Jon DiPietro is Domesticating IT

Weekly High Five lists the most interesting, compelling, and/or useful links of each week.

This week’s High Five is a grab bag of internet marketing topics.

#5: ACTA Draft: No Internet for Copyright Scofflaws

Regular readers of this blog will know that I often talk about net neutrality and copyright issues.  This article discusses efforts by the U.S. to convince other nations to develop protocols for copyright protection that would make it the responsibility of Internet Service Providers to police copyright infringements and immediately suspend internet connectivity  and terminate “in appropriate circumstances.”  In addition to raising costs for ISPs, this will almost certainly result in a “shoot first, ask questions later” policy in order to reduce their risk.

Link: Wired

#4: WSJ on iPad for $17.99 a month, magazines to be at or near newsstand prices?

It’s becoming clear that the print publishing industry is looking at the iPad as an opportunity to start with a clean slate <rimshot>.  The horse has already left the barn in terms of providing free content on the internet, and so it seems that they intend not to make that mistake again.  From the outset, several publications are intending to at least begin their subscriptions on the iPad at very near news stand pricing.  Given Apple’s strict control of the content application rules on their platforms, this should not encounter the technical hurdles publishers have faced on the internet.  This time, it’s personal.

Link: engadget

#3: 5 Quick Ways To Improve Your Facebook SEO

Lisa Barone writes one of the best internet marketing blogs on the internet, in my opinion.  She is a frequent guest writer on Small Business Trends and this article provides five simple, yet solid tips for improving the search engine optimization of your Facebook fan page.

Link: Small Business Trends

#2: Are Marketing Dollars Shifting? Exhibit Industry Down 12.5%

There’s not a whole lot to tell for this one.  While the decline of the exhibit industry isn’t shocking, I was a bit surprised at the steep drop from last year.  More evidence that marketing dollars continue to flow from traditional channels like trade shows to inbound marketing.

Link: Hubspot

#1: Facebook Foreshadows New Features With Privacy Policy Tweaks

It’s time for our monthly Facebook privacy policy fire drill!  They are proposing a couple of new (and potentially disturbing to some) tweaks that will be made to their privacy policy.  The first is the integration of automatic geolocation features.  Applications like foursquare provide a fun way to localize social media and meet new friends, but they also broadcast your activities to the world and provide criminals with a possible blueprint for tracking your whereabouts.  The second change is the implementation of the new Facebook Connect policy, which may automatically sign you into sites and share your public information simply based on the presence of a cookie on your computer.  Given the fact that many Facebook users still don’t fully understand the implications of the “Everyone” default sharing mode on their wall, this has the potential to get a little nasty.

Link: TechCrunch

Feel free to provide your thoughts and/or contributions…

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Don't be a social media lemming.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: “Get 300 followers per day on Twitter!”

We all have, and I’ve heard this and other similar enticements in just the last couple of days.  This topic has been covered ad nauseum by every social media and marketing blogger out there, but apparently the message isn’t getting out.

So here is one more shot…

Metric vs. Strategy

Measuring is a good thing – provided, of course, you’re measuring the right metrics.  The number fans on your Facebook fan page, or followers on Twitter, or subscribers to your blog are all important metrics that (indirectly) measure the reach of your message.  But they are not a strategy!

Getting additional followers on the social media channels is relatively easy, but what is the point?  Many businesses hold the mistaken assumption that more followers will somehow equal more business.  All it equals is more opportunity for business, but you need to have a plan to turn those opportunities into customers.  The real question is how many of those fans/friends/followers will convert?  What reason are you giving them to convert?  How are you tracking your conversion rate?  That’s what inbound marketing is all about.

