On Wednesday, August 7^th 1974, shortly after 7:15 a.m., Philippe Petit, the French high-wire artist, walked, ran, and danced back and forth across a cable he’d rigged between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. After 45 minutes of high-wire antics, Petit was arrested – and instantly became a folk hero. This artist did something outrageous, public, and dangerous.

And lived.

On May 16th I attended a conference in NYC called Pick Yourself (more on that in a future post), conducted by Seth Godin – that smart, bald marketing guy. Three ideas (among 40 or so waiting for me to blog them) have been sticking to me since the conference ended.

Early on in Seth Godin’s presentation to an auditorium of entrepreneurs, corporate leaders, non-profit leaders, technologists, marketers, writers, educators, artists, and other assorted “Linchpins“, he invoked the story about Philippe Petit and then asked us this:

(1) Would you want to do something so much – believe in it so much – that you’d be willing to get arrested for it?

Hmm, good question. Dance on the edge… don’t conform –  take a risk! Of course I should say Hell yeah! But… nobody really wants to get arrested – or die. It’s hard work to stick your neck out to express your passion to do something new, radical, and dangerous – if not downright fatal, like Petit did in 1974. When he was asked why he did the dangerous (and illegal) high-wire stunt, he said, “When I see three oranges, I juggle; when I see two towers, I walk.”

Here’s my takeaway from this story in 2012:  in the face of relentless change and stress, move into the unknown, but keep focused and execute with precision – without taking everything too seriously – even when it is. It will help you stay alive.

At the same time, you have to be willing to take personal responsibility for whatever disruption you cause, because if you’re really taking a risk, it will cause disruption at some point to someone.

Real change can feel dangerous. And,  if you’re a traditional marketer who’s been doing marketing a certain way for the last 20-30 years, digital and social media are forcing you to quickly re-think how you connect with your target audience and build your brand online. It may be daunting, but the best opportunities usually are.

Welcome to the Information Revolution and the Connection Economy!

The key thing about the shift from the Industrial to the Information Age is this: we have to shift our worldview from marketing-to-the-masses to marketing-to-each-other – because thanks to the Internet, everyone who has a receiver now also has a transmitter. And the goal is to get your ideas in front of as many people as possible. Attention is the precious commodity of the future.

(2) Ideas that are shared widely have more value; the enemy of your idea is obscurity, not piracy.

Here’s the business model: give away the product and sell the stuff around it. You’re selling the soft tissue around the center (your product) which is now like the doughnut hole.

For example, Google Analytics is free, because anyone who uses it will eventually want to buy what it measures: web traffic. Google is teaching future customers about their product by measuring the performance of exactly what they’re selling.

Chris (Bryant) and I were talking about our approach to tracking the performance of brands online. Channeling Seth Godin, I asked him, “What if we give away the approach and sell the consulting services that help people apply it most effectively to grow their business?” Chris winced and hesitated, because in addition to the awkwardness of my question, we still share an Industrial Age worldview: intellectual property should not be shared widely without compensation to the author.

However, the Information Age worldview says the more people see and share your ideas, the more valuable they become. A manuscript that ten thousand people have already read will be more valuable to a publisher than one that nobody’s read, because there’s already a market for it.

(3) Hire customers that share your worldview.

It makes the sales and customer retention process infinitely easier. If I’m spending too much time and energy trying to convince you why you need my product or service, then I either change my product, or you’re not my potential customer after all. Instead of finding listeners for your music, find music for your listeners. It’s easier to sell to people who are thirsty than it is to make people thirsty.

At the close of the conference someone asked Seth what he wishes he could have known earlier in his career that he now knows. He paused thoughtfully. “I wish I had known everything will be okay.”

But I’m not here to promote Seth Godin. I’m here to thank him.

Thanks, Seth.

Photo Credits: Seth/Juggler/Petit; Seth and me.

A Content Marketing Story

LiveExercise is an example of a brilliant content marketing strategy that revived Bodylastics, a product suffering from stagnant sales, while simultaneously creating brand equity and is the brainchild of entrepreneur and certified personal trainer Blake Kassel. I reached out to Blake to find out how he made his business so successful.

Bodylastics Resistance Band Exercise Equipment

BigVoice: What was your business strategy?

Blake: We began selling Bodylastics exercise bands systems in 1998, and soon discovered a disconnect once the customer purchased the product.

Even though we supplied an extensive user’s manual, most customers would not be able to use the product to its full potential. They would run out of exercise ideas early on and stop using it. We wanted to close this gap with our customers. Our solution was to offer free workout shows that would encourage our customers to use the product and then create viral marketing through referrals to friends and family. Currently, we generate sales and create an advantage over our competitors by offering top-notch video exercise content for free. We also created an online community; a place where people go through a difficult common experience – the workouts – and then have a place to chat and share their thoughts and feelings.

