Today’s journey is about Internet marketing magic.

We start magically enough discussing PPC and money. Money isn’t money anymore. Money floats. Money is a VOTE for or against something. How can money be a vote against something? When you don’t make any of it. After a strange daydream driving to the office on a rainy and finally cold day in February I wanted to write about how being an Internet marketer and curator over the last twelve years has changed my thinking.

There is a problem knowing truth. Humans are dynamic systems with billions of social and biological inputs. How do we KNOW such a complex system?  In a Black Swan world do we ever know the truth? Wrong question asked in the wrong way for Internet marketers.

The web is magic. One of my favorite tools, Scoop.it, spiders the web based on keywords helping curate across many topics (see Curation Revolution on Sccop.it). Let’s see if we can find or understand Internet marketing magic further.

Internet Marketing and PPC Magic
Several years ago, determined to understand the unknowable, I experimented with Google Pay Per Click (PPC), the most immediate direct feedback system. I manipulated Return On Ad Spend (ROAS) up and down. First I moved standard ROAS from our default $3 to $1 to $6 to $1. Here is what happened:

• Internal P&L for PPC got healthy even fully loaded we made money on PPC ($3 to $1 was close to breakeven)
• Organic search (SEO) fell out of bed crashing and halting progress where we were climbing and sending existing #1’s down the page
• Catalog subscriptions tanked – our “B” conversion point was joining our email list for the “best deals” and we cut new names into the list by half
• YTD (year to date) vs. LYTD (last year to date) Sales Tanked – since PPC ROAS of $3 to $1 was in the history I was comparing against upping the ROAS to $6 to $1 hurt sales by about 30%
• Despite cleaning up our PPC profits and losses net impact of the move up to $6 to $1 was negative costing more than we saved by a large margin

Our next experiment was to move ROAS down to $1 To $1. Here is what happened:

• Internal P&L looked UGLY, fully loaded we lost a lot of money on almost every sale, but we were making it up in volume (little inside joke there since this month of almost $1 to $1 almost cost me a job)
• Organic search got better but wasn’t covering the differences due to SEO’s slow uptick (organic can be behind by as much as 90 days as spiders and links catch up) AND PPC doesn’t really help with link bait – the most important SEO lure
• Catalog subscriptions were up but they didn’t triple (figure our standard ROAS was $3 To $1 so catalogs and sales should triple if there was a one to one relationship between ROAS and either metric – there isn’t a one to one relationship between ROAS and anything so don’t look for it)
• Sales Improved but didn’t triple, sales almost doubled

Point of Diminishing Financial Returns
There is  always a point of diminishing returns, the place where putting in or taking out more only hurts. Our standard $3 to $1 ROAS kept internal P&L healthy. $3 to $1 ROAS was as close to a one to one relationship anything on the web ever becomes. We fed PPC at $3 to $1 ROAS and good things happened across multiple dimensions and, even better, we almost paid for the PPC investment on its face (i.e. without any help from other channels), almost.

Feeding other systems such as sales, email list subscriptions, white paper downloads, requests for product demos, traffic, time on site, pages viewed and lowering bounce rate is PPC’s purpose, its raison d’ être. Eventually more diversified competitors win because:

1. Customer acquisition costs are lower in aggregate for well diversified Internet marketers so they can afford to drive PPC bids up to a pain threshold forcing other less diversified Internet marketers to retire from the field
2. Since PPC is only one of many feeder systems for well diversified Internet marketers if PPC tanks well diversified Internet marketers have other options such as email, social, and mobile while less hedged competitors go out of business (and believe me PPC tanks on occasion for strange and undetermined and undeterminable reasons)
3. The forward momentum of PPC is seconds, turning PPC off turns traffic off like a light switch. Organic listings, in contrast, can last years. My Content Marketing Networks presentation on Slideshare was #1 for years, slipped to #2 recently but a nice run for a very long time.

Modeling Dynamic Systems
The terms “weather forecasting” and “weather prediction” tell a lot. Use of “forecasting” and “prediction” speak to a complexity beyond 2 + 2 = 4 linear modeling. Weather is highly dynamic or full of Bursts to use Notre Dame network researcher Albert-Laszlo Barabasi’s term from his book Bursts: The Hidden Pattern Behind Everything We Do.

Don’t think your website is burst-y? Here is a traffic chart from ScentTrail Marketing my blog:

Here is a graph I used in Content Curation Magic and Contest:

See the similarity.

ScentTrail Marketing creates a wave, a series of bursts.  My pattern is a burst followed by quiet. I have a great day job so don’t have as much ScentTrail content creation time as before.

