Know your RSS from your elbow

I’ve been re-reading David Ogilvy’s “Confessions of an Advertising Man”. This passage stood out for me:

Competition for the consumer’s attention is becoming more ferocious every year. She is being bombarded by a billion dollars’ worth of advertising every month. Thirty thousand brand names are competing for a place in her memory. If you want your voice to be heard above this ear-splitting barrage, your voice must be unique. It is our business to make our clients’ voices heard above the crowd.

Guess when that was written. It’s an accurate description, after all, of the current problems of interruption marketing. When Ogilvy wrote that, however, there were few alternatives available. Interruption was really all there was. Ogilvy wrote that in 1963.

Of course, things have become worse for advertisers, not only because of an increase in the number of competing brands visible through advertising, but also because advertisers are competing against the inherent scepticism and associated ad-blindness of its target audience. People do all they can now to avoid watching, reading, or hearing advertising. For many, it’s got to the point that an advertisement is a sign of a product’s failure. It’s certainly a sign of the product’s manufacturer failure to engage with its core market.

If the product is seriously worthy of spending millions to promote through a methodology that everyone by now surely knows is generating diminishing returns - to say the least - surely it’s worthy of spending a fraction of that amount engaging directly with the very consumers you hope will buy.

Don’t ask your agency to show you their ideas for your next TV campaign. Ask it how it intends to find the consumers that matter and discuss with them how to make your product better, get those consumers to tell other consumers, and how it intends to measure the success of the campaign.

Here’s the choice. Do you want your ad agency winning creative awards for stylish ads where nobody remembers what was being sold or do you want a campaign that delivers measurable results and is spread by consumer recommendation and conversation?

Adam and I have both had conversations in the last week with companies keen to talk about SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). Companies that still needed persuading a couple of years ago that the web would be a key part of the their business future now see SEO as a panacea for all their traffic ills. If only they could find the right level of SEO skills, the phone would ring off the wall, their turnover of widgets would explode, and the company directors could take early retirement. This belief is reinforced by digital marketing agencies hyping SEO: take a look at the ads at the back of a magazine like NMA and you’ll see pages of SEO services on offer. So it must work.

Well, not quite. Skilfully applied SEO ‘magic’ may increase your search engine rankings in the short term but it’s really a question of diminishing returns. Success will always be temporary because it is subject to the arcane algorithms applied by the ranking engine. SEO is really Search 1.0. Let’s face it, publishing a web site without at least some level of applied SEO nowadays is like publishing your company details in the Yellow Pages using yellow ink: you’re invisible. SEO, therefore, is something you build into your site at birth.

Relying solely on SEO, however, is like putting up a billboard and then expending huge amounts of time, effort, and cash to erect a traffic management system that directs all cars past your advertisement. Described like this, you can see immediately how SEO has its roots in the old rules of marketing: make them look at me! We’ve moved on. (And the traffic will soon find a better and quicker route home.) You may get to the top of the rankings but that’s not much use if all your traffic is clicking through from Poland and Lithuania and you only deliver in a twelve mile radius of Manchester.

It’s the SEO experts who benefit
There is an increasing war of attrition between SEO experts and more wonga is probably spent on fine-tuning what lies behind the site than on the content and usefulness of the site itself. We know: we’ve done SEO in the past. This state of affairs ignores the fundamental truth of a successful web site: the most valuable visitors arrive through recommendation and they return because your site is sticky.

Recommendation leads to valuable visitors because they have already taken some self-qualifying steps before they arrive. They know what your site is about and they are either interested in the subject or even ready to buy. It means, for a start, that your home page or landing page can get down to business quickly. Contrast that with a click through from Google based on a simple link.

Bad love
Talk of recommendations raises the question of back links and link love. Google loves links, of course, but it’s choosy in the same way you would be choosy about recommendations. If I’m looking for a restaurant in a new town, I might look for further confirmation if I discover that the first two people who raved about the food and service at “Hank’s Especially Greasy Spoon” were the manager’s son and Hank’s wife.

Staying with the restaurant theme; if the manager shouts loudly enough then people will come. But what if the food’s dreadful, the service appalling, and my partner’s a vegetarian and the chef only does meat? I won’t be making another booking as I leave and I’m not going to be telling friends, colleagues, and family to hurry on down for a meal.

Acquiring visitors through recommendations and positive conversations means there will be fewer disappointed customers. Save the money you may end up spending on SEO and hire a better chef - or at least some bigger wine glasses.

