Blogging, it appears, has become a bona fide tool for spreading news, sharing ideas, relating to peers and, to be sure,  has opened a new type of device for doing – or expanding knowledge of a – business. To illustrate this importance, one only has to look at some of all the recently developed tools for optimizing the blogging experience, increasingly allowing companies to use blogs professionally. 

Earlier in this blog, I’ve written about SEO, SEM and so forth, but this was all related to more traditional websites. In lieu of the focus on blogs, I therefore set about to find a way to optimize the use of e.g. a wordpress blog.

One of the tools I came across was the SEO booster. Briefly, what SEO Booster does is to track all traffic from Google and detect which word was searched and where this word is situated in the blog. With SEO Booster comes a widget, which can be placed in the wordpress to show which words have been searched with a reference to the post which matches the search. This little widget therefore does the trick as it optimizes the internal structure and gives links to the relevant searched words.

Another clever feature of the SEO Booster is that it can be programmed to take the relevant search words with which users have found the blog and add additional tags automatically. In this way, a blog could be boosted in ways the writer could not have thought of initially!

Below is shown part of the control panel of the program from a Danish peer evaluation of the application. It shows a quick overview of the latest searches in Google as well as the position of the user’s site at the time:

In the options menu, it is possible to see which search words have generated most hits as well as the position of the blog:
 

This was just one quick example of how the use of a blog could be improved. The SEO Booster itself obviously has many more features, and there are many other interesting products/application currently available on the web.

 If anyone should be interested in this specific application, it can be bought at cleverplugins.com. Obviously, such software has been developed in the in true new web spirit where the “freemium” model is used (e.g. giving something away for free or for trial, and then make people pay for additional features, updates, newer versions, etc.) so a free light version can even be accessed here: http://mywordpress.com/plugins/page-2-seo-booster/

Additionally, as I have accessed numerous blogs to write this post, I came across an excellent one which, unfortunately for some, is in Danish: http://www.larsbachmann.dk. The author of this blog also has a seemingly rather successful company which specializes in attaining visibility on the web and caters professionally to companies on http://www.conseo.dk/. Further illustrating the importance of blogs as a media tool, are also the many courses on how to create blogs and even specifically designed ones for wordpress. For a very interesting presentation on “Wordpress Optimisation Strategies” by Joost de Valk, see video below:

 http://yoast.com/a4uexpo-wordpress-presentation

In conclusion, with all these professional tools becoming available for making and managing blogs, it should by now have become evident that neglecting blogs from a business perspective would be a costly communication channel to miss… A rather blunt point to be made by someone who, until a mere three months ago, would have dismissed blogs as just another nerdy online platform, useful for nothing but meaningless chatter… How wrong one can be!

Haiku
The Twitter-platform structures the content very sharply. It could be said to be a radicalization of the sms format which the Europeans have embraced for years. 140 characters are the limit of each tweet. Of course, one can send several tweets, but the idea is to condense the opinion and content published. In this way it could be argued that the 140 rule works in the same way as the limitations and verses in the Haiku poem.

The competition

It appears that Facebook takes the threat of Twitter quitet seriously! Google bought the Finnish Jaiku, which at that time was the largest direct competitor to Twitter – and now after a bit of development, has been put somewhat on hold and migrated to the Google Apps platform. The “spin” sounded good, but afterwards appeared to be just a quiet decommission of a product.

In the meantime, a plethora of alternatives to Twitter has appeared: Rejaw, Utterli,Identi.ca, Tweet.ie, etc. These last ones are based on the open software framework Laconi.ca which some claim has a bright future. This could spawn a Darwinian struggle between these platforms and maybe, or maybe not, there will be a place in the online world for these niche-micro blog services in the future.

What is it Twitter can do?

Twitter appears to satisfy the need for exposure, as well as bond people together in opinion/attitude/interpretation/action communities. Additionally, the number of people who tweet appears to have reached critical mass, which has made possible the development of monitoring and analytical tools that take as their point of departure a belief in social intelligence.

