The Honey Pot

by Dan Kurani
Copyright © 2009 by Dan Kurani. All rights reserved.
Published by Kurani Multimedia, Inc., Red Bank, New Jersey
Visit Dan online at http://www.kurani.com

No part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted, or

disseminated, in whole or in part, in any form or by any means,
electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any
information storage and retrieval system now known or hereafter
invented, without written permission from the author or publisher.
Requests for permission to excerpt or quote this work should be
made to the author directly via email (dkurani@kurani.com).

This work is based wholly upon the opinions of its author. Neither
the publisher nor the author make any representations or
warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of this
book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties. The
viewpoints expressed in this book may not be suitable for your
business and no part of this book should be viewed as specific
business advice or strategy recommendations. Neither the publisher
nor the author shall be liable for any loss of profit or other types of
damages. Readers must use their own judgment when evaluating or
executing any business or marketing strategy.

Although software, technology vendors and websites may

occasionally be mentioned, this book offers no explicit or exclusive
endorsements. Names and dates have been altered in some of the
anecdotal accounts contained within this work to protect the
privacy of those involved.

ISBN 978-0-9800051-1-0

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 Contents
Acknowledgements ....................................................... 6

Dedication ..................................................................... 8

Introduction .................................................................. 9

Like Bees to Honey.............................................................................9

Building Buzz ....................................................................................11

The Sweet Spot ................................................................................. 12

About This Book............................................................................... 14


Chapter 1 The Honey Pot Strategy ............................... 17


What’s in Your Ecosystem?.............................................................. 18


Chapter 2 The Media Landscape ................................ 20


Ubiquitous Infrastructure................................................................ 21

Connected Fragmentation ...............................................................23

Online Experience for Offline Media ...............................................32

Disintermediation and Democratization.........................................33

Semantic Tools ................................................................................. 35

A Shift Towards Creating Value.......................................................40

Accountable Relationships...............................................................42


Chapter 3 How a Honey Pot Works .............................47


First Things First.............................................................................. 47

Distilling the Value...........................................................................50

Living It ............................................................................................53

The Power of Core Value..................................................................54


Chapter 4 How to Sweeten the Pot ..............................56


Cultivating a Honey Pot ...................................................................58

Brand Promise and User Experience...............................................59

How to Grow an Ecosystem .............................................................64

Ecosystem Tactics and Synapses .....................................................64


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Communication Strategies...............................................................87

Content and Contact Strategies .......................................................92

Conversion Strategies ......................................................................96

Performance Tracking and Metrics ................................................. 97

Balancing the Budget .....................................................................100


Chapter 5 Where This May Lead................................102


Integrated Consumption................................................................ 103

Shifting Logistics............................................................................ 105

Renewed Focus on Intellectual Property....................................... 109


Glossary ...................................................................... 112


Index ........................................................................... 116


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5
 Acknowledgements

Colleagues and confidants: Hillary Bressler of .Com Marketing a

great friend and web original, Tom Sullivan of Princeton Partners,
Michael Parker of Gravitate Design, Stephanie Agresta, a social
guru, Walter “Chip” Craig, Josh Goldman, Sal Magnone, a true
futurist, the St. Jacques crew, Dave Einzig of Industry Connect, and
Valon Sopi of BoldUnderline.

People and firms bringing talent and a solid reputation to the Red
Bank, NJ area: Thomas McGee and Gregg O’Keefe strong UX
design from MediaHive, Bill Meyers and Alex Shanley of
DefinedLogic, an enterprise-level web development shop, and
Domenick Cilea of Springboard, a PR agency that gets the web.

Help with the book: Jeffrey Ginsberg for editing, Barbara Clement
for the Organization, Greg Marta for the sanity check.

Team members I’d like to thank: Matt Holloway for always hitting a
visual on the head, Joe Falcone for his unrelenting effort, Mike
Melli for smart solutions, and Alan Mazzan for his commitment to
excellence.

Out of a few hundred clients and over a thousand consulting

engagements a few standout as particularly influential: Ed
Grzeszczak of foryourgarage, David Edell of CCA, Amram Shapiro
and Louise Firth Campbell of Book of Odds, Patrick Seehafer of
Nike, Karen Verelley of DFA, Mike Boneillo and Scott Rasmussen of

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Rasmussen Reports , Cathy Peterson and Doug Weeks of Primus,
John Caplan of Ford Models, Jules Garner of PointRoll, Michael
Jager of JDK design, Brian Ribeiro, of mspire group, and Bob
Joudanin at RJ Consulting.

Author Influences: Seth Godin, Chris Anderson, Malcom Gladwell,

Guy Kawasaki, and Jeff Howe.

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 Dedication

To my wife, Danielle, and 3 children, Kai, Max, and Tate – thank

you in every way conceivable

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 Introduction
The Honey Pot is about a shift in marketing. It’s an approach
based on extending brand value to attract and retain customers
naturally, by giving them something they want instead of just
bombarding them with advertising.

This approach is rooted in the interactive, but Honey Pot thinking

could very well change the way you approach marketing in
general, because this strategy leverages changes that have been
taking place all across the media landscape.

Your brand lives in that landscape. A world of ubiquitous

infrastructure and multi-channel media convergence, where the
distinction between online and offline have blurred and the old
rules of advertising and marketing have morphed into something
new. The Honey Pot is a way to leverage that connected
landscape.

Like Bees to Honey

Since 2001, the number of “wired” Americans has risen sharply.
Three out of four have easy access to the Internet, two out of three
via high-speed connections. As cheaper smartphones and
netbooks proliferate, the community enjoying constant access
only grows.

Last year, a Harris Interactive poll found that 95% of the

American public characterized access to the web as “very

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important” or “important.” A number of those polled even said
they’d rather give up sex than lose their Internet access!

Whether the Internet is truly an acceptable substitute for sex is

questionable. But there’s no question the web’s a sociable place.

The number of Americans who maintain a profile on a social

networking site more than quadrupled in the past three years
according to Internet Retailer. Nielsen Online estimates the
amount of time users spend updating their status on social
networks nearly doubled in the past year.

There’s been even more velocity in the growth of blogs,

tumbleblogs and microblogging. Thanks to camera phones and
mobile apps allowing bloggers to post from pretty much
anywhere, citizen journalists are everywhere. News of a major
world event, celebrity misfortune or political scandal may reach
you by tweet before it hits the wire services.

You may be more likely to see television commercials when

they’re shown on sites like Hulu than when they were first
broadcast on network television and you Tivo’d past them.

The digerati can speculate on the resale value of MySpace and

debate whether Twitter has indeed led us to Web 3.0 with
semantic predictive filtering, but what’s undeniable is that tools
like these have permeated our lives.

The fact that Rupert Murdoch’s plans for MySpace or Biz Stone’s
pronouncements about Twitter are breathlessly reported, not only
in industry blogs, but also in traditional media outlets like The
Wall Street Journal and The New York Times tells you
something—that social networks, blogging and microblogging are
all squarely in the mainstream. Of course, we knew that the first
time someone re-tweeted Oprah. But if you need more proof, just
look at how many column-inches of print media are now devoted
to promoting their own blogs, websites and social media profiles.

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Traditional media isn’t trying to compete with new media; it’s
trying to incorporate it in an attempt to stay relevant. Clearly
some major cultural shifts are under way.

Businesses that want to stay competitive know they have to dive

into this roiling stew of new media, old media, social media and
social messaging because their customers are always on and more
connected than ever.

Building Buzz
Bottom line, marketers now face more challenges than ever. How
you advertise your products and services, how you get media
coverage, how you create brand awareness – have all changed
radically in recent years.

Lots of new technologies have come into play, of course, but that’s
only half the story. The other half is that a new kind of consumer
has evolved – one with high expectations shaped by their “always
on” lives, their exposure to new media tactics and their own
embrace of social media. One study points out that younger
consumers are more heavily influenced by recommendations from
friends and trusted sources than brand strength compared to
other age groups.

They may be influenced by all kinds of digital/print/broadcast

media, including your carefully planned media buys, but these are
not passive consumers. They’re participants. They’ll give brand
loyalty when it’s deserved, but they demand a two-way
conversation in order to build a relationship with the brands that
are important to them.

A new kind of marketer has emerged as well. Ten or fifteen years

ago, a marketing officer might have spoken vaguely about wanting
to “add” an online component as an “adjunct” channel. A
committee would hire a consultant. They’d produce a nice static,
text-heavy, “brochureware” website and the web address would

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get added to everyone’s business cards. End of story. Even worse,
the marketing director would take a stack of brochures and hand
them to the webmaster and walk out.

Now, the internet has become a company’s primary mechanism

for two-way communication – a real conversation – with
consumers. Now, it’s the first place marketers commit budget
because it’s the first place consumers look for information. Even
as fewer people read print ads or watch commercials on network
television, more people are searching for products and services
online. They’re reading crowd-sourced reviews, and they’re
paying attention to the recommendations of powerful online
influencers.

So the average marketing officer today is not only working

feverishly to make that old brochureware site more engaging and
more interactive, but also trying to juggle a dozen other very
different kinds of online channels, all hooked into an increasingly
complex online ecosystem where marketing and media overlap
and most of the old rules have been thrown out window.

The industry has gone through profound changes, and, as the

founding partner of an interactive agency, I’ve had a ringside seat
for most of the fun.

The game really began to change at the turn of the millennium,

with the rise of search marketing. Then the pace of change
accelerated once again as social media moved into the
mainstream. Now we are in the midst of another surge, as
semantic technologies spread.

The Sweet Spot

In the past few years we’ve grown used to hearing one respected
consumer brand, after another, announce decisions to focus
almost exclusively on digital. Advertising spending, or adspend,
on print collateral had already been declining. Adspend in both

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print and broadcast media followed suit, as tightened budgets
were reallocated to digital.

Why? Search marketing, social media, semantic technology – all

of these promise to help a brand achieve greater impact with less
investment. Brands making the switch expect to realize significant
cost savings and achieve greater reach, too.

The big question is, can the social-semantic web deliver on that
promise? I believe the answer is yes. There is potential for more
brand loyalty and much greater return on investment (ROI) in the
long run, but only if the brands making this change also embrace
certain core principles that are critical to success in the current
media landscape.

The Honey Pot is really about embracing those principles – things

like alignment, authenticity and value – and using them to build a
rich online ecosystem that can attract customers the way a pot of
honey attracts bees. If done properly, the honey pot may even
start to feed its own growth.

The reason why a Honey Pot strategy can work so well right now
is that value matters more than ever. We’re in a long-tail world,
where niche products and services proliferate, the voices of
individual consumers are louder, and the impact of those voices
more wide-reaching than you can imagine. But if you can win over
your core constituency by providing real value – the sweetest
honey – the customers will find their way to you.

Take a look around at what’s happening in the advertising and

media landscape and you’ll see why it may be time to change the
way you think about marketing. It’s no longer about mass
marketing, and may not even be about one to one marketing.
Today think one to niche marketing as a way to reach your core.

I’d be the first to admit that a Honey Pot strategy won’t work for
every business. For those companies that have a compelling core,

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however, this kind of approach can provide better ROI over time.
The principles behind the Honey Pot can help you build strong
brand identity, attract new prospects and forge lasting
relationships with customers.

About This Book

What I hope you find here is encouragement to adopt a more
value-driven approach to marketing. In more practical terms,
what you’ll discover as you thumb through this book are musings
about achieving brand alignment, communicating authenticity,
starting a conversation with your customers and offering them
real value – all the essentials of a Honey Pot strategy.
These musings are organized in five sections:
 Chapter 1 explains what a Honey Pot is and why value-
based, “pull” strategies are so attractive.
 Chapter 2 surveys the media context, highlighting key
trends that call for a value-based response.
 Chapter 3 examines the principles that make a Honey Pot
strategy succeed.
 Chapter 4 describes tactics that can sweeten your Honey
Pot and add more brand value.
 Chapter 5 looks at the big picture and speculates about
where Honey Pot thinking may take you.

Special Terminology
As you read, you may encounter a few unfamiliar phrases. Online
ecosystem and user experience are the most important of these.

An online ecosystem is somewhat analogous to a carbon footprint

in the sense that it can serve as a measure of accumulated impact.
But it’s digital impact we’re talking about. Your own personal
online ecosystem, for example, comprises all the evidence of your

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online life, including your public profiles as well as your
connections and activities. The more active and connected you
are, the larger your digital footprint.

Companies and specific brands have online ecosystems, too. The

larger the ecosystem, the higher the visibility and the more likely
they are to be found by customers. That’s why so much of the
advice in this book is about ways to enrich and expand your
online ecosystem.

Whatever it is you’re marketing, it’s more important than ever to

recognize that an online ecosystem forms naturally around your
brand and its audience. That’s true whether you’re paying
attention to it or not. Implementing a Honey Pot strategy can help
really leverage that online ecosystem.

User experience sometimes refers to experiencing a specific

digital environment (such as navigating a website or reading an
email.) It also refers to the entire brand experience. How your
target audience experiences your brand is the end result of all the
touch points, both online and offline.

One fundamental assumption I make is that user experience must

reinforce brand identity. Another is that it’s important to deliver
an engaging user experience throughout the different components
of your online ecosystem (at least, those that are under your
control).

You may notice that I use the terms digital, interactive, online,
and web almost interchangeably. This is because the original
distinctions are no longer meaningful.

I also refer to members of the public as “users” – whether they are

website visitors, consumers, target audiences, customers or
prospects. This is due in part to my having a digital orientation,
but it also underscores my belief that you must offer your public
something useful and valuable.

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Other special terminology you may encounter here is explained in
the glossary at the end of this book.

What You Won’t Find in This Book

You won’t find any checklists or simple rules here. There is no
standard formula for building a Honey Pot of your own because,
by definition, it’s something that needs to grow out of an
understanding of your brand and the culture it serves.

How to Use This Book

You can use this book however you like, of course. Feel free to
read the chapters in sequence, from beginning to end. Or act like
a honeybee. Flit around and dip into anything that looks
interesting.

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 Chapter 1
The Honey Pot Strategy
A Honey Pot strategy can pretty much be summed up in two
words: create value. Strip away the advertising gimmicks and
old-fashioned marketing ploys. Instead of trying to message more,
more loudly or more insistently, just focus on creating value. If
your product is sound and you communicate honestly, you will
naturally develop a deep connection with your audience.

Consider this: what if you had something so rich and sweet and
irresistible that it would simply pull people in? What if it would
not just attract new prospects, but also entice them to come back
again and again and tell all their friends? Your online ecosystem
can be an irresistible Honey Pot that pulls people in. All you need
to do is start building brand value and communicating honestly.

First, shift your attention away from advertising. Stop

bombarding people indiscriminately with unwanted, disruptive
and frequently irrelevant messaging. Instead, invest in building
value: create something that is so useful, informative and maybe
even entertaining, that your customers and new prospects
naturally gravitate toward you.

Offer a unique solution to a particularly difficult problem while

remaining closely aligned to your brand message. It’s best to stay
focused on a very specific need or sensibility your target market
has. In other words, offer something your audience will want,

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need or enjoy. That’s Honey Pot value. It will attract exactly the
kind of qualified traffic you want – the kind that comes to you
already interested, engaged and ready to act.

The real beauty of this is that you can feel good about what it is
you’re doing. Every day you’re creating more value for your
customers and prospects, not just stealing their time or alienating
them with unwanted ads. Instead, you’re always seeking to be
more relevant to their specific needs. You’re asking, “What can I
do to make your life easier? What can I do to make your life more
fun? What can I do to solve the most annoying problem you
have?”

When marketers shift from thinking about how to steal your time
to thinking about how to improve your life – well, that changes
everything. And that’s what the Honey Pot strategy is all about.
It’s a fundamental shift in the way we approach marketing –
through attraction.

Many businesses see the value in this new strategy, but don’t fully
grasp that they can implement it to make this new form of
relationship marketing work for them. They need to define exactly
what their Honey Pot can be.

What’s in Your Ecosystem?

You probably already have an online ecosystem of sorts. What
does it say about the health of your brand? And what’s there to
attract and engage your market?

Unless you’ve intentionally tried to remain under the radar – and

even startups trying to keep the lid on things have a hard time
doing that these days – the fact is you probably already have an
online ecosystem.

The centerpiece of your ecosystem is likely to be your website. But

your digital trail shouldn’t begin and end there. You’ve also got

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press releases and various newsletters you’ve created. Perhaps
you and your colleagues have made the news on occasion. You’re
probably in a variety of online directory listings. Your products
may appear on review sites. Members of your staff may be active
in social and professional networking communities, leaving tracks
back to you. They may be blogging or commenting on other
people’s blogs. They may be microblogging. Or maybe you’ve got
some banner campaigns running somewhere. There are back
issues of your trade publications where you’ve been featured. Your
suppliers and distributors may have sites that link back to you.

Get the picture? There’s a whole network out there that’s formed
around you. Whether intentionally or not, you’ve been building a
platform for value creation.

If you’re like most companies, you haven’t used that platform to

build real value in your brand – or even seen it for the resource it
could be. Its potential remains untapped. However, if you really
invested in building value in selected areas of your ecosystem, it
could become your Honey Pot.

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 Chapter 2
The Media Landscape
The subject of this book is not media or market trends, but rather
the idea that the best way to grow your brand’s online ecosystem
and enhance your marketing efforts is by creating value.
However, it’s helpful to begin by surveying major trends.
Advertising, media and consumer markets have gone through
profound changes in recent years, and those changes are some of
the most compelling reasons to consider a value-based Honey Pot
strategy.

Marketers need to stay nimble and on top of the trends because

the media landscape is always evolving. Some of the trends that
have emerged in the past decade are real game-changers.

Ubiquitous infrastructure, continuous information flow, the

fragmentation of media and markets; the emerging influence of
the individual, even in the midst of increasing collaboration and
connection; patterns of integrated consumption and media
convergence; and a new generation of semantic tools. These are
just a few of the trends that are changing the media landscape.

The players best positioned for success in this changing media

landscape include:
 Owners of original ideas and unique intellectual property

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  Businesses that know their core, listen to their niche,
remain agile, and invest in areas that improve value
 Niche communities with critical mass
 Neutral parties that facilitate collaboration and interaction
 Tribal leaders or influencers
 Individuals with targeted ideas and the discipline to
execute
Those who may face challenges in this new environment include
marketers of homogenized, one-size-fits-all, mass-market
products and middle market players, such as retailers and
distributors.

Ubiquitous Infrastructure
The reality of life today is that we are always on, always
connected. The technology infrastructure that unites us allows for
a continuous flow of information that we, both, consume and
feed. This information flow gets deeper and faster all the time.

