X SEO

Though Apple and the late Steve Jobs have been praised (with justification) for improving, streamlining, face-lifting and otherwise revolutionizing the cellphone, it’s only fair to note the one thing Jobs and his company did not do: invent the contraption. That honor belongs to Motorola engineer Martin Cooper, who gave the world its first commercially available cellphone in 1984: the DynaTAC 8000X, yours for only $3,995. This was the phone that would later be dubbed “the brick,” and which became famous when Michael Douglas as Gordon Gekko used it in the 1987 film Wall Street.

Meanwhile, Finnish competitor Nokia was working furiously to deliver the counterpunch. It came in 1988 with the P-30, a phone that appeared in the U.S. the same year as the Radio Shack CT-301, shown in the ad at right. This nifty chunk of high tech was close to 19 inches long (including the antenna), weighed nearly two pounds and would only set you back $1,499. Go ahead, laugh.

Given the tectonic changes that have hit the cellphone market since then (2 million Americans owned cellphones back in 1988; today it’s 300 million), it’s hard to find much that’s similar about the two ads on these pages. Nevertheless, if you look past the obvious differences in technology, you might notice something interesting: The marketing psychology at work here is identical.

“Both ads are talking the exact same way to the exact same person,” said Stuart Leslie, president of design and innovation firm 4sight inc. “The key element is lifestyle. Whether it’s a golf course or a sushi restaurant, they’re nailing your aspirations and dreams.”

Let’s back up a moment. Aside from doing the necessary work of explaining what a cellphone was, the 1988 Radio Shack ad takes the critical step of inviting the reader to imagine himself using the device. The CT-301 “lets a person make or take calls at a job site, in a rental car, on a service call, or even on the golf course.” Leslie said that phrase alone lures the would-be buyer into imagining himself as the Goldfinger of his world: “This phone was the essence of cool at the time. You pull it out and everybody admires it. So you’re the guy, it’s your time, you’ve arrived. It’s brilliant marketing.”

The pitch, in other words, isn’t really about the phone; it’s about the phone as a facilitator of the sophisticated lifestyle that’s yours if you buy the phone. And that, Leslie said, is also what Apple is doing 22 years later with its ad (opposite) for the iPhone 4S.

“Apple’s focus in not on the device; it’s what’s going on in your life,” Leslie said. “It speaks directly to your emotional state: ‘Hey, I feel like sushi.’” Then Siri, the 4S’s “intelligent personal assistant” leads you to that sushi. “We all want to find a great sushi place. It’s a real-world thing,” Leslie said. Take your chums to an awesome restaurant, and you’re the man—just like you’d have been back in 1988 had you pulled our your CT-301 on the fairway. (There was just no Siri back then. Oh, and no Internet either.)

None of which means that 22 years from now, we won’t be laughing at the design of the iPhone 4S. “We absolutely will,” Leslie said. But at least it looks better than a brick.

Click here to view more content from The Mobile Issue.

by Stoney deGeyter

In the world of business, marketing and advertising is everything. Marketing is at least as important as the products or services you sell. Without marketing, you have no one to demonstrate the superiority of what you offer!

There is a reason people build businesses in cities surrounded by people, rather than in a desert surrounded by cactus! You need people to market to, and you need customers coming in your door. The success of your business relies on how well you market your product or service first, and second by how well you deliver it. Very few businesses survive on word of mouth alone. But what many small business owners fail to realize is that while marketing is everything, everything you do is marketing!

Everything you do, as a small business, has an impact on your marketing message and ability to get that message out to your customer base. How/whether you answer your phones, how you reply to email messages, what you say on Twitter/Facebook, the presentation of your website, and your ability to produce satisfied customers all play a role in your ongoing marketing efforts.

How are you perceived?

My company helps business owners build and execute their web marketing strategies. But all too often, many are missing even the most fundamental marketing and common-sense business development components. We can help them online, but lacking the offline aspects, we are simply attempting to fill a bucket that has holes in it.

