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Archive for the ‘e-marketing’ Category

Shameless self-promotion, parts XXXVI and XXXVII Tuesday, August 17th, 2010

Here’s a video we produced recently for HotHouse Interactive to announce their recent move to new premises. Simon is the star and Ray has a cameo at the one-minute mark!


Do it for love AND money Thursday, July 8th, 2010

Here’s a preview of my first column in NETT magazine - click through to read the whole piece:

What’s the secret to financial success for small businesses? It turns out that Dr Seuss could hold the key.

Everyone has an idea for their dream job. Mine is to be the Australian Stieg Larsson.

Am I doing my dream job? Not yet, but like many small business owners, I’m working towards it by channelling my passion for words and ideas into a more tangible commercial enterprise.

Follow your passion and the money will follow. Opinion is strongly divided on the truth of this aphorism. Is it a good idea commercially to follow your dream? Plenty of passionate people without the requisite business skills have gone broke following their passion. I think the reverse is true: if you don’t have that passion, you can almost guarantee mediocre results.

In his latest book Linchpin, marketing guru Seth Godin talks about emotional labour, some essential part of yourself that can’t be automated or outsourced. This emotional labour, he argues, spells the difference between ‘just a job’ and ‘work’.

Sonia Simone, writing for the Copyblogger blog, says: “When you’re starting out, it’s tempting to look for a paint-by-numbers solution. Something that works a lot like a franchise, with a three-ring binder that explains what buttons to push.

‘The problem with push-button systems is that you can train a robot, or an ultra low-wage worker offshore, to push that button for you.
“What happens when someone comes along who can push the button 104% more efficiently than you can? Or who can push it at 97% of your cost?”

Small business success, she writes, lies with the emotional labour you bring to the task at hand. “It’s about the part that wants your creativity, your strange ideas, your ADHD, your intersection of interests, your passion, your giving a damn, your hard thinking. Simply put, it’s the love that you put into it.”

Read the whole column here: http://nett.com.au/blogs/do-it-for-love-and-money/135.html

Ray Welling, Content Guy, Zazoo


We now resume regular programming… Thursday, July 1st, 2010

How embarrassing, an online content consultancy that doesn’t update its own blog. I’ll eschew all the obvious analogies such as the plumber who doesn’t have time to do the plumbing at his own house, and instead just point to some of the things that have kept me away from the blog:

Ray Welling, Content Guy, Zazoo


Marketing-advertising shift signals need for content Tuesday, March 16th, 2010

In an interview with Zazoo published this week on the HotHouse blog, Econsultancy vice president Rebecca Lieb observed that the Internet is bringing about a fundamental shift in power within companies from advertising to marketing.

She says that “not only has online search technology made it simple for customers to connect with businesses, the evidence shows that most searchers are going straight to a company’s website for more information about their products. In other words, it’s not advertising driving people to your business online, it’s search.”

Companies, she says, need to shift their thinking from an emphasis on advertising to an emphasis on marketing and content creation. That means there’s “lots more media to play with. And it’s free – but that doesn’t mean you can mess with it.”

In the digital age, she says, you need a long-term perpetual strategy. To be able to successfully develop and execute a perpetual strategy, according to Rebecca, “You need to think like an editor.”

“Brands are not just businesses,” Rebecca says, they’re now media companies.”

An excerpt from the story:

“…traditional media based their business model on a (mostly) clear separation between advertising and content. What happens when the ‘advertiser’ is also the content provider?

“In the digital context, according to Rebecca Lieb, ‘Being authoritative is more important than being objective – though transparency and disclosure are incredibly important.

“’If, for example, you’re a sporting goods company and you publish information on your site about mountain climbing. That information can be entertaining. The information is not invalid, as long as you know where it’s coming from.’

“Rebecca concludes: ‘The rules aren’t different; it’s the channels that are shifting.’”

Are you ready to act like a publisher with your website and social media program?


Zazoo writes for NETT on online video Thursday, March 11th, 2010

Zazoo was asked to put together a workshop article for NETT magazine on how to promote your business online using video. The article has been published in this month’s issue (see a PDF version here).

Here are a couple of excerpts:

“Online video is no longer a nice-to-have addition to your marketing mix: it’s becoming an essential tool for small businesses trying to stand out in a crowded market. Yet, often the biggest challenge for SMEs interested in creating online video is taking that first step. Your dream may be to create something that goes viral, but where do you start? How do you make it interesting enough to get people to watch – and then spread the message? The good news is, creating online video is getting cheaper and easier to do.

