Author: Dave J.

Second Life peaked in its web2.0-ishness foolishness, um, like two years ago. And for B2B it was questionable to begin with.

So, when you are a components manufacturer opening a virtual corporate museum in 2008, you are likely to attract snarky posts, like this one from Circuits Assembly Magazine’s blog titled Art as (Second) Life:

“In trying to explain why the company is underwriting the costs from its R&D budget, Jan Jurcy, Avnet’s vice president of digital communications (you probably don’t have one of those, either), said, “We look at this as another piece of the social media revolution.”

And here you thought they were in the business of selling components.”

Now, quit rubber-necking at the accident on the information superhighway and get back to real marketing work 🙂

“Why do so few business to business Web sites load user reviews of individual products online?” asks Julie Powers (The Internet Marketing Report Online: Offer user reviews instead of discounts? Maybe).

She goes on: “Because all the results from consumer Web sites seem to imply that there isn’t much downside to posting reviews (unless all your products suck. And that would never be the case, would it?)”

Admit it, we all love the product reviews at Amazon. So, Julie asks a great question: Why not?

1. Fear. Your team, CEO, and salespeople will ‘what if’ you till you scream and give up.
2. No alternative products: We aren’t distributors with multiple brands to select from. At Amazon, I can jump from Canon to HP products. If shopping at Agilent, a bad review may drive me to Tektronix’s website.
3. Its personal. These are my products and I don’t want anyone dissing them publicly on my website!
4. Cases vary. Successful application of many B2B products depends on the skill of the user and the actual usage.
5. Customized products. The reviewer may have a unit with a modification that they may praise in a review, but others may not know is extra.
6. Loss of control. Related to fear–how do we control who posts reviews? What do you do when a salesperson calls saying he lost a sale due to what a review said?

Well, I could go on, but those are enough to stop any B2B marketer from allowing reviews on their website. What do you think? Are these just excuses, or reasonable reasons? Are there other issues at hand? Is it worth allowing reviews anyway?

And if you can help Julie (and me out) if you know of anyone in B2B-land allowing user reviews, let us know.

I’ve been a Google Analytics (GA) user for a while. And I always was disappointed that it only showed paid traffic results for AdWords. Hey, what about my paid Yahoo and Microsoft ppc programs?

Well, the Google Analytics blog posted the answer today. Essentially, you the linking URLs need to be tagged with certain information. And the article links to a URL Builder Tool that creates the proper URL for you.

Actually, you can use this tracking URL tool to monitor any specialized campaign that would otherwise get lost in GA data charts and tables.

Very nice to have this fixed. Now I can look at the rest of my paid traffic more critically.

When launching my new company website, I added a new feature—a PDF employment application. I stumbled my way thru making it a automated form back in December. But it worked.

It’s been up a while and I’ve started hearing about some people having problems with it. And I shouldn’t expect someone applying for a factory job to be capable of handling Acrobat forms beyond following instructions.

So I started over. What a chore.

First, please know that there are two ways of making a form in Acrobat 8–There is a form menu and subsequent toolbar, and a separate program called ‘Live Cycle’.

One problem was two ‘operation not permitted’ error boxes when opening the form. This is because EVERY font has to be embedded in the PDF when using the ‘Live Cycle’ form-creator. (It sees the attempt to use the user’s fonts as a possible security risk.) And once you edit the PDF using Live Cycle, you can’t go back to modifying the underlying document. Which is why I was stuck rebuilding the form. Hell 1.

Part of the steps you need to do when making a form editable is going to the ‘advanced’ menu to change permissions so the user can save the PDF with their entries. This would also fix the ‘operation not permitted’ problem, I believe. Its an obscure step, IMHO. Hell 2.

The other problem was that some users needed to submit from a webmail client like Yahoo, Hotmail, or (if they are hip) Gmail. The Live Cycle program automatically created two buttons, one to email the document, the other to print it out. Webmail clients need to save the PDF and manually attach it. Hell 3.

