Bettina Hein, Founder & CEO of Pixability, Inc.

One of my (many) marketing resolutions is to start making use of video. As such, I’ve had an eye out for all things video here at the Inbound Marketing Summit 2011. Bettina Hein from Pixability did a presentation titled, “The Power of Reel: 5 Successful Recipes How Marketers Use Video for Results.” She presented some great tips and several examples.

But first, some obligatory “convincer” statistics:

• One minute of video is worth 1.8 million words, according to Dr. James McQuivey of Forrester research.
• According to Comscore Video Matrix, the average U.S. Internet user watches 186 videos per month.
• E-commerce sites that incorporate product videos sell up to 45% more. Zappos reports that it sells 30% more of products with demonstration videos than those with just pictures.

Recipe 1: Short and Simple

Given the Forester statistic cited above, it’s easy to see how powerful video can be at delivering messages. Hein talked about Site Slinger, who was having a hard time convincing prospects that it could deliver on its value proposition: Design to code in 24 hours or less. They made this video for a total cost of $1,300:

Recipe 2: Video as a Strategy

Many companies who do use video are not incorporating them into overall marketing strategy. Bettina highlighted EasyCare Inc.‘s highly successful video marketing campaign, which was tightly integrated with their website and Facebook fan page. The success of these videos increased revenue and dramatically cut marketing expense.

Recipe 3: Build Context

The third recipe is to build context by incorporating text, video, pictures and other media into your website. The example cited for this approach was the San Diego Zoo. Check out the link and notice the use of video, images, calls to action, and even a game!

Recipe 4: Use Video to Drive Action

Online retailer Zappos uses product demonstration videos and found that products with videos generate more sales and fewer returns.

Recipe 5: Find Your Audience Where They Are

In 2011, more people access the Internet from mobile devices than from desktops. You need to make sure your videos work on mobile devices. Many time, this means not using Flash but HTML5.

Top 3 Things Successful Video Marketers Do Differently

Bettina finished up by observing that successful video marketers:

1. Produce way, way more videos
2. Invest in metadata the drive SEO (more tags, longer descriptions more playlists)
3. Use video assets on all channels

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

Everyone who is tired of anecdotal “social media success stories” please raise your hand. OK, you can put it down now (but keep reading anyway). This article is not a lecture about why you should be using social media for customer support. This article is a tear-down of how to do it correctly.

I had a very short Twitter exchange with UPS this morning. It was quick, enlightening and illustrative. It begins with my frustration over waiting for my second Motorola Droid 2 replacement phone in a week. Naturally, both failures occurred on a Friday evening and so I had to wait until Monday for delivery. The interesting thing is that the ability for me to track shipments – a very good feature – actually becomes a frustration for me. I happen to live about ten minutes from the UPS warehouse at Manchester airport in NH. When I look up the tracking data for my phone, I can see that it was loaded on to a truck for delivery at about 6am this morning, but I also know that I am dead last on the route and won’t receive my phone until after 4pm.

Which lead to the following Twitter exchange:

Social Media Customer Support “Done Right:”

1. The elapsed time between my Tweet to @UPS and their response was 4 minutes! Even for a big company, that is impressive.
2. The response was from a person (@evanatups), and not a faceless, generic corporate account.
3. They gave me information that was valuable, timely and will improve my customer experience while also reducing their costs.
4. While it’s not on the screen shot above, he also joked around a bit, responding to my claim for credit with “The check is in the mail (DISCLAIMER: A check is not actually in the mail)”

So what exactly did they accomplish?

For starters, they made a customer happy and demonstrated that they are listening. This improves my perception of their business and makes me much more likely to use their service. From an ROI perspective, they just spent about two minutes of employee time and substantially reduced their bottom line costs. How? I’m going to use this option many times in the future to go to their location and pick up my packages, cutting the cost of the truck and driver coming to my house.

Maybe I would have found out about this option some other way at some point in the future. But how? I never watch TV commercials anymore because of my DVR. I listen to satellite radio in my car. I haven’t read a (print) newspaper in about 4 years and have an ad-blocker installed on my browsers. Whatever means they would used to reach me, I can assure you it would cost them more than these couple of Tweets.

And let’s not forget the added value of my re-Tweets and this blog article. They were able to satisfy a customer, gain additional visibility through my promotional activities, and build important social capital with this blog article.

However, I’ve been live-Tweeting the 2011 Inbound Marketing Summit for the past few days and was curious to see how it affected my score.

Obviously, the score was going to go up due to the unusually high number of updates and re-Tweets. But then, looking at the time graph it occurred to me to ask, “When exactly was WordCamp Boston?” That happened to be the last live-Tweeting event I attended.

As it turns out, the steep drop in my Klout score occurred exactly 30 days after WordCamp Boston:

It’s not terribly meaningful, but it does provide some insight into the Klout algorithm. Apparently, there the Network Influence and Amplification Probability calculations are performed over a 30 day moving window. It further seems to be a fairly simple calculation that is not using any sort of moving average, but just a basic summation.

Brian Halligan presenting at Inbound Marketing Summit 2011

One of the first presentations came from Brian Halligan, co-founder and CEO of Hubspot. As one of the people who literally wrote the book on inbound marketing, it makes sense that he would give us his vision of the future of inbound marketing. He didn’t disappoint!

Shifting the Funnel

Brian began with a review of inbound marketing and its effects on marketing. In the beginning, he said, sales reps had all the power. They controlled the information flow with catalogs and collateral. If the buyer wanted information, they had make the sales rep part an integral part of the buying cycle.

Not anymore. The sales process (more often than not) now begins with an Internet search. The buyer has all of the information and, therefore, the power. This has shifted the sales funnel and requires a new approach, since the buyer now keeps the seller at arms reach.

Top of the Funnel

Inbound marketing 1.0 was about expanding the top of the sales funnel. By creating remarkable content, optimizing it for search, promoting it via social media and building effective landing pages, businesses can expand the top of the funnel. It’s not just about generating more visits – it’s about generating more qualified visits. Good inbound marketing achieves exactly that.

