Debunking the Social Media Myth: A Framework for Social Media Strategies
Marketing Using Credible Signals to Close Tough Customers
What is Web Strategy and Why Should You Care?
Websites Worth Caring About
You Don’t Deserve to Use Web 2.0, and That’s OK
This Whole Internet Thing Could Get Big Someday

Once you understand web strategy, you need to stop reading about it and start doing it.

I’ve said all I have to say on the general topic. If you’ve been paying attention, you’ve probably read all you need to read about it. I may write about it again in the future, but for now that chapter of this blog is closed.

I will continue to post to this blog on a variety of subjects of personal interest to me. You’re welcome to stick around. I hope you do.

This is a post from the Josh Klein Web Strategy blog.

I’ve said what I had to say

I’d like to share a quotation in the spirit of elections:

I am unable to conceive that the people of America [...] will [choose], and every second year repeat the choice of [...] men, who would be disposed to form and pursue a scheme of tyranny or treachery. [...] I am equally unable to conceive that there are at this time, or can be in any short time, in the United States any [...] men capable of recommending themselves to the choice of the people at large, who would either desire or dare within the short space of two years, to betray the solemn trust committed to them.

Republican government presupposes the existence of [virtue] in a higher degree than any other form. Were the pictures which have been drawn by the political jealousy of some among us, faithful likenesses of the human character, the inference would be that there is not sufficient virtue among men for self government; and that nothing less than the chains of despotism can restrain them from destroying and devouring one another.

James Madison, Federalist Paper #55

This is a post from the Josh Klein Web Strategy blog.

Election Day 2009

This community has already raised $225 and completed 3 projects, reaching 157 students – not hypothetical “students”, but these specific 157 children. How awesome is that? The more we can raise before this Sunday (October 25th) the more funds Hewlett-Packard will match.

In case that isn’t enough to get you to donate, I want to sweeten the pot by making you a deal:

I’ve written a report called An Introduction to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for Non-Technical Business Owners. It contains everything you – real people, not SEO geeks – need to know about how search works, minus the jargon.

Instead of just another technical guide, you’ll get a 20-page game plan for your business. Read it and you’ll know the business side of SEO. Leave the tech guides for the geeks you’re going to hire; you should be running your business.

If we hit $1,000 donated through my giving page at Donors Choose by October 31, I’ll release the report here for FREE. If not, the report will continue to be reserved for my clients.

So help some kids, help your Google rank. It’s as simple as that.

We helped buy school supplies for Ms. W’s Kindergarten class, Ms. L’s 6th grade class, and Mr. W’s 10th grade technology class. How about a few more classrooms?

Click here to donate with your credit card. It takes 5 minutes.

This is a post from the Josh Klein Web Strategy blog.

Help Some Kids, Help Your Google Rank

The website is filled with proposals for students in need: basic human needs like toothpaste and toothbrushes, necessary classroom supplies like pencils and books, and technology for advanced students.

Right now, Donors Choose is holding The 2009 Social Media Challenge. Last year, bloggers raised $270,000 to provide 65,000 students with classroom resources.

Budget cuts are seriously threatening education right now, especially here in New York State.

I created a giving page for this blog’s community in the Tech Blog category. My goal is for us to raise $2,000 during this drive, and I’ve added a number of projects I think are worth sponsoring.

If you can donate, please do so at the giving page. If you can’t, please pass on a link to others to help spread the word.

I’ve focused the projects for our group to high poverty areas in New York City, but if you see another project you’d like to fund, let me know!

Donors Choose is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit corporation accredited by the Better Business Bureau, with a 4-star rating from Charity Navigator, and contributions are tax deductible. Kudos to Fred Wilson for inspiring this. I’d say we should beat his donation group, but that seems implausible.

This is a post from the Josh Klein Web Strategy blog.

Donors Choose Bloggers Challenge

Even without dipping into complex issues like PCI compliance, payment processing, analytics, and reporting, selling online requires a stack of systems that aren’t immediately recognizable to the non-technical business owner.

When you think “we need an online shopping cart”, pause to consider the role of each of these systems in your business:

1. Store UI - The User Interface is the equivalent of the layout of a physical retail store. Place a product in the “back corner” of your website and it won’t sell. The store UI is determined by your information architecture and web design.

2. Marketing – Sales, discount codes, coupons, gift cards, search engine optimization, customer reviews; each of these tactics requires a compatible technical system. Doing this manually would be a nightmare.

3. Merchandizing – This is how you can grow your average sales per transaction; up-selling, cross-selling, product bundles, and so on.

