Micro Persuasion

Search Engine Visibility and PR - An Edelman Digital White Paper

Regular readers here know that in addition to focusing on emerging technologies, I also have long taken an interest in how search engines are evolving. Fundamentally, I believe that Google is media and also every brand's home page. Therefore, search engine visibility (and all of the reputational concerns that go with it) are front and center an opportunity for the public relations industry to shine.

With this in mind, my colleagues and I have co-authored a 13-page position paper on Search Engine Visibility. We released it to our clients last month but now we are making it available to the public today at the Edelman New Media Academic Summit in Washington. You can download it here (PDF). It's also embedded below. This is the second in a series - the first is here.

In the paper we posit that today there are two primary search visibility tactics: Paid Search (more widely known as search engine marketing - SEM) and Optimized Search (e.g. SEO). Both of these are generally not managed by public relations professionals.

Now, however, there are two new disciplines emerging. And both sit squarely in the public relations professional's domain...

• Reputational Search - The premise and promise of Reputational Search is that any company, NGO or brand can apply a search mindset to tried-and-true PR tactics and, in the process, influence the search results around certain keywords.

• Social Search - With Google and competitors increasingly prioritizing social content from Flickr, blogs, Twitter and others in result pages, it is imperative that brands build out "embassies" in all relevant networks – places where employees work to serve the interests of the community, as well as their company.

If you read the paper you will see that we are convinced that search engines for the foreseeable future will have a critical impact on how brands are perceived - far more so than any single social network site, which tend to come and go. As always, we're interested in your views. Please share them below or on Twitter or Friendfeed.

Open publication - Free publishing - More steve rubel

Marketers Zero in on Utilities to Navigate the Attention Crash

For more than 100 years brand marketers have largely focused on push - a mix of tried-and-true tactics that include paid and earned media. However, that was before the Attention Crash, which is changing the economics of digital marketing.

The endless supply of content is taking a toll. It has forced consumers to make hard choices about where and how they spend time. Today people are browsing less and going deeper into a small number of sites. The exact mix of destinations change. What they have in common, however, is that they are all useful.

This habitual shift is resetting the way marketers think. To remain relevant today brands realize they increasingly have to create valuable utilities that consumers pull. These need to seamlessly integrate into the hubs where consumers are investing their shrinking attention.

Kraft, for example, circumvented the Attention Crash with the iFood Assistant, a database of 7,000 recipes that can be accessed from the iPhone. Even though it is clearly Kraft branded and costs 99 cents, the app has remained one of the top paid lifestyle programs on the iTunes store for nearly six months. (Kraft is an Edelman client but we didn't develop this app.)

Utility, however, isn't just about the iPhone or mobile applications. Others are successfully building relationships via rich iGoogle widgets and/or games that consumers find downright irresistible. So, the business case is simple enough. However, the economics are disruptive.

As more marketing becomes utilitarian in nature, marketers will need to invest in not only in developing "high concept" applications but also marketing them. It's very similar to Hollywood where studios spend millions on big-budget blockbusters that have no guarantee for success. Consider, for example, the typical iPhone application. iPhone development costs range from $20,000 for the basics, up to $150,000 or more, according to Forrester Research. That doesn't even include the budget to promote the application.

Unfortunately, this is the new reality of the digital age. Still, the economics and benefits of utility marketing are very favorable when compared to TV advertising - and more marketers will therefore shift their dollars. Success, however, is far from guaranteed.

The End of the Destination Web Era

Photo credit: Décoration du château de Versaille by Djof

For the last 15 years marketers lived like kings online. We built ornate palaces in homage to ourselves in the form of web sites and micro sites. Each acts as a destination that embodies our meticulous choice of aesthetics, content and activities.

We still put a lot of time, effort and money into erecting these palaces, much as Louis XIV did in planning Versailles. And, for the most part we have been rewarded handsomely for our efforts. For years consumers flocked to our sites, reveled in all we had to say, played with our toys and, sometimes, were motivated enough as a result to buy our stuff.

That's what life was like in the good old days. But now we're in the age of online enlightenment. People (rightfully) have reasoned that they too can be creators, not just consumers. Content choices became infinite and peers are trumping pros.

After years of erosion it now it appears the destination web era is drawing to a close. This a trend that digital thinkers like Om Malik have long noted. In fact, the numbers prove it.

In March the average American visited a mere 111 domains and 2,500 web pages, according to Nielsen Online. What's worse, our attention across these pages is highly fragmented. The average time spent per page is a mere 56 seconds. Portals and search engines dominate, capturing approximately 12 of the 75 hours spent online in March. However, people-powered sites like Wikipedia, Facebook and YouTube are not far behind, snagging nearly 4.5 hours of our monthly attention.

In the post-destination web era the secret to breaking through won't be advertising. A new study from ARAnet in conjunction with Opinion Research Corporation confirms what PR execs have known for years - we are far more likely to take action when reading online articles that include brand information (51%) compared to search engine advertising (39%) or banner ads (25%).

Unfortunately, digital marketing is still wired for the destination web era. To succeed going forward we have to change our thinking. "Earned media" through direct public engagement in the venues where our consumers spend time will become the only way to truly influence a behavior change. The greatest advantages will go to the first movers who embrace this shift. It's not too late.

Twitter's Monetization Strategy: Developers, Developers, Developers

There's endless speculation about how Twitter will make money - and when. Twitter is really hot right now, making it attractive to advertisers for both outbound marketing and deep insights. However, I don't think Twitter will be able to build a long term, sustainable business through advertising revenues. 

The brief history of online communities (all 15 years worth) informs us that it's virtually impossible to make money around them. No one has been able to build a sustainable business doing so that has lasted more than five years. The reason is, people online are fickle. We come and go. This is why I wrote that Twitter is peaking - at least as far as in its ability to grow users.

