MarketingSherpa Blog

Ann Rubin of Afghans for Afghans wrote in to say, per my Blog from last week, that she’s very interested in scanning in print versions of newspaper stories that have been written about her site because many newspapers delete or charge for older stories. Linking to the story isn’t an option anymore.

However, she asked, “If we scan the newspaper article and post it on a Web page on our site, do we need to get permission from the newspaper? Wouldn’t we otherwise be violating copyright?”

Yes, yes, yes. Such a good point! In fact you’ve got to watch copyright in three ways:

1. Ask permission before you re-use a story from any online or ezine publisher. This means you can’t copy and paste a story from someone’s site or email newsletter without explicit permission. No, the fact that a publication includes a “forward to a friend” offer does not mean you can cut and paste, or otherwise take a story out of context. You have to follow the publisher’s forwarding instructions so the rest of their content (such as copyright line, URL and possibly ads) are included as they want them to be.

2. Ask permission before you scan in a print story for your site. Or before you reprint a Web page or email newsletter for mass distribution. For example, you can’t have 250 copies made of a Web story about your company to hand out at your trade show booth if you haven’t asked the publisher first. There may often be a cost associated with it, plus the publisher generally wants to control what the story looks like (what kind of paper, placement of their logo, etc.) because it directly affects their brand.

3. Ask permission before you use any company, brand, Web site’s or publication’s logo or branded packaging on your site. (So many Webmasters forget this!) Most companies want complete control over where their logo appears. Many major brands will actually threaten you with legal action if you put their logo on your site, even if you did so in a positive manner. Yes, this includes magazines and newspapers.

If you get a mention in, say, BusinessWeek, that doesn’t mean you can stick either the BusinessWeek cover or logo on your site unless you ask first. Some marketers get around that by using a logo-sort-of-look-alike. That can be dangerous too. Be careful, why risk upsetting the media you rely on to promote you?

MIT’s Technology Review just announced that when they started offering e-version subscriptions in June, their site’s magazine
subscription sales rose by 25% (mainly to foreign readers who didn’t want to pay or wait for mailed copies), which equaled about 600 paid $30 annual subscriptions sold in “fewer than three days.” As of Jan 2002, the magazine had more than 300,000 paid print subscribers, so e-version sales won’t make a huge slice of
the pie anytime soon. It’s interesting nonetheless.

Instead of putting the magazine up online as password protected HTML pages, or sending people a PDF of it, MIT invested in Zinio
Systems’ digital format, which is a lot like the Newsstand format for newspapers. It looks just like print, including layout and ads, but it’s on your laptop. Plus it’s searchable.

Does this mean people are happily reading their issues online now? I’ll bet a bunch of them are hitting their “print” keys and
making do with a stack of black and white pages from their printer. At least that’s my experience with the PDF sales in our own store.

Electronic buyers tend to want it faster and without paying customs, they still read anything longer than 2-3 pages in print
no matter what. Although the press release is careful to note that this e-circ qualifies as auditable readership by ABC (Audit
Bureau of Circulations) that doesn’t mean advertisers would be thrilled at how their ads turn out on all those black and white printers.

http://www.technologyreview.com/

How wacky is this? A guy with a Mindspring account has been signing up for opt-in newsletters with the aim of giving the
publishers a deliverability heart attack.

He’s set up his email account to send auto-reply to all incoming mail that looks identical to an AOL bounce message that says in part that all of the messages you are sending to AOL are bouncing. Right down to the number of the AOL techie to call if you’ve
got questions. So it looks like AOL bounced your entire issue to all AOL accounts that signed up for it.

I’m not allowed to give away any more details, but suffice to say we’ve seen a copy of this faux message because one of the publishers affected forwarded it to us and it does look awfully real. AOL wasn’t too happy about it either.

This afternoon Lyris acquired their customer SparkLIST. (Lyris both sells email list host software to other firms, and also hosts clients themselves.) Lyris CEO John Buckman gave me a buzz to say hi. Apparently they’ll be upgrading Sparky clients to Lyris v.6 which is, according to Buckman, more glorious in many, many ways.

Also, Sparky’s tech team, Stu, Mindy and Mike are leaving the glamour of Wisconsin to move to the West Coast to work for Lyris.
Where they may be warmer in the winter, but they’ll never find houses they can afford. Life is a tradeoff.

