Browsing Tags Marketing

Love For Search Engine Marketing? It’s Not Dead – But Love Stinks!

Posted on February 13, 2011 by Robert Rose

Okay, I have to admit that I originally considered “Organic Search Is Dead” – or “Search Marketing Is Dead” – for titles of this post. But I just can’t. First, I don’t actually believe it IS dead – but is definitely going through a fundamental change. Although, candidly, I do have echoes of Billy Crystal from The Princess Bride in my head as I say that – “woo hoo – look who knows so much – there’s a big difference between all dead and mostly dead”.

Secondly, I don’t think it actually ever will die. While search engines, and the strategy for optimizing your content in general, may be changing (more on that in a moment) I definitely feel that making an effort toward making your Web content friendly for indexed search is generally a good thing. It’s a little like eating your vegetables. There’s no way it ever goes away – because it’s just always a good idea.

Having said that – this Valentine’s day – the digital marketer’s love affair with Search Engine Marketing may have reached a tipping point. Over the first two and a half months of this year – three things are leading me to believe that our love affair may be really waning. In the immortal words of the J. Geils band:

You just can’t win
And so it goes
Till the day you die
This thing they call love
It’s gonna make you cry
Love Stinks… Yeah Yeah!

Trend Number 1: Organic Search IS Becoming Less Useful To Marketers

It seems like the entire Internet is abuzz with how search engines are becoming less and less useful to users. This is less about the whole Bing Vs. Google thing (although that certainly has its own flair) but more specifically how SEO and Content Spam are the little kids that are tearing down the scenery and ruining the whole play.

Paul Kedrosky wrote late last year how Google is “eating it’s own tail” and how “pages and pages of Google results are just, for practical purposes, advertisements in the loose guise of articles”.
SEOMoz published an incredibly interesting blog post about how SPAM has just taken over Google search results.
The New York Times published an article late last week on the JC Penny search controversy
Which, in part, prompted Michael Arrington to post this blog just two days ago on how Search Still Sucks

The crux of all these articles is the same: SEO – which at its heart is the production (or in some cases stealing) of content – and the constant attempts to game the Google algorithm has rendered search results much less useful than ever before.

Now there are plenty of debates on whether that’s true or not – and one need just read the comments on all of the above articles to see that people are passionate about it.

But here’s the thing: whether it’s true or not doesn’t really matter. What I know IS unequivocally true is that from a marketer’s perspective it’s much HARDER than ever before to rank well for a targeted search term. Make no bones about it – what we marketers used to know as the benefits of Search Engine Optimization have become ever-more difficult to achieve. And, the benefits vs. the level of effort may have just crossed the tipping point.

That leads to the second trend…

Trend Two: Social IS Changing Search

There are plenty of data that show how the Social Web is changing search marketing strategies. Some point to marketers’ shifting priorities – and others show how Social is just an incremental layer to the already robust search marketing budget. In fact, search marketing firm Covario posted the results of a very interesting survey they conducted where they found that, yes, Social is indeed more of a priority to Search Marketers. And, they also found that budgets for social media (such as Facebook) were coming out of print and display – as opposed to cannibalizing the search marketing budget.

But I’ve also started to notice a very real change in perceptions. I did my own informal survey recently – asking clients, partners, vendors and friends a simple question: “What do you use to search for something on the Internet?” Even as recently as two years ago, the answer (without hesitation) would be unanimously “Google”. Okay, there was the occasional “Yahoo” but.. I mean really… Come on, it was Google.

But now – about 40% to 50% of the people I ask that same question to these days answer “Well, it depends on what I’m searching for.” They’ve started to alter their behavior to either use their Social Graph (e.g. search Twitter or Facebook) or use niche oriented tools (e.g. Yelp, TripAdvisor etc..) because they’re getting faster, more relevant results to what they’re looking for.

