Author: Dave J.

As part of the lead-up to my panel discussion about business blogs at BMA, I’m taking a look at business blogs:

This is the kind of blog I like.

Industrial Quick Search launched a ‘newsroom’ blog around the beginning of the year. In the past it was mostly press releases by customers and IQS marketing content.

But now it is a newsroom. A couple of the SEO team at IQS are blogging there.

Here’s a great post of original content, that isn’t a shill for their business, or fake punditry. It is reporting, observation, and commentary worth the read:

Is it springtime for US Manufacturers?

This piece is nice to read just because it gives a helpful vision of the potential end of this recession. Hmm, not too many business bloggers doing that.

Other times the articles are less newsworthy, but they are interesting discussions of the products their advertisers sell.

At first doing such a newsroom seemed like a waste of time to me. Too much content for not enough value (traffic). Admittedly, Marjorie from IQS told me they don’t really do it specifically for the SEO value anyway.

But I now realize: what better way to let an SEO staffer ‘sharpen their saw’ than to let them write freely about the products they are trying to help sell by being found by Google.

I’d see it as an opportunity for a company’s staff to step out from behind the curtain a little and see what happens. Maybe like Google lets its staff work on side-projects for 20% of their time.

Play, learn, share, experiment, & connect.

Its an investment in the company and the staff.

I don’t get out of the office much. And going to marketing events isn’t usually my shtick, either.

But Gary Slack, VC of the BMA, has invited me to be a part of a panel to discuss business-blogging at this year’s BMA Conference, so I’ll have to take a break from my office life. The event is in Chicago the second week of June. Maybe I’ll get to meet @B2BNinja!

Here’s the scoop on the panel I’ll be on:

Why B-to-B & Corporate Blogging Matters: Best Practices & Key Trends

When 500,000 people are going online every day for the first time in their lives, we are in a time of rapid change. Leaders are realizing that blogging and social media provide one of the most direct ways to build relationships and personalize their story. This expert panel, led by one of the most experienced corporate blogging professionals around, will examine how business marketers benefit when employees and executives blog, how to start and sustain blogging efforts, how to measure their value and lessons learned along the way.

~ Bob Pearson, President, Blog Council, and former Vice President of Communities and Conversations, Dell (Moderator)

~ Rick Short, Director of Mar-Com, Indium Corporation

~ Dave Jung, Marketing Manager, (some un-named industrial company), and Creator, B2Blog

~ Kevin Flynn, Member, Blogging Team, Obama for America

Wow, Bob Pearson, the voice of bloggers in the media? And Kevin Flynn from the Obama campaign? Cool. Plus Rick Short who is another in-the-trenches marketer, and in a related field to mine? This should be a fun session!

Will we be able to get out of the session without saying ‘Twitter’? You’ll have to come and find out!

I’ll be posting additional thoughts leading up to the conference on business blogging, so stay tuned!

Our company dropped out of the SAE World Congress a couple years ago. It is/was the largest automotive engineering events that was the place to be, ten years ago.

I find this announcement at the close of this year’s event fascinating:

Changes on horizon for SAE 2010 World Congress

“The whole idea is to go to three days on the event and focus only on those exhibitors who have truly new and innovative technology and can qualify by way of writing a several-page white paper submitted to a committee of OEMs,” said Thomas J. Drozda, Group Director, SAE International. “Ford is the host, and they’ll participate, and we’ll recruit other OEMs to sit on a panel and look at these papers and decide, ‘yeah, that’s new technology that’s good to have at Congress.’”

Catch that? The exhibitors will be selected based on having new/innovative technology to display, as well as technical/white papers that back up that technology.

Makes sense … people come to shows to ‘see what’s new’ primarily. If they crank up the quality of the reason people come, I think it could make for a more interesting place to be. Of course, this means the exhibit becomes a side-show to the conferences and sessions going on during the Congress. But maybe that’s how it truly should be.

Like lots of other ‘old-school’ media, the trade show needs to change dramatically. While this is an obvious down-sizing of this event (which used to fill every nook and cranny of Cobo Center), the change of focus actually increases the value of the show.

What do you think? Is this a smart move? Or just an excuse for a dying event?

YAD is my short-hand for ‘Yet Another Directory’.

As such, I won’t spend a lot of time analyzing it. It promises all the benefits of ‘.tel’ domain ownership matched with keyword tagging to connect businesses with searchers. I kinda get it, but not sold on any value. What do you think?

