Internet Marketing Blog

Social Bookmark Marketing Presentation

I am a del.icio.us addict. I save tons of things to my del.icio.us account and republish that content using their wonderful RSS feeds. It's just insanely useful. But as much as I love del.icio.us, there are a few things I'd change:

• In the Links For You section, why can't I accept all the tags from the person who sent me the link with just one click?
• Why can't I archive an entire page like you can with Yahoo! MyWeb?
• Why can't I use a minus sign when creating a tag search so that I can exclude links with a specific tag? e.g. http://del.icio.us/tag/football+news-soccer, so I can get everything tagged with "football" and "news" but not "soccer".

Aside from those admittedly minor complaints, I heart del.icio.us. I've been using it for quite some time now, so I know the ins and outs. I have, therefore, a pretty good idea of how to use del.icio.us in particular and social bookmarking in general as a marketing tool, as well. (And, no, I'm not talking about spam. I'm never talking about spam because spamming doesn't work.)

This is a presentation on social bookmark marketing I recently put together for a seminar on the topic:

| View | Upload your own

You might also be interested in my post on social bookmarking demographics for a breakdown of the demographics of the users of various social bookmarking services.

Marketing To Millennials Presentation

This is a presentation for a seminar Pat Lilja, my colleague at Tunheim Partners, and I conducted on Wednesday for some public health people who are interested in how to reach the Millennial generation. We will have video of the session soon.

The Tactical Marketing Utility Of Social Networking Sites

The more I use social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, and even Flickr and YouTube, the more impressed I become with their usefulness as tactical Internet marketing tools.

The ease with which you can find like-minded people with these sites is pretty breathtaking. The ability to precisely define a demographic target audience is particularly fine tuned with MySpace and Facebook's advanced search functions.

Understand The Community

These sites, of course, are particularly sensitive to their users getting spammed, as they should be. The thing is, the users of these sites are not averse to receiving commercial messages, they just need to get them on their terms. They are happy to be brand fanboys and promote their favorite brands on their pages and friends lists; you just need to give them a valid reason to do so.

That's why it is essential to become an active member of these communities. It is imperative that you understand the culture of a given social networking site. You do that by joining the conversation, listening to the community, and exploring how the community works. Add value to the community by being helpful or providing valuable information or content and in that way build up trust among the community members.

I've also seen many cases where the users of these sites have created their own communities around a brand without the company even being aware of it or before the company has established a presence in the social networking site.

Social Networking As A Media Relations Tool

I'm seeing more and more journalists, bloggers, and other online content creators using Facebook and LinkedIn as a tool for cultivating sources and maintaining relationships with them. This aspect of social networking is clearly mutually beneficial. It makes it very easy to communicate with journalists and bloggers on their terms.

Social Networking As A Business Development Tool

Of all the social networking sites, I am most impressed with LinkedIn, by far. Based on the notion of six degrees of separation, LinkedIn examines the details of your contacts and makes suggestions of people LinkedIn thinks you should know.

Nine times out of ten, those recommendations are exactly right. The people LinkedIn recommends may not always be people I know, but more often than not they are people I know of. And if I don't know who the recommendations are, they are at least in the right industry or there is some clear rationale behind the recommendation.

You never get those bizarre, from-left-field suggestions you sometimes get at Amazon.com. Like, why in the world would you think I wanted a book knitting for beginners?!?

LinkedIn's search function is just as impressive as Facebook and MySpace, except with LinkedIn, you're getting a list of people who are often among the most influential people within their organization. If that person sees that you know some of the same people, they are going to be more likely to trust you than they would otherwise.

As with Facebook, I'm seeing a lot of media people on LinkedIn. A search for "New York Times" returns 50 pages worth of results.

Punch Pizza Flickr Photo Contest Campaign

Punch Pizza was in the process of getting their web site built when they came across a blog post by local pizza blogger Aaron Landry that was mildly critical of Punch for prohibiting him from taking a photograph of their pizza oven, as was wren at Flickr.

