Do your marketing efforts look like this?

This morning I stumbled upon the cluetrain manifesto. In short, it is GREAT.

The basic idea is that traditional mass media advertising and marketing methods are going to fail. The manifesto gives a great historical perspective of how sellers and buyers have interacted in the past.

In the beginning, markets were simple: a seller would talk with a buyer face-to-face. The market was simply a conversation between a seller (telling a buyer what he was selling) and a buyer (telling the seller what he wanted).

But the industrial age changed all that. Mass production made interchangeable products, and sold them to interchangeable consumers. In this time, customers became as similar in the minds of producers as their products.

This led to mass marketing, which in turn, led to the fact that marketers were broadcasting their messages to people that didn’t want to hear them. Instead of going to an open-air market to barter and negotiate over goods and services, the consumer was subjected to a barrage of impersonal marketing messages.

As the manifesto states:

Every one of us knows that marketers are out to get us, and we all struggle to escape their snares. We channel-surf through commercials; we open our mail over the recycling bin, struggling to discern the junk mail without having to open the envelope; we resent the adhesion of commercial messages to everything from sports uniforms to escalator risers.

The internet is going to change all that.

Sure, the internet is littered with ads, scams, spam, and other mass market advertisers. But when you look through all the dressing, you can see that new markets are forming. These markets consist of people that are interested in talking- in participating in the conversation.

Again, the Cluetrain Manifesto puts it best:

In this new place, every product you can name, from fashion to office supplies, can be discussed, argued over, researched, and bought as part of a vast conversation among the people interested in it. “I’m in the market for a new computer,” someone says, and she’s off to the Dell site. But she probably won’t buy that cool new laptop right away. She’ll ask around first — on web pages, on newsgroups, via email: “What do you think? Is this a good one? Has anybody checked it out? What’s the real battery life? How’s their customer support? Recommendations? Horror Stories?

So what does this mean?

Just putting a web site up isn’t enough anymore. People aren’t interested in empty corporate press releases. They want to know the objective truth.

One more quote:

Not only can the market discover the truth in the time it takes to do a search at a discussion archive, but the tinny, self-absorbed voices of business-as-usual sound especially empty in contrast to the rich conversations emanating from the web.

I understand that all of this sounds more suited to products than services, but the same basic premise applies: any business that hopes to attract new clients needs to join the conversation, and they need to be honest.

I think blogs and blawgs (I know, many of you HATE the name) are doing just that. Bloggers are surely promoting their services, but they’re doing it in an honest, truthful way. It’s not a direct advertisement, and it takes more work than putting an ad in a newspaper, but in the end, it’s worth it. It’s all about credibility.

Having a pole in the water just doesn’t cut it anymore. You’ve got to get out there and actually talk with the fish.

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This morning, while reviewing my daily RSS feeds, I noticed two posts on web design/marketing for attorneys and law firms.

The first is from Dennis Kennedy, called “Current Standards in Law Firm Websites - Some Improvements for You to Consider“.

Dennis took the client’s viewpoint when looking at firm sites, and in doing so, took a fresh vantage point that is sometimes ignored by firms. He found that many firm sites are working against the firm rather than for them.

His first complaint is the difficulty in finding contact information. He’s right there. Finding a phone number or email address is such a common reason for using a firm’s web site that it often is either forgotten or not given much attention. Though some firms do not want to list individual phone numbers of attorneys, firms should think of the main reason for having a web site in the first place: to get clients to contact them.

Another problem he found deals with attorney bios. In looking at as many sites as I do, I’ve found his assertion that bios are hard to find and use to be true.

Though some firms do not want to be too flashy and want to remain conservative here, I think that the attorney bio is an underused resource on many firm sites. The attorney bio is, in many cases, the ultimate goal. Your potential (or current) client has made it through your site and they’re interested in contacting someone. That’s great!

They’ve waded through the impersonal monolith that is the firm’s site. Now they are looking for information on the human being that can help them with their problem. But instead of learning more about the person, they are just given cookie-cutter corporate information.

I’d love to see more firm sites give their attorney bios much more personal attention. Aside from the regular email address, education, and practice areas, why not have the attorney actually say something first-person? If you’ve got an attorney that is a golf-fanatic, why not say so? If an attorney is hoping to sail around the world one day, why can’t they say that?

Aside from putting a human touch on the bio, it also gives an opportunity to break the ice. I don’t know about you, but I am much more comfortable starting a conversation with someone I know a little bit about. It’s much easier to say “wow, tough loss for the Bruins last night, eh?” than “I noticed that you’re an established expert with experience in corporate transactional blah, blah….” Sure, I want to know that. But it’s much easier to form a bond with someone with an interest than someone with marketing text.

I’m sure some will disagree with me. Some will say “We don’t want to put anyone off. What if a client is a huge Maple Leafs fan? They may choose to go with another firm because of our attorney’s favorite team.”

Well, that may, or may not be true. But I sincerely believe that trying to be safe all the time is a huge disadvantage.

The other post was from Larry Bodine on “The Compleat Guide to Web Marketing“.

He points to a 22 page white paper from Mark Merenda on “Using the Internet to Market Your Law Practice.”

Mark explains the importance of web marketing for lawyers in one simple sentence:

When it comes to looking for a lawyer, more Americans are turning to the search engines than the Yellow Pages

Well that just says it all, doesn’t it?

