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Twitter Gate – Buy More Twitter Followers Free Instantly – Business Marketing Strategy Implications?

This week there are stories raging in political circles with allegations the Newt Gingrich (or more likely his Internet strategists) bought or acquired Twitter followers. Seeing a concept I’ve seen whispered in the back of the room at Internet conferences being discussed in a broad and general way in Time magazine makes one wonder if we are witnessing an important inflection point moment.

The article brings something in the bright, bright light that had been hidden in the darkness, the TIME article states, “…Newt’s numbers are way out of the ordinary – even for a politician. While about 8% of his followers are real, other politicians were deemed to have anywhere 20% to 30% of “real” followers. In comparison, the average Twitter user, like you and me, have anywhere from 35% to 60% real people following them.”

It makes one wonder where all these non-real followers are coming from and more than a few CEOs are likely reading this article and asking the question, “Is all this investment in social media justified and an activity that will grow my business and improve the bottom line or are there wiser marketing investments to be made?” The answer is not one that will immediately be answerable completely. Before we get into that, a little history is required. Twitter has API’s that allow people to interact with their data to build other tools. For reasons that are completely unclear, the API allowed people to automate certain actions like posting, retweeting, even creation of new accounts via automated programmatic methods.  This appears to have helped Twitter grow users to create user adoption rates that were shown to venture capitalists. Some have suggested that certain due diligence steps were missed, I don’t know whether it is true or not. Time will tell.

What this incident has a potential to do is bring this conversation into the boardroom and have serious questions asked like are these 80,000+ Twitter follower social media experts really experts at anything at all? Are all of these investments in social media justified? Shouldn’t I be focused on a well diversified portfolio of relevant marketing activities? What does Klout’s influencer score of 72 for @NewtGingrich say about fake retweets being counted as real and will Klout eventually become the solution with verified users and replace Twitter altogether (if Twitter doesn’t buy it someday soon)? How many reports of social media ROI are sitting in executive boardrooms right now that are not true representations of actual real world reality? How many marketers departments will have new and different leadership 90 days from now due to questions raised due to this incident? Will people across the globe stop looking at the number of Twitter followers as the Holy Grail of social media efforts?

The answers to these questions aren’t fully clear yet, but I wanted to raise some of the most important ones. I can confidently say that the goal should always be one of diversified marketing strategies that reach relevant demographics and real, actual target customers.

It’s time for CEOs to rewrite the job spec of the CMO to the creation of relevant business results instead of hype, buzz and hocus pocus. This needed migration is just an idea in most boardrooms today, it needs to one day become reality. It’s time for businesses to adapt their organizations to perform in this environment which is something that must be customized for each company in solutions provided based on the markets that they serve.

How big is this marketplace? According to Google’s Keyword External tool over 3,361,550 queries on Google occurred on the term Twitter Followers. This quantifies 1) the amount of people researching how to improve their Twitter followers is large and 2) it means that social media people seeking Twitter followers are not talking to their friends via Social Media about this, they are using a search engine called Google, which is the primary tool that most people use for this research as well as what the majority of the population uses at the moment they are seeking highly relevant information.

