Author: Dave J.

How sloppy and/or lazy can you get? ‘Giant Mass Email Document’ from ‘Do Not Reply’:

• I’ve cropped the email, but it doesn’t say what they do at all.
• He misspelled ‘machienery’, part of his company name.
• He used his own email account, so likely will be tagged a spammer and none of his real clients will get his email for a week.

He did remember to have an ‘unsubscribe’ link, but I imagine he’ll never do another mass email because ‘it doesn’t work’.

Life’s been in fast-forward for the last month or so, but I’m trying to slow it down a bit and recognize the objects flashing by.

Here’s three posts by fellow B2B bloggers worth checking out:

Difference between Marketing and Sales post by Troy Bingham surveys some Linked-in groups: “When do you contact your web leads?”

… In the Marketing, the responders often said it was best to wait 24-48 hours. … On the other side, the Sales responders all felt that a call should be made immediately or as quickly as possible.

Anyone got an answer for why that is for Troy?

Wild, Wild Web: Shoot Out at the Online Corral post by Julie Power serves up discussion of B2B trash-talking:

Now in a new twist, a business customer of a communications firm has created a new sucks site that cuts its provider up in to tiny little pieces with a commentary that must really, really hurt.

Examining Google’s Practices post by Tom Pick is well-researched commentary on the threat Google is to our marketing. He uses the term Monopolist, and not without justification. If Google is more than $100 of our monthly ad-spend, you need to read this one.

Some bits from the post: Google disabling some SEO tracking tools (not my beloved Free Monitor for Google, which uses API). Google treating directories as paid link farms. Google squeezing us for revenue, tracking data, and providing crappy customer service. Etc.

ThomasNet knows that their advertisers are hands-on marketers. So are their engineering-type users. So here is a cool desktop thingy they have released for free: The ThomasNet Toolbox. Screenshot:

It does just enough for a marketer to be useful. And as it hangs out in a normally dead zone of your screen (the very top), its not in the way.

1. The screen capture lets you select the part of the screen to capture. Saves me a step cropping, especially if doing the same shot repeatedly. (Good for engineers making instructions, too.)
2. Color palette tool picks colors off your screen and gives you coding. I forgot about this feature and was doing things the hard way this morning, copy-and-pasting Hex color numbers from a CSS to see what color they really were.
3. The rulers help you measure items on your screen … again helpful for marketers and engineers. (I do have a cool Firefox plug-in that does this, as well.)
4. Who-knows when the magnifier may come in handy. I know Windows has one, but couldn’t tell you how to call it up.
5. I normally hate post-it desktop tools, but who knows, I may use this one since it is attached to these other useful items.
6. You are stuck looking at “ThomasNet.com” all day in your header area. If it pays off, people will use the first item in the toolbox, which is a link to their site.

I’ve picked on TN for posting other web-stuff that didn’t really do the job, but this one is a winner.

One of our client’s just sent a PO notification. So I have to go retrieve from their EDI service, Exostar. Here is my rant I punched into their help/support form:

“1. Does not work with Firefox.
2. Does not give any warning about not working with firefox.
3. Tells me my user/pass is incorrect instead.

… So I attempt to log in and reset password in IE. (I see the website add some text to the end of my user_id when I press submit, which apparently is what Firefox couldn’t do). I get a temporary password.

4. Now I have to select my secret question and secret answers? Why, why, why, do I have to select my secret questions?

5. Now I am locked out from logging in for 5 minutes?????

Could you make it any harder???????????”

Yes, I have to select two secret questions from a pulldown list of four. Then provide an answer. And all four questions are things you ‘like’:

Who is your favorite author?
What is your favorite book?
What is your favorite sport?
What is your favorite food?

The answers to these questions may change over the years. I may have answered these questions 5 or more years ago. My favorite things may have changed. My mother’s maiden name will not change. Neither will the city that I was born in.

Apparently my submission was given a case/ticket. It’ll be interesting to see what kind of reply I get.

UPDATE: Semi-related: Mean Dean explains how poor ‘secret questions’ were the cause of Sarah Palin’s email getting hacked. Publicly available info makes poor questions, too.

When checking my website’s leads this morning, I found a promotional submission, most definitely not a sales lead, but someone trying to sell me. The message was a bit vague, but promised a new way of generating leads via webforms.

I tend to ignore spammy messages, but to save you, my readers, the trouble, I took a look at their website to see what the deal was. Here’s there quick run-down (less their brand name):

1. You tell XXX what industries you want to target
2. You specify the geographic areas
3. Choose the plan, that fits your objectives with the maximum number of ‘form submissions’
4. XXX proprietary technology then scours the web for industry and geographic matches.
5. XXX pulls the data in, ranks them, and submits your contact info & sales message. XXX populates the forms it determines most meet your target objective as qualified sites.
6. You get oodles ultra targeted, interested, incoming calls/emails quickly.

So, the assumption is that people forwarding webleads will helpfully forward your request to the correct person in the company. Hmmm.

I imagine this may work as a back-door to sales and marketing departments. It may also work because it is a less common approach. But I don’t think there is a whole lot of reason to think it is more worthwhile than other marketing techniques.

