Branding online: search engines, blogs, podcasts, wikis and more
I spoke at the Strategic Branding conference in Auckland yesterday. My session was on new ways to brand in the online channel. Of course branding campaigns appear in many forms online besides the ubiquitous banner ad. It was my job to provide the audience of brand marketers a crash course in blogs, RSS feeds, paid search, natural search, contextual advertising, text link advertising, microsites, and podcasts, and to do all that within an hour! Well I managed it, and I have the information-packed slide deck to prove it. Feel free to download the PPT.
Duncan Shand has some nice coverage of the conference sessions here.
Open Source – what’s the point?
If you think that Open Source is about it being “free” in the sense of not paying for it, you’re missing the point. It’s about being “free” in the sense of freedom of speech and freedom to create and re-mix intellectual property, unfettered.
Information wants to be free, after all.
But it’s more than that. According to John Perry Barlow in his classic Wired article from 1994, The Economy of Ideas:
- Information Is a Verb, Not a Noun – Information is something that happens when minds or objects or other pieces of information interact.
- Information Is Experienced, Not Possessed – It’s something that happens to you as you mentally decompress it from its storage code.
- Information Has to Move – If it isn’t moving it ceases to exist as anything but potential.
- Information Is Conveyed by Propagation, Not Distribution – It cannot be shipped around like widgets, because it doesn’t simply move on; it leaves a trail everywhere it’s been.
- Information Wants to Be Free – Information by its very nature desires to escape outside its imposed boundaries.
- Information Replicates into the Cracks of Possibility – The more universally resonant an idea or image or song, the more minds it will enter and remain within.
- Information Wants to Change – It evolves constantly into forms which will be more perfectly adapted to its surroundings.
- Information Is Perishable – Generally, its quality degrades rapidly both over time and in distance from the source of production.
- Meaning Has Value and Is Unique to Each Case – We assign value to information based on its meaningfulness. That value depends on the extent to which each recipient has the receptors (shared terminology, attention, interest, language, paradigm) necessary to render what is received meaningful.
- Familiarity Has More Value than Scarcity – Most soft goods increase in value as they become more common. Often times the best way to raise demand for your product is to give it away.
- Exclusivity Has Value – Exclusive possession of certain facts makes them more useful, but that value often degrades over time.
- Point of View and Authority Have Value – People are willing to pay for the authority of those editors whose point of view seems to fit best.
- Time Replaces Space – Information is generally more valuable the closer the purchaser can place themselves to the moment of its expression.
- The Protection of Execution – The best way to protect intellectual property is to act on it, not to sit on it.
- Information as Its Own Reward – Information is its own currency. It has intrinsic value, not as a means to acquisition but as the object to be acquired.
If you read Stanford law professor Larry Lessig’s book
Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity, which is freely available for download and is “Creative Commons” licensed, you’ll understand that this is a war and how high the stakes really are: humanity’s creativity will either be stifled or unleashed, depending on the outcome. Or if you don’t have the time to read a book, (even one that won’t cost you anything), do at least listen to Larry’s Free Culture webcast.
I’ve blogged before about the benefits to businesses of “embracing and extending” what’s already out there. Why reinvent the wheel countless times over?
We “stand on the shoulders of giants” because of the free exchange of ideas.
If this is too idealistic for you, then from a practical standpoint, Open Source ensures you won’t be “held hostage” by your web developer withholding web site source code as proprietary information — a common practice (but not here at Netconcepts!). Having the complete source code of your site, mitigates possible legal and operational code access problems and gives you maximum flexibility for future modification. I think one should continue to work with their web vendor because they are delighted with the service and quality of work, not because a transition would be too costly and would require rebuilding the site from scratch.
In addition, an Open Source solution is not constrained by licensing agreements, as proprietary software is. Open Source also offers security benefits because it’s open to public scrutiny and subject to constant user testing. And of course there’s also the reliability, adaptability and ease of maintenance of Open Source solutions. ( More from OpenSource.org on this.)
More free-to-download books on the subject of Open Source: Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution, Open Sources 2: The Continuing Evolution, and Producing Open Source Software: How to Run a Successful Free Software Project.
Vive la resistance!
My favorite Firefox extensions
These are my favorite browser extensions for Firefox (also referred to as plugins by some) that make my life easier (and will make yours too!):
- Tab Mix Plus – I keep so many tabs open at once that if my browser crashes, I would end up spending a lot of time trying to remember everything I was doing / looking at – that is, if I weren’t using this invaluable extension. I used to use the SessionSaver extension, but Tab Mix Plus is more robust and has a richer featureset.