Middle of the Funnel

Where inbound marketing 1.0 is about expanding the top of the funnel, version 2.0 is about improving the conversion rates throughout the funnel. Halligan spoke about the gaps in the funnel and losses from them:

The aim of inbound marketing 2.0 is to reduce those losses as much as possible and to improve the conversion rates throughout. So how do we do that? Like so many other answers to business questions, it’s “Do what successful companies are doing.” Halligan points to companies like Amazon, Google and Netflix as examples. What’s one secret to their success? Personalization. The more you use their services, the better the user experience becomes and the more value users gain from it.

LinkedIn profile percent complete - irresistible

The inbound marketing takeaway is to keep track of every activity your lead takes on your site and personalize that marketing experience. The more I use your website, the more personalized it gets. The more personalized it gets, the more valuable it is. The more valuable it is, the more likely I am to convert to a customer. One example he offers is the “percent complete” profile builder on LinkedIn. “It’s irresistible!” Halligan insists.

And he suggests you incorporate similar marketing profiles into your websites. The entire goal is to segment the crap out of your leads toward the ultimate goal, which I think is absolutely brilliant:

Dead End courtesy of monstersweare on Flickr

I’ve performed a bunch of free inbound marketing evaluations for businesses large and small. There are two mistakes I see companies making far more than any other. I covered the first mistake by describing why companies fail at social media. But there is another mistake that is even more common.

It seems that a majority of companies have conversion aversion.

This mistake is even more pervasive and costly. If you’re creating well-optimized, remarkable content and doing a bang-up job promoting that content via social media, what’s the point if you’re just sending them down a dead-end road? Converting those hard-earned visitors into leads is the final step in inbound marketing. And, frankly, it’s the only one that truly matters at the end of the day.

con-ver-sion a-ver-sion [kuhn-vur-zhuhn uh-vur-zhuhn]

noun
1. opposition to and/or apathy toward providing website visitors with strong calls to action
2. failure to describe the problem being solved or solution being offered
3. implementation of high-friction process for obtaining goods/content

Landing Pages to the Rescue

The first step in curing conversion aversion is the creation of landing pages. These pages are  highly specialized and single-minded in their mission to achieve their goal. Each page’s goal must be clear and action-oriented (e.g. buy, download, join, etc…). What exactly is a landing page?

Ideally, a landing page contains a strong call to action, clear value proposition, and a low-friction conversion form. You’ll notice from the screen shot above that these are the only things on this page. The widgets have been removed in order to remove distractions. You don’t want to give visitors any extra shiny objects to take their attention away from the task at hand.

Crafting the Message

Create pages with compelling headlines.

It all starts with the headline. Along with the sub-heading, this is the main message that must communicate exactly what is being offered (Free Inbound Marketing Evaluation) and the problem that is solves (How well does your site compare? How can you improve it?). Focus on creating a vision for the audience that allows them to see how much better off they will be after taking the action you want them to take. Be sure to include one of the seven fascination triggers in your headline (lust, vice, alarm, power, prestige, mystique or trust).

Connect with the audience.

Build off of your headline by showing the audience that you can identify and empathize with their plight. People want to buy from people who are more like themselves.

Clearly define your offer.

Tell the customer exactly what they will get in exchange for their lead information (preferably no more than an email). Don’t get cute here – be extremely concise with your language and don’t hide anything.

Provide testimonials.

If people have made it this far, a powerful testimonial can seal the deal. Social proof is a vital aspect of the buying process.

Dispel their fears.

Try to anticipate the buyers’ reservations and address them head on. For example, tell them it won’t take as much time as they may think or won’t be as risky as they may fear. Making the offer completely risk-free (e.g. money back guarantee) is another way to accomplish this.

Low Friction

Every field of data the visitor must provide lessens the chances of conversion. Don’t ask for data just because you’d like to have it; only ask for the minimum amount of data required in order to fulfill the request. In many cases, the only field really and truly required is an email address. In the example shown above, some additional data is required because the offer is a free evaluation. As a general rule, the more valuable the offer is, the more friction users will tolerate.

Optimize

Which title should you use? What color is best for the submit button? Should you include a picture of the product or a human face?

Landing pages are incredibly fickle and tricky to optimize. Fortunately, there are some free tools available to help us to exactly that. Google Website Optimizer will allow you to create multiple versions of landing pages, then rotate them randomly and measure their respective conversion rates.

Content is the fuel that powers inbound marketing (What is inbound marketing?). It needs to be compelling enough that your audience wants to share it with their peers. That’s the definition of “remarkable.” This workshop is going to present some strategies and tactics for planning, crafting and promoting remarkable content.

Here’s an overview of what we’ll be covering:

Introduction

The first session will provide an introduction/review of the five fundamental components of inbound marketing; content, search engine optimization, social media promotion, conversion and analytics.

Characteristics of Remarkable Content

The cornerstone of inbound marketing is remarkable content. This session will explain the three characteristics that determine whether or not content is truly remarkable.

Planning

It is more important to be consistent than prolific when it comes to content creation. “Planning Content” will cover strategies and tactics for developing ideas for content and establishing an effective publication schedule.

Crafting

The heart and soul of this workshop, “Creating Content” will break down the components of any content (title, lead, body and kicker) and explain the role and importance of each. Next, it will cover valuable techniques for creating appealing and engaging content.

Promoting

What good is remarkable content if nobody knows it exists? “Promoting Content” will explore some strategies and tactics for actively promoting your content via social media and passively promoting it via search engine optimization.

Wrap-Up

The wrap-up session will feature case studies, questions and demonstrations of some of the tools and techniques discussed.

About the Marketing & Sales Summit

Sponsored by the ISA Management Division, the ISA’s Annual Marketing & Sales Summit will help marketing and sales executives in the automation markets meet the strategic and tactical challenges of the 21st century. This unique event is designed exclusively for senior sales and marketing professionals in the automation markets.