This is something that’s not lost on Marketers – and where we put our money. Marketers are starting to ask themselves – should I put more money into getting from page 30 to page 15 on Google? Or, does it make more sense to put that money into a social media strategy?

Trend Three: The Stink Is On – And It’s Hard To Rub Off

So, according to many, none of this “it’s getting worse” stuff is actually true. In fact, Google actually posted an article saying that “Google’s search quality is better than it has ever been in terms of relevance, freshness and comprehensiveness.”

And interestingly, SearchEngineWatch then actually referred to that post when it posited that – “yeah this is a problem that Google has had from day one and it’s not likely to go away anytime soon.”

But the challenge here is, ironically, how Google tends to look at many things – which is: life is an algorithm. Google may be correct. They may now technically be returning more “relevant”, “fresh” and “comprehensive content”. But if this more relevant, machine-washed, overproduced SEO optimized content is less useful to us as humans then really who cares if they’re right.

But even that isn’t as important as the fact that if this continues – and the complaints keep coming – it won’t matter. As soon as (or admittedly “if”) search has enough “stink” on it to warrant marketers having the perception that it isn’t worth the effort – you’ll see budgets for things like PPC and SEO start to fade (or at least change) quickly.

So – yeah, Search isn’t dead – but loving it this Valentines day seems to be a lot harder than it ever has been before.

What do you think? Still as active in SEO and PPC than ever before?

Summoning Our Marketing Daredevil

Posted on August 24, 2010 by Robert Rose

I’m guest hosting a Webinar with Demandbase later this morning – and the topic is Best Practices That Must Die. It’s a topic that I’m familiar with, as I posted earlier this year how I thought Best Practices Produce Mediocre Results. In fact, they tell me that my post inspired the Webinar Series – which is both flattering and exciting.

So, I thought I’d summarize at least the first part of my talk here – because I think it’s a fun way to think about our marketing strategy and what we have to do on a day to day basis.

Let’s Bring Out Our Marketing Daredevil

So, and this will show my age…. when I was a kid… Evel Knievel was one of the biggest daredevils out there. Watching him jump busses and cars and what not was just simply incredible. He was the guy who set the standard. And even today – I imagine that most of you, despite your age, know who he is.

But, maybe, the way you know who he is – is because when he failed… He tended to fail rather spectacularly. In one jump –at Ceasar’s Palace in Las Vegas – he landed short – and suffered a crushed pelvis and femur, fractures to his hip, wrist and both ankles and a concussion that kept him in a coma for almost a month. As a side note, the next time we’re worrying about whether that new PPC marketing campaign might work we might just ask ourselves… What’s the worst that can happen?

See for kids like me – and even to this day – Evel Knievel represented the daredevil we all want to be… He was fearless and as he said…

“bones heal, pain is temporary, [and] chicks dig scars…”

But What About Success?

So, he was crazy and he was a daredevil and he pushed the limits – but was he successful? Well real quick – consider that a successful major league baseball player has about a 30% success rate in batting. The highest average as of today is Josh Hamilton of Texas with a little over 34%. An NFL pro quarter back – let’s say Drew Brees of the Super Bowl winning New Orlean Saints –his passing percentage (meaning how many of his passes were caught) was 70.6%. Which, by the way, is outstanding.

So, over his career, Evel Knievel had 300 or so jumps – 276 of which were successful. That’s a 92% conversion rate for success. So, he not only created a sport where he pressed the limits – he was incredibly successful at it.

In 1975 I was one of the kids that watched on TV as he successfully jumped 14 Greyhound Busses. It was an amazing jump. And even though he didn’t quite make it – which almost made it cooler because he landed on the safety deck on the 14th bus - it got him the distance record for jumping the most buses. He set the standard. And it was a World record that would hold for 24 years.

Incremental Improvements – Huh?

So, one of the things that made Evel great was he didn’t spend the next 25 years trying to top his bus or car jump by one or by two. His next jump was trying to jump the Grand Canyon.