Landry's post led them to Flickr and they realized that many people were posting they'd taken at Punch Pizza locations and the quality of those photos were striking. On Facebook, they found a Punch Pizza fan club.

If your product or service is great, then your customers are likely to fans as well. Punch has great food and as the Flickr photos and Facebook fan club illustrate, they have fans.

This social media activity inspired Punch to create the Punch Neapolitan Pizza "Capture Our Fire" Flickr photo contest. Though they had legitimate business reasons to keep people from taking pictures of their ovens, Punch Pizza eliminated the no-photos policy. As Landry's blog post and the photos of Punch at Flickr made clear, their customers were also fans. If they wanted to take photos, the potential of someone stealing trade secrets was outweighed by making their customers happy.

They are giving away $3000 worth of Punch Pizza dining cards to the winners and they'll use the contest entries for their new web site when it launches. That will certainly make customers very happy.

We helped punch Punch navigate the social media waters by building the infrastructure through which they could learn a new way of communicating with their customers.

Punch Pizza co-owner John Puckett wanted to let Aaron Landry know that they'd changed their photo policy and were launching the contest, so he emailed Aaron and invited him to take part in the contest.

With that, the contest was launched.

Corporate Blogging - The Team Approach

Though most people understand the concept, corporate blogging is still a relatively novel concept that encounters a significant amount of reluctance to employ as a marketing tactic. Often, one of those barriers is a perceived lack of resources. Who will be the blogger? How much time will it take?

Team blogging is often the answer.

Last November, the Marketing Voices podcast interviewed Southwest Airlines' PR Manager Paula Berg about their team approach:

• Southwest Airlines Blog

Roger Clemens Posts Steroids Denial On YouTube

Major League Baseball pitcher Roger Clemens has posted a video to YouTube denying the Mitchell Report allegations that he was a "juicer." This is a fascinating new tactic for online reputation management:

Hillary Clinton's Rapid Response Microsite

Maid-Rite Sandwich
Originally uploaded by oanais

On my way home from work yesterday, I was delighted to hear the NPR report about Hillary Clinton's campaign stop in Iowa at a Maid-Rite because back in the day, when I went to school in Iowa, a Maid-Rite hamburger basket (which comes with thinly-sliced onion rings) with a strawberry shake was a regular meal for my girlfriend and I. Nummm.

But then I heard the down-on-her-luck waitress from the Maid-Rite that Clinton visited say that the Senator did not leave a tip.  I winced. That is fundamental politics, folks. How do you not leave a tip for the working woman? I expected this story to overtake Clinton's debate-flub story in the news cycle.

The only problem was that the campaign did pay a tip, a $100 tip on a $157 bill, to be exact. NPR had gotten it wrong.

In response, the Clinton campaign launched The Fact Hub, a rapid response microsite to combat inaccurate coverage. NPR quickly appended an editorial note to the original story on the web site.

The rapid response site is a great, if not obvious, idea.

The site includes blog-like posts rebutting various news stories and campaign issues, and YouTube video clips rebutting a given topic or story. The site includes an RSS feed to which you can subscribe.

That's great as far as it goes but I think the campaign is missing a huge opportunity, here.

If I were them, I'd add to the site the ability for visitors to subscribe to a rapid response email update, a rapid response text message update, and a rapid response instant message update. This would allow them to respond in near real time.

Hillary Clinton
Originally uploaded by
Will Merydith

I didn't know the NPR story was inaccurate until I read the headlines this morning. That left from about 5 p.m. yesterday till 6 a.m. this morning for me to discuss or even blog about the story with a lot of people, spreading the falsehood in the process. Getting a text message shortly after the story aired would have obviated that problem.

I would also add MP3 audio clips from the candidate and/or campaign staff commenting on the story, as well as embedabble code for photos and video about the story in question for the blogosphere to use. Bloggers would love it because, hey, it's additional free content that they don't have to spend time creating and it makes their blog posts all the more richer. That would also encourage friendly bloggers to seed the blogosphere with the rebuttal.

Still, rapid response microsites are a great reputation management tool for the online politics of presidential campaigns.

The Pitch Is Dead! Long Live The Pitch!