"#Like 2" courtesy of misspixels on Flickr

Inbound marketing begins and ends with content. But it can’t be any kind of content in order to be effective. In order for it to be all it can be, there are three specific traits it needs to have.

Remarkable Content

Dictionary.com defines “remarkable” as “worthy of notice or attention.” In other words, remarkable content is something that people want to, er, remark about. There are a few different ways you can create content that has that effect on readers.

• They learn something from it.
  One of the most effective and common forms of remarkable content is informational. It’s intended to let readers know something important that they didn’t already know. But important to whom? To them, of course! By way of example, nobody would care about a blog post in which I bragged about how just landed a new client who wants to better understand how to create remarkable content. Too many companies publish “press release content” that they think is important but hardly anyone else does. Make sure it’s important to the audience.
•  They are inspired by it.
  Sometimes content can be important because it motivates us to take action on something we already knew. Maybe it’s a case study about how a company improved its conversion rates by 50% through landing page optimization. You’ve been reading about it for months and now this story finally inspires you to implement some A/B testing on your own site.
• They need it.
  This is a wide category that covers a number of possibilities. In some cases, the information in the content is timely. For example, the first article written about the Stuxnet virus is going to be considered much more remarkable than the fifth. Another possibility is that the content is exclusive. Often, this is the case with original data from research, polling or your own customer database.
• They’re entertained by it.
  Sometimes (most of the time, actually), we could just use a good laugh. I’m a big fan of corporate blogs letting their hair down once in a while and showing their humanity. Humor is a great way to do that and is consistently among the most shared content on the web.

Readable Content

If your informative, inspirational, exclusive and entertaining content is unreadable, what good is it? If an article appears in the forrest and nobody is there to read it, does it really exist?  Here’s my definition of readable:

Short words, in short sentences, in short paragraphs with lots of white space, clear/compelling headlines and bullets.

Let’s talk about the first part of that definition; all the short stuff. I think there’s a common misperception (especially in the B2B world) that content writing must be erudite and formal. However, when you’re competing for attention from readers facing an infinite number of online distractions, the more quickly your content can be consumed, the better. There are some tools you can use to actually measure how complicated your writing is. One of the most common is the Flesch Reading Ease score. The higher the score, the easier something is to read. According to Wikipedia, “Reader’s Digest magazine has a readability index of about 65, Time magazine scores about 52, an average 6th grade student’s (an 11-year-old) written assignment has a readability test of 60–70 (and a reading grade level of 6–7), and the Harvard Law Review has a general readability score in the low 30s.” This article – by the way – scores a 63.

Now, what about the white space, headings and bullets? The problem with that approach is that Internet users don’t read; they browse. Visitors will check your content first to see how long it is. Next, they will scan it to perform an instant cost/benefit analysis. “Will spending the next five minutes of my life be worth the payoff I’ll get from reading this?” White space reduces stress levels when someone is trying to scan your content and perform their risk/benefit analysis. It also makes the headings and other indicators pop out a little more. The headings are crucial. They are mini-titles that allow readers to scan quickly in order to build a quick and dirty outline of your content.

The easier you can make it for readers to scan and consume, the better your chances that it will be read.

Shareable Content

Yes, I know “shareable” isn’t a real word. But I think it should be. Our entire goal with inbound marketing is to spread our ideas and attract qualified visitors. Therefore, why not make it as simple as possible for readers to share your content if they are so inclined? While the situation is improving quickly, I’m still shocked at the number of web pages and blogs I encounter that don’t have Tweet, share or like buttons!

Hopefully this article is readable enough that you’ve finished it and found it remarkable enough to share with your friends and colleagues.

The agony: So much great information, but my head is swimming with possibilities.
The ecstasy:  I have a plan and a blueprint.

While this blog post is – in part – a review of WordCamp, there is also plenty of good stuff that applies to internet marketing regardless of the platform you’re using. In other words, don’t stop reading if you’re not a WordPress user.

One last note: There were three simultaneous tracks running so, obviously, this is my review of the 1/3 of the conference that I saw. I’m sure there was other excellent content and fabulous speakers.

Big Picture: Strategy

A number of presentations covered planning and strategy. As Christopher Penn mentioned in his presentation, “The strategy of, ‘If you build it, they will come‘ only worked for, like, the first five blogs on the Internet.” If you want readers for your blog, and if you want your blog to actually accomplish something, you need a plan.

Don’t Be a Tool

My award for Cleverest Title goes to John Eckman, who had the audacity to suggest that WordPress may not be the best solution for every website. His point was that, too often we select a tool first and then try to shoehorn our strategy into that paradigm. In a humorous and briskly moving presentation, he chronicled the potential pitfalls of selecting a CMS (content management system) and presented five strategies for getting the CMS decision right; business, technology, content, engagement and optimization. Developing these before deciding on the tool will help ensure that everything is aligned.

You can view his presentation on Slideshare: Don’t be a Tool: Content Management Strategy

Now What?

My favorite presentation of the conference, “How to Market Your Blog (okay, Mom’s reading, now what?)” by Chris Penn gets my award for Best Presentation. I would have paid the $20 and sat in the horrible I-93 traffic just to see this presentation. At the end of his talk, he said “Well, there you go. Eight weeks of marketing education in forty minutes.” And he wasn’t wrong. Chris broke his talk down into three categories; grand strategy (why?), strategy (what?) and tactics (how?). Using a mind-map to illustrate the relationship of the dozens of topics he covered, the presentation was fun and informative.

You can download his mind-map here: How to Market Your WordPress Blog

Inbound Marketing

There was no way I was going to write a review of WordCamp and leave this out, right? The talented and vivacious Karen Rubin gets my Energizer Bunny award for the presentation with the highest energy. Karen delivered an overview of how to implement inbound marketing on your blog with a nice balance of strategy and tactics. Being a certified inbound marketing professional myself, much of it was review but I still took away several helpful tips and nuggets. One that I intend to investigate is the Hubspot for WordPress plugin she mentioned. It has some badges and a call to action feature that looks helpful.

