Speaking at Folio

September 5th, 2008

For anyone going to the 2008 Folio show, I’ll be speaking in the session below:

EDITORIAL TRACK

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 23 4:45-5:30 p.m.

Boosting Reader Engagement Online

Speakers: Frank Chloupek, Web Development Director, IndustryWeek and Scott Havens, Director, Business Development, Portfolio.com

Technology, combined with readers’ migration online, has opened up entirely new opportunities for editors to create reader engagement and elicit feedback and response to their content. In this session you’ll learn the ins and outs of blogs, RSS, podcasts, wikis, and video, and how and where you can use them to amplify your content and resonate with new audiences. You’ll learn what they are, how to deploy them successfully, and how to measure response.

Now I just have to decide what to say.

E-mail Copy: Short vs. Long — Why Not Both?

August 10th, 2008

A ClickZ article by Karen Gedney — Who Says People Don’t Respond to Long E-mail Copy?– brought up the question that keeps recurring about the “right” length for email copy that seems to continuously come up again and again.

What I don’t understand is why most emails can’t have the best of both worlds by crafting an email that does both.  Have an email that contains a quick nut graf with a call to action high in the message, but then also a copy block with a call to action at the foot of the copy. 

This way you get both types of of readers — the ones that completely get the message and are ready to take action right from the preview pane and also the ones that need more background.  You don’t lose or irritate the people with the long copy because they never get to it, and you place the call to action where and when the reader wants.

One example — though probably not the best — is one of IW’s events mailings for our Excellence in Action plant tour series http://www.industryweek.com/excellenceinaction/080608invite.html  , that has calls to action throughout the message.  IW’s Webcast mailings are an even better example, with a 1-2 sentence box at the top describing the event to get the quick registration and then several paragraphs of copy below (I don’t have a link to share here, sorry)

This “mixed” message would seem to be exactly how you want to communicate, in a form that satisfies multiple types of readers.

Getting "extra" out of your Web site

June 11th, 2008

One thing I have gotten out of the habit of is trying to post the occasional hint or tip that people haven’t thought of in terms of squeezing extra out of their Web sites. 

This article from MarketingSherpa (open until 6/17) brought one more to mind.

http://www.marketingsherpa.com/article.php?ident=30637

(I’m a big fan of their information, as some of you already know)

The point is to look at any emails that your property generates and look for opportunities to use them to promote related products and services.

An example which I’ve put into place on IndustryWeek.com

Web Conferences/transactional emails: Every Web conference generates a ton of email — confirmation messages, reminder messages, post event messages.  In these messages you have an audience of people who are interested in attending Webcasts.  So we put a footer in each message detailing the Webcasts we have upcoming as well as providing a registration link.  This provides us with additional registrants for our upcoming events — not hundred, but it will get us a dozen or two attendees for each event, just in what otherwise would be a missed opportunity.

Confirmation screens are another place that can be used.  For example, in a forward this article feature, you have someone who is very engaged in the brand — engaged enough to promote to someone else.  Often times a screen comes up saying “Your email has been sent”  We’ve added to that confirmation screen a push for IndustryWeek’s enewsletters (all our newsletters are opt-in, so it’s a continual battle to keep circ up)

None of these are whiz-bang changes, but they’re bits of continuous improvement to try to extend that relationship and interaction with your audience.

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The Perils of Paid ads and Passing PageRank. On this one I’m Siding with Google.

December 3rd, 2007

The crackdown/debate on sites using paid ads to pass PageRank is still ongoing.

Here’s a blog post and discussion from “Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO” that hits on some of the key points.  Also see the official Google post on why paid ads that pass pagerank are bad.

Perhaps I view things too simply but isn’t the argument basically….

  • Google: We believe that paid links are — overall — not a good indicator of authority
  • Google: To avoid counting these links in terms of a site’s authority, we wish to have them removed from our methodology with a ”nofollow” tag. We don’t care about selling links for any other purposes, so a ”nofollow” tag will only remove the site from our ranking method.
  • Google: anyone who refuses to follow this is trying to harm our methods of ranking, so they are not acting in good faith.
  • Google: Not acting in good faith means they’re complicit in trying to skew the linkings, so we’ll take action against the linker and the linkee

Am I missing something here?

What I see as the main counterarguments: 

Some paid links are good — Ok Granted, but is is better to remove all paid links or to try and “qualify” links on an individual basis.  I don’t see a way to algorithmicly to distinguish good and bad links. Should there be a company that really can devote energy to making this distinction, and it really makes the search results better, they’ll have better results than Google and thus Google will either adopt this to keep pace, or searchers will leave to go elsewhere — it’s pretty easy to change your search engine. 

