I don’t know if it’s just the Mother’s day effect, but the top 10 online retailers for May 2009 were dominated by flower shops. The top shop is converting almost 40% of their visitors to buyers, though the average is just over 5%. Tim, meanwhile, claims he’s lowered his bounce rate to just 10%.

If you remember Ask.com, you probably remember Jeeves. Now he’s back on the UK site. It turns out that people liked the old chap, and in this age of social media, it’s probably prudent to have a corporate avatar (it looks a lot better on Facebook, anyway). There’s more about the resurrection at Search Engine Land.

Japan’s The Ministry of Foreign Affairs English-language Web Japan is a bottomless trove of in-flight magazine-quality stories like ANTIBACTERIAL EPIDEMIC and J-culture-hyping love-fests like Honoring The World’s Manga Artists.

If American propaganda efforts are this bad, why do foreign governments even bother blocking them?

VA Linux founder Larry Augustin on OSS

In Augustin’s view open source development became a necessity in the 1990s when the cost of marketing a program came to exceed the cost of creating it. “My favorite is Salesforce.com. In 1995 they spent under $10 million in R&D and over $100 million in sales and marketing. That doesn’t work.”

“Open source enables people to reach all those customers. It’s a distribution model. The people who create great software can now reach the rest of the world.”

Businesses get the most protection from the GPL, he insisted. “They get protection from competition.” The license’s insistence on reciprocity means no one can take the code you wrote, tweak it, then compete with you.

F/OSS, GPL, Larry Augustin, OSS, distribution, free software, marketing, open source

Found on Jeff Nolan’s blog:

Competitive Intelligence: “a large fuzzy animal may be a bear.”

Marketing: “SAP can help you understand your fuzzy animals. With over 30 years in the fuzzy animal industry, we know if you are looking at a bear, a guy in a coat, or a large dog.”

Communications: “In today’s world of increasing challenges, It’s obvious fuzzy animals are what our customers care about.”

Sales: “Who cares what it is. Let’s kill it and eat it.”

animal, communications, competitive intelligence, fuzzy, joke, large, large fuzzy animal, large fuzzy animals, marketing, perspective, sales

I have mixed feelings about the value of advertising — it’s worth pointing out that according to John Battelle, Google never ran an ad anywhere prior to going public — but I still enjoy seeing things like this Wyoming Libraries campaign. Jill Stover quotes Wyoming Libraries’ Tina Lackey with the news that “Wyoming’s libraries are as expansive as the state, and as close as down the street.”

I’m just hoping that A, the horse is real; and B, they auction it off. See, I have these silly ideas about doing a cross-country road trip with it.

advertising, buzz, libraries, library, marketing, prairie, promotion, trojan horse, wyoming, wyoming libraries

Ken forwarded me this podcast of Robert Cialdini speaking on his Six Weapons of Influence, which he lists as

• Reciprocation
• Commitment and consistency
• Social proof
• Authority
• Liking
• Scarcity

Cialdini’s book is in its fourth edition, and has apparently been adopted as a text for more than a few classes and the concepts have worked their way into everybody’s marketing seminars. Motivation speaker and marketing yakyak Patricia Fripp summarizes those six weapons like this:

• The Old Give and Take–and Take
• Hobgoblins of the Mind
• Truths Are Us
• The Friendly Thief
• Directed Deference
• The Rule of the Few

Academics often feel uncomfortable mixing marketing in their fields, but isn’t it worth a look?

tags: apparently, authority, commitment and consistency, directed difference, friendly thief, give and take, hobgoblins of the mind, liking, marketing, motivation speaker, patricia fripp, podcast, reciprocation, robert cialdini, rule of the few, scarcity, six weapons of influence, social proof, thief, truths are us, uncomfortable, yakyak

Lynne Puckett on the Web4Lib list pointed me to Web Pages That Suck and highlighted this quote from the site:

Nobody cares about you or your site. Really. What visitors care about is getting their problems solved. Most people visit a web site to solve one or more of the following three problems.

• They want/need information
• They want/need to make a purchase / donation.
• They want/need to be entertained.

Too many organizations believe that a web site is about opening a new marketing channel or getting donations or to promote a brand. No. It’s about solving your customers’ problems. Have I said that phrase enough?

Then, while Googling for something else I ran across a post in Branding Blog

If you’ve heard me speak publicly, you’ve heard me say, “Talk to the customer in the language of the customer about what matters to the customer. Bad advertising is about you, your company, your product or your service. Good advertising is about the customer, and how your product or service will change their world.” Do you know the language of your customers?

Connected, no?

tags: advertising, branding, client needs, customer needs, language, marketing, new marketing, patron needs, web site

Matt and I have been talking about online role playing games lately. He’s more than interested in the new challenges they pose to our legal system, the new media opportunities they offer, the ways they’re altering culture. We got into a conversation about how companies are taking advantage of them in marketing campaigns, so I asked him, “in what presidential election year will we see the first in-game campaigning?”

He seemed to think it might be as late as 2020 before that happened, but immediately embraced the concept. He offered the following idea: if a candidate had a child involved with video games, that child would be an outstanding asset in the marketing of that candidate to youth. How effective? With just one MMORPG claiming a million US players (each paying a monthly subscription fee, by the way), and many others in the market, one might imagine that in-game campaigning might someday have the same revolutionary effect as the internet did in 2004.