The World’s First .tel Industrial Search Engine: “Industrial Web Search is like no other industrial search tool on the market today.”

The Twitter thing is everywhere! Here is a new application from my inbox:

“Twitter may be all the rage, but for BtoB marketers who need to reach a very specific audience – not the masses – it holds little value. Now, there’s a micro-blogging tool for BtoB professionals – a way they can keep up-to-date about what’s happening now in their vertical market. For marketers, it’s a great real-time communication tool, where they can “chatter,” knowing industry buyers are listening.”

… So MediaBrains introduces their new “Business Chatter” tool …

“Business Chatter appears on every page of the MediaBrains Business Directory for your vertical market. It’s a simple, yet extremely effective way to reach out to customers and prospects, drive leads and expand your business. When you make a post, it links directly to your Company Profile page. So anyone who reads your Chatter can click directly to your Company Profile.”

The link I followed in the email dumped me to a page where I could immediately post chatter on behalf of my company. I tried it and it worked exactly as promoted, my chatter showed up on the directory site my company is listed in immediately.

It did tell me that I could post another ‘chatter’ on 5/15, a month away. That seems like a fair way to throttle postings. RSS feeds are available for chatter.

The chatter links to your company profile, but as an un-enhanced listing, there is no link to my site from there. Even so, the chatter would make more sense if you could link it to further details. That said, the beauty of Twitter (and Chatter) is that you have some freedom to post news without having to make sure a full collateral set is ready to back it up.

And for those who wonder if this service could be abused, the answer is yes. But their TOS make some pretty fair ground rules, and since the chatters are linked to your company profile, it’s pretty easy to trace those who abuse it.

Gimmick or gadget?
As much as I want to like this tool and its application, it isn’t Twitter. It is a firehose of information for directory visitors, but I wonder about the real value and interest in its content. And without the relationship of ‘followers’ that Twitter provides or direct links to your site, there is no feedback to maintain its use.

Now maybe the real benefit will be the flow of keywords to MediaBrian’s sites.

Okay, I played the Twitter game for a while, then got tired. It’s a fire-hose of status updates and pushes of information you never knew you needed. It’s hard to tell if anyone is listening to anything you share, too.

People say Twitter is hard to explain. But you are already using a pre-cursor of Twitter.

I just realized this yesterday. Let me explain:

Inbox Twitter:
There are dozens of email newsletters I subscribe to. Well, some I didn’t ask for. Trade pub. newsletters, marketing services, vendors, new product updates, webinars, skills & training offers, etc.

I’m sure you get a lot of the same.

I delete most after just reading the subject line, without opening (or even previewing). Don’t you?

So why don’t I unsubscribe?

These emails serve as a continual feed of information of what the outside world is doing as it relates to the scope of my job.

A continual feed of information? Hmmm, just like … Twitter!

So what does this mean:
That all said, I’d say email marketers should maybe reconsider how they write their subject lines, to help feed Twitter-like bits of information to their subscribers who don’t open their messages.

Sample:

• Current subject line: “Amazon.com: Top 10 Deals in Electronics”
• My suggested subject line: “Amazon.com: Canon A123 enters top 10 deals in electronics”

Some may call this ‘the scent of information’. Always a good thing, but if you realize your readers are using Inbox Twitter, all the more important.

It looked easy at first: an idle piece of equipment on our ‘final test’ line. “Let’s shoot a quick video of it operating,” I said.

The final production was more work than that, but I think this sets us on a trajectory to do more, and do better.

This video was for a less-common, but more interesting product, so the risk-factor was low in doing this. In the end, it is a video that does so much more than the rest of the web page that I’ve posted it at does.

Here’s what we did to make the video:

1. Shot video, with our digi-cam & a tripod, of the unit operating.
2. Created ‘powerpoint’ slides to cover product description, plus openings & closings.
3. Shortened text on slides to absolute minimum.
4. Used Windows Movie Maker to lay out the video & slides.
5. Made the video in two sections: product info, and demonstration.
6. Led the video with a snip of the demo, to interest the viewers.
7. Recorded voice-over of the video (using WMM’s narration tool) three times.
8. Wrote down what I said during the voice overs, and recorded a final take.
9. Overlaid the voice-over with a music track using Audacity (music from Wired’s Rip Sample Mash Share CD)
10. Adjusted timing of ‘slides’ in WMM to fit the voice-over.
11. Export to WMV file and upload to YouTube.