4. Prices – You may want to tier prices or offer product options and add-ons. A one-to-one SKU-to-price might not work for you.

5. Catalog – It needs to be simple to manage a product catalogue if you ever plan to add/remove products or have descriptions, specifications, images, and video.

6. Inventory – Receive an order, manually check your inventory, email a customer who ordered out-of-stock items, and refund their transaction? Sounds like a good way to lose business in this just-in-time world.

7. Customers – Managing your customer relationships is mandatory. Generating repeat business won’t happen if you don’t have a system that learns about your customer over time. There are plenty of opportunities; creating email lists, remembering shipping information, one-click purchasing, sending birthday discount codes, offering add-ons to already-owned products, and so on.

8. Fullfillment – Receiving orders and shipping products can be a hassle if you’re printing out emails. You should be able to check if an order has shipped, cancel orders upon customer request, measure and improve the time fullfillment takes, and so on.

9. Deployment – The website hosting, security considerations, software, and integration with any systems beyond e-commerce.

I think too many non-technical business owners look for web development service based on the ability to create the Store UI, implying the business owner already has a handle on the other eight systems. Caveat emptor.

Diagram and inspiration care of the excellent Get Elastic E-commerce Blog. Check it out.

This is a post from the Josh Klein Web Strategy blog.

The 9 Required Systems of E-Commerce Shopping Carts

Since there are other ways to generated suggested posts, I’ve dropped that plugin for now. DISQUS is more irreplaceable, since it’s the platform that manages the community for this blog.

In fact, it was the wonderful Gianni of DISQUS support that helped me figure out what was wrong after my troubleshooting lead me in her direction.

If you haven’t signed up for DISQUS, you should.

This is a post from the Josh Klein Web Strategy blog.

RSS Technical Issues Resolved

This is a post from the Josh Klein Web Strategy blog.

RSS Technical Issues

Either social media works, or it doesn’t.

I’m not sure this is the right approach. It would be better to discuss where and when social media fits into a robust marketing plan.

How can we develop a resilient marketing engine to power a business, and how can social media fuel that engine?

A brief aside on what brought this subject up…

Two recent posts got me thinking about where social media fits into the big picture. The first, Quitters by Fred Wilson, in response to an NY Times Magazine piece on The Facebook Exodus, showed some of the miraculous growth of Facebook and Twitter. The second, Back to Digital Reality by Ken Burbary, discussed the state of digital marketing & advertising in the world today.

According to comScore, there were 13.6 billion searches last month by online Americans. Google maintains the lion share of that volume, at 65%. Google’s continued dominance in search is why they continue to rake in the cash, generating $5.52 billion in revenue for Q2 2009.

I find it hard to swallow, in all my techno-snobbery, that Google accounts for only 65% of search engine usage.

It’s easy for us snobs to get excited about the best technology. Take cell phones: the iPhone is king, but the vast majority of people don’t have one. It’s instructive to look at the best to see what the future holds for the mainstream, but the real world of cell phones is still rinky-dinky dumbphones.

And 35% of internet searches happen somewhere other than Google.

In social media, Twitter and Facebook are the current technology darlings. They’re useful tools, but they can’t be the center of a strategy. They’re peripheral, and the sites themselves are not so important as the state of mind using them requires; the big “ah ha” is that individuals and their relationships matter.

So I thought: maybe it’d be helpful to prioritize these things. Maybe instead of “social media is good” or “social media is bad“, we can talk about where it properly fits in a broader landscape.

If I were making a marketing plan today – which I am – and I had to cope with a limited budget – which I do – I would start from the most important core tactics and work my way outward:

Email-based loyalty campaign

The most inexpensive marketing is to people who already know you and buy from you. Why do we obsess over these flashy new leads when we can do so much more with the customers we already have?

Get permission to be in a relationship with your customers, then do a damn good job of staying in touch. Email is the best way to do this. The rest of your marketing should lead to this permanent, growing business asset (the almighty “list”), rather than put-put-putting along with one-off messaging campaigns. It’s about the people, stupid.

Conversion-oriented website

Okay, fine, but how do you get those emails in the first place? Build a website with the focused purpose of converting traffic into email subscribers. This might require publishing a newsletter, offering discounts for frequent shoppers, or something else creative you come up with.

Your website should be a destination worth caring about, but that’s not enough if you’re a marketer. It also has to lead somewhere.

Organic search

Now that you have the engine of your website running, trick out the body. Pump out content, tools, and dowloadable content – all the things that would encourage someone to link to you. Say something smart, funny, or controversial. Do something creative, new, or crazy. Add to it constantly.