While writing this I received an email asking if I wanted my web site to be ‘top of the Google rankings’. This sort of SEO promise is becoming increasingly like the other spam I get offering to add inches to my manhood - and I guess they’re not talking about my height. To be fair, the SEO offer, however shady the methods applied, might have a better chance of success - but not for long. The problem with using underhand tactics to manipulate rankings is that sooner or later - and usually sooner - Google notices and your site will be penalised. That means it more or less disappears from view. Yellow ink applied by Google.

Find them before they find you
The answer is to engage with customers before they arrive at your site and then, once they have visited, make sure your product or content is vital enough that they keep returning. (Maintaining core content is a subject for another post altogether.) So, less SEO and more CIE - Customer Interaction Effort.

Mike Southon, co-author of “The Beermat Entrepreneur”, has a weekly column in the FT. It forms part of the ‘Entrepreneur’ section, which, in turn, sits at the the back of the Saturday ‘Your Money’ section. This obviously involves some newsprint origami before you reach it but it’s usually worth the effort.

I miss it occasionally and yesterday browsed the column titles on the FT web site to catch up with anything that appeared interesting. The title that immediately got my attention was ‘Reputations precede you‘. Southon rarely discusses the internet per se but here was a subject - the combination of entrepreneurs and reputation - that seemed a perfect fit for an examination of how on-line tools can enhance or damage a brand or its owners.

Here is what Southon said about reputation and the internet:

“Your reputation is defined by your case studies, which should be refreshed on your website and in your literature as often as possible.”

That’s it. Seriously. Over 700 words on reputation and entrepreneurs and not a single mention of a ‘blog’ or a ‘forum’ or a ‘podcast’. Not even a hint that a quick check of Google or Technorati (for instance) could show you what your global reputation might be.

Southon’s starting point for his column is a report issues by Coutts, bankers to the wealthy. It appears they have at least 18,000 entrepreneurs as their customers. It would also appear that those 18,000 care little for what an internet-based network of their partners, colleagues, and customers might be saying about them and their services or products. The thrust of the report is towards being in control of your PR by knowing everything about your company and then controlling the messages you deliver to ‘the media’. By ‘the media’, of course, is meant traditional press outlets. This is inevitable, since the report has been written by a PR professional at a top rank PR company with a web site that you can search for a long time without finding any evidence that the internet could form part of any integrated communications strategy.

But that’s by the way. Stuck like this in the world of reacting to the impact of traditional media means allowing your reputation management to turn like an oil tanker when what you need is the handling of a speed boat. The report’s author ends with a Japanese proverb:

“The reputation of a thousand years may be determined by the conduct of an hour”.

This was from a period before your company’s share price could be irrevocably damaged in the time it takes to watch the cherry blossom fall. The proverb needs updating:

“The reputation of your brand may be determined by the speed and manner of your reaction to a blog post read by a thousand customers.”

Things are bad in the world of marketing. In marketing departments and for marketing directors in particular, it’s hard to see how things could get much worse. Deloitte have released a report - Marketing in 3D - which, to put it bluntly, states that marketing is a dying profession. Nothing makes this clearer than the fact that a marketing director spends, on average, only 22 months in the job before being asked to move on to “better things”.

Anyone involved with new media or with companies who have already embraced the idea of the conversation will find this unsurprising. I was shocked, however, to find an article in this month’s Director magazine from the IOD that seemed to deduce all the wrong messages from Deloitte’s report.

Jane Simms is a former editor of “Marketing Business” and believes, with the understandable conviction of someone who has spent a career promoting marketing, that “Marketing should play a crucial role in identifying and satisfying customer demand.” Mmm. She does have a few harsh words to say about marketers whose sole interest is the size of their budgets but she refuses to face reality. It’s no longer about changing a few characteristics of marketing: the game has changed completely. New rules, new stadium. Even the ball has changed shape.

The sad truth for the ‘marketers drive the market’ brigade is that consumers are more sophisticated, have a wider range of communication tools at their disposal, and have grown mightily tired of being interrupted. If there is a role for marketing now, it is surely one that begins with the consumer rather than the company. A savvy marketer is one who relays the mood of the market and tries to effect change in his or her company rather than in the consumer. Customers know what they want, what works for them, and what is simply marketing hype and nonsense. It’s time to accept that it’s the consumer who does the marketing. The smart company listens.