Would you hire someone to build a car that has never driven? Corporations are doing just that, creating the hundreds of witnessed online promotional failures. Polished MBAs that have never posted on a forum or even commented on a blog create programs for obsessive, digitally-savvy users that interact online for several hours a day. The MBA thinks the flash-site community with music is awesome–the customer to which the site is directed thinks it’s morbidly annoying because it cannot be RSSed or opened in tabs.
Yesterday I sat through a presentation. Two managers presented a strategy to create an online community. The strategy made perfect business sense–it planned to make money and met stakeholder needs.
The problem is that these managers don’t know a thing about online communities. There is no vision for this community because they have no clue work works. Manager 1 probably joined Facebook last year. Manager 2 has never heard of Disqus. Both are touting all the bells and whistles of their social network. Not once did they talk about the strategy for building the community–it scared me. Alex touched on these types of participants. Oddly, they are contributing content without ever being fully aware or active in their craft.
It’s the small details that make a difference. When you’re not actively engaged or participating, you would never even know they were there.
When I took marketing courses at business school, I learned few technical skills. Professors focused on marketing frameworks, like the 4 P’s, 5 C’s, STP, and SWOT. This is great if you work at McKinsey. But if you’re at a small digital agency or are an entrepreneur, you need hard skills to get things done. Few start-ups can to hire four employees to develop a marketing strategy, draft the creative, write the code, and measure the analytics. An excellent online marketer is one part Seth Godin, one part Chris Pirillo. Our generation’s marketer is a digital Ben Franklin.
So what skills are markerters lacking? A ton: CMU (Drupal, Joomla, Wordpress), MySQL, PHP, Javascript, Ajax, Analytics (Google, Omniture), online advertising platforms (AdSense), SEO, A/B optimization and testing, web standards, Adobe CS, APIs, e-mail marketing, streaming video, web hosting, video editing, and so on… (note: I didn’t make this list up; it’s compiled from the job requirements section of online marketing postings).
Where do you start? Most marketers have never heard of above subjects. Let’s start with MySQL.
Storing Information on the Internet
Are you familiar with Excel? You probably use it to store data. When you connect multiple spreadsheets together, it creates a database. Many websites, such as Yelp, use databases to store information. Yelp’s database, for example, likely has a table (spreadsheet) devoted to restuarants. Each restaurant has a row with information on the location, price range, and hours. It probably looks like this:
Besides Yelp, sites such as YouTube, Craigslist, and even this blog handle data in exactly the same way! Like Microsoft Excel, there’s a “brand” of databases for storing information. The most popular for online marketing is MySQL.
Displaying and Editing Information
Programmers invented special code (PHP, ASP, we’ll cover this in the future) to request information from the database. If Yelp wanted to create a web page with information from the above table on Per Se, they would write a bunch of code that requests certain cells from the table. Those cells would be output and formatted so that it is readable and user-friendly in the context of the web page.
Suppose you wanted to edit the information? Imagine editing a spreadsheet remotely, where you could change a cell by typing text into a field on a website:
MySQL is dynamic; so Yelp and its users should be able to easily edit Pe Se’s information (i.e., the Per Se table). Check out this page Yelp created to do just that.
In Short: MySQL is a brand of online databases. An online database is a bunch of spreasheets connected and stored for access on the Internet. Websites can retrieve and edit stored information easily.
This covers the basics of MySQL–I’ll go deeper in future posts. If you would like to get started, check out this tutorial for MySQL; it gives a great overview and a short example.
When I started using RSS, I added the top 20 Adage marketing blogs. After three days, I was overwhelmed with redundancy and feed overload. These bloggers are popular because of their credentials and abundant re-posting, not because of inspiring and unique content.
Is there a better way to seed content for an RSS newbie? Google Reader has an interesting feature called feed bundles.
These are pre-packaged feeds for different categories. The problem is that the feeds are junk; the marketing bundle includes Marketing Profs, Marketing Sherpa, eMarketer, and Brand Autopsy. The selection creates the same problems as adding bloggers from popularity lists.