Paid search

Paid search advertising is the perfect way to test out your messaging. It’s not cheap, but at least you only pay if it works. As you learn what works and what doesn’t, optimize this campaign so that you’re spending just enough money that the visitors you attract convert into subscribers at a ratio where you’re minting money. Then this is an investment, not an expense.

Social media

Only after you have those first four core tactics in place should you be getting yourself seriously into social media. You have the engine running, the people and money are flowing, and you have a purpose to your social media. With the right metrics in place to measure your marketing engine, you have something to compare the social media against — both in cost of time and money.

Remember, social media is a cocktail party. Go out, shake some hands, and find out what makes people tick.

Display ads

Now, you’re talking to the fanatics in your industry. You’re getting a feeling for what the web community around your product or service is like. You know who the players are, what the big ideas are, and where the eyeballs go on a daily basis.

Pull out the checkbook and buy some ads on targeted websites. You’re bound to find some hidden gems that don’t break the bank.

What about everything else?

There’s a lot more to a marketing plan than these tactics (or tactics at all, for that matter). My point today is just that social media should be the candy coating around a healthy marketing pill.

Wait, it was an engine analogy…

Social media is your car’s odometer, speedometer, and the new paint job that attracts pretty girls.

Wait, social media was supposed to be the fuel…

I give up. Go tweet yourself.

This is a post from the Josh Klein Web Strategy blog.

Where does social media fit in a marketing plan?

This is a post from the Josh Klein Web Strategy blog.

Mistake on Yesterday’s Post

*          *          *

June was a bad month for the music industry. The first deaths were in trade magazines Radio & Records and Performing Songwriter magazines. Then the 38-year old JazzTimes temporarily suspended publication.

And following the passing of Michael Jackson, VIBE magazine, founded by his mentor Quincy Jones, went under.

According to the blog Magazine Death Pool, other fatalities included Nickelodean Magazine and Children’s Digest. Think of the children.

The magazine industry is in a tough spot. Readership is down due to the encroachment of free online content. Advertising is down due to fragmented attention, not to mention the inability of advertisers to prove the return on investment during a recession.

Being on the ad buying side, it’s been some time since I’ve seen a rate card I didn’t scoff at, particularly given the epidemic of subscription inflation. I still get a copy of every magazine I’ve canceled.

Magazines have a broken business model.

But they’re not broken because of what you think. Magazine people think blogs are killing them, and their only solace is that they’re not the Newspaper industry.

Time for a wake up call: self-publishing and micro-publishing from faux journalists isn’t the problem. The problem is not that your content isn’t worth reading anymore because some non-reporter is saying something smarter than you.

The real problem is that your advertisers are publishing, so they don’t need you anymore.

You aren’t losing the game; you’re playing the wrong sport.

It no longer makes sense for a business to spend money to get attention from a magazine when they can publish to get the attention themselves.

It used to be very expensive to reach an audience, so it made sense that businesses would specialize in attention-gathering, and others could outsource the expensive first point of communication to these professionals.

These days, it’s not as expensive to reach an audience, so advertisers are bringing publishing in house.

This is a shift in their business model, and the reason magazines are slipping rather than imploding is that many businesses are just as intractable in their ways as you are. But this is changing quickly.

It used to be that your advertisers were only in the product business. They sold widgets. Now they’re in the content business, just like you.

You’re competing with your own customers.

Only, they’re able to do it better than you. They have narrow focus and niche audiences, but more importantly, they’re not involving a third party that subverts the trust they win from their readers.

You are.

Magazines are in the business of attracting the finite attention of thir readers, then selling that attention — attention supposed to be “spent” on journalistic content — to advertisers. That means magazines have to balance the interests of their readers against those of their advertisers.

So how do magazines fight back?

It doesn’t require enough specialization to publish solely to attract ad revenue anymore. Fragmentation — along with socioeconomic contributors like the end of cheap energy, the continued urbanization of America, and hyper-localization — are leading to the death of the mass medium.

So as advertisers encroach on  your territory, encroach right back on theirs.

Popular magazines “in decline” still have millions of subscribers. These subscribers are a willing audience of a specific demographic you’re intimately familiar with.

What if you were starting from scratch? What if your past business magically disappeared, all your overhead was gone, and the thing you had left was a list of several million people fitting a specific demographic, checking their mailbox next month to see what you had sent them?

What would you send them?

This is a post from the Josh Klein Web Strategy blog.

Preview: Saving Magazines