Listen

Listen New strategies for integrated marketing Forward The title of this book might seem a bit weird, but it’s descriptive of the core concept of this book.

Traditional marketers are like the irritating person in a conference room, not listening to anyone but the people they want to impress, waiting for you to stop talking so they can say something.

Actually most marketers don’t wait. In traditional marketing most companies just talk--and to talk they interrupt. That’s all commercials and advertisements are: interruptions.

And then they lie.

Conversations have two elements, and listening is the most valuable part. You aren’t learning anything when you’re doing the talking. We spend money on focus groups so we can learn that nobody looks at pornography and everyone works out. Want to learn what features of your (and your competitors) products that infuriate users? The truth is already out there in conversations already underway.

People are talking about you. Join the conversation. But first, LISTEN.

Preface I believe that before you read a business book you should have some idea of the qualifications of the writer. Along with my partner Diane Jenkins I started the advertising agency Babcock & Jenkins (www.bnj.com) 17 years ago, and helped guide the company through the challenges of radical transformations of marketing.

The next few paragraphs outline the nature of that qualification and read like an abbreviated history of B&J. If you’re satisfied that I might have might have something to teach you, you can certainly skip it and dive in to chapter one.

B&J is an odd agency--very introverted. The most descriptive term I’ve come up with is “heads down”. Many dynamic and engaging individuals work at B&J, but even they are as comfortable speaking with our clients’ engineers as with their marketers. The overarching personality is decidedly geek. Some of our clients (for example, Intel) consider us to be more of a software development company than marketers.

But we are marketers to the core. We simply look for a technical solution to nearly every marketing problem. That’s our DNA--for better or worse. Our devotion to technical innovation, (along with some disastrous mistakes I’ve made) has sometimes limited our growth, but it has also enabled a small agency in Oregon to have the largest companies in the world as clients.

Nearly every major technology company is or has been a B&J client.

It’s common for companies to claim to innovate ahead of the curve. I don’t brag about that as much as I used to, because I no longer consider innovation to be an unadulterated benefit. I know firsthand how painful and pointless innovation can be--ahead of the curve means ahead of fashion and general knowledge. As any good marketer knows, being too far ahead of the curve means the benefits of your approach are not known--you have to teach instead of sell, and teaching is expensive.

I’m not even sure that innovation is a measure of clear foresight or a pioneering spirit. I think it’s just a byproduct of a particular disposition intersecting with a set of circumstances. And I’m not so foolish as to claim we pioneered anything uniquely--when a set of technologies evolve they create opportunities that many people and companies see and build solutions around. What I do claim is that B&J is one of those companies, and built leading edge solutions again and again.

We have the patents and the history to prove that. The innovations continue today. How many agencies do you know that deliver lectures on iPhone development at software conferences?

How many provide access to marketing campaign results via smartphone? The better question may be why would we do that? And the answer is that we must. You may get smarter about managing your natural proclivities, but you can’t change your DNA. I mention all this because the insight I gained during those years of continuous innovation fuel this book, and some characteristic of my personality that makes me continuously curious. But several years ago I decided to step down as CEO. Despite my Peter Pan leadership the company had grown up and become very professional. We had all seen how difficult it was to get clients to adopt innovative solutions to sales and marketing problems, especially if the company didn’t know they had the problems or couldn’t understand the value of the solution.

The final straw was a year-long development effort of a tool we called iMarq to deal with sales lead nurturing though a rich media publishing platform. Selling clients on the value of a tool that combined concepts now known as Wiki, blogging, personalized automated email newsletters, web profiling, permission-based publishing and profile-based site personalization. Selling it proved nearly impossible when when a sum total of NONE of those concepts existed anywhere else. Even the concept of nurturing or maturing prospects and customers was largely unknown.

“So who else is using any of this stuff successfully?” “Well, you would be the first”. The only customer we had was a division of Siemens, and then the dotcom bubble popped and our corporate sponsor was laid off (yes, it was that long ago).

We searched for a CEO, found a person we thought could lead the company, discovered he couldn’t. I went back briefly to help stabilize the company and handed the reins over to Denise Barnes, who had been running operations for many years. Denise has grown into the role and is doing a spectacular job running the company, succeeding even in the current recession to add new business and keep our customers happy.

They’ve become a very professional organization that does spectacular work for their clients. I’m very proud to be associated with them.

I went off to play in the internet, looking at how new technologies and concepts can benefit marketing. I view what I do as pure research. I share what I learn with B&J, but I no longer try to

convince them to adopt the things I learn as practices for our clients. I use my undisciplined programming abilities and steady flow of competing ideas to build experimental websites and tools--mostly around particular interests I have so that they can do double duty. I analyze everything I do and roll what I learn into new ideas.

So that’s my qualification. I’ve been early enough in internet marketing that we didn’t pay any premium to register www.bnj.com, innovated excessively, and now I’m playing with all the tools and concepts of social marketing, web publishing, mobile, and the loose agglomeration of notions called Web 2.0. I’ve earned my stripes, made and lost money, paid attention, thought carefully and wildly, and experimented within the limitations of time, money, and the need to be right most of the time.

Now I wrote it all down. I hope you find it useful.

Chapter 1 Organizational Stuff Perhaps this should be in an introduction, but I never read them, and I doubt you do either. If you don't read this stuff then some of the book won't make sense, so it's Chapter 1.

If anyone doesn't understand the power of that little name change, or thinks it's somehow dishonest, then I sincerely and kindly suggest you read something more entertaining--this book won't help you. We're all liars here, manipulating reality to suit our purposes.

What is this book about?

The nature of marketing, and especially the subset of marketing termed advertising, is changing very rapidly. Over the last 100 years the notion of advertising has matured and morphed from it’s print-dominated roots into a broad set of disciplines. But until recently all of those disciplines worked in a similar fashion--you thrust some kind of advertisement in front of a lot of people, hoping some of them would be influenced to buy your product. Change happened slowly when it happened at all--a TV ad from 1950 is not substantially different from one in 2009. Then along came technological acceleration and everything got fast and weird.

The internet and the web are important elements of that change, but really only that--just an element. What is really different is that technological rate of change has reached a breakneck pace and will not stop or slow anytime soon (absent catastrophe). A simple example is data storage. I have no problem remembering when I used to count every byte in each field of a data record hoping to trim a bit or two so I could do better data manipulation with my very expensive 40 megabyte hard drive. Seems like it was yesterday. Now my phone stores 16,000 megabytes of data on a card the size of my fingernail, and that’s only because it’s old. A terabyte drive (1,000,000 megabytes) is less than a hundred bucks.

Here’s a factoid that’s a bit less geezer than ruminating about data storage and the bad old days.

Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook six years ago. Today if it were a country it would be the world’s 4th largest. China’s equivalent, Qzone, is two years younger and three times larger.

We could “gee whiz” about this all day, but the critical takeaway is this: Marketing is being dragged along by this rapid change at a rate that means we will see more changes in the next few years than the last three generations of marketers experienced over their entire careers.

Got any plans to prepare yourself for that?

I’m going to help you build that plan. We need some organizing principles to do that. When I started writing this book I just began stuffing things I’m experimenting with into chapters. Good information I think, but hard to assimilate. In casting about for an organizing principle I came across an article from the IBM Institute for Business Value titled “The End of Advertising As We Know It”.

Oh crap, methinks, another death of advertising article. But it really isn’t, and there’s some fabulous research and insight behind the humdrum title. But even better for my purposes are the four drivers for change that IBM identified in their global survey: Attention – Consumers are in control. We marketers used to be able to interrupt them and consumers had to just take it. Now they have control over what and when they view content, how they interact, what channels they use and how much advertising they are exposed to. Attention is shifting away from linear TV to adskipping, sharing and rating tools. Not just Tivo and DVR’s but web TV and a whole new class of personalization. IBM’s survey suggests personal PC time now rivals TV time. Even where it doesn’t, control is shifting more in the consumer’s favor every day.

Creativity – Anyone can create compelling content that achieves an audience.

The tools are cheap or free, the most important venues are free. User-generated and peer-delivered content, conversations and ideas shared for free across social networks, new models for compensation. All are driving a huge burst in creativity with a scope that is almost beyond description. What the content lacks in polish it makes up for with relevance and freshness. On the professional side, established players, like publishers and broadcasters, are taking on traditional agency functions and broadening creative roles.

Measurement – The old mass-market model relied on highly disconnected, fuzzy and time-shifted cause and effect. “We put up five billboards and our business increased by five percent last quarter”. The one-to-one world includes involvement-based measurement and reporting with undreamed of precision.

Everything can be measured in realtime, and so it is. Fewer and fewer marketers are interested in buying “impressions”. Two-thirds of the advertising experts IBM polled expect 20 percent of advertising revenue to shift from impression-based to impact-based formats within three years.

Advertising inventories – Increasingly the cost of advertising is set directly by it’s value in attracting business. With an infinite number of channels and venues, exploding content, and precise measurement intersecting with technology to

manage all value factors, there’s little room or reason for human interaction.

Advertising is increasingly bought and sold through efficient exchanges. What will that look like five years from now? More than half of the ad professionals polled expect that open platforms will, within the next five years, take 30 percent of the revenue currently flowing to proprietary incumbents such as broadcasters.

Smells like a whole new ballgame to me. But best of all (for me anyway), that’s my set of organizing principles. A set of broad strokes capable of pigeonholing everything I have to say.

I will be writing about new concepts and modifications of traditional approaches in the context of these four elements. I believe this will be the most helpful and effective way to present this material.

We will be using a semi-fictional company as an example throughout the book. The company is called Ke Nalu (Hawaiian for The Wave). We'll grow it from a simple Stand Up Paddle surfboard company into a multinational conglomerate to suit our purposes.

This is all quite handy since I own Ke Nalu, LLC. and the web site associated with it--an emagazine about Stand Up Paddle Surfing, one of my hobbies. I built the magazine as an experiment, but it's live and functional, so it makes a great sample. About 400 people visit it daily, so we can even play with marketing approaches and see what really happens.