Perception matters. If your potential customer’s perception of you, true or not, is less than they expect, you’re going to have trouble selling them. Would you trust a mechanic with a poorly tuned vehicle? A lawyer who drives a Yaris? A contractor with a run-down office? A landscaper with an overgrown lawn?

You might, but I guarantee you’d think twice before you do. None of these things demonstrate how well any of these business owners do their job, but the perception is, if they can’t take care of themselves, how can you trust them to take care of you?

When performing link building for our clients, they are often picky about where we get links from. So are we, but they often want to get links only from high-caliber sites, when their site is somewhere below that. In link building, people will generally only link to site’s of equal or higher caliber than themselves. If you want a link from a high-caliber site, you have to be one. Otherwise, take what you can get from those below you!

The little things matter the most

Businesses purchase online marketing because they want to increase sales. But if the SEO is doing its job but sales don’t follow, there may be something else at play. Lack of business success doesn’t always fall on the marketer’s shoulders. In fact, such woes may directly be caused by how the business is being run.

The SEO’s job doesn’t include running your business. There are a lot of things that fall outside the SEO’s area that can make or break your business success, and even your search engine rankings!

As an SEO, we routinely try to help our clients in areas that fall far outside the SEO box. We’ll provide feedback on design, programming and presentation, just to name a few. We want our customers to succeed, and sometimes that means we have to help in areas that we were not necessarily hired for.

Everything matters, and when it comes to business success, everything should be on the table for a discussion on how to improve your ROI. If your SEO thinks your design isn’t great, it may be worth discussing in greater detail, even if you love it. There might be a reason they hate it that goes beyond personal preference. If your SEO provides a recommendation on how something looks or appears on the website, it many worth noting, even if you can’t change it right away.

Little things can create big perceptions. Especially when it comes to usability issues. It’s not just website design, it’s also communication, problem resolution, response times and a whole lot more.

A picture on your website may be worth a thousand words, but perception is worth 1001. You are what you’re perceived to be. That’s true whether you believe it or not.

Follow me at @StoneyD, and @PolePositionMkg.

Be sure and visit our small business news site.

What's the difference between an advertising campaign and a startup accelerator? In the case of "Intel Innovators," there isn't much of one.

Launched by the tech giant in December, “Intel Innovators” is a Facebook marketing push in the form of a contest for young tech entrepreneurs seeking cash to bring their ideas to life. On Thursday, the brand announced the winner of the campaign's second round—a 23-year-old computer engineer whom the brand will give $100,000 to develop software that is designed to make tablets more friendly for people with fine motor disabilities like cerebral palsy.

“Assistive Scanning Keyboard,” created by Chris McMeeking, is a visual aid that tracks through a tablet keyboard, highlighting rows and letters that also turns the entire screen into a trigger, so users can spell out words by touching anywhere. “With our mobile app alone we can allow [users with disabilities] to text/call their family, read a book, browse the Internet, and much more,” reads a description of the idea. The technology has already been tested with cerebral palsy patients at a school and children’s hospital, and McMeeking’s company, ASK Interfaces, is working towards releasing iOS and Android versions of the application. 

The idea technically won two $50,000 prizes: One from an expert panel that heard pitches from five entrepreneurs culled through fan feedback from twenty committee-selected submissions, and a second awarded by a “Top Fan.” (The “Top Fan” is a Facebook user who invested the most "Social Currency" during a given round. Points are earned by using the app, nominating friends’ ideas, sharing submissions and otherwise participating in and amplifying the campaign, and then spent to push ideas up the leader board into the five finalist slots).

The first round pot of $100,000, announced in late December, was split between two winners. One was “LoginWill,” a tool that lets users assign beneficiaries for their online logins and passwords and instructions on how to handle a Facebook account in case of death, for example. The other was “Cosmic Cart,” a video ecommerce technology that lets viewers buy products from online clips.

