Marketing Logic

Courtesy of Xavier Casanova’s Blog:
WebSite analytics is big business, and getting bigger. Unfortunately, most companies still do not see how web analytics can “save” their websites. Which I just don’t get. In my speaking around the country, I always talk about the importance of analytics, how every decision about the site can be made from intelligence gained from the analytics. Yet, I always hear the same excuse, “It’s something I know I should be doing, but it seems boring.”

I think it comes down to two main issues:

1. People aren’t sure which questions to ask about their stats (which metrics matter).

2. People are overwhelmed by their stats as hundreds of charts and graphs aren’t intuitive.

I would always suggest learning more about stats and how to interpret that data. You’ll get every penny out of it in savings on your website. Usability problems can be uncovered by evaluating your site data, search engine effectiveness can be evaluated, market segments and trends can be uncovered, if you know where to look. Find where to look, and you will be rewarded.

Xavier points to the following events in the past few months:

“(1) Coremetrics’ $31M series D funding (company has raised $62M to date), which nicely prolongs a series of other impressive moves in the WA space - (2) WebSideStory’s Visual Sciences acquisition for $57M, (3) Omniture’s $40M round last year, and their plans to go public this year, (4) Google offering Urchin for free, thereby killing the lower end of the market, (5) Webtrends going back to being privately owned.”

This graph is very telling of no clear leader in the Analytics market, but yet significant growth:

What I don’t see is the amount of WebTrends sitting on the shelf. I talk to companies every week that have WebTrends, but either doesn’t know how to use it, are frustrated with it, or haven’t even installed it. Site stats seem to be one of the many contentions between marketing and IT departments, which causes one of the most critical elements of the marketing strategy to fail.

I am a big fan of ClickTracks, and I think they make the most of a marketer’s view of analytics. The more questions you have, the better information you can gather from the program. It is one of the most intuitive and easiest to set up programs, within 10 minutes of using it, you’ll see your site in a whole new light.

I am in Walnut Creek, CA today for Jill Whalen’s High Ranking Seminar.  However, I don’t have to speak until later in the afternoon, as the last speaker for the day.  Which I enjoy - there is aways a different midset of the audience for the last speaker than the first.  I find that I can get away with more and also have more fun.

Yesterday was a typical travel day , considering a trip to the West Coast.  Fortunately, I missed all of the BART delays last night and got to the hotel early in the afternoon.  Now it’s a matter of catching up from a missed day, catching up on news and doing some maintenance while sitting in the back of the seminar room.

A few links of news and events that I think need ot be read by anyone in marketing:

Kathy Sierra’s Church of the Customer Blog:  Dignity is Deadly, part 2. A great post about comparing the mentality  between typical corporate culture and start-ups.

Who’s Blogging?:  Ross Mayfield and Chris Anderson created the Fortune 500 Blogging Wiki.  Find out who in the Fortune 500 is blogging and where the blogs are.  As of this month, 24% of Fortune 500’s had some kind of blog presence.

And finally?  What is Heroin Content?  Vincent Flanders (one of my first and best influences) explains . . . .

Courtesy of Rand over at SEOMoz, Google looks to have a search refining query for recipes. This immediately caught my attention, as I always seem to be searching for a recipe for the evening meal.

I love cooking and it is one of those activities that just seem to calm me after a long day. Amazingly, I found a very nice Middle-Eastern recipe for lamb right out of the initial search. A great tool for cooks and those who love food!

I first heard about this a few months back, when someone blogged about the attention Snakes on a Plane was getting from simply the combination of the title and the lead character, Samuel L. Jackson.  I must admit, those to elements create some interesting images in my head.  Apparently, it does for others as well, but to a whole new level. Google now has over 2 million results for “Snakes on a Plane“.
The creators of the movie have watched intently as fan-created trailers have hit the net, along with plot suggestions, movie posters, T-shirts, and of course, blogs.  Filming was wrapped up last summer, but the producers are re-shooting scenes based on the input from the fan base already created by the movie.

This is an amazing example of word of mouth, citizen-marketing, whatever you want to call it.  I chalk it up to the combination of Samuel L. Jackson and the name and idea of the movie – it has to be hilarious.  This movie has become a cult phenomenon before anyone has even seen it.  And that’s how you create buzz, everyone.  Allowing the customers to drive what they want to see in the movie.  Of course, you couldn’t honestly say you were expecting Lord of the Rings quality in a movie like this, would you?

