Tag: Features

Owning Up

Social media technologies can be a powerful tool, but it’s important to know who within your organization should be taking the lead for your social media marketing strategy, which includes responsibility for everything from budgeting to staffing.

It’s commonplace for executives and managers to ask about social media leadership and inquiries stem from the growing desire to get involved with communities of customers, partners, and employees.

However, this question of who within an organization “owns” a specific community isn’t easily answered because it’s really three complex questions that need to be answered first: who interacts with the community; who pays for it; and who champions it?

Who Interacts with the Community?

Organizations have many questions when they get started with social media. They want to know who will write the blog, who will run the forum, who will manage the Wiki. These are all good questions about who you entrust with the responsibility of being your spokesperson to a specific community.

Some companies, such as General Motors, have high visibility bloggers (like GM’s Vice Chairman Bob Lutz). Other companies have a general manager overseeing its community efforts (like Intuit’s Scott Wilder). And other businesses field an team (like Southwest Airline’s Nuts About Southwest blog, which includes contributions from a diverse group of employees including Gordon Guillory, a Structures Mechanic in the Heavy Maintenance Department).

These different approaches show that any employee can interact with communities that they never deal with face-to-face with in their regular work. Community contacts shouldn’t be determined by title or department, but rather, by the mindset and judgment of the person in the job. It must be someone deeply passionate about developing that specific relationship – even if it means challenging long-held corporate culture and standards.

Natural places to look for these individuals are in marketing, public relations, and corporate communications. But don’t overlook customer support, market research, and product management as well.

Who Pays for Community?

The easy answer is that it depends on the goal of the community and who benefits most from the community. For example, a company may form a community for the express purpose of gathering insights into its customers. In this case, market research could work with vendors (such as Networked Insights, Passenger, or Communispace) to create a private community that can be polled and asked questions. These interactions can be used to supplement other sources like surveys and focus groups. In this example, it’s clear that market research should fund the community. However, companies can also allocate back the expense to other departments that also tap into that community for insights.

Communities can also be formed to provide better support. For example, through the use of discussion boards where customers, as well as company representatives, can answer support questions, the customer service department can eventually see decreased costs. In that case, customer service should pay for the community, as well as provide focus and direction.

One circumstance demands additional detail — when the IT organization should pay for (and control) community. IT usually gets involved when there’s a need to have a company-wide adoption of social and collaboration technologies. Historically, this has meant enterprise deployment of collaboration platforms like Sharepoint. In contrast, most social technologies are point solutions, designed for easy adoption by business users and requiring minimal IT involvement. IT typically becomes involved in social technologies when integration is needed into existing corporate systems and databases, where the role IT plays is one of ensuring security and systems maintenance. At some point, there will be enough point solutions where IT may also need to get involved to ensure corporate consistency in identity, data structures, and security, as well as in vendor and platform selection.

In the end, who pays for and thus controls the community should be fairly easy to determine because the formation of the community should be based on concrete goals that benefit the organization. If the goals are unclear, then the question of who pays for the community is the least of your worries.

Who Champions Community?

Deploying social media and creating communities is hard work that often challenges long-held company beliefs and cultures. But social media and community managers typically are younger, and earlier in their career, and thus they don’t always have the skills or the clout to be a change agent within an organization.

What’s needed is the third area of community ownership – executive sponsorship. Take for example Ben and Jerry’s. CEO Walt Freese is deeply involved in social media at the ice cream maker and not because he thinks it’s cool, but rather because he believes social technologies are crucial to deepening relationships with core customers – the lynchpin to increasing customer lifetime value.

Freese’s office title is Chief Euphoria Officer and he is the bearer of the social media torch inside the company, encouraging the integration of social media into all aspects of customer relationships, from marketing to customer service.

And at H&R Block, Paula Drumm, vice president of Interactive Media, has been the executive champion. She’s been educating executives while steering her team to engage with customers in multiple social media channels. Like many companies, H&R Block executives are conservative and come from a generation that’s generally skeptical about social technologies. Drumm’s change management skills have helped the company become a model of how to develop customer relationships with social media.

A key skill of this champion is the ability to understand far and how fast to push. In Naked Conversations by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel, the authors write about the importance of understanding the “corporate membrane” – how to stretch it to accommodate social media but not to the point of breaking.

The hard part of about this particular question is that it’s hard to appoint someone into position — usually, this person volunteers because they see the need and have the passion and energy to lead change within the organization.

Everyone owns Community

It’s a mistake to treat community as a separate, distinct asset because you’re talking about relationships that are core to the form and function of a business. In the end, everything that a company does flows through some sort of process that touches a relationship be it with a customer, partner, or employee. Thus, there’s opportunity for everyone in the company to own a piece of community, if only they are given the chance to do so.

I believe that a company that can spread the wealth of community involvement and ownership widely throughout a company will always be better positioned to win than one that doesn’t. After all, all companies want to be closer to their customers.

So, think hard not only about who will own community today in your organization, but also who is best positioned to open and share that ownership throughout the entire organization. The future health of your company may well depend on it.

Participation Is Not Passive

Elvis has left the building and he took the audience with him.

The only people left are fellow participants. Social media has made everyone an author, creator, director, developer, editor, critic and media outlet. There are millions of voices, but they are all saying the same thing – listen to me.

Participants do not consume passively. They do not sit silently ready to have their eyeballs converted into cash. Participants participate. They create their own original information, entertainment and art. They remix their own version of mainstream pop culture – copyrighted or not. They post their thoughts, publish their fears and fact check faster than any newsroom. They share with their friends to discover the quirky and interesting, making it an instant blockbuster- at least for 15 minutes.

Participants have ideas to be declared. Each of them is a market of one. Collectively they are a trend, a publishing powerhouse and a voice to be heard; a voice that has something to say. Participants have changed the way media is published and interactions are monetized. But more broadly and importantly, they have changed the flow of global information from top down to bottom up. They are changing the tone and tempo of the conversation.

Who’s Listening

While there are so many buzzwords surrounding this topic – social media, Web 2.0, conversation – many are overused, misused and misinterpreted.

The word conversation comes up over and over, but it’s a concept that is as old language itself – maybe even older. It is not a new construct invented by the social media advocates.

And while the medium for conversation has changed and evolved over time, the fundamental human need for conversation remains the same. We want to connect to each other. We want to express ourselves. We want to hear authentic voices engaged in a dialogue with us. Everyone wants to be heard and feel valued.

But who is doing the talking is also important. The conversation between customers and businesses must include people that are empowered by businesses to make decisions. This is not just about your support staff or marketing department interacting with customers. CEO’s, vice presidents, product managers, and other executives must be part of the conversations.

The Art of Conversation

It’s also what is said and how it is said that is key. With social media, you must treat these conversations as you would any face-to-face interaction – act like you would at a dinner party. After all, this is a social setting like any other. You say what you would say in any face-to-face conversation at a dinner party. Respond respectfully to criticism. Escalate the feedback. Act on it. Thank people for compliments. Elevate them. Ask them for more information. Reward them for their efforts. Empower them to spread the word.

That all sounds great, but ultimately for businesses, it’s about the return on investment or quantifying revenue generated by these conversations. At this point, it’s hard to put a specific value on a human connection or word or mouth. But imagine the value if all this “idle chatter” was publicly documented, archived and spread around to thousand of friends and connections. With social media and the web, it is.

The return on investment is nothing short of identifying your weaknesses in a rolling and real-time focus group. It is finding your friends in the marketplace and turning them into evangelists for your product or service. It is the new marketing – one-on-one influence of your market.

More importantly though, it’s beyond influencing your market; It’s about your market influencing you – shaping your product or service. It’s about making your stuff worth having a conversation about.

Getting Started

First, do some homework. Read some books – The Cluetrain Manifesto and Naked Conversations – are a good start. Then move on to Blink and Now is Gone. Then get off the beaten track. Start using the tools and services your market is using – Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Seesmic and FriendFeed, to name just a few.

But having a Facebook profile or a presence is not enough. That’s just like walking into a dinner party. The next step is finding someone interesting to talk to. Participate. Find Facebook groups that matter. Search Twitter for people talking about your company, product, service, industry, competitors and pain points. Respond to them. Listen to them. And respond again. You just had a conversation. A dialogue between two participants where one communicates something, the other digests the information and responds.

It’s not magic, but it is magical. It is basic. It is human. And it works.

Show me the Money

Currently, looking for the money in social media marketing is like asking directions in a foreign land when you don’t speak the language and don’t know how the locals connect and communicate.

Social media is commonly defined as comprising “primarily Internet-based tools for sharing and discussing information among human beings.”

As an online marketer you want to hear about ad copy and conversions. Everyone – your audience, customers, and your employees – wants you to listen, connect, and collaborate. You want to control the conversation so people click. They want you to understand there is so much more – including profits.

Here are three models that are working and speak to business in terms it can understand – cost savings, marketing, advertising, customer service, and lead generation – as well as terms it may not yet understand like passion, heart, transparency, sharing, not controlling, and being there for your customers. These are business models that go beyond mere advertising.

Business Model 1 – Social Product Development

Why hire employees to develop new products when you can have the audience do it with you, and both of you get paid? Even better, what if you could involve all of your audience to share, participate, and spread the word, and get them paid as well?