Here’s the rub, all websites NOT led by brilliant, algorithm-creating Internet marketers are burst-y. Now look at the government’s chart for Amazon’s growth in ecommerce from my SEO and The Amazon Paradox post for my friend Bill Ross’s excellent LinchpinSEO site:

NOT BURST-Y

I can hear the 2 +2ers out there thinking this chart shows money not content so of course it is smooth. Amazon’s money chart serves as a proxy for all other charts such as traffic, conversion or acquisition. Amazon’s chart is also a perfect example of the first law of content marketing for Internet marketers: More and More, Faster and Faster, Better and Better.

Amazon’s chart is smooth because the most amazing content creation engine the world has ever known isn’t burst-y. Amazon is built to make Google happy generating more and more content, faster and faster, better and better. Amazon’s content creation process is THE key to great Internet marketing. Amazon will reach 1B pages in Google’s index by August, around the same time Facebook crosses the 1B subscriber mark.

More and More
If you aren’t watching Google page spread using a tool or the site:YOURSITE.com command then your marketing team is missing one of the three legs of Internet marketing. All Internet marketing sits on a three-legged-stool of CONTENT, COMMUNITY and CAMPAIGNS leading to CONVERSION. The Internet marketing stool is business model agnostic (B2B or B2C).

Faster and Faster
Google CEO Eric Schmidt supplied one of my favorite stats. We create as much content now in two days as from the cave until 2003. Every two days we create the same amount of as in MILLIONS OF YEARS. Moore’s Law states integrated circuit power will square every two years even as costs go way down. You don’t have to look very far to see Moore’s Law’s impact (Google, Facebook, Amazon). Expect more speed faster. Compare Moore’s Law chart showing the gain in integrated circuit power to Amazon’s smooth rise and the relationship becomes clear:

Better and Better
Google created PageRank, named after founder Larry Page, to index the web. Google’s bot establishes a score from 0 to 10 for every web page. Google does not and will probably NEVER index every web page; Linked: How Everything Is Connected To Everything Else And What It Means also by Barabasi shares that only about 2/3rds of the web will ever be in any search engine index.

Before reading Linked I used to tear hair out over my Google page count. Our site had over 10,000 pages, but our Google page count rarely moved about 5,000. Our “lost pages” were probably Google knocking pages out because they weren’t unique, well linked or both. Other “lost pages” float in a Sargasso Sea moving slowing further out never reaching Google’s shores. Isolated, unlinked and alone these un-indexed pages are NOT what any Internet marketer wants.

“Better and Better” is only partially what you do. Better is mostly about what others think about what you do. “Voting” on “better and better” takes many forms including traffic, LINKS and Facebook LIKES. This means any Internet marketer’s job is creating content capable of springing legs and walking around the world.

Modeling Dynamic Systems – The Cool Psychedelic Part of Internet Marketing
Ken Kessey and the Merry Pranksters (c. 1964) were Internet marketers before there was an Internet to market:

The psychedelically painted bus had its stated destination as being “further.” This was the goal of the Merry Pranksters, a destination that could only be obtained through the expansion of one’s own perceptions of reality. They traveled cross-country giving LSD to anyone who was willing to try it (LSD was legal in the United States until October 1966). Wikipedia

I inject the sixties for more than a smile; the Pranksters idea of “further” as a process rather than destination is prescient. Systems as dynamic, diverse and alive so the Internet require different processes, different ways to understand what those dynamic Internet and web systems are trying to tell us. Weather turns quickly. Here is a quote new friends at CurationSoft helped me recover:

“I’ve seen tornadoes roar up on dusty Texas plains. I’ve run from a black storm’s vengeance, furry and terror. No Texas tornado has anything over the content storm heading at each and every one of us.”

Curation The Next Web Revolution on ScentTrail Marketing

Collapsing Content Network Space/Time
We’ve arrived at our “further” for today. What occurred to me driving to work listening to Jim Stengel, a fellow P&G alum, speak about VALUES in his excellent book GROW: How Values Power Growth and the Good To Greatness of them is the web and the wisdom of crowd system the Internet creates requires a new value system, a paradigm shift. Valuing new metrics and web paradigms is NOT to say core values don’t begin any Internet marketer’s (or content curator’s) journey since establishing values is THE KEY first step.  The way we THINK is what we lucky few Internet marketers control. A wise and smart friend, Rich Kurnik, once told me, “If we can’t change something that seems uncontrollable change YOURSELF, change your thinking and feelings about it.”

