MarketingSherpa Blog

I was just surfing the Time-Life site in preparation for a special issue of MarketingSherpa coming out this Wednesday (we’re doing an exclusive interview with the marketer in charge of Time-Life email marketing). Go over to the Time-Life home page when you get a chance and note the box in the “sweet spot” (the upper right corner where visitor’s eyes tend to flow to naturally).

Now, you sophisticated SherpaBlog surfers may think, “Why does Time-Life waste valuable space stating the obvious?” That web shopping is safe, etc. However, recently marketer after marketer who I’ve interviewed has told me the same thing: The online population is *not* as Web savvy as we think. They still need to be reassured about safety, shipping, etc. This stuff which may seem oh-so-1998 to you and me, is still mission critical messaging today.

Thanks to Tara Calashain of ResearchBuzz for spotting a story in the Sydney Morning Herald blowing the whistle on Hotmail which just followed in the footsteps of Yahoo Mail and has added a pre-checked option to every users account stating that their information can be shared with 3rd parties. Hotmail has 115 million users so that’s a great big list on the rental market. A great big list that may be mighty annoyed to learn about this.

To see for yourself, if you have a hotmail account, go to “Options” and then to “Personal Profile.” The new copy reads:

“Choose how much of your .NET Passport information Microsoft can share with other companies’ .NET Passport sites at sign-in:

[x]Share my e-mail address.

[ ] Share my first and last names.

[x]Share my other registration information.”

Just as the Syndey paper pointed out, Hotmail hasn’t gotten around yet to changing its privacy policy to reflect this change. It still reads, “.NET Passport will not sell or rent your personal information to third parties. .NET Passport will not use or share your personal information in a manner that differs from what is described in this Privacy Statement without your prior consent.

Does sticking pre-checked permission boxes in my personal profile (which like most people, I haven’t visited since I set up the account years ago), count as me “selecting” to have my name rented out? Hotmail appears to think so.

Will renting out this non-permission list make Hotmail much money? Well, it’s hardly high quality. The names aren’t proven buyers, aren’t proven shoppers, aren’t proven email offer responsive, aren’t proven in be interested in any particular topic, aren’t proven to be any age. Shall I go on? In the list rental world that’s what makes a list valuable to renters. Not just a whole mess of names.

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