Collective Intelligence and social proof

It is commonly accepted that we, in the interplay with other people, navigate on the basis of “social proof”. In 2007, the Washington Post persuaded the famous violinist Joshua Bell to play in the underground in Washington DC during rush hour. Bell even brought his Stradivarius worth 3-4 million dollars and started to play. Nearly no-one stopped to listen! This example is often highlighted as an illustation of the notion of social proof; that is, people react as those around them. Thus, when certain communities start making use of new tools, it is often seen that the masses follow – as in the case of Twitter.

Collective Intelligence

The twitter platform also makes possible a hitherto non-existing opportunity to ”test” people and phenomena – without risk. One can go on a discovery in the thoughts, feelings and actions of other people – as well as their relation to products, brands and concepts. With this in mind, it is little wonder that the platform attracts people.  That was also possible with blogs, but today the dynamics have evolved. These dynamics often appear to make people optimize their communication with the intent to get the most followers. Quality and relevance have become parameters of web 2.0, and whilst some might claim that quality is not exactly the general hallmark of Twitter, it does appear that many find that connecting by the means of tweets is both relevant and useful in their everyday lives…

AdSense was an ad serving application run by Google, where website owners could enroll to enable text, image and video advertisements on their websites. These advertisements were administered by Google and generated revenue on either a per-click or per-impression basis.

Here is a picture of the typical reports page in the AdSense application:

The application was actually discontinued last year and superseded by DoubleClick, which was quickly snatched by Google after the huge potential of the application was revealed. This was solidly underlined by the $3.1 billion price tag! As an ironic twist, Microsoft actually tried to stall the acquisition on grounds of monopolistic effects – something quite hilarious considering the myriad of similar accusations against, well, Microsoft. DoubleClick, however, has not been without its problems; it has been linked to spy ware as cookies are tracked and it is therefore even considered “malware” by several antivirus programs. Additionally, DoubleClick was accused of misleading the consumer by proposing an, in effect, useless opt-out option of the tracking feature. Nonetheless, it continues to strive as a more or less independent subsidiary of Google and churns out some interesting products, especially for advertising and media companies to allow their clients to traffic, target, deliver, and report on their interactive advertising campaigns.

Below, one of many useful tools in the DoubleClick application is shown:

The other tool mentioned in class was AdWords – the grand flagship of Google’s online advertising, bringing in a staggering $21 billion in revenue in 2008 alone.

Below, an image of the AdWords position in the typical web browser is shown:

It is in relation to this that we see the currently ubiquitous Pay-Per-Click advertising model mentioned several times in my earlier blogs. The product has been developed extensively and is now relatively simple for anyone to operate and includes a suite of tools to enhance a website and monitor traffic. Despite of its huge success, there have also been a few glitches with the product, both in the form of trademark law suits (e.g. American Blind vs. Google and Rescuecom Corp vs. Google), patent infringements, and click fraud. The latter especially marred the reputation for and was settled for $90 million.

Nevertheless, the success of Google currently seems relentless and a plethora of sub-industries has appeared to cater for the increasing need of companbies needing to access all the people using the search engine. Included in such sub-industries are thousands of SEO and SEM specialists, as well as companies designing entire online campaigns to tap into the full potential of the online consumers.  The interesting aspect here is that, as Google increases the range of products offered directly to the companies, the intermediaries have to offer even more specialized and tailor-made solutions. It is currently not sure what the market for these will be in the future, but for now, it appears to be a lucrative market. A couple of examples of such intermediate companies are www.marketiniano.com as mentioned in class, as well as the even more interesting company www.guavamedia.com, which has received some attention in Scandinavia for having greatly increased the value of the companies in their portfolios. Apart from offering a complete overhaul of all online and branding issues of a company, Guava Media undertakes the innovative “Pay for Performance” solution where a company only pays for the actual sales realized as a consequence of an online campaign as opposed to the simple “pay-per-click” or “pay-per-lead” models.

