Category: Marketing

The Battle of Buzzwords

Last month, Brian Clark over at Copyblogger, questioned the value of the term “linkbait“. Linkbait started out as a marketing term to describe “any content or feature within a website that somehow baits viewers to place links to it from other websites.” The benefit of getting links from other websites is to increase your website’s rank in search engines.

The term has since taken on an almost derogatory connotation, in some people’s eyes. At the same time, a whole niche market as arisen to service this desire.

So Clark asked:

Link attraction is crucial. But is “linkbaiting” bad branding for an important skill? I prefer to call what I do viral copywriting, but linkbaiting goes well beyond the written word and can include blog themes, widgets and web applications.

It may be too late to change the tide, but let’s take a vote anyway. Let the people speak.

Leave a comment to this post with either:

  • Yes, I think the term linkbaiting is OK; or
  • No, I think the term linkbaiting is bad.

I saw this as a battle of semantics and buzzwords. The negative connotations of linkbaiting is certainly bad for copywriters and SEO specialists. It’s like being known as a “spammer” instead of an “email marketer.”

But as a buzzword to help describe it to people outside of the industry? It’s potentially good that way. I wrote as much in Copyblogger’s comments:

While buzzwords can be annoying, I think they actually can be a helpful semantic platform for describing concepts to people not familiar with the industry.

For example, I was a web developer and have been using a technique called remote scripting since 2001. Then the term “Ajax” was coined, which basically meant the same thing.

Scores of web developers were endlessly annoyed at the popularity of this buzz term. Everyone seemed to be using the term “Ajax” – and many times, inappropriately too.

But then I became an engineering manager and began working with product managers, marketers, and designers who were unfamiliar with this technology. And suddenly, “Ajax” became a useful term. I would correct inappropriate uses and wield it as a tool to help them understand how we could build better web products.

So I think linkbait, while annoying, is a useful buzz word. (But for professionals in the industry, “viral copywriting” is a much better term – just like “remote scripting” is a better term than “Ajax” in the web development industry.)

However, after reading Clark’s conclusions, I’ve changed my mind. Especially for a copywriter or SEO specialist. Or, as Clark phrased it, a social media marketer.

The disadvantages of having a negative connotation outweigh the advantages of having a buzzword that many people loosely understand. Since the majority aren’t familiar with, or may misuse the term, why keep it? Why not replace it with a more descriptive and positive term? It’s fortunate that this market is still relatively young; such changes in the lexicon hopefully won’t be that painful.

Linkbaiter vs social media marketer? Hmmm. Spammer vs email marketer? No contest there. Down with derogatory buzzwords!

Thinking About RSS

RSS icon Emily Chang will be speaking on a panel entitled, “Using RSS for Marketing” at this upcoming SXSW Interactive Conference. On her blog, she asks for feedback on insights & topics related to RSS.

This got me thinking (which, I know, is dangerous). Fundamentally, what is RSS?

Fundamentally, RSS is an XML-based stream of data. Or, as Wikipedia defines it:

A family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated digital content, such as blogs, news feeds or podcasts.

Okay, that’s not helpful at all.

Conceptually, RSS is a free way to share real-time information with the world. Cool, okay, now it sounds more like radio waves or television broadcasts. Analogies are good.

How can RSS be used?

Currently, RSS is most commonly used to distribute updates from websites like blogs, vlogs, and podcasts. This information is time-sensitive and archives can be just as important as updates. Other real-time information that can be distributed are weather, traffic, and stock prices reports. These are also time-sensitive, though archives are not very important.

Conceivably, RSS could also share non real-time information, like dictionaries and encyclopedias. Or non-textual information like maps and technical diagrams.

RSS readers are currently built to display chronological information, so this would not be a standard way to use RSS. Arguably, it’s not an effective way either. There are other ways to retrieve static information, such as using web services. But possibly, the RSS format could also be used as a web service?

So what is RSS and how can it be used?

RSS is a way to share information, with some kinds of information being better than others:

  • Real-time information = blogs, vlogs, podcasts, news, weather, traffic & stock prices
  • Static information = dictionary info, encyclopedia info, maps & technical diagrams (maybe?)
  • Archivable information = blogs, vlogs, podcasts & news
  • Non-archivable information = weather, traffic & stock prices
  • Textual information = blogs, news, weather, traffic & stock prices
  • Graphical/video/audio information = photos, video, audio, maps & technical diagrams

As a marketer, are any of these information formats useful to your business? Or rather, would your customers find any of these information formats useful?

Perhaps. In my opinion, RSS isn’t just for blogs, vlogs, and podcasts though. With some thinking, perhaps you’ll find more uses for it too.

Creative Review Says: Your Mother is a Whore

Cover of Creative Review This just in from the Creative Review: Your Mother is a Whore. But that’s only if you’re a subscriber to that UK magazine. The subscribers received this February 2007 issue in a brown envelope with those words crudely written on it.

