the “elites” and the “chattering journalists.” Some of the material is already a bit dated from its 2007 launch, but the author revised and updated since. And if you’re into following microtrends and the groups spawning them, Penn has a Microtrends blog with updated articles. Regardless, if nothing else the point of the book is that big trends are not those we, as business people, should be most concerned with…but instead, it is these hundreds of disparate splinter groups with the power to drive markets.
Penn points out pretty eloquently over and over and over again how few businesses, politicians, organizations, etc are really zeroing in on the right folks. For example, he makes the case throughout that women are some of the most influential in many of the micro-targeted groups across micro-trends! They are buying most of the new cars–though as Penn points out so much of the automobile advertising is still testosterone-soaked. They are responsible for casting well over half the votes in this country and that a rapidly growing number of these female voters are Hispanic women, and how rare it is the politician that really identifies and appeals to this constituent.
Another takeaway: banish the notion that the masses are dumb or somehow easily led by the nose.
Almost every day, I hear experts say that voters and consumers are misguided scatterbrains…That’s why many commercials feature pointless stories with no relation to the products. Too often, candidates and marketers don’t believe the facts or the issues matter that much….If you use the right tools and look at the right facts, it turns out that the average Joe is pretty smart, ….People have never been more sophisticated, more individualistic, or more knowledgeable about the choices they make in their daily lives.
A really insightful read and dripping with concrete data and statistics–nothing anecdotal here. I think anyone who makes business and marketing decisions can reap a benefit.
If you’re a search disciple you’ve likely been witness to the march of new search features Google’s introduced over the last few months. One of the latest is the search engine’s attempt to identify synonyms for search queries and apply a bold text decoration within the results search snippets.
At this stage of the game the functionality is pretty primitive and inconsistent at best. But as the folks over at Search Engine Watch put it: “SEO copywriters would be diligent to consider the… expansion of synonyms should Google like how its new feature plays out….”
Screenshot of bold synonyms in action:
Notice the synonyms in the Adwords are bolded, too…
While I was playing around with Google searches I had a heck of a time getting the synonyms feature to show. Search Engine Watch mentions a couple examples which are pretty obscure. For example, I finally produced bold synonyms when I searched for digital pictures of dogs, but I couldn’t when searching for pictures of dogs. Maybe the feature is Google’s attempt to clarify less concise search queries by meting out synonyms. Not sure at this point it’s worth speculating over. I’ll wait and see if this is going to gather any headwind and become a more important feature of search and ultimately the shape of the copy on the page.
Domain buying as a task is pretty simple and straightforward, but as a business DOMAINS are cutthroat. About 1.5 years ago I published a post recounting my sideswipe with domain front-running. Yesterday I was reminded of just how misleading the domain registration business can be.
A few months ago I registered the domain goatguide.org. Really I wanted goatguide.com –already taken BUT on the cusp of expiring. Apparently over the weekend that .com domain became available. In my email inbox I had 2 domain registrars contacting me with messages that go something like this:
“Congratulations!
goatguide.com is available.
Since you are the registrant for goatguide.org we thought you might be interested in this more valuable .com domain. It’s yours today for only $99….But you must act fast!”
Sounds like they have my best interests at heart, too. My heart started to race–yeah I wanted it. Could I justify the $99? What if I passed it up?
I settled down for a minute. Let’s see how available it really is, I thought…I’ll go to my current host and see if it’s available for registration through them.
Guess what? I registered this domain for $10 (not $99) through my own hosting company. What does that mean?
Domain businesses are looking out for themselves, period. They are really good at pushing buttons when there’s internet real estate up for grabs. Lesson: don’t follow the leader. Be suspect when it comes to domain buying. Don’t “test” domain names through a host (I learned that the hard way). There are very few people you can trust in this arena and a business is likely the least trustworthy, even if you’re a customer/client.
Gaming Google’s become a popular pasttime among pay per click advertisers, affiliate marketers and “others.” Instructions abound all over the web for launching new businesses seemingly out of thin air and using AdWords–Google’s own business. So this is where we’re at:
The New York Times (I’ll probably have to pay for this type of article in 2011 thanks to the NYT proposed “pay meter”–in fact, I think 2010 will the year of the “meter”…for various reasons)…any way. The NYT posted an article today reporting on Google’s “Cleanup Efforts” in the realm of AdWords. Since this past September Google’s been on the warpath and banning thousands of its advertisers’ accounts– PERMANENTLY. ouch….
NYT report follows on the heels of the 4th Quarter reports on Google’s activity: in December according to findings by AdGooroo, Google may have banned upwards of 30,000 accounts and with new technology is able to “ensure they don’t weasel their way back in.” The house cleaning apparently had a collateral benefit– driving a renewed frenzy for ad placement among other advertisers and boosting Google’s revenue.