Inbound Marketing

If you combine a large number of followers/friends/fans with an effective inbound marketing infrastructure, then you’re in business.  But building a large following without it is putting the cart before the horse.  Here is a basic outline of what inbound marketing entails:

1. Create compelling content. Which is easier said than done for many people.  Creating remarkable content in the digital age requires some competency in four skills: webapprentice, designer, storyteller, and marketer.
2. Optimize it for search. Inbound links are by far the most important factor for search engine optimization, which is why #1 is extremely important.  But it is also important to understand the basics of on-page optimization in order to maximize the visibility of your content to search engines.
3. Share it with others. This is where your large following can start to pay off.  Once you’re creating compelling content, share it through your social media channels in order to drive traffic back to your web site.
4. Create calls to action. Once the traffic is flowing into your web site, it’s important to have clear, prominent calls to action.  Make the visitor some sort of offer that gives them value in exchange for their contact information.
5. Nurture your leads. Ideally, your leads would be entered into some form of database or customer relationship management system so that you can follow up appropriately and move them through the buying cycle.  Cull them when necessary.
6. Convert your leads. That’s what it’s all about – convert leads to prospects, and prospects to customers.
7. Measure. You need to be measuring all of this activity every step of the way.  Understand where your traffic sources are and which ones are the most/least effective.  Compare those against your conversion rates and use the data to optimize your efficiency and scrap ineffective strategies.

Having 100 extremely engaged followers is far more valuable than 1,000 who are not paying attention.  And even if those 1,000 are paying attention, without an effective strategy for converting that asset into business you’re just wasting your time.

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Weekly High Five lists the most interesting, compelling, and/or useful links of each week.

This week’s High Five is about Internet advertising and metrics.

#5: Is 2010 the Year Digital Will Eclipse Print Ad Spending?

A recent Outsell study predicts that advertisers will be spending 32.5 percent in digital media versus 30.3 percent in print.  The silver lining for print is that it predicts advertising expenditures to increase slightly.  For some time, this has been a question of when and not if, and so while it comes as little surprise, it is no less momentous.

Link: Wired

#4: Why Ad Blocking is devastating to the sites you love

While print advertising is taking a beating these days, it’s not all moonlight and roses for digital advertising either.  Ars Technica decided to conduct an interesting experiment on their own site to block their content from visitors who were using ad blockers, since this was detrimental to their revenue stream.  After all, everybody needs to put food on the table.  While the experiment was a technical success, it was a social failure.  They determined that the backlash from this was far worse than the lost revenue, but more importantly they discovered that they had made a false assumption.  Their visitors, as it turns out, were not blocking the ads out of malevolence.  The simply hadn’t considered the ramifications of doing so and the vast majority were more than happy to whitelist the site.  The takeaway here is <drumroll> communication works!

Link: Ars Technica

#3: Chart of the Week: Marketing Budgets Shifting to Digital Tactics

Another marketing survey, this one from Econsultancy and ExactTarget, confirms a shift not only away from print but radio and television as well.  In all, 66 percent of companies surveyed are increasing their investments in digital marketing.

Link: Hubspot

#2: 35 Crucial SEO, Twitter & Social Media Statistics for Business People

Given the mass exodus from traditional marketing into Internet and social media, it’s important to have data to determine which which digital channel is appropriate for a given campaign.  This article posts a long list of recently gathered statistics that are helpful in that regard.

Link: SEOptimize

#1: Odds Are, It’s Wrong (Science fails to face the shortcomings of statistics)

Fair warning – this article is fairly dense with mathematics and statistics.  However, the bottom line and the reason it’s included here is that with all of these statistics and metrics, it’s important to maintain some healthy skepticism.  Almost every week, I see a marketing company either make faulty logical assumptions (here’s a bonus link: 7 Common Logical Mistakes People Make), rely on poor sampling, or flat out use the wrong statistical calculation.

Link: ScienceNews

Feel free to provide your thoughts and/or contributions…

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“Groundswell” by Forrester Research analysts Charlene Li and Josh Bernoffis one of the earliest and most influential books on the business effects and uses of social media.  It is often at the top of recommended reading lists, and for good reason.  The book is very well written, informative, practical, actionable and soaked with real stories and examples.  I recommend the book to anyone involved or interested in how social media affects organizations and the ways in which they can leverage it.

But there’s one large caveat; Li and Bernoff (unsurprisingly) take every possible opportunity to inject research analysts into each step of the process.

The Skinny

Why it rocks:

The book brilliantly paints a picture of your organization before, during, and after engagement in social media.  It lays out the influences it is having on all businesses, provides clear and understandable (i.e. non-techy) strategies and tactics for implementing it, and then predicts the aftermath of embracing social media.

