Chief Chicken Headless

Orz and other considerations

2006-02-22T11:45:00.000-08:00

Sorry. Busy month.

=Sorta Table of Content=

Triggering Google AI via SEO pages
Measuring global clicks in Google time
The mythical 2,000 keywords mark
Moving keywords - not operator error
Biz.com
Made-up news
Small people need shirts too
More oars in the water
Orz!

**
SEO pages - triggering Google AI testing

I must say one of the most interesting things that I have noticed with the SEO exercise is the interaction with the Google adwords program.

SEO (search engine optimization) pages are suppose to help a particular set of web pages show up in higher ranking for the corresponding set of search terms. So, say I want to drive traffic to people who search for "panda bear adoption", I can hire an SEO company that would produce a set of web pages that are designed to have a lot of information on panda adoption and therefore when somebody searches on yahoo for "panda bear adoption" one of these pages would show up as the #1 page. That is the theory anyway.

So, I rolled out a set of SEO pages for the corporate site. And, yes, I definitely see these SEO pages climbing the organic search result ranking. But, what is not expected is that somehow it also triggered the Google AdWords engine to re-consider some of my adwords keywords and ad's.

In all fairness, this is a conjecture in my part, but frankly, I cannot see another explanation. Basically, because my organic search/corporate site has this infusion of new content that target specific service that my corporate site has been relatively weak on, somehow, Google noticed the change in the organic content and activates the AdWords engine to try out some of the existing keywords that have been relatively dormant.

Let me give you a made-up example. Say that I have a set of keywords in AdWords related to New York Taxi. However, due to a number of reasons, none of these keywords have good performance and, as a result, Google's budget auto-optimization gives these keywords low bid prices which, in effect, renders them rarely used. Then, with the SEO pages on New York Taxi added to my corporate site, suddenly, Google noticed the difference and started to experiment on these same keywords to see there is a change in click-thru rates.

Okay, I suppose this does not need to be a coordinated efforts between Google organic search and AdWords as Google has always maintained an official separation between the two operations. And, I suppose it is possible that Google adwords simply found the new content and decided to experiment with those dormant keywords. But, I think that kind of separation is kind of artificial.

Anyway, the SEO pages are out and we are seeing a nice increase in our web hit rate. This is actually a bit problematic as I use to scrub through the daily web hits to get new keywords. But, with the longer list, I do not that kind of time to eyeball all the entries...

**
How long does it take for Google adword's conditions to proliferate around the world. How do I know?

I noticed a term that seem to invite quite a bit of click-spam. So, I removed it from my list of keywords and, as an added security, I added the term as a negative keyword to indicate that I definitely do not want it.

Guess what, two days later, I noticed in my daily web hit log, the exact term was being used by a click-spam-er from Japan.

Naturally, I reported this to Google and asked for a refund. And, this also proves that it takes a while for the Google data centers around the world to sync up with the central servers.

Interesting, huh!

**
Oh, this is kind of exciting. I have reached the mythical 2,000 keywords mark with one of my AdWord group. I remember reading about it in a forum a while back about the problem of reaching that limit and wondered when I'll hit that number myself.

Basically, when you hit the 2K mark for the number of keywords, Google AdWords tells you to par it down because it impacts the server performance. And, there are certain things that it no longer do such as providing estimates on the budget auto-optimization engine.

But, upon further investigation, the 2k limit is artificial and you can request to have the limit increased. Which I did. It took a bit of back and forth to get the limit increased, but it is do-able.

Of course, this is only the first half of the story. I'll need to break down that monster list into smaller chunks for different campaigns and groups. With 2K+ keywords, however related they are, there are ways to make divisions into smaller groups. I just dread the task. Scrubbing through 2K+ keywords is not exactly a fun thing.

**
You may have heard about the google adwords function of copy/move keywords between groups. A pretty nifty tool for those of us that works with thousands of keywords. The problem was that I could never get it to work.

Being the noisy type, I was never shy on asking Google for help. The first inquiry yield a rather unsatisfactory result as the reply basically quoted the information available in Help. Gosh! I know how to read and I have read the darn thing already.

Second time, I asked again and told them not to give me the run-around this time. And, interesting enough, there was a perfectly good reason that I was not able to use the tool and it was not even an user error. Basically, it does not work with the budget auto-optimization engine turned on! Who would have guessed? I have included the actual text below for your info. Hopefully this info makes into the AdWords Help section soon.

Google reply
The reason why you are unable to locate keywords in campaign 'XYZ' using this tool is because that campaign has the Budget Optimizer enabled. In order to successfully use the Copy/Move Keywords and Ad Text tool, I would suggest that you temporarily disable the budget optimizer while using this tool.End Google reply

**
I think I have mentioned that I recently contracted with business.com for their PPC program. I heard about them via a conversation with a potential VC investor. After all VC is suppose to be smart money. Right?

Wrong.

I must say that biz.com's performance has been rather dismal since day one. I am paying good money but it is not driving any meaningful traffics. In particular, the conversion rate is nil! So, I am paying for the clicks without getting the benefits of conversion.

The account manager is nice enough but that does not compensate for the lack of performance. The other thing is that biz.com makes it difficult to adjust and retrieve information vis-a-vis Google.

Finally, and this is not biz.com related (I do not think), my biz.como traffic is not showing up in GA(N). Don't ask me why. I just got a reply from GA claiming that they can see it. So, I promptly asked them where they saw it! Hope to have the mystery resolved in a few more days.

**
Creating news is a funny business. But, it is important when there is general market interests but people are not looking to you for information. So, in the spirit of shaping public opinion, I have commissioned a consultant to conduct a study that links to the business concerns over Sarbanes Oxley. We'll see if anyone bites on the topic.

And, the beauty of this exercise is that it can become a living thing itself. First with a PR piece on the study. Then, another PR piece on the result of the study. Then, a whitepaper or a webinar on the study. And, if I keep pounding on the issue, maybe somebody would think that I know what I am talking about...

It is all very sinister. And, I am not even left handed.

**
Oh, so that t-shirt saga has come to a good conclusion. I found a vendor who was able to do it in Silicon Valley. I also found the contact of the co-worker who was most interested in the project. Very good news for my poker event.

The interesting thing is that I am out of the L size already. It seems like that is a rather popular size for the company. Alternatively, maybe we are a company of small people...

**
Not sure if you remember the old saga on how we could not get sales people to show up. Our fortune must have changed. Two new sales people just came on-board. I do not know much about them yet but it is good to have more oars in the water as the saying goes.

Maybe one of them will make it into this blog one of these days?

**
Finally, on a completely unrelated front. do you know what is "Orz"? Apparently, this is a popular term for text message in Asia.

One hint, it is similar to the idea of the smiley ":-)" but on a large scale.

Still not sure, that is okay - I never got it myself. It is a pictograph showing a person bowing down on all four. Kowtow, I think that is the technical term. To deconstruct the expression - "O" represents the head, "r" represents the shoulder/arm touching the floor, "z" is the butt, leg, knee on the floor.

Orz!

How cool is that! It is too bad that I do not use text message. But, I am using it here! I do wonder how long it would take for Orz to make it into an auto conversion symbol like ":-)" by MSFT?

Oh, Oh! How about finding Orz in ODE? Actually, I do not know if :-) itself is in ODE - I should check.

chiefchickenheadless (at) gmail (dot) com sign out
Legend: (at) = "@" (dot) = "."

Accounting for GAN and GAW, t-shirts, and an endorsement for filth

2006-02-01T16:38:00.000-08:00

I think I am a fairly ethical person. I have my shortcomings, for sure, but when somebody drops a wallet, my first instinct which I usually follow through is to let the person know that he dropped his wallet. My point is that for a reasonably ethical person, I hate those "company values" and "mission statements". When was the last time these values or missions said anything interesting? And, I have never felt any of my actions in a particular company is guided one way or another by stated values and mission. Neither have I seen any of my co-workers from CEO on down, follow these ideas.

(Oh, don't get me started on this one time that a CEO insisted that I use some ill gotten data set from the competitor. Welcome to the real world.)

Anyway, the reason I am reminded of these observations is that Mr Proper recently wanted everyone to come up with an agreed list of company values in a corporate meeting.

We want to be (in no particular order):
* Accountable
* Patient
* etc.

You get the drift. And, half way through the process, I was already in my semi-fetal position. On one hand, I really have nothing against these values, nobody is going to argue against being accountable after all. On the other, this does not seem to be something that anyone, with the possible exception of Mr Proper, would remember after the discussion.

To my surprise, Mr Whupass started to challenge the whole idea as well as the individual statements. For example, what is being accountable? Is it a way to pin fault on people? Why cannot we just use common sense to tell whether somebody is being accountable?

I loved it!

Being the CEO, when Whupass showed his cards, the people fall into line rather quickly then. (We may try to be accountable, but we also know how to kowtow to the big boss.)

This kind of got me thinking though. Why are these company values important and who cares? I still maintain that these values are not worth more than the material that they are printed on. This is basically, my conjecture, a global conspiracy by marketing and HR people to create work and production opportunities. Having said that, having a list of company value can also be interpreted as a sign of being a real company since "real" companies have those silly lists. Do you think that is what Mr Proper wanted? A bit artificial, wouldn't you say?

**
I finally got my acts together to poke around the Google Analytics Help forum. So, the first thing is that it is not Analytics or Urchin (the original vendor/product name for the product). It is call "GA". Logically enough, but how about Google AdWords? It would seem that to avoid confusion that AdWords would be known as GAW where as Analytics should be called GAN.

Yeah, you've probably guessed it, I have not learnt much on how to use GA yet so I can only make these tangential observations.

I poked around my GA numbers on a daily basis to get more familiar with them. Man! They are not intuitive to decipher. And, there is not an easy consolidated source that would serve as the user manual. Technically, there is a help section which I am in the process of reading through. But, this is nothing like AdWords where you can print out a 400 page tome on how to use GAW.

Is Google turning sloppy? The wind is not favorable.

**
I must confess that I have not watched any TV program in an organized fashion, meaning having a fixed time or a favorite show, for years. So, it is only logical that I have no cable. And, in any case, I have only heard of the recent popularity of poker games - I think I read it in an article while waiting in a doctor's office a while back.

So, imagine my surprise that one of our partners is hosting a poker tournament as part of the product/vendor program - come for one hour of sales pitch and you get to play three hours of poker.

I love that idea, mixing business with sinful pleasures. (Disclaimer, I have nothing against gambling. In any case, I am for anything that would help to shock the sensibility of some segment of the civic society. So, please take my use of "sinful" in that tongue-in-cheek spirit.) So, I quickly signed up for the program as one of the vendor "acts". In addition to the sales pitch, I will also be hosting a blackjack table for those who are not playing poker or got eliminated from the tournament. Finally, I will be handing out t-shirts to all the participants.

Nobody can fault me for not being able to spend money in the name of marketing. :-)!

**
So, this comes to the latest saga on the t-shirt making front. For several months now, one of the field support engineers told me that he has a friend who can make t-shirts. I am all for routing business to people we know. So, I have been asking for more information so I can make a batch.

Nothing.

Anyway, with the poker event looming, I really need to get my acts together. So, I quickly sent out a bunch of queries for local t-shirt guys and got a few quotes going.

Not sure if you ever made t-shirts in the 80's. It used to be a pretty simple operation. I used to go to a photo copier with the image I want silk screened and make a photocopy onto a thick transparency. The transparency goes to the t-shirt maker and, a few days later, a batch of t-shirts. A good way to make a little spending money on the side.

Well, things have changed. I was asked for an EPS format file for the company logo. I said, sure, I've got exactly what you needed. Then, when I talked with the graphic designer, she informed me that the EPS file that I had was in pixel format as oppose to vector format. Now, you have to bear with me on this point as I am not clear on the details. Basically, a pixel format cannot scale easily since the images are in pixel, i.e. when you blow it up, the gaps between the pixels become visible. On the other hand, vector format, being of mathematical (vector) expressions, can be scaled to whatever size since these expression are robust unless you go into the imaginary plan (okay, I add the conjecture about the imaginary plan but it is probably true.)

Being the good marketing executive, I told the graphic designer to come up with a new logo that is close to the current one but in vector EPS format. It does not need to be perfect for the few people would really notice the discrepancy in a t-shirt.

Then, there is the issue of size. This is basically a statistical question and I have no data to go on. So, I talked with one of the t-shirt making guy and gave him the instruction that I would like to make 50 shirts for a population that is mostly male (90%). The triangulated recommendation is: 2 Small, 8 Medium, 20 large, 18 XL and 2 XXL. I think there is a surcharge for XXL. I may stick with 20 XL instead.

I wonder what kind of sizes I did in the 80's.

**
This is not exactly marketing related, but I just want to say that I enjoyed documentary films. And, the most interesting one that I have seen in a long time is "The Aristocrats". It is not, by a long long shot, family friendly, but it exposes a side of the entertainment world and American psyche that are often considered taboo to explore.

The film retells the same joke by many famous comedians each with his own ways of telling it. I won't ruin the fun for you by telling you the joke here, but suffices to say that the whole point is to shock and disgust the listener. In a way, it is sort of like the "my brother can beat up your brother" game to see who can top each other in the category of shock and disgust. And, that in and of itself is fun aplenty.

What I also find fascinating is that the joke really allows a person to explore the notion of taboo and boundaries in the American context (since the jokes are told by American comedians.) Wouldn't it be fun to tell the same job around the world and see what are the taboos and boundaries that people have?

chiefchickenheadless (at) gmail (dot) com sign out
Legend: (at) = "@" (dot) = "."

My First SEO toys and PPC tools

2006-01-25T18:45:00.000-08:00

Now that Analytics is on, I still have not had a chance to really go through it. The documentation front seem a bit thin compared with AdWords. This could means that Analytics is the new wild west or I am just looking at the wrong places. Surely, Google won't make software that is hard to use...

I suppose I have been procrastinating on Analytics. But, I have a good excuse. We just brought the SEO pages live. I purchase/licensed the SEO content for a list of 30 keywords that I want to get good ranking on. It turns out that one keyword I cannot use after getting a better understanding of the system. The key reason is legal, it gets too complicated to do SEO on a competitor's name. So, if you have come up with a good way to do SEO on a legally registered (competitor) name, please let me know!

The structure of the SEO pages are fairly plain. So, I spent some time with the web people to spruce it up so that at least the touch and feel is similar to the overall corporate site. Of course, this process can be taken too far. So, when my VP of engineer told me that it is time to push them out to make the licensed content earn their keeps, I readily agree.

The funny thing about SEO pages is that it could impact the performance of the AdWords program. Based on historic data, when people search on the company name, naturally, we rank highly in both the natural and paid search results. And, there are very few click on the paid search results.

You may think that this is a good thing, why pay when you get the click through natural search. the trouble is that the paid search is optimized to create conversion events. In other words, when you click on the paid search, the route is designed that you either abandon the path or leave your contact info. This is how we generate the bulk of leads.

Now that SEO pages holds the promise of getting really good natural search ranking for the keywords that have been generating the bulk of conversion traffic, this could be a problem when people no longer leave their contact info with us.

Theoretically, I would love to do an empirical A/B test to see if the concern is valid. But realistically, the stake is too high that I have no intention to taking the hit. So, I have been working on these pages to create as many conversion traps as possible.

**
So, here are a few good tools to have

1. To figure out exactly what a viewer would see when doing a google search

http://merjis.com/local_google_search

Why bother: say that you want to see what a viewer in Germany searching for "tiny boots" using a German interface would see. This tool automatically generate the appropriate tags. A very helpful tool if you do regional/local advertising from afar.

2. US location keywords generator

http://5minutesite.com/local_keywords.php

Why bother: you would be surprised the power of regional/targeted ads - at least that I have been told many times over. I have never personally tried it but I am looking for an angle to do it with a regional partner - that is a separate story though. Anyway, the interface is reasonably intuitive. It does not capture ALL permeation in terms of location keywords, but it wold give you a good start. And, that is all that we can ask for in life, a good start.

