Year: 2006

I talk a lot about business directories here. Their kissing-cousin, the Yellow Pages, aren’t relative to my kind of marketing. But they struggle a lot with the same changes caused by the internet.

The Yellow Pages & Small Business Commandos Blog is a bit infrequent, but Dick Larkin’s posts are good stuff. His latest post tells about one yellow page publisher that is ignoring the internet. But its really a business lesson. Here’s the sum of his post titled Zig vs. Zag:

“The print strategy will probably not carry Seig for the next two decades, but by that time, a company with an Internet strategy will have paid through the nose for the deep market penetration that Valley has achieved.

See, it’s all about picking a strategy and sticking to it.

That is one of the toughest business strategies of all.”

Well said Dick! Looks like Seig is being business-smart and market-savvy.

I hate ‘webinars’. They just seem to promise too much while reeking of sales pitch. Then there is all the technology required to ‘log-in’. Often they are just talking heads and PowerPoint slides. And you’ve got to sit thru the whole thing to get to the good stuff, if there is any.

All the classic collateral tools work well enough, but is there a way to make them better, leveraging the web? MarketingSherpa posted a new report that may be an answer:

Marketing Collateral Adored by Reps & Prospects Alike — PowerPoint-Style Libraries With Audio

Malvern Instruments found a service that provides such presentations over the web, giving them great usage data and flexibility to let their folks put together their own presentations. You can see a sample ‘On Demand Training’ presentation here.

Because of its slide-by-slide navigation, the user has control to skip slides or browse around to find if the presentation is really worth it. Malvern says they try to keep each ‘training’ to less than five minutes. They are requiring registration to see most of the presentations.

In the comments to the article, other services besides Brainshark (that Malvern uses) are listed. Very cool stuff!

If you missed my post a couple months ago, I’ve come to the opinion that Adsense ads aren’t a particularly good value for B2B advertisers. To ad to your thinking about what each of those clicks represents, up-and-coming blog Caffiene Marketing posts Google Adsense Clicking Rationale Explained:

“There is a new topic titled “The Behavior Behind Users Clicking On Google Adsense Ads” on the WebmasterWorld discussion forum the I recommend checking out. The discussion covers the rationale behind internet users decision making process involved in clicking on a Google Ad. Some of the possible explanations are below:

1. “Compelling on topic or relevant supplemental information”
2. “They don’t know it’s an ad (well “blended”)”
3. “They know it’s an ad but want to get the hell out (of the page they are on)”
4. “Just boredom””

…and on to number 11. While WebmasterWorld is $150 a year, this list gives a good summary of what webmasters think is going on. Not sure if these opinions come more from those running AdSense on their websites or those looking for click-thrus. The sad part is less than half of the reasons have to do with actually being genuinely interested in seeing where the ad-link goes.

(I hope its not too much ‘inside baseball’ for me to assume you understand the difference between Adsense and Adwords ads. Adwords run strictly on Google search pages.)

I thought the beginning of the school year and the resulting schedule change with be a demarcation that would allow me to raise my energy and productivity, both in my work and personal life. Having the kids in bed an hour earlier and getting to work a half-hour early would seem to open up my day at bit, plus no soccer on Saturdays this fall. A chance to get off cruise-control and crank things up a notch.

And I do feel a bit freer, but nothing dramatic.

But instead of thinking just of me, I’ve found myself thinking about friends and acquaintances in challenging situations. Some situations I’ve been involved in, and others just a witness. Regardless, their combined struggles so closely grouped in time becomes greater than the whole.

When my son was in the hospital (twice in the last year), the people who came to visit him/us, or offer help really taught me a lesson about the value of reaching out in a time of need. And the pained regret of missing someone’s funeral last year was uncovered last night, making the realization that ‘cruise control’ is something that needs to be turned off sometimes…to slow down, not speed up.

When did it happen that we went our separate ways, that we stopped looking after each other? How is it that we forgot the still true warning of revolutionist pamphleteer Thomas Paine: “If we do not hang together, we shall surely hang separately”? –Big Picture Guy

Tonight I need to make a phone call.

Here’s a few quotes to savor for the weekend.

This first two come from Big Picture Guy. These came up in conversation this week.

• “We are what we do. This should frighten many of us.”

• “Procrastination is seldom about not wanting to do something; it is most often about not knowing what to do.”

This one I ran across this week, but forgot where…(anyone know the source?).

• “I can work with ignorant people or arrogant people, but not those who are both.”

And finally, from Weird Al, I just find this line hysterical no matter how many times I hear it (and as a father of twin 9yo boys, its been a few times):

• ” You’re just about as useless as jpegs to Hellen Keller”

From It’s All About the Pentiums (sorry, pop-ups at this lyrics site) or watch the video at Yahoo.

Enjoy the long weekend, my US readers!

Once again, BtoB Magazine sent out a reader survey to review advertisements in their latest issue. And just like my post last year, it is appalling when you slow down and put a critical eye on these ads. They surved up thirteen for me to review–I’ve dubbed two excellent and three poor.

Click on the small image below to see the whole ad.

Excellent ads	Poor ads
TechTarget: They have one message and they communicate it clearly.	Cheetahmail: The ad is ugly and takes three paragraphs to get to thepoint.
Global Intelligence: It says what they do and give specifics about costs. Confident without swagger. All in B&W.	Davis Harrison Dion: If these guys do branding, their ad certainly doesn’t prove it.
	CTIA: What a jumbled ad. And poorly written.

