Exploring Marketing Technology

Opinions are all my own

  • 5 blogging tips for small business

    Many moons ago the authors of the book Citizen Marketers posted a list of reasons why small businesses of all stripes — either b-to-c or b-to-b — should consider blogging.


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    Equally valuable in their post were these tips for the business blogger once the thing is up and running. Here they are:

    1. Do not have someone else write your blog. Write it yourself.
    2. Blogs should not be managed by the PR department or ad agency. Blogs are best when they’re authentic, which may include run-on sentences, detailed analysis or critical opinions. Typically, those qualities run counter to the sensibilities of traditional public relations.
    3. Do not have a thin skin. Comments to your posts may bite or sting, especially while other people watch. But a strong benefit of blogs: unwarranted criticism often causes other customers often to spring to your defense. Trust-based relationships emanate from taking the bad with the good.
    4. Do not let your blog go unattended for weeks at a time. Focus on several posts per week, even if they’re just a few paragraphs.
    5. Do not make your blog a branding exercise of self-centeredness. If you endlessly promote yourself and your services, no one will care.

    Much of what followed in their post is dated. But re-reading it just now, I see these five tips as withstanding the test of time. Violate them at your own risk.

  • Google Latitude brings web closer to place-based networking

    Today Google has proved correct the predictions of many, including anthropologist and technology expert danah boyd. For years she has been fond of saying that the next iteration of the web — the much ballyhooed Web 3.0 — will be place-based. In a post of hers from two years ago, she writes the following:

    I believe that geographic-dependent context will be the next key shift. GPS, mesh networks, articulated presence, etc.

    People want to go mobile and they want to use technology to help them engage in the mobile world.

    Leaping across the chasm to a robust mobile web experience won’t be easy. Especially in this country. Like the ancient city of Bable, the current state of U.S. carriers is one of everyone speaking a different language.

    This suits the carriers just fine.

    As long as you cannot easily share rich functionality with someone who has a different cell plan, the temptation to switch is less. In other words, as long as each carrier is as dumb as the next, we all remain tied to our current one. In a confederacy of dunces, you might as well stick with the dunce you know.

    Enter Google, Stage Left

    Even before 2005, when Google purchased Dodgeball, there have been indications that they see the future in place-based networking. Everyone has been watching for the big play; the one that will accelerate the steady march to this new networked experience.

    In the meantime, many of us have done our own experimenting with what has been available. I, for one, have toyed with Brightkite.com — especially its “I am here” interface with Twitter (my handle in both: TheLarch).

    The experience has been kludgy.

    This is rarely a word used for Google applications, though. And today they officially announced Google Latitude.

    Here’s a video to explain how it works. It’s about (surprise, surprise) privacy:



    What Latitude will do for our progress toward rich mobile networking is not necessarily revolutionary, but it is evolution on steroids.

    I am certainly not the only person predicting that the news today is big.

    I am, however, the only one in this particular location. Perhaps by later this year, if you’re a close friend, and I choose to let you know, you’ll be able to know through Latitude exactly where my current “here” happens to be.

  • Putting emotions to work in b-to-b content

    Many talented copy writers hate business-to-business (b-to-b) projects. They give a variety of reasons, but most boil down to a lack of deep emotional connection that they can feel in the writing process. Emotions are the fuel that drives writers. And when selling to businesses instead of consumers, they feel stifled. The emotional air is too thin.

    There are just two emotions that truly persuade a b-to-b audience. They are the desire to earn more money, and the fear of a responsibility going awry, and its consequences.

    That’s it.

    Greed and Fear

    Together, fear and greed don’t seem like much. But just as some of the greatest photographs are made up of shades of black and white, some truly supercharged copy can come from this limited palette.

    Here’s an exercise to show how you can put these emotions to work. Imagine you are writing — or overseeing the writing of — copy for a rooftop heating and cooling system. This system handles entire business campuses, and has a central control called the Ultra Site Minder (this and all names are made up). It also has an improved motion control system for extinguishing lights or lowering thermostats, called the Ultra Sensor, and an Ultra Payback Guarantee.

