NVMUG eNews 4/14/2007
Last updated 4/16/2007
Internet Marketing and Blogs
Neil Raphel and his wife welcomed the members to their house. Then Neil lead a discussion about new directions in Internet marketing. He demonstrated how he puts up the Raphel Marketing blog. Then Warren Walker, who took pictures, showed his new Pentax K10D digital SLR camera and I gave away items and books that were otherwise going to the waste management district.
1.Internet Marketing and the Buzz
Neil Raphel by Warren Walker
Neil is teaching a course on Internet Marketing at Lyndon State College. He and his students have been studying new developments in marketing and blogs. The text book they are using is brand new, but it is based upon what existed in 2004. Neil said that if he ever taught the course again, he would do it without a book because things are changing so fast that any book is obsolete before it is printed.
In the past most advertising, including most Internet advertising, was in-your-face advertising. It popped up at you and got in your way when you were trying to do or see something else. People were annoyed and did not like it.
The new wave in Internet marketing in 2007 is to create a buzz. The idea is to involve other people and get them talking about your product. It is much easier to sell a product if you can get other people talking about why they bought it, how they use it, and what they think about it.
The unique structure of the Internet Web is the web, it is the connection of people with some shared interests. It can be interactive. When people ask a question, have someone on hand to answer by telephone or in a computer chat. Get comments about your product, like it or not, opinions, reviews and create a discussion among users and potential users.
Some companies embrace having their product appear on YouTube because of the valuable advertising and the way it gets people talking about their product, others threaten to sue to keep any of their product from being pirated on YouTube.
Second life is a video game played by a community of people doing things on the Web. People actually buy real estate and with real American dollars, and they buy brand manufactured clothing. Neil called this participatory advertising.
Yub.com is a Web site that invites you to meet, hang, and shop. You can go there to get advice from other shoppers who like what you like, If you buy through them from one of their participating stores you get cash back. If you help another Yubber or if another Yubber helps you to you buy from from one of their participating stores you both get cash back. They list a large number of participating stores with discounts, and invite you to "Read the Buzz" in the New York Times about "online shopping is becoming a less lonely place."
Neil's college class has been studying this phenomena.
One problem in using comments is that you often do not know the source and whether the comment was planted by someone who wants either to sell the product or to get rid of it as competition for another product.
Stephen Farber asked if you can create a buzz on a lemon. Neil gave an example of a "horrible" TV show called "How I Met My Mom." Whene the character in the TV show looked up another character on MySpace, the show's rating jumped up.
Warren Walker said that when he is shopping for camera lenses, he looks for products that have a review. Warren also said that magazines are moving toward a Web style. He found the first issue of MacLife almost unreadable because the articles were little bits of information scattered around the page, and because of the blue type on white background.
Now there is a whole new category of influences where the more connections you have the more valuable you are. Where search engines used to look at medadata in your Web site, they now look at how many connections your Web site has. This makes it more difficult for a new Web site to become known.
The question is "How do you harness it so that people talk about it and you get word of mouth advertising?
One possibility would be a Web page with lots of advice, expert panels, to help the person seeking information.
Neil expects there to be search engines for categories of what you are looking for. He foresees intelligent networks which understand the content of the page.
It is difficult to get comments. Neil told of one person who offers $1,000 per month for the best letter, and is doing it just for the person making his web page better. Neil said that 90 to 95 percent of the blogs get no comments from readers.
Warren said that the most effective blog is a community of common interest.
Neil said that up to now it has been politics. Every candidate has his or her own blog. Blogs have been effective.
2. Blogs
A blog is a web log. Originally it was an on-line public diary for the millions of people who want to expose themselves. Now blogs are also becoming commercial with businesses using them.
Neil demonstrating his blog by Warren Walker, from left to right Midge Lubot, Neil Raphel, Hartley Jackson, Norm Johnson, and Stephen Farber
Neil said that there are two ways to put up your own blog.
- A bunch of organizations allow you to put up a blog today with pictures and a way to get comments with a name like Steve123@blogspot.com. The form is already their for you to use.
- Put a blog on your own Web site.
Neil chose this second option. He bought the name, Marketingrules.org, for his blog URL. He found that his Web host provided an option to use WordPress on their site to put up a blog. WordPress is an editor for blogs that allows you to switch between WYSIWYG to enter the information and code editing when you want to use HTML to dress it up. He said that Safari does not allow switching to HTML editing, so he uses another free web browser, FireFox, does.
Neil does not consider himself an expert in HTML, but he does understand enough so that he can copy and paste HTML that he wants to use. He showed how he could do this using WordPress with FireFox to modify some of his text formatting and a picture location.
