AP File Photo

Last year as the recession took hold my employer took drastic action cutting back the marketing team.  I was out of a job. In 25 years of working, it was the first time in my life that I needed unemployment benefits. While I didn’t keep an exact count, I suspect that I applied for over 300 jobs in the past 11 months. I’ve worked with at least 20 recruiters; done 150 phone screens and probably 100 face-to-face interviews. Today, 347 days after my search began, I start a new job with a great company that I’m very excited about!

Understanding how difficult the job hunting environment is now I would like to extend a hand to those who are currently looking for a job with 5 recommendations that I hope will help.

1).  Make Every Moment a Learning Opportunity
While I’m writing with a focus on the online marketing world, I think this applies more broadly as well.  Every conversation, all the research you do on a prospective employer, all the vendors they use, and every strategy they employ is an opportunity to add to your toolkit once you’re employed.  However you don’t unearth any treasure without digging.  All of the prospective employers I spoke with ask for feedback on their site and some required a formal presentation. Peel back their source code and look for analytics packages, advertising partner tracking codes and vendor partners; evaluate their PPC programs, Affiliates, CSE partners; evaluate their user experience, key site features, third-party tools used, taxonomy, key products, pricing, value proposition, branding; use tools like Compete.com to get a sense of their traffic and evaluate the best of their competition with the same rigger.

Undoubtedly in your interview you’ll share what you’ve learned with a viewpoint on the pros & cons of what you’ve found.  But equally as important, ask questions that probe more deeply and give you further insight into the business strategy and tactics.  If their doing something innovative that’s working, take note.

Digging into the details of a company’s online marketing strategy takes some time but is really worth the effort as much for your own edification as for the insights you can bring to an employment discussion. What’s more it will lead you down paths of further research that will strengthen the breadth and depth of industry knowledge and further challenge your own strategic thinking.

Beyond the effort I put into my job search I spent my days as though I was in a boot-camp specifically designed to maintain and improve my knowledge base. Not only did I seek out consulting opportunities and work on some very interesting short-term projects, I also spent a tremendous amount of time reading blogs, listening to podcasts and keep abreast of industry trends, tools and strategies. I attended more then 30 webinars that help me expand my knowledge base in areas that are important to my career. Below are a few of those resources.

2).  Get Mad and then Get Over It
During my search I went through the full range of emotions, 11 months of job searching gets old.  When I had a setback, most of the time I got mad and then got over it and pressed on.  When it comes to the job search and the people your working with I urge you to keep any negative emotions in check, no one can afford to burn a bridge regardless of the circumstances.   My best advice is to vent your frustration by taking a day off and do something fun.  Ultimately professionalism and persistent pays off, perhaps not always in the ways you expect but it does eventually.   I do have to admit that there were times when my friends had to dope-slap me when I was feeling sorry for myself.   So get over it and use that emotion to redouble your efforts, and if you need a dope-slap send me a note…

3).  Leverage Every Resource You have and then Add Some More
If your looking for a job right now, whether you’re an online marketing professional or not, here’s a list of resources I used that might also be useful to you.  Candidly, as resources go, Indeed.com was THE OUTSTANDING performer!  They aggregate all the leading resources as well as less common resources.  While I still maintained profiles on Monster and Careebuilder, Indeed.com delivered the most leads for me, by far!

4).  Expand your Network in Non-Traditional Ways
Many of you may know about LinkedIn.com and it’s benefits as a networking resources. If you’re not on LinkedIn.com I suggest you get a profile up there immediately and get busy building your network and leveraging those relationships. Nevertheless I want to encourage you to look beyond your immediate job needs to the future relationships you want to build. In my job search I’ve met some really great people, including amazing recruiters and hiring managers & executives alike with very interesting companies. While the job opportunity wasn’t necessarily the right fit, the professional connection could prove to be invaluable in the future.

If you meet someone your admire, respect or is just connection well with, then be sure to get networked with them using one or more of your favorite networking tools: LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook MySpace, whatever. Maintain a constructive dialogue with them. Be more valuable to them then they are to you! You never know how that relationship might be mutually beneficial.

5).  Seek Out & Use all the Help & Advice you can Get
I can’t tell you how many leads have come from family, friends and former co-workers. I followed each of them to the end of the trail. I also solicited resumes from the most successful people I know and have incorporated presentation ideas from many of those sources. After interviews I frequently recapped the discussions and negotiations with peers and got their feedback on how to handle difficult questions and situations.

