Once again, the value proposition is the critical point.  If a marketer can offer value to the customer that prompts the customer to initiate a permission-based relationship then the door has been opened.   As Seth Godin writes:  “Permission marketing is the privilege (not the right) of delivering anticipated, personal and relevant messages to people who actually want to get them”.   Godin goes on to say that permission marketing is based on receiving actual permission to send messages, not based on some form of legal permission that a marketer scooped by being sneaky with the opt-out box.  So how does one receive this consent?

Lyris E-mailLabs offer a list of 28 ways to start building a permission-based (double opt-in) e-mail marketing list.  The gist of the list is to use any and all opportunities to invite people to sign up.  Every interaction you have with a customer is an opportunity to move that relationship along to the next level on the continuum of building loyal customers.  About.com has also compiled a long list of e-mail marketing tips.  Ensuring that one’s landing page matches both in content and context with the e-mail message is a point that stands out for me, as it continues to support the story I have been weaving with my recent blogs; specifically, that the story you tell potential customers about your product or service and the value it has in their life is the basis for their relationship with you, and so it is important to pay attention to the narrative that the content and cotext of your messages are creating to ensure that they are actually telling the story you want them to.

Why is this on-going story so important to your e-mail marketing campaign.  Well, as the writers at E-mail Marketing Reports put it: “We don’t (actually) get permission, we borrow it”.  When someone double opts-in to our marketing e-mail newsletter, we form a social contract with them in addition to the initial permission granted.  This unspoken contract on the part of the customer says:  “You can keep sending me messages as long as they are relevant, valuable, and come at times when I want to receive them”.  As soon as a marketer’s messages break one of these agreements, the customer can rescind permission and end the relationship.

Getting permission and keeping permission are all a part of the customer/company relationship that only lasts if it is built on real value and trust communicated consistently through a clear and coordinated story.

Affiliate marketing provides new opportunities to continue our stories with new publishers, potentially reaching new markets.  Affiliate marketing is essentially a process by which Company A pays Business B  to market for them on Business B’s site.  The hitch with affiliate marketing is that Company A only pays Business B when a customer clicks through the ads on Business B’s site and actually completes a purchase.  Think of it as “risk-free” advertising for Company A.  This is a very simplified explanation of affiliate marketing (and embedded below is a quick 2 minute tutorial), but the process can actually become quite complex, with complicated networks of affiliates intertwining and optimizing the entire process with SEO and other traditional internet marketing tools.

But is affiliate marketing really “risk-free”?  Once again narrative and filling in the gaps comes onto the scene.  Through the development of affiliate networks multiple Company A’s make marketing deals with the same Business B, and so now when a user opens up Business B’s site they may see ads for competing products.  A very simplified example of the risk involved in this scenario is such:  If you work hard in all your messaging to tell a story about low cost, specifically how your product is the best value for the lowest price, you can see how quickly that comes undone if it is placed next to a competing product that is shown as comparable quality but cheaper.  Though your story may work outside of the context of the affiliates website,  within the context of other ads viewed immediately beside or directly after a flaw in the narrative will lead consumers to fill in their own conclusions.

Not entirely affiliate marketing related, but widening the examples and tools we have to work with (and interesting to consder in terms of the power of context), is the video below demonstrating the Kuleshov Effect.  Lev Kuleshov was a film maker and researcher working in the early 1920′s. He shot a series of short film pieces as part of an experiment to demonstrate the power of context in film making.  Essentially, he took a shot of a man’s expressionless face and placed it after a series of other shots (a bowl of soup, a girl in a coffin, a child’s toy, a woman reclining in a couch) and showed the match ups to participants,  The participants resoundingly noted different emotions on the man’s face even though it was the same expressionless face every time.  The results demonstrate that we make sense of things by putting them in context with other things.

And so we might ask ourselves what is my affiliate’s site saying (consciously or not) about my product?

And so geo-targeting enters the scene to make your marketing efforts even more efficient, and, if you have a good value proposition, effective.  Geo-targeting, according to AdWords who offer it as part of their search engine marketing service “lets you target your ads to specific locations and languages. For each campaign, you can select the countries or regions and the language(s) for your ad. That campaign’s ads will appear only to users located in those areas and who have selected one of those languages as their preference”.  Most major search engines offer geo-targeting as an option when designing your SEM campaign.   Yahoo, for example offers targeting via postal-code.  Facebook is also offering geo-targeting combined with other demographic and sociographic filters.  One can easily imagine the benefits of this type of targeting, especially for small businesses with a limited ad budget.