But now, flash forward to 23 years later. In 1998 a guy named Bubba Blackwell breaks the first World record of Evel Knievel when he jumps 20 cars. This was exactly one more than Evel Knievel had done back in 1975. And then one year later – in 1999 – he tied Evel Knievel’s World record when he jumped 14 busses. Some say beat it since Evel’s tire had actually hit that 14^th bus. So… amazing right?

Except… Who the heck is Bubba Blackwell?

And the – and I’m sure you were all over this news. In March of this year – Seth Enslow went to Sydney harbor in Australia and broke the world record again – and this time – as the headlines said – he SMASHED the record by going 183 feet. That’s a 16% difference. Huge. Except….

Even though the event was called Seth Vs. Death (gotta love that title) by the folks that were marketing it – as I’m sure you all have guessed – the rest of the world just hasn’t cared that much. Bubba Blackwell… Seth Enslow… Yaaaaaaaawn….

Lessons

So… What’s the lesson here…. To me, first of all it inspires me to live life more daring. Now, let’s be clear anyone who knows me, knows that I’m not one of those guys. No skydiving, bunji jumping or shark tanks for me. I’m not necessarily going to do something so daring that I’m going to break my femur bone if I don’t succeed. But I at least want to try extraordinary things some of the time. And I certainly want to try extraordinary things in the place where I spend the majority of my day – my work.

At least some of the time, if we’re going to fail – let’s fail spectactularly because we tried something extraordinary.

The other lesson I get from Evel Knievel is that you can be the one to change the rules and set the new standard … Or you can be the one to incrementally break a record… And, most of the time (quite honestly) the one to establish the record – that’s who gets remembered.

That’s what STARTING at Best Practices – but not ending there is all about. Let’s take some time to bring out our marketing daredevil. I’d just leave you with two quotes from Peter Drucker and Albert Einstein. So, Drucker famously said that “business only has two functions… Marketing and innovation… Marketing innovation creates value and all the rest are costs…”

So, if we slavishly follow marketing’s best practices – it’s a great way to avoid failure and succeed moderately.

But to quote Albert Einstein… “Try not to be of success, but rather of value… “

Looking forward to my Webinar today – and I’ll post the Audio of it and the presentation once it’s ready.

New Marketing Programs – What's Your 60' Time?

Posted on June 16, 2010 by Robert Rose

Okay, let me be the first to say that I know nothing about cars. I’m the guy that if the car breaks down, I go and open up the hood and I check the battery terminals. All fine. I look at any plastic reservoirs that have liquid in them. All filled. I pull out the oil dipstick and look at it. No idea. Then, I gaze into what might as well be a nuclear reactor, and get that squinty look that only guys looking at a car engine can have (ladies you know what I’m talking about) and say with confidence – “yeah, we need to take it in”.

But okay, having said that, I’m oddly fascinated with drag racing. I’ve been to a few in my day – and you can literally feel the power of those cars in your chest. It’s actually quite something.

So, there’s a concept in drag racing called the 60’ Time. Basically, the 60’ Time is how long it takes you to go the first 60 feet in a ¼ Mile race. Apparently, this is the “make or break” of a drag race. If you “burn out” your tires too much, or if you don’t get off the gate fast enough, – you’ll have a slow 60’ time.

And, here’s the magic: the general rule of thumb is that for every tenth of a second you can shave off of the first 60 feet – you’ll get a .15 to .20 second benefit at the end of the race. Remember a 1/4 mile race is 1,320 feet and less than 7 seconds. And, the first 60 feet is usually somewhere between 1.8 to 2.0 seconds of the race…. So, about 25% of the time of a race is spent covering the first 4% of the track. No wonder that this important statistic can make or break your race.

What’s Your 60’ Time When It Comes To New Digital Marketing

As I start to work with more and more organizations – especially those that are launching new social media and online marketing programs – I find there to be a really similar phenomenon.

