Arms race outside of the Prado

Sorry for feeling a bit stupid. I just cut my finger while chopping up some veggies. Shit happens and this is not the first time I cut myself since I cook everyday. (As they say, statistically, it is bound to happen.) The stupidity part came from the fact that just a split second before the accident, I was just thinking to myself that how I was holding the stuff was probably a bad idea. Then, Whack!

Be thankful that I am not the type to post images of my mutilated finger...

**

Onto the more pleasant topic of my upcoming Spain trip. All the duckies are beginning to line up. I met up with an art historian buddy, M, to borrow her tome on Prado. No, not the $500 pieces of leather strips pretending to be mules from Prada, Prado is the venerable art museum in Madrid with Goya, El Greco, and other masters.

One question did arise. What is the actual name of Bosch's painting - is it "the Garden of Delights" or "the Garden of Earthly Delights". M swore that it is commonly known as earthly delights. So, my job is to find out.

**

In the realm of Marketing-landia...

What kills me is that Google is getting expensive. I did some quick analysis and noticed that our average costs for the various campaigns have been on an upward trend.

Theoretically, Google employs the dutch auction method and lets you pay just a minimum increment above the next bidder for each click through. On the other hand, if all the competitors, big and small, are determined to get high placement for the Google ad's, this becomes an "arms race" where we attempt to outbid each other while Google is laughing all the way to the bank.

Bastards! That is one brilliant scheme to rule the world.

One possible way to deal with the issue is to switch to targeted site campaign instead of the Content Network. I was initially skeptical of the Targeted site program thinking that it cannot add any more value than the Content network programs that I already employ. However, since the Content network is not performing well, I am always open to experiments

What I found interesting was the process of selecting the targeted sites with this new Google program. Specifically, I entered a list of key words that I want to match with site contents, then, I have to go through each proposed site to see if it is indeed the right fit for the campaign. I must say that about half of them are pretty low quality sites where having the impression made (ad served) is unlikely to have meaningful impact. Then, there is an additional 25% of sites that simply made no sense from my perspective but because some of the key words I used contained generic terms that have multiple meanings I end up with a bunch of washer/dryer sites to choose from!

Of course, the insight is NOT that the targeted site is a bad idea as I am trying it out on a small scale and will likely expand the program once I get more comfortable with it. My insight is how Google's Content network may not be an appropriate vehicle for ad's with the cart blanch approach where Google determines the "right" content for you. Based on the list of available sites from the Targeted site exercise, the Google engine is not to be completely trusted.

On the other hand, Google's ad serving optimization engine does work darn well. The optimization engine will serve the best performing ad's as defined by the higher click-through rate. I turned the engine off for two weeks to force an A/B test and saw our leads flow dropped off. Then, I turned it back on and we saw the number came back up. I am impressed!

This is search engine day. I must confess that I am on the verge of killing our Yahoo/Overture exercise. I have run the program for about four months and I got a paltry two leads from the program. Based on our weblog, we get most of the hits through Google - which makes sense as Google is the preferred engine for most technical people who are our customers. Finally, they upgraded their system last weekend and caused total havoc in their billing system. I had to call twice to get the bills straighten out and get the excess charges reversed.

The funny thing is that I have not found the way to terminate the Yahoo program yet. It will be done. I just thought it is silly to increase the ill will of users in making it unfriendly to terminate a program.

Right. A few personnel update. Mr Whup-ass is still around. He survived the board meeting mostly intact. There were some questions about his intention and allegiance, but we really are not ready to look for a new CEO.

The dragon lady came and went. She declined the offer to join the team. On one hand, it is a shame because we all thought that she is highly capable. On the other, I suspect several sighs of relief was let out as she made an "impression" on a number of us.

The website is still an evolving process. I am in the process of pushing out new Partners pages where people can sign up to become a partner or find an existing partner. I am getting pretty proficient with Contribute and only ask our webmaster in helping me to hook up the navigational stuff and some of the back-end codes.

The new website design is coming along. The designer has given me a few more updated designs to ponder over. This is an interesting process as we try to coordinate and communicate with each to align what we had in our respective minds. One thing is that while the designer works away on the new ideas, I am still chucking along with new content for the existing corporate site. Hope the current site does not outgrow the new site design...