This is the result of many factors:

 The digital medium itself
 Improved publishing tools
 Hunger for information
 Search technology
 Accurate measurement and anlytics
 Easy tools to slice and dice information
 Mobile access
 Social connections
 Citizen journalists pushing information in blogs,
tumblelogs and microblogs

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  Microapplications, such as iPhone apps
 Infotainment vehicles like Yahoo Buzz, Daily Motion and
others
 Integrated consumption and media convergence
Interesting stories and news of product launches are all
communicated almost instantaneously. This means that if you
have something of great value, it can catch on quickly. Conversely,
bad products will fail just as quickly. Word gets around faster
than ever, and the value you offer matters more than ever. Not
just because we’re always on.

The jury is still out on how being “always on” will affect
humankind in the long run, but the speed of information flow
certainly isn’t slowing down.

At 6pm, I bought tickets from Fandango on my iPhone

immediately upon seeing a billboard ad for a new movie. I was
hungry and my phone told me I was within minutes of eight
different restaurants, three of them chain eateries I’d liked before.
If my iPhone had triangulated my position just an hour earlier,
while we were still driving west, it could have offered me a coupon
for Jersey Mike’s subs – and then we would have been able to
bypass the whole family discussion about where to eat.

Within hours of Oprah introducing a new book club selection, it

can be number 1 on Amazon and hit 5 million books in print. But
before she is even done with the 5-minute segment, I can have
already downloaded the audio book on iTunes and be listening to
it. I may have even already tweeted it. And during the couple
moments I spent waiting for the book to transfer to my iPod, I
realized the release date of this book was just two weeks ago. How
long would market penetration have taken in the past?

Are you keeping up?

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Connected Fragmentation
The intense connection made possible by the Internet is precisely
what has led to such extreme fragmentation of mass markets and
mass media. We’re now in the age of the niche.

The central paradox of all this connectedness is that it has

resulted in a kind of connected fragmentation. While the Internet
can bring everybody together, it also allows us to break apart into
smaller and smaller tribes. And even fragmentation of individual
identity, allowing us to belong to several different tribes at once.

Some of the most profound changes impacting media and

markets relate to this connected fragmentation. Because of our
ability to connect with obscure niche groups, to purchase highly
unique product from anyone, anywhere in the world, people are
gravitating toward the fringes.

Brand dilution combined with access to on-demand

manufacturing has sped the process. In the past, there was a
discernable cycle: a fringe product, once it proved it wasn’t just a
short-lived fad, would gain enough traction to move into the
mainstream and become part of the mass market. Now, however,
the fringes won’t be the new mass because volume won’t exist to
create that mass market; demand will be spread out over a larger
and larger number of unique niche products. In theory, the
market will continue to divide itself into smaller and smaller
slices, in an attempt to increase relevancy, until it becomes
unsustainable (i.e., unprofitable). The increased ability of nimble
manufacturers to produce on demand may, in fact, be double-
edged. Mass marketed products may only be viable if they have
uniquely differentiating customizable options.

Niche Markets, Niche Media, Nimble Manufacturing

Not only does the web allow individuals to connect with other
individuals who share similar – even impossibly unusual –

23
interests, but it also allows marketers to identify those individuals
as members of a specific niche market and, more importantly,
connect with them.

This is not just because marketers have more data than ever and
thus can find those niche markets, but it’s also that marketers can
now offer niche markets a product that suits them thanks to more
and more nimble manufacturing practices. We’re not just seeing
more fragmented niche markets, but more fragmented SKUs as
well.

As a result of media fragmentation, it’s taking businesses longer

to find places to spend their advertising budget. Despite the
continued reduction in share many traditional channels like
network television continue to charge more and get away with it.
The death of mass advertising might be near, if not for the sheer
amount of capital that has no other place to go – yet.

Once a clear path to fragmented communities is laid, advertisers

will realize the unbelievable conversion rates that can be had by
targeting so precisely. (This is not about vertical ad networks, for
they are still sliced too thick.) The cost will rise for online
advertising based on the volume of viewers in precisely targeted
niche communities. This will suck capital out of less effective
scattershot mass advertising. That means the most rewarding
time to play is now. At least until publishers figure out how to drill
down to the levels possible. The moment that happens the upside
will vanish.

For now, you need to work site by site and section by section on
push advertising efforts in the interactive space. But prior to
undertaking those types of light seeding efforts, you should first
invest in building up your online ecosystem so that you’ll get the
most value possible from the capital you deploy. That’s the
underlying message of the Honey Pot, really: the best way to deal
with the diminishing returns of “push” advertising is to enhance
your online ecosystem so that it supports a “pull” strategy.

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Just think what you can do to actually improve your product with
that leftover capital you no longer waste on mass advertising.

Collective Conversation, Individual Voices

The internet has given us new ways to connect with others and to
have collective conversations. But here’s another paradox: it’s also
truly empowered the individual voices and producers. The
individual’s perspective can be delivered quickly, cheaply and
effectively thanks to an infrastructure that’s leveled the playing
field so much even the smallest players can compete.

Even people with limited technical knowledge are able to express

themselves and increase their visibility online using tools like:
 Blogs
 Tumble logs
 Microblogs
 Personal websites
 Podcasting/Vodcasting
 Commenting, rating and ranking
 Social news sites
 Social networking sites
 Social bookmarking
 Review and opinion sites
 Wish list and intention sites
 Collectives
 Video sites
Every one of us can have a voice online. Individuals can set up a
media outlet all by themselves, if they want. And sometimes a

25
lone voice can be louder than the biggest advertising budget.
Think about what happens when a top 100 reviewer on Amazon
shares a particularly disappointing experience with a product.

Individual opinion – whether delivered in comments, ratings,

blogposts, or tweets – can have real potency, but there’s also a
weight to the aggregate of individual voices. Note the impact of
the accumulated opinions voiced on forums like Yelp, Epinions
and The Consumerist. This collective voice is different from mass
media. Think about the effect of reading a succession of blow-by-
blow accounts of an event from multiple citizen journalists. Each
individual account takes on more importance when it correlates
with other accounts. The power is in the hands of the crowd, and
every member of the crowd has a digital megaphone.

The Internet provides any individual with a worldwide podium or

a soapbox for expression and exposure. This makes it a great time
for start-ups, creativity and new connections, but a perilous time
for the mass media behemoths that can no longer force-feed
homogenized products and messages to the masses.

Individual Fingerprints
The new demographics are simple: everyone is as unique as a
snowflake or a fingerprint. We’re seeing the end of broad-brush
demographic profiling. Forget simply advertising cereal to any
“female-head-of-household-middle-income-25-to-45”. Most of
your adspend will be wasted on people who never eat breakfast or
who ignore your billboards entirely.

But suppose you are a small specialty foods manufacturer trying

to market a new cereal. It may be true there’s not enough value in
that untargeted mass advertising. However, it may be worth your
while to join the community at the PostPunkKitchen or run a
promotion on the MrBreakfast site. And if you’re thoughtful about
the information you provide on your site, you can easily connect
with the customer or social influencer who’s searching for

26
breakfast cereal ingredient labels online. Offer that searcher your
clean-label information, information about children’s nutrition,
and maybe some coupons and recipes. Sign her up to be part of
your online rewards program. Soon she’ll be happy to tell you
what she buys, how often, when, where, and why. Oh yeah, and
you’ll also discover she’s a vegetarian with two preteen
stepchildren who really want you to use more eco-friendly
packaging.

Consumers are able to communicate their own individual

identities today, while revealing their interests and behaviors
making it easier to identify and connect with those whose values
align with yours. And markets can actually identify and connect
with you when your values align with their interests. So there is
an opportunity now to focus on solving problems on almost a
unique personal fingerprint level. That’s why the hot new
demographic is not an age group, an income level or a zip code.
It’s hardly a group at all.

Say you live in the Pacific Northwest and you like to run in flip-
flops when it’s raining and the temperature’s just below 65
degrees, but still above 38 degrees. I have no doubt that with just
a little Digging, you could find other people who also like to run in
the rain in flip-flops when it’s cool, but not too cold. You can find
each other online and create your own little community. Soon,
you may create a running sandal company of your own or an
existing running sandal company will find you, by matching
certain points of your online fingerprints.

Marketers can find niche markets for their products and they can
make niche products to suit these markets. Even if you aren’t
going to sell five million units of running sandals, isn’t there a way
to sell a half million or even a quarter million units and have a
good, profitable niche? You might even be able to develop a
similar product that’s just right for groups of golf sandal lovers
and fishing sandal lovers and any number of other niche markets
who will be incredibly loyal to your specialized products. More

27
and more companies are going to be asking themselves how they
can take advantage of niche markets and incorporate real time
feedback into their product lifecycle development

So these personal fingerprints have a lot to do with how marketers

can connect products directly to smaller and smaller subcultures.
There’s also an interesting corollary to the uniquely personal ID:
the personal profile.

Centralization of Identity
First, mass markets fragmented into many, smaller niche
markets. Then, those niche markets fragmented into individual
fingerprints. Now each social influencer has their own identity
and their own personal fingerprint online reflecting their personal
interests and behaviors. And we have the tracking mechanisms
and behavioral analysis techniques to use that unique fingerprint.

Another phenomenon that’s closely related to the new

demographics of individual identity: the centralization of identity
in personal profiles. Although there’s a lot of loud pushback from
privacy advocates on this, your personal profile is becoming more
and more like an online ID.

It’s not quite centralized yet. Your medical profiles are over here
and your social profile is over there, while your friend profiles,
work status and personal status are somewhere else entirely. But,
while this data might exist in separate places for a while, it seems
inevitable that your disparate profile information will start to
coalesce at some point soon. We’re already seeing some of that
with Facebook Connect.

Should we be afraid of our online identities destroying our offline

privacy? In the short term, we should continue to be vigilant, but
be open to selective changes. Whatever happens, fears about
privacy issues will eventually be more than outweighed by the
benefit because there’s a better understanding of the user. As

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marketers we don’t really want to reach somebody who’s not
going to be interested in our product. Understanding the
consumer better means we won’t end up serving them messages
they don’t want or need. What an improvement!

This could still be many years away, but when it happens it’s
going to change the environment. We aren’t going to need to see a
lot of messages that we don’t care about because it’s a waste of
money for the marketer, the advertiser and the company. Plus, it
creates a negative impression for the consumer.

On the flipside, when centralized profiles are available, we’ll be

able to get things that are much more relevant to us. This can be
based not only on interest, but also on timing. Say it’s dinnertime
and you’re driving by a Quiznos. An advertiser knows which chain
you like and also knows you’re likely to have three kids in the car.
Voila! you get an electronic coupon for “buy three subs, get one
free” sent to you in real time. Of course there would likely be an
incentive for you to forward to your friends or neighbors.

Tie together the interest level and the timing, and you actually
have a stronger messaging system – because more relevant
messaging means fewer irrelevant interruptions.

People talk about how invasive that might be. But, at this point, I
feel pretty invaded by the billboards that are all along the
highway, too. I’d rather see that billboard come down and have a
much more relevant message come to me personally via text.

Individual Influencers and Individual Producers

One more interesting development – not only do the phenomena
of fragmentation and the trend towards customization together
lead to almost individualized markets, but this new reality also
invites other kinds of individualization. Namely, the emergence of
highly effective social influencers given voice by new media and

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the resurgence of individual producers making highly unique
items in a modern-day twist on artisanship.

Individual consumers can sometimes have impact on a brand

simply by posting a scathing review in the right place at the right
time, but singular reviews or rants tend to be ignored or
discounted – unless the writer has established credibility in their
online life.

Some pundits who noted the increasing importance of individual

influencers over the past few years have dubbed it
“micropersuasion.” Media consumers adopted a steady diet of
blogs, social networks and discussion boards – leaving a lovely
digital trail detailing likes/dislikes and interests in their wake.
They also came to be influenced by the guides in these new media
venues: moderators and administrators who acted as the
guardians of groups, forums and message boards; bloggers
elevated to demigod status within their own little tribes thanks to
highly specialized search engines (think Technorati, for example);
and the stars of social networks who garner more friends or
followers than the rest of the crowd, who get more feed
subscribers, or who exert more authority through more (or more
powerful) interactions with the community.

In the new/social media world, it’s clear that individuals can

become hugely influential, taking center stage either by the sheer
volume of their actions or by building trust when they
demonstrate their knowledge and expertise.

There are even specialized services to help you identify the

individual influencers in specific niche communities – so you can
start the delicate dance of engaging with them. These individuals
have, in effect, created personal brands of such power that
marketers feel the need to court them or at least, wish they could.
In some tribes, the strongest influencers are notoriously
independent. Those with an analytics orientation may even look

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for key metrics, such as who has the most incoming links or
incoming traffic thanks to their feed subscribers.

Individual producers exert a special kind of influence. As mass-

market goods become less attractive, niche products take on more
cachet. The individuals who create those products become stars of
a sort. They’re no longer anonymous designers or crafters because
online audiences can connect with them directly.

Consumer Vigilantes and Revolt

Advertising agencies used to think they could shape brand
identity, but one of the truly democratizing effects of new/social
media is that advertisers no longer control the playing field and
the truth will come out. A brand will be seen for what it is,
eventually. (Of course this is only good news for some of us.)

When consumers in the online space question the truth of a

brand, it can quickly become a revolt. This often happens in
response to a change – maybe a change in the privacy policy or a
change in the business model – that could threaten the neutrality
of the community. Within moments masses of users band
together gathering steam and fury. They threaten to jump ship or
manipulate results until the culprit relents.

In two high-profile examples, when Facebook and Digg made

moves that affected the crowd, they were swamped with user
discontent and organized attempts to make the companies
acquiesce.

To Facebook’s chagrin, more than a quarter of a million users

revolted when they made announced their intention to
automatically post user activity with Beacon. In an attempt to
build monetization into their model, Facebook merged user
activity, like adding a friend, with purchases on external sites and
showed them in a consolidated list. Further, they allowed

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advertisers to target specific user behavior and market directly to
it.

With publicly announced calls for patience by the CEO and some
adjustments that gave users more control, the backlash relented,
but not before some damage was done to the “Facebook is like us”
image. And, in the end, even though it did spark some privacy
concerns, users eventually found that the connection of activity,
likes and wants through a list of behavior actually helped them
find the things they needed and make new and deeper
connections.

Digg got a taste of crowd revolt when word buzzed around that
the there was editorial weighting going on in what many
perceived to be the world’s most democratic news aggregator.
Most of the community associated with Digg, as well as industry
media outlets like Wired, voiced their disapproval.

Whether there was actual editorial weighting or not, the fact that
the founder’s Diggs and a steady group of Diggers always seemed
to be associated with the stories bubbling to the top gave the
community at large enough ammunition to cry foul. The story
eventually faded and most observers later speculated that the
algorithm was tweaked to find middle ground for all sides.

Online Experience for Offline Media

One of the most striking characteristics of the media landscape
today is its connectedness. Newspapers, magazines, radio,
broadcast and cable television – even movie studios and record
labels – all use interactive channels to stay connected with their
audiences.

Every major broadcast player now has an online presence and

every one of them tries to drive their offline audiences to it. It’s
not just about traffic. Although there’s often a cost per thousand,
or CPM, component that still represents a fairly minor return

32
when compared to airtime. It’s really about relationship
marketing – continuing the conversation with the audience and
strengthening the connection. These media outlets have
essentially become brands that use multiple online and offline
channels to reach their markets. Effectively, they’ve moved
toward a brand model – something that’s based on customer
solutions rather than specific types of content platforms.

The more that print or broadcast media use both online and
offline channels, the more they elevate their brand over their
native media platform. Courageous media outlets there are
reaching for iPhone apps and mobile video. The best adapters are
providing an interactive online user experience that connects with
the offline customer experience and enriching the overall
experience of the brand. For their sake, we can only hope they
haven’t waited too long.

Disintermediation and Democratization

New media encourage direct engagement and provide few
barriers to entry. The combination has been somewhat explosive.

Because they can make direct contact with the source, users now
feel encouraged to so, bypassing middlemen and distributors
whenever possible. This disintermediation puts more of the
burden on companies in many respects, because consumers not
only expect to get valuable information from manufacturer
websites, but they also expect to have conversations directly with
manufacturers.

Honoring expectations and engaging in conversation can

strengthen your relationships with customers. Moreover, this
connection with users can enhance your product development.
When you encourage that kind of interaction, you’re hearing the
voice of the customer loud and clear. They’re not just telling you
what they want, they’re often telling you exactly what you need to
do to improve your product offerings.

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The fact that ubiquitous infrastructure is equally available to all
without major capital investment is also leading to greater
democratization. Individual producers running sole
proprietorships can compete with large companies to service
small, niche markets in search of unique products. Citizen
journalists with smartphones or netbooks can scoop professional
journalists backed by major publications and service bureaus. In
fact, media professionals are increasingly cast as middlemen, and
bypassed.

There is also something inherently democratic about phenomena

like peer production and crowd-sourcing. That leveling effect is
particularly evident now that we’ve seen sites replete with user-
generated content usurping the place of traditional media.

In this new age of the individual, the playing field is level. Any
person or entity can produce an amazing product, service or piece
of unique content. If it fills a real need, it can spread like wildfire
overnight. In some cases, without spending even a penny of
marketing budget.

Democracy equals opportunity because everyone has a completely

independent vote. Anyone or anything that is viable in the eyes of
enough people becomes viable. In a true democracy, no one can
cry about foul play or barriers to entry since everyone has a
chance. Certainly there are factors that play into the likelihood of
success, such as intelligence, talent, skills and relevance.
However, this is about as level as the playing field can get.

Democratization of content also reflects those independent votes.

The content that is the most preferred gets the most exposure.
The method of determining what is viewed varies, but it’s usually
based on user rankings, number of views and links to the content.

What makes this even more interesting is that content has the
ability to transcend planes. For example, it’s easy to see that the
most viewed videos on YouTube and especially the ones most

34
often identified as favorites (“favorited”), move to the forefront
and therefore get more exposure. However, those same videos are
likely spreading along through other channels (including email)
that aren’t as readily tracked. It’s also important to note that
although there is some advantage to being a first mover, reset
rankings, fair algorithms and user-controlled timeframes allow
for content to enter the marketplace. If users find the content
valuable, whether for entertainment, education, or any reason
whatsoever, it has the ability to go viral through widespread
exposure.

Today, anyone can become a hit – an individual, a small company

or a large company. For those that provide a compelling core
value, the world can open up faster than ever. But for those who
have counted on traditional barriers to entry – such as large
capital investments – to maintain their monopolistic mojo, a new
game is afoot.