This is the new world of virtual currency or creating value out of traditional points systems. T-shirt maker Threadless.com allows people to judge, promote, and even get their picture taken wearing a t-shirt, and rewards them with points each step of the way. Points can be redeemed for cash.

While MetaCafe and others have tried to incentivize content creators by paying them a fee based on ads, Threadless.com takes it to a new level where the creators and fans of their T-shirts can help spread the word and generate sales.

How They Do It

Designs are submitted to the community and printed by Threadless, who shares some of the revenue with the creator. Each action is tied to some form of currency; some of it is monetary, yet in social networks much of the social currency is how people view your reviews, your creativity, and support it.

By incentivizing certain actions and maintaining an active community, they unleash the genius of their audience and profi t.

  • Incentivize the product creators: they invite people to submit T-shirt designs. If it is selected, the person can win up to $2500, or maybe even $10,000 if it is selected one of the Best.
  • Pay the slogan creators: submit a slogan and win up to $200, so you don’t have to be able to draw to win.
  • Incentivize consumers to spread the word: Members of this social community can recommend t-shirts via email, or traditional affiliate links, and earn two credits (about $3) per sale. If they get their picture taken with their favorite T-shirt and submit it, they get one credit ($1.50). If the picture is used in the main site for promotion, they get 10 credits ($15.00). Considering t-shirts run $9-$30, that is a significant bounty for a small action.
  • Reward people for taking action: The key to Threadless is the fun community. Just paying people to promote and create is one thing; rewarding them for good behavior and excellence is the new way of product development.

Business Model 2 – Direct Response Media: Ads and Performance Marketing

This is the most common model in use, with businesses basically trying to fit the traditional marketing world onto social media with mixed results. When matched to the right audience, this can be very effective. Still, targeting will almost always decrease the overall size of the audience you are reaching, so numbers are not off the charts.

Direct media is the evolution of traditional direct response media (direct mail, DRTV, etc.) and Internet direct response like pay per click and affiliate programs into the social media space. The goal is to get a sale, and these folks have been posting ads, manipulating search engines, and building links.

How They Do It

  • Use personality to create buzz: Create buzz about product by using audio and video-driven business personalities, driving people from social media portals like Facebook and MySpace to their own sites, and even social networks, to create ongoing business.

Gary Vaynerchuk, WineLibrary.TV: Gary combines a video show about tasting wine with ongoing presence in many social networks. He drives people from these networks to his own Wine social network, Corkd.com (he bought it after being successful) and drives retail sales through WineLibrary.com, among other sites.

Gary’s personality plays against traditional wine snobbery and drives sales. Personality is essential, because in social media, how they remember you is the most important thing”and if they remember you. For retailers,this means driving repeat visits, which the video, social networking and marketing continually generate.

  • Develop new direct response ads: Allow people to interact, watch, and make selections within the advertising itself. Instead of an ad inciting people to click and leave the space they are at, these ads invite people to stay where they are, browse, and buy.

MyWeddingFavors.com has an affiliate program that uses video and a special video widget from Qoof.com. Affiliates place these ads in social media spaces, where videos can be played right on the page.

People can choose, watch, and explore while they are in the middle of their own social media experience. Basically the performance based marketing invites them to engage and interact with the ad, and pulls them away from what they are doing BEFORE sending them to the eventual site to buy the product.

Other tactics include:

Buying low cost advertising ($0.50 – $20 CPM) space on a variety of social media through ad networks. Ad buys are mostly based on straight ROI. Clickthroughs are very low. Branding ads are rarely successful.

Posting consistently to blogs, social bookmarking sites, video sites, and tag these posts with keywords in the title, tags, and description to drive search traffic.

Do performance marketing deals and pay others to promote and pay a bounty for a lead or sale. If the ad does not perform, no one gets paid. Lead generation is dominant here, especially to targeted audiences where it works best; because people are often more open to inquiring than to buying.

Business Model 3 – Customer Relationship Management and Employ Retention Management as Social Support Media

Many smart companies are using social media to better engage with their customers, and some to better engage with their employees. But social media canal so be used to manage customer relationships as well.The social media business model is very simple. Your content is your marketing tool. Sois your contact with people, either directly or watching over the discussions, questions, and interactions around your product, your brand or inside your company.

How They Do It

Zappos empowers its employees through an innovative training program which allows them to go out, via Twitter, and be available to answer questions from people and customers. A whole book could be written about Zappos customer service, and in fact it has, by the employees of Zappos (you can find it on their website). Giving employees technology will not solve your problems; inviting them to be passionate about your business does!

The key issue is trust; good employees find good customers if you teach them. Zappos sees employees as assets and ambassadors, not as a cost of doing business, and it shows. They are not afraid of how powerful their employees can become, and in fact, encourage it.

Many smart companies are improving communication and efficiency within their own company with social media, as a way to improve communication internally. Social media technologies like microblogging enable employees to follow each other for specific projects, and gives management an excellent tool to keep an eye on the growth of the business.

Best Buy claims it has drastically improved employee retention with social media. Technical firms like Cisco and Intel swear by their internal social media initiatives that foster ideas and feedback, while saving money and time. Financial firms like Wells Fargo are seeing better production by employing some social media within the company.

As you can see, there is money in terms of sales, yet also in terms of savings in social media. It is not just an advertising game, and it is one that can change business.

Be Unique

If you want to find the money you have to create your own business model. One that deals with your goals while building a relationship with your audience (and employees) that can reduce expenses and build sales year after year if you manage it right…or better yet, moderate it instead of manage it.

Social media demands a blend of heart and business savvy. You cannot have one without the other; if there’s no business, we should all ignore social media right now (like most of you, right?). If there’s no heart, if no one shows up as customers and employees get bored being employees,nothing really happens. Put the two together and you may find the magic, and profits, you are looking for… because it is the new game and it is happening right now.

Incentivize Your Audience

Budgets are tightening, and advertisers need to boost ROI- fast. The social Web is gaining value not only as a medium that delivers measurable results, but also as a resource for gaining insight a company can use to make all of its advertising (TV, print, online) more effective, to increase ROI across the board.

Social media is known for its wealth of useful information. Using relevant analytics can pinpoint audiences and learn more about them. Need to reach adults who are interested in European travel? How about people in Los Angeles who like spy novels? Done. You can even aggregate more information along the way and optimize your ads as you go, to fine-tune your reach and make your campaigns more effective.

But as important as such targeting is – and it is significant – there’s another valuable aspect to social media: the level of engagement of the consumers with the social “medium” itself (compared with any other medium – TV, radio, print or even traditional online).

People choose to spend time on social sites. They’re not passive observers – they’re active participants. They’re playing games, sending messages, reading blog posts, poking their Facebook friends, commenting on someone else’s photo, and the list goes on. They’re typing, thinking, laughing, and conquering their enemies (only in the games, we hope). They’re engaged.

Use social media to provide access to enough data about demographics, traffic, interests and social actions to pinpoint a target audience and understand them better, and the attention that users give to this medium while they’re engaged.

What you get is the potential to gain unprecedented levels of information about your audiences and your messages by offering people incentives to give some of that attention to you.

The Payoff: Increased ROI

The idea of incentives isn’t new. Most of us have handed over our contact information for the chance to win a trip to Hawaii (or name your destination), or responded to a handful of survey questions to get a free soda with our next meal. The virtual world is no different. In this virtual economy, people still have wants – someone playing a game wants extra points, someone with a virtual pet wants extra gold to buy toys for it, someone in love wants to send a gift of a dozen virtual roses.

The new opportunity for advertisers is to apply the principle of incentives that we’re all familiar with offline to the virtual economy. Offer game points, gold for virtual pets, or a free gift, in exchange for taking a certain action.

It’s in this action where the real gold lies, thanks to the two characteristics of social media mentioned above. No longer are the actions limited to collecting a consumer’s mailing address or surveying for opinions that aren’t tied to any demographics.

The action is to view your ad (banner or video) and answer a few questions about it. The incentive is whatever the publisher is offering as a reward (the points, the gold, the gift, anything).

The payoff to the advertiser is intelligence that will help you increase ROI within all types of advertising.

Your survey can be designed to measure consumer perception:

Awareness – Who has heard of my brand?
Attitudes – How do people feel about my brand?
Favorability – Do people like my brand?
Intent – How likely are people to purchase my products or services?
Preference – Do people prefer my brand or products over others?

The right analytics partner can couple those results with user demographics like age, location and gender, along with interests and social actions. For example, anonymous User A is a 45-year-old woman who lives in St. Paul, reads murder mysteries, plays Scramble on Facebook and says she is “very likely” to see the next James Bond movie.

That is a significant amount of actionable intelligence for any company. In our fictional example, using aggregate (and always anonymous) audience information, the movie studio might discover that while it’s been concentrating ad dollars on reaching the male audience, perhaps there’s value in targeting females that match certain demographics.

Beyond its significant value as an advertising channel in and of itself, the social web is becoming a giant testing ground for companies to discover who their audiences are and how to more effectively reach them – from any medium.