Rich’s idea perfectly describes the mental paradigm shift necessary to become a GREAT Internet marketer. Here is my attempt to build on Rich’s wisdom:

Hope today’s journey was magical, if not tomorrow is sure to be because Internet marketing is getting more and more magical faster and faster.

Martin
—-
Martin Smith (@ScentTrail)
Director Marketing

Win an Ipad 2 or Kindle FIRE
The first Content Curation Contest seeks to discover the Top 10 content curators of 2011. The contest has two phases: APPLICATION (ends 226) and VOTING (starts the next day). If you love to curate content on Facebook, Twitter or Scoop.it you might win an Ipad 2, Kindle Fire or Fame and fortune with a profile page on Atlantic BT and a “TOP CURATOR” handle.

Easy Curation Contest Application
Wanted to keep application easy, friendly and FAST. The toughest question asks to describe your curration philosophy. This is a question I’m not sure I could answer. I curate a little like I used to paint. Generally I curate the intersection of Internet marketing, cancer survivorship, art and startups – the things I love and care about (cycling creeps in there too). We don’t need a polemic about curation philosophy as much as we need your sense of motivation and where you want to help, where you want to make a difference with your content curation. Don’t over think, have fun and know everyone at Atlantic BT appreciates your hard work.

Win Fame, Fortune and Appreciation
We created the Content Curation Contest to say THANKS and heap some rewards on people who help first and worry about awards later. Click on the link above to fill out our contest application – only takes a few minutes and you may be selected as a top curator, win fame, fortune and some of those drinks with little umbrellas in them. Good luck and thanks for everything you do to help others understand the information revolution.

Thanks for your had curating work. Together we understand faster and better than apart. Wisdom of curated crowds is the only way to survive Moore’s Law of content chaos.

Martin Smith
Director Marketing

Martin’s Ecommerce Copy Writing Secrets
There is an important trick to writing great ecommerce copy – remember your TWO “readers”. Copy on an ecommerce web site is read by search engine spiders and people and the first one (spiders) catches the second (people) in its web. Here is the rub – you ecommerce copy is constrained by mutually exclusive ideas such as:

First Operational Business Intelligence Awards
How many years of your life have you spent bent over a spreadsheet trying to tease out Truth, Justice and the American Way? I started working on spreadsheets when they were called VisiCalc and then Lotus 1-2-3, and yes I realize how much that last sentence ages me.

We made better business decisions even in those early days. We had to key data in from printed reports back in the day.  We became human filters passing digital data through our fingers so it could become OUR digital data in Lotus or later Excel.

We’ve come a long way. One of Atlantic’s coolest customers, Entrinsik located right down the street, created a feed and database agnostic tool called Informer that does things I dreamed about. The years I would have gotten back if our data warehouse and SQL reporting tools at M&M/Mars could magically tie data from internal AND external systems.

I love the IDEA of Informer. Selling it to our tech guys at M&M would have been an interesting conversation. In the end, M&M’s ISG tech team wanted sales and marketing to be self-sustaining. Sales and marketing were too much of a pain to do anything else. We didn’t have a tool like Informer, a tool capable of blending, matching and empowering. If you’ve read any of my Marketing Director at Atlantic posts, my ScentTrail Marketing posts, @ScentTrail Tweets or my Internet marketing writing for Technorati you know data democracy and the empowerment it creates is a favorite topic.

We live in special times as marketing pros. We don’t have to GUESS so much, but we need information to do what we need it to do. When we need a standing front somersault we need real time business intelligence, easy to cut, spin and create actionable information mined out of an impossible black hole of data that gets more impossible every minute of every day. We need to find golden needles so well hidden no pivot table or what if analysis will ever even know they are there.

I wrote about No Silver Bullets or Barking Dogs in web development on Friday. There are times when the right information is worth millions, years of your life, advancement in your career or all of the above. There are times when a silver bullet is a very good idea. Don’t know about you, but I’ve found it TOUGH to be so armed in my 30 year career.

My friends at Entrinsik want to pat me and every other BI spreadsheet junkie on the back. Entrinsik’s First Annual Operational Business Intelligence Awards reward the hardest working people in rock and roll – analysts and line managers who battle numbers, feeds and giant Ogres to help marketing, sales, manufacturing, nonprofits, colleges, universities and that garage business you love and want to fund your retirement.

The First Annual Entrinsik BI Awards focus on creative uses of their magical Informer reporting tool. Our marketing team and I are working on a creative use of Informer’s ability to tie Google Analytics, Argyle Social and site conversion data from our ancient Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system together. Probably NOT going to make the BI Awards 2.29 deadline, but we will make next year’s Entrinsik’s BI Awards. If you are doing cool things with Informer be sure to APPLY for an Informer award today (deadline is 2.29).