One piece of advice I found valuable early-on, “don’t turn down interviews just because the company doesn’t immediately look like a good fit”.  You might never actually work for them, but you may connect in ways you never anticipated and you will definitely sharpen your interviewing skills.  I also received very valuable advice from Recruiters.  Recruiter’s significantly influenced how I prepare and present myself. One recruiter resource that I highly recommend is Harry Joiner’s 97 Job Search Tips.

In the midst of this recession, many community colleges have introduced programs offering free tuition to those who are unemployed. Our local community college, Bucks Community College offers one such program for area residents. You may have specific skills development needs and this type of program might be perfect for you.  Back in January I seriously considered this and judging by the packed orientation meetings and registration lines many others did as well.

Thanks to all those who helped me, and Good Luck on your job search. If I can be of any further help please feel free to contact me!

The Top 10 Reasons Why YOU should use Delicious.com?

Because it’s Owned by Yahoo!  “That’s not a good reason Tom!  What the #@!* are you thinking.”  It’s a simple fact that if you don’t support the competition you’re going to slip into a dictatorship where Google-bots rule the world.  Do you really want that? Your probably one of those guys how goes on Yahoo Answers and replies with a link to Let me Google that for you!  Don’t let the bad man bother you Mr. Yahoo, I still love you and am eternally devoted to Delicious!

Delicious gives you universal access to your bookmarks from any computer so you can remember all the stuff you can’t remember without wasting your own memory.  No it won’t help you to remember to take out the garbage, but it will lead you to the most interesting content on the Internet on the topic of taking out the garbage!

The non-hierarchical classification system allows you to use as many reminders as it takes to help you remember how you classified your precious link in the first place.  Now I just hope I can remember the tag I used, no worries, I’m bound to remember one of the 20 tags I used… see you really can use 20.

If you don’t trust your own judgment about what’s worth bookmarking you can use Delicious.com to research what others are bookmarking so you can follow the crowd.  Hmmm, “follow the crowd”, “take a note, Tom”, he said rhetorically to himself, “this could be a terrific aggregator of popular opinion, wow and imagine the SEO benefits – This is a really great tool isn’t it”?

With over 5 million users and 150 million bookmarks you aren’t alone in your inability to remember everything that’s available on the Internet off the top of your head.  So you should feel as I do, completely normal in your senility!

“You get what you pay for?”  Well, in this case you get way-more because it’s totally FREE to use.  But that doesn’t mean it didn’t come at a price.  Let’s assume that you invested 10 minutes of your time to qualify something as a worthwhile bookmark to save and share.  Let’s assume your time is worth an average of $25/hr.  That means that I’ve personally invested approximately $2000 in Delicious, for ME and YOU!  With over 150 million bookmarks, people have created a focused Internet resource worth more then $600 million.  When was the last time someone invested that kind of cash for your benefit?

All the links are publicly viewable but you can make links private if you want to!  Ok, ok, I know where your mind is drifting, don’t go there!  Honestly some things are best left private – Do you really want to see my Gastroenterologists’ web site?

Regardless of whether you use Firefox, IE or any other browser for that matter, you can have your bookmark resources at your fingertip with Delicious browser toolbar applications.  NO! This doesn’t cost anything either, but thanks for reminding us all about how cheap you are!

I use to travel a lot on business and you know how it seems that virtually every flight you take these days is delayed, so while I may only fly now a few times a year, I’ll be damned if I’m ever going to sit one second longer in an airport then I have to.  Delicious is just the ticket to quick reference on those obscure but useful resources in situations like that!  Now what was that tag I used for the Flight Tracker site, oh yah, flight_tracker…   What’s more you can access their beta Mobile site from your phone or PDA.

And the #1 reason why you should use Delicious.com is to clear your head of all the minutia filling it so that you can relax, enjoy life and perhaps use all those extra brain cells to be more creative and innovative in your life.  You can rest assured that your treasure of great links is safely ensconced at Delicious.com.

It’s clear from the blog post that the web site where his original article was first posted experienced an increase in traffic specifically from Twitter.  Any analytics package will capture general source stats.  Nevertheless, as a marketing guy I can’t help wanting to measure a little more precisely.  People use TinyURL.com all the time to embed a brief URL into twitter posts.  What’s really cool about TinyURL.com is that since you’re abbreviating the URL it doesn’t matter how long the original URL is, so adding tracking codes to the URL is a simple and powerful way of getting precise information on the impact of a Twitter post.

