Alert Blog Reviews

The online space is certainly trying hard to cut the apron strings associated with traditional media techniques and practices. It can be hard though, to completely separate from something that may still have value. Think about how nice it was (or still is) to go back “home” and get that meal that you just can’t make on your own. While you never want to be back there 24 / 7 again there are certain things that are part of our past that will always have great value and we get to take the best of those things with us. The same concept may apply to the Internet marketing world as well. As much as we try to break away and create our own identity separate from the traditional world of content generation, advertising, PR and every other piece of the overall marketing mosaic, there may be some things that will always have a place. One of them might even be snail mail. An article in the Wall Street Journal talks about how there may be certain aspects of snail mail that carry importance even in the rush to digitize everything in our business lives. While not right for every business, part of the relationship building that we talk of as the most important aspect of the social web can be cemented with a good old fashioned handwritten note. For instance: Looking to cut costs amid the recession, Alicia Settle initially thought it would be a good idea to eliminate her company’s annual direct mailing. Spending about $20,000 on the personally signed letters, which offered customers a discount on early orders, seemed indulgent for Per Annum Inc., which sells city diaries, albums, and planners in the struggling corporate gift market. But after swapping snail mail for email last year, Ms. Settle saw a 25% drop in early orders compared with the same period the previous year. “We realized we had made a huge mistake,” says Ms. Settle, president of the New York firm. This is one of the dangers of taking established businesses and preaching that since online is the wave of the future that you need to go there. Damn the torpedoes and full steam ahead into the future! Sure businesses do need to evolve but to what extent is completely dependent on what kind of business it is, what their existing customers are used to and how new customers can be attracted to the offerings. As a result, you don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater so there may be room to get rid of some traditional marketing that is certainly unproductive in the new world order while keeping others. These “old school” activities like handwritten thank you notes and other techniques now are part of the whole social marketing fabric that can serve to benefit the new and the old customers. They are actually part of social media. The idea is to send something that’s more appealing than “junk” mail and potentially more noticeable than an email message, says Eric Anderson, a professor of marketing at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. That allows business owners “to offer a personal touch the larger firms may not be able to have,” he says. Prof. Anderson says other business owners are trying to figure out how to integrate Web marketing—such as email campaigns, banner ads and social-networking sites—with direct mail. “The introduction of new media has forced [business owners] to go back and revisit the whole playbook on what’s the best way to communicate with customers,” Mr. Anderson says. Ms. Settle, for instance, plans to use e-marketing to complement the hand-signed direct-mail piece, not replace it. So how do you incorporate the best of the old and the new in your business? Have you made a “pendulum swing” adjustment and taken away too much of what was once effective? Did you then find that part of the old way of doing things could still serve you well? Where is the happy medium and what might it look like moving forward?

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Can Snail Mail Be Part of Social Media?

Interactive marketing as a whole is a good place to be relative to the rest of the marketing world. Anywhere where the worst numbers show low single digit decreases and the happy numbers are still in the positive teens despite a continued overall economic morass you have to smile at least a little. We need to, however, remember that the overall interactive marketing is doing fine it is still like any other market. That means, simply, that some industries are going to be much better off in the interactive space than others. It is not a silver bullet for everyone. Forrester is starting a series of reports that tell just how particular industries are utilizing the interactive marketing environment. The first is called “US Interactive Marketing Forecast by Industry, 2009-2014″. It is interesting to see how some of the verticals are using the medium in its various forms and what lessons can be potentially learned. Not surprisingly it’s the retail and financial sectors that account for nearly 1/ 3 of the interactive spend and that trend is likely to continue through 2014. What is interesting is that their overall marketing budgets still hold room for their growth to be significant. I wonder when other industries will find that they are completely under utilizing the Internet channel and will take more of their traditional spend online? Our readers are knee deep in this stuff every day. Do you see any verticals / industries that may be missing the boat to this point? Where are there spots in the B2B and B2C world that will be hot growth areas for the next five years for interactive marketing. C’mon now. Don’t think you have some big secret that you can’t share. Remember that 99.999 % of the people that hear your ‘great idea’ probably couldn’t even begin to figure out how to execute it so don’t hold back.

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Forrester Looks at Interactive Marketing by Segment

We could spend all day every day telling you about the latest and greatest flame out in the traditional media world. Every day a newspaper or magazine or some other bastion of the “old world media order” goes away but that gets kind of old. I would even go so far as to say that we on the online side of the world have gotten a little cocky and maybe receive a little too much joy from the tumble of the old media outlets. As a result it is possible that we clump all of these properties together and make a broad (and likely incorrect) assumption that eventually there will be no room at all for the traditional delivery of newspapers and magazines because everyone and everything will be online only. Not so fast says the new owners of BusinessWeek magazine, Bloomberg LP. Fresh off their namesake’s election for a third term as New York City mayor (congrats to Mayor Bloomberg) the company has announced some plans for the magazine that has a very unique place in the business and marketing world. Mediaweek reports Bloomberg’s chief content officer Norman Pearlstine revealed the plans for BusinessWeek’s future direction during an employee meeting Nov. 3. He said that Bloomberg would increase the number of pages in the magazine, upgrade the paper stock, double the story count and expand its global coverage, according to a source who was present. That’s not a “shrinking violet” approach by any means. While it remains to be seen how such an aggressive expansion of a traditional magazine will play out I think it may be a good move. Many who read the magazine have been slower to adopt the ‘online only’ mentality. In other words, they are older readers but who have money and influence so they are still very desirable. Sure they won’t live forever and eventually the printed version may have to go away but why ignore the market now just because everyone and their brother proclaims the death of the printed word every day? Is it possible that pundits may actually be wrong or at least a bit over zealous? Oh dear, not that! What about the online side of the ledger? It’ll be there and it will be a mix of the old ‘free content’ model and the new ‘pay wall’ approach. As for the Web, Bloomberg plans to keep most of its content free while creating deep, vertical content areas that paying users could access for roughly $100 a year. Sounds like a smart idea. Cover all of your bases. Make hay while the sun is shining. If done correctly traditional media outlets have more opportunities for revenue than ever before albeit a potentially short window of opportunity to take advantage of several delivery options due to the disparate make up of today’s business news consumer. The final indication that Bloomberg sees opportunity is the tact of actually charging MORE for the magazine subscription and adding Bloomberg to the magazine’s title. I have to admit that I think that this may be one of the few traditional titles that could pull this off while establishing itself in a high end market that marketers will love whether it’s in print or online or both. I am looking forward to seeing the new BusinessWeek and watching this model go up against the News Corp.’s ‘pay for it all’ mentality. Who do you think will win or is there room for both?