3. Google match option wrapper

http://www.mikes-marketing-tools.com/cgi-bin/adwrapper.cgi

Why bother: well, if you have not heard my rant, let me just say that it is a worthy effort to include all three match options for every keywords - broad, phrase, and exact. The problem with the level of dedication is that it is painful to do manually. I constructed a macro using Word for the job, but that was still painful. Then, this site comes along and all you need to do is to plug in the broad match keywords and, voila, out comes all three permutations of the match options.

The truth is that I still manually add the match options on a day to day basis when it is just one or two keywords to add since it is a bit of hassle to open up another browser. But, for a mass job, this is definitely the ticket.

4. Statistically predictor on performance

http://splittester.com/index.php

Why bother: well, I think the original premise of the tool is to help you predict how your ad will perform relative to a benchmark ad with minimum data. Think of it as a way to predict the result of the A/B test. I actually have no idea what kind of statistical model they use in the backend. But, I think it is an interesting idea and until I am willing to sit down and figure out my own statistical prediction model, this is a good standby tool.

On a related front, I think the model can be expanded into additional usage than just comparing ad's. For example, why can't I use the same model to compare the number of click through vs conversion rate? I think these would be much more interesting.

5. Where do you rank on Google

http://www.nichebot.com

Why bother: Technically, this site offers mostly keywords related services. Which, to be honest, I have not really looked into. The last option on Google ranking, however, is a great tool. This is especially important if, like me, you are embarking on an SEO project and need to have a third party benchmark to see how things are coming along. My favorite part is that you just dump in all the keywords that you want to have ranked and just let it run in the background. It is not the fasting service. But, for the data provided, I do not mind the wait.

chiefchickenheadless (at) gmail (dot) com sign out
Legend: (at) = "@" (dot) = "."

Passing keywords, amongst others

2006-01-18T11:51:00.000-08:00

Yeah, yeah. I know. I had taken a bit of time off. No good excuse. But, then, it is not like this blog is a life and death issue either. Hopefully.

All is well. Life is still crazy in the Silicon Valley startup land. The good news is that our performance for the past year has been so good that we are planning on starting a fund raising process. And, almost to validate our performance, some of the current investors are already jockeying for position with pre-term investment to help us ramp. Well, we will see how it works out.

Google is giving me a bit of heart burn lately. In particular, it has become unruly to manage and I am finding ever more lack of features. For example, I have begun the process of cherry picking the top performing keywords to their own campaigns with higher budget and dynamic keywords to make it perform even better.

That is the theory. But, it has not worked out so far. I am definitely paying more since the bid prices are many times higher than the standard campaign. But, I am not seeing better conversion.

Anyway, it is partly my fault, I am sure.

Oh, the Google Analytics account is finally turned on. I am glad. Of course, I still need to hook it up with Google AdWords to get the full details. I just logged into the Analytics account the first time about one hour ago and I am sure that it will take quite a few days for me to get up to speed and figure out what I am looking at.

This should be a good challenge.

**
So, I have begun to apply more pressure on the PR firm. They seem competent enough and there are certainly enough carrots that they have been dangling in front of me.

I have been pretty "easy" on them in the past month or so since it was the Thanksgiving/Christmas season. For one, I was not that motivated to work too hard. The other thing is that the PR firm has been saying the the reporters and calendars were closed for the year. May or may not be true but I was not pushing them too hard.

Now, it is a new year and I have made it fairly clear that I want to see results. They have had their play time already and it is time to earn their keeps.

It would be interesting to see how much can they deliver. The verdict is out but I want to give them Q1 to really perform and if Q1 is no good, then Q2 would be their chance for redemption.

Will keep you posted.

**
Here are some other cool undocumented Google tags. With them, I can tell the following thing when a viewer clicks on my adWord ad:

1. If the click comes from Search vs Content network.
2. What is the keyword match (if search network) or the site (if content network)
3. Which ad is triggered.

{ifsearch:keyword}{ifcontent:site}={keyword}{placement}&advert={creative}

Taken in their individual components:

{ifsearch:keyword}

If the click is from search network, pass the text "keyword"

{ifcontent:site}

If the click is from content network, pass the text "site"

{keyword}

Pass the actual keyword match.

*This is important* the parameter passes the matched keywords instead of actual key words. For example, with broad match, a search for "big shoes" can match the keyword "large shoes". In this instance, the passed keyword is the matched "large shoes" instead of actual "big shoes."

One way to address this issue is to scrub it against the web log to find the delta and add to the keywords list.

{placement}

This gives the position of the ad if the ad appears in the Content network site (I think, but I stopped using Content network a while back so did not bother to find out the details.)

{creative}

This passes a numeric string which is the ID for the specific ad. Using the ID number, you can match it with the actual ad under AdWords reports. (A rather clumsy process for users who want to optimize the content, but that is another issue.)

**
I am not much of a decorator and I was pretty resistant to the idea of doing office decoration. Mainly because I am too lazy to get involved. But, what must happen, must.

Everyone was assigned a task in terms of to-do and to-get. Then, we had a pretty miserable time in agreeing on a common decor vision. To be politically correct, it was an issue of styles and tastes. But, of course, *I* have the better taste and *fortunately* my style prevailed.

On the other hand, prevailing on that front does incur the issue that I had to manage the execution which was the whole reason that I was not keen on the idea to begin with. Not exactly a "winner's curse", but it felt like it.

So, the office is now decorated and I am curious to see how long we will keep it up. Good thing that the new plants are plastic. (Yes, I am cynical.)

chiefchickenheadless (at) gmail (dot) com sign out
Legend: (at) = "@" (dot) = "."

Confession of a Googletizer

2005-12-28T17:58:00.000-08:00

Let's face it. Google dominates the pay-per-click market and is THE benchmark for search engine.

Translation: if you engage in any manner of online marketing, you are a Googletizer.

Like me.

I used to have very warm and fuzzy feelings toward Google but I do wonder if the recent success, financial and otherwise, of Google is turning it into your typical hi-tech bumbling hydra since there are so many things going on in those campuses.

My last post noted Google's attempt at dictating how a word/expression should be used (whitepaper, bad; white paper, good). Now, I noticed that my ads are showing up at unexpected places. As a Googletizer, one of the main value of Google service vis-a-vis other PPC vendors is that Google seems to be pretty good at keeping its words and leveling the playing field. So, I was very surprised when my ad shows up at a location that looks like a link-farm - a website that offers nothing but links where the site operator gets paid when a viewer clicks on a link. However, as a Googletizer, I am most adverse to link farms because it does not provide high quality clicks and the operator has incentive to create click-fraud to boost their own earning. (The Economist even noted operations in China where people are hired to click on these links to generate money.)

For this and other reasons, I have opted opted out the Content Network option with Google to minimize this kind of exposure. So, imagine my annoyance when I found a click that come from a site that is a link farm (no search capability and no meaningful content). I filed a request to Google support asking for clarification of policy and how to avoid this kind of exposure. I got a reply assuring me that Google does its utmost to have the right content site operating for my ad's. I then replied with "but I have opted out of Content network." Google gets back with a comparison between the Content and Search network and advise me that if I wish to opt out of a specific site, I can do so from the Content network option. (But, I have opted out Content network completely?!)

Anyway, suffices to say that I am not impressed with this kind of service and find their black-box process wanting. I am perfectly willing to accept the argument that I have stumbled onto a special micro-site run by Google to improve my performance. that would have been kind of cool... But, at least be forthcoming about it!

==
Anyway, I recently read David Ogilvy's Confession of an Ad Man. He is my new hero. He is nothing like the average advertising types that I know - thank god!

Anyway, my latest experiment with Google is to separate out the winners from the pack and give them their own campaign. The idea being that these VIP's will get special treatment with better budget allocation to ensure good ad placement. For the rest of the pack, I will just use the auto-budget option.

The auto-budget option is not a bad thing, if you do NOT accept any of the Google suggested parameters. There is nothing inherently wrong with Google's suggestion. But, Google gives you the average and, unless you only aspire to be average, you should not take the face value.

Yes, my grand theory of inter-temporal black box optimization. I had some additional thoughts about it over the past few days when things are less crazy. I think it comes down to the ability to set out a systematic program to optimize from component level to system level. For example, selecting the keywords is the typical first step. Then, use the web log to optimize the keyword selection. Then, there are all sorts of tricks for keywords in terms of capitalization, order, and matching options. Then, the typical second step is to optimize the bid price. I have found it usually take a few days to get a good baseline and it is a constant adjustment between auto-budget and manual control.

I think one of the key points in the process is figuring out how to know when enough is enough. For example, how do you decide that a keyword/ad is a dud. For the longest time, I was thinking in units of time. It is a good proxy for similar campaigns. However, for a brand new campaigns where there is no basis for comparison, time is a tricky thing. Somebody suggested that I consider the number of impressions. This is actually quite an enlightening idea for me, I know - it does not take much to impress me. So, instead of waiting for two weeks, it has to wait for X impressions. Rumor has it that 1,000 is the magic number for Google engine. Of course, one early caveat is that if your keyword selection is rather poor, it may take forever to get to the 1,000 mark and, consequently, risking introducing too much temporal distortion into the analysis.

Speaking of temporal distortion, how does viewer/user preference change over time is another topic that I find fascinating. The key question being that how do I go about capturing the change at the earliest possible time? For example, in the old days (of course Al Gore has not invented the internet then...) people may search for a "personal computer" but at some point people would search for "PC" only and these days people probably only search for "Dell". So, how do I capture that shift in viewer/user behavior?

Another experiment that I am embarking on is SEO, search engine optimization. The idea being that PPC is still relatively expensive. And, as viewers sophistication increases, the legitimacy of a high natural search ranking is significantly higher than the paid-for high ad ranking. I have engaged in some SEO on the corporate site before, but it was a bit clumsy and difficult. My latest insight is to break the process into compartmentalized pages. So, instead of optimizing for the top five terms that I want for index.html, I can have five individual pages optimized for these terms and have it linked into index.html. On the face of it, the idea makes a great deal of sense and I am hoping to get these SEO pages implemented in the next week or so. This would indeed be a very exciting experiment for me.

==
Happy 2006!

chiefchickenheadless (at) gmail (dot) com sign out
Legend: (at) = "@" (dot) = "."

A whitepaper on printing Googlster in color

2005-12-21T11:28:00.000-08:00

Hmm... I thought Christmas/New Year would be a bit less hectic. Trust me, it ain't.

Oh, one cool news. A buddy is getting the Rank Prize in UK. He finished his Ph.D. in Biology/Quantum-Chemistry in four years. Just don't ask me to explain what he does.

Dr. M. Bruchez http://www.rankprize.org/news1.htm

**
You know, I have always been somewhat of a fan of Google. But, the real question is are the Googlsters turning into the Evil Empire like Microsoft of yore? I am seeing disturbing signs.

Recently, I was notified that I was using an unapproved word in my Google AdWords ad. For those of you not in-the-know this usually happens when you have a typo or used a copy righted term in your pay-per-click ad. (This may apply to obscene words, but I never tried/checked. Honest!) Guess what was my offence. I used the term "whitepaper" while the officially sanctioned term according to Google is "white paper".

When did Google become the last word in English spelling and styles? Shouldn't the menace of Mountain View, aka Googlsters, stick to making unseemly profit and leave the business of language to the everyday folk who uses it? I am sure that the good people of OED, Oxford English Dictionary, would not approve.

==
This being the holiday season, I am happy to report that I got my gift/toy today - a laser color printer. I may have mentioned that the current printer is kunking out and I am spending way too much nursing the beast when I need to print stuff.

The good news is that I was able to install the sucker physically including the duplex option. The bad news is that I have not been able to install the software driver and I cannot even see the machine on the network.

Time to call in the pro's. I've logged a request to our IT support team and hope to start printing 'em color stuff in a few days.

chiefchickenheadless (at) gmail (dot) com sign out
Legend: (at) = "@" (dot) = "."

There is no story

2005-12-07T13:58:00.000-08:00

I was originally planning to talk about my grand theory of Inter-temporal Black Box Optimization. But, you know what, at this hour, I do not believe that I have enough energy to explain what it is. Maybe I will work it out over the Christmas timeframe. It basically treats the Google engine as a black box and seeks to optimize the output for a given input across time.

At least the title sounds impressive.

**
So, I am still very much knee deep in the website revamp purgatory. On one hand, it is gratifying to be able to mold the output so closely. On the other hand, it is a huge emotional and energy drain. I am now working from each branch of the website structure. About half way through but I have started from the easy ones.

The other thing is that I still need to add the SEO (search engine optimization) and other ancillary services designed and hooked up to the new website. Man! This is going to take a while.

Sent out a blast to an industry vertical where we are seeing some traction. The mechanics of sending out blast is not that big of a deal as I have done it a number of times. The trouble is how to massage the information into the CRM. There is also the issue of marketing vs sales view of the world. Marketing (me) wants to hit enough of the audience to make the effort worthwhile since it is the same costs. Sales (Mr Proper) only wants to hit the very narrow subset of people that he has in mind. To the extent that my targets are a super-set of his targets, you would have thought this is a pretty straight forward discussion. But, no sirree bob. I think I've spent more time negotiating the structure of the targets than the time I've spent on doing the blast.

Me bitter? Never.

Oh, we also made a bunch of Happy New Year card. It is a good idea and it is a nice gesture. the trouble is that we do not have most of the people's mailing address! In this day and age, the key information to capture is email and phone number and until now, we have done a rather poor job of capturing the mailing address. So, we will work on these. My plan is to have the initial fill-in-the-blank done by early next week so I can scrub the final list and get everything out either Friday or the following Monday.

So my fiasco of the week is the conversation with an IT trade reporter.

The background is that we bagged a major medical school as a customer and I have been pushing the PR firm to shop the story around. The first reporter flaked on us and the PR firm found a replacement reporter.

The reporter talked with the customer first and, before talking with the reporter, I was warned that there could be some tough questions on what has changed, product-wise, since the last time this publication covered us. Fair question and I quickly assembled a list of new features and accomplishments since that last coverage. Ever the boy scout.

So, this is the gist of the exchange with the reporter (C = Chief Chicken Headless, R = Reporter)
==
C: Since the last coverage we have come up with a new configuration which is used by this customer
R: What is the difference between the customer from the last coverage to the new customer this time?
C: The new customer uses a new configuration whereas the prior customer uses a different one.
R: But, it basically does the same thing despite the differences in configuration.
C: That is a fair point in that it fulfills the same business needs, but we are pretty excited about the new configuration and the school loves it. And, this is a new release.
R: When was the release?
C: About two months ago.
R: This is not news
C: We think that the new customer represents a new way of looking at this critical user issue. Their users have all the IT infrastructures but they cannot address these needs effectively. Our product provides the ability to "level the playing field" and effectively solve these concerns.
R: Surely the old customer does the same thing
Y: This is the first customer who came to us and told us explicitly this is the reason they needed our solution. The solution also provides a slew of backend management tools that has helped the IT administration of this key user needs.
R: Yeah, that is a new customer not a new story
C: We think this is a brand new way of looking at this user issue and the customer has clearly articulated the underlying issue that are often difficult to articulate by most of the IT people
R: ... Not enough of a news
C: Would you be interested in getting information on the school's case study
R: That's okay, I've already talked with the school
==
and then it loops back to the top - "this is a new configuration"

I do not fault the reporter for asking tough questions but it was a bit frustrating to have to keep repeating the same thing knowing full well that he will retort with the same too. Obviously, we did not go into an infinite loop but the various overtures and explicit questioning of what will be enough of a story from me did not yield anything.

If I did not know any better, I would have fired the PR firm for not prepping the reporter ahead of time. And, of course, I am sure that it will be a funny story in ten years.

chiefchickenheadless (at) gmail (dot) com sign out
Legend: (at) = "@" (dot) = "."

