Category Archives: marketing

Bad News for Good Newspapers

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Nick Carr summarizes a study in the UK that suggests more perils for news organizations as they move online.    The online editions appear to be “cannibalizing” the offline edition readership.   A university study looked at how online news readers are less likely to buy a newspaper from the same company they read online.

If this proves true across the newspaper landscape it presents newspapers with the twin challenges of needing to beef up the online portal to keep up market share even as their total advertising revenues are tending to go down.   Offline readership generally gives a better ad return per reader, so even as online advertising increases that extra revenue is not likely to keep pace with the offline losses. 

Coffee Calendar

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My brother-in-law Ricardo is an artist in Minneapolis, MN.  He’s got a neat new project he’s been working on for some time called “The Coffee Calendar“.   For Coffee or Calendar enthusiasts this will make a neat christmas gift, and you can order it directly from his Coffee Calendar Website over at TheCoffeeCalendar.com

Oh, yes, this post is in part an attempt to get the coffee calendar *correctly listed* over at Google as the top result for the query “Coffee Calendar” where it now shows as third.   I suppose Google could argue that the coffee shop calendars they have should be at the top, but I’d say Ricardo’s Coffee Calendar is more relevant.   

Of course, relevance is, in part, defined by the linking structure of the web which in this case I’m slightly manipulating by this blog post.  But it’s for a good cause and I think even the inimitable Matt Cutts over at Google would agree this is white hat SEO which helps internet users find the Coffee Calendar they’ve been looking for for so long.   

Note:  This is NOT a pay to post post about coffee calendars.  Would it be less relevant if it was a pay to post post?    Yes, but clearly it would have some relevance about coffee and calendars nonetheless.   How much relevance?    Google makes all those decisions and they are mysterious algorithmic magic, so don’t ask me.  

Online advertising juggernaut rolls on.

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This Internet Advertising Bureau report notes that online advertising is still showing explosive growth.    Interesting is the fact that the types of online advertising – with search ads at the top – seems to have stabilized somewhat with “pay for performance” one of the few categories that has clearly increased from last year.   

 I don’t think this stability reflects the “optimal” mix of ads, rather it is more an indication of how the big players take some time to get comfortable with innovations in advertising, and still stick to more traditional CPM style approaches rather than the clearly superior PPC and pay per performance models.   Clearly even many of the big advertisers and agencies still have fairly weak SEM and SEO departments so they’ll choose to use big CPM campaigns that are easy to analyze rather than the more productive – but more complicated to manage – PPC and performance approaches.

Online ads are now a mainstay of any good campaign, but it’ll take some years before advertisers realize the foolishness of many online advertising approaches which generally include bloated CPM impression campaigns.   Much more effective are targeted organic and PPC ad campaigns, but these require more analysis and a newer perspective.

The most conspicuously stupid type of campaign – still extremely popular in travel – is to use expensive print advertising in an attempt to boost online visitation.  I studied this *extensively* across many print ad types during my work marketing southern Oregon several years ago and despite the clear results that showed print ads lead to only a tiny number of online visits, many travel marketers still think print is an effective way to promote online.    It’s not, but it will continue until the incentives and simplicity of squandering money on ineffective print advertising go away.   The lack of research in this area is odd to me given the huge total travel advertising spend, but most travel research is self-serving and often sponsored or conducted by the very agencies or entities that benefit from certain results, so stupid biases remain intact for a long time.

Another victim of Google’s cleverness? Zunch Marketing goes belly up.

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I don’t know Zunch, but I’d argue that it’s generally good riddance when overpriced fancy SEM firms go belly up. As Google creates easier, better, and cheaper ways to do great in-house SEM (e.g. Analytics and PPC management) it’s not surprising places are opting for this approach. For the most part the big SEM firms are dramatically overselling types of SEO that cannot be done at all or are best done in-house or with the greater expertise found in small SEM shops and freelancers. My $9600 bad experience with a fancy SEM firm last year led to a refund, but that was thanks to threatening to blog about it and the written guarantee of increased traffic. I think very few get refunds despite generally poor performance.

