Ernie the Attorney: The three stages of blog-awareness. [Scripting News]

Email Marketing Drives Billions in Sales.

WSJ (subscription required): Study Shows E-Mail Ads Are Prompting More Sales

I tried to find this study on the DMA's site but couldn't. The write-up in the WSJ is not much longer than this excerpt:

Commercial e-mail advertisements generate more than $7.1 billion in sales each year in the U.S., and now play an important part of the U.S. economy, according to a new study that will be released this week by the Direct Marketing Association.

. . .

About 36% of e-mail users, or 21% of all adult Americans, have bought a product or service as a result of some form of commercial e-mail over the last year, the study says. This group of users made an average purchase of $168.

[MarketingFix]

Adapt Your Site to Your Visitors Needs, Whether They Know What They Want or Not.

ClickZ: Two Steps to Spike Acquisition, Conversion, and Retention

A look at how to serve "Visitors Who Know Exactly What They Want; Visitors Who Know Approximately What They Want; Visitors Who Aren't Sure What They Want/Are Just Browsing." You definitely need different content and copy to cater to these different prospects. This basically amounts to translating your sales cycle management through your online presence.

[MarketingFix]

Brand As Navigator - Paid Search Hi-jinks.

Here is a NY Times article on paid search.  From the lead paragraph:

" . . . reputable advertisers increasingly find themselves outbid for top search listings by unscrupulous and perhaps fraudulent e-tailers."

Example.  If you Google "Sony Handycam DCR-TRV27" today then you will get Broadway Photo as the top paid hit.  The article lists various allegations against this site (bait and switch, etc.).

I'm not sure whether the fact that this is occuring on paid search is all that relevant.  Something equivalent occurs if the "bad" retailer catches your eye with a huge Sony Handycam ad in a newspaper.

Of interest is the debate as to whether the search engines such as Google or Overture should do anything about this.

[The Trademark Blog]

Blogs are conversations.

Joi: A Cluetrain Moment. This combination of Google and blogs may create an opinion management and cluetrain manifesto sort of human conversation about products in a much less centralized method than some of the earlier models like epinions.

Dig Marc's comments on Joi's blog (scroll down).

[The Doc Searls Weblog]

Google PageRank Explained.

Searchengine Blog: Interview with Chris Ridings

One of the reasons that PageRank is so hard to explain and understand is because it is analogous to something we all do all the time without thinking about it. Consider I want to buy a new DVD player, I might ask a group of friends what the best DVD player to buy is. Now some of them are going to give me names of DVD players, but some of them are going to say "I don't know, Tim knows a lot about DVD players". When I talk to Tim, I have a greater respect for his advice because everybody said he knows this stuff. Now if Tim says "Ask Harry too, he knows a lot about DVD players", then despite the fact that nobody else has told me to ask Harry I can assume that Harry probably does know more than the rest (although probably not more than Tim).

PageRank is the same mechanism. Instead of trying to find out who knows most about DVDs, it tries to find out what pages are the most "important". It's hard to actually "ask" a page something, and talking to a computer monitor is not the best way to impress your colleagues, so they make a general assumption. That assumption is "If a page links to another page then it thinks that page is important". There are lots of things wrong with this assumption, but you said "briefly" so I'll leave people to research more if they want to. Just like Tim's advice to "ask Harry also" is given greater weighting because most people told me to ask Tim, if a page has lots of "important" links, when it says another page is important then PageRank gives that more merit.

[MarketingFix]

Internet Now the Most Important Information Medium.

CNN: Study: Net now more important than TV
Mercury News: The Net is cutting into TV time, study finds

About 61 percent find the Net "very" or "extremely" important as an information source, concludes the third annual nationwide survey on the Internet from the University of California at Los Angeles.

That's roughly the same as the importance Net users place in books and newspapers. By comparison, just half of them find television important, 40 percent think that of radio and 29 percent of magazines.

Yet less than 2% of ad spend is directed at the internet.

[MarketingFix]

Online Educational Material Can Help Grow Business.