This new, democratic environment has resulted in two striking

developments:
 Customers have always had more credibility with their
peers than you when talking about your brand, and now
their voices are just as loud as yours.
 Customers expect more from your brand now. Forget your
monologue. They want dialog. They have grown to expect
it because they get that level of interaction everywhere
else. They require a relationship with your brand.

Semantic Tools
A new ability to reveal intent promises new opportunities.

There are many definitions of the semantic web. Fundamentally,

it means the ability to take the syntax of conversations and data
and the timing of that data, and draw actionable insight from it.
This insight into intent and relevance can be used to improve

35
people’s lives by helping them to collaborate, quickly find
information they really want and receive marketing information
they may actually find interesting.

Suppose you’re in the digital photography business and are

specifically interested in people who only use Leica cameras. If
you drill down further into that demographic, there’s bound to be
a certain mindset and personality type that tends to like that
camera. Semantic tools could give this particular niche market the
ability to make deals in a group fashion. For instance, they might
save money by buying equipment at a quantity discount and
having it all shipped to a location where they agree to meet up –
say, at an upcoming Leica convention.

Tapping into intent also allows you to message people more

effectively – using GPS data on mobile phones to tie their areas of
interest to their geographic area at any given moment. Semantic
tools let you deduce interests based on the syntax of their
conversations and their online behavior.

This all creates a powerful foundation for giving people what they
want, when they want it.

Revealed Intention
The first intent shown by Internet users came in the form of user
searches. But search data initially had no time frame, level of
desire, or other information associated with it – except for the
following activity by the user. For instance, if the user made a
purchase after a search, we could deduce their level of desire was
high and their place in the sales cycle was deep. We then looked
back at the information they’d entered in the search box and
cross-referenced it with their subsequent activity. This allowed us
to figure out that searching for specific multi-keyword phrases led
to faster and higher conversions, and that singular, generic terms
led to browsing-based activity, and so on.

36
But logical assumptions about what we would do, given certain
search terminology, just weren’t enough to change the market. It
had a temporary positive impact on marketing ROI. But, as we’ve
grown able to figure out expected conversions to an even more
precise degree, the positive spread – or differential – is
decreasing, and, it’s pretty likely that as the level of certainty
increases with a particular tactic, the cost will go up.

So how do we move to more explicit exposure of intention? How

do we move to effective collaboration – banding together to
achieve a specific goal, for example, whether it’s to save money,
create a product, or harness processing power to solve complex
computational problems? And how far away are we from this
capability?

People made a major step toward collaboration with more explicit

expression of intention as a natural extension of our activity in
online communities. Simply, by telling friends and coworkers in
our own circle our intentions – whether it was to buy a home or a
car, go on vacation, or whatever – we automatically included
qualifiers that aren’t needed in search. Maybe I’ve revealed that
I’ll be renting a bungalow in Tahiti in three weeks and I am
nervous about sun exposure because I burn really easily.

In a normal search scenario I might type in “best sun block”,

which would trigger vaguely relevant ads to be sent my way. But
by tapping into the semantics of the conversations I’m having
with the people in my circle, an advertiser might be able to
introduce something totally new – an intelligent suggestion that
actually improves my experience. Maybe it’s an offer for a long-
brimmed hat or reduced-cost tanning sessions. Maybe it’s tanning
sessions at a local establishment two weeks from now since they
know I’ll want to be building my base tan right before I go.

With the outcry of privacy invasion at Facebook, it was clear that

users aren’t yet completely comfortable with the announcement of
their previous activity or future intentions unless they’re given the

37
opportunity to confirm them. In the case of Twitter, users detail
practically every move they make, but again, it is pushed by them
directly – as opposed to their cell phone mapping back GPS
coordinates or taking random pictures against their will.

However slowly, users are starting to come around to more

explicit expressed intention and some non-controlled
manipulation of how those intentions are displayed. Even in the
Facebook example, users are actually connecting with more
friends, new causes and useful applications because of the listing
of user actions.

Connection and Collaboration

When we truly become effective at the gathering of intention,
natural collaboration will ensue. Unfortunately, we can’t get there
until we get past some initial resistance. Once people begin to see
the positive effects of their intentions being exposed, I believe
we’ll see widespread acceptance. At that point, we can deal with
other obstacles and risks, such as people not knowing what they
want or changing their minds.

Once we can develop a unifying force that either consolidates

(simplifies and cross-references) data or creates fixed data points
(such as an interest in product X, at cost Y, within Z weeks) to
express intention, we can then match effectively and aggregate
intention among individuals to do things like group buys or
matching people to causes – whether it’s for a charity walk or for
building a company.

In fact, we are already seeing non-profits benefiting from badges

on Facebook and LinkedIn profiles. Given the number of people
within my network who match some aspect of my digital
fingerprint, it isn’t surprising that quite a few of them have
charities that are of interest to me.

38
I don’t mean to make it sound like we’re on a path to socialism
when it comes to collaboration. Have faith that the motivated
forces of commerce within our networks and communities will
always be looking for ways to profit. Furthermore, increasingly
sophisticated algorithms will allow those willing to expend greater
effort to take a bigger share of the pie. This could lead to a more
pure and efficient form of capitalism, essentially shifting the value
of relationships to the value the relationship produces.

I do think that collaboration will be the next great frontier on the

web. The amount of collective power that can be harnessed by
social networks to achieve goals is astonishing. Think about
saving money with group buys, cloud computing to solve medical
problems, conducting joint product development or even simply
finding a way to pass on a lineage of storytelling. Wikis and other
tools have given us the ability to crowd-source all types of
information as well as new opportunities to work together toward
a common good.

At first we saw groups of individuals who were already connected

in the offline world embracing online tools as a way to collaborate
on a business presentation, a school project or community
initiative. But soon it was clear that simply having the means to
collaborate could itself create connection and community.

For years, intent existed in our own minds but generally went
unspoken, except perhaps with close friends and spouses. On the
web we find that by expressing our intent we are fulfilled. We’re
able to connect with products or services or communities that
meet our needs. This gratification probably explains why early
technology investments focused so heavily on search results. But
imagine a world where people express their desires proactively
prior to making a decision. Although we’re still in an early stage,
it’s exciting.

39
A Shift Towards Creating Value
Some marketers like to bemoan the decline of brand loyalty. But
how can you expect loyalty unless you’re providing real value to
your customers? Especially when the value becomes more and
more transparent with the proliferation of information and
distribution through new communication tools.

There’s no logical reason for somebody to be loyal to a brand. The

brand is there to provide a product or service and get paid
something in exchange. Whether the price is $5, $500 or $5
million, there’s a value exchange involved.

If they’re acting logically, customers will be loyal as long as there’s

a compelling exchange for the price. The challenge arises when
the value is no longer compelling enough or there are equal
alternatives. Just because somebody always used Tide detergent
in the past does not necessarily mean they always need to use
Tide. Consumers know that there are alternatives and there will
always be more alternatives.

Niche products have less to fear from alternatives, however, and

this is important. More niche products and more SKUs mean a
longer tail economy – one that serves the customer in a different
way. This changes a basic dynamic.

It no longer makes sense to spend so much on brand marketing.

Just raising the recognition of your brand and reinforcing the
perception of your brand won’t increase brand loyalty. The way to
increase brand loyalty is to have the best product, solve the
problem in the best possible way and provide the best value
exchange for that user who fits your core value based on their
unique needs.

In the most basic terms, the old way of brand marketing was an
exposure model that pushed messaging on people. Brand value
and trust used to be proxy for real information. But with the

40
Internet, users were suddenly able to pull the world to themselves
on their own terms. This means more than empowerment for
audiences, although that’s certainly part of it. It also means that a
good deal of consumer intent that had been hidden is now
exposed. Simply by stating their interests – through the
navigation of category selections, through consumption patterns,
and via search – consumers revealed a wealth of data to
advertisers. Not just what they were looking for, but also how they
looked for it.

Although search certainly helped accelerate the shift, this change

actually began as soon as consumers were able to express choice
in a dense enough market to perpetuate that activity – meaning
they got what they were looking for, and not just because they had
a tool to do it. Then, with search, consumers were not only able to
find the things they were looking for, but also the things they
didn’t know they wanted. Even mistaken searches opened new
horizons.

The world hasn’t changed totally; you still must have a compelling
product that fills a need in order to thrive. But what is
fundamentally different is this: people are now telling you exactly
what they want and need.

Moreover, in the current landscape consumers draw out pertinent

value – whether that’s a product, content or a connection. They
choose. Therefore, unique value is paramount.

Consumers now create their own vacation experiences rather than

relying on vacation packages. They research product intensely and
know prices high and low before making an offer. They can
connect with people like themselves immediately whenever they
want to, even if they’ve never met anyone like themselves before.
And they consume niche lifestyle/mindset-related entertainment
such as heavy.com, vbs.tv, and surfline.com.

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How does a marketer deal with this? By offering something
uniquely compelling that builds upon the core value of the goods
or services offered. Give consumers a reason to engage with your
brand.

Of course, while you want your online presence to be attractive

and pull people in, you should always make sure that the
incentive is related to your company’s core value in some way.
You also want to be sure not to get too caught up in technology for
technology’s sake. If it doesn’t help a user in the lifestyle where
your brand lives, don’t offer it. In today’s market, alienating even
one person can throw a monkey wrench into your efforts –
because it’s so easy for that one individual voice to make itself
heard.

And one more thing – you always want to ask yourself whether
your product is good enough. Because the best way to achieve
marketing success today is not to trump your competitor’s ad
strategy – it’s simply to provide a better product. Your customers
will spread the word for you.

Accountable Relationships
One of the most significant changes that the spread of “web
culture” has imposed on advertising and marketing is greater
accountability. The availability of metrics has had a huge impact
on business relationships, and it’s also allowed for some direct
partnerships to develop that might not have happened in the past.

In the same way that the web allows consumers to find

manufacturers directly, cutting out the middleman, it also allows
would-be advertisers to bypass media buyers and partner with
publishers directly. So we now see manufacturers connecting with
niche publications that directly cater to the audience that would
consume their product. They’re bypassing the standard
advertising relationship, which is often CPM-driven.

42
Online publishers who truly “own” a niche audience, can track
visitor behavior precisely, providing an asset that can be leveraged
with advertisers. Niche publishers, in fact, have the ability to
prove they can help advertisers get into deeper relationships with
audiences. So instead of spending time simply trying to sell more
advertising on a CPM basis, they can focus instead on creating
opportunities to advertise products or services that are directly
relevant to their readership – and thus get a much higher effective
CPM.

Because it’s tracked, the risk is driven down to limited tests.

Advertisers can know exactly what worked and even a fair amount
about whom it worked on. There’s more direct and more accurate
feedback than there was from old advertising models, too.

The infamous quote by John Wannamaker, "Half the money I

spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which
half.", may becoming obsolete. But the accountability inherent in
the new, metrics-driven model changes that. It allows advertisers
to shift some risk back to the publishers – risk that publishers are
willing to take on when the metrics justify it.

The new dynamic can actually get better product in front of

consumer markets and also level the playing field for companies
with better products. They can now reach markets with much
lower upfront marketing expenditures.

A whole new era of deal-making has begun, primarily because of

the accountability that metrics bring and because deeper analytics
give the ability to break things down to such a granular level. But
publishers and advertisers will need to align more closely while
walking the tightrope. Collaborative efforts mean that businesses
become more intertwined and depend on each other for success.

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Fundamentals
Before we get too far ahead of ourselves, however, it might be
good to take a quick time-out and go over some of the
fundamentals that underlie online advertising deal structures.

There is a difference in which party – publisher or advertiser –

bears more of the risk when deals are based on CPA (cost per
action) versus CPM (cost per thousand). At the end of the day,
putting an advertiser with a great product or service together with
a publisher who’s got highly targeted and receptive readers is a
win-win for both parties. But there are different approaches to
financially aligning and balancing publisher risk with advertiser
reward and vice versa.

With CPM models, cost is typically based on how tight the

demographic is, the behavior of that demographic, and the
available inventory. Unless we’re talking about a fairly large
campaign or a campaign with a particularly motivated publisher,
it’s typically the responsibility of the advertiser to provide
appropriate creative (direct response, branding, or a blend). In a
CPM deal, fees are paid regardless of the performance of the
campaign; therefore the risk is primarily on the advertiser.
Typically, this results in the lowest long-term effective cost for the
advertiser. But that’s something that can only be determined if
the advertiser has solid metrics with conversion data.

Often, if a publisher isn’t getting the conversions expected at a

CPA level, they may fall back on a CPM or a CPC (cost per click)
arrangement with the advertiser. They may be doing this for cash
flow reasons, due to an unexpectedly long sales cycle with your
product or service. But if you’re an advertiser who’s allocated a
fairly reasonable budget for threshold marketing cost, be wary of
doing a CPM or CPC deal instead of CPA. You may be advertising
in the wrong venue or using the wrong medium or the publisher
may not be providing proper placement, or maybe your
product/service just isn’t critical to the audience at this point.

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CPC models balance out the risk between publishers and
advertisers. Depending on the CPC cost, it may slant in favor of
one party or the other, but both are typically vested in making
sure that the creative converts. For example, Google Adwords will
make sure that the highest conversion/price combination moves
up higher in the listings. CPC is a good way to start a balanced
relationship while mitigating some risk; however, keep in mind
that it is likely you will be limited to text links and traditional
display ads (rich media or other). It is possible, with a minimum
commitment, that the integration may be greater, but likely still
not as far reaching as the CPA.

CPA models make the most sense when they’re related to a

transaction (such as a sale, form completion, or other action.) The
publisher takes on most of the financial risk because they believe
they will get a larger upside on the back-end, leading to a higher
effective CPM for their inventory. It’s not unusual to see effective
$1000 CPM deals on the back of a CPA deal, sometimes
unbeknownst to the advertiser.

Pure and simple, CPA is a math and risk game. Although it is in

the interest of the publisher and the advertiser to build a long-
term relationship that is mutually beneficial, it is important to
understand how the system works so you know which approach is
best for your target audience. You’ll also want to see that the
metrics line up so both parties can thrive.

CPA deals are often the most creative and effective at reaching
your target. Publishers are committed to integrating advertising
messages in the most appropriate spots for conversion. They’re
also offering more touch points (phone, email, and other types of
support) to ensure that a transaction is completed. However, you
must still know your metrics and the exact reach of the deal. For
example, a publisher may expect a payout if users who register on
their site first later convert with you. This can expose you to an
unexpected payout in the future, even if the publisher did nothing
more than just increase your brand awareness.

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Further, it’s wise to thoroughly evaluate any agreements that
include touch point controls to ensure that delivery is consistent
with your intended brand experience. Remember, these customer
experience touch points are associated with you.

Regardless of the level of risk and time required to set it up, a CPA
is a partnership that can yield great results for both parties,
especially if you don’t have a strong ecosystem or content strategy
of your own (and thus can’t generate the kind of traffic you need
organically.)

If you have an opportunity to do a CPA deal, don’t just jump at it

thinking, “Hey, we are only paying for results.” Even if you have
already done your homework and know your threshold cost per
acquisition, you could still get stuck with a long term contract that
forces you to pay $100 per customer, for example, when you have
been getting them for $20 using a CPM approach across all of
your networks. Equally costly, CPA does typically carry a higher
opportunity cost, so you expend more internal resources,
technology costs, and mind space to get a deal implemented.

Upfront risk is calculated into a CPA and CPC. It may not be the
best option if you have stellar metrics. Once you have a solid set of
performance metrics – from multiple publishers, ad types and
creative – you should consider whether moving away from CPA or
CPC toward a CPM approach that will get you the best ROI simply
because when you take on the risk, you get the benefit.

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 Chapter 3
How a Honey Pot Works
Brand alignment, authenticity and a compelling core value. Those
are the requirements for making a Honey Pot work. Without them,
your Honey Pot just won’t be sweet enough. Creating value for
users is the central goal, but alignment with that core is critical if
you want to be sure you reap the rewards of the value you create.
And without authenticity, none of this will fly.

Any online ecosystem can give you some visibility and generate
some traffic. What distinguishes a Honey Pot is that it’s an online
ecosystem cultivated specifically to impart value to your users in a
way that aligns with your core value. The result is something
better than just eyeballs. It means qualified traffic, better
conversion and retention, and better ROI.

First Things First

At the heart of a strategy based on authentic brand value there has
to be, well, a brand.

For a while marketers talked about the death of the brand – or at

least the death of brand loyalty. Certainly, it’s true we’ve seen the
painful death of some badly managed big brands in recent years.
It’s also true that economic downturns can make consumers more
price-conscious, putting their brand loyalty to the test. But the

47
brand dynamic is always there unless your business is completely
commoditized.

By commoditization, I mean that there’s absolutely no qualitative

difference between you and any of your competitors. It’s all about
who can offer the lowest price. A higher quality product or a more
convenient location or superior customer service – none of those
things make a difference because your customers are completely
driven by price.

If you are purely a commodity player, then you had better be

selling something relatively scarce. Otherwise, you’re going to
have to find some point of differentiation and fast. That
differentiation is what allows you to market your products or
services, and what distinguishes you from the competition. It goes
right to the core of your value proposition.

Cultivating a rich, sweet Honey Pot requires three things: brand

alignment, authenticity and a compelling core value. But in order
to pursue a strategy that leverages authentic brand value, first you
need to build authentic brand value. And that means you have to
be able to do three basic things:
 identify your core value
 develop a brand experience that embodies your core
 foster a culture that aligns with your core
These are the necessary prerequisites. Without them, a Honey Pot
– even if it’s well executed – just won’t work for you.

Identifying Your Core Value

Not everyone can easily articulate his or her company’s value
proposition. But if you’ve stayed in business for any length of
time, it’s a good bet you have one. There’s probably something
you’re doing right – whether by accident, by instinct or by plan.

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The trick is recognizing what your core value is so that you can
put together a strategy that really leverages your value. There is
simply no way to succeed with a Honey Pot strategy if you truly
can’t discern your core value.

So what is it that you do particularly well? What is it that you offer

that no one else does? What unique problem have you solved that
no one else even recognized? What is your story?

Communicating Your Brand Identity

Face it, mood boards are some of the best props to come out of
design studios. But your brand is more than a mood board or a
list of attributes. It’s more than your logo or tagline, and it is
definitely more than all the agency conversations you’ve had
about how to communicate your brand.

Brand is something intangible, but nonetheless powerful. It is, in

a sense, the real essence of your product or service – a set of
associations based on the public’s interactions with your product.