  Chris Anderson 
  Originally uploaded by Uncleweed

Wired's Chris Anderson ranted about inappropriate PR pitches and revealed some of the practice's apparent practitioners by publishing a list of public relations pros' email addresses as retribution for sending him untargeted pitches.

I won't defend the practice because I think it's ineffective and a waste of time. I don't spam people in general and certainly not journalists. If I want to pitch a journalist, I will find the most relevant publications or news outlets and find the beat reporter's email address, not the editor in chief's. I'll do a bit of research about the reporter and the stories s/he have covered to be sure I've got the right reporter. That just makes sense.

And blind pitches do not make sense. But Anderson's blacklisting and public posting of these people's email addresses is petty, vindictive, and embarrassingly childish.

First of all, everyone gets spammed. I probably get about 200 spam emails a day. It's a fact of life. Deal with it. It makes about as much sense as throwing a hissy fit over getting direct mail. Just throw it away, fer Godsakes!

Also, as one of the commenters to his blog points out, email addresses are incredibly easy to spoof. It's entirely possible that some of the people on his list were themselves victims of spoofing and had actually done nothing at all wrong. Did he validate all the emails? I doubt it.

Lastly, Wired.com doesn't exactly do a stellar job of making it clear which reporters cover which beats, so some of the blame for Anderson's grievance certainly falls at the feet of his very own employer.

Still, Anderson's post reveals, I think, an attitude many reporters have toward PR people that they are not to be trusted. I've seen this attitude in some reporters I know myself.

The Spin Era

I guess it's understandable since we are at the tail end of an era in which the public relations profession was dominated by one primary tactic, spin.

During the spin era, you highlighted the positive and ignored the negative. You reinforced your message through repetition of a clever phrase. The Spin Era went from the sublime ("It depends on what the definition of is...is") to the ridiculous (Mission Accomplished).

The advent of blogs have rendered spin ineffective, even quaint. The roiling conversations taking place in the blogosphere have laid bare the inauthenticity of spin.

People are now savvy enough to see through the catchy phrases and ask what is being hidden and what has been omitted.

The spin cycle is broken.

Open Source PR

Where the Spin Era used talking points; the Open Source PR era should use facts and transparency to help re-establish a relationship based on trust.

The manipulation of the Spin Era helped create an adversarial atmosphere between PR pros and the press, with the PR guys trying to spin their message into the reporter's story, leaving the reporter frustrated and suspicious. 

It should be noted that this dynamic is certainly not universally applicable; the best PR people build relationships with reporters that are helpful and trustworthy, that serve both the clients' and the reporters'  happily. 

Yet a there remains a significant amount of tension between many spokespeople and journalists, and perhaps part of the problem is the format of the press release itself. In this day and age, the traditional press release looks like nothing more than an inauthentic hype sheet that serves neither client nor reporter very well.

And this may be where the Social Media Release comes into play. Instead of providing reporters hype, PR pros might simply supply the parts that make up the story: Sourced facts, quotes, photos, graphics, audio and video clips.

What if reporters could subscribe to your news releases through the magic of RSS? Can the social media release become the new email pitch?

Rather than attempting to shape coverage of a story, public relations practitioners might serve as a resource for covering the story.

If PR pros become resources for reporters, facilitators that help them do their job, perhaps the journalists will seek out the spokespeople rather than the other way around.

The Case For Video Biographies For Business

A colleague sent me a blog post (YouTube At Work: Why Your Employees Should Be On There) recently that discussed the virtues of using online video for business. It's a topic I think about a great deal because video marketing is a component of Internet marketing that is growing ever more important.

But because the advantages of video marketing are so vast and varied, the overall topic is too big to tackle in one blog post. I will, therefore, break the topic down into its components and write a series of posts on various aspects of video marketing.

Today I'll address a topic I've been tossing around for some time: Video Biographies for Business.

Staff Biography Web Pages

Many company web sites include a staff section that include an individual page for each employee featuring their written biography, a photograph of the employee, and such essentials as their title and contact information.

Why not add a short video interview of that employee to their bio page?