The campaign taps into the excitement over startups using trendy advertising techniques like crowd-sourcing and gamification. And, it appears to be working—Intel said it’s generated thousands of ideas and created hundreds of thousands of "engagements" in its target demographic, 18- to 24-year-olds. Created by youth marketing agency Noise, the campaign limits contestants to people in the same age range. While that decision was driven in part by legal considerations—Intel maintains it can’t award cash to under 18-year-olds—the upper cap has invited minor grumbling from entrepreneurs too old to participate. Limiting eligibility to those 24 and under was driven by Intel’s desire to focus on college-aged students, the brand says.

Users can still participate in the investing portion of the third round, but any would-be contestants looking to submit are out of luck, at least for the time being. So far, the campaign is only scheduled to run for three rounds. Submission for the third closed on Jan. 16th, and Intel has yet to publicly announce any plans for an extension. But, the app’s submission page does promise to inform would-be contestants when submissions open for a fourth round. So there may be hope yet—for anyone who doesn’t turn 25 first.

Mobile action codes are getting harder to miss in magazines. That trend is documented by Nellymoser, a mobile marketing firm that supports brands and publishers’ QR campaigns. The firm has a new report out that says that in all of 2011, nearly 4,500 codes appeared in ad and editorial pages in the top 100 titles.

Women’s magazines were the biggest users of QR codes in 2011. The biggest was InStyle at No. 1 with 141 codes. It was followed by ESPN The Magazine (136), People (136), Self (126) and Entertainment Weekly (123).

The occurrence of such quick-response codes (a broad term encompassing QR codes, Microsoft Tags, SnapTags and others) grew sharply over the year, mostly driven by ad pages. Put another way, 8 percent of magazine ad pages in December contained codes, up from 3.6 percent of magazine ad pages containing codes in January.

Among brands, nearly 40 percent of the codes came from the beauty, home and fashion industries, led by John Frieda (82), L’Oréal (79), Cuisinart (74), Garnier (72) and Revlon (67).

Earlier research into 2-D barcodes in magazines has shown this relatively new technology is starting to catch on with readers. Still, there’s room for improvement among its users. While readers increasingly understand what the funny interactive symbols are for, the codes get better results when they describe what benefit the user gets after scanning them, whether it be free content or a coupon, according to Roger Matus, executive vp of Nellymoser. Still, one-third of those that ran in 2011 didn’t include that information.

Nellymoser has also found that the more codes an individual magazine issue contains, the higher the response rate. Yet, one-fifth of the magazines it studied accounted for nearly half the QR codes that ran in the fourth quarter, suggesting there might be an opportunity for others to step up their frequency.

“The more codes that are in a single publication, the higher the scan rate for the single publication,” Matus said. “We have found this again and again. People get trained once, and they have their phones out, and it becomes part of the process.”

For the survey, the firm looked at all print-to-mobile action codes that were printed in the pages of the top 100 magazines by circulation, excluding membership-based and regional titles.
 

Image from: LouisCK.net

Every good marketer knows that although content is king, the means by which people produce and consume that content are constantly changing, and no one understands the changing face of content like the entertainment industry. One of the most prolific comedians of his time, Louis C.K. has been innovating with his content for years. Most recently, he released his fourth stand-up special, Live at the Beacon Theater. Instead of producing and releasing the special through traditional channels (broadcast and physical media), C.K. produced, directed, and released the video himself on his website, LouisCK.net.

Without even looking at the actual revenue and profit from the digitally distributed show, we can infer that it was a success by looking at some of the site metrics for LouisCK.net. You can see from the chart below that there was an enormous spike in unique visitors to C.K.’s site in December, a whopping 1,295.32% growth month-over-month and 965.63% year-over-year.

The daily reach and attention numbers for the last three months show an even more specific spike. You can clearly watch as the video is launched for download on December 10 and see how it rapidly grows in popularity.

