Friday, January 09, 2004

Marketing strategy. Here is some more information about what is working and what is not. -- BB Survey Puts Search and Email Tops. The MarketingSherpa/AD:TECH survey results failed to shock, with search marketing (price-per-click in particular) and house lists ranking as most effective. Apparently, while increased spam has pushed list rental to the bottom of the heap, mailing house lists produces results. It seems counter-intuitive at first, but list rental costs much more than mailing a house list. Price-per-click search remains hot, with many marketers increasing their budgets. A surprising number of marketers are still somewhat inflexible in changing or re-allocating budgets. It's gonna be a fun year. MarketingSherpa reports. [summary] [MarketingWonk - The single source for no-nonsense Internet marketing news] 9:53:46 AM

Social network software. Social network software has been getting a lot of attention lately. Is it a good thing or not? I think it's always good to add a channel through which people can find you, especially if you are a small business. Some people are suspicious or nervous about sharing their rolodexes. My view is that those who share thrive, those who hoard die. I'm on LinkedIn - search for me as William Brandon, and please add me to your network. -- BB What YASNSes bring. Jeremy Zawodny: "Get yourself out of the mind set of social network software for the sake of social network software and start thinking about how adding a social networking component to existing systems could improve them." Follow the links from JZ's post to find a lot of discussion surrounding this debate. And see the argument that my colleague Stephen offers to the view that there is a disincentive to sharing one's connections: "If the value you create is based on 'knowing', then your livelihood will be undercut by someone who has the same knowledge - in this case, the same (or similar) network of contacts - and who shares it freely." (By the way, my primary point of presence in social networking systems is here, on Ryze. Ryze is one of the oldest systems alive today - it was launched in 2002. Worth a login if you have yet to try one of those systems...) [Seb's Open Research] 9:49:40 AM

Weblog strategy. This could be important if your weblog is an important part of your marketing communication or your personal branding. -- BB Should you split your blog?. Last month Lisa Williams answered no, and proceeded to eloquently articulate a key part of the philosophy that motivated the design of the Internet Topic Exchange (which incidentally turns one year old next week!). Basically, unless there are good reasons to do otherwise, all of an individual's public writing ought to be coherently tied together (that includes comments too, by the way). Some of it could additionally go to other spaces, if the author feels like sharing it with a community. To reuse Don Park's metaphor, bloggers are mountains, topics are lakes, and posts flow like water from one to the other. Topics help generate new connections and they provide good starting points for new bloggers. Here's part of Lisa's post: As syndication becomes more robust, I think we will see more and more site/feeds that contain vast quantities of news and commentary on a specific subject as people map their own categories to a kind of "pidgin taxonomy." The categories in that taxonomy could then be themselves a feed displayed in an aggregator or on a webpage or both. (While I was hanging out on IRC someone -- I wish I remembered so that I could attribute this idea -- made the comment that we could use the categories of the Wikipedia as this kind of lingua-franca. Just think how it would enrich an online reference work to be able to get a definition of a term and then hit a button and see a live, continually changing feed of related news stories and blog posts on that idea!! I need to fan myself...is it warm in here?). It so happens that Michael Fagan took it upon himself to create directories of topics in the Exchange early on. One of them uses the Open Directory's category scheme. (link via Kaye) [Seb's Open Research] 9:43:10 AM

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