Devour The Web

If you’ve been getting caught up in all this talk of RSS versus email, its time to stop wondering.

Marketing Sherpa just posted a new report that stirred up the old RSS vs Email debate again. http://www.marketingsherpa.com/sample.cfm?contentID=2988

The report starts out by stating, "It chills our blood when we hear email marketers and publishers blithely state, "I’m thinking about switching over to RSS entirely!" Oh no. Please don’t. RSS is worthy of testing, but it’s not an email replacement and it never will be."

A report in Jupitermedia titled "E-Mail Marketing: Alive and Well" notes, "RSS won’t be immediately effective as an alternative to e-mail marketing. (But) for some companies (primarily publishers who cater to a technical audience), it’s sensible to press forward with RSS now as a supplement to e-mail marketing." http://www.jupiterresearch.com/bin/item.pl/research:concept/1103/id=96103/

A lot of people think this debate has been going on for long enough. RSS is NOT a replacement for email. It does not (and may never) rival the marketing reach and immediacy of an email message.

Those who’ve been mourning the death of email marketing don’t seem to "get" the fact that RSS hasn’t reached the tipping point yet. More people read email than RSS feeds ? many more.

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An advertisement that has been pounded out in the white heat of enthusiasm can be tamed and made effective. But it is impossible to put life into dead copy. ~John Caples

Whether you’re promoting a product, a program or just an idea, exuberance sells. One of the reason blogs can be so effective is that their writers tend to show more enthusiasm than polish. And that’s not a bad thing—if you have to pick one over the other, enthusiasm wins.

Here are a few tips on how to get infectious enthusiasm into your writing. When you write with passion, you’ll grab your reader’s attention and persuade her that you’ve got something worth getting excited about.

Write as fast as you can

When you find something that gets your heart racing, start writing while that excitement is hot. Great ideas (or the perfect turn of phrase) don’t always stick around. Get your thoughts onto paper or pixels as quickly as you can.

This is why professional writers keep a notepad or a handful of index cards handy all the time. An audio recorder works great too–and most newer cell phones now have a record function.

For beginners, link exchange campaigns can be a minefield of problems. For example, here is a question I was asked:

“Hi Andy, I have noticed that a lot of sites that request a link exchange from me may have a PR 5 or 6 on their home page and when I click through to the links page there is a PR 0. This is very disappointing and I don’t exchange with them. Should I reconsider this practice or am I right in thinking they are doing something to prevent PR from passing to their links pages? Best Regards, Troy”

There are many things to consider when exchanging links.

The above question asks whether you should consider linking to a PR 5 site when the links page is a PR 0.

What are your thoughts on that?

The question you should ask yourself is “Why does the homepage have a PR5 and the links page a PR0?”.

There can be a few different reasons for this.

Reason #1 - the links page is new and has not had a PR assigned to it in the Google toolbar (that does not mean it has no PR, just that the toolbar has not been updated to reflect its PR).

As we all know, visitor traffic is crucial to the success of every Website. If you do not know how many views your pages get, how can you know if anyone is seeing your site, product or service? With an online business, you can not afford to guess at how effective your marketing, content, message or website design is.

Ideally, you need to know what pages are viewed, how long the visitor stays on any given page and what page they click to next. Also, if you can see the keywords they used to search for you, or see what link they clicked to get to your site (referral link), you have great information for SEO (search engine optimization) of your site content and keywords. This is all part of Web analytics. The more you know about site analytics, the better prepared you will be to get the most out of your site traffic and visitor usage. Read through these basics and you will be ready to go look for an effective visitor traffic reporting service, find the best features for the price, and boost your site’s effectiveness.

Who are your visitors?

Lots of people in digital marketing are promoting the concept of tracking engagement — instead of giving credit to the last ad clicked on a Web site.

But what exactly does “engagement” mean? That question was posed to a panel at the American Association of Advertising Agencies‘ digital conference today in New York City.

And, if David Smith, chief executive of MediaSmith, had his way, he’d head back to the drawing board — or Webster’s.