So I went to a marketing seminar hosted by our Big Four accountant. It was a bit of time waster. The speaker is earnest but the example and ideas are pretty well wore. Of course, we all want to delight customers because happy customers means that they will help to spread the good news on the product and the company. The real question for a marketing guy like me is what to do when the customer puts limitations because the legal department mandates it? The question is how does internet fit into the marketing reality. In fairness, I did dot down a few ideas that I want to explore further. But, it sure did not need a four hour session to get these ideas.

Besides, the food and coffee were terrible.

Speaking of time wasters. I have been invited to attend a Google focus group next week. No idea what they plan to do. I hope they have better munchies. For me, I hope to meet a few people in the trenches so we can swap notes on how to deal with click-spam amongst other exciting and well documented on-line marketing problems that nobody seems to have a good solution for.

I am happy that we switched PR firm. Being the second week of the relationship, they are still promising the world and pushing me to give them more information. What a change. Before, I had to prod and cajole the PR team to get things done. Now, I am worries that I do not have time to give timely update to the PR people.

I also like the big picture strategy this firm is proposing. The arc is a series of product announcements which should be planned out on a monthly basis. This arc is supported by a series of related activities such as vertical and geographic pushes. Then, we will also crank up the speaking and whitepaper program to provide the "technical" support. Finally, they are suggesting to put Mr Whup-Ass in places like the Red Herring. Now, that is cool!

**

M is relatively new to the Bay area. And, a typical Bay area obsession is housing prices. So, we were talking about how co-workers deal with the skyrocketing housing market including two-hour one way commutes. Gosh! Can you imagine spending a solid four hours in the car everyday to get to and back from work?

On a lark, M thought of the sky taxi idea. Instead of commuting by car why not take a commuter flight? So, instead of a two hour drive, it can be cut down to 40 minutes. Of course, it won't be too comfortable, but I think there is money there somewhere. I already promised M that I will parcel out some shares for the idea if I ever get around to the idea. Let me know if you are interested in this idea - I always need partners.

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Watching out for J-CAP

Another lunch story. This time was with the old CTO of another startup that I worked at which we ultimately sold to a competitor. That was another interesting experience.

Anyway, I was sharing the story about how some of well-to-do Manhattan Jewish families are adopting baby girls from China. And, it would be interesting to see what happens to Wall Street and other places in 20 years when these babies are grown women and start to exert their influence...

**

Mr Whup-Ass's event has blown over mostly without new wrinkles. He was able to help us change the "was" in the press release so we can all move on with our lives.

Of course, officially, the verdict is not out since our board still has to approve of the change. I do not believe it would be wise to ask Mr W to resign at this junction, but, with the board, you never know.

The PR agency change came about easier than I originally thought. I tried to call the out-going account manager on Thursday afternoon without success. But, I was able to connect with her on Friday morning. Since our contract stipulated that we can terminate the relationship with a written note, I told her on the phone first and then followed up with an email to confirm the conversation. She was a bit shocked of the change, but took it well. I told her that we really enjoy working with the firm but the new firm made an offer that we/I did not want to turn down.

With the new firm, there was one contractual change from the proposal. Initially, we had a 30 day notification for terminating the contract. I call them up and said that I want the ability to terminate the contract immediately. Not that I plan to end the relationship before signing up. But, I do not want to have carry an agency for 30 days knowing that there is no incentive to perform. In exchange, I offered to sign up for 90 days to put a bit of our skin in the game. My thinking is that I would need to give them at least 90 days to ramp up and prove themselves. And, this also give them a way to justify the change. Anyway, they agreed to it and we started the relationship this Monday.

It is obviously too early to say what is going to happen with the new agency. So far, they have been pretty good at asking questions. I think they will put together a detail proposal next week. But, I am pushing them to start our weekly call this Thursday. We'll see.

The Google thing is interesting. I have gone in and started to kill ad's that do not perform well. Usually, there is a clear drop off. One type of ad that I tend to leave in are the webinars. They usually do not perform as well as other ad's, but I do want to see if there is some way of improving it.

My gut feeling is that webinars do not work as well as the standard sales ad's since few people are motivated to mark their calendar in advance for something that they know little about. As I trim the ad's with low click through rates, I hope to collect more data to confirm webinar's performance.

A related idea is to start offering whitepapers and articles through Google. I think this could be something that might entice people to click through because a download is considered a significantly lower commitment than a webinar.

Two other ideas that I am thinking through are 1. have a canned/recorded webinar and 2. the Google targeted site programs. Still doing research.