The social space is evolving into a place that offers advertisers an efficient way to understand audience behavior and perception – and to reach people with precision targeting like we’ve never seen before. You couldn’t ask for a better incentive to get social.

Content vs. SEO

Hamlet Batista, president and CEO of NEMedia, wants to change your content. He wants to change it so much that he can’t wait to get his search team cracking on it. It’s his bread and butter. And like any SEO outfit, he claims he can get your site optimized and ranking rapidly. But he also has a passion for words. He wants to respect your content – the carefully crafted articles, summaries and reviews you painstakingly labor over. “You have to write the content for the user,” he says. “If they don’t like it, they are going to leave.”

His mantra seems to echo throughout the Internet recently, especially as Google and other search engines keep refining how they rank your site. That means publishers have to keep toying with their optimization. There’s just no way around that, but it also means that some site owners will sacrifice the uniqueness of their content to get the rankings. So, the big question becomes, does doing good SEO cancel out the ability to have compelling content?

Batista points out that about 20 percent of queries people type every day are new keywords. He calls this the “invisible longtail” where there is always a set of new keywords publishers have to optimize for. He calls it a new opportunity. For some sites, just following the SEO 101 rules about using keywords in content and getting your tags and titles in order dilutes the single exclusive thing that makes a site unique – its tone of voice.

Taking a Tone

Attitude is often ignored as more search marketers chase the most recent algorithm changes in Google. But adjusting a site and content accordingly is always going to have only a short-term effect.” It’s important to understand the fundamental nature of how information retrieval works to really be able to get the most out of an optimization project,” LeeOdden, CEO of search and public relations consultancy TopRank Online Marketing, says. However, he adds that, “I often hear content purists confuse attempts at understanding how search engines work with gaming them and it’s just not the same thing. It’s the old debate about whether great content or great links gets you better rankings.”

Odden likens the question to debating which is most important, air or water. “Links and content are both necessary for competitive search marketing efforts. Emphasizing one over the other depends on the situation. Excelling at both is the ideal,” he says.

While understanding all that goes into making search engines tick – in terms of algorithms, methodologies and the importance of link building – is helpful to an overall optimization plan, Odden says that content is equally important.

NEMedia’s Batista goes one better and says that “Content producers don’t use the same words as a content consumer. “He says that users will write in terms of problems, not in keywords. If you’ve been robbed and you search for an alarm system, Batista says that most people will present the problem (“They broke into my house and stole my laptop.”) and not the solution (“I need an alarm for my 4 bedroom house.”). He likens it to the symptoms you relate to a doctor. Most people do not go into a doctor’s office and state, “I have a liver condition; I need Lipitor.”

Going Natural

That’s why some search professionals are advocating more natural language in content whether selling shoes or promoting CRM software. Write content naturally at first and do not worry about the page, suggests Batista, then go through it for keywords, adjusting tags, titles and link building along the way. Don’t get too focused on rankings for all the keywords on the page and neglect a sense of narrative. Batista says a lot of SEO people get too caught up in the technical side of optimization and ignore common sense. Lisa Barone, a senior writer at search consultancy, Bruce Clay, writes that content itself is changing. “It used to be that you go to a page, you open it, you parse it and you index it. Now, Web pages are increasingly based on AJAX. It’s like a Choose Your Own Adventure novel. It’s all little fragments of XTML. Crawling it is a hard thing to think about.”

“Sadly,” says SEO and marketing consultant, Anthony Gregory, “a lot of SEO copywriting is not very charming for humans to read.” He says to “remember that the goal of effective SEO writing is not only to improve your searchability and search engine rankings but also to lure customers to your site.”

Keyword stuffing – the practice of repeating the keywords in content copy until it looks like a gorilla wrote it – is a rejected method these days. He says the search engines have become too smart and can recognize this pretty easily. A site could be labeled as a spam site and create a big headache when trying to get it ranked again. He says that a site full of badly written SEO articles makes the site owner “look greedy and desperate for business.” A talent for writing for the user and the search engines is a rare one, and not one that necessarily comes when hiring an SEO professional.

A Balancing Act

There are some things that an SEO consultant may know that a publisher doesn’t. SEO consultant J. Walker says some search engine algorithms prefer pages with higher word counts. The highest ranking pages in Yahoo averaged 1,300 words per page while Google’s high rankers averaged 900 or so. Not that word count alone will propel your site to number one. She says that unless a publisher is able to pour money into paid ad campaigns, they should hire a copywriter or learn the SEO techniques for themselves.

Some writers struggle with striking the balance and do all they can to help keep a piece of copy optimized – even through adversity. Shailey Motial, a writer for content provider Chillibreeze.com questioned herself when assigned to write copy incorporating the phrase “statistics of home schooled in kindergarten” a minimum of four times in a 500 word article.”Was I corrupting my art?” she asked. “Am I guilty of diluting the form of writing by inserting predetermined keywords? I toiled through my first piece, a little unhappy, and a little lost about what to do. I grumbled, as is natural for all of us faced with change. However, pragmatism soon took over and I realized that my writing was of no use, if it did not get any readers. It had to be noticed and hence using the selected keywords would distinguish my work from the clutter,” she says.

Motial adds that the task involves pleasing a human as well as an algorithm – a unique mandate, perhaps impossible to realize completely. But while she says that links can come and go and be dead tomorrow, good, useful content will never be stale. That’s also why firms test their pages as best they can, testing being another revenue source for SEO companies.

Robert Bergquist, CEO of testing and optimization company WideMile, says that with conversion rates currently at .5 percent to 2 percent, sites can’t afford to not test thoroughly. “What they haven’t learned is what to do once they come into the site,” he says. Batista explains that’s why he puts an emphasis on thorough keyword research and link building.

Beyond that, paying for syndicated copy to post on a site has proven popular for many, especially site owners with product-specific sites that can benefit from articles on their niche or theme. Outfits such as uclick.com, Content Infusion, and YellowBrix which bought out syndicated content pioneer iSyndicate, specialize in selling copy from cartoons to political columns to news of the day. Copyblogger.com also offers a handy list of tips to make you a better copywriter.

SEO and online marketing blogger Andrew Girdwood goes so far as to classify a distinction between SEO and “ethical SEO.” Simply put, ethical SEO is about allowing a search engine to see what your website is about as clearly as possible without any”black” arts like keyword stuffing, confusing URLs, or dubious link building. He quotes Google’s “evangelist” Adam Lasnik, who has said that “our algorithms want to see something that’s a happy medium cleanly between: Extreme A — Not listing relevant terms at all on the page. ExtremeB — Focusing on increasing keyword density to the point that your English/Writing teacher would thwap you with a wooden ruler. Hard. Repeatedly.”

That advice speaks to the difficulty of saying once and for all what is the right balance. Girdwood says some believe all you have to do is reach a certain percentage of keywords per page to rank well – anything over that gets labeled as spam. Lasnik has also said you can’t believe that. “There is nomagic number,” he says. Odden adds that “a combination of content as well as social networking, link networking, public relations and gaining editorial visibility as well as viral and individual link solicitations will all work together synergistically.”

Many believe that while good, natural writing is key, finding good writers is a dilemma. Affiliate marketer Kim Rowley finds good writing in family. She employs her two aunts to help her write fresh copy for her many websites and she keeps a pen and paper by her bed to jot down new content ideas. She keeps her blogs personal because it goes well with the kinds of sites she has on baby clothes, florists, coffee, pregnancy and coupons. She adds that some of the best content she’s received is by asking visitors to submit posts. This way, she says,”the content is true and unbiased.” She also builds content based on traffic stats and can write more for a particular site if there is a traffic spike.

Creating Compelling Copy

There is little consensus on how to write truly engaging copy while hitting all the SEO marks, but some of the key elements include:

  • Write naturally and try to add SEO elements later.
  • Use unique ideas for content instead of relying on cookie-cutter advice from SEO books.
  • Use consistent title and tag information – make it straight forward but descriptive.
  • Narrow keywords to the most strategic ones. Don’t over-stuff with keywords tangential to your topic or theme.
  • Think of the descriptive tag as a story and not just a spot to place keywords.
  • Make sure keywords match what people are looking for.

Matt Cutts, Google’s search guru, weighs in on his blog about content as well, warning that “if you put in time and research to produce or to synthesize original content, think hard about what niches to target.”

Cutts advises not to begin with broad articles about “porn/pills/casinos/mortgages” but with a smaller niche. “Look for a progression of niches so that you start out small or very specific, but you can build your way up to a big, important area over time. There are a lot of niches that just take sweat equity. You could be the SEO that does interviews” Or the SEO that makes funny lists. Or the SEO company that provides WebMasterRadio. Or the SEO that makes podcasting easy.”

The right balance may be yours to define. J. Walker says that “SEO methods are specifically designed to increase traffic to your website. Marketing techniques are designed to keep that traffic on your website, and encourage visitors to make a purchase. Your challenge is to find the delicate balance between them.”

Leagues of Their Own

Since the days of the gladiators, sports fans have had an irrational bond with their favorite athletes and teams. Feats of athleticism evoke eruptions of euphoria or a tidal wave of tears as a game’s final play unfolds.These strong emotions create an indelible brand loyalty that remains long after the season ends.

