Last month I had the opportunity to interview actor, broadcaster, and comedian Janeane Garofalo. Garofalo is an avowed Luddite but that never interfered with her desire to become a writer, act in television and film, and to start a radio network from scratch. A lot of people write about Garofalo on the internet but she doesn’t spend much time there. What she does do is make sure that she is a real and genuine human being when interacting with other people. I observed her interact with many different kinds of people at the AltCom Festival – managers, comedians, fans, and press, and she was guileless and direct in all her communications. People will be repeating their experiences with her for a long time to come.
As someone who specialized in helping clients get the most of their inbound marketing programs, I’ve always realized that inbound marketing is part of a marketing mix and should not exist on its own. Yesterday’s Google crash has been written up by some other marketers out there, but not many have taken the position that you should not be 100% reliant on any one marketing program.
Google handles well over 60% of all web searches and that, in combination with its other services means that a failure at Google can affect: email, chat, AdWords ads, chat, banner ads, YouTube, Google Voice, Google Analytics, and many other functions that include communications, advertising, and measurement. Sure, you might say, you should also have Yahoo! search ad campaigns, and ok, that might get you some other exposure but what I’m trying to communicate is that AdWords and SEO shouldn’t be what your organization relies upon exclusively.
Some changes in Google’s indexing algorithms last year prompted AdWords guru, Perry Marshall, to tell his followers via podcast that they needed to diversify their marketing efforts. Changes in indexing can severely affect a website and its AdWords campaigns for weeks or even months. What would happen to your organization if you stopped receiving web traffic from Google for a month or two?
There are regularly infrastructure outages that can affect cities, states, regions, and even hemispheres. Everything from a trawler cutting a transocean cable to a squirrel frying itself at a powerstation can knock drop your website off the map or your connectivity to the web for hours and days at a time. What will happen to your business processes if you don’t have connectivity or if your ISP goes down?
This is more than about having a contingency plan to get back online as quick as possible (which you all have no doubt) – it’s about recognizing that people interested in what you have to offer need to be able to exposed to your messaging and be able to reach you in avenues other than the internet.
Infrastructure issues aside, your target audience needs to know that your organization exists beyond the web and since they exist beyond the web, you need to know what magazines they are reading, what social events they go to, and establish a presence there. It goes without saying that you will have this all backed up with great SEO, a killer website, and sharp branding. The flow goes both ways – someone who has seen you online in all the places they look: websites particular to their subculture, your website, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc., will be reassured when they see your ad in “The Journal of ____” as well as the fact that you are a sponsor of _______ social event and that you have real people attending who can have real conversations with them.
You need to have a quiver of arrows, SEO is one of them, AdWords is another, but you need more than just those two unless you have a bank account that can handle the web not working for you for days to weeks at a time. It’s guaranteed to happen.
I’m a big fan of Dharmesh Shah’s OnStartups blog, and his company HubSpot, I’ve used their capable and elegant service to improve businesses I’ve worked at and consulted for. I’ve had the privilege to see Dharmesh speak on a couple of occasions as well as talk to him personally. While I can appreciate the founder-focused perspective of OnStartups, I was disappointed to read his latest post which had elements that displayed a far too stereotypical technologist slant against advertising, and therefore marketing.
Technologists (with blinders on) have the view that anything that isn’t contributing to the actual production of their product or service is a negative. They tend to look at money spent on anything other than production salary, equipment, and software as money down the drain. They seek to eliminate all that “wasteful” spending. Obviously they are making a product so good, that is should sell itself. Any adjustment to features should result in the same customer base coming back to the cash register to fork over more money because the product, by its very nature, telepathically communicates to all parties who have either the interest or the potential interest, that this is the product they need right now.
Dharmesh states, “I still don’t like advertising. I really don’t. I can see why it’s important in a lot of industries — but I don’t know that software is one of them.” The irony here is that, a. Dharmesh’s company does advertise using Google AdWords among other tools, and b. that Dharmesh’s company, HubSpot, is 100% dependent upon advertising in order to survive. HubSpot’s platform helps businesses by improving their websites using search engine optimization and keyword strategy under the premise that a company should attract potential customers using these inbound and permission marketing techniques rather than “interruption” and attention exploitation of standard marketing and advertising.
The problem is that all of the search engines, with the partial exception of Microsoft’s, are 100% advertising-driven. Without advertising, there would be no search engines, and therefore no HubSpot. Advertising is what changed the world from agrarian societies to what we have today. While it isn’t perfect, no one has figured out anything better – they’ve only proposed refinements. There are plenty of producers, and particularly software developers, who think that their products need no advertising because they (Dharmesh again) “solv(e) a user’s problem”. The user has a need, the software addresses the need, a sale is made.