What Twitter has done, however, that very few companies have achieved, is build an amazing platform that developers love. That ecosystem, if they invest in it, changes the game. 

Suddenly, Twitter is no longer a web site. Rather, it is becoming the web's first major social operating system. Twitter is to rapid fire online communication what Microsoft is to PCs, Apple and Blackberry are to mobile phones, Google is to search and advertising and Facebook hopes to become to the social graph. The numbers from comScore don't tell the real story. This BusinessWeek photo essay, which shows the innovation in the platform, does.

If Twitter invests in growing its platform and empowers developers to do more with its API (i.e. build profitable companies), it can create a remarkable business much as these other giants have before them. The beauty of it is they will never have to worry about the ever cyclical online advertising market or the fickle consumer who is in search of the next hot site. What's more it can spur all kinds of innovation, as the platform has already done.

This is the surest path for Twitter: mold the robust platform into a social OS and add premium services for developers and Twitter could become a giant business that weathers the ever-changing fickle nature of online communities. Choose instead to focus on growing site traffic and advertisers and it will fall prey to the same fate as The Well, GeoCities, Tripod, ICQ, Friendster and every community that walked before it.

So Twitter, be Microsoft, not AOL. Focus on the developers. Enable them to monetize and to grow with you. Become the Internet's first social OS and the rest will take care of itself. Do not chase Madison Avenue. Build the platform, monetize it with value-added services and inspire innovation and Madison Avenue and the rest of the world will plug into you.

The Future of Advertising: Just Ask "What Would Google Do?"

Photo credit: WWGD & Jeff Jarvis at the Frankfurt Buchmesse

Jeff Jarvis' new book, What Would Google Do?, is a must-read and a real eye opener. Here is a Q&A that Jeff graciously participated in for my column in Advertising Age...

How Google is Changing Advertising Agencies

Jeff Jarvis Suggests Asking "What Would Google Do?"

In just a little over 10 years, Google has built a business that is impossible not to admire. In fact, its success begs the question -- what would Google do (WWGD)?

Media pundit and thinker Jeff Jarvis tackles this question head on with a new book by the same title. In "What Would Google Do?," Jarvis breaks down Google's practices into 12 distinct rules and then applies them to aging industries like media and advertising.

I interviewed Jeff by email on Google's model to get his thoughts.

Steve Rubel: Since you titled the book with a provocative question, I will start the same way. If Google were an ad agency, What Would Google Do? How would they run it?

Jeff Jarvis: I'd say we already know: Google is a new form of agency-as-platform.

As Publicis' Rishad Tobaccowala pointed out in my book, Google served an entirely new population of advertisers who didn't have agencies and that enabled it to set new rules. Google sells performance instead of scarcity (a lesson the rest of media must learn in this post-scarcity economy). Because it rewards relevance, it encourages better, more effective advertising.

Through search, Google enables any brand to speak with customers without advertising. Google still does business with the agencies, of course, because they hold the checkbook -- and that is delaying the tectonic change that will come to advertising as it has to music, newspapers, TV, and radio. It's coming.

Mr. Rubel: A book, however, is very un-Google, as you noted in several places throughout. It's ranking well on Amazon. How did you apply the lessons in WWGD to the way you wrote/marketed the book and what can digital marketers learn from your experience?

Mr. Jarvis: As I write this, the book is up in the 500 range (on Amazon) and, of course, I hope this Ad Age coverage gets it back up to at least 100!

I do confess that in seeking this old-media attention and in publishing an old-media book -- instead of just putting it all online, where it would be searchable, linkable, correctable -- I am a hypocrite. I did not eat my own dog food. Why? Because the book industry still works well enough to pay me an advance. Dog's gotta eat, you know.

My publisher, HarperCollins, is trying many new things. They had me produce a 23-minute, sitcom-length video version of the book. We put full text of the book online (in a widget that that Google can't search). I shared 30 days worth of excerpts on my blog. Most important, the book began on my blog a few years before it was published -- as I explored ideas there and got help, even an entire chapter, from my readers -- and the discussion continues there and in Twitter now (I love seeing readers tweet their reviews and quotes).

Where this should go: Readers should be able to buy access to an author's ideas in all media at once. I'm impressed that O'Reilly books offers a lifetime subscription to updates of its digital titles. By the way, I asked in my hardback edition whether the paperback should be ad supported; this wasn't met with a resounding yes.

Mr. Rubel: In the book you stress Google's relentless focus on the consumer. And you wonder whether focusing on the consumer over the client makes more sense. Isn't this what ad agencies already do? And if not, what needs to change?

Mr. Jarvis: In the book, I quote an Australian ad exec saying that agencies should pay attention to clients instead of consumers. Then I quote the ever-quotable Toboccawala saying that agencies should focus instead on their customers' customers. I'd vote for the latter. The real question is whether agencies -- ad or PR -- can truly act as consumers' advocates. If a company has great customer service, do customers need advocates?

Mr. Rubel: Are customer service and peer-to-peer advocacy the new advertising? And if so, how does that change the ad industry?

Mr. Jarvis: Advertising is failure.

If you have a great product or service customers sell for you and a great relationship with those customers, you don't need to advertise.

OK, that's going too far. There is still a need to advertise -- because customers don't know about your product or a change in it or because, in the case of Apple, you want to add a gloss to the product and its customers. But in the book, I suggest that marketers should imagine stopping all advertising and then ask where they would spend their first dollar.

In an age when competition and pricing are opened up online and when your product is your ad, you need to spend your first dollar on the quality of your product or service. If you're Zappos, you spend the next dollar on customer service and call that marketing. If the next dollar goes to advertising, there has to be a reason -- and if the product is good enough, that reason may fade away.

Mr. Rubel: You also talk a lot about transparency. Google, however, isn't the most transparent company. What does the ad industry need to change here?