- All-in-One Gestures – Don’t know what mouse gestures are? Wow, you’re missing something cool if that’s the case! Mouse gestures allow you to execute commands within Firefox without using the keyboard, menus or toolbars. Just by making certain movements with your mouse, you can quickly go back a page, close a tab, open a new tab, open a link in a new tab, and more! More on this…
- User Agent Switcher – masquerade as Googlebot, Yahoo Slurp, or msnbot or any other user agent to see if a site is doing bot detection
- Web Developer – Great tool if you do any CSS coding or building of web forms, etc.
- Google Toolbar for Firefox – Includes Google Suggest, where you get query suggestions as you type in the search box. Be sure to enable advanced features so you’ll get the PageRank meter. Watch my Google toolbar screencast which will quickly show you how to install, configure, and get the most of of the toolbar.
- SEO-Links – Hover over a link and it quickly checks the top 3 search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN Search) for link popularity numbers and rankings for the anchor text, displaying the results in a table next to the link. Watch my SEO-Links screencast to see how to get the most out of this handy tool.
- Copy Plain Text – Useful for copying stuff from a web page into Microsoft Word so that the font style isn’t carried over when you don’t want it to.
- ChatZilla – A handy little IRC (Internet Relay Chat) client
- Sage – An RSS feed reader. I actually don’t use this much because my newsreader program of choice, NetNewsWire (for the Mac), is so awesome.
- ViewSourceWith – So that you can view the page source in another program (such as BBEdit for the Mac).
- ShowIP – Displays in the bottom right corner the IP address of the server that’s hosting the page being displayed.
- StumbleUpon – While surfing, get recommendations of related recommended pages to check out from friends and like–minded individuals.
- Search engines for the Search Bar – Technically, this isn’t an actual extension. Up in the top right there’s a built-in “Search Bar” and you can add your own favorite search engines in addition to the default set of engines that already appear there in the drop-down list. The search engines I’ve added include: MSN Search, Wikipedia, LinkedIn, Technorati, and Creative Commons, to name a few.
My most favorite time saving tip isn’t an extension at all. In fact, it not only works in Firefox, it works in IE too, and Safari, and many other browsers. The shortcut is this: Type in just the main part of the domain into the address bar (without the www. in front or the .com at the end) and then hit Ctrl Enter (i.e. hold down the Ctrl key while hitting Enter), then the browser will automatically add the www. and the .com to the address for you!
Want more? Then check out the brand spankin’ new Firefox ebook from FirefoxFacts.com. It’s chock full of tips, tricks and hacks to enhance your online experience when surfing with the Firefox web browser.
Did I miss any particularly great Firefox extensions? Leave a comment and let me know!
Domainers laughing all the way to the bank
It used to be in the “old days” of the Web, domain name speculators and cybersquatters would sit on desirable or trademarked or typo domain names and demand ridiculous prices. Selling a domain name for orders of magnitude more than you paid for it was the ultimate goal.
These so-called “domainers” are playing a different game now. Instead of selling, they’re BUYING. They’ll even shell out tens of thousands of dollars if the projected amount of type-in traffic warrants it.
I sold the domain countryinn.com last year for low five figures after playing hard-to-get for several weeks. I refused the domainer’s original offer and he kept coming back, eventually doubling his initial offer.
I did not know the buyer was a domainer when I sold the domain. It wasn’t until I saw the “site” that he put up on the domain after he took it over that it dawned on me. Before that, all I knew was that it was someone out of South Korea. At the time I thought a cash payment in the low five figures was a pretty good return on my investment on a domain name that I had bought for $500 a few years earlier from a former client who didn’t want it anymore.
Boy was I wrong. After I read the article in Business 2.0, “Masters of their Domains, I felt like a total SUCKER. That was because I realized that the domainer would make his money back in probably just a few months, by monetizing the type-in traffic through Google AdSense ads and affiliate links. Then forevermore the domain will be a nice little annuity for him. As Business 2.0 describes it:
….it’s all about the income stream. A single good domain name–Candy.com, Cellphones.com, Athletesfoot.com–can bring in hundreds of dollars a day, in some cases while the owner hardly lifts a finger. Schwartz, for instance, directs his traffic to one of the many small companies that serve as go-betweens with Google and Yahoo, the two giants that make this all possible. The middlemen, known as aggregators, do all the heavy lifting, designing the sites and tapping into one or the other of the search engines’ advertising networks to add the best-paying links.
After acquiring the domain from me, the domainer put up a pretty lame “site” at countryinn.com, powered by one of the aggregators. Heck, the home page doesn’t even have a title tag! How lame is that! But of this I have no doubt: it’s making him money while he sleeps.
This is such big business, and here I was, absolutely CLUELESS about it. Of course that’s what the domainers rely on, that the seller has no idea of the money-making potential, and thus the true value, of the domain they possess.
