MarketingSherpa Blog

My God. So annoying. Today at least 17 zillion media outlets picked up and ran the release on eFinance Insider acquiring our FinancialMarketingBiz newsletter.

It’s not that it’s such a bad thing to get press (thanks you guys!), but it just seems weird that this transaction, which really affects so few people in the general scheme of things, gets picked up by the world at large while other releases we’ve sent recently, such as the way email list owners (which is practically every company on this planet) should protect themselves against Klez, were almost completely ignored.

Do they train people in J-school that M&A matters more than stuff you need to know to run your business? Yup, I think so.

The funny thing is that Klez story and release circulated a whole lot of email discussion groups and Listservs ™. So our target market was talking like crazy amongst themselves as soon as they saw it. The press (with the exception of of ezine-tips.com) weren’t. Somebody smell disconnect?

I never, ever cut and paste post here from press releases, because, you know it’s lousy reporting and you deserve better. However, just a few seconds ago I got a release in my in-box that I think has such impact that it’s worth quoting. Here’s the note I got from David Libby of Libby Communications (the PR Guy):

“Fifty-two percent of 1,256 regular e-mail users surveyed by integrated email solutions agency Quris Inc. said they delete messages from unrecognized senders unopened. Another 21 percent said they may open them but are annoyed when they do. What’s more, these users said on average that commercial email overall makes up 66 percent of the volume they receive and that spam takes up 35 percent of their inboxes. Marketers who think that simply getting permission is enough should think again.”

I’ve asked David to shoot a full copy of this study to me so I can report on it further in next week’s MarketingSherpa issue. In the meantime, you can read the full text of the release, which has a few more factoids, at Quris’s site here.

This evening I turned down an offer to buy one of our publications. Today I also publicly announced that we sold one of our publications, FinancialMarketingBiz, to Bill Martin of eFinance Insider. So why was one a go-for-it and the other a no- chance? Company focus.

In the case of the first product, it’s near our core promise to all readers that we’ll help them improve their online marketing.
It fits and is easier to produce, sell and cross-sell. Whereas the second product was off-focus for us. It was a fun launch that didn’t affect most folks at our core. When it turned into a distracting product, our core suffered. Not worth it to us.

However, Bill’s core is eFinance business topics. Worth it to him.

My old boss used to draw a circle on a big sheet of paper whenever I wanted to acquire or launch something (which was pretty much constantly). The circle was our core audience and our core buyers. He’d say, “Ok, so draw where your circle intersects.” If my circle didn’t include enough overlap, he say, “No way.” Law of the land.

http://www.efinanceinsider.com

Reasons why I’m glad I’m not a corporate communications pro: It’s too easy for someone, anyone to conduct a smear campaign against your company online. This morning I tripped over one that someone is running on Raltor.com against Network Solutions/Verisign, when I made a typo on my way to Realtor.com (which is consistently one of the most trafficked sites online by women; so you can image how much traffic the common typo gets!)

The site is framed top and bottom by a bogus headline from “LosAngelesNews.com” which appears to be auto-dated as a few days prior to the date a visitor visits. Your first thought is, “Oh my gosh, how did I miss such a big news story?” Then the pop-ups start appearing; pow, pow, pow. I counted four, but there may be more. All saying the same thing with different art; Netsol is a “bad” company. I scrolled down to the copyright line on one of the bigger pop-ups (why would you copyright a smear campaign? Whatever), and it said (c) 2001. Which means this thing’s been going on for awhile.

How hard would it be for someone who really hates your company to do something similar? Not very I’m afraid. What’s the marketplace impact? Depends on the brand.

Are you violating your privacy policy without meaning to? When you use ASP services to “power” parts of your business, sometimes that means your customer’s email addresses can end up going to places you didn’t intend, or be seen by people you don’t want them to be seen by.

For example, a shopping cart system we’ve evaluated for our own store’s possible use, allows affiliates to get the email addresses of every sale made through their link. Another company owner just told me he was considering online invoicing ASPs to electronically bill his clients, until he realized that every client email address would go through and possibly be harvested by that ASP’s parent company’s systems.

It’s so easy to write “We never share our customers or readers emails with anyone!” in your privacy statement. It’s a lot harder to stick to that promise in real life.

Privacy software has no future. You read it here first.

I’m on a satellite connection to civiIization. Having read a lot about denial of service (DoS) attacks for my latest book, I was aware that hackers often plant software on unknowing computers on always-on broadband connections, like satellite. Stay with me here; I’ll be back at privacy software soon.

The first thing I did when I got satellite was to download personal firewall software (ZoneAlarm). Within 5 minutes, it stopped an intruder from connecting to my computer. I get chills when I look at the log files and see how many hackers are trying to sign onto my computer (over 100 in the last 24 hours).

Well, I upgraded ZoneAlarm to ZoneAlarm Pro a couple weeks back, when I thought I had a virus (upping general security precautions), and ZoneAlarm Pro comes with privacy software.

My choices were tantalizing: With high cookie control, I could surf in complete anonymity, since no cookies could load; with Medium cookie control, I could allow cookies for personalization, but forbid 3rd party (ad-tracking) cookies; or I could turn cookie control off and allow all cookies. Ha! As if I would ever allow 3rd-party cookies again!