Dharmesh, it’s time to read some Paco Underhill. People don’t buy based on “need” – they buy based on “want”. There is also the false notion in B2B sales that you are working to sell to “companies”, “organizations”, and “business entitities” (my quotes). Sorry, those are all manned by people who still buy based on “want” and other emotional reasons. Advertising is a method to communicate to people reasons, attitudes, positioning, and availability in order that they should want to buy your products. Some of this is non-quantifiable (at this time). We don’t have enough data and understanding to make this coldly scientific enough for some technologists to grasp. I tend to think it’s part of the fun of being a human being.
If I may loosely quote Peter Drucker, “successful entrepreneurship is the combination of innovation and marketing” – advertising is a tool that should not be denied the marketer. Inbound marketing is extremely effective but it can’t do everything. Even noted Google AdWord wizard, Perry Marshall, was forced to admit last year in a podcast that it can’t all be done with SEO and AdWords – those are just two of the legs of the stool.
I “joined” Seth Godin’s new Tribes movement a couple months ago by prepaying for his new book Tribes. Buying the booksecured me an invite to Godin’s Ning-based Tribes website which I admit has been very difficult to keep up with. Between the other social media websites one is already invested in, adding another to the mix has been tough, even though it’s highly targeted to my work, goals, and demographics, setting aside the time has required some commitment. I try to check in weekly perform a flurry of activities but it seems that there are a lot of other people who are very active there. There are some interesting topics every time and people are friendly enough – I’m interested in seeing if it has legs.
Godin, as usual, is totally amazing with his book promotion. As I said, I pre-paid for a copy of Tribes, and what did I find in the mail today but a free copy of the book sent directly to me from Godin’s publisher along with a letter from Godin urging me to read the book and then give the copy that I ordered to someone else. Also, Godin is going to be launching some kind of kick-off presentation on October 22nd in New York City. I managed to secure an invite to Monday’s (10/07/08) dress rehearsal. I can’t blog about it until the 22nd though as there is a blackout on the content which I will respect. Does this create buzz and hype? You bet! It’s direct from the master.
I covered the HubSpot-sponsored Inbound Marketing Summit ‘08 (#IMS08) for Bostonist and it was there that I met the very friendly and funny Greg Verdino of Crayon. I only managed to catch the beginning of his presentation before I had to dash for an interview but HubSpot made the entire presentation available and Greg has now posted it on his blog.
Greg’s informative and humorous presentation outlined how the web of social networks is pervasive and should be embraced by organizations who want to be successful. Adapting to how people want to work and how these are both convenient, efficient, and collaborative is a theme throughout his presentation – it’s well worth watching.
A great post on SEOMOZ today about how to investigate if the website/domain/company you are working for has been engaging in “black hat” SEO games. SEOMOZ is calling this SEO forensics and it’s an apropriate designation as it involves data gathering, investigation, experimentation, and documentation. I’ve been extremely fortunate in working at companies for the last 10+ years that were just getting their websites off the ground when I became a part of the team and then knew whether or not they were being legit in their web presence.
It does raise the spectre of moving to a new company as either a web analyst or consultant and then being responsible for a domain that has been using circumspect tactics. It was only a couple years ago that BMW.de was banned by Google for practices that they frowned upon.
Can you imagine starting up a job somewhere and being faced with the task of salvaging a company’s reputation without knowing that’s what you were in for? SEOMOZ provides a forensic methodology to see how deep the problem might be before you sign off on the responsibility. You can find out fairly quickly if you are in for trouble.
Of the four tools offered, these two made the most sense:
“Google Analytics Report Enhancer by RoiRevolution. Brings up tens of new reports in Google Analytics. It also calculates for you “True Time on Site”, which is the average time spent on site, excluding all bounces.
Google Analytics Downloader by Juice Analytics. Adds a highly valuable button to your keywords and referrers reports, stating who sent you unusual traffic. Really great info can be brought out of it.”
Just a quit post today. Has anyone seen the Google InQuotes interface? One of the great things about Google is that they have no problem putting the time into creating something like this without monetization as the primary goal of creating it – there is not a single ad on that page despite the obvious benefit of providing it.
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For you Analytics freaks, the “official” Google Analytics blog has its first post today from one of their certified consultants regarding the set up of Profiles.
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If you aren’t a member of the HubSpot-sponsored ProMarketers group (available via LinkedIn and Facebook), you should consider signing up. They’ve organized a couple of events in San Francisco and Boston.
Thanks Seth Godin for boiling the problem I have with Microsoft’s new ad campaign down to the basics.
I blathered on, as I tend to do, over at The Brandbuilder, but Godin got it down in just a couple sentences.
I’ve been to Redmond several times and I have yet to run into the “passion” he describes. Yes, a PC is cheap or “cost-effective”, but the telling thing is that the most expensive PC will not run as well as your average Mac and a cheap PC is next to useless for anything other than your most basic word processing but they won’t even surf the web well – you might as well get a Mac Mini.
For those that bemoan how expensive Macs are, they are just toting the party line – they kind of sound like Republicans ruminating about how Democrats aren’t any good at national security. They should check out resources like The Low End Mac among others.