Mr. Jarvis: Google is not perfect. It expects us all to be transparent -- so we can be found in search, so we can benefit from our Googlejuice. But Google is not sufficiently transparent about its ad splits or its Google News sources. So, as our parents would say, this may be a case of doing what Google says more than what it does.

Online, it only makes sense to be as open as possible, to have answers to every possible customer question online, to join in conversations with customers as people rather than institutions. Transparency leads to trust. Transparency is just good business.

Mr. Rubel: How does WWGD apply to b-to-b marketing?

Mr. Jarvis: Customers are customers, communities are communities. In the mass of niches, there's nothing to stop every community -- moms or plumbers or chemical engineers -- from joining together online and sharing their knowledge and interests. See the success of blogs such as TechCrunch and PaidContent with targeted B-to-B content, advertising, job boards, and events. In the highly specialized world of online media, B-to-B represents a big opportunity.

Mr. Rubel: If Google were a Super Bowl ad, what would it look like?

Mr. Jarvis: It wouldn't. Google does not treat us as a mass. And it has better ways to spend its money.

Mr. Rubel: Can advertising become a platform?

Mr. Jarvis: In a sense, Google is that. It provides the means for anyone to reach anyone, whether through ads or through their own sites and conversation. This, I believe, is Google's greatest lesson for media, advertising, marketers, as well as government: provide a platform for your customers and communities to succeed and you, too, will succeed.

Is that advertising? Well, if we redefine advertising, it might be. Most every company and brand can become platforms for their customers and except for the means to accomplish that, there's nothing new in this. A great company always helps its customers do what they want to do. That's a platform.

Mr. Rubel: What parts of the advertising assembly line (e.g. research, creative, media buying, PR, direct, digital, etc.) has the greatest risk of getting Googled or the greatest opportunity to become Googled -- and why?

Mr. Jarvis: Everything is changed by the Internet, and not just by Google, of course: We have more means to learn more about customers today than focus groups or certainly panels, ratings, and samples ever told us.

Customers make the best creative when and if they recommend and talk about products. Media buying, I believe, will morph into network creation; in a mass of niches, there's opportunity in curating those niches to create critical mass and that work is being done today not so much by agencies but by technology, media, and network companies. PR becomes everyone's business in a company, which must have direct relationships with the public, person-to-person. Direct? The Internet is direct and we're still not done with the argument over whether it is anything more.

Everything in marketing is changed.

Mr. Rubel: Finally, in the book you wrote that "The agency and the advertising need to get out of the way in the relationship between customers and companies." This seems like it's an endorsement for public relations -- if it's done in such a manner. Yet, you are sour on PR and lump its future as questionable with the legal profession. Why? And what needs to change?

Mr. Jarvis: Though they can and certainly do use the Internet to improve their businesses, PR and law can't take on all the attributes of the open age because they serve clients and thus can't be transparent or consistent. The true test of a firm's willingness to prove me wrong would be firing a client that doesn't act Googley. I don't see that happening often.

Having said that, I know what you're fishing for here: If -- in my radical oversimplification -- advertising is failure and relationships are everything, is PR in a better position strategically than advertising?

Well, maybe, but there is this: A company and its employees must cultivate direct relationships with customers and communities without middlemen. So what is the role of the PR agency? It can advise and goad a company to build those relationships. But then, like a good consultant, it needs to get out of the way, to leave. I doubt we'll see that, either. The economics of agencies are built on getting clients to spend more, of course. So the real question is whether new economic models can support both agencies and Googlethink.

Forrester Says Paying Bloggers is OK Provided There are Disclosures

Forrester Research is out with a new brief this morning by analysts Sean Corcoran, Jeremiah Owyang and Josh Bernoff that says that sponsored conversations on blogs - akin to what how Chris Brogan partnered with KMart - are going to become more commonplace. Further, they recommend the tactic provided that there are clear disclosures all around.

Sponsored posts are nothing new. Although the tactic always raises a fair amount of controversy. Daring Fireball, one of the most popular Mac blogs, regularly runs sponsored posts inside its feed. Techmeme has them on the site too. However, where these are different is that they act more like advertorials. Where it gets prickly is when bloggers themselves write about their personal experience with a product (usually balanced) in exchanged for compensation.

Forrester makes five recommendations in the brief: mandate disclosure, ensure freedom of authenticity, partner with relevant blogs, don't talk and walk away. All good advice. Further, as you can see from the chart below they sit sponsored conversations somewhere between advertising and PR in the matrix.

Source: Forrester Research, Inc.

The report misses something, however. This is nothing new. Magazines have run advertorials for years. And radio stations run promotions where the DJ gets involved. What is new is that on many of these sites the editor and publisher are the same individual. There are no hard church/state boundaries as there are with other media.

The way to get around this is to write and submit your own content as a sponsored post. Have the blogger run the copy but with an advertorial label. This has worked in magazines for years. 

Further, I would suggest working with an organization that represents bloggers and has experience running such programs - such as Federated Media. In addition, sponsored conversations work best when you integrate tactics across the spectrum that Forrester has here. Sometimes, earning media can lead to additional opportunities to get to know the personalities behind a blog and then additional opps. down the road.

However, on the whole, I agree that we're going to see more of this in the future. I am hopeful that everyone, publishers and sponsors, will bring their ethical A-game.

Ads in Google News Turn it into a PR Playground

The Google News team blogs that contextual ads are now running alongside of news search results...

"What this means is that when you enter a query like iPhone or Kindle into the Google News search box, you'll see text ads alongside your News search results--similar to what you see on regular Google searches or Google Book Search."

Read between the lines and guess what that really means: Google News is now a PR playground. Given the relative ease of launching a simple Google Adwords campaign we're going to see a lot of companies - some legit, others not - buying up real estate on Google News solely for influence, not clicks. Google may bounce these ads if they don't perform - time will tell.

