| LED Digest 1786: Marketing Online and Off (and Winnie the Pooh) |
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================================================== The LED Digest Moderated Discussion List "Effective Online Advertising, Since 1997" pair Networks: The LED's Web Host Hosting and Domain Reg. from a Trusted Leader pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains ================================================== List Moderator: Published by: Adam Audette LED Digest adam,led-digest.com http://www.led-digest.com ................................................ April 20, 2004 Issue #1786 ................................................ .....IN THIS DIGEST..... ==== CONTINUING ================= --== Keeping it in Perspective ==-- ~ Lennart Svanberg "...let us brand ourselves as *marketers* not Internet marketers." --== Why People aren't Buying Online ==-- ~ William Ernest Waites "Without a clearly stated guarantee and return privilege, potential buyers will go elsewhere..." --== Site, Product Measurement ==-- ~ David Jonah "The more you measure, the better you manage..." --== HTML Editors? ==-- ~ Mark Whitman "It's amazing to me that people use HTML editors at all..." ~ Sheryl Coppenger "...the real damage is done with inattention to image sizes." ==== BILLBOARD =================== --== Patent Attorney Needed ==-- ~ Ian Dickson ~ Martha Retallick ~ Peter Warnock ===== CONTINUING ================================= From: Lennart Svanberg Subject: Perspective > ... global 2003 search-based revenues of Google, > Yahoo/Overture, MSN, and all the rest were approximately > US$2.5 billion, annual retail sales for Winnie the Pooh > merchandise exceed US$5.9 *billion*. > Now, I don't know about you, but after the past six > years of surviving the first dot-disaster and working > my fanny off... I can bearly handle this information... - David Yancey, LED 1785 Dear Led-Digest readers, It's time that Internet Marketers step out of its boxes. It's time to reach out to marketers that handle Winnie the Pooh. It's time that marketers unite. Internet Marketing people have lived *alone* for almost 10 years and developed a unique knowledge base. I've been reading this digest since 1998 and gone from a newbie to a veteran in this field. For me it's time to broaden my knowledge by studying what's happening to *Winnie the Pooh* marketing. At my recent conference in Montreal, Gay Gaddis of T-3 media www.t-3.com, as well as Laurie Dillon of IBM Services gave examples of how different types of marketing interacted: events, newspaper ads, email campaigns, branding etc . Their bigger customers are not only in need of a website or a good listing at a Search Engine; they need the whole package of marketing services and preferably from one company. Some people in the Internet Marketing area seem upset that traditional marketers don't have enough respect for our knowledge about Search Engines, but as David Yancey points out; in the big picture our knowledge is not worth that much right now. I believe that our knowledge about the Internet is getting more important, day by day, but in the meantime, let us brand ourselves as *marketers* not Internet marketers. I don't know about you, but I definitely would like to get my hands on the contracts for Winnie the Pooh merchandising so I can buy up the whole Search Engine Market for myself! Live and Learn, Lennart Svanberg http://www.internetmarketingconference.com ------- new post - new topic ------- From: William Ernest Waites Subject: Buying online > Look hard at what you are trying to do, and if, in reality, > the best you can hope for is to inform a future buying > decision... don't worry too much about whether or not > people are actually transacting business online. - Ian Dickson, LED 1785 One of the immutable laws of direct order selling is that you must provide your customers with a mechanism to return what they don't like when they see it in person. Yes, you may have some abuse. That is a cost of business. Without a clearly stated guarantee and return privilege, potential buyers will go elsewhere where they can be assured that they are getting what they want. William Ernest Waites Eyewriter - with 15 years of Web retailing experience ------- new post - new topic ------- From: David Jonah Subject: Measurement Hi, LED readers Congratulations on this discussion group as it appears to be the new go-to-place for information exchange. I am a relatively recent recruit to this Discussion Group. Of course my interests are about local information and search developments, Winnie the Pooh not with withstanding. (David Yancey, LED 1785) But the real value nut is communicating the value of what we do when we first develop a reach / frequency program for customer communication through advertising exposure. This is what sells advertising over the long haul and puts marketing investments into perspective. Reliable accountability of impact measurement. > So what I'm looking for is some software that will... > look at my order confirmation page and tell me what > route the visitor took to get there. - Richard Graham, LED 1785 Now I believe that credit should be given where credit is due, so here goes. On the Jonah Top 10 sources of reliable tracking information, after LED comes Big Jim Know-Your-Customer-Novo. His newsletter is invaluable and I am ploughing (plowing?) through his book. He will even send a few sample chapters to provoke your mind and awareness of customer centric policies and measurement. I have no interest in t(his) organization beyond appreciating the free information that appears in my inbox every month. Drilling Down - Turning Customer Data into Profits with a Spreadsheet: Customer Valuation, Retention, Loyalty, Defection Drilling Down Book http://jimnovo.booklocker.com and if you need copious amounts of material and leads to articles on same, then subscribe to his newsletter available at http://www.jimnovo.com Now there's also Jimmy the-slide-ruler-Sterne, whose newsletter and articles are great sources of webanalytics. However, my favourite $9.00 marketing publisher (great reports on marketing items for reasonable per articles costs for the cost of trendy fashion magazine) is MarketingSherpa. Their frequent publishing efforts are always welcome in my inbox. Now MarketingSherpa and a colleague of Slide-Ruler-Sterne's is Terry Lund, who has put together the definitive comparo of web site analysis programs, which for a dollar less than $200. you can own in PDF instantly delivered to your desktop or have a dead carbon version humped by your local postal agent to your doorstop for $20. bucks more. Given my experience with MarketingSherpa articles and insights, this is the right book for you right now. MarketingSherpa