“….The biggest challenge for businesses, especially SMEs, is taking the first step. Video can confound people who are only familiar with traditional marketing. Developing an interesting concept is the next challenge. Viewers have been conditioned by years of television watching to expect video to be entertaining as well as informational, so that talking head presentation from your MD is an online video no-no.

“….Each video and each campaign is different, so work out ways you candetermine the success of your video in meeting your goals.How can you tell whether increased sales are due to your video? You do things like link from the video to a particular landing page on your site instead of the home page. Measure hits to this page and add a call-to-action…. As you produce more videos, you can see what type of content gives you the most business impact.”

Keep on the lookout for future articles in NETT and other publications.

Ray Welling, Content Guy, Zazoo


“Think like an editor” - podcast Tuesday, March 9th, 2010

Last week I interviewed Rebecca Lieb, US vice-president for the digital marketing research and publishing company Econsultancy, for a HotHouse podcast on the topics of search engine optimisation and content strategy. Her main message: Like it or not, the evolution of search on the Internet now means that every company is a publisher - people are going to come straight to your website for information about your products/services and about your category in general. As a result, you need to “think like an editor” and create fresh, engaging content for your website - constantly.

The podcast has now been published on the HotHouse blog - you can listen to it/download it here. I’ll also provide links to related articles that will be published on the HoHouse blog as soon as they’re published later this month.

Ray Welling, Content Guy, Zazoo


The Internet? It’s just a fad (oops!) Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010

Hindsight’s a wonderful thing… a couple of blogs have picked up a copy of an article printed in Newsweek back in 1995 that dismissed the Internet as a fad. I love the title: “The Internet? Bah!” Writer Clifford Stoll dropped a number of clangers in his original article. Here are a couple of examples:

  • “Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic. Baloney.”
  • “…no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.”
  • “…Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we’ll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure.”
  • “…the Internet is one big ocean of unedited data, without any pretense of completeness. Lacking editors, reviewers or critics, the Internet has become a wasteland of unfiltered data. You don’t know what to ignore and what’s worth reading.”
  • “Computers and networks isolate us from one another. A network chat line is a limp substitute for meeting friends over coffee. No interactive multimedia display comes close to the excitement of a live concert. And who’d prefer cybersex to the real thing?”

In one report on this article, Clifford Stoll himself commented on his article, saying, “Wrong? Yep.

“At the time, I was trying to speak against the tide of futuristic commentary on how The Internet Will Solve Our Problems.

“Gives me pause. Most of my screwups have had limited publicity: Forgetting my lines in my 4th grade play. Misidentifying a Gilbert and Sullivan song while suddenly drafted to fill in as announcer on a classical radio station. Wasting a week hunting for planets interior to Mercury’s orbit using an infrared system with a noise level so high that it couldn’t possibly detect ‘em. Heck – trying to dry my sneakers in a microwave oven (a quarter century later, there’s still a smudge on the kitchen ceiling)

“And, as I’ve laughed at others’ foibles, I think back to some of my own cringeworthy contributions. Now, whenever I think I know what’s happening, I temper my thoughts: Might be wrong, Cliff…”

At least he’s man enough to admit he got it wrong…

(Reprinted with permission from the Welling Digital blog)


Internet stats - the mind boggles Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010

Here’s a quick one - check out this video on the latest statistics on the growth of the Internet. A couple of notable facts:

  • YouTube is now serving up 1 billion videos every day
  • It’s predicted that people will upload at least 30 billion photos onto Facebook this year
  • The vast majority of all email is spam (grrrrrr!)
  • The average Internet user (in the US) watches 182 videos per month - that’s about 6 every day

JESS3 / The State of The Internet from Jesse Thomas on Vimeo.

Ray Welling, Content Guy, Zazoo


Digital content: What customers want Thursday, February 25th, 2010

There may be a disconnect between the types of online content that customers want and the types that marketers think they want, according to a recently-published survey.

Marketing Sherpa and IDG Connect asked both marketers and buyers what types of offers would be increase the likelihood of clickthrough, and there were some sizable differences between the two groups. Marketers placed more weight on the impact of educational content (92%) and free research reports (86%) than buyers did (65% and 64%, respectively).

Marketing Sherpa reported that “While educational content, such as whitepapers or relevant industry research reports have their place, sending too many of these offers can further diminish their impact in buyers’ eyes. You need to create the right mix of offers, timed to stages of the buying cycle and contact role, to encourage continued interaction with your email messages.”

