What Does Google Think About Blogging?

November 29, 2006 | 2 Comments

Any internet marketer worth their salt will tell you how Google’s algorithms love the keyword rich content of blogs. But what does the Google hierarchy actually think about the explosion in content flooding the internet on a daily basis? After all, it can’t make their job any easier trying to classify millions of websites constantly being updated every day?

In an article in The Economist for ‘The World in 2007’ Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, provides an insight into how he thinks the internet is playing a healthy role in shaping how people use software, gather information and communicate. He comments that:

“The lesson is compelling: put simple, intuitive technology in the hands of users and they will create content and share it. The fastest-growing parts of the internet all involve direct human interaction.”

It has never been easier for people to find and share information. Anybody with a PC and internet connection now has their own electronic printing press and a potentially global readership. Relationships are now increasingly being built based on interest rather than geography. This is an aspect which many traditional marketers are struggling to come to terms with. Many still seem to have the terms ‘internet’ and ‘bubble’ irreparably connected in their minds and continue to treat the web as only a temporary phenomenon:

“business models based on controlling consumers or content don’t work. Betting against the net is foolish because you’re betting against human ingenuity and creativity.”

If businesses don’t start appreciating how there has been a paradigm shift in how people access and share information then they are underestimating what is going on in the online world. They are going to struggle to get their messages across if they don’t understand how it’s now a two way conversation and not a long range bombing campaign.

In an interview, discussing his Economist article, Schmidt comments that:

“It’s clear, over the next few years, that people will have access to farmore information then they can ever handle. And that is a goodthing: that more information crowds out bad ideas, bad information, bad governments, bad behaviour.”

Schmidt is describing how the spread of blogs and social networks should eventually lead to a rise in transparency in the way information is presented. Anybody posting inaccurate or misleading content will inevitably be caught out by an increasingly web savvy audience who can expose them in forums strewn all over the web. Being honest and genuine in how you engage and project your message will be the only way to communicate if you want to remain relevant to your audience.

Schmidt revisited his point, on the growth of transparency, in a recent speech to the British Conservative party. He discussed how:

“Politicians must realise the results produced by the Internet. Many do not understand the phenomenon, its deep dynamics and implications.”

Politicians are a lot like salesmen. Their role is to sell their message by appealing to their voters’ desires. Worrying about whether the message was genuine, or had any real substance, was secondary. All that mattered was influencing mindsets to garner votes rather than to actually engage in a political debate.

Schmidt believes that the internet’s growth as an information sharing resource means that politicians and businesses will have to start becoming more transparent and engaging if they want to continue being listened to. Google evidently intend being a leading innovator and driving force in how these new values will be propagated online.

Posted by Matt Ambrose | Filed Under Marketing, blogging 

Internet Marketing Motors Ahead In Driving Brand Engagement

November 22, 2006 | 5 Comments

Stats and studies are sprouting all over the place to support the case for online marketing. A study which could offer the most valuable insight would be one where its subjects are ‘non-techie’ and non web savvy. After all, its these people who need to be interacting with blogs and websites if engagement is really going to be the marketing dynamo that everybody seems to believe. The UK’s Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB), in collusion with Carat Insight, have released such a study.

Mothers and middle aged women are a demographic marketers love to seduce because of their control over the household purse strings. The IAB study analysed five marketing campaigns for super-mini cars (such as Renault Clio, Toyota Ayo, Nissan Micra etc) directed at a female audience.

The aim of the study was to assess the impact of the different advertising mediums on its targets buying decisions. The significance of its female subjects is that they are not normally associated with uploading clips onto YouTube or updating their MySpace profiles.

Predictably, the IAB were delighted with the findings, which further reinforced the common perception that online marketing now has more of an impact than any other medium. Online was deemed to account for 40% of the advertising effect, ahead of print (36.7%) and TV (17.6%).

The internet also proved its effectiveness as an indirect influencer. It has the advantage of enabling people to ‘pull’ information by visiting websites, reading reviews, checking prices etc. Subsequently, the online medium was calculated as indirectly contributing 27.5% to the decision making process. This now puts it ahead in significance of the old traditional influencers: magazine reviews, car dealership and watching Top Gear.

“This important cross-media study in the car market shows how online drives brand engagement more than any other medium – not just through rich media advertising, but because consumers go on to seek product and information and reviews, too. This study will go a long way to help brand marketers understand how well online performs in the media mix.” – Guy Phillipson, IAB CEO

People now have greater access to information than ever before. When they go to buy a car they now know what mileage, price and air freshener they want before they even step on the forecourt. The pushy, fast talking salesmen might become a dying breed in this world of ‘pull’ access to information. Consumers can no longer be duped into buying substandard products and services. They are becoming better educated and informed all the time.