It's already happening. Here's a case in point. Last week an eagle-eyed reader alerted SEO blogger Barry Schwartz that one advertiser tried to use Google News sponsored links as a way spread fake news - in this case a false rumor that President Obama was killed. The ad, Schwartz notes, was pulled down. But you can bet there will be more. And clearly some people saw it.

On the whole, I am bullish about ads in Google News. The PR industry largely missed the first search engine marketing wave and I believe that, at least when it comes to smaller campaigns, we still have time to catch up. Richard Edelman, our CEO, is also thinking the same way (see point #3). For more, see this post from my colleague, Marhsall Manson, on how good SEO is an outcome of good PR. Ads on Google News will serve as just another log on the fire that will encourage PR pros to boost their search knowledge. 
However, the ethics issues around contextual news ads and search overall are huge, particularly on sites like Google News. It will fascinating to see what Google deems as kosher/not - and to what degree people in PR and outside may try to push the boundaries.

Guest Post: Leo Babauta on the Tao of Marketing

One of the five digital trends to watch as outlined in our white paper is what we're calling "The Power of Pull." In essence, this refers to creating value-added digital content and utilities that people will find on their own online and engage.

Leo Babauta of Zen Habits, author of the new best-selling productivity book, The Power of Less, is someone who shares our thinking so I have invited him to contribute the following guest post (although the views expressed are his own). We look forward to hearing your comments. Over to Leo...

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Recently I ruffled some feathers in the marketing and advertising communities when I recommended, in my free ebook Thriving on Less, that people avoid advertising as much as possible in order to avoid having new desires created in them to buy more.

Advertising and marketing is designed to create new desires in us, I argued, and if you're trying to live a more frugal (but more full) life then you should avoid advertising.

So Steve Rubel -- a man for whom I have much respect -- asked me what the marketing world should do in light of my recommendations to consumers (also known as "regular people"). It's a great question, and something I've dealt with myself as I've worked on marketing my blog (Zen Habits) and my book (The Power of Less) to good success.

I built Zen Habits from nothing, with no resources, to one of the Top 100 blogs in the world within its first year, based completely on principles of what I like to call "The Tao of Marketing" -- based upon principles found in Taoism. I've used the same principles to make my book an Amazon best-seller within its first day.

Let's take a look at The Tao of Marketing, and how you can use it successfully.

The Challenges of Marketing Today

We first need to assess the world in which we find ourselves -- to recognize the landscape for what it is, and to accept it and work with it. Marketers find themselves in a very different world than existed just a decade ago. The Internet has changed everything, from product marketing to personal branding to presidential campaigning. Just a few points to make:

1. In some ways, marketing is easier these days, as there are more viral ways to spread the word about a new website, product, service, brand.
2. In others ways, there are greater challenges, because there's greater competition -- anyone can compete these days, with unknown individuals (such as myself) having the ability to go head-to-head with the giants ... and sometimes win.
3. Even more challenging is the mindset of the consumer/regular person. We are more informed than ever before, often more cynical, less tolerant of spam or gimmicks or pushy marketers. We want things that are real, genuine, valuable. We can't stand slickness, overbearingness.

Given these points, let's take a look at what marketing was (in the days before the landscape changed) and what it can be, with the Tao of Marketing.

The Old Way

Advertising, to start with, has spent decades refining techniques that create desires within the consumer, and this method of persuasion is a form of control. And it works, even to this day. People who didn't know they wanted an iPod before, who didn't know they wanted an iPhone or Macbook Air, or a Google Android device ... will instantly crave it when advertising is done with them.

The problem is that with the economy taking a dive, people are realizing they have to change their habits. With this realization comes the realization that they've been manipulated by advertising for years, and that it has to change. More and more people are blocking ads on websites, are using Tivo to skip TV ads, are shutting off ad-supported radio in favor of digital music.

Marketing faces similar problems. Marketing of old was (and still is) a pushy industry, forcing a brand down people's throats. The pushiness reached a pinnacle with junk mail and then, when email became big, spam. It's aggressive and it worked for awhile but people got tired of it quickly.

The result is that they are much more resistant to any kind of aggressiveness, pushiness, and don't like being controlled or manipulated. The landscape has changed, and so must marketing.

The Tao Way

Marketers must adopt an entirely new strategy -- more than that, an entirely new mindset. They must get away from trying to create new desires in people, trying to push and force themselves on people, trying to control people.

Instead, find a more natural way. Find out what people want, and then give it to them. Offer them value, and they will appreciate that. Be a resource. Give things away. Don't force -- let them come to you, because of all the value you offer. Here's how:

• Accept things as they are. Marketing and advertising have tried to change people, but instead it's smarter to accept the landscape, and people, as they are. Learn to understand people, what they want, and give it to them. Don't change things to suit your needs, but change your methods to suit things as they are.
• Don't control. Let people be free. The content industry has tried to control people, without accepting the changing landscape of its industry, and it has backfired on them. Their controlling has pitted their own customers against them, and they're losing the battle. If instead they embraced the desires of people to be free, they could have gotten ahead of these changes, and given people DRM-free, restriction-free content to download and share. They could have found ad-based systems, or other business models, based on giving value to people. Controlling doesn't work these days -- let people be free.
• Don't force. Pushy marketing, forcing yourselves on people, is not acceptable anymore. Instead, find the path of least resistance. Be like water -- flow with the landscape. This means more flexibility, the ability to read the landscape as it changes, the ability to adapt with the changes and be what you need to be. Steve Rubel has done a great job of this, becoming an early blog adopter before the rest of the marketing world understood what blogging was about, becoming a Twitter power user when others are still trying to get it. He flows with the changing landscape, rather than trying to bulldoze it.
• Do less. Marketers tend to overdo things, which makes people sick of them, leery of their methods and message. Do less. If you find yourself doing a message blitz, back off. Create a more powerful and attractive message, and let it speak for itself. A great message will go viral, which is much easier these days with social media. But if a message isn't great, not only won't it go viral, but blitzing the message will create a negative effect.
• Do small things. Little things can go a long way these days. Doing nice things for bloggers, helping websites succeed, releasing something for free, giving away valuable advice and information, creating a useful resource, providing small daily tips through Twitter, writing a useful blog post, being friendly and kind to others online ... these little things can make a big difference over time. It might sound corny, but it's true. I've proven it with Zen Habits and The Power of Less, and Steve has proven it with Micro Persuasion.
• Be valuable. Give people what they need, give away value, and they will appreciate you for it. Creating a slick new website designed to go viral only works in planning meetings ... but creating a free tool to help people find what they need is valuable. Writing a blog to help them actually do what they want to do is valuable. Creating a forum to help them discuss what they want to discuss -- something they might not find elsewhere -- is valuable.
• Attract, don't smother. By creating value, a powerful message, you can get people to come to you, instead of trying to smother them with your message and brand. If they don't come to you, rethink the message, rethink the value you're offering. You'll need to get your message out there, undoubtedly, but do it with the aim of attracting, not smothering.

Read more from Leo Babauta at Zen Habits, or read his new book on achieving more by doing less: The Power of Less: The Fine Art of Limiting Yourself to the Essential ... in Business and in Life.

Five Digital Trends to Watch for 2009

This has also been cross-posted on the Edelman Digital blog.

In my role as Director of Insights for Edelman Digital I am writing monthly white papers for clients on key trends. Sometimes we will release these broadly. For the first one, I drew on members of the Edelman team, as well as third party research, to highlight five digital trends to watch for 2009. Each includes specific recommended actions.

Even though the economy is slowing, all signs show that audiences are still spending a lot more time on the web. Marketers need to invest to meet them there. However, what's changed today they are smarter about where they focus their time, dollars and energy. Experimentation is giving way to tactics that deliver ROI. These include public engagement, search and social networking — three themes that connect the major macro trends.

There are five trends covered in this white paper...

Satisfaction Guaranteed - Customer care and PR are blending as consumers use social media to demand service

Media Reforestation -  The media is in a constant state of reinvention as it transitions from atoms to bits

Less is the New More - Overload takes its toll. Gorging on media is out. Selective ignorance and friends as filters are in

Corporate All-Stars - Workers flock to social media to build their personal brands, yet offer employers an effective and credible way to market in the downturn

The Power of Pull -  Where push once ruled, it’s now equally important to create digital content that people discover through search

You can download the full paper here(PDF) or simply browse or read it below. I look forward to hearing your feedback.

Publish at Scribd or explore others: Research Business & Legal marketing media

Banner Ad Quality Sinks to New Lows

 

Seen a lot of big bellies on the web lately - like the ad above? How about ads you might normally see running on low-ranked blogs, like for Snorg tees (also above), popping up on mainstream news sites? Feeling like your credit might be in trouble, even if it's not? I would have the same feeling too judging by how many time trashy appeals for credit score reports are showing up on high-quality news sources. (Note - I am not picking on these products. For all I know they might be good.)

This is just an observation since I don't have hard statistics, but it seems like a lot of the banner ads from quality Fortune 500 advertisers have vanished as the economy shrivels. This despite signs that online advertising is alive and well. 

In some ways it feels like we're a time warp back to the early 2000s when mainstream brand marketers had yet to invest in digital advertising in a big way. That all ended mid-decade but now we're back in the dark ages for banners.

If ad revenues are up, so what's going on here? The investment may be shifting to higher ground.

Some will argue this is cyclical. Brand marketers will be back using banners once ad spending increases. But you can argue the opposite might be true depending on how long the economy remains in a recession. 

Banner ads have a notoriously low ROI. They are good branding vehicles but terrible for direct response and they require a significant investment to really be successful. You need to blanket the web with them. I'm inclined to believe that as marketers look for ROI in these times they will find success through search ads, public relations, email marketing and some, but not all, social networking programs. 

If they get comfortable with other tactics beyond display ads - and the ROI is proven - then it could spell even more trouble for media companies that depend on banners for the bulk of their revenues. Reduced investment increases inventory, reduces the prices (and quality) and creates a vicious cycle. 

So will quality banners be back? Yes, but not at the rate of adoption we saw before the economy began to sink. The money will have moved by then into other areas.

Is the Google Cookie Tracking Everyone's Surfing Habits?

Photo: Google Cookie by Massless on Flickr

Note update from Google at the end of this post.

Google tonight made an important change to the Google Ad Planner that - at least as I read it - means they are now tracking every site you visit via a Google cookie and serving the aggregate data up to advertisers. If I am wrong I hope someone will tell me. (If this post is wrong I will correct it - but this is how I am interpreting what Google has put out there so far.) 

Let's take a look at the facts. 

First, Google yesterday made some subtle changes to its privacy policy. Coincidence? Maybe.

Second, according to the Google Adwords blog, the search engine has now added a new site traffic metric in Ad Planner called Unique Visitors (cookies). This, according to Google is a new cookie-based metric that "help(s) you cross check and compare metrics, similar to Google Analytics unique visitor metrics."

The help page goes a little bit further, saying that unique visitors (cookies) is "the estimated number of unique cookies on a site. The unique visitors (cookies) metric is more similar to data from server logs, analytics applications, and ad servers."

Google does not provide any additional details on how they are gathering the data from cookies. Is it possible that this means that as long as you have visited Google once and get cookied that they are now tracking every single site you visit, even if you didn't get there via a search? It's unclear. But it sounds like it. I hope they will be more transparent.