Maybe you'll even get into standup paddle surfing--I highly recommend it.

We'll start off with basic theoretical principles of new marketing tools and approaches, we’ll start playing with the toys and watching results, and then we’ll integrate those new tools, venues and concepts into more traditional marketing for an overall plan. Some companies make two very visible mistakes today--they separate their marketing approaches into new and old, or they abandon traditional marketing for the bright, shiny new toys. The most successful marketing I see today marries the old and new to leverage the strength of both.

You might wonder why I don’t simply use B&J clients, and just lean over the shoulders of B&J’s people to illustrate approaches and concepts. Two reasons--first it would distract the heck out of B&J’s fine talent, and second when I have previously tried to write about work we’ve done for our clients I was perpetually stymied by the proprietary nature of most things we do. B&J is great at collecting data and turning it into strategic and tactical directions. But our clients understand how valuable and revealing this is and insist that we keep their particular flavor of it secret.

For example, many years ago we developed a new way to radically boost the response of a direct marketing campaign. We called it TriggerTouch(tm). I don’t know why I bother to assert trademark on the name, we never could tell anyone how good it was.

TriggerTouch melded paper mail to a website and email. Simply put, when people started responding to a direct mail piece in a specific zip code we knew the mail was being delivered and automatically sent a booster email to all the rest of the people around that zip. The email

pointed them to the paper mail in their inbox and offered a one-click way to respond to the paper mail.

The presentation value of the printed piece reinforced the email, and the email drove attention to the printed piece and provided an instant way to respond, and only asked the respondent for information that we didn’t have.

The first time we did it we added it to the rollout of a very successful campaign for Microsoft. To my recollection (always suspect and inevitably enthusiastic) the campaign was already yielding more than 5 percent response. TriggerTouch boosted it to over 20 percent.

Naturally we were thrilled and so was the client. We wanted to show off the results at conferences everywhere. Naturally the client was concerned about releasing their data. After torturous negotiations they agreed to say the results “greatly exceeded expectations”.

In truth, TriggerTouch was a tough trick to pull off in those days. You needed to have a big enough mailing to group delivery triggers with some accuracy, and you needed to have email addresses for the database. We had lots of other toys to show off, so we never made a big deal about it. But it’s an adequate illustration of why it’s hard to use other people’s data.

The So-Called Science of Marketing: Why nobody knows anything I’m tempted to do a spit-take when anyone says “the science of marketing”. Marketing is not now and probably never will be a science. The most fundamental aspect of science is a willingness to prove that your hypothesis is wrong. Marketers always aim to be proven right, even when they fail.

We do generally learn more from failures than successes, which is a good thing, since a lot of marketing fails miserably. And good marketers certainly test. The best marketers test as often as their company or clients will permit them. We gain a lot of data, but it’s all hopelessly skewed since it is gathered without a true control element (though direct marketers toss the term “control” around constantly), and a need to be right. The aim is always to eventually sell products or induce a specific behavior. The need for success precludes science.

That doesn’t mean we proceed purely with guesswork, but it does mean that the discipline of marketing bears more resemblance to shamanism than to science. It’s more fashion than fact. For example, marketing expenditures for direct marketing using printed materials have declined sharply, buoyed only by catalogs and mass mailings. Most of that budget has been redirected to internet-based marketing. Is that because marketers have conclusive evidence that internet marketing provides a superior ROI, or that the effectiveness of direct mail has diminished for some reason? Or is it simply that it’s out of fashion?

Since very few marketers actually track response through to sales, and often more importantly, through to larger relationships and large scale adoption, the ROI figures reported by various industry surveys are highly suspect.

There is no “science” behind that trend. Certainly we can prove internet-based marketing yields a lower cost per contact. But so would a loudspeaker truck in Times Square. In terms of short and long term sales effect we really don’t know, we just pretend to. Most importantly, the people who really make the decisions often know nothing about the data--flawed though it might be.

In truth, most marketing decisions are made by people who are not hands-on marketers, and therefore are not knowledgeable about the newer tools and approaches. The executives who approve, and in many cases restructure the marketing budget often have very little supporting evidence for their decisions. They make highly arbitrary decisions about what to cut and what to support, without regard to, and even in spite of good information. I’ve been doing the advertising business long enough for that realization to inform everything I do as a marketer. In this book I will pay as much attention to what is feasible, fashionable and defensible given the current environment as to what can be proven.

I’m not being hard on, or dismissive of CMOs or other senior marketers, I’m simply recognizing the limitations of senior positions. They don’t have time to play around with this stuff.

Furthermore, any senior manager that tries to understand the tactical aspect of their marketing by getting their hands dirty will be regarded as “not strategic enough” or “incapable of delegation”.

Please remember as you read the rant that follows that I do not expect CMOs and senior marketers to be tactical. But I do believe they need to open their eyes to the demands of the marketing environment we now inhabit.

A recent study sponsored by the sales and marketing practice of Deloitte Consulting LLC, the Jigsaw business community, and Ad-ology makes this disconnect between what is measured and what gets done very clear.

Senior management is demanding that marketing contribute more to the bottom line.

Senior marketers express confidence that they can deliver by focusing on execution and having clearly defined goals, improving operational controls, and stepping up analytics to help guide resource allocation.

That simply floors me. From everything I have experienced senior marketers can’t or don’t invest in initiatives on the basis of bottom line results. Overwhelmingly their budgets are for what I’d call status quo digital--email applications and standard web initiatives. They are shifting their budgets away from traditional marketing in the old sense, but they shift it towards marketing that has a relatively dodgy history to delivering actionable results.

Their budgets--at least as reported in the survey, and certainly in my experience--have very little focus on analytics or data. They are not investing in the tools or the people to support what they say are their goals. At most they’ll buy a Marketing Automation system, which would require a complete refit of their marketing team to deliver the kind of results they are hoping for. And while they are learning that new software is not a solution for systemic problems, implementing such a system will suck up 20 percent of their budget and 60 percent of their resources.

The failure to invest is not necessarily a bad thing if they can rely on their agency to fill in the holes, but there are very few old guard agencies that have any real understanding about

integrating all forms of marketing across digital platforms. In fact they are allergic to the entire idea. The lead agencies at the large advertising conglomerates break out in hives at the thought.

They retain their big picture orientation on brand and old media. The digital marketers are isolated in their niche and are viewed by the core agencies as competing for the clients budget.

Companies that really decide to focus on accountability, data-driven integration and advanced digital tools are likely to need odd geek agencies like Babcock & Jenkins, which can be a challenging shift. Smaller, aggressive, fast moving companies don’t have a problem hiring leading edge agencies, but larger companies generally want a solid, global infrastructure. Highly technical agencies tend to deal with globalization through collaboration rather than expansion-it’s a natural solution to them, akin to outsourcing elements of a software development project.

When I was actively working at B&J I had far too many meetings with senior executives who told me that even though our marketing was working spectacularly well for them, that they needed an agency with a global infrastructure. This despite our success at executing successful global integrated direct mail/email/web programs, that delivered direct mail, email and supporting landing pages into dozens of countries--all tuned for cultural idiosyncrasies by freelancers in every locale.

It’s not easy for a big company to understand that an office in Hamburg does not make an agency better at confronting the grand shifts in how marketing is done. In truth, a fixed global presence stands in the way. An agile agency pulls an international team together for even a single project-that’s what web collaboration tools are for. They aren’t stuck with a low-performing staffer at a remote office--you can get the best and brightest and instantly replace anyone that doesn’t measure up. No inertia, no politics, no HR issues.

But that is not how big companies handle global presence, and they can’t imagine their agency doing any different. They still tell themselves stories about Chevy calling the Nova a name that sort of means “doesn’t go” in spanish. But that was 1965, and really, no one needs to make those kinds of mistakes in our world where global communications, document sharing and all forms of digital collaboration is instant and free.

It doesn’t matter that there is a demonstrably better, or at least equally good way of doing things.

The challenge is that large companies carry large momentum, and the rate of change today is so great that many can’t even comprehend what is possible, let alone execute it.

For example, CMOs who were surveyed for the Deloitte study said that retraining and developing existing staff is the leading strategy for acquiring or sharpening expertise in digital marketing competencies, with 62.9% of respondents electing training over recruiting new talent (28.6%) or outsourcing (17.1%).

I don’t know of any training that will ensure digital marketing competency, in fact I can’t imagine it. This world moves too fast for a syllabus. The examples in this book will be obsolete before I finish writing it, never mind before it gets printed. I suspect that few of the CMOs surveyed have any idea, much less an actionable plan, for what it would take to get their staff

trained and competent. They just like the idea. They don’t have to replace good old Wally, just get him some training.

Training might be a good start if it were sufficiently hands-on, but there is only one way to stay current--immersion. You have to jump into the machine and start playing with all the knobs and switches. While there are many thousands of people who are highly knowledgeable about digital marketing, they are a rare breed in the marketing departments of large global companies. I’ve only met a few, and they are wonderful to work with. The more knowledgeable they are, the more they appreciate what approaches like the ones I will talk about can bring to the party.

According to the survey, CMOs say that realigning operational processes and capabilities to better support sales and drive demand generation was their top accomplishment for in 2008.

Well it’s about time. But I’d love to do a follow on quiz to ask the CMOs about sales processes and advanced sales support techniques like maturation (cultivation). I know there will be some brilliant exceptions, but I suspect many would have limited knowledge of the processes used in their own company. How they can realign to better support the sales organization without understanding these issues?

I’ve read some really bizarre papers recently about getting sales and marketing aligned. Peppers and Rodgers went so far as to call Sales and Marketing a Power Couple. Yuck! I’ll talk about this a bit more later, and why I think you should not only not bother with this notion, but why it could destroy the effectiveness of both departments. The Israeli army isn’t one of the finest in the world because of their peacemaking ability.

CMOs are also investing in general marketing automation, with the top categories being email marketing (44.9%) and online surveys and research (33.2%). The analysts found it disappointing that only 10.1% are investing in master data, 12.8% in marketing operational systems, and 9.3% in marketing resource or process management solutions.