The Benefits Of Video Biographies For Business

The benefits of video biographies are many.

People are familiar and at ease with the medium. Americans have been watching television for 60 some years. And, as the extraordinary popularity of YouTube demonstrates, people love to watch video online and increasingly are coming to expect it.

Video biographies are easy to use. It is a lot easier to watch a video than it is to read. I'm not suggesting that video should replace written biographies, but why not make it easier on your site's visitors by offering them the option to watch a bio instead?

People are increasingly distrustful of faceless organizations. Video biographies can help a great deal in overcoming that obstacle to gaining people's trust. Trust, after all, is the foundation of any business transaction. Video biographies will help humanize organizations by focusing on the people that make up the organization rather than the faceless entity itself.

In Naked Conversations, authors Robert Scoble and Shel Israel credit the Channel 9 video blog with helping to humanize the monolithic Microsoft corporation. Bill Gates has been one of the most vilified chief executives ever. This video interview with the head of Microsoft for Channel 9 shows he's human who likes the 24 television program and maybe even a little boring when he talks tech. But it's hard to consider him evil after watching the video:

There is nothing like building trust than seeing someone eye-to-eye, even if it is through video. Video biographies showcase the humans in an organization, and people are much more likely to trust other people than they are an organization.

Video can help demonstrate the passion, expertise, or competence of your staff. Humans' presence and demeanor cannot be communicated through text. A person's tone of voice and phrasing can convey emotional triggers that are lost in print. When people love what they do and are confident in their abilities, those qualities come through loud and clear when they talk about their jobs. Video can demonstrate that better than any other medium.

Video biographies can familiarize your staff with strangers and provide an icebreaker. Most people will look for a biography or other information about strangers they are about to meet with in a business setting. Video biographies can help strangers not just recognize one another but the content of the video biographies can serve as a conversational icebreaker.

Video biographies for conferences, events, or speaking engagements. Many organizations offer select employees to serve as speakers or as experts or representatives at conferences and business events. Such events traditionally include a list of participants and short biographies of those people. More often than not, these bios are posted online. Providing embeddable video biographies is a great promotional tactic that will definitely make your biography stand out.

Video biographies can help strengthen media relations. Journalists are trained to be professional skeptics, so they are more inclined than most to distrust organizational messages.  Video biographies for organizational spokespeople put a personality to what is often just a voice over the phone for journalists. Just as for anyone visiting your web site, video biographies can help to humanize your organization to reporters and help build trust with them.

Finally, video biographies can be marketed off site. In addition to featuring video biographies on your organization's web site, video biographies can be marketed off site at video sharing sites, as well.

The Obstacles To Implementing Video Biographies

Asking your employees to be interviewed for video biographies may be a tough nut to crack.

Plenty of people are uncomfortable in front of a video camera. Some people may feel uncomfortable about having a video of themselves online. These are legitimate concerns and should obviously be honored. Video biographies should be voluntary.

Not everyone in the organization need have a video biography. Certainly, the top leadership of an organization should have video biographies, especially if they want to convince lower level employees to have their own. Video biographies are most important for the people who are often in contact with others outside the organization.

For the camera shy, these people need not even appear in the video if they don't want to. They could be interviewed off camera and appropriate visuals could be edited in over the course of the video.

How Should Video Biographies Be Done?

Though the style of video biographies will depend upon the nature of the organization, here are some thoughts on how video biographies might be implemented.

The interview format will probably be the easiest and most natural format for your employees to execute.  Include job-related questions (what do you do? what is the favorite thing about your job? etc.) but also include some personal questions that will help viewers get to know the person rather than the employee.

More often than not, video biographies should be informal and conversational so as to reinforce that this is a person rather than a spokesperson or an employee.

Unless you're a slick production studio who wants to demonstrate your slick production capabilities, I think raw, even amateurish video helps to reinforce that personal and informal atmosphere.

Video biographies can also be as simple as the subject talking directly into the camera telling the viewer about themselves without the presence of an interviewer. This format might be more difficult to pull off because the subject may try and read from a script or memorize a script and therefore come off as less genuine.

