Internet Marketing Blog

LinkedIn Marketing Presentation

I've found LinkedIn to have the most remarkable technology I've seen in a long time. By examining the relationships among my contacts and among my contacts' contacts, LinkedIn can suggest people I may, or should, know. It is breathtaking just how accurate it's predictive abilities are and how often. Nine times out of ten, the person LinkedIn says I should know, I know of and know that I should know them.

This fascination with LinkedIn has made me take a very close look at the service, and, as I am wont to do, examine it as a marketing vehicle. No, not as a way to spam but as a way to build business relationships. Or just relationships.  I have, as a result, created a presentation about how to use LinkedIn strategically for marketing purposes:

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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.

Protecting Your Online Identity: The MPR In The Loop Interview

The interview I did with Minnesota Public Radio producer Julie Siple about online reputation management aired yesterday on the Morning Edition show.

I thought she did an excellent job with the story: You can read it here and listen to it here (in RealPlayer format).

The interview is for a show called In The Loop that includes a live audience component and the show has its own Gather page, Public Radio's social networking service. Unfortunately, the story doesn't include any of the live audience portion. UPDATE 10/16/07: Listen to the full In The Loop show including audience participation.

I realize this was a story for radio and therefore needed to be edited accordingly, but, at the risk of sounding egotistical, as I've mentioned before, I would've liked to have seen the unused portions of the interview put online to provide more depth to the story. I didn't say anything particularly profound during the two interviews, but there were plenty of things that would have been helpful to people worried about managing their online reputation.

Such a practice would be easy and wouldn't require much additional labor. If the interviewee had offered some comments off the record or only for background, that would have to be edited, but aside from that, I don't see how it would be that tough to do.

Regardless, it was a fun interview and interesting to hear the final story. And, oh yeah, she did take my advice and dot-commed herself: juliesiple.com.

What It's Like To Give A Radio Interview

Perhaps it's serendipity but it's funny how things work.

On August 1st, the 35W bridge collapsed in Minneapolis, for the next few days I watched and subsequently wrote about the Minneapolis bridge collapse and citizen journalism.

As a result of that post, I was interviewed by Joseph Jaffee for his Across The Sound new marketing podcast, during which I brought up the issue of reputation management during such crises.

That interview got me thinking about reputation management in general and that I hadn't really wrote about the issue here, which resulted in a new blog category for the topic and few new posts on the subject:

• Preemptive Marketing
• Persona Marketing - Marketing Characters Online
• Consolidating Online Identities

All of the above has presumably led a Minnesota Public Radio reporter to find and interview me about managing your reputation online.

We had two fairly in-depth telephone conversations where I discussed some of the technical aspects of how search engines work and why some web pages get ranked higher than others, as well as some practical tips for managing your reputation online.

She followed that up with a request to tape an interview with me, which she did at my office.

She gave me two examples of people who had encountered negative information about themselves onlilne. A few days later I got a call back from here asking to re-interview me because her editor suggested she make the story about herself rather than the two examples she asked me about.

Considering the topic, I did some online research about her and learned a great deal about the reporter. I discovered plenty of news stories she'd produced, so I got a feel for what she was interested in professionally. I learned where she had gone to college, some of her attitudes about college, that she is very smart because she'd been awarded some fellowships to work abroad, so I also knew where she had traveled. I found a full color photograph of her.

Further, from the information I found, I could also deduce her age and her income. I had essentially built a fairly comprehensive demographic and psychographic profile of this reporter.

I found nothing damaging about her except a few things she may consider slightly embarrassing.

I gotta say, she really took one for the team by making the story about what information there was about her online.

The interview was a little weird because it was my first experience doing a radio interview that wasn't over the phone. She arrived with a little black brick that was her digital recorder and attached a set of black headphones to it and a big black microphone to it as well. It was all very sleek, black, electronic goodness. I totally want one.

Anyway, while she was interviewing me, she would direct the microphone at my keyboard whenever I went to use my computer. The only problem is that my notebook has a very quiet keyboard! At the end of the interview, she recorded about 30 seconds of room noise which is used to fade from one segment into my interview so it doesn't sound like an abrupt transition.

At one point I said something quoteworthy but the tape wasn't running, so she asked me to say it again and I think I pulled it off, but I think it sounded better the first time.

The interview was for a relatively new show called In The Loop that  incorporates live audience participation. The live show for which I was interviewed will be held on October 11, at MPR's UBS Forum at their Saint Paul studios (register for tickets here).

I'll let you know when the show goes online.

Consolidating Online Identities

I've spent this week talking about the importance of claiming your online identity by creating accounts and profiles with the various social networking and Web 2.0 sites.

When you begin to do this, though, it immediately becomes apparent that you're going to have a logistics problem on your hand when you try to manage all these accounts.