Marketers are learning to exploit these relationships in new ways by expanding the scintillating sights and sounds of sports beyond television highlights to broad online distribution. By enabling fans to personalize their interactions with multimedia content and by bringing the game to their favorite arena – be it a social website or a personalized Web page – sports leagues are creating new online marketing opportunities that are increasing revenue. Typically, online merchandising of memorabilia and apparel is not handled by sports leagues’ online properties and is therefore not addressed in this article.

Sports leagues and their broadcast partners have historically been conservative in granting permission to use video and audio from games online. This idea was based on the belief that making highlights or live broadcasts available dilutes the value of live games and would reduce advertising revenue and attendance. For example, in the late 1990s, local radio affiliates streamed broadcasts of baseball games online for free. But within two years, Major League Baseball ended the process, allowing audio webcasts to be streamed only through the MLB.com website through paid subscription services.

Baseball continues its policy of charging to listen togames online today. Dinn Mann executive vice president of content for major league baseball, says the league listened to fans and for the 2008 season reduced the price of a season audio subscription by $5 to the former price of $14.95. “We tipped our cap to fans who complained,” he says.

Requiring customers to pay for live audio provides an alternative revenue stream, according to Mann. “Having a subscriber base and not relying entirely on advertising is of strategic importance,” says Mann. Subscriptions,which require submitting an email and physical address, provide an avenue for MLB to pursue online and offline direct marketing.

Major League Baseball also charges for video streaming of live games and restricts viewing to any games that are “out of market” from where the customer lives. This protects the lucrative contracts with cable companies and local TV stations that are the bread and butter of their revenue. Baseball game viewing- despite the lengthy 162 game schedule – remains largely a pay-per-view world, Mann says, because “some things are still worth paying for.”

This year is the first time that baseball fans can watch archived broadcasts of full games for free, something that MLB is”experimenting with,” according to Mann. The archived games do not feature advertising, but MLB is “exploring the right relationship,”Mann says.

Growing the Audience

Sports leagues are now taking a page from online marketers’ playbooks by encouraging consumers to personalize their experience in interacting with content. Instead of going the affiliate marketing route, the digital sports media companies are focused on partnering with social networking sites and other media companies that have established audiences of fans. The strategy is to encourage consumers to link to and save content on the sites where they visit on a daily basis, enabling fans to mash-up multimedia content to create something new from existing content. Marketers who join the roster of their online partners will gain a share of the spoils in growing their audience and reaching a new generation of fans.

At the start of the 2008 season, MLB.com announced a partnership allowing Yahoo.com to stream games and highlights.Yahoo will also sell ads against both pay and free content, although thus far the video has been distributed largely without ads. Through this agreement, MLB.com gets access to Yahoo’s large audience and the two companies share revenue from any transactions facilitated through Yahoo.

Professional and collegiate sports leagues have learned that embracing younger audiences on their home turf is the quickest path to rapidly growing an audience. The NCAA, in partnership with CBSSports.com, opened the video streams of its college basketball championship tournament to a wide variety of publishing partners with great success. This enables fans to see the content where they want it delivered.

Just a few years ago, video streams of March Madness games were protected from the majority of the population as if they were enriched uranium. The subscription service generated just $250,000 in revenue annually. But over time online distribution was proven not to be hazardous to the health of television advertising revenue. Subscription fees were replaced with free streams, and then the NCAA/CBSsports.com embraced social networking (See sidebar).

Free live game webcasts have paid huge returns, according to Jason Kint, senior vice president and general manager of CBSSports.com, which manages the online video distribution of the NCAA tourney. CBS Sports created an embeddable media player that contained multiple advertising locations, in-stream ads, and fixed positions sold to sponsors.

Online “consumption is additive and not cannibalistic”of the TV audience of live college basketball, Kint says.The streams were primarily delivered to people who didn’t have access to TV, including office workers. The media player’s “Boss Button,” which instantly hides daytime viewing at the office, was clicked more than 2.5 million times, according to Kint.

People will continue to watch games on TV if they can,he says, as the final championship game was the most watched game on TV and had the smallest proportional share of online viewers. Industry watchers speculate this type of arrangement may lead to new relationships between those who promote other events, such as concerts or entertainment awards shows and affiliates who can deliver a targeted audience.

Content owners looking to maximize their audience for ad-supported content should also spread it far and wide, Kint says. “Don’t expect users to come to a URL – bring the content to them.”

Like its collegiate counterpart, pro basketball also recognizes that working with existing online communities enhances rather than endangers its own digital efforts. For the past two years the NBA has “embraced the idea of distributing content beyond NBA.com” and is partnering with video sharing and social networking sites, according to NBA’s Vice President of Interactive Services, SteveGrimes.

Grimes says working with video sites such as YouTube, Joost and Hulu and social networking sites such as Facebook, Beebo and MySpace has increased fan engagement. The NBA makes highlight videos available to publishers such as Hulu and Joost to strengthen its brand awareness among younger audiences who are consuming a greater majority of their video online.

The NBA is encouraging fans to create their own highlight reels by mashing up content available only on NBA.com and embedding it on their social networking sites. “Fans that love the NBA will come to NBA.com, but those who like it will visit other sites,” Grimes says.Widgets that enable sharing of content are delivering interactivity to sports media. NBA’s widget page (www.nba.com/widgets/) contains embeddable code for showing highlights, up-to-date-scores and photos. The NBA has sponsorship deals with companies including Lenovo and TMobile for some of its widgets to gain revenue from content that sits on other sites, Grimes says. The league has also launched a fan application on Beebo to reach its audience.

“(Sports) sites are starting to realize the power of how content can be aggregated across the Web (using widgets),” says Tad Greenleaf, the media team lead, for Omniture Consulting. Greenleaf, whose company has measured fan engagement for the websites of all of the professional leagues, says that while some leagues have hesitated on widgets and distributing content to other sites, they will do so as long as they can maintain some control.

By contrast, MLB has not released any widgets as yet because “we haven’t reached the point that the content needs to reside on their (fans) pages,” says MLB.com’s Mann. “… We have taken a long term view and not just rushing to the tool of the day.”

Measuring Success

Most of the sports leagues are more concerned about building traffic and fan engagement than selling tickets or jerseys through their partnerships with publishers, according to Ominture’s Greenleaf. His company built a social networking website for the Indianapolis Colts (www.mycolts.net) that greatly increased traffic to the NFL’s Colts site by enabling fans to comment, share content and create their own blogs. The leagues want to measure views of videos to see how they can be used to retain consumers, Greenleaf says. “How much can a piece of content drive people into the site, or are they hitting and leaving?” He says sites want to see if the relationships have “velocity” and are encouraging users to “dive deep” into the sites.

Greenleaf says another strategic play is for leagues to buy keywords about teams, players or about timely topics in the news because the leagues “don’t want them going to other places on the Web.”

“The key thing is that you need to control [the environment] if you are the owner of the content,” says Robert Tuchman, the President of TSE Sports and Entertainment, which develops corporate marketing programs around sports. Tuchman says those who market sports leagues have yet to capitalize on the legion of diehard fans that follow their sport. “They have to get behind their existing market or other organizations will control their inventory.”

Tuchman says while social networking around video highlights is the hot topic today, it should be part of a larger strategy that integrates all media. “Social networking is just one aspect. You need to sell combined media packages” that include TV, print and outdoor, according to Tuchman.

Scoring With Mobile

The days of learning how your team fared by reading the morning paper are long gone. Now fans want to know about scores, injuries and trades immediately, and the league sites are marketing to this perceived need. Through mobile-device enabled websites (WAP) and SMS and text-messaging services, sports leagues including the NHL, NBA and MLB are generating revenue from on-the-go consumers.

For the 2008 season, MLB.com added video alerts to its text alerts subscription service. The alerts highlight great catches or home runs from a fan’s favorite team that will be sent to handsets within three minutes after a play happens. The NBA’s “mobile to go” service offers team and player text alerts as well as a service customized for fantasy league fans.

Quattro Wireless launched the mobile version of the NFL Draft site for the annual draft, which took place in April. The site, which included photo galleries,articles, draft prospect pages, player analysis, and the full draft order, was updated in real-time as the college players were selected by NFL teams.

“The NFL is trying to continue to give their fans more coverage wherever their fans may be,” Lars Albright, vice president of business development for Quattrosays. “The NFL found that the draft is turning into something of an event … It’s becoming a marketable event.”

Sports leagues and news services originally charged subscriptions for notifications to mobile phones and handhelds, but they are starting to shift to ad-supported services, says Eric Eller, senior vice president of products and marketing for Millennial Media. Eller, whose company operates two mobile advertising networks (CPM and CPC) that aggregates demand, says one of the big trends is in-game mobile marketing.

For example, during a game, fans in attendance can be shown messages on their mobile phones that are linked to messages being shown on the big screens that sit high atop the stadiums, Eller says. Mobile phones “will play an important part of sports marketing around events,” he says.

Sports leagues have learned that by making highlights more widely available and engaging on their favorite online destinations, they can grow both their television audience and put more fans in the seats.

AOL’s Advertising Aspirations

What a long, strange trip it’s been for AOL.