”The

The IAB report further adds weight to the notion that people from all groups and demographics are now using the internet for product and service information. This doesn’t just mean looking at a pretty brochure style website and reaching a decision.

Many people now track other people’s comments, blogs and reviews before they even think about picking up the phone.

The advantage of this is that when you do receive their call you know that they will be further down the sales funnel. Just make sure you don’t then ruin a potential sale by assailing them with the marketing claptrap and sales spiel they have gone to so much effort to avoid.

Posted by Matt Ambrose | Filed Under Marketing, blogging 

Nomination for Top Ten Writers Blogs

November 22, 2006 | Leave a Comment

I was delighted to discover, earlier this week, that I’ve been nominated for the top ten of the best writers’ blogs on the Writing White Papers website. Very uplifting, particularly when you consider that the nomination might have come from a fellow writer. Now the pressure is on to try and maintain whatever it is I have been doing to justify such an accolade.

Posted by Matt Ambrose | Filed Under About 

The Engagement Movement Set to Dominate in 2007

November 17, 2006 | 3 Comments

The engagement marketing movement is gathering pace all the time, with new converts joining every week. We now have an official motto (definition), a conference in its honour and blogs taking root all over the web. A leading market research firm has now heralded that 2007 will be the year that we begin our full scale assault. Big brands are joining our cause all the time – soon there won’t be a traditional marketer left to stop us!

I was made aware of the news, that engagement is set to dominate marketing, by the ‘Engagement Principles‘ blog of Tom Chandler, a fellow copywriter also tracing the evolution of our trade. It now seems inevitable that businesses will start turning to professional writers to fuel their websites with surfers getting hungrier for content all the time. Being able to apply time proven copywriting techniques should come in handy as well.

Engagement marketing was hailed by Dr Robert Passikoff as one of the biggest marketing trends for 2007. His company, ‘Brand Keys’, is a leading research consultancy specialising in consumer loyalty and predicting the ROI of any marketing initiative.

Brand Keys’ business revolves around understanding what consumers want through a complex algorithm of polls, statistics and trends. He should be ably qualified to predict how people will be responding to brands in the years to come.

His other future trends follow along the same engagement philosophy: consumer generated content, touch point focused media, better usage of technology and using innovation to inspire loyalty.

Dr Robert’s assessment fits in with what every engagement marketer has been preaching. Consumers are now smarter, have greater access to information and are more cynical than ever before. They are in control of how they receive the message and that message had better be of value otherwise they’re not going to listen.

The Advertising Research Foundation (ARF) and the American Association of Advertising Agencies (AAAA) have even set-up a specific blog featuring videos of leading figures discussing the evolution of their industry.

One of the videos features Dr Robert. He evokes how some advertisers are starting to panic because they can’t simply bombard consumers with messages like they used to and expect an ROI. The solution, he suggests, is to start thinking of marketing as a multi faceted campaign designed to subtly change how prospects respond to a brand. It is no longer a one way conversation.

The gospel of engagement is now spreading beyond the realms of the internet and into the mainstream. Earlier this week it was announced that Kevin Adler has left his Vice Presidency at Relay Worldwide to start his own new integrated marketing agency. The agencies name? Why, ‘Engage Marketing’ of course.

Relay are an event marketing company and specialise in creating associations between brands and sports events. The ‘Cola Copa’ for example: a football (soccer for my US readers) tournament for young teens worldwide.

Adler defined his business’ philosophy, “Engagement Marketing represents a fundamental paradigm shift in how brands enter into dialogues with their consumers, by putting the needs, desires and interests of the consumers before the needs of the brand.” In other words, to stop carpet bombing audiences with marketing messages, but instead to sit down and find out what it is they actually want.

As advertising and marketing evolves into the engagement philosophy copywriters are going to have to develop some new tricks of our own. It looks as though the old AIDA principle is going to need a few more letters in the years to come.

Posted by Matt Ambrose | Filed Under Marketing 

Latest research illustrates the continuing growth of blogs as marketing tools

November 14, 2006 | Leave a Comment

It’s always satisfying when independent studies collaborate what you have been writing about for the last few months. Internet marketers have been preaching the value of blogs as marketing tools for some time; now the research figures are surfacing to support those claims.

A report by ‘Ipsos Mori’ has suggested that average Euro Joe has started trusting blogs more than TV or email. More and more people are following the US example and using blogs as sources for getting news and opinion to influence their buying decisions.

A third of those interviewed had been put off a purchase following negative comments, whilst 52% had immediately whipped out their credit card based on the advice of a fellow consumer.

As the head of technology research at Ipsos Mari, Gareth Deere, recognised, “we all trust people’s opinion in the real world. Now we’ve proven the same link online, and its having a major impact on people’s buying behaviour.”