After a clever and intense process of selling me on the service it was frustrating to watch them apply generally good but obvious principles of SEO. Also frustrating to note that I knew more about SEO than they did from attending a few Webmaster World Conferences.

So, is Zunch the beginning of a new trend? Perhaps a good trend.

Brain scans yield key first step to … reading your mind.

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A provocative experiment in Germany raises questions about the future of keeping our thoughts private and even free will itself.   Researchers have been able to predict, with modest accuracy, the *intention* of a person to complete a mental task.     Predicting physical actions with brain activity has been done before but this appears to be the first example of predicting mental activity from brain activity as measured by MRI.

Here’s the story

The implications are significant both philisophically and in practical terms.    What exactly is “free will”?   If our decisions are effectively made *before* we actively process the information then what exactly is in control of our thoughts and actions?      If your future “decisions” are simply a product of a bunch of your past thoughts and behaviors then you may be a lot more predictable than you think.

From a practical side this could make for a marketing dream world (or nightmare world?), where persuaders in advertising or politics would tailor the message to your specific brain activity, or even try to “short circuit” activity in their favor.

Hmmm – I suddenly feel compelled to vote Ray Kurzweil for president …

Alexa – Beware the Satanic Statistics?

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Peter Norvig over at Google has published a quick little study indicating how unreliable the Alexa Metrics are if you want to know about website traffic. Thank you Matt for pointing out this Peter paper, which is very intriguing as it demonstrates that Alexa is off by a factor of 50x (ie an error of five thousand percent!) when comparing Matt Cutts’ and Peter’s site traffic.

I’ve realized the problems with Alexa for some time based on Alexa comparisons to sites where I knew the real traffic, but 50x is a rather spectacular level of error. So great in fact, given that these sites are both read mostly by technology sector folks, it suggests that Alexa is effectively worthless as a comparison tool unless there is abundant other data to support the comparison, in which case you don’t need Alexa anyway.

Of course the very expensive statistics services don’t fare all that well either. A recent, larger, and simply superb comparison study by Rand over at SEOMOZ collected data from several prominent sites in technology, including Matt Cutts’ blog, and concluded that no metrics were reasonably in line with the actual log files. Rand notes that he examined only about 25 blogs so the sample was somewhat small and targeted, but he concludes:

Based on the evidence we’ve gathered here, it’s safe to say that no external metric, traffic prediction service or ranking system available on the web today provides any accuracy when compared with real numbers.

It’s interesting how problematic it’s been to accurately compare what is arguably the most important aspect of internet traffic – simple site visits and pageviews. Hopefully as data becomes more widely circulated and more studies like these are done we may be able to create some tools that allow quick comparisons. Google Analytics is coming into widespread use but Rand told me at a conference that even that “internal metrics” tool seemed to have several problems when compared with log files. My experience with Analytics has been superficial but seems to line up with my log stats well.

Microsoft to move almost all ads online over next three years. It’s about … time!

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I’ve been wondering how long it would take for the big players to shift the big money online, and it looks like Microsoft is heading powerfully in that direction based on this story from Media Daily News.

I’m not sure Microsoft is really a bellweather for corporate ads as MS is a technology company that does a huge amount of business online and has a huge online customer base, but whenever close to a  billion dollars is shifted from conventional media to online it’s a significant development in the advertising landscape and probably an indicator of things to come from other major advertisers.Since I did several conversion studies many years ago in the travel sector it’s been clear to me where things were headed as these strongly indicated that online advertising is far more effective than print ads.   As an online marketing guy for Oregon travel projects we ran full page Sunset ads featuring huge displays of separate domain names that I assigned specifically to each campaign.    This made tracking easy and also kept users from having to type in long, cumbersome URL strings.  Despite this we saw very modest traffic increases from major print exposure.    A 20,000 full page print ad would only yield a few thousand extra website visits over the next month.   Initially this came as a shock to me but after dozens of experiments in many magazines, and an examination of other print advertising campaigns, it became clear that it’s foolish to try to drive web traffic using print.   Although we did not run any signifiant TV or Radio campaigns I examined some data from Texas’ Travel web efforts and concluded that TV was also a prohibitively expensive way to drive web traffic.    Online methods generally outperformed offline by a factor of perhaps 10x, and this advantage does not seem much less today.