BigVoice: What has your digital marketing strategy been?

Blake Kassel, Owner and “Chiseled” Instructor leading a workout on LiveExercise.com

Blake: For Bodylastics, the goal is to be the biggest name out there. We’ve achieved a good degree of market saturation with Bodylastics through SEO, PPC and an extensive affiliate program. We back that up with a fantastic product and customer service.

LiveExercise began as a service we wanted to offer as an “extra” for our Bodylastics customer, but our overwhelmingly enthusiastic customer response demanded that we make fantastic exercise content a core offering – not only to  increase the value of Bodylastics and drive sales – but to grow our online viewership. To do that we are generating revenue through targeted advertising within our programming and on our LiveExercisesite. Our fitness-conscious consumers are a sought-after demographic for our advertisers.

BigVoice: What impact did your digital strategy have on your business results?

Blake: We increased overall Bodylastic sales – mainly due to user referrals.  It was an easier Bodylastics sale when the customer knew that the workout programming was available. In fact, 90% of the time our borderline customers pulled the trigger and purchased when they were made aware of our exercise video site.

BigVoice: How do you measure the ROI of your digital marketing spend? 

Blake: Although we enjoy a very good conversion rate between 2 and 4%, many of our orders are tough to track because they end up on Amazon. Today a consumer researches a product on online and then immediately goes to Amazon to see if they sell the item. This may sound like a negative, but our overall sales numbers actually increased when we began to sell through Amazon.com

Core Digital Strength as a Way to Measure Marketing Efficacy

 I decided to run Core Digital Strength, our metric to measure a brand’s digital footprint relative to competitors, for Bodylastics.com. We compared Bodylastics against their biggest competitor, Thera-Band. Here’s what we found.

It’s noteworthy that Thera-Band, a company that’s been around since 1979, almost twenty years before Bodylastics was launched, is not the clear winner here. While the scores are close, Bodylastics is in the lead.

LiveExercise was built, creating a digital flotilla of content, all leading seamlessly back to the product promise: Getting in shape using Bodylastic quality bands. Customers stay involved with product, share content and have constant access to on-demand workouts, all of which links back to Bodylastics main page building a formidable core digital strength as rated by Google and other search engines.

BigVoice: What is the most important thing you learned about building a strong brand online?

Blake: You MUST have a great presence online due to search engine optimization. This needs to be your backbone. If you are driving sales with great SEO, then all of the other channels are incremental revenue. It’s also essential to have award-winning customer service. All of the rules have changed and if you do not treat your customers right your business will fail before it even begins.

Digital Muscle

What started as a digital marketing tactic for Bodylastics became not only a content marketing campaign, but a free-standing digital media company, itself a separate opportunity for revenue with direct access to a loyal following of health-and-body-conscious consumers.

That’s digital muscle.

With baseball’s opening day around the corner, our thoughts at BigVoice turn once again to Billy Beane, who’s been a key inspiration in our development over the past two years.

Digital Marketing is on the cusp of an evolution similar to that which Sabermetrics  brought to baseball.  Almost daily now marketers from P&G, Kimberly Clark and other leading CPG companies are quoted as saying, “there is no digital marketing, now it’s marketing in a digital world.”   Much like baseball, the driving force behind the change in marketing is insightful identification of what’s most valuable to measure.

Marketing metrics are evolving quickly. The business of data collection is finally beginning to yield its promise of actionable information. Old fashioned spreadsheets containing collections of single measurements are being replaced by more sophisticated aggregated indices like our own X-Ray Analytics to offer marketers a clearer picture of everything from campaign efficacy to consumer behavior.  The result is finally living up to the promise of digital analytics – faster, more informed strategic decision-making.

However, much like old-fashioned baseball managers, marketers are missing opportunities to cost effectively grow their digital brand equity by maintaining allegiance to “traditional” programs that have worked successfully in the past.  This situation is perpetuated because most are unsure of exactly what to measure and/or how to measure.  In time, they will follow the insightful few taking advantage of new marketing tools to make a swift transition to cost effective marketing in a digital world.

The Oakland A’s advantage lasted for four years before Sabermetrics began to gain industry-wide acceptance. In marketing it appears the timeframe for adoption will be far shorter.

Smart Metrics for Marketing Managers = Sabermetrics for Baseball Managers

But for anyone placing long-term bets on Facebook, here are two points to consider:

First, 21 years into the internet economy (if you begin with the creation of the Commercial Internet eXchange) our references are still based on 20^th century business history. These analogue references are at odds with internet time, where decades are compressed into months.