Law.com: Web Sites Can Net Attorneys More Clients

Communications and client services director Michael Sacks [at "lemon law" firm Kimmel & Silverman] said that since its launch in 2000, the firm's Web site has helped grow the business 25 percent. In fact, Sacks said that according to Web site data, more than 2,000 new clients each year find the firm on the Internet. And since Kimmel & Silverman handles 5,000 to 6,000 cases a year, that's about 40 percent specifically mentioning the Web site when they e-mail or call.

Interestingly, Sacks said the goal of the site was to educate visitors, since the main obstacle the firm faced was consumers unaware of their rights. Accordingly, the site includes lemon law rights; answers to frequently asked questions; a newsroom providing up-to-the-minute information; and links sections, among others. Visitors can also take interactive worksheets with them on car-buying expeditions. And the site permits consumers to contact the firm via e-mail or an electronic form.

[MarketingFix]

Say where?.

Judith: The Power of the Blog —

The nature of blogging allows us to point to what another individual said, adding our opinion without mutilating theirs¹ in the translation.

Each opinion in the string remains intact while the message goes ¹round.

This is very different from the Telephone game where the message is always translated by the forwarder. (The news media is more like the telephone game.)

The ideal scene of blogging being "the voice of the people" is that the precise blogging voice echoes repeatedly, thereby gaining velocity and power.

Interesting. I never though about blogging as insurance against the distorting effects of the telephone game. Now I do.

[The Doc Searls Weblog]

Measure What Matters.

ClickZ: Beyond the Log Files

Don't make the mistake of asking what information is available, then building from there. Start with your objective. Determine what metrics are critical to monitor progress. Then, figure out what data you need and what tools you'll use. If you didn't identify objectives before you designed your site, you have bigger problems that I can't help you with.

For the record, you're hearing this from someone who learned the hard way. Analysts love data. It's easy to get overexcited about an abundance of data and all those reports you can create. Get back to objectives. Make sure everyone knows what they are, that individual department objectives support the overall objective, and then look for data.

Hint: You may have to look outside your log files.

[MarketingFix]

Weblog designed to foster internal communication {Infoworld]

Two months after Google acquired blog technology developer Pyra Labs the company is already eating its own dog food. Craig Silverstein, Google's director of technology, told an audience here at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference...

Thanks for the (Corporate) Memories. When employees leave, vital institutional knowledge may be lost forever. [Into the MyST]

Interview: The Email Marketing Scene.

eMarketer: E-Mail Marketing's Mayor, Mike

Good interview with NetCreations President Michael Mayor covering best practices, legislation, B2B marketing and his involvement with the IAB.

MM: There's a lot of theories on how to fight it. My frustration is that they are often borne out of self interest. All the technology players are saying that they have a solution, and so on and so on. We've clearly illustrated that we cannot regulate ourselves. That ship has sailed. We had an opportunity to do that -- mind you, if everybody was double opt-in, this wouldn't be a problem. I think we have to look to other alternatives. I'm not a big fan of technology being the solution. After they invent it, three months later it's obsolete. I do think it's going to be a combination of federal regulation and education.

There are people out there who really don't understand how turning a blind eye to their reseller network can affect their brand and affect the spam problem.

[MarketingFix]

News.Com: "The market for XML-based content-lifecycle products -- software and services that allow content to be easily reused in a number of formats -- will grow tenfold to $11.6 billion in annual revenue by 2008, according to a report released Thursday." [Scripting News]

RSS Moves Even More Mainstream. Rusty Coats (American Press Institute): The next front[ier] in the disruption of traditional media. Most importantly, the cost of not... [Dan Gillmor's eJournal]

Interview With Search Engine Guru Danny Sullivan.

searchengineblog: Interview with Danny Sullivan :: Search engine blog:

Here's a good interview with the man who makes it his business to know everything there is to know about search engines. Here's a tidbit on how he sees search engine marketing:

Question: While online marketing trends come and go, search engine marketing appears to have been a constant. Where do you see SEO heading in the future? Does it have a future?