Regardless of the analytics package you use on your blog or web site you can tag a URL with tracking codes that will allow you to see exactly the traction your getting on that specific post.  Suppose for instance that @UtahNewsGuy’s publisher was using Google Analytics to measure results.  He could take the existing URL and add the following string: “?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=online&utm_campaign=newspaper_survival”.  This is captured in Google Analytics identify the Source, Medium and Campaign Name with accurate stats on the user sessions generated by that URL.  By take the combined string of the original URL and the tracking component and it would look like this:

http://www.utahstories.com/utah_newspapers_decline.htm?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=online&utm_campaign=newspaper_survival

By plugging this string into TinyURL.com I get:

http://tinyurl.com/cs53oh

As long as UtahStories.com is using Google Analytics (which they are) @UtahNewsGuy doesn’t need any technical assistance to add this string when he does his Twitter post.  All he needs to do is ask the analyst at his publisher to update him on the results captured in Google Analytics.  In fact by my creating this Tiny URL and you clicking on it, you’ll be automatically compiling UtahStories.com traffic data in their Google Analytics Reporting Suite.  Just remember that each analytics suite is a little different in convention but the principles remain the same.

I’ll post a tweet about this using @UtahNewsGuy’s technique with Google Analytics Tags myself and let you know what happens!  Visit me at @TomStockwell.

GoDaddy.com Invoice

Recently I received the e-mail seen on the right from GoDaddy.com announcing that they had automatically renewed the “Business Registration” for several URL’s that I own.  At first I was thinking that this was an automatic renewal for my domain names but this was not the case.  In fact GoDaddy.com had bill me for a service I had never requested.

I immediately called GoDaddy customer service and asked for an explanation!  The customer service agent told me that I had “chosen” to receive this renewal.  At which point I about blew a gasket!  B#&%$HIT! I never proactively requested any such service!  It may have been that I missed unchecking a prechecked box but that’s totally diffierent then me making a choice.  It’s possible that GoDaddy slipped this by me when I originally purchased the URL’s, as was the case with this guy.  Nevertheless, I never would have actively chosen to participate.

So I continued with the customer service agent asking, “What exactly is Business Registration anyway?”  It turns out that GoDaddy.com Business Registration is nothing more then a business listing service.  By Compete.com’s accounting the GoDaddy service halls in a paltry average of 23K+ visitor a month.  Perhaps that might seem like a lot to some but when you compare this to Yahoo’s Directory average of 50K or Google’s directory with 160K, or The Open Directory Projects 1.2 million or Business.com with 5.4 million visitors you begin to realize that even a $5 fee is a complete rip-off! Not to mention the unscrupulous practice of billing me first and begging forgiveness afterwords.

I guess that’s what pisses me off the most!  They reached into my wallet and took the money and then told me about it, almost as an afterthought.  GoDaddy’s customer service kept telling me this was “my” decision, my choice, not theirs.  Funny thing is that they didn’t automatically renew my domains, so why automatically charge me for this service?  Their customer service agent wasn’t the least bit apologetic.  How many folks do you suppose receive this e-mail and just accept it or confuse it for the domain renewal?  Far too many I’m afraid.   If you want to be a part of a real directory at no cost then get listed in The Open Source Directory for FREE!

In the end I got my refund, but I can’t help but wonder Dale Earnhardt, Jr, Danica Patrick or Canice Michelle endorse these types of business practices.  It’s all a little bit sleezy to me, but I guess that’s all a part of their brand strategy and they are remaining true to their core values.

Lisa mentioned that one of her competitors launched a “community” but she wasn’t terribly impressed.  In her view the community lacked innovation and leadership and failed to drive concrete business objectives.  Having a look at the competitor I found that while there were a lot of features, an active community with interesting content it seemed disjointed with more monologues then dialogue.  There didn’t seem to be that much direct interaction between the host and it’s visitors and while there were plenty of text links and banners leading to the corresponding e-commerce site none of the links were tagged for analytics reporting.  It’s little wonder Lisa was not impressed.