Just curious? Learn More About Entrinsik’s Operational BI Awards

Follow @Entrinsik

Entrinsik on Facebook

Entrinsik’s Informer  reminds me of Arthur C. Clark’s famous quote ”any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

Feel like you are drowning in BI?
Entrinsik’s talented team can help (they are helping me).
Call 888.703.0016 and tell Yanni or Sharon Martin sent you. Email sales(at)Entrinsik(dot)com.

Entrinsik’s Contact Form

Got a great Battling Spreadsheet Ogres story?
Share it on Entrinsik’s Contact Form and they will pat you on the back. Keep the faith, data is growing like wild Kudzu but so are cool new curation tools such as Informer (read my Curation Is The Next Web Revolution post for more hope).

Martin

There was a problem. HTML structured the page but didn’t fill it with copy or images. Each time I learned one skill two more that needed learning popped up. Web development challenge in these early days centered on finding people willing to help for a reasonable amount of money or learning how to DIY (do it yourself). We’ve come a way since 1999, but some things don’t change. Anyone can have a website only a few will understand how to make money online.

You Get What You Pay For And Web Development Costs Are Going Up
In 1999 presence was the challenge. In 2012 presence is assumed. Once everyone has an Internet marketing presence competition moves from presence and engineering to the battle for hearts, minds and advocacy.

Fighting for hearts, minds and advocacy requires different skills. Internet marketing may be the most engineering-like marketing thanks to a sea of behavior and heuristic information, but cutting clutter to make strangers love your company, brand or product is as much business therapy as business.

As web development business therapist we see common mistakes such as:

• Search For Silver Bullets
• Know Thyself To Know Others
• Barking Dog Marketing
• Cathedral vs. Bazaar

Stop Silver Bullet Search
We believe in the quick fix even when life teaches otherwise. The search for silver bullets is distracting and bleeds our most valuable asset – TIME. Reject quick fixes and instant millions. People do win the lottery, but their winning never improves your odds. “Win the lottery” isn’t an effective Internet marketing plan. Anyone who tries to sell you a silver bullet or lottery ticket should be avoided. Creating greatness is HARD and requires sweat, tears and treasure.

Know Thyself To Know Others
Thinking Like An Internet Marketer values the web for what it can and can not accomplish. No web site makes a company’s communication more organized or clear. The web is a huge guassian blur making pointed and sharp ideas, potentially dull and confusing. How would you rate your knowledge of your company’s character on a ten point scale? If you answer anything below a 8 then you have introspective work to do. If your company, brand or product is blowing from pillar to post then, as Gertrude Stein famously said of Oakland, “There is no there, there.” Know yourself BEFORE you create any site, blog, social media or email campaign. Compare each effort in some meaningful and measurable way to your company’s core values.

Barking Dog Marketing
Do you walk toward or run away from a barking dog? Barking at visitors has the same impact. Greatness, transparency and honesty are more sustainable and profitable than any short term bark. Barking may improve sales or conversions for a short time, but damage to brand, positioning and long term profits and advocacy may be significant and long lasting. Every day and action matters in the battle for hearts, minds and advocacy. Read Dov Seidman’s great book HOW: Why we do anything means everything. Seidman explains why values and processes are the only things any business truly own.

Cathedrals vs. Bazaars
Internet marketers build sand castles. Whatever we create will be gone soon. Building sand castles requires different attributes than constructing Renaissance cathedrals meant to last a hundred years. Thinking like an Internet marketer means organizing work around:

• Speed
• Data
• Creative Use Of Convention (don’t recreate what visitors expect)
• Team
•  The Magic 11% (see 1:10:89 Rule)
• Listening and Leading

Speed, passion and wrecking what needs ruination means errors, bumps and mistakes happen. If mistakes drive you crazy don’t become an Internet marketer. Mistakes are a part of the cost of being relevant in a constantly shifting space such as Internet marketing. Perfection isn’t a sustainable Internet marketing strategy. Speed, being data-centric and listening more than you talk work better. Understanding the difference between creating sand castles and accepting input from the bazaar instead of laying stones to live for a hundred years is why “Thinking Like An Internet Marketer” requires a paradigm shift. Perfectionism is too expensive for sand castle builders working in the world’s largest bazaar dodging silver bullets and barking dogs.

