Marketing Logic

An article in the Boston Globe shows that blogging can be a good move for your career.  Blogging shows that you are more than an observer in your profession, and willing to share socially about what you do and your opinions in it.  According to the article, “A well-executed blog sets you apart as an expert in your field.”

In related stories, many business magazines are also running stories about how employers are searching on prospective employees by searching their names and reading their websites and blogs.  I’ll never forget one story of a man that was helping his niece to find a job, when he Googled her name, her blog was top in the search results.  The name of the blog: The drunken musings of a college student.  Of course, a little familial advice was dispensed and she probably learned her lesson.

Interestingly, the article focuses more on the networking ability of blogs to expose a person’s opinions, work, and skills to a larger audience which could result in job offers, bigger opportunities and breaks.

Blogging – it’s more than just the cool thing to do . . .

Courtesy: Search Engine Guide

ClickTracks is offering user the chance to test drive the unique features and interface of their analytics software by offering ClickTracks Appetizer. With Google’s release of Google Analytics late last year, it changed the landscape of the analytics market. ClickTracks has decided to come back by offering a sampling of the features that are available in the full program. Some of the more popular features will be able to be tested and experienced once a month as the ClickTracks team enables the feature, creating a true appetizer experience.

This is not meant to be a full analytics solution, but an enhancement to one that is in place, but it will give site owners and web managers a glimpse in to the robust capabilities of ClickTracks and some of the unique tracking that it offers.

The best of the features, the site overlay, will be available in the appetizer version. The visitor labeling will be available to some degree. For my money, the power of labeling visitors based on keyword groups is by far the best feature of ClickTracks. Grouping visitors by keyword group and then analyzing the behavior and tendencies of that group is as easy as falling down in this simple interface.

In addition to this ClickTracks will also be offering free seminars to help new and existing user to get the most out of their ClickTracks. Any user is encouraged to sign up, as new features are always being added and there are many different methods to extract valuable information using this product. Upcoming ClickTracks Seminars.

Or, just go ahead and buy a version of ClickTracks Pro, trust me, you’ll love it. I’ve seen some under-the-wraps features for the 6.1 release and I have to say that the ClickTracks team is one of the most innovative and responsive development teams for website marketers and SEO’s.

When the New York Times has an article about tweaking your headlines for the search engines, you know that the word is out.

While the article makes some points on writing styles and some of the challenges that editors now face when attempting to write misleading witty and creative headlines to sell their stories to readers. Newspapers have begun to understand that their sometimes clever headlines may not provide the search engines with enough information to properly classify the story, so they have adopted a clearer, more factual approach (say it isn’t so!)

One of my favorite examples in the article was this:
“On the Web, space limitations can coincide with search-engine preferences. In the print version of The New York Times, an article last Tuesday on Florida beating U.C.L.A. for the men’s college basketball championship carried a longish headline, with allusions to sports history: “It’s Chemistry Over Pedigree as Gators Roll to First Title.” On the Times Web site, whose staff has undergone some search-engine optimization training, the headline of the article was, “Gators Cap Run With First Title.”

So, readers don’t desire clarity and factual headlines as well? It seems to be summed up with the headline of the article: This Boring Headline is Written for Google. I’m sure a few SEO copywriters I know would take odds with that opinion.

Danny jumps into the act as well . . .

“Journalists, they say, would be wise to do a little keyword research to determine the two or three most-searched words that relate to their subject — and then include them in the first few sentences.”That’s not something they teach in journalism schools,” said Danny Sullivan, editor of SearchEngineWatch, an online newsletter. “But in the future, they should.”

Bravo, Danny.

Imagine. Keyword research into what people search for, how they speak and the words that they use to find news – it’s a great concept to model. It might go far into getting newspapers back into the public arena, as both stock prices and readership are dropping for the old media giants. New media, such as Google News, Yahoo News and thousands of well-known blogs are providing instant news fast with access to a variety of additional news sources. Even YouTube and MySpace are surpassing the New York Times handily in daily reach numbers (Courtesy Church of the Customer).

Do you ever check on your own products and see what people are saying about them (or you) online? I was able to be on a panel discussion during last week’s eCommExpo where we talked about viral marketing. It was a very good experience and the Q&A portion was a lot of fun. I felt I learned as much as I taught by listening to the other panelists.