Answer: Absolutely, search engine marketing has a future. At a conference earlier this year, I likened search engines to being a "reverse broadcast network." People pay tons to be on television because you can get your message out in front of millions of people: broadcasting. With search engines, millions of people are telling you *their* messages: what they want to buy, purchase or get information about. You don't broadcast to them; instead, it's the reverse, they broadcast to you.

[MarketingFix]

Into Blogging? -- Your Blog Neighborhood.

Heck ... Its wicked cool even if you aren't.  Recommended.  [_Go_]

View My Blog Neighborhood

Note: What this is showing you are blogs that you'd probably enjoy reading if you aren't i.e. they are "neighbors" of yours that you might not have been introduced to yet.

Congrats to Veer and the rest of the team on this one.  Good job guys. 

[The FuzzyBlog!]

7 Tips to Increase Your Site's Ability to Get Leads.

ClickZ: Challenge: Get More Leads by Next Friday

Here's what this article suggests you do to improve your site's ability to collect leads from its visitors:

Message Must be Relevant (Identify the benefits and value your products or services confer)

No Jargon

Don't "We" All Over Yourself (The first rule of online success is it's never about you)

Keep It Need-to-Know (Ask for as little information as possible)

Help Them See It (Evaluate text scannability)

Qualify Better (Let visitors know briefly who you are, what you do, and what you offer)

Test, Measure, and Optimize

[MarketingFix]

What Kind of Research Can Marketers Do Online?.

Imedia Connection: The Future of Online Research

"There are certain forms of research, for example concept testing and price testing [that take advantage of the Internet's strengths]," says Anke Audenaert, director of Global Market Research at Yahoo!. "The Web offers unique benefits like [user] interaction via the computer and the ability to show [these] people pictures of product concepts without respondents having to leave their locations."

Adds Flores of CRM Metrix: "We should relate to it beyond the ways we think about doing research now. The process is long, slow, etc. Whereas if you need ideas, feedback, suggestions, just ask simple questions, learn from it and go back to asking questions.

"Today you can do this from your desktop and speak with thousands of customers very much like you speak with friends or colleagues on the phone," continues Flores.

Essentially, when considering research conducted over the Web, the Internet can be looked at really as a technology and not necessarily a medium.

[MarketingFix]

MarketingSherpa: When Traditional Software Marketing Tactics Fail, Try Adding Workshops to Your Web Site

A detailed look at how a software vendor in the commercial mortgage industry uses educational material such as online workshops to detect new business.

[MarketingFix]

ChannelSeven.com: The Elegant Online Event

WebTrends' Director of Marketing Brent Hieggelke has been a driving force at NetIQ for the development of online events. Since his hiring in spring 2000, the product division has launched and steadily grown its investment in Webcasts. This year, it will produce four or five of them -- compared to approximately nine live events per quarter. [...]

Michael Kushner, director of integrated media solutions for Reed Business Communications, has been at the helm of several sponsored events and knows that getting the look and sound right is a prerequisite for spurring attention.

"For our sponsors, it's all about lead generation. I don't want to go to them with egg on my face and say we had five streams," Kushner said. He has found that tending to production values is key to preventing that.

Web conferences and webcasts are a cost-effective way to handle prospects that are quite interested in your offering (and probably quite far in the sales cycle already,) but are not ready to travel. That said, this article reminds us that attention to proper production values and technical details matters a lot.

[MarketingFix]

Marketing Profs: "Blogs offer the human voice, which can be loud, controversial, and even wacky. But the realness of the blog inspires trust and piques people’s curiosity. A blog can create a community and a dynamic discussion." [Scripting News]

Weblogs and Discourse. Oliver Wrede [Scripting News]

Weblogs as a transformational technology for higher education and academic research
Blogtalk Conference Paper, Vienna, May 23rd-24th 2003

Abstract This paper discusses different questions of weblogs in context of higher education. It is focussing on three loosly coupled questions: 1. How can the weblog format improve discourse? 2. How it can weblogs support teaching at universities? 3. What are the insitutional benefits of weblogs in universities?