Marketing strategies

2005-11-30T18:00:00.000-08:00

Howdy! I am back.

Last week was the Thanksgiving weekend in the US. Having no direct connection with the Mayflower boat people, it is not really a major holiday for me as such. On the other hand, I would take a four day weekend any time.

It is kind of sad that the business environment in the US is quite stingy when it comes to vacation in the name of higher productivity output. The worse part is that France has higher per capital hourly productivity despite the 35 hour work week. I do not know what this means really, but I can tell you that I was green with envy when Isa told me that she had ONLY six weeks of vacation in her very first full time job. I became a serious francophil all of a sudden then.

**
Thanksgiving notwithstanding, life continues to be hectic.

All is going well in the case study land. Just got a new case study done with a well known medical school. The trick is to get that news out to the press. So, I am working with the PR agency to get a feature story for an IT publication and a medical trade journal. Fingers crossed.

But the true excitement these day is the website revamp. After all the noises and posturing, I am finally getting down to the nitty gritty of getting the new website implemented. It is somewhat of a thankless task but it has to be done. The tricky part is that I am working with an outside web implementer with whom I have never worked with. I am, to be candid, a bit anxious as to how the initial output would be. It is sort of like dating - we are still trying to figure out how much we would like each other's style.

One major stumbling block is that the web designer is holding onto the design templates until we cut a check for her work. That is reasonable. I am hoping that she would send me a file or two so we can get started as the payment process will take a few more days and I want the implementer to get started yesterday. This is one of those little tricky things working for a startup - gotta manage the cash flow and work within these limitations.

In the Google land, I continue to experiment with new ideas. My latest is to have each keywords in all three matching incarnations - broad, phrase, and exact. So, for example, if =chocolate cookies= is a keyword that I want, I would have chocolate cookies, [chocolate cookies] and, "chocolate cookies" in my keywords list. It was not obvious at first that the performance would be significantly different. On the other hand, the matching is different and both the impression and conversion rate also differ. This is kind of freaky actually, but I am glad that I found it.

Google recently made Urchin a free offering as Google Analytics. I was all gun-ho about implementing it for the new website as part of the on-going optimization process. But, I was just been told that it is closed to applicants as the flood of requests had overwhelmed the current infrastructure. So un-cool! After all, my needs are obvious more pressing than the rest!

==
I have been pushed quite a bit lately on increasing the lead flow. The irony is that I am generating more than enough leads for the current sales team. Actually, they are feeling a bit overwhelmed by the flow. But the concern is that if we ramp up with more sales people, we would need more leads.

The problem right now is that we do not seem to be able to find the sales people we want. And, until we get the sales infrastructure in place, the desire to generate more leads is kind of academic. And, if anything, I would not want to generate a significantly higher level of interests if we do not have the sales coverage for it.

Nevertheless, I have been thinking about what are the possible venues to boost leads. The major caveat being that I do not want to adversely impact the per lead acquisition cost - after all, it is all too easy to throw money to the wind and hope for best. (Alas, it brings back memories of the exploits of the internet bubble. Ah, those were the heady days...)

So, the first thing is to work the existing leads harder. To the extent that sales does not have the resources to cover the current lead flow, it is quite possible that there are perfectly good leads that are being neglected. To what extent is that a problem, or how much more we can squeeze at the current level, I do not know. There is no way for me to know in a quantitative sense beyond gut feels. I have been arguing for having an in-house lead person to scrub the leads for a while but there is reluctance because there is the perception that the same investment would yield better return if we hire another sales person instead. Maybe, maybe not. I will do some analysis and see if I can come up with a more compelling argument backed by numbers.

The second thing is to tap into the existing network of resell partners. They each have an install base and it would be good to be able to target their in-house list and see if we can convert them into customers. The key issues right now is how to structure a program where the partners are incentivized to do this kind of joint-marketing activity. I have worked with a few partners and the preliminary result has not been encouraging.

There are also a slew of SEO and on-line marketing activities that I am working on. They all look promising and I am sure that they will yield good results. But, I do not know if it would be a spike or just incremental changes.

PR, my new hope. It is going okay. I cannot say empirically that the new PR firm is better than the old one. There does seem to be more activities in terms of ramping up. So, we are not getting that much more media coverage. Yet. But, we are definitely getting more briefing opportunities. There are also scintillating promises of more coverage as we roll out more case studies and new product releases. On this point, I just need to keep on their rear to make sure that they deliver as much as possible.

A few ideas. it is late. I am going home. :-)!

chiefchickenheadless (at) gmail (dot) com sign out
Legend: (at) = "@" (dot) = "."

Getting by

2005-11-16T19:56:00.000-08:00

It is kind of late. So, I will make it short and sweet.

I am swamped and this sucks.

chiefchickenheadless (at) gmail (dot) com sign out
Legend: (at) = "@" (dot) = "."

15 seconds of fame

2005-11-09T14:16:00.000-08:00

When it comes to internet groups, I am pretty much your average lurker. Taking lots of notes but maintaining radio silence all the same. So, it was kind of surprising to be mentioned by somebody in the AdWords Help group about my dynamic keywords posting. Beyond being flattered, it was really a bit surprising to know that people actually read my blog.

People! Surely you have better things to do?

**

The truth is that I am not terribly motivated this week. So, instead of coming up with new brilliant ideas, if I've ever achieved one, I focused on house keeping tasks. For example, finalizing case studies and press releases. The trouble of working with a PR firm on writing works is that the writer would never know as much as you do. So, it is a futile effort to demand the writer to somehow translate your thoughts into words in a manner that you had imagined. This minor insight took me years to realize as I used to fight with the writers. In my current wiser age, I just take whatever has been written as the base and go at it with a critical eye to have the piece say exactly what I want to say. Oh, and, I also control the input, so I give the writer the script, usually interview notes, on what the piece is about. Not sure if this means I am a control freak, but it does significantly minimize surprises and re-writes.

But, no system is 100% fool-proof. For whatever reason, the writer refuses to change the boilerplate information on these pieces. (In case you are wondering, boilerplate refers to the standardized text that describes the company/product that you just copy and past at the end of a press release.) I have told him several times and also furnished him with the latest boilerplate file. So, earlier today, I was going over a new piece and updating the boilerplate info.

But, it is not all work and no play with the PR people. Recently, I received a care package from my PR account manager. She recently went on a business trip to Europe and I jokingly suggested that she should bring back some bonbons. So, when I open up an overnight package this afternoon, I was pleasantly surprised with some chocolate goodies. Like the saying about happiness to a man's heart is through his stomach, the happiness to a client's heart may very well go by the same route...

I have been busy in the case study land lately. My graphic designer asked me why I keep including a picture of the client in these case studies. "Elementary," said I. What more cost effective way is there to give the client that extra incentive to flaunt his/her recent appearance in a nicely formatted document that says nothing but how smart they are? Viral marketing in its best, I would submit.

KS program has been running for about one week now. No significant pickup just yet. I see a lot of Google alerts as the content propagates throughout the KS network. The latest being Germany. But, I only see a trickle of inquiries. But, it is still early in the program and I shall continue to monitor the program with bated breath.

The program with InfoSearch, on the other hand, is giving me some unease. As noted last week, the keyword selection has been over and I was notified that I would be contacted by a copy writer to start the content development process. Nothing. I sent an email to ask what is the next step and was told that the copy writer will not contact me until next week. The reason for my unease is the fact that all these time, my meter is running. So, if InfoSearch drags out the process, I would have to pay for the time when I do not have the content. I am not thinking of the worst, but this is a concern. I will bug my account manager about this. I need to make my marketing budget count!

I am working on my November newsletter. There is a format that I follow and I have more than enough content to put something together. The special challenge for this newsletter actually has to do with a challenge to use a specific word in a clear and meaningful sentence. Still working on it. (Yeah, this is how you create "fun" in marketing land. At least the challenge is not to use the seven forbidden words. Not yet, anyway.)

**
A random thought. I just watched the 10 year edition of "Leon, the professional". Great film. Anyway, as I was enjoying the film, I came to the realization that Natalie Portman was a better actress in the Professional than she ever was in the new Star Wars. Granted that I am partial to the original trilogy, but she was in a much more fluid form as an 11 year old girl who wanted to become a hit-man.

chiefchickenheadless (at) gmail (dot) com sign out
Legend: (at) = "@" (dot) = "."

Muahhaa...

2005-11-02T18:41:00.000-08:00

Happy Halloween.

Speaking of this candy infested day. I have one report and one bone to pick. First of all, I'd completely forgotten about the day and when I went home in the evening, my neighborhood was crawling with kids. The problem was that I had neither the candy nor the time to entertain these little critters. (I know it sounds kind of un-neighborly but I am being honest here.) So, I had to employ the time honored strategy of shutting off all lights in the house to simulate the appearance of nobody's-home. Beyond feeling pathetic, I had to break out my flashlight several time to find stuff in the house.

On the bone picking part, what is the story with Halloween candies? Specifically, what kind of scary ingredients are people concocting these days? I mean it tastes nothing like the Halloween candies of yore. If I am going to fatten myself with sugar and other junk, at least make it taste good!

**
Right. Back in the Marketing grind.

Most important grip for the day. My color printer is dying. I use it to print collateral for our sales super heroes. In the old days, the printer used to jam every other day. Then, it started to jam every other job. Now, it jam on every page. This is a serious pain. Why people do not take their file delivery in digital form is beyond me. Anyway, I am searching for a new color printer and if you have any suggestion, please let me know.

Right, so last week I was mumbling about my experience with FindWP. The changes seemed to have yield some result. The key thing being that, I am theorizing, I also upped the bidding amount to get #1-3 position in the listing. The quality of the click-through improved meaningfully. However, it also chew up my budget extremely quickly at about 2x to 3x of the prior rate. Bigger budget is not an issue as such if the ROI is there. But, the quantum leap in budget does require me to sit down and regroup a bit. Unfortunately, I have been too busy to do that - no time to think. Hope to get on it next week.

Also signed up with KnowledgeStorm which is another whitepaper/case study serving service. It differs from FindWP in the delivery method - people click on KS's links instead of my links. Then, KS delivers the users info in a spreadsheet. KS does a good job of making the whole thing as painless as possible by creating the content for the whole campaign. However, having a disinterested third party creating the content has the disadvantage of not having that crispness in good copy writing. So, I spent some time before it went life to enter in all the keywords to boost its performance. I still need to scrub the rest of the detail contents but that will take a bit of time.

Another question on KS. Since I was clicking on some of my listings to see what is is like for users, I do wander if my info will be "captured" and sent to me as a lead. They better not! And, if they do, I will demand that my info not be counted toward the minimum raw leads guaranteed. We will see tomorrow as the daily leads info come in.

Another service InfoSearch which provides targeted content for better natural search ranking. Just finished the keyword selection process. It is an interesting exercise to see how these "experts" come up with the most relevant set of phrases. We started with the Google AdWords campaign keywords as the seed. Some of the initially proposed keywords had the issue of relevance, the lack thereof, when created by disinterested third party. That happens. But, what I find a bit disturbing is that some of the proposed terms I already have very high natural search ranking (#1 or #2). I am not paying to get these terms targeted since I am already there. Between you and me, you would think that the professionals would have the sense to scrub the proposed list by doing searches against Google before presenting to the clients. Anyway, this one is going along fine. I cannot wait to see the initial contents.

On the PR front, I am a bit inundated with case studies, press releases, etc. This is a good problem, I suppose. I am in the middle of getting two case studies formatted for production. I have one case study waiting for final approval. I have a press release approved which I hope to push out soon. Another press release is kind of stuck because the customer who is giving us a quote is dragging his foot - I may decide to switch the customer to get the press release moving. Finally, I need to get a partners release produced. And, this is just what is going on this week!

My PR firm is doing their job. I will have a good chat with them tomorrow. Partly to cover the various activities underway. The other is to see if we can get more press pick-up. I know it is not the easiest thing but they is why we are paying the big bucks!

Oh, not sure if I've mentioned this before. Part of the grand scheme with the press release is to structure it so that it is also optimized for search engine. The upcoming releases all have varying degree of search engine optimization. It will be interesting to see how the experiment pends out.

Producing another newsletter. This one is for the install base. I got feedback from some of the customers that they feel a bit "lonely" since we do not talk with them that regularly. Hey, if people want to hear my rambling, I am game.

Not doing a heck of a lot on the Google front. I am running the budget optimization thing and have been adding a new keyword here and there. I am sort of in my maintenance mode. Most of my Google exciting these days come from the AdWords Help group where people ask the most obvious of questions. I know it is unnatural to look for documentations, but, people!, asking obvious questions do not improve your stature in my mind...

**
BTW, just thought that you should know I only learnt of the expression "Muahhaa..." recently from JC, a Californian transplant in Texas, who is many years junior and, in all likelihood, smarter than I am. But, hey, an old dog can too learn to say Muahhaa...

chiefchickenheadless (at) gmail (dot) com sign out
Legend: (at) = "@" (dot) = "."

El Jardin de las Delicias

2005-10-26T18:49:00.000-07:00

I think I mentioned a while back that one of my missions, if I were to accept it, while in Spain was to figure out what was the Boch painting called. Long story short, the Spanish title is "El Jardin de las Delicias" which does translates into "the garden of delights". However, on the official catalog of Prado Museum, English version, it is noted as "the garden of earthly delight." I can only assume something has happened for the scholarship of that painting between the book I read and today. What it is, I do not know.

So at least you are at the same page of ignorance as I am now...

**
So, the office pool idea turned out to be a bad omen. The guy only showed up once in two weeks. And, the latest is that we have reached an amicable agreement to separate with this person.

I don't get it though. I am not aware of any compelling reason why he would not be able to come. And, if he was negotiating with another employer, this is a rather poor tactic in his part. My only real complaint is that I now have to revoke the various accounts that I have created for him.

The newsletter was sent went out okay. As expected, I got a few unsubscribe requests - my way of cleaning up the database. But, I also got a few takers to requested more information. To the extent that the infrastructure is in place, read sunk costs, this is a pretty high ROI exercise.

FindWP continues to disappoint. So, I fired up an email to my account manager and demand that he solve my performance problem. He gave me several ideas which I am kind of skeptical about since they run contrary to my experiences with Google. But, goodness knows that I am usually wrong about this kind of things. So, I am implementing two strategies that he has proposed. First one is to have an alternate landing page which is very sparse - asking only for name, email, title, etc. instead of the current landing page which provides some company and product descriptions on the landing page. I have set up two identical ad's for the campaign rotating at 50-50 ratio. We will find out which landing page works better. The second strategic change is to narrow the number of categories that a campaign targets. Originally, I run a campaign targeting up to 40 categories. Partly, it is a function of my product being a platform product with proven application in different verticals. Partly, I reasoned that the click-through should be self-selecting and if I serve an ad in an inappropriate category, I would not get any click anyway.

So, these changes are in place and the waiting game begins.

**
Sorry dudes, I am tired today - went to bed at 12:30 last night and got up at 6:30am. This will be a short one. I promise to be more verbose next time... :-p!

chiefchickenheadless (at) gmail (dot) com sign out
Legend: (at) = "@" (dot) = "."

Doing an office pool

2005-10-12T12:52:00.000-07:00

It is kind of freaky. We seems to have problem signing up salespeople. Now, I am not seeing a "problem" in the sense that we are on the verge of splattering onto the ground in a speculator fireball. If anything, our quarter to quarter performance is nothing but up - doubling or more revenue and customer base, albeit from a smallish base. And, since I am generating loads of leads that our able sales people have not enough time to digest, I do not see any immediate downside to coming on-board.

Okay, just to show that I am not talking right after drinking the company Kool-Aid, I would readily admit that being a small startup, there are certain standard concerns that people ought to know and think about.