Conversely, video biographies could be as sophisticated as a Ken Burns documentary complete with voice over and featuring a montage of images and video that is not necessarily about he subject directly but related to the subject's bio.

You can get as creative as you like with video biographies but always remember that their primary purpose is to build trust.

See Also:

• Yahoo Upgrades Search Engine, Blends Search Results

On The Record...Online - PR Podcast

Eric Schwartzman
Originally uploaded by
edelman_talkshop

I have been a big fan of Eric Schwartzman's On The Record...Online podcast since I discovered it a couple of years ago.

Eric Schwartzman is the president and founder of iPressroom and the managing director of Schwartzman & Associates.

On The Record...Online is a public relations podcast with a unique, fascinating, and educational focus: Every month Schwartzman interviews a journalist or someone in the PR or news media business primarily about how they use the Internet for their jobs.

For someone like me who is fascinated with, and needs to know about how people behave online, I find the podcast extremely valuable in helping me understand how best to approach online PR.

For public relations professionals in general, Schwartzman's monthly podcast should be a must-listen for the insight not just into how journalists use the Net, but also for their views of the media industry and how that landscape is changing due to the Web.

A minor complaint: The first five minutes of the On The Record...Online podcast is devoted to housekeeping items and self-promotion.

Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against self-promotion; it is a primary reason to do a podcast, or, in my case, a blog. Publishing a podcast or blog is a wonderful way to market yourself by demonstrating your expertise. In Schwartzman's case, I think the podcast itself accomplishes that by the quality of the content and high-profile people he interviews.

I can tell from his interview questions and the people he gets as guests that he's well-connected and understands PR and, especially, online PR. It seems to me, then, that he could leave the  overt self-promotion for the end of the podcast because his interviews themselves are self-promotion.

Despite that quibble, I am a big fan of the podcast.

Listen to the most recent On The Record...Online with BusinessWeek's chief of correspondents, Joseph Weber.

See also:

• (Not So) Daily SearchCast - Search Engine Marketing Podcast
• Across The Sound - New marketing podcast

Google Trends Gets MUCH More Useful For PR Pros

Google's tool for tracking search term popularity, Google Trends, just got a lot more useful by updating their search term data daily rather than monthly, reports Mashable.

The upgrade to Google Trends also includes a Hot Trends tracker that shows you the 100 most popular search phrases for a given day and even look deeper at individual search phrases. 

For example, the third most popular search phrase on September 24, 2007, the eve of the Halo 3 video game release, was "g4tv.com/halo." By clicking on that phrase's link on the Hot Trends page, you can see the details of the search data for that phrase.

The upgraded Google Trends also includes a Hot Trends gadget to add to your iGoogle start page and an RSS feed for Hot Trends so you can subscribe to them with your RSS reader.

The most useful new feature is the ability to change dates on the Hot Trends so you can view historic data. This feature will give us the ability to track the life cycle of searches and search types as well as to better understand search behavior, particularly event-driven or media-driven search surges.

I've noticed, for example, that people search for football-related information on Sundays and Mondays, the days of the games. The last two Sundays have a high proportion of NFL players' names among the most popular searches.

The September 17, 2007 Monday Night Football game pitted the Philadelphia Eagles against the Washington Redskins. The top searches for that day included "hyperbaric chamber," "andy reid," and "charles barkley."

Andy Reid is the head coach of the Philadelphia Eagles and the Monday Night Football broadcast team discussed his sons' recent legal problems. The broadcast team also mentioned that one of the football players playing that night used a hyperbaric chamber to help with their game. And finally, former basketball great Charles Barkley was "in the booth" of the Monday Night Football team.

Clearly, viewers were turning to the Web for further information that they heard about on the broadcast.

Google Trends is now an invaluable tool to help Internet marketers and public relations professionals gain insight into how offline media and events affect search behavior.

Preemptive Marketing

One of the first things I do for a new client is conduct an audit of their current online presence and assets. That includes not just how their web site is faring in terms of traffic and visibility, but what domain names they own and what accounts have they opened with any centers of online gravity?