 The only question is, how long it will be before such services merely become a standard part of the already rapidly expanding range of B2B and B2C offerings by Google…

The main idea of how to achieve this is worth restating from class: the user experience! The user experience is

“The overall experience, in general or specifics, a user, customer, or audience member has with a product, service, or event. In the Usability field, this experience is usually defined in terms of ease-of-use. However, the experience encompasses more than merely function and flow, but the understanding compiled through all of the senses.”

 (www.nathan.com/ed/glossary/)

 Last week I referred to some of the best websites in the world, so this week the blog will be slightly more conceptual and treat some general guidelines on how to create a good website.

I think a couple of visual representations firstly will provide a nice overview of some different elements involved. The first here is one made by James Garret in 2000 which depicts the more technical elements of usability, web design, and experience as engaged by the user:

A second one illustrates even better the elements that should be in place in a consumer-centric webpage. It was taken from the great blog of David Armano – Logci+Emotion:  

Here we see that the user experience is much more than just design – although this is also crucially important in a world jam-packed with visual stimulations; it is about the senses and story-telling so that people feel engaged. It is further about activation of the user and interactivity. This can be achieved e.g. by having focus on a website. Find out what the key attributes are and enhance the visibility of these. Case-in-point: check the popularity of Google versus Yahoo. Also, good old-fashioned market/customer research is needed; one needs to know who the audience is in order to provide the benefits they seek.

Any company online would be wise to consider how these qualities can be attained. After all, such features are likely to also increase the popularity (read “money-making potential”) of companies: in the end it can differentiate the experience and make people stay longer on the site and, not to forget, increase the likelihood of making a purchase!

Those were just the quick thoughts of the day after class…

 Well, if it had been in 2002 we could have sold the algorithm to Google for $102 million (like Applied Semantics sold AdSense in 2003) but since that’s already been done, I suppose we’d have to go about marketing it ourselves:)…

 The Unique Selling Point of the product would be obtaining “more precise targeting of consumers for ads” – something likely to resonate with everyone taking part in the rapidly growing, multibillion dollar market! Already in 2006 the worldwide advertising market was worth an estimated $428 billion in revenues, according to ZenithOptimedia. On top of that, the Interactive Advertising Bureau, a trade association, estimated that advertisers waste—that is, they send messages that reach the wrong audience or none at all—$112 billion a year in America and $220 billion worldwide, or just over half of their total spending[1]. Having a product like Adsense which cleverly matches advertisements with a pin-pointed, suitable audience is thus “an easy sell” in terms of marketing.

  General mass marketing is not necessary as it is not the end consumer that will be purchasing the product, but rather companies of all sizes interested in getting more value for their advertising-buck on the internet. Thus, the following actions are likely to help in creating awareness of the product for the right audience:

  - We could create a website and use specific SEO techniques so as to increase the visibility of searches on advertising tools. SEO is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” or un-paid (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results as opposed to search engine marketing (SEM) which deals with paid inclusion. It would therefore not be as costly for our already pressed start-up budget. The importance of SEO for our website was highlighted in the article “La Importancia de Ser Primero” in El Pais, October 2009, where it was stated that 93% of the internet users do not bother to look at the second page of the search results. Thus, the higher our webpage appears, the more likely it is that the marketers around the world looking for better advertising methods see our webpage.

 - We could further create a blog dedicated to technology and mention our product in relation to the content where appropriate. Several CEOs (like Jonathan Schwartz of Sun Micro Systems, Josep Balleste of MarcoPolo Express, etc.) have personal blogs; even if they do not directly advertise any products, if it is a well-structured, informative blog, it is likely to positively affect the company and product. Such a blog would likely be visited by industry insiders and could even be opened at dedicated professional sites like freemarketingzone.com and ipsos-na.com.