Anyway, long story short, we are having a darnest time adding a third California based sales person. Then, I was told that somebody signed up last week. Being the cynic that I am, I thought to myself that I won't believe it until I see it. The funny thing is that I have not seen the new employee in physical form. From what I can gather, he is a bit under the weather and I certainly sympathize. But, this kind of got me thinking, maybe I should start an office pool...

**
Google is a funny business. I signed up with the Google Groups to get daily updates a while back because I want to be in the loop in terms of the latest and best practices. Then, a while back, I posted a note saying that I am terminating a particular type of campaign because the performance has been very unsatisfactory. Then, I think the follow day, I no longer get the daily update.

At first I was not terribly concerned. IT disruption happens. But, it dragged on and I started to wondering for the worst. Maybe the Google gods take wrath with my ungrateful comments and how one of their products sucked? Anyway, I still have no idea what happened. But I got the first batch of daily update today in a while and, with a bit of luck, things will be back to normal.

Just to show that I am not easily reformed, I doubt if I will ever refrain from being a demanding customer/user. But, I have a few side stratagem to keep the information flowing. We'll see if my primary bitching account is being blocked. (Don't you just love a good conspiracy theory!)

Oh, I also started a new Google campaign based on the library of case studies and whitepapers I have. It is a tricky business because the keyword selection is not obvious - too broad, the ad's gets lost and the budget wasted, too narrow, the ad does not get seen and there is no return on the investment. I do wondering if there is anyone crazy like me who have tried to serve whitepapers and case studies on Google AdWords.

Speaking of pay-per-click programs, I finally got all the new landing pages ready to go for the FindWP program. Loaded them yesterday so today is the first day of the new landing pages for FindWP. More importantly, these new landing pages allows me to know exactly where it came from. So far, the result has not been encouraging. The overall rate of case study and whitepaper requests have been dropping. And, the only one that I can confirm come from the FindWP program was a junk lead. This is all a bit discouraging. My theory for why this is happening goes something like this: 1. the spike of enquiries from last two weeks came mostly from a recent article in a major IT publication. Then, since the same FindWP program has been running for a while, the novelty is gone and anyone who might be interested in the program has indicated as much. Maybe I will try a new set of whitepapers and case studies to see if there is more uptick. Wouldn't hurt.

Speaking of FindWP. Another vendor with whom I worked with on a similar campaign early in the year came knocking. He asserted that FindWP sucks and he can do better. Is it just me or he (the vendor) is a bit too transparent? Anyway, I told him to back off because FindWP is a cheaper way to run experiments. After all, if FindWP does not cut it at the end of the day, I am sure this vendor would be glad to take my marketing money.

PR schedule is a delicate art. There are just so many different variables outside of my control. On top of it, the competing strategies and direction of a startup forces one to be super flexible and willing to put aside works that do not meet the immediate needs. My weekly session with the PR firm is like a weekly negotiation. Whoever thinks Marketing is all fluff has never done it.

Going off on a complete tangent. I have been the CPO, chief production officer, lately. As we sign up vendors and partners, there are official propaganda to be shared. And, since it costs more than $1,000 to get 50 sets of 10 double side color prints from Kinko, this task has firmly remained in-house. And, this also means that I have to nurse the color printer. This part really sucks. I do not mind the work because it provides a disruption of everyday. On the other hand, since the color printer seems to break down more often than it use to, it seems like I am spending more time staring at it these day than what is healthy. Anyway, I will try to get a hourly help to do this work. It is not hard, but time consuming.

Oh, I am penning the new newsletter. The originally plan is to do it monthly and it got started in August. However, since I was busy spending money in Spain in September, this will be the second one for the newsletter. It is not too bad. I enjoy writing short spurs of thoughts. I even made reference to a popular film in the 80's. I figure that it is a pretty well known reference and surely my readers will appreciate it. We'll see!

Right. So, how much do you think the office pool should start with. $5 per block? More importantly, just so that you know, the bookie, yours truly, gets to keep 3% pf the pot for all the trouble.

chiefchickenheadless (at) gmail (dot) com sign out
Legend: (at) = "@" (dot) = "."

Being dynamic - keywords and otherwise

2005-10-05T12:24:00.000-07:00

Looking at my schedule, it would not be obvious that I am that busy. But, man, this week has been a real bitch. I suppose it is a good thing and all the going-ons foretell good things to come. (Fingers firmly crossed.)

The most exciting thing is the fact that our lead flow is increasing a great deal. The question that I cannot answer is why. Two major suspects. One is that we got a nice write up on eWeek, a major IT trade journal. And, we definitely received inquiries noting that they saw the article. The other is that I have subscribed to the Findwhitepapers service which is basically like Google but they serve whitepapers and case studies. To tell you the truth, my original thought about Findwhitepapers is that it should have a nice impact on our lead flow. However, I am seeing a definite shift in percentage terms from Google originated inquiries to Findwhitepapers originated inquiries. The trouble is that I have set up all the tracking mechanism to see exactly where and how Google inquiries come from. But, I cannot do the same for the whitepapers and case study yet. So, I am happy with
the result but, the fact that I do not know the break down is killing me. For all I know, all these white paper and case study inquiries are natural searches and I am not actually getting much traffic for my money.

Of course, I am not just sitting here lamenting the lack of data. I am working on a series of replacement landing pages for whitepapers and case studies so that I can track them with some degree of precision. Time. I need more time. Fortunately, our engineers are first rate and easy to work with. I suppose the fact that I am buddy-buddy with the VP engineering does not hurt...

Oh, did a briefing with an analyst earlier in the week. This is the first time that I was going solo and I thought it went well. Sometimes I would work with the VP of Biz Dev as a team. But, this time he was not able to come. Fortunately, since it is the same story, I was pretty good at toting the company line and directing the analyst's attention to the particular area of mutual interests.

On the PR front, I have a fully loaded schedule. I am counting a minimum of four press releases in the various stages of readiness. There are two case studies in the offing, and one whitepaper waiting for final approval. My hope is to pump everything out at least a week before Thanksgiving so that we can catch the wave of year-end purchasing.

It is quite a bit of headache in coordinate all these PR activities. Need to talk nice to the customers so they can approve the work. Need to work closely with the PR agency to ensure that the deadlines and messages are met. Then, internally, the work never comes out quick enough...

Oh, I am also being chased by a bunch of on-line marketing vendors. they all offer some variation on the Google marketing theme. I am in talk with one and expect to pluck down a few grands for that program. Basically, it provides customized content with the idea that it will boost the natural ranking on the search. There are quite a few headache keywords that I am struggling to get good natural ranking placement. So, that is a particularly attractive offer. I do still need to get my arms around the financial numbers because it is presented as a licensing arrangement. But, if the content works, it would be more sensible to buy it outright.

Two other vendors that I am looking into basically offers similar solutions as Findwhiteppaers. The key difference, from my perspective, is that these vendors have a more business focus instead of technical. So, in addition to being placed on IT trade journals, I would get exposures on places like Forbes and WSJ (Wall Street Journal).

Oh, our engineers have implemented a solution where the on-line inquiries automatically get inserted into our CRM. A vital but mundane task that used to fall under my sphere of influence. Automation is a lovely thing. I now just need to inspect the entry and make some adjustments. Did I say that our engineers rock!

This is a long week and I am ready to take a break...

Oh, the Google program is going better. The good news is that the CTR and conversion rate is better than before now that I implemented a keyword focused ad format for all the campaigns. I also killed my Content network campaigns because the yield is simply too poor. So, the financial numbers are looking better. However, if I look at the Google campaigns specifically (my standard analyses lumps all on-line activities together), the performance number has been dropping. This is disturbing. I do not know what to make of this new observation just yet.

On a related front, Google AdWords has a few undocumented features. In the Silicon Valley parlance, "undocumented features" is usually a synonym to bugs. But, in this case, this is actually a feature that I would use had I read/known about it. I have heard some rumor about this feature a few weeks ago and decided to go to the source and ask how to do it. And, below you can find the the official response.

Oh, yes, I am referring to the ability to create dynamic keyword insertion into ad's. The reason this is important is because if you have hundreds or even thousands of keywords for a campaign, it is a real pain to create targeted ad's. With dynamic keywords, this helps a great deal. Of course, the drawback is that you now have to deal with key words that may not make sense with one ad format. But, first thing first.

** Google AdWord's undocumented feature - dynamic keywords **

You can use our keyword insertion tool to automatically populate a search term from your keyword list into your ad text. This tool automates the ad text creation process and minimizes the manual edits required to create unique ad text for accounts with large amounts of keywords.

Please use keyword insertion with the requirements detailed below. If your ad(s) and/or keyword(s) are not in compliance with all requirements, they will be disapproved.

KEYWORD INSERTION

Place {squiggly brackets} around one of the following, as shown, into your ad text:

{Keyword:Default Ad Text Here}
{KeyWord:Default Ad Text Here}
{keyword:Default Ad Text Here}

SPECIFICATIONS

- Default Ad Text: You must include default ad text in case your keyword exceeds ad text character limits. If you do not include default ad text, and your keyword exceeds character limits, your ad(s) and/or keyword(s) will be disapproved. The default ad text you choose must be 25 characters or less for the title and 35 characters or less for the description line (including spaces).

- Editorial Guidelines: Ad text using this tool is still subject to our Editorial Guidelines (http://adwords.google.com/select/guidelines.html). Therefore, if your inserted keywords are not in compliance, your ad(s) and/or keyword(s) will be disapproved.
- Character Limits: If an inserted keyword makes your ad text exceed the character limit and you have not included default ad text, your ad(s) and/or keyword(s) will be disapproved. Please be sure that the final ad text (including inserted keywords) does not exceed the character limits for each line (1st line = 25; 2nd line = 35; 3rd line = 35).

If you create text ads using non-Latin characters, please be aware that the character limit may vary. Ads in languages with double-byte characters, such as Arabic, Chinese, Japanese and Korean, can contain the following number of characters, including spaces: 12 characters in the title, 17 characters in each line of ad text, and 35 characters in the display URL.

EXAMPLE

Ad text created:

{KeyWord: See the Amazon} <- 'Keyword' shown with initial capitalization Gorgeous vacations for the entire family; try us out!
theamazonjungle.com

Ad text seen on keyword: amazon jungle

Amazon Jungle <- Keyword shown with initial capitalization Gorgeous vacations for the entire family; try us out!
amazonjungle.com

Ad text seen on keyword: travel to the amazon jungle (27 characters)

See the Amazon <- Keyword too long, default ad text shown Gorgeous vacations for the entire family; try us out!
theamazonjungle.com

** Google AdWord's undocumented feature - end **

chiefchickenheadless (at) gmail (dot) com sign out
Legend: (at) = "@" (dot) = "."

Nice pix - an unschedule detour

2005-09-29T16:17:00.000-07:00

I must say that I consider it infinitely healthy to take unscheduled detours just to tick off the determinist crowd.

So, here is a new site (Aquarius Space) that you might want to check out. I particularly like the photos. They look awfully exotic on first impression but often turns out to be everyday objects with over-saturated colors. Takes some real skill to do it, you now.

http://city.udn.com/v1/blog/article/index.jsp?uid=aquariusspace

Okay. Back to the grind.

chiefchickenheadless (at) gmail (dot) com sign out
Legend: (at) = "@" (dot) = "."

Organic pillows

2005-09-28T18:46:00.000-07:00

Hi folks,

I am back. Yes, there is still not enough junk on the cyberspace and I am doing my best to fill it up.

Spain was great fun. I highly recommend paying it a visit if you are looking for a different kind of European vacation. A few caveats though. 1. People smoke a lot. So, you just need to be mentally prepared for it. 2. Food ingredient is excellent but sometimes the seasoning can be a bit heavy-handed. 3. Petty crime is, so I understand, rampant. Fortunately(?), I, apparently, look too poor to be a target.

So, the whole first half of September was a blur. I was too busy being a tourist to pay attention to the Google numbers or PR activities. Of course, I have to pay for this indulgence once I am back and I am slowly digging myself out of it.

**

Google. I must give it to them, they do make life easier for their customers. In addition to being the most effective engine for clicks, they have started an user group for people to share ideas. So, I promptly join the group as soon as I hear and started to post questions and suggestions.

I killed my Yahoo account. It did not perform well and from all the feedback that I was able to gather (users of Google and Yahoo services), I was not able to find out how to improve the Yahoo performance. So, after sticking it out for all these months, I have put the Yahoo account on the pay-as-you-go plan and let the account run to zero.

Something that I thought Yahoo was being unforthcoming was that the "pay-as-you-go" plan is not an option that can be selected by users. So, I had to request this setting via support email. Oh, and Yahoo also made finding the support email much more tricky than necessary. On Google, it is on the upper right hand corner and it is clearly a click-able option. On Yahoo, it is marked as "Support" in smaller font and grayed out in color so that the "natural (mine anyway)" reaction is to assume it is not a click-able option.

I find the whole arrangement very annoying. If I need to kill my program, I am not exactly in the best frame of mind as it is. So, by making it difficult to do, it only generates ill-well. I don't know what the fine folks at Yahoo are thinking...

Not sure I have mentioned the whitepaper posting service before. It works well. As of last count, it increased the whitepaper and case study request rate by 5x in two weeks when compared to comparable prior period. The catch is that the landing page is not setting up to capture the exact click-route, so I cannot say with 100% confidence on the performance. But, it surely helped.

On the PR front, I am happy to report that our new PR firm is doing an excellent job. Did an interview with a trade reporter last week and got the write up yesterday. Scheduled to talk with another reporter tomorrow for another trade rag who is supposed to be influential. (We'll see.) Then, there are two analyst briefing that we will be doing one for tomorrow another next week.

The trick now is to monitor our sales/leads flow to see what is the impact for all these activities.

One problem with the PR firm. They were going to do the writing for case studies. The first one case study is pretty wanting. In terms of style, it is kind of boring to read. In terms of talking points, I do not think that the key points were as clearly articulated as it could be. I am sure that I am partly responsible for it somehow. I will try to sort it out with the PR firm. Then, if it still does not work, I will hire an outside writer.

Will catch up by and by. October is going to be crazy. I can feel it already.

**

By the way, it is true that sleeping on your own bed is the best. I especially missed my pillow which is made with organic fabric and organic millet hulls. I do not think that Spaniards are that big into organic stuff like people in California are.

chiefchickenheadless (at) gmail (dot) com sign out
Legend: (at) = "@" (dot) = "."

Arms race outside of the Prado

2005-08-24T18:40:00.000-07:00

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.

chiefchickenheadless (at) gmail (dot) com sign out
Legend: (at) = "@" (dot) = "."

Watching out for J-CAP

2005-08-17T18:33:00.000-07:00

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.

chiefchickenheadless (at) gmail (dot) com sign out
Legend: (at) = "@" (dot) = "."

Taking on Chindia

2005-08-10T18:16:00.000-07:00

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'!"

chiefchickenheadless (at) gmail (dot) com sign out
Legend: (at) = "@" (dot) = "."

Quantity, if there is no quality

2005-08-03T17:11:00.000-07:00

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!

chiefchickenheadless (at) gmail (dot) com sign out

David the cleaning dude

2005-07-27T18:54:00.000-07:00

These are the little things. But, it just hit me last week that I have no idea what is the name of the janitor who came in every day in the evening to clean up the office. Since I am usually still in the office then, I have been smiling at him all this time. But, who is he or at least what is his name. So, I asked. His name is David. So, now, when I see him, I greet him by saying "Hi, David." I am not sure what all these means, but sometimes, there is no point in asking too many questions.

(Maybe I am going soft...)

The webinar thing started with a bang. It was made official last Thursday. I set up all the Google stuff and make sure all the links works. Then, when I come into office on Friday, there were five requests for webinar. Then, through out the rest of the day, additional requests came in. It is pretty cool! The first webinar took place yesterday and of the nine people who ultimately requested it, four of them showed up. So, that is a decent ratio that nearly 50% of the people came. In my prior experiences, I would be happy with a 25% attendance rate. Then, I blasted our existing leads to remind people that we also have a Thursday webinar session. Right now, between those new requests and people who missed the first session but asked to attend the next one, we are looking at a list of about ten people.