I call this Preemptive Marketing. Dictionary.com defines preemptive as "taken as a measure against something possible, anticipated, or feared; preventive; deterrent."

In our case, then, Preemptive Marketing is doing some kind of marketing activity in anticipation or defense of a potential opportunity or danger. The purpose of Preemptive Marketing is simple: To prevent someone else from obtaining your name or brand and/or preserving the future option of using your name or brand in specific ways and places.

Domain Name Strategy

The first and most obvious example is with an organization's domain name strategy. Does an organization own all the domain name variations of their name or their brand names? Do they own the .org, .net, .tv, et al versions of their name?

Unless you can afford it, you don't have to go crazy with this by buying up not just example.com, .org, .net, .tv, .us, .info, .mobi, .name and .biz, but also all the crazy variations that the domain name registrars now give you: myexample.com, yourexample.com, examplehome.com, exampleonline.com, examplewebsite.com, etc. The list goes on.

The most important reason for securing all the variations of your domain names is primarily to prevent someone else from using it. You never know what people will do; you may have a net-savvy disgruntled customer or employee who decides to exact revenge online.

Having secured our primary domains, let's turn our attention to the Web 2.0 centers of online gravity.

Web 2.0 Preemptive Marketing

It seems a new Web 2.0 startup is launched every five seconds. As this graphic shows, there are a dizzying array of Web 2.0 services and sites out there already:

Web 2.0 Collage logos
Originally uploaded by premiardiego

You certainly don't need to register an account most of them but you certainly should open an account with the most popular ones and those that are most applicable to your organization, services, products, or target audiences.

By far the most popular Web 2.0 sites are MySpace.com, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Flickr, but you can find plenty more at these Web 2.0 industry sites:

• Mashable
• Webware's Top 100
• Everything 2.0 blog
• Listio's Everything Web 2.0 Directory
• Web 2.0 List
• All Things Web 2.0
• Killer Startups

Such sites are often an invaluable tool for reaching very narrowly targeted audiences. For that reason alone, it is a good idea to set up shop at such sites.

These sites often use the username of your account to create your online profile at their site.  These profile pages can often rank well in search results. These are the URL structures of some of e-strategy.com's profile pages:

• www.myspace.com/estrategy
• www.youtube.com/estrategy
• www.flickr.com/people/e-strategycom
• technorati.com/people/technorati/estrategy
• del.icio.us/e_strategy.com
• digg.com/users/estrategyblog
• estrategy.newsvine.com
• estrategy.jaiku.com
• estrategy.tumblr.com

You'd obviously rather have control over that link than having someone else controlling it and the content on those profile pages. It's better, then, that you own the account.

Micromarketing Strategy - 3 Words

Fred Smoot Tackles Steve Smith
Originally uploaded by bpatton

A friend of mine told me yesterday that Washington Redskins' and former Minnesota Vikings' cornerback Fred Smoot had been cut.  I was skeptical. As a football nut, I follow NFL news quite closely, so had Smoot been cut it would have caught my eye and I surely would've known about it.

Turns out Smoot wasn't cut, at least not during this round of roster moves. But he had been cut previously and that is why my friend thought Smoot was out on the street. He'd read a headline from a blog aggregator that had not been updated in some time. The headline was an old one and the headline was all that my friend had read of the story; it read "Fred Smoot Cut."

Three words.

My friend got the message; it's just that it was wrong. His mistake is understandable. It happens to me all the time. I read only the headline of a vast amount of content because there's far too much for me to consume. Even if the headline is current and accurate, I've got absolutely no context or depth to the story that goes with it.

I constantly preach that you must be able to boil your message down to three words.

As information distribution channels proliferate through RSS and as more and more people consume information through an increasing array of mediums and devices such as RSS readers and smart phones, the importance of developing a micromarketing strategy only increases.

The reason your message must be boiled down to three words is that it has to fit in an email subject line if you're doing an email marketing campaign, it must be easily scannable when read on a smart phone if you're doing a mobile marketing campaign, and it must be easy to digest when read in a list such as a in a blog reader or when you're doing online PR when using an Internet wire service.