Lisa was also anonymously participating in industry related blogs and engaging in some other Twitter activities with industry leaders.  In spite of the unofficial nature of Lisa’s strategy, her organization seems to be benefiting, if only modestly from her social media activities.  What’s more Lisa doesn’t have to jump into the responsibility of managing a community or hire more staff to continue to make important and beneficial strides in her social media activity.  As Lisa  engages cautiously she just needs to continue to avoid three common mistakes…

1. Narrowly Defining Social Media. Don’t imagine for a second that the only way to leverage social networking is to put up a community.  Intuitively Lisa realizes this or she wouldn’t have come as far as she has, but she needs to identify those gateway opportunities that will strengthen her confidence to expand her social media activity!
2. Ignoring Social Media Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Some seem to think SEO and Social Media are UNRELATED!  There are two key sources of SEO benefit, you can build a community and grow content that generates traffic, get’s crawled and ranked, spawning more traffic; or encourage your fans to make their voices know in other social media communities kicking off the same virtuous-cycle via inbound links.  Of course doing both will ultimately maximize your benefit but motivating your current fan base is a fine place to start.  When consumers use social media sites to identify their interests, affiliation or appreciation for your web site, your credibility grows, increasing the likelihood that your natural search rank will improve and you will attract new prospects.
3. Without Measurement Your Driving Blindfolded. A failure to create strong measurable and contextually relevant connection between all social media content and commerce is like driving blindfolded.  Having text links and banner ads is great but if you don’t measure it you’re blind or worse yet you’re probably attributing sales to the wrong event or content and skewing ALL your reported results and their interpretation.  Measure accurately or perish!

I strongly believe that organizations should have a comprehensive social media strategy with clear measurable goals engaging the full spectrum of social media tactics.  But use the same approach you’d use grasping a rose, proceed with caution.  You can outline a long term strategy that looking forward a couple of years and flesh out the first year with goals and measurable objectives.  Be flexibility enough to benefit from the learning of a phased deployment and deepening customer insight.  Doing so, organizations can be action oriented while using key learning to refine and optimize strategy.  Ultimately the phased deployment of campaign and tactical layers fill out the full blown strategy.

As a part of that strategy it’s important to establishing some fundamental business rules and training to guide employees in their strategic participation in social media.  This will insure that everyone is in sync as they represent the organization. These rules don’t have to be complex day-one nor does the training need to be a week-long seminar.  The effort should set clear standards of conduct and unify the participants around the strategic thinking behind the planned social media tactics.

Six Shoestring Social Media Salvos

1. Invite or use incentives to get your fellow employees to setup a Linkedin account and link back to your e-commerce site (Benefit: improved natural search ranking)
2. Invite your customer and employees to setup a Delicious account and bookmark several of their favorite pages or products (Benefit: improved natural search ranking), do it in conjunction with a sweepstakes drawing to get people engaged.
3. Launch a single blog that provides your customer base with further insight into your business and provides thought-leadership among your customers (Benefit: improved natural search ranking, contextual advertising via text or banner; foundation for relationship and customer engagement)
4. Identify 5 employees to actively participate in external industry related blogs offering comment and gathering insights on topics and trends that might be relevant to your business.  Include folks from senior management, marketing and customer service. (Benefit: Increased visibility in the community and intelligence gathering)
5. Launch a Social Media Newsroom or convert your existing PR into Social Media PR with the addition of relevant media assets (Benefit: expanded visibility of new product or service offerings, to a wider media audience generating link benefits and ultimately strengthened SEO).
6. Identify employees who are currently maintaining a blog or active on Twitter provide them incentives to do posts with links back to your site about current promotions, new products or services(Benefit: the exponential exposure of existing social networks to your products and services).

Small steps, YES, but remember this is just phase one.  These social tactics will aid core SEO strategies and ultimately create more exposure including consumer feedback and criticism.  Nevertheless by creating a blog you can openly acknowledge your organizational weaknesses and keep your customer base updated on the actions you’re taking to improve their customer experience.  Leading marketing experts argue that consumers actually embrace those who acknowledge their shortcomings, attributing greater overall credibility to the merchant as well as exhibiting greater customer loyalty.

Professional Continuous Improvement Cycle

Today it’s imperative that you are continuously learning.  In rapidly evolving industries like internet marketing it’s critical that you not only stay abreast of strategic and tactical developments in the industry, you also need to address your own professional developmental needs to insure that you not only maintain but increase your value to your employer, remaining sharp and marketable.  But how do you prioritize and focus your efforts?
There are 3 priorities for your professional development that I would recommend regardless of your career path.