Facebook is only 8 years old and valued at almost $100 billion. That’s already a fifth of Apple’s market cap, which took Apple 32 years to create after it went public. With almost 1 billion users, Facebook certainly appears to be eternally dominant. But there was a time when we thought the same thing about AOL. LOL.

Here’s how we see the speed of this change:

Lots of smart financial factoring has gone into Facebook’s IPO valuation, none of which I’m qualified to address. But amidst all the assumptions, there’s one that’s potentially quite risky (my second point): That Facebook will be able to continue to share all that personal information about us that’s the asset behind the billions and billions in projected revenue.

This assumption is already being challenged in a more privacy-sensitive Europe, where the fight is in full swing over whether sellers of data like Facebook and Google will be able to continue to monetize our information and whether the advertisers buying this information be able to use it to track us down and sell to us.

Given the controversy in the U.S. already surrounding issues like consumer targeting, the debate will likely reach a critical mass here as well. The cynic in me believes that if Congress does legislate restrictions, The Information Lobby — the largest, most powerful lobby ever assembled — will ensure that whatever does pass will have as few teeth as possible.   

As in other significant consumer rights battles, it may be the states that lead the way. California, for example, is not counting on Congress or federal regulators. It announced a deal on Wednesday with six major mobile app platforms to bring privacy practices in line with California law regarding the collection of personal information. It’s a small step, but an indicator.

Whatever actions taken at the state or federal level will be driven by what people determine is their tolerance is for the public trading of their personal data. And this is where the interesting power dynamic comes into play. Because the same people who become concerned that their whereabouts and personal conversations are being used to deliver local pizza coupon offers, are the consumers advertisers want to reach.

In other words, in this battle, there won’t be any need to Occupy Wall Street or any other territory. In this fight, the people are the territory.

These companies, who have everything to gain by listening to and respecting their constituents, may very well be forced to develop and support the restrictions themselves. The integrity of their brands may depend on it.

Sound improbable? Remember the revelation back in 2010 that Google Street View cars were ‘inadvertently’ gathering data on people’s web use over unsecured wireless networks? It set off major alarms in Europe, though here, not so much.

All it might take is one very high profile privacy breach to whip up sentiment demanding change.  And if that happens, it’d create the kind of momentum to change a business model built on an assumption that a fair value exchange for the use of a networked service is the use of your personal information.

Agree? Disagree? Tell me what you think.

1. Anchor your brand with a separate domain. A domain is the foundation of digital brand equity. Many CPG companies make the mistake of burying their brand within the corporate site in a sub-directory. This makes it more difficult for consumers to find and misses an opportunity to build separate domain authority for the brand.
2. Avoid vanity domains with no relationship to consumer searches. If the actual name of your brand is not available as a .com domain, make sure the domain you choose either contains the brand name or contains a top search term or phrase consumers use when searching for your brand.
3. Avoid dynamic web pages that use parameters rather than page names for your brand website. Avoid at all costs brand page URLs that look like this: www.mybrand.com/page?id=2112. Many older web technologies (and even some not-so-old content management systems) deploy this paradigm for calling web pages from a database. This format is nearly impossible for search engines to index and assign page authority. Ideally, every page in your brand site would have a descriptive name that contained a related consumer search term. For example: www.mybrand.com/key-ingredients.html.
4. Make every page within your brand website sharable on top consumer social networks. One of the key drivers of digital brand equity is Social Media Impact. This includes the volume of social media mentions and the amount of consumer engagement with your brand and web content. If you make it easy, consumers will engage with and share your content.
5. Know where your digital brand ranks against those of your closest competitors. This is the most important practice of all. There is no better way to understand the impact and effectiveness of digital marketing strategies than to observe your competitors and the impact their specific efforts are having on their brand

One of the things we do for our clients is assess the value of all the digital brands in their category, identify their competitors’ digital strategies and tactics, and show how those tactics impact their digital brand value over time.

With this competitive intelligence, we help our clients develop the most effective digital strategies to reach, attract, and engage more of the customers they want, more efficiently. In other words, we help them build their own Big Voice.

I’m curious to hear other counterproductive digital practices you see being deployed by consumer goods companies. Please share your feedback.

Let us know what you think of Numbers. And if you like her/him/it, please share!

Cheers for a healthy, happy 2012.

Designer Chris Benz

Chris-Benz.com as viewed on a mobile device

In light of the steady increase in the use of smart phones, tablets and other mobile platforms to access digital content, being mobile accessible is no longer optional. According to a Google study conducted earlier this year, 77% of websites visited via smart phone are search engine websites, and 9 out of 10 searchers have taken action as a result of a smart phone search.