 - Involvement in the industry specific, interactive online communities could further be a cost effective way to inform the CIOs and marketers about the product.

- Affiliate marketing could also be a way to keep the marketing costs down. This would be a revenue sharing venture between a website owner and us. The website owner would place advertisements on his websites to either help sell our product or to send potential customers to our website, all in exchange for a share of the profits. It would thus be attractive for our start up with a small marketing budget because no payment is due to an affiliate until results are realized. Further benefits of this approach are that we could team up with already successful online advertising companies which e.g. CIOs and marketers are used to engage to optimize their online solutions and would thus have very specific audience. This method is great for getting the word out, but partner needs to be well chosen. Companies increasingly use this approach with blogs that have a large/specific following. This works so well because affiliate marketing is best when there’s a relationship with trust between the publisher and their readership – as with followers of a blog. The trust deepens and readers are more likely to follow the recommendations that the blogger makes (remember that the blogger could be the CEO of Sun Micro Systems). On the downside, this would, of course, dilute the earnings from our product as commissions can range from 3 to 60%, so – at least initially – this would not be our preferred way of marketing our product.

- In terms of more regular marketing, we could engage the adworks model through companies like Guava Media where the innovative “Pay for Performance” solution is used so as to only pay for the actual sales we get as opposed to the simple “pay-per-click” or “pay-per-lead” models. However, we would only undertake such actions if the ones described above did not create sufficient awareness.

 Thus, believing we’d have a very interesting product for potential B2B clients, we would likely go about marketing our product by creating a website, with extra emphasis on SEO, creating a blog/engaging other blogs and engaging the online marketing communities for cheaper ways of creating awareness of our product to create a subsequent pull effect.  

 Any other suggestions anyone?

With several examples of how seemingly nice corporate webpages actually were unlikely to give the user the experience he or she looks for (such as those of several medicinal companies and banks), Ariel demonstrated that even large webpage development budget cannot make up for the lack of originality and customer focus.

In wanting to find a nice corporate webpage with a unique user experience, I encountered a dearth of originality and an abundance of feature and information-oriented pages. As I kept searching, I came across a very illustrating outcome of this: not a single large, traditional corporation has made it onto TIME Magazine’s list of 50 Best Websites of 2009!http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/completelist/0,29569,1918031,00.html

Every single website on the list was made to be the product/service in itself, such as flickr, skype, Amazon, and TripIt. In that sense it might be unfair competition compared to traditional companies which often use the website as an additional service to their normal products. But the fact is that the web 2.0 generation is being accustomed to, and has come to expect, a certain user experience when browsing the web. And if companies don’t realize this, they will be very unlikely to reap the full benefits a well thought-out website can offer!

During my internship this summer, I was a part of developing the webpage of a large commercial bank (as mentioned in my earlier blogs) and I know from personal experience that it is really hard to truly offer a consumer experience when the webpage essentially serves as an additional information service to customers. We tried to solve this by thinking in needs instead of features, but more often than not, came up with solutions that merely listed products and any related information. See illustrating screenshot:

A divide is therefore likely to be created where we use corporate websites for straightforward information searching (e.g. about the company or product) and we then go to different places to have a user experience. Certain companies are trying to lessen this difference such as we have seen in the case of Nike+ and the BMW “driving experience” as demonstrated by Jordi in class – but these are the exception rather than the rule.

 The real challenge for the traditional brick-and-mortar companies is how to cross this divide and find out how to draw users and customers through attractive online offerings which translate into real life sales…

The importance of SEO was also highlighted in the very interesting article “La importancia de ser primero” in El Pais, Thursday 8^th of October 2009. Here it was stated that:

“En España, Google copa el 96% de las búsquedas. El 53% de la publicidad digital contratada en nuestro pais, 324 millones de euros, son enlaces patrocinados (adwords). Pagar por aparecer el primero es sencillo. Lo complicado es rentabilizar la inversion”.

