Last week was a rough week for marketing and PR professionals in the blogosphere. Chris Anderson (Wire/Longtail), David Meerman and Marshall Kirkpatrick (Read/Write, TechCrunch) wrote critical posts to PR folks who are trying to reach out to bloggers. Chris even published a list of emails from PR people he’s blacklisting.

But what are the responsibilities and expectations of PR/Marketing Agencies and Blogggers?

While I am a marketer by profession, I am also a blogger. I’ve received plenty of horrible blog pitches, like the dreaded “Dear Website Owner” emails or even those completely misunderstanding who I am or who I work for. I’m right there beside with Chris, Marshall and others on this.

We bloggers embrace the long tail influence we have over traditional media, but we don’t like being on what looks like a “Press Release spam list”. Marketers and PR folks need to adapt to this. And as Bloggers, we’ll always be caught with horrible “Dear Site Owner” emails every once in while. It just shouldn’t be every blog pitch email.

As someone involved in e-Storm’s Social Media efforts, we spend time reading and targeting each blog we recommend our clients to contact. We build a list of bloggers along with a description of each, plus an “Approach & Messaging Recommendations” document for each blogger. Generally, these documents have to be approved both internally by e-Storm and externally by the client before any blogger outreach happens.

Bloggers: Help Educate us PR/Marketing on How to Do It Right

And to my fellow bloggers out there, instead of just being angry, write back and tell them what you’d prefer. Educate us marketers because in this ever changing Blogosphere, we’re all learning what it means to be a blogger, what is a blogger mindset and how can we reach out to bloggers relevantly.

Marketers and PR folks need to learn that the blogosphere is a community, not a place to send press releases to. Let’s show them by helping them join the community in a relevant and helpful way.

To those rightly annoyed bloggers, point us PR/Marketing flacks to the right direction:

• Emergence Media Blogger Relations Outreach Guidelines
• SHIFT Communications Blogging Guidelines
• Word of Mouth Marketing Association: 10 Principles for Ethical Contact by Marketers

I’ve also set-up a Wiki on Blogger Outreach, which is available here. Feel free to contribute as you wish and save bloggers from poorly targeted PR pitches and help PR/marketers from embarrassing themselves.

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Why Companies Are Going UGC: Community, Conversion & SEO

Lee Odden has laid out the reasons for UGC, citing some of the many studies that point to both

• Increasing consumer expectations to create online content
• Improved conversions for online retailers that provided user-based product reviews

Here is Lee’s list of “common benefits of user generated content for web site optimization and better search engine rankings”:

• Leveraging a like-minded, enthusiastic community for the creation and sharing of topically focused content in multiple media formats: text, audio, images and video
• Additional web site content attracts traffic through long tail phrase queries
• UGC increases the breadth of overall content available to consumers, increasing the chance they’ll find what they’re searching for
• The opportunity to contribute content in a meaningful way fosters community and can result in an effective feedback loop – motivating the creation of more content and participation. ”

Image Modified and Borrowed from Avinash. :)

UGC and SEO for Long Tail or the Head?

When doing an integrated SEM Campaign, which at e-Storm we define as doing Organic (SEO) and Paid (PPC), who gets what keywords from the client’s “Keyword Portfolio”? Here’s one scenario:

• PPC gets the Tail: Because it is easy to ensure that you get the tail and the tail is cheap
• SEO gets the Head: Because the keywords are too expensive to buy on the PPC side, and also limited content forces the client to focus on a smaller set of keywords

UGC can help solve this problem of choosing between the “Head” and “Tail” keywords for SEO. But, of course, this is based on getting it right on four assumptions:

• Quality of the Content:
  What kind of quality are you looking for? How will you solicit them?
• Amount of Content:
  Is your audience massive enough to leave substantial feedback? Do you have incentives or a timeline? Building UGC content can be a long term project.
• Internal Linking – Integration:
  Will the UGC content be well integrated to your website or pushed off as a quasi-orphan.
• External Linking – Will People Link to Your UGC Content?
  Will people want to link directly to the UGC content? Great content with no “linklove” may not rank well.

How will you deploy UGC to help take advantage of long tail content? How will be integrated with your current site (link structure) and will people want to link to it?

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Last Saturday, I attended the CommunityNext Viral Marketing conference in Silicon Valley. The Conference, by Noah Kagan and Adam Kalamchi, brought together an interesting array of speakers to talk about Viral Marketing – from tactics, strategy, philosophy to viral marketing as Facebook widgets to community building.

Most of the speakers ranged from the experienced serial entrepreneurs (Dave McClure: PayPal, SimplyHired) to founders of accidental start-ups (Eric Nakagawa of icanhascheezurger). The atmosphere was very much on the casual side, with some point reaching nearly 1990s dot-com humor with of Adam Rifkin of Booze Mail making a cocktail during a talk to clearly very sharp and serious with Keith Rabois of Slide.