I can fix that—I’ll just add another button that uses a script to open ‘save as’ so the user knows to save the file before sending. And I could do that. Cool.

Except Acrobat wouldn’t show the button’s label text. Dunno why. So I tried editing the form using Live Cycle…now the label shows up, but the script is gone because Live Cycle can’t do that function. Damn. Hell 4.

I could go on, but I’ve probably already bored you. And I won’t even mention the problems with getting different Acrobat Readers to open and use the final result. Hell 5.

The point is that if you want to have a PDF form that website visitors need to fill out, it ain’t easy to make—it’s pure hell!

Our clients are primarily engineers. I think one of the benefits in starting in sales is that I learned that engineers want—need—the facts. Actually, with a degree in mechanical engineering, I was already ‘speaking their language’.

I enjoyed this article in the latest BtoB Magazine: Sparking Interest; Electronics engineers demand facts, not fluff. Enjoyed? Yes, is was nice to hear other marketers thinking sensibly about how they approach engineers. A number of marketers are quoted in the article, all reinforcing the title. Here’s a good sample:

1. “They’re introverted, they’re very technical, they love the Internet and they don’t like salespeople,” said Jeff Curie, VP-marketing at SupplyFrame, a vertical search engine for electronics components. “They really don’t want you calling them and e-mailing them. They want to pull what they want, when they want it.”
2. “We find that they are really, really savvy and capable of cutting through marketing mumbo jumbo and getting right back to the key message that we’re trying to communicate.” -John Mannion, exec VP-director of client relations for ad agency Doremus
3. Yet communicating brand to an audience of engineers can be somewhat tricky because they want information with substance, Jan Spence, director of brand for TI, said. “We feel like first and foremost we have to get out there with that technical data,” she said.
4. One challenge with reaching engineers online is that many marketers are still spending too heavily on banner advertising, Curie said. “You go to a site and there are pop-ups, and towers, and pop-unders and all kinds of things that engineers tend to be somewhat annoyed by,” he said. “But that’s still how a lot of marketing people think.”

Okay, that last one is a reminder of the struggle we face…we need to approach engineers with low-key, fact-driven marketing. But how do we get them to notice what we have to offer in the first place?

Last week I gave a little report on the success of my new company website. I’ve been asked more than once…why. Good question.

First, let me point out that my AdWords and other promotions were untouched except for the landing page. The only thing that changed was the website.

Also, since I wrote that post, I looked at the ‘impressions’ of my AdWords campaign to confirm that search traffic was down for January, just like traffic on my site was. So the decrease in traffic is not caused by the website.

A bit of pruning:
The new website did not replicate every page from the old site, and ‘302 redirects’ did not save every attempted visit from getting a 404 error. In essence, I think I cut off a bit of ‘dead wood’ from the site. That dropped traffic a little bit, and may partly account for the lowered single-page views (or “bounces”).

Strengthen the branches:
Mike Boyink’s & my updated navigation scheme works better. The number of visitors to my main product page was way up, and then they filtered down to the product pages. Whamo–more conversions.

Enjoy the blooms:
I don’t really have an answer for why my paid search advertising had conversions jump up. I’ll continue to observe for answers, but for now, I’ll just enjoy the sweet smell of success!

It’s been a little over a month since I launched my company’s new website. I was able to get a full month of traffic data via Google Analytics to review for January. I decided to compare it to the average of the preceding three months. Here are the major observations:

1. Lowered bounce rate
This was surprising me because my bounce rate (number of visitors viewing only one page) has been pretty much the same since inception. It dropped by more than 8%. That also meant that visitors stayed an average of one minute longer and viewed one more page. Traffic to the main product page improved the most, as well.

2. More leads
Despite a drop in number of visitors for January, the number of leads was up. (Ain’t tellin’ how much.) I made some calculations based on our close ratio and average sale to impress the boss with ROI. It also made me feel better about all the work I did.