What I find interesting is that none of the requests came from Google. Because we pass a text string when somebody clicks on our Google ad, I can tell that these requests came from our website directly due to the absence of the text string. I think partly it is a function of the first batch who signed up were people who worked at different divisions of the same parent firm. So, I can only guess there is a bit of network effect at work here. We did move the webinar to the most visually prominent location - upper left. So, that probably helped a bit too. But, it is curious to me on how people would rather come to the site and sign up than just sign up directly via Google ad's. I need to think about this.

One side thing that I have noticed with the new landing pages is that the number of junk leads seems to be lower than before. This, I, too, have no obvious answers. Partly this could be cause more fields are mandatory so that it is more "painful" to leave junk request. (And, by junk request I am referring to requests that came from a Yahoo.com address with no name, no company info, nothing.) A second thing could be that we now have a more professional looking interface from both the text description, color/design template, and that we now have two attractive female images on the landing pages.

Oh, another thing about Google that I thought was fascinating. I have separated out each campaign between Search and Content network so that I can control the cost in each. Theoretically, these are two distinct networks. However, they do intersect when you search on the Google site where it would serve the ad with higher CPC. How I found out was that I keep seeing a Content network ad when I do a Google search where I was expecting to see a Search network ad. After going back and forth with Google help, they figured out that because my CPC is higher in the Content network for the same key words, it crowded out my Search network ad. Talk about logical yet technical answers. So, the first thing I did after learning it was to scrub through the Google campaigns to make sure that all my Search network key words have higher CPC than the Content network counterparts.

This is a busy week. We came out with a press release on company momentum on Monday. Followed Tuesday by another press release announcing our relationship with a major Silicon Valley technology vendor. Finally, we also have a white paper published by an analyst on our product. I am not a big fan of momentum release since I always find it suspect - after all I have never seen anyone issue a release about losing momentum. On the other hand, this is probably the easiest way to generate some buzz or, at least, have something on the wire. The momentum got picked up at the usual suspects - Yahoo, Google, Excite, etc. Financial Times also picked it up. That was kind of cool since I am a fan of FT. The second press release was shorter but has a marquee name that also has been in the news lately. It got picked up at more outlets and I can only assume it is because of the name. I guess I should be nicer to customers so they would let me use their names in publicity. :-)! As for the white-paper. It was sent out to the analyst's database as a new white-paper. I do not know how many pick up we will get out of it. So, I need to think of some other ways to promote the white paper - I am paying good money for it after all.

This must be the "find an analyst" season. After talking with an analyst who write for Network World, I was alerted to another one by a colleague. So we went through the courting ritual of saying hi and we love to know more about your products. This guy is a bit more work. He wants to sign us up for a $20K annual contract and he becomes a retained analyst. This is the typical Analyst/Gartner model. There is merit to the model for large ticket enterprise solutions. But, in our case, it has not been a good fit after trying several variations of the same idea. Of course, I did not say it out loud. Instead, I asked that he writes an article about us since how we found him was through an article he wrote that purport to address the specific vertical that we are in. I do not know if he would bite, but I did send him all the official propaganda. Fingers crossed.

Oh, a side note about the prior analyst. For some reason, she decided to do an article on us sooner rather than later. So, we quickly did a demo for her, gave her all the key talking points. The article is supposed to come out sometime next week. And, from the draft copy that she sent me, it looks like she drank the Cool-Aid! Gotta love it!

Okay, the last rumbling of the day. We got into this rather heated debate last week on some marketing terms. What it boils down to is should we do a blanket statement that is clean and intuitive but somebody can argue is not completely accurate from certain technical angles or should we put in the relevant qualifiers so that the information is technically factual from the very start. Being the marketing guy whose mission is to never confuse good marketing with reality, I am firmly on the side of using a clean and intuitive copy and just tell the sales people to blame it on those clueless marketing folk who come up with these lines. On the other end of the argument is Mr Proper who is the head of Sales. Unlike a lot of sales people I know, he insists on full disclosure up front. This may have something to do with the fact that his prior incarnation was in the legal world. Well, Mr Proper has done a great job as a salesperson so I certainly would value his input. On the other hand, I have done a good job marketing the company, if I may say so, so I must value my own judgement too.

I think this is partly a philosophical debate. I do not believing in lying. But, at the same time, I do not think it is wise to water down the effects of first impression with all the details to either bore and scare away a prospect. This is a ginger balance. My current position, after taking into consideration of Mr Proper's views, is to keep the marketing message simple and clean. However, in our technical documents like data-sheet, there will be an asterisk to explain some of the "practical" limitations as a result of the browser features.

(Maybe I am not going soft after all...)

chiefchickenheadless (at) gmail (dot) com sign out

Simpering UK-92480

2005-07-20T12:06:00.000-07:00

Okay, this is cheating a bit but I have been dying to use the word "simper" meaning to smile in a silly, self-conscious, often coy manner. Or, the shorter form for the expression "grinning like an idiot." Something that I do with some degree of frequency.

Oh the UK-92480 bit was the initial name for the pharmaceutical compound that eventually came to be Viagra. I thought you might enjoy this bit of lore that is becoming part of the popular culture. Viagra, that is.

But, back in the ranch, things are busy as always.

The latest website revision have been pushed to the live site. Of course, I immediately found some errors. Fortunately, with the help of Contribute, I was able to make the correction in minutes on the staging site. But, the problem is that I have no way of pushing the quick fix out. That is, not until earlier today when our head of engineering walked me through the process via an home-grown website management tool that I can control through a browser. As the saying goes, I am now armed and dangerous! With Contribute and the home-grown tool, I can pretty much do all kind of strange stuff to the website without having to wait for the webmaster. Not that I would do that, but the potentiality is there. Heh!

We are at the late stages of preparing for launch our webinar program. The website is ready. The email reminder text has been prepared. I am ready to add a new set of key words and ad's in Google to drive traffic. Pretty much the only thing that is holding me back is time. Because this is a weekly program, I want to wait until tomorrow for the promotion because I do not want people to sign up for this week's non-existent program. I am curious to know how the webinar will do as part of the lead-gen and sales process. Fingers crossed.

The website revamp is coming along. I had a good discussion with the designer and gave her some detail information on the components needed in the new site design. It is not meant to be something revolutionary so a lot of stuff will be from our existing site. On the other hand, it is good to have a professional build a foundation that we can work from.

One thing that I am thinking of doing is to add web click path tracking on the website. It helps to collect information such as where users go and the most popular page of a website. From that information, we can infer what page/information need to come forward so it is easier to find as well as what kind of information that are of particular interests to viewers. My original plan is to run it in conjunction with the new website. However, the head of engineering was pretty psyched for the idea and he wants to deploy some resources to get it done in the current site. Cool!

I have been staring at Google and not doing a heck of a lot for a while. It is partly a function of fatigue since I was monitoring it every day for about two months. And, of course, now that I am busy doing other stuff, it is just not the most pressing issue. Anyway, I finally got my acts together and cleaned up the Google AdWords account. Specifically, I added a new campaign because one of our prospects told us what key words they searched on and a few of them were completely off our radar. That was pretty cool. Customer input complements nice with the program of looking through the daily web log to see what search terms that lead people to us as well as running a Google tool to find out other related terms that people search for given a set of key words. Long story short, I run the Google tool and now have a few hundred new key words.

Of course, it is a good deal for Google because it means I am paying more by the sheer increase of key words which leads to wider coverage. But, if it brings qualified leads, I am all for paying a few extra bucks. The interesting thing about the new key words is that they are all variations of the major key words that we are already using. For example, adding a "Windows" in front of the key word. I guess people just search for different flavor of the same idea and it is good to cover all bases. As a result of the increase in key words, one of my campaign is getting blown out of water in terms of hitting the daily budged limit. It is a good problem to have because it also means that we are casting a wider net. We will see if the extra expenditure and efforts are warranted in a few months.

My latest project is to come up with a game. The idea is to let viewer play a simple game/quiz and get a score on their knowledge level. This would, in theory, pique their interests so there is a higher level of recall and, if the goddess of fortune smiles upon me, get the viewers to sign up for more information. Game is hard to make. Distilling a list of questions is tricky enough, then, there is question of how to score the answers. Originally, I was going to come up with a formula, but it turns out to be a rather difficult one. So, I have changed tact to brute force and created a spreadsheet with all possible variations of answer combinations. Then, I will assign a score for each combination. I know, it is not the most elegant method, but sometimes, elegance takes too much time.

Life on the PR front is going okay. I am asking a bunch of customers to okay a press release and some of them are saying we cannot mention their name. Not what a marketeer wants to hear. Then, there is the case study pending approval from the customer. I plan to call him later in the week to follow up. The case study re-write is going slowly. I am hoping to have a new first draft this week - but I am not holding my breath. But, whatever happens, I will have a PR piece hitting the wire and a white-paper posted next week. That, I should be thankful for.

Oh, I tracked down a regular contributor to Network World magazine because she wrote an article that touches on some of the issues that our solution addresses. We had a good chat and she indicated that she would be interested in writing an article about us! How cool is that! That will not happen for a few weeks due to other articles in the queue, but that is fair. I suggested that I would buy some reprints once it is published. Yeah, it is all very mercantile. It is alright though, if the rules are understood.

Arms akimbo, simpering, and dreaming of a world without UK-92480. (Yeah, akimbo was another word that I was dying to use. And, yes, I seriously need to get a life.)

chiefchickenheadless (at) gmail (dot) com sign out

Keeping the momentum

2005-07-13T18:20:00.000-07:00

The latest thinking is that cold call operations via Harte Hanks, third party, or internal team would not be a cost efficient method to generate leads.

HH program has come to an end and the stat's are: 173 hours of call for 180 completed interviews and 21 appointments. According to HH's own matrix in their project proposal, they have exceeded their expectation of 110 completed calls. My thinking, however, is that HH probably sandbagged the numbers so that they can exceed expectation. I would. But, at the same time, I also think that we cannot expect much more than completing one call per hour which is what HH has done. And, this, again, leads to the conclusion that this is a very expensive way of generating leads.

The highly recommended consultant got back with me and advised that she is not willing to drop her prices. (If she can get people to pay that kind of money, more power to her.) I think partly, this is a function that she deals mostly with enterprise solutions costing from several hundred thousand dollars to a few millions. In that price range, her fee would be quite minuscule. But, this is not how it works for us.

I have finally finished the first case study and fired up to the customer for reaction and approvals. Writing case study can be a bit exhausting mentally, so I have outsourced that operation to Mr Whup-ass since he volunteered. I am not sure if it is a good idea. Case study writing is a specific way of thinking and takes somebody with ability to feel detached so you can keep up the BS while having a nice touch with the language so that the story/case maintains a momentum to the logical conclusion. Mr Whup-ass does not seem to have that touch from the first draft that he came up.

I am too lazy to deal with it for now. But, I will probably take a crack at it myself and find a professional writer for this kind of work. Mr Whup-ass is excellent as an editor in providing additional perspectives. But, as the first draft, I need somebody else.

My major focus is now on PR and website update. PR is moving along. I am loading the PR agency with information and ammunition. So, I expect to see some firework in August. Otherwise, I will change pitcher.

The website thing is kind of interesting. I am now set up with Contribute which is a website collaboration solution where I can go into our website and make changes directly without having to wait for the change by the webmaster. This also significantly speeds up the revision process because I can see the change in real time and make adjustments accordingly. For non-technical (HTML) editing and some light technical work, I highly recommend Contribute.

So, we are making some additional changes to the existing site while a new site is being designed. The major ones are the new landing pages. I commissioned a design house to give us a landing page design and we now use it as a template for three different type of landing pages. The key things about the new design are twofold: the color coordinates and there are two female images on the top banner. I know it seems silly, but studies have shown that attractive images helps with recall and conversion. And, since we target technical people who are mostly male, two female images are surely better than one. Ha! The other thing is that we will be starting a weekly webinar program so there is a series of stuff that need to be taken care of. Actually, most of the work is done and, theoretically, I can push the changes from staging to live tomorrow. But, since our webmaster is out for the rest of the week, the head of engineering and I agree that we should wait in case the process did not work as planned that the webmaster is there to fix our mess.

For the new site, design work is just starting. For my part, I am collecting user requirements and putting the outline on a board to review. My plan is to have a detail listing of each page in a Word document including all the links, images, and functionality. This will serve as a guide to the designer on what are the needs of the new website as well as being the blueprint when we actually implement the site. This is a daunting task since there are many conflicting demands on the site. I have done the easy parts and will embark on the difficult ones.

chiefchickenheadless (at) gmail (dot) com sign out

Scaling cost of selling

2005-07-06T18:25:00.000-07:00

There is something to be said about long weekend. On the other hand, it is also doubly difficult to come into office after a long weekend. The funny thing was that I was the first person who made it into the office after the 4th of July long weekend. At first I thought I missed the memo about taking an additional day off until people started to slowly file in.

Another thought on long weekends. I am envious of the French with six weeks vacation to start. Ay... I still remember getting an e-mail from Isa a few years back saying that she is so sad that she only has six weeks of vacation because she was a newbie college grad! Man, talk about rubbing it in, eh!

Anyway, all is quiet on the marketing land. I have been busy playing catch up in terms of phone calls and negotiations. Today, for example, I negotiated for a volume discount to publish four of 'em white-papers. Then, I had an inconclusive discussion with a lead-gen consultant. She will get back with me on a new proposal. Oh, I also got a call from Dell asking if we would be interested in using them as our hardware OEM. Then, I got a phone call from a perspective customer irritated that nobody followed up with him since he requested information. (The truth is that we have tried to contact him seven times via phone and email.)

Maybe it ain't so quiet after all.

Oh, the Harte Hanks program is coming to an end. I am in negotiation with the HH rep on price. And, since we are negotiating, I also asked for tape recordings of the calls. The rep will get back with me in terms of pricing. We are currently paying approximately $55 per hour for the HH caller. The caller is able to complete 1.2 calls per hour with an actual appointment made at 0.14 per hour. I am not rendering any judgement on these numbers. These are our new baseline.

So, talked with a lead-gen specialist in our area on retaining her for lead-gen work. the thinking is that she will be better at qualifying prospects and providing higher quality leads in the process. Got her proposal today but the cost number was a bit out of my reach. So, we went back and forth a bit about the structure of the proposal and the costs. She promised to get back with me on the counteroffer. Will let you know if we decide to go forward with her.

Busy working on some PR pieces. I am done with the white-papers and just need to figure out how to best publicize them with our PR team. I have gotten the first draft of a customer case study. The content is more or less in place. I will probably get it to the customer for approval then get it beautified. It is a bit tedious but necessary.

There was an interesting discussion last week. Mr Whup-ass wants Marketing and Sales to assign rating for the same lead. So, as a lead comes in, Marketing enters the info and provide a rating opinion based on the available information. Then, Sales would also render a rating opinion on the same lead. Now, this is not a difficulty thing to do mechanically. On the other hand, it is not clear to me what is the point of this exercise. My argument is that it does not provide any meaningful insight since these ratings are liable to be highly biased and variable. Mr Whup-Ass wants to have these numbers as an early warning systems on the lead flow. We went back and forth on this issue and, frankly, I do not believe that anyone is convinced of the other's position. Nevertheless, we decided to humor him since it is a very minor incremental process given what we currently do.

Of course, I need to keep open-minded on this issue. Nevertheless, I am not sure if the data is action-able. We'll see.

Along the line of lead gen, we had another discussion on what is the strategy for lead gen given the performance of HH. The concern is that on a per completed sale basis, HH and other cold-call operation would be extremely expensive for our average sales price. More specifically, this makes the business model significantly less scalable.