Below are my notes on:

1. Widgets – Metrics, Key Points on Facebook Widgets
2. Notes from Keith Rabois, one of the most impressive speaker at CommunityNext (Definitely Read This)
3. Flickr Photos: Including PowerPoint Slides given by Speakers. Plus: All Photos of the event
4. Feedback for the next CommunityNext Conference

** General Notes by Theme **
The Power of Leveraging Existing Networks: iLike v. last.fm

• The long established music discovery service from 2002, Last.FM, has been quickly overtaken by iLike which grew quickly once it launched the iLike widget for Facebook. (Tom Conrad of Pandora)
• Leveraging Existing Off-site Networks: It is a simple feature for your product to ask if the user if wants to import her Gmail Address book (or Yahoo, etc) and see who else is on the site and to “friend” existing contacts.

The Appeal of Widgets on User Profiles – Unique, Media, not Technology (From Jia of RockYou)

• “It’s like the first day of highschool” and you want to show-off how you’re different.
• Think of Widgets as a Media tool and a product, not a technological gadget
• It is not about “being technologically cool” but “being cool to use”

Facebook v. MySpace Widget Marketing Channels (Flickr Slide)

• There are 14 channels (opportunities) for spreading widgets, such as from the mini-feed, refer a friend (shown when adding a widget) and the profile page. (From Jia from Rock You).
• MySpace channels were mainly focused on In-Profile, Profile Comments, Bulletin Messages (e.g. “Your Friend Daniel has added Widget X”), and Forums (not often talked about, but highly effective).

MySpace v. Facebook Differences, Openness (From Jia of Rock You)

• FaceBook: Users do not necessarily browse around by visiting profiles, they have more reliance on using the FaceBook Mini-Feed on keeping touch on their friends
• In FaceBook, you need to rely on the Mini-Feed to place your call to action, e.g. “Daniel Riveong has just added the widget ZYZ, you should too”
• In Facebook, a user can only invite 10 friends a day to add a widget, making the friends feel more special

UGC Challenges

• With Yelp.com: Debate the use of paid-reviews to seed reviews. How authentic is it?
• Use MyBlogLog, Friendster and Others: Spam. Black-Hat marketers will always look for cheap tricks to hijack a platform for spam marketing tactics.
• From Friendster: The need to constant “prune” bad content to help develop the culture of the community and thus the brand

Miscellaneous Viral and Widgets Metrics

• Booze Mail on Facebook was able to grow its userbase at 30% per day
• RocketYou achived 9 million users in Facebook in 1.5 months
• Friendster: For every 1 (Exhibitionist) profile, there is 5,000-10,000 (Voyeurs) viewers
• Development of Widgets: ranged from 2 days to 4 weeks, using 1-2 programmers.

** Keith Rabois of Slide **

Lesson 1: “Viral Growth is Really Hard”
A very, very good reminder that Viral marketing and growth (user adoption) is just not magic and not just putting a YouTube video of a “funny video” and expecting traffic. It’s a mix of luck and strategy.

Examples:
Only 1 really great viral video every 6 months
Facebook Widgets: LinkedIn and Yelp.com have 2 widgets each, all have so far failed to reach beyond 4000 users each.

Lesson 2: Knowing the Value of a User: Viral Marketing v. E-Commerce Projection
E-commerce (Online Retailers) have data on the “tangible of users”, and so there is no real need for viral marketing. They know how much they are willing to spend for each user.

In a space where the value of each new user value is unknown viral marketing becomes very attractive; it has potentially the “lowest marginal cost for user acquition”. It is the safe choice to go far, when you don’t know how much you should spend, so you spend as little as possible.

Lesson 3: Is PR helpful in Viral Marketing? Not Really.
Keith felt that the best PR is done in-house, based on his experience and from talking to others. He cites the story that out of 5-6 start-ups in a room, only 1 company raised their hand when asked if they were happy with their PR firm. Other speakers repeated a similar theme.

Lesson 4: Viral/Social Network Structures & Business Model Changes
Yelp was originally an “Ask a friend where to eat tonight” referral service. YouTube was more focused as a dating service, but changed after utterly failure in the Los Angeles market. Slides was originally desktop-based before going into the Widget space with Facebook.

** For Next Time: Suggestions for Improvements **

Noah, Adam and the rest of the CommunityNext gang pulled off a heck of a conference. So I’m providing suggestions here, but in no way are they intended to criticize either the CommunityNext team or their invited speakers. This is stuff both CommunityNext and the speakers will hopefully (I hope that is) find constructive and useful.

Overall, I think a quick 30 minute session on refreshing one’s presentation skill will go a long way in making many of the speaker’s performance. We all need reminders! Also, maybe invite folks from the Marketing Agency world too to talk about their experience, especially working with a client to understand the viral/social-media space…of course, I’m not suggesting merely me. :)

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If SEO is Multi-Disciplinary: Is In-House Better?

If SEO requires a holistic approach that integrates content development, PR, blog outreach, blog marketing, usability and so on – there is always the looming question of which is better: a well-turned in-house SEO team or the top SEO consultant with a willing client?

With the level of coordination and integration required, I’m leaning towards the in-house team. Although, I think there are currently more creative/top SEO consultants then there are top notch in-house SEO team. However, going in-house has been the trend for the past 1-2 years.

What Do Agencies Need to Do?