Oh, I finally got the new product pages pushed out. It is note worthy for two reasons. For the company, I am glad that these pages are out because it is actually the biggest revenue generator for the company although it is a stealth product. We still see people searching for it on the web-log and I am glad to offer the information on the corporate site again. From a marketing perspective, I am glad because now I can start to work on additional web components that will deal with the partners program which is both more interesting and more important for the growth of the company.

Speaking of partners program. We have interviewed and extended an offer to a dragon lady. She seems very competent and has all the relevant experiences. But, as I was talking with Mr Proper, Sales VP, she seems like a ball-buster... Anyway, my plan is to have the partner pages ready before leaving Spain. And, in parallel, work with our new PR team to push the program and its success with press like CRN.

I am starting the email newsletter program. For the longest time, I was reluctant to do it because I do not feel like I have enough content to keep it going for the long haul. However, with the influx of articles, whitepapers, customers, etc. I am now comfortable with the idea and will send out the first one tomorrow. One interesting thing about newsletter is that you have to keep it information rich to make it sticky with readers. So, I actually spent quite a bit of time talking about user experiences, press coverage, and only minimum spins on attending our webinars. I even suggested that people forward the newsletter to their friends. We will see if anyone takes me up on the offer. :-)!

The webinar program wanes and waxes in terms of attendance. In the past week or so, it is in the wane stage. So, Mr Proper suggested that we change the date and frequency to have one every Wednesday. I do not have a good reason on why the change because we started the webinar program with a respectable bang. The mystery of the web.

Actually, I am looking into a number of tools that will help to answer some of my conundrums. I really need a full time web person to get these things implemented...

Finally, the second website draft came in. It looks better than the first one. However, I made some changes to it as a counter-proposal. I hope the designer does not kill me. But, I actually thought the counter-proposal makes more sense in terms of eyeball movement patterns. We will see how she reacts to my ideas.

**

...Mr CTO thought about these baby girls from China in the Manhattan Jewish homes for a second and said, "Hmm, J-CAP's. Jewish Chinese American Princess."

I thought that was a good line.

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Taking on Chindia

I had lunch with a buddy to catch up. He told me about this new buzz word "Chindia" - a contrasted form of China and India like "Wintel" for Windows and Intel. Have not heard "Chindia" before but got the notion immediately. It would be interesting to see if this term lives. I know people sometimes use Wintel, but I do not believe it ever caught on.

Did you know the English word "entrepreneur" came from the Old French "entreprendre" meaning "to undertake"...

**
A strange week indeed.

The biggest news, by all measures, is that Mr Whup-Ass is taking on the acting CEO role of another company. He is on the board of this company and there have been quite a bit of internal turmoil there. So, the board decided to fire the existing CEO and asked Mr Whup-Ass to step in for the interim while they figure out how to take care of the situation.

Of course, this is proving a bit problematic from my (marketing) perspective. Mr W is staying on as our CEO and we want him to do that. However, the original announcement of his acting CEO appointment put his association with us in doubt. This put a bit of pressure on us because we needed to explain to everyone who monitors our activities that he is still with us without sounding like a bunch of headless chickens.

It took a few days of going back and forth to confirm that Mr W will indeed stay on as CEO as originally thought. Then, it becomes a matter of putting out those small fires and doubts. Unfortunately, the other company's website still have not been updated. I will need to keep bugging them to change the website...

The other thread on the on-going PR saga is that I have gotten internal buy-in to change the PR agency. I have talked with the new agency and they have put forth a proposal that is within what I was expecting. The tricky part now is to figure out the best transition period. Strategically, I do not want to advise the out-going firm too early because there is the risk that they will start to coast for however many days that are left nor does it make sense to have the out-going firm work on relationships and project knowing that they will not be supporting them. On the other hand, at the emotional level, I have not decided on how "cold blooded" I want to be. I have enjoyed working with the people from the out-going firm and I certainly do not hold ill feeling beyond the fact that I think I have a better team with the new agency. I will talk with a few people and decide the best way to handle this.

On the Google front, I have started the A/B test with ad's. Actually, it is a test with two components. One is to test which copy works better. This is achieved by serving these ad's in an even rotating manner. So, the comparison is apple to apple. This is distinct from the Google AdWord default choice of automatic optimization. On the back-end, I am also testing which landing page works better as a conversion tool. This is achieved by having two identical ad designs one that goes to an information request page with the other going to the webinar request page. This test has run for one week so far and I would like to run it for a few more weeks to see the results.