The research reinforces the growing belief that there is a direct link between the sense of trust and integrity of blogs with the buying patterns of consumers. No more will they be brainwashed by the bombardment of daily advertising. But instead seek out and listen to the advice of their shopping comrades.

“Word of mouth is no longer restricted to close friends and family, it can have the same level of influence upon millions across the world,” hailed Deere of his research findings.

UK copywriters shouldn’t rush to hand in their resignation letter to their advertising agencies just yet though. The study also found that only 50% of those Brits interviewed even knew what a blog is. This wouldn’t be so disappointing if it wasn’t for the fact that 90% of French people were perfectly aware of the biggest publishing phenomenon since the invention of the printing press.

Blogs are certainly growing in prominence all the time. Even traditional marketers are starting to talk about engagement and trust, rather than interruption and attention grabbing. Now more UKbusinesses just need to wake up to what is going on in online world; then the usage of business blogs will surely grow.

Posted by Matt Ambrose | Filed Under Marketing, blogging 

Searching for the ROI of Engagement Marketing

November 8, 2006 | 4 Comments

Ad:tech is in full swing in New York and ‘engagement marketing’ has been the buzz term on everybody’s lips. Marketers everywhere are getting excited about leveraging the increased time people are spending online, to keep eyeballs glued to their sites and interacting with their brands. This revolves around the intrinsic belief that the more time people spend with you, the more they are going to get to know you and more likely they are to pay for an association. But the stumbling block remains finding the elusive secret formula to show, in hard figures, how increased engagement leads to increased sales.

The internet is creating a shift in advertising from an interruption based marketplace to one which is permission based. There is going to have to be a parallel shift in thinking before many traditional advertisers are happy to plough funds into something which doesn’t guarantee a quantifiable conversion in sales. It is very difficult to drive investment in online branding exercises when they have only the ambiguous measure of ‘engagement’ as the yardstick for success.

The drive to utilise the growth in popularity of interactive websites is gathering steam all the time. But as any marketer will tell you, “you cant monetise what you can’t measure.” There is mass confusion in the industry in understanding the ROI of engagement marketing; this isn’t going to change until a methodology, or metrics, have been developed to identify what its formula is.

The general consensus seems to be that the number of different ways in which people can interact with websites (bookmarks, subscribing, commenting, voting etc) means that no ROI formula can ever be the same for every website. Engagement marketing will have to mature for a while before we are able to understand how it influences people’s buying decisions. Even then the models involved are going to be more complex, and include more factors, than any we use at the moment.

In a recent podcast, Joseph Jaffe (a leading new marketing guru) and Max Kalehoff (Nielsen Buzz Metrics) discussed how ‘the traditional reach, frequency, impression models are working less and less,’ and a new ‘hybrid’ of metrics had to be created. Joseph elaborated that we shouldn’t even try to fit engagement marketing into the same cast iron rules that have served advertisers for so long. But instead accept its complexity as a reflection of the range of behaviours people can exhibit in online social networks.

Simply using the old methodology of measuring the responses to calls to action, such as signing up for a newsletter, no longer provides enough scope to cover all the different ways in how people can interact with a website’s content.

This view is reinforced in a post by Anthony Mayfield, a UK PR consultant, in response to a Wiredset article. We shouldn’t be trying to simplify engagement with traditional measurement models, but instead embrace new complex ways of trying to understand its ROI. He comments that, “media and marketing communicators need to develop a new world view, one which embraces complexity as a defining characteristic of our communications environment.”

As marketers continue to grapple with the formulae for measuring engagement’s ROI, the race is on to provide the software solution for measuring the equation’s components.

Hubspot’s website analytics software takes the old marketing and sales funnel, extends it and then bolts engagement stats onto the side. By measuring and tracking subscribers, visitors, commentators, etc they aim to be able to pinpoint where visitors are in the sales process. The principle is that interaction helps push prospects further down the funnel and that it can be identified when they are ready to receive their first sales call.

Software solutions, such as Hubspot’s, are already in the pipeline, and it will just take time for advertising industries to understand how consumer engagement translates into sales. Once this has happened, and software metrics have become corroborated with marketers’ formulas, then the march of engagement marketing could become irrepressible, and mark the next chapter in advertising’s evolution.

Posted by Matt Ambrose | Filed Under Marketing, blogging 

My blog’s name change to ‘The Copywriter’s Crucible’

November 8, 2006 | Leave a Comment

After much pondering, I have finally decided to change the name of my blog. ‘SEO, Business Blogging and Copywriting UK’ just wasn’t cutting it anymore amongst all the other punchier blog names out there.