Then I went to Amazon. Even with medium security, I was asked to sign in on every other page and couldn’t use any personalization features. At Hotmail, I couldn’t actually get IN to my inbox, although I could authenticate. At Bluelight.com, nothing would go into my shopping cart. I could go on.

All these sites rely on what my privacy software believes are “3rd-party ad-tracking cookies?” So it seems. Since there are too many major merchants I need to visit out there to get mad at all of them, I simply had to disable the privacy feature.

Bottom line: The only thing you can do with privacy software enabled is read the news. Who is going to settle for that?

Three things I’m loving about ProofReadNow’s site: the white paper “Can software replace human proofreaders?”, the line on the home page reading “Welcome Wall Street Journal readers” (if you got killer coverage, why not flaunt it?), and their pricing.

http://www.proofreadnow.com

Factiva just published their 2002 White Paper on the state of the B2B corporate information marketplace. You can download the prŽcis free at the link below. The 13-page paper is based on research by Outsell Inc who specialize in helping biz publishers sell databases and newsfeeds to corporate librarians and competitive intelligence pros (aka “knowledge
workers”) so it’s probably not bad. I’ll read, digest and report on highlights shortly. (No, I’m not going to depend on the press release for the summary!)

Later: Ok some factoids about this report:

-> 6,000 “knowledge workers” were interviewed in late 2000-early 2001. So these findings are not exactly hot news, nor do they reflect the profound (I think) changes in attitudes towards paid content since then.

-> Marketplace numbers also appear to be a bit muddled. The study precis notes that American companies “spend $107 billion a year paying their employees to search for external information” but then it never pins down precisely what “external information” means. Offline vs. on? Paid vs. free? Reading time vs. cash cost of information?

-> The study brings up some very valid perception vs. reality points that haunt us all still a year after the research was conducted. These are the perception on people’s parts that they can find anything “for free” online if they just look hard enough, vs. the reality that well, looking is hard, time consuming, and expensive. Naturally Factiva concludes that that’s why you need a Factiva feed into your intranet.

On the other hand, feeds such as Factiva only provide the big publishers’ content to corporate users. I’m not ragging on that, it’s a service that’s honestly needed and valuably provided. But the Web’s initial promise, back in the old days when we gray hairs remember, was that for the first time the smaller niche experts would be heard. Would have a platform to speak from.

People and publishers could grow online who it would be cost ineffective for content distributors such as Factiva to integrate into their systems and hence into the intranets of the Global 2000.

Yeah, you can get Bizwire releases, and major newspapers, and trade publishers with a certain massive amount of stories all gathered and coded in clever ways in an intranet feed. Factivia still hasn’t solved the problem to their business model; which is online the tiny niche guys win. And as small pubs get smarter about search engine marketing, they’ll win even more.

Study prŽcis at:

http://www.factiva.com/collateral/files/whitepaper_feevsfree_032002.pdf

A Sherpa reader who’d like to be known as “KC,” just cc:ed me on a letter he/she emailed to a business vendor he/she was considering using. KC is definitely a highly qualified sales prospect for this vendor, and after surfing the vendor’s site for a while, KC decided to click to see a demo of the vendor’s service in action.

That’s where the trouble happened, like many B2B marketers, this vendor’s marketing department put a free online registration form up as a barrier between the sales prospect and the juicy stuff so they could collect more data on prospects. Again, like many B2B marketers, the vendor forgot to include a link to their privacy policy next to their request for prospects’ email addresses.

KC wrote, “I got as far as [the registration page] before I high tailed outta there! I wonder how many other visitors bail out at this page? Have you ever considered posting a privacy policy? Your pitch is good and I would have really liked to take the test drive. But without some assurances that my personally identifiable information is not going to be sold, rented, or given to third parties once I sign up, I am afraid I cannot take the chance.

I am truly amazed that you have not gotten on board with the other quadzillion websites and positioned your company as one that can be trusted to conduct business forthrightly and treat their visitors with respect.”

Now, I happen to know folks at the vendor in question personally and I know they are cool about privacy; they would never do anything untoward with an email address they collected from their site. But, their prospects don’t know that. And in this spam-crazed environment, people are getting warier about handing their emails out daily. (I’m picturing a ‘Wariness Chart’ and that arrow is shooting up off the top edge of it.)

Often a quiet little text link will do better for you than a big blaring rich media ad.

This concept first came to the forefront when researchers found text-information gets noticed by the eye of the average surfer, while they tend to skip over color and graphics. Folks are surfing online for information, after all. It makes sense informative marketing versus interruptive marketing would work better online.

Then last year when search engine optimization and paid listings began to be the hot thing in online marketing, again it pointed out that effective creative is using words (text), not images. Very few marketers tell me anymore about the banners they bought against key search terms. Nearly everybody tells me about their PPC campaign.

Last night while surfing for house blueprints (dream a big dream), I noticed an unusual little text-ad “hidden” at the bottom of a site’s copyright fine print at the end of the page. I don’t remember a single ad from that site, or any other ad from the approximate two hours I was surfing. But that little text ad sure leapt out at me, even though it’s not for anything I’m interested in.

My theory: The (near) future of Internet marketing is text.