Come for the Ride…

At the most recent meeting of the Atlanta Gang of 5, the subject of marketing using SEO/SEM came up.  Like most conversations about SEM, the discussion went something like this:

Person 1: I spent $$$$ testing Adwords but I’m not sure if I’m doing it right.  It drove some sales, but it didn’t really pay out so we stopped it after X weeks (or months).

Person 2: I also spent $$$ testing Adwords.  It worked but I think I need to hire someone to do it for me cause I’m sure it could be doing better.

Person 3: (Nodding)  We dropped $$$$$$ into Adwords but it really feels like a full time job monitoring it. I wish we had the resources to do it but we don’t.

As someone who used to manage pay-per-click campaigns for various brands, it makes me cringe a little to hear entrepreneurs dive in head first without checking to see if there’s water in the pool.  However, they really can’t be blamed because sometimes large brands do the same thing - the only difference is they have more budget and therefore, more room for error.

Confession: I’ve even done the same… throwing some money in the pool just to see how things would run without properly setting up all the metrics.

The truth is most business owners test Pay-Per-Click to check one thing - Will this drive me more traffic? The answer to this question is a 100% YES! Just like any other marketing tactic, if you throw any money at it, expect to see a lift in traffic through that medium.  However, if that’s the extent of your test, most of you will feel a little empty inside even after getting the answer you want.  After all, it’s similar to playing the slots - will this machine pay me if I put in some money?  Eventually yes…

So how do you REALLY test PPC marketing and when should you hire external help?

With so many things that can be tested and refined in a PPC campaign, if you are new to SEM and can not optimize your campaign in at least 10 ways (seriously, that’s 10), you should probably outsource your campaign creation and let them run the show for at least 2-3 months until the campaign is somewhat optimized.  At that point, if the contract is in your favor, you can hopefully keep the campaign and the work and continue running it on auto pilot for a few months until it needs to be tweaked again.

The reason I would recommend this technique is because most entrepreneurs take risks and many dive into PPC without being properly trained in it. (Let’s face it, it’s what we do.)  Unfortunately, this means throwing money away at an unoptimized campaign and giving up on the whole thing weeks or months later when the ROI doesn’t work out.

Pay-Per-Click can be great at helping you make money!  In fact, the only reason it’s popular IS because it has helped so many mom and pop shops reach the right audience amongst the masses on the internet.  If you’re still not convinced at hiring a professional is the right thing to do (at least for the setup), my next post will highlight some of the things you should look out for when setting up PPC campaigns.

Twitter - whether you know what it is or not is the one company (next to Yahoo!) that has been in the news in 2008 for its ability to fail.  What started out as the golden child for social media experts and early adapters now face constant struggles to stay alive.  Let’s face it… when your designers need to get cute with multiple ERROR screens because there are several ways to kill the system - that’s a problem!  Sending out a hot vet assistant telling me my dog has cancer does not make the issue any easier to swallow.  The choices are to operate or to put it down. Note: multiple hot assistants wouldn’t help either.

What irks me about the Twitter platform is that it’s being used as a live communication device.  A few of my friends have subconsciously stopped emailing me and have instead turned to direct messaging me on Twitter to get my attention.  That’s fine for recreational purposes or as updates to their status on a microblog but when things are important or when things need my immediate response, Twitter is still failing miserably at this.

In the last week or so, I’ve noticed overall updates have been down.  Whether that’s people abandoning the platform or Twitter’s throttling their usage, I don’t know.

I’ve noticed with the most recent Twhirl upgrade, Twitter has dropped its hourly API quota from 70 down to 20 requests per hour.  First off, just because you managed to keep your system alive (barely) on life support, doesn’t mean it’s still good or useful for the general public.  If email only allowed 3 gets an hour or if cell phones only allowed access to calls and data within some throttled time blocks during the day, would it still be useful for communication?  Would anyone trust it enough to rely on it knowing it’s in a constant state of cripple?  The answer should be “No” to the above 2 questions.

I’m really baffled as to why Twitter think it’s okay to scale it back to this level of service when its indirectly competing with other forms of communication.  It’s like a rat competing to be the messenger in a room full of pigeons.   Let’s be real here… the only time I would personally accept a delay in live communication to the point of crippling the experience would be if we’re doing live chat with someone who lives close to the Sun.  Being that it takes light 8 minutes to travel between Earth and the Sun, I guess I would have to settle for delayed responses even though I’m sure engineers would try to find a way to make that closer to real time than Twitter’s proposed solutions.

Maybe they need to hire some real startup people - you know, the ones who have built extraordinary things without the luxury of doing so in a funded startup.  I fail to see how $15 million (and more) can’t create a stable system… at the same time, maybe they should just shut it down and start over.  Sometimes it just makes more sense to buy a new car than trying to fix a lemon.

Everyone on the internet is running around like a headless chicken saying video is the next big thing.  Of course, since it IS the next big thing, many ad agencies have been trying to take advantage of viral videos to help boost their clients’ brand into the buzz world.  However, from the many attempts I’ve witnessed and the storyboards that have been presented, most of them have been or would have been huge flops.

In most cases, technology is not the issue.  A viral video is all about the content and in exchange for great content, the viewers are willing to sacrifice quality and post production touchups.  So why is it that a 13 yr old girl can capture a random event on their cell phone and have it be more viral than a professional commercial that cost $25k to produce?  What is it that teens and social media experts get that traditional brands don’t?