I’m not surprised at those percentages, and I do not find that unwise. Most internal marketing operations are focused on product and market issues and managing the internal hurdles to effective marketing. Building and operating complex marketing automations systems that leapfrog each other with each release is a poor use of effort and resources.

Most importantly, buying a hammer doesn’t make anyone a carpenter.

Companies get bogged down in big automation solutions, and once they choose one, they are largely committed to that solution for a long time--perhaps forever. The lessons of Sales Force Automation should not be lost--complex systems rarely get used anywhere near the capabilities of the system, and when they don’t, the return on investment may be a long time coming. In fact that’s true of software in general. How often do you use style sheets in your word processor? If you use them at all you’re a rare bird. More likely style sheets are a feature you curse at when the formatting of a paragraph suddenly changes, or you can’t get paragraph numbering to work the way you’d like.

I don’t view investment in these tools as a good basis to determine how effectively a company is approaching digital marketing. Much more important is that senior executives have a clear understanding of what is possible, and a rational path to achieve their goals. Working with the right partners and transitioning internal skill sets over time can be far more effective than trying to build in-house capability quickly, or basing the transition on selecting a particular tool. I think it’s important that companies develop deep digital capabilities, but the company culture must figure greatly in the “own or rent” decision.

Company’s need to own their platform, and invest in it’s capabilities. The mistake is in thinking that platform means some piece of software. Platform is the way you integrate all your marketing to face your prospects, customers, critics, analysts and the world in general. We’ll talk more about this.

“This year’s survey shows increased spending in online and digital at the expense of traditional media budgets will continue in 2009,” said C. Lee Smith, president and CEO of Ad-ology, one of the study sponsors. “Digital marketing metrics such as page views and click-through rates give at least the perception of accountability, making online marketing increasingly attractive as the industry focuses on performance measurement.”

“Perception of accountability” is an excellent choice of words. It’s interesting to see that only a small percentage of marketers (less than ten percent) consider their metrics and analytics to be excellent while more than thirty five percent are questioning the value of their investment in digital marketing, struggling to show value or to demonstrate that they are converting visitors to leads or to customers.

The problem isn’t the media, it’s the method. We’ll address all these issues in this book. We’re going to get very technical, but we’ll do so only to show how these new approaches work. I don’t expect you to necessarily learn to use the tools--just to understand what can be done today, and see where you’d like to go tomorrow.

About the study: The survey was conducted among more than 650 marketing executives worldwide across a wide range of industries. Respondents were asked 28 questions. The study was sponsored by the sales and marketing practice of Deloitte Consulting LLC, the Jigsaw business community, and Ad-ology.

The Closest Thing to Science: Keywords as a Discipline As you will soon discover, I’m enthusiastic about keywords. Keywords and keyword research are about as scientific as marketing really gets. When I say the word “Keywords” I know that everyone immediately thinks I’m going to talk about SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and Paid Search, or some related web-specific discipline.

I’m not. I don’t consider myself enough of an expert at SEO to write a book. And SEO to me feels like spending a tremendous amount of time to memorize the part numbers of a 2009 Honda Accord. The information might be useful today, but when Google changes how they work, or

web search somehow actually does what we would like it to do (find stuff we want) then all the part numbers will change. In other words the knowledge is about a temporary situation, the governing parameters of which are both arbitrary, and under the control of other people.

That isn’t to say that SEO isn’t valuable today--it clearly is. But for me the biggest value is not the SEO practice itself, but the underlying principles of the tools: They are a really good attempt at distilling relevance and popularity. I use the tools and principles constantly so I can experiment with all elements of marketing.

I believe that Keywords are the most powerful marketing effort organizing tool that marketers have ever had (other than perhaps good databases). What keywords really are is the words and phrases that customers, prospects, pundits, critics, and anyone interested in your products and services uses to talk about them. Not only can you use them to lead people to your advertising, but you can find everything your competitors are doing online, locate every online conversation, determine the relative value of each concept, trend market growth and consumer interest, monitor customer reaction, find untapped niches and competitive weakness, gauge market size and growth, and inform every bit of marketing, PR and customer relations that your company does or considers.

And you can do it all at a remarkably low cost.

Equally important, companies today are struggling with how to use social media to boost business. Good keyword research flings that door right open and makes any effort more certain of success. Social media is completely about conversations, and Keywords are the guide to effective conversation.

Here’s the bullet version of what you can do with keywords: Create new revenue streams: • Find and exploit competitor weakness • Locate niches and alternative markets • Find markets for revised products or services Measure market size: • Find the total number of searches for every keyword • Trend the market: • Track search growth for all relevant keywords Develop advertising and content: • Include critical keywords in online content • make conscious choices about creative, based on the language your prospect use in all advertising • Find popular online content to license or use for “inspiration” Do customer/prospect research: • Find and track the critical conversations • Rank customer/prospect concerns

• Build FAQs • Rank desired features Inform SEO and paid search campaigns: • Locate search bargains • Develop keyword domination strategies • Track and evaluate competitor efforts Drive web traffic: • Build copy that incorporates keywords • Address issues that your market is searching for Even if your CEO is allergic to web advertising and all you are allowed to do is free standing inserts in magazines, then Keywords will help you design, optimize and track the results while you start searching for another job.

Marketers assume they know the words that people use to talk about their products. I assure you that they do not. Many years ago one of our clients rewrote one of our ads to eliminate all sense and meaning, interjecting every buzzword and acronym available.

The revised ad read something like: “The TDS3456 is the first TDSM in the industry to trap and track every artifact in the 20 ns regime. Any DTR development or FRG team will find the Machspec feature vital in qualifying and FTGE testing.”

No, that's not what it really read, I just made that up on the fly, but the client would have loved it.

It was incomprehensible to me, and I had worked on the account for months. But hey, I wasn’t the target. The client said the engineers knew all the gibberish and would consider an ad that lacked them, or even one that pedantically explained them, to be not credible.

I took the ad to the engineers that designed the test equipment. They treated it like a puzzle: “I think I know what that one is...”

The point is not that the client was nuts (well, maybe) but that correct terminology may not be what the market uses to talk about the issue at hand. Here’s a more direct example that I’ve seen mentioned several times on the web: Airlines use the term “low fares” to talk about what customers call “cheap flights”.

If you use any keyword tool to look at those two terms you’ll find customers and prospects use the term “cheap flights” thousands of times more often than “low fares”. Here is the results from using the Google Adwords tool to look at “cheap flights” 45 Million searches for that term in August. Now look at the result for “low fares.

If you were going to do a TV ad for a low fare promotion, which words should you use?

That’s not really such a simple question. You might not want to connect that closely to your passengers--you might want to retain a professional distance. But you should certainly understand the difference, you should have the data, and you should make an informed and defensible choice.

And if you ever wanted to spike someone else’s plan, this kind of data is a fine tool--especially if they don’t have it.

While we are here, take a look also at the Advertiser Competition column, which is a relative value for number of adwords buyers and how active the bidding is (Google adwords are placed on the basis of the price the customer is willing to pay for the click AND the success of their efforts in garnering clicks that they pay for. Doesn’t matter how much you’ll pay, if your wording doesn't get clicks you’re outta there). Clearly there are lots of people that know “cheap flights” is a better search keyword than “low fares”--they are competing hard for the term. Do a Goggle search for cheap flights and you find all the online travel companies--Priceline, Orbitz, etc. and Southwest Airlines. Hmmm. Search “Low Fares” and you get all the same folks and Alaska Air as well as Southwest.

Here’s the traffic estimator for these two terms.

Looks like if you want to be a player in the “cheap flights” sandbox you better have deep pockets and a good conversion rate from clicks to sales. Fifty K per day will eat through a budget pretty quickly if the ROI isn’t there.

I’m not privvy to the decision making at either Alaska or Southwest, but I have no problem seeing the brash Southwest folks embracing “cheap flights” (hey, that’s what we are!) and other airlines having a problem with that.

You are probably already aware of the challenges of using an adwords campaign for a hot keyword like this. Since Google places your advertisement on the basis of the amount you are willing to pay for the keyword and your success at garnering clicks, you are unlikely to garner a good position in the listing until you have spent a great deal of money.

But what if I was doing any kind of old media ad for an airline? Perhaps TV, or direct mail, or email. With this understanding, which cost me absolutely nothing but a few seconds of my valuable time, I might lead with “If you’re looking for cheap flights...” because that’s what people are doing when they are using a search engine. Looking. And then I might talk about low fares and quality service. And I would certainly write any paid search copy to include the words “looking for cheap flights” perhaps even regardless of the keywords I was paying for.

Whether you care about web searches or not, you certainly have to see the value in being able to find how your customers, prospects and the big wide world think and talk about you and your products. This example also serves to illustrate early on that not all keywords are equal in value.

But you should also understand that the most common may not be the most important. Even before you start your search for keywords you should understand that some of them do not signal intent to do what you want them to do. That is a critical concept. Keywords should be grouped according to type and the most useful keywords signal intent to take action.

For our sample company, Ke Nalu, the term SURF is the most common search term our prospective clients use, but how many people searching for SURF want to find Stand Up Paddle Surf information. A small fraction, not only because SUP is a subset of the sport of surfing, and “surf” has many non-sport meanings, but also because searching for the word “surf” displays no intent to buy. In fact there are a lot of surfers that HATE stand up paddle surfing because it encroaches on their particular flavor of surfing.

If you follow this book your keyword efforts will yield multiple sets of keywords--product focused, feature focused, customer focused, prospect focused, brand focused, competitor focused. You'll also have negative keywords and keywords aimed at particular steps in the sales

cycle. Many of them might be the same, but you will find unique segments that are best addressed with unique words.

