Marketing and content trends, tools, and tips that are always one step ahead of leading edge

Lots of websites use so many acronyms and “inside” language that you need your own special glossary to decipher what’s being said. Sure, you can create a sense of community by developing a common language, but don’t just assume that your users know what you’re talking about.

One of my favorite recent examples is RSS feeds. Many websites refer to RSS feeds as if everybody understands and uses them, but LOTS of people still have no idea what RSS feeds are, how to use them, and how helpful they can be in sorting through Web content.

That’s why I love this video by commoncraft.com—a good, simple explanation of RSS that even my mother could understand. (And a great example of video explaining a concept and delivering value; it’s the perfect medium in this case.) We’ve included a link to it on our site next to our “Get the Tendo RSS Feed” button so that readers can figure out what it is before clicking. ―John Kovacevich, VP, marketing services

Google is in hot water this week because an employee voiced a political opinion on a corporate blog.

Obviously, it’s important for companies to have policies about the scope of their blog postings. But it would be a mistake to think that the lesson here is that all corporate blogs should have a Big Brother corporate reviewer who vets every piece of content before posting.

What makes blogging and other Web 2.0 strategies so engaging is that it democratizes communication. It means that you can communicate quickly and engage your customers directly. And it may mean that you get yourself into some sticky situations.

While Google may have wanted to avoid this controversy (although, maybe not…it is being covered widely in the press and they are getting lots of publicity), the fact is that the blog posting did exactly what it was supposed to do: It engaged the audience. People were able to respond to the post and Google clarified its position. That’s a conversation and that’s good.

It may be messier than the old way of communicating with customers, but we might as well get used to it. We’ll be seeing more and more of it. (Full disclosure: My brother works for Google, although I haven’t talked to him about this particular case.) ―John Kovacevich, VP, marketing services

Last week ended for me with a heated discussion on the subject of just how much companies of all sizes are restricting email and Internet usage these days. A colleague claimed that because the Internet and email had become accepted—and necessary—business tools, companies of all sizes were moving away from policies that restrict their employees’ email and Internet usage. I believed just the opposite. And, as it always does, the war of supporting stats began.

Partly in an attempt to stanch the flood of stat-filled emails flooding my inbox, and partly because I wanted to confirm or disprove my viewpoint, I took the opportunity to do a little informal (very informal) field work this weekend. A friend of mine works for a nationally recognized travel website that set up a booth at an event. The booth had two purposes: support brand recognition and boost subscribers for the site’s quarterly newsletter. Perfect for my purposes, eh? So, I worked the booth all day on Sunday trying to sign up folks for this newsletter.

I’m pretty good at selling—especially when I’m selling something I believe in. And I believe that this newsletter has valuable content: travel tips, special offers, great resources for business travel—and I’m not even the target audience. In the process I also asked people about their Internet and email usage at work. I talked to approximately 100 people and 95 percent of them told me that the company they work for restricts their Internet usage and/or monitors their email.

These folks worked for big companies and small companies, they came from all over the country (even a few from Europe and Latin America), and they worked at all levels doing all kinds of things. But most of them gave me the same message: My company controls/monitors my Internet and email usage.

Now, my methodology—if you could even call it that—was hardly scientific, and I know every legitimate researcher will be jumping on this entry with all four feet. But I’ve got to admit, even I was shocked to hear person after person tell me that, in their company, Big Brother is alive and well.

So, let me hear it from you. Does your company control/monitor your Internet and email usage? And if so, how? ―Chris Zender, VP, creative services

Six years ago on this very website, I wrote an article called “Making the Move to a Content Management System.” Today, many of the ideas contained in the article are quaint. In 2007 content management systems are standard for large sites, and off-the-shelf software like Adobe’s Contribute make content management accessible for even the smallest organizations. Blogs and wikis and community forums are an extension of the CMS infrastructure, which democratized Web publishing.

But like I said back in 2001, a delivery system is not a content strategy. And just because it’s easier to post to the Web doesn’t necessarily mean that you should.