The survey revealed that buyers are receptive to receiving industry news and articles from vendor sources (84%), but only 73% of marketers felt the same way.

Marketing Sherpa recommended that marketers ”consider developing competitive comparison tools or guides to help prospects manage the buying process. Although more marketers than buyers said these tools increased their likelihood of a click, buyers still ranked comparisons and buying guides third on this list.

“….It’s difficult for a vendor to present a competitive comparison in an unbiased way, but at the very least you can provide a framework for doing competitive comparison.”

The survey asked how much more likely recipients were to click on certain types of offers. Surprisingly, buyers gave the highest rank to promotional content.

According to IDG Connect VP Bob Johnson, “Buyers want to see your promotional content. They need to understand what you do as a vendor, and need details about what your products and services offer.”

However, you can’t try to pass off promotional content as educational content. “That angers and frustrates them,” says Johnson.

Email body copy is another area in which marketers can provide more value for subscribers.

When asked which features would make vendor emails more useful, buyers ranked “highlight key words and points” (using bold fonts and hotlinks) third out of 12 options - more valuable than social media links, and more valuable than graphic imagery.

Ray Welling, Content Guy, Zazoo


Love what you do, and the revenue will follow Sunday, February 14th, 2010

Appropriately enough for a blog post on Valentine’s Day, I want to talk about love - and digital content. Basically, I believe that if you love what you do and show it in everything you do, success will follow.

Sonia Simone has just published a piece on Copyblogger inspired by Seth Godin’s new book Linchpin. Sonia writes, “One core theme (of Godin’s book) is the idea of emotional labor — bringing more human feeling and connection to your work, some essential part of yourself that can’t be automated or outsourced.”

“….When you’re starting out, it’s tempting to look for a paint-by-numbers solution. Something that tells you exactly where to start, what to do, and how to do it. Something that works a lot like a franchise, with a three-ring binder that explains what buttons to push.

“The problem with push-button systems is that you can train a robot, or an ultra low-wage worker offshore, to push that button for you. If the business’s genius resides in the system and not in you, what happens when someone comes along who can push the button 104% more efficiently than you can? Or who can push it at 97% of your cost?”

The difference between doing it by the numbers and doing it ‘differently’ is emotional labour, which, she writes, “is about the part that’s outside the system.

“It’s about the part that you can’t train a chimp to do. It’s about the part that wants your creativity, your strange ideas, your ADHD, your intersection of interests, your passion, your giving a damn, your hard thinking.

“Simply put, it’s the love that you put into it.”

This has perfect application to the content you put on your website. If you just publish the bland PR releases that you’re pumping out through traditional channels, or if you just blindly pursue an SEO strategy based on badly constructed, soulless copy that contains all the right keywords in the right density, you might get the traffic to your site, but they’ll suffer a let down when they’re there and you won’t get the conversion.

But if you put yourself into your content, show that you’ve got some personality and that you’re truly passionate about your company, you’ll get the payoff. It might be a quirky, slightly daggy video showing how customers can use your product, or it may be a blog where your CEO professes his or her passion for a 60s psychedelic band, or just personal phrases inserted in product copy.

So today on Valentine’s Day, and every day, feel the love, show the love, and you’ll get some love back. (Cue Barry White singing “Can’t Get Enough of Your Love, Babe”)

Ray Welling, Content Guy, Zazoo


More bang for your buck - repurpose your content as online video Thursday, February 11th, 2010

Phyllis Zimbler Miller writes this week in the Internet Business Examiner about a cost-effective way to drive more traffic to your site - turn your existing text content into video content.

She writes, “Turning your written content into short (2-3 minute) videos can be a very effective way to repurpose your content.

“You can break up the content of a long article or post into two or three short videos of you talking about the subject and then upload these to YouTube with appropriate keyword tags. Next you can embed the videos on your own site and leave the video link on other places around the Web.

“Of course, it’s a good idea to include your site’s URL on the video itself so that anyone seeing the video can instantly connect to you.”

While I think repurposing text content as video can be very effective, I would caution against just producing a talking head video of someone reading out your articles verbatim. You need to be a bit more creative and think of how you can tell the story visually, using pictures and graphics, rather than just someone’s face. That creative touch can mean the difference between traffic arriving at your page and bouncing off, and traffic that stays and moves down the conversion funnel.

