Author: Dave J.

I remember struggling to find rules on Overture, and later Google, about using other companies’ names as part of keyword advertising. I’ve probably blogged about it, too. Well, now it looks like we now have a legal case that has defined the rules clearly. As posted by MarketingVox:

“In her written opinion, issued last week, U.S. District Court Judge Leonie Brinkema sided with Geico, ruling that the use of trademarked terms in the text of Google ads was ‘likely to cause confusion’; but she also ruled that Google can use trademarks as keywords to trigger the appearance of ads.”

The article also quotes someone at Google saying that their ad technology is already set up to block use of trademarks in AdWords ads.

Read more: Google Chews on Choices after Geico Rulings

How many home-made calendars have you seen people make in Word or Excel? Aren’t they horrible? Microsoft has a number of templates that come with Office, but a bunch of others that you can download from their website including calendars.

I needed to make a agenda for our annual sales meeting yesterday. Rather than use the same Excel one we’ve used for years, I downloaded a very professional one from Microsoft Office Templates: Word.

Last year we needed to create a business plan for a new product. After cobbling a format together, I found that PowerPoint has a template for that exact purpose, with descriptions of the content that is required. I ended up exporting it to a Word Outline format.

But let’s not get caught using the standard Office templates for faxes and memos–then everyone knows how lazy you really are!

With my new duties, I’m finding business processes that need to work better. Recent experience with a couple of our salespeople has shown me a “I’ve followed the process, what more do you want” attitude, partly as a result of the futility of the broken process they are supposed to follow (the other part is laziness).

So I want to change the process, only find the issues Creating Passionate Users Blog wrote about recently:

The systems, policies, procedures aren’t set up to incorporate your proposed change, and nobody’s willing to think about changing things. It would just be too disruptive. It would make too many people uncomfortable.

Kathy Sierra points to one possible response you may get from your organization, that you don’t “have all the facts and don’t see things from the ‘higher’ perspective of management.” Or, in my experience, the answer is that the process does handle the issue, its just that the employee or customer doesn’t understand how to follow the process. When the answer is RTFM, I’d call that a signal that there is a broken process, not in-attentive staff or clients.

But, like Kathy acknowledges, sometimes you may find the mountain too steep. I’ve got enough mole-hills to stomp on right now, anyway. Choose your fights wisely.

Read More: When process goes bad

It’s been about a year since ThomasNet.com was debuted. (Read my comments-and some by my readers-about the site here.) Part of the debut was an appropriate contest to give away an OC Chopper.

Well, now that the motorcycle is given away, MarketingSherpa has blogged how ThomasNet promoted the contest and managed the launch of the new site.

“The idea was less-far-fetched than you might think. ‘All the parts on the Chopper can be sourced on ThomasNet,’ explains Higgins. ‘And small machine fabrication shops, like OCC, are part of our target audience.'”

The article is probably of most interest to Thomas watchers and those considering contests as part of a promotion of a site relaunch.

Read more (full article now $3): MarketingSherpa.com:

In my previous post, I pointed out how vertical B2B media companies need to focus on their strength, which is knowing their audience, as blogger Prescott Shibles posted. And now I just realized I had a good example on my desk…

We talked to a sales rep for WWJ radio in Detroit, which is weird for a small, B2B company like ours. Turns out that what he was selling wasn’t air time, but sponsorships in a newsletter they send out. Seems they have been able to parlay their close ties with the automotive industry into a publication called “Autobeat Daily“, which is a daily digest of auto industry news. They also have a sister publication called “Autotech Daily” which focuses on automotive technology.

They have 80,000 subscribers to Autobeat, which is a $125 annual subscription. But here is what they deliver that makes them a good example of what Prescott Shibles was saying: They have a demographics on their readers that makes every ad and click all the more valuable to those who are marketing to those types. For example, 43% of readers work for tier-one suppliers. Even more compelling is the fact that 76% of readers read it daily, and before noon.

Technically, the publication is in a PDF file that is easy to get passed around, too. The layout of the newsletter is made to be easy to scan-and-scroll, which I think is a great simplification that makes having to open an attachment acceptable. And they have a pro editor who has been in the auto industry for years. All that being said on the positive, their ad rate is $1,100 per issue for a banner ad, which is apparently still a hard sell based on the filler ads they’ve been running.

Shibles.com is a new blog by a B2B media player, pointed at by B or not 2B Blog. And here’s a post worth noting:

“While vertical search is going to be a means of competing, don’t try to do exactly what Google does but in your industry. Trust me, they’ve got legions of PhD’s thinking about how Einstein’s theory of relativity can be applied to make search more relevant. You’re not going to beat them at their game, Web search.“

Tip 2: “Play to your strengths… your deep, data-rich understanding of your highly qualified readers.”
Tip 3: “Understand that Google IS (I repeat IS) an ally as well as a competitor.” “At the end of the day, our goal isn’t to keep Google out of our markets, it’s to grow and expand ours.”