There’s a hot discussion on one of the e-publisher lists I’m a member of about what to do when folks want to buy multiple copies
of an ebook. Here’s the answer I posted there (bear in mind I’m a publisher who’s routinely asked for and gotten print buyers of $200 reports to pay me $125 per each additional copy they made of that report on their own copier machines):

Content is *not* valued by the media it’s delivered in. If that were the case all CD ROMs and DVDs would cost the same, and all
Web sites would be the same price.

You should keep your production costs in the equation simply to know what your margins are. However, beyond that you are selling
knowledge, a better life, a better business, more satisfied employees, trust in your brand name, etc.

For perspective: in the research report sales field I used to market $15k reports that were 10 pages copied and stapled together, while my former company also gave away copies of
expensively produced glossy 4-color magazines free to qualified readers. Production values didn’t equal value.

Content did.

Trust me on this one, I’ve marketed bulk and site license subscriptions to about everything you could name in my time. The bulk discounts are the same no matter what your production price is (as long as you can afford it).

Rough-not-to-be-taken-seriously numbers
5-10 copies – 10% off
11-25 – 20% off
26-50 – 30% off
50+ – call for quote

Freakish chance, Steve Outing who does a great new media column over at Editor & Publisher just wrote an article on SpamAssassin
including the idea I brought up yesterday about having a service publishers could use to run issues past prior to mailing to make
sure they will not be filtered too badly. I guess great minds think alike.

Anyway, as always Steve’s article on the whole spam filtering and delivery problem is well-researched and well worth reading if you
are an email publisher.

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/editorandpublisher/features_columns/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1570036

I hear one thing from every single email marketing expert I talk to. No matter what marketplace you’re in, there is a rule that holds true: Make your landing page (the page people click through from your email) reference your email as much as possible. The most disconnect there is between them, the lower your final conversion rate.

If your email campaign has a headline, the headline on the landing page should match it. Etc.

I was talking this over, with yet another marketer, today when I got an amazingly fabulous example of Best Practices in action in my own in-box from Old Navy. In fact it was so great, that I asked our webmistress Holly to post the email alert and the matching landing page up where you can see them here.

An additional note about this campaign (which cleverly mimics the Brady Bunch opening) is that because it mimics a TV show, it makes sense to use rich media. It’s a relief to get a campaign in my in-box that uses rich media because it enhances the creative message perfectly – not just because somebody thought it would be neat-o to add. It’s worth noting that Old Navy usually doesn’t use rich media for campaigns. This was a conscious choice rather than a rule of thumb. I’m lost in admiration.

Got ad creative in today from a sponsor that’s guaranteed to get our issue stopped at the border by spam filters because it has the word “free” in all caps, so I sent it back with some suggestions.

I also realized this means we really have to adjust our media kit to give the long list of stuff you can’t do in email these days. Which make me think, could there be an easier way?

Here’s my proposal: Somebody entrepreneurial please set up a site where publishers and advertisers can pay a monthly fee to put their proposed copy into a form, submit and have it come out the other end with stuff that might get it filtered highlighted.
Anybody up for it?

Re: My question a few Blogs back about publishing on 9/11 this year, Rob Morrow writes, “I, personally, will be turning my site (www.1wizards.net) black on 9/11/02 with just a message stating that it’s been a year and Bin Laden is still out there somewhere. On that date, I think that no news is bad news!”

Ankesh Kothari, of MaxMailer, says, “Living in the real world, if we don’t publish a condolence note on that day, we will get lots
of hate mail; telling us in many words that we are inhuman.

Just writing a condolence note on sending it to your list won’t bring in any cash. Hardly any goodwill too; as most of the publishers and newsletter owners will be writing a similar message. My advice would be to take the middle path: Write a bit of both.

Start with a paragraph giving respect. Then you could say something like: ‘People have not lost their spirit. The best way to show Osama Bin Laden that he can’t shake us is by following our routine and showing him that we are not affected by his inhuman act.’ Then follow it with your daily newsletter.

In the wake of AOL’s most recent site redesign which eliminated most ad pop-ups, iVillage has announced they are removing most advertiser pop-ups from their site as well because according to their own reader survey more than 90% of iVillage registered users really really hate pop-ups. Now their ad sales reps have to explain to advertisers who liked pop-ups’ responsiveness, “Yes, they got you lots of clicks, but do you really want clicks at the expense of negative brand awareness?”