1. Identifying current professional development needs
   • For the role you hold today
2. Identifying future professional development needs
   • For your next career move
3. Keeping current
   • Industry trends, tactics and best practices
   • Business and competitive philosophy and strategy
   • Industry relevant economic research and trends
   • Industry relevant consumer research and behavioral trends

It is very common for people to move into different functional areas as their careers develop.  Even if you remain in the same department for your entire career there is nothing more valuable then someone who knows their job, can demonstrate transferable skills, offer cross-functional insight and is knowledgeable about topics that have direct impact on the broader business.  That’s a person I want to promote.

Current Developmental Needs

I would begin with your most recent employee review and work with your line-manager to identify three developmental areas that you can focus on to improve in the coming year.  I would formalize objectives and deliverables that both tie into the organizational objectives but also stretch your skill in the developmental areas you’ve identified.

If your organization doesn’t include professional development in your review process then engage your manager in the dialogue anyway and take it upon yourself to close the developmental gaps.  One tool that I would strongly recommend is the Lominger, For Your Improvement (FYI) book and their Leadership Architect Sort Cards.    The card set is an invaluable aid in gap analysis.  I’ve learned a great deal from these materials.  Lominger also offers an excellent Architect Suite of professional development tools that I would highly recommend for any HR organization.

Future Developmental Needs
As you contemplate your career advancement, begin to identify the skills you will need to be successful in that future role.   One way to do this is to talk to people who hold the role you aspire to and ask them what competencies have made them successful in that role.  Then use Lominger’s FYI to understand the skilled use of those competencies, how to remedy common problems and identify additional resources.

You can also ask a senior manager to be a coach or mentor and help you develop your career.  If a mentoring relationship isn’t possible simple observation can also help identifying traits that distinguish successful people.  Nevertheless dialogue and observation will help you identify competencies and define gaps.

Keeping Current
Because there are so many resources available to keep current I think it’s more important to be very selective about the quality and relevance of the content you consume.  You could read dozens of books a year; thousands of blog posts; hundreds of research documents; read the NY Times cover to cover every day and not take one step to embrace or apply what you’ve learned.  It’s like eating and never leaving the dinner table.  It’s your choice, fat, lethargic and irrelevant or healthy, alert and insightful!  Who do you want as your coworker?

Application
So you’ve identified some gaps, how are you going to fill them?  While many employers will pay for a certain amount of training annually, unless your on a fast-track, it is not likely that they will pay for future skill development.  So focus on immediate skill needs with your current employer.  Outside of your current job you need to make a commitment to a professional continuous improvement cycle.  Small steps will lead to big steps.    Resources abound for investing in your continuous improvement from reading professional journals, going to conferences, even going back to college.  I’d like to remind you of some of the non-traditional online resources available.  Here’s my short list:

1. Online Universities
2. Podcasts & your iPod
3. Audio Books – ITunes,  Audible.com, Amazon’s Kindle
4. Professional Webinars
5. Industry Blogs using an aggregator like Google Reader

It may seem difficult to add professional development to the existing demands on your time.  Yet, online universities can provide you with an outstanding education that’s flexible to your schedule. Many of us are reclaiming time wasted commuting, sitting in airports, overnights in a hotel, workouts at the club, or simply doing chores by using our iPods.  Yes it may mean sacrificing some of the music on your Nano for an audio book or podcast but it’s worth it.  For webinars I frequently wait for the recorded version of a live daytime event to get posted so it doesn’t conflict with my regular workday.

As you begin this new learning discipline you’ll want to think in terms of synthesis.  How can I apply this to optimize my current skills or role?  How can these ideas be rearranged and combined into solutions that will contribute to the success for my current business situation?  Let those thoughts simmer a little and if your new insight is as profound as you think, it will be just as profound weeks if not months later.  And probably much better thought-out by then!

I’ll be adding a list of the most influential resources I’ve experienced for your reference to my Blogroll and a Recommended Reading tab.  I’d love to hear about other resources you’ve found valuable.

Posthumous portrait of Christopher Columbus by Ridolfo Ghirlandaio.

When Christopher Columbus made his maiden voyage in search of a western route to the East Indies there were many similarities between that venture and the pioneers of social media in organizations today.  It’s an unprecedented request; potentially requiring significant funding & resources; a business case with research and data must be developed; and the project must deliver an attractive and measurable ROI!