Enjoy these great posts. Now it’s time for me to add some personal information to my bio. Best to practice what you preach, right?

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I am not an attorney. I just want to point that out.

There’s big news today about Google settling their click fraud case for $90 million. From the San Diego Union Tribune:

Google Inc. has agreed to pay up to $90 million to settle a lawsuit alleging the online search engine leader overcharged thousands of advertisers who paid for bogus sales referrals generated through a ruse known as “click fraud.”

Rather than paying the parties involved in the class action suit, Google will be giving advertisers a credit that can be used in future ads.

The lawsuit alleges that Google conspired with its advertisers to downplay the percentage of fradulent clicks.

SearchEngineWatch has the PDF of the complaint.

From the complaint:

Among the questions of law and fact common to the Class are:

• the pervasiveness of advertising “click fraud”
• the construction of the agreement between Google and the Class
• Google’s acts and/or omissions as alleged herein
• whether Google’s promotional and advertising materials for its “AdWords” program misrepresented and/or omitted material facts with respects to the pervasiveness of “click fraud”
• whether Google has taken adequate measures to prevent “click fraud”
• whether Google has properly accounted and for and refunded fees it has wrongfully collected from identified victims of “click fraud”

So basically, here are the problems with click fraud:

1. Business rivals- competitors click on ads to drive up the cost of fees paid by their rivals. For example, if I run a web design company and a rival design firm advertises on Google, I could click on their ads, thereby costing them a few cents each click.

Since each advertiser has a daily maximum budget, a rival could click enough times that the advertiser’s daily limit would be reached. When that happens, the ad stops running for that day.

2. Placement Boost- Since the order in which an ad is positioned is determined by how popular that ad is, I could click on my own ad to move up in order. If my ad was in the fifth position for web design, I could click on my ad to boost its placement. Sure, clicking my own ad will cost me money, but it may be worth it to me if I can become the highest placed ad.

Placement Boost can also occur when a competitor (as in #1 above) runs through an advertiser’s daily budget. For example, let’s say my AdWords ad is in the #2 spot. I could keep clicking on the ad in the #1 spot until their daily budget is reached. When that happens, my ad would move up to the number one spot.

Example:
Before:

After

[By the way, I didn't actually do this. I just used Photoshop]

3. AdSense- This is the big one.
On my blog, I use Yahoo ads, but the idea is the same. When a reader clicks on one of the ads, I get a couple of cents, Yahoo ads gets a couple of sense, and the advertiser is charged. If I was evil, I could just click on these ads all day to make money for myself. Or, I could have someone else do it for me. Since Google/Yahoo can monitor this kind of activity, they could easily figure out my scheme and cancel my account. But if I were clever, I’m sure I could find a way to beat the system. And there are lots of people out there doing just that.

And this really gets advertisers angry. What good is it to have traffic to their site when the visitor couldn’t care less about what they’re trying to sell?

Some people code bots to click on the ads over and over. Bots definitely don’t buy what advertisers are trying to sell.

To me, the AdSense problem is the easiest problem to solve. First, advertisers can choose to have their ads only display on Google. That way, their ads won’t show up on blogs or other sites, eliminating the motivation for publishers to click ads to make money for themselves.

Secondly, Google can set click limits. For instance, if Google sees that an ad is being clicked every second, there’s a pretty good chance that a bot is hitting it.

Google could also identify the user clicking on the ad, and in doing so, could only charge the advertiser once regardless of how many times that user clicks on the ad. Sure, there are ways around this. The user could disable cookies, switch IP addresses, etc., but doing so at least reduces the amount of click fraud. More importantly, it makes it more difficult for an unscrupulous clicker to defraud advertisers.

Though I’m not sure how to implement it, I think that there’s at least a partial solution. Advertisers would put a piece of code (probably JavaScript) on their landing page. The code would either drop a cookie or initiate a session identifying the visitor. It would transmit this information back to Google. If the visitor is a bot, the code would not be executed, thereby nullifying the click conversion. If the visitor comes to the page multiple times, the advertiser is still only charged once.

This would make it very difficult and annoying for scammers. In the cookie example, the visitor would have to delete their cookies each time they wanted to click on the ad, then they would have to change their IP. If Google and the advertiser were using session variables, the visitor would have to shut down their browser and restart it each time. This would be a huge, time consuming hassle. And that’s the best way (for now) to combat this kind of fraud.

Though there’s no perfect way to programmatically end click fraud right now, it’s possible to make click fraud extremely cumbersome and annoying to accomplish. Since 99% of Google’s revenue comes from advertising, I think they should do as much as possible to make click fraud a process that just isn’t worth the effort.

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I’ve often found it annoying trying to track down each state’s rules on lawyer advertising and marketing. Because of that, I’ve put together a page that lists all the states with links to their rules.

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If you’re reading this blog, chances are you know who Seth Godin is. From his bio:

SETH GODIN is a bestselling author, entrepreneur and agent of change.

When it comes to marketing, he’s the guy. I’ve read nearly all his books, and the guy knows what’s up. His book “All Marketers are Liars” discusses how successful marketing is not about how great a product or service is. Rather, it’s the story that matters.

On February 28, 2006, Seth Godin gave a talk at Google, and it is now available on Google Video. It’s a 48 minute presentation, and it’s definitely worth a look. So if you’ve got the time, check it out. It’s always good to start the week with a little motivation.

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