Links are important in blogs. Neil showed using one to link to the "Importance of You" which refers to a 1959 NewsWeek subscription sales letter. The letter used "you" very often, and highlighted it in yellow. It was so successful that they used it for 17 years.
Neil finds graphics for Marketing Rules using a Googles Images search to seek images by the subject name. Stephen Farber noted that one of the images showed a person looking out instead of in toward the text. So Neil put the image into Photoshop and rotated it to flip horizontal. He then used Dreamweaver to look in the images file, find the image "investigate.jpg" and replace it. When he refreshed the web site, the correction was where it should be.
Themes, templates, are available in WordPress. Neil had someone more experienced use it to put up his web page, but Neil knows enough to maintain it. it does not take him very long to add a new blog. They have received a bunch of comments, and traffic has almost doubled since he put it up. He cannot tie it directly to sales yet. His monthly newsletter is indexed in the blog site.
Their monthly email newsletter, The "Raphel Report" contains articles with observations on marketing, advertising, sales and promotions. They are straight articles interesting to those who want to know more about these subjects, and do not fit the current chatty formats with their small bites of information. We discussed whether he should change this format, and decided that he would probably lose many readers if he did. They come to this site expecting useful observations and information and they get it. For now, they will probably cross reference between the friendly blogs and the not unfriendly but not chatty articles.
Neil is working with a web site developer to help others market on-line with Neil being the marketing advisor for the sites. He is also interested in other on-line marketing opportunities. The Vermont Country Store now dominates in Vermont, but there might be room for a competitor featuring Vermont products.
3. Tips
Stephen Farber suggested that you highlight text and then try using Safari > Services > Summarize. At 100% you get a copy of all the text you have highlighted. You could do the same thing by dragging the text to your desktop after highlighting it. Where the real fun is, is to use it to summarize at much less than 100%. It works with most Macintosh programs including Mail, TextEdit and Pages.
I tried it with the above Blog information and summarized it, with Sentences selected, to between 25 and 35%. It summarized into 5 paragraphs with 9 sentences which did an amazingly good job at capturing the essence of the content, and I have absolutely no idea how it did it. Try it and you to will be blown away too.
Stephen also recommended that when you bring up a web page such as a news source or www.apple.com/startpage in a browser like Safari, you click on the RSS symbol that appears to the right of the URL. You will get a summary listing of the contents and clicking on the contents will enable you to quickly access the information that is of interest to you. (When I checked this out I became too interested in the story of a bicycle ride across the USA by a woman with terminal cancer which interrupted my writing. I will watch the full video later.)
Try using command + to make e-mail or web page information aprear larger and command - to make it smaller.
3. Pentax K10D Digital SLR Camera
Warren Walker and his camera
Warren Walker's new Pentax K10D digital single lens reflex camera has 14 buttons, 5 switches, 3 dials, plus a 4-way selection switch. He says he will have to figure out what he wants to do with the camera, and forget the rest. He has installed a very fast Secure Digital Sandisk Extreme 3 two gig card which can store from 129 ten meg RAW images to almost 1900 two meg pixel size JPEG images at fine detail. At highest compression it could store over 5,000 images!
He bought it after lots of research because of its many seals. Keeping out dust and dirt is more of a problem with a digital SLR because, unlike film, anything that gets on the sensor just stays there. His camera also has a vibrator to shake dust off the sensor, and it has in camera image stabilization.
He selected a macro-zoom lens to photograph butterflies on a flower in RAW format. Butterflies do not normally sit still long enough to capture them with a normal lens or for the shutter delay in digital cameras other than SLRs.
Warren also selected this camera because it was larger than the others he considered, and fit his hands better. (I put my hand next to his, and it was obvious why I might prefer a smaller camera.) If you are buying a camera, Warren recommends that you hold it in your hands to see how it its.
One thing Warren misses with his digital SLR is the live preview that enables you to compose on the LCD screen in other digital cameras. With a digital SLR you must use the view finder, and can only see the image on its LCD screen after you have taken the picture.
Neil probably will buy a right-angle viewer that will fit over his camera's viewfinder so he can shoot a flower without laying in the swamp shoot it, a problem that he did not have when using the LCD screen. There are other add-on LCD viewers with a sensor that mount over the viewfinder. Warren read a review of one which cost $480 and broke after a month of use - he is not considering it.
He wanted the RAW format for more control over his images than you can get with the usual JPEG format. JPEG images are fine most of the time, but in the RAW format you capture about twice as much information. This additional information s most necessary when the scene is beyond the capability of the camera's JPEG image to capture; for example when you need to capture detail in a wider range of light and dark. It is also important when you want to adjust your image to correct a problem because some setting was not quite right when you took the picture.