However, if this is true, given the huge number of people that have done at least one Google search (e.g. everyone) that sounds like they are collecting a staggering amount of data. And something that might alarm privacy advocates while at the same time creating the largest consumer panel on the web - e.g. everyone, except those who delete their cookies.

UPDATE 1/30:: A Google spokesperson emailed in the following statement in response to my post... 

"Google does not track users in the manner described in the article. We do not track every site every Google user goes to, nor do we have the capabilities to track in this manner.

The updates to our privacy policy made on Wednesday refer to data collection only for the purpose of detecting and preventing fraud or other misconduct; Google Ad Planner is not using any of this data in our enhanced features. There is no relationship between our updated privacy policy and our updated Ad Planner features."

Seems to make sense. However, it doesn't explain where the cookie data comes from. Others point out in the comments that Google has a lot of cookies sprinkled across the web through Doubleclick, etc. and that - in theory - they could triangulate the data. I have emailed Google to see what I can find out.

IBM Turns Old NYT Editorial and PR Into Ads

What the Internet does - and quite well - is blur lines.

Where once there was social media and media, that's no longer true. All things social are media and all things media are social. Where once there was PR and advertising, the lines of influence today are grey thanks to new paradigms. And where once there was display advertising and editorial, today things are not so black and white anymore. 

Here's one example that certainly got me thinking.

Last night when I was on the New York Times web site, a new ad campaign from IBM jumped out at me. It was startling not because of its imagery or messaging but for its unique approach.

The campaign is different in that the ads curate archived editorial on the environment from the Times and displays it right in the unit itself. The reader doesn't need to leave the page he/she is on to peruse the articles. Branding is light and the focus is on content. Needless to say, since all of the articles are by star columnist Thomas Friedman, the writing is strong. 

As you can see from the screen grab below, the Times calls the program "Sponsored Archive." Some of these articles highlight IBM media coverage. So in effect, IBM is turning positive PR it generated with the Times - in some cases two years ago - into fresh advertising.

Disclosures make sure the campaign is indeed totally ethical. At the very bottom of the ad unit, you'll note, that the Times clearly says that the units are ads, that the reprinting was paid for by IBM and that the editorial staff was not involved.

Now you can argue this isn't anything new. For years magazines have featured advertorials that are written by journalists on staff but paid for by advertisers. Still, this feels different to me. It opens the door to future where earned media becomes effective paid media.
It essentially takes PR and recycles it into a paid format that is quite effective. However it competes with more current editorial a reader is likely visiting the site to consume.

Like similar programs from Google, efforts like these unlock the hidden value in thousands of articles deep inside archives. It takes what's old and makes it monetizable. All of it has me thinking that this could be the beginning of a new era where archived content is turned into a form of advertising that's more credible than static, generally poor-performing banners.
More importantly, it takes the work that PR professionals do - earn media - and gives it even stronger legs than before and for years to come. And that's exciting.

With Google Killing Products, Is Reader Next?

UPDATED 1/15/09: Google exec Jeff Huber says there are no plans to shut Google Reader. However, I think the monetization issue is still out there for fodder. 

In a move that's been rumored for awhile, Google tonight said they shutting down or ceasing further development on five products: Google Video, Catalog Search, Notebook, Jaiku (once a promising Twitter competitor) and Dodgeball. None of these products makes Google a dime and it has me wondering what the future is for Google Reader.

In tough times, even the most stable Internet business focus on their core products. I recall back in 2000 or 2001 that Yahoo in its heyday shut down a bunch of products that weren't performing. Now Google is doing the same. If the products don't drive the big G's core businesses -  search, apps and ads - then they're at risk. These five clearly are in that boat.

Enter Google Reader, one of my favorite products and by far the best RSS reader on the market. However, Google Reader is completely un-monetized. Further, RSS adoption aint exactly a robust growth market. It's still for geeks. So I wonder if the economic storm intensifies what Reader's future is. My bet is that they will either shut it down, cease development or start to monetize it the way they are doing with Google Finance. More likely it's the latter. Even Google Maps now has ads.

If Google chooses to run ads in Google Reader, that creates an issue. Lots of publishers run ads in their feeds. If Google is competing against these with its own contextual ads in in Reader then what? It might just be easier for them to shut it down. Thank God for OPML exporting. 

All I am saying is: don't bet that Google Reader will stay the same.

Scribd and Zinio Offer Full-Length Books in a Browser

Two digital publishing sites have quietly started rolling out electronic books that can be viewed just using a web browser.

Random House is now offering several full length books for free on Scribd. The choices include The Surgeon, a 2002 novel by bestselling author Tess Gerritsen. What's also significant here is that Gerritsen is making the book available as a DRM-free PDF download.

Meanwhile Zinio, a site that offers digital magazines and textbooks, is expanding into mass-market books. Zinio has opened a digital bookstore that features a handful of titles. These include technology tomes like Social Media Marketing in an Hour a Day.

It's great to see the publishing industry experimenting with new formats. I personally think that book publishing is primed to see the same kind of disruption that the music business saw earlier the decade. This is why I am a fan of sites like Safari Books Online.

As mobile devices become more sophisticated, many consumers will aspire to do more in their browsers. This includes, for some, reading books. I think this will lead to a lot of experimentation with different business models. Two that come to mind are a-la-carte pricing for specific chapters and/or books that are free and supported through advertising.

Scribd, which has seen strong growth this year, and Zinio won't be alone. Google could start monetizing out of print books or even current bestsellers in a manner similar to what it has done with magazines. In addition, I would be highly surprised if by year's end the Amazon Kindle wasn't just a gadget but a platform that operates on many devices, including most mobile phones. They will increasingly face pressure from the iPhone.

It's early going and electronic reading is not for everyone. However, millennials and their younger sibings expect all media to be searchable and available in chunks. So this is why I am bullish about ebooks and think they will have a breakout year in 2009.