Karen’s presentation isn’t online yet, but hopefully it will get posted to her talk on SpeakerRate: WordPress & Inbound Marketing: How to Generate Leads With Your WordPress Blog

Tactics

Most of the presentations I saw fell into the category of tactics (as opposed to strategy) and there was no shortage of tips, tricks and advice here.

Security

D.K. Smith grabs my Head-Slap award for the most sobering wake up call in the conference. He revealed some basic best practices everyone should follow in order to put in place a baseline of security that will protect from script kiddies and basic malware. With regard to plugins, he advises that you keep it simple and use these three: Login LockDown, WordPress Firewall 2, and WP Intrusion (could not find a link). Other suggestions include using secure FTP, configuring long passwords and blocking folder indexing using the htaccess file.

Custom Post Types

K. Adam White receives my Rookie of the Year award for his presentation, Stepping Into Custom Post Types. He is a natural at presenting and seemed really comfortable for his first ever presentation. The information was well organized and helpful. While these tactics were obviously quite specific to WordPress, the concept of extending a CMS and making it your own is worth considering. Using custom post types is a way to automate content creation and organize it in a way that makes it easier to develop and maintain.

Check out his presentation on Slideshare: Stepping Into Custom Post Types

Convert or Go Home

Last, but by no means least, my Can I Get an Amen! award goes to Ross Beyeler’s presentation on conversion. With all of the inbound marketing evaluations I perform, the lowest score is consistently conversion. It’s something that is either not done well or completely ignored by an overwhelming number of websites. Ross did a nice job in presenting conversion from a designer’s standpoint and suggested five principles for designing for conversion;  audience segmentation, clear messaging, building trust, targeted offerings and clear calls to action.

Check out Ross’s presentation on Slideshare: Converting the Crowd

If anyone else has a review of WordCamp Boston 2011, feel free to leave a link in the comments and I will add it to the body of this post.

Updates:

From FirstTracks Marketing: WordCamp Boston 2011 Review

This comic appeared on the xkcd site today and it made me laugh out loud. I’m sure there are more than a few automation professionals who can identify with this:

In January, 2000, Uri Gneezy and Aldo Rustichini published a study titled, “A Fine is a Price.” In this study, they followed six day-care centers in Israel. They found that, on average, there were seven or eight late pickups per week across the ten centers they were monitoring. At six of these centers, they instituted a fine for late pickups and the effect was immediate and striking. The incidences of lateness steadily increased over a four week period. Eventually, the average number of late pickups peaked around twenty – almost triple the original rate. What happened? And what has this to do with social media?

Mixed Norms

Gneezy and Rustichini attributed this to something they called an “incomplete contract.” The rules that were in place were sufficiently ambiguous that customers had to figure for themselves what was appropriate behavior. In those circumstances, we tend to fall back on social norms. Social norms are a set of unwritten rules that determine what is and is not acceptable behavior in social situations. However, in the case of the day-care experiment, instituting a fine shattered the ambiguity and replaced it with an economic norm. The parents no longer feared social repercussions. They determined that the convenience of showing up whenever they wanted was worth the price.

Oil and water courtesy of andredoreto on Flickr

This is an example of “mixed norms.” When we combine social behaviors with an economic situation or vice versa, we get unpredictable (and sometimes volatile) situations. Consider, for example, finishing a holiday dinner at your parents’ house. You compliment the cook(s) on a terrific meal and pull out your checkbook asking, “How much do I owe you?” Most people would be offended and might even throw a utensil in your direction. Dating also carries such risks.

Social media also carries such risks.

Social Media and Norms

Make no mistake. Social norms are in play in all social media channels. The main reason for this is that when it comes to social networks, the users are also the owners. This is not the case in most other media with which companies are used to dealing (e.g. television, radio, newspapers, even Google). And so their tendency is to dive into social media with their economic norm behaviors. The result is that people will automatically tune them out and unfollow/unfriend them. In a sense, the companies have placed a virtual fee on their social media presence. This fundamentally changes the relationship from a social one to an economic one. Game over, influence squandered.

And here’s the really bad news…

Mixing Norms is Irreversible

Back to Gneezy and Rustichini. After five months, the day-care centers rescinded the fining policy. However, the behaviors didn’t change. It turns out that once you change the relationship from social to economic, you cannot go back. It’s altered permanently and there’s nothing you can do about it.

This should give pause to companies currently or planning to be involved in social media. You had better get it right the first time, because you won’t get a second chance. So how does a company insure it’s following social norms? Well, there’s a four letter word that spells social media success; gift. Make sure the vast majority of the content you’re creating and sharing can be considered as a gift to your audience and you should be fine.

Google’s “Panda” update earlier this year is the latest example of search game-changers. What’s a company to do? This video from the search experts at SEOmoz explain the reason for and implications of this algorithm change. Before you watch this important video, here are a couple of important takeaways:

Search Engine Gaming Is Getting Harder

There were lots of automated, black-hat techniques that were effective at generating inbound links, boosting your page rank and improving organic search ranking. While inbound links are still important, other more social factors are getting involved in the algorithm that are harder to game. At the end of the day, the formula for success is still the same: Create remarkable content that people want to consume and share with others.

Ignore Social Media at Your Own Peril

The search algorithms are increasingly incorporating more and more data from social media APIs. This means that by not participating in social media, you are potentially hurting your organic search engine results. In other words, you may not generate lots of leads from social media activities like Twitter but alone that isn’t a reason for not participating.

Dump Metrics, Adopt Analytics

The Grand Pooh-bah of web analytics, Avinash Kaushik, warns against confusing metrics with analytics. “When people say, ‘web analytics,’ they really mean web metrics. Your boss rarely asks for analysis; she asks for ‘data’ (metrics) or ‘reports’ (KPIs)… If you remember nothing else, remember this: life is about taking action, and if your work is not driving action, you need to stop and reboot.” Old metrics like page views and inbound links used to tell most of the story. But now that’s no longer the case. Search optimization requires diving much deeper and finding answers like, “Why is the bounce rate on this page so high?” or “How can we increase the conversion rate of this page?”