Despite the recent legislative uproar about Internet piracy, C.K. decided it would be best to distribute his video DRM free and appeal to his audience to consider the direct relationship between artists and consumers in hopes that they would choose to pay for the performance rather than steal it. By setting such a low price ($5.00), the show became more accessible and affordable to his audience which effectively deterred piracy evidenced by his producing more than $1,000,000 in profit in just twelve days.

Positioned as one of the hottest comedians in the business at the moment, C.K. has a unique opportunity to help redefine how content creators think about the means of production and distribution. The lesson for marketers should be that sometimes, less is more, and trusting your customers is always important. By trusting his fan base to spread the word about the show, C.K. reduced his costs and created a more beneficial relationship with his audience. By openly asking them to purchase instead of pirate, C.K. was rewarded with mutual trust and respect between himself and his fans.

Is grassroots marketing based on honesty and openness a concept that can be scalable for industries outside of entertainment? What lessons can digital marketers take away from the Louis C.K. model? Let us know what you think in the comments!

No matter where in the world you live, it’s likely you have rituals that you participate in at various times of the year. Website owners have a New Year ritual too. The first item we need to address is updating the copyright year in the footer of our website. Not only does this show that [...]



Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

By Eric Goldman

Marketing and Advertising

* Facebook is putting Sponsored Stories in user newsfeeds. Naturally, they will make the ad label almost invisible. Yet another reason to hate Facebook, and what a desperate act of financial overreaching to goose their IPO. FWIW, I absolutely hate that Twitter does the same thing. It’s terribly marked as an ad, and it takes me more time than it should to figure out why it’s appearing in my stream. Boo for Twitter, and boo for Facebook.

* Then again, not all Twitter ads are objectionable. The most popular tweet of 2011? An ad from Wendy’s.

* Interesting NAD decision involving Coastal Contacts’ offer of “free” glasses in exchange for Facebook likes. Compare the subsequent ruling in Fraley v. Facebook.

* Top 10 PR Blunders of 2011.

* FTC does another bust of health marketers who allegedly used affiliates to create fake news sites. Prior blog post.

* Rebecca reports on a lawsuit over marketing that chickens were “raised humanely.” Note to meat eaters: there’s no such thing as mass-raising of animals “humanely” for our food consumption. Invariably, meat-eaters who actually take the effort to understand the process of manufacturing meat decide to reduce their meat consumption.

* NYT on caller ID spoofing. The FTC just announced another bust on this front.

* AdAge: FDA’s Social-Media ‘Guidelines’ Befuddle Big Pharma.

* Yahoo Inc. v. XYZ Companies, 2011 WL 6072263 (S.D.N.Y. Dec 5, 2011). Yahoo gets a huge and uncollectable default judgment of $610M under CAN-SPAM against Nigerian spammers.

* Adware déjà vu: Facebook bitches about adware. Prior blog post.

* A table manufacturer tinkers with his AdWords account and discovers a correlation between AdWords and clicks on his organic links (1, 2). Prior blog post.

* Pom loses a jury trial against Ocean Spray over false advertising.

* Washington Post: An inside look at the world of TV news payola/“plugola.”

* Ad Naseum on reverse product placement, i.e., manufacturing virtual brands created for TVs and movies.

* NYT: In China, car brands have very different meanings to consumers than they do in the US (except for BMW, where the brand attributes are surprisingly the same).

* Cracked: 5 Black Friday Myths The Media Wants You to Believe.

Privacy

* In re Facebook Privacy Litigation, 2011 WL 6176208 (N.D. Cal. Nov. 22, 2011). Prior blog post. Judge Ware dismisses the Facebook/Zynga referrer ID case with prejudice. Wendy Davis’ coverage. It appears the plaintiffs have appealed (sub nom Graf v. Zynga) to the Ninth Circuit.

* Facebook will make 45 privacy-related changes—almost none of them “important”—to appease the Irish Data Protection bureaucrats.

* Mark Zuckerberg has extensive experience apologizing to Facebook users for Facebook’s privacy transgressions.

* USA Today on how Facebook tracks user activity at websites other than its own.