Keywords aren't the only issue I want to talk about, but they are the key to the conversations that are the uber issue of this book. The marketing I’m going to talk about is mostly the straightforward tactical kind. I’m not Don Draper. I don’t have the talent to concoct the “wants and needs” inspired by triggering brain chemistry. I’m just a guppy for them like everyone else--I can’t watch Mad Men without wanting some scotch. But the tactical stuff I’m going to cover does relate in some ways to persuasion and brain chemistry. We won’t build stories or theories about WHY certain keywords relate to intent to purchase while others have more to do with searching for information or reassurance that the prospect is taking the right next step. Instead we’ll work at isolating them. And then we’ll work at owning them.

If I help you own the organic version of “cheap flights” for your industry then you owe me a really great bottle of single malt.

These words can even relate to the personas and philosophies of our prospects and give hints about the triggers that can cause behavior. People are constantly thinking and constructing their world. They gather up clues from the external world and incorporate them into their personal existence. While visual elements like style and color, and auditory or olfactory components all have their place in the mix, they are not accessed in the same way ideas, beliefs and concepts are.

Thoughts and memories are fundamentally words. We communicate thoughts and memories almost exclusively through words. Anyone that can do it another way is termed an artist.

Surely you can see where I’m headed with this. If we detect the words properly we can construct stories--content--around them that cross the cultural divide because they align with the thoughts and beliefs of our targets. It can be as simple as getting the name right--it’s not “low fares” it’s “cheap flights” Why Is This Book So Short The short answer is that I just don’t know that much. The one that requires explanation is that there isn’t any fluff. A few years ago I wanted to write a book on web marketing, but didn’t have the time or publishing connections to get the job done properly. So I got together with a successful business book writer. I gave him the outline of what I planned to write along with some sample chapters and background material. After reviewing it all he told me there were at least three books in the three chapters I had written, without getting into the outline or the source material.

He explained that most business books are constructed around a fairly rigid formula. A core idea is advanced. The ramifications of the idea are explored. Stories about how people in varied businesses have used the idea successfully are told. Implementation issues are discussed, and variations on the idea are advanced.

End of book.

I tried to cooperate in building such a book, but I found the process unspeakably dull, and I didn’t think the book was going to deliver value. I bailed.

Perhaps none of my notions were sufficiently unique or important to build a book around--I certainly didn’t think so then, and I don’t now. So I’m going to violate the code of business books and tell you what I’ve learned about a large number of concepts. I’ll show direct experiments and data-gathering approaches I used to verify or at least provide support for my conclusions about the concepts.

To whatever degree there is a core issue, it’s the conversations that make up marketing today, how they are different from the ones we had in business before, and how you can adapt your marketing efforts to make better use of all the venues of communication with the people who might buy your products.

In other words I’m going to give you everything I’ve got. No idea what I could do for a sequel.

Wait for the world to change I guess.

B2B or B2C? This is neither a Business to Business or a Business to Consumer book. This is a Business to People book. Those are ludicrous pigeonholes anyway. With incredibly rare exception, businesses don’t buy anything--people buy products and services. There are only a few significant differences in B2B and B2C: • The money the buyer is spending is often not their own • The addresses work differently • More people may be involved in the decision process • The sales cycle could be longer That’s it. Other than that there really there isn’t a dimes worth of difference. If you can do B2B you can do B2C and vice versa. If you focus on one discipline you can learn 90 percent of everything you need to know about the other in a weekend. Sure, there are refinements such as distribution channels, co-op programs, etc., etc. That's the remaining ten percent. But refinements have little to no effect on how the core elements of marketing are done to show success.

More significant is the issue of simple or complex sale. People use B2B as a replacement for complex sale and yet there are many B2C sales that are very complex and have most of the characteristics of a B2B sale. I’m going to talk about most tactics from the standpoint of a complex sale, but if you’re selling products with a simple cycle they work equally well (actually, better). There’s just fewer steps.

Complex sale generally means the product or service is expensive, the sales cycle has multiple steps and is longer, more than one person and more than one type of buyer may be involved in the purchase decision. These sales rarely happen online, so the action we’re trying to get prospects to take is to respond to qualifying questions and provide a sales lead.

The issues individually play out like this:

Sales Cycle Has Multiple Steps: We talk about the steps of the sales cycle as if they were exactly that--discrete steps. In reality it’s more like moving through a spectrum--red fades to orange which fades to yellow. In our sales cycle it’s more like Pain (a business or personal situation that the prospect would like to rectify) that moves to Awareness that solutions exist, moves to Interest in specific products, moves to Need analysis (consideration of a purchase) moves to Negotiation, where the sales for gets involved. We’ll take this further when we talk about sales processes.

Because the cycle has multiple steps we can’t focus simply on getting the product sold. We need to connect with potential customers and guide them through the cycle. We also need our online and offline campaigns to engage prospects at various points in the buying cycle.

More than one person and more than one type of buyer involved in the purchase decision.

In complex sales there may be an economic buyer who controls the money and a technical buyer who examines suitability of the the solutions. both of these have veto power. There is also the Users, who judge whether or not the solution is suitable for them, and the Supervisor, who judges suitability for the wider set of organizational interests.

Does that sound like pure business-to-business to you? How about this situation. Your kid needs a computer for college. The technical buyer (advisor) is the college--they want the platform consistent. The user is your kid, who is secretly angling for a computer that will play his favorite games and look cool when he pulls it from the bag. The supervisor is your wife, who wants to make sure this equipment is strictly business, and you are the economic buyer. A marketer can make traction by influencing any and all of those buyers, and great traction by influencing them all.

That happens by targeting as many of these potential buyers as possible and paying attention to the kind of information they need. Getting the right information to these decision makers makes the sale much easier and shortens the sales cycle. You may need fairly specific versions of all the usual whitepapers, success stories, videos, application guides, etc for each kind of buyer.

Complex sales also may offer opportunity for repeated sales, standardization, and organizational deployment. If you are not just driving consumers to a site for an immediate sale in a single visit, then your focus may be on forming a relationship with the buyers and ensuring they understand you are in for the long haul. Demonstrating that you can solve their challenges in the future as well as now.

Marketers specializing in complex sales generally trail far behind marketers doing simple sales in adopting new online methods and applying them to optimize offline marketing. Complex marketing keeps more balls in the air and requires that a lot more moving parts be modified to adopt something new. But once the market demonstrates the value of an approach it is grabbed up quickly. When you apply the approaches in this book and experience great results you should understand that part of the reason is that you won’t have much competition. That won’t last. Roll successful programs up quickly and gain all the ground you can.

B&J has been preaching for years that the marketing strategy must match the customer’s buying process. Many companies have adopted this for their offline marketing, but not as many extend it to search marketing strategy and tactics.

The sales Cycle Could Be Longer. You also need to adjust your analytics to the sales cycle. In a simple sales the analytics connect click to sale immediately. With a complex sale you need to connect clicks to an eventual sale extending to weeks or months. You also need to adjust program test times. You won’t see much results from a short program if your sales cycle is several times longer than the test. You can get away with something like half your sales cycle and extrapolate.

In complex sales the person your first contact may not be the eventual purchaser. When you are doing the analysis you need to account for that. The more that you are staying in touch with the prospect and extending your communications to the other decision makers, the easier it will be to make that connection. The sales force might call foul if you make contact with someone at a large company, and then claim success when someone completely different from the company buys six months later. The more you mature leads before handing them off, and the more you expand the sphere of influence, the fewer arguments you’ll have when it comes time to count coup. But understand that the role of analysis and testing is not to prove things to the sales force, it’s to make your marketing work better.

If I were allowed to define the new job of marketing I’d say it is to find, stimulate and join conversations. Those conversations are not about the features of your product, they are about the needs of your prospects and customers. You should be making it easier and easier for prospects to engage with you and your company. You should start conversations, join conversations, welcome conversations--and then you should Listen

Section 1

Attention, creativity, measurement, advertising inventories

Consumers have a huge amount of control in the modern marketing environment. How can you reach them, capture their interest, stay in front of them, get them to decide on your products, and be able to prove you did all that. That’s what we will cover in this first section.

Chapter 2 Join the Conversation There is a swirl of conversation going on about your business. These conversations are not new, they have always existed around any product or service. But they used to be small, controlled, and inaccessible to outsiders.

If you were a plasterer in Boston in the 1800’s you knew what products you needed to do your job and where to get them. If a new technique was invented, or a better or cheaper product emerged the word would make it’s way through the community of plasterers, the trades that supported them, and the people that used their services frequently. The fast mechanism was

conversations--word of mouth--though it had a high level of distortion since it spread by repetition, and the information got muddled in repeating. The slow but more accurate mechanism was information in books and journals that covered this business. The chatter was continuous, but the volume was low and access limited.

Today, whatever business you are in, there is a literal maelstrom of instant information about your product or service. However mundane or esoteric your business is, people are talking about it, access is unlimited, and the volume knob is turned up to eleven. Blogs, forums, specialty magazines, webinars, audio broadcasts, video, pictures, wikis, and thousands of channels of television transmitted by cable, satellite, broadcast, internet, and perhaps taut strings. While I was typing this I got an email from Speed Channel offering to let me watch live streaming video of the American Le Mans qualifying at Laguna Seca. One click and I could be watching, courtesy of Michelin.

Once the only information channel that was open to everyone and uncontrolled was word of mouth. Every other channel was controlled by people who had enough money to afford access.

Money to print and distribute, money or power to access radio and television. Now there is virtually no control and the most important channels are free or nearly so.

Everyone participates.

That’s pretty important, we’ll show you why shortly. Everyone participates in the new conversations, and credibility is not just dependent on formal credentials, training, experience, or title. People who simply stay involved and connect appropriately with the culture gain influence.

A highly qualified person who doesn’t step properly through the social dance is not only less influential, they are likely to be shunned.

This is an odd circumstance--it runs contrary to some aspects of general human experience, but it’s explainable and understandable. The social platforms currently deliver a limited scope of interaction--credentials are not obvious, and people who try to present them must interrupt the flow of a particular conversation to do so. And they would not necessarily be believed. Instead, credibility accumulates through relevant and useful posts, even though the person doing the posting might have no real expertise and might just be looking up answers to questions with a quick google search.