Politics, we understand, is more than message. After all, how else can we explain the way moderate young men were drawn to vote for the Governator in the California recall? Now, imagine if the Bush daughters were gamers…imagine a campaign that carefully handled that? How many otherwise moderate — perhaps progressive — gamers would be more than tempted to vote for the Bush guild?

tags: campaign, campaigning, election year, embrace, game, gamers, games, gaming, in game, in game campaign, in game compaigning, in game marketing, marketing, mmo, mmorpg, online role playing, online role playing games, political gaming, politics, presidential election, role playing game, role playing games, rpg

The Telecrapper 2000 is an improvised, homemade system that identifies telemarketing calls and leads the marketer through an artificial conversation that wastes the company’s time and money. The idea is to drive down productivity, and like so many other productivity sapping things, it can be quite funny. Check this Flash-animated recording: My Hip Hurts (mirror)

Rather less funny, though interesting nonetheless, is EGBG’s Counterscript.

tc2k hint via Engadget.

anti-productivity, deviantart, flash animated, funny, idea, marketer, marketing, phone, phone call, tc2k, telecrapper 2000, telemarketer, telemarketing calls

I don’t want to admit to being interested in marketing, but I am. Here’s a few links…

Blogs:

• Church of the Customer
   
• Seth Godin
   
• Aaron Wall’s SEO Book.com
   
• Threadwatch.org
   

Randomness:

• Writing, Briefly
   
• Google’s search result quality evaluation guidelines
   
• definition of the Google Economy at Wikipedia
   
• The Fall of Advertising and the Rise of PR
   

tags: building buzz, internet marketing, marketing, search engine optimization, seo, web marketing, google economy, googleeconomy

The Speakeasy Speed Test is an okay way to waste some time, but the most amusing thing is how easy they make it to promote them. The Speakeasy badge here looks like any web ad, but they’re not paying for it. All they did was post a link saying Add Speakeasy Speed Test to Your Site.

I guess we all ought to take this marketing tip from them: make sure your readers know how to link to you. Make linking easy, and your position in the Google Economy will grow.

tags: amusing, google economy, internet marketing, marketing, marketing tip, speakeasy, speakeasy speed test

The news came out last week that the biggest music consumers — the ones throwing down cash for music — are also the biggest music sharers. Alan Wexblat at Copyfight says simply: “those who share, care” (BBC link via TeleRead).

Rather than taking legal action against downloaders, the music industry needs to entice them to use legal alternatives, the report said.

Lawsuits against customers go hand in hand with DRM in limiting community buzz for a particular artist or song. It would seem that music is subject to the rules of the Google Economy too, but losing evangelists for the latest Britney Spears song wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world. Her record company is going to spend millions promoting the album anyway and teenage girls will buy it because it’s obvious. The problem, as Bob Frankston explains, is the non-obvious:

DRM is a way of assuring that the “content owner” can maintain control. That seems innocuous in itself but it has the effect of limiting the marketplaces’ ability to change. This makes sense in limited cases as it allows investors to recoup the cost of their investment and make a profit but if DRM works too well it prevents growth. A marketplace is a dynamic system that keeps changing. Why doesn’t the marketplace simply devolve into chaos? The reason is that it is an evolutionary process — one that provides opportunity for creating new results. We can think of this opportunity in terms of Chris Anderson’s long tail — it represents the value to be discovered rather than what is obvious.

Marketplaces that work can capture the results that are viable while surviving those that don’t work. They renew themselves dynamically. Without this process of renewal marketplaces stagnate and fail. While the goal of DRM may be noble, if taken too far it leaves us impoverished.

(via CopyFight).

In short, the value of these music publishers’ back catalogs is dependent on passionate individuals sharing their love and creating a buzz. Hip hop culture was created by sampling music that the record companies had largely forgotten. That sampling renewed interest in the original works and created a huge market for material that would have otherwise sat on the shelf. Artists can ask to try such things now, but the fact is that content owners just say no. DRM and overbearing copyright law eliminates the power of fans to spread the joy.

Besides cutting off the tail that feeds them, DRM just plain gets in the way. Technosmart Jenny Levine has been stung by DRM more than once, and former RIAA chief Hilary Rosen says she can’t stand DRM either (though she’s been accused of sock puppeting). Heck, DRM can even make the US Constitution — a public domain document — unusable.

The problem is that DRM goes beyond copyright and blocks activities that we used to take for granted as fair use. In a world where it’s increasingly difficult to differentiate between creator and consumer, DRMed content risks being isolated and ignored.

Considering how easily most DRM can be cracked, one has to wonder what the real purpose is. If determined crackers can always break it, but it gets in the way of average honest users, why bother? The cynical answer is that record companies want to use DRM to force you to re-buy your music regularly. That’s certainly what HBO is doing with television.

Mac users beware: A lot of reports are coming in that Apple has added “trusted computing” to their Intel developer builds. This was a fear of mine when Apple announced the Intel switch.

tags: consumers, content, content consumers, content owners, content producers, copyfight, copyright, downloaders, drm, evangelists, fair use, fairuse, lawsuits, legal alternatives, marketing, music, music consumers, music industry, music marketing, music sharing, owners, producers, share, sharing