Quick follow-up to today’s issue of MarketingSherpa — in the article entitled 6 Best eMarketing Practices for Software Product Launch Campaigns, expert Merrill (Rick) Chapman gave an example of Baaaaad software product positioning copywriting on one company Web site.
Now he just emailed in to give us an example of a good site product positioning statement. Rick says, “When you’re done reading it, you know exactly what the product does and why what it does is good.” To get inspired by the good guys, check out www.brs-inc.com. Their clean, understandable statement starts, “Plan Write creates a business plan that includes a complete set of financials. Even a first time user can build an expert business plan that gets needed funding.”
Wow. note the complete lack of buzzwords, nasty tech terms, and the word “we”!
Tip: Don’t use your AOL email address if you’re trying to look like a “real” company. Last week I requested quotes from leading online advertising experts for a special report we were working on. When some so-called experts emailed us quotes with AOL email as their reply address we were far less likely to take them seriously.
While most marketers almost certainly have company accounts to send mail from, I’ll bet many would be surprised to see how many of the PR firms repping them still use AOL-type accounts for email correspondence. (More than you would ever dream.)
Azriel Winnett, the researcher who’s working on our upcoming Buyer’s Guide to Email List Hosting and Mailing Services, told me of a similar SNAFU at one bureau. They want him to list them as a “leader in the space” of hosting and sending marketers’ email newsletters. When he went to their Web site to get more information, he noticed that they themselves have a company newsletter. It’s hosted by the free service at Yahoo Groups. How silly do they look not even using their own service to send their own newsletter? Let’s just say Winnett is not planning on giving them a rave review.
How important are search engine rankings? I just received a clever press release from one company boasting that they just achieved the #1 search engine ranking in their category in Google. The spin is they see it as validation — they are #1 in Google so ipso facto they must be the “best.”
What’s interesting is that Google doesn’t actually know if your company or product is good or bad – it’s not like people at Google have truly examined your product vs your competitors and said, ‘yeah it’s the best so we’ll put it at the top.” All Google knows is that your Web site is created and optimized in a way that makes its automated spider happy. And yet, most Internet surfers seem to view Google results (which also show up at Yahoo) as a type of recommendation. Haven’t you ever thought that if a site is listed high up it must be more important than others?
Suddenly getting a good search engine ranking is just as (if not more) important than getting industry analysts, reporters and reviewers to say nice things about you. PR schmoozing takes back seat to search engine optimization tech savvy.
I just learned a number that startled me. More than 45,000 marketers have used GoTo’s search term auction to buy links to their Web sites. To put this into perspective, as of last November Yahoo which had more online ad accounts than anybody else at the time, had about 4,000 advertising clients on file.
Back then, I was very excited about offline publisher Primedia’s acquisition of About.com, predicting that the move could bring thousands of offline marketers into the online ad arena. While I wasn’t entirely wrong, GoTo’s influence over the future of online advertising — simply from the perspective of getting thousands of newbies to test it — has proven far more profound. Cool. (Now could some branding guru please stop GoTo from their really dumb name change to Overture scheduled for October????)
This news flash just in: eMarketing Magazine has decided to cease printing. Publisher Dan Shannon is unsure as to whether he’ll keep their email newsletter going or not.
This is the 5th media fold this year for media covering the online advertising industry (which shows you how incredibly tough it is to make a living providing stuff like MarketingSherpa free to the world.) Other folds have included:
– Digitrends magazine and email newsletters
– The Standard magazine and marketing-related newsletters
– Upside magazine and newsletters (announced earlier this week)
– Several of eMarketer’s email newsletters (they now publish a single daily)
– eContentNow magazine (folded into Business 2.0)
Leaders ClickZ and Iconocast are both still publishing steadily, but both have seen staff reductions and have slimmed down the volume of content they put out each week. Others, including John Audette’s Adventive Group, Dr Flint McGlaughlin’s Marketing Experiments Journal, have gone to paid subscription route.
If I hadn’t been through a down market before while working for other media companies — including The Oil Daily during the days when oil companies were going under, PBI Media’s Telephone News during a telecom slump, and Jane’s All The World’s Aircraft during the days when the aerospace and avaition industries were in trouble — I would be having a heart attack right now, and probably quitting Sherpa. Luckily I’m vastly experienced in lasting out a drought and just caffeinating!
As the entertainment industry has been floundering, trying to figure out how to be funny in the wake of the attack on America, the Internet marketing world has come through. (Yeah, marketers rule.)