A Solution
The sports industry figured it out. ESPN announced the Truehoop Network. It is an association of 20 bloggers; each has a specialty (local team). Instead of a standard blog roll, the Truehoop Network provides the best day-to-day content for every facet of basketball. Each writer is unique, eliminating redundancy problems mentioned before. Oddly, the bloggers are not popular. ESPN chose them because of their quality and unique content, not because they were famous or blogged/reblogged four times per day.
SB Nation functions similarly. It is a network of blogs around specific sports. If you were interested in baseball, SB Nation compiles the best baseball blogs specializing in team niches and provides a corresponding feed for all of the content (imagine, subscribing to the best bloggers for each baseball team in one aggregated feed!).
How sweet would it be if this existed for marketing or business? I desire a marketing blog network, not a blogroll, of writers covering unique content that can be aggregated into one feed. Anyone new to RSS could add this feed and have such a holistic view of marketing–the aggregated 15-20 blogs are of higher quality information than anything you could find on Technorati’s top 50.
I’d love some help.
Check out the categories. Am I missing any for a great marketing blog network?
Know an expert blogger perfect for a category? Let me know. I’ll try to identify a writer for each topic–hoping to release the list later this month.
Who best understands Twitter’s business model? The thousands of bloggers speculating on off-beat ideas, or the founders? Pay a certain agency $200,000 and they’ll give you 50 ideas, but only Jack Dorsey understands the most feasible approach.
Sadly, mature companies continue to choose the expensive route: hiring a marketing agency.
Strategy. Design. Branding. These are not difficult ideas; no certification or technical education needed. Could an employee with three years of tenure produce comparable results?
“But Matt, Agencies are experts in the subject. They can do it so much better and efficiently.” This is definitely true for technical problems (those requiring a degree or special knowledge). But most agencies are not experts. Amex understands Amex’s business better than any agency. It would take years for an agency to absorb all of the tacit knowledge required to produce quality work.
The time and resources needed to conduct appropriate research strain the agency’s absurd business model. Digitas may secure a $200,000 project, but revenue is squeezed by competition and expenses associated with RFPs, SOWs, and business development. Throw in overhead and I have no clue how they make money (check out the underperformance of WPP, Publicis, and Omnicom).
Corporations of the world: train your staff. Hire some digitally savvy employees. Hand expensive strategy and design projects to some motivated entry-level employees. Pay the expensive guys once something technical is needed. The results will be astounding.
Alisa makes a great point: “Social media isn’t social media…it is the Web.” Maybe in 1998, my online behavior was siloed. But everything I do online is social–I’m constantly interacting. Online marketing is social marketing.
This is why a focus on engagement makes so much sense. Instead of trying to get as many visitors as possible to your site, lets exploit the Internet for what it is–a great communication device.
Every project I’ve witnessed at American Express focuses on 1998 metrics: click-throughs, visitors, visits, page views. Again, from Alisa, “The point isn’t click-throughs, its about that interaction/involvement/intimacy– ie ‘engagement.’”
and from Mike on why the old metrics don’t work:”…brands currently spend the majority of their online budgets on display advertising, is that it is a known quantity. People know what to expect…But, just because a thing can be measured, doesn’t make it worth something.“
My problem, however, is that you need KPIs to figure out whether you’re on the right track. What do these metrics look like? I’m internally debating what makes the most sense, but here are some possibilities:
Repeat Visitors. Rating = poor. it logically follows that if you keep going back to a site, you’re engaged. But you could have still formed a relationship with only one visit.
Viral. Rating = poor. Viral activity would be a great metric if you could quantify it better. Does anyone know a way to track this effectively?
Activity. Rating = medium. If your site has a channel for interaction, then using activity is a great way to measure engagement. Not every site, however, has a way for users to easily take action.
Subscriptions. Rating = high. User subscriptions follow from strong engagement and a willingness to receive communication on a regular basis. This is about the same as granting permission (a la Godin).
Average Time on Site. Rating = high. Time is valuable, and it is great proxy for engagement and loyalty (via FeverBee).
Something to think about: what other metrics approximate the consumer engagement and relationships?