Free SEO Evaluation White Paper (coming soon)

Look for the Atlantic BT SEO White Paper soon. Today’s post shares SEO Tips prompted by a customer who successfully made SEO low hanging fruit changes and is looking to move his web site to the next level.

SEO – Martin’s Tips Note

SEO is a many layered challenge with touch points in site design, site reputation, viral campaigns, PPC (as a traffic generator and source of content research), hosting (site speed is becoming an increasing issue), meta data (particularly page titles), keyword aligned body copy and about fifty other things. We’ve seen tremendous SEO change in the last two years due to the growing influence of social networks. Diving into the middle of such a many layered challenge takes skill, time and a solid understanding of your site and business goals. Here are “best practices” you can implement in your site today to improve organic traffic:

• Facebook Likes (macro and micro) – Be sure to have the Facebook LIKE button on your home page and on important individual pages such as product pages or key articles AND make sure your counters are accurate to the page the LIKE button is on. I want a macro “reach” counter capable of summarizing LIKES across multiple touch points, but no such tool exists yet (that I am aware of) so make sure your Facebook counters are aligned to pages they are on.

• Platforms Beat Websites – read my Internet Marketing – Platforms vs. Websites post on ScentTrail Marketing to understand how significantly Internet marketing is being transformed by Web 2.0 and the promise of Web 3.0. As Amazon nears a billion pages in Google’s index understanding the interconnected “platform-yness” of Internet marketing has never been more important.

• UGC Rules – One of the implications of living in the land of platforms is you can’t create enough content to win keyword wars on your own. You team and content creation budget isn’t big enough even if you have millions. User generated content (UGC) is KEY. Create campaigns that develop community and encourage people to share your site across their social nets (and remember to use the Facebook LIKE button whenever possible). You may want to read my 1:10:89 Rule post too as it explains how magical and rare contributors are. My favorite UGC tools are polls, contests and games. Each UGC tactic has a “best practice” application I will write about in another post.

• Content, Community and Campaigns THEN Conversions – Living in a platform time means learning SEO stepping stones to success. Each step builds on and contributes to the next. Create a content strategy. We create content strategies with extensive keyword research, something we’ve named ”branding keywords”. Branding Keywords maps keywords to business values, buying personas, buyer pain points and potential blue oceans (those keywords not frothy red with competition). This kind of research is a HUGE time commitment (days usually), but it makes your content and campaigns jump off the page. We are working on sharing these steps so anyone who wants to can “brand keywords” (look for our tutorial in about a month). Community can be as little as adding reviews or as much as building out a Facebook environment. Content without community support is a tree falling in the desert with no one to hear it. Campaigns are the “buy one get one free” or the “free white paper” or the “Holiday Sale” language of email and social marketing. You need deadlines, a great offer and compelling presentation across all touch points (site, blog, social, email) to motivate and cut through clutter and buyer apathy. Conversions come because you fire on every step. Any friction such as TRUST and REPUTATION must be fully eliminated (another post for another time). Conversions Key Performance Indicators can be anything including more time on site or increased page views. We like to make conversions some ACTION such as sign up, download or buy.

• SPEED – Go to Alexa or use a speed evaluation tool. If your site is anything other than FAST redesign it or serve it better or both. Google’s margins erode when pages take too long to load so they will punish your listings for slow response.

• SPAM – Work in SEO long enough and you can feel hidden SPAM traps. You know exactly how to SEO write to push keyword density without spamming. There are tools that you can use to confirm and help eliminate things like “stop words”, but do this long enough, test enough content and you develop an intuitive feel for what works. If you don’t have such a sense yet read my SEO Writing Tips 1 – 5 on ScentTrail Marketing for a quick crash course.

• DATA – We are constantly reminded that however much we think we know about SEO we don’t know anything. SEO and the Internet live organically in Real Time. The only things that matter or define SEO success is what is happening now. The good news is there is a sea of data to help cut the cost of the gamble. SEO and Internet marketing are always gambles, but informed ones perform better and better over the long run. Every now and again we re-read Black Swan by Taleb just in case we think we can finally predict Internet marketing’s future (no one can and arrogance goes before a huge fall in our Internet marketing experiences).