Hence, from this perspective it may pay off much more in the long run to do a proper SEO than having to pay anywhere from €0.8 to much more in the Pay Per Click (PPC) adwords model.

I’ve actually had a little experience with SEO myself:  this summer during my internship at a large commercial bank in Dar es Salaam, we were constructing a new website and the issue of how to make it stand out was brought up. The answer, or at least one of the them, was SEO. As the bank was also launching several new products, backed by a “traditional” marketing campaign (meaning thousands of posters all over town), we wanted to translate some of that effort into online success as well. And indeed with the help of an online expert we managed to make a number of the key products appear as the first in a given search. Examples:

-  The Tembo Card appears first (although 2^nd when written in one word)

-  The Malkia Account also appears first

Herebthe result of a “Tembo card” search can be seen. On the right are the PPC results.

These two are particularly important because “tembo” is actually the Kiswahili word for “elephant” and “Malkia” is the  word for “queen”. Having these two search results appear so prominently on e.g. Google therefore means that they don’t just appear in specific searches, generated from awareness due to the usual marketing efforts, but also when people write given phrases in the Kiswahili so as to generate additional awareness and traffic. Whether that turns into sales via a good conversion rate, however, is another matter.

That something is indeed needed in order to appear as one of the first in a search was nonetheless clearly highlighted in the article: “Un 93% de los internautas no se molestan en mirar la segunda página de resultados”.

And much more to the point: “Si su web no figura entre los 5 o 10 primeros, no existe en internet”

Those where my thoughts of the day…

Definition:

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” or un-paid (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results as opposed to search engine marketing (SEM) which deals with paid inclusion. Typically, the earlier (or higher) a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine. SEO may target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, video search and industry-specific vertical search engines. This gives a web site web presence.

 There has been an interesting trend in the emerging e-markting paradigm lately; a gradual eradication of the traditional 4 Ps of marketing (Product, Price, Place, and Promotion). There is, as always, a plethora of new marketing frameworks and buzzwords vying to take their place but one of the more interesting concepts in relation to this course is that of the new 4 Rs of online marketing*:  Reveal, Reward, Respect and Retain.

The four are described as follows:

1. Reveal – understand your website visitors’ most current interests and identify common traits to build focused marketing segments
2. Reward – reward behaviors with offers and special opportunities to further engage and delight.  This falls under the umbrella of transferring the ownership of the brand form the company to the people.  The example from WebTrends was Kettle chips customers getting to pick the upcoming flavor (think also of voting for M&M colors and so on.)
3. Respect – highly relevant, targeted offers result in increased trust and respect of the customer toward the marketers brand.  It’s the concept of aligning your business with your audience’s thoughts and aspirations
4. Retain – stimulate interactions with the products through fun and imaginative extensions of the concept (ex: kettle-ictionary, potato gallery)

As we can see, these four Rs are all intensely consumer-oriented and require a large effort to be leveraged correctly.  They are about knowing the customers intimately to be able to cater to their exact needs (which is increasingly necessary in the online world where a company’s website is given just one chance by a customer). Some relatively new tools to enable such tailor-made service to customers are those of data mining and profiling.

Data mining promises a great future in terms of customer relationship management as it, rather than randomly contacting a prospect or customer through a call center or sending mail, enables a company to concentrate its efforts on prospects that are predicted to have a high likelihood of responding to an offer.

Profiling is also a part of this process and profiling practices enable refined price-discrimination, targeted servicing, and extensive social sorting to name but a few. With these prospects in mind, it is no wonder that companies are investing a lot to attain the latest data processing programs and algorithms.

The very features that make these marketing tools attractive for companies are, however, also causes for some of the controversy surrounding their application:

“They are by their very nature discriminatory tools. They allow unparalleled kinds of social sorting and segmentation which could have unfair effects. The people that are profiled may have to pay higher prices, they could miss out on important offers or opportunities, and they may run increased risks because catering to their needs is less profitable (Lyon 2003)”.