Forums, for example, generally have very short comments since people are typing. The apparently more limited format of Twitter is illusory--most forum posts are less than a hundred characters. People who can stay on point, provide useful information, remain engaging and human, and speak with the language of that particular venue are welcome and credible. When they provide romantic advice you can’t see that they are living in a rusty camping trailer, surrounded by cats and stacks of old Popular Mechanics. You don’t see the food-spotted T shirt and the deferred dentistry. All you see is 100 characters of information: Four sentences. Their reputation within the culture of that forum depends on the hundreds of posts that preceded their response to your plight.

In more technical venues and richer communications channels credibility can be somewhat more formal, but it can be hijacked by better presentation or more interesting viewpoints. Charlatans can trump experts. Hey, that’s us! Marketers rule.

Not so fast. Remember that Everyone participates. You can’t control what Everyone says about your company. You certainly can’t gain any traction as a Troll. What you can do is try to stay out in front of the conversation, or at least run along beside it. You can highlight good things and respond honestly to bad. You can encourage people to speak up in your favor. You can respond to criticism in a thoughtful, honest, and wise way that resonates in the culture of the venue.

Hey, if nothing else you can LISTEN. And then maybe you can speak with authority.

But first of course you have to understand those cultures and pay attention to how to speak to them. Once again the answer is...keywords. Or at least something that looks and smells a lot like them.

The Cultural Divide This is a big topic that we will return to again and again. People call it other things, from Cognitive Dissonance to Culturally Clueless. Let’s start by picking up a small corner of it.

Your boss doesn’t listen to you. You’ve given him brilliant advice on leading edge and traditional marketing, crafted a superb plan and laid out the milestones to get there. In spite of your efforts and some pretty good performance by the agency you know and trust he forces an agency review. I show up. I show him pretty much the same stuff you have, and my presentation naturally lacks the key factors your deep knowledge of your business enables.

After our presentation your boss says “Wow, that guy is brilliant, and so current on all the latest approaches. We need his insight. Hire them.” Or words to that effect.

I use myself as a positive example because it’s fun, but believe me it’s gone the other way. For example, we showed up at a review for a client for whom we had done stellar work. The new VP Marketing had been promoted from heading up marketing in Asia. One of the competing agencies showed up with an account rep that spoke five languages, including Mandarin, and a presentation that focused on global coverage rather than the key market strategy we knew they needed. We were toast.

Before you toss yourself out the window, consider what conspired against you--the cultural divide. Works for every consultant and outside gun in the world. If you ever have a chance to see a full-fledged McKinsey presentation, or any company that has achieved their level of practice, sit quietly in the corner and take notes. Here’s what you’ll see: • • • •

They look like your boss, and at least one of them is probably older.

Nothing jars the presentation--all the cues are in place Their information is flawless and correct They talk about your competitors frequently

• They rarely make any attempt to convince--about their information, their credentials, or their suggestions Your boss believes and wants to act on every word they say, even if you said the same thing for free three weeks ago and he ignored you.

Why can’t you do that? Because you have to live with the guy. He knows you as the aggressive punk that would crawl across his cooling dead body to take his job. He remembers how little you knew when you started, remembers every social and business faux pas you ever committed.

You’d have to change yourself 24/7, and no one can really pull that off. All it takes is one slip, and you’re pegged as who you are. I’m not there long enough to be caught picking my nose.

I also connect culturally--because I’m careful to. I’m dressed like him, I talk like him. I’ve got the white hair and all my mistakes were made where he couldn’t see them. I say smart stuff but I don’t threaten him and I’ll probably do him a lot of good. He likes me. Who wouldn’t?

Why is this important? Because the cultural divide is part of what informs every consumer, whether they’re buying a beer or a geosynchronous satellite. Your dentist has a little brown spot on his smock. The waitress in a fancy restaurant has support hose. The bartender in a biker bar has no tattoos.

The quality of your dentist’s work has NOTHING to do with the spot. The quality of the food or service has NOTHING to do with she support hose. The flavor of the beer or the atmosphere of the bar has NOTHING to do with the bartender’s lack of tattoos.

And yet it all does. The experience is compromised by an unrelated element that is culturally disconnected. Uncool.

Marketing has to cross cultural divides, and modern marketing has to do it constantly, with limited bandwidth. Every thing that is important to the prospect is important.

If that’s true than how are you going to cope? How are you going to convince your boss that I’m a shmuck and he should listen to you. How will you convince those bikers that it’s cool the bartender has no tattoos? You must cross the cultural divide, find the conversations that are important, and join them. Take the time to cross the divide--and you’re in.

You can cross the cultural divide suddenly or incrementally. Incrementally takes lower effort and lasts longer. Take our goofy example of your boss for example. If she is really a problem then you need to build a marketing campaign to deal with that. You can analyze the things and people that influence her and start understanding how to manipulate that interest in favor of your credibility.

On the web we have a wonderful organizing component in Keywords, which we will explore and exploit in depth. In the offline world you have to rely on paying attention and gentle probing. My guess is that there are conversations you can join or initiate to ratchet up your credibility with your boss--if you consciously choose to do so and make the effort. But you can’t do it the day

that I show up to present to your boss. That’s way too late for you to have significant influence.

The key principle in long-term cultural adjustment is persistence. If you set specific goals, and ask yourself each day “have I moved forward on these goals” then over time you’ll be where you need to be.

New marketing approaches are EXACTLY like that, only we have better tools and a bigger audience.

What’s in it for me?

The subtitle above will be a frequent refrain of this book. It will generally lead off an exercise for you along with a description of the knowledge, information and power you will gain when (if) you do the exercise. It’s also a goad to me to insure that I provide that information. After all, it’s the one question I constantly return to when I’m writing advertising copy In this case the exercise is a benchmark. Get a notebook that you can keep along with this book.

Yeah, paper, put that crackberry or iPhone away for now.

Write down ten keywords each for these three groups: • Those you think define your business • Those that define your products • Those that define what your customers are looking for Leave lots of space under each group.

Now, on the basis of those keywords, write down what the world is talking about when they use those terms. We don’t need a thesis. Take the time and effort to keep the conversations short.

If we do a decent job in this book then your view of the likely keywords and the conversations around your company and products is going to change a great deal. I believe the end result can be a very useful transformation.

Truly, what’s in it for you is that your purview, as a marketer, is what is really transformed. You can be the voice of your company, indeed, of your entire industry. Your scope inside your company can dramatically expand as well. At one time we just got prospects to raise their hands and tossed them over the wall to sales. We no longer need to rely on those lazy fakers in the salesforce to convert interest into sales (and pray that they’ll give you a little credit for it). We can cultivate interest into need, need into sales, and sales into standardization and evangelism if we locate, participate in, encourage and guide those conversations. And you can precisely track your effectiveness every step of the way.

You need knowledge and a plan to pull that off. Your plan needs to include the fashionable tools so your distracted boss will be happy. And you need methods to test and tune along the way so you can deliver accountable results.

That’s what I will attempt to deliver.

What you won’t find herein is anything about awareness, brand, or any of the magnificent strategic stuff that big agencies peddle. I understand the value, I just don’t know much about it. I understand that makes this all very tactical and limited. Sorry. But from what I can see there are only a few companies that actually pull off brand image efforts, so maybe I’m not alone. There surely is a brand advantage to being part of the conversations that swirl around your industry and market. Surely there is a brand advantage in getting lots of new customers and keeping them happy. But I don’t know how to quantify that.

As Peter Sellers said, “It’s not my doggy”.

Chapter 3 The Process Selling a product or service is a process. The sales cycle for a candy bar at a checkout stand might be short, but it’s a process.

Pain: A little bit hungry for something sweet and there’s nothing but healthy junk in my shopping cart.

Awareness: Oooh, candy bars.

Interest: I like dark chocolate Milky Way. There’s one right there.

Negotiation: I have enough pocket change.

Timing: No, don’t put it in the bag, I’ll just take it. I can finish it before my wife sees it.

We’ll come back to PAINT when we talk about lead scoring, but in the case of the dark chocolate Milky Way it’s a score of 458. Done deal.

In general for any relatively complex product the process is some variation of this greatly extended process: Pain -- We have an issue that would be good to solve Awareness -- There are solutions for our issue Interest -- Tell me how your solutions will work for us Consideration -- Show me your success stories and implementation details Comparison -- How do your solutions compare to competitors Negotiation -- What do we get and how much will it cost Adoption -- Help me get our people to use this solution Extension -- Let’s add other users/divisions Standardization -- Let’s deploy it everywhere In traditional marketing we attempted to intercept people somewhere in the Pain, Interest or Consideration stages of the cycle. We qualified the responses according to some lead scoring criteria such as BANT (Budget, Authority, Need and Timing) and then tossed it over the wall to sales, who promptly ignored anyone that didn’t have a check in hand or a thousand users. They then claimed that they had cold-called everyone who bought, that the leads were useless, and they needed a lot more of them.

No more of that. Now we can connect to everyone that has the slightest interest, stay with them throughout the sales cycle, delivering exactly the right information they need at each stage of the process. We can cue them up for the sales force or even take the sale directly, then mature them into as large a customer as they can be, and turn them into evangelists for our products.

In other words, the conversations that we are entering into support the entire selling process That’s a huge difference in the value of marketing. Marketers are no longer just some folks that might be helping sales or pushing prospects into an online store. Now we can be true marketers-making customers happen. We can control the entire relationship. It’s a great opportunity.

It’s also critical to the survival of your business. If not today, then someday. It may seem that if you’re selling a product or service that delivers more value, is cheaper, lasts longer, delivers higher performance and has the best reputation that you should win every sale. But the truth is that everyone, even purchasing departments, buy the stuff they want to buy.

If you rely on the superiority of your products to always make the sale, then as soon as your products get leapfrogged then the other guy wins. Or should. The continued existence of Microsoft is clear evidence that it simply doesn’t happen--or at least it doesn’t happen simply (says the Sphinx).