For years the common wisdom held that brand identity was an
image you could carefully craft. It was the impression you wanted
customers to have of what your products or services stood for. So
brand managers tried to create this idealized identity and then
advertising whizzes tried to persuade customers they wanted or
needed exactly what was promised by the brand. But it’s
increasingly hard to pull that off.

The days of simply running a catchy campaign for a completely

mediocre “New and Improved” product and then watching its
subsequent meteoric rise are long gone. The reality is that you
have much less control of your brand identity than you might like
to think. Customers now have the ability to talk back – more
easily and more publicly than ever. They won’t just talk to you.
They’ll also talk to each other.

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This means the reality behind that carefully crafted brand identity
will be readily apparent. So those who fill a real need, make a
totally great product or offer a truly unique service, can grow their
business – sometimes very quickly – based on word of mouth
alone.

Aligning Culture and Core

The notion of seeking “cultural alignment” with your brand is just
as important as recognizing your core and building a strong brand
identity around it. Aside from being something that can drive
innovation, “cultural alignment” is one of the things that will help
keep your messaging authentic. As an entity your company needs
to live the brand. The members of your organization need to
understand your core value and be able to express it.

Don’t worry if you think they’re not a particularly expressive

bunch. You can always have a third party help smooth the rough
edges, but you definitely need to make sure everyone in the
organization knows what differentiates you from your
competitors. That’s not only your core marketing message; it’s a
compass for day-to-day business decisions.

Distilling the Value

If you don’t have a compelling or differentiated core value,
nothing much in this book really matters. No matter how smart
your tactics are and how well executed they may be, without that
core value a Honey Pot strategy just won’t work for you.

A Honey Pot strategy can be a wild success when you have a clear
and compelling core value, but it’s tough to build an online
ecosystem around nothing other than an empty positioning
statement. The amazing thing is lots of clients come to us with
that compelling core but don’t even know they have it. We love
those opportunities when we can help unlock hidden potential.

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My agency, like many others, has one hard and fast rule about
clients: we won’t work with companies that lack a solid core value
because we believe an online ecosystem can thrive only if it is
built around that core.

It’s important to find your core. If you’re really lucky, it’s the story
that’s told in the marketing collateral. When it’s not, the best
thing to do is to strip away all the marketing jargon and see what’s
left. What was the spark that started the company? What was the
founder’s intention? Sometimes when you get back to that, all of
the elements you need to communicate the company’s core value
readily bubble to the surface.

Maybe the company founder was a scientist who needed precision

lab equipment to ensure the fewest possible variables in
experiments, so he started making his own because he couldn’t
find anything on the market that was good enough. There’s the
story behind a major equipment supplier.

Maybe the founder was a baseball player frustrated that he

couldn’t bend his pinky when wearing his mitt. He just wanted a
mitt that was a little more supple so he could feel the ball a bit
more. There’s the story behind a sporting goods manufacturer.

Sometimes the core value is at the heart of what drove everything

before there was any profit. It’s okay if the founders were looking
for some financial reward, but what was their real motivation?

Were they trying to solve a major problem faced by a loved one?

Were they fascinated by an idea for an invention? The truer the
story, the more it will help you communicate the core. If
somebody was just searching for a dollar, they could have gotten
that dollar any number of ways. So why did they choose this way?

You want to look for the heart so you’ll be able to decide when
value’s being added in the right places. Everything you do to build
the online ecosystem should be an enhancement of that core value

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– and not just an effort to get more traffic or higher conversion
rates. Those things may result, but they shouldn’t be the primary
focus.

Agencies typically go through some kind of “discovery” process

with new clients. We try to elicit the business goals. We review
what the positioning statement is and what the messaging has
been to date. We break down the business units into teams, then
we interview, research and summarize. The problem is, the usual
discovery process doesn’t always yield results that are honest.
When an organization has been telling itself a particular story for
a long time, staffers may come to believe it – even if it’s not quite
true.

Often, you can figure out what the core value really is by finding
the passion in an organization. That’s why we sometimes pay
more attention to the intangibles during discovery sessions. When
do the CEO’s eyes light up? When do the chief marketing officer’s
hands start moving enthusiastically? Sometimes the best place to
look isn’t even within the organization. What do the company’s
customers have to say about the core value of the company? Are
there feedback mechanisms? Can you intuit anything from
metrics that may have been gathered? Can you put some street
teams out there? Can you make the call to a friend who happens
to be a loyal user of the company’s product? Why does she use it?
What problem does the product solve for her? That’s another way
to find the heart.

But what happens if there really is no hidden heart? If you can’t

get down to a core value that you believe in – or one that you at
least believe can succeed in the marketplace – then you have some
serious work to do.

Figure out how to improve or enhance what you’ve got. Work with
your R&D folks. Find out who’s most closely aligned from a
cultural perspective and work with them to enhance your core

52
value. Take responsibility for making that product better, making
that service better and making the real heart come through.

Living It
In the best companies, the organizational culture aligns with the
core value of the brand. If you’ve got that heart, then let it show.
That’s authentic value.

Every company has its own back-story and a unique culture. That
uniqueness must be embraced to connect with consumers in the
new media landscape. It’s an essential part of establishing your
credibility.

A typical tactic in the past was to go after the mass market with a
brand identity calculated to appeal to the broadest group.
Although there are still some opportunities to do that, the middle
is really shrinking. The plays are on the fringes. And to reach
those fringes, you need to speak the right language. If you
understand their needs, niche markets will come to you – and can
spread like wildfire.

When your people are aligned with your core value, you have
credibility with your constituency. And, as an organizational
culture, you have passion, energy and clarity of purpose. That
passion and connection to the community are critical.

Say your business is building better bikes. Do you hire biking

enthusiasts or just people who are trying to earn a good living? Do
you attract outdoor enthusiasts? People who are intensely health-
conscious? You really should think about this because the mix will
start to affect your product – and your customer base – at some
point.

If your culture is aligned with your core value then let the
individuals in the organization do their thing naturally. The
people on your team must not only believe in your vision but live

53
it themselves so they’ll understand how they would want to
interact with your brand. Your team will be speaking the same
language as your customers and you’ll be able to build a more
credible ecosystem. You’ll make a natural connection with your
audience. That’s something you just can’t fake.

The Power of Core Value

For a number of years the web was ripe with marketing
inefficiencies (read, opportunities.) Some companies were built
on arbitrage plays as affiliates or as product companies filling a
void in niche markets. These companies relied on pockets of low
acquisition costs, maybe a super cheap remnant CPM or
uncontested pay-per-click terms. Although some of these
opportunities still exist, the best categories are taken, and a shift
away from media spend on mass advertising is squeezing out any
differential in converting inventory.

Recently, I helped a client negotiate what I thought would be a

challenging CPA deal because of the price expectation imbalance
illustrated in a volley of emails between our client and a publisher,
leading up to the talks. I prepared every data point possible based
on about a half a dozen scenarios, including various combinations
of percentage share of voice, data sharing, ad formats, email
frequency, transaction process and touch-point control. I noticed
the principal representing the publisher becoming a bit agitated
just as my client started talking about how they had cornered the
market.

This was odd. A bit of frothing (whether real or feigned) might be

typical when the deal numbers are being discussed. But we hadn’t
discussed any numbers yet, and the principal of the publisher was
a seasoned deal-maker. Such visible reactions were out of
character.

My client finished a clear articulation of his unique service and

was about to broach the numbers in an attempt to set a realistic

54
anchor. But the publisher interrupted to say, “Whatever it is, we
will find a way to work with you.”

Excuse me? Did they really just say that? In a nervously

enthusiastic follow-up to the unexpected, they went on to say my
client’s product was something they felt the market had needed
for a long time and that they had even tried to bring something
similar to market at some point in the past. They weren’t reacting
to the deal; they were having major “I-missed-the-train” pangs.

If you have a compelling and differentiated product that fills a

need, don’t underestimate the power of your position.

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 Chapter 4
How to Sweeten the Pot
How you grow your ecosystem – and turn it into a rich, sweet
Honey Pot – depends on what the core value of your brand is.
Even though you may engage consultants to actually build
elements of your ecosystem for you, remember that you know your
business, your customers and your core value. Don’t be pushed to
do anything that doesn’t align with your core brand identity.

There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to building a Honey Pot.

What works for you may not work for another business and vice
versa. So embrace the concept without trying to replicate it. First
try to understand your user’s motivations, needs, loves, fears.
Then do something original with your customer in mind.

We’ve seen that the fundamental reason why a Honey Pot works
is that it imparts value to its visitors. Whether it’s information,
entertainment or utility, there’s some type of value being
provided. Of course, the trick is not simply to attract traffic, but to
engage then convert and retain that traffic. So you need
something sweet enough to attract visitors and sticky enough to
keep them coming back.

This means you have two challenges: first, what can you do to
provide the value that will attract, and second, what kinds of
things can you do on a tactical level to ensure you close the loop?
Many of the same concepts you’ve always used in relationship

56
marketing will work here, too, but they have to support the value
strategy. Just pushing your messaging isn’t supporting value.

Remember that the whole point is to nurture an ecosystem that

will take hold and flourish – ultimately, delivering better margins
for your company. You’re in this for the long haul in order to tap
into the system you’ve nurtured and reap the real benefit of your
investment.

A “pull” strategy like the Honey Pot can definitely yield a better
return on investment over time, but you do need to give it that
time. While “push” marketing strategies can give instant
gratification, whether they achieve anything in the long run or
not, there is a certain amount of latency in many “pull” strategies.

Unlike spending on advertising, which is akin to putting gas into a

car (a never-ending demand, with diminishing returns),
cultivating your organic ecosystem and turning it into a Honey
Pot is an investment. Think of it as a capital expenditure on an
asset that appreciates.

I’m not saying there’s no longer a place for straight advertising

messages, but just that you can achieve more by finding ways to
impart value through the process of a user’s behavior. Then you’re
not just advertising to them – you’re doing something more
important. You’re providing value. This creates a real relationship
with your customers or prospects because you’re giving the user
more control over his or her environment.

Those with product to market, for example, can tell a story that’s
useful and engaging and based on what the user’s actually
experiencing at the moment or how they are aspiring to feel. So
the presentation of the product is really just an extension of the
user’s experience – rather than something that is abrupt or
disruptive.

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The Honey Pot strategy requires you to make a decision as a
marketer: do you continue to be disruptive so you can be in
control of the user, or do you look for ways to give value to the
user so that they’ll choose to stay in a relationship with you?
That’s a big shift in thinking, and a critical one.

Cultivating a Honey Pot

Your ecosystem will be as unique as your company and the culture
it serves. So there is no one, perfect formula for turning that
ecosystem into your Honey Pot, but there are some best practices,
which you may want to follow. The easiest way to understand
those is to look at examples of the kinds of things that typically
work well.

This isn’t, by any means, a how-to guide; it’s just meant to get you
thinking. Whenever you’re trying to decide whether a tactic makes
sense in your ecosystem, ask yourself two important questions:
“Does this align with the core value of my company?” and “Does it
add value for my customers? “

It’s easy to over-think what will and won’t work on the web. The
reality is simple: even though the web can be a viable revenue
channel when used as an extension of an existing business, there
are really three primary areas that work well on the web: content,
commerce and communication. You may find examples that fit
neatly into just one of these categories, and you may find hybrids
that have some element of all three.

 Content (Information, Education, Entertainment): This

was once a simple advertising (placement or sponsorship)
or subscriber play. Now many content providers have
found that the abundance of free proxy content combined
with lower-than-expected volumes (and/or corresponding
CPMs) requires a different monetization model. Those
different models include everything from intertwined
commerce and product placement to incentivizing user-

58
 generated content. There are a number of players that
have made it in this area as pure plays, too; however, more
prevalent success can be found with the hybrids – those
companies that own a lifestyle brand and leverage content
to build value for their constituents.
 Commerce/Savings: Across the board, commerce online
works and alternative commerce (such as auction sites and
social shopping) is growing at a faster rate. It isn’t just
Amazon. Savings and/or niche products also do quite well.
 Communication: Even though the field is crowded, the
potential for this type of venture isn’t tapped out yet.
There’s still room for expansion of online communities
and social networks. Collaboration platforms, in
particular, offer major opportunities going forward.

Brand Promise and User Experience

Before we get into specific tactics, one of the things we should
address is what kind of user experience is required not only to
keep the brand promise, but also to achieve the right balance of
engagement, utility and conversion. There should be at least an
understanding of what it is you’re trying to achieve.

Engagement is typically the first conversation that design studios

like to get into and it’s often the last. What’s the level of
engagement? What’s the brand story? What content could engage
the user and pull them into that story? The answers will depend
on the brand.

In some respects, the nature of the enterprise can determine the

overall level of engagement. A major movie studio, for example,
might be able to get a level of engagement that’s ten times as
strong as what a successful B2B manufacturer might be able
achieve with their audience.

59
Obviously, you want to create a user experience that’s aligned
with the brand and suitable for the user (meaning that it works
within the culture of its target market.) And you want to consider
whether it provides any utility. The utility factor, ultimately, is
what imparts value. But that utility can be provided in many ways.
It can take the form of information, a feeling of esteem,
entertainment or useful tools of some sort.

What provides utility to users depends entirely on the community

you serve. It could be something that helps your users do their
job, something useful to their households or something that helps
them enjoy a personal hobby. The kind of utility you provide to a
business audience might be something that gives market insight
or digs deeper into a service offering your company has that could
benefit their operations. An example of a utility app useful to
households might be something like an income ratio calculator
that allows a consumer to figure out their ability to finance a large
purchase. Or you can offer utilities that touch people’s personal
passions. Say you manufacture surfboards. What will surfers find
useful? Maybe a “wave cam” that lets them see the waves at
popular beaches around the world?

The goal for any utility you provide must be to enhance the user
experience and/or solve a particular problem and/or enhance a
feeling or experience The utility is also in the content itself, which
can be authoritative, informational or just wildly entertaining.
What value can you impart in terms of adding to a user’s
knowledge? And can you do it in an entertaining way?

Another aspect of this is conversion. Although we usually think of

conversions as specific actions like requesting a quote, buying
something or signing up for a feed, depending on how long your
sales cycle is, your conversion goal might simply be to get users in
the loop. This way you can continue to build a relationship and
execute a transaction with the user at some point in the future.

60
Getting the user in the loop can mean an actual e-commerce
transaction, but it can also mean getting them interested in
signing up for your house list – with a specific value that’s offered
– and helping you build segmentation in that list. Or generating a
sales lead that can be scored and sent to your CRM.

Experience Isn't Equal in All Forms

User experience isn’t just the interaction design on your website
(although that’s especially critical for purely online plays.) It’s the
whole customer experience – the smell at the threshold of your
location, the inflexion in your customer service rep’s voice, the
sincerity of their smile and the texture of the floor. Even the toilet
paper in the restroom.

We live in a world where product and services are becoming

increasingly commoditized. So the ability to provide a unique,
relevant, and engaging experience may be the sole surviving
differentiating factor for some companies. The ability to transport
a customer to another world becomes your responsibility. They
aren’t just paying you for your wares – they are paying for love,
for excitement, and often for the chance to fulfill a perceived
identity. Your ability to provide them with a visceral experience
relies not on a wow factor, but on an intuitive understanding of
the intangibles that make up your brand and touch your
customer’s soul.

Don’t underestimate the value of user experience nor assume that

user expectations of experience are similar across online and
offline media. Further, don’t expect that the merging of two or
more media is going to yield an experience similar to either
individual medium.

Experience in the physical world has higher value because all

senses can be engaged. It’s easy (and this is particularly true for
those of us in the interactive industry) to focus entirely too much
on the digital experience. But even though we are certainly going

61
to see more digital signage tailored to a viewer’s individual
identity (yes, think Minority Report), the physical world will still
take precedence.

Our experience in the physical world engages obvious senses such

as smell and touch. Attempts have been made to simulate those
aspects online, but they just can’t stimulate the emotions and
provide the same degree of engagement. Especially when you add
in the impacts of the intangibles – like intuition, pheromones,
wind shift, a genuine smile from a customer service rep, and so
on.

The long and short of it is this: what you do to enhance the online
user experience also enhances the brand by leveraging the utility
value within the brand itself and sharing it with your users. So
even if users can have a physical experience of the brand, you still
have an opportunity to improve overall ROI with the online
experience – and it’s generally a far more cost-effective
proposition.

Surprise! Users are Human

The funny thing about users is that they are human. Agency types
(and this is true whether we’re talking advertising, marketing or
interactive agencies) can get wrapped up in professional debates
and obsessing over client deliverables like complex wireframes,
heuristic evaluations and in-depth quantitative analyses. But the
reality is that there are so many intangibles and so many different
dimensions making up a user experience that you can never
completely define it with the deliverables. Even qualitative
feedback from user testing may fall short. These artifacts are just
studies that help us explore the user experience we want to
provide.

Frankly, a lot comes down to feel. That’s why you always want to
work with an interactive agency that gets engaged and thoroughly
enjoys solving problems. They must connect with your product

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and be able to sense what’s right or wrong with it. Does it have a
richness to it or is it minimalist, and does that clean, simple
quality adequately reflect the brand? Remember, a blank screen is
one thing for Google, but it’s not necessarily going to work for
another brand.

Not everyone will think about your brand the way you think about
it, but that ability to get into the user’s mind has everything to do
with your success and the alignment of your brand value with the
user experience. Every choice creates an experience that adds or
subtracts from your brand’s emotional bank account.

Online Brand Extension

Expect widely varied results when extending your brand online.
In fact, if you are the owner of a single mom-and-pop or a small
chain, be careful. An online player with a streamlined
infrastructure may undercut a well-trafficked regional brick and
mortar retailer whose core value proposition revolves around
price.

Even a seasonal retailer, with great in-store merchandising, may

find that providing a unique experience on the web has its limits.
On the other hand, professional services can thrive online. A two-
man operation that offers network consulting with a
differentiated approach, for example, can become a national
brand.

First, you need to decide if digital is your primary channel or a

support channel. Once you’ve decided on the web’s role in your
business, you can determine how your brand may fare online by
considering your core DNA. Pick one of the three known success
zones – content, commerce or communication – and leverage it.

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How to Grow an Ecosystem
There are some other things you need to be thinking about
beyond the fundamentals of brand value. Is your message clear?
Are you offering the real value your customers need? Are you
providing increased value in each touch point with them? Are you
giving them enough value through your conversation that they
perceive this relationship to be a benefit to them?