The more than 20 year old company that was once at the forefront of Internet community building and defined the online experience for many early Internet adopters, is now experiencing a bit of an identity crisis.

AOL has moved far beyond its famous “You’ve got mail”catch phrase/punch line/movie title. So, then how does AOL define itself ? Is AOL an Internet provider, a media and entertainment company, an ad network, an email provider or a Web portal?

While it’s all of those things in one fashion or another,the company is working toward positioning itself as just one thing – a next generation ad network.

“AOL has reinvented itself so many times. It is hard tokeep track,” says Adam Schlachter, senior partner at media and communications consultancy Mediaedge:cia.

AOL’s ad strategy comes at a time when Jeffrey Bewkes,CEO of Time-Warner, acknowledges there is no future in the dial up Internet. There is increasing pressure as media companies and Web portals aplenty are starting and the future is buying or promoting networks as the next step toward”one-stop” shopping for ad buyers.

Acquisition Spree

In an attempt to reinvent itself, AOL has spent about $1 billion acquiring ad-centric companies over the last several years. (See sidebar). AOL’s first big step into the ad market was its 2004 purchase of Advertising.com for $435 million. Advertising.com made a name for itself selling ad space on websites at a time when few were doing it and is the largest third-party display advertising network.

In 2007, AOL bought contextual advertising company Quigo. It alsosnapped up Tacoda, a behavioral targeting company. It bought Third ScreenMedia, a mobile advertising network and maker of mobile software. It also acquired Germany’s Adtech AG, an international online ad-serving firm and added Lightningcast to its roster of companies. Lightningcast delivers advertising for on-demand, live and downloaded video content on the Internet.

The buying spree continued this year. In February AOL acquired Buy.at, an independent affiliate network based in the United Kingdom, with more than 9,000 international affiliates and merchants such as Butlins, Carphone Warehouse, Capital One, Egg, John Lewis, M&S, Powergen, TMobile and Virgin Media.

In March AOL made a step into the Web 2.0 world by acquiring Bebo.com, the fourth largest social networking site, for $850 million. With more than 40 million members, Bebo’s user base is a far cry from the space’s leader MySpace with 109 million.

The Platform Play

AOL’s Platform A division brings together all of AOL’s ad-related silos under a single umbrella. Formed in September 2007, the division has already experienced a series of executive shakeups. Since November, several Platform A executives have exited including Kathleen Kayse, vice president of marketing; Lance Miyamoto, head of human resources; and Dave Morgan, chief ad strategist.

Curtis Viebranz, CEO of Tacoda, who was brought in as president of Platform A, was removed in March. Lynda Clarizio, a nine year AOL veteran that was previous president of Advertising.com, took over the reigns of Platform A.

Clarizio, for her part, has reportedly jumped in with both feet. She is known to have reveled in the start up culture of Advertising.com. PlatformA insiders say she is looking to infuse the many AOL ad groups with that same startup work ethic. And up until recently, the acquired companies had so many department heads with similar roles that many insiders claim various parts of Platform A were essentially competing with themselves for the same clients.

Clarizio has publicly said she will structure teams so that there is only one sales team, technology team, product and operations team, marketing team and publisher services team. She has also combined the overlapping search marketing efforts by Advertising.com and contextual targeting shop Quigo.

In recent interviews with the media Clarizio focused on the short term goals of the group, rather than the executive turnover and claims of integration difficulties.

“As our technology has continued to advance, we’ve gotten better and better,” Clarizio told the Associated Press.”We can handle a lot of demand from advertisers.”She also told the Washington Post that “this is probably the most dynamic industry in the world right now, the online advertising space. To compete effectively in this space, you have to be constantly pushing, innovating new products.”

Some analysts are giving AOL the benefit of the doubt as it works though integrating all its acquisitions.David Hallerman, an analyst at New York-based eMarketer, says, “It takes a while. This is not just buying technologies. It’s buying human constructs, and it takes a while to work out.”

While Platform A is still in its early stages, its reach is already significant when accounting for all the once-disparate units. According to comScore MediaMetrix, Platform A counted 167 million unique visitors in February 2008 and claims 90 percent of the U.S. online audience. However, AOL as a whole, however, ranks fourth as a Web portal, behind Google, MSN and Yahoo.

AOL’s ad revenue is still growing but not at the same clip as previous years. Its ad revenue for 2007grew 12 percent, off the 37 percent growth AOL experienced in 2006 and the 38 percent growth in2005, according to eMarketer.

“AOL appears to be feeling pressure from aggressive sales targets set against the backdrop of a slowing economy,” says Greg Sterling, analyst at Sterling Market Intelligence.

Advertising.com recently lost its biggest advertiser, University of Phoenix, whose ads accounted for $215 million in 2007 and $157 million in 2006- that’s about 17 percent of AOL’s ad revenue growth last year.

There has also been repeated speculation that Time-Warner may sell off AOL and that the recent acquisitions and formation of Platform A is meant to make the company look more attractive to potential buyers or as a spin off company.

And with Microsoft’s bid to buy Yahoo rejected by Yahoo shareholders, AOL is once again mentioned as a potential merger partner with both of those companies as each seeks to thwart Google’s continued dominance online.

Last September there was talk that Platform A itself could be spun out and become public with an IPO. There was also wide spread speculation in the blogosphere that with the dial up business and its Web portal stagnating AOL might change its name to Advertising.com in an effort to clarify its focus to outsiders.

A Big Plan

A key element in AOL’s ad network strategy is the purchase of Bebo.com. Some industry observers say that in a best case scenario, Bebo can leverage the behavioral targeting capabilities from several of the PlatformA companies to better target certain demographics,and will be able to scale to reach a larger audience with AOL’s Instant Messenger.

While revenue from ads on social networks is likely to reach $1.6 billion this year – up from $920 million in2007 – the lion’s share of that money was from MySpace and Facebook.

“It’s hard to know what AOL is getting,” says Ryan Jacob of the Jacob Internet Fund, a firm that invests in Internet companies.

At the time the Bebo.com/AOL deal was announced inApril 2007 there was some debate in the press that AOL was overpaying for the network, given that Bebo’s traffic over the preceding three months had been relatively flat.The Silicon Alley Insider reported that many AOL senior managers were against the deal and that AOL president Randy Falco and COO Ron Grant alone pushed hard for the acquisition. AOL did not speak with Revenue regarding those issues.

In 2006, AOL’s first attempt at dipping into the social network pool (the launch of AIM Pages) was labeled by industry watchers as a misstep. The project was reportedly slow, weighed down by ineffective JavaScript and patched together from up to seven AOL systems. AOL replaced it with a simpler AIM Profiles platform within six months, aping a Facebook look. Since AOL merged AIM Profiles with its extensive Member Directory it gets about 170,000 page views a day, says comScore, however Facebook gets about 1.2 million. “As soon as it bombed, no one wanted anything to do with it,” an anonymous AOL product manager told TechCrunch.

AOL has also faced challenges on the search front. In2007 AOL went from a results page with links for copy, images, song files and other elements to a cleaner page that looked more like Google’s. Reportedly, the reasoning behind the change was that the diversity of search results was slowing down the pages from loading and that had an impact on revenue per search.

But revenue on search in the new format actually dropped to $156 million from $232 million in a previous quarter.

At the time, the top brass at Time-Warner claimed the search improvements would be good for traffic growth. But traffic in the following four months dropped with unique visitors down 0.2 percent from March to May 2008, to 30.6 million in November 2007 from (what), according to comScore.

“It’s troubling that they didn’t know what the impact of the search change would be,” Richard Greenfield, analyst at Pali Research, says. “This raises serious concerns about their ability to run the business and turn it around.”

The Transformation

From a content and functionality point of view, AOL maintains a variety of strong offerings. Its Truveo video search engine sports 100 million videos to search and is on track to total 1 billion by 2009. Its TMZ.com gossip site is on fire with 10 million visitors per month and a spin off TV show. AOL Music’s free music has an array of videos, news and concert tour information and is second only to Yahoo’s music portal.

AOL TV is the only site that hosts shows from all four of the major broadcast TV networks.

One AOL insider, who asked not to be named, says part of the problem is that AOL is unlikely to gain the same type of dominance it once enjoyed and being held to that old standard is unrealistic.

Before the dot com bubble burst in 2001, AOL’s userbase at its height was estimated to be more than 27 million people (it’s now about 10 million) all paying about $19 per month to stay connected. Its biggest coup was the much ballyhooed merger with Time-Warner in 2000. However, things quickly soured and by 2002, the combined company wrote off $99 billion. And, by 2003 the media giant had removed the”AOL” from its name and AOL head Steve Case from his chairman’s seat.

In 2006 AOL seemed to be making a comeback. It became free (it’s all ad-supported) and saw 46 percent ad-revenue growth in a single quarter, 49 percent the following quarter. Its stock seemed to spring back, too, rising as much as 40 percent in a six month period. At it’s height in 1999 AOL’s stock hit about $147. It currently hovers around $15 per share. AOL revenue in 2007 was $5.2 billion and its websites still draw 112 million visitors per month. Plus, it continues to have one of the most recognizable brand names on the Internet.