You initially build your position in the market on value, performance, and real advantages. But that can’t be the only brick in your foundation. You need the stories, the conversations people have about your products and services. The more evangelists, the more people who are bought into and committed to your company, the stronger your brand is. If your brand is big there will be many more conversation and stories swirling around, if it’s healthy the conversations will be mostly positive and frequently helpful.

I’m going to show you how to locate, stimulate, monitor and join those conversations. I’m also going to show you how to become a thought leader in topics and markets that are important to you. How to translate that leadership into monetary value. And how to use the conversations you take part in to improve your company, your products and your market share.

The Cure-All Myth Will the ideas in this book cure all our marketing problems? I’ll answer that question with a question: Do you even know what your problems are? I suspect you don’t.

Not because you are not good at your job, but because business issues are complex. When I say complex I don’t mean difficult, I mean they have a vast number of variables, most of which are only loosely identified.

One reason physics succeeds so well in answering fundamental questions is that physicists are careful to limit their quest for answers to things that are not complex. It’s one thing to construct formulas that relate pressure, temperature and volume to ideal flow. It’s another thing entirely to predict fluid flow through real-world plumbing. The best you can do is an approximation,

because the environment is not completely described and controlled. Too many loosely defined variables. Too much chaos, too much complexity.

Marketing problems suffer from many many layers of imprecise communication. We rarely even know if the problem we think we are solving for our boss, our stakeholders, our customers, our prospects is even the one they want solved, or if the solution looks adequate to them. Part of the problem is improper focus--we pay more attention to the solution than to defining the problem.

Part of the problem is inherent complexity--fix it here and you break it there, or perhaps worse, fix it here and nothing happens. Part of the problem is imprecise language and the lack of a clear communication between the person with the problem and the person aiming to solve it. By clear communication I mean an understanding of what constitutes success--what some people refer to as an obligating issue. “If I make that purple, will you buy it”.

The reason I’m so high on all these new tools, and especially on Keywords is that they are not complex. They are extremely specific, the data is easy to extract and results are easy to measure.

They have a fundamental defining nature because they are so terse. There’s a million editors honing the sense. All the tools and techniques I’m going to show you can provide a lot of clarity in both directions. But the shaman still interprets the bones. How valuable they are, depends on how well you use them and whether or not you are lucky enough to ask a relatively simple question.

So NO, it’s not a cure all. But you already knew that.

Getting Wet Let’s take a very light dip into the world that I’m talking about--where the conversations are taking place that can make your marketing so much more powerful. We’ll come back and examine many of these elements in more detail later, for now we’re just going to take an overview.

A Simple Example--Ke Nalu Since I have no idea how sophisticated you are in web tech, I’m going to assume you know nearly nothing and you’re starting from a traditional marketing base. As I said before, we’re going to use Ke Nalu, an e-magazine I own, as an example. We’re going to pretend that Ke Nalu sells stand up paddle surfboards. In reality it doesn’t sell anything--Ke Nalu is an experiment and a hobby. This is going to be a learning process for me as well, and I do expect to dramatically improve the performance of Ke Nalu during this process.

The good news about all the tools I’m going to show you is that they are pretty much the leading edge. The bad news is that these things age faster than crab salad. In a year this book will look as current as the goofballs dancing the Frug in a 70’s movie. I can live with that if you remember that what we are doing is looking at HOW things are done, not what tools we use and how they look today. I’m not teaching you how to use these tools, I’m teaching you the conceptual aspects of marketing. That will age pretty quick too, but nothing lasts forever.

Ke Nalu is a highly modified Wordpress blog that uses a special theme, a host of plugins, and a lot of custom programming that I did in PHP and CSS to make it look the way I wanted it to. Or I should say as Diane Jenkins wanted it to since I asked her to design the look and feel. Diane was an excellent graphic designer when we started our company 17 years ago. She’s also my wife: We got married 14 years ago.

When it comes to programming skills, I make a great marketer.

I’m a hack, in the old sense of the word, but I get by.

Of course you should go to http://www.kenalu.com and play around on the site, but here’s what the site looks like-fundamentally like the table of contents of a magazine. Each article abstract leads to the pages that comprise the full article.

No one ever really sees the full page without scrolling unless they have a larger monitor than my huge Apple display, but you get the idea.

The purple tabs across the top open other feature articles.

The green header across the top contains other navigation to the site’s archive, a book on Stand Up Paddle Surfing that I’m theoretically writing, equipment reviews (a popular feature) and housekeeping stuff.

We’ll be talking about navigation choices and how keywords work on pages other than the home page. That’s an important issue in frequently changed and expanding web assets, so it’s useful that you understand that this site is pretty deep.

The short abstracts down the right side contain the abstracts for all the feature articles that are accessed by the purple tabs. Nice organizing features (like those purple tabs) can have a negative effect on how both people and search robots view your content. This is as important in print as it is on the web. We need to make people (and robots) recognize quickly that the page they are looking at contains information relevant to their interest. Keywords are how we do that.

Translate the term “keywords” into the phrase “words and images that connect immediately to the prospect’s interest” and you’d find this quick recognition concept in the writings of any of the sages of direct marketing, particularly Herschel Gordon Lewis, and in any good web design book. Indeed the fundamental concept of a Johnson Box in direct marketing and the design philosophies of myriad agencies building successful magazine advertisements, or any designer building a magazine cover are exactly summed up in the idea of keywords and keyword placement.

Let’s set up and examine some of our tools for starting to play with these ideas.

In order to participate effectively in the conversations you need to know which ones are important, and that means Web analytics. I’m using Google Analytics for three reasons–it’s adequate for my purposes, it’s simple to set up, and it’s free.

Wordpress (the blog software I use for Ke Nalu) has it’s own implementation of analytics available on it’s dashboard page. This gives me a pretty good idea of progress, and the interest level in particular posts. But it doesn’t do everything I want and need for the sake of this book. It has the benefit of requiring no setup, but we’re not afraid of a little configuration work, are we.

From the Wordpress dashboard graph you can see that Ke Nalu waxes and wanes in popularity. The big dip at the end is a graphing error--the month of September isn’t over yet-it’s a partial data point. But it most likely will be down from June and July because in the summer I do a lot more vintage car racing than standup surfing, and Ke Nalu goes semidormant--it’s pretty much a one-man band. It takes time for the visitor count to change--lots of momentum on the web--so both the peaks and valleys are substantially delayed.

Thirty thousand views sound kind of impressive until you do the math. On average each visitor views three pages so it’s just 10,000 visitors per month. There are simple blogs that receive a hundred times that number of visitors. But that’s a good thing, it gives us a base to work from and an easy way to measure results. If Ke Nalu was already at a million visitors we’d have a tougher time showing clear progress.

While this dashboard view is helpful, there are far more powerful analytical tools available on the web, and the surprising thing is that many of the very best are free. Like Google Analytics for example.

As you can see from the Google Analytics dashboard below, a lot of people showing up at Ke Nalu are typing the URLs directly into their browser or clicking links in a referring site. The site is getting about 150 unique visitors a day who on average look at 3-6 pages depending on the day they visit and what it was that drew them to the site.

At the time of this particular snapshot, 29 percent are direct traffic (they typed Ke Nalu directly into their web browser) 25 percent are coming from particular forums or other referring sites (more about that later) and 45 percent come from search engines like Google. What are they searching for?

Google analytics will show me, but we have so little data on this site yet that it’s not very accurate--I restarted using Google Analytics on this site for this book. From prior analysis I can tell you that it’s mostly “Stand Up Paddle” and variations on that keyword. The keywords shown in this report are just from the last two weeks. Google Analytics works best when you have at least a few months worth of data.

We’re going to show you a lot of ways to derive and evaluate Keywords, but analyzing the search terms terms that bring people to your websites is a decent start.

Analytical tools also tell you what’s popular on your site and what isn’t, as well as delivering a wealth of information on bounce rates (the percentage of people who view only the target page and then navigate away), the amount of time people spend on each page or each element of the page, and other related prospect data.

You can cross-tab and fiddle with this information to great effect. But as I said, we’re going to take a very shallow dive into this very deep pool, because this isn’t a book on web analytics. I’m going to have to keep saying those kind of things, as much to remind myself where I’m going as well as to focus you, because we can easily wander away from the premise of the book and spend too much time in an attractive niche.

If you want to compare the use frequency of a number of keywords there is a powerful new tool called Google trends. It’s one of the neat things Google has buried in it’s Lab. To use Trends you enter a set of keywords, separated by commas, and Google provides a graph of the use of the words over the last few years, along with web events that may have sparked upticks in use.

When you are using a tool like this it’s important to eliminate or mitigate the effect of terms that might be in more general use. For example, if I added the word “surf” to the list it would generate a huge trend line that would reduce all the other keyword trends to a squiggle at the baseline. In fact when I first did this example I included the term “SUP”, an acronym stand up folks use as “Stand Up Paddle”. Including SUP blanketed the results because SUP is used in many other ways (including goofy beer commercials), so I modified it to SUP Surf and got better results.

So now we know a little about what people are talking about and where they are coming from.

We have some idea how to separate the important conversations from the trivial by looking at what content is popular and how much time people spend with it.

Let’s join some conversations. We’ll start with our top key phrase, stand up paddle and just add the word “forum” or “blog”. We could also use Google’s new Blog Search tool, and we will later.

Here’s where some of the conversations are taking place.

Once you join them you’ll find others. The people you talk to (and more important, listen to) will guide you there.

The #1 organic result is StandupZone. Here’s where you have to use your imagination. If you’re running marketing for a big telecom equipment company, what you’re going to be looking for are conversations about your company, your equipment, your competitors, your customer service. You want to go where those conversations are already taking place and join them.

I’m also going to stimulate further conversation and get people to visit my blog. Do it right and you’re adding to the community, do it poorly and you’re just a spammer, or a troll, and you’re trying to steal visitors.

That means walk before you run.

Ask questions, have a conversation, offer up some knowledge. Make it clear who you are and establish some credibility. In other words, be human--a courteous one.

So I join the conversation. Note that my signature line includes both the URLs for my blogs and the RSS feed links. And you can be a little more blatant if you like, but restraint is called for. forums are peopled by true believers, and they can be very prickly.