For those of us working on the Agency side, we need to ask ourselves: If our client’s competitors are a top-notch in-house SEO team, how can we act like our client’s in-house team rather than as outside consultants? What training is required? What cross-discipinary (PR to conten producing) stakeholder buy-ins is need? What Long Term planning must be done?

See the various Case Studies of a successful in-house Social Media Marketing campaign below:

Docshop (by David Willson)

“Sujan James Sujan Patel is responsible for driving organic and social media traffic to Docshop, a health information portal.

Getting web sites to link to anything health related can be an extremely difficult task, but Sujan has managed to add over 38,000 links this year!”

“Digg, and Stumble Upon are very good sites and can drive a lot of traffic but smaller niche sites can drive good traffic that is more likely to come back to your site. This is something I haven’t seen many marketers take advantage of.”

SEOMoz
SEOMoz built over 1,000,000 links in 33 months through the quality of its content, participation in the SEM community and timeliness. See Rand’s article here.

Link Building success through content:

Web 2.0 Awards – 72K + 30K = 100K+ links
Beginner’s Guide to SEO – 6.5K + 5.6K = 12K+ links
Page Strength – 4K + 3.5K = 7.5K+ links
Search Ranking Factors – 14K + 9K = 23K+ links
SEO Blog – 19K + 34K = 53K+ links

SplashCast (Via Jeremiah Oywang)
Splashcast hired to Social Media folks to active conduct community outreach via: blogging, sending trackbacks, commenting on other blogs, using Twitter, reaching out to bloggers for product launch and other methods.

“As a result of implementing this strategy before, during and after our initial launch, we had more than 1,000 publishers register for an account at launch, we doubled that in our first month to 2,000 and doubled it again in our second month to more than 4,000. SplashCast player loads are now aproaching 5.5 million.”

Of Blog Outreach: “That strategy lead to more than 250 blog mentions within 48 hours of our launch, for example.”

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Just recently I wrote:

If you’re search engine optimization campaign is targeting Google, then what are you doing about the “searches” on Del.icio.us, Technorati, StumbleUpon, Yelp, Wikipedia, Oodle and even Digg? Maybe those searches are not for the mainstream (yet), but it maybe where the Linkerati, the savvy “Influencers”, go?

Now, Google Universal Search makes us ask: What other channels do we need to optimize in (YouTube, Google Video, Google News) to get on the Google SERPs? A reverse question.

As state by David Wilson:

What GUS does in short is reduces the number of organic listings available on the home page. No longer is getting to the first page of Google good enough. Now you need to be in the top 5 or 6 positions as the rest will be taken by video and news.

Seems like we’re practically on the same page here.

SEO no longer means optimizing only one’s website, or links…it means being active promoting and staying relevant through a variety of channels and mediums. It means distributing your content on YouTube, Yelp, Wikipedia, Press Releases etc.

Google Universal Search really presents no new known challenges of SEO. It just brings the message home: Old SEO is Dead, New SEO is a form of Multi-Channel Content Optimization and Distribution.

It’s all been said before:

1. SEO as Website Positioning Strategy? – Updated
2. Quick Post: Editorialization of Google Results, And the Change in SEO
3. Google’s Personalized Search: How Much Should We Care?

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SEO is Dead! Well, maybe your Google SEO

Why is SEO important? Because the majority of people search on the Internet to find things…reviews, contact numbers, shopping etc. But what is Search? Google? Yahoo?

If you’re search engine optimization campaign is targeting Google, then what are you doing about the “searches” on Del.icio.us, Technorati, StumbleUpon, Yelp, Wikipedia, Oodle and even Digg? Maybe those searches are not for the mainstream (yet), but it maybe where the Linkerati, the savvy “Influencers”, go?

Is your SEO really just “Google Search Optimization”? Have you brainstormed with your marketing team to see if your company, product and/or service needs to do more?

The Linkerati: Where Are They?

Rand Fishkin has made much about how SEO folks need to make sure their linkbait (and ditto for Viral/WoM campaigns) needs to cater to the Linkerati audience, the savvy online influencers who create and forward content.

But moving beyond finding what appeals to the Linkerati, is the need to find out where are they online, We need to diversify our thinking on 1) how where/how they create content; and 2) how they find content.

Recently, ValleyWag noted that while the number of active blogs tracked by Technorati has stagnated “personal publishing is still growing, but the fastest growth is occurring on social media properties”, such as MySpace, Digg, Yelp, and Twitter. Indeed, a recent study suggests that “40% of all social networkers said they use social networking sites to learn more about brands or products that they like”.

Questions to Ask:

1. Where are my customers? Who are the influencers within those circles?
2. Where do they search?
   (Do they search on Yelp, Technorati, Digg or Del.icio.us?)
3. Have I distributed my content there?
   (E.g. Placement of Yelp, Blog on Technorati, Content on Digg, Bookmarked on Del.icio.us)
4. Is it searchable? Or, simply, Findable? Is it “optimized”?

Counter Point: Who needs the Linkerati? Web-2-What and Big Seed Marketing.

There is the question of how important the Linkerati crowd is in shear physical numbers and how important the Linkerati and influencers are in general.