• Snake Oil – In another much younger life I sold soap for P&G, an honorable straight forward job. SEO is full of people who project confidence when they should have NONE. They use words they don’t understand but do so in a way that makes listeners confused or anxious. Here is a quick Snake Oil test. Ask a prospective SEO how they would change your home page title, the most important meta copy on any page. If they answer anything other than, “I have no idea,” RUN FOR THE HILLS. Existing sites are modeled and indexed in Google. Change is expected and accepted WITHIN parameters, within modeled limits. First rule of SEO is DO NO HARM. Anyone who, at a moment’s notice, creates a SEO plan for your site is dangerous and should be avoided. Avoid snake oil salesmen since the first rule they violate is DO NO HARM and harm within Google’s Elephant Memory Brain is forever (or a very long time anyway). Another good Snake Oil test is anyone who says, “I can get you #1 on X keyword in Y time.” The only way to achieve such a mission is to wear a black hat, to game or trick Google. Never game or trick Google. The math always wins and the over/under doesn’t favor such a tactic (what you stand to gain vs. lose). A former CFO told me, “I want you to make something happen on Google by the end of the week.” Something is happening on Google all the time, I had to explain, but only BAD things can happen for sure by the end of the week. Hard concept for a CFO to grasp.

Keep the faith, keep creating content and find a way to move your “site” to a platform generating UGC and the magic Google Juice it provides is the most important SEO lesson once you are past the low hanging fruit of solid meta, body copy, tags and purple cow link bait.

Hope these ideas have helped. Look for our Free SEO White paper and more on Branding Keywords soon. If you would like to be kept up-to-date with the latest at Atlantic BT (never share our list and don’t spam) use the link below to stay in touch.

Yes, Please Add Me To Your Think Like An Internet Marketer Email List.

Martin
Director Marketing

Suggested Reading:

Phil Simon’s new book

The Age of the Platform

Great Job By David Tonight!
Fantastic job by David Rose from MagneTVideo.com tonight at our Internet Marketing Meetup on video marketing.

Video Secrets Meeting Summary on ScentTrail

Summary of  tonight’s MEETUP at Atlantic BT is on ScentTrail. Will post a link to David’s presentation.

Martin’s Story
Imagine you are on a beach. Suddenly water moves swiftly away. Fish flop and dance naked in early morning sun. “Tsunami,” we think involuntarily. We live online, via CNN and in a global village so we know a big wave is coming. Internet marketers stand on just such a beach. We face a coming web video marketing Tsunami.

“This is better,” I thought before testing a 3 minute video on the home page of the $6M site I managed as a Director of Ecommerce (before joining Atlantic BT as Director Marketing). “Run it,” I said watching our metrics nervously. Never test in production without a B option you can easily roll back too. Good news this day was I’d learned the “rollback” lesson. In four hours site conversions tanked by a full point (about $3K). “Kill it,” was my next command before the site walked into a end of summer weekend with such a conversion train wreck.

“What happened,” my boss asked me. Ever wish you could jump in a time machine and go back a few years traveling with the knowledge you have now to just such a moment? Here is what I know now that would have helped then:

• Read vs. Video = VIDEO
• 3 Minutes is an eternity online (1 minute or less now).
• Video on the home page is TOUGH (lots of views but converting traffic can easily be lost never to be heard from or converted again)
• Too polished doesn’t work well online – rough edges establish immediacy, authenticity and authority (strangely enough)
• Videos create VERY HOT spots immediately below them, so include a Call To Action (CTA) in the video that mirrors a CTA immediately below the video (or, if video is on product page keep it far enough away from the MAGIC BUY button as to NOT create confusion)
• Videos are EMOTIONAL and that is a good thing
• Videos “SEO” well, pop nice on YouTube, can spring legs and walk around the web (via embed codes) and are easier to get top listing on than text (LOTS EASIER but getting harder as I write this)

This list could get longer, but you get the idea. A quick note about video and SEO. Spiders can’t “see” video so tagging, linking and surrounding text can be very important. I learned another video SEO secret today from David but won’t spoil his January 24th presentation. Want to know a very cool video SEO secret that is EASY and POWERFUL you will need to join us for pizza in a few weeks.

What I know without any doubt is VIDEO is a powerful Internet marketing tool. Powerful enough Atlantic BT is working with David Rose and MagneTVideo.com to learn how to provide video marketing services. The end of my story is we finally figured out a winning video formula (less than 2 minutes, on the product page, make the product the hero and pull in wisdom of crowds reviews). Pays to have a good team, a patient and trusting boss and a B option.

The net of our tests was conversions on product pages with videos quadrupled. New products already on a roll set new records. Older products starting to wane got a new lease on life. How many failures before finding the winning formula? My team created about ten different videos before we found the winner. Who has that kind of time confronted with social search, the real time web and Internet marketing as we know it today? A: No one, thus asking David and MagneTVideo to share “inside baseball” secrets so Atlantic BT can offer easy to buy, effective web video marketing.