But it's not just the logistics of where your message will be displayed and how to make it fit that you have to think about. As the aforementioned Fred Smoot story illustrates, you have to think about what knowledge your three-word message will convey to the recipient now and in the future.

Music Marketing Through Blogs, or How I Tuned Out & Discovered New Bands

05.26.06 @ The Wiltern, Los Angeles CA
Originally uploaded by voxtrot

I was trolling Upcoming.org last night to see what shows were coming up and it occurred to me just how important MP3 blogs have become for marketing music and bands.

As a frustrated musician, I love music. As those of us who are passionate about our music can attest, there are few things better than discovering new musicians and bands. And though I don't get to as much as I'd like, I love to see bands live.

Back in the day when I played in bands and had a ton of time on my hands, I'd devour newly discovered  bands, listen to as much of their music as possible, memorize the lyrics to their songs, watch for their videos on MTV (yeah, that was back when MTV actually aired music videos).

There were three primary ways you'd learn about new bands back then: 1) friends, 2) radio, and 3) MTV. Nowadays, I find new music through MP3 blogs.

I've tuned out of music radio because I have no patience for the commercials. With the exception of stuff like talk radio-sports or otherwise--and live events, I just don't listen to radio. When I do listen to the radio for music, I listen to The Current, Minnesota Public Radio's ad-free modern music station. But even The Current has annoying pledge drives to give me a reason not to listen.

When I want music, I turn to my trusty iPod and that gets filled from the MP3 blogs to which I subscribe. Some of my favorites:

• Stereogum
• IndieFeed
• I Am Fuel, You Are Friends
• An Aquarium Drunkard
• The Yellow Stereo
• Large Hearted Boy
• The rest of my bookmarked MP3 blogs

So I learn about new bands not from traditional sources but from my favorite MP3 sites, MP3 search engines like Hype Machine and elbo.ws, and music sharing sites like last.fm. I think I'm becoming the rule, rather than the exception. Plus, I spread my love these bands among my friends and coworkers. They laugh because I have a "new favorite band" every week.

Back in the day, when I wanted to go see a band, I'd go to the Entertainment section of the Sunday Star Tribune, our local newspaper, or I'd get a copy of our free weekly alternative newspaper, The City Pages. Or I'd hear about upcoming concerts on the radio.

Now I go to Upcoming.org, or, occasionally, the web site of a nightclub that has live music like First Avenue or The Fine Line. I'd rather pay ten to twenty bucks for a far superior performance in a nightclub for a relatively unknown band than $200 to $350 for an inferior concert by an international superstar in a cavernous auditorium.

But for MP3 blogs, though, I would not have recognized three-fourths of the bands with upcoming gigs that were listed on Upcoming.org.

In addition to MySpace and YouTube, MP3 blogs have been a boon to music marketing, especially for the unsigned musicians and bands.

I may have only downloaded the one or two promotional MP3 songs that Voxtrot or Spoon released online for blog fodder, for example, but now I know who they are and am more likely to buy a CD or go to a concert. Were it not for the MP3 blogs, their names would not have jumped out at me on Upcoming.org.

From a music lover's point of view, too, MP3 blogs have made a vast amount of music far more widely available than ever before. I'm constantly amazed at the amount of great music out there.

And that is what we Internet marketers do in fact call, "A very good thing."

Read More: Music Marketing

Domain Name Strategy - Follow Up

Last Tuesday I discussed a domain name problem I ran into after I was interviewed for Future Tense about the Minneapolis bridge collapse and they omitted the hyphen from this blog's address when they cited it on air: They said estrategyblog.com rather that e dash strategy blog dot com.

Because I had not yet bought the hyphenless version of the domain, I stood to lose some very targeted and valuable traffic to my blog as a result of the interview.

Consequently, I had to scramble to buy estrategyblog.com, forward it to e-strategy.com, and write a blog post seeded with "estrategyblog.com" on the assumption that radio listeners would use that as a search phrase if they wanted to find my blog after hearing the interview.