It took Columbus more then two years to persuade Queen Isabella’s committee.  Central to his case was his estimation of the circumference of the earth and the argument that he could get to the east faster by going west.  There was also the promise of a huge ROI making Spain competitive in the Indies spice trade.

Once approved, Columbus set sail with the blessings of senior management.  Unfortunately Columbus drastically underestimated the earth’s circumference and assumed there was only ocean between Spain and the Indies.  He landed in the Bahamas. He also misinterpreted this data believing he had landed on the East Asian Mainland.  Nevertheless this voyage is remembered for many crucial discoveries and his subsequent travels benefited from improved metrics.

In the world of Web 2.0 the evolution of social media is well beyond any “Pre-Columbian Era”.  We stand on the shoulders of explorers that have gone ahead of us paving the way with ever more user-friendly and commercialized solutions.  The state of social media simply awaits inspired ideas, informed intuition, and strategic vision applied to unique industry needs to be the catalyst for further exploration and innovation.  In the future, today’s tools may seem as antiquated as a Model-T but unlike the advent of commercial auto industry, the roads are already paved for social media.

Yet senior managers I’ve spoken to still seem hesitant.  The economic conditions we currently face are a factor, yet in these economically challenging times the cost effective nature of social media makes more sense than ever!

• There are FREE open source community applications like Vanilla or blogging applications like WordPress.  Even WordPress has widgets that allow you to build a very serviceable community forum at little or no cost.  Applications like Joomla and Durpal offer FREE open source e-commerce with integrated social media components delivering the holy grail of community, content and commerce.

• Leaders like Pluck, Awareness Network offer highly refined solutions that include blogging, wikis, forums, widgets.  Solutions include media integrations such as video, photos, podcasts as well as API’s that allow integration with Twitter, Facebook, SharePoint and more.

• Industry giants like Google are working on the development and adoption of industry standards like Open Social that should increase networking across the social media landscape.

For some companies delivering content and a community seem very natural but when Fiskar launched their Fiskateers site a few years ago the social media connection wasn’t so obvious, who would want to write or read about scissors?  Nevertheless they found a hook in Scrapbooking and a mission in driving the growth of their specialty retail sales and delivered 3X sales growth.

Social networking and forums create a tremendous opportunities for raising corporate visibility and consumer engagement. Leveraging the full power of the Internet will cost effectively expose your organization to a dramatically larger audience.  By taking a holistic approach that engages your customer where they’re active online and facilitating networking, content and community, you open a dialogue that will fundamentally change your business.

Ultimately senior management want a clear ROI.  “We’ve got limited resources, will social media deliver?  Can you prove it?”  Don’t throw all your eggs in one basket but there are too many examples of success and measurable ROI to ignore the opportunity.

KraftFirstTaste.com Unique Visitors courtesy Compete.com

Kraft’s new KraftFirstTaste.com community has already attracted 1.2 million visitors in Q4 of ‘08

Scotts Miracle Grow experienced an 18% YOY growth in traffic from their February ’08 relaunch converting their forums to a community.

Doing the math, Scotts added 450,000 new visits to the site. (Calculation: 450K / 5 visits per visitor x 3% conversion rate x $50 average order = $135K in incremental retail sales – implementation costs = ROI).  A multivariate linear regression model can show the connection between key variables like visitors and sales.  It’s a safe bet that Scotts will break even in less then a year!

These CPG companies face the most difficult measurement challenges because they aren’t selling anything on their sites.  However they are effectively positioning their products contextually within the community dialogue and offering links within their own site to product info to move the customer down the sales funnel.  Nevertheless the most compelling ROI models will close the loop between investment and real sales.

KraftFirstTaste.com has closed that loop.  Not only do they gather valuable attitudinal and Net Promoter type data (a prize in itself) at sign up, the community seamlessly integrates custom coupons for in store redemption.  Coupon redemption is the tie back to a indisputable ROI.

When an e-commerce site adds content and community it is critical to build a contextual advertising strategy and measure clicks and conversion.  By using contextual text and/or banner advertising in community content and sidebars (properly tagging the links), you’ll be able to use your analytics package to track what percentage of community visitors have moved down your sales funnel to became customers.  Transactions close the loop between the community traffic and sales, yielding a measurable ROI.

