Joseph Stiglitz was quoted in the article as saying all our bailouts are focusing on the past, not the future.  Will throwing money at corporations for innovation work?  or should the government be investing in small businesses?  I am not sure either will work effectively.  This is a little farfetched, but what about making all college graduates publish at least 1 academic paper before graduating?  This would show them the power of creating new ideas and the validity of peer review.  I am not sure it would create jobs, but it would certainly make our society one of thinkers and creators, two ingredients for innovation.

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This got me thinking about marketing an unproven product.  Setting expectations too high could cause a huge backlash that could ruin a company or product.  Nowadays with twitter and ratings sites like yelp, a set of unhappy customers all responding to good marketing is hard to bounce back from.  Any tips to manage those expectations from the start without losing market share?  What about ways of fixing a fiasco?

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As a marketer, I read David Mullen’s 5 PR Predictions and think he has some great points.  I want to focus on his point about measuring people.  I agree with David that we will start measuring people instead of impressions, but I think it will go a lot further than that.  I don’t think the economy is turning around so quickly, which will cause companies to be very “bottom line centric”.  Companies will want to show how their investment in Web 2.0 has paid off and that will mean qualifying the active users/visitors.  It will mean developing ways to report how effective social networking tools are, like managing a twitter account.  Yes, twitter allows the company to talk to it’s customers one-to-one, but did that person buy something?  Did they click on an ad?  Did they refer someone?  How long did the cycle take? 

I think 2009 is going to be the year of the number crunchers and web analysts.  Maybe it is time to take a statistics refresher course.

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I completely agree that the U.S. and the American people need to start watching the dollars they spend and stop spending money that isn’t there. I agree that we all need to tighten our belts and stop “the limitless consumption of trashy consumer goods”, but where is the incentive for innovation?  Not only do we need to educate, feed and provide health care for the country, but we need something to aspire to.  Kennedy put us on the Moon without knowing the science.  What is the next frontier?  Artificially Intelligent robots in every home?  Mars?  Flying Cars?  What is America’s dream?  Once we figure that out, we will be on the road to recovery.

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I now think that blogging is about being part of the conversation: the conversation of the web.   It should be an extension of what I micro-blog about and give me and my followers a larger space to converse.

Any thoughts?

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This time, instead of looking at the existing portfolios, I looked at the individual keyphrases to see how they performed and if there would be any obvious answers.  Luckily there was!  It turns out that over the last 4 months more than 95% of the 22,000 keyphrases didn’t result in a sale, an assist to a sale or lead.  This made my head spin.  I had always assumed that during the sales cycle people were clicking on the paid ads multiple times.  Therefore, even though we only expected a few hundred sales a month we would need a few thousand active keyphrases to support the multiple clicks of a single user.  This assumption was proven wrong by the numbers.   

After uncovering this flaw in our strategy, we have now restructured the campaigns into only 4 groups:  Performers, Assisters, Lead Generators and Growth Phrases.  The performers can be directly tied to a sale.  The assisters can only be connected to a performer, meaning they were clicked on early in the cycle.  The lead generators only caused leads and the growth phrases are phrases we hope will become part of one of the first 3 groups.  This allows us to put 95% of budget into performers and assisters, 2-3% for lead generators and another 2-3% for growth phrases.   This restructuring allowed us to cut 23% of the budget with room in the budget to experiment on new phrases, even during tough times.  It still isn’t clear how much of a dip in revenue we will see.  My hope is that there will be less than a 10% drop in revenue, because the only group that is truly cut is the the outliers, an unpredictable bunch. 

I think this strategy can work for all companies in times like this.  You may need different labels on your groups and maybe more than 4 groups, but the overall strategy should be the same.  Each group should have its own budget and target ROI associated with it, letting you optimize each one as frequently as possible.  We are planning on regrouping every month based on 4 months worth of data.  These two parameters are probably different for different companies, because it all depends on the sales cycle.  Companies with a longer sales cycle and a higher end product can probably afford restructuring monthly.  Shorter cycles may demand weekly restructuring.

I am really excited about this update and if anyone decides to implement something similar, please let me know how it works for you.  If you already have, let me know if there is something I am missing or if I completely missed the mark, please let me know too.  Feedback is always welcome!

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I found this very interesting because I have been researching what it takes to create a successful office-community.  The article lists three rules that they live by: 

1. Everyone has the ability to talk to whomever they need to from any department or level.  
2. Everyone has the ability to offer up an idea.  
3. Everyone must be familiar with the goings on of the academic community.  

At the same time, they setup a brain trust, consisting of their smartest and most creative people. The trust is used to ask questions of and to get feedback from on a daily basis and more frequently if necessary.  

I read this and thought, wow Pixar has a great management team.  They respect their staff, give them the authority they need to get their jobs done and supply the feedback they need keep things on track.  Until now, those were the ingredients I thought were necessary to get the job done well.  But according to Ed, my missing ingredient is Talent.  