What’s up with that? Why so mean? Adrian Shaughnessy from the Design Observer tells us that this issue featured guest editors from the UK advertising agency Mother. And they are here to make a statement:

Does the presence of money diminish our creativity? The Sistine Chapel was a commissioned work. Was Michelangelo less of an artist for taking the Vatican’s money? Some would argue painting the Pope into a fresco is more noble then putting a Ford in your Bond movie. Some wouldn’t. We’re not here to decide. After all, ‘We sold our soul and it feels great.’

Once upon a time, I contemplated a career in graphic design and illustration. I was one of those kids who’d doodle in class all day long. Fate took me on a different path, but I still like to keep in touch with the design community.

The question of whether or not money stifles creativity is as old as, well, it’s pretty old. So I’d like to posit a theory:

Money can increase creativity.

How? Money puts boundaries on art. Creating art within boundaries can lead to innovation & creativity. Therefore, money can increase creativity.

An article from The Madison Avenue Journal, entitled “A New Lens To View Limits Through: Constraints & Creativity by Christina Kerley, quotes Marissa Ann Mayer of Google (GOOG) on this topic.

Marissa believes that constraints empower creativity, and remarks, “creativity thrives best when constrained”. Rather than constraints and creativity living at odds, she posits a complementary, almost symbiotic, relationship between the two polarities, writing, “innovation is born from the interaction between constraint and vision”.

“Constraints can actually speed development. For instance, we [at Google] often can get a sense of just how good a new concept is if we only prototype for a single day or week.”

Kerley (or simply CK, as she’s more commonly known) adds an example from her own experience.

Here’s a creative constraint that I constantly grapple with: length. I have to keep my columns to a certain word count to be sensitive to readers’ busy schedules. Get too wordy, go off on too many tangents, and I lose my audience.

37signals, the web design & development agency known for innovation, also uses constraints to foster creativity. “Constraints are a unique advantage that small teams have over the big guys,” they write. There’s only six people in 37signals, and they’ve been able to build five products, write one book, and create an open-source framework. They even claim that the lack of constraints is what killed the quality of the most recent Star Wars films. From a comment on Slashdot:

No the problem is money. Lucas has way too much of it. Especially for the first film [New Hope] there was a severe budget crunch. They were limited in both money and time. I think this forces a film team to make decisions that in the long run are good for the film. If you have no boundaries, you are more likely to throw in little bits that really have no business being in the movie. If you are limited, you are forced to trim the fat and leave the good bits. With the prequels, Lucas had no limits. He effectively had infinite money and time in which to make these films. As a result he wasn’t forced to REALLY think about which parts worked to help the film and which didn’t.

Constraints seems very counter-intuitive to creativity. Shouldn’t giving yourself total blue-sky freedom make you more creative? How else would you come up with that next great big idea, if you’re forced to hold yourself back?

To that, I ask: have you ever been in a productive brainstorming session? If so, think back to their use of constraints. They could be as innocent as, “brainstorm solutions to solve this specific problem” or “using the resources we currently have, what can we do next?”

One popular brainstorming method, known as lateral thinking, has participants refocusing their minds to different frames of reference. For instance, if I ask you: “It took two hours for two men to dig a hole five feet deep. How deep would it have been if ten men had dug the hole for two hours?”

You might answer logically and say, “twenty-five feet deep.” But in lateral thinking, you could also answer:

  • There are more men but are there more shovels?
  • Would we rather have 5 holes each 5 feet deep?
  • The two men may be an engineering crew with digging machinery.
  • What if one man in each group is a manager who will not actually dig?
  • Etc.

Lateral thinking isn’t the removal of constraints. It merely shifts the constraints over. Psychologist Edward de Bono created the Six Hats method as an application of lateral thinking. In it, participants approach the problem by putting on six different “hats” (effectively, constraints).

  • Red hat – think emotionally
  • White hat – think logically & realistically
  • Green hat – think about creative solutions
  • Yellow hat – categorize and combine solutions
  • Black hat – think skeptically of those solutions

All of these organizations and individuals – Google, 37signals, and Edward de Bono – have all realized the need for constraints in being creative and innovative. Money for art is just another constraint, isn’t it? So it shouldn’t stifle creativity; if anything, it should strengthen it.

Will Blog for Cash

What are all the ways to make money off your blog? When Darren Rowse of ProBlogger.net recently published his top income streams, it got me thinking.

My aim isn’t to make a living off my blog. I already have a job I love (it’s like getting paid for a hobby). But I’ll admit I’ve fantasized about making a side income from my blogs. And c’mon, what blogger hasn’t?

So far, there are three five main sources of income for blogs. All are essentially advertising vehicles for businesses, but with some differences.