Yet there is a type of momentum that comes from human stubborness that keeps TV, print, and radio advertising over-funded even as conversion studies are now abundant indicating the superiority of online advertising.   Recently I think it was Ford that decided to increase the online spend considerably, though I think this news from Microsoft is the first time a major advertiser has chosen to move most of their spend to online venues.

Eventually online costs may catch up to conventional media in terms of ROI, but I think this is not the case yet.    That’s not to say that positive ROI in online ad campaigns is a simple process – it is not and many millions are squandered in bad online campaigns.  But this pales in comparison to the *billions* that are squandered every month on ineffective offline media campaigns.   The offline advertising Emperor has very few clothes, but few will notice until people start doing quality mathematical analyses of advertising campaigns and stop listening to self-serving research.    I’m not holding my breath for that.

Blinkx

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Blinkx is a brilliant video search program that allows people to search *within* videos for specific content.  This has become one of the holy grails of search because the internet is now awash in video content. Tastes vary but almost everyone would agree that most of the clips out there are garbage. With routines like Blinkx users can rapidly search the tidal wave of video that pours online every day for things that interest them.

Check out the Blinkx home page with it’s “wall” of tiny video clips reflecting content they have recently indexed.   It’ll keep the attention of even the most stubborn A.D.D. sufferer.   Some cringe at the sensory overload of dozens of videos, but massive input reflects the new ethos of the internet, and I predict we’ll see desktops and applications become increasingly overwhelmed with content.    As a superb tool that will manage the most rapidly growing and complex part of the digital maelstrom – video clips – Blinkx has a rosy future indeed.

The New York Times reports on this today.

Zawodny to Beal “Spammer!”. Beal to Zawodny “Get a Damn Clue!”

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You’ve got to love these spats between clever and prominent blog dudes. It’s not only the closest onliners generally come to schoolyard or barroom brawling, but often these debates give huge insight into the future of the online world.

When Yahoo bought MyBlogLog, the clever social community application, it fell to Jeremy Zawodny to help refine the project into the robust and scalable environment demanded by the world’s top website. Jeremy also decided to take on a bit of quality control, and accused Andy Beal, a top marketing consultant, of spamming MyBlogLog. Andy had used as his avatar “win a free zune” rather than using the normal convention of a personal picture.

Andy Beal shot back angrily that he was not spamming and even had permission to run the contest from MyBlogLog’s founders. Cheap trick or not, if he had permission I think Jeremy owes him an apology – or at least an upgrade to “officially approved MBL spammy tactic”.

Although I thought Jeremy was too hard on this marketing “trick” by Andy, I certainly agree with many who think that MyBlogLog is now suffering from it’s own popularity. Popularity that has brought a lot of questionable tactics outside of the spirit of a quality community.

There is no great harm in the win a free zune *except* it defeats one of the nice aspects of MyBlogLog which is that you can see the person’s face. Several prominent and clever SEO’s with great blogs like Andy’s “Marketing Pilgrim”, as well as several junk sites and junk SEOs are resorting to similar tactics. The most common is to plant a pretty woman’s face rather than your own face, encouraging signups to your blog community.

Avatars are the heart of this system since they appear at other sites. Therefore to preserve the integrity of MyBlogLog Yahoo should require that avatars reflect either the person or a highly relevant aspect of the community. I’d even consider requiring that if you want to play with MyBlogLog you’ve got to be the real person in the picture.

Andy’s a good guy and a quality SEO, but his claim that he’s helping MyBlogLog with this type of approach rings pretty hollow with me.

Update:  Jeremy retitled his post and apologized.  But hey, it was fun while it lasted!