* Cohen v. Facebook appealed to the Ninth Circuit. I’m not sure how the Fraley v. Facebook ruling affects this. Prior blog post.

* Interesting visualization of Facebook’s creeping degradation of privacy for user-provided info.

* In the Matter of ScanScout, Inc., FTC File No. 1023185:

According to the FTC complaint, from at least April 2007 to December 2010, ScanScout’s website privacy policy discussed how it used cookies to track users’ behavior. The privacy policy stated, “You can opt out of receiving a cookie by changing your browser settings to prevent the receipt of cookies.” However, changing browser settings did not remove or block the Flash cookies used by ScanScout, the FTC charged. The claims by ScanScout were deceptive and violated the FTC Act, the complaint alleged.

* FTC bust of Skid-e-Kids for COPPA violations.

* Another cookie litigation settlement where the lawyers get almost all of the settlement value. PaidContent and MediaPost coverage.

* Weber v. Google, over Google toolbar snooping, was quietly dropped.

* Incorp Services, Inc. v. Does 1-10, 2011 WL 5444789 (N.D. Cal. Nov. 9, 2011). The court orders unmasking of alleged click fraudders:

By tracking the clicks over the course of several weeks and narrowing a substantial portion of the activity to only two IP addresses—both owned by the same ISP—Incorp has provided sufficient information to indicate that the responsible parties are “real person(s)” who may be sued in federal court. Incorp also has demonstrated that it took reasonable steps to identify Defendants. Because information pertaining to the assignee of an IP address is maintained by the third-party ISP, the only way in which Incorp is able to identify definitively the parties associated with the suspect IP addresses is by subpoena to the ISP.

* In re Application of the USA for an Order Pursuant to 2703(d), 1:11-dm-00003-TCB –LO (E.D. Va. Nov. 10, 2011). No Fourth Amendment privacy protection for IP addresses.

* NYT provides yet another update on some European regulators’ efforts to kill Silicon Valley.

* Peter Fleischer: Harsher data protection sanctions are coming.

Contracts

* Stebbins v. Texas, 2011 WL 6130403 (N.D. Tex. October 24, 2011). Another court calls David Stebbins’ attempt to manufacture an arbitration award “frivolous,” saying “his factual assertions that the alleged contract was formed when Plaintiff sent an e-mail to Defendant with a blog link and a dollar bill describe fantastic or delusional scenarios that are clearly irrational and incredible.” Prior blog coverage (1, 2).

* Garon v. eBay, Inc., 2011 WL 6329089 (N.D.Cal. Nov. 30, 2011). No antitrust claims for vendors who eBay terminated for low ratings. I think eBay should have been able to use 47 USC 230(c)(2) (not discussed by the judge).

* Fadal Machining Centers, LLC v. Compumachine, Inc., 2011 WL 6254979 (9th Cir. Dec.15, 2011). In a B2B context, enforcing an arbitration clause posted to the web that was incorporated by reference in the vendor’s invoices.

* Spam Arrest v. Marketingesquire complaint: Spam Arrest sues an email marketer for violating its TOS by sending “spam.”

* Wofford v. Apple Inc. (S.D. Cal. Nov. 9, 2011). Free software update to iPhone software did not constitute a “tangible good or service” for California CLRA purposes.

* How plaintiff firms are adapting to Concepcion.

* WSJ: Are We All Online Criminals?

Hi, my name is Chrissy and I am an SEO neophyte!

Since you haven’t seen me in this space before I’ll go ahead and give you a rundown of how I got here. I worked in PR, Marketing and Social Media.  Anyways, I thought the next natural progression would be SEO. Well, nothing about this progression was natural or even remotely fluid. Everything I had learned up to this point (three and a half years) equated to nothing more than a big pile of crap! Yep, that’s right, it was crap!