It’s a good practice to compare the ROI of media channels to understand their relative performance. But a recent Webinar by Hubspot, Mike Volpe shared a spreadsheet modeling a dramatic contrast between investments in PPC vs. SEO optimized Social Media.   To satisfy my own curiosity I creating a variation to see if diminishing returns or conversion rates changed his results.  Consistent with the Hubspot model, long-term investment in content is clearly more cost effective.  PPC investments only provides a one-time benefit but the shelf life of content can easily be a year or more.  (Beware – Plan to optimize your social media content for SEO.  Without SEO optimized you will easily lose 50% of the traffic you could be generating.)

One final thought, there is one lesson from Columbus that is lost on those who are risk averse.  Regardless of how “buttoned-up” your execution is, you WILL undoubtedly have extremely valuable and unanticipated discoveries that will profoundly enhance your customer relationships, create competitive advantages, and change your world.  Deliver the ROI, but keep your eyes open for the game-changers.  Columbus did!

Generic Cola Can - Jewel Supermarket

I read a very interesting post on the Branding Strategy Insider Blog that got me thinking about house brands and how beneficial they are to driving product innovation and in particular a product’s value proposition.  Granted house brands are often a lower cost version of a brand name but there is genuine innovation going on here.  There is no doubt that the manufacturing processes are being optimized, there are lower R&D costs, product components or ingredients are being changed to add to that cost optimization and of course they are being placed in head to head competition on retail shelves.  Nevertheless if the consumer chooses the house brand over the name brand, the price is only one component of that decision.

Twenty five years ago when “generic” brands first hit the marketplace, the “branding” was designed to tell the story that they were a cheap but serviceable alternative to the real “brand name” products.  The stenciled font used clearly identified them as taking very little effort in packaging cost and offered a tremendous value and price savings.  As a young couple my wife and I made ends meet with these un-branded brands.

Today even though our household income is substantially greater, house brands STILL fill our pantry.  Whenever we feel that a house brand is about equivalent to the leading brand we will invariable pick the house brand and typically save a bundle.

I get the fact that a leading brand might deliver some level of comfort and satisfaction to a consumer simply by having the most recognizable name.  However the advance of house brands points to a shift in consumer behavior, expecting a greater tangible value for their loyalty. The closer a brand can effectively target products to the increasingly unique demands of the individual consumer, the more likely they will build a loyal following including garnering a premium price.  Name brands may get the product right but house brands are creating more value for the consumer.

It’s not easy getting it right and so name brands will always lead the way.  An Example.  I wear Adidas ClimaCool running shoes.  In my mind there isn’t a pair of shoes that compares to these on the marketplace.  When I run my feet tend to overheat and that increases the stress of running.  These shoes are super ventilated and breathe like no other and they fit my feet perfectly.  As a result I’ve fallen in love with them and wouldn’t run in anything else.  When a brand can target a product effectively, at a specific need, to a specific market segment, they will hit a home run nearly every time. And if that same targeting spills over to their other products that loyalty will extends to other products they offer as well.  Years and years have passed without a credible alternative to the ClimaCool offering.

It’s no surprise then that house brands are making their stand with product categories like facial tissue, mouthwash, OTC medications, laundry detergents, cereals and many other commodities.  You’ll find all these and many more house brands in my house.  In this world of knock-offs the house brands are swinging for the fences but just as frequently striking out.  I love Kellogg’s Special K with Red Berries.  I’ve tried several house brand alternatives and have failed to find anything that tastes as good.  I will remain loyal to Special K until someone offers me something that clearly beats it.

Inevitably competition will drive the innovation of the value proposition and consumers will reward house brands that raise the bar.  Unfortunately in some cases that often puts the major brands in competition with themselves and undermines their ongoing profitability.  An example of this is found in  Wal-Mart’s Ol’ Roy dog food.  An extremely successful house brand in it’s own right being manufactured by Mars Petcare. You may be aware that Mars is one of the world’s largest manufacturers of pet foods including brands such as Pedigree.  I’m sure Ol’ Roy and Pedigree sit side by side on Wal-Mart shelves.  I wonder if the erosion of profits that occurs when consumers switch from Pedigree to Ol’ Roy worries Mars.

The consumer wins every time someone innovates the overall value proposition so let’s all cheer on the innovators whom ever they may be!