3. Steady in the Google
I was most nervous about how Google would rank my new web pages. The new website maintained its ranking in Google, almost exactly. Two less-important keyword phrases dropped, but I’m not worried about them.

So, updating a website and doing it right is worth all the effort. (Still ain’t tellin’ how much it was worth!)

I debated even posting a link to this Marketing Profs article: In Search, Bigger is not Better.

I didn’t know vertical search people were still trying to justify their existence.

The author is an owner of several wholesale-related vertical sites. For what he is doing, vertical search/directories make sense.

One of his major points is that Google et. al. fails the business searcher X percent of the time. Hmm. So do the verticals.

I made this point very specifically at Infocommerce when I spoke there a couple years ago. Usability problems and dumping people onto their advertisers home pages are huge, huge problems for verticals.

I went to the authors website and tried looking at ‘electronics’ wholesalers. The top listing clicked thru to a home page. Their ‘merchandise’ page had a list of about 20 different types of products they sell. Thats it. Not hotlinked to more info, no list of name brands. Nada zip. That sucked.

I call this ‘dumpage’, as in you get dumped onto a website. Its not a kind word, sorry.

While it is easy to blame the advertiser for a sucky website, the directory has to do a better job of clarifying what products their advertisers sell and providing more data. According to the article’s author, that is part of the added value of vertical sites: “customized algorithms and search strings put relevant results directly in front of targeted B2B buyers.”

Much of the logic in this article is typical of the usual vertical directory play, without specifics about successes. This guy’s just lucky he picked a good market in wholesaling where the demand is large and the bar is low.

Take a look at Globalspec or Zillow who integrate additional detail about the listings they provide. That’s added value that can overcome much of the usability problems users might encounter. There must be a wholesaling site that is trying to integrate actual inventory of advertisers–that would be what I would expect.

Vertical search sites, you can’t keep partying like its 2005. (And it was already old in 2005!)

Hey, are we marketers or what? I haven’t seen any blog posts about last nights Super Bowl commercials. Sure they are nearly irrelevant to us B2B types, but they are fun. Or are you all out there too busy working on your Web2.0 campaigns for 2008?

Me, I lost my notes and shouldn’t really pig-out on time and bandwidth at work to review all the ads and give you my opinions. So here’s some quick thoughts and links.

Winners:

• Loved the two Coca-cola ads. Charlie Brown wins! Peace exists in Washington DC. A great theme for a product that should be loved.
• FedEx giant pigeon ad was great (and B2B). It pokes at the issue of fear, but really the fun makes it a brand to love.
• The Wall-e ad was terrific. When every other movie runs a trailer, Pixar goes the extra mile here. Wall-e gets love just from being associated with Buzz and Woody.

Losers:

• Dannica Patrick stripping at GoDaddy.com? Girl next door goes bad? GoDaddy has a weird problem with portraying women (wholesome on their website, slutty on their ads). I don’t even have the dignity to go to their website to see what it was all about. And I’m a customer.
• UnderArmour you are not Apple.
• Sunsilk if you get permission to use Madonna’s image and music in a commercial, why waste the rest of the ad with anyone else? Ray of Light even, it ties in with your brand name. (See SoBee rockin’ with Thriller…that’s what I’m talkin about.)
• SalesGenie, a lot of folks will say you are out of place, as cute as your ads were. And if you are so good at sales leads, wouldn’t you be spending the money on direct mail?

Love wins! Hat tip to Seth for bringing up the subject.

Anybody else got thoughts on these or other ads?

Wow, I just found this. I just Googled my main competitor to see who was running AdWords against their brand name. I scrolled down to the bottom of the page and voila, there it was:

Google obviously knows that BrandX and my company are the top players in the same business. (Brand-Y is in a different market and is just one letter off from my competitor’s brand.)

Wow, free advertising on searches for their brand without pissing them off. Thanks Google!