So, whether it’s Brand Marketing, Content Marketing, PPC, SEO, Social Media – whatever – in my experience, there are generally two phases to new digital marketing programs. There is – the first moment (it might be one hour, one week or six months) where moving the needle is relatively easy and there’s lots of excitement and results to show for it.

And then, there’s the second phase which is incremental movement – and so begins the slow process of learning, iterating, failing, succeeding and ultimately improving over time.

And, what I’ve found is that there are two keys to both of these phases.

Make sure you really optimize your 60’ Time – or that first phase so that you are really set for the second phase.and…

Make sure to set the expectation with your stakeholders (clients, management team, board etc…) that this second phase is coming.

A quick look at each:

Launch Well To Win

As one drag racer said to me – “how you launch your car (basically less than half a second of real time) is the entire world of drag racing. You have to know your car inside and out. How does it take off from the line? Can you launch it in the heart of the ‘power band’? Do you have a high stall torque converter? All of those things determine whether you’ll have a great 60’ time.”

Okay, so most of that might as well be written in Klingon to me – but the lesson is crystal clear. When you’re launching a new marketing program in your organization – taking the all important time to make sure you know all the details about your campaign, the content, the goals, the creative, your measurement capabilties. It’s understanding your process and content strategy for content marketing. It’s understanding your goals and priorities for both landing pages and keywords for Search Engine Marketing. It’s understanding the “who is listening” for social media programs. Taking care to launch your program well, will save you time, and exponentially increase your chances for success in the second phase.

Manage The Race For The Long Road

So, once you launch and you get your baseline of results – don’t make the mistake of assuming that the initial growth or improvement will always be there. It’s definitely a race you need to manage on two sides.

The first is learning to immediately start making changes. Iterate. Experiment. Change. If you’ve launched well, your process allows for these experiments and empowers you to try weird “out of the box” things – without upsetting the continuing success.

But more importantly – set those expectations with your stakeholders. Make sure that they understand that this is a process – and that there will be times of incremental growth, as well as even declines as you try new things. I’ve outlined before what C level executives really want to know about your marketing before – but just remember a couple of things…

Know what’s important – understand from your management team the important KPI’s and goals and make sure that those are what you manage to

Budget for success and failure – make sure you have permission to fail

The *only* thing that analytics are good for are insight to take an action.

So, among racing aficionados – especially those that don’t like drag racing, there’s a saying that says “drag racing is for fast cars, and [track] racing is for fast drivers”. In other words – what wins – the marketing or the marketer?

I think in today’s socially connected marketing world – you’ve got to have both. You’ve got to bring the unique talents that only you can bring to the race – as well as a well prepared, and extraordinarily fast car.

Start your engines…

PS> The awesome image I used for this comes from the Google archive of Life Magazine Photographs and is from the Great Photographer Grey Villet… If you’re interested in racing photos there’s a whole bunch there.

Are You Milking Your Sacred Cow?

Posted on June 13, 2010 by Robert Rose

So, recently, a much younger colleague at a client told me that I should listen to this really cool band that he’d just discovered. He said to me, “I just heard this band called the Dead Kennedys – they released a ‘greatest hits’ album and I just downloaded it from iTunes.”

Oy, sometimes youth really is wasted on the young.

So, okay, first of all youngster get off my lawn. Secondly – yes I know the Dead Kennedys. They were one of my favorites as a young, suburban, latchkey na’er-do-well growing up in Dallas. Their cassette (oh yes I just did) Fresh Fruit For Rotting Vegetables would blare out of my pickup truck as I drove to piano lessons. That’s right – punk rock, pickup trucks and piano lessons. What can I say – as a teenager I was filled with contradictions.

And then, thirdly, are you kidding me? The fact that the Dead Kennedys would even release a “Greatest Hits” at all is beyond ironic. They were always the first to ridicule and parody the establishment.

