Archive for May, 2010

This post is part of a series of posts describing the ingredients that cause media to go viral: Viral Marketing Ingredients

Virtuosity describes when a story or video captures sheer, remarkable talent. From a viral standpoint, it also helps if the talent is coming from someone we have never heard of. For example, we all know Eric Clapton can play the guitar, but have you ever heard of Funtwo? I hadn’t either, but a video of him playing Vivaldi is one of the most-watched on YouTube. And the words “I learned to play guitar with GuitarMasterPro.net!” that accompany the video have driven many aspiring Funtwo’s to the guitar instruction site/service. The low-fi clip was produced by GuitarMasterPro, and markets their services as well as Clapton ever could.

While the GuitarMasterPro video captures what the site is offering, this one is about as subtle as advertising gets. Can you tell who produced this video?

Watch for it … watch for it …

Ok, did you notice the Gatorade bottle sitting next to her chair right at the end? Unfortunately, the clip is a fake and no matter how much Gatorade you drink you won’t be able to defy gravity. The ball girl was a stuntwoman assisted by wires. But for a while people passed the clip around, wondering at her achievement.

This last one is not marketing any business or product, but the Evolution of Dance has to be included for the fact that it launched the talented but otherwise unknown Justin Laipply in to viral stardom. This video is one of the most watched ever on YouTube.

As a marketing technique, virtuosity works best when it is relevant to the nature of your business. Does your product or service enable people to do remarkable things? If so, think about capturing some of your customers doing what they do on video. Not only does this showcase what you offer, it is a way to celebrate your customers.

Two Octobers helps businesses in Colorado’s Front Range with low- and no-cost marketing. For more information on our services, click here.

Google released an algorithm change early this month that has been dubbed “Mayday”. The name references the timing of the release, but it also describes the panic expressed by many SEO consultants who have invested much time and effort into optimizing sites according to their theories of how Google’s crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms work.

SEO forums such as WebmasterWorld are abuzz with the prattling-on of search engine optimizers who are debating how to take advantage of this latest update. I can’t respond to this chatter any better than the excellent advice of Vanessa Fox on Search Engine Land:

Focus on what Google is trying to accomplish as it refines things (the most relevant, useful results possible for searchers) and you’ll generally avoid too much turbulence in your organic search traffic.

On the heels of this update I have had various conversations with local businesses who hope to achieve top ranking for competitive keywords. To those businesses I have two pieces of advice:

1. Play to your strength – focus on local optimization.
2. Invest in content, not SEO.

Play To Your Strength

Google and other search engines are getting increasingly better at recognizing local intent in user’s queries. For example, if I do the query “industrial supply”, I get Google local results after the first two listings. I was talking to a client recently who has a small business selling industrial supplies and hoped to show up on the first page of results. Maybe it would be possible for a small business to show up on the first page of organic results, but not without a considerable investment in link-builing and content development. On the other hand, the competition for local results is not that strong.

Many SEO consultants will take your money and do their best to improve your ranking in the organic results, but the return on investment is likely to be much better for local optimization, and you are less vulnerable to the whims of the next Google update. Look for a marketing consultant who has experience with local optimization, or read up on Mike Blumenthal and Matt McGee and work on it yourself.

Invest In Content, Not SEO

Or, at least, invest more in content than SEO. The goal of a search engine is to deliver the page that best matches a user’s query. There are a number of best practices that help ensure that a search engine can crawl your content, and that you are getting credit for the good content you offer. But pick any one of those and I can find an example of a page with good content that doesn’t comply and still shows up in the top results. It is possible to game search engine algorithms and rank well with poor content, but the safer and better long term investment is to provide content that is useful to searchers.

I was responsible for SEO for the social/local community Guidespot.com (my involvement ended about a year and a half ago), and we did incredibly well in organic search. But my job was easy, because we were investing a lot in fostering good content. If you are striving to achieve a top ranking, you should ask yourself if your content is more comprehensive, funnier, more informative, more engaging or in some way better than all of the other content on the web. If not, you are polishing a turd, as the expression goes.

I don’t think it is possible to give an exact ratio, but if your SEO budget is more than 1/10th of what you spend on content, you are probably spending too much.