Popurls is My Pick for the Best Web Site of 2008

There were a lot of web sites I really used actively this year - the entire Google network, Techmeme, Friendfeed, Facebook and, of course, Twitter. There's one though that stood out: Popurls. It's a site that people don't talk about enough and that's a shame because there's so much to tout here. Popurls rocked this year and it's my pick for the the best web site of 2008. (Disclaimer: the Popurls page features a link to my most recent blog post but I am not compensated by them in any way nor does Edelman, my employer, represent or currently work with them.)

Popurls calls itself "the dashboard for the latest web-buzz, a single page that encapsulates up-to-the-minute headlines from the most popular sites on the Internet." The site was created by Thomas Marban. What it basiscally does is aggregate web sites all in one place - digg, delicious, news sites, Techmeme, key blogs, media sites (Flickr, YouTube, etc) and much more. The great thing about it is that you can easily personalize it to your tastes. As you use it, the site gets smarter and shows you recommendations. You can view stats for the web site here.

So why am I nuts about Popurls? There are many reasons...

• It's a digital curator that helps mitigate the Attention Crash


• It underscores that the world is flat (Thomas is from Austria)


• Popurls added a ton of features this year: you can sign in with Open ID or your Google Account, sharing, a live view and a cluster view, a deep archive, a zeitgeist and much more. He seems to be adding features as fast as Gmail and Friendfeed.


• They're also on Friendfeed, Twitter, Facebook, mobile devices, the iPhone and even the Wii.


• Popurls Live - track it in real-time like Twittervision.


• And finally, killer search - complete with search feeds.

However, there's an even bigger story here that everyone is missing. Thomas Marban is making money.

Popurls has sponsors. More importantly, the site is represented by Federated Media. Together they have come up with some very clever, deep brand integrations. For example, Populrs and Intel created Popurls Blue for IT managers. It also debuted a partnership with Epson.

It's too bad that Popurls doesn't get the props it deserves from the tech blogging community. It's an important site. They had a banner year and it's easily one of my favorites overall. Congrats to Thomas on a great 2008 and I look forward to seeing more innovation from him in 2009. A next logical step for them would be an API.

How Increasingly Intangible Media Will Bring Tangible Benefits

The following is also my column this week in AdAge.

Last time in this space I outlined my conviction that five years from now all media will either be completely digital or well on its way to becoming intangible. Two weeks later, the trend has accelerated.

Many are questioning the future of major newspaper companies who, faced with declining print ad revenues, are putting themselves up for sale or filing for bankruptcy. Meanwhile, the Amazon Kindle is sold out until February and book publishers like Random House are racing to embrace the iPhone as the next big growth market.

Even if you don't share my belief that all media will be digital by 2014, the migration is inevitable and it will have a major impact for advertisers. Here are three trends to watch.

Reach Devaluation

Although advertisers increasingly are exploring other metrics, i.e. engagement and reputation, reach still rules -- at least for now. Unfortunately, reach is slowly losing its value as media consumption increasingly moves deeper into the digital realm.

Where in the analog age we might be loyal to a given media brand, today's consumers are far more agnostic. We're more likely to dip into an array of online sources including traditional news sites and blogs  -- and often via search or social networks.

All of this diminishes the entire concept of reach. After all, if a site claims that it reaches millions but they're all just drive-bys, do such figures truly matter? In the years ahead, advertisers will rethink reach and not pay nearly as much for it as they did when they bought media based on a rate base and/or circulation. This will create tremendous disruption for media companies as they have to shift to new ways to prove their value.

Just-in-time Creative

Despite all of the advances in digital marketing, ad creative remains largely static once it's placed. It doesn't change based on news or memes like a mood ring might. But that's about to change.

As digital channels supplant tangible formats it will usher in innovation from vendors, the media and advertisers. The lines between widgets and banners will blur as creative becomes more utilitarian. Ads will change on the fly based on preset conversation and search data triggers. They will more appropriately reflect pop culture and the "memes" of the day and therefore be a lot more engaging and relevant.

Further, as consumers continue their transitory ways, advertisers will be able to better optimize the creative that runs across different sites. Ads will "talk" to each other so that marketers can identify consumers who have already been exposed to their creative on other sites and then serve up something more relevant to reinforce the initial impression.

Google Unlocks the Value of Back Catalog Content

Finally, there's no denying Google's power. It's becoming the primary gateway to the web for both consumers and the digital marketers. What's particularly noteworthy is how Google is digitizing old physical media.

For example Google Book Search now incorporates a vast print magazine archive, including back issues of "New York Magazine." Google News has likewise digitized old newspapers and Google Image Search has done the same with the complete "Life Magazine" photo archive online.

Media companies will increasingly partner with Google to bring their entire back catalog of content online. Right now these are not monetized with ads. But Google will surely layer contextual search ads into these databases and unlock the value of all of this content. This will offer advertisers all kinds of new opportunities and also throw publishers a lifeline as they make the transition from atoms to bits.

How Google is Unlocking the Hidden Ad Value in Old Media

Recently I outlined my conviction that five years from now all media will either be completely digital or well on its way to becoming intangible. Two weeks later, the trend has accelerated.

Many are questioning the future of major newspapers which, faced with declining print ad revenues, are putting themselves up for sale. Meanwhile, the Amazon Kindle is sold out until February and book publishers like Random House are racing to embrace the iPhone as the next big growth market.

However, Google is quietly throwing the media a major lifeline by digitizing old physical media. This is going to unlock the hidden value of archived content and make the media's transition from tangible to digital much easier to monetize.