Keyword    Global Monthly Searches
how to get twitter followers    90500
top twitter followers    4400
get more twitter followers    40500
get twitter followers    90500
twitter followers free    27100
increase twitter followers    8100
get twitter followers fast    4400
how to increase twitter followers    8100
most twitter followers    27100
find twitter followers    60500
pay for twitter followers    390
twitter followers tool    1900
twitter follower    246000
get more twitter followers fast    1000
free twitter followers    27100
twitter follow    301000
get more twitter followers free    6600
getting more twitter followers    880
get twitter followers free    14800
get free twitter followers instantly    480
build twitter followers    1300
targeted twitter followers    2400
who has the most twitter followers    12100
grow twitter followers    720
get thousands of twitter followers    480
more twitter followers    49500
get targeted twitter followers    320
twitter followers fast    5400
get more twitter followers instantly    320
buy more twitter followers    590
more twitter followers fast    1300
get instant twitter followers    390
increase your twitter followers    880
get free twitter followers    14800
how to buy twitter followers    33100
twitter followers for free    27100
more twitter followers without following    390
twitter follower software    1000
how to get more twitter followers    40500
add twitter followers    3600
get lots of twitter followers    4400
download twitter followers    880
more twitter followers free    8100
how to use twitter    135000
add more twitter followers    320
get more followers on twitter    40500
fast twitter followers    5400
buy twitter followers    33100
increase twitter followers free    720
twitter follower adder    720
get twitter followers instantly    880
automatic twitter follower    1600
buy twitter followers without following    590
how to get twitter followers fast    4400
buy guaranteed twitter followers    1600
get twitter followers for free    14800
free instant twitter followers    390
twitter for business    60500
twitter advertising    14800
twitter follow back    12100
best twitter to follow    14800
get alot of twitter followers    2400
twitter software    49500
twitter adder    12100
twitter who to follow    301000
twitter more followers    49500
purchase twitter followers    14800
getting twitter followers    14800
get more twitter follower    40500
best twitters to follow    880
get twitter follower    74000
get twitter followers without following    1000
buy youtube views    18100
guaranteed twitter followers    2400
get more followers on twitter free    6600
free twitter followers instantly    880
twitter increase followers    8100
auto twitter follower    1900
how do i get more twitter followers    49500
who has most twitter followers    12100
get followers    165000
buy real twitter followers    110
twitter followers following    9900
automatic twitter followers    1600
instant twitter followers    1000
buying twitter followers    12100
generate twitter followers    260
how do you get twitter followers    301000
free twitter follower    22200
increase twitter follower    6600
how do i get twitter followers    301000
get free followers on twitter    14800
twitter follow Friday    1600
how to get twitter followers without following back    480
how to get more twitter followers fast    1000
highest twitter followers    14800
how to get a lot of twitter followers    4400
get followers on twitter free    14800
remove twitter followers    6600
twitters to follow    8100
twitter followers    301000
Total monthly Google queries for the term Twitter Followers on Google Keyword External Tool    3361550

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Jim Sterne On His Book Social Media Metrics

Jim Sterne is a unique person in the interactive space. He cares not only about the multitude of marketing strategies, measurement and tactics, but the success of the people. Jim has been helpful to me in ways that are too long to list here and has cared more about the status of certain issues in my life well beyond the level that is required. Let me publicly say “Thank you!”

Jim Sterne on Social Media Metrics

Jim has written many books and is the founder of the eMetrics conference, the leading web analytics conference. Recently, Jim released the book “Social Media Metrics” with a foreword written by David Meerman Scott. The book provides a useful framework for considering how one should consider measuring social media and other forms of emerging media. Jim graciously agreed to do an interview with me and what resulted is below!

How did your extensive history in metrics and measurement influence your approach to this book on this new medium?

Jim Sterne: Like my previous books, I wanted this one to be for people in the trenches, doing the work as well as the executives they work for. A bit of theory, a healthy dose of strategy and a lot of practical tid bits on how to tell if this stuff is working. I wanted to avoid being one of those experts who is full of sounds and furry delivering thought-provoking sound bites, but no practical knowledge. So all of what I know about measuring online success is included in “Social Media Metrics” as the background. The basics are all there and the rest is delivered almost parenthetically.

What are the biggest hurdles to effective creation and usage of social media metrics?

Jim Sterne: Buy in. Not just upper management comprehension and dedication and not just troop level activity, but actual investment. This stuff requires new jobs with new jobs descriptions to be populated. “What? You mean I have to hire people to do things I’ve never had to hire people to do before??” Yes. That’s a major commitment and faces the same hurdles as when we tried to hire a webmaster, an email manager and a web analyst.

In a recent article, I discussed the tendency for people to lock onto the hot metric – Technorati link counts, RSS subscribers or most currently Twitter followers. How can marketing leaders and web analysts change this dynamic?

Jim Sterne: Once you understand that hard and fast numbers are not hard and fast, you begin to look for the trends and the meaning inside the numbers. That’s great that you got a million people following you an Twitter, but does it make any difference to the bottom line? It’s great that you advertised your shop floor cleaning solution to tens millions of Oprah fan on TV but do any of those viewers have any connection to buying your product? Are your Twitter followers more likely to buy your goods or services? The latest hot metric about the latest, shiniest new tech may be fun, but is it actionable??