In May’s Harvard Business review, Duncan Watts and Jonah Pertti proposed the idea of “big-seed marketing” as opposed to “Influencer”-based viral marketing, which:

combines viral-marketing tools with old-fashioned mass media in a way that yields far more predictable results than “purely” viral approaches like word-of-mouth marketing.
…
big-seed marketing harnesses the power of large numbers of ordinary people, its success does not depend on influentials or on any other special individuals; thus, managers can dispense with the probably fruitless exercise of predicting how, or through whom, contagious ideas will spread.

The Tiny Linkerati

According to a Pew Internet May 6 study, 49% of the US audience are those that have “few “tech assets” and limited use of technology”. The survey goes on to show how little of the US audience are among the Web 2.0 Internet savvy. They are so little of them. Is it worth the effort on being on Yelp, Twitter, Digg, MySpace etc to appeal to them?

Of Course, It Depends

It is important to understand that you can create online marketing success without getting caught in the buzz about about “influencers” or the Linkerati. It depends what market your client and your customers are in. Of course, innovation carries risk – but this is not to forsake the long-hanging fruit for risk taking and vice-versa. You need both.

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The past two weeks have been a busy week for me: Ad:Tech, Web 2.0 Expo, attending the Social Medic Club and helping a client ramp up their Blog Outreach program.

Speaking with folks from Ad:Tech and just surveying the marketing blogosphere lately, we are seeing three trends that are affecting the marketing landscape all the way from increasing importance of a CMO to the strategic changes required for SEO.

The Three Trends Affecting Marketing

• Longer Tail of Media Consumption
  Increasing variety of media (mobile, social networks, search blogs, Xbox 360) that people are consuming means more effort required for marketing/brand/PR integration and more requirements for a “grand strategy” vision.
• Marketing increased emphasis as a Revenue Driver
  Increasing Trend Towards Measurement and ROI means that marketing will take high prominence in the C-level space, helping shape product development, internal culture and budgeting
• Social Media as the Disruptor on the Web
  Social affecting all of Interactive Marketing Activities, diversifying the types of media being consumed and making marketers have greater engagement with the customer audience and moving from brand control to brand management.

Changes in the Evolving Marketing Landscape

• Raise of the CMOs (As Opposed to VP of Marketing)
  Elevating Marketing position as part of a revenue generating, rather than cost center; rebalancing the importance of the sales team vis-à-vis the marketing team.
• Evangelist becomes more integral to Marketing-PR
  Going beyond being a spokesperson, writing to the community (writing post, responding to comments) and generally engaging the community be it on Yelp, Amazon.com reviews or blogs or in-real-life (IRL)
• Executing the Social Media Program
  Need for Evangelists and Community Managers to execute Social Media Program to engage, manage and measure Social Media and Communities.
• SEM becomes Strategic Website Positioning
  How SEM (particularly SEO) is shifting from its early days of simple keyword analysis to integrating brand, PR, word-of-mouth, content strategy, usability etc. SEM or Strategic Website Positioning needs to coordinate under the CMO and with the Social Media Program.

1. Raise of the CMO (Not VP of Marketing)

It is common knowledge that when a business is adjusting to a difficult economy, R&D slows and marketing is chopped. Marketing is seen as an expenditure, rather than vehicle for sales. The increasing emphasis on measurement and ROI is changing that somewhat.

Marketing’s evolution to a more strategic role (from VP-level to C-level) is boosted by three trends:

• Marketing increased emphasis as a Revenue Driver
  Thanks to better metrics and ROI measurement, Marketing is getting more respect as a revenue generator.
• Longer Tail of Media Consumption:
  Diversifying media consumption means more difficult in marketing integration and greater need for strategic direction in managing multi-channel marketing.
• Social Media as the Disruptor on the Web
  Social Media is helping fuel the long tail of media consumption. It also has been pushing companies to integrate their PR/Word-of-Mouth/Marketing campaigns and change their internal corporate cultures.

Jon Miller writes most succinctly on the definition and greater responsibility of a CMO at the Futurelab Blog:

“To be successful, the CMO must play a role broader than just leading the marketing organization. The role must include driving revenue, leading innovation, and providing strategic vision. These growth champions must lead all four Ps – not just promotion but also product strategy, place (channel and distribution), and pricing.

Like other C-level executives, these CMOs must be rigorous in their financial planning and metrics, making revenue forecasts and justifying their budgets like the investment in the future that marketing spending really is.”

See Jon Miller’s article at:

1. ”Are You a CMO or a VP of Marketing?”, April 30, 2007
   http://blog.futurelab.net/2007/04/are_you_a_cmo_or_a_vp_of_marke.html

2. Evangelist

While we can debate the number of blogs or if MySpace is here to stay, Social Media has changed the Internet landscape just as the Internet in the 90s changed the marketing and business landscape.

Evangelist have been around before Social Media took off as the latest buzzword, but the importance of their role is increasingly clear if corporations are to have plans to thoroughly engage their online audience and communities.