“If you just look at what AOL has accomplished in the last three years, it is amazing,” the source says. “I just don’t know how anyone can see that as failure. Most companies would kill to have achieved this level of success in online advertising.

The Changing Digital Landscape

2008 has shaped up to be a crazy year for online advertising – the writers’ strike drove people online and the presidential election and the Olympics are causing advertisers to boost spending in a down market. The timing of these factors has altered media behavior – making the business of online media anything but typical for the year.

How the advertising dollars that moved online in 2008 will be spent is a matter of much debate. Reports indicate that because the digital landscape is changing, advertisers are finding that the tried and true initiatives that performed well a few years ago are now considered passe.

As more and more individuals become their own tastemakers, advertisers need to take into account how users consume information. The days of pushing content have given way to users pulling the content that they want – making it tricky for companies to get a hold of their potential consumers.

At the end of 2007, AdTech and MarketingSherpa surveyed 421 Internet marketers about the tactics they would try out this year and where they plan to spend their budget in 2008.

In terms of the initiatives that marketers plan to increase more than 5 percent of the budget on in 2008, 32 percent of marketers cited PPC, 27 percent of marketers said they’ll increase their spend on behavioral targeting and 26 percent will spend it on rich media.

The survey found that viral marketing and advertising on online video sites, mobile phones and virtual worlds are among the emerging trends that marketers plan to check out this year. Marketers say they are encouraged to try out those tactics for the first time by their agencies.

Ninety-three percent say agencies suggested an increase in spending or begin spending on viral video; 87 percent were urged to spend on viral marketing using networking sites; 60 percent were asked to try wireless ads on mobile networks; and 62 percent said agencies advised advertising in games and virtual worlds.

In March, PQ Media reported that total spending on alternative media – including expenditures on online/mobile, lead generation advertising and consumer-generated media – is predicted to grow 20.2 percent to $88.24 billion in 2008.

Clearly, how companies approach their ad budgeting is going through a major metamorphosis. Of course, online marketing plans and their budgets depend on several factors – including the type of company, product, audience and goals.

The Big Trends

In terms of how advertisers budget their marketing plans, three trends have been shaking up the status quo in 2008 – paid search, social media and ad networks.

The biggest change in the last couple of years is that search ad spending continues to increase – it is expected to rise 32 percent this year to $15.5 billion in the U.S, according to J.P. Morgan Chase.

Some industry watchers call search the greatest advertising medium of all time and many marketers agree. However, Jake Fields, president and creative director of Treeline Interactive, warns that marketers need to be careful because it is easy to waste budgets buying keywords. Fields recommends Spyfu.com, a tool for finding competitors’ keywords.

The rise of social media is one of the dramatic differences between 2007 and 2008. Although a recent Forrester Research report indicates that spending is still relatively small, companies are benefiting from what it offers: consumers contribute brand messaging as opposed to only passively receiving communication from marketers.

There are many ways for new publishers as well as established brands to leverage social media. They could create buzz on a social network before the site launches or do some ad buys on social networks sites, which are cheaper than buys on traditional content like CNN because traditional advertisers are weary of social networks.

The Northern California ski resort, Northstar at Tahoe, has a campaign that encourages customers and staff to post videos and photos with the tags “Northstar, Tahoe” on social media sites such as YouTube and Flickr – with the prospect of being featured on the Northstar site or even the possibility of winning complimentary services. Fields explains that this initiative enabled Northstar at Tahoe to quickly expand its presence within these social media sites from a couple hundred entries to thousands of social media posts that positively represent their brand.

Also gaining traction in 2008 are advertising exchanges, which allow advertisers to bid for impressions on a CPM basis. Cam Balzer, vice president of emerging media at DoubleClick Performics, explains that ad exchanges bring the benefits of search marketing to display advertising – namely, the ability to test a large number of placements (an ad of a particular size on a particular site or even site section) dynamically (no minimum or locked-in budget), to bid more for placements that are driving strong ROI and less for placements that aren’t working.

More and more display inventory of an increasingly high quality is becoming available via advertising exchanges, and this trend should continue as publishers get comfortable with selling inventory in this way.

Balzer says that for a minimal investment, companies can test various approaches to building awareness of their brand. They can secure a large number of impressions at a low CPM to increase reach. If they are also selling advertising on their site, they could sell ad inventory via an exchange to improve the CPM yield of their site.

Regardless of whether companies attempt to leverage one or all of the big online marketing trends for 2008, the ever-evolving interactive space is moving away from cookie cutter campaigns that seem too inflexible to yield results.

To rise above the clutter, companies need to aggressively try the latest tactics like product placement in games and paid ads on networking sites. Mixed approaches are required – recent research finds that when search and display advertising are combined, clicks increase after people see the display ads.

Because there is no silver bullet, marketers need to constantly analyze and optimize their mix. Fields says that campaigns are all a matter of trial and error – it is important to try, pull back, measure, analyze, and then try again.

Marketing in Action: Q & A with Seth Godin

If you’re in any way involved in marketing – online or off-line – chances are that you’ve read at least one of marketing guru Seth Godin’s best-selling books. He is the author of 10 books, including “Meatball Sundae,” “All Marketers Are Liars,” “Purple Cow,” “Permission Marketing” and “small is the new big.” Armed with a degree in philosophy and computer science from Tufts University, he began his career as brand manager for Spinnaker Software in Cambridge, Mass. Godin is also founder and CEO of Yoyodyne, an interactive direct marketing company, which was acquired by Yahoo in 1998. More recently, he founded Squidoo, a recommendation website, in 2005. Revenue’s Editor-in-Chief, Lisa Picarille, talked with the author, blogger and in-demand speaker about his unique views on marketing.

Lisa Picarille: How would you characterize the current state of online marketing?

Seth Godin: It works! It’s always worked, but now it really does. And, at the same time, off-line marketing is not working. We regularly see the results marketers are getting with big campaigns fail to meet expectations. At the same time, the power of social media continues to expand.

LP: What are the most important components of successful online marketing?

SG: Making something people want (choose) to talk about. They have power, not you. Also, delivering anticipated, personal and relevant messages to those that want to get them. And finally, treating people with respect.

LP: Can you give some examples of companies (and/or people) that are getting it right, and why?

SG: Talk about the importance of social media in online marketing – it’s becoming increasingly clear that messages that spread from person to person are far more powerful than those that come straight from a company. So, social media is powerful, but not if it’s manipulated. Then it fails.

LP: Are there aspects of social media that work for online marketers more effectively than others (Facebook, Twitter, blogs, vlogs, etc.)?

SG: Social media doesn’t work for marketers. Social media exists for the users. Sometimes there’s a positive side effect for a marketer who makes something worth talking about.

LP: You often post multiple blog entries each day; where does all your inspiration/topic matter come from?

SG: I look for things that are broken and then talk about them!

LP: If you were to give advice to someone that is just starting out in online marketing, what would you tell them to do as a first step?

SG: Start a blog. It’ll make you humble. And a better writer.

LP: Your book “small is the new big” is a huge success. But do the “Big Guys” really get it? It must be a whole new concept for many companies to grasp that success doesn’t directly correlate to size. That goes against everything they were taught.

SG: Yes it does. That’s where the meatball sundae comes in. This is a new time, a new era and a new industrial revolution. Not everyone will play by those rules, but that’s okay, because those that do will thrive.

LP: I’m curious what role you think customer service plays in marketing, and are online marketers leveraging that facet to their advantage?

SG: Customer service is part of the product now. So, amazing service (e.g., Amazon) is a valid replacement for advertising.

LP: What role do you think mobile marketing will play in the future of online marketing?

SG: Mobile marketing demands permission. You can’t do it as a spammer.

LP: What are the three trends that online marketers should have on their radar for 2008?

SG: Make great stuff. Get rid of the factory. Measure.

LP: What are the top challenges and hurdles that marketers are facing right now?

SG: This whole thing about “prove it,” and show “ROI” is totally bogus. There’s no ROI on TV or other traditional media. Why do I have to prove that the measured thing is better than the unmeasured?

LP: I keep wondering if marketers will become the new “celebrity chefs.” Do you see a time when marketers will be garnering more PR, praise and adulation than CEOs?

SG: I see a time (now) when the great marketers are the CEOs. Like Steve Jobs of Apple and Howard Schultz [chairman and CEO of Starbucks] and Sir Richard Branson of Virgin Corp.

LP: Is there an industry, vertical or niche that is poised to benefit more than others from the evolution of online marketing?

SG: The only people who won’t want to play in this space are those that make commodities, because it makes it more brutal. The neat opportunity is that almost anything can stop being a commodity (bottled water, micro steel mills, etc.)

LP: What is your vision of online marketing five years from now?

SG: When online is everywhere, all the time, it’s all online marketing.

ABCs of Online Marketing

With words entering the lexicon constantly, it’s a good idea for performance marketers to study up on some new industry jargon.

Because performance marketing encompasses a variety of different disciplines, including affiliate marketing, search, interactive advertising and lead generation – each with its own terminology – it can be difficult to keep up. Just getting a handle on this ever-changing industry can be a full-time job, never mind the time it takes to decipher cryptic acronyms. Planning an Internet marketing strategy is complicated. Will you get the best ROI from a CPA, CPC, PPL or a hybrid model? And how will you track your CPM and determine your CTR?