How exactly does geo-targeting work?  Watch this video by marketing guru Bob Nicholson for a complete explanation:

For a moment, let`s examine geo-targeting from a consumer or net user`s point of view.  On the one side I can really appreciate the reduction in clutter.  When I search for peanut sauce recipes, I really do not care to see ads for Thai restaurants in  Minesota.  This product offer has no value to me.  I likely would not click on the ad and even if I did, it is highly unlikely that I would follow through and patronize the business.  On the other hand, as a consumer with privacy and free-access to web content concerns, the idea of my search results being filtered based on my geographic location is disconcerting.  As marketers it is important to be mindful of consumer privacy concerns whenever we are launching new campaigns or taking advantage of new technologies.  (Not to is folly as Facebook learned.)

Putting on the marketers hat once again, the value of geo-targeting extends beyond simple not bothering those who have little or no interest in our value-proposition.  As Bob Nicholson points out in the video, geo-targeting prevents marketers from having to pay for clicks from customers that cannot access their products or service anyways.  This in turn will increase the ROI on ad campaigns as it decreases dead end hits.

Geo-targeting is but another tool for getting your message to the right people, and taking the first step in building lasting customer-relationships.  Of course, as with any tool, it will only be effective when used as part of a larger plan that promises and delivers value at the end.  Because really, it does not matter how fancy your hammer is, if you drew your blueprints on the back of a napkin.

Well, search engine optimization (SEO) itself is not a new concept.  Dating back even before 1996, the use of tags within code and counting links to determine placement on search engines were just two ways that early websites ensured users could find them.  Granted there were not as many sites to search in 1996 (Yahoo indexed over 19.2 billion individual webpages in August 2005 by comparison), the huge growth in the number of sites has created an environment where even more sophisticated (though in some ways simpler) approaches to SEO have been born.

One of these approaches relates back to my opening point about “connecting concepts to preexisiting notions”.  It is not enough for the marketer or site developer to ask themselves “What words or phrases best describe my product, service, or site?”, they must also ask “What preconceived words or phrases will my customers come to the search engine with?”  Because really, all the tagging, labeling and categorizing on the web is generated by the connections that already exist in our minds.  A self-perpetuating circle is born and reborn daily as users search what are to their minds learned and logical terms and site developers then use tools like Google Adwords: Keyword to determine which search terms are most popular.

The recognition of this cycle also supports the assertion that it is more important than ever before for marketers and site developers to not compartmentalize themselves, but work together to create full customer profiles and design and optimize e-sites that meet the needs of those customers.  In this way, we are all building the world wide web together.

For those of you who have only just recently emerged from that cave you were living in somewhere in Nepal, a quick background on Facebook before I get to my point for the week.  Facebook is a social networking website, which means essentially that the point of the site is to provide the tools and applications used for building an on-line community.  These sites provide the platform and the space and the users provide the content.  Perhaps before you arrived in Nepal you heard of MySpace.  Launched in 2003 it was the first social networking site to gain popular use in North America, but has since been overtaken in terms of accounts and unique individual visitors daily by the aforementioned Facebook.  Originally founded as a tool to connect Harvard University students, Facebook is now available in numerous countries around the world, in over 25 languages and boasts over 110 million accounts.  Scientifically speaking, that equals a ‘whole buncha’ eyeballs!  Which brings me to my point.

Facebook is marketing magic, or at least has the potential to create and control the crystal ball, for two reasons.  First and foremost, it is a goldmine of market research and demographic information.  No need to craft an enticing survey to get the low down on what a market segment is excited about.  Every second of every minute of ever day, people around the world are freely writing about and connecting themselves to trends, friends, finds, and all kinds of specific descriptors.  All of which is being stored by Facebook to use as research for marketing campaigns and the sale of ad space.  How do I know that they (or at least some sort of algorithm) is paying attention to the content I am adding to my Facebook page?  Because, the ads on my page match the content (check your page, they will match too – creepy, I know!)

This is called “targeting” or “contextual” advertising and Facebook has been at it for a while, according to an article in Tech Crunch by Duncan Riley.  From an efficiency and clutter reduction point of view, this can be seen as a good thing for consumers.  Unlike the continual spam I get in my e-mail for “male member enhancement aids”, the ads I see on my Facebook page might actually be applicable.  Not only does this mean that Facebook can charge a higher rate for ads  ($10 CPM as of 2007), but it increases the likelihood that users will respond to the ad because it speaks directly to that user’s need.

The second trick up Facebook’s sleeve is that they have not relied on this “targeting” technique alone.  They have gone one step further and provided a direct opportunity for users to interact with the ads on their pages.  Next time you are on Facebook look for the small thumbs up and thumbs down you’ll see below every ad.  If you click on them, they allow you to rate the ad you are seeing.  You can let Facebook know if this ad is applicable to you, or if you find it offensive or irrelevant (just two of the many optional reasons for giving an ad a thumbs down).

In these two ways Facebook is poised to take the lead in contextual advertising, building a database of information that may allow them to crack that ever elusive code and begin to successfully predict and pre-emptively offer to meet the needs of consumers.