Jeremiah explains that: “An evangelists role is to go beyond understanding and get others to ‘believe’ in your product or service. This is beyond just communication and advertising and gets to the fundamental root of human communications, building trust. “

In Matt McGee’s “Meet Your New Employee: Writer, Marketer, Evangelist”, Matt’s focuses on how even an evangelist can apply to small businesses in:

• To Write: “You need a blog to communicate directly with customers, and good writers make the best bloggers….In this day and age, you need to become a mini-publisher and that demands someone who knows how to write.”
• To Network: “finding customers and joining their communities and conversations. Good “people skills” are imperative to market successfully.”
• Do Public Relations: “This should include traditional media; press releases are still the way to reach out to those folks. But it should also include online influencers: important bloggers and important online discussion forums that cover your industry.”

Read more at:

• “Meet Your New Employee: Writer, Marketer, Evangelist”, April 26, 2007
  http://searchengineland.com/070426-082409.php
• “Understanding the role of an Evangelist at a Web 2.0 Company”, October 07, 2006
  http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2006/10/07/understanding-the-role-of-an-evangelist-at-a-web-20-company/

3. Social Media Program

Jeremiah Owyang is on *the* thought leader when it comes to understanding how corporations need to respond to social media opportunities. If you’re not reading his blog, you should.

While he has written about the need for Evangelist and Community Managers, Jeremiah recently wrote on the technical needs of the Social Media Programs the Evangelist and Community Managers would execute, listing some important tactical level thinking:

Recognize the new influencers. Like Media, Press, and Analysts, consider Social Media yet an additional influencer group to reach.

Prepare for all scenarios. Create an internal process or at least discuss how to deal with crises. (such as exploding products, embarrassing situations). Draw from classic PR strategies, but realize that acting quickly in a human way, and not hiding is key.

…

Employees will blog, embrace. In addition to creating the corporate blog(s), be sure to recognize the natural employee bloggers that appear. You may find them in the product groups, support, and marketing departments. Have a discussion on how to include them in your strategy, even if it means to let them continue on their own. When it comes to trust, prospects and customers may trust employee bloggers that don’t have the corporate logo on their blog.

Measurement. You’ll need to measure to prove worth in this new arena, get more budget and even get a raise. I’ve discussed this extensively, see all posts tagged Social Media Measurement.

See more under:

• “Strategies for organizing your Corporate Social Media Program (Starting internally first)“, April 23, 2007
  http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2007/04/23/strategies-for-organizing-your-corporate-social-media-program/
• “10 Social Media Strategies for the Fortune 1000 Corporations”, December 12, 2006
  http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2006/12/18/10-social-media-strategies-for-the-corporations/
• “Understanding the Community/Evangelist Role, and profiles of a few of my Favorite Folks”, March 26, 2007
  http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2007/03/26/understanding-the-technology-evangelist-role-a-few-of-my-favorite-folks/

4. SEM becomes Strategic Website Positioning

SEO (and with it PPC) has been steadily evolving away from the traditional SEO methods, with a full embrace of Social Media to usability to content strategy, with changes occurring in:

1) the further integration of PR-ish tactics like “linkbaiting”; 2) the embrace of social media in social media marketing; 3) changing the metrics from rankings and to relevant traffic and conversion; and 4) thinking about usability and conversion optimization, not just search traffic generation.

All of these new changes will be unfamiliar to someone from the early days of SEO, which mostly concerned itself with placing important keyword on the webpages.

We are now at the point of needing to recast SEM (SEO and PPC) as Strategic Website Positioning:

The idea of Strategic Website Positioning is to think of search marketing (organic SEO and PPC), social media marketing and website development as an integrated approach, by asking questions centered around:

• How is your website’s content, structure and usability fit with the intent of your audience?
• How does your website “fit” in how people search (one-box searches on Google/Yahoo, Technorati, Oodle, vertical search engines)?
• How is your website positioned in Social Media Community? How do you want to participate?

See more at:
“SEO as Website Positioning Strategy? – Updated”, February 26, 2007
http://www.emergence-media.com/2007/02/seo-as-website-positioning-strategy/

Closing Thoughts: A Warning on Social Media Fatigue

I still very much remember the irrational exuberance of the Dot-Com (Web 1.0) and know that not every SharkyBuisnessIdeaHere.com will not raise up to become an Amazon.com or an Ebay.

The audience, the social media audience, will suffer from “Social Media Fatigue”. People can only support and pay attention to a limited amount of the ever increasing variety of social media websites, video networks, Pligg (digg) clones and Twitters twittering and Myspace commenting.

At the same time, the Internet was not a fad and has brought about the behemoth that is Google made websites like Wikipedia and YouTube possible.

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1. Fitting in Social Media Marketing within the Agency For the past few months, I’ve been rethinking what it...

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Client-Agency Relationships: Now a Two-Way Street on Breaking Up

Via What’s Your Brand Mantra?, From the Wall Street Journal’s “Now, Often, the Agency Is the One Walking Away“:

Given a tough new-business climate, walking away from a client might seem counterintuitive. But some agencies are choosing to do just that, rather than sink more resources into accounts where it isn’t clear that either financial success or creative harmony is guaranteed.
…
All this back-and-forth is just another sign that the chummy advertising partnerships of yore are giving way to a more impersonal, market-driven environment. There is “relentless pressure on agencies and chief marketing officers to drive revenue. It’s killing our business. It destabilizes the relationship between agencies and clients,” says Matt Weiss, an executive vice president and chief growth officer at Interpublic’s McCann Worldgroup.