B2Blog’s take? Tip 2 is the biggie, and often the one that I, as the client of B2B media, don’t see enough follow-through on. Most vertical websites just offer ‘exposure’ and ‘clicks’ without giving any additional value over what Google is already doing. Prescott Shible is right, but execution is not easy.

Read more: Three Tips on Competing with Google

So, you are reading this right? Why? Is your mind picturing wooden buckets with rope handles, overflowing with green bills? You may not believe that you will really get these buckets of money, but the over-the-top imagery appealed to you, and you are reading this. I did this as an example (or test of my persuasive skills) of what the newsletter from the Wizard of Ads said, posted by Sam Decker. Check out the Wizard’s example:

“If you really want ‘lots of lemon,’ you must raise the impact quotient of your message; paint a bigger picture in the mind. Smile and say, ‘I’d like iced tea with so many lemons that they slide off the table onto the floor. I’m talking about this restaurant being knee-deep in lemons when I leave, so many lemons that it takes two men and a little boy to carry them all. Will you do that for me?’

Do I get lots of lemon when I say this? Yes. Do I enjoy doing it? No. Do I think it’s witty, cute, clever, funny? No.

I do it because I want the lemons.”

As a B2B marketers, we tend toward the boring. We understate what’s at stake and just assume that the facts are enough for the prospect to make his own decision. But we need to do what the Wizard says. (Think Geico ad.)

In fact, this image here comes from the winning ad in Test & Measurement World’s annual contest, surveying their readers. “How prepared are you for nanometer design?” the headline reads, a message that would normally get lost in a B2B ad like this. Now its compelling and memorable to the readers.

Read more: Persuasiveness by Saying it “Visually”:

I’ve been invited to speak at InfoCommerce 2005, billed as “The Working Conference for the Thinking Publisher”. Anne Holland (of MarketingSherpa) and I will be giving short ‘sanity check’ presentations to the attendees, who are marketers of databases and tools that provide sales leads. They want to hear from me, as a representative of ‘the customer’ of their products, like ThomasNet, InfoUSA, etc.

Its my opportunity to tell them about the pathetic web directories, pushy salespeople, and poor results I encounter. Or is there something more substantial you think I should talk about? Yes, there probably should be, but I haven’t thought of it yet.

BTW: They have great copy about their conference and why one should attend. This is compelling writing, not the usual banter in conference brochures:

“What matters most now is quality, and that means…producing the authoritative source, providing sales leads that actually pay off, getting our advertisers’? phones to ring. And as those of you who have attended past InfoCommerce conferences know, our industry is delivering. We’re now equipping our customers with ever deeper, fresher, and smarter data. But while we’ve cleared the bar on quality, how can we really prove it? That’?s the conumdrum.

Put your head together with those of the most ambitious and talented data publishers at infocommerce 2005 and let’?s tackle quality head on -? how to deliver it, how to prove it and how to price it.”

Why struggle with copying down someone’s address or spelling their company name when you’ve got them on the phone? I don’t even ask people for their address any more, just phone and email. Let Google do the rest…I sent out the following tip to our salespeople:

Watch your caller ID on new prospect calls and write it down. I always ‘Google’ the number to verify the company, and quickly get their address, while they are still on the phone. Just type the phone number like this: 202-456-1111. Yahoo and MSN don’t do this.

I know I’m repeating myself, but I know I’ve told my sales guys this before, too. Okay, it doesn’t always work because of the way corporate phone systems dial out, but its worth trying. If not, just enter the phone number they give, if its not a direct-dial. See all the functionality as described by Google here.

Still one of the most useful tools for knowing more about a new prospect while they are still on the phone.

Why-oh-why do companies send out ‘vendor application’ forms in such pathetic formats? Today we’ve had one in PDF that must be printed out, hand filled (or ick, typed) and another one in Word. The Word form was laid out poorly so whenever you typed something in a blank, the rest of the form scrolled as the blank line ‘_____’ pushed into a second line.

Do the people sending out these forms realize how unusable they are? And how much they waste our time just figuring out how to fill them out. Of course, what they are getting back isn’t any more usable for them. Why can’t this be an online form? Or a PDF form? Or a Word file configured to by filled out? I don’t even mind having to fax it, if its easy to fill out.

Unfortunately, no one seems to care about forms. They have no one who cares about them or their use (except an ISO auditor). But they have to be a significant cost of doing business. They are just something to be printed and filed. I hope you care about the forms your company sends, or at least your department. Gosh, should a marketing or sales department send any forms to be filled out to anyone, anyway?