UPDATED 12/16/2007: The lists below have been revised as I’ve gotten new info from advertisering providers.

  1. Ads
  2. Affiliate programs
  3. Job boards
  4. Paid reviews
  5. Video

Ads

There’s a wide variety of ad types from which to choose. First, there’s the UI of the ad: text, image, video, or RSS. Then there’s the payment method: CPC (cost per click), CPA (cost per action), or CPM (cost per 1000 impressions). Finally, there’s the ad selection: automatically matching your content, explicitly setting the criteria (category, location, keywords, etc), or a hybrid of both. Each will vary in revenue potential, depending on your blog’s content, audience, and popularity.

Affiliate Programs

Affiliate programs basically offer what look like ads for your blog, except they focus on the product or service sold by the parent business. Most offer CPA programs where bloggers get paid for qualified leads. A qualified lead is when a click from the blog leads to a sale. Bloggers get a share of this revenue.

Shopping comparison engines are an exception. They offer CPC affiliate programs because they earn their revenue not from sales, but from clicks from their site to their merchants. Bloggers get a share of this click revenue.

There are too many affiliate programs to list. They can range from direct providers (e.g. retail stores, mortgage providers, insurance companies, etc) to affiliate networks (third-party companies that have set up affiliate programs for others). What I have here are some of the more popular ones, including several affiliate program directories.

Direct Providers

Affiliate Networks

Shopping Comparison Engines

Lists of Affiliate Programs

Job Boards

Job boards are the newest offering on the block. They basically offer businesses a way to advertise their job listings on blogs – and bloggers get to set the price for hosting these job listings. Prices can range from $10 – $500, though bloggers aren’t paid until the job is “closed,” meaning the business hired someone that came through that blog. Essentially, this is a CPA model. One job board, HiddenNetwork, offers a CPM model instead.

This trend seems to be just the tip of something larger: CPA classified listings of any kind of product or service. Anyone, from large businesses to your neighbor down the street, could be creating these listings and advertising them on blogs soon.

Paid reviews

Paid reviews are a new and somewhat controversial form of word-of-mouth marketing using blogs. Business pay anywhere from $5 – $500 for each blog post written to review their product or service. A recent FTC ruling has made it necessary for bloggers to disclose that they’re getting paid for the posts too.

Video

As embeded videos become more widespread on blogs, some companies are finding ways to monetize them through CPC video ads. Placed at the end of the videos, bloggers get a share of the revenue earned each time a video ad is clicked. The creator of the videos also get a share.

Good luck getting rich! And don’t forget the little people who helped you along the way!

Reality TV as Advertising?

My Super Sweet 16 Who’d have thunk that MTV (VIA) could spawn a niche market? In last December’s issue of Entrepreneur magazine, there was an article entitled: “Party Planning for Teens“. It opened with:

Blame MTV’s My Super Sweet 16 for showing teens nationwide the extremes the super-wealthy go to for a child’s coming-of-age soiree. American teens, who number more than 70 million, want what’s hot at their parties–from bar and bat mitzvahs to sweet 16s, quinceañeras and other coming-of-age rites.

That got me thinking. If My Super Sweet 16 could start a new niche market, could similar reality TV shows also start (or jump-start) other markets? What if an advertiser created a reality TV show just to increase the demand for their product or service?

That could be a stupid idea. TV as an advertising medium is losing its luster. More and more kids are on the Internet. They don’t care about TV. Or do they?

Another Entrepreneur article, “Whip Up a Hot Kids’ Cooking Business“, cites a growing interest in cooking classes among today’s youth.

Americans’ interest in cooking has drizzled down to the nation’s kids. From cooking classes and kits to full-fledged cooking parties, this still-hot category even includes kids’ cookbooks in the recipe for success.

It doesn’t point to Top Chef, Hell’s Kitchen, or even the Food Network as influences. But it makes me wonder. Also: has American Idol increased the sales of karaoke machines or customers to karaoke bars?

Goodbye 30-second commercial spot, hello 60-minute TV show!

What’s In Your Pipe?

Yahoo! Pipes You’ve probably heard by now. Yahoo! (YHOO) just released a new service called Pipes.

Pipes is an interactive feed aggregator and manipulator. Using Pipes, you can create feeds that are more powerful, useful and relevant.

I described it to a non-technical friend as: “A way to create mash-ups of RSS feeds through a WYSIWYG UI.” My friend said, “Wha?” then bonked me on the head. So I punched him.

After he regained consciousness, I tried again: “It’s a way to make a new web site from a bunch of other web sites.” “Oh! Cool!” he answered as he rubbed his head. He’s not too bright, you see.

He’s probably not the target market for this tool anyways. But I am. And here’s how:

I’m currently looking for an apartment in San Francisco, CA, that has a garage. Sounds simple enough, right? Unfortunately, Craigslist doesn’t have advanced search options that allow me to really pick out the listings with a garage.