This is the only way I can make money — I’ve heard this argument with pop-ups, pop-unders and every shady scheme out there. Good sites will find ways to make money legitimately through advertising.  If you can’t make money that way, you shouldn’t be in business.

So on this argument, I side with Google.

The one point I do give tothe people complaining is that sites weren’t warned of the change. This seems legitimate to me.  If Google has to go to the trouble of “dinging” a site, it would seem like they could set up an automated email that goes out a week or 2 before the actual event to give the site a chance to fix the issue.  Maybe there is some large overhead to this I’m missing, and yeah some of the emails would be ignored, but it seems like that extra step would have given Google a degree of goodwill and cover.

Ads in .pdfs? A New Revenue Stream or Just a Niche?

November 29th, 2007

So, everything is breaking about the news that Yahoo has reached an agreement with Adobe to put ads in .pdfs.

Possibly I’m missing something, but is there really a lot of ad available .pdf content out there?  It seems like HTML newsletters claim one end of the market, and content managed Web sites the other, while .pdfs tend to be reports, whitepapers, or other content that really isn’t advertising appropriate.

In the early Web days there were a bunch of magazines at Penton that put a lot of their content up in .pdf form, but that’s almost aways fallen by the wayside. 

As to new content, could is really be a higher ROI to place items in .pdf format, where you would be limited to yahoo network pricing, or to have a more flexible HTML site?

Digital magazine *might* be a possible niche for these ads, but could you really make enough from just these ads to keep a business going?  Maybe its like running a blog on google ads, it could keep the lights running. 

Regardless, I’ll be interested to see if anyone can make a significant business model work on these.

Do Not Track List — A Good Idea? Or The Wrong Problem?

October 31st, 2007

The Center for Democracy and Technologyand other groups recently called for the establishment of a do not track list for the internet — See the press release here.

Now this draws an analogy to the do not call list, which I think doesn’t make sense (there’s an interesting analysis from MediaPost’s Just An Online Minute… CDT Suggests Do-Not-Track List that illustrate these points)

However, I think there is a valid point being made that Web sites are delving deeper and deeper into profile management and people do not yet realize what is being collected and possibly shared.  Its not really the relevant ads that are the big problem, but the fact that people may have different browsing personas or may have one-off searches that shouldn’t be part of a general ad serving profile.

Amazon, for example, allows the inclusion and exclusion of various purchases from one’s profile.  If I’m searching for information on researching a dog breed for a friend, I may not want that to be part of an online persona — nor really should it be.

One thing that I don’t think will work is the “privately run” do not track list such as the one Time Warner is establishing. There’s a chance these might work if enough of the big players get behind them but really the behavioral tracking issue is only a sideshow to other privacy concerns.

I’m not sure this situation would raise as much concern if the current sharing of information policies did not lead to information being “shared” by minor actions such as clicking on a link. 

For example, if a user is browsing through a directory that they had to register to get into and they click on an entry in that directory, I don’t thing the “average user” would understand that that action might lead to their registration information being shipped, in its entirety, to the vendor. 

Or that by clicking on a enewsletter ad, that their registration information might be shipped to the advertiser.

Now there are legitimate lead gen deliverables where the consumer understands what is going on and even welcomes it.  Downloading a whitepaper, attending an event, submitting a “send me more information” request are but 3 examples.  Even third-party mailing lists that come bundled with a print subscription or e-subscription (You want our content newsletter, you have to pay the price for getting 3rd party offers — assuming that the content newsletter doesn’t willy-nilly turn over the names) is a bargain I think most people can understand if it is clear in the sign-up process.

What would be my starting place for a solution?  I certainly might be missing some of the finer points, but requiring an explicit opt-in for sharing at the time of the event would be a clear demarcation.  This could even be a requirement, as in “By registering for this event you agree that the information will be shared with the sponsor”

This would limit the lead gen opportunities to places where there is real interest from the user, either in the vendor’s services, or in the information that the vendor is associated with – and will lead to higher qualified leads to the sponsor.  It would eliminate casual “looky-lo” leads which might come from newsletters or directories unless a further action is taken. 

Of course this also means that the deliverable has to go from number of leads to qualityof leads, but if we can show the real valueable leads and eliminate the low-quality leads, it will be a more transparent situation and enable a better environment.

If we as media suppliers do not treat the information that is given to us with greater care, then we run the risk of government stepping in and dealing with not only this, but with ancillary issues such as behavioral targeting as well.


As a follow-up there are comments from Dave Morgan, Chairman of Tacoda, defending his service

U.S. State Department Blog — Dipnote — A Bad Choice of Names

October 8th, 2007

The U.S. State Department is now blogging.