If you were asked by a CMO to quickly define social media metrics for a company, what are the questions you’d want to ask and issues you’d want to address?

Jim Sterne: What are your business goals?

What processes and people do you have in place to oversee and manage those goals?

How are they compensated?

What does social media marketing success look like to you?

How much detail do you need to monitor the social media conversation?

What percent of your decision makers know what social media is and why it’s important?

And so forth.

Will mobile social media complicate all of this, simplify it or too early to tell?

Jim Sterne: It will complicate things while we’re getting a handle on it and then simplify things as we come out the other end. We may end up with standards and benchmarks before we’re done. Then, these public, attitudinal metrics can be correlated with direct attitudinal metrics (surveys) and behavioral data and we end up with a really rich, actionable dataset.

Did your views of social media change as you wrote the book and researched the topic? If so, how?

Jim Sterne: My views about how far along we are were established during the research for the book. My optimism that tools and techniques will get better and that there actually are companies that get it out there improved. There are some really bright people who are doing some really impressive things. It’s a joy to learn from them.

After the last emtrics you wrote “I believe the message we have been beaming at the C-Suite is getting a hearing and the resources are about to be significant rather than symbolic.” Could you eloborate on this more please…

Jim Sterne: I’m seeing more and more senior executives dedicating more and more budget and resources to marketing accountability. I’m seeing more top level managers asking better questions about trends rather than numbers and looking for insights rather than benchmarks. That gives me hope.

———————————————————————————————

This concludes the interview with Jim Sterne and I hope you found the strategic information valuable. What else does it make you wish to discuss about this topic?

Here are some other recent interviews and thoughts about (and by) Jim Sterne:

Mixpanel – Analytics for Startup

Book Review

Jim on  why you should not buy this book! 😉

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Pat LaPointe of Marketing NPV Marketing Strategy Enagement : BMA 2010

When I first saw the schedule for the 2010 BMA conference, I immediately noticed that Pat LaPointe from Marketing NPV was on the schedule. Was immediately excited about that as I had not seen him speak before but had heard many positive things.

For those of you who don’t know Pat LaPointe, his bio on his website states the following:

Pat LaPointe – Managing Partner

At MarketingNPV, Pat LaPointe directs the development of client solutions for CMOs in the areas of skills, structure, processes, and tools to improve marketing measurement through greater alignment and accountability. His book Marketing by the Dashboard Light: How to Get More Insight, Foresight, and Accountability from Your Marketing Investments is a pioneering work on the topic of marketing dashboard development.

Prior to launching MarketingNPV in 2003, Pat was an equity partner and senior vice president at Frequency Marketing Inc., a consulting and software company known for design and operation of large-scale customer retention and loyalty programs. Pat also directed the operation of a marketing department at Bell Atlantic (now Verizon), creating and implementing customer acquisition and development programs for both B2B and consumer markets. He started his career in advertising in the Y&R network and at Ketchum, where he managed large client portfolios in all aspects of marketing strategy and communications.

Pat is an MBA graduate of Stern School at NYU and holds a B.Comm. from McGill University in Montreal.

Gary Slack introduced Pat as someone who helps CMOs and CFOs in the Fortune 100 better measure their marketing. Pat started his talk by telling a funny and likely inappropriate joke. Happy to retell it privately.

So how do you measure engagement?
Some engagement methods have more traction and have better acceptance.

Traditional Problems In Measuring Engagement:
See a stimulus > Think/Feel Differently (Research) > Buy Something (Pray for correlation)

Behaviorist’s View of Engagement – Referrals lead people towards purchase funnel:
Challenges#1: Engagement is not Linear – these things do not follow an order. Awareness, Consideration, Preference, Purchase, Retention, Repurchase
Challenge #2: Interaction Effects are Very Real – there is a basket mix effect – last touch versus complex reality
Challenge #3: Value isn’t always transactional (Me: more and more I’m not sure this is the case)
Forrester’s 4 I’s Engagement Model: Involvement, Interaction, Intimacy, Influence

Eric Peterson’s engagement calculator provides brand impression, engagement metrics.

