A few months back, I had a chat with Josh Stinchcomb, Publisher, Wired Digital. The company encompasses Wired.com, Ars Technica, Webmonkey and reddit — all of which feature user-generated content to some degree.
Josh and his team strive to build smart ways to engage their sites’ communities. I poked around after our conversation and realized he wasn’t kidding. Conversation is rampant on those sites.
When customers talk about your brand online, those conversations last for a while. They sit in article comments, in forums and on profile pages, waiting to be spidered by search engines. Every one of those enduring comments is a piece of mini-media that either builds your brand’s credibility or stains it.
Usability does not get enough love. Many marketers consider it a problem for software developers to ponder, not the CMO. The truth is that the usability of your website, email and other media directly affects their performance.
There’s a ‘black hat’ marketing technique that predates search marketing, search engines and the Internet itself. It’s buying press. We’re all familiar with it.
Publishers try to avoid compromising editorial integrity at all costs, I thought. But maybe I’m naive. A recent AdvertisingAge article on buying press says otherwise.
Mr. Phinney was a genuinely nice science teacher in my high school. He liked to relax and chat casually with students while not in class. Like many science enthusiasts, Mr. Phinney (or occasionally Phinn-dog) knew a lot of strange things about the world.
Even after about a decade, the jury is still out on email open rates. Some marketers disregard them as pointless. Others check them daily to guide subject line and content decisions. Personally, I think there is value in measuring open rates — even if it is limited.
An often overlooked and undervalued metric is website bounce rate. A page’s bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who leave immediately after arriving. There are two ways to measure it:
o Percentage of visitors who leave before a set time
o Percentage of visitors who leave without clicking into the site, regardless of time spent
For landing pages, it measures the connection of the message driving the traffic to the message on the page. A poor connection causes a high bounce rate.
Tracy Drumm found herself in an unpleasant situation three years ago. Tracy, the Marketing Director for plastic surgeon Steven Dayan, MD, FACS, was told that she had to clamp down on marketing spending, big time.
She didn’t panic, though. Instead, she got creative.
We love debating words in the office. We discuss whether an ad was “changed” or “manipulated” or if a marketer “destroyed” or “smashed” previous records. And we try hard to write in the language of marketers.
We particularly love to debate “marketing-speak.” Marketers like making nouns into verbs, or adjectives into nouns. It’s our job to decide where to draw the line. Here’s a quick list of some of our favorites:
Trust is a large part of marketing. You know that. Customers will not spend their money with you if they do not trust you.
Few things can shatter trust faster than a major data breach, and data breaches are up this year. Once customers find out that their credit card numbers, addresses and birth dates have been compromised, say “sayonara,” because they’re leaving.