Here’s a concrete example of giving value. When you send out an

email blast, are you just hawking your latest offer or are you
respecting the customers who opted into your email list by
providing real value to them? Respecting your audience means
you hold up your end of the relationship. You don’t just target
someone. You get to know what their role is and what’s important
to them, then you provide them with something that will be of
particular interest to them.

Talk of the decline of loyalty has a lot to do with annoying or

irrelevant push-based marketing tactics. The essence of pull-
based marketing is natural attraction – which is exactly what
we’re talking about here with the Honey Pot. You create brand
value and people seek it out. Ultimately, this approach requires
much less of a financial investment than the old tactics and
results in better retention.

Think about it this way… instead of having an advertising

machine that needs to be fed more and fed more often, you’re in a
situation where your initial investment is compounded. The value
you create actually helps create more value; there’s a snowball
effect. In the end, the value you add to your ecosystem adds value
to your brand.

Ecosystem Tactics and Synapses

The specific tactics that create the user experience form the
framework of the organic ecosystem. Some of these tactics might
be used on the main website, while others might be used on other
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areas of the ecosystem – for example, on an extranet (sometimes
a multiple-permission level extranet), on an intranet, on a
microsite or a family of microsites around specific events or
issues, on landing pages, in applications (both on-site, platform-
specific applications and off-site applications that are self-
contained), in search (both paid and natural), in email newsletters
sent to your segmented house list or to a partner’s list in a co-
branded message) or in some direct email.

There’s potentially a viral or social component in many of these

tactics. Some, like news releases, also tie into your online PR,
influence and outreach efforts. There may be mobile tie-ins as
well, and alternate distribution, including affiliate and
syndication. Then there are a lot of traditional tie-ins. Depending
on your particular audience, guerilla tactics may also be fruitful.
Web-based, mobile, print and broadcast advertising can also help
by driving traffic and getting users into the loop. A digital
approach calls for customer-focused, two-way communication,
but there’s still room for traditional print or broadcast media to
act as stimulators, even if they’re no longer your main tactics.

Extranets and Intranets

An extranet is a good way to provide things like tiered pricing for
your distributors. It also allows you to create secure login areas
where your consumers can manage their account or their orders.
Really, you can create any type of workflow that’s consistent with
what your business offers, and bring it directly to the user – often
cutting a tremendous amount of overhead and opening up new
opportunities for feedback channels.

You can gather tremendous insights from extranet usage patterns.

We recently built an extranet site for a client containing
compliance material. It allowed them to see what materials their
users were requesting and what paths they were taking. We built
in some fairly extensive reporting features so they could monitor
the flow and see exactly what the interest areas were for

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compliance. This allowed them to optimize training for their
software based on the needs or interests expressed by users.

That level of responsiveness kept users engaged through the

training material – long enough to show them the benefits of
additional functionality they weren’t using yet.

What you do with an extranet or intranet component, of course,

depends entirely on your brand, but both provide a good, solid
communications platform that can have substantial utility value.
On the other hand, we’ve often seen far too much invested in
company intranets with little return. If your people are very
attuned to what’s happening in the digital space, then the intranet
might have more value – or a whole lot less, since there are many
other online utilities competing for their attention.

Say you’re a manufacturing facility, where 85% of the population

comes in for a shift, does their job and leaves. They might not
hang out on the intranet reading news, but they might take
advantage of HR forms libraries and benefit summaries posted
there.

Landing Pages
Landing pages are a wonderful tool for testing different
campaigns, optimizing pages and experimenting with where to
put forms. You can even optimize on the fly, tweaking your
messaging and getting an instant read on results. Landing pages
allow you to do multivariate testing on larger volume campaigns.

Applications and Widgets

Applications and widgets are another type of component that can
be important to the organic ecosystem. Savvy marketers are
finding that offering things of value not only improves brand
exposure and awareness, but also brand interaction.

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If your company’s product/service lends itself to developing your
own media, why would you spend millions on display advertising
when you could put a quarter of that budget into content
development that supports your niche base?

For instance, when I was a kid, I used to go into a nearby surf

shop to pick up a small pamphlet that listed the local tide tables.
The pamphlet contained the surf shop’s branding and other
marketing related content. Yet, those tables were so useful to my
friends and me that we never minded having the store’s brand in
front of us.

In our present-day connected landscape, there are more ways to

provide that kind of utility than ever. What if I could order a
Domino’s pizza with one click on my refrigerator screen – then
see the GPS coordinates of the driver when I want to check on
delivery status? Or what if I’m out volunteering at a Life Rolls On
event and I’m so overcome with emotion that I want to donate,
but I don’t carry checks or cash, and they won’t take credit cards.
It would be nice to hit a Charity Navigator app on my phone and
tap in the amount I’d like to donate.

Neither of these examples is at all far-fetched. The point is that if

you truly understand the needs of your market segment, you can
give them amazingly useful tools that improve their lives. Just
make them effective tools that are a natural extension of your core
brand value. As with all ecosystem extensions, the goal is to
provide users with functionality they need or want, but in a way
that suits your brand. Maybe it’s a calendaring or a time-tracking
wizard, some kind of really specialized calculator or another
helpful tool. Whatever it is, it should convey your brand value.

This is really wide-open territory. You can have large-scale,

enterprise-level apps that solve a workflow problem, or quirky
little widgets that act as small, highly specialized applications
providing a very unique utility value. Applications and widgets
come in many forms and can be provided to users in many ways –

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as downloadable, self-contained components or hosted on your
main site, on microsites, or even on partner sites.

Platform-specific apps – such as for Facebook, MySpace and

other active social sites – are continuously evolving, always
staying just ahead of the curve. That makes doing platform-
specific applications a little harder, but the trade-off can be many
more impressions served. Not only do you get more brand
impressions, but you also get them cheaper than you would if
you’d had to go out to the market.

If an application is strong enough, it’s something that can stick

with the user for a long time, too, which is another reason to make
sure that the application is a natural extension of your core brand
value.

An application that gets lots more impressions, but does nothing

to tie back into your brand does little good because there’s a total
disconnect. It’s a wasted opportunity.

Microsites
Microsites are another great extension. They are a natural place to
feature event-driven material or to provide a very specific
functionality or tool set. You can also develop microsites on
separate servers, so they function more like unbiased resources
that can help drive additional natural search results back to your
core site. Creating a strong, unbiased microsite can allow you to
build a reputation. When multiple people link to an unbiased
resource that, in turn, links back to your core website, it
ultimately raises the ranking for your core site as well.

Because corporate websites often get bogged down providing

information and links to multiple product lines and services,
compliance requirements and investor relations pages, microsites
can become areas where companies are able to build the most
brand engagement. On their microsite, companies are free to

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think like their audience and give that audience what they want
and need.

Email
Email is another tactic you want to coordinate within your overall
ecosystem. This includes auto-responders associated with very
specific on-site actions taken by the user as well as scheduled
follow-up emails based on where the user might be in the sales
cycle. Email also includes things like cart reminders,
confirmations and receipts, as well as more crafted messaging like
e-newsletters.

The important thing to remember about developing newsletters is

making sure you don’t go outside of a contact strategy that you’re
really comfortable delivering. Make sure it’s providing valuable
content and not making announcements of little use to the user.
Also make sure that the communication is as consistent with the
brand as anything else you do. The site, the extranet, intranet,
microsites, applications, search and all the components of your
ecosystem need to be as consistent with your core brand
messaging as possible. You’ll see the best return on investment
when you’re coordinating all these elements.

There are a number of things you should keep in mind as you

develop your email strategy:

 Value – This is perhaps the single most important factor.

What are you giving the user in exchange for their time?
The content of your emails needs to target what’s
important to them and demonstrate an understanding of
their mindset. The days of an auto-responder or e-
newsletter with no value-add are past. This means you’re
in the value-creation business, but once you are thinking
in terms of what emerges naturally from your brand, this
isn’t the burden it would seem. However, you want to
consider whether your plan is sustainable. Remember that

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 you’re going to need to increase that value over time to
keep attrition low while increasing sign-ups.
 Frequency – The timing of mailings is important: How
long between each mailing has everything to do with what
value you are pushing in the email. Are your users willing
to consume what you can deliver daily or weekly? If so,
they may welcome frequent mailings.
 Segmentation – If you can provide strong enough
incentive (such as a free app, a white paper or a special
offer, for example) during the data gathering process
(whether it’s a profile, an application, or newsletter sign-
up) you will be able to segment your list further. This is
hugely helpful in targeting your communications and
making sure you are providing appropriate value based on
user interest.
 Delivery – Use a hosted solution instead of managing the
data in-house. The primary reason for doing so is
deliverability. Credible hosted solutions have close
relationships with Internet service providers (ISPs) and
can help ensure that your IP address is white-listed.
 House List Email –Even if you have permission, I can
guarantee most of your readership will not be waiting for
your email. If you want to get through, you need to provide
a lot more value in exchange for their time. Otherwise,
you’re just intruding. Emailing in the individual age
requires some finesse. It isn’t the old days when you could
rent a legitimate list of 2M names and email en masse.
 List Rental – Remove “rented list” from your vocabulary.
Building a verifiable opt-in email database of users that
are explicitly interested in your brand is the best way to go.
A tightly woven co-branded email is a respectable runner-
up. List rental is a very distant third. If you cannot build a
decent house list of your own, it’s a better strategy to do a
joint, co-branded mail campaign using a partner’s list

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 (provided you can find a solid partner that’s a strong fit in
terms of lifestyle.) If you still insist on renting a list, here
are some things you’ll want to find out up front: How often
is the list mailed to? What are the results? What are the
deliverability metrics? What have typical open/click-
through rates been? Who are the other advertisers using
the list?
Whenever you have an opportunity to partner with a publisher or
another house list owner, try it. Mix your house lists together and
send out a co-branded mailing that benefits both parties. As long
as there’s no direct conflict between your offerings, it only
enhances the efforts of both.

Search Marketing
Search engine marketing has two aspects: natural search
(visibility in search engine query results based on
relevance/ranking, also called SEO) and paid search (pay-per-
click ads that appear adjacent to natural search results also called
SEM.) Putting a good foundation for natural search in place on
your main website is an absolute requirement. Paid search is
something you might use tactically. One of the great benefits of
SEM is not just the traffic it can bring, but also the fact that you
can use it as a type of testing mechanism and get results that can
then inform natural search and overall messaging. SEM can also
be useful to provide coverage for your SEO campaign by filling in
gaps where your rankings fall short for important keywords.

SEM (Paid Search)

You can do a lot of keyword research prior to running any actual
campaigns but, ultimately, seeing which keywords or buckets of
keywords are converting and garnering the greatest interest is
more helpful. Paid search can give you that kind of intelligence.

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There is one thing to consider if you go the paid search route
looking for conversions: long-tail search means someone is that
much deeper into the sales cycle (and thus more open to your
message.) So it’s great to go a little bit deeper using multiple
words in the keyword phrase. The users searching with more
detail will generally turn into more qualified traffic. Broad
keyword searches will generally indicate people in the early stages
of the sales process so you’ll need patience and may need to
consider these keywords more of a branding method. Remember
to invest in your branded keywords. Even though you should
rank high for your branded phrases in the organic results you can
block out competitors by buying up branded phrases.

Say you’re an auto manufacturer and you’re putting some

advertising budget into Google AdWords to create excitement for
a new hybrid car. You might not want to pay for search ads
associated with the generic keywords “car” or “cars” because
people searching on that kind of generic term are most likely not
far into the sales cycle at all. But compare that to somebody
searching for “crossover hybrid 270Z with a 4.2-liter” and you’re
looking at someone much deeper in the cycle – someone who’s
likely pretty close to finding a dealer and asking for a quote.

Another consideration with search marketing is balancing your

efforts with both paid and organic tactics. There is a documented
brand lift and increase in conversion rates when you appear both
at the top of natural search results and in pay-per-click ads
relevant to that search, but achieving that kind of mutual
reinforcement depends on staying abreast of how the search
engine algorithms evolve.

Do your research when you’re selecting niche keywords. Look into

whether there’s high or low search volume on them. Also bear in
mind that these search ads can act as standard display
advertising. So you may decide to provide a message from a
branding perspective without expecting conversion. If you can
stay competitive and fairly high up in the ranking, you can get

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some brand exposure without necessarily paying for all the click-
throughs on the page.

Paid search campaigns can often get better ROI by targeting many
different, low-volume niche terms rather than just a few high-
volume generic terms, because the higher volume terms can also
be more expensive. This is still a very effective way to market for
now, although there may soon be less opportunity as everyone
catches on to this.

It should be noted that we’re talking mostly about Google here,

because it’s got the lion’s share of the traffic right now. Again, that
might change, but as of this writing, it’s still one of the main areas
that you’ve got to consider, along with Yahoo, bing, Ask, and
MSN.

SEO (Natural Search)

If you’re building an effective organic ecosystem, you’ll get the
most results in terms of natural search performance just by
following the most accepted best practices – designing the core
website with a logical structure, logical page structure, search-
friendly content management system, proper keyword weighting
within the content itself, and well-formed, descriptive metatags,
including page titles, descriptions and keywords. Internal anchor
text is also important in helping the search engine spiders
understand what your site’s pages are about. Be sure to use
keyword-rich phrases when linking internally.

Further, by doing things the right way, you’re also giving the user
more value. When you find a site that offers precisely what you
were looking for, particularly if you’ve been frustrated by visiting
other sites that don’t, you feel a positive sense of accomplishment.
The whole page-ranking strategy that Google has built is about
creating a reputation ranking – that’s typically based on the value
to the user, traffic to the site and reputation of inbound links for
that particular location.

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If you want to build a real Honey Pot, you want to deliver exactly
the right kind of value to users (both people and bots) based on
your brand. That means coming up with unbiased, valuable
content that’s able to suit the market. Looking in obvious places
may yield surprising results. For instance, you may find a useful
manual, an offline database, or stacks of attribute rich spec sheets
to build out content and value for the user. If you do that, you’re
going to get unbiased, highly reputable inbound links, which are
going to help improve your ranking. The best way to succeed in
natural search is to offer good value and put a solid technical
foundation in place.

That’s not to say you won’t need to do some ongoing optimization

and monitoring, including a lot of nuances from domain aging on
down the list. But, ultimately, following best practices means that
a good deal of natural search performance has been baked into
your organic ecosystem from the start.

It is pretty important that you begin managing search right from

the start of the process. Do some keyword clouds upfront as part
of brand discovery. Talk to users about your product and
understand what’s really being searched for. This kind of research
is invaluable. You may find that how users search – and how they
think about your product or service – is very different from the
way you talk about your product or service. For this reason search
can actually help fine tune your messaging overall.

Viral
It seems that the love affair with viral is far from over, so if you
decide to go this route, make sure that the entertainment you
provide is in some way related to your products or services (see
the Will It Blend? video from Blendtec: www.willitblend.com.)

There are all kinds of formulas out there for viral success, but the
reality is that even if you follow them slavishly, the chances of you
having a viral breakthrough are still pretty slim. There are a

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number of intangibles that come into play, among them: timing,
execution, the idea itself, the value of the idea, the culture it
targets and whether that culture will actually facilitate the speed
of the spread. It may not, depending on the market that you’re
going after.

Though there are a lot of factors to consider, they can be thought

through, giving you have a greater chance at success. But keep in
mind that it isn’t as simple as creating a video – and boom! –
you’re the next viral success on the Internet. There are hundreds
of thousands, if not millions, of people attempting to do the same
for themselves and their businesses. More often than not,
companies actually do more damage to themselves with a poorly
executed viral attempt.

The fortunate thing is that most of the failures won’t spread very
far. Of course, if it is forwarded because it’s such a great failure,
you’re still not going to be getting a positive brand impression. So
be careful attempting a viral strategy. Know that there are
formulas out there for success, and try to play within them.

Most importantly, don’t be bland. If your ideas start to play it too

safe then viral may not be appropriate for your brand. By the
same token make sure that you viral marketing ideas don’t hurt
your brand. This is an opportunity to have fun with your brand
and extend it, but do it in a positive manner.

In the end, a lot really depends on your culture and your brand.
The higher your brand loyalty is, the greater chance that you have
for a viral success. We typically opt for utility more often than
viral engagement – not just because it has more long-term value,
but also because it makes more sense to be able to articulate or
connect more closely when you’re aligned with the brand itself.
Utility tends to do that more effectively. But again, this ties into
your brand.

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Online PR
This includes planting posts, mentions and comments in blogs,
forums and social shopping sites. Injecting your brand in the
social space can be effective, but remember that the game has
changed. It’s still about publicists making contact with the media,
issuing press releases and holding event-driven launches – but
the definition of media has been greatly expanded. Publicists now
work on developing relationships with influential bloggers and
citizen journalists, too.

The upside of this is that connections are much easier to come by

and develop. Now, you may have to connect with three citizen
journalists, one niche publication, and any number of followers
you’ll need to cajole into spreading the word. But, since your
message is much more targeted and already filtered by experts
and actual users, when it spreads, it spreads because it should and
not because you lunched with the right connection.

There are two important rules that will keep you from
embarrassment here. First, remember that this is a social
medium. So your people – not your company – should be doing
the seeding. Second, remember not to butt in where you’re not
wanted. Have you ever been deep in conversation with a close
friend about an arcane, inside event and someone who only heard
the last sentence jumps in on the totally wrong track? That
person’s credibility is shot, and, worse, they don’t know it. Apply
this concept to social networking. There are conversations that
started hours, days, weeks, even years ago and if people are kind
enough to let you in, you better understand the context. The good
news is, new conversations are starting everyday and you can be
an authentic part of them.

Another piece of good advice is this: make good associations. Just

like when you were a kid, if you hung out with a certain crowd,
teachers, parents and your peers would perceive you to be of like
caliber. In the new landscape, business connections are similarly

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transparent. It’s critical for businesses to make the right
connections.

This may be no surprise, but the companies best suited to help

you with online outreach and influencer outreach are actually
traditional PR firms. It’s in their DNA. Unlike traditional full-
service agencies, which are facing a challenge in shifting to the
web, PR firms seem to have made the leap fairly gracefully. That
may be because their business was always about relationship-
building. That lends itself really well to navigating the social
networks and making contact with influencers such as bloggers.

Online PR really has two aspects: social interaction and news

releases. News releases provide you with great natural search
exposure regardless of the wire source you use. Particularly good
pickup for your release in reputable news outlets gives you even
more bang because backlinks on higher-reputation sites can boost
your overall search rankings. That can increase traffic for you and
also get you into some of the social or news marketing sites like
Digg. The potential residual exposure you can get from improved
SEO ranking as a result of backlinks is great – and it only
increases the return on your original investment.