While the stats are fluid (and hotly debated based on methodology), we’re in the neighborhood of 30 billion Web pages now. That’s a big neighborhood. Before you add your content or blog or video to your corporate website, you should put it through a rigorous vetting process. Why are you adding it? What are you hoping to accomplish? Is it providing value to your readers? Will it move you closer to your business objectives? If you can’t answer those questions, don’t post…even if the CMS makes it simple to do so. ―John Kovacevich, VP, marketing services

As Chris Zender pointed out in her May 22nd blog posting, several TV shows have used innovative marketing techniques to promote their shows, including cross-media offerings like content-rich experiences online.

The marketing of films is changing, too. One tactic that has become increasingly common is the movie "Easter egg”—a scene shown after the end credits have rolled (according to Wikipedia, these post-credit scenes are also called stingers.

In the 1980s, stingers were typically funny additions at the end of comedies. Remember when Ferris tells the audience to go home at the end of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off? Movies like Airplane!, Scrooged, and other funny flicks from the decade also have stingers.

More recently, the practice has evolved as marketing has become more sophisticated. While Wikipedia’s list has a disclaimer that it’s incomplete, the site lists 11 stingers for the entire 1980s, whereas it lists 16 stingers in 2006, and eight so far in 2007. Stingers are no longer limited to comedies—dramas routinely use them as well. Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End has a bonus scene, if you’re patient enough to wait for the endless end credits. And franchise flicks often promote the next chapter: Matrix Reloaded had a stinger for The Matrix Revolutions. And X-Men 3: The Last Stand has a scene that reveals that a key character is still alive. Pique the interest of the audience and entice them with what’s too come. Now that’s good marketing. ―Julie Jares, managing editor

I’ll admit it: I love TV. I watch everything from network standbys to PBS specials to cable access programming. I’ll watch anything once, no matter how bad it is. I used to feel guilty about all the hours I’ve accrued to attain my couch potato status. No so anymore. These days, TV is teaching me something: how to create a better experience for Tendo’s clients.

Some of the best TV shows are leading the way in providing content-rich experiences online. Programs such as Heroes and Lost are extending their reach by creating brand-new content that adds deeper dimensions and richer context to their story lines. The key concept in that sentence is “brand-new”—the content on these sites goes beyond the simple blogs and episode synopses that most TV show websites routinely provide.

Sites like The Hanso Foundation , Oceanic Flight 815, and YamagatoFellowship.org  feature new material that extends and enhances viewers’ experience in totally new ways. Material such as maps of the island or profiles of historical “heroes” deepens viewer engagement, creating strong relationships between the show and its audience.

Of course, new content doesn’t come cheap, and I’m well aware of how much work went into creating these sites, but I think the payoff speaks for itself. —Chris Zender, VP, creative services

I’ve just met with yet another prospect who said to me, “We need to make our website more Web 2.0. We want a wiki, RSS feeds, podcasts, and a blog.” And while I’m always happy to get new business, when I asked the client about his company’s strategy behind developing these tactics, his answer was, “Our competition has them, so we need to have them as well.”

In other words, “Me, too!”

In fact, a recent scan of our inquiries box shows a decided uptick in the amount of requests we’re getting for “Web 2.0” work. Call it keeping up with the Joneses or call it competitive advantage—from my perspective, “Me, too” is driven by fear. Fear that Web 2.0 will provide business rivals with a magic formula that will grant them a permanent advantage.

And so, we have a bit of a conundrum: Everyone wants Web 2.0 tactics, but few are willing to put the time and effort into creating a strategy and roadmap for how to successfully deploy them. I think this lack of strategy stems, in part, from the immaturity of the Internet as a marketing medium. People are still unsure about how to best leverage the Internet, so when a hot new technology or technique surfaces, we grasp it without determining its real value.

Recently, I was talking about this with a friend of mine who runs the Midwest office of a national PR firm. She related a story that typifies the challenge of Web 2.0: Her team put together a Web promotion, which included a blog, for a well-known household brand. After just one week, the blog got a tremendous response—the traffic numbers tripled the agency’s projections and the team came running into my friend’s office, crowing about their success.