…Oh, you’re back!  Great!  To my point for this week:  Ze Frank truly is a viral marketing success.  After launching his own website in 2001, it was an on-line interactive birthday invitation that featured ridiculous dancing forwarded to only 17 of his friends that went viral and resulted in millions of hits.  Now he has built his own empire complete with a cult following, numerous awards, and critical acclaim.  But why?  How did one little video build all this and why do users still forward his content on to their friends, and their friend`s friends, and so on?

The answer is two-fold.  The first component focuses on the viewers themselves, and the second on the content generator.  First the success of any viral video is based on the same motivator I mentioned in the opening paragraph:  the vicarious thrill.  The best way for viewers to relive the humour, shock, awe, or amazement of something they have seen before is to spread it to someone else and enjoy their reaction (or in the case that they can`t actually see or get feedback from their friend, imagine what their reaction will be!).  This is why people send one another countless forwards of pumpkins that look like fannies, and that video of the baby who turns the water on in his sleep (the two most recent examples  I`ve received multiple times).

My second point requires us to reframe viral marketing success.  There has been a lot of hype about viral marketing over the last decade, and perhaps rightly so.  It can be astoundingly cheap by comparison to traditional marketing and it has the potential to reach a mass audience in a climate of increasing fragmentation.  However, it is important to remember that in the long run 80 million people viewing your clip may not make your campaign a success; especially if all those views did not translate into reaching a clear goal for your company or website.  What has made Ze a success over time is that his content was backed up with value.  A high percentage of people who received the ridiculous dance video and forwarded it on, also visited his site and found enough value there to keep them coming back and wanting to share that value with their friends again and again.

So to answer my question more directly, how did one little video build Ze`s empire?  The short answer is; it didn`t.  Nearly anyone can make a funny, shocking, or water-cooler worthy video.  The challenge is consistently providing for your customers once they have been hooked. Ze`s dance video merely brought the folks to the gate.  It was the value built into to Ze`s site that made all the difference in whether they stayed or not.

Thanks for reading again this week!  I`ll leave you with links to my favourite episode of the Show with Ze Frank, all about product placement and brand identity.

What you need to realize about context and content is that whether you are aware of it or not, they are telling a story.  In combination with your site’s context, the content tells the user a story about your company, your brand, your product, and most importantly what you think, know, or ‘think you know’ about your users.  This has powerful implications.

The human mind wants narrative.  We automatically look for it because it helps us make sense of the world and remember important lessons.  Further to this, we fill in gaps in stories with devices like stereotypes to save time and help us feel that the story is complete.

What does this mean for your website?  Well, if your website is going to tell a story whether you want it to or not, it would be a good idea to consciously write that story yourself.  The use of narrative can take both a macro and micro form on the web.  On a macro-level, websites as a whole can tell a story that pull the user through the site in a logical process predetermined by the site designer.  On a micro-level individual narratives may exist on a single page.  A good example of this in e-commerce is the testimonial that tells a customer’s first hand experience with the product being sold.

Another example of how narrative can consciously tell a story in e-commerce is ‘Catablogging”.  Catablogging is just what it sounds like, a hybrid of blogging and e-commerce.  On his blog all about catablogging, Brian Clark defines the term as “a blog that is designed to mix content and commerce in a very deliberate fashion. It’s looking to attract people who are interested in buying things, but who are also interested in immersing themselves in the lifestyle surrounding the products”.  He then goes on to outline the steps in designing and building your own catablog.  It is a great resource with many additional links.

A final note for this week about narrative and commerce, I’ll leave you with an insight by Hugh McLeod:  “If people like buying your product, it’s because its story helps fill in the narrative gaps in their own lives”.

Shouldn’t our e-commerce sites fill that gap as well?

Why target? While launching a website for your organization may seem like an amazing opportunity to expand your market to include “everybody”, this is a dangerous perception. The old adage: “You can’t please everyone” comes to mind. If you try to build a website meant to please everyone, chances are you will at best confuse the majority of visitors and at worst frustrate your potential customers so that they do not return. Having a clear user profile for your website provides the foundation for every other design decision you make. If you are not yet convinced about how necessary it is to be clear about who your site is intended for (or need a laugh) check out some of these sites, contenders for the worst websites of the year for 2008: Havenworks, TeacherXpress, Alternative Transport Services.

How do you find your niche? I’m going to quickly gloss over the initial questions you would answer, including identifying demographics and psychographics, as these are the basis of any marketing campaign, on-line or not. Instead, if your goal is to create a real on-line value proposition, there are 2 very important questions you need to answer:

1. First when creating value for your company, you need to go beyond identifying your general customer and instead answer the question: “Who is my perfect customer?” Answering this question thoroughly, will of course provide better results and a better ROI.