It’s a Marathon, Not a Sprint

Setting proper expectations for search optimization is critical. As the system becomes harder to game and increasingly requires social validation, the results will take longer and longer. The reason is that you need to build an audience, which takes time. There are exceptions, of course, when you can catch lightning in a bottle go viral but those are infrequent scenarios and unreliable. Remember, hope is not a strategy.

UPDATE: Less than two hours after publishing this article, Search Engine Land published an article about “The Bleak Future of Commoditized, Outsourced SEO.” It explains in detail why the shortcuts are disappearing.

How Google’s Panda Update Changed SEO Best Practices Forever

Without further delay, here is a great video from SEOmoz’s Whiteboard Friday series.

As jokes go, that one wasn’t very funny. Yet most of us chuckle about the fact that we agree to terms of service contracts on an almost daily basis without ever reading them. I was commissioned by the American Water Works Association (AWWA) to study and report on the terms of service for 13 social media sites. I’ll be presenting the results during the “Creating Successful Social Media Strategies for Today, Tomorrow and the Future” session at ACE11 on 16-June in Washington, DC. While I’ll be covering lots of important aspects, there were three terms of service common to all sites that I thought deserved special attention.

1) You’re On Your Own

Every single one of these services expressly stipulates that the service is provided “as is,” with no warranties of fitness, completeness or reliability. In other words, “it may work, it may not work, you’re on your own.” This is no great shock and in the era of the Never Ending Beta, we have grown accustomed to this. But the problem is that we’ve grown so accustomed to this and the services have been so reliable that we are unprepared when things don’t work.

Takeaway: Don’t make these services part of any mission critical service.

2) You’re Liable for Security Breaches

Another common aspect of these agreements dealt with account security. The surprising twist (to me) is that many of these services require you to notify them if your account has been compromised. If you don’t notify them, you could be held liable for any damages caused by the breach.

Takeaway: Take account security seriously, don’t share passwords and keep an eye out for suspicious activity.

3) You’re the Last to Know

Similar to the first caveat, nearly every one of these services reserves the right to terminate your account for any reason, without notification. In some cases, they go so far as to say that in such a case, your content may be irretrievable. Facebook, for example, has been in the news quite frequently recently for suspending accounts for a whole host of reasons (including having a name they don’t like). Although Facebook is notoriously slow at resolving these issues, they generally get resolved without further harm. Nonetheless, there’s no shortage of other services shutting down suddenly and without notice.

Takeaway: Have a solid backup plan.

I’ll be sharing more insights from this research with my newsletter subscribers, so sign up if you haven’t already!

Making Money While You Sleep

Working as a solopreneur can be a great experience. As the saying goes, you can work 80 hours you want! And therein lies the rub: When you are the business, the business only makes money while you’re working. If your revenue stream is tied to billable hours, there is a built-in limitation to the amount of cash you can generate. Furthermore, there is no external value to the business. Except perhaps for the customer list, the business doesn’t exist without the proprietor’s expertise.

The solution to both of those problems is to “make money while you sleep.” In other words, put a system together that does not rely solely on one person’s billable time. Whether that means creating products that can be sold (e.g. books) or some sort of knowledge library (e.g. online webinars) or hiring and teaching others to perform your service, the goal is to perform an action once and then make money from it repeatedly. This will create a business model that is scalable and salable.

The Gift That Keeps on Giving

Let’s use that same paradigm to compare outbound marketing and inbound marketing. Here’s a list of traditional outbound marketing methods:

• Advertising: Only effective as long as the advertisements are running, which is to say, “As long as you’re paying for them.” As soon as you stop, the brand awareness may linger but the lead generation stops cold.
• Direct Mail: The benefits of a direct mail campaign only last as long as the materials themselves. Once the last flyer has found its way to the circular file, the lead generation stops.
• Cold Calling: Cold calling can only be effective as long as there’s someone working the phones. Stop the calls, and the lead generation stops.

I’m not arguing that these methods aren’t effective, just that they don’t work unless someone is executing the tasks. Once the effort stops, the benefits die off quickly.

Conversely, inbound marketing keeps on working long after the content is created and the Tweets are sent. The blog post lives on, finding its way into search engines and always collecting traffic. The ebooks and presentations continue to be downloaded and embedded across the Internet. In fact, great content spreads geometrically; one Tweet gets re-Tweeted twice and each of those gets re-Tweeted twice more, and so on. A single Facebook Like is seen by several dozen sets of eyeballs. Your content will continue to work at spreading your ideas and your brand day and night, without any additional effort or expenditure on your part.

And that’s the killer feature of inbound marketing: It keeps working when you’re not.

This process sounds obvious and maybe even simple. But if those are both true, then why do so few of us achieve the level of success we believe ourselves to be capable of attaining? It’s because there are a combination of forces aligned against us; some of them external but  most of them insidiously entrenched inside our own lizard brains.

Fortunately for us, Seth Godin and Steven Pressfield have written a quartet of books that provide a blueprint for being successful and making a difference. I’ve coalesced them into what I call the “Godin/Pressfield Algorithm” (What can I say? I’m engineer, which means I love algorithms.).

Start

“What kind of moron doesn’t know that the first step in achieving success is starting?” That’s a fair point, but I’m using the word “start” in a less literal sense. There all kinds of distractions and time-wasting efforts that look like starting, but are really procrastinating. This is where Godin’s “Poke the Box” (affiliate link) comes in handy. It’s a manifesto that clears the fog away from indecision and provides inspiration and advice for overcoming the fear of getting started. But don’t expect a map, because there isn’t one. Godin explains, “Instead of learning to be more compliant, I want to push you to be the one who takes initiative.”

