CopyDiva

Though there seem to be two a week that are “must be there” conferences — this week, for example, the Shop.org Annual Summit in Vegas and Web 2.0 in NYC — I was glad to come across this helpful list today, from Paul O’Brien:

1. Search Engine Strategies (SES)
2. Pubcon (WebmasterWorld)
3. ad:tech
4. eTail
5. Search Insider Summit
6. Affiliate Summit
7. Shop.org
8. Online Market World
9. Direct Marketing Association
10. eMetrics Summit
11. Search Marketing Expo (SMX)
12. OMMA Expo
13. Internet Marketing Conference
14. SXSW - which you should attend just because
15. iMedia Agency Summit & iMedia Summits
16. PPC Summit
17. MarketingProfs
18. American Marketing Association (AMA)
19. Online Marketing Summit
20. MIXX Expo
21. Media Relations Summit
22. ACCM (DMA)
23. DM Days (DMA)
24. Searchnomics
25. ClickZ Specifics
26. Internet Retailer
27. Web Analytics Association Base Camp
28. Next Generation Marketing
29. eRetailer Summit
30. New Marketing Summit
31. IAB Events
32. MarketingSherpa’s Email Summit
33. Apartment Internet Marketing - really!
34. Frost & Sullivan Marketing World
35. T.R.A.F.F.I.C.
36. Catalog & ECommerce Club
37. Blog World Expo
38. eComXpo

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.

How do you use, interact with, and communicate with social computing/social media tools? Lately, I have spent some time thinking about the way I use specific social computing tools and why others bore me, or why I simply have no interest in others. Certainly not a science, as these are my observations about my personal usage, but I do think that perhaps it bears some useful information, particularly about motivations, necessities, distractions, connections, and other words ending in -ion.

Blogging: Writing and Reading

The ol’ stalwart blogging. Yes, I blog, but certainly not an A-lister - more like a D-lister or lower. My blog isn’t bringing in money, nor is it set up to do that. I blog about mostly business topics that interest me. I am not really a personal blogger, except for the occasional anecdote. I blog for this blog, guest blog on occasion, and blog where I work.
As far as reading blogs, I subscribe to a number of blogs via Google Reader, but I have to say I rarely read them. Having worked at a social media measurement company, I am spoiled, and so I don’t like sifting through blog posts I don’t care about. So, I use Filtrbox to streamline my reading. I have a few filters set up, and I sift through those when I have time to peruse posts that are of interest. I am less interested in who is doing the writing, because there are plenty of unknown bloggers that write good, interesting, thought-provoking posts.

Generally speaking, I find a lot of interesting and relevant things to read through people I follow on Twitter and Friendfeed.

Micro-blogging or update services

Twitter: I use Twitter for updates that are both personal and business-oriented as well. I follow friends, business associates and interesting and important people in the social media space, and I am followed by similar folks. I don’t necessarily follow everyone who follows me. Early on, I did, but I found that some people were micro-verbose (meaning, they would tweet 6 or 7 tweets in a row, which is really annoying). So, I have reduced somewhat the number of people I follow, but am always adding new people as well.

How I access Twitter: I never login to Twitter’s web page to tweet, only to read profiles. I use Twirl as my desktop tweeting app (its also my friendfeed app). I don’t like having to visit web pages to update messaging, it takes too long and makes it even more disruptive than it needs to be.

What I hate about Twitter use: It’s bad enough when someone you’re talking to gets a phone call or email, but by far the rudest interrupter is getting tweets delivered to your phone. TURN IT OFF. I can certainly envision a helpful aspect to getting tweets to your phone — getting updates in an emergency, for example, or getting organized with a large group you are traveling with. But, I have to say, the tweets I get seem really not important enough to interrupt me when I am away from a computer.

FriendFeed: This very helpful aggregator of social tools, from Digg and Technorati to Plurk and Twitter to LinkedIn. After plugging in all my accounts, I have no reason to visit the FriendFeed site, except to find people to follow, which makes it very easy to interact with, at a low commitment level, which I prefer.

In part 2, I will discuss many other micro-blogging or update services, plus social networks.

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

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.

In Gerry McGovern’s most recent edition of his excellent New Thinking e-mail newsletter, he covers a bit of interesting territory regarding web content. Are the words people use to search the same words they want to see when they land on your website? Here’s what Gerry has to say about it: “The words that people search with may not always be the words they would like to read when they arrive at a webpage. Search needs to be understood as a particular type of mental behaviour. Once the customer arrives at a webpage, a whole new set of words may kick in. One set of words to bring customers to your website-another set to get them to complete a task.”