I would suggest putting some of the pieces of the ecosystem in

place before you go out and try to stimulate activity. You need to
have the hooks to ensure that activity is going to be continuous
and ongoing. You also need to have a website that’s able to
provide some level of engagement, able to share some utilities or
tools with users, and able to stimulate a conversation – whether
it’s among users or with the company – via commenting or
feedback mechanisms.

The key is to have something there to keep users coming back. To

use a retail analogy, you don’t want to send people into a store
that’s empty. No matter how big the sign is outside, if the store
has nothing to sell, there’s no reason to be there and absolutely no
reason to come back. Just as importantly, you need to be able to

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close the loop with email and other contact strategies. Make sure
that as many of those components as possible are in place before
you do too much outreach.

Communities and Platforms

The first rule here is that you can’t build a community. They grow
organically. The second rule is that communities are also
fundamentally tribal. Thus, the tribe leaders are the big
influencers. If you, by some strange twist of fate, become one of
those leaders, remember that dictators die hard. So allow dissent.
In fact, hug it. Hug it until it no longer exists. You will have a new
client/customer and respect from all in attendance. One thing to
keep in mind is not to foster a community around your brand if it
already exists elsewhere; this may actually threaten your
legitimacy.

Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, WordPress, wikis and

other similar networking platforms can be enormously helpful.
But we’ve seen too many marketers put up a Facebook page on
their company and then ask all their employees to go and become
fans of it. It’s obvious the company is forcing its employees to be
fans and that gives a negative impression.

It’s more important to consider whether Facebook is even the

right outlet for your brand. Does it lend itself well to brand
loyalty? Everybody wants to have brand loyalists. But you need to
think about what your product does, think about the culture it
serves. Is that culture truly intertwined with your brand on a
regular basis? If so, maybe Facebook is the place for you. If not,
leave it alone.

LinkedIn on a B2B level is a little bit stronger for marketing, sales

and human resources efforts. There is definitely potential for
creating applications that can improve the business workflow
there; that might be interesting enough to ultimately yield some
activity for you. Just don’t lose sight of what the brand value is.

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Social opportunities aren’t a magic bullet that will solve all of your
marketing problems. Product won’t suddenly be flying off the
shelves just because you do a Facebook page or app. But it is good
if you do create an application that has great value. It should have
that value first and foremost, and the value should be closely
aligned with your core brand value. That will get some exposure
and has some viral potential, too.

It’s really the same story with Twitter. It’s about getting some
exposure. Twitter is interesting in that there’s this great uptake,
but there’s also huge attrition. And you need to consider the
ongoing maintenance that is required if you have your CEO or
another prominent member of your team constantly tweeting.
There is also potential negative fallout if the activities of some of
the core people within the organization are not necessarily aligned
with some of the messages that you’re trying to deliver to the
market.

Imagine you’re out there knocking on doors at the Department of

Defense, saying, “We’ve got a really squeaky clean team and that’s
why we’re great for government contracts.” Then your executives
are tweeting about being out all night drinking and partying.
Don’t pass up on the exposure if it makes sense. But consider how
it’s going to tie in with your brand and whether it’s really
worthwhile.

The same is true for seeding activities that occur outside your
brand ecosystem (or at least outside the areas of the ecosystem
that you maintain.) This includes things like postings to forums
and conversations via commenting fields on other sites. Make
sure the people who act as social seeders understand their role as
brand stewards. See that they have the right messaging and are
able to converse in real-time with people while keeping brand
values and beliefs intact through the conversation – as well as the
ability to proactively solve problems as they come up. The latter is
particularly important. If your representative engages with the

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public and then can’t deliver a solution, you’re going to lose
credibility.

When they see issues come up in message boards (and they will)
those seeders have got to have the authority to be able to solve the
problem or at least fix it (up to a certain budget limit or a certain
crisis level.) They have to be able to fix things immediately,
without red tape, because by the time it needs to go through
multiple levels of approval, the conversation has already moved
on. Readers will be left with the negative idea of whatever the
issue was and a negative association with your brand stamped in
their minds.

Can’t you go back and fix it? Yeah, but it’s probably going to be
too far down the thread to make any difference. That’s why it’s so
important that you be able to address those types of things
immediately and give people the authority to do so. Have
individuals active in the blogosphere and make sure they identify
themselves are members of your company. This is necessary to
maximize your exposure in blogs and maintain credibility.

There are many opportunities to do that as well as tie in directly

with your corporate blog. If you have something to say on a
regular basis, it’s a great way to get it to the market. It’s a good
opportunity for expression in an informal setting. You should not
use the blog as a way to publish, say, key medical studies, but it
can be a way to give people insight into your brand in real time.
You can use it to show them what some of the possibilities are.

A corporate blog is still very much an informal gateway to your

brand, however. Keep in mind that if you start to formalize it and
put structure in place there, you may be losing the pure purpose
behind the blog itself. Once it’s subject to the same controls and
pressures as your main corporate site, it’s going to have less value.

The other important aspect of the corporate blog is overhead.

Make sure before you start that there’s a long-term commitment

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to keeping it freshly updated. This is a multi-year commitment
that may not pay dividends for months or even years. There’s
nothing sadder than seeing an abandoned blog, where no one’s
posted or commented in months. That tends to say nothing much
is going on anywhere in the company – even though it’s probably
due to the fact that you are too busy to post.

Another aspect of the corporate blog that can be challenging is

making sure you have outside links coming in as well as
comments going out to other blogs. This stimulates activity
between bloggers and also helps you in terms of search visibility.
But it also takes a fair amount of time. One final bit of advice…
seeding is fine, but remember that you want a solar-powered
machine or at least a hybrid, not a gas-guzzler. If you find yourself
having to put gas in the tank too often, then reassess your
strategy. The topics need to be engaging for your team as well as
the audience which will keep everyone engaged.

Online Advertising
With online ads, it’s a little more challenging to impart value.
You’ve got to serve a higher level of engagement in the ad, but you
can impart value through the rest of the organic ecosystem via
utilities and content. So, spend your energy on the creative
elements of online ads, including the storytelling, and focus on
being able to engage the user. Again, while your online advertising
needs to be in alignment with the brand, this is the one area
where you don’t need to be as serious. You can have a bit of fun.
Reach out to your core in places that they wouldn’t expect to find
you. Many studies have shown that advertising out of context can
be much more effective because your ad will be differentiated
from the rest of the noise on the page.

There are specific things you can do with online ads that are more
effective. For example, in scene one you can do an engagement, in
scene two give a punch line, and then in scene three have a call to
action. That pattern has proven successful in online advertising.

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Just keep in mind that you need to maintain a very high level of
engagement in online advertising.

Mobile
Engagement includes things like iPhone apps, mobile platform
advertising and streamlined versions of your site/microsites
planned specifically for use on mobile devices. Inherent to many
new mobile devices are GPS systems. The proximity detection
makes mobile even more critical for multi-location business like
restaurants, insurance agents, and retail chains

There are some smart, new ways to impart value with mobile
applications. Obviously, there are great successes coming out of the
iPhone, where you’re getting millions of downloads for very specific
applications. The cost to develop some of these popular apps can be
anywhere from $10,000 to $250,000 – but you’re getting many,
many, many times the return in impressions on a long-term basis
than you would if you just put that money into traditional
advertising. The advertising dollars could be used up in a couple of
weeks, whereas these applications might be on the users’ iPhones
for years. And that includes the maintenance cycle for some of these
applications, not to mention all the data that you collect from them.
There are wonderful opportunities here.

Alternate Distribution
Opportunities includes affiliate marketing and procurement
intermediaries, as well as submission to social venues and
comparison engines. Although you may make significant headway
building your own user base due to providing value-added tools or
other content to your lifestyle segment, leveraging existing user
base holds a lot of potential. Map out the touch points of your
lifestyle group first. Are they using comparison engines? Are they
frequenting content sites that are well off your radar?

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Depending on your content strategy, there could be potential
syndication of content that you’re producing or utilities that
you’re developing. This can perpetuate your brand message, drive
house ads through to you, and even help you work together with
partner companies to create some kind of co-branded
applications. Syndication is a great way to get things to market
and get distribution for your content and the thought leadership
that you’ve created.

Affiliate advertising is another way to go. It’s primarily for

product-related companies on the consumer level, but you get
some brand exposure when you’re getting distribution through
their efforts (in exchange for sharing a piece on the CPA level.)
You do need to take steps to maintain your brand. This means
watching to make sure that affiliates follow your creative
guidelines and style guides. You don’t need to go to an affiliate
network, either. You might be able to develop relationships
directly with a couple of other sites and tie them into your brand,
give them a great value for working with you. There are other
alternate approaches you might consider as well, based on your
brand and what makes sense given the community it serves.

Traditional Tie-ins
Traditional methods of advertising continue to hold their merit if
you are using them in a way that draws the user into an extended
conversation with your brand. Think of the traditional advertising
process as nudging users toward your brand and its online
ecosystem. Once they’re within reach, you can pull them in and
convert them.

Awareness-based advertising is a decreasing margin endeavor, so

you certainly don’t want to devote the majority of your budget to
it. Worse, it not only doesn’t add value, but also takes something
(time, attention) away from your customers and prospects. You
want to be adding useful tools and enjoyable experiences, not
stealing something from your customers.

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With that said, advertising, in some form, is often required to get
things started. In small creative doses, it can kick-start the
introduction of your value to the market. Here’s an example.
Many multi-channel retailers use direct mail and/or catalogs to
reach out to potential customers. Typically they print a glossy
product catalog with lovely, unrealistic lifestyle shots that are
often disconnected from the customer. The message, essentially,
is buy this product by calling this 800 number or visit our website
to place an online order. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with
this. In fact, it may be required for profitable conversion numbers.
However, why not engage your precious prospects or customers
with something that touches their senses or stimulates pass-
alongs? It won’t be interactive, but it can be engaging.

Suppose you’re a jewelry company and you want a high gloss

catalog. Instead of doing a standard 11x17 fold-over that won’t,
why not print the catalog on a dozen or so postcards that are held
together with a neat elastic band? It could even be something that
doubles as a bracelet (potentially a bracelet for a cause.) The cards
are separate, so they can be passed out among friends or
significant others. People may hang onto them and use them as
hints near a birthday or anniversary. Each can have your site URL
for web orders, as well as the 800 number for telephone orders.
You could even punch out one of the cards to use as a ring sizer,
kept by the boyfriend for a future date that may or may not
include a proposal. And, instead of hammering the customer with
product, give them a story behind the company and the product.
The tale of how your buyers found a special piece, for example. Or
how about a card for designer bios? You can create a card that is
all about one of the employees who personifies the culture of the
company. You are not only creating goodwill among your staff,
but also subtly tying the characteristics of the employee to the
strengths of the company. That’s positive brand reinforcement.

You can do a lot of things creatively with some of the traditional

mechanisms, but the goal is really, more than anything, to get
these media flowing into your organic ecosystem so you don’t

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have to continue to pay on an impression level. By stimulating
activity, giving users ways to engage with your content, and
providing a feedback mechanism, you’re actually creating more
activity, more comments, and more content and utility usage.
That’s going to give you data on user activity as well as user-
generated content, both of which enhance the organic ecosystem.

In their early days, Patagonia used to provide some great articles

and how-to instructions in their catalogs. This was a way of
relating to the people who were at the core of their connected
culture. They were doing nothing more than sharing with their
peers. Finesterre is doing something similar today in the surf
community. They feature articles about real watermen, not
necessarily the most sponsored or most attractive, but they
combine that effort with related interest stories and relevant
product.

But, too often, when capital comes first, efforts are driven entirely
by conversion needs, and those are too often driven by
operational missteps behind the scenes, such as running ahead of
the market with staff size or capital investments. The Patagonia
case was classic – a simple product created by people who wanted
to make their climbing and their friends’ climbing safer. Their
laboratory was established after they already had a loyal
following. But many companies who try to copy the Patagonia
formula lack that core of authenticity and heart. They disregard
what’s best for their customers (and ultimately their brand) over
the long run in exchange for short-term conversion
improvements.

No wonder customers jump ship so quickly. Brands are

commoditizing themselves right out of consumer hearts. Think
longer term, and if you are part of an organization where the
culture is truly aligned with the core value, you can rest assured
that what is in your culture’s best interest is likely also in your
customers’ best interest.

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A Honey Pot strategy means looking out for the best interest of
the customer – so that everyone comes out ahead. If you are using
an in-store kiosk, for example, don’t just install one to save on
customer service time unless you plan on passing along that
savings to the customer. If cost-savings is within your company
DNA, then the customer will accept the skimming of service in
exchange for an enhancement of your value proposition. If not,
they’ll just be annoyed at the wait time.

And make sure that kiosk can be used to get public reviews on
products, browse inventory across stores/warehouses, review
service history and compare prices. Don’t think for a second that
your users will remain uneducated. If you neglect to provide them
with the information they need, they’ll just get it elsewhere – and
possibly make their purchase there, as well.

This kind of thinking can translate into improvements across all

your marketing channels. If you are doing outdoor displays, why
not put the forecast on the billboard? You can select the best days
to visit your theme park, museum or restaurant on the water –
and then do something unthinkable – give an alternate suggestion
on the less appropriate days, like stay home and color with your
kids. Remember, people are shutting out your messages anyway.
So if you can’t be memorable, at least be useful. Ironically, that’s
what just might make you memorable.

Need an idea for your company-based CD-ROMs? Stop printing

them. Maybe you’re thinking that if you could just get one in a
prospect’s hands, you’d be virtually guaranteed their undivided
attention. It’s not true. Maybe you think that at the very least it’s
an additional brand impression, a coaster, or a Frisbee. It isn’t.
Those CDs are too slippery for coasters because there is this weird
cohesion thing that happens. Plus they really hurt when you get
hit with one (I have; it may have been yours.)

If you really want some mindshare and must have that CD, then
follow a Honey Pot strategy and give something of value as the

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primary impetus, not as a trick to get a user engaged. Include a
full version or pre-release of something, provide useful tools or
software. You can even entertain users with a video that can be
repurposed for other venues (such as online or at a tradeshow)
Just remember, it isn’t about you. It’s about them.

Another important point, don’t blindly mail existing customers

your latest product extension promo. If your customer just bought
a white plastic mailbox from you, are they going to be in the
market for a black mailbox? Probably not, but they might be in
the market for a new fence or a new welcome mat. Put yourself in
their mindset and deliver accordingly. Don’t be afraid to
collaborate with other companies that can deliver value for your
customers, as well.

Communication Strategies
Honest communication of your core value is absolutely essential.
Exaggerated claims get you leads that aren’t qualified or that you
aren’t qualified to serve. That wastes a lot of time, too, because it
gives you the impression that you might be getting more activity,
even though that activity doesn’t convert (or worse, converts into
unhappy customers.)

Communicate Your Core

What’s the core messaging you want to convey throughout the
ecosystem? Maybe you have different messages for different
market sectors. B2B websites often have to do multi-layered
targeting so they can address different application verticals and
speak to retailers/distributors while also addressing consumers.
B2C websites may want to message, a set of specific personas,
based on a particular product.

It’s important to make sure that the components of your

ecosystem support your messaging. For example, if you say that
you have the best customer service, then the customer service

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mechanisms on your site need to be robust. Or, at the very least,
you need to have an account section on the site that anticipates
major concerns and provides a smooth, streamlined flow so
customers can have all their questions answered quickly and
easily. The functionality you provide has to be consistent with
what’s been promised by the brand.

This meets the user’s expectation of the brand and also creates a
home for tactics that will bring users back. It’s fine to serve the
brand expectations with self-contained applications, but you do
want to make sure that users still flow back to the website. It
doesn’t need to be everything to all people – you can use
applications, landing pages, extranets, intranets and microsites in
the extended ecosystem – but the main site should serve as a hub.

Have a Conversation
Your communication strategy should flow from core value and
cultural alignment. It’s really important to understand that you’re
not trying to create a broadcast platform. Rather, this needs to be
two-way communication. In other words, conversation. This is
something that many marketers are talking about and feel they
need to be doing, but they just aren’t sure how.

Use Search for Research

Individuals reveal intent through search activity, making it a
wonderful resource for research into what your users want. Don’t
just use keyword research for your paid and natural search strategy,
but also for uncovering trends in your space. Are users searching for
a phrase in greater volumes than you would expect in your industry
vernacular? Are there heavy searches on keywords even when there
is no competition for them? Are there search queries popping up
where no solution exists? Keyword trend research can give you
some interesting insights. For example, you can do a side-by-side
report of keywords that are ranking well for competitors and
driving traffic to their sites, but falling short for you. This

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intelligence will help you do some tuning. Also be sure to measure
the impact of branding and other direct response campaigns on
your branded search campaigns. Remember, the point isn’t to look
smart, but to communicate effectively.

Stop Talking! Read and Listen

Remember, your brand communications can no longer be
monologues. They need to be part of an ongoing conversation
between you and the individuals who choose to participate. So stop
talking and learn to listen.
This new approach to marketing requires all the cleverness of the
past plus the ability to think in another dimension. Today’s dialogue
is open. Whether users speak to you in clickstream, transaction or
spoken words, they want to be heard (and responded to.)
Similarly, pay attention to reviews and ratings. These are also ways
to hear customers – or potential customers – talking to you. You
can become part of the conversation by injecting yourself at a
micro, not macro level.
For example, say a customer posts, “I received my shipment from
ABC three days late and missed my wife’s birthday.” They posted it
not just on their blog, which would have been bad enough, but also
on an e-commerce review site. A proper response deals with the
problem first: “I am Jane from ABC company and we sincerely
apologize for the late delivery. We would like to do blank to make
up for it.” Then there might be an opportunity for just a little apple-
polishing: “ABC prides itself on blank.” What would a totally
improper approach be? It goes a little like this: “ABC company
provides great customer service. Click here for a 10% off coupon.”
That’s worse than comment spam.
Keep your ear to the ground and gather up intelligence by listening
in. There are many online vehicles that can be your barometers:
blogs, search trends, buzz meters, community forums, reviews,
ratings, profiles, and so forth. Ignore them at your peril; they are
often the voice of your customers. Call it proactive customer service.

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You might not have a process for it, yet, but with or without you, a
discussion is going to happen. Will you be part of it?
There’s a tremendous amount of feedback available that can be
gathered from blogs, review sites, your own boards, or from any
feedback mechanisms or utilities you have on your site. It can also
be revealed in your site metrics – what the clickstream is, where
people are connecting, whether there are any social interaction
points on your site or off-site.
You can also do a lot of monitoring of search trends as well, based
on what people are talking about and looking for. That’s going to
give you quite a bit of feedback on how you can improve your own
messaging. Even something as simple as keyword intelligence or
back link analysis can reveal the things users are looking for in your
brands.