Today, I have been pounding away at Microsoft Word, and something that always bugs me about MS Word is the Adobe toolbar that always seems to take up its own space, bumping everything else down. I like to have my viewing area and as much as I try to move that crazy little toolbar (that I never use) it always pops back.

So, I did what any good technophile does, and I go to a search engine to figure out how to get this irritating little problem solved. Lo, and behold I am not alone:

With over 2 million results for “remove PDF toolbar from Word” you’d imagine that someone might get the message. Not only are these results telling of the frustration that people feel, there are also discussion groups with dedicated threads to this topic - some on the adobe forums themselves!

Apparently this is fixed in Adobe 7. Until I upgrade, please don’t tell me that I have to rely on a hack to get this thing off my MS Word. This is the lesson in creating a viral market. Adobe owns the market when it comes to PDF’s. I’ve sung their praises when they did things right, such as better accessibility features. But isn’t this enough of a call from the market that a “feature” is not really a feature, but an irritant - and not the slight irritant that I thought I was alone in feeling.

What “features” might you have in your products that users may not like, or even hate?

In order to compete with similar products from Google and Yahoo, Microsoft has created Office Live. It is in Beta and the comments about the back-end management of the site have been very complimentary so far. Users have access to all the features of Office Essentials and to Office Collaboration, which are all free throughout the Beta. (Oh, they offer free analytics as well . . . )

Eric Meyer talked about another Microsoft project as well and was very impressed in his review. Microsoft Expression. Apparently this is “FrontPage done right” as Eric calls it. It creates “sophisticated CSS –based layouts”. The demo is pretty impressive.

Not long after seeing Eric’s post I wandered upon a similar-themed post at The Web2.0 Place, where Edmon Begoli reviews Microsoft Visual Web Developer Express Edition 2005. There is no auto-generated HTML, even when operating in WSYWIG mode. It also supports CSS 2.1, XHTML and even assists for CSS.

These products are strange, because of the mixed messages, at this point. The upcoming of release of IE7 has CSS developers on the verge of frustration with Microsoft because of the lack of CSS adherence. Microsoft’s answer is that the CSS bugs will not be addressed in the first release and is not talking about the CSS problems that IE7 has in the initial release.

This has to make you wonder about the angle that Microsoft is taking at the industry. If they can get into the design tools for basic site building, and get the CSS crowd on their side (not until IE gets worked out), then it certainly provides a foothold, but to where?

However, it was the doomed from the start, says Jackie Huba at Church of the Customer.  Anytime you give the public the tools to create something for themselves and have it displayed at that company’s website, you are asking for trouble.

Chevy was asking for people to take a variety of clips, music and create their own commercial.  People could add graphics and slogans, but the campaign was taken over by eco-groups building commercials that became anti-GM and anti-SUV.  All of a sudden, GM had some cleaning up to do . . .

Somehow, it seems as though big corporations and ad agencies are always trying to create the next big viral campaign instead of letting it happen.  When a viral campaign is forced, it backfires, or usually, just sputters out, as people can tell when it’s faked.  For example, take a look at The Captain’s Blog.  This was supposed to be a blog started by Captain Morgan to sell rum.  Unfortunately, there are only 5 weeks of posts and the last one is over a year old.

If you want to see viral in action, go to YouTube.com (which is an example of viral in itself) and do a search for “brokeback parody.”  There are hundreds of Brokeback mountain trailer spoofs.  Using the music and lines from the original such as “they forgot about ‘love’” in the spoofs, users have created Brokeback to the Future, Brokeback Trek, Brokeback Island (Lost), Lord of the Brokeback (LOTR), Brokeback Dumb and Dumber, Brokeback Kid (Karate Kid), Brokeback About Nothing (Seinfeld), and my personal favorite, Brokeback Stooges.  There are hundreds of self created videos and many using clips from other movies and shows to spoof this trailer.

No contest, no prizes, just for fun.

Frank Gruber at TechCrunch posts a great evaluation of web-based feed feaders.  He rates and evaluates nine readers, with a heavy emphasis on Web 2.0 features (ratings, tagging, social contacts, and recommendations).

Frank also introduces two newer products Attensa and Gritwire, which is a Flash-based reader with many Web 2.0 features coming soon.

I was glad to see my preference, Bloglines, getting a great review.  However, it seemed to get beat up for a lack of 2.0 features, which doesn’t really bother me at this point.