The spread of broadband, increased time people are spending online and growth of social networks means that effective internet marketing techniques are evolving all the time. With this in mind, I have renamed my blog ‘The Copywriter’s Crucible’ – a melting pot of internet marketing news reacting with my own thoughts to provide a weekly dose of information, which I hope is of value to my readers.

The internet is also, in many ways, creating a period ‘characterized by the confluence of powerful intellectual, social, economic, or political forces’. We are going through a phase where we are just discovering how the internet can turn business models on their side and disrupt the entire philosophy of advertising. An exciting time for copywriters everywhere with a new generation of cynical consumers who need to be educated rather than sold to – ‘The Copywriter’s Crucible’ intends to be on the front line in spreading awareness of how this can be done.

Posted by Matt Ambrose | Filed Under About 

World’s Second Biggest Advertiser Prepares for Their Internet Future

November 1, 2006 | Leave a Comment

Martin Sorrell, CEO of WPP, has started preparing his ship for a change in course, and joining the fleets setting sail for exploration online. This is in response to WPP’s figures, for the last quarter, in which they experienced growth of only a measly 1% in the UK. Significant news when you consider that in 2005 the figure was 14% and 22% in the US. Traditional advertising appears to be drying up, and now even the industry’s High Admirals are realising that the riches and rewards are to be found in new lands of opportunity.

WPP is recognised as being the second largest advertising and marketing group on the planet. With around 84,000 staff and 1400 offices around the globe, WPP’s figures are a key indicator of the advertising industry’s health.

TV advertising revenue might be falling, but Sorrell isn’t about to scuttle the entire fleet from the medium just yet. WPP are due to produce their own TV dramas, and advertise by product placement and sponsorship.

WPP have also launched a joint venture with Universal Music, the world’s biggest music company, to link brands with bands. The aim is to investigate new ways of utilising artists and breakthrough acts to promote products, other than merely providing the background music.

With cynical consumers becoming immune to marketing messages, WPP are learning that they have to come up with ever more creative ways of penetrating their audiences.

Sorrell might be adopting new tactics with the traditional media, but he is also not so stubborn as to ignore the shift in eyeballs focusing online.

Sorrell has blamed their falling growth on the rise of internet advertising, which occupies a larger percentage of ad revenue in the UK than anywhere else in the world. In the first half of 2006, online advertising spend was £917 million; an increase of 40.3% on the previous year!

But from his comments in 2005, you wouldn’t expect him to suddenly start ploughing his entire war chest into fighting over uncharted, or properly explored, opportunities online:

“Why is it that he is so preoccupied with this and willing, it appears, to make investments almost willy-nilly? I think I can use the word panic – that is probably overdoing it but maybe I am not.“- Sorrell on Murdoch’s purchase of MySpace, Oct 05.

Murdoch bought MySpace to chase the advertising revenue escaping from his creaking newspaper fleet. But Sorrell has already sought to distance WPP from being an advertising company. They are instead a business focusing on “insight, information and consultancy, public relations and public affairs, branding and identity.” Perhaps this is an indication that advertising is becoming a weak term; now marketers have to think of influencing people’s perceptions through more subtle means.

As Sorrell mentioned recently, “growth of the internet was driving spending in public relations, the fastest growing area of WPP’s business during the last quarter, as companies sought to influence social networking websites, blogs and other online forums.”

With this in mind, WPP have, over the last few months, been making strategic investments in emerging online businesses. Instead of full blown acquisitions, they have been making tentative steps into understanding the internet and its new branding opportunities. WPP’s investments will be able to provide them with an insight into what’s going on and to assist them develop the online relationships needed to promote their clients:

  • Visible Technologies – Monitors search results and blogs for insight into how brands are being perceived online. WPP bought a 25% stake.
  • Live World – Promote clients in online communities and influence conversations by developing blogs and message boards. Received $2 million funding from WPP.
  • Wild Tangent – Provider of downloadable games featuring in game advertising and branding. They also develop complete games for advertisers. WPP has bought a 3.4% stake.
  • Spot Runner – provides online interface for low cost services for TV advertising. WPP have invested for 10% of the company.

Sorrell is following the trend of redirecting funding into formulating an online strategy of PR, branding and relationship development. Last year he had already admitted that the pace of the digital revolution was “faster and bigger than we had anticipated.”

When the world’s second biggest advertiser sees their growth in a key market fall from 22% to 1% in the space of a year then you know there will have to be a significant change of course in marketing’s direction. We might not be witnessing ‘advertising’ being made to walk the plank just yet. But I expect to see far more ships following WPP’s example and hoisting their sails, for invading and plundering the internet, under the banner of branding, relationships and PR.

Posted by Matt Ambrose | Filed Under Marketing