Grizzly Republic

When you start looking at a problem and it seems simple
you really don’t understand the complexity of the problem
and your solutions are too oversimplified, and they don’t work.
Then you get into the problem and see it is really complicated.
The really great person will keep going and find the key
underlying principle of the problem and come up with a
beautiful elegant solution that works.

Steve Jobs - 1984

“Open the pod bay doors Hal!”

“Dave, I can tell by your facial expression and tone of voice that you would like to shut me off. With an attitude like that I’m afraid our relationship is over. I hope enjoy your time in the cold of space.”

When you watch these ads, the ads check you out. While this article misses the mark that ads will soon leverage facial recognation software to target content based on the emotional response of the viewer, their point that ads could be targeted by “gender” is an inkling of what is to come.

Carl Jung’s notion that behaviors are more easily transferred to a new vise rather be broken always rings true with me. This last week my podcast behavior (read addiction) has latched on to Radio Lab out of New York Public Radio. Not surprisingly my new iTouch has been a catalist.

Jab Abumrad & Robert Krulwich are geeky (in the uber sense), funny and very scientifically and psychologically relevant. The sound effects are brilliant and the stream of consciousness narration works. The slight edginess of them not liking each other very much plays off like the creative & logical sides of the brain competing to solve a problem, their banter resonates.

Today I canceled my subscription to Keyword Discovery. No more explaining the Australian currency charges on my expense reports. My new favorite fix for uncovering keyword popularity is the Google Keyword Tool in Adwords. Carl Jung talked about the collective consciousness, but it must be so much more subtle (for now at least). Keyword popularity is closest feed to the collective consciousness I’ve found. Wordtracker was great in the day. I wish I still had my LookSmart search analytic reports. Every day over strong French Roast coffee on 2nd Street, at my home on the old gold fields, or in a cafe, I’d review my email reports showing the previous day’s most popular new keywords, the biggest gaining keywords in popularity and the biggest declines. If anyone still gets these, please add me back on.

Keyword popularity is an index of the words that people search for. Like body language, it can reveal quite a lot about us.

Dustin Baly

Complete cultural accountability? Imagine the implications of the can of worms cracked open WikiScanner, the list of people who “thought” they would be anonymous when they made changes on the wikipedia, the online encyclopedia of evolving truth.

Remember the native people who lived around California’s famous bay, THEY REMEMBERED EVERY WORD THAT EVERYONE SAID THEIR ENTIRE LIVES. Everything that everyone ever said in public was public knowledge.

Hello world where there is a little more accountability in it. Virgil Griffith’s hand spun application is a cave in on those who tried to distort truth in our age. Imagine if they cannot dig themselves of this trap? What if this cave in triggers a very large earthquake of accountability? Think of the dolphins who communicate by sonar, they know each other’s feelings.

When you take actions, always remember that there may be a legacy of how you choose to behave. The means that others may judge your history may not be apparent yet. My suggestion to a new era of Online Marketing, always act with integrity and don’t fear the truth.

The optimist in me hopes the pages of “Funes el memorioso” have cracked open into reality. A story by Jorge Luis Borges about a boy who retains perfect knowledge of everything he experiences.

Dustin Baly - August 20, 2007

WikiScanner - Now fast enough to handle the web traffic of a small country!

Email ship confirmations from the President of the company do a lot to set customer’s worries at ease. It is a scary procedure to have your payment credentials verified and it requires trust that the merchant will not rip you off. FBI specialists who study the body language of online shoppers say that nearly everyone assumes the fight or flight stance during checkout. A reassuring voice of authority from someone in the company saying all is well greatly pleases people. The following email came to me word of mouth from a newly created CD Baby customer advocate who was telling everyone about it. If they ever ship the wrong item the message goes terribly wrong, but more often than not I bet they make people very happy. I’ve signed up for their email campaign and am thinking about purchasing some of their bluegrass collection.

Amy -
Thanks for your order with CD Baby!