While outside the scope of the WSJ article, two trends will continue heighten the “commodization” of client-agency relationships, resulting in the ever more common “break-ups” between major brand and agencies:

1. Increasingly ROI driven Marketing/Advertising decisions
2. Increasingly integrated approach to Marketing/Advertising

These two approach drives the pressure for both parties to have increasingly control over the marketing strategy, creative direction etc – driving up the potential for friction (while also collaboration) in the relationship.

Skip to the end to see how this also links to SEO campaigns.

1. ROI Means No Patience

In Karl Capek’s play “R.U.R.“, a character named Alquist laments that his stockholders refused to stop selling robots soldiers out of greed and profit, ominiously warning that “dividends are the ruin of mankind.” In the end, the robot soldiers revolt and destroy all of humanity.

Ok, so maybe the same is not at stake in a client-agency relationship, but there needs to be an appreciation that CMOs face great pressure from stakeholders to ensure that marketing is a money-making machine. The emphasis on ever more advanced logistics (from Dell to WalMart), integrating CRM systems with marketing data, and the promise tracking all online metrics makes the idea of complete ROI tracking seem misleadingly reality in some respects.

Planning and assessing based on complete ROI can be misleading in two ways:

1. Nothing can be tracked 100% and in the online world there can be high margins of error (20%) in just figuring out how many visitors came to a website. Just imagine the difficult of multi-channel analytics.
2. The most efficient ROI tracking system is still limited by Time. Compounding tracking issues, is understanding the lifecycle from repeated brand exposure to a purchase;it is increasingly difficult to figure out how to understand how long the ROI converstion process is. And remember that consumers diversifying their media consumption (XBox 360 to text messages via FaceBook), meaning more data that needs to be tracked.

With the false sense of security that ROI data can sometime give, a branding campaign maybe killed well before it can help drive sales. And even if given enough time, how can one prove that Brand Campaign X was what really helped drive Leading-Generation Campaign Y?

With stakes being so high, patience can wear thin while also pressuring the need for more control to ensure that the campaigns succeeds.

Which bring us to…
2. Pushing for More Integrated Campaign
The trends towards using integrated campaigns, uniting mobile marketing to online viral campaigns to television, means that the stakes get ever so higher on strategy, creative direction, and execution…basically everything.

Take this need for better control with the ROI pressures mentioned in #1, and you have the increasing chance of client-agency relationships becoming more contentious.

Closing Thoughts: Will this Happen to SEO as it turns in to Project Management?

Jennifer from What’s Your Mantra has some choice closing words:

If agencies don’t have senior staff that can speak C-level lingo and understand how to tie creative execution to business results, we’ll see more and more of agency/client relationships go sour. On the other hand, clients often fallaciously think that advertising is (or could be) a magic bullet. They no longer have the patience to stick with a campaign (or an agency) for the long haul. And lastly, most aren’t empowered to make the kind of customer-experience decisions that would actually move the revenue needle.

While I would of word things differently, she and I are basically on the same page.

Interestingly, SEO has some similar issues. SEO has been striviing to prove its worth with metrics and ROI tracking, but it has also expanded its roll to focus on “customer-experience decisions that would actually move the revenue needle”.

SEO folks are more embracing usability practices (e.g. shopping funnel optimization), branding considerations, and integration with PR as it focuses more and more on sales and conversions. See: “SEO as Website Positioning Strategy” and “SEO and Project Management“. Will it stay this way? Will things “sour” more among Client-SEO Firms relationships?

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• Overall Strategy
• Messaging and Approach
• Making the Connection: First Contact
• After the Review Blog Posting

The full article is on the Emergence-Media Wiki (seldom used admittedly) to encourage everyone to contribute ideas to the “Blog Outreach: How to Pitch Bloggers” article. Here are some excerpts:

Build Your Relationships: Recognize Them Publicly
Lots of companies may send “thank you’s” for reviewing their product (good or bad) on the blogger’s website. But how many create a “Blog Mentions” page on their corporate website (or blog)? Think beyond listing the generic press releases under your “Press Room” section. As they say, give some “link love” back to the blogger (regardless of the review).

Be Clear with Your Blogger: On Reviews, On Embargoes etc.
The big Microsoft Vista incident with the free Acer Laptops was due to the lack of clarity and consistency on what conditions were bloggers given the review units. Bloggers are like lack amateur journalists, they may not know exactly what you mean by an embargo or what a review unit is. Be clear and consistent – but in human language, not legalese. Bloggers will compare notes and see if they received different emails, they did this publicly with Microsoft Vista with embarrassing results.

Know the Landscape Part 1: Look Beyond the A-Listers
It’s one thing to know the A-List bloggers, its another to know what mid-tier blogs they read. Just like in regular PR, you may need to hit the mid-tier bloggers (who are read by the A-List bloggers) before you get covered by the big leagues. Don’t be fooled by looking only at Alexa data or Technorati rankings, see who links to them too.