This will be an on-going discussion of course, but looking at the initial numbers, I think the concern on the cost per sale is valid. One possible way is to bring this function in house which we estimated to cost about 2/3 of what we currently pay. The other possibility is to scrap that program and pour the resources into more PR work since it seems to increase the lead flow every time we do something.

I think partly this is a discussion on the price points. As we move downstream in price points to soak up user demand, the cost of selling needs to be able to scale downward accordingly. This is a critical insight but I do not know what the answer is. Yet.

chiefchickenheadless (at) gmail (dot) com sign out

Compound this!

2005-06-29T18:26:00.000-07:00

This is a bit of digression, but, hey, it is my blog.

So, last week, I was faced with the task of figuring out the annual compound growth rate - don't ask why, it is a long story. The trouble is that I cannot remember how to do it in terms of the right formula. My initial attempts at solving the equation using Excel ended unsatisfactorily (turns out to be a human error.) Then, I got really worried and grabbed a piece of paper and started to construct the summation equation from scratch. The first sample run was inconclusive because I was doing everything by hand including the compound calculation. Eventually, the formula hit me and I did a second simulation on Excel and it suddenly all made sense.

This is kind of freaky. You see, being an alumni of the school that wins the most Nobel Prize in economics and with graduates flooding the floors of Wall Street and other financial centers around the world, I am trained to do this kind of calculation even in my sleep. It is partly a pride issue where I was stunned that I could not recall how to do this.

I suppose when my school friends suggest that my diploma from that erstwhile institute should be stripped, they are onto something? But, That, I definitely take pride in.

so, how to you find the annualized compound growth rate. The equation in an Excel cell looks like:

V0*(1+r)^t=Vt

where
V0 = the base value of the growth
Vt = the ending value after t period
r = the growth rate
t = time period

And people think marketing folks are only foo-foo.

Harte Hanks is getting on my nerve. Whenever there is a request, their first reaction is to say "no" because it is out of the standard protocol. For example, I requested the daily update to include the field to indicate the number of employees for the enterprise. Within minutes, the reply was that this cannot be done because it is not one of the standard fields and it would have a major major impact for their operation. So, I replied with an e-mail that I was getting that information in prior daily updates and it just disappeared a few days ago. So, I would like to get it back. Anyway, I think I am getting it back starting tomorrow, but I don't know until I see it. Separately, I requested that HH provide new tape recordings of the call. They turn it down saying that unless we are not happy or concerned with the caller quality, it would be the same and this is additional work that they rather not do. Now, my question is that given all the calls are recorded, what is so difficult about getting that information to me? For that matter, I'll pay for the postage!

Things are getting interesting for Google again. With help from our capable engineering team, we now have the capability to send text strings via Google AdWords clicks. So, for each Google Ad, I have added information specifying the category, campaign, and ad title. In other words, i can now track where those pesky junk e-mail requests come from. And, amongst the good email requests, I will be able to measure the effectiveness of each category, campaign, and ad titles in a very granular way. Data collecting is half of the game and we are definitely starting on it.

Remember the concern with the sudden spike, it turns out that it was because the ad's were approved for Content on the 21st, thus the spike. It is pretty amazing that it went from 10-20 hits to thousands in one day. I understand how it works at an intellectual level, but it is still pretty mind-blowing in terms of the scale. On the other hand, it does appear that Google have process issues in Content approval. The campaign has been set up for a while and I just assumed that the Content has been approved (had I look closer, it would have been obvious that was not the case, but anyway.) On the other hand, since I split up the Search and Content hits for the campaign last Friday, I just got the new Content campaign approved in three days. What explains the difference in time? I believe the trick is to be a squeaky wheel. This Monday, I fired up another enquiries on why the Content hits has not been turned on yet. Today, I got a reply saying that it has been turned on - a turn-around of two days. On the other hand, in fairness, you have to give Google credit for the customer service. So, the lesson is to know what you want and demand that people give it to you.

I think.

Oh, the PR stalker. He gave me his references and I have set up a few calls. Unfortunately, the first call, I was about 10 minutes late and I left her a message about calling me. The second call, the person was not there. We will see how the stalker's references stack up.

The new thing for me is website revamp. I have been interviewing designers and setting expectations. The initial discussion did not go very far because the designers were looking for a comprehensive projects costing $15-20K with usability analysis and the other things nice. Lovely and wonderful but I cannot afford it. So, I have been in talk with a number of other designers and I told them that I am looking to get 5-7 website templates and we will do all the content and implementation. So far, some of them are still talking with me and I have a phone call tomorrow to interview another designer who is actually a friend. I hope that does not spoil our relationship.

On the website revamp, it also gave me an opportunity to reflect on how I want to position the company in terms of its public image and persona. I think the key thing for me right now is that it should not be text heavy which is a common fault of most tech company's site. The navigation should be such that a visitor can quickly find the relevant information he/she is looking for instead of having to read three pages of information before it. Color-wise, I like to keep it warm and bright. My concern is that given the number of new items that we want to add to the home page - webinars, quiz games, etc., I am not sure how to make the navigation clean and obvious. This will be an interesting challenge. But, first thing first, let's find a web designer.

chiefchickenheadless (at) gmail (dot) com sign out

Stalked

2005-06-23T18:41:00.000-07:00

My personal theory is that there is a conspiracy in Google land to drive up traffic. In one of my Google AdWords campaign, the usual impression rate is about 10-20 per day. That is until two days ago, started on the 22nd, the impression rate spike up to thousands. Now, as much as I like to take credit for increased exposure, I know this is not due to any intentional effort in our part and, as far as I can tell from the daily Google alerts, there is no reason from the external world that would cause this.

What I do see is a corresponding spike in junk e-mail hits from China. Lots of @165.com and @qq.com. I won't belabor the point of the stupidity in entering the info when you cannot expect to get anything in return, but this is really getting on my nerves.

So, I first fired up a complaint to Google saying that there is an unusual spike in impressions and I suspect there is a good (bad) reason for it. Then, I took all the non-core markets off the Google campaign geography - China is off. Finally, I split up the campaign that experienced the spike into Search and Content to ensure that any crowding effect from Content hits does not impact negatively the Search hits.

Can somebody explain to me the attraction of virtual vandalism? Shouldn't the person be surfing some adult oriented sites instead?

Harte Hanks is going on its second week. So far, we are getting an average of nearly two requests for appointment per day. And, non-appointments discussion where they agree to receive additional information runs about 11 per day. The initial logistic issue have been sorted out for the most part. We now get a daily update around lunch time for all the leads generated the day prior. I have also created a number of algorithms to prep the raw data into something a bit more intelligible for the salesperson. (I am just a nice guy.)

How to measure HH? That is really the question. I think the verdict is still out. But, so far so good.

I have been inundated by PR and marketing outfits in the past few weeks. It seems that as soon as our press release for the marketing product launch came out, everybody, or it seems that way, smells blood. And, in fairness, I have not discouraged this interpretation and been inviting these firms to send me their information.

The issue with my current PR team is that there does not seem to be a good energy level and everything seems to have to be driven from my end. Given the fact that we are not getting a lot of exposure anyway, this is quite tiresome. The plan to have a nice chat with the PR team tomorrow with Mr Whup-Ass in attendance. Given a choice, I prefer not to switch PR team due to the time needed to get up to speed. But, at some point, it may be needed. The question is, what and where is that point.

In terms of the PR firm calling, there is this firm that is kind of passive aggressive. The sales rep says that he can do better than our current team and keeps sending me cryptic messages on why he can do a better job in upping the exposure. Stalking comes to mind. We will see how this one works out.

Oh, remember the discussion about making a consultant/analyst an industry expert in an area that he has no idea on. I have been laboring everyday for the whole week to come up with a series of four white-papers focusing on different aspects of the product functionalities that are considered important by customers. While each white-paper has a specific focus, there are side notes that tries to give anecdotal information on the history and usage. I kind of like the format and it also allows me to intersperse bits and pieces from other whitepaper to create a complete picture for the reader. so, on one hand, each whitepaper has a specific focus, but in its entirety, it still gives a complete picture of what our product does and why it is a good thing.

Finally, there is additional discussion on pricing. Somehow I think we have a dysfunctional pricing process. This seems to be a topic that is regularly discussed and I have never heard any consensus. I think partly it is because pricing has been fairly academic until recently when we begin to get enough sales traction. But, as a consequence, there is a constant tug of war between sales and finance/operation. In a way, this is healthy because as a company grows, it is important to keep adjusting. On the other hand, I do feel that we still do not have a common language on pricing so that we spend a lot of time talking over each other's heads. That part bugs me.

chiefchickenheadless (at) gmail (dot) com sign out

Seventh inning stregth

2005-06-22T18:29:00.000-07:00

You know, I have not been to a baseball game for a long time and I do miss the silly interlude of the seventh inning stretch. Whoever came up with that idea is a genius.

Anywho, this is a little detour on the daily marketing grind so I can tell you about a few interesting blogs and how I am trying to monetize this Chicken Headless blog.

*Interesting blogs*
www.faultyvision.net
gc-gastronomic.blogspot.com
globalcorners.blogspot.com
zen.sandiego.edu:8080/Jerome

*Monetizing Chicken Headless*
I have signed up with Google's AdSense. So, do scroll to the bottom and click on something. I get paid by the click.

Okay, the stretch is over.

chiefchickenheadless (at) gmail (dot) com sign out

Toasting and roasting

2005-06-15T18:26:00.000-07:00

This week is pretty nuts. We have all the department heads flown in from all over the world for senior management strategy meetings. It is a good opportunity to meet the rest of the team with whom I have only talked via phone and Skype. On the other hand, meetings of this sort is a huge drain on time and it is not like I have too much time on my hands to begin with. But, truth be told, the past few days have been quite productive. Face to face meeting has the benefit of allowing contextual and real-time reaction that I have not seen reproduced in any meaningful manner via phone or internet.

The other good thing is that this is a good team. People have opinions and are not afraid to express them. At the same time, we do not hold fast to our views and readily accept logical counterarguments. In a way, it is a lot of fun. It is so important to have a team that is competent and have compatible social skills while maintaining heterogeneous views. This does not guarantee our success as a team or the company, but it sure gives me a lot more confidence than otherwise. (And, trust me, I have seen it all in this startup-land.)

I did my song and dance piece on what had transpired since I took over the marketing position as well as the various marketing programs that we will be doing in the next 90 days. The emphasis is to do more lead-generation and more publicity with the same budget. Specifically, I need to ramp up the lead-gen quantity to match the projected hiring of additional Sales people so that Sales gets enough through the funnel up front.

Harte Hanks is part of the story. The program just got underway last Friday and the response has been reasonable for the first few days. We are still working through some of the kinks. For example, there were entries where a request for meeting was setting for May (that is LAST month, in case you wondered what was the problem.) There are also some questions on what each responses were relative to the calling script. While these are important details, I feel pretty good that we will be able to overcome these issues. The bigger problem for now is the "lemon problem" in the case of who would talk with the caller. Ideally, we want people who are high-powered decision makers. Reality is that people who would take the time to talk tend to be lowly employees who was glad to talk because there is not a lot of interesting things going on. This problem, unfortunately, I am not sure how to fix unless we bring this function in-house.

But, overall, it looks okay. As of the first three business days of the program, we have generated six requests for meeting and some 25 contact information for future use. The hope is that as the caller ramps up with the program, we will have both faster and more efficient calls. I am also waiting for tapes of current calls as an on-going check-up of these calls. This is going to be an interesting program to monitor and learn from. Then, I want to get this function in-house as soon as possible with the assumptions that it will be less expensive as well as more efficient/effective. We will see.

For a high level PR spin approach, my song and dance piece consists of three prongs: vertical, geographical, and functional. By vertical I mean the specific market verticals that we have seen some success and have some good names to leverage. By Geographical, I want to focus on metro areas where we are seeing clusters of users. For functional, it would be an on-going process of touting the specific features and benefits of the product.

The key philosophical change is that I will be taking a much more component level approach to these prongs. One of the major failings with our past publicity effort has been that we have a consistent message. Now, this is great in principle because nobody is confused. But the problem for us is that it also becomes old news very quickly and I am having the darnedest time drumming up interests amongst press. By mix and match these components, I hope to weave different angles and hooks to pique interests and maintain a continuing level of exposure in the public space.

The other key philosophical change would be what I termed "the George W Bush's approach to publicity", namely we will undertake the program assuming no additional cooperation from the usual suspects - customers, analysts, and partners. This has been a major problem with the marketing program so far where we are constantly hampered by customers who are holding back and/or take forever to agree to press releases and case studies for one reason or another. So, I am putting together a slate of press releases and case studies/white-paper to be launched without getting customer help.

Finally, this is mostly tactical but interesting to note, I plan to make a consultant an industry expert for a field that he has no idea on. This guys is a hired-gun when it comes to white-paper and articles. And, originally, my plan is to hiring him to do one article. However, upon further consideration, my plan is to get him to "do" a series of at least four articles to establish himself as an expert in our particular product vertical. Of course, the part that I am particularly interested in as a marketer is that I will be writing these articles and spinning the story that defines the world view according to me. I am sure that I will have more to report on this intricate marketing dance as time goes on.

As I said, these were productive meeting.

In these meetings, there were dinners and lunches where we work on our team spirit by debating the merits of wine and food. There was almost a bet on what is the percentage of merlot grape in Petrus. Good thing that bet did not happen because I would have lost since I held the position that it is 100% merlot. Turns out, Petrus uses 95% merlot and 5% cab franc. I also got a list of New Zealand winemakers to try. And, most interestingly, our European head has a friend who just inherited 70,000 bottles of Austrian wine via a wine estate and this new owner is looking for ways to unload the wine cellar. Now, I would not be able to handle 70,000 bottles. But, with wines going back to the 1920's, I would not mind checking out some of the early ones to see how they turned out. This will be a small project that I will work on the side - playing the role of a match maker to get one or more wine import merchants in the San Francisco area to take these wine. And, maybe I can get a few cases as a finder's fee? We always need interesting wine.

chiefchickenheadless (at) gmail (dot) com sign out

Optimizing input and output

2005-06-08T18:44:00.000-07:00

So, the lead-gen side of things continue to hum along nicely. Based on my 7-day rolling average, we have doubled our raw lead counts since the product launch which is already double of what we used to get before the effort to optimize Google paid-ad's began.

The benefits of doubling leads is obvious. What is not obvious is that there is not a corresponding increase in junk leads. What I mean by junk lead is that there are times when people leave nonsensical information to request a product demo. Now, what I do not get is that it takes time to fill out the form and, since we are not a sexy company or sell a sexy product, why anyone would bother is really beyond me. If you are a competitor wanting to get product information, I can understand. But, to request a product demo with phone numbers like 1234567 and e-mail like aa@aa.com is just... Anyway, suffices to say that these people do not impress me with their intelligence. So, before I get really off the track here. I am very gratified to note that the increased raw leads does not lead to increase in junk leads and I am always looking for ideas on how to minimize junk leads. Please let me know!

So, I got the initial designs for the new landing page. They look darn good compare to our current offering. Bless our webmaster's soul, but good UI/design sense ain't one of the key hiring criteria for that position. Long story short, it fits well with our expectation as well as the various "best practice" sites that the on-line marketing guru has shared with us a while back (See the entry on "Harte Hanky"). Amongst the various design elements, I pick the one with a top banner showing the head shots of two (attractive) female professionals (I am sure they are model, but they look professional) while everyone else is pushing for a faded computer/keyboard/hands typing image. What won the argument is that while neither images are objectionable in an objective sense, studies have shown creating an association with a positive image can heighten the conversion rate. And, what is better than two women on the banner watching you enter your contact information like a good IT boy (yeah, it is a guy) should. This is just the design and will take a few more days to get it up and running. This is going to be fun!

So, Mr Whup-ass and I had a little chat on marketing. Specifically, my new mandate is to increase the lead gen activity by 5x going forward. The question that I am suppose to answer by next week's management retreat is how will I do it.