has just now published Terry's Booklet the "Buyer's Guide Web Analytics". Reportedly, the guide reveals 53 products from 48 web analytics vendors. You want to know how the various tools and services compare and contrast? http://sherpastore.com/store/page.cfm/2146 Now, I realize that there is much wringing of carpal tunnel plagued visionaries over giving free plugs and singling out suppliers from one another on discussion boards like this one, but here's my take. The remarkable level of for-free and for-fee education about exploiting the true potential of the web that bright, sometimes even brilliant people like Anne Holland & Associates (Novo & Sterne come to mind) puts out day in and day out, let along the stuff they charge the price of a carton of cigarettes for... on MarketingSherpa (MarketingWonk aka VOX) deserves the odd random act of selfless kindness, in my opinion. But then I am Canadian and have a neo-colonial, socialist medicine, military-adverse understanding of true American (e)commerce values. So, as an appreciative reader of this post-till-you-promote discussion group, here's my two seconds of freely enabled non-self promotion for those wunderkinds who are trying to make sense out of the thicket of web brambles, we call internet marketing today. The more you measure, the better you manage, and the more you are efficient,.. while profit level is the measurement of efficiency. David Jonah www.localintheknow.com ------- new post - new topic ------- From: Mark Whitman Subject: HTML editors > Well, one good reason to go in and "tweak the code" > is to fix the things that the WYSIWYG website design > programs, such as Frontpage, don't do right. - Kathy Wilson Anderson, LED 1785 It's amazing to me that people use HTML editors at all, *especially* FrontPage which bloats a page with nonsense and restricts you to the FrontPage way of doing things. HTML is *very* easy to learn. There's a learning curve with every HTML editor there is so, if you have to spend time learning *something*, why not just learn the HTML so you can take complete control over your web pages? Style sheets, same thing. Easy as can be to learn and very effective in terms of giving control over a page that HTML doesn't give you on its own. Rather than spending time trying different HTML editors do yourself a favor, try this resource: http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/index.html WebMonkey gives easy to understand basic tutorials that can have you up and running with HTML, style sheet code, JavaScript, programming languages and more. You probably could have learned half of all you need to know about HTML just in the time it's taken to read this post :) Mark Whitman mark at webstuf dot net ------- new post - same topic ------- From: Sheryl Coppenger Subject: HTML editors > As far as costs go, memory and bandwidth are > essentially free... My counter argument to you on > costs is, what is your time worth...? - Joseph Taylor, LED 1786 And your customers' time is worth nothing? Last I checked, they had money. You want it. If you waste their time they don't give you any, so you're probably not going to get that $50 or $100/hour. IMO the important thing isn't that your server disk and bandwidth is almost free. I think you get into that mind-set at your peril. Many potential customers still will be on dialup -- about half the people I know are even though they live in areas with broadband or DSL options. You need to respect that if you want their business. But the Frontpage overhead probably causes minimal time lost in most cases. IMO the real damage is done with inattention to image sizes. I run a webring for artists, and I reject a lot of sites because they've done multi-MB scans of 15-20 pieces of artwork, then they use the height / width in their HTML to shrink them down to thumbnail size. The problem is, the client still has to download the full-size image. I have broadband at home, and if I find the site slow there's no way I'm going to subject other people to it. Sheryl Coppenger, SEAS Computing Facility Staff The George Washington University http://www.seas.gwu.edu/~sheryl ==== BILLBOARD ==================================== From: Ian Dickson Subject: Patent attorney > Can anyone in this group recommend a top notch patent > attorney who specializes in internet related intellectual property. - Mark Whitman, LED 1785 A word about patents. This is based on my own experience and advice received. (I looked at patenting some stuff in the early nineties, stuff which actually changed UK law, and again with CommKit). For a small company owning a patent can be a waste of time / money unless it is absolutely solid. Big companies patent everything, no matter how dubious, because then they can write letters to small companies threatening legal action. You going to fight or settle when IBM send you their letter? Reversed it isn't so good. Microsoft infringe your patent. So what you gonna do. Sue them? Can you afford to? The only patents worth having for a small company are ones which are so strong that you know that the legal adviser on the other side says, at first juncture, "settle". It's a rare patent that is so obviously that strong. In software the web also makes the issue of prior art an interesting one. In any dispute people will trawl everything looking for a paper that suggested the idea etc. One existing post (that you don't know about) on Slashdot or Sourceforge and you could be sunk in a court case. If you still want to patent, go ahead, but don't get too excited about the worth of those patents, unless of course you really have discovered something new, non obvious, and which cannot be circumvented once the concept is understood. Cheers Ian Dickson http://www.commkit.com ------- new post - same topic ------- From: Martha Retallick Subject: Patent attorney recommendation Permit me to recommend the intellectual property attorney who has served my family for two decades, William H. Eilberg. He has offices in suburban Philadelphia and in Nevada. He's also on the Web at: http://www.eilberg.com While you're at his site, sign up for his excellent e-zine. It's well-written, to the point, and always worth reading. Hope this helps! Martha Retallick ------- new post - same topic ------- From: Peter Warnock Subject: Patent attorney I recommend Randall Reed. http://www.levinhawes.com/1/profileRLR.html Peter Warnock ------------------------------------------------------- The LED Digest is sponsored by pair Networks: pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains Copyright 1995-2004 Adam Audette. All Rights Reserved. ----------------------------------------------------------------- "For I am a bear of very little brain, and long words bother me." - Winnie the Pooh |