Work

Undertaking any endeavor is scary because you might fail. But even worse, your brain will fight you every step of the way because we’re programmed to pursue immediate, short-term gratification instead of activities aimed at longer term rewards; in other words, “work.” This invisible force that tells us to check our email or Twitter stream instead of authoring a blog post or writing a few more lines of code or making that client phone call is called “The Resistance” in Steven Pressfield’s book, “The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles.” Pressfield pulls the curtain back from this insidious obstacle and offers sound advice for recognizing and overcoming it.

Fail

Failing happens. Failing can even be a good thing. In fact, failure is not an option, it’s a strategy. But the problem is that it can be demoralizing. This is where Pressfield’s newest book, “Do the Work” (affiliate link) comes in very handy. He says, “It’s about getting off your behind and starting something. And Seth Godin writes about this, that once you start, you have to finish; you don’t get off the hook half way through.”

Ship

“Real artists ship.” Thus sayeth Steve Jobs, as quoted by Godin in the final book of our quartet, “Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?” (affiliate link). This book dares you, actually embarrasses you into making yourself indispensable. It serves as the foundation of the Godin/Pressfield algorithm and stresses the importance of shipping. Otherwise, everything else is boasting, procrastinating, bullshitting. Real artists ship.

And now you have an algorithm for shipping. You’re out of excuses. Grab these books and get started.

Then Matt Cutts told us that Google was tweaking their algorithm to do better at excluding content farms and then announced a Chrome extension to crowdsource that effort.

And now Google is getting personal. On their blog last Friday, Google announced three changes that were all based on the searcher’s social graph. These changes are:

1. Social results used to be second class citizens relegated to the bottom of the page, but now they will be interspersed throughout the SERP (Search Engine Results Page) based on relevance.
2. They’re annotating results that were shared by friends in your social graph. For example, searching for “jeff atwood google trouble” may return a link to his blog post with my mug below it and a note that says, “Jon DiPietro shared this on Twitter.”
3. In addition to allowing you to configure social accounts publicly in your Google Profile, they will now be allowing you to link accounts privately through your Google Account.

Since I wrote about Internet marketing’s new currency last August, Google has been on a slow but steady march to incorporate more and more social search results into their algorithm. Last week’s announcement ups the ante significantly. Traditional SEO is still important – and always will be. But remarkable content and an extensive online social circle are increasing in importance every single minute.

Get that blog going. Start engaging online. And make sure your website has strong calls to action with well constructed landing pages.

DO IT NOW…

Here’s a video from Google that explains social search (and hints at how important it is to have a complete Google Profile):

From "Publishing in the Digital Era" from Bain & Company

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and Recording Industry Artists of America (RIAA) would have you believe this is the effect of piracy. But let’s dispel that right out of the gate: Digital music piracy has steadily declined for the past five years and is nearly half of where it was in 2005.

Is it just a coincidence that music theft began to decline at exactly the same time revenues fell off a cliff? I don’t think so.

In the Beginning…

In the beginning, Publishers created the record and the CD. Now the Internet was formless and lifeless, darkness was over the surface of computer monitors and the Spirit of Tim Berners-Lee was hovering over the wires.

During this dark age before the Internet, music consumers had two choices; the single or album. Once cassettes and CDs took over, however, even that choice disappeared. Consumers frequently had to buy twelve songs they didn’t want in order to get the one they did. There wasn’t any other choice, so we sucked it up and (more often than not) bought the CD.

And Tim said, “Let there be a world wide web,” and there was a world wide web. Tim saw that it was good and he separated the interface from the data. Tim called the interface a “browser” and the data he called “hypertext.” And there was Netscape and there was Lycos – the Internet.

But it wasn’t only the Internet that led to digitization. Inexpensive computers with CD drives that could burn songs into a compact format were also required. Once consumers acquired a taste of freedom to separate the songs from the album, piracy was born. Napster came on the scene and sparked an explosion in digital theft. Although Napster was shut down relatively quickly, new services and technologies popped up in the never ending game of “Whack a Mole” between publishers and pirates.

Yet, around 2005 piracy started to decline and music sales began to fall off of a cliff. Hmm… Wha happa?

Let There Be Downloads

I remember clearly sitting in front of my computer in 2003, calling a friend over to show him the announcement of a new online store that would sell individual songs and let you download them straight to your iPod. “This is great! I’ll never by another album again!” I exclaimed. My friend looked at me and deadpanned, “The record companies will never let that happen.” Well, you know what happened. In fact, take a look at what happened right around 2005 (click on the image for full size):

Downloads exploded but revenues fell off a cliff. Consumers were liberated from having to buy stuff they didn’t want. Meanwhile, the MPAA and RIAA spent enormous time and effort battling the white elephant of digital piracy and started sending their customers to jail. They were caught in a business death spiral.

Newspapers and magazines are battling a similar mirage. They think that the enemy is bloggers who are stealing their content and giving it away for free. In reality, consumers want their content in tiny, hyper-relevant bites. But so far, publishers haven’t figured that out and continue to try to force-feed us the all-or-nothing options on a shiny new object.

Freedom!

The chart at the beginning of this post is an illustration of what happens to an industry that has enslaved its customers when they are finally liberated. In his blog today, Seth Godin addressed the issue of “pricing power.” He suggested that there are two reasons why you aren’t getting paid what you think you’re worth:

1. People don’t know what you’re worth, or
2. You’re not (currently) worth as much as you believe

Most businesses refuse to believe #2 could be true. If it’s not, you have a marketing problem.

If it is, you have bigger problem.

I’ve read a few blog posts recently from a tribe of people I’m going to call the “Grumpy Old Marketers.” Not because they necessarily are actually grumpy, but because their rants remind me of Dana Carvey’s “Grumpy Old Man” character from Saturday night live. Members of this group include grizzled industry veterans who insist that, “In my day, we didn’t have all this social media stuff. We spent 60 hours a week cold calling people who cursed at us and hung up on us until our ears were bleeding. That was the way it was and we liked it!”