So, what is it that I now deem to be crap and what have I learned in the last month? Here’s a small sampling of what I have learned to be true:

• Formal outreach to bloggers for links does not have to be so formal. The more casual you are the more likely you will be to have them actually respond to you. (Dear nuns, thanks but no thanks for your MLA training!)
• Those ‘crappy sites’ I used to bounce from only seconds after clicking on them – apparently they aren’t so bad after all. Just because it is aesthetically displeasing doesn’t mean that site isn’t valuable in the eyes of an SEO professional.
• Mommy bloggers are racking in the dough! Seriously though, these women have cashed in and understand the value of working with SEO professionals. Not to mention they are usually very accommodating of our requests.
• Forums, who knew! These sometimes-overwhelming website destinations can hold a lot of value, through profile links and other fun stuff.
• People are actually talking about hedgehogs, that hangy ball thing in your throat, dreams and even dreams about hedgehogs, hens and floating. Who knew?!
• If you’re being shady with links and websites, Google will find out! Then you’ll be in deep-dark, un-rankable trouble.
• If a client’s rankings drop – keep calm and carry on (unless they have been trending down for more than 2 weeks, then it’s time to rethink your strategy).
• It’s better to ask for forgiveness than ask for permission. If you have an idea – run with it. Satisfy your curiousity.
• The biggest lesson I have learned so far – social media cannot be quantified…yet. (I still hold hope that one day I will be able to quantify it as something that helps rankings but until then I wait in anticipation like a five year old on Christmas eve.)

My hope is that some of these initial lessons help other SEO neophytes who are transitioning from PR, Marketing or similar industries.

[Post by Venkat Balasubramani]

In re Hyundai Motor America, FTC File No. 112-3110 (Nov. 16, 2011) [.pdf]

We’ve posted on the FTC endorsement guidelines, which broadly require disclosure of relationships, and incentives provided to those who endorse products or companies. (“FTC Dings PR Firm for Fake Reviews — In re Reverb Communications“; “FTC Drops Investigation of Advertiser Who Gave Gifts to Bloggers“; “FTC Online Endorsement Guidelines Strike Again – FTC Dings Legacy Learning Over Allegedly Misleading Affiliate Reviews.”) The FTC recently closed an investigation on Hyundai, whose marketing agency gave bloggers gift certificates as an incentive to “incline links to Hyundai videos in their posts and/or to comment on . . . forthcoming Super Bowl ads.” You can access a copy of the FTC’s closing letter here [.pdf].

The FTC provided two reasons for why it closed the investigation into Hyundai’s promotions:

- Hyundai did not know in advance about the incentives, which were offered by an employee of Hyundai’s marketing agency.

- offering an incentive to post about or endorse a Hyundai product was contrary to the social media policies of both Hyundai and its marketing agency.

It was challenging to me to make sense of the FTC’s decisions under its endorsement guidelines. Thus far, the FTC has taken action against entities who directly violate the rules (Reverb), or those who have an active role in encouraging reviews or endorsements which violate the endorsement guidelines (Legacy Learning). It seems that an entity which haplessly doles out gifts with the unarticulated expectation of reciprocation in the form of an endorsement have yet to come under the FTC’s knife (see this investigation and Ann Taylor). Meanwhile, the FTC seems to have given celebrities–who reportedly shill for products and companies on a regular basis without accompanying disclosures–a free pass.

The FTC’s reliance on the social media policies of Hyundai and its marketing agency is interesting and yet another data point in favor of adopting a social media policy. Query as to whether the FTC’s reliance on these policies is inconsistent? The FTC doesn’t seem to accept affiliate agreements at face value for the proposition that companies are policing their affiliates. It’s odd for the FTC to accept a social media policy for the same purpose.

Other coverage:

FTC Closes an Investigation Into a Blogging Promotion

Related posts:

“FTC Dings PR Firm for Fake Reviews — In re Reverb Communications“
“FTC Drops Investigation of Advertiser Who Gave Gifts to Bloggers“
“FTC Online Endorsement Guidelines Strike Again – FTC Dings Legacy Learning Over Allegedly Misleading Affiliate Reviews“