Why It Doesn’t:

At every opportunity, the analyst-authors espouse the importance of using analysts to properly align your strategy with the social demographics of your target audience.  On its face, it sounds perfectly logical and back in 2008 (yeah, way back then) it was probably much more important than it is today.  One reason is that the ROI calculation was much more delicate two years ago than it is today, as the investment was generally higher and the return significantly lower.  In other words, it is arguably much easier to earn a positive ROI on social media engagement today.  Also, given the ubiquity of social networking sites and the advent of real time search, there are lots of fringe benefits to social media engagement that, in many cases, can make the ROI case themselves.  Finally, more and more customers expect their vendors to be present in social media.  This means that not participating can become both an opportunity cost and have a negative impact on their brand, both of which are hard to quantify.

Who Will Dig It:

Managers and executives who are ignorant, dubious, curious, or all of the above with regard to the hows and whys of engaging their organizations in social media will find the book very valuable and a fairly easy read.

The Essence

Part one focuses on understanding the groundswell.  This first section by itself would make the book worth reading!  It provides solid background and compelling examples to underscore the concepts.  But it also introduces the core idea of the Social Technographic Profile.  While I think this is a valuable thought exercise, I feel that the concept is a bit overdone.  The idea is that you should tune your social media presence according to the technographical makeup of your target audience.  My thoughts are that there are now sufficient tools available that the cost of leveraging all of the channels makes it a no-brainer to do so regardless of your target audience.

Part two of “Groundswell” builds on the concept of the social technographics profile and describes strategies and tactics for tapping into the groundswell.  With chapters on listening to, talking with, energizing, and helping the groundswell, no stone is left unturned.  Once again, my only beef is that the importance of determining the social technographic profile and shaping your strategy around it is slightly overemphasized.  I would argue that similar to writing a business plan, the journey is more important than the destination.

Finally, part three talks about the transformation that an organization fully engaged in social media will undergo.  These are important considerations, because like many initiatives, an organization cannot simply go through the motions.  Doing so will be painfully obvious to the social media world and will cause more harm than good.

The Verdict

Though I found the self-promotion of the analysts to be a bit strong and notwithstanding the fact that some of the concepts are becoming slightly dated, the book has too much valuable information not to recommend it.  And I do recommend it strongly with my previously expressed caveats.  So, as they say at the end of the book, I “look forward to meeting you in the groundswell.”

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The Guardian posted an article that provides eyetracking results, showing that users are ignoring the much hyped Google “real time” search results.  The article goes on to postulate as to why this is, and in doing so makes some clever references to hidden gorillas and characterizes the problem as one of “presentation.”

I beg to differ and would suggest, instead, that this is a problem of authority.

You Will Respect My Authoritah!

Any quest for answers, especially those involving Internet search, is entirely based on authority; namely, the authority of both the referrer and the source.  We have all grown to lend a certain degree of trust to the search engine of our choice.  That is, after all, why we’re using Google as opposed to Bing, or vice versa.  We understand that their respective algorithms or ranking processes have pre-qualified these results and judged them to be the most relevant to our search.  However, we also understand that the machines are imperfect and so we scan the results and try to judge for ourselves which of the individual sources appears to have high enough authority to warrant our attention.

In the South Park episode “Chickenlovr,” Cartman pulls over a speeding vehicle and discovers that just because he is wearing a uniform, it doesn’t mean that he has authority.

The problem with real time results is that the sources come from social networks that are decidedly outside our circle of trust.  If I see a list of Tweets from people I don’t follow, my gut reaction is to say, “I don’t follow that person, therefore what they have to say is not important to me.”  It’s a defense mechanism as much as anything.  On a certain level, we feel like we need to protect our social network by not admitting that outsiders have anything of superior value.  As Ani DeFranco sang, “God forbid you be an ugly girl, ‘course too pretty is also your doom, ’cause everyone harbors a secret hatred for the prettiest girl in the room.”

And so it goes with so-called real time search results.  Since you are not in my circle of trust, you are either too ugly or too pretty – but either way I’m not buyin’ it.

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