    The superior features of these products are things like this:

    • An ability to monitor and control from afar
    • Sensors that are guaranteed to gently lower temperatures in the winter, when rooms have been vacated for four hours — and do the same for air conditioning during warmer months
    • These same sensors control lighting, and are less prone to leave customers — or other building occupants — in the dark when they are not moving vigorously
    • An improved way to identify inefficient heating and cooling
    • A guarantee that the system will reduce fuel bills at least to the point of pay for itself within 24 months (at the going rate for fuel)

    Now try writing headlines that turn these features into benefits. The difference between a feature and a benefit is the emotions that the latter carries with it. Here are three headlines for each of the two emotions:

    You’re in control as never before with the Ultra Site Minder

    Placing valued customers in cold, dark rooms is no way to deliver savings. Warm to the Ultra Sensor difference!

    Sleep better at night knowing the Ultra Sensor is working twice as hard

    That was obviously the fear emotion at play — the fear of loss of control, of being cut for not saving enough money, and of missed opportunities. What about greed? That’s a little easier. We all want a raise. And especially in this tight economic climate, it is cutting costs that will demonstrate your value to an employer. At least, that is the case for the person responsible for building operations!

    Ultra Sensor upstream reporting makes you the star with the people who count

    “I’m reducing costs this weekend using Ultra Site Minder in my cell phone”

    “The Ultra Payback Guarantee will pay my salary in Year Three”

    Obviously, headlines can only deliver the hint of a benefit. Subsequent copy would expand upon these kernels of thought.

    Show, Don’t Tell

    One final thought: Writing copy for the web is far more challenging than for print. As recent studies have shown, visitors to sites do more skimming than actual reading. Be succinct, and use the technology to show — instead of tell — wherever possible!

    See the accompanying post, and other thought-provoking posts about business-to-business marketing and branding, at The B2B Debate.

  • Danger: Under Construction placeholders are worse than irrelevant

    Any “Watch This Space” or “Under Construction” placeholders you see on sites mean little to the typical visitor. Their interests coincide less with your corporate interests than you could ever imagine.

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    Evidence: Bounce rates on sites of 50% or higher are the norm. A typical adult web visitor has little patience for the sort of peekaboo he or she enjoyed as an infant.

    Worse than irrelevant, posting these types of notices for long periods of time place you at risk of being demoted by search engines and disregarded forever by the users would were turned away.

    Take aways: Post these types of notices only as necessary. Should you need to, post them only very briefly. Consider following these “reconstructions” with a strong promotional push, to help woo visitors back to your site and your brand.

  • Using fMRI “heatmaps” to understand online shopping behavior

    Heatmaps to observe eye movements of online shoppers have been around for a while. They’re quite helpful. But in a perfect world marketers would get direct consumer intelligence. They’d see maps of consumers’ “emotional flow,” displayed dynamically as shopping decisions are taking place.

    Brace yourself. We’re getting our wish.

    Armed with fMRI imagery, emotional heatmaps (my term) are being charted and analyzed. They’re yielding fascinating insights into why we choose the purchases we do.

    Take the recent work of William Hedgcock and Akshay R. Rao (in this PDF report). Hedgecock is assistant professor of marketing at the University of Iowa’s College of Business. Rao is director of the Institute for Research in Marketing at the Department of Marketing & Logistics Management at the University of Minnesota. This duo has recently published findings on why some shopping decisions are so difficult to make — and how adding a “decoy” option can get consumers “unstuck” and back in the buying mood.

    Overall, they are using functional magnetic resonance imaging — or fMRI — to “offer an assessment of whether and how neuroscientific techniques might be employed in the study of consumer choice in particular and consumer behavior in general.” Yeah, right. Here’s the English translation …

    Relieving Aristotle’s Anxiety

    This is what they did:

    1. Subjects were hooked up to fMRI machines and presented a choice between two purchases. The choice was so close in desirability a mental stalemate occurred. The consumer chose neither. (As the researchers noted, Aristotle first discussed this tendency toward stalemate by describing a person who was equally thirsty and hungry, and equidistant from food and drink. In this famous thought experiment, Aristotle’s subject remained in place until he dies.)
    2. A third choice — one less desirable than the first two — was presented in the mix. This was their decoy choice.
    3. fMRI readings showed that the mental discomfort generated by the stalemate went away. Once this anxiety level was lowered, a selection between the two “dominant” options usually followed.

    Their conclusion suggested that the addition of an item, simply to hasten a decision, not only makes sense when you tally purchases, but is also validated by watching real-time fMRI heatmaps.

    For e-marketers, a greater takeaway is this: The day is on its way when we can validate our assumptions about major types of “shopping cart conflicts,” and find automated ways to aviod or resolve them.