PonoBill, huh. Hey, this guy looks familiar.

Two thousand posts!?!

Hey, get a life buddy.

Well, I told you I was into Stand Up Paddle surfing. Pono is Hawaiian, meaning basically “striving for excellence”. I am, but the name really comes from the road my house in Maui is on.

In this case I’ve started a new topic and a new conversation. This topic quickly expanded to eleven people responding and 266 people viewing the posts.

A good number of people come to my blogs because I participate in this forum and other similar ones. I don’t participate in all the forums and blogs that I could–this is just an experiment.

But when you do this kind of thing for your company you must make sure there’s representation everywhere that’s important.

Let’s look at other kinds of conversations you can join, start, and nurture. We’ll start with a twitter search, which is a grand place to start.

I’m amazed that companies seem to be so slow on the uptake of what to do with Twitter. Most decide it’s just a great big market and they should spam it.

Dumb, and pointless. Twitter conversations have the life expectancy of mayflies.

I’m certain that I’m missing dozens of uses for Twitter, but I’m focused on conversations and market intelligence, and Twitter is amazing for that.

You can put your keywords into Twitter and see who is talking about your company, products, market, and world. The volume of conversation on Twitter is so large that you can find tweets about nearly anything.

Of course Twitter is also a place to put your own tweets about what “you” are up to. Ke Nalu automatically sends it’s posts to Twitter, Facebook, and many other social sites.

Consistent with my assumption that you know little or nothing about this weird online world, here’s a quick and dirty Twitter primer.

You sign up for a free Twitter account by going to http://www.twitter.com. The signup page is a great model for how registration should be done on the web. Quick, easy, and unfriendly to webbots.

You get a username (like @ponobill) and can set up a profile page. Then you can use twitter on both your computer and your mobile phone. You can post a 140 character “tweet” to your page as often as you like, about anything. If you want to send a message to a particular person you preface it with their username, like @ponobill.

You can find friends, groups, brands, companies, and twitter stars to “follow”--meaning you’ll have their tweets delivered to your page. That sounds odd, but play with it and you’ll see the utility. When you follow someone, Twitter will send them an email notifying them. Sometimes they will reciprocate by following you.

Twitter search, as shown here, is not as complete as some of the third party applications. There are LOTS of add-on applications that use the twitter platform. Many of them make it easier to

write and follow tweets by tracking multiple pages. Some automatically shrink the URL links you place since long links eat up too much of the 140 character limit. Some allow you to share other content such as video and pictures.

Twitter also has some conventions that people have adopted that are not really part of the original design. One such convention is hashtags, such as #kenalu. The hash mark (pound sign) indicates that this word is a tag, much like the metatags that can applied to other web content. But Twitter has no facility for tagging, so a simple inline convention was established by the users. There are no real rules for using hashtags, but if you are writing some post that references a common topic you can gain readers by adding a hashtag, such as #marketing.

When you search for the hashtag #marketing you find everyone that has recently posted to twitter that included that hashtag. You can see that Twitter notified me that 5 more people posted tweets with the hashtag #marketing between the time I made the search and the time I captured this screenshot--perhaps fifteen seconds!

Half an hour later it was over 200.

Twitter is fast becoming the hub for all kinds of information dissemination, in part because of this feature which isn’t a feature.

You can make up a keyed hashtag to coordinate an event or enable discussion with anyone that uses that hashtag. For example if I were doing a web presentation I might offer the hashtag #preskenalu to my participants, which would allow them to interact via their mobile phone or computer during the presentation via twitter. I use the hashtag convention to make what I’m up to more searchable. I could just as easily use any nonsensical combination of symbols and letters to make a searchable entry. The hash mark is just a convention, not a rule.

I’m getting sidetracked--welcome to my world. Time to go take some Concerta(tm). Where I was headed originally was explaining how you can use these social platforms actively, for pushing people to your site and interacting directly with consumers, critics, pundits, etc.. They are powerful for initiating and participating in conversations, for monitoring attitudes about your products. We’re going to get much deeper into the hows and why of social sites later.

Here’s an example of how I use twitter directly from Ke Nalu to post abstracts from the e-magazine. This is NOT an optimal approach, I’m being very lazy. There should be real tweets interspersed between these automated extracts. But it makes a good example, and these do show up nicely on searches for keywords I care about as long as I’m careful to include the keywords in the first few words of the article--which I rarely do. We’ll fix that so you can see how the site will benefit.

My laziness is paying great dividends--we’re going to be able to show excellent progress by simply doing the stuff I know I should have been doing all along.

What’s In It For Me Well, let’s see. I’ve shown you how to locate, stimulate, monitor and join conversations about your company. We have a lot more work to do on those topics.

Your assignment is to take the lame little list of keywords you have generated and use them in the same manner I did here: Go find the blogs and forums that talk about your business. Join the most important ones and start establishing yourself as a contributor.

DO NOT talk about your company and it’s products, though it’s perfectly fine, and even important to your long-term credibility to reveal your affiliation. Then do a Twitter search on your keywords to see what people are saying there. Most likely you’ll find some startling things.

What’s Next In the grand scheme, I plan to show you how to become a thought leader in topics and markets that are important to you. That’s mostly related to content, and I’m going to cover that issue to the brink of tedium in the Creativity section

Then I’m going to show how to translate that leadership into exposure and how to measure every aspect of what you are doing. We’ll track efforts online and off all the way to the money. That, of course, will be in the Measurement section.

Finally I plan to show you how to take action on everything we’ve built. How to plan your costs, buy advertising in the new and emerging auction markets, create, morph and use your budget to improve your company, your products and your market share. Naturally that will be in the Advertising Inventories section.

For now we’re going to continue explaining how to get the attention your company needs. We’re going to take our tools and go hunting for real keywords. I’ll start with nice civilized tools that everyone uses, and then we’ll pull out the chainsaw and play like pros. Remember to keep your limbs clear and your safety goggles on, this could get dangerous.

Chapter 4 Finding Keywords Choosing keywords seems like something you could do with a pen and legal pad and a half hour of cogitating. In fact this is almost certain to fail unless you truly are the prototype for the ideal customer. And even then you’ll miss a lot.

The quick way is by these seven relatively simple steps.

1. Steal them from your competitors, especially the ones that are kicking your butt. I’ll assume you know who they are, but if you don’t, start with a guess at keywords. For Ke Nalu we’ll guess Stand Up Paddle surf, SUP surf, paddlesurf, stand up board. Now search Google for those terms:

This is a good time to explain a little about Google and search engine result pages (SERPs) in general. You probably know all this, but I’ve learned to assume very little. The left side of a Google page is like editorial content in a magazine--it’s the stuff they give you to get you to use the service. It’s called the organic search results and companies like Google have closely guarded secret ways of deciding who gets listed first.

It’s supposed to be in order of greatest relevance and popularity, but SEO (Search Engine Optimization) aims to defeat that purpose and game the SERP. That’s fine, Google and other search companies set the rules and enforce them, but they are far from perfect. Many sites with superior content languish with nearly no visitors because they haven’t done the dance according to Google.

You may consider SEO to be sleazy snake oil (and a lot of it is) but you need to know the rules, and Goggle sure isn’t going to tell you. Their “SEO” instruction is certain to relegate you to page fifty.

My Goggle and Your Google

Here’s an important sidebar. Your Goggle search results and mine may not be the same. You rush into your boss’ office to show that your efforts have somehow moved your website up to the #1 spot in Goggle for your most important keyword. She does a quick search on the keyword you gave her and your site shows up on page three. Why? It’s because you have Google History turned on and she doesn’t. Her search is real, yours is wishful thinking. Some time ago Google added some interesting features for people who have the Google toolbar. They started keeping track of all your searches and modified the search results to reflect what you have been searching for previously. In theory this should make searches more relevant to you. In practice it means your searches are meaningless for determining your standing on search pages. Google doesn’t say too much about search history, the privacy advocates are tearing their hair over it. Google has moved it from a little surprise feature into a place of it’s own called Google History. But it might be active on your account. Go turn it off.

All better, end of sidebar.

Google is encroaching more and more on the organic search with sponsored links on the top of the left column and “shopping results” on the bottom. Google gets affiliate money for the shopping links and is paid directly for the sponsored links at the top of the page and in the right column.

For our current purposes we are interested in all the results, because we can scalp keywords from everywhere. I make this sound underhanded, but it’s legitimately available information, I’m just going to show you how to get and use it.

Looks like Ke Nalu is doing pretty poorly. It used to be on the first page of Google for the keyword “Stand Up Paddle” but my inattention has let it slip. Again, that’s a good thing--I’ll be able to show progress. The listing in the middle of the page titled Ponohouse is actually a site of mine as well. It hasn’t slipped much because it was one of the first SUP sites. Somehow history matters on Google. No one really seems to know why.

We click on the top link and go to Supsurfmag.com, an incredibly cluttered site that does well because the founders work on Google position constantly and have a lot of backlinks and fresh content. I think it’s a pretty homely site, but on the web, beauty is as beauty does, though good design still delivers value. I’ll explain all that later in the creative section, but for now let’s concentrate on our search for Keywords.

At the top of the Firefox menu--my preferred browser--I select View>>page source to see the html code for the home page. I’m not going to show it all here on this page--you can look at it for yourself.

Near the top of this code are a lot of housekeeping and structural statements that tell your browser certain things about the page it is going to display. In particular a set called Meta code that describes the nature of the page, including this code: <head> <title>Stand Up Paddle Surfing Magazine</title> <meta name="description"content="STAND UP PADDLE SURFING MAGAZINE (SUPSURFMAG.COM): Worldwide Stand Up Paddle Surf Destination for stand up paddle surfing sports. SUP surf" /> <meta name="keywords" content="stand up paddle surfing,stand up paddle sports,paddle surf,stand up paddle magazine,sup surfing,sup surf,paddle surfing," /> The “Keywords” meta name includes keywords that the owners of the site believe are important.