If it stopped there, it wouldn’t deserve a rant. But one article recently set me off. The author had a sales and marketing automation system running on a Digital minicomputer back in 1982. He insists that his customers enjoyed the marketing collateral and white papers he sent, lovingly arranging them into three ring binders. In his post, the author wants us to believe that mailing brochures is the same as crafting an e-book, and pressing the flesh at a cocktail party is the same as connecting on LinkedIn. And while I agree with his central point that human behaviors are the same as they have always been, his final conclusion – and thus his advice – is simply dangerous in my opinion.

Permission Marketing

He argues that they did “permission marketing” back in 1982.

How exactly did he know when somebody no longer wanted their propaganda? Does he really think that people took the time to fill out his little postcard and mail them back to stop receiving his junk mail? Doubt it. And today’s permission marketing is all about people opting into the medium as well as the content. He had one tool – direct mail – where now, people can subscribe to email or RSS, fan pages, Tweets, SMS, etc…

Content Marketing

He argues that they did “content marketing” back in 1982.

“They [customers] received high quality, current information about products and the industry free of charge.” While this may be true, it’s like a caveman laughing at a tank saying, “We had artillery back in the stone age too! We called them ‘rocks.’” His brochures and white papers cost his company a fortune in production, printing and mailing costs. Today, I can write my own e-book with free open source software, upload it to a cloud-based host like Scribd for free, register with an affiliate sales channel for free, Tweet it, share it on Facebook and have it downloaded by a million people without spending a nickel. I can record high definition video on a $150 Flip camera and upload it to YouTube where millions more can watch it – for free.

Furthermore, his content was not discoverable. Your name had to end up in his database somehow or a colleague had to give you his/her copy. You couldn’t simply type some keywords into a brochure search engine and have it magically fly onto your desk.

I don’t think today’s low/no cost multimedia environment is anything remotely like what he’s describing.

Social Marketing

He argues that they did “social marketing” using telephones back in 1982.

Again, that version of social marketing was done on a one to one basis, where today’s version is one to thousands to millions. Apples and oranges.

Social Networking

He argues that they did “social networking” at trade shows back in 1982.

This one’s just flat out wrong. The definition of social networks today is a many to many network of producers who are also its own audience. When you’re exhibiting at a tradeshow, you are a producer and the attendees are the consumers. Period. Completely different paradigm.

Marketing “In Enfilade”

His conclusion is that marketing is “simple” and hasn’t changed at all – only the technology. I strongly disagree. When the machine gun was first introduced into warfare, they tried to use it the same as they would a rifle; head on. It turned out not to be very effective since they were so immobile. But when they figured out that moving them “in enfilade” (flanking the formation shoot along the longest axis), they created interlocking fields of fire that became the death traps in Word War I. The point is that the battle strategies had to change dramatically when they went from single shot rifles to machine guns.

Likewise, just because there are some similarities between direct marketing tactics and social marketing tactics, it doesn’t mean the strategies are the same. In fact, they are very different.

But I had to write this post after reading the latest prediction of the privacy apocalypse from the Intelligentsia. In a February Wired Magazine article titled “Your Life Torn Open,” Andrew Keen wails that we are being led down a primrose path to Hell with these social networking sites. Fear mongering has a long and glorious history – especially in journalism and politics – because it’s such a powerful emotion. If Gordon Gecko were a journalist instead of a wall street banker he would have said, “Fear, for lack of a better word, is good.”

While being concerned about your privacy is very important, articles like Keen’s focus the attention in the wrong place, in my opinion. In an effort to warn people about an impending doom, he’s inadvertently doing more harm than good. His article peddles three untruths that I see commonly thrown around and I will take exception to them now.

#1 – Social Networking is Narcissistic

In my opinion, this is the laziest, most gratuitous slap anyone can take at social networking. Almost invariably, they cite Tweets about what someone had for lunch or wall updates about their pet did this morning. Since social networking begins with us talking about ourselves, it’s really easy (too easy) to make quips about it being narcissistic. But it’s also demonstrably false.

If social networking were truly narcissistic, then NOBODY WOULD FOLLOW ANYONE BUT THEMSELVES. And that would pretty much defeat the whole purpose of a social network, wouldn’t it? The very fact that someone has Facebook friends or Twitter followers annihilates the argument. I follow other people because I either learn something from time to time, or am entertained by that person, or want to keep my relationship with them warm by seeing what they’re doing. I’m interested.

There are billions of people on this planet who could not possibly care less about what I have to say. From their perspective, I’m obviously self-absorbed for writing about stuff they don’t care about. But I’m not talking to them. I’m talking to few hundred or thousand who do care. I’m talking to you. Does that make me a narcissist?

Now, I have no doubt there are true narcissists in social networks, but that’s because they are already narcissists and would be whether Facebook existed or not.

#2 – We Aren’t Naturally Social Beings

This line in Keen’s story made burst out loud with incredulity. This is absolutely demonstrably false. There have been countless experiments that illustrate the fact that much of our irrational behaviors are specifically geared toward social acceptance and group dynamics. Fear of public speaking is an example. We developed a fear of standing out from a crowd as a survival mechanism because there’s safety in numbers. Cognitive researchers have shown that our decision process is highly dependent on and easily swayed by others’ opinions. This helps promote harmony in small groups so that consensus can be reached on important decisions.

Keen opines that “human happiness is really about being left alone.” Really? Do I really even need to make an argument against that? Everybody likes some alone time now and then, obviously. But for my entire adult life I’ve heard about how our social fabric is being torn apart by people moving out of cities and into solitary lives in suburbia.

Now all of a sudden we’re all Greta Garbo? Here’s a free tip if you’re feeling too “social” – shut down your laptop and turn off your phone for a few hours. Problem solved!

#3 – Social Graphs Are Evil

Whereas the first two points I’ve made are demonstrable facts, this one is a little more of an opinion and personal preference. However, I feel like the whole paranoia over privacy settings gets a bit hysterical sometimes. First of all, you’re in complete control over what data you want to share and what data you want to keep private. Yes, reasonable people can argue about whether or not it could be more user friendly but the capability is there.