In summary, you should not care about any given algorithm update if you are a small, local business. Focus on showing up well in local search before trying to compete with large, national businesses in the organic search engine results, and invest in good content on your web site if you want to attract visitors.

Two Octobers is looking for space in Denver – specifically, we are looking for space for two hard-working but very pleasant online marketers. Since we are a new business and don’t know how quickly we will grow, we would prefer not to lock in to anything long term. In fact, we’d be quite happy sharing space with other good folk. We are fairly quiet, and are known for sharing tea and baked goods with our office-mates. We don’t need anything fancy like fax machines or conference rooms. We don’t even really need desks, just room enough for a couple of laptops and a teapot.

We would prefer something walking/biking distance from Union Station, but would be interested in hearing about anything close to public transportation.

If you have a little extra room, or know of someone else who does, please let us know. Email or or give us a call at (720) 468-0012.

And if you’d like help growing your business, please let us know about that too.

There is a basic problem with web analytics today. Web analytics tools give us data on what drives leads or web conversions, but the picture they paint is incomplete at best and can be misleading. As an illustration, below is a cartoon describing my own experience deciding on and purchasing a new brand of trail running shoes. This cartoon more or less follows the path I really took, from when I was first motivated to look for a new brand to when I actually purchased.

Along my meandering path, I had many opportunities to interact with brands and retailers. You’ll also notice that word-of-mouth played heavily into my decision. And this is not just anecdotal – there is a lot of research to support the fact that most purchasing decisions are heavily influenced by word-of-mouth. Also, my cartoon illustrates the interactions I remember – but there are many brand and business interactions I don’t remember. For example, several local retailers are very active in the local running community, including online forums. I tend to think of those businesses as authoritative, even if they are not speaking directly to my current interest. There are also race and athlete sponsorships that create a positive association with brands, even if I don’t consciously remember them.

The lesson here is that much of what happened prior to my purchase was not directly measurable. In fact, if someone were measuring, they would probably think that search advertising or organic ranking accounted for my purchase, but I had all but made my decision at that point. Online reporting tools are good at measuring search clicks, but not so good at measuring everything else that happened prior to that last search.

There are some reporting tools that do a better job than others of measuring all of the interactions that lead to a conversion. See some of the great research done by the Atlas Institute for more on this topic. (Disclosure: I used to work for Atlas, but the research is still great.) I’ve found both Atlas and Omniture Discover to be very useful when trying to understand buyer behavior, but both of these are too expensive for small businesses. Unfortunately, Google Analytics does a poor job at this even though it is a very powerful tool in many respects.

The solution for small business lies in combining online conversion data with other on- and offline sources, such as a Facebook Insights reports and “how did you hear about us” questionnaires. Also, engagement metrics such as time-on-site and bounce rate can be very useful indicators. At Two Octobers, we produce our own dashboard reports that draw from multiple sources to provide a more complete and accurate view. We pull it all together to show how all online activities and channels are contributing to business goals. There is no exact formula – the right combination of data sources and indicators depends on your business model and marketing methods.

If you know of other useful tools and techniques, please comment below.

This post is part of a series of posts describing the ingredients that cause media to go viral: Viral Marketing Ingredients

Before reading on, watch this video and see if you can count the passes:

And this Berlitz ad:

I put the Berlitz ad in so that you wouldn’t read this before watching the first video, but it is also a good example of misdirection. If you’re like me, you were totally had by the first one. I counted all of the passes and I completely missed the moonwalking bear. Misdirection occurs when a video or story takes us down one path, then surprises us with an unexpected ending.

We like to share things like this because they are clever, but also because we feel duped, and we want to see if others will fall for the same trick. What makes the Test Your Awareness video particularly effective is that the trick is also the message.

Here is another brilliant example:

To summarize, the protagonist is relentlessly annoying until at the end you realize that he is the wind, and that the wind can be harnessed for Good. A perfect message coming from Epuron, which is a German wind energy company, and the company has generated over 2 million views with the video. I also like that a German company chose a Frenchman to be the embodiment of annoying, but that’s another subject.

Please comment if you know of other good examples. For other posts in this series, click here.

Social networking tools that combine location with a status update have been around for a few years. Among them, Gowalla and Foursquare have gained some traction among the uber-connected. Both of these tools broadcast “this is where I am right now” to other users in some way, shape or form. Collectively, such systems are called “location based services” (LBS). Twitter also recently announced support for location-based tweets, prompting some analysts to predict the demise of the aforementioned tools. But if Twitter was going to kill them, Facebook will for sure.