Of course their name choice might leave something to be desired.  In shortening “Diplomatic Note” they decided to name their blog “Dipnote“ 

I’m not sure they fully thought through how that name sounds…

The Limits & Effectiveness Of Online Advertising

August 25th, 2007

In terms of Web 2.0, there are some cracks being seen in the advertising model.  As one in the trenches I don’t see this as much of a surprise, rather as part of the gradual evolution of the mediums, but they seem to have caused some consternation.

First, a Forresster Research study on online advertising (Marketing on Social Networking Sites) shows that the ROI on social networking and forum sites is not as effective as those same campaigns run on content sites. 

Truthfully, this doesn’t surprise me at all.  What a person is trying to do on a social networking or a forum site is quite different than what they’re doing on a search site or a content site and they would therefore be less receptive to a Web message that was just shovelled over from a different type of content site.

I view this as being very analogous to the late 1990’s in Web advertising when companies took print ads and chopped out a piece of them for the Web.  Ultimately, there was a shift from these branding type ads, to those that actually encouraged user responses and played to the strengths of the medium.  What Forrester is saying in their report is that the same shift will need to occur to appropriately market in social sites. People are there to socialize (written broadly) so the marketers will need to get to be part of the conversation.

This is going to be a hard shift though.  Getting involved in a community is work, and continuous work at that.  It can’t be easily outsourced to an agency and will likely need ongoing involvement of subject experts. 

We see some of this going on in individual company blogs being launched — and of course there have been user forums for some time — but to take the next step and participate in someone else’s forum or community will take guts that might not be so easily to accomplish from either side.

Advertisers will not control the message like they can in their own ad or forum and unlike magazines or publishers sites, will have much less certainty about what the message will be.  They have accepted this lack of control — oddly enough — in Google adwords (though how much the CMO realizes this might be debatable) so in principle they should be OK with this.  However they will also have to participate in the community in an ongoing basis, which is going to be a much bigger “I” (as in ROI) then a lot of companies are used to.

From the point of view of the community, it will mean that the community will actually have to welcome (or at least not be hostile) to the advertiser.  This will probably be easier in B2B forums first since there’s a greater degree of professionalism there. 

Still its possible this jump won’t be made and the limit of a company’s social marketing would be their own blog or user forum. They’ll be cutting themselves off from a segment of the audience though, so I have to believe that they’ll be the long term losers.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

On a second piece, Jakob Nielsen has updated his studies on banner blindness – Banner Blindness: Old and New Findings.  This goes father than showing that banners hare having a decreased click-through rate, but adds eyetracking studies to show that even a branding component doesn’t hold through.

Jakob gives 4 elements that attract attention:

  • Plain text
  • Faces
  • Cleavage and other “private” body parts
  • making the ad look like content
  • Now why I am normally a Nielsen devotee, I don’t accept his view that making the ad look like content is on its face — unethical (and I think he himself backs away from his assertion when he actually explains it) but there is clearly a fuzzy line (clearly a fuzzy line?) somewhere when an ad does become deceptive.  This is something that might need some standards as it becomes examined more. 

    I can tell from my experienced that those text based ads that are designed specifically for a site outperform that standard ad.

    Also in enewsletters, I don’t see why *anyone* offers a banner spot anymore, be it a banner, tower, or rectangle.  By far the most effective ad position is a text-spot and tose few instances where an advertiser has insistedon a different style of placement, it performs abyssmally.

    The other interesting conclusion is that ad networks may wind up being a bad bet for a marketer, since an ad network serves up the same ad to multiple Web sites witout any personalization.  This gives me some hope that the ROI on direct buys will still justify publication by publication buys — especially if a publication gets aggressive in doing the content ad creation for the advertiser.

    Do We Really Need Smelly eBooks?

    August 25th, 2007

    E-Textbook web site CaféScribe plans to offer e-books with scratch & sniff stickers that smell like old books starting in September.’… Students will be able to place the sticker on their laptops to enjoy the familiar musty book smell while reading e-books they bought for half the price of regular textbooks.

    Now I’ve never been a big fan of eBooks, but I’m not sure the reason was because they didn’t smell.  It reminds me of the DigiScents feature I never really understood either.

    Full details at http://www.prweb.com//releases/2007/8/prweb548580.htm for those that really need the musty book smell.

    Google Has You Picking Your Nose

    August 10th, 2007

    As a follow up to The New Mapping….

     Well, the uploading of user photos into Google Maps has already led to some interesting developments.

    Linking to the LA Times story on a site to bypass their registration http://www.freepress.net/news/25262

    Bloggers uploaded photographs including “students sunbathing in bikinis at Stanford University, motorists being ticketed by police, a man walking into an adult bookstore in Oakland, even a man picking his nose on a San Jose park bench.”

    One of the perils of user content.  I wonder when the first lawsuits will be coming in…