Converse to Succeed
Although companies do have control over a number of the
ecosystem areas, we are quickly coming closer to a connected
landscape where the most a company will be able to do is create
value and let it work its way through integrated channels naturally,
ultimately leaving you with nothing more than an ongoing
assignment of monitoring the adaptation of your brand and
tweaking the output objectively. So instead of having a day filled
with running A/B tests, modifying copy and running focus groups
for messaging feedback, a marketer’s day will likely increasingly
involve working with the R&D and customer service team.

Truth
It all comes down to honest and clear communication and
knowing your own core. Users want to know what they’re getting,
and they’ll appreciate clarity. So, are you selling them fun? Are
you selling them a solution to their problems? Are you looking to
give them a utility that makes their lives easier? Don’t tell them

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about something that doesn’t exist, don’t exaggerate, and don’t
over-dramatize.

Ultimately, when you deliver an honest message, you’ll get such

wonderful information to improve your product and brand, and
you’ll get continuous praise as a feedback loop. This can be really
positive for your internal culture.

I love the old movie Crazy People, with Dudley Moore, just
because it’s such an exaggerated account of what can happen to
your brand when you start telling the truth. Moore plays an ad
exec checked into a mental hospital by his employer when he
breaks under the stress of the business. The other patients in the
hospital help him write a new batch of ads – which accidentally
get sent to print. Of course, sales go through the roof and the
agency wants a piece of the magic that Moore and his new friends
created. That magic was the truth – yes, our product tastes like
crap, but it might save your life. Who wouldn’t believe that?

What’s the Story

Do you have a story? Is it authentic? If your business began as a
solution to a problem, is there any real emotion tied to that
solution? If the answer is, “well, a half-dozen of us sat around the
conference table dissecting Gartner/Forrester research and we
determined that this product/service was needed” – well, that’s
not much of an emotional story.

If the answer is, “my Dad couldn’t get out of the chair because of
his hip arthritis. He is a proud man and it hurt me to see the
defeat in his face when he had to ask for help to get out of a chair.
So, I used my background in mechanical engineering to design a
comfortable chair that uses simple physics to help a person get to
his or her feet.” – then you just might have a story that people can
relate to.

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What is the reason, the motivation and the desire? If you figure
this out, you will likely uncover a story that can be interesting and
inspiring.

Positioning
So much time is spent figuring out how to position your brand in
the market. But sometimes the positioning just doesn’t matter.

The exploration of positioning is certainly a good exercise for a

new product or company launch. For existing brands, however,
your position is what the market has already determined it to be –
and the best thing you can do is understand and embrace it.

Trying to be something else requires retooling of your

organization and changing your value. This is perfectly okay and
in fact some evolution is always good. But don’t confuse value
exchange with telling the market you provide a value that only
moderately exists just to get a larger market share or to drive a
wedge between your competitor and your customer. Your DNA is
your DNA. It’s uniquely yours and it contains some destiny.

If you find yourself positioning, it is likely against a perception or

perceived threat.

Content and Contact Strategies

Your content and contact strategies also factor into balancing the
ecosystem and how it relates to your brand. For example, if you’ve
determined that your particular audience needs a very high
knowledge value, then your strategy will be driven by a need to
provide informative, research-oriented content – something that’s
actually building up that value in a way that meets audience
needs.

At the same time, you may need a contact strategy that keeps the
user in the fold if there’s an exceptionally long sales cycle. So,

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interspersing bits of content according to a timeline – on a
quarterly, monthly, or even biweekly basis through the sales cycle
– will potentially result in increased conversions.

But again, this is not about making sure your users have more
advertising in front of them. You don’t want to be bombarding
them with messaging when they’re not ready for it yet. It’s about
creating content that’s valuable to users – whether it’s produced
directly by your firm, drafted by a hired copywriter or syndicated
from other sources. There are other ways to provide your user
with value through content, too, by leveraging user-generated
content, as well as widgets and things of that sort, if they fit with
your brand.

The advantage of a strategy based on providing content that

doesn’t need to be highly produced (such as the content developed
directly by your staff, syndicated content or user-generated
content) is that you can continuously impart value at a very low
cost, at the same time tying that in with a low-cost contact
strategy via email. That supports your contact strategy because it
will allow you to reach out to a user with purpose and reason. The
continued contact will keep them in the sales cycle and keep your
costs low.

While there are sites that have real gold in terms of native
content, not everyone is going to have that kind of material to
offer. Don’t automatically sell yourself short, though. If you have
an office full of engineers, you might think you’re really going to
have a hard time coming up with compelling content, but maybe
the best behind-the-scenes and how-to content can come from a
solid engineering staff. If you don’t believe that, check out the
magazine Make.

One thing that’s essential is to make sure you have a clear set of
objectives before you try developing your content strategy. Unless
you need to speak to a highly technical audience, keeping your

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content bite-sized is the most important factor after remaining on
brand message.

Other questions to ask yourself: Are you trying to be sticky or

convert visitors? What types of content assets are actually
available?

Regardless of your strategy, keep it short and keep it relevant. It’s

also a good idea to seed your content with important keywords.
You may even want to think about things like syndication.

Remember that developing an in-depth content strategy isn’t for

every company. If it isn’t in your DNA – and, just as importantly,
if it’s not useful to your audience – then don’t force it. Just work
with a publisher to get the impressions you need elsewhere. But if
you do have natural talent or content that creates an experience,
then by all means, use it.

One final caveat on content. It’s tempting to count entirely on

user-generated content to build your site. But don’t. First of all,
the number of active contributing users on the web is a lot lower
than you probably expect, and for any specified demographic it
could be significantly lower. Second, many of those individuals
need a stage for their expression –whether they are doing it for
popularity, or notoriety. Unless you can provide a sizable
audience, you won’t be an attractive venue. Moreover, without a
large audience, it’s unlikely you can find a democratic way to
determine whose contributions should rise to the top. This lessens
your chances of building out a content base with user-generated
contributions.

Feeding and Syndication

Almost every company has a blog these days. But in order to
syndicate that content, it needs to be unique and valuable. The
question is, “Does my target want to read it?”

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Before you jump to build feeds or line up syndication partners,
consider whether your particular audience is really hungry for
your content. Providing an RSS/Atom option without first
considering the value of the content to the end-user could hurt
your credibility. If you get it wrong, it tells the user that you don’t
understand what is important to them. Instead, it might be better
to offer drill down feeds if your content hits multiple targets with
different objectives. Another consideration is, will a feed of your
news give more value to your customers or to your competitors?

Making Contact
Your contact strategy needs to be just right. Although there are
other means of maintaining contact, it’s likely that your online
ecosystem will be tied into email and/or RSS. To create the
optimal contact strategy, allow your visitors to tailor their
experience. After asking for first and last name, and email
address, add some secondary steps for segmentation by areas of
interest, and ask for a desired frequency of communications
(daily, weekly, or monthly.) Remember the parameters: too many
mailings and you will have high attrition; too few mailings and
recognition may wane.

Depending on your content strategy, the frequency for reaching

out may be predetermined. For example, if you are pushing
newsworthy content daily, then a condensed daily mailing may be
in order. If you find that the user checked lifestyle and left
business unchecked, then make sure you design your email to
bring the most relevant lifestyle information to the top of the
screen page – above the fold. Also keep your typical sales cycle in
mind as you craft an appropriate call-to-action. You can almost
drill it down to a one-to-one level, or at least to a specific segment
of the total population within your house list.

You may have predetermined actions in your CRM system that

dole out emails based on certain milestones in a sales cycle or
based on events in the CRM. This approach is usually most

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appropriate for business-to-business players with heavy lead flow
and a large, fragmented sales force.

Bottom line, you want a contact strategy that will balance

immersion with function. You want contact to stay on-message,
even in the nooks and crannies (metatags, form validation
responses, auto-responders.) And you want to make sure it:
speaks to the target and their mindset; matches their place in the
sales cycle appropriately; provides an appropriate experience;
picks the right spots aligned with core value; and delivers on
brand promise – no more, no less.

Expect Assumptions
One particularly important point to keep in mind as you plan your
contact strategy is that you are building up expectations among
your users. If you ask for contact information with every reader
request, then users will likely expect you to get in touch with them
at some point in the future. This assumption may even prevent
them from bookmarking you, either they assume a connection has
been made or because it requires more effort – and you’ve already
used up some of their goodwill making them fill out your contact
form. Follow up quickly. 48 or 24 hour return phone calls and
email autoresponders aren’t fast enough anymore.

Conversion Strategies
Most metrics and analytics efforts look toward one primary goal –
conversion improvement. For the sake of clarity, let’s define
conversion here as anything that leads to a goal action – be it a
lead, a sale, a newsletter sign-up or a registration.

First and foremost, keep your conversion strategy simple. The

best way to improve conversion is to steer clear of confusion. Be
the horse with blinders on. Keep attention focused on the core
message from initial brand touch (banner, search result or other
contact) through their action.

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It’s natural to want to tell the whole story, and you will get an
opportunity to do that once your conversation begins, but for
right now you have the fish on the hook and throwing more bait
into the water won’t help you land it.

Keep your message/creative/branding consistent from touch

point to landing page or microsite, and create simple form-
integrated landing pages (often centered forms have the best
conversion.)

Create stepped forms for long sign-up processes to gather core

initial data. At a minimum, get first name, last name, email, and
opt-in permission. This allows you to market to that individual
later even if they get distracted or disenchanted with your sign-up
process. If you need to provide more information than a landing
page to convert the user (depending on the value you are looking
to pull from the consumer), then develop a concise microsite
around the offer or value proposition. But be careful not to stray
from the offer and don’t put too much information out there
prematurely. If you must drive users to your main site, make sure
there is a clear path with a call to action that is relevant to your
primary driving message and make sure that message supports a
specific user goal.

Another way to improve conversions is to keep as tight a profile as

possible around the personas that you have predetermined. By
doing this, your message will be more concise and the value that
much higher for each user.

Performance Tracking and Metrics

The great thing about the online ecosystem is that it actually
allows us to measure how things are going while we’re at work
engaging audiences and imparting value. Metrics tracking is an
essential part of your infrastructure. Everything – all of your
various strategies and tactics – will be pulled together by tracking.
You’ll want to get metrics for two reasons. One is simply that

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you’ll need metrics to further the relationships with publishers
and partners. And second is that you’ll be using metrics yourself
to adjust your ecosystem tactics. Metrics can tell you where the
greatest ROI is now, and then show you change in ROI over time
as the ecosystem gains steam.

That said, while analytics are important, the numbers themselves

are not always critical. Their importance is determined by what
kind of company you want to be. Do you want to be a marketing
company relying on efficiency or a company that serves up a
compelling value? Focus on the intelligence you get out of metrics
more than meeting some arbitrary benchmarks for traffic levels or
click-through rates. Ultimately, less volume of more qualified
traffic is always better than more volume of less qualified traffic.

With the dizzying array of measurable bits and bytes available, it

is no wonder that companies often get mired in not only analytics
implementation, but also in coming up with a process for
reviewing, analyzing and presenting metrics that initiate change
in an organization. New methods of turning analytics into action
pop up all the time, but typically, we are making this more
complex and arduous than it needs to be.

The change curve (combination of business strategy, brand

position, product/service, user needs, and site changes) for most
organizations is still evolving too fast to benefit from analysis of
arcane data that may improve conversion by 2% if and only if all
other variables stayed the same. Instead of getting swept away
with sexy pie charts and the newest analytics buzz words, focus on
what matters. Develop key performance indicators (KPIs) based
on absolutely critical business metrics. Ask real questions like, did
the average sale increase? Is our cost per acquisition increasing or
decreasing? Where exactly on a contact form are we losing
people?

If your site is not transaction-oriented, your questions may

revolve more around brand exposure or time. How long is the

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average session? What was the interaction level and time with the
AJAX/Flash application? How many visitors were repeats?

Do yourself a favor and ignore everything except your key

performance indicators. Keep focused on the questions that
matter. I have seen way too many managers at good companies
stall on progress because they get caught up in worries about
conflicting data points. After much debate and a lot of wasted
time, most end up going with their gut anyway.

It’s also a good idea to make sure the analytics tools you put in
place are able to get you what you need, not more. The sheer
effort required to get complicated metrics tracked accurately with
a plethora of moving parts surprises most companies.

A few of the well-known, enterprise-level packages are

WebTrends and Omniture. But don’t discount a simpler solution
like Google Analytics (GA.) GA was adopted quickly by a lot of
small and medium-sized companies because it was free, but larger
organizations are considering it, too. It’s hard to ignore the
simplicity of integration combined with a focus on metrics that
really matter.

While they may lack some of the bells and whistles (like funnels
and conversion-oriented tracking) many of the analytics packages
that come with hosting services are actually quite sufficient for
many companies. Add in the Google Analytics tracking code and
you will probably be able to satisfy some of the most demanding
KPIs.

The most important thing to remember as you build out your

ecosystem is that you’re making a long-term investment here.
You’ll want to come out of the box with the best-architected and
designed ecosystem you can – creating an ideal user experience
across the entire ecosystem that really ties in with the brand
experience and employs the best set of tactics, applications and
utilities to engage users. But, chances are, you’re going to have to

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do this incrementally. You’re going to have to show stakeholders
that there are high levels of engagement and that your acquisition
costs are better than previous campaigns. You’re going to have to
defend the ecosystem until it starts proving itself.

This is where metrics really come in handy. The numbers can help
you make an argument against wasting advertising dollars. Yes,
the real reason you want analytics data is for continuous
improvement of messaging and user experience. But metrics will
also show you ways to optimize the tactics you use and help you
figure out which tactics work best for your brand. Like a living
organism, the ecosystem is a very flexible, malleable thing. As
trends change, tactics can change in response. As new
opportunities arise, new mechanisms can be added.

When you can justify this all from a metrics standpoint you’re
going to find that you enjoy your job more. Creating a positive,
brand-reinforcing effort will be imparting more value to your
users, bringing more value to the market in general and lowering
marketing costs in the long run.

Ultimately, what we’re looking for the ecosystem to improve

marketing by making a positive impact on the economy in
general, the individual economies of companies and the cultures
within those markets.

Balancing the Budget

What you do as far as tie-ins will ultimately rely on budget (in
most cases, at least.) How do you decide what portion of your
budget should go to the core elements of the online ecosystem and
what part to the traditional tie-ins? The tie-ins are only meant to
act as stimulators to drive people to the ecosystem itself, but they
can be critical in starting the snowball effect that the organic
ecosystem tends to have.

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If you’ve got a generous budget, you can afford mechanisms to
engage rather than simple call-to-actions and trade ads. But it
really has a lot to do with what your brand is, what your market is,
what your culture’s open to. If your budget is tight, then you’ve
got to put most of your money into the organic ecosystem itself
rather than these traditional tie-ins.

You don’t necessarily want your marketing dollars to drive what

your messaging or your medium is, but often that’s just the way it
works. So depending upon where you are, whether you’re B2C
with a high engagement factor or B2B with a high call to action or
a long sales cycle factor, you’ve got to weigh that in when you
consider how to use some of the other formats. Keep in mind that
you’ve got to get people into that ecosystem and keep them over a
relatively long period of time. You can do that with a compelling
core value.

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 Chapter 5
Where This May Lead
Where will Honey Pot thinking take you? Hopefully, toward
higher ROI, better retention and greater brand loyalty. And, in the
long run, maybe to some other positive changes as well.

It should be said that there are likely consequences to excessive

Honey Pot thinking. Your technical staff might actually start
enjoying this new sense of having a conversation with your
customers. And when they make that kind of connection with
your customer base – well, it has been known to cause innovation.

It’s also possible you’ll stop thinking of marketing as something

separate from the core “real business” of the company. Once that
happens, your marketers may start suggesting lots of ways to
improve your products, and you just might see the marketing and
product teams cooperating more. Again, it’s been known to
happen.

Other interesting changes can occur as well. The consequence

that’s the most exciting to me is this: putting more emphasis on
creating value can lead you towards developing your own
intellectual property.

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Integrated Consumption
While I’ve focused mostly on interactive here, the reality is that
there is more and more integration across different media.
Integrated marketing takes advantage of that. Yet consumption
behavior still differs across different media – TV, radio, PC,
mobile and print . It’s important to understand the best use of
each medium, because that will help you determine what provides
the most “value” to a user in a particular medium.

Here’s an example. Ever use your iPhone or another mobile

device to view a website? Sure, it can be useful, but you don’t
really want to do that all the time. Scrolling madly to see a whole
site in tiny pieces gets annoying pretty quickly. But while most
users may still prefer to go to a full screen to experience a full site,
that’s not always practical. So you scroll madly for a while – and
then you start wishing the website would provide a streamlined
experience with just the functionality pertinent to you when
you’re in a mobile state. Say, just enough functionality to search
for a product or find a store location directly through the mobile
device.

This is why iPhone applications have really taken off. They solve
problems in ways that are uniquely relevant to the user in a
mobile state. Take, for example, the Sit or Squat app. The folks
who came up with this originally brought their idea to the web as
a rather idiosyncratic blog. They’d been online for a year or more
with fairly limited visibility. But as soon as they came up with an
iPhone app, the name was suddenly everywhere.

Why? Because an app matched the utility value of the idea

perfectly. When you’re on the road, you really do want to know
where the best and cleanest restrooms are. And what better
medium than a mobile? Using this app when you’re parked in
front of your computer makes little sense, but when you’re on
your mobile phone? It’s brilliant.

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Another thing that’s interesting about integrated consumption of
media is how much different media cross-pollinate each other.
Commerce and content have started to mesh, too. Add semantic
tools to the mix, and you get something with amazing potential.
When you can discern a user’s intent on the fly, based on what
they might be watching or reading or listening to, you can offer
them highly relevant product and even have the ability to tie that
back to a CPA calculation.

The sooner you see that there is little division among different
types of media – just unparalleled and ubiquitous access to your
audience – the sooner you can think creatively about how to
engage and deliver more value at different stages of the buying
cycle

Wireless broadband, widely available cheap screens, a trend

toward unified search and other factors have led to simultaneous
multimedia consumption that’s even blurring the line between
online and offline. You might think you are offline, but you’re not
really. That new billboard you look at while you’re stuck in traffic
is getting fed real-time weather data and switching from water
park advertising on a sunny day to movies on a rainy day. Plus
you’ve got a web-enabled GPS device that feeds traffic data, a
watch that resets with the tides, and a cell phone sending you
coupons for local eateries when you drop pins for restaurants on a
Google map.

