In my travels, the group that wants to know the most about marketing, and seems to know the most about marketing (except, of course, for marketers) is engineers. Software engineers and programmers, to be specific.
Why? I think it’s because online marketing is particularly interesting and often allied with programming techniques. That and the fact that programmers toil long and hard and get bitter pretty quickly when some marketing dork screws up their efforts.
So, if there are ten things I’d tell you, Professor Engineer Software person, it would be this:
- Marketing is not rational. Programming is. Works the same way every time. Marketing doesn’t, almost in a Heisenbergian way. If it worked before, it probably won’t work again.
- Marketing is even more difficult to schedule than bug fixes. Marketing expenses are easily timed, of course, but the results are not. That’s because there’s a human at each end of the equation.
- Most marketers have no clue whatsoever what to do. So we do unoriginal things, or stall, or make promises we can’t keep.
- Just because Sergey is both a brilliant programmer and a brilliant marketer doesn’t mean that all brilliant programmers are good at marketing.
- People often prefer things that are inelegant, arcane or even broken. Except when they don’t.
- Truly brilliant coding is hard to quantify, demand or predict. Same is true with marketing.
- There is no number seven.
- Unlike mediocre programmers, mediocre marketers occasionally get lucky. When they do, they end up with a success they can brag about for a generation. But that doesn’t mean they know how to do it again.
- Just because some marketers are dorks doesn’t mean your marketer is a dork. Some programmers aren’t so great either. Be patient.
- Without marketing, all your great coding is worthless. Push your marketer to be brave and bold and remarkable. Do it every day. Your code is worth it.
June 26, 2006
How a composer on the other end of the earth (at least the other end from where I am) helps customers find him: the amber theatre.
Retailers that spend on real estate, win.
The most expensive real estate in my county is a mall filled with stores. And those stores are jammed with shoppers. Almost none of them fold, none of them appear to be struggling. Almost all of them are expensive.
Two blocks away, independent stores, stores that cheaped-out on their real estate investment, those guys are struggling.
Well, you’re not in retail, maybe, or you’re virtual, so what difference does this make to you?
Question: what’s your "real estate"?
For most of us, it’s people.
Expensive people are just like expensive real estate. If you invest in them, you may just find they pay off. Some businesses work as hard as they can to pay people as little as they can (witness the fights over the minimum wage). What sort of growing business wants the minimum wage? If your business is people-based, as opposed to machine-based, why wouldn’t you want people who command more than the minimum?
June 25, 2006
The most successful marketers tell two stories at the same time. A shiny one and a deep one.
The shiny story is easy to notice, easy to enjoy, easy to spread.
The deep story is fascinating, worth your time. It has texture and mystery and it lasts.
Consider The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia. It’s more than 800 pages long. Dylan is shiny (sometimes). His songs get played on the radio or around the campfire. It’s not unusual for a teenager to hear an old Dylan song for the very first time and then add it to her iPod.
But Dylan’s also pretty deep. Hence the encyclopedia. Can you imagine an encyclopedia about… The Back Street Boys?
Most marketers choose to be just shiny. Deep, it seems, is way too much work.
June 23, 2006
Matt points us to this very fine post about context, design and the swoosh: Design Observer: writings about design & culture.
June 22, 2006
Japanese researchers diagnose neophilia, the unhealthy love of the new, so says Media Life Magazine.
I for one don’t think it’s organic. If it is, why does it strike computer geeks and people who live near oceans, virtually bypassing certain suburban subdivisions?
It’s a great neologism, though. I wish I’d thought of it.
I have no idea how much that weighs. A lot, I think.
You can win them all here: Squidoo Thirty Thousand: 1 to 1,000.
It’s really cool to see that much stuff, edge to edge. Makes you realize just how big the web is.
A quick look at popurls shows that of the top 20 sites featured on Furl, more than half are spam (unless there’s been a huge upswing in interest in colon cleansing and acne).
At first, the spam problem for things like Furl and Digg was about self-hype. "Hey," the poster says, "It only takes 30 people to ‘Digg this’ for me to see a huge traffic flow, so please, do it." But now, it’s a more focused and concerted effort.
Spammers are short-sighted and selfish, and don’t care what they wreck. It’s the enemy of anything open. Once again, just like with email and with comments, the answer is reputation. Get rid of anonymity or at the very least, track reputation over time. When reputable people speak up, it should count for more than when a stranger does. That’s the way it works in the real world, right?
[update: reputation, by the way, is not the same as a real-world ID card. It just means that your virtual identity benefits when you are consistent over time. Clark Kent has a reputation, even though he’s really… Superman.]
Mark Hurst makes it easy for you to talk to yourself by email… tomorrow. Good Experience – Introducing Gootodo, a bit-literate todo list.
And Brandon points us to the free app oh, don’t forget….that lets you text message yourself (or a buddy) at some date in the future.
[PS I wrote this at 4:30, but arranged to have it posted near midnight. Just because I could.]
Eder points us to this post about CPA ads from Google.
Bottom line: in addition to buying clicks from Google, you can now bid on actions. Meaning sales, or sign ups. An action is worth 100 or 1,000 times as much as a click, so this means that a huge amount of the marketing risk is being transferred from the advertiser to Google or the affiliate.
A thoughtful profit-maximizer would buy every single bit of available inventory. Why not?
The challenge is thus on inventory. With such a low production rate (only one in ten thousand or a hundred thousand impressions pay off), the ads are more like lottery tickets for a typical website. The next step will be landing pages that are optimized for these actions. Example: company X does a bad job converting, so they start buying CPA ads. They pay, say, $100 an action. But media company Y figures out an efficient way to convert people. So they build pages that do this for say $50 each. They can scale and make money all day long being in company x’s business… without the pesky overhead.
Should happen pretty quickly.
June 21, 2006