Ray Welling, Content Guy, Zazoo


Consumers expect video entertainment as well as marketing from companies Friday, February 5th, 2010

eMarketer’s recent report on the use of online video by the consumer packaged goods sector has uncovered some interesting results, such as the numbers showing that people are expecting to be entertained by companies as much as they are expecting to be marketed to. 

Across nearly all of the categories, entertainment rated as high as marketing (see above). Solving problems and offering incentives to buy were the highest rating expectations, on average.

The survey, conducted among nearly 600 US new media users, demonstrates the strength of online video and shows how consumers’ perceptions of marketing and advertising are changing, as the line between content and promotion becomes increasingly blurred.

“Digital video content, whether delivered through a computer, mobile phone, handheld device or TV monitor, has the potential to ignite two-way conversations between consumers and brands,” said Tobi Elkin, author of the report.

According to an eMarketer summary of the report: “Putting a hard number on the dollars spent by consumer packaged goods marketers on online video content is difficult, as outlays are not included in measures of paid advertising spending. Assessing its effectiveness is likewise a problem for marketers. The same metrics issues that bedevil marketers trying to assess the effect of online advertising on their brands also plague the ability to evaluate the performance of video content.”

Ray Welling, Content Guy, Zazoo


Constant content reaps business benefits Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010

A recent article in MarketingProfs has some insightful comments about what sort of content you should put on our website to engage people and get them to keep coming back to your site.

Bob Knorpp, president of the advertising, marketing and social networking consultancy Cool Beans, makes the point that your website should be about the future, not the past. He says, “I could have easily filled my website with descriptions and photos of my past projects. But I hated that option,” because perusing a list of past accomplishments at a website is like “reading a history book and calling it cutting-edge thinking.”

He creates weekly podcasts and video clips related to the podcasts, tweets about site updates, and has a Facebook and Wikipedia page. Although the amount of effort sounds exhausting, he says it helps his business in three ways:

  1. It establishes him as an experts
  2. It provides context for clients.
  3. It makes him better at his job.

“Having your customers engage with a growing body of content is one of the surest ways to raise the perception that you are expert in your given field, and create a path toward ongoing loyalty and advocacy with your brand,” Bob says.

Shameless plug: If you want to emulate those efforts but don’t have the time/internal resources, Zazoo can help you create relevant, up-to-date, optimised content.

Ray Welling, Content Guy, Zazoo


Remarkable content is king Thursday, January 28th, 2010

I came across a useful posting about Internet content by Leo Demilo on his Internet Marketing for the Rest of Us blog. He writes:

“There are a lot of people who say that content is not king. And while I am not saying that content IS king, I don’t fall into the camp that content is NOT king either….. I believe that REMARKABLE content is king.  Why?

  • Remarkable content gets talked about by other bloggers and webmasters.
  • Remarkable content get links by other bloggers and webmasters which in turn get MORE links (links beget more links)
  • Remarkable content establishes your site as an authority site BECAUSE of the links from your peers.
  • Remarkable content confirms that your site must be good because it is talked about (social proof)”

While Leois writing specifically about people setting up their own blogs, I think the same principles apply to corporate website content - and they are a strong argument for setting up a corporate blog if you don’t have one already.

What does he mean by remarkable? He means copy that doesn’t just use well-researched keywords to draw the punters in, but content that is interesting, original and thought-provoking. It’s not enough to just drag someone to your site; you need to give them a useful experience once they get there.

If people find you via a search engine (and that is the case with the vast majority of web traffic), then they want to find out more about you and are thinking about doing business with you. Give them a reason to do that with remarkable content.


Yes, even teachers are going digital Monday, January 25th, 2010

To those of us who remember school as a distinctly low-tech experience, it may come as some surprise that teachers are turning increasingly toward digital content to make education more engaging and effective.

A report on THE Journal highlights a recently-released study showing that more than 75% of K-12 teachers were using digital tools in the classroom last year, up from 69% in 2008. Meanwhile, 72% of teachers reported they stream or download content from the Internet, up from 65% in 2008.

According to the study, “A majority of preK-12 teachers indicated they strongly agree that TV and video content is more effective when it is integrated with other instructional resources in the classroom. A majority of teachers are more likely to use five- to 10-minute video segments rather than entire programs. This is one indication that teachers are becoming more strategic in their selections and targeting use for specific purposes.” Or it could just mean that they are reacting to the fact that attention spans are getting shorter and shorter.

This means that companies will need to rely on digital content more and more as the next generation graduates into the workforce. I’ll avoid the obvious pun about an Apple for teacher…

Ray Welling, Content Guy


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