It’s not the ‘YouTube’ style video that I imagined–it’s actually pretty bland and corporate. But it is quick (just over 2 minutes), and covers all the bases on the product.

Covering ‘all the bases’ slowed down the the production, and made this format much easier to complete. And as much as I wanted to be in front of the camera being all glib about our product, doing a voice-over worked much better. Saying it first, and writing it second, made the voice-over much more listenable and authentic than using a script.

Take a look: YouTube -Dust Chambers

(FYI: that’s not me in the video, that’s my assistant Chris. He did all the fun stuff with WMM to put this together. )

The easiest way to explain my ‘test’ is to let you read the following email I just sent to Yahoo Marketing Solutions customer support:

My account was turned off for a while, since 11/12/08, I don’t know why. I restarted it last week by manually drawing money from my credit card.

When it was restarted, ‘content-match’ was enabled, although I never used it before. The ‘bid’ was set at $5.15. The result is 1,191,689 impressions and 213 clicks, resulting in $281.01 in charges in one week. (Sponsored search was much more reasonable $25.58.)

I have turned off content-match, but am concerned about these charges. While we can debate the problems with my account, I also want to point out that the content-match ‘bidding’ screen showed that monthly estimates for my campaign would be: Impressions: 628,800 – 1,257,600, Clicks: 180 – 660. I have hit this in only one week. I am concerned that this amount of activity may have been fraudulent.

To recap, three things went wrong:
My account was disabled for unknown reasons
When reactivated, content-match was turned on without my knowledge
Traffic and clicks for content-match were excessive based on Yahoo’s estimates.

Also, please look at the attached stats from Yahoo to my site: 93% bounce rate, and average time on site of 12 seconds. Those clicks were worthless, which is why I’ve kept content-match off for almost ten years.

If you can shed any light on the causes of this, I’d be interested to know. I’d also like to see the $281 refunded.

Thank you for taking a look at this and understanding my situation.

Okay, that sucked! I could have guessed that, but now I’ve proved the obvious.

Back in the day, I came across a one-page web page that served as a directory of the major players in my marketplace. All the webpage said at the bottom was “Copyright Industrial Quick Search”.

After IQS came out of ‘skunk works’, they proudly said ‘patent pending’ on all their promotional materials. A lot has happened since, and patents on web site functionality has become the norm, although it still makes me scratch my head.

And now IQS has received a patent for their web-directory tool, proudly posted at

Here’s the summary of the ‘invention’:
(I have added paragraph breaks and bullets to make it readable without falling asleep, or wandering-off to check your email.)

“The present invention includes a supplier identification and locator system whereby a user can identify a supplier of goods or services over the Internet. The supplier identification and locator system includes at least one directory Web site with a directory Web site domain name.

The directory Web site domain name typically is at least partially descriptive of a class of goods or services. The directory Web site also typically has

• a plurality of links where activation of a link accesses a supplier’s Web site;
• a supplier descriptive portion located substantially adjacent to the corresponding supplier link;
• a descriptive title portion substantially corresponding to the description of the class of goods or services described by the directory Web site domain name;
• and a rollover window that displays information about at least one of the suppliers corresponding to a supplier identified by at least one of the supplier links.”

The big thing at the time was that ‘rollover window’ which previewed an ad for the supplier. It was just a clean way to give some worthwhile content in a standard format.

They’ve added additional small-print listings for non-advertisers and some technical content, but today’s IQS product-specific domain pages look a lot like they did when they first came out. But Google still likes their content, as must their visitors & advertisers, which has established IQS as a serious player in the online directory business. The patent just becomes a badge of honor.

I’ve been to more than one show where one company goes all-out with their booth. They’re the talk of the show, and everyone goes to see it.

How about if a number of booths followed the same creative, interactive theme?

QC Industries Conveyor Blog posted on about the upcoming ATX South Expo:

“CFC’s booth will feature a gambling theme and many of us will have gambling related fun going on in our booths. I have seen the Epson craps table, and it is one you’ll definitely want to come check out and try your luck.”

Very cool idea. Everyone likes a game at a trade show, and I love this picture of a robot doing all the table-work. And it’s great that the companies are all working together on this.