And this is just the beginning. Integrated consumption isn’t just

cross-media integration. It’s also a combination of interactive
experiences and tangible/non-tangible concepts that are a lot less
linear than we might imagine.

Here’s another possible scenario – a user looks up the Mets score

via mobile after missing the game the night before, and there
happens to be a link to video of David Wright’s bottom of the
ninth home run to win the game. Maybe, just maybe, the user is
interested enough to watch a 12-second clip. So you may be able

104
to squeeze in some links for Mets merchandise and tickets, or
even the top ten plays of the week. But I wouldn’t put all my eggs
in one basket. You just can’t place an ad in any given format, walk
away and expect money to roll in.

It’s your responsibility to think, not just filter down to select the
best publisher to work with. Build a rich online ecosystem that’s is
completely integrated in both the physical and digital space (not
just media-based.) Then use selective media buys to stimulate
activity.

We are approaching a stage of merging media types. TV bleeds

into the Internet, where there are tie-ins to radio and print, and so
on. Even outdoor billboards and in-store kiosks have gone digital,
which means they can integrate all the more easily. There’s a
meshing of content and commerce in media – and it’s all coming
together into one harmoniously perfect experience.

Shifting Logistics
Some of the smartest companies out there are making the move
toward nimble manufacturing and niche products. They’re
removing themselves from the middle of the chain and putting
themselves at the front or the back of it, perceiving that the value
proposition of being an enabler will only belong to a chosen few –
the efficiency machines.

It means making an about-face on a fifty-year-old business

strategy, but trend-savvy companies are retreating from choices to
use China and other developing nations to manufacture a large
number of mass marketable SKUs. Instead, they’re designing and
developing their own unique product lines and then built them in
their own facilities, many in small batches, on demand.

From customer service to fulfillment, the standard formula for

getting product to market and servicing it has changed. What
used to serve as a barrier to entry is now a ready-made, pay-as-

105
you-go path for intellectual property to speed into the market.
Furthermore, the ability to shift mindshare to differentiating
factors, rather than expending it on repeatable processes (like
fulfillment, customer service and distribution) allows a greater
focus on specialization.

Companies like Shipwire and Amazon exemplify this. Shipwire,

an order fulfillment and warehousing solution, helps e-commerce
companies stay lean. They’re able to fulfill orders for very small
quantities of a wide variety of SKUs. In effect, they can use their
core value to complement yours. Send a pallet, a gross or even just
a dozen, and Shipwire will take care of the rest. From
warehousing through shipping, the entire process is available on
demand, so you can send as few SKUs as you like and pay as you
go. They have an API that allows you to connect your web store or
catalog operation directly to their order fulfillment process, so you
can bounce back status to your system to pass through to the
buyer, making the entire user experience and customer
management process seamless.

For a long time now, it’s seemed that Amazon is one of the
ultimate efficiency plays. They stock, store, distribute and fulfill –
and they do it smarter and faster than anyone else. They also
deliver efficiencies with a solid matching, search and
recommendation system that squeezes as much revenue out of a
potential customer as possible. Their core value isn’t
merchandising or customer experience; it’s their system and
process. Recognizing that core value, Amazon now offers direct
use of their customer service, warehousing and fulfillment to
others. You can add products directly to their database. That
connects you with their highly effective matching system and
imparts a high level of credibility.

Offering their real core value to the market in this way was a
smart move on their part, and one that can benefit you. But with
acquisitions of famously customer-focused companies like
Zappos, Amazon has also shown an understanding of what’s

106
possible with a completely different model – one that depends on
a deeper level of user engagement and more social transparency.
Zappos, in particular, cultivated a powerful amount of goodwill
and customer loyalty simply by exposing the heart of their
corporate culture and showing what was in their DNA. They built
a culture of authenticity and alignment, letting customers see that
their core values actually drove the way they did business.

No Barriers to Entry
Today there is a way to get product/services to market on even the
smallest scale. In the past, due to prohibitive infrastructure costs,
you needed to hit a certain number to break even, but now you no
longer have to look to the mass market to develop products. It is
now possible to be profitable with very few pieces because there
are so many avenues to get product to the consumer – micro-
webstores, collectives, digital malls and even mini-spaces within
retail stores.

Faced with the alternative of mass-produced product and brands

that are becoming more and more diluted, consumers are turning
to individual producers. Additionally, consumers who are
individual producers themselves or might aspire to be one by
nature are loyal to the individual producers.

What may have started as swag on Cafepress has evolved

artistically and culturally to such a new level that even some of the
most well-known brands are having trouble retaining the talent to
design their product. Why would a designer commute to work for
a salary that they could double on their own? Why would they
work for a boss who constrains their creativity when they could
have complete freedom? There are some exceptions, of course,
especially with complex product. However, even those rules are
changing. We are getting more and more connected, and those
with genuine stories and real talent have a direct and ubiquitous
connection to a market that wants their products/services.

107
Monkey in the Middle
From retailers to brokers, the value of the middleman is being
replaced by enabler systems, including automated matching
systems and knowledge bases. A middleman used to be a
necessary translator and provider of basic information for
complex purchases, like buying a home, an insurance policy or a
diamond. But much of the translator’s value is negated when
enabler systems can offer a clearly defined process with necessary
information and an ability to save money, too.

That’s why many web-based business are automating business

processes and connections to create greater value or more speed.
The cost-savings that result ultimately get the end-user closer to
the end-producer (whether that end-producer is an insurer, a
manufacturer or the other side of an equity or bond trade.)
Although the need for middlemen will persist, the role itself will
continue to get tougher.

Need a few examples? In finance, look at E*Trade. In insurance,

SelectQuote. Looking for diamonds? BlueNile. Need a business
broker? BizBuySell. And in real estate – well, there are so many
examples in real estate, it’s hard to pick just a few.

Less Infrastructure, Less Investment

A resurgence of individual producers, a glut of efficiency
platforms, consumers hankering for unique product. How can a
business that once relied on a large middle market expect to
thrive or even survive? One way is staying nimble with less
infrastructure investment. We live in an age where market
validation can be tested without setting up factories, call centers,
or going through an 18-month ERP installation. Scale when you
are forced to support a rapidly growing business, not to create
one. Sheer scale doesn't necessarily bring customers or clients,
but it does cost money to maintain.

108
The same is true when it comes to enriching your online
ecosystem. You don’t need to build out all the elements of your
ecosystem at once. Remember the 80-20 rule (Pareto’s Principle):
20% of your efforts will most likely yield 80% of your success.
That’s true more often than you’d think and that’s why I often
counsel clients simply to look for that one “thing” that will get
them the most bang for the buck. By the “thing” I mean the utility
application or whatever it is you come up with that will yield the
most impact. “The thing” should be something that’s completely
aligned with your culture, has value because it addresses a real
user need and can elevate your brand by hooking into a current
trend or touching something in the psyche of your users.

Renewed Focus on Intellectual Property

As commoditization flattens the business world, ideas become
increasingly important landmarks.

Infrastructure is commoditized, customer service is

commoditized, and distribution is commoditized. Even user
experience has limits in the long tail economy. So what now?
Focus on your intellectual property. What is it that you can do or
produce that no one else can?

Do you have an intellectual property pipeline? You better. Build a

base of solid intellectual property – be it content, a design, a book,
or a new product. Originality is key, but so is connection with your
markets.

It’s safe to assume that shortly after you come up with some nifty
business concept, someone else will figure out how to do it better.
Even small, incremental improvements get to market quickly and
easily these days, then spread like wildfire. That means it’s
absolutely critical to focus on creating more value in your
products and services themselves, in ways that are essential to the
lifestyle of your products/services.

109
A combination of factors has led to intellectual property – ideas
themselves – becoming more critical than ever. These factors, as
mentioned throughout the preceding chapters, include the
commoditization of infrastructure, nimble manufacturing that
can create small runs of unique products, fulfillment houses that
will ship tiny quantities of only one or two items, and, most
importantly, the ability of consumers to connect directly to the
products they want. Something they can now do from many
different platforms, including the web, phone and mobile device.

A lot comes down to the fact that it’s getting harder to get margins
just by finding faster or cheaper ways to run your business, but
there’s still market opportunity for smarter (better vetted, better
aligned, problem-solving) ideas.

At the end of the day, all of these technological innovations are

leading people toward products in a way that lowers acquisition
cost to the point where the long tail economy really can ensue. A
product can now more closely resemble that unique fingerprint of
the individual. And we’re not only talking about personalized
product here, but niche products. While these niche products
appeal to smaller markets and account for less volume overall,
they can yield better margins since the web provides a cheaper
avenue to markets.

We’re also seeing the inevitable flattening of the supply chain as

the web lets consumers access manufacturers directly, often
completely cutting out retailers and distributors. Companies don’t
have to go through the process of coming up with a distribution
infrastructure and a channel for it, because the overall
infrastructure’s already commoditized and available.

Because of collapsing supply chains, intellectual property itself is

becoming even more critical. To find value, you need to focus on
developing intellectual property that solves a problem and is
needed in the marketplace (or partnering closely with those who
do.) Ultimately that promises more longevity, because regardless

110
of what happens as your supply chain flattens, you have the ability
to at least own the primary value to the user.

As we get more direct access to these products, the value of sales

and marketing itself is also getting flattened. People can now get
connected with product in a fashion that gives them more value
with less messaging.

Maybe right now there’s still some way that your company can
bring goods and services to market more efficiently than your
competitors can through automation. The best hedge against
losing that advantage is to leverage your core differentiator.
Develop your own intellectual property and be the best so you can
be the only.

The one sure way to thrive in the midst of this marketing shift is
simply to provide more and more value.

111
 Glossary
above the fold — Positioned in the top half of a page for
prominence and visibility. This is a holdover from the print world,
when newspaper editors aimed for placing the most important
stories in the upper half of the front page of a broadsheet so they’d
still be visible even when the newspaper was folded. On a webpage,
the best placement is also said to be above the fold, meaning that a
user doesn’t need to scroll down to see it.

active traffic — The people who visit search engines and actively
search for specific keywords or key phrases. Because they’re already
actively searching, all you need to do is place your brand in their
path. That’s why search engine marketing (SEM) works well as a
performance marketing vehicle. Using “long-tail” search terms, you
can target people who are farther along in the sales cycle or decision
path.

app — Application software running on a computer, a mobile

device or other platform (for example, an iPhone or Facebook.) App
is really a generic term for any standalone bit of software.

backlinks — Inbound links pointing to a webpage on your site,

either from pages on other domains or from other pages of your
own site.

conversion rate — The number of visits to a website that result in

a sale, a subscription, a request for information or other desired
action. This is often expressed as a percentage. For example, if a

112
web site has 50 visitors and 10 of them convert, then the site has a
20% conversion rate.

CPA — Cost-per-acquisition or cost-per-action. CPA may refer to

the cost of acquiring a customer or it may describe a pricing model
where what online advertisers pay is based on the number of
qualifying actions (when a visitor completes a sale, subscription,
registration or other desired action.) When used in the latter sense,
a CPA is a unit cost.

CPC — Cost-per-click. The unit cost in a PPC (price per click)

pricing model where an advertiser pays whenever someone clicks
on a link leading to their website.

CPM — Cost-per-mille. This means the cost-per-thousand ad

impressions (literally, cost per mille with the M coming from the
Latin word for thousand.) A CPM pricing model is a system where
advertisers pay for the number of times an ad is viewed. The unit
cost is typically expressed not as a price for a single impression but
as a price per thousand impressions because ad views are often sold
in blocks of 1,000. CPM pricing originated with print advertising,
but also applies to broadcast media, direct marketing and online
advertising.

CTR — Click-through rate. This is the percentage of people who see

a link and click on it. Typically, only immediate responses are
counted, so CTR may not reflect the cumulative effect if there are
delayed responses (meaning that someone sees a link and goes to
that URL directly later.)

creative — When used in a noun form refers to the creative

components of an ad: typically, the copy and the images.

house list — The list of users who have signed up to receive email
communications from you. This is typically a permission-based list
where users have opted to join. You can use your house list to
nurture customer relationships, market, cross-sell or up-sell.

113
impression — A single ad view. Note that cost per impression is
generally expressed not as a unit cost for a single impression, but
rather as a cost per thousand impressions (see CPM.)

keyword — A word used in a search engine query. The amount of

traffic a page gets from search depends to some extent on how
relevant the page content is to the keywords used in search queries.
A keyword phrase is simply a multi-word phrase used as a search
term.

keyword density — The number of keywords that appear on a

page expressed as a percentage of the total number of indexable
words on the page.

keyword research — The process of investigating what keywords

are appropriate for a site and analyzing which may yield the highest
return.

landing page — The specific webpage a user is sent to when they

click on a link. Attempts to improve conversion rates often involve
testing different landing pages to see which perform best.

metadata — Information placed in the code of a webpage (using

metatags) in order to pass information to search engines and
browser software that describes the page. This typically includes a
page title, a page description and keywords. Metadata is rarely seen
by customers and prospects visiting a site.

opt in — Choosing explicitly to join a mailing list or permit

mailings to be sent to you.

re-tweet (RT) — Pass along a Twitter message that someone else

posted originally, usually giving credit to the original poster.

ROI — Return on investment. This refers to the profit generated by

an activity expressed as a percentage of cost. For example, if the

114
total cost of a pay-per-click campaign was $200 and the revenue
generated by the campaign was $1000, then the ROI of the
campaign would be 500% ($1000 profit divided by a $200
investment multiplied by 100.)

search algorithm — A set of rules used by a search engine to

determine the order of the results returned for a specific query. The
reason that search results can vary depending on which search
engine you’re using is that each search engine develops its own
unique search algorithms.

seeding — Typically this refers to a strategy of increasing visibility

by leaving comments, links, or other entries in blogs, forums and
other online venues. Seeding can also refer to a particular kind of
online outreach that seeks to engage the individuals behind
influential blogs, but that’s a less common meaning.

SEM — Search engine marketing. This includes both natural search

(the organic results of a search) and paid search (paid advertising
that appears on search engine results pages.)

SKU — Stock keeping unit. An acronym that refers to an

alphanumeric identifier used for specific products stocked by a
retailer or wholesaler.

URL — Uniform resource locator. The address of a specific

webpage (not just the overall domain.)

UX — User experience. This encompasses all aspects of an end-

user’s interaction with a company, its products or services. In a
more limited usage, user experience can also refer specifically to the
experience of a digital environment (like a website or software
application.)

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 Index
acquisition cost 52, 98
advertising 7, 11, 15, 22, 23,
24, 25, 40, 41, 42, 43, 47,
52, 55, 56, 62, 63, 65, 70,
79, 80, 81, 91, 98, 102, 111
alignment 45
Amazon 20, 24, 57, 104
applications 36, 63, 66, 67,
76, 80, 81, 86, 97, 101
authenticity11, 12, 45, 46, 83,
105
BizBuySell 106
blogs 8, 17, 23
BlueNile 106
brand 7, 9, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15,
16, 17, 18, 25, 28, 29, 31,
33, 38, 39, 40, 43, 45, 46,
47, 48, 51, 52, 54, 57, 58,
59, 60, 61, 62, 64, 65, 66,
67, 68, 70, 72, 73, 76, 77,
78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84,
86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 94,
96, 97, 98, 100, 107, 110
116
brand value 7, 12, 15, 45, 46,
61, 62, 65, 66, 76, 77
Cafepress 105
commoditization 46, 107, 108
connected landscape7, 65, 88
connectedness 21, 30
conversation 9, 12, 31, 32, 57,
62, 74, 75, 77, 78, 81, 86,
87, 94, 100
conversion 22, 42, 43, 45, 50,
57, 58, 70, 82, 83, 94, 95,
96, 97, 110, 112
core 11, 19, 33, 38, 40, 45, 46,
47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 54, 56,
61, 65, 66, 67, 71, 77, 83,
85, 86, 88, 94, 95, 98, 99,
100, 104, 109
CPA 42, 43, 44, 52, 81, 102,
111
CPM 31, 41, 42, 43, 44, 52,
111, 112
crowd-sourcing 10
demographics 24, 26
E*Trade 106 55, 62, 65, 69, 70, 75, 76,
80, 84, 87, 96, 98, 99,
email 13, 33, 43, 52, 62, 63, 100, 101, 109, 110, 111
67, 68, 75, 91, 93, 95, 111
media landscape 7, 11, 18, 30,
engagement 31, 57, 60, 66, 51
73, 75, 79, 97, 99, 105
metrics 29, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44,
extranet 63, 64, 67 50, 69, 88, 94, 95, 96, 97,
Facebook 8, 26, 29, 30, 36, 98
37, 66, 76, 110 microblogs 8, 17, 23
feeds 92, 102 microsites 63, 66, 95
fragmentation 18, 21, 22, 28 mobile devices 8, 31, 34, 63,
HoneyPot strategy 11, 12, 13, 80, 101, 102, 108, 110
15, 16, 18, 47, 48, 56, 83, MySpace 8, 66
84
natural search 66, 69, 70, 71,
house list 68 72, 75, 86
identity 12, 13, 21, 26, 29, 47, New York Times 8
48, 51, 54, 59, 60
newswire services 8
individual producers 23, 28,
105 niche communities 22, 29
individual voice 24, 40 niche markets 22, 25, 26, 32,
51, 52
intellectual property 18, 100,
104, 107, 108, 109 online ecosystem 10, 11, 12,
13, 15, 16, 17, 18, 23, 44,
landing pages 64 45, 48, 49, 52, 54, 55, 56,
LinkedIn 76 62, 63, 64, 65, 67, 71, 72,
75, 77, 79, 81, 82, 83, 85,
list rental 68 86, 90, 93, 95, 96, 97, 98,
long tail 11, 69, 110 99, 103, 107

Make 91 organizational culture 51

marketing 7, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, paid search 69, 71

15, 16, 18, 31, 32, 35, 38, Pareto’s Principle 107
39, 40, 41, 42, 48, 49, 52,
personal fingerprint 25, 26

117
privacy 26, 27, 29, 30, 36 Twitter 8, 36, 76, 77, 112
profiles 8, 13, 26, 27, 37, 87 user experience 13, 59, 113
seeding 22, 74, 77, 79, 113 value proposition 46, 84, 95,
103
SelectQuote 106
viral 33, 63, 72, 73, 77
semantic tools 18, 102
Wall Street Journal 8
Shipwire 104
widgets 64, 91
social networks 8, 23, 28, 37,
57, 75 Zappos 104

118
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