Ed writes that “if you give a good idea to a mediocre team, they’ll screw it up.  But if you give a mediocre idea to a great team, they’ll make it work.”  He defines a great team as a talented group of smart people.  What happens if I don’t have a smart group?  What if each individual in my team never finished high school?  Can’t their collective intelligence make the team work?  or are they limited in what they can do?  Is there anything they can do to move passed their mediocrity?  

I don’t have an answer, but hope there is one or that Ed is wrong.  Otherwise many companies are doomed to fail by their unsurpassable mediocrity and that is just sad.

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Yesterday’s NY Times article wrote about the talks and mentioned that the biggest thing holding things up are the privacy concerns that Verizon has.  The authors mentioned that Verizon hasn’t decided how much data about their customers they want to give over to Google.  I am happy Verizon is thinking about my privacy, but I am still concerned.  What data does Google want?  What kind of data is Verizon thinking about giving over?  Is it only about searches?  Does it include my subscriber status?   

I am going to hope that Verizon is only thinking about giving over information related to searches, because even the thought of more than that scares me.  More than search related data includes: how much I pay a month in usage charges, how long I use the phone for a day, how much money I spend in transactions over my phone, how long I have been a customer, if my GPS is on then where I travel, what my local hangouts are and anything else they know about me.  

In a comment to my post about where privacy and marketers meet, Roman said that I shouldn’t fear marketers because the data they have or want is relatively harmless.  I agree, I do not fear marketers.  I fear ad providers and ad networks because their networks and ad space is worthless if they cannot serve ads that will attract the right customer’s attention.  In order to optimize their ad server technology, they would love to know customer demographics, buying power and search and click patterns.  

If the deal goes through will Verizon allow their customers to opt-out of all the data sharing it is doing with Google?  I am sure not, because Google wants to know where you are when you search. They want to be able to serve you ads for a store right in front of you, or a restaurant down the block or reenforce a banner that is on the side of a building across from you.  Not only will they have the ability to serve local ads to you, they will also be able to interpret the meaning of your searches based on proximity.  For example, a search for the word “Prada” will be more valuable if you are on Fifth avenue in New York City than if you are in the Fort Lauderdale airport.  

At the end of the day, I hope we figure out how to curb all this data sharing and tracking across different media and that Verizon Wireless acts responsibly.

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This made me realize that I am a little Jekyll and a little Hyde.  The Dr. Jekyll in me thinks that no one should be tracked if they don’t want to be and everyone should be able to choose how they are marketed to.  The Mr. Hyde in me loves the idea of tracking users, segmenting customers and using machine learning to enhance marketing campaigns.  This seems like a clear contradiction, am I a schizophrenic? In hopes of convincing everyone reading this that I am not a hypocrite, I will try to rationalize my thoughts.  

I believe that the constitution provides everyone with an inherent right to privacy, including online privacy, and should be forced to actively opt-in to a service where you give up that right.  This means that a privacy policy on a website should not automatically opt you in to a  tracking service.  On the other hand, I also believe that marketing strategists should be able to tailor their campaigns to as small a customer segment as they can.  This means that if the strategist selling jewelry knows who shopped for high-end clothing recently and only wants to display an ad to that specific customer, they should be able to.  The only caveat to my second statement is that everyone who is shown those customized ads has to opt-in to them.  

Most marketers don’t agree with me because it would make their lives harder.  Not only would they have to ask before being allowed to track a customer, they would also have to ask before showing a customized ad.  I think most marketers assume that if people are forced to make a conscience choice, they avoid making it and use the default settings.  This would cause marketers to have a lot less data about their customers and would not be able to make as educated a guess when choosing where to place an ad.  

I, on the other hand, believe that people make conscience choices about everything they do and would welcome another one.  I also believe that having less tracking data to work from may mean more work for the marketer, but it will also result in a better product and a better ad.  This is where scientific marketing comes to play.  Marketers should start by making a hypothesis based on a small amount of data and then try to prove it with experimentation and watching more data.  In effect, scientific marketing is a little behavioral targeting and a little marketing psychology, but it conforms to a world where privacy matters!

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Now that I am opted-out of seeing the ad, what is stopping Yahoo! from taking my search and surfing patterns and then creating a model to market to someone that is not opted out?  If there are lots of people like me going from Toyota’s site to the WSJ, what is stopping Yahoo! from going directly to Toyota and letting them know?  This way, Toyota will just buy more ads on WSJ.  Maybe it will cost more, but chances are it will be more effective advertising than placing the ads randomly.  

Despite my negative twist, I would still like to commend Yahoo! for being the first provider to allow such an opt-out service!  Customized advertising costs more for advertisers and while Yahoo! is lagging behind Google in ad sales, this is a brave step.  I think Google should take a page out of Yahoo!’s book and allow similar opt-out services on their sites, otherwise I think they are risking being labeled “evil”.

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