The “Copy Chasers” really need to get after their own advertisers!

Thanks to a reader, I learned that there was a ‘B2B Case Study’ session at the recent Search Engine Strategies conference in San Francisco. The article reviewing the session, titled, Search marketing works for B2B, too, starts with this gem:

“Most people assume search marketing works only to reach consumers, but it’s actually quite effective for businesses wishing to connect with other businesses, as well.”

Um, I’d counter that SEM is more effective for B2B, but I think this comment just shows the lack of knowledge of the author–obviously B2B is off the charts for some folks. The article throws up comments about basic SEM for B2B but this bit is probably of interest B2Blog readers:

“Rick Brown, President of NetTrack closed out the session with a discussion of the effectiveness of paid inclusion in vertical aggregator sites like ThomasNet, GlobalSpec and Industrial Quick Search. Brown articulated his endorsement of such aggregators cautiously, saying that they can bring in relevant traffic as well as provide valuable links to a company’s homepage but that many of the metrics such websites use to promote their services (such as “reach,” “page views,” and “brand activity”) don’t have much impact on a client’s bottom line.

He also noted that the value of the links from content aggregators is highest when the landing page can be controlled and there is a one to one relationship between the product category being searched and the landing page on a firm’s website. Brown suggested than firms who invest in paid inclusion on a vertical aggregator site have their own analytics like ClickTracks to determine the value of the traffic coming in from sites like Industrial Quick Search. “

Um, get an analytics program? Duh. What most B2B folks don’t do is actually look at the data and ponder its meaning.

One thing that Rick Brown said that is innovative, is that he proposes a 1-to-1 relationship between the seller’s landing page and the product categories on the directories. I’ve opined before that part of the problem with directories is that once the user clicks-thru, they have to start their search over again.

BTW: A rather interesting post by Marketing Headhunter Harry Joiner about a SEO specialist looking for a new job. Key fact: $125-150K pay for specialists at SEO agencies. Wow!

Globalspec’s newsletter, Marketing Maven, posts a e-marketing 101 article titled What to Know About Sponsoring e-Newsletters that caught my attention. I don’t think the subject gets talked about very much. Ultimately, she is making a case for sponsoring Globalspec’s industry-specific newsletters.

“A compelling case exists for suppliers and manufacturers to add sponsorship of e-newsletters to their marketing mix. The benefits of the right sponsorship include:”

• Brand visibility
• Frequency
• Low barrier to entry
• Audience
• Ability to test”

Okay, the Maven is right on these (and she explains more for each bullet), but there are two other issues that come to my mind:

1. Cost. Of course.
Globalspec has always positioned itself as costing about as much for a one year listing as a single full page ad in a trade publication (around $15K). Their newsletter sponsorships (three different positions available) are about $2,500 per issue. This was true regardless of the audience size (30K or 70K), but is on par with pricing I’ve seen with trade publications.

This expense could be acceptable for an advertiser with a large budget trying to round out their exposure triangle. For a partial-page advertiser like myself, this is a big price to pay for a extremely fleeting exposure. But that leads to my second point.

2. Effectiveness
Just how fast do people scan e-newsletters? Fast. The quality of content and the format is going to effect how the user reads the newsletter, but the process is fast nonetheless. While there is a ‘low barrier to entry’ as the Maven says, and it sounds good to get your promotion in front of 70K folks at one shot, I don’t think that you can just throw money and a simple ad/listing and expect results. Particular care needs to be placed on what your ad says and looks like, and how it fits in the newsletter. Essentially, the same due-diligence should be applied as to a print ad in order to be effective.

So, in summary, I think e-newsletter sponsorship works when:

• It is a smaller part of an overall marketing program
• The newsletter format makes the sponsorship likely to be noticed
• The advertiser prepares content that gets noticed
• Sponsors should take advantage of the points the Maven calls out

Longtime readers may remember I once posted about a newsletter sponsor that got me to click, only to lead to a white paper as a Word file. Hopefully we’re all past that by now.

Posting email addresses on your website is dumb. Evil things called Spam-bots patrol the web looking for email addresses to add to their spam lists. For a corporate website, a web-form is a convenient way to hide from bots as well as manage incoming requests.

But for situations where direct contact with someone is preferred, please don’t post their email address on the website without hiding it from the bots. There are a number of ways to do this, but the best way is to use Javascript to assemble the email address for a browser. Spam-bots (and search-engine-bots) don’t use browsers or Javascript and thus just get some useless code.

A quick search turned up a number of tools to do this, but I used this one yesterday. You just take his email.js script and add it to your website, then use his tool to generate the script-call with the information to assemble the email address in the browser.

So I’ve added an email link to the right of this blog, instead of going to the ‘about’ page (where I assume Blogger has posted my email address with similar cloaking). Blogger won’t let me use the script within my posts, but you can look at the webpage to email me (if you can’t guess that my email is dave-at-b2blog anyway.)

So leads a mailer I recently received from ISA (Instrument Society of America). Seems that they are putting together their “First Annual Marketing & Sales Summit”. Wow, a real B2B organization putting together a marketing program!

The ISA seems to be more about software and automation these days than instruments per-say, so maybe I’m overreaching in thinking they care about ‘industrial’ marketing vs. ‘tech’ marketing.

Anyway, it lands at a bad time for me to be able to attend (second week of September), but maybe some of you guys out there are interested. www.isa.org/rsvp/1