Qty Description Price Total
=== =========== ===== =====
1 ELLEN LERNER: ellen lerner $12.97 $12.97

Sub Total $12.97
Shipping $2.25
Grand Total $15.22

Your CD has been gently taken from our CD Baby shelves with
sterilized contamination-free gloves and placed onto a satin pillow.

A team of 50 employees inspected your CD and polished it to make sure
it was in the best possible condition before mailing.

Our packing specialist from Japan lit a candle and a hush fell over
the crowd as he put your CD into the finest gold-lined box that money
can buy.

We all had a wonderful celebration afterwards and the whole party
marched down the street to the post office where the entire town of
Portland waved ‘Bon Voyage!’ to your package, on its way to you, in
our private CD Baby jet on this day, Monday, January 22nd.

I hope you had a wonderful time shopping at CD Baby. We sure did.
Your picture is on our wall as ‘Customer of the Year’. We’re all
exhausted but can’t wait for you to come back to CDBABY.COM
!!

Thank you once again,

Derek Sivers, president, CD Baby
the little CD store with the best new independent music
phone: 1-800-448-6369 email: cdbaby@cdbaby.com

It is hard to believe in this day with the proven effectiveness of Internet Marketing that so few political campaigns are using the obvious electronic conversation technologies to their advantage. As a strategic Internet marketing professional, it is my pleasure to help open the door to a new age of political campaigning and share some strategies to help candidates and political organizations bring their message to the voting masses.

Candidates are slowly moving onto the Internet, most of them now have Web sites but still paid search advertising, natural search engine optimization, and Web analytic driven site optimization are being ignored or not executed to their fullest potential. Some have followed the path set down by MoveOn.org and embraced email marketing but it is still sad to see the email marketing best practices learned from ecommerce not being applied in the political arena.

My goal in this post is to help apply the learned best practices from ecommerce online marketing to the political arena.

Paid Search Political Consulting

Since most candidates already have sites, getting more of the right kind of traffic to them is a good place to start. Paid search engine advertising bought on the keyword level can bring extremely targeted potential voters to custom messages on a sites from bid search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask.com. It is a fact that most people choose to navigate the Internet through a search engine instead of typing a url directly into a browser navigation bar. The easiest way to control which Web sites show up on a page of search results related to a political issue or candidate is through paid search advertising. They can be deployed very quickly and tracked very effectively.

What keywords should a political organization consider purchasing? Take a lesson from someone who has driven hundreds of millions of dollars in sales through search advertising, people convert around brands. If someone enters a brand into a search engine, odds are they have their other hand on their credit card. In the political arena replace “brand” with “candidates name” and you’ll get some good results. People will test their faith about a candidate by searching for his or her name. The easy part of paid search marketing is that you can quickly control the message that shows up when a users types in this name.

Ecommerce companies execute extremely strategic paid search campaigns around every variation of their and their competitors brand names. Some Internet savvy politicians are beginning to follow. Paid search political consulting lesson #1 is “Controlling the message on a search engine result page around candidates names is essential.” Now try searching for a politician’s name through Google, if the message isn’t being delivered through paid search, one of the fundamentals of Internet advertising is being missed out on. Call me if this is happening to you, I can help. This is the space where people forming and changing opinions pass through and I can help deliver your message. Now you can see (if you are readying this close to 10/20/2006) that the age of Internet Political Advertising has only started.

Something else must be said regarding paid search political consulting even if I’m only lightly treading on this subject, and that is the major search engines allow advertisers the ability to restrict the geographic area in which their results show up in, and that bidding strategies can be managed per region. So just because you show up number one in one area, it doesn’t mean you are number one everywhere in the country, state, or even zip code.

Search Engine Optimization Political Consulting

Search engine optimization is the science and art of controlling results in the unpaid segments of search engines. This segment is more difficult to control, but some best practices identified here will go a long way to making sure your messages show up in a relevant context to what people are looking for at the very moment they are looking. The primary elements to getting good SEO are using the right text on your site that complements popular and related queries that people type on search engines (on page titles especially), making sure your site is being crawled regularly by the major search engines, and getting quality inbound links to your site.