I know this album well – and fans were generally annoyed with this album’s release in 2007. The band had long broken up, and most knew it was just some of the band members trying to extract more money without actually releasing new material. This critique was certainly not lost on the band – and hence the album title.

But okay, there’s something interesting here in all of this and it relates to our own marketing?

Even when we’re successful in marketing – why are we so resistant to change? Why do we continue to milk our sacred cows?

After working with a number of companies over longer lengths of times, here’s what I’ve noticed:

The more successful our marketing is, the harder it is to realize when we have to change

We’ve watched it happen to entire industries. The music business, newspapers and broadcast television come to mind. And, we’ve watched it happen to individual companies such as Polaroid, Palm, and Sun Microsystems.

The people who managed marketing for these organizations weren’t dumb by any stretch. They were smart, talented people (for the most part) and the lesson we need to learn is that it can certainly happen to us. But why does it happen at all?

Our “Way” Gets In The Way

Over time, our marketing strategies and tactics become doctrines. They are “the way it’s done”. We come to have certain beliefs about things. They become shortcuts for our thinking. Consider some of these beliefs that I’ve heard from real clients (and even said myself):

Events & Conferences don’t work for us – they never have
We tried a blog once. We couldn’t build an audience for it
All of our best leads come from SEO
We’ve maintained a 27% close rate on opportunities for two years
Our real competition isn’t XYZ, it’s the ABC
Everything goes through the VP of Marketing – that’s the way it is

And sometimes it’s not even something that the marketing team says out loud. It’s just the “way that we do it.”

Even If It’s Not Broken – Sometimes We Have To Fix It

In today’s world, things change much too quickly not to be constantly open and seeking change in our marketing strategy. With technology, globalization and the ease of communication, it’s just too easy for competition to emerge and suddenly become a disruptive force in our business.

As Adaptive Marketers, we’ve got to stop looking at our markets, competitors and customers through the lens of 20th century strategies. We’ve got to deploy resources to be constantly looking for the opportunities for our marketing to change – even if it means disrupting what’s traditionally been successful for us.

Consider this: iTunes launched in January, 2001 – while Napster and the whole idea of burning CD’s of music was under a cloud of Federal lawsuits. The Napster service (as it was) shut down officially on July 11, 2001 – six months post iTunes launch. On June 3rd of this year, the founders of Skype and Kazaa launched a Twitter-like streaming music service called Rdio.

Think the Apple marketing guys are paying attention? Well, they may or may not be. But the rumors are flying about why they’re certainly taking their sweet time approving it for the app store.

Let’s Ask Ourselves Some Questions

As marketing leaders in our organizations, we can start to include continual, adaptive questions to facilitate this change and identify our doctrines:

What do we, as a marketing team, consider success? If we look at our most successful tactic in comparison to our competition – where would we rate?

How much time do we spend extracting a decimal point’s worth of more effectiveness out of a single tactic vs. working on new, breakthrough innovations that may fail?

Do we hire people that look just like us (not physically) or are we considering people who see the world fundamentally differently than us?

What do we believe to be absolutely true about our marketing. What if tomorrow we woke up and found out that it wasn’t true? What would we do?

We need to make sure that when we’re looking at our markets, we acknowledge threats to our success before they become threatening. This gives us the time to change in a way that is meaningful and not reactionary.

Take The Forgetful Pill

One of the keys to this success is freeing our minds from the doctrines that build up like barnacles on a ship. There is often a mandate in corporate marketing to build up our knowledge base so that our doctrines can live beyond any one team member leaving. But, okay, while we do that let’s also build in our ability to forget doctrines – especially the ones that we don’t even understand why they exist.

We’ve got to create an ability to give ourselves amnesia and fundamentally change our beliefs. Just because something didn’t work – doesn’t mean it won’t ever work. And, conversely, just because something has worked for a long time, doesn’t mean it will always work. And sometimes those swings can come fast and furious.