Please see the entire “Blog Outreach: How to Pitch Bloggers” article at Emergence-Media Wiki (seldom used admittedly). Everyone is encouraged to contribute ideas appropriately.

Not sure how well this whole wiki thing will work out, but it’s an experiment I’m trying out.

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Introduction

Last week, there was a lot of buzz around BrandWeek’s article, “Are Marketers Dying on Second Life?“, which placed a reality check on the marketing hype around Second Life:

So far all this collective marketing savvy hasn’t much impressed the actual Second Lifers. More than 70% of the site’s users say they are disappointed with the marketing that goes on in SL, according to a new survey by Komjuniti, a Hamburg, Germany, research firm. This could be because companies are approaching the site like a traditional marketing channel. (Emphasis Mine).

Does that sound familiar? Remember back in 1996 when someone’s idea of a website was scanning in the company brochure and uploading it? Yep, that’s what marketers are doing on Second Life.

The Web is not a PDF repository for your company brochure. Why are the big brands on Second Life following that pattern? As Karl Long declared: “For gods sake have some imagination, experiment with something, create something that you can’t create in the real world, create a way to for people to interact with people that they can’t in the real world.”
Understanding the Second Life Market Landscape

A 15 minute walk around Second Life will reveal that its a very niche demographic of users – again, just like the Internet in the early days. Further exploration would reveal two major challenges on marketing opportunities in the Second Life metaverse:

1. Scale and Audience Size

Scale

Just like in real life, in Second Life only so many people can be at one store at a time. For regular websites, you can have hundreds of thousands of visitors entering your ecommerce store with not too many problems (given enough hardware).

Audience Size

Second Life is rushing in its attempt to scale up, but in the near future it will never have the size nor the scale of say American Online at its peak in the 1990s. As of today, Second Life has +5.3m members, but only +1.6 have logged on in the past 60 days.

AOL had about 10m members in the late 1990s, and I would assume that most were active (since it was a paid service). And on Facebook, there are 18m members as of February 2007.

2. Demographics and “Second Life Culture”

Second Life geniuely have its own distinct culture that is different from the general Internet users at large. Eric Kintz of HP puts it well, when he neatly separates the mass audience appeal of the Internet with the more narrow and niche intention of Second Lifers:

“Second Life is about realizing your fantasies and being something different than you are in real life. Many avatars have a different gender than the subscriber or take animal forms. However most brands mimic their real life experiences and value proposition in Second Life.”

In other words, you do not go to Second Life dressed in your transgendered furry costume to go to the newly opened H&R Block Island on Second Life. Note: If you don’t know what a “furry” is – then you really need to do your research before marketing on Second Life. ;-)
Eric Kintz goes on to list 10 reasons why he feels hesitant about Second Life, here are some of the most relevant:

#5. The content is primarily adult oriented
#6. Brands are underestimating the investments required.
#7. Brands are not staying true to the Second Life values.
#8. Second Life experiences are not integrated with the overall brand experience.

Conclusion: Second Life is Not Ready for Primetime
In short, Second Life as a marketing channel face several barriers before it can seen as having broader marketing opportunities:

• Scalability: Second Life has a relatively small, active and niche userbase. Also, being 3D you can not have say, 1 million people hit your location at one time. Just like in real life there’s a limit on how many people can be in one store.
• Demographics/Second Life Culture: Given its small size, Second Life has its own culture that must be respected and requires any brand to truly fit and become part of that community. Unfortunately, right now that Second Life community is too narrow to appeal to most companies – Why is H&R Block there?

Assuming Linden Labs can overcome its scalability issues (as they’re known for having some issues keeping up) and establish a more diverse Second Life audience and culture, marketers may find broader opportunities in the Second Life metaverse.

Additionally, while not discussed here, Second Life also seems to have a lack of full metrics tracking, due to technical bandwidth and priorities. While it is possible to track all actions on Second Life, this is something that is currently not a priority on Linden Labs.

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Web 2.0 Revenue Model: The same Underpants Gnome Problem?
Via Steve Rubel, Marketwatch’s Frank Barnako mentions that Rocketboom is still searching for a viable revenue model with Rocketboom founder Andrew Baron mentioning that “It’s frustrating that we haven’t worked it out by now”.

For a website that has “200,000 downloads of Rocketboom shows, seven days a week”, this sounds like troubling news. But why is a “Web 2.0″-ish website still relying on tradition advertising models? Why the concentration on visitors, hits and downloads? Sounds very Dot-Com mindshare/Underpants Gnome (YouTube/Wiki).

Web 2.0 websites like social media websites have very poor CTR rates for traditional online ads compared to more “old school” online media. Assuming that ValleyWag’s report on Facebook is accurate, its very poor indeed. I would assume that a geek/tech vlog would experience similar issues.

Ads for Engagement not Eyeballs?
Rather than focusing on eyeballs, what about engagement of the audience?