Ad Age reported today that Facebook is getting ready to release location-based status updates. But the reason I am writing about this is not to report another Goliath-kills-David story. It is because both Gowalla and Foursquare employed a marketing strategy which is effective, but risky. And now they face the business end of that risk, so to speak. They both focused their marketing efforts on digital hipsters, in particular choosing the super-cool SXSW conference as a launching pad and battleground for the attention of social mavens. The strategy worked, and both reported significant adoption in 2009 and growth in 2010.

The risk of this strategy? Hipsters are fickle. Being hip is about knowing what’s next, not doing what your neighbors do. Sometimes, hipsters can skyrocket a product or brand into the mainstream, as when Corona beer went from super-cool to mainstream import. But if a big, well-known brand copies a hip product before it goes mainstream, all you are left with is a bunch of hipsters who are eager to turn their backs on you and get on to the next new thing.

Will all of my friends who spend time on Facebook switch to Foursquare or Gowalla for location-based services? I don’t think so, and according to Ad Age, big brand marketers don’t think so either. Will Foursquare and Gowalla’s current users bring mainstream users into those services? Nope. That’s not what hipsters do.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the piggyback effect, where a video or story piggybacks on the success of another story or video. Well, here is an example of piggybacking genius. This video parodies OkGo’s This Too Shall Pass video with a story about how the game “Mousetrap Never Works.” Brilliant.

Here is the OkGo version, also brilliant:

Internet marketing is targeted. In contrast to the 30 second network TV spot, the internet allows marketers to target messaging by medium, location, topic, demographic and a variety of other factors. Yesterday I tweeted that I want to be a firefighter when I grow up. Today I was followed by @firefighterjob in Twitter. Most of the ads that appear in Facebook as I browse around are local to me or specific to my interests. In fact, I spent some time convincing my dad that there are ads in Facebook at all. He had seen them, but he didn’t recognize them as ads.

But not all advertisers take advantage of these targeting capabilities. And not all web sites encourage targeted ads. Going from one web site to the next can be like going from New Hampshire to Vermont.

When you drive across the border from New Hampshire in to Vermont, the landscape becomes friendlier, more compelling. At least that is what visitors said to me when I lived there. Then I would explain to them that Vermont doesn’t allow billboards. And a light would dawn, and they would say “Yeah, you’re right. That’s nice!”

Google.com is kind of like Vermont, in that respect. They have never allowed any kind of advertising that doesn’t fit in to the landscape. The ads that do appear don’t use color or presentation in a way that make them stand out from other content on the page. In fact, most of the ads appear along the right hand side, which is visually the least obtrusive real estate on the page. Google also seeks to make all ads relevant to a user’s query. Most other search engines have followed Google’s lead, but their progress has been slower than some of us would like.

Historically, Yahoo has been more like New Hampshire, allowing run-of-site ads that appear for all users, relevant or not. The good news is that Google’s approach generates better ROI for advertisers, and ultimately more revenue for Google, so Yahoo has been following Google’s lead and cleaning up of late.

What does this mean for marketers? Placing ads that are not relevant is digital pollution, plain and simple. It’s pollution we have taken for granted and overlooked, but that is changing fast. Google, Facebook and other sites are teaching us to care about the relevance of marketing. This means that marketers who broadcast ads regardless of user’s interests or intent face increasing risk. The risk is that consumers start to see those marketers as polluters.

The word “pollution” may sound strong. Can you really compare a Classmates.com ad to a plastic bag stuck in a tree? I believe you can. We spend much of our working and non-working lives online. We spend time with friends and meet our future spouses online. Why then should we allow our online world to be populated with valueless clutter?

The bad news is that there will always be polluters, but the good news is that there are a variety of marketing methods that do not pollute, and in fact those methods generally get better results with less investment. Rich media and viral ads can entertain and inform. Social marketing creates bonds based on mutual interest. Search marketing answers questions. Just as businesses are adopting no-impact and sustainable business practices in the physical world, they can and should be translating this behavior to online. Not only is it good citizenship, it is good branding.

Billboard graphic courtesy of Big Huge Labs’ Billboard Maker