New definition – Pre-transaction, then purchase
Pre-transaction screening – the scores are linked to what we think will create value
Pre-transactions can be either positive or negative and scoring models can be created to create useful measurement of marketing activities across multiple channels.

Marketing Effectiveness = change (direction * velocity) t+1 vs expectations (Me: What if the expectations are highly flawed?)

Measuring engagement in 4 simple steps
1) What does your business objectives (hint: awareness is not an objective)
– What are your hypothesis about the behavioral pathways?
– How are you attempting to influence them?
– Ask “So what?”

2) Create a methodical testing process:
– Break the big problems down into smaller component parts
– Use experiments to test your hypothesis

3) Look for leading indicators of eventual purchase behavior
– Use analytics to verify how these audiences drive customer behavior
– Important Protect and Defend the Credibility Chain

4) Develop and refine drivers to leverage drivers

If you follow these actions you can make a credibility chain!

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Brand Marketing Channel Strategy Misfortune : Porters of Racine

portersPorters of Racine was founded in 1857 providing furniture of distinction well before Abraham Lincoln was President of the United States. My understanding of the history is that fine furniture was brought into port of Racine, Wisconsin and that people traveled from across the Midwest to Porters of Racine to purchase fine furniture. Fast forward to 2010 and we learn that Porters of Racine is closing after 153 years. There were detailed stories in the Racine Journal Times which mentioned the owners were hoping for better sales that did not materialize. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel mentioned the following items in their story:

“Small local furniture retailers who sold mid-range to higher priced furniture already were challenged before the recession because of competition from lower-priced Chinese imports.”

“Porters of Racine, one of the oldest surviving high-end furniture retailers in Wisconsin, soon will close after struggling for several years with declining sales.” Reaction: Notice that phrase “several years”, it’ll become vitally important in a minute.

“Through November, retail furniture sales in the U.S. dropped by 12.1%, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The decline followed an 8% slide in 2008.” Reaction: Yes, after the housing bubble which created unnatural demand for furniture in 2005, 2006 and 2007, this would be natural.

The story states that Porters of Racine “will close after several years with declining sales”. Yet the story mentioned sales figures that only showed declines for 2008 and the first 11 months of 2009. dictionary.com defines several as “being more than two but fewer than many in number or kind”. This seems to indicate a period of two to possibly up to seven years. A previous 2007 story mentioned Porters of Racine being in a challenging business situation, before the housing bust took place indicating a clear issue about the business had formed earlier than 2007.  What could possibly explain several years of declining sales that included a four year boom in housing that correlated with increased buying of correlated household goods? That is a really good question.  It would seem to indicate that there was an agonizingly long, slow drop in quantity of qualified store floor traffic.  Let’s examine Porters online marketing channel usage, obviously without the help of the actual marketing plan in my hands.

The following branded terms for Porters of Racine had the following monthly query volume:
porters of racine outlet    36
porters of racine    1000
porters of racine furniture    91

According to my post, Local Search Marketing Keyword Allocation: Porters of Racine, there were about 48,948 qualified queries for the term Wisconsin furniture, 38,971 for Milwaukee furniture and 3,110 for Kenosha furniture for a total of 91,020 queries. Give that the standard 1/3 Google keyword haircut and we’ll call it 60,000. However, if you include the other communities in southeast Wisconsin and northeast Illinois, you’d probably have between 40,000 and 60,000 long tail queries for places like Lake Forest, Wilmette, Winnetka, Kenilworth, Highland Park, Glenview, Northbrook, Deerfield, Buffalo Grove, Lincolnshire, Mettewa, Libertyville, Schaumburg, Kildeer, Lake Bluff, Barrington and Riverwoods. In Wisconsin, there is places like Madison, Green Bay, Appleton and other cities within a drivable distance of Porters. To be conservative, we’ll even leave the high query volume term Chicago furniture completely out of the equation. So let’s call it 100,000 monthly queries in the regional furniture query market.