The service does not yet exist but whoever creates a unified login/management application that will allow you to update your MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn pages, upload content to your YouTube and Flickr accounts, manage your del.icio.us and StumbleUpon bookmarks, and post messages to your Twitter and Jaiku microblogs will have an instant hit on their hands.

We need consolidation tools.

Though it doesn't address the problem I've just outlined, Spock is a new entry in the people search space that offers a way to consolidate all of your online outposts on one page.

If you've never used Spock you may nevertheless find your name listed there because it appears the "people search engine" is harvesting data about individuals from sites like LinkedIn. I found two friends listed at Spoke whom I am certain have not used the site, much less heard of it. Both listings included my friends' names, their geographic location, their job title, and a link to their LinkedIn profile. As Facebook opens up their profile pages to the search engines, expect that site to be added to Spock's crawl list.

If your name is in Spock's search results, you can "claim your search results" by creating an account and filling out your profile. It's a rather clever approach on Spock's part because it certainly gives people an incentive to create an account and add data.

Two of the main features of Spock are the ability to add links to all of your online profiles and the ability for you to apply tags to your profile. (Spock allows anyone to apply tags to your profile, which begs the question: What's to prevent people from tagging you an "idiot" or some other derogatory term?)

If it takes off, it could prove to be a great platform from which to promote yourself.

Also Read:

• The  Spock blog
• Vanessa Fox's excellent overview of the people search space at Search Engine Land

Persona Marketing - Marketing Characters Online

Yesterday I discussed the importance of preemptive marketing as a reputation management tactic.

Today, let me address another reputation management tactic that should be considered for within an overall brand marketing strategy: Persona Marketing.

There are several types of personas:

• Celebrities are their own personas and brands
• Consumer products and services that use a character for branding
• Creative intellectual property that contain characters such as novels, movies, and video games

With the exception of celebrities, whose being and persona and brand are one and the same, personas are not actual human beings.

If you, your business, product, or service depends at least in part on a character or persona for brand marketing, you need to consider how to use that persona online.

Celebrity Personas

lindsay lohan
Originally uploaded by elsabet

If you're a celebrity, "your people" should be registering accounts to all the various Web 2.0 social sites if only for preemptive marketing purposes.

Someone, for example, has created a Lindsay Lohan Twitter account and is using it to make fun of Lindsay Lohan's penchant for getting into trouble.

On the other hand, a Steven Wright fan has created a NotStevenWright Twitter account and is using the microblog for posting Wright's one-liners. It's too bad Wright himself hadn't done the same because, with it's 140 character limit, Twitter is the perfect format for promoting the comedian because his jokes are generally within that size limit: "I replaced the headlights on my car with strobe lights. Now it looks like I'm the only one moving."

There are countless personas for consumer products or services but I could find few who were putting those characters to work online in a strategic manner.

Consumer Product/Services Personas

Frito-Lay's Chester Cheetah Cheetos character, for instance, is a natural for a MySpace page. He's a sunglass-wearing cool cat: "It's not easy, being cheesey."

Chester Cheetah could show off his commercials on the videos page; photos on the pics page; and he could blog there as well. If he adopted the MySpace culture, built up his friends list, commented on his friends MySpace pages, shared music, etc., the page could be a powerful platform from which to extend the brand.

But there is no official Chester Cheetah MySpace page. Search for Chester The Cheetah MySpace at Google, and the first link is to a video clip from Family Guy that portrays Chester Cheetah as a bandana-wearing, Rush fan getting his fix.

There is one MySpace user who has adopted Chester Cheetah as his MySpace persona and there is a Chester Cheetah fan group with 162 people.

Chester Cheetah is being appropriated at MySpace but there is no official alternative for people to find or friend.

Last year I wrote in depth about Comcast's online marketing of their spokesturtle personas, Bill and Karolyn Slowsky, that included a YouTube channel for the TV ads, an official web site, and a blog where Bill and Karolyn talked about all things slow.

It's a great example of effective persona marketing online.

The Marlboro Man is not a good fit for MySpace or any other space that is known as an online teen hangout, but I could see him having a blog. He could just talk about the cowboy life and man's men things. He would not even have to mention cigarettes.

Book/Movie/Video Game Personas

Characters from creative works are potentially a very rich source for persona marketing that can help extend the brand online.

I don't know if it is a deliberate, official campaign, but it looks like it could be: Someone has created MySpace pages for all of the major Lord Of The Rings characters. And they are all one another's friends, of course.

The Frodo MySpace page includes this description from the About Me section:

I am Frodo Baggins. Im am a hobbit from the Shire. My best friend is Sam. I am the Ringbearer of the one ring. I had to travled to get to mordor to destroy the one ring. Sam and i must destroy the ring before its to late. Finally we get to mordor and destroy the ring of power. Now everyone can get back to normal. Me and Sam were heros.