This is basically an optimization problem on possible input and expected output. On the input side, there are a series of "tools" that go from completely passive like boosting our Google ranking to aggressively active like buying directory information and call into the IT departments of these organizations. How I segregate the "tools" is to consider them along two dimensions. One is cost and expected ROI in both immediate and longer time frame. For example, buying ad's in a trade magazine is unlikely to provide an immediate return for the investment as it takes prolonged exposure for it to work. Whereas, doing a webinar is likely to have quick result as the audience is self-selecting. The other consideration is how much control we have in manipulating these tools. One tool that is difficult to control is trade show because once committed, there is nothing you can do if the audience is the wrong market and/or insufficient people show up for the show. On the other hand, Google AdWord is a beautiful tool that gives you a great deal of control and allows quick turn-around in experimentation. So, my current strategy consists of continuing the current program such as search engine ranking, Google paid-ad's, Harte Hanks, etc. The new program would be in the area of starting a weekly webinar series and boost PR output in terms of white paper, case study, and contributed articles.

Separately, in discussion with VP of Sales, his target is to get the monthly raw lead count to about 100 so that, factoring in our current conversion rate and closing rate, it would lead to each rep doing $1 million of revenue per year. Purely by that number, I think I am siting pretty since I am already exceeding that monthly number. But, of course, I should not be too cocky and start crank up the program. After all, we can do worse than having to bring in more sales and marketing people to offload the work. That, I am all for!

Speaking of Harte Hanks, it is commencing tomorrow. Our second test call came in and it sounded okay. Much more smooth flow and the branching really help in making the caller sound intelligent. We did have to make a change that mid-way through the question, there is a "read" where the caller talks about why this is an important issue and how we are a key player in this space. That is a fair idea and, if executed properly, should be powerful. One question I had was to put that "read" before or after the question where the call-ee answers how satisfied he is with his current solution. My thinking is that it should be before the question to plant the seed of doubt that maybe he is missing out on a good stuff and indicate that he is less satisfied with his current solution than what he otherwise would have said. Conversely, I do not want the call-ee to get agitated because he just said that he is perfectly satisfied with his current solution and was told that there is something even better out there. Long story short, I asked the Harte Hank lady to tell us where that "Read" should go given her vast experience, and she put the "read" after the question. (It is a shame that I cannot test out the two scenarios, it would be interesting to find out empirically.)

chiefchickenheadless (at) gmail (dot) com sign out

Kinds of impression

2005-06-01T18:33:00.000-07:00

Memorial weekend is a good thing. Actually, I think all long weekends are good things.

The product launch continued. We continue to get coverage a few days after the wire. Unfortunately, there was only one article written on the product. On the other hand, that article was picked up by quite a few outlets. So, between the wire piece and the article, we seem to have covered quite a bit of ground quantitatively.

One gratifying thing to note is that we are seeing increased traffic to the website. Before the launch, majority of traffic comes from search engine and the information requests tend to be the few that I have targeted with search engine in mind. But, this past week, there is a nice increase in information request coming from other areas that were not targeted. So, as a proxy, there is definitely increased interests. You might ask "shouldn't the site design be such that it drives the traffic to only the targeted/desired areas?" Well, if you have to ask that question, you do not know websites. Long story short, it is a perpetual catch-up game since you can only react to data which, by definition, is old news. Nevertheless, I am exacting some additional budget to streamline the website. Still trying to put my arms around this project but this should be a major undertaking for the next month or so.

Remember the "hot lead" that Harte Hanks called me for? We listened to the call recording a few days later where it was one of the calls. All that I can say is that the "hot-ness" came from the fact that the person asked the caller to call back at a specified time. (So far so good, objectively.) On the other hand, it was obvious that the person just wanted to get the caller off his back and, my guess, gave a call-back time knowing full well that he will not be there to pick up the phone.

Anyway, we decided to re-do the script. The individual elements are kept pretty much the same, but we put in a lot more navigational things in terms of what questions to ask. The original script was a sequential list where the caller just recite the questions from top to bottom. The new script has several branches and specifies that if the answer is Yes - go to Q5 and No - go to Q8. The idea is to take away the thinking for the caller. Two observations. One, it is unfortunate that we assumed a higher level of caller capacity than what was warranted. We always know that these are just hire guns and we cannot expect too much from HH. On the other hand, we have assumed that the caller would exercise some discretion in the basic zig-zag of a conversation. Did not happen. Even when the person on the other end already answered the question two minutes ago, the caller still recite the question. Anyway, I am glad to provide the hard-coded intelligence if it cannot be had organically. Two, it is kind of fun to come up with the branching script - it is like writing in unstructured programming languages like BASIC with a lot of GOTO. So, the new script was shot to HH for testing and I hope to hear the specifics before the week ends.

The $25 promo idea still sucks. I am quite disappointed. The latest incarnation is that the headline with no mentioning of the $ gets better performance. I will end the program this week and figure out what to do next. I also contracted a web designer to re-do a number of these landing pages. Hope to run the new pages in a couple of weeks.

I am sure that you heard me talking about Google paid-ad's before. The latest fine-tuning comes from separating out the Search Network from the Content Network. Basically, if you specify a campaign to do Search network only, it will pop up only when an user searches for the specified term. This is particularly desirable because it means that person is motivated to find the information. On the other hand, Google also pop up ad's next to relevant content using some proprietary algorithm - less desirable because the person who clicks on the ad may not have an immediate need. But, the good thing about the Content network is that it gives volume in terms of impression. A typical day, I may get a few hundreds of search impressions, but I typically expect to get a few 10,000's content impression if not more. Herein also is my problem. One of my campaigns starts to get a bit expensive and majority of the traffic comes from content network. Cost issues aside, my biggest concern was that the high Content network fee is crowding out my search network usage. So, while I am paying good money because of the content network volume, I am missing out on quality search network listing because of the budget. (This is a bit convoluted, if you really want to understand the thinking, drop me a line and I'll try to explain better.)

So, all these explanation leads to my decision to separate out the Content and Search network. Basically, I now run two campaigns for each category instead of one with identical content with the only difference in the network targeted. The early verdict is quite positive. The search network has been cranking along as expected and I no longer have to worry about people not being able to find us in a search. The content network is getting fewer impression because of the budget constraint. However, there is no noticeable drop in our website hit and, more importantly, product/sales demo requests. Finally, this gives me a much higher level of fine-tuning capability to trade-off between costs, number of impressions, and type of impressions. My plan is to run these campaigns for another week to collect enough data and change all the other campaigns into this duel-mode.

We are going to do a senior management on/off-site where all the managers fly into the HQ for Kumbaya and strategy sessions. I am in the process of preparing the marketing piece. This has been an interesting exercise because this is the first time since coming on board four months ago that I try to take a step back and see the big picture on what fits where. And, this also helps me to identify whatever is missing and where to put the resources. I should have something more concrete in a few days.

chiefchickenheadless (at) gmail (dot) com sign out

Where to land?

2005-05-25T18:24:00.000-07:00

Product launch was official on this past Monday, May 23rd. The impact is still being monitored. The PR piece went on wire and we are seeing a number of outlets picking up the story. And, in addition to the reporter/analyst mentioned last time, we also got some coverage in other trade rags without having to brief them. For a few hours we were quite concerned with a reporter because she misquoted a technical spec which makes our product look stupid. Anyway, with a bit of pleading and arm twisting, we got it fixed. Just got off the phone with our PR agency and it sounds like we will have a more in-depth coverage in the print edition of a trade rag that mentioned us on their website.

On the launch day, Monday, I got an e-mail from a customer saying that our regular contact is no longer with the firm. Life happens and, usually, this is a non-event. But, it just so happen that this regular contact has agreed and been prepped to talk with reporters about the launch. And, it just so happen that a reporter wanted to talk with a user/customer for a quote to file a story on the product launch in two hours. So, for a few hours, I was in a seriously scrambling mode - calling and begging. It was not a pretty sight. Long story short, we manage to secure a pinch hitter in about two hours but it moved beyond the reporter's deadline so she filed talking only with an analyst with no customer quote. Thinking back, I do not know if there is anything I could have done differently. Usually, I would love to have several customers that reporters can call in, but our install base is just starting and there are very few people who have production usage experiences and be willing to talk...

I think the verdict is still out on how successful this launch is. First week does not give you a good sense of how everything will play out and fit in the bigger scheme of things. We still have two analyst briefings to do later in the week. We will see how that one goes.

The experiment with landing page continues. Now that we have a bit more data point and it does indeed look like converting the paid-ad link to a landing page where the user cannot go anywhere else is the trick to force a conversion event. The number is approximately double of the usual rate. So, the latest for me is that I have converted all the url's for all of the paid-ad's Google and Yahoo to the landing page. With a bit of luck, we will see an avalanche of conversions. (Dreaming is free.)

I think I have mentioned that I am running a $25 promo through Google paid-ad's where if you search for specific key words and click on the promo link, you become eligible to receive $25 if the conversation goes as far as a demo. This promo has run for three days now and it has been an unqualified failure to date. I saw no conversion event. The number of click-through increase just a little bit so maybe the paid-ad made a bit of difference. But, the key thing is that nobody has signed up for the promotion. I have a few theories about this. Looking at the chain of events for this promotion to work: 1. the key word selection need to be board enough to get enough impression but narrow enough that the eye balls are self/pre-selected in terms of likely customer. On that count, the campaign gets nearly 150 impressions with a 4% click-through rate for the past three days. These numbers are comparable to the numbers generated from prior period. 2. The text of the paid-ad: I have created a 2x2 matrix with headline and text alternating between the most attention grabbing line from existing campaign (a known winner) and some flavor of "Get $25". The idea is to find out if we get more click through via the known winner or with $25. So far, on an individual ad level, one of the "Get $25" ad is slightly ahead of #2 which is the known winner. On a combined level (remember it is a 2x2 matrix), the "Get $25" is ahead a lot more. But, the number of data point is simply too small to be particularly meaningful right now. So, I have even thrown into the mix today a new ad that has similar language but instead of showing "$25" it just mentions that you will get a prize. Will see what happens. 3. Landing page. My personal feeling is that this may be a major contributing factor for the low conversion rate. The landing page is serviceable in all technical dimensions. But, it is definitely not inviting and, I suppose, could even be considered a bit scary given the number of fields that are asked. On the other hand, unlike the super-duper landing page mentioned above, this landing page actually provides a bit more details about what the product is and how it works. So, maybe it is a matter of people being even more self/pre-selecting and decide that this product is not a fit. I do not know. Not yet. I will try a few things to see if we can rectify this situation.

Yahoo has good customer service. After I filed my complaint about not getting a decent bang for the buck with Yahoo, I got two phone calls for a bit of hand-holding the follow day. That gets extra point from me. Unfortunately, they were not able to solve a good deal of my issues at their level. The limitations are technical in nature and I basically have to live with it for now. So, the unfortunate truth is that Yahoo pad-ad still sucks. Sorry to say.

Did I mention that we are working with Harte Hanks to do telemarketing calls? Last week, we spent quite a bit of time going back and forth to finalize a script for the caller. This week is for test calls and final adjustment before commencing the program next week. Today, I got a phone call saying that as part of the test call, we got a person interested in the product and wants us to call him at 11:30, a lead. So, that was exciting. Unfortunately, the information came to me after 11:30. So, I do not know if our sales people were able to connect. But, let us think of it as a good omen. We are scheduled to hear the testing calls tomorrow. This should be an interesting exercise.

Not sure if you have to deal with the billing side of things. I do, for marketing related activities. Harte Hanks drive a hard bargain. The invoice indicated that the payment term is net 30 (you have up to 30 days from receipt to pay, for those of you so luck as to not have to deal with billing). However, I got a call from the account manager that they must receive one half of the payment before they can continue with the test calling and program launch. Man! That was unpleasant.

chiefchickenheadless (at) gmail (dot) com sign out

My Yahoo soap box

2005-05-17T18:56:00.000-07:00

So, the latest scoop is that if you limit where a click-through can go, there is a higher chance of conversion.

Cryptic ‘nuff for ya?

On the subject of web click-through conversion, the question is how to improve the conversion rate when the person who clicks through to your ad (an act that costs money) will do what you want him to do which is to conduct a conversion event (leave their contact info and indicate product interests in our case). So far, limiting where the click-through goes seems to make the biggest difference. If you think about it rationally, it does not make a lot of sense; he could use the “back” button on the browser, he can just wondering onto somewhere else through “home” button, and there is even a "escape hatch" if he is willing to click amongst objects on the the conversion page to break out of the navigation limit. On the other hand, we are mostly animal of habits. So, as long as it does not look wrong/bad, when asked (or, more likely, given no obvious alternative), people will just do what they are told to do. The data is still a bit too early to be conclusive. But, the early report is quite positive on the change. The irony is that I am running this experiment on a crappy conversion page which does not even pretend to be nice by giving product info and/or images. Once you get there, you either leave your contact or else. The plan is that we will now set up better conversion pages that would do the same thing but in a less blatant manner. And, hopefully, that would improve the conversion rate still.

My question, a follow-up really, is that how does this setup of forcing people to convert impact the actual closing rate? After all, people may feel obligated to leave their info since there is no other way out. But, that is quite different from whether they will fork out the money to buy. At a purely ego-centric level, this is nothing more than idle speculation since, as the marketing guy, I am measured on the number of conversion rather than the closing rate which is much further down the chain of events. Something to monitor though.

Yahoo/Overture sucks so far. I have spent some time going over the account and poking at all the options and trying to figure out how to read the information. It is hard. As much as I hate to say this, since I do not own Google stocks, Google’s AdWords is much more intuitive and helpful for advertisers like me. So, here is my current laundry list of issues. 1. The impression rate seems to be quite low relative to what we are getting in Google. I accept the notion that Google remains the preferred search engine for techies thus the lower impression rate. However, there is no tool, that I have found, in Yahoo that would help you optimize the keywords in an existing listing. There is an option to provide estimates for a new listing, but it is not integrated with existing listings. 2. Duplications. I understand why they will screen out duplications. However, the duplication flag made no sense since the keywords that I am trying to get does not appear anywhere else. How is that duplication? 3. Conversion. Yahoo provides conversion tool like Google. But, Google now offers cross-channel conversion so that I can track both Google and Yahoo conversion from my Google account. How cool (and convenient) is that! Well, I have fired up a few inquiries to Yahoo support on the questions above. Who know, maybe I am just a lazy user who did not read the documentation closely. On that account, I can only say that is true of everyone user I know. Finally, still on my Yahoo/Overture Suckth soap box, what is the story with the log-off button on the Yahoo account? I won’t bore you with the details but it took me a few minutes to find the first time I used it. And, even now, I still go into a very transitory panic mode every so often because I cannot find the log-off button.

Oh, the reporter/analyst round is still on for the product launch. One reporter at 9am and one analyst at 11:30am. It is always interesting to be part of the call and observe. On one hand, there is a bit of adversarial relationship between the vendor and the reporter/analyst because the vendor thinks whatever product that he is selling is the cure-all for the world’s ills while the report/analyst need to be objective and put things in perspective. On the other hand, without those vendors with snake oils to sell, there is no news to cover for the reporter and no customers to buy the analysts' reports. Anyway, the 9am call was a bit on the testy side. She kept pushing for the question of “what’s new.” We danced around the issue a bit since it was more of a new target market than a brand new product. On the other hand, we could have been bold and assert, with quite a bit of confidence, that what is new is that there is nobody in this marketplace that does what we do. It may not be very “new” if you were an existing customer using our solution for a different reason, but for the new market place/users, this is a heck of a new thing. Hmm… So easy to be a Monday morning quarterback. The 11:30am call went better. She got our pitch and, fingers crossed, we will get mentioned in her blog.

chiefchickenheadless (at) gmail (dot) com sign out

Hartey Hanky

2005-05-12T18:25:00.000-07:00

Wow! It has been a while. I guess I have been busy. Honestly, I meant to write more frequently.