You are not alone if this question overwhelms you. Although many people who are new to the online marketing space understand the basic principles, they lack the essential vocabulary. And like any industry, it greatly helps if you can talk the talk and walk the walk.

To excel in online marketing, you have to communicate effectively with your design and development teams, your clients and potential strategic partners.

To assist those who are new to the Internet marketplace, we have compiled a list of essential Internet marketing vocabulary. Although this guide is most helpful to newbies, we think even more advanced affiliate marketers will find some useful information here.

And because this industry includes search and e-commerce, you can find an expanded list of key terms on our website. We will update that list regularly with new words that pop up in this constantly moving space.

A

Abandonment: When a user leaves a shopping cart with an item in it prior to completing the transaction.

Advertiser (also Merchant or Retailer): Any website that markets and sells goods or services. In affiliate marketing programs, advertisers contract with affiliates to get consumers to register for services, purchase products, fill out forms or visit websites.

AdSense: An advertising program run by Google enabling website owners to display text and image advertisements. Revenue is generated on a pay-per-click basis. Google uses its search technology to serve ads based on website content and users’ geographical location.

AdWords: Google’s text-based advertising system. It is cost-per-click (CPC) advertising and publishers pay only when users click on their ad. It has cost-control features that can set daily budget and limits.

Affiliate: A website owner that earns a commission for referring clicks, leads or sales to a merchant.

Affiliate Fraud: Bogus activity generated by an affiliate in an attempt to generate illegitimate, unearned revenue.

Affiliate Link: A piece of code residing in a graphic image or piece of text that is placed on an affiliate’s webpage, notifying the merchant that an affiliate should be credited for the customer or visitor sent to their website.

Affiliate Manager: The manager responsible for overseeing the marketing of a merchant’s program including forecasts and budgets, as well as communicating with affiliates regularly, establishing incentives and monitoring industry news and trends.

Affiliate Network: An intermediary between an affiliate and merchant. For merchants, it offers tracking technology, reporting tools, payment processing and access to affiliates. For affiliates, it offers a one-click application to merchants, reporting tools and payment aggregation.

Algorithm: A set of mathematical equations or rules that a search engine uses to rank the content contained within its index in response to a particular search query.

Analytics: Technology that helps to analyze the performance of a website or online marketing campaign.

Arbitrage: A practice through which Web publishers – second-tier search engines, directories and vertical search engines – engage in the buying and reselling of Web traffic.

Auto-Approve: An affiliate application approval process where all applicants are automatically approved for an affiliate program.

B

Backlinks (also Inbound Links): All the links that point at a particular webpage.

Banner Ad: An electronic ad in the form of a graphical image that is available in many sizes and resides on a webpage. Banner ad space is sold to advertisers to earn revenue for the website.

Behavioral Targeting: The practice of targeting and serving ads to groups of users who exhibit similarities in their location, gender or age, and how they act and react in their online environment.

Bid: The maximum amount of money that an advertiser is willing to pay each time a searcher clicks on an ad. Bid prices can vary widely depending on competition from other advertisers and keyword popularity.

Browser Helper Object: A DLL module designed as a plug-in for the Microsoft Internet Explorer Web browser to provide added functionality. Some modules enable the display of different file formats not ordinarily interpretable by the browser.

C

Chargeback: An incomplete sales transaction (for example: merchandise is purchased and then returned) that results in an affiliate commission deduction.

Click & Bye: The process in which an affiliate loses a visitor to a merchant’s site once they click on a merchant’s banner or text link.

Click Bot: A program generally used to artificially click on paid listings within the engines in order to artificially inflate click amounts.

Click Fraud: The deceitful practice of posing as pay-per-click traffic for the purpose of generating false revenue by the affiliates serving the ads. In PPC advertising terms, it generates a charge per click without having actual interest in the target of the ad’s link.

Clickthrough Rate (CTR): The number of clicks an ad receives, divided by the total number of times that ad is displayed or served (represented as: total clicks / total impressions = CTR). For example, if an ad has 100 impressions and 3 clicks, the CTR is 3 percent.

Client: A software program that is used to contact and obtain data from a server software program on another computer. Each client program is designed to work with one or more specific kinds of server programs and each server requires a specific kind of client.

Cloaking: A deceptive process that sends search engine spiders to alternative pages that are not seen by the end user. Search engines record content for a URL that is different from what the visitor sees in order to obtain more favorable search positions.

Cobranding: A website or page to which affiliates send visitors that includes their own logo and branding.

Commission (also Referral Fee, Finder’s Fee, Bounty): The income an affiliate receives for generating a sale, lead or clickthrough to a merchant’s website.

Compensation Rate: The rate at which an affiliate receives money in exchange for goods or services. It is how affiliates are paid and should be stated in the affiliate contract.

Contextual Advertising: The term applied to ads appearing on websites or other media where the ads are selected and served by automated systems based on the content displayed by the user.

Contextual Link: The integration of affiliate links with related text.

Contextual Search: A search that analyzes the page being viewed by a user and gives a list of related search results.

Conversion Rate: The number of visitors who convert after clicking through on an ad, divided by the total number of clickthroughs to a site for that ad. (Expressed as: total clickthroughs that convert / total clickthroughs for that ad = conversion rate.)

Cookie: Small file stored on a visitor’s computer that records information. For affiliate programs, cookies have two functions: to keep track of what a customer purchases and to track which affiliate was responsible for generating the sale and is owed a commission.

Cost Per Acquisition: The cost metric for each time a qualifying action, such as sales and registrations, takes place.

Cost Per Action (CPA): The cost metric for each time a commissionable action takes place.

Cost Per Click (CPC): The cost metric for each click to an advertising link.

Cost Per Lead (CPL): The cost an advertiser pays per qualified lead.

Cost Per Order (CPO): The cost metric for each time an order is transacted.

Cost Per Sale (CPS): The term for advertising in which the advertiser pays only for those clicks where the user clicks through on the banner or ad and actually purchases a product on the advertiser’s site.

Cost Per Thousand (CPM): The cost metric for 1,000 banner advertising impressions. The amount paid per impression is calculated by dividing the CPM by 1,000. For example, a $10 CPM equals $.01 per impression.

Crawler (also Spider, Robot or Bot): Component of a search engine that gathers listings by automatically trolling the Web and following links to webpages. It makes copies of the webpages found and stores them in the search engine’s index.

Custom Feed: Enables submission to XML feeds for each of the shopping engines. The engines have different product categories and feed requirements.

Customer Bounty: The merchant payment to an affiliate partner for every new customer that they direct to a merchant.

D

Dayparting: The ability to specify different times of day – or day of week – for ad displays, as a way to target searchers more specifically. An option that limits the serving of specified ads based on day and time factors.

Data Feed: A text file that contains the information needed to generate a website. It is provided either directly to the affiliate or indirectly through a network. The affiliate then converts the data feed into a database, which is then used to populate webpages full of products.

Deep Linking: Linking to content buried deep within a website.

Delisting: When webpages are removed from a search engine’s index.

Demographics: The term that refers to specific information about a population or a target market. Demographics include information such as age, sex, geographic location, and size of the group.

Destination URL: The specific location within a site where the user who has clicked on the ad should be directed. The destination URL does not have to match the display URL but should be in the same domain.

Distribution Network: A network of websites or search engines and their partner sites on which paid ads can be distributed. The network receives advertisements from the host search engine, paid for with a CPC or CPM model.

Domain Name: Controlled by the worldwide organization called ICANN, domain names are obtained on a first-come basis and are used to identify a unique website.

Doorway Page (also Gateway Page): A webpage created expressly in the hopes of ranking well for a term in a search engine’s non-paid listing. It does not deliver much information but is designed to entice visitors to enter.

Dynamic Content: Information of webpages which changes, or is changed automatically.

E-F

Earnings Per Hundred Clicks (EPC): Earnings or average payout per hundred clicks.

Earning per Thousand Impressions (EPM): Earnings or average payout per thousand impressions.

Eighty Twenty Rule: A rule of thumb that dictates that typically 80 percent of the products sold in a product category will be consumed by 20 percent of the customers.

Escalating Commission (also Sliding Scale): A compensation system based on an increase in the money paid to an affiliate. It is a percentage commission that increases based on the achievement of certain targets, such as specific number of copies sold.

Feeds: A Web document that is a shortened or updated version of a webpage created for syndication. Usually served at user request, through subscription; also includes ad feeds to shopping engines and paid-inclusion ad models. Ad feeds are usually in eXtensible markup language (XML) or rich site summary format.

Freemium: A business mode that offers basic services for free, or is ad supported, but charges a premium for advanced or special features. The model is popular with Web 2.0 companies that acquire companies through referral networks, organic search marketing and word of mouth.

Frames: An HTML technique that allows two or more pages to display in one browser window. Many search engines had trouble indexing websites that used frames, generally only seeing the contents of a single frame.

G-H

Gateway Page (also Doorway Page): A webpage created in hopes of ranking well for a term in a search engine’s nonpaid listings.

Geographical Targeting: The analytical process of making decisions on the regions and locales on which a company should focus its marketing efforts.

