This week at the annual ACCM conference in Orlando, FL, attendees gained a marketers share of Web insight at the Annual Catalog Conference’s power forum and brunch. Moderated by Sherry Chiger, editorial director, Multichannel Merchant, panelists Stephan Spencer, founder and president of Netconcepts, Ken Burke, president/CEO of Market Live, and Amy Africa, president of Creative Results shared their wealth of search engine expertise.
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Annual Catalog Conference — Orlando, Florida
Multichannel Merchant editorial director, Sherry Chiger will moderate. Learn about the latest news, trends, and opportunities in multichannel marketing from a panel of leading-edge experts, and take away tips for improving sales and profits.
Sherry Chiger, Editorial Director, Multichannel Merchant Magazine
Amy Africa, President, Creative Results
Ken Burke, CEO, MarketLive Inc.
Founder & President: Stephan Spencer, Netconcepts
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How do you make a solid business case for blogging for marketing? What about managing upper management’s expectations on the outcome? Should you hire a professional blogger to write your company blog?
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Here’s a startling bit of research, done by EmailLabs and written up in MarketingSherpa, for all of you folks responsible for crafting email campaigns and newsletters:
This [past] fall tens of millions of emails from permission mailers were tested for a brand new metric: actual read time.
Turns out 15-20 seconds was the average. Consider the last email campaign or newsletter you sent. Could a typical reader skim the entire thing, digest the graphics, and decide to click on the best item for them in just 15-20 seconds?
Yes, people. You read that right. The read time of your precious prose is, on average, a lousy 15 seconds… 20 seconds, tops!
You labor so hard over that e-newsletter: spending countless hours writing it, then perfecting it, then testing it, then further refining it… and to what end? The bloody inconsiderate recipient spends a mere 15 seconds absorbing it! How rude!
So, what to do? Email marketers must become masters of the 15-second soundbite. The conventional wisdom in email marketing of short sentences, short paragraphs, placing the call-to-action so it appears above-the-fold in the preview pane, etc. etc. just won’t come close to cutting it any more.
Based on this study, I’ve been totally rethinking how we’re doing our regular “communiques” to our clients & partners. Perhaps we should ditch our current approach of a roughly-monthly, short-and-sharp 400-word e-newsletter? I think we’ll test another approach: where I strive to deliver a single idea or tip that offers real value to the recipient and coaxes that person into engaging in a dialogue with me — within a mere 80 words! (This paragraph, including this parenthetical note, is 80 words.)
Bite-sized chunks of relevant advice, personalized to that individual client’s situation, sent on more regular intervals than our current “communique”… Sound like a plan? (Actually it sounds like an extranet blog, but done less frequently and delivered via email instead of RSS.)
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Strategic Branding — Auckland, New Zealand
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Think what audio books on tape did for the road warrior—turning our cars and airplane seats into mobile universities. Podcasting has the same capacity to change the way we learn and take in new information.
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Circulation and the Internet: Co-hosted by American Business Media and National Trade Circulation Foundation, Inc. — New York City
Gloria Adams, Pennwell - Moderator
Laura Wilson, NEJM - Panelist
Sean Fulton, GCN Publishing - Panelist
Brian Klais, Netconcepts - Panelist
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Most email marketers agree that ethically, email address harvesting and sending unsolicited opt-out messages are taboo and should be avoided. I of course agree. It’s always fun to talk ethics, but let’s bring the discussion to a practical level. I contend that harvesting and opt-out are both impractical for legitimate email marketers.
Let’s look at why…
Harvesting of email addresses from the Web will inevitably pick up “honeypot addresses” that will end up in your opt-out database. A honeypot is an email address hidden in the page somewhere where no one will click on it, but email harvesters will still capture it. Any emails received at the honeypot address will then get the IP address of the sending mail server “blackholed” for a period of time, so that emails to other addresses on the receiving email server will not get delivered.