Life in Google land is going well. The Conversion matrix is yielding some interesting numbers. One of the things that I did not think of, but should have, is the fact that as we test new web pages that lead to conversion events, sometimes the conversion number can be overstated. Hmm.. A statistical details that I need to think about.

Life on the ranking side is going well too. We have now become the number one site for the two terms that I really wanted on Google. I have not checked our Yahoo ranking, but it should not be too bad either.

The LL Bean promotion idea is coming along. We will be offering a $25 gift certificate if you take our product for a spin (demo). Different pieces are getting ready and I hope to have it rolled out next week. What is particularly interesting is that I had a good discussion with an on-line marketing guru who company generates several hundreds million in revenue by helping corporations run their on-line marketing campaigns. Long story short, he gave me some very specific pointers on how to make it better and I have asked our web guru to implement like changes. It will be interesting to see if our promotion page will perform better than our current standard design.

Actually, I was inspired by the on-line marketing guru’s examples and thought that I should come up with a small quiz that people can take to find out how they are doing in the Ace product areas. This could be a fun way to spread our names around, even if it is self-serving.

Oh, also signed up for Yahoo/Overture. Still in the early stage of figuring out how everything fits together at Yahoo. You know, maybe I am just too in-grained in the way Google AdWords work, but the Yahoo interface and flow does not make a lot of sense so far. But, this is probably too early for me to say any6thing until I have all of my lists approved and running.

Product Launch is stalling a bit. Quotes. For a miserable quote, I have been begging in different parts of the world asking customers to take pity on me. Not a lot of luck so far. But, come rain or shine, we will do a product launch the week after next. Fortunately, this is a marketing launch so the stake is not as serious.

Have you heard of Harte Hanks? It is the 800 pound gorilla of the telemarketing/direct-sales space. So, we will be hiring Harte Hanks to run a 30 day telemarketing campaign to generate some warm leads. Harte Hanks has been very easy to work with, it is obvious that the systems are in place. But, they can be pretty rigid on what they can do and how they can do it. For example, we want to get a list of non-leads from the campaign so that we can also gage what did not work. It took a few back and forth to get the intent across and we still have to pay an additional $1,500 to get the data so we can run the correlation internally. This could have been much easier done automatically inside Harte Hanks. But, that is a just a small pet peeve. Will start the wheel going with Harte Hanks starting tomorrow. This should be another interesting learning experience.

Finally, how long do you or your sales people get back to a lead? One minutes? One hour? One day? The expectation varies and the actual performance varies wider still. So, I was looking for an alternative source to Harte Hanks and there is an outfit that comes highly recommended by a trusted source. An introductory e-mail was sent. Nothing. I called the second day to get to a sales person and got the CEO instead. We chatted and he told me that one of the sales people will get back with me. Nothing. I called the third day and got to talk with the CEO again, and he promised that the sales person will call and gave me the person’s name. An hour of so after the call, I call again and asked the receptionist to put me through to the sales person, now that I have the name. Turns out that this person is a consultant to the firm and only the CEO has the contact info. Nothing. Day four, I talked with the CEO again, and the receptionist and I are pretty much on first name basis now, he was most apologetic and gave me the sales person’s contact info. I call and left a message on both the office and cell numbers. A few hours later, I got a call from the sales person. Now, call me crazy, but it ain’t a good idea to make your potential customers run around like that. It does not engender good karma and does not make you look too good either. Like I said about Harte Hanks above, HH makes it easy to work with them and we will go with HH this time.

Well, time to go.

chiefchickenheadless (at) gmail (dot) com sign out

Waiting for Google

2005-04-20T19:05:00.000-07:00

It is a funny image, if you do not have to deal with it, waiting for Google search engine to update its cache. As I mentioned, we made a number of changes on the website to reflect the new product direction. So, I have been monitoring the Google search results to ensure that it is being shown. How long do you think it would take? A data point - according to our internal log/sensor, Google bot comes to our site daily. Well, it took a total of eight days. Now, don't get me wrong. I am not complaining as such - but it does provide some perspectives on what kind of lead time any one revision could take. (I have heard story about two weeks cache update, but I rather not think about it.)

So, part of the website revision include a number of specific search terms that we try to get high ranking on - get the top two spots for prime search engine real estate. There are two variants. For one, we clearly kicked ass. Of course, it is a term that nobody is using. Hardly difficult, but, a victory is a victory, however you dice it. The second variant, and naturally the one that I really really want, got the site bumped up to the third company position but fourth entry on the search result. (This happens when one site has several pages that relate to the search term.) So, the next objective is to become the second company on the list (third entry.) I have a few strategies that we have implemented and we will see what happens in another eight days.

Staying on Google, we also implemented the Google conversion tool. It basically tracks the number of people who clicks on your AdWords ad (Google paid-advertising) AND conducts a conversion activity (leaving their contact info in our case.) It may not sound much, but it sure will provide a load of interesting data. Of particular interests to me, I would like to find out how many of our leads came from non-paid Google search vs. the paid-advertising. And, this will help me get a sense of what kind of budget allocation and further paid-advertising fine tuning ideas.

Separately, I am lining up all the duckies for the product launch. Buttering up analysts, consultants, and reporters to make sure that they pretend to be interested. This is a capitalistic system and these rules of the game are not meant to be a measure of a person's true self. Now, I do not mean doing anything illegal. But, take for example; the easiest way to curry interests with analysts is when you are a major paying customer of his firm. Now, you may say this is a clear case of interest of conflict, but I would argue that if I have the money, I want to ensure that the analysts are informed of what I/we are up to and we get regular feedback from the analysts' impartial perspective.

Anyway, let me stop before I spill all the little dirty secrets in the life of marketing.

Revising the data sheet. When it comes to collaterals, my personal experience is that it is simply easier to start from scratch instead of fixing the existing library. I have found the majority of collateral design in Microsoft Word are not taking full advantages of its rich function set and make revisions beyond adding a few texts just darn difficult. Now, I will not blame you when I see your poorly formatted Word documents like I would if you do not regularly scrub your e-mail lists. On the other hand, take it from me, it is not that difficult to figure out how to do text boxes, tables, insert and format images, manage section, or setup header/footers. It is a bit tedious to learn but, if you take pride in your work, it is really worth that extra ten minutes looking up the Help.

Anyway, after reading an article about LL Bean's direct mail philosophies, I am planning on doing a promotion-oriented Google campaign. Still thinking it through, but it should be interesting to see what happens.

Oh, btw, we closed a few deals and still filling up the leads pipeline from all the marketing activities. So far so good.

chiefchickenheadless (at) gmail (dot) com sign out

Hot chocolate with Mr Whupp-ass

2005-04-13T18:50:00.000-07:00

Sorry for the long absence.

So, the major band-aid fix for the website went up. Visually, it does not look that different. However, if you read the content and see how it is structured, it definitely shifts the focus onto the new product line and optimized for search engine. It just went live this Monday; so, I am anxiously monitoring the search ranking daily.

the next major step is to clean up the website on a more fundamental way. Take out products that we no longer want to sell, add a few more verticals and collaterals on the product space that we are interested in.

I am not trying to make marketing a boring thing, but it is mostly grunt work. And, if you mind the daily tackle and heavy lifting, this ain't for you.

So, what have I been doing lately? Blasting. Send out e-mails to let people know that we exist and we offer a worthy solution. Then, unleash the sales people to follow up and hound these leads. One thing that I do want to point out is that while this process sounds a bit gruesome, the truth is that a good sales/marketing campaign will take you off the target list if you would say that you are not interested. Think about it, why waste time on you if you are not interested. And, as a corollary, if any of your salesperson thinks otherwise, he/she should be fired.

Oh, also very important is that you always scrub the e-mail list. Nothing is more annoying than keep getting blasted when you have indicated that you want to be off the list. For me, it is a karma thing, I want to be treated the same way - so do the honorable thing and scrub your list regularly.

Another thing that I am trying to put my arms around is to do a regular webinar. I will probably combine this with the blasts and assorted Google initiatives. Still do not know exactly the structure yet. More thinking is required.

Finally, a product launch. This is going to be interesting. I am working with our PR team on orchestrating journalist and analysts reviews and package things around it to announce the two new products/versions in May. It is coming up and I have no idea if I can pull this one off. Hope to have a better idea by tomorrow, but we will see.

BTW, we got paid - I mean we got several seven digit checks from a deal that we worked on for a long time. It is nice to get the check and deposit it in a bank. Mr Whupp-ass and I grabbed some hot chocolate afterward as celebration.

chiefchickenheadless (at) gmail (dot) com sign out

Ask not what you can do for your marketing chicken headless

2005-03-23T18:30:00.000-08:00

Two weeks, more or less, has passed.

Yeah, it has been crazy. I focused mostly on converting existing data into our new CRM tool, SalesForce.com, and updating the website.

A CRM tool is a good thing, theoretically. It takes a lot of the thinking out of the marketing and sales process. The downside, however, is that, like all computer solutions, its usage and limitation is not always exactly what you wanted.

SalesForce.com is a hosted service so it is kind of nice that way. Our new VP of Sales is a fan and, having no strong opinion on the issue, I am as happy with it as any other choice. So, my biggest challenges are mostly in the realm of loading data onto the database. There are several spreadsheets of existing customer information and marketing information that needed to be consolidated into one. Being an old COBOL programmer who worked with DB2 extensively, I know my way around loading data. This is one of those things that ain't too difficult but tricky enough that if you ain't careful, you can screw yourself royally.

What bugs me about SalesForce is that the standard field "Lead Source" is a picklist and can only have one entry. Logical but not useful. From the same lead (person), there could be multiple ways of contacting us. For example, if a person received a whup-ass e-mail then requests a product demo as well as a whitepaper, SalesForce does not allow me to provide the kind of granularity I need. If you think I am just nuts for wanting that kind of info, it gives me the opportunity to come back later and do con-joint analysis on the selection/request preferences and the ultimate outcome. (And people thought marketing is all frou-frou.) Anyway, I came up with a method of capturing that information that does not look too ugly on the database structure without dragging down the performance.

Website is coming along. Pushed the new sales process update onto the live site. My next major objective is to get the text changed so that the website reflects the new corporate focus. This will help the search engine ranking. With all the band-aids in, I will be able to sit back and think though the whole website re-vamping process. Part of the problem with the current site is that it has a very year 2000 look. Hope to put in a few fixes to make it look younger.

After staring at the website for so long, my favorite method of taking a break is to put in all sorts strange stuff onto the site. So, far, I have added Bevis and Butthead onto the corporate banner, added one of the exec's photo and added mustache onto the home page. Good thing that everyone enjoys the gag. It is a shame that some of the more inspired graphics and languages will never be shown on the live site.

Oh, also got some budget to upgrade the Hoovers account. Did you know that if you use Master card to pay for Hoovers, there is a discount? In my case, it amounts to some 20% off. I always thought that Master/Visa target consumer markets. But, I will take the discount.

The blasting program continued until this week. One of the particular memorable lines, I thought, involves a paraphrase of the JFK's "Ask not what your country can do for you..." by juxtaposing our product against the solutions that we are suppose to replace. It was cute.

chiefchickenheadless (at) gmail dot come sign out

Whup-ass in Week four

2005-03-10T18:09:00.000-08:00

Week four with Ace.

Working on Google AdWords. If you have not heard, it is the paid-ad program that allows you to pop up a message on the right hand side whenever a relevant search is conducted on Google. There is a whole industry around it with companies with tens and hundreds of millions in revenue that does nothing but optimizing Google ad's. And, of course, it is incumbent upon me to optimize our little Google operation.

Adjusted some wordings and shifted the budget around. The prior program was set up focusing on different products and with a set of new products to peddle; it was not too difficult to make the initial adjustment.

What will be interesting is to implement the conversion program. Long story short, it allows you to know not just how many people was curious enough to click through your ad when doing a Google search, but actual do something like leave their contact information so hapless marketing guys like me can send them tasteless blasts (see below on Mr WA.) Well, that is what it is suppose to do, am thinking through the process and hope to get it implemented soon.

Re-vamping corporate website. Yeah, it is going to be a lot of work since the website was done for the prior set of products. So, you would never be able to guess what we want you to buy by looking at the site. Also, the new VP of sales wants to change the sales process which will also have impact on the site.

For now, I am thinking small. Change the part impacting the sales process and give the website home page a face lift with appropriate propagandas, and do the Google conversion stuff.

It is a survival skill to take small steps and declare victory often.

=A few updates=

The TechTarget problem turns out to be a logistic one. A paper targeted at the Exchange users was blasted to Domino users. No wonder no Domino users were interested in what we had to say about Exchange. So, problem ID'd and I demanded that Ace gets a free blast to the Exchange users since the Domino blast was useless.

The result was encouraging with a higher level of Exchange user interests. But, the interesting part was that there were also a little bit of Domino user interests. This kind of got me thinking, and thinking is free, are those Domino users for real? The blast title clearly stated that it is for Exchange. Are they requesting info to fill out an otherwise free afternoon, getting a copy for a friend, or, drum roll for conspiracy theory of the day please, is there a minimum level of response that certain organization orchestrates?

==

The internal marketing blast went out with minimum surprises. I particularly liked one of the tag lines where "whup-ass" is involved. It is not the most tasteful, but it sure made that afternoon that much brighter. On the administrative side, I had to spent a whole afternoon scrubbing the returned e-mail from the original list – for future reference, if you are going to take the trouble to maintain an e-mail list, please make it use-able, or I will come after you if you made me scrub it. Also had to deal with unsubscribe requests which were promptly processed - I would not want to be treated any other way.

So, back to the whup-ass story. It was somewhat controversial since it is wanting in the proper and good taste department. Nevertheless, the CEO rammed through that one. Reactions. First one was an angry reply who complain that he was not suppose to be getting marketing blasts. Technically not true as I got his e-mail when he requested information from the website which is an automatic inclusion into the marketing e-mail list. Twice. The twist of the story is that since he requested info twice from the website, he was blasted twice including the whup-ass line as one of the two. Well, technical truth is not what we are looking for. So, I took that poor sap off the blast list and tell the sales guys to blame it on me/Marketing. Second reaction was even better - we got a call wanting to know more about the product because the caller's boss' boss got the blast. God willing, we will close this customer. Regardless, there were high five all around for the "brilliant" wording.

p.s. I downloaded an image of a whup-ass label and stuck onto a can of Pepsi (the choice of drink has to do with the color of the can vis-à-vis the label). A can of whup-ass! Yesiree bob!

chiefchickenheadless (at) gmail dot come sign out

Figuring out head from tail

2005-02-23T18:33:00.000-08:00

Second week with Ace.

Things are shaping up more clearly and I am begining to understand what people are talking about. But, this also means that I will soon lose the ability to ask stupid questions - a gift that should be hung on for as long as possible.

Fire of the week. We are working with TechTarget to send out whitepaper to targeted audience. The program worked well for January but the result has been dismal for Febuary. My job, whether or not I accept it, is to figure out what happened and fix it. So, long story short, I ask the TechTarget account manger to come up with some expert advice so that I would look bad on my fifth day on the job. We will see how it works out.

Fire of the week II. Come up with a special limited time offer for the new product that we are pushing. Pricing, duration, package, etc. This is going to be interesting.

As an old buddy to come in so we can pick her brain as an proven sales pro. She gave a lot of good advice and, we are hating oursleves for it, she does not want to come here. Given the $4mm contract that she is trying to close, she is just being rational.

chiefchickenheadless (at) gmail dot come sign out

Ace Company

2005-02-20T10:37:00.000-08:00

Yes, there is still life in the Silicon Valley amongst the denizens of the Startup Land.

I have been hired to run/re-start/pray for the marketing operations of Ace company.

All postings are fictionalized and altered to protect the innocents.

Let the ride begin.

Chief Chicken Headless - CCH

chiefchickenheadless (at) gmail dot come sign out