2. Next, when looking to create value for your perfect customer, you must answer the question: “How does my perfect customer want to be communicated with?” I developed this second question based on two observations from other on-line marketing bloggers that resonated with me. Mat Greenfield`s definition of a target market as adapted for the web: “A group of possible buyers for a given product or service, which share common elements that provide insights into how to communicate with them” and Michel Fortin’s observation that some of the best copy doesn’t translate to a high conversion rate because it does not communicate with the right audience.

Doing your homework and answering these questions well will set your new website, or website redesign on the right track.

1. Kevin Roberts, CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi, is heard to say that: “The consumer is now in total control…she’s going to decide when she buys, what she buys, where she buys, how she buys…they are so empowered at every age…all the fear is gone and all the control is passed over to the consumer…it’s a good thing.” In this instance, I believe Kevin Roberts is referring to marketing’s trend toward fragmentation and the service of the market of one, partnered of course, with the evolution of technology, making for well-informed and savvy shoppers who expect to be catered too.
2. Douglas Rushkoff, the correspondent for “The Persuaders”, then ends the episode with “…maybe we are in control. Once the market becomes the lens through which we view the world, then there is no us and them anymore, we are all persuaders.”
3. Finally, one last piece of context that might clarify why these particular quotes stood out; the episode also explores how politicians (specifically in the US, though I feel certain similar tactic are used here in Canada) use narrowcasting or microtargeting, and consumer profiling to tailor what are often contradictory messages to specific electoral groups in the run up to an election.

These points lead me to the big question that has been plaguing me: Are consumers really free and in control? Or to put it another way, who is the carrot and who is the ass? If the market is the lens through which we view the world, and politicians, the media, business, and marketers alike are working continually to shape that lens (create reality or inform ‘popular’ culture) through the ‘micro-tailoring’ of messages, do consumers really have control? Just because someone theoretically has access to “all” the information, does not mean they are getting the whole picture.

Somewhere in a data-warehouse buried in reams of data, a profile of me and my needs can be teased out and marketers will know within a certain likelihood what sort of products I will need a decade before I’ll need them. And millions will be invested in getting me (and all those just like me) to follow their product’s path through the market maze by leaving a trail of breadcrumbs meant just for me. I guess the point I am driving at is, even if halfway along the trail of crumbs, I decide to start down an alternate path, I am still in the maze. I may be able to pick the path, but I can`t move the walls and I don`t have a complete map.

To paraphrase John Zerzan from the film Surplus, somehow the freedom to choose between product A and product B does not seem like freedom at all.

The personal irony in all of this is that I love persuasion with a passion, recklessly preoccupied with the power of micro-messaging from the pits of the datamine.

Patterns provide powerful insight when predicting human behaviour as it relates to consumption. Once you understand a subject’s, or demographics’, common consumption habits then you may anticipate their needs and provide them. Consumer tracking technology is a huge and rapidly developing field with many innovative developments on the horizon. Of those, radio frequency identification tags (RFID) are of particular interest to me.

RFID tags, although currently used primarily for product tracking, supply-chain-management, and enhanced personal document security, have phenomenal potential within the field of marketing and consumer behaviour. So small they are nearly invisible (some just the size of the period at the end of this sentence) RFID tags are finding their way onto shelves and into wallets across North America.

These tiny transmitters are able to store and transmit information from themselves to an RFID reader. When placed on a credit card to store information about a person’s purchases, the tags can then make that information readily accessible to organizations with access to an RFID reader. From a marketer’s point of view, RFID tags are like customer loyalty cards to the nth degree, without the sticky limits of only being good for one store. They essentially put a name and a face back on the faceless demographics that have been leaving bits and bytes of info about their lives wherever they go. Watch this to see how they work:

Imagine a scenario like that described in a 2005 InfoWorld article where a consumer carrying an RFID tag on their credit card enters a shopping area equipped with RFID readers. When the consumer gets within 100 feet, the reader rapidly accesses the information stored on their RFID tag (EG past purchases) and responds with a customized message displayed on the storefront or spoken directly to the consumer. If the customer likes the message he can interact with the storefront display for more information, if not then he can simply pass by.

Here of course is where I find myself in a conundrum. From a consumer-point of view (a label I apply more easily to myself than “marketer” at this point in time) this technology and its potential to creep into uses that violate my personal privacy is very alarming. Security issues are likely the largest factor keeping RFID tags from mass use, but as marketers we must also ask ourselves the ethical questions about tracking individuals and their purchases in an effort to serve the ‘market of one’.   Perhaps RFID is not the future of “permission marketing”, even if it helps us get to know our customers better!

For more information on the privacy implications of RFID technology and what resisters are concerned about, check out the video links below to a speech by Dr. Katherine Albrecht of SpyChips.com.

This is Part 1 in a 7 part series.  Visit YouTube to view them all.