Frank Fleischer, who runs the site breeders.NET, also owns the domain breeders.com. Frank received two phone calls last week from someone who turned out to be a domainer. In the first call the domainer offered an amount in the mid five figures. Sounds like a pretty sweet offer, eh? Well, after considering what I and some others had to say about the business of domain name buying and selling, he’s decided to keep the domain and make the most of it himself. A wise decision.
The dirty little secret is that the search engines are a party to this seedy industry. They don’t like to talk about it, but all this type-in traffic is lining their pockets BIG TIME:
No one knows for sure how much Web traffic comes from type-ins, and Google and Yahoo execs won’t discuss it. But privately, during one of the late-night parties at the Traffic conference, one Yahoo official estimates that type-ins could make up 15 percent of its search business.
The engines even wine-and-dine the domainers and go out partying with them. The Business 2.0 article regales us with the story of 14 Yahoo executives at a trade show for domainers called Traffic and how they all piled into a stretch Hummer with a few of the domainers and headed off to a Gentlemen’s Club to hang out in the VIP section complete with plush booths and red velvet curtains. I wonder if the IRS considers lap dances as expensible items?
What should be your corporate blog’s URL?
A reader emailed me with the following question:
I was wondering if you have a POV, on if a blog should live on a corporate domain name (ex. company.com) or if it would be better to have the domain name be different from the corp. (ex. companyblog.com)?
That’s a great question.
My answer is this: if the blog will get more links by being at an arm’s length from the corporate site, then I’d have it on a totally separate domain.
Let me supply a hypothetical example… If a life insurance company has a blog about health and wellness and it’s at www.stayinghealthy.com, that will garner many more links than one at blog.lifeinsuranceco.com, IMHO.
This may seem like an oversimplification, since I haven’t discussed the branding implications, but I believe the “link-ability” of the blog is what will give the blog a long productive life in the blogosphere. Anything else is peripheral.
Lifelong learning
I just got an email from one of my (Netconcepts’) first clients (circa 1995) that he’s now completed his MBA, doing it while still working full-time as a marketing exec. It takes a lot of courage to get an MBA after being in the workforce for several decades. Way to go, Greg!
Lifelong learning is where it’s at. Even if you don’t go back to school, you need to keep developing your brain and your skills.
Once you stop learning, you become a dinosaur, unable to compete in this increasingly complex world. This has never been truer, considering that technology is advancing at an exponentially faster rate.
Simultaneously, technology — such as the Internet and podcasting — is breaking down barriers, making it easier than ever before to access knowledge and information once only available to the priveleged elite. For example, MIT are making publicly available course materials and videos of lectures — for FREE! It’s not just MIT, there are Stanford Graduate School of Business MBA lectures and UC Berkeley lectures too, for example.
If nerdy professors aren’t your cup of tea, then how about business leaders and technology pundits? IT Conversations offers some amazing material, again all for free. Such as talks from Malcolm Gladwell and Tim O’Reilly. And entire conferences such as Web 2.0, PopTech and Accelerating Change, all of which I highly recommend.
The way I make time for learning is by subscribing to podcast feeds of this material and having it download to my iPod. Whenever I work out at the gym or go for a bike ride or drive to the office I’m listening to gurus rather than singers or DJs.
Speaking of gurus, here are two to definitely listen to: Steve Jobs (from his commencement speech at Stanford in 2005), and the Dalai Lama when he was a visiting lecturer at Stanford. Download from here (iTunes required).
Boosting website credibility
Stanford’s web credibility research surveyed 4500 people and took over three years to compile, but the 10 guidelines that came out of this study are worth repeating here.
- Make it easy to verify the accuracy of information on your site
- Show that there is a real organization behind your site
- Highlight the expertise in your organization and in the content and services you provide
- Show that honest and trustworthy people stand behind your site
- Make it easy to contact you
- Design your site so it looks professional (or is appropriate for your purpose)
- Make your site easy to use – and useful
- Update your site’s content often (at least show it’s been reviewed recently)
- Use restraint with any promotional content (eg ads, offers)
- Avoid errors of all types, no matter how small they seem
Read the full report.
New way to follow and join Internet conversations
Now here’s another great little service I’ve recently discovered.
Say you’ve just released a news story, blog post, product page or any other web page, hopefully people all over the Internet are talking about it. And you’d like to keep track of all those conversations, right?
TalkDigger will help you find, follow and display conversations evolving around a subject (URL). It works like this: If you want to know who is talking about you, copy the URL, paste it in the TalkDigger search box at TalkDigger.com and hit “Dig it!”
TalkDigger then returns results from various search engines, all of which contain a link to the URL.
Having access to these conversations is a truly powerful tool for webmasters and bloggers, and online marketers can discover what people think of your new product — its strengths and weaknesses. Pretty neat, eh?
Hat tip to Jeremiah Owyang for this one.