A look at website of Porters of Racine, shows a classic flat small web site with “Porters of Racine” on every title tag. And while the site had several more pictures on it before the going out of business sale banner was added, this was the case before the change. A further look back at the Internet wayback machine, indicates a series of websites built over the years that did not venture far from the current web sites theme. The word Milwaukee does appear on the site during a year 2000 version. Well you are getting my point, Porters of Racine appears to have never created an effective content strategy that would attract the types of searchers that would be looking for high end fine furniture and lived in the region. In fact it only ranks for the non-branded attribute term – Racine furniture. In my opinion, the shift in how companies engage customers has been shifting from many traditional forms of media to effective content and relevant paid search marketing strategies that can create engagement with potential customers. I’m making an assumption about content only as I see no evidence of an active paid search marketing campaign.

One might assert that many of those 100,000 queries aren’t qualified customers of a high end furniture store like Porters of Racine. Alright I’ll grant you this. But before we write them off, let’s talk about their potential benefits for a minute. Thousands of people wanting the best and aspiring to buy furniture from Porters of Racine! The amount of word of mouth, the number of people who visit the store and tell stories about it. All great things!  Not to mention we likely all know someone in our lives whose significant other caused them to buy something more expensive than they should be buying right? I do! OK, so let’s drop 90% of those queries as completely unqualified customers. This leaves us with around 10,000 queries a month.

10,000 queries a month for how long? Let’s say 7 years from 2003 (once Google had mainstream traction) through 2009. 10,000 queries times 7 years times 12 months per year yields us = 840,000 queries over the past 7 years! During a time period where customers were deluged with tons and tons of new content in news ways and forms. Not to mention that all of these queries were people putting in the word furniture with a regionally local qualifier – so they were relevant prospects! If done right, much more effective than traditional brand marketing spend that wastefully sends outbound messaging to many unqualified and uninterested customers.

So would 840,000 queries from relevant prospects have made a difference in Porters of Racine viability as a profitable and thriving business concern I think so.

Not fully convinced? Consider this. Doris Hajewski’s next “Shop Talk” entry was about Steinhafels opening a new mattress store. Who ranks #1 for the terms – Wisconsin furniture and Milwaukee furniture? You guessed it, Steinhafels!

Back in Chicago, I performed business content strategy and seo services on Weber Furniture Service, a fine furniture and refinishing and restoration provider, at the end of 2008, in the 1st quarter of 2009 versus the 1st quarter of 2008, a very different economic period, unique site visitors were up 45%!!! The company was able to cut traditional media spending as an added benefit which improved profit margin!

To be perfectly clear, my goal here is not to rip on Porters of Racine. Quite the opposite. By profiling a business which is going out of business, it is my hope that tens of thousands of other businesses can learn about the importance of effective SEO, SEM and content marketing practices from this event, which in my personal opinion is one of missed opportunity.

Let’s summarize what we’ve observed here in this post.

1) Effective search rankings can contribute to business success (Steinhafel’s) or business failure. Do you want to learn about Gen X CMO management techniques so you can prevent other businesses from this fate.

2) With the emerging changes in operational risk liability laws is your Board of Directors receiving qualified advice from someone who understands seo and web analytics as well as traditional executive level business techniques? Are they keeping current with these items are transforming the world of business strategy and customer distribution? If your Board of Directors  is not yet receiving this advice, it should be. Shareholders should be demanding it!

3) Are you aware of the trend of how search marketing is allowing product attributes to be electronically stored and retrieved from non-branded search queries allow you focus on the customers needs instead of your product push? As volume of content increases there is an ever increasing lack of mental band with to absorb additional information. You may wish review the appendix to this post.

4) Are you aware of the microeconomics of your marketing channels and successfully migrating organizational resources to align yourself with the customer and lead this change management initiative?

5) We are living in a time that is similar to the industrial revolution.  Marketing is changing from a purely outbound medium to a medium via search that is creating inbound marketing. This is a 180 degree process change that has large process ramifications. We are in a recession, but there are structural changes happening to the economy as a result of search and most businesses are not properly adjusting.