Frodo would like to meet "people from Middle Earth" and he has 1004 friends; foremost among them are Bilbo Baggins, Samwise the Brave, Gandalf and the rest.

If this is a case of citizen branding, the citizens have done a great job and have treated the brand well. But citizens will not always be so kind; better to be proactive than reactive.

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.

Marketing With Web 2.0 - A Communications 2.0 Presentation

This is the full presentation Ann Treacy and I gave on marketing with Web 2.0 technologies, called Communications 2.0. We presented to a nonprofit communications class at Hamline University.

This lecture is divided into twelve segments that cover the theories and technologies behind Web 2.0; marketing with photo sharing sites such as Flickr; podcasting and podcast marketing through such services and search engines as Odeo; viral video and video sharing sites like YouTube; social bookmarking marketing with services like del.icio.us; feed readers and RSS marketing through services like Bloglines and Technorati; microblogging and mobile marketing through text messaging and instant messaging with services like Twitter; marketing with document sharing services like Google Docs; event marketing with online calandar services like Google Calendar and Upcoming.org; expertise positioning with answer services like Yahoo! Answers and Answers.com; and the lecture is capped off with a question and answer session.

• Links and PowerPoint presentation for this lecture

See also:

• Communications 2.0 - The Theory Of Web 2.0 - Part 1
• Communications 2.0 - Flickr Photo Sharing Marketing - Part 2
• Communications 2.o - Podcasting & Podcast Marketing - Part 3
• Communications 2.0 - Viral Video Marketing - Part 4
• Communications 2.0 - Social Bookmarks Marketing - Part 5
• Communications 2.0 - RSS Marketing - Part 6
• Communications 2.0 - Blog Search Engine Marketing With Technorati - Part 7
• Communications 2.0 - Microblogging & Text & Instant Message Marketing With Twitter - Part 8
• Communications 2.0 - Marketing With Google Docs - Part 9
• Communications 2.0 - Event Marketing With Google Calendar & Upcoming.org - Part 10
• Communications 2.0 - Establishing Expertise With Yahoo! Answers - Part 11
• Communications 2.0 - Questions & Answers - Part 12

Communications 2.0 - Establishing Expertise With Yahoo! Answers

This is the eleventh part of a presentation Ann Treacy and I gave on Web 2.0 technologies, called Communications 2.0. We presented to a nonprofit communications class at Hamline University.

The eleventh segment discusses establishing your expertise by marketing yourself or your organization by providing answers using services such as Yahoo! Answers:

See also:

• Communications 2.0 - The Theory Of Web 2.0 - Part 1
• Communications 2.0 - Flickr Photo Sharing Marketing - Part 2
• Communications 2.o - Podcasting & Podcast Marketing - Part 3
• Communications 2.0 - Viral Video Marketing - Part 4
• Communications 2.0 - Social Bookmarks Marketing - Part 5
• Communications 2.0 - RSS Marketing - Part 6
• Communications 2.0 - Blog Search Engine Marketing With Technorati - Part 7
• Communications 2.0 - Microblogging & Text & Instant Message Marketing With Twitter - Part 8
• Communications 2.0 - Marketing With Google Docs - Part 9
• Communications 2.0 - Event Marketing With Google Calendar & Upcoming.org - Part 10

Whole Foods' John Mackey Is No Dog

  Internet Dog 
  Originally uploaded by vena_wolf.

"On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog," says the famous New Yorker cartoon, to which I'd add, yet.

On the Internet, people may not know you're a dog, or a CEO, but they can find out. Whole Foods' CEO John P. Mackey discovered that brutal fact yesterday when news broke outing him as Rahodeb (i.e. Deborah, his wife), an online persona he created in order to anonymously champion himself and his company's stock on Yahoo Finance's message boards.

During seven years of online anonymity, Mackey posted 1,394 messages, according to 24/7 Wall St. Among those posts were glowing missives about one John P. Mackey. According to Stockpickr's The Best Collected Works of John Mackey post,  on January 19, 2000 Rahodeb said (emphasis mine):

Contrary to your argument it appears that WFMI is trading at a premium to the market--not a discount. Does Mackey get credit for this premium for being a brilliant CEO??!! Why else is the PE ratio so high for this company?

While it is amusing to hear someone write so glowingly about themselves, it is also interesting from an online PR point of view to see a chief executive aggressively engaging an online audience. The only problem, obviously, is that he did it anonymously.

While you can hardly expect CEO's to engage audiences on finance message boards because of the many inherent risks of doing so, engaging in online discussions is a practice corporate American will increasingly need to do as a standard PR tactic. But that will require them to drop Corpspeak and engage in a genuine dialog.

