December 31, 2005
Bob Dylan, Seth Godin, and Neil Young
As someone who never thought of marketing as a profession, or even an interest, one of the questions that I've thought about a lot over the past year is 'what is marketing?'. I even bought and read a few classic marketing books like 'Kotler on Marketing' to brush up on the four 'P's and such.
My primary observation has been that 'Marketing' is badly named, branded, and positioned. Hopefully that will be the subject of a future post or ten.
But today in the first of a series of brilliant posts even by his own high standards, Seth Godin summarizes part of the confusion I have about marketing with this question:
Is marketing the art of tricking people into buying stuff they don’t need? Or is it about spreading ideas that people fall in love with?
I think both are done under this banner, and that's a problem. Hopefully admitting you have a problem is the first step to a resolution.
So how do Bob Dylan and Neil Young come into this? At BobFest in 1992 Neil Young said that what was great about Dylan was how simple he could be. Anyone can be complex he said, but Bob can be simple. I think this is true of Seth too.
(I don't have the exact Neil Young quote, but have asked the experts and should be able to post it here soon.)
December 30, 2005
Search Optimization Eye Tracking Study Results
Anne Holland of MarketingSherpa summarizes several recent eye-tracking studies over at Chief Marketer, in terms of what they say about Search engine optimization. She draws a few conclusions which should come as no surprise: * Users have short attention spans. * The copy in your listings really matters. * Paid search isn't a replacement for good organic results. The last of course is where most people need to focus. Paid search is great, can produce good to great ROI, and generate a lot of business. Nothing wrong with that. But it's consistently reported that 8 of 10 clicks on search engines happen on the organic results side - yet budgets and focus generally isn't there. It's easy to see why. Paid search is relatively straightforward and produces near-instant results. Organic optimization is black magic at best, and takes months to even begin to produce results in many cases. But as these new research results demonstrate, if paid search is most or all of your search engine marketing program, you're effectively invisible to most searchers. (Marketing Sherpa also sells a report with more detailed results. We provide this link for your convenience, and don't get any compensation if you choose to buy it.)December 25, 2005
Links
* Om Malik ponders the question of whether or not tags (and the people who make them) can 'beat Google at the search game'. I don't think there's a simple answer to that one. In terms of results quality it's obvious Google can get beat, because they are often not that good and rarely are they 'the most relevant'. But I worry that tagging of any kind will succumb to spamming far quicker than algos did. Taggers need identities and reputations, and then I think it will start to work. The other problem is that people search on a lotta lotta subjects, and tags are (and will continue to be) far to narrow in their coverage. * What the heck is Web 2.0? This question keeps coming up. It's just interesting right now, but I have a feeling that pretty soon it's going to matter.Feed Icons
Subscribing to the RSS (or Atom) feed of a blog (or any content) has become a crazy game of 'find the icon' as the tiny orange little XML icon has mutated into a thousand variants. While standards rarely tend to get simpler again, it looks like we have a shot with this one, because someone created a nice little 'feed' icon that Firefox is using, and Microsoft of all people has adopted it and so a movement has been born.
We're all for it, and will be dumping our existing XML and other icons in favor of the new standard. Please consider doing the same.