Which quickly diminished under my friend’s questions: What data did the team have about these visitors—age, income, geographic location? How many of the visitors had actually bought the product? Her lesson to the team: Response does not equal success.

The larger lesson for all of us is that “Me, too!” isn’t always the answer. Don’t just jump on the Web 2.0 bandwagon—use Web 2.0 technologies and tools just as you would use any others: as your goals, audience, and strategy dictate. ―Chris Zender, VP, creative services

The cornerstone of Web 2.0 is community: collaboration among users. And in order to have a community, you need users. Lots and lots and lots of users.

And when you get enough users, you achieve critical mass: “a size, number, or amount large enough to produce a particular result,” according to m-w.com. For the purposes of this conversation, that “particular result” is market domination.

Luckily, alexa.com can give us a great idea of what critical mass looks like in terms of number of users. I plugged in the URLs for two human-compiled reference sites: About.com and Wikipedia. Here’s what the “reach” graph, which measures number of users, looks like.

About.com was happily chugging along reaching something on the order of 1 percent of all Web users, and essentially still is (although it appears to be in a downward trend). The bump in traffic in 2005-06 can probably be attributed to its sale to the New York Times, which substantially increased About’s profile, as well as its marketing budget. But along comes Wikipedia in late 2002 and surges past About by mid-2005. Is Wikipedia directly responsible for About’s decline? We can’t say for sure. But let’s take a look at some other cases of more direct competition: Friendster vs. MySpace, and Flickr vs. Everyone Else.

If you were under 25 in 2004, you had to have a Friendster page or your social life was over. It was the first social-networking site that really cracked the code in a space where so many other companies had failed. But in early ‘05, MySpace — a carbon copy of Friendster — simply trounced it. Much smarter people have weighed in on all this, but the bottom line is that MySpace rules and Friendster, well, drools.

Photo hosting was a hotly contested space: Ofoto/KodakGallery had decent traffic, as did Snapfish. But Flickr came along and routed the competition by applying Web 2.0 principles — tagging, sharing, rating, and more — to online images. Whereas the Web 1.0 sites encouraged you to lock others out of your personal photo albums, Flickr embraced openness, and crushed the competition in the process. Here’s the graph for proof. KodakGallery and Snapfish are both DOA, and Flickr, while in a downward trend, still boasts 10 times more traffic than the other two.

So that’s what critical mass looks like. If you can achieve it, the success of your community-based website is assured. Now if I could only figure out how to make it happen, I could quit my day job and pursue my dream of doing nothing all day long. ―Ian Miller, managing editor

As the Web becomes more and more interactive, news organizations and others may be shifting away from interactivity. According to an article on KFMB-TV’s website in late January, "Yahoo quietly pulled a discussion feature from its news site in recent weeks. Before, readers were allowed to post comments on individual news stories. The message boards were suspended, according to a note from Yahoo’s general manager for news, Neil Budde, because they allowed "a small number of vocal users to dominate the discussion."

The article goes on to say that most news organizations don’t allow readers to freely publish comments on their sites. I did a quick search and found that some news blogs, and also corporate blogs, do still publish comments. Whether readers can "freely publish comments," however, is another question.

As readers, we may never know what’s been weeded out, but a quick peek can be telling. For example, NBC’s Meredith Veira has a blog called "Behind the scenes with Today’s leading lady." After my unscientific perusal of the comments, I’d say they run the gamut from gushing to highly critical.

Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz blogs regularly and Sun is courting responses. The February 6 home page asks readers to "comment on what Sun’s CEO is blogging about." Readers are complying, but I have a sneaking suspicion that the comments are being screened, and not just for language or appropriateness. The 21 comments in response to Jonathan’s January 30 blog posting are either positive or somewhat neutral. Is that possible? I have my doubts.

Reader feedback is key to a blog’s success. Comments are often interesting to read, they can spark debates, and they show that the blogger is touching on topics that spark interest. But how does a reader’s right to express opinions co-exist with a company’s right―or desire―to control messaging on its own website? ―Julie Jares, managing editor