MarketingSherpa Blog

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.

for the United Way of Greater Toronto (look for a Case Study we’re doing on them in SherpaWeekly this week), emailed in a reaction to my postings about how Blogs are becoming the next hot marketing communications tool:

“Come to think of it: I think that is how Blogger got started in the first place–as a cheapo tool for Evan and Co. to update each other on the ‘real’ software’ project they were building. One day it dawned on them that Blogger was better than the project, and the rest is history. At least, that’s what I heard. It is funny to think people are now proposing that other companies use it (in-house) for what it was originally designed for: interoffice communication and posting project milestones.”

This weekend the weather was stunning, glorious, incredible. I know because I ran outside briefly twice; once to get caffiene and once to stop a cat fight.

The rest of the time I was utterly, completely engrossed in Mary Wells Lawrence’s brand new autobiography A Big Life (in advertising). If you are either working for an ad agency yourself, or a woman heading any sort of company, or anyone interested in the ad biz, I highly recommend it. Some of the lessons I learned:

I was just answering a Washington Post reporter’s questions on how the spam epidemic is affecting the way consumers trust email newsletter publishers, and realized that it may, ultimately, help our sponsorship CPM. After all, if consumers are so disgusted with spam that they *only* open email from people they know and trust and have a longstanding there-will-be-value-in-this-email relationship with, then broadcast email newsletters will get higher open rates than other broadcast email. That’s gotta filter down to higher trust and clicks at a lower CPM for sponsors.

About a year ago I saw a study showing that ezine sponsorships were getting (an average) a 1-2% click rate and cost 1/4-1/2 CPM of whatever banners did at the time. Now I’d love to see some numbers on ezine sponsorship clicks currently, and compare them to broadcasts to rented opt-in lists. Oooh, maybe I’ll have to commission a researcher to look into that for Sherpa!

I’ve begun noticing a new Web design trend that I’m calling “the dot-dot-dot thing.” Remember when everybody’s site background was black? Then when everybody got frames? (Then dumped them.) Next, when you couldn’t swing a dead cat without getting stuck in a Flash intro?

Now it’s the dot-dot-dot thing to give some structure to a logo or navigation bar, without the harshness of actual ruled lines. Check it out on these three sites, and I’ll bet soon you’ll start seeing it everywhere.

http://www.creative-mail.com/

http://www.uwgt.org

Big question: if you already publish an email newsletter (or several) and you launch a new one on a similar topic, can you automatically subscribe all your other readers to the new newsletter too?

Last week a publisher I know well launched a new daily and started sending it to everyone who got their other letters. There was a note at the top saying words to the effect of “We’re sending you this because you subscribe to our other stuff. If you don’t want it then click here to opt-out.”

I was annoyed. I didn’t want another daily clogging my overloaded in-box.

Tis week we launched a new newsletter ourselves. It’s called MarketingSherpa and it was developed specifically in response to our reader survey results. People said they wanted something like it, so here we are serving their voiced need. Potential advertisers emailed us like crazy – can we have your media kit??

Only problem, we had almost zero circulation. So, yeah I felt the yearning burning to slide some names from our other lists into that new subscriber file. But I got all moral and didn’t.

Maybe that’s stupid and unbusinesslike. But I’m building relationships with our readers for the long haul. Plus each reader is worth a few bucks a year to us. Why do something that might annoy them? So we’re going to build the list for MarketingSherpa the same slow, painful way we did for everything else. One opt-in at a time.

When can you get away with doing something your readership might consider spam? If you have a terribly strong relationship with them and you do it in an awfully charming way. Witness the letter F***dCompany Publisher Phil Caplan broadcast to his list today which started:

Subject: FC Sporadic for Friday, May 10, 2002 Ha ha tricked you! It’s just spam. Well sort of. Anyway, if you could do me a favor and either (a) signup, or (b) forward this to somebody who will, that would rock. It’s a new service I came up called “RUMOR ALERTS” that I think a lot of businesses would
(should) be interested in…”

http://www.MarketingSherpa.com (super subtle plug, huh?)

Several business newsletters I’ve opted in for send their issue afterhours for the next day. For example, eMarketer Daily seems to always send around 4-5am. I’m sure they’re thinking, hey we’ll be the first thing in your email box when you come in in the morning. I’d urge all publishers who do this to rethink it because of the spam problem.

I leave work at each night having emptied my email in-box. When I get in the next morning, there’s a whole bunch of mail. As in more than 100 messages. A tiny handful are from insomniac or Australian readers. The rest are spam, spam, spam, spam.

Then, nestled into the heart of dozens of messages urging me to improve my sex life or buy insurance, is eMarketer. Many’s the time I’ve swept the “delete” button over the whole mess (after plucking forth the Aussies) and canned it.

I’m betting if late-night mailers changed their send time to say 9:30am when recipients get lots of mail from human beings (vs just mass mailers) they might increase their issue open rate. If anyone’s tested this, lemme know. AHolland@MarketingSherpa.com

[BTW: Yeah I’m aware of the incongruence of this note as compared to the time I usually send out this Blog as an ezine to opt-ins on Friday evenings. Bad me.]

[Note: ContentBlog reader Henrik Torstensson of tradedoubler.com emailed in a response the the Blog above, “With regards to the timing of eMarketer Daily. I, living in Sweden, recieve the eMarketer Daily between 11 and 12 AM (CET). This is an excellent time as there aren’t any/few other newsletters at this time (compared with afternoons and the flow of newsletters from 2 PM to 5.30 PM) and if things aren’t completely messed up the few minutes it takes to read the newsletter are usually worth it. Time zones make timing of newsletters more difficult.”]

Ok – that’s it. English is the common language – let’s make NYC the common time zone! Or would someplace in China take precedence? 🙂 http://www.tradedoubler.com http://www.emarketer.com (Pls. don’t take it personally, ok?)