Historically some search engines used these keywords to find relevant content, but they are generally ignored now--Google categorically states that they don’t use them. But almost every site has them since you simply don’t know for sure if they might help. They might not help with the search engines, but they let us know what the site owners probably think are most important.

Equally important is the “description” meta name, since site owners still believe that this is searched, and the words in the description are often (but not always) the ones that appear in the abstract that the search result displays. Remember that Keywords aren’t just important to robots.

The human looking at the result needs to see that the site they click on is likely to have relevant content.

If you do this step for all the significant competitive sites in the search results you’ll have a pretty nice collection going.

You should be using a spreadsheet to organize these keywords. If you do that you can copy and paste directly from the page source, just as I did to place that meta data onto this page. Later you’ll be separating your keywords into segments like company, product, product interest, product evaluate, product buy, etc. We’ll show an example later, but it’s nothing fancy.

2. Look at the paid advertisements that show up in search results for any keyword. These folks are paying for clicks associated with these particular keywords. This gives you very strong clues about the value of the keywords you are finding, especially if established online companies are using them. I’ll show you how to get an even better idea by looking at what they are willing to pay for these ads later, but for now, relevant ads are good. Go ahead and click on them and do the basic keyword analysis you’re learning. Don’t get carried away-you’re costing them money and it’s underhanded to do that for the pure purpose of harm. But the advertising is out in the public. You should use all the information you can gather to inform your marketing.

3.

I

Now that you have some basic keywords and you know where your competitors’ sites are, use keyword tools like Wordtracker or Google’s free tools to expand your set and evaluate their popularity. Popular keywords are important, but once again I warn you to consider other characteristics. for example, Starboard is a popular maker of SUP boards. A prospect searching for Starboard SUP boards might be interesting, but a prospect searching for Starboard SUP Board Prices reveals something entirely different. find Google’s keyword tool particularly handy for locating hordes of keywords. If you are trying to do SEO only, then it’s not for you--Google clearly designed it to encourage you to buy lots of adwords. But if you’re building

what we are building--a template for conversations, content, marketing, customer understanding, etc. , then it’s just great.

You can use the tool for expansion and evaluation of keywords you already know, and you can use it to fully evaluate the competition’s site for keywords.

Notice that some of the words relate only peripherally the search terms that we’ve examined so far--you’ll get some chaff with this tool. But look also at the interesting variations.

4. Analyze Similar Sites. Here’s some magic. Check the radio button for “Website Content” instead of “Descriptive words or phrases” and enter the URL for your own or your competitors sites. Bonanza. A valuable analysis of the keywords found on the website and the search volume.

This analysis is for www.surpsurfmag.com. It doesn’t take too much imagination to understand how helpful this is.

Cooler yet, you can export the results as text, CSV (comma-separated variables) formatted for Excel, or just CSV so it can go straight into your spreadsheet.

As you can imagine, using this tool you can flesh out your spreadsheet quickly. You can eliminate duplicates as you go, or write a macro to do the elimination. For research purposes I like to retain the duplicated keywords on a worksheet dedicated to a specific site or characteristic, and then eliminate the duplicates on the master page.

5.

Add specificity. Work your way through the keywords and add modifiers that make your keywords better fit your products, company, customers and prospects. For example, Women’s Stand Up Paddle Boards or Stand Up Paddle Shortboards are more specific. Then roll these more specific keywords back through the tools to to rate them for popularity and add variations you may not have considered.

Keywords and the Long Tail The long tail is a reversal of the 80/20 or Pareto rule--that 20 percent of a market collects the vast majority of the sales.

Chris Anderson looked at the power curve that results and realized businesses could thrive in that skinny long tail of the power curve if there were a large volume of prospects, and the distribution and inventory costs allow them to realize significant profit out of selling small volumes of hard-to-find items to many customers, instead of only selling large volumes of a reduced number of popular items.

Keywords should follow a Long Tail approach, in fact one of the keys to world domination is to start with the small volume, 80 percent, more specific keywords and work your way up to the 20 percent big mommas. As your site gains in volume and links from traffic resulting from searches for long tail keywords, you are in a better position to compete for the higher volume ones. It’s like gaining a beachead, which I consider a primary concern in marketing--both taking them offensively and defending them.

6. Always update your keywords. Your analytics will show which words and phrases are having the most effect. You are doing all this work so that prospects looking for a specific product can find it at your company. But even more important is that you can cross the cultural divide and get them to buy. Keywords change more rapidly then you might expect, influenced by everything that is going on in the space. All of the conversations on the web are ephemeral to some degree, so committing your research to paper is not as valuable as you might expect, unless you’re interested in the history and trends for some reason.

7. Rank your Keywords. Now you have a seed list of highly relevant keyword phrases from all your efforts. There hundreds of keyword phrases in a column on a spreadsheet. Keywords that have gone through a tracking tool (Google, wordtracker, etc.) have the search counts in an accompanying column. Now you do a Google search for each keyword and record how many pages return for each keyword in the next column on your spreadsheet. Take a look at the competitors that emerge. You will find a lot of surprises. I helped a friend with this approach and found a company that was knocking off his products, being supplied by his chinese manufacturer. An all-too common tale these days, but before we did the keyword research he had no idea it was going on.

Let’s Get Competitive I hate hearing someone say they don’t really have competitors--I’ve been there myself. It only means one of three possible things. You’re too early to the market, or you don’t know the market or there is no market. Usually it’s simply that you don’t know the market and there’s no excuse for that today. You need market intelligence to know your competitors. It used to be expensive and difficult. Now it’s free and easy.

Good marketing these days calls for some highly organized competitive intel. And of course we’re going to use keywords to do it. I promise that pretty soon now we’ll talk about marketing tactics that don’t have much to do with keywords, but for now we’re stuck with them--we need them to get our baseline strategy in place.

Let’s find our toughest competitors. We’ll define this as people who are using a strategy similar to ours, and doing a good job of it. They will have found keywords, or at least concepts that prospects find their products with, and they will have optimized their entire site, or sections of it, for those keywords. We’re going to get a little esoteric in doing this, and I apologize for not explaining everything, but if I did this would quickly devolve into an SEO textbook, and the world doesn’t really need another of those right now. If you don’t understand what I’m doing just view this as a recipe.

Pick a set of the keywords that seem most relevant--both in connection to your products and in popularity. For our example for Ke Nalu it’s going to be just Stand Up Paddle which got 60,500 searches in August 2009.

We start off just doing a google search for that phrase enclosed in quotes. Remember to turn off search history. If you don’t, the results will be skewed by the searches you have made--your site will figure large, even though if you go to someone else’s computer it may not show up at all.

Now we’re going to do an intitle search, which means we’re going to add a parameter to our search to find sites that include that phrase in their titles. Google parameters are fussy, you can’t have spaces between the colon following the parameter and the keyword, but the keyword must be surrounded with quotes if it’s a phrase.

Lots of sites are optimized for “Stand Up Paddle” in their title. Now let’s see who is really working this keyword hard. We’ll do an inanchor search along with intitle

Still lots of results. These are the most formidable competitors for the keyword: People who have optimized both the title and anchor text for the keyword I care about.

Now it’s time to see how tough these competitors really are. One easy measure is the number of backlinks. Links to the site are one of the key ways that Google sets pagerank. I’d take everything on the first page of the Google search and use Yahoo's Site Explorer to look at all their backlinks. Here’s the first one:

I wander off to all these links to look at their quality--by that I mean how relevant they are to the page they link to and what kind of keywords are in the text. While I’m looking I also note the pagerank of the referring pages. If they have a high pagerank the links are worth more.

All of this is a lot of work, but it can really fill in the competitive landscape for you. If your business is new, or new to this space, it gives you a good idea of what you will need to do to be successful. Who the prospects and customers are, who the major secondary players are--the consultants, resellers, value-added resellers and dealers, etc.. And it can show you where all the influential editorial comes from, which pundits are active, where the blogs and forums are.

If you play around with these tools in your space you will probably be terrified initially. Even if you are the industry leader and a Fortune 500 or Russell 2000 company you may be getting your butt kicked online. The online world can look like you’re standing knee deep in Piranhas. Don’t sweat it too much, a lot of those Piranhas are toothless. If you bang away at things and build a plan you can do well in almost any space. I’m going to stop saying “we’ll cover that later” because I’m getting quite a backlog, but that’s pretty much what I plan to show you.

What we are fundamentally doing is building a marketing platform. The platform is not just a website, or just a set of tools, it can be the combination of all your marketing efforts once they have been integrated. TV, print, direct mail, and all your web stuff along with how you interact with the sales force and/or customers as prospects. You can build it all into a robust environment, or you can hold it together with string, duct tape and a lot of manual labor. You can leave out the

components of your marketing that are tough to integrate, or get some good help and stitch it all together seamlessly.

Seth Godin wrote a post in his blog recently about this notion that really resonated with me. He said modern marketers don’t rent, they own. Generations of marketers rented attention--a magazine, a TV network--every advertising venue or media company developed an audience that they could rent to you. We didn’t care about the long term value or health of that media venue, we just wanted to know how many eyeballs we could attract to our brand or products.

Now the rules are different. We’re building our audience and that means they are a long term asset. There are two important elements to this difference--the audience and the platform. If we are really smart we care about both and invest in both. We gain value both by making the platform more sticky, useful, engaging and by keeping the audience satisfied and involved.

Depending on your business and it’s sales model the value of either element can be higher. But the place to invest first and foremost is in the platform. The quality of the platform and it’s ability to bridge the cultural divide is the primary tool for maintaining and extending the audience. Your sales cycle can live in your platform, attracting, nurturing (maturing), converting and extending the prospects into customers and advocates.

As Seth Godin says: “If you don't invest in the platform, you'll be at a disadvantage, now and forever. The smart way to build a brand today is to invest in the elements of the platform... the product, the technology, the websites (plural) and the systems you need to make it easy for people to show up at your very own trade show. And then embrace these people and shoot for 90% conversion, not .5%. Like most good investments, it's expensive and worth more than it costs.”