6) In the new normal economy, one needs to utilize the power of the Internet to lower marketing and sales costs to create competitive advantages over their competition. It’s actually not that hard to do once you understand it, but one has to understand that revenue and profitability improvements are possible. This is why the change management is so difficult, many don’t understand what is possible and are not aware of the far reaching organizational issues. One further needs to understand that SEO content strategy is not instant, but rather a long term process.

7) Newspapers, online news sites, TV and cable news need to cover more than just the facts. The reality is yes businesses are closing and jobs are being lost, but that is a symptom, not a root cause of these complex business issues. But these are things that happen well after the damage that is caused by not migrating your marketing channels to an ideal search marketing strategy.

If you’d like to learn how to become aware of these issues so that you can migrate the structural changes in our economy, please consider attending Think Tank Live in Waukesha on February 23, 2010, code WI50 gets you a $50 discount. Chris Campbell of Lakeshore Branding and WordPress Expert Lisa Sabin-Wilson wrote blog posts about the upcoming event where you will learn things such as “How Breaking Business News Stories Migrate to Mainstream Mass Media“. We hope to see you there!

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Marketing Channel Business Strategy Reallocation Management: Where Are You?

The other day Google (GOOG) had it’s earnings call, Google stated that a primary agenda for 2010, in addition to mobile, was display advertising. Yes, you read that right, display advertising.  Display? Yahoo 2.0? After the call one had to think about how non-targeted and potentially wasteful advertising spend could potentially be harmful to corporate profitability as some people might try display that aren’t appropriate for display (and could do far better just creating quality content to be indexed in organic search). The promise of the Internet comes from the potential to change organizational structures to be closer to the customer in the way that Peter Drucker would want to increase customer utility and reduce the cost of marketing and sales. I think we have all underestimated the amount of time these changes will take and clearly question whether our society is picking the right leaders to lead these changes.

Obviously one must consider that without true reform of advertising models away from CPM driven page view models how display in 2010 can do nothing to further the goal of lowering costs of marketing and sales for companies and improving our standard of living. CPM can only maximize revenue of an ad network with some residual benefits to publishers. A few days ago I considered writing something about this, but thought this was part of something larger than just Google and their display initiatives in 2010.

Surely, less than 48 hours later, Jason Calacanis started a discussion about comScore that has the Blogoshpere abuzz. Michael Arrington also chimed in (as did a bunch of other people) in his post, Jason Calacanis Punches Comscore In The Face. Comscore Punches Back. Fred Wilson Drags Us Into It. $SCOR” rel=”bookmark” href=”http://techcrunch.com/2010/01/24/comscore-calcanis-wilson-punch-face/”>Jason Calacanis Punches Comscore In The Face. Comscore Punches Back. Fred Wilson Drags Us Into It. $SCOR.The buzz around Jason and his conversation is ultimately about symptoms of the current ecosystem, not the root causes of the future end game.  While the conversation about the current state is certainly an interesting conversation to observe, it’s not the conversation I wish to take to the next level. We need to have a different conversation. There is so much more to achieve and limited marketing resources of companies need to be put to work effectively. There are advertising models of the future to consider where offline, mobile and Internet will collide and will someday make this entire conversation look primitive.

Sure enough reading this post brought me back to the conversation about Google and the worthlessness of poorly targeted and untimely display banner ads. You see there was not one but two large banners on TechCrunch that stood out as irrelevantly served by Google. What were they? They were display banners for a company I had interviewed with to be the CMO of in Spring of 2009 that I would have likely have increased the revenue significantly by now.  Unfortunately most CEOs don’t yet fully understand the magnitude of the amount of change  that is necessary to transform a company successfully for marketing on the web while improving customer satisfaction and the corporation’s profitability. I had researched them and their competitors back then. I was never a potential customer of the service. So now, a full nine months later, here I am looking at this completely irrelevant ad on TechCrunch of all places (which is completely unrelated to the vertical). Wasteful. Pathetic. Sad. Not something a rational business leader following the rules of being a Gen X CMO where search marketing becomes the top of the strategic process.  The first decade of the Internet got us to the batters box to start the game of corporate business strategy transformation, I look forward leading that conversation into the first inning during the next few years. The magnitude of the change and the amount of transformation needed is massive, whether it is a small company or a member of the Fortune 500.