Famed Cluetrain Manifesto co-author Chris Locke (who I’ve previously blasted for spamming me) is this week’s hero for inspiring a truly funny cartoon of Bush and Disney to Team on Foreign Policy” aka “Herbie Goes to Afghanistan. Advertising/branding firm Farago in Manhattan created the cartoon and are hosting it on their servers, so I asked them about it.
Peter Farago told me, “It’s all Chris’s fault! I was being harangued by my old hippy friends for my hawkish point of view. Staring into the smoking crater outside my window, I suddenly had heard enough of their “Send Love not Bombs” drivel.
Time to retaliate! Time to show mock those tree hugging fools and their preposterous pollyannaish fantasies.
Chris had written a particularly brilliant bit of prose about channeling Thorstein Veblen, and I chose to hijack his notion for my counterstrike against the peaceniks.
I was going to write about channeling Hailey Mills (Pollyanna) which lead me to Dean Jones (funnier but also still alive) which lead me to his movie credits – Ta-Da! Herbie goes to Monte Carlo. The rest is a mental train wreck and I remember very little.”
Ouch. Reason #471 to institute companywide rules for all sales/marketing-related email activities: Typos can make your brand look so incredibly stupid.
Here’s a not-so-fun example sent in today by one Sherpa reader:
“Please visit our site and place your add for free and surch our data base for free as well. http://www.tempready.com/irhome/wh001.html”
I find myself ranting about how *dumb* most PR people are about online PR frequently. So I thought today it might make a nice change to show an example of an emailed pitch from a *smart* PR gal. I get more than 100 emailed press releases and pitches a day. This is one of the few I didn’t delete. Instead I clicked on “reply” to set up the interview. The tactics she used are repeatable across industries:
SUBJECT LINE: Gale Group introduction [ok kinda bland, but not as bad as ‘News from”]
MESSAGE COPY: Hi
Gale Group is a leading Internet content supplier. We’re the world’s largest publisher of reference information for libraries and have a fast-growing content licensing business. I recently discovered MarketingSherpa and like it very much. I’ve seen Gale mentioned in interviews and articles (sometimes as Gale Research — a name we used until 1998).
I intend to add you to our media list, but would also like to offer our content experts as sources of interviews. For example, we’re seeing a subtle shift in the content marketplace from pure content to content management tools (like indexes, thesauri, vocabulary tools). That shift, however small, signals a change in the content industry — only a handful of companies currently build effective content management tools.
Gale’s VP of Business Development — Chris Morton — is a thoughtful interview on this topic (pretty much anything on content is in his bailiwick). He understands the strengths of the main players and where the content industry is going. In an interview, his answers are meaty — lots of depth and insight.
The MarketingSherpa interviews I’ve read have been quite interesting, so forgive me for providing a list of questions that you may already be contemplating, but I could envision questions like…
* Are you seeing a change in what content buyers are purchasing this year versus past years?
* Why are information buyers looking for content management tools?
*What tools are they looking for?
*What does that say about the sophistication of today’s buyers?
*What does that say about where the content industry is going?
*What different skill sets do buyers and sellers need now versus a year ago?
*Who benefits from this change?
*Will there be an industry shake-out?
I’m looking forward to hearing from you. I’d like to get to know you and also provide you with more background on Gale. My contact information is below. Thanks.
Beth Dempsey
Manager, Corporate Communications
Gale Group
So what does it say about the state of SPAM that I’m actually relieved to the point of reading and taking messages seriously when they are not from slimy sexual-related spammers?? I got an email tonight from a guy who claims to “stop snoring”, and, I didn’t even mind that it was spam (even though I live alone and if the cat snores, who cares?) Such a relief to get spam that wasn’t from someone who wanted me to spank 18 year old virgins or something.. you know?
That said, quite a few Sherpa readers have written in asking how to control the spam they get in their in-boxes. I’m no expert (more used to advising potential spam-senders than recipients) but have heard that a great place to report spammers for free is SpamCop.net. Last time I was there last week a few well known companies were listed as spammers, including InternetWire which charges its users a few hundred bucks per release to send out PR online. Since then InternetWire who according to their spokesperson take spamming accusations VERY seriously, have not shown up again … yet.
Now that I’ve been “outed” in the epublishing press as a massive supporter of the use of compelling subject lines for marketing newsletters, thought I’d share a fabulous one I just saw with you. It’s for today’s issue of Astrology.com’s monthly specials newsletter:
“Astrology.com:Your favorite subject — you!”
What horoscope-loving person is gonna click “delete” on that one before reading it?? No one! It’s a thing of marketing-beauty!