Here are the results of my efforts:

Search Engine Visits

Since Tuesday, this blog had seven visitors who found it using "estrategyblog.com" as a search phrase. Those visits had a bounce rate of 25.57% and the average time on site was 12:57, which says that the information on the blog matched what they expected to find and was compelling enough for them to stick around and read it.

Further, those visitors averaged 2.43 page views, so they were interested enough in the overall blog rather than just that specific post, making them prime candidates for becoming regular readers.

Search Engine Marketing Results

By the following day, August 8, 2007, Google had found, indexed, and listed my blog post for the search "estrategyblog.com":

Yahoo hadn't found the post yet (nor as of this writing) but provided a link directly to the domain, so I likely didn't lose traffic even though the actual post wasn't listed:

Windows Live Search hadn't found the post as well (nor as of this writing) but asked if I was looking for e-strategyblog.com and provided a link, so, like Yahoo, I likely did not lose traffic here as well:

While seven visitors is obviously a tiny, tiny sliver of my overall traffic, because I know they came to my blog after hearing the interview on Future Tense, they are highly qualified visitors. Future Tense is a self-described "journal of the digital age" so I know that it's listeners are interested in technology. Because of the topic of my interview, I know these visitors are interested in Internet technology in particular and social media specifically. That adds up to make them highly likely to like the topics I address in this blog.

Time Shifted Media

The other thing to consider is that the interview is likely to have a very long afterlife, the proverbial long tail.

Future Tense distributes each episode as a podcast, as well, so they are not just being consumed over the airwaves. They post a summary on the Future Tense site for each episode that includes the MP3 file of the episode, a Real Audio stream of it, and a link to the episode in iTunes.

Not only are existing Future Tense podcast subscribers going to hear the episode but anyone coming to that post about the episode can listen to it as well. And because there's a downloadable MP3 file of the episode there, the episode could end up anywhere online.

People will often listen to their podcasts at their leisure, not necessarily the day of, or even the week of, the original broadcast.

I would not be surprised to find people searching for "estrategyblog.com" a year from now after people found and just finished listening to that particular episode on the web somewhere. Or, in the event of another disaster, it's entirely possible that this episode of Future Tense will get referred to and I could consequently see a spike in traffic as a result.

So it is important to have the mis-cited domain name active, and those search results in place, to funnel the traffic from those delayed searches to my blog.

e-strategyblog.com vs. estrategyblog.com

Case Study: Domain Name Strategy

Hyphens in domains are problematic when it comes to earned media, online or off.  A perfect case in point presents itself to me today.

As I posted minutes ago, yesterday I gave a radio interview to a reporter from Minnesota Public Radio for the Future Tense program about citizen journalists' role covering the Minneapolis bridge collapse.

At the end of the interview, the reporter cited this blog but omitted the hyphen: "David Erickson runs  estrategyblog  dot com." I don't fault the reporter; it is entirely too common for people to omit hyphens from domain names when they cite them. It's just an inherent danger that you have to live with when you use hyphenated domains.

I bought e-strategyblog.com to match my company's domain: e-strategy.com. But as a result I have to emphasize the hyphen when citing the address: e dash strategy dot com, e dash strategyblog dot com.

People usually go to search engines if they want to find out more about something they discovered offline. So, in this case, if they wanted to read this blog, they'd either search for my name or the blog's name as they heard it: estrategyblog.com.

If I don't already have that domain in place, then it's likely people will be frustrated when they try and find me.

And I did not have the domain in place, so I'm very likely losing a lot of potential readers. And the Future Tense audience, because it is technology focused, is very likely to like this blog.

Here's how I'm addressing the situation:

1) I bought the estrategblog.com domain and I'm having it forwarded here (as of this writing, the forwarding has yet to take hold).

2) I'm writing this blog post and seeding it with the keyword estrategyblog.com in the hopes of it showing up quickly in search engine results (and blogs do tend to show up faster than web sites).

If you're planning a new web site or domain take these things under consideration. If you want a hyphenated domain, chose one that also has a non-hyphenated counterpart and put the forwarding in place.

See also:

• Domain Name Strategy - Follow Up