SeoRoundtable and SearchEngineLand both have been hot on the Google ad bans reports over the last 6 months. SeoRoundtable was able to post one of the ban notification letters sent to a banned advertiser. The focus is clearly on advertisers that offer less than ideal end user experiences. Content that will get you banned according to the ban letter:
- Sites that charge users or collect personal information in exchange for a product that is never delivered
- Sites that charge for “free” software
- Sites that trick users into paying for fake or poor-quality content
- Sites that charge users for information that makes unrealistic promises of financial- or personal gain
- Sites that install malware on a visitor’s computer.
Best advice: learn the AdWords system and have something decent to sell, give, and otherwise put out into the universe. Google WILL run its own show one way or the other.
1. Keep a close tab on Google’s move to snag real estate sites…I’ve got a gut feeling this could be big in so many ways.
Google Place pages…
Back in September, the Official Google Blog posted this:
Google Maps is a great tool for exploring places — you can pan around the map, zoom in and see nearby places, look around in Street View and search for whatever you want. But what I always wanted to do is be able to get a clear understanding of what a place is all about. Instead of doing the research all over the web, wouldn’t it be great to see all the information about one place in…one place?
Starting today, you can do that on Place Pages for Google Maps. A Place Page is a webpage for every place in the world, organizing all the relevant information about it. By every place, we really mean *every* place — there are Place Pages for businesses, points of interest, transit stations, neighborhoods, landmarks and cities all over the world.
2. Frank Kern is on the move again with yet another repurposed version of Mass Control. This time he’s recast his flagship program as a “look over my shoulder” newsletter. In fact Kern’s email pitch is unique: (subject line:) I NEED YOUR ADVICE (please 
.. (email body:) this will take like 3 seconds…blah blah. Click on that subject line/email (like I did) and the link to a survey on his Mass Control site. True to his word, the survey is 4 questions long and takes really about 30 seconds. The final survey question goes something like this: “If I were to offer a kind of ‘look over my shoulder’ program so you could see everything I was doing and how to apply it to your own business, would you want it?” Answer “yes” to that final question, like I did, and you are then taken to a page with a classic Kern video front and center with a simple Add to Cart button below it–a cleverly placed landing page to be exact with pre-qualified customers 
). The video, of course, pitches the “look over my shoulder” newsletter deal.
3. Ryann Diess is “revealing” ways to game GMail so advertisers and marketers might nab a lion’s share of targeted ad traffic…it’s the latest greatest program up at bat.
and tomorrow’s another day…
Is being social with social media in the confines of a corporate structure a real possibility?
Interesting article on MarketingVox– Competitive Data Ripe for Picking on SocNets– reveals the numerous ways savvy companies can collect information about competitors based on the information freely posted on social networks. Everything from LinkedIn to Twitter is open real estate for collecting a competitor’s info– “competitive intelligence.”
The article is inspired, no doubt, by a recent study by Cisco that indicates, “Despite Increased Adoption of Social Networking Tools, the Absence of Policies, Process and IT Architecture Puts Organizations at Risk.”
The article quotes a few corporate strategists that advise business entities from small entrepreneurs to large corporations on the advantages to staying abreast of your peer’s social network behavior. It’s a perfectly legal strategy to siphon all the online news and banter you can about a business, company and competitor and to use it to your competitive advantage.
Because people have so much freedom to talk and share with abandon on Facebook, Twitter and elsewhere, many fail to realize how often they might disclose potentially sensitive information in the course of casual online socializing. OR they might fail to anticipate just who’s eyes are watching.
Sources could track any and all mentions of a company in social media, keep tabs on newly hired personnel thanks to public profiles on Monster, CareerBuilder, LinkedIn and more; follow employees on Twitter unaware that their casual banter about work could at some point “out” a sensitive topic. Fact is there are smarties out there divining all manner of corporate flux and movement from the “casual” banter being dished online.
Monitor competitor’s social network mentions, their customer relationships and their employees’ social conversations and you could come up with a rich and intriguing “data” map. I can see how this might have benefit for a variety of applications and not just for large corporations.
When you take one giant step backwards to check out the Big Picture of web copy and content you can see how web copywriting becomes just one component among many necessary to launch an online business, website, blog, etc. I am a task on someone’s Build A Million Dollar Online Business – To-Do list. When you put it like that…
I’ve ranted about clients who don’t even want to pay a price equal to the cost for a McDonald’s Happy Meal in exchange for “high-quality” content and those jonesing for “automatic content”– NOTHING’s automatic, bucko, it all starts somewhere with a someone who wrote it, designed it, drew it, photographed it, recorded it, or videotaped it. But I’m willing to remove my ego for a few brief moments to explore the bigger picture of putting a website together.. .because I’ve been doing it myself.