So, what about you… What beliefs do you need to change? I’d tell you mine – but I’ve suddenly forgotten them all…

The "Sorry" State Of Marketing

Posted on February 21, 2010 by Robert Rose

Well, if someone didn’t say “I’m sorry” to you this week – let me be the first to apologize. This was a week filled with mea culpas for dastardly deeds.

First, there was John Mayer apologizing over again for using a racial slur during an interview with Playboy. Stay classy John. Then, of course, maybe it was the kerfuffle with movie director Kevin Smith and his “heavyweight” bout with Southwest Airlines. Southwest offered more than a bag of nuts and some free drink tickets. Or, maybe you got an apology from WordPress.com’s Founding Developer Matt Mullenweg. His “it sucks to be us” post at the end of the week came clean for the hour and a half downtime that took WordPress.com and more than 10 million blogs offline.

No? None of these folks apologized to you? Well, then of course you must’ve felt better when the grand-daddy of all apologies made its way up on stage on Friday. By most accounts, Tiger Woods’ apology was simultaneously heartfelt, robotic, angry andsincere.

Brand On Brand Action

One of the ironies of all of the above apologies, is that each of them are brands making public mistakes against other brands. Well, maybe not the John Mayer one – that was just stupid. There are definite lessons for us as marketers here. In today’s marketing landscape, it’s not only how we handle our organization’s mistakes – it’s how we handle a mistake committed against us. So, let’s look at three of these. Again, I’ll avoid the John Mayer one because… well just because it seems better left alone.

Social Media Celebrities Turning Into Deathstars

The @thatkevinsmith vs. @southwestair battle is very interesting, because it’s the first time that I can remember where someone with a truly huge following was “dissed” by a company that seems to truly “get” the social media thing. Historically, the blogosphere rages and the company being raged on either isn’t there – or is responding through traditional methods.

Southwest started apologizing quickly and often through Twitter and their Blog – even as the furor just began to rise over the hours and days from the time of the incident.

If we look at it from Southwest’s point of view – they just made the business case for Social Media monitoring and for being part of the conversation. Without taking sides here, things could have been so much worse if they had not been part of the conversation. If you’re trying to convince your management team that a social media strategy is worth doing – just point them to the coverage of this. And, review that coverage (and ultimate financial loss) as compared to when Taco Bell did almost nothing after a YouTube video of rats in a store went viral.

This is an important lesson to us as marketers, as this is a trend that’s only going to get bigger. Customer Service is now a contact sport – and how we deal with being on the business end of a popular “celebrity’s” Twitter gun will be a key piece of that strategy.

But just as importantly is what Kevin Smith will do now. It’s certainly no secret that he has a new movie opening soon, but by most accounts, he certainly seems to not be interested in using this as fodder. But what he does now will be just as important to his future brand now that he has received that attention. He might argue this point, but he’s now taking on a new set of responsibilities when it comes to service. I’m sure he wasn’t asking for the conversation around obesity – but he’s now in the middle of it. People take him seriously on this point now – and like it or not that comes with its own risks. The lesson here is to be aware. As the all important philosopher Kenny Rogers would say “know when to hold them, when to fold em’. When you should walk away – and when you should run.”

The Fast And The Furious Non-Apology Apology

Last week WordPress.com went down for 110 minutes and took 10 million blogs with it. If *anything* was going to cause the blogosphere to erupt in anger you’d think this would do it. But it didn’t happen. Even TechCrunch.com – who had literally just moved into WordPress.com from Rackspace wasn’t even snarky about it. So, why?

Interestingly, it wasn’t because of a traditional apology. In fact, you’ll note in Matt Mullenweg’s “apology” the words “we’re sorry” are never even mentioned. Wordpress.com just managed to get out ahead of the story by keeping everybody in the loop.