Frequently the ethical question is posed as to whether the opt-out email is spam if the content is squeaky clean. The answer is an unequivocal YES. It’s still spam because you do not have a prior business relationship with the recipient, you were not granted permission by the recipient in advance, and your email is unsolicited. It doesn’t have to be “bulk” to be spam. Spam is spam to the recipient regardless of whether you sent 100 or a million; it’s immaterial to the recipient what is going on outside of their inbox. And spam does not need to be a sleazy message to be considered spam. A church could “spam” people with donation requests by email if they are unsolicited.
So back to the practicality and repercussions for a moment… Imagine this: you send out unsolicited emails requesting people to opt-in and you have no prior business relationship with them. Some of them inevitably will report you to SpamCop. Your ISP will be notified by SpamCop, and they will need to either give you the boot or justify in a response to SpamCop why you don’t deserve the boot. ISPs take SpamCop very seriously, as they don’t want their SMTP servers blacklisted. More than a couple SpamCop complaints and your ISP is going to be very grumpy with you.
So in all, this whole approach is quite an impractical one. Spammers must be very good at hiding their tracks (e.g. by sending spam out through “zombies” which are PCs compromised by viruses/trojans) or must ‘move house’ constantly. Unless you’re willing to live like that too, you’ll find that the email harvesting and opt-out approaches will burn you.
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A couple months ago I shared one of my Google secrets, since that secret no longer worked. 
Specifically, it was how to obtain a list of the most important web sites according to Google.
Now, surprisingly, this little trick appears to work again (it stopped working in 2003), thanks to a bug introduced into Google’s algorithm. Two months ago, a search for http would have revealed results like HTTP - Hypertext Transfer Protocol Overview and Welcome! - The Apache HTTP Server Project. Today, these sites appear nowhere near the top of the results. Instead, the top results are occupied by a “who’s who” list of highly important web sites — sites that don’t include the word http anywhere in the text of the page.
As already noted by blogger Nathan Weinberg, this same phenonemon occurs when you search for www.
One thing I found curious is that http and www Google queries return different results. Now these results are NOT in order of PageRank score, at least not the PageRank scores as revealed by the Google Toolbar. You can verify this to be the case yourself simply by using SEO Chat’s PageRank Search tool. Indeed, it’s a well-known fact within the SEO community that the PageRank scores served up by the Google Toolbar servers are not the actual PageRanks used by Google in the ranking algorithm. PageRank debate aside, perhaps this list offers us a (now) rare glimpse at some of Google’s Chosen Ones — the most important sites on the Internet according to Google.
What makes me say this is due to a bug in Google? For one thing, these results are NOT relevant to the search query. Secondly, I’ve uncovered another bug newly introduced into Google’s algorithm, namely that the inurl: query operator does not work properly, and I think these two bugs might be related. For an example of this second bug in action, search Google for site:blogs.msdn.com scoble inurl:msnsearch and the top search result is currently blogs.msdn.com/mikehall/archive/2004/11/10/255417.aspx. Note there’s no msnsearch in that URL!
I’ve compiled a list the top 1000 results for each of the two queries for your convenience. You’ll see, they do vary quite dramatically:
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It seems a small tick-box is causing a few ructions in the world of Google Desktop. Which tick box you may ask? The one where Google Desktop, by default, indexes secure web pages.
This ‘feature’ of Google Desktop results in GD indexing and caching secure files such as internet banking pages and web-based email pages that are viewed by the user. The index isn’t providing the passwords to access these, but the pages viewed by the user once the password prompt is passed.
These cached files have previously been somewhat buried in windows, but with them easily available to GD there are obvious security concerns. For example, try a search for ‘compose’ on Google Desktop if you have used web-based email recently and you may be surprised at what GD indexes and caches.
While the tech news sites argue over whether this is or isn’t a security threat, it’s clear Google overlooked an obvious user concern when they left that GD option on by default.
It makes one wonder what secrets may be buried deep in the Google web index, just waiting for some intrepid searcher to discover!
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