There are many great video marketing providers including friends at Atlantic Creative, Big Fat Film and RHEDPixel (they did the work mentioned here). I also have a good friend who runs a cool company called mailVU in Charlotte. We are working with David and MagneTVideo to combine Atlantic BT’s web development and Internet marketing power, learn cool video marketing secrets to share with customers and potential customers and surf the monster video marketing wave coming in the web’s direction.

Hope you can join us for our monthly Internet Marketing Relativity Meetup on Tuesday, January 24 (Join Raleigh Internet Marketing Meetup Here).

Martin

PS. Lifted image at the top from an excellent article “Why Use Video Marketing” by Sneh on Buzzom.com.

Check it out: http://www.slideshare.net/MarkRiggan/mobile-first-responsive-web-design

I started working for P&G (1981) when phones were on walls at home and webs were something spiders created. Networking was when we met on Fridays to exchange damaged consumer products goods. Everyone, there were salesmen and women from P&G, J&J, Campbell’s Soup, Heinz, Colgate, Crest, Lipton and Clorox was glad when I arrived. Soap was currency. Everyone needed it all the time. Bleach you could live without for a few weeks, soap not so much.

We met in a parking lot, threw our trunks open and traded damaged soap (torn wrappers mostly) for dented soup, smashed dryer sheets and crushed plastic bottles of bleach and detergent. Our early EBay auctions established preference, currency and bids. I got more for Coast than Ivory (like 3 to 1).

The market was open arbitrage. I’ll give you two bars of Coast soap for slightly abused dryer sheets, crushed bleach, and a cut but taped bottle of detergent. The rep next to me would make his offer and he might beat mine or vice versa. Coast was my best currency. I never doubled down using my best selling soap back when soap came in bars and on a rope not ubiquitous liquid.  I would toss in three bars of Ivory sealing the deal. The Johnson & Johnson rep tried to cut a “better” deal using crushed bottles of Tylenol.

The first big tampering case had just happened. No one touched his pre-tamper proof bottles despite his saying, “these are from BEFORE the problem.” We felt for the guy. He’d spent days clearing shelves of his product on the off chance of tampering. Logically we knew he had to send any potentially tampered product back to HQ for accounting and then directly into the flames, but no one would touch the aspirin during my tenure.

Every now and again someone would take pity on the J&J guy. They would throw him something for Q Tips or Petroleum Jelly. Mostly he represented something we feared – strange, random madness, inflated hysteria and disorder. Barter happened on Fridays because grocers didn’t want “reps” in their stores as weekend traffic built. We had paperwork to do. Everyday I filled out a three part “Daily Call Report” that included how many FAPs (field activated promotions) I’d sold, how many calls were made and what was accomplished.

My goal was 12 sales calls a day and Friday was a “day” making our daily sales call goal 15 since Friday it was hard to make a single sales call. Everyone in the trading parking lot had similar daily goals. “Plan your work, work your plan,” P&G taught during orientation. P&G was masters at the sticky metaphor mixed with easy to remember song-like alliteration and report card-like aids. Sales presentations had four parts (Summary, Idea, How Works, Benefits). The sales call had seven distinct “steps” (don’t remember these anymore). There were hieroglyphs for describing store conditions noted inside a large notebook then transposed to our Daily Call Reports.

The Daily Call Report was almost 24 inches from left to right. When a P&G rep returned to their car he or she would pull a long board from the back seat, fit it over the steering wheel, transpose notes taken in the store and then dock the large board with pegs perfectly fitted to the company Malibu back in the backseat. They would look down at the “Daily Plan” sheet hanging from the console, drive to their next store and repeat the process selling grocery store managers displays of Downy, Bounce or Mr. Clean.

Before pitching the store manager we checked the store’s backroom. Some stores were mean about letting sales reps in the backroom. If you replaced a good sales rep there was a note indicating to ask permission before walking in the back. Entering the store we wrote our names in a long ledger probably never looked at or cared about. Once your relationship was built with Store Managers you didn’t have to sign in anymore.

Green sales reps like me in 1982 had to create a consistent rhythm. I always signed in. It seemed courteous and easy. One of my favorite managers, after about a year, said, “Martin you don’t have to sign in anymore.” By then signing in was part of the ballet, part of my process. I heard something else in his statement. I heard how pleased he was that I was following procedure despite our friendship. I continued to sign his and every store’s “call sheet”.