You should read those comments in Michael Arrington’s post and think about their motivations – extremely carefully. You’ll also find a link to Jason’s original post there if you wish to read the full details. The future of not only the Internet, but also the future of business organizational structures and marketing strategy budget direction hangs in the balance.

So my question for Jason Calacanis, Fred Wilson, Michael Arrington and EVERYONE ELSE is the following, “Is it time to stop pretending that offline branding models simply converted online is the future of the advertising? If a world migrated budgets from CPM banner ads to CPA/CPL and other emerging forms, who would really care about unique visitors besides site owners seeking an ego boost?

Bonus question for Fred Wilson: Wouldn’t your energy be better spent on funding ideas that move the conversation in the direction of innovation of advertising instead of arguing with Jason about a company you exited long ago? (If you are up for it, I’d like to create those realities with you in start ups in that future arena.)

In the end measurement of the type discussed in Jason’s post only matters in an advertising world based on page view based(CPM) or time sponsored impressions. As in my example above, considerable display advertising occurs in an irrelevant way after the fact. For example, I bought a car last September, I’m still seeing increased banners on the models I considered now – after the purchase. Women planning weddings likely have seen related retargeted banners long after the wedding has occurred, possibly even after the divorce is filed in some cases!!! We must do better.

The convergence of offline, online, search and mobile marketing will require entirely new processes to effectively manage them as it becomes a real-time individual decision marketplace. To me, it will have similarity to the changes I made in the 1990’s at BlackRock, where we created new data, new structures, new standards and created better information for us to create strategic advantages.  I actively network with some outstanding nascent start ups, sadly many are ignored as many VCs look for traffic or who is involved rather than focus on revenue models, vision, market size and evidence that there might be paying customers for such a new , disruptive model.

The economy right now is bad, but to state that it is just an economic event is way oversimplifying it. It’s prolonged and drawn out due to the structural effects of the Internet not being managed to corporate advantage effectively. Stated simply, corporations and our society is not allocating resources in an effective manner as it fails to migrate budgets and marketing strategy to the highest ROI activities which attract relevant customers. It’s time for scarce, new and often misunderstood breeds of executives that understand these concepts to be allowed to realign corporations big and small, new and old to these new realities otherwise we will see more corporations destroyed “by doing nothing”. There is certainly a significant cost to tapping new leaders, with new skills to lead organizations into new frontiers in terms of realignment and retraining. However, the costs of doing nothing are far greater to our society as not allocating budgets to the most efficient channels and allowing those decisions to be made by people who understand these new realities is far greater.

All I can ask the both the blogosphere and the world business community is to please stop the bickering about these legacy models so we can move onto the real issue and work ahead – realigning our corporate business strategy and our society to the realities of Industrial Revolution 2.0. It starts with board of directors, CEO, CFO and COO executives asking their CMO and marketing partners the right questions. The journey will be fun.

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Bryan Eisenberg’s 21 Secrets to Top Converting Websites

Bryan Eisenberg will be giving a session shortly entitled 21 Secrets to Top Converting Websites at Search Engine Strategies Chicago 2009 and at marketing conferences worldwide in 2010 – here’s a high level preview of the session:

1. They Communicate Unique Value Propositions & Unique Campaign Propositions
2. They Make Persuasive & Relevant Offers
3. They Reinforce The Offer Sitewide
4. They Maintain Scent
5. They Make A Strong First Impression
6. They Appeal To Multiple Personas/Segments
7. They Don’t do Slice & Dice Optimization
8. Leverage Social Commerce: Use Voice of Customer
9. They Use It For Navigation
10. They Use It For Promotions
11. They Use It For Credibility
12. They Use It For Feedback & Research
13. They Use Persuasion Principles Like Scarcity
14. They Make Forms Engaging
15. They Provide Point of Action Assurances
16. They Keep You In The Process
17. They Consider Email Preview
18. They Budget For Experience
19. They Utilize a System for Prioritization
20. They Make Data Driven Decisions
21. They Know How To Execute Rapidly

Postscript: The session was well attended! In fact there wasn’t an open seat in the room, people were feverishly taking notes of Bryan’s material during his thought provoking conversion talk.