I’ll admit it… I’ve bought a few domains. In my mind’s eye (I love that metaphor) I see each and every one of them as these massive subject matter portals with webpages populated with text, video, images, feeds, etc– real nice blends of relevant content ready to be gobbled up by users…thousands of them.
To those ends I’ve broken out my tasks, one of which is the content, near and dear to my heart:
- Buy domain
- Buy hosting
- Design– straight-up website (CSS, customizing the look)? or WordPress blog (template, customize)?
- Keyword research
- Sitemap
- Monetization? If so, goals
- Content (me to do)
- Upload
- Promote
- Maintain
(my disclaimer: some folks would do a few of these tasks in a different order. Some would put keyword research first, even before a domain buy or monetization goals…I go by my interest and/or experience in a particular niche/market)
The CONTENT I will write myself. However… once I’m seeing things through the eyes of a website owner a few more pieces of the puzzle creep in. First I’m acutely aware of time–that competitors are nearby and they are stealthy….so I suddenly have this nagging rush to get the writing done. Could that stress ultimately become a contributing factor leading me to sacrifice quality for speed?
- Domains are pretty inexpensive….
- Hosting is affordable….
- Design – from free to thousands of dollars…
- Keyword research once cost a pretty penny, but the tools and the know-how are all readily available…
- Content– well if they’ve gotten everything else for almost nothing why pay much for content and why not expect it overnight, right?
- Uploading… depends on how many pages we’re talking about… but costly in time.
- Promotion, maintenance are totally dependent upon the site owner.
Some tasks I’ve even omitted in this re-telling, but I’ve illustrated, if only to myself, how my clients might view the web content as this sort of frustrating task plopped right in the middle of these other time consuming website tasks. Ultimately, how inexperienced “business” people could quickly become drunk on the overall “cheapness” of building an online business.
What I really think will happen: the massive content creation will plateau–at some point. When that happens many people will not succeed in business online. Truly successful website models will sport high-quality content and will be self-sustaining over the long haul.
Hint.fm serves up a virtual candy dish of unique data visualizations…
Hint.fm’s Project Seer is billed as a “portrait of human curiosity” via Google Suggest:
A simple one-sided visual picture of a Google Suggest when I enter the word “ice” (note: thickness of arrow lines reflects volume of webpages associated with that keyword/phrase):
and then a more complex two-sided comparison visualization using the terms “why won’t he” and “why won’t she”:
(interesting difference here btw “why won’t she… love me” vs. “why won’t he… say i love you”…. hmmmmm)
Human curiosity, yes, but also a type of artful trend and keyword visualization. If you’re into some curious ways to “look” at web data go to Hint.fm and check out the array of other visualization projects. Another of my faves…Flickr Flow…oh, and Word Tree….
In my last post I talked about getting outside yourself for inspiration. I’m still “in” that vein, but urging you to witness the web and its content by observing others. In 2010, you can build your business by being a good spy….
Over the holidays I stayed with friends for a few days, one of them an avid bass fisherman. When he’s not at work his head is buried in his Bass Pro Shop catalogs or he’s surfing the fishing sites online. Now I’ve seen him dig into the paper catalogs (they’re awesome swipe ideas, btw), but this visit was the first time I really saw him dive into the web. And he was a great teacher.- while I sat nursing a horrible cold…
I watched him while he carefully and completely explored the few websites he has come to know inside and out. He seemed to drink in every word, totally consuming each site. Online he’s shopping for gear. When I asked him what he was really reading most intently and using as key content he responded: “user reviews and ratings.”
This particular niche’s products are driven by users and performance, so user-generated reviews–at least for an expert fisherman,–are most valuable. He gave me a perfect example, too: when it comes to, say, shopping for and buying lures the biggest attraction to buyers is a product that can boast that it’s been used by a notable pro to win a particular competition. Winners sell the gear they’ve used to bag big bass and win competitions, period. Unless I’d actually watched him and asked him a few questions that day I’d possibly still be a little in the dark about the bass fishing market.
he’s an expert in his niche, has become familiar with a few websites he visits religiously. he consumes them completely, drinking in the user ratings and reviews for help in the buy process.
I have another friend–she’s a completely different web user: younger than my bass fishing friend and uses it to search for all types of info. She consistently clicks on the top one, two or three Google results for any search she executes. I’ve looked over her shoulder a number of times to note instead of looking for the most authoritative site of the crowd, which may not be number one, she instead clicks on a top result (and a few of them have been quite spammy). But she’s a quick study — if she fails to see what she’s looking for within 10 seconds she’s gone, mercilessly.
I can read eye-tracking and web usability studies til the cows come home, but it’s most instructive when I lift my eyes from my own small screen to observe how others interact with search and web content.