So I created this Pipe. All it does is filter out a bunch of text like “street parking only” and “no garage”, making it a heck of a lot easier to find an apartment with a garage.

This is just one really simple use for this tool. Apparently, there are more profitable ways to use it too. Rok Hrastnik from site-reference.com has written a lengthy piece entitled: “How Marketers Can Use Yahoo! Pipes to Increase Their Online Sales” to show just how.

If you understand RSS and technical concepts like filtering and aggregation, give Pipes a try. Maybe it can improve your online sales. And if you know of a good apartment in San Francisco with a garage, let me know!

Don’t Believe Everything You See

I used to be a pre-press operator. I digitally touched-up photographs and artwork for a national magazine. This included preflighting, color correcting, retouching, positioning, and raster image processing.

Back then, doing all of this work required a Scitex machine, which costed about a quarter of a million dollars. Today, all of that can be done on a MacBook Pro.

But that’s not the scary part. The scary part was what I manipulated.

I airbrushed the wrinkles off of Oprah Winfrey’s face. And Hilliary Clinton’s face. I straightened out their hair, deepened their lipstick, and even shaved off a few pounds. All digitally.

Not scared? Okay, I understand. You never trusted magazine photos anyways, right? How about on TV?

Via: MediaBlog

The Pageview is Dead

Here Lies the Page View 1994-2010 Last December, ComScore reported that someone finally topped Yahoo! (YHOO) in pageviews. It was News Corp’s (NWS) MySpace.

This seemed like big news at the time. “Oh my goodness! Someone beat Yahoo!” Unfortunately, a poor metric was glamourized: the pageview.

David Dueblin at On Tokyo Time amusingly writes:

The page view metric (PV) is already dead! Not everyone got the memo though…

The pageview was important because it gave Internet advertising companies a way to measure the number of users as a means to price their advertising placements. They used it like newspapers and magazines used subscriptions. In the past, this was effective.

The adoption of modern web browsers, however, has changed the game. And advertisers either don’t realize this, or have known it all along (perhaps as far back as late 2005) but didn’t want to tell anyone. Steve Rubel of Micro Persuasian suggests that some advertisers may not want a more accurate metric either:

This is a dirty little secret in the advertising business that no one wants to talk about. Media companies love to promote how many page views their properties get. They’ve used the data to build equity. They will fight it tooth and nail to protect it, perhaps by not embracing interactive technologies as quickly as they should. But that’s not going to stop the revolution from coming.

Modern web browsers have given us the ability to change a piece of a web page without reloading the entire page. This is more popularly known as Ajax. And this technique effectively makes the pageview obsolete. How? Mike Davidson explains it well:

This would be the flow in a, say, Google-engineered network experience:

1. Click over to “GoogSpace”, or whatever we want to call it. (+1 page view)
2. Click through to read and reply to all mail (0)
3. Visit a few friends’ pages (+3)
4. Edit my profile page (+1)

That’s about 5 registered page views. The rest of the interaction comes from XML/HTTP requests.

Here’s the same sequence on MySpace:

1. Click over to MySpace. (+1 page view)
2. Log in, because MySpace doesn’t remember logins very well. (+2)
3. Click through to read and reply to all mail… about three per mail. (+21)
4. Visit a few friends’ pages. (+3)
5. Reload a few pages because of server errors. (+3)
5. Edit my profile page. (+10)

That’s about 40 registered page views… and it’s not an atypical pattern at all, from what I’ve found. Many people have also mentioned that web-based IM generates a ton of clicks for them as well.

In other words: the stuff on your page can dramatically change without having to load a whole new page. Since your page doesn’t change, it doesn’t technically count as a pageview. And if you can’t count it as a pageview, what can you count? What’s a better metric?

Evan Williams of Evhead answers with: “It depends.”

If you’re talking about what’s important to pay attention to on your own site, you have to determine what your primary success criteria are and measure that as best you can. For some sites, that could be subscribers, or paying users, or revenue, or widgets deployed, or files uploaded, or what have you. It may even be pageviews.

Here’s a summary all the metrics I’ve seen used at Internet companies or mentioned elsewhere:

  • Number of signed-in active users (as opposed to number of user accounts)
  • Number of repeat unique visitors (tracked by cookies)
  • Number of relevant actions (for YouTube, it could be number of videos viewed per user)
  • Number of clicks made (Ryan Stewart of The Universal Desktop calls this the “interaction rate“)
  • Number of feed subscribers (though this wouldn’t measure visitors to your site)
  • Time spent (this can be artifically inflated, however)

I agree with Williams. It depends. The best metric is the one that’s relevant for your application and/or market. In some cases, advertisers are going to care more about the number of active users in your system. In other cases, the number of relevant actions & clicks made.

The pageview is dead. Long live the pageview.