The missing element is… the danger zone.

Viral videos for the most part crosses the safety line and bring in to light something that shouldn’t be seen.  Now, when I say “shouldn’t,” it doesn’t necessarily mean a sex tape even though those are pretty viral.

Shouldn’t includes a number of things such as:
- the likelihood of witnessing that in our lifetime is close to nil
- something created that was meant for private viewing
- something so amazing you just had to pass it on so you can discuss how awesome it was
- a new idea or process that invites imagination and wonder
- a train wreck or something so dangerous that you simply can’t look away
- something so stupid you just have to pass on because it made you feel smart
- something witty caught on video that made you smile after you watched it

Unfortunately, the above is where most brand marketers get stuck because they aren’t allowed to cross the safety line into the danger zone.  In fear of offending anyone at all, most brands have chose to stick around in the safe zone when producing videos or worse, they try to take it half a step further by faking the funny or faking the dangerous situation by staging the act, which usually bombs miserably.

Most people can tell a genuine smile from the fake one you do when posing for a camera and that 6th sense is heightened 10 times more when watching it in video form.  So if you’re looking to do a viral (promotional) video of your product, make sure you ask yourself if your video crosses any of the lines mentioned above.  If it doesn’t, you’re probably going to waste a lot of money and time to learn the hard lesson.

Here’s one that was trying to cross into the danger zone.  They were close… but just not quite there.

Summer is here! Well, for everyone who isn’t working in a startup who has had a chance to look outside, summer is here. For the rest of us, this seems to be the time when things slow down, motivation is low and when potential customers are harder to reach as they disappear for weeks on various vacations.

So what do you do when you want to move at the speed of business but business is crawling like a snail? Change things up!

When I worked in the corporate world, summer was the time when all the co-workers wanted to duck out early, go out for lunch, and stay at home on Fridays. Not a lot has changed. If you’re feeling the cabin fever, schedule some networking meetings over coffee or lunch outside and join the rest of the people in the afternoon Sun.

On the subject of scheduling meetings and making deals - avoid Mondays and Fridays. People are busy catching up on stuff from the extended weekends on Mondays and they’re either physically out of the office or mentally out on Fridays. Either way, if you want to be heard, try the middle of the week.

Do you really want to hurry up and wait? Sometimes it’s good (and healthy) to go with the flow and take a break from time to time. Now that we spend our days doing SEO and waiting for responses from various business people, I find on some days I’m busy manning the computer when not a lot is going on. On some of these afternoons, I really feel like going to the pool and just hang out for a bit; and maybe I should.

Burning yourself out when everything is slow is just… bad.

I’ve read a multitude of blogs out there in the last day about how people were incredibly disappointed in what was actually shown at the 2008 WWDC yesterday. Whereas I can understand the disappointment for things like dual cameras for conferencing on the phone, I also understand that most wireless networks do not yet have the infrastructure to handle this sort of bandwidth. Let’s say you start selling 5-10MM more iPhones around the world and these people start to take advantage of this feature on a daily basis, whereas in the US we might be able to ramp up the necessary bandwidth, I hardly believe Denmark, Malta, Peru or Madagascar could handle this out of the box. Out of the box, everything works is Apple’s bread and butter. They understand that people will suffer with a few less features for a user experience not plagued with slow of buggy features (the Windows Mobile Task Manager is a perfect example of the sort of hack Apple has a knack for avoiding).

With all that said, what was shown was absolutely mind blowing. The developers who demoed their products simply blew me out of the water. I recall developing games in Microsoft’s MFC development environment in high school and simply being stonewalled at the obscurity and limiting nature of a development environment. I then look at a combination of what’s in the SDK (I downloaded it shortly after watching the Keynote video) and what was shown and I’m almost ready to delve into trying to create an iPhone app TODAY. The 3D game shown was nothing short of astonishing. The music app, Band, sold me when they got to the “Blues Music Keyboard” and seeing all the Modality Apps made me want to become a doctor. It may sound dumb to you, but this device is more than Apple’s next big money making scheme, this device really can enable the dreams of others (to quote Randy Pausch) by allowing greater flexibility in their day to day life. From presenting information never available to the public in such a rich manner (again, Modality apps) to keeping track of all your information in a centralized location with no fear of losing the data (MobileMe) to sharing your life  and everyday adventures with the easy of taking pictures and blogging through the iPhone 3G, I’m floored and almost ready to be one of the idiots in line on day one for these phones.

This phone is right now for the bleeding edge customer. The power user. We know what we’re doing and we use all features of the iPhone on a daily basis. However, the average user like my Mom, my Dad, my Fiancee and my Brother are simply going to be overwhelmed by a phone with many more features than it has. Apple is slowly allowing people to test and try the iPhone and get used to a PDA that works for the average person. Society as a whole is still getting used to the mobile enabled citizen and if they’re going to release a product that lives up to what we expect from Apple (ie. Perfection), they’re going to need more time to ensure that both the product works flawlessly and people are able to use this in such a way that their cited 90% satisfaction rate isn’t tarnished.

But that’s just my take on it, and though I always want more, I also want time to learn some of these features from a developer’s perspective before some more of these great jumps in mobile awesomeness.