Hit: Request from a Web server for a graphic or other element to be displayed on a webpage. Sometimes the misleading term hit is not the same as a visitor.

Hybrid Model: An affiliate commission model that combines payment options (i.e., CPC & CPA).

I

Impression: An advertising metric that indicates how many times an advertising banner, link or product on the Internet is viewed.

Inbound Link: A link to a particular page from elsewhere on the Internet. Inbound links are important to SEO because many search engines’ rankings are at least partially based on the amount of inbound links.

Index: The database of webpages maintained by a search engine or directory.

Interactive Agency: An agency offering a mix of Web design and development, Internet advertising and online marketing, or e-business/ e-commerce consulting.

K-L

Key Performance Indicators (KPI): Metrics that are used to quantify objectives that reflect the strategic performance of online marketing campaigns. They provide business and marketing intelligence to assess a measurable objective and the direction in which that objective is headed.

Keyword(s): The word (or words) a searcher enters into a search engine’s search box. Also the term that the marketer hopes users will search on to find a particular page.

Keyword Buys: The act of bidding on specific search terms related to a specific industry.

Keyword Density: The number of repetitions of a keyword as a percentage of the total word count of a webpage. For example, if a webpage has 200 total words on it and 20 of them are keyword advertising, then the keyword advertising has a 10 percent keyword density on the page.

Keyword Domain Name: The use of keywords as part of the URL to a website. Positioning is improved on some search engines when keywords are reinforced in the URL.

Keyword Marketing: The method of getting a message in front of people who are searching through the use of particular words or terms.

Landing Page: The specific webpage a visitor reaches after clicking on a search engine listing, pay-per-click ad or banner ad.

Lead Generation: Websites that generate leads for products or services offered by another company. On a lead generation site, the visitor completes a contact form to get more information about a product or service. The submitted contact form is considered a lead.

Link Bait: A useful, entertaining, creative Web content or Web tool that encourages website owners to link to it.

Linkspam: A company attempts to place as many inbound links as possible to its site regardless of the context of the originating site.

Listing: The information that appears on a search engine’s results page in response to a search.

Loyalty Affiliates: Affiliates who offer incentives to their members with cash-back or other benefits and rewards to shop through their website. Often they own cash-back shopping websites.

M-N

Manual Approval: An affiliate application approval process where all applicants are manually approved for an affiliate program.

Merchant Account: An account with a payment processor for settlement of credit card transactions. Any merchant that takes credit card orders must establish a merchant account.

Meta Tag: A way to describe various aspects of a webpage that is not intended for users to see. Meta tags pass information to Web crawlers and spiders along with browsers and other applications.

Minimum Bid: The least amount that an advertiser can bid for a keyword or keyword phrase and still be active on the search ad network. This amount can range from $0.01 to $0.50 or more for highly competitive keywords, and is set by the search engines.

Multilevel Marketing (also Two-Tier Marketing): Affiliate program structure whereby affiliates earn commissions on their conversions as well as conversions of webmasters they refer to the program.

Nanopublishing: An online publishing model that uses a small-scale, inexpensive operation to reach a targeted audience, especially through blogging. Sometimes communities of shared interest emerge quickly online, such as PaidContent.org and Gawker.com.

Niche Sites: A website oriented toward a very specific topic or audience. Niche sites often have high traffic and items can bring higher prices than on general purpose sites because they serve customers looking for unique content.

Opt-in Email: Email information that the recipient explicitly requests such as a newsletter or eZine.

Optimization: Changes made to a webpage specifically to improve the positioning of the page on search engines.

Organic Search Results: Non-paid search engine results (also called natural search) – the pages that search engines find in a vast index of the Web that the search engine determines are the best matches for the search keywords.

Outbound Link: A link on a webpage leading to other webpages both on the same website and other websites.

Page Rank: An indicator of the value of a webpage that is used for ranking in search engine results and that is governed by a proprietary formula by search engines. It is based on factors including the number and quality of links to a website and the content of the website itself.

Page View: The term for the loading and screen presentation of a single webpage.

Paid Inclusion: Advertising program where pages are guaranteed to be included in a search engine’s index in exchange for payment.

Paid Listings: Listings that search engines sell to advertisers usually through paid placement or paid inclusion.

Paid Search: Paid search often referred to as pay per click (PPC) is a strategy used by a large number of affiliates.

Parasite: Software that works on a person’s computer, typically without their knowledge or consent and without a visible interface. It can include software that is installed along with another application.

Pay Per Call: A model of paid advertising similar to PPC, except advertisers pay for every phone call that comes to them from a search ad, rather than for every clickthrough to their website landing page for the ad.

Pay Per Click (PPC): A program where an affiliate receives a commission for each click they refer to a merchant’s website. PPC offers some of the lowest commissions and high conversion ratio since visitors need to only click on a link to earn the affiliate a commission.

Pay Per Impression (PPI): An advertising pricing model in which advertisers pay based on how many users were served their ads.

Pay Per Lead (PPL): A program where an affiliate receives a commission for each lead that they generate for a merchant website such as completed surveys, contest or sweepstakes entries. Pay per lead generally offers midrange commissions and midrange-to-high conversion ratios.

Pay Per Sale (PPS): A program where an affiliate receives a commission for each sale of a product or service that they refer to a merchant’s website. Pay-per-sale programs usually offer the highest commissions and the lowest conversion ratio.

Q-R

Query: The word (or words) a searcher enters into a search engine’s search box.

Quality Score: Reflects an ad’s historical CTR, keyword relevance, landing page relevance and other factors proprietary to Google. Yahoo refers to it as a Quality Index.

Rank: How high a particular webpage or website is listed in a search engine’s results.

Really Simple Syndication (RSS) Feed: A data format for syndicating news and other content. Subscribers to RSS feeds are notified every time content is updated on a particular site.

Reciprocal Link: A link exchange – the process whereby two websites’ owners agree to display a link to each others’ sites.

Residual Earnings: A program that pays affiliates not just for the first sale, but all additional sales made at the merchant’s site over the life of the customer.

Revenue-Sharing Program: A program that allows merchants and website owners to increase sales. The host site links to the merchant site with a banner, button or text link, for a fee. The merchant pays the website owner for increased traffic, sales and leads from the host site.

S-T

Search Engine Marketing (SEM): Tactics that seek to promote websites by increasing their visibility in search engine results. SEM methods include SEO, paid placement and paid inclusion. It includes the practice of buying paid search listings with the goal of obtaining better free search listings.

Search Engine Results Page (SERP): The page the search engines returns to after a visitor entered a search query.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO): The practice of altering a website so that it does well in the organic, crawler-based listings of search engines. The process usually involves choosing targeted and relevant keywords and phrases that will drive traffic to the site.

Shopping Cart: The term for software that is used to make a site’s product catalog available for online ordering, whereby visitors may select, view, add, delete and purchase merchandise.

Social Network: Online networks of communities who share interests and activities or who are interested in exploring the interests and activities of others, which necessitates the use of software.

Spamdexing: Also called search engine spamming. It combines techniques employed by some Web marketers and designers to fool a search engine’s spider and indexing programs to ensure that their website always appears at or near the top of the list of search engine results.

Spider: A software program that crawls the Internet by following links and indexing webpages.

Sponsored Listing (also Paid Listings or Paid Sponsors): A term used as a title or column head on search engine results pages to identify paid advertisers and distinguish between paid and organic listings.

Spyware: Generally refers to deceitful software that is secretly installed on a user’s computer and that monitors use of the computer in some way without the user’s knowledge or consent. Most spyware tries to get the user to view advertising and/or particular webpages.

Super-affiliates: The best affiliates in a program based on performance and earnings, usually the top 1 percent, who generate the majority of revenue for a program.

Targeted Marketing: The act of making the right offers to the right customer at the right time.

Text Link: A link that is not accompanied by a graphical image.

Tracking Method: The way a program tracks referred sales, leads or clicks. The most common is by unique Web address for each affiliate or by embedding an affiliate ID number into the link that is processed by the merchant’s software.

Trademark Poaching: The act of using PPC ads to appear as though they have come from a merchant (using its trademark). When clicked on, the ad directs the consumer to the trademark owner’s site through a link that inserted the affiliate ID, generating a bogus commission for any resulting purchase.

Trusted Feed (also Paid Inclusion): A trusted feed is a fee-based custom crawl service offered by some search engines. These results appear in the ‘organic search results’ of the engine. Typically, the fee is based on a ‘cost per click,’ depending on the category of site content.

V-Z

Visitor Segmentation: Differentiating of users to site by categories such as age, sex, etc.

Visit: Measurement that has been filtered for robotic activity of one or more text and/or graphics downloads from a site without 30 consecutive minutes of inactivity and which can be reasonably attributed to a single browser for a single session.

Web 2.0: Also referred to as the Semantic Web. In this iteration, sites, links, media and databases are ‘smarter’ and able to automatically convey more meaning than those of today.

Widget: A small application designed to reside on a PC desktop or within a Web-based portal or social network site offering useful or entertaining functionality.

XML (eXtensible Markup Language): Its primary purpose is to facilitate the sharing of structured data across different information systems. It is used both to encode documents and to serialize data.