Courtesy Church of the Customer Blog, New Line Cinema is now asking fans to create an original song for the movie.  Now that’s listening to your market.

An excellent observational post over at  Customer Listening.  The writer draws an analogy between taking his son to an aquarium and a marketer observing what he thinks is a real life focus group behind a one-way mirror.  The aquarium may have real fish, but the environment is artificial.  Life is sustained by scientists, students, diets regulated and very little “Law of Nature” is experienced in the aquarium.

In the same right, a focus group is made up of consumers in an artificial environment.  Customers that are not being asked to make a split decision between products in a store isle, but being led in a discussion with a “handler.”  The writer makes the claim that marketers need to be in the actual environment, talking with the customers, getting to know them and their tendencies.

This reminds me of a great book that I read a few months ago, Paco Underhill’s Why we Buy: The Science of Shopping.  Underhill takes the science of observing the customer in their natural environment to new heights, giving amazing insight to marketing practices and simple things that can enable better sales.  Amazingly, I learned a lot that applies to online marketing from this book that focused mostly on the shopping experience.

This happened early last week, a Marxist parody site, The People’s Cube, seemed to have been dropped from Google’s index. Now, as a Marxist parody site, this was picked up in the conservative blog, Little Green Footballs (of Dan Rather memo-gate fame). Of course, this picked up steam as a conspiracy from Google to suppress a comedic view of Marxism.

Shortly afterwards, Matt Cutts posted an explanation that had little to do with the content, but rather the hidden content of keywords, links and hidden CSS text. Matt recommended purging the spam first and then submitting a re-inclusion request.

I have always recommended that people be extremely honest and sincere in their re-inclusion requests, that manners will go a long way and it is always better to be nice. However, Matt posts the first few lines of the re-inclusion request from The People’s Cube, who chose to be a little more confrontational ;

“Dear comrades at Google . . .
We suspect it is also a deliberate removal - much in the spirit of 1984-style historical revisionism - removal of a “people’s enemy” from life and history. …. We can only think of three reasons for this:
1. Google is retaliating against sites that ridiculed its Google China project.
2. Google has begun to implement its Google China policies in the rest of the free world.
3. A left-leaning Google employee who’s got access to the database was suffering a nervous breakdown over the mockery of Marxism on our site, and so he or she dastardly removed/blocked The People’s Cube, hoping to “improve” the public discourse by silencing the competition.

You tell me which one it is.”

This would be my best example of what not to do with a re-inclusion request.

Knowing spam, penalties and re-inclusions like I do, I was rolling with laughter at this whole situation. All parody aside, I think that the People’s Cube got more exposure than they could have ever imagined at their own expense. Looking over the Cube website lately, there are songs about Google suppression of free speech, tributes to the power of 1984 Orwellian group-thought, and some pretty hilarious headlines.

One of my favorites: ” Google: information is like coffee and we’re the filter”

Of course, I posted this for no real educational value, but simply for the comedy that is life.

Now, there was some not-funny things that happened as a result of this. Some supposed “SEO” company found out the who the design company was for the People’s Cube website, and then tracked down as many of their clients as they could and then called them and told them that Google would penalize their sites as a result of their association with The Cube.

This “SEO Company” was asking for payment to prevent the penality, otherwise they would report the association. This is Marxist parody, right?  Unfortunately not. This has been happening to a few other people as well. It looks like some companies are using Matt’s examples that he posts on his blog as “meat” for their bogus “optimization” cold calling campaign.

Not nice, guys.

In the latest of ridiculous lawsuits against Google, this one has to be one of the most pathetic, creating a firestorm of criticism from the SEO community:

Entitlement Mentality on the Web

More Dumb Litigants 

If a website is going to sue Google for losing rankings, they should at least educate themselves first as to what the typical reasons are for losing those rankings.  The Google Guidelines are probably the most underutilized resource for webmasters and web managers.   While suing a search engine for lost rankings leading to lost income is a joke in itself, one SEO pointed out that they also are using Google’s Adsense at the top of every page. Talk about biting the hand that feeds . . .

Other SEO’s made note that Kinderstart was nothing more than a glorified link directory.  Still others pointed to specific architectural problems within the site that would cause serious problems.

The lesson here is to know full well what you are getting into.  If you are going to sue Google, you will have an entire industry of SEO’s going to your site, and critically evaluating your website from every angle; programming, content and link associations.