We recently did a study on a segment of the fashion industry, and profiled up-and-coming designer Chris Benz because we love his hair — and his collections. His brand is young and smart, and we assumed that a smart fashion brand would be mobile savvy… but we were wrong.

When we looked at Chris-Benz.com on a mobile device, in my case an iPhone,  the website was not accessible at all. That is, if you go to his website, you arrive at a blank white screen – which validates what we found when comparing Chris Benz to selected competitors in the charts below.

Chris Benz is off the charts, but in the wrong direction

• Not accessible to mobile devices (no mobile presence)
• Accessible, but not optimized for mobile devices (weak mobile presence) – this means that the website will show up on the screen of your mobile device, but you might not be able to easily navigate it or read its content.
• Optimized for mobile viewing (strong mobile presence) – this means a user may successfully navigate and interact with the site.

The chart shows that all of Chris Benz’s selected competitors have websites that are accessible by a mobile device, but not optimized. There are several reasons why this might be the case. One reason could be that companies use Flash technology for delivering content or navigation — resulting in partial loss of content and functionality on a mobile device.  In some cases such as Chris-Benz.com, Flash is used for delivering the entire website—which explains the blank screen. Another reason might be that the more complex a website design is, the harder it is generally for a mobile device to successfully translate its appearance and functionality.

Worth noting is that Marc Jacobs has a website built for a desktop web browser that can be viewed on a mobile device, although not as intended by the web designer. You can navigate – sort of – but can barely read and interact with the site.

Marc Jacobs' website shows up on a mobile device in miniature with glitches

Putting this in perspective, let’s look at this in the context of volume of search activity.

MarcJacobs.com skews the entire comparison, because  he is literally off the charts with 1.7 million total global searches. By making the scale able to show giant Marc Jacobs’ search volumes, the smaller competitors are rendered nearly microscopic and cannot be visually compared in the same chart.

So let’s zoom in from a scale ending at two million to one that ends at seventy thousand and acknowledge the fact that Marc Jacobs is off the charts.

Magnified view of chart

Chris Benz is shown to be second lowest when it comes to volume of searches for his brand compared to his competitors. However, based on actual search volumes we used to build the charts, 9% of all Global and 9% of Local US searches for the search term “Chris Benz” are made from a mobile device. The rest of the smaller competitors all hover around 10% for Global and Local US searches, compared to Mark Jacobs – who has 13% of all Global and 16% of all Local US searches for “Mark Jacobs” originating from a mobile device.

Now think about it: if you are growing your business and have 10-15% of your target audience searching for you online via mobile device, and they can’t find or interact with you, you’re leaving money on the table. Those mobile searchers are a significant chunk of your potential client/advocate network that you are ignoring. They’re not purchasing anything from you online, and just as importantly, they’re not spreading the word about you online either. The exponential push that your marketing can get from mobile social sharing is simply not possible.

What to do?

Start with a little research. You can visit Google’s GoMo site, plug your URL into the nifty little tool, and it’ll simulate what your website looks like on a mobile device. Even better, plug in your URL on your own mobile device. What kind of experience do you have with your website? Let that be your guide. Then, if you want to learn more about your Mobile Signal Strength and what you can do with it, give us a call.

We think Chris Benz is cool, and therefore re-frame the blank screen we get from Chris-Benz.com as a zen moment, a quiet oasis in the middle of a busy day…  even if it happens to be at the expense of potential customers.

Welcome to Voiceterous, the official blog of  BigVoice Unlimited. Join us in a boisterous and thoughtful conversation as we look at what’s going on online in the realm of digital marketing. Here you’ll find our latest ideas and observations about—first and foremost—BigVoices. A BigVoice is the strong call a business or brand makes that differentiates itself from the crowd, while connecting it with its constituents.

You might say it’s kind of like a brand mating call.

In looking at what it takes to build BigVoices, we’ll explore the latest trends in analysis, the best (and worst) content out there, and where we think social media is heading. We all have expertise to share and lessons to learn. We welcome spirited discussion and passionate curiosity. So bookmark or subscribe, email everyone you know to come join the conversation, and let’s get Voiceterous!

I’ve been recently obsessing about measuring the impact of any given event on any given online campaign. To get started here’s my first “Analytics Pop-up”: a tiny little analysis measuring the impact of something that happens in the news which will pop up every so often in a post. In this case, the campaign I refer to is Rick Perry’s for 2012 Republican presidential candidate.

See the Analytics Pop-up below of the impact Rick Perry’s GOP debate gaffe had on blog sentiment. Enjoy.

Insight: That's gotta hurt.