Mark Cuban is a pioneer in just such communications with his Blog Maverick blog.

Ironically, Mackey can count himself as one of the new communicators among American CEOs with his very own blog at the Whole Foods site. One of the articles of faith of the blogosphere is the issue of transparency; the more honest and open you are as a blogger, the more credibility you'll have with your readers.  It is surprising, then, that as a blogger, Mackey apparently did not get that.

Beyond that, though, it is stunning that the consequences of being outed didn't prevent Mackey from posting anonymous messages to a financial message board in the first place.

There's a standard that used to be applied to email but works equally as well for any online communications: Don't post anything that you wouldn't want to see printed on the front page of the New York Times.

The fact that people can collaborate so easily online means that if a given group of people want to discover the identity of an anonymous online participant, they probably can through using open source research, if you will.

The fallout in Mackey's case is substantial: Negative publicity for himself and his company and potential legal problems.

The reputation management advice I'd give to anyone considering such a tactic is Don't Do It!

MikeCiresi.org - Cybersquatting In The Minnesota US Senate Race

I originally published this story in the June 7, 2007 issue of the Politics In Minnesota newsletter. I'm posting it here because it has a lot of bearing on Internet marketing in general and on online reputation management in particular.

Cybersquatting & Wikipedia Intrigue

A Google search for the words "mike ciresi" revealed an interesting Internet marketing tactic. But by whom remains a mystery. At the very top of the search results you'll see a highlighted link that is labeled a "Sponsored Link." That's an ad purchased by the Ciresi campaign that points to the ciresiforsenate.com site.

It's the first link in the "natural" or non-advertising search results that's  interesting. That link reads Mike Ciresi and points to mikeciresi.org.  Clicking on that link takes you to what appears to be, and is--and isn't--Ciresi's  Wikipedia entry.

It is the Wikipedia entry in your browser but that entry is "surrounded" by the mikeciresi.org domain. If you click on any link on the Wikipedia page, you'll notice in your browser's address bar that the address of the page never changes; it always remains at mikeciresi.org. Mike Ciresi's Wikipedia page is located at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Ciresi yet that address never shows up in your address bar.

The technique is called domain masking. It entails some simple HTML code called "framesets" that essentially encloses all browser activity within the domain that is used for masking purposes. You can see how it works by using your browsers' "view source" function when you're at mikeciresi.org.

In effect, you never leave mikeciresi.org but can surf the Web within it. The only way to escape the domain is by hitting your back button until you reach your original Google search or by typing a different domain in your browser's address bar.

There is nothing sinister at all to this practice per se though it's a bit of a mystery as to why it is being done in this case.

The domain mikeciresi.org ranks 1st when you search for "mike ciresi" because it contains the words "Mike Ciresi" in the Title area of the site that shows up on your browser's title bar and the words are contained within the domain itself, an important consideration for Google rankings.

The campaign's domain, ciresiforsenate.com, has not been optimized for the phrase "mike ciresi." That basically means that those words have not been placed prominently or strategically enough on the pages of the site for Google to recognize that that is the topic of the site. It explains both why that domain does not rank well for Ciresi-related searches and that in turn explains why the campaign is buying ads on Google.

Though Google knows about ciresiforsenate.com (it has 21 pages from the site in its index), the search engine obviously doesn't consider the site relevant enough for the search "mike ciresi." Further searching revealed [NOTE: The following data was accurate when this piece was originally published but have since changed, possibly due to search marketing done by the campaign]:

• mike ciresi us senate campaign website - no links on the first page of Google
• mike ciresi senate campaign web site - no links on the first page of Google
• mike ciresi us senate - no links on the first page of Google
• mike ciresi for senate - no links on the first page of Google
• ciresi for senate 1 link to mikeciresi.org and no links to ciresiforsenate.com on the first page of Google

The ciresiforsenate.com domain name was purchased on February 11, 2005 by Ciresi's State Director Kerry Greeley (Tim Walz' former campaign manager). Six months later the mikeciresi.org domain was purchased anonymously from a domain registrar in Germany on July 14, 2005.

Greeley does not know who registered mikeciresi.org and no one has contacted the campaign about it.

But why mask Ciresi's Wikipedia entry?

There are only two reasonable explanations: 1) Since mikeciresi.org points to the relatively innocuous Wikipedia page, the domain is controlled by someone outside, but friendly to, the campaign, or 2) the domain is controlled by someone who may or may not be a friend but, if hostile, may be pointing it at Wikipedia to keep their powder dry, so to speak. Considering that the domain was purchased on foreign soil, if you will, the safe bet is on the latter. Also, since Google tends to rank Wikipedia pages near the top, masking that page may be an attempt to fool Google into thinking the domain is a Wikipedia entry so it will rank well.

View the screenshots (click on the graphic for more