clemans on marketing: confessions and misdemeanors

Build Your Brand Online.

Web 2.0 is all about collaboration, sharing, networking, friending, transparency, connection, community. Small company or large enterprise, everybody is already at the party. Are you? Linkedin, Facebook, MySpace,  Twitter,  Wikipedia, WordPress, Jabber, Second Life, Digg, del.icio.us, You Tube, Ning. Place your brand everywhere it fits - and mostly, for free. Keep it short, abbreviate, inform, chat. What are you doing now?

Nuggets on 2.0 for Business.

Last week at the BtoB Online NetMarketing Breakfast, speakers from Cisco Systems (announcing yesterday that they will buy online videoconferencing company WebEx Communications for $2.9 billion), Sun Microsystems, Plantronics, and AMD, all senior level online marketing directors, gave us valuable insights into the online marketing fast track, including behavioral targeting, proactive chat, customer reviews, secondlife, youtube, communication frequency, demand generation with free deliverables, nurture programs, RSS, the human network, etc, etc.

With online revenue reaching $16.8 billion in 2006 (32% over 2005), the world has been put on notice. The bleeding edge today is the norm by tomorrow.

Keep it Simple.

Kayak, the travel search engine, sure did. Called the "Google of travel", Kayak aggregates travel suppliers all over the world, making it simple to: sign up for fare alerts, track fares, share tips in forums, access search history and, most importantly, book flights. Simplify and clarify your marketing communications, websites to sandwich boards, so your message has a better chance of cutting through.

User Experience First.

Online Narcissism used to be rampant. Websites blathered on ad nauseam. When visitors stopped coming, everyone took notice.

Now we talk about the "User Experience." We put the user, rather than the company or system, at the center of the process. We work on creating smaller clickstreams, give immediate feedback, make auto suggestions and encourage social collaboration. Patagonia.com delivers an impressive User Experience. It's easy to navigate, easy to shop, easy to purchase. Bundled with their dedication to supporting and leading environmental campaigns, I am ready to buy.

Stocking Stuffer?

Next to the cash register at my neighborhood bookstore: A stack of books titled: Why do men have nipples? Bookstore magic. Over 1 million sold!

First I chuckled at the shock value title, then I started thinking that the topic was kind of freaky and, for blogging fodder, jumped on Amazon to see if the book had anything worthwhile between its covers. The answer is "kind of yes": find hundreds of guy-oriented sometimes juvenile questions "you'd only ask a doctor after your third martini!"

While checking out the book, I discovered a really cool new feature on Amazon - check it out! – lively video interviews with authors, entertainers and artists on Amazon Fishbowl with host Bill Mayer.

Did I buy the book? Nah. Why do men have nipples? is not exactly in the same league as War and Peace. But you might consider it for that quirky someone special who's already read the classics. The book did receive 4 1/2 stars if that means anything!

Techno-Vintner.

Raise a glass for Crushpad. Last night I went to a happy hour wine tasting event at the Churchill Club and heard former technology executive Michael Brill talk about his exciting new winemaking venture.

Innovative San Francisco-based Crushpad helps budding winemakers produce premium wines from grapes grown at California's top vineyards. Clients, located anywhere in the world, can fly in and be on site, participating in the crush. Or stay at home, viewing the entire process via web cams. Buy a barrel of Cabernet, Chardonnay, Merlot or Petite Syrah! Crushpad will do the rest, including pressing, fermenting, aging, bottling, packaging and label design. Crushpad is so 2.0. They recently launched Crushnet, an online custom wine community, serving – and connecting – 1500 members from over 30 states and six countries.

From a marketing perspective, Crushpad is firing on all cylinders. Check out their website: It's got the response mechanisms, credibility features and turnkey capabilities to turn visitors into customers. There are links to "adopt a barrel", "tell a friend", great press like the BusinessWeek Online article, customer spotlights, harvest blogs and ecommerce.

Oh yes, I tasted the wine, and though a little young, it was delicious!

Traversing the New Media Landscape.

Watch the convergence of old and new media through the promotion of British Photographer Malcome Venville's brilliant new photographic journal, Lucha Loco, on the wild and wooly world of Mexican pro wrestling, Luca Libre. Release date: November 2006.

To promote the book the new media way, the publishers built a designed-to-match website showing off Venville's masterfully photographed portraits of the masked stars, including Super Porky, Raziel and Doctor Karonte III, an interview with Tigre Metalico who declares, "Sometimes the good have to find tricky ways to defeat the evil", a link to the author's personal site, and, of course, let us not forget, the ubiquitous shopping cart.

Pleasantmorningbuzz talked it up. BoingBoing, the highest rated blog on Technorati, picked up the story this morning and posted it at 7:31 AM. Bloglines, BlogPulse and Technorati linked to the post. On the 22nd, prnewswire.com devoted seven paragraphs to Lucha Loco. Fwakanimation.com dedicated a whole page to everything Lucah Libre with a mention to Venville's book. Get the masks! (Thinking Christmas presents...)

Standing around all day at a book convention, hawking books, plastered on smile and sore feet, it ain't.

"Huge" Talks Just to Me.

Went to Amazon to check on the delivery status of a CD I recently ordered, Good to Great, and discovered that I now have my very own Plog. Here's how Amazon describes Plogs:

Your Amazon.com Plog is a personalized web log that appears on your customer home page. Every person's Plog is different (hence the name) and just like a blog, your Plog is sorted in reverse chronological order. Each post also gives you the opportunity to provide feedback to the sender as to whether you liked the post or not. This feedback loop means your Plog becomes even more relevant and interesting over time. Your Plog will appear if you are logged into our web site and is visible only to you.

This is what I have been shouting about.
Amazon is doing it right. They are continually finding new ways to personalize the customer's experience. I give my Plog four stars. Since they know that I just purchased The Long Tail, by Chris Anderson, they've linked me to his profile. Once on Chris' profile page, there's a link to his blog at www.longtail.com. Interested, I followed along. Impressive.

Hungry Customers.

Potential customers are starving for attention, wandering around flat lined websites dead on arrival.

Think I'm talking to myself? Several colleagues and clients of mine in small to billion dollar companies agreed that their websites were vacuous maws (my words). In the transcendent classic Clue Train Manifesto, this sentence lit the night sky for me, "Conversation is a profound act of humanity." Real conversations take place between people, not software. Many large companies and small groups acting "as if" fall into the trap of buzz words, self-important blather, laundry lists of features and benefits, unimaginative stock images that fail to inspire, bios that glitter but don't engage. Just as the best speakers seem to be reaching out and talking just to you, a website should do the same.

10 Can-Do Tips for Creating Online Stores.

According to technology analysts at Gartner, 75% of e-businesses will fail in the first year.

Glass half full: 25% of e-businesses may succeed.

Get it right and you could make a decent living. I just heard about a one-woman operation selling cutesie outfits and accessories for pugs online that rakes in $150K per year.

1. First things first. Develop a memorable name that has something to do with the products you're selling. For a company that specializes in software that improves memory using patterns of seemingly random dots (yes, it exists), what about MINDdot.com? For a California-based industrial design firm, here's a name that will define them and their local, EVOCA.com. For a line of eco-friendly cleaning supplies, PLANETsaver.com could get some heavy traffic.