On the lead front, it seems we are getting more quality leads this week. I do not have any idea on what is the difference this week. The probable candidate is the nice article that we got from Network World. On the other hand, I do need to guard against the psychological trap known as the "immediacy/proximity effects" where I correlate what happened right before an event as being the cause. But, hey, if that is what it takes to take some credit, it is an easy sell. :-)!

**
Oh, did somebody mention Spain? My Spanish vacation is coming in a bit more than three weeks. I have been listening to Spanish tapes for a while now and I must say that if I ever want to retain a cleaning lady for my apartment, I am ready. Now, if you want me to order food from a restaurant, that is a completely different story. The tapes I use focus on preparing a person to live in a Spanish speaking country whereas I need tourist Spanish. Not saying the exercise is for naught though. It is still good to prep my ears and generally trying to recoup my limited vocabulary.

The other thing I have been doing is to watch as many movies from Spain as possible. The idea being that I need to prep my ears for Castilian Spanish. It is interesting that through these films, I am learning the Spanish on how to kill a neighbor (La Communidad, a great film - illogical, dark, and funny) or how to say the F word in Spanish (El Secreto de la Corazon - it is a cute film about growing up). Now, I am working on a film that talks about drug, transvestite, and the church (La mala educacion - interesting so far.)

So the truth is that I will probably still get lost in Spain. But, that is a separate issue.

!Vamos!

**
Oh, my latest brilliant idea on the landing page is to cross-promote the webinar events. In other words, once somebody requests information on our products, in the thank you page, I also give them an option to request a webinar. It is worth a try. My two technical challenges are 1.) I would like to spare the person who signs up for the webinar the trouble of typing the same info again 2.) I would like a way to track the flow from info request to webinar request.

I also attended a marketing webinar. The bad news is that I am already doing most of what the speaker was talking about - namely be quantitative and double down on the venues that work instead of a shotgun approach to cover everything. The good news is that I got a few ideas out of the webinar anyway. Specifically, I think offering a report on the "Top 10 Mistakes" for IT folks to download could be quite powerful. I always enjoy reading this kind of list because I (feel that I) can judge how well I am doing with third party benchmark. I think this ties into my ideas of doing assessment and quiz on the website. IT people like that stuff. The other idea is to do a customer referral program. The speaker did not go into the details and I need to find out more. But, I am convinced that it is faster/easier to sell through customer referral than anything else in the world. Maybe I will announce a customer referral program in my upcoming company newsletter blast?

I think I mentioned that we are working with an analyst to write a series of whitepaper. So far, I have not seen any interesting traffic (that I can discern of) from these whitepaper. The plan now is to include an additional press release on the wire touting these whitepapers. I do not suppose that he would oppose the idea. And, in any case, I am lifting words from his whitepaper and peppering these words liberally in a number of upcoming customer press releases. I guess the danger is that I wear the relationship thin with both this analyst and the press by keep talking about the same analyst.

If you want control over the web content, Macromedia Contribute is a great product. For the longest time, every change I need would go through a mark-up from me to the webmaster for implementation. It takes quite a bit of time going back and forth. Now, with Contribute, I can update text, add new objects, etc. to the staging website. And, when I am happy with the result, I can push out the changes to the live site.

Of course, a new capability also comes with a new ability to make mistakes. For example, I was building a few new pages on a product that we have not featured for a while. These pages were work in progress. And, in came a request to change text on the webinar request page. Not remembering the work in progress, I made the simple text changes on the webinar page and pushed out to the live server - along with the work in progress pages. Yikes! Good thing that I remembered within one hour or so and took out links to the work in progress pages. It could have been embarrassing.

New website design is coming along. I got the first full color drafts for review. All I can say is that I am glad to have retained a professional for the work. Of course, this does not preclude me from making a fuss about the lines, disjointed components, and menu items, etc. I was nice about it though. :-)!

**

For our parting thought, my buddy Mr Chindia told me a conversation he had with a "patriotic" American who was unhappy with the French. This patriot quipped that "Look at how France economy is a mess. Heck, they probably don't even have a word for 'entrepreneur'!"

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Quantity, if there is no quality

Summer is in the air. And, more importantly, I am going to take two weeks off in September for Spain. So, if I wander off into Spanish, be forewarned.

Bueno. Vamos a ver la vida de un marketeer...