The example he uses is a search for cheap hotels. Now, if you were to do a search for cheap hotels, or even discount hotels, it doesn’t mean you want a crappy hotel. You just don’t want to pay more than you have to. So, searching for a cheap hotel doesn’t mean you want to land on a website that has a headline something like “Here’s a cheap hotel!”

This search vs. web words difference isn’t universal, but it is a good exercise to think about what you want a site visitor to do once you get them to your site:

• make sure they see the keywords or phrases that let them know they are in the right place
• help them complete a task by making it easy to find what they want, whether it’s watch a demo, download a white paper, get customer support, etc
• use the right words to make them comfortable as you guide them to complete a task

Today’s TechCrunch mentioned two new players in the pay-per-post arena, CreamAid and ReviewMe. I’m not quite sure that CreamAid is really the same as PayPerPost, though the whole royalty-for-posting idea is there. With so much of the blogosphere as spamblogs already, how does pay-per-post effect the trust factor of bloggers? Since PayPerPost already has people willing to sell their blogs for cash, I think the trust level suffers. Of course, there will always be a market for a service like this because there will always be marketers unwilling to really delve deep into learning how to really connect with customers. But really think about it — people already have such a low trust of advertising in any form, they ignore banner ads, get Tivos to bypass commercials and get creative to avoid being sold to. Soon enough, they will learn to tune out these fake blog posts too. Hey, sounds like a great new service, a way to strip those out.
The most important thing to remember about your customers — if they are even reading blogs — is they don’t want hype. Hype is the easy way out that will negatively impact your customers and prospects. People look to web resources for information, so give them information, leave the hype on the cutting room floor. If you want to make an impact in the blogosphere, there are simply better ways to do it then paying bloggers to write fake praises.

This week in his Excess Voice newsletter, Nick Usborne’s article asked the question: what is trustworthy information online? Apparently, blogs and other social networks are moving down in credibility among consumers. In fact, according to a story in Brandweek, a new study by Jupiter Research reports that only 21% of consumers trust the product information found on social networks like blogs and forums. And, get this – they are twice as likely to trust the information they find on corporate web sites.

If you’re in charge of the content on your web site, use this to your advantage – don’t abuse the trust. Don’t hype. Give site visitors the real information they want.

The whole trust element I find personally interesting as it relates to the book reviews I post here. I wonder, and I posed this to Nick as well: would it be more valuable content for readers if book reviews were not all just glorious praise? What if I reviewed a business book that I ended up thinking wasn’t very useful? Should I post that on my site? Certainly, no one would buy it based on my review, so why post with an affiliate link to Amazon? ‘true that the books I review are just ones that I find helpful. Is there a place for a broader spectrum?

Not too long ago, I went to a marketing event put on by our local Boulder Marketing Group, and chatted with a woman about her company’s web site and pay-per-click campaign. This is a company that sells courses for professionals in the food industry. She was telling me how much they were spending (a lot!) on their PPC’s to get clicks to one particular program they offer, but they weren’t getting many leads interested in the program. She didn’t understand why.

What’s wrong with this PPC campaign?

Though they seemed to have the right keywords, their follow-through just wasn’t there, and with PPC, you need follow-through. Click-throughs were going to their home page, and not directly to information about this specific program advertised. So, once at the home page, visitors had to search around for the advertised program. How likely is it they will spend the time to do that? Not likely.

How can they fix their PPC campaign?

What would work best is to create a specific landing page for the PPC, which would track directly to that particular campaign. That would make it easy to track ROI for the PPC campaign. If they don’t want to spend the time or money to create a landing page, at a minimum, the click-though ought to go to the program page, as long as there is a way for the site visitor to request more information on that page.

The problem with the second approach? The program page is bound to just lead the site visitor elsewhere because of the site navigation. Then you lose that lead. Landing pages just work better in targeted marketing, such as PPC, because you get the user to immediately act on their impulse.

I know that corporate marketers can find it to be a big hassle to get landing pages created, because inevitably, they have to work with IT or their outside agency to get them done. That equals delays or too much money. But, there are tools out there to create branded landing pages on-the-fly. SurveyGizmo is the best one I have seen. An online survey system, this great little application is easy enough to use that you can just bypass IT altogether and test PPC campaigns easily.

3 basic best practices for PPC

1. Use for specific campaigns that you need or want a specific result. Examples: lead generation, download white paper, sign up for more info, get a discount if you buy now (or soon).
2. Landing pages should be simple: no navigation, not a lot of graphics to distract from the purpose. Save the amazing graphic design for some other purpose.
3. Repeat the heading text from the PPC ad on the landing page. Let clickers know they are at the right place so they trust what happens next.