Keep in mind, it’s been three years since Advertising Research Foundation first promoted the concept of measuring “engagement.” And Microsoft backs it in a big way, calling its approach, “engagement mapping.”

Trouble is, Smith said: “Engagement is more of a concept. It’s such a common word. We use it everyday to describe what a campaign is doing — when we are not talking about a metric at all.”

The auditorium in the new TimesCenter, part of The New York Times headquarters, left some laptop toting visitors attending the AAAA digital conference hungering for a little power.

Turns out the auditorium has no place for visitors to plug in their laptops and recharge their batteries.

While that’s common in older venues, it’s surprising for a site built for the 21st century.

On the plus side, there’s wireless Internet service.

Delivering regularly updated content to website visitors is easier through RSS resources.

RSS, also known as Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication, has been used for years by online visitors. However, it has only recently begun to gain popularity among webmasters as a means of providing visitors with constantly refreshed content. These feeds were originally developed to deliver updated news more quickly, but they have since evolved to allow for nearly instantaneous updates of many types of information.

Growing websites can benefit from RSS feeds since they allow for fresh copy to be updated regularly online. Once the RSS feeds are inserted into the web pages, they provide a steady stream of syndicated content updated continuously. Most RSS feeds consist of a headline, content summary, and a link to the actual online article. They are typically composed in XML, a markup language similar to HTML, to allow webmasters to manipulate and integrate new copy into their existing site pages.

Shares of U.K.-based Yell Group are up on rumors Microsoft has approached the directories publisher about a possible sale. The acquisition, if it came to fruition, would be Microsoft’s first merger in the local business and residential look-up arena, and could be interpreted as a play for search share. For instance, Yell’s online properties, including Yell.com in the U.K., YellowBook.com in the U.S., and PaginasAmarillas.es in Spain — could carry Microsoft Maps and local listings, along with geo-targeted advertising. And Yell’s sales force could upsell local marketers on Microsoft’s other channels.

Even so, YellowBook.com is hardly the leader in the space, particularly in the U.S. See below for a traffic comparison of YellowBook.com next to category leaders YellowPages.com (AT&T) and SuperPages.com (Idearc).

What a sale to Microsoft would mean for Yell’s working environment may be a point of some nervousness for the company’s staff. The firm was just awarded a ninth place ranking on the Financial Times’ list of the U.K.’s best workplaces.

Ikea is pulling out all the interactive marketing channel stops to promote the opening of its new Brooklyn store. The campaign — aimed at getting New Yorkers to the new big box retail location in a seldom-visited area — utilizes e-mail directing recipients to play a game played both online and via mobile device.

The Ikea Brooklyn Get There Giveaway asks viewers to locate boxes hidden on the pathways leading to the store on a map interface built in Ajax. Find and click on boxes containing designated Ikea products and players are given a code they can send via SMS. Each text message is an additional entry into a shopping giveaway.

The game is clever and somewhat engaging — but it’s not really apparent why mobile would come into play here. There’s no apparent rhyme or reason in jumping across channels to actually enter the contest. That said, it doesn’t unduly burden users, either, given mobile devices are usually within arms’ reach.

Guest Post by Bob Hoffman

I stand naked before you with the intent of committing heresy (okay, I’m not really naked, but I’m still pretty unsettling to look at.) My heresy is this – I don’t think the internet is all that interactive.

If I’m right, this has big ramifications for us in the online marketing world.

What Do We Mean By Interactivity?

Let’s start at the beginning.

I know the web is interactive for you, and I know it’s interactive for me. But for the vast majority of internet users – the ones who don’t have blogs and don’t have their own websites – it is mostly another passive medium. And it’s getting passiver. If that’s a word.

Before you start hyperventilating, let’s define our terms. What do we mean by interactivity? I propose the following definition: the ability to interact with the content of the medium, not just the medium.

For example, television. You interact with the medium all the time. You change the channel. You turn the volume up and down. You lighten and darken the picture. But you don’t think of it as an interactive medium because you can’t interact with the content.