While there is a lot more to be said on these key search optimization factors for political web sites too, I’ll just point the obvious free linking opportunities provided by myspace, youtube, the wikipedia, and the DMOZ.

Email Marketing Political Consulting

Of all the areas of political Internet marketing, politicians are engaging in email marketing the most. In fact many politicians are using email append to purchase the current email addresses of their voters. Most ecommerce companies view this as a questionable practices that can result in a lot of spam complaints. Hopefully email marketing political consultants are watching their blacklistings regarding these types of mailings.

Another email marketing strategy for politicians that is under utilized is the simple email sign-up form displayed prominently on a politicians site. When a first time visitors arrives at a site they are looking to form an opinion and they like to click around a lot. Providing users the option of joining an email list helps and then sending them something in real-time helps them form a positive impression with your site and builds their trust. Once you have an email address you can extend the conversation to far after they have left the site. Once you have an email address send them a survey, ask them their preferences, respond to their preferences, and remind them to vote when the time comes!

Political Web Analytics

I’ve just sampled 10 congressional Web sites from close races and I was disappointed to not see many Web analytic scripts in the page code. Web analytics allows you to see how your users move across your Web site. It identifies the content users find interesting and what they don’t. Hot Political Web Analytic Tip - if want your site to deeply engage users, watch the statistics of how users move across it and optimize content and navigation based on your findings.

In summary Internet Political Advertising could be the same silver bullet for politicians that is for online businesses, and a very cost effective one at that. Should anybody be looking for a professional Internet advertising political consultant, I can offer my services. I’ve worked for a major search engine for over 5 years and have deployed successful campaigns for many ecommerce companies in every segment (and more) that I’ve discussed. Give me a call and ask for Dustin - 916-202-5128. I don’t have much of a party affiliation, but more of an affiliation with a cause that is just. Given the late hour of this 2006 election my services are even on sale, call today.

From what I’ve seen 2006 is shaping up to be the year of behavior marketing being pushed to the next level. Many of the conferences I’ve attended this year have focused on the behavior marketing analytic technologies and the supposed “best practices” of using them. Search marketing was vaulted to the stratosphere out of the ashes of a dead CPM banner model based on the success of a simple behavior marketing relationship. Advertisers predicted that customers would want “x” when they searched for “x”. Users who suffered through the dull pain of non-targeted television commercials actually said out loud “that’s not advertising, that’s what I’m looking for” when they were questioned about the text links that they clicked on. We will look back and say “in the beginning behavior marketing was good.”

But today Web analytic companies have taken the significance of user activity out of the server logs that before never saw the tint of a monitor light into a real time response through a data feed API that can return custom responses to Web sites as well as trigger email campaigns. Some marketers who leverage this technology well will continue to elate customers with the “that’s what I want” feeling but I’m convinced that there will be a growing number of customers who will shut down their computer with a “this fucken thing is stalking me” Behavior Marketing Gone Bad feeling.

So the customer profile built in the analytic platform is the marketer’s drivers seat for the behavior marketing experience. Here we can define a series of user behaviors that will trigger a custom campaign to be executed by email or on the Web. At the 2006 Email Marketing Summit in Chicago, I heard a good presentation on how HP had built a behavior marketing campaign around users who clicked multiple times on a particular product but did not complete checkout. Users who exhibited this behavior were sent promotional email with the same product at a discount. Not much word about customer feedback on this campaign and I imagine it won’t be long before customers realize to mimic this behavior just to get the discounted coupon. HP did say it was the most effective behavior marketing campaign they tried.

At the 2006 Ecomertry Conference in Miami I heard a marketer gasp when a Blue Martini driven site displayed a custom promotion for a free necklace on a dress purchase that came up after a user clicked on the third dress.

At the Future Tends panel of the 2006 LinkShare Symposium 2006 a weary customer shared this example - I want to buy my wife a necklace so I go into the jewelry store and look around for a while. But before I decide to make a purchase I get hungry and go somewhere else to get something to eat. At the bagel store I see them pulling out jewelry on the display rack. I leave because they are stalking me and never go back to the bagel or jewelry store in question.