That’s an important lesson for us as marketers. Knowing when to apologize – and when to just make sure you’re in front of the issues is key. Just letting the problem go, and then apologizing for it later without any details isn’t going to work. Belkin discovered this the hard way last year when they were caught “paying” for positive reviews on a product. The CEO simply apologized – but then they were caught doing it again – and made the situation worse.

On the other hand, now knowing when to apologize sincerely might be worse. Just ask Goldman Sachs how their brand is doing when their CEO issues this as an apology: “while we regret that we participated in the market euphoria and failed to raise a responsible voice, we are proud of the way…” blah blah blah (it just gets worse from there).

Sometimes… It Is Just Awwwwkward. Planning Is Priceless

Say what you will about Tiger’s apology – it’s being thought out. You may agree or disagree with the strategy – but there’s a definite plan and it’s definitely being rehearsed. And that’s the key. When you really screw up – and you’ve got to move into crisis management, the key is to plan and execute deliberately. That doesn’t mean slow down (see above) but it does mean to act decisively and definitely think about your actions.

For Tiger (or anyone dealing with an extreme crisis of brand confidence) it’s how you plan your long-term strategy that will count most. You can’t be focused just on what will be said in the minutes and hours and days after – but rather the weeks, months and years that will follow.

Just look at celebrity brands that have come back from enormous crisis. Will Tiger follow the Bill Clinton model – of just coming back and executing brilliantly and hoping that the scandal doesn’t follow. Or, will he follow the Britney model of disappearing for two years and coming back “better than ever”. Or, maybe he can follow the Hugh Grant model – and work Oprah, and Leno and Letterman, and Regis and be forthcoming (not very likely).

Or, how about just apologizing (as he has) and waiting for it to go away. Everybody’s saying that it won’t work. But let’s look at another sports star – Kobe Bryant. Does anybody even remember that Kobe was accused of sexual assault seven years ago. Kobe apologized, bought his wife a $4 million diamond ring and played basketball with more determination than ever. Seems to have worked out okay for him. Don’t really see it working out for Tiger that way – but, you know… maybe it will.

In The End It’s Authenticity – Not “if’s or but’s”

Just remember that a real apology has no “if’s” in it. If you say “I’m sorry IF you were inconvenienced” – what you’re really saying is that the person had no right to be offended, so therefore you’re sorry that the person isn’t as big as he or she could be. An apology is simply “I’m sorry. We screwed up. You were wronged and we made a mistake”.

When we’re all moving as fast as we are – we are all going to make mistakes. In the end it’s all about being truly sorry that we caused a mistake – and then moving on. There’s a wonderful quote from the English writer G.K. Chesterson. He said “a stiff apology is a second insult… The injured party does not want to be compensated because he has been wronged; he wants to be healed because he has been hurt.”

When we hear success stories of mistakes turning into huge marketing opportunities such as Jet Blue’s Passenger Bill Of Rights – we can see that in every mistake lies an opportunity to be a better brand, and a better marketer.

/spn vuxohn Mayer one because… well just because it seems better left alone.

Social Media Celebrities Turning Into Deathstars

Southwest started apologizing quickly and often through Twitter and their Blog – even as the furor just began to rise over the hours and days from the time of the incident.

The Fast And The Furious Non-Apology Apology

Sometimes… It Is Just Awwwwkward. Planning Is Priceless

In The End It’s Authenticity – Not “if’s or but’s”

Marketing Is NOT The New Finance

Posted on September 20, 2009 by Robert Rose

I’ve been reading about all the excitement around the Adobe/Omniture acquisition. And, I’ve noticed that in discussions with clients, partners and among much of the coverage, there’s been a resurgence of the phrase that “marketing is the new finance“. This seems to be a sentiment that many are attributing to the reason why Adobe, so focused on right brain solutions, would acquire a purely left-brained focused company. Ann Lewnes, SVP Corporate Marketing for Adobe was quoted with this phrase back in June at the CMO Leadership Forum in reference to how marketing is relying on ROI and measurability.

But I really disagree…

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