This is a relatively uneventful week. Last week's lead flow has been relatively low but good quality. So, I upped the Google budget and sure enough we are getting a flood of junk leads this week. I must say that this remains a conundrum for me in terms of how to get people NOT to leave junk info. One new strategy is to make the sign up process more onerous requiring full contact information and description of the buying process. This just got pushed out in the new Google landing page. I hope to see some positive impact that way.

Still on the junk lead thought. What is the story with internet users from China? What is the attraction of leaving junk information in a sign up page? I have no problem with the good people of China. But, to the extent that they are wasting my good marketing budget, I am peeved.

Yet another junk lead angle. Recall that we set up the webinar sign-up with a long list of questions and people have been leaving meaningful information. Well, yesterday, I got the first junk webinar lead. It is slightly different. The person's email indicates that he hails from UK. Still no excuse for leaving junk, and I do wonder why any sane person would bother with that list of questions?

One degree away from junk leads. I also have a $25 promotion ad running in Google. For the longest time, there was no taker. But, earlier today, somebody bit. That was the good news. The bad news was that the promotion specifically stipulated minimum company size and geographic location which this person did not meet. In fairness, I do not blame him for not reading the fine prints since I rarely bother to read it myself. I did tell Mr Proper that if this guy buys, I would be happy to give him an additional $25 discount from my marketing budget to compensate him. Will be interesting to track this lead's progress.

Webinar is still running. After the initial surge, there seems to be fewer takers. In fairness, they are still coming but it is not as numerous as before. On the other hand, this is probably the more "normal" state for a new program like this. somebody told me that there is an organization called CMP Research that is very good at driving traffic for webinars, I have not been able to find more information on it. Will try again tomorrow.

For a while, I have just assumed that our Google activities are fine and it would be just a matter of constantly tweaking it. Ha! I must have spent nearly half of my time on Google in the past week. First off, there were additional categories that I did not think of but customers suggested. So, that was kind of exciting adding a new category for search and content networks and all the associated decisions such as countries and ad-copy for the category. The other thing is that I am running an A/B test on all of my ad's. The A is the standard sign-up page and B is the webinar sign-up page. I am curious to see what would be the difference in sign-up rate.

A related question on Google is that I am wondering what is the impact of NOT letting Google automatically optimize the ad's served. My thinking is that the only "fair" A/B test is to make sure both ad's have approximately similar served rate. But, I guess this is another instance where I need to turn to my on-line marketing guru for some insight. Will ask. And, what the heck, I will play with it for a few weeks anyway with the auto-optimizations off.

Finally on Google. Recall that every time there is a conversion event at Google, I pass a text string to ID the ad and campaign. I have been keeping the stats on the ad/campaign combination. However, given the fact that there is a fair number of junk leads, I need to guard against having the junk leads skew the stats on the ad/campaign performance. Since I started to keep the warm/cold status of incoming leads (where junk leads are marked as "Cold") I can correlate the ad/campaign performance better with the true winners. I will run the numbers on my regular Thursday analysis. This should be an interesting eye opener.

Got a call from my favorite customer that the case study is all great but he cannot give me the official approval because there are some internal business needs that need to have a publicity blackout for about a month. This happens. Of course, this does not stop the CFO and I speculating about some kind of major SEC filing. We are nowhere needing to file with SEC, but we can always live vicariously...

Last item, more of a rant, for the day. I am pretty close on firing my current PR team. They are good people and, when given enough pressure, will deliver publicity. But, that is the thing. Why does it require pressure for getting performance? Isn't it what PR folks are supposed to do - get publicity? Every time I ask for something or suggest an idea, the response was pretty much the same. It is difficult, it is not interesting, etc. Now, I do not pretend to be a genius, but if my ideas suck, I would expect to hear some other ideas. Nada. Then, I see publicity for competitors that are based on ideas that even suck-er than mine. I also have to seek out analysts myself to brief them. Admittedly, these analysts ain't tier-one. But, they are certainly easier to talk with and I even get a few of them to write about us. (Oh, the article from the consultant/analyst lady came out this week and we got at least one confirmed phone call on the product as a result of reading that article.) The current PR team is shooting for the tier-one Gartner boys. I have no issue with roping in Gartner, but the truth is that I will never get the money to retain them and make them actually listen to what we/I have to say right now. So, when there is no quality, I would go for quantity.

Do you think that I am asking too much of PR? All I want is to get some publicity!

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