Leaving P&G for M&M/Mars I discovered the value of rhythm, routine, coaching and mentoring. M&M/Mars, like many consumer products companies, hired P&G sales people because they didn’t have to train as much. P&Gers had a consider investment, an investment in process and rhythm that included a week of video taping sales presentations and peer feedback (make a fake presentation, get feedback, make another get more and on like that for a week – see amazing 80′s picture below). I couldn’t wait to attend my first Friday trading. What would damaged M&M’s be worth? If I could barter Coast for enough detergent to not have to buy Tide for a year what could M&M’s get me?

There was a problem. M&M’s was less organized, less regimented. Paperwork at M&M’s took Friday, some of Saturday and Sunday (on many weeks). P&G’s systems were constraining, you had to do it THEIR way. M&M’s lack of systems turned out to be more constraining. How, I wondered, could I free up my Fridays so I could attend barter town again?

Reading something or hearing something about “personal computers” I bought an Apple II. It whirled, beeped and was fun to pick through. Learning how computers worked became my second job. From 8 to about 11 almost every night after wrapping my M&M work I picked my way through Lotus, early word processing and databases.

It was fun and differentiating. I became the “computer guy” who was always “playing” with his computer. Attending training at M&M’s national office in Hackettstown, New Jersey I brought my Apple along. During a lunch break I shared what I was doing. I was smart enough to bring the computer, but doubt I planned positioning myself as “the computer guy”. Fire was the result. Once my story was out a group form up after training to see “the computer”.

I remember several, “WOWs” as people gathered close in an attempt to get close to something heard about more than seen (remember this is now 1984 the year of the famous Apple Big Brother commercial). Word of what I was doing, unbeknownst to me, traveled across the street to the “national office”. At that time an M&M’s plant and a boiler room of desks arranged begrudgingly for sales and marketing all with phones with the loudest ring tones you’ve ever heard and this is WAY before iPods).

I’d created my first meme. A meme is a sticky cultural idea that is easily passed around, easily buzzed via word-of-mouth. The personal computer meme and I fused at M&M’s national office. A very special man named Wolfgang Pfiefer called me two days later. “Martin,” Wolfgang said with the most amazing German accent, “My name is Wolfgang Pfiefer, I work in the Sales Information Group in Hackettstown and I hear you are using a computer. How are you using it?”

After a long pause I remember sharing my love for long nights huddled over spreadsheets, seeing my first graph on a monochrome dull grey monitor and how my buyer’s bought more from print outs on dot matrix printers than anything created by hand. “It is like they think my pitch is more legitimate because it is from a computer,” I explained to Wolfgang (those were the days).

“Wait there,” is what I thought Wolfgang said over the phone. “What,” I remember saying into the line. I was about to hang up and then I heard Wolfgang talking to Debbie Putz asking for a morning flight to Buffalo. “Martin,” I will be in Buffalo around 4:00 tomorrow,” Wolfgang said as I could hear Debbie speaking in the background,” can you pick me up? “Sure,” I’d said into the phone confused and unsure. “Tomorrow” was Saturday and Wolfgang didn’t say anything about my boss or his boss. “Do I need to tell Stuart,” I asked after Stuart Brownstein (my boss). “Oh….yeah and I will give him a call too,” Wolfgang said before asking me to write his flight information down.

It is rare you know when your life is about to change. This was one of those moments. I sensed momentous change within seconds of its happening. Stuart and his boss Region Director Bernie Lee were curious about my “playing” with computers and supportive as long as it didn’t interfere with my sales goals. Bernie became President of Ethel M, possibly the best chocolate made in America, a Mars subsidiary.

Within weeks of Wolfgang’s visit I was offered a job as a “Project Manager” in the Sales Information department at M&M/Mars in Hackettstown. After a year of using a primitive SQL query language called Ramis creating ad hoc information to the sales and marketing team I was working on the Sales, Management, Analysis and Tracking (SMART) system – the first laptop based sales information system communicating call sheets across dial up lines using a Toshiba T1100+. Change sense became change realized. I learned my first lesson in Internet marketing (long before there was much of an Internet). My first lesson continues to be instructive:

• Going Early and Ugly Beats Later and Perfect
• Being First Beats Being Second
• Create Sticky, Well Timed Memes
• Web Sites Are Equal To My Old trusted Apple II (necessary and capable but out gunned now see Platforms Beat Websites)
• Blue Oceans, unique ideas, are out there and even more valuable now than then (because harder to find)
• If A Guy Named Wolfgang Wants To Meet On Saturday, Always Take The Meeting

Have a great weekend.

Martin

—
Director Marketing
Martin(dot)Smith(at)AtlanticBT(dot)com

If you attended P&G training in Cincinnati 1981 / 1982 and are in this picture, please claim your spot (if not too embarrassing).