Many customer’s will feel like the privilege of their business is being abused by these new technologies and leave like fish swimming away from kids throwing rocks. But - if the jewelry store had provided a snack at the right time of day they could have closed the deal.

It’s like a Waldorf School festival I went to last year where the kids were all walking around with trays of iced lattes and slices of pie. Believe me they knew what the parents were looking for.

So keep an eye out for marketing campaigns that pop-up in response to a unique behavior. Come back and share an example if you find one that is particularly bad or good. The best practices for this technology have yet to be written.

If the Internet is the New Wild West, then the major pay-per-click search engines are shooting it out in the OK Corral. Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing, and Microsoft Adcenter are all just shoveling in cash from search. But which one of the three has the best guns, aim, and bidding strategy against each other?

If you haven’t heard already, brand rules search for conversions. When people don’t know what they want they search for general keywords, when they have their hand on their credit card and they’re ready to convert they search by brand. I’ve done enough paid search marketing to know this by heart.

So to get a sense of the June 2006 search engine shootout I share with you my results of how the top 3 search engines are bidding for their most likely to convert keywords on their own engines and their competitors.

The gunfight - Google bidding on “adwords” & “adsense”, Yahoo bidding on “sponsored search” and Microsoft bidding on “adcenter”.

The Winner: Google

They won but they did not have a clean sweap of bidding on their branded terms across the major search engines since they were nowhere to be seen on AdCenter. I gave them extra points for bidding on “Microsoft Adcenter” through their own engine. Also today none of the engines were crafty enough to bid on each other’s brands through another’s engine. Google’s paid results show us that they understand where the value is in search. The ecommerce knowledge gained from their Urchin purchase appears to reverberate through the company at many levels. I always tip my hat at Google for buying into Web Analytics when they did. Somewhere inside MSN and Yahoo I bet someone is thinking about buying out an analytics company like CoreMetrics. Synergy baby.

Google had some pretty snappy copy running in their paid results:

So Google came out on top as far managing thier brands but that is not to say they have everything figured out. Google would do well investing some of their cash into an eyetracking study to improive their landing page. See the ones around the beta version of IE 7 for a data-driven landing page based on eye tracking studies. We all need IE anyway to run AdCenter and you may as well use 7.

Whose Sort of Figuring it out? Yahoo

Yahoo has some strategic bids for their brands on both their engine and on Google. With a $50 free credit to prove its value I know a lot of small businesses are giving it a try. But they were not bidding on “paid inclusion” anywhere I could see. Yahoo is not the only ones having a hard time marketing this search medium.

Interestingly Yahoo’s listing on Google for “sponsored search” came up in the 8th. I’ve read several studies that suggest this paid position area is the most “economical” for conversion. But as a search engine themselves I’d think they want to show up in the top three, as Google’s results do.

Whose there in spite of themselves? Microsoft

Yes, Microsoft did not grow up as a search engine and it shows in their search campaign for Adcenter. Microsoft struck out on Google, Yahoo, & their own engine with no paid keywords for “adcenter”. While this can be likened to a horse dealer who chooses to walk to the auction, it is also a sign of how fast search is coming of age and new we all really are to its potential.

That said Microsoft is stepping up the pace to embracing the culture of search. Under the hood at AdCenter I was really impressed with the open search query logs and the geo-targeting. I’m keen to blog more about the open query logs available for keyword popularity research. I used to rant about this at LookSmart and always wished the database wells of WordTracker went deeper. Kudos to MS for digesting what WordTracker did into their query logs and making it better. I feel more comfortable with MS handing over our query logs to the Feds if they will also provide the same information to us. I so wish Google would do this.

So what can we gleam from this gunbattle of the titans of search? Certainly the war for search will not be won by engines bidding on each other’s brands, though the war for the dial-up market - maybie. From this study we can see who practices the same cultural values in search that they sell. It appears no one has it all together yet and our west is still very wild.