CopyDiva

Here’s my every now-and-again list of posts that’s I’ve liked and followed recently:

• I have heard many people talk about how every company should have a blog, which I really disagree with. Seems BL Ochman and I follow the same line of thinking.
• Discussions of measurement and ROI abound, both in the context of scalability (and here) and justification of paying for social media engagement.
• And yet others on measuring Word-of-Mouth and standardizing metrics there as well.
• Ways to bucket social media technologies.
• Should corporate communications people show their true colors when engaged online, or does that deflect from “the brand?”

Nothing sucks worse that a 404 error message. What’s a 404 error? Well, its when you click a dead link on a site and you get “sorry, this page doesn’t exist.” This can happen when a company changes or updates their website, when they yank down a promotion, or generally make changes to the navigation structure of a web site.

But, how cruddy is it when you change your blog URL, causing all the old article links to become dead? For a company, this is really bad form, and for a blogger too, especially if you want to have some kind of credibility. I mean really, how difficult is it to put up proper re-directs?

Bottom line: If you want people to find your amazing prose or deft analysis of something and hope to gain from the “long tail” of search, you will need to do one of two things:

1. keep the old site up and linked to the new one indefinitely: Jeremiah Owyang managed to do this very well, and even links to the archives from the old blog on his current blog
2. point re-directs from every post on the old blog to the URL of that post on the new blog: there are automated ways to do this when transferring over from one URL to another, but if you are prolific, Option 1 might be a better approach
3. (marginal at best) link back to the main page of your blog. NEVER link back to the main page of your web site, because the original link was for a blog post — that’s a sure way of getting people to leave - they want to read an article, not your sales pitch

Either way, if you are a company, chances are you’re blogging to improve your SEO, be seen as a thought leader and, generally speaking, gain more business. It makes you look bad if blog links go back to your main web site instead.

If you’re a blogger, you really want people to find your content, so don’t make it hard, otherwise you loose the long tail advantage of keeping your content up there, at least for a period of time.

Interesting posts I read this week, so far:

• Improving your website as a business asset and lead generator: This post at conversation marketing gives you concrete steps to take for a 3-hour improvement on your site (probably good for sites that don’t have 100’s of pages).
• WOM moneyback guarantee: WOM agency BzzAgent is challenging themselves by pitting their efforts against a typical interactive shop — if they don’t do 20% better than an agency, your WOM campaign is free. Kudos to them on that challenge, its very compelling.
• Top 50 Women Bloggers: Want to know which women bloggers have the most influence (granted, as per usual, this is a subjective analysis)? What really intrigued me about this story was the incredible diversity of topics of these women, from knitters to sex therapists to techno-geeks.
• Alisa Leonard has great, cheeky insights when I remember to read them. She added to her list of things to do when you want to get social.

Today, my snail mail showed up with yet another catalog that I never order from. Here’s the basic reality: I can count on one hand how many purchases I’ve made, from a paper catalog, in the last year. These purchases were from two catalogs: RoadRunner Sports (where I buy my running shoes and the very occasional item of running clothes) and Sierra Trading Post (skivvies for skiing and assorted outdoor activities).

I am not a paper catalog buyer, generally speaking. So why does LL Bean continue to send me catalogs? And Lands End, Chico’s, Title Nine (who has a store in my town that I could go to instead), etc? The catalog industry is in the dull-drums, thanks to Internet buying habits of people like me. But, it really peeves me that perfectly good trees are cut down and wasted so that the catalog industry can create glossy catalogs for me to put right into my recycling bin.

I would think that in today’s world of marketing and sales metrics, the catalog companies would figure out that I am a bad target — haven’t ordered from you in many years — and simply cull me from their list. Most sales organizations do this regularly, so that they don’t waste time marketing to people who, frankly, are not interested. Otherwise, marketing lists get unwieldy, corrupt and create lousy return on lead gen efforts.
Compare this to other companies that are more Internet and search-driven, like Zappos and Bluefly.com. I’ve ordered from Zappos (though I did return my order), and though they maybe have a catalog, I haven’t received one from them. Blessedly. Same with Bluefly — what they sent was a clever postcard coupon for a percent off my next purchase, a few months after my last purchase.

So, my message to companies like this — its time to diversify your customer relationship strategy, your lead generation strategy. Thanks to search and other online marketing, many people - maybe most - don’t buy the way they used to even 5 years ago.

• strategize better search terms to expand customers for specific types of products (like running shoes, flip flops, etc) that people tend to repeat buy
• go niche — products targeted at natural communities (scrapbookers, cyclists, techno-geeks) work better than demographics - remember, just because I am a white, middle-class mom with kids, doesn’t mean I have the same interests as another white, middle-class mom with kids who lives next door
• create more interactive shopping experiences for items that are difficult to shop for online (shoes, bathing suits, dress suits) AND make returns of those items free of charge — it works for Zappos

Over at the Collective Intellect blog, I wrote a piece on targeting, and how social media engagement now means that marketers have a better way to target consumers. This piece was inspired in part by a presentation at the Colorado Business Marketing Association last Wednesday by Matt Preschern from IBM.