For example, consider three recent moves. Google Book Search this week started to incorporate a vast print magazine archive, including back issues of New York Magazine. Google News likewise recently digitized old newspapers and Google Image Search has done the same in bringing the complete Life Magazine photo database online

So media companies are increasingly partnering with Google to bring their entire back catalog of content online. Right now only Google Book Search's magazine pages are monetized with sponsored links. But you can bet that Google will slowly and surely layer contextual search ads on top of all of these databases, create others and split the revenues with the content owners

Such a move will unlock the huge hidden value in all of this content. It will offer advertisers all kinds of new opportunities to reach consumers through pay-per-click venues. However, most importantly, it will throw publishers a huge lifeline as they make the transition from atoms to bits. Keep an eye on this space.

IAB's New Measurement Guidelines Are Trapped in a Time Warp

After months of work, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) today published a series of measurement guidelines, MediaPost reports. A quick look at the PDF reveals a clear set of guidance on how to think about audience reach either through uniques (cookies, browsers, devices and users), vists, video views and/or time spent. Anyone can comment on the guidelines here until January 20.

The good news is that page views - a dead metric - are barely mentioned at all in the 35 page document (PDF). The bad news is that the guidelines are trapped in a time warp and do not adequately provide marketers or the industry the standards we so desperately need to stack programs up against each other. Future proof they are not.

I have long been a proponent for standards, particularly when it comes to how we measure the impact of digital and social media programs. After all, if I said to you Yao Ming is "tall" you would know what I meant. Now on the other hand if I said the YouTube program we ran was "successful," would you know what that means? No. And that's because there's a 50 ways to measure a program and across several different vectors: reach, engagement, repuation and purchase/trial.

Now of course, the reach metrics that the IAB task force covers in this document are certainly one key vector for measuring programs. However, they do not nearly go far enough. They're beholden to an era when the reach dinos ruled the online landscape. They don't any more. It's a new era.

To be truly useful, the IAB needs to step it up in conjunction with its partners and not only offer guidance around reach but also other measures. They should span to include engagement, reputation/sentiment and, ultimately, stronger links to sales. Otherwise, I fear this effort is creating an outdated set of measures that are truly set in a bygone era when just a small number of sites ruled the roost. They're not the right system for a web as fragmented as the one we live in today.

Hopefully they will take another pass at the process and think broader. Reach is a good starting point but we need more. The IAB may need to branch out here and include stakeholders who can see the bigger picture. Most of those who participated in the process (big publishers, vendors, ad networks) have a stake in propagating reach as currency. We need some other kinds of voices in the mix.

How I Tweet Plus Thoughts on Twitter's Future

If you haven't seen it, Darren Rowse has a great new blog about Twitter called TwiTip. This week he and his followers interviewed me about how I started using the service, how I Tweet today and what companies who want to engage on Twitter should do. I won't steal his thunder, but want to share an excerpt here on a potential business model and where Twitter will be in five years time ...

If you were on the management of Twitter how would you monetize Twitter? (or would you) - question from @sachendra

It seems to me that Twitter is sitting on cash. It just needs to unlock the value. One way is through insights. I bet marketers would pay for advanced insights on what people are saying/doing. The other is through contextual search. Twitter should do a deal with Google or Yahoo to put pay-per-click ads on all the permalink tweet pages and then share the revs with users. The other idea is to monetize search.twitter.com, also with contextual ads. I think the only reason they’re delaying this is to make sure they don’t alienate their community. That’s the biggest risk they face.

Is Twitter just a passing fad or will it still exist in 5 years? How do you see Twitter evolving? - question from @AnitaBruzzese and @justcreative

I have been a participant and observer of online communities since 1988 - that’s 20 years. There’s no community where I am spending time today that was not born in the last five years. If I think back to what I used over the years it spans from Compuserve to AOL to GeoCities to Facebook, Twitter and Friendfeed today. No community has ever had staying power. TIme will tell if Twitter can break the trend. I don’t see a moat there yet.

Further, they’re at risk at becoming just infrastructure as people interface with the site through all of the other ports, most notably, apps, Facebook and Friendfeed. I hope I am wrong. Five years may not be a timeframe long enoughf for change.

The End of the RSS Full Text Free Ride

If had to pick a single technology that changed my life the most this decade it would be RSS. Phones and computers evolve, surely. However feeds, which I started reading in 2003, were a total game changer. Today I read almost 600 of them. In fact I view my entire reading list as a competitive weapon that allows me to help my company and our clients stay head of the curve.

There are two kinds of RSS feeds - full text and summary feeds. This is a topic that's often debated. Many bloggers syndicate the full text of their posts. In some cases, they monetize them by running ads in the feed. Other bloggers are happy to give away their content sans ads to build thought leadership.

Almost every large media outlet, on the other hand, only offers partial text feeds - also with ads. The reason is they want to monetize your eyeballs twice. They get you with one ad impression in the feed itself and then go for even more if/when you click through to read stories.

In the midst of a massive global downturn I suspect that many advertising-supported bloggers will follow in the footsteps of the larger media outlets and pull their full-text feeds. While none of the big tech blogs has done so just yet, the signs are there that they're perhaps feeling pressure.

Take a look at these screen captures from two great blogs in my Google Reader stream. The first one, from CyberNet News, features a giant banner ad at the top of the feed. For a long time ads in feeds, generally speaking, were really small and unobtrusive - no more. The image on the the bottom, from Googling Google, is a sponsored post that appears in the feed.

If online advertising should continue to shrink, RSS ads - which have not been exactly been a big winner - will get cut. And this will lead more ad-supported bloggers to start going the way of partial text feeds. Some, however, will recognize that remaining with full text feeds has its advantages. Further, they might be fearful of alienating their readers as other emerging voices happily offer the same news via a full text format.

I would also keep an eye on corporate bloggers. They almost always syndicate full text and have little to gain from traffic. Full text can build their brands. If corporations continue to become digital curators - which is happening - then they may use full text feeds to compete for attention.