Second, we’re not talking about sharing social security numbers and credit card details. We’re talking about the brand of car you drive, your favorite songs and television shows, and news articles you’ve read. Lots of people think it’s “creepy” that this information can be used to target advertisements to us when log into Facebook or visit a newspaper website. I prefer to think of it as spam-blocking. I’m all in favor of giving these websites information that lets them improve the ads I see and offers I receive so that it’s more relevant to me.

Let’s Be Smart

OK, please don’t waste our time by mis-characterizing my point: I am not saying you should make everything public. I am not saying there’s no such thing as identity theft. I am saying that you should be concerned about the important things, like strong passwords and recognizing a phishing attack when you see one. Those are much, much more important than preventing Facebook from telling someone your favorite artist is Justin Bieber.

Well, maybe you do want to keep that one private.

Let me know what you think about privacy and targeted ads. I think there are more dangerous things to worry about but maybe I’m missing something.

Sirocco the Kakapo Parrot (courtesy of Department of Conservation on Flickr)

The Kakapo is a parrot native to New Zealand, which is critically endangered. For thousands of years, they lived a stress-free life due in large part to having no natural predators. In fact, life was so good for the Kakapo that it lost the ability (desire?) to fly.

The male Kakapo’s mating call is a very low base sound. If you have a home theater system with a subwoofer, you know that it doesn’t matter where you locate it in the room because low frequency sounds are non-directional. That makes things a bit frustrating for a potentially interested female trying to find the source of the mating call. But even if she can find him, they will only mate when trees are masting (fruiting heavily) and that only happens every three to five years. And even then, the female will lay just one egg.

Changes in Latitude

This seems absurd until you consider what the Kakapo’s biggest problem was for thousands of years – overpopulation. While some animals survived by developing camouflage or venom, the Kakapo evolved by mating more slowly. For most of its evolutionary life, their inefficient mating ritual was not only a non-problem, it was a survival mechanism. This changed quite drastically in the 1840′s when humans showed up and introduced predators like dogs, cats and rats. When faced with new predators and a falling population, you’d think that the Kakapo would start to change its behavior. It did, but probably not in the way you’d think: It actually started to slow down its already anemic reproduction cycles. Why on earth would it do that?

When faced with stress, it reacted the same way it had for thousands of years because it had always been a successful strategy. To do anything else would be against its nature.

Changes in Attitude

Which brings us to business death spirals. Many people watch dying industries from the outside much the same way we look at the Kakapo and think, “Why don’t they change their behavior?” It seems absurd when we watch them continue to follow the same strategies that aren’t working in the new environment. Worse, they tend to focus even more energy and resources on those failing strategies because it’s their evolutionary reaction to stress. To do anything else would be against their nature.

When a print publication (hypothetically) has to lower its advertising rates because budgets are shifting online, what do they do?
They (hypothetically) put a plan in place to sell more ads at the lower price in order to stay even.

When a membership organization (hypothetically) is losing members because they are finding the same value elsewhere, what do they do?
They (hypothetically) turn up the volume on the marketing message because people obviously aren’t hearing it.

When a brick and mortar retailer (hypothetically) is losing business to a digital or online equivalent, what does it do?
It (hypothetically) lowers its prices in order to lure in more shoppers.

When a Hollywood studio (hypothetically) is losing a portion of its sales to digital piracy, what does it do?
It (hypothetically) takes its own fans and customers to court and makes an example of them.

The point is that many of these organizations mistake changes in latitude (i.e. the environment) with changes in attitude (i.e. the customers). They think that if they keep doing what they’ve been doing – only a little better – they can change the customer’s attitude. They don’t realize that the environment has shifted and that they’re quite possibly doing the exact opposite of what they should be doing.

Parrots, the Universe and Everything

The story of the Kakapo was revealed to me in this Douglas Adams presentation. It’s quite long, but thoroughly entertaining (not to mention educational). If you don’t have time right now, then “don’t panic,” just bookmark it and come back later. How much later? Forty-two hours, obviously.

Weekly High Five lists the most interesting, compelling, and/or useful links of each week.

Weekly High Five lists the most interesting, compelling, and/or useful links of each week.  This week’s theme looks (tongue in cheek) at the “Death of Print.” I kid because I love. Print isn’t dead (or dying) but it is getting beaten to within an inch of its life and is going to need some serious cosmetic surgery after the beating is over.

#5: Changes to the Marketing Budget Landscape in 2011

I can hear the newspapers, magazines, telemarketers, and radio stations now – “Nothing to see here. Move along.” This chart from MarketingSherpa is about as surprising as the sun rising in the morning and shows that 2011 is going to be another year for the trees to rejoice.

Link: MarketingSherpa

#4: Amazon’s e-book sales beat paperbacks

More good news for trees was revealed with Amazon’s earnings report last week, when they reported that they are selling more Kindle e-books than paperbacks.

Link: USA Today

#3: Ebooks Hit the Big Time With Amazon Singles and TEDBooks

This announcement from Amazon came out just days before they revealed the e-book vs. paperback sales figures. It’s a long-awaited move by Amazon to get their paws on the exploding popularity of self-published e-books. By lending credibility and “gravitas” to this category of books, the publishing world continues to transform itself.

Link: Hubspot

#2: How ready is the publishing industry for 2011?

This presentation by Forrester for Digital Book World (DBW) presents some figures that show how publishers are preparing themselves for the “printpocalypse.”

Link: Slideshare

#1: Digital Book World: Content>Consumer; Tweet Notes, Wrap-Up

Bob Mayer is a NY Times Best-Selling multi-published author. He is a West Point graduate, served in the Infantry and Special Forces (Green Beret) commanding an A-Team and as a Special Forces operations officer, and was an instructor at Fort Bragg. In this blog post, he takes exception to some assertions made at Digital Book World and offers some interesting insight and predictions about the future of books and book stores.

Link: Write It Forward