Many of my colleagues at e-Storm have been pushing this idea around and its nice to see Shannon Clark do a great comment on it on Steve Rubel’s post:

“I listen to a lot of podcasts – one thing that Podshow at least is doing well in min estimation is in directly incorporating their advertisers into the CONTENT of the shows (generally by discussion of the advertiser by the hosts of the various shows). It is still clear what is being paid for – and as a viewer I have a stronger connection with the host – and thus at least a positive impression of the various brands (because they are supporting a show I enjoy). That said, I personally would prefer that brands which I had more interest in were supporting various shows.”

The content publisher can also go forward and directly ask the audience (via polls, voting, personal preference) the type advertisement the user wants: travel, electronics, BMW 355i, geek furniture etc.

This type of “push (giving advertisements to the audience) & pull (letting the user chose what type of advertisement)” creates good value for both the consumer (gets a commercial that he/she is at least interested in) and advertiser (gets the advertisement to someone who is actively interested). Hopefully, this would translate to higher CPM/CTR/CPA rates for the publisher and better conversion of the advertiser.

In practice, this would translate to a user being able to choose the pre-roll they would see before viewing an online video – this can be chosen on the spot or via registration. Assuming a registered user model, the publisher would have valuable demographic information to better sale ad space to niche advertisers.

This is all not original thinking I know, but it is one that more folks should considered if Rocketboom’s troubles become more common in the Web 2.0 world.

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Summary: Up Your Analytics, Strengthen Your Content, Smarten Your SEM

A recent study by the Retail Advertising and Marketing Association has found that traditional offline media – such as Magazines, TV and Newspapers – were a high factor (>~42%) in leading to consumers conducting online research on the product/service advertised.

This completes the conversion loop when comparing to the Google’s number showing that of the “25% purchased an item relating to their query, and of that number, the majority – 63% — completed that purchase offline.”

What does this mean:

• Analytics Integration: Reinforces the Need for Marketing and Sales Analytics that can take offline and online consumer activities and behavior, since consumers freely move from offline and online worlds.
• Multi-Stage SEM Strategy: The SEM Strategy (SEO and PPC) must properly target both research phrase consumers, as well as, purchasing phase consumers.
• Content Funneling: Good Content is key to help funneling consumers in “research mode” to become consumers in “purchase mode”.

Offline Awareness, Online Research, Offline Conversion

MediaPost has recently reported on a “Retail Advertising and Marketing Association” done by “BIGresearch’s Simultaneous Media Survey”, which found the following numbers that consumers were most likely to search online after viewing:

• Advertisements in magazines (47.2%)
• Newspapers (42.3%)
• Ads on TV (42.8%)
• From reading articles (43.7%)

Combine this with Google’s 2006 ComScore data which pointed to:

“Of 83 million Americans tracked by comScore who searched at one of the 24 top search engines in November and December, 25% purchased an item relating to their query, and of that number, the majority – 63% — completed that purchase offline.”

Tracking Offline and Online Marketing/Sales Analytics

At the moment, many companies house their online marketing/sales data completely segregated away from their offline marketing/sales data. Indeed, most website analytics tools are packaged this way, with the exception of the enterprise models that integrate with the company’s CRM datawarehouse. But that’s a major effort and still mostly focuses one way traffic flow: Online Visitor > Offline Purchaser.

Off the top of my head, hear are some straightforward suggestions I’ve offered.

• Getting the ZIP code (from the online registration) and geographic area (of those that visit online) and mapping that to where your stores are (or should be)
• Website-Only Coupons
• Ask your customers! Do a survey as part of loyalty program

e-Storm International, my employer, does have an interesting partner that has a powerful tool that can actually estimate how offline media can shift people’s behavior online and vice-versa. Time for Emergence-Media to conduct interviews?

Multi-Stage SEM Strategy and Content Funneling

Keeping in mind that the Retail Advertising and Marketing Association data shows that online search is a major research tool for consumers, this reinforces the need for 1) “content funneling” (see below); and 2) also translates to need a smart SEM strategy to push that content to consumers who are researching those that are looking to by.

Note this applies to both consumers who convert offline and online; what ties these two together is both use the web as a research tool.

Content Funneling

Content Funneling is an issue that Emergence-Media has dicussed before in “Building Content for Branded and Non-Branded Search“:

“Content is King” is the old Maxim. And for “SEOing” e-commerce websites, it is about ensuring that the e-commerce website has the type of content the user is looking for for each step of the buying process: 1) General Research (”Why are HD DVD Players different?” Page); 2) Targeted Research (”HD DVD Player Review & Guide” Page); and 3) Purchasers (Product Page for the Specific Item).

It comes down to this: around 40% of consumers will be motivated to do an online search after seeing your ad on TV, Print etc, so when they do their research online will they find buying/product guides (for those not ready to buy) or maybe your product page (if they are ready to buy online)?

Multi-Stage SEM Strategy

Avinash Kaushik has just done an incredible insightful posting on this in “How Thick is Your Head and How Long is Your Tail?“, so I’ll show a teaser here, but I highly recommended reading the whole thing.

Take From Avinash Kaushik

Avinash’s “Killer Search Marketing strategy recommendation”:

1. Focus your SEM budgets deliberately to leverage the Long Tail (/Category key terms).
2. Focus all your SEO efforts on SEO’ing the heck out of your website / web pages for your Brand key terms (those that are in your Head).

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