In the end, it is just another spamming method, I think.

At the beginning of August, I broke down my AdWords campaign into more keyword-centric ‘ad groups’. Now I am able to look at the results of a whole month, and I’m glad I did it.

Overall, I had about 20% less click-thrus. But wait, I had 40% MORE conversions. The conversion rate nearly doubled over July. Cool!

In reviewing the data for individual keywords, I had one clunker of a keyword I am completely stumped by. Here’s the situation:

Its the number one keyword for this particular ad-group, lets call it ‘tennis shoe’. I even pay a premium over my normal maximum CPC for this term to make sure I am listed well versus the competition. Right below it with almost identical views is ‘tennis shoes’. But look at the conversion rates:

Keyword	CTR	Conv. Rate
tennis shoe	3.80%	1.30%
tennis shoes	2.15%	19.00%

What the heck is going on here???? And what should I do?

I’m going to watch a little closer and see what’s going on. But I see a major savings in my AdWords spend coming up.

Its been a week. That alone should take the pressure off. How do you write about it? How do you talk about it?

My boss and company president died last week of a heart attack here at the office. Joe was a too young 56. The gap in our business is huge, as well as a personal loss of someone I have worked with for almost 18 years. And the shock of realizing I could just walk away from the office, something that he would never be able to do again.

Being the marketer, I realized I had to put something on the website. People are going to be looking for news about it. It was 11pm at night when I finally posted something. One of our overseas reps had sent an email of condolences, and I guess seeing it in print made it real enough that I could talk about.

I showed what I had posted in the morning to a co-worker who made two comments: we should check with his wife first; and it sounded too newsy.

I disabled the post waiting for approval, and replaced some of my text with someone else’s “we regret to inform you…”. Turns out that the approval never came. But for at least a few hours the news was right on our website.

What I realized, and was willing to accept, is that in certain situations, dignity and respect are more important than directness and timeliness. The writing style that I use here and on my company website needs to be dialed back, even to the point that the voice no longer seems to be mine. Who really wants to read a death announcement written by someone who was there and personally affected by it anyway?

The thing is, the funeral service had this third-person feel. Part of the problem is that the pastor never acknowledged that a whole company was wondering ‘what’s next?’ I hope that the family felt comforted by her words about his family life, but I wanted her to acknowledge my pain, my worry.

I settled for accepting that our presence there was to comfort the family as well. And the family was very gracious and heartfelt in meeting with everyone who was there.

So what do you say? What do you write? Who’s your audience? Will you make others (or yourself) cry? Are you direct and personal, or formal and polite? Does it gloss over the ugliness or make it real to others?

All these questions for someone who has to communicate, never mind the personal thoughts one has about the passing of a colleague.

Shalom Joe Hamm.

Saw this post yesterday by Tatum Marketing: B2B Online Advertising – You Need to Change the Default Settings

“The first of these settings is an automatic opt-in to a content network. When you’re in a content network, your ad is served on non-search engine websites – presumably those whose content subject matter is a match for your ad.”

How important is this? Take a look at this example of what not to do I found:

Hmmm, Adsense is content-matching based on the word ‘strip’. And this poor advertiser is getting 95K views just from Bloglines users!!!

If they are lucky, no one is actually clicking on their ad. Even 0.1% of viewers click (accidentally or curiously, I assume), that’s 95 clicks to pay for every day the ad runs.

Adsense for B2B marketing: Adnonsense … if you aren’t careful.

Video is the next frontier of B2B marketing. But how to do it? Where to do it?

For ‘where’, partnering with a trade pub makes sense to aid in promotion. But ‘how’–most trade pubs that use video are offering ‘webinars’ and I HATE WEBINARS.

Quality Magazine has taken a stab at a different video presentation, in the form of “Q-Tube“:

“Q-Tube SHOWS you the latest products and technology manufacturers are using to improve their manufacturing processes” etc…

Q-Tube in its current form is three interviews by the editor of the magazine with marketing folks at a trade show about their products. Like some webinars, adding a representative from the publication makes the presentation seem less like a sales pitch. The sound quality is poor and the content is as dry as any staged pitch, but I applaud them for experimenting.

I really think video is the next frontier for trade pub editorial content, too, but that’s a subject for a different post. So, what do you think? And is anyone out there in industrial B2B marketing or publishing getting video right yet?

Blog Collateral Damage posts The weirdest ad for lab equipment you will EVER see:

“How do you market a machine that automates using a pipette (an instrument used to transport a measured volume of liquid)? Romance, of course. Eppendorf is pushing its new epMotion machine with a video of a boy-band group of lab types singing a boy-band type of love song about how you deserve to have your pipetting done by a machine.”

You can follow link above to Collateral Damage, or go to YouTube, or the epMotion site where you can also get wallpaper for your lab PC.

Just way over the top!

But you gotta figure that, lets guess, $50k to pull this off is the equivalent of 5 full page ads in Lab Equipment Magazine. Makes it look like a reasonable approach, all of a sudden.