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Don’t Stick a Fork in All Traditional Media – It Ain’t Done Yet

Just in time for Halloween, Google has given us a chance to put together a very timely and pithy headline (although I have to give credit where credit is due – hat tip to Andy). So how exactly is Google doing this and what the heck does it mean? In a nutshell, it’s a way to move toward a kind of ‘simulated’ real time search because the idea is to use its RSS/Atom feeds to identify and index new content more quickly. Is this replacing the traditional crawling technique of forever? There is no consensus on this aspect but it is obvious that Google is fully on board the real-time search train that is leaving the station as we speak. ReadWriteWeb reports According to a post on Google’s Webmaster Central blog , Google is now discovering web sites by automatically scanning RSS and Atom feeds. This new process will help Google more quickly identify web pages and will allow users to find new content in search results as soon as it goes live. While not exactly “real-time,” using feeds to identify updates to websites is an arguably faster method than the traditional crawling techniques Google has used in the past. And Google may get even faster in the near future – the post also notes that the company may soon explore using mechanisms like the real-time protocol PubSubHubbub to identify updated items going forward. This is pretty nifty. Of course, the obvious question is how do you rank these new entries into whatever keyword clustered group the page belongs in? Just because they are the newest or freshest entries into a space by no means determines their relevancy and quality. In fact, one could argue that real time could be a real pain in the butt because it could simply end up meaning that whoever is first is best. That’s not a good result. It’s kinda like saying that the kid in school who runs the 100 yard dash the fastest get the prize for Best Science Project. There is no correlation between speed and quality. It happens on occasion but it is more rare than one might think. Real time may be more suited for news and not for research. It’s too early to tell but these are questions that will be cropping up regularly moving forward. The bottom line is that Google is going to be using all of its considerable resources to try to harness the new push to real time results. Once everything is gathered however then the fun really begins. If I could be so bold as to make a suggestion I would like to see a “real time” search option and “traditional” one. I’m not sure there will be a real clean way to present real time results with those that are actually the best result without making the SERP’s a complete usability train wreck. What are your thoughts on this one? Pilgrim’s Partners: SponsoredReviews.com – Bloggers earn cash, Advertisers build buzz!

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Google Feeds Its Spiders

Just in time for Halloween, Google has given us a chance to put together a very timely and pithy headline (although I have to give credit where credit is due – hat tip to Andy). So how exactly is Google doing this and what the heck does it mean? In a nutshell, it’s a way to move toward a kind of ‘simulated’ real time search because the idea is to use its RSS/Atom feeds to identify and index new content more quickly. Is this replacing the traditional crawling technique of forever? There is no consensus on this aspect but it is obvious that Google is fully on board the real-time search train that is leaving the station as we speak. ReadWriteWeb reports According to a post on Google’s Webmaster Central blog , Google is now discovering web sites by automatically scanning RSS and Atom feeds. This new process will help Google more quickly identify web pages and will allow users to find new content in search results as soon as it goes live. While not exactly “real-time,” using feeds to identify updates to websites is an arguably faster method than the traditional crawling techniques Google has used in the past. And Google may get even faster in the near future – the post also notes that the company may soon explore using mechanisms like the real-time protocol PubSubHubbub to identify updated items going forward. This is pretty nifty. Of course, the obvious question is how do you rank these new entries into whatever keyword clustered group the page belongs in? Just because they are the newest or freshest entries into a space by no means determines their relevancy and quality. In fact, one could argue that real time could be a real pain in the butt because it could simply end up meaning that whoever is first is best. That’s not a good result. It’s kinda like saying that the kid in school who runs the 100 yard dash the fastest get the prize for Best Science Project. There is no correlation between speed and quality. It happens on occasion but it is more rare than one might think. Real time may be more suited for news and not for research. It’s too early to tell but these are questions that will be cropping up regularly moving forward. The bottom line is that Google is going to be using all of its considerable resources to try to harness the new push to real time results. Once everything is gathered however then the fun really begins. If I could be so bold as to make a suggestion I would like to see a “real time” search option and “traditional” one. I’m not sure there will be a real clean way to present real time results with those that are actually the best result without making the SERP’s a complete usability train wreck. What are your thoughts on this one? Pilgrim’s Partners: SponsoredReviews.com – Bloggers earn cash, Advertisers build buzz!

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Google Feeds Its Spiders