In essence, the process of data mining is neutral, but what is done with the data afterwards decides whether or not the tool is used for “good or evil”. The thing is, used correctly the tools can be used to make content and advertisements unique to the individual consumer and thus much more relevant and interesting. No more Libresse ads for the middle-aged, car-interested man (or 20-something year old student for that matter:)!!

It could thus become a win-win situation where consumers are increasingly entertained and offered products relevant to their lifestyle and wants whilst companies “have the opportunity to leverage both online behavior and past offline interactions to tailor direct marketing efforts towards the customers that will yield the highest lifetime value”.

These were the quick reflections on e-marketing of the week:)

……….. 

 For further discussions on the topic feel free to access these interesting blogs and websites:

www.webtrends.com

http://www.webtrends.com/AboutWebTrends/NewsRoom/NewsRoomArchive/2007/WebTrendsDemonstrateshowtheFourPsofMarketingareTransformingintotheFourRsofMarketingRevealRewardRespectandRetain.aspx

http://www.searchmarketinggurus.com/search_marketing_gurus/2007/10/emetrics-the-ne.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_mining

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profiling_practices

*Just to add to the confusion and mishmash of management buzzwords, there are also the 4 “regular” Rs of marketing:

Recognition. “Recognize me as an individual not a statistic.”
Relevance. “Don’t bother me with things that aren’t relevant.”
Reward. “I know what’s in it for you, but what’s in it for me?”
Relationship. ” Treat me like I’m important and I’ll reciprocate”.

It features a woman named Karen who discusses how she met a male tourist and ended up going home with him and bringing the Danish concept of ‘hygge’ to life (loosely defined as the presence of and pleasure from comforting, gentle, and soothing things’). Karen is now trying to find the man she spent the night with to tell him that he is now the father of her child!! Hence the YouTube appeal. Karen even publishes her email address and highlights a website.

It quickly generated several million views and was talked  about quite a bit – until someone dropped the bomb: it was in fact FAKE! It had been sponsored by the official Danish Tourist Board “Visit Denmark” in an attempt to generate awareness of the liberal Danish values and independent, proud women. As has been pointed out by many people, anyone who watches the video, however, could also just as easily get the impression that Danish women are “loose, and careless skanks” (translated from a Danish politician). It generated so much controversy because it was  sponsored by the government and represented an image that many Danes do not particularly want to promote through their taxes and the Director of the Bureau ultimately had to resign

Now that it has all been exposed as fake, however, all the good benefits of the viral marketing* approach where the power of social networks and video sharing websites ensures the quick spread of a message, are now haunting the makers: Visit Denmark  has desperately been trying to take back the video but it has in fact been “hijacked” by the users of e.g. youtube and for every video the Bureau deletes, there are 5 more uploaded.

These were just my quick thoughts on one of the dangers of viral marketing.

Karen

 A picture from “her” website before it was cancelled (http://karen26.mono.net)

Please follow the link below to see one of the newly uploaded “hijacked” videos (or simply type in “Karen”, “danish woman”, “payoff”, you get the picture of the spreading of the video):

*Definition of Viral marketing:

viral marketing and viral advertising refer to marketing techniques that use pre-existing social networks to produce increases in brand awareness or to achieve other marketing objectives (such as product sales) through self-replicating viral processes, analogous to the spread of pathological and computer viruses. It can be word-of-mouth delivered or enhanced by the network effects of the Internet.[1] Viral promotions may take the form of video clips, interactive Flash games, advergames, ebooks, brandable software, images, or even text messages.

The goal of marketers interested in creating successful viral marketing programs is to identify individuals with high Social Networking Potential (SNP) and create Viral Messages that appeal to this segment of the population and have a high probability of being passed along.

(source: Seth Godin: Unleashing the ideavirus, 2001,  wikipedia. org and USAToday)