Monitoring social media to determine campaign direction works for both the B2B and B2C side, it just manifests differently in terms of the behavioral targeting and tactics:

B2B marketing: For B2B, targeting is more focused on finding out what the key influencers for a specific topic — such as virtualization, or PC security — are talking about in relation to the issues. what are the top themes they are discussing right now? Then you can base a lead generation campaign strategy directly on the issues that are of top concern to the influencers and the people who read them, and nurture those leads through a longer sales cycle by constantly understanding the top issues.
B2C marketing: For B2C, targeting is focused more on sub-groups within an area, such as new runners or skiers within the communities that discuss running and skiing. Or, scrapbookers who are tied in to the crafting communities. What are their issues? What kinds of themes are hot right now? How are the sub-groups interests and concerns different from the total group. In B2C, instead of building out white papers or webinars, you might offer coupons, training techniques or discounts to events.

Just posted on the Collective Intellect blog my opinions related to the whole issue of measuring influence in social media. This is an important question for folks in marketing, advertising and PR these days, because everyone is trying to figure out how to monetize (I know, hate that word) social media.

What concerns me about that whole “making money” aspect is that too many agencies will convince their clients to jump into social media before they (the agencies and the clients) understand what they are doing. This already happens — in fact, we were just arguing about that in the office this morning when one of our partners asked for ideas for a social media campaign. It was clear from the request that the partner is still relatively clueless about good potential uses for social media campaigns.

The result is that users will just jump on the next bandwagon (newer app, fewer advertisers) to try to get away from the onslaught. It’s time for advertisers to realize that the whole model is broken. Why do you think TiVO’s are so popular?
Anyhoo. Back to the influence measurement. Since social media is dynamic, you cannot measure influence like you do in traditional media, where influence remains relatively static. To find out more about my opinion, visit this link to my post at the Collective Intellect blog.

This morning at 10:15m, I will be co-presenting a seminar on Tracking Reputation in the Blogosphere, with two of my Boulder colleagues, Ari Newman of Filtrbox and Howard Kaushansky from Umbria. If you’re in Vegas for BlogWorld, stop in to our session, ask questions and stay and listen for a while, it should be an interesting conversation. One of the things I will discuss in whether reputation always matters for companies in every industry. Plus, just like in middle school, reputation is only as good as the people who like you, so understanding who those different influencers are is very important to gaining understanding of your reputation. Hopefully, I will have the opportunity to blog other sessions later — at the very least, I will Twitter my experiences. Follow me at Twitter here or here.

I posted today on Collective Intellect’s blog about an article from Monday’s Wall Street Journal, discussing the metrics problem with online advertising — basically, how it is hard to figure out online measurement because there are a lot of variables, and different vendors measure in different ways. I find it amazing still that measurement is so seemingly arbitrary still, similar to the model by Nielsen to measure advertising online. Online measurement should be easier, because there is a trail of data left behind. However, now there are so many place to measure, it is more complicated.

You can read my post here.

When was the last time you felt friendly about embarking on a customer support experience? I am guessing it wasn’t recent. Some things that I use seem to break or be slow often — Twitter and Facebook both come to mind. But, there are lots of things that a company can learn from exposing comments from customers and users of their products and services. This is the general idea behind Get Satisfaction. A free service, anyone can start a section on any product by any company. Companies that are smart have people who participate in these areas to provide answers to questions, get feedback and generally reach out to their users.

The idea is that Get Satisfaction is hoping to help companies make customer service a truly two-way interaction. I am not sure how the posts will be organized — self-tagged by users? — but what’s interesting is letting complaints, suggestions, and other comments hang out in a public social media environment.

Apparently, Twitter is one of the beta users. Tagged topics range from “broken” to “bugs” to “friends.” Anyone can respond to a posting, so that means power users can help as much as a company. This could in some way take pressure off companies who get inundated with questions, alot of time redundant questions.

What’s interesting is that companies now have an ability to actively allow this two-way communication that is social in nature. I’ll be interested to see what happens. Like other social sites, this one will be ripe for gaming.

Sometimes it seems like marketing is moving at warp speed (set your phasers on stun). First there was websites, which so many in the B2B world poo-poo’ed as the latest passing fad. Now, not only are sites ubiquitous but there are so many online activities just waiting for the smart, savvy marketing professional to take advantage of. And, at the same time, play nice in the sandbox of experimental marketing in fresh communications realms. What that means is, don’t blow it to be the first one to try it, understand the environment first.

It is fun to watch, too. Who knew 2 years ago that Second Life would host analyst briefings for the likes of IBM? Yes, that’s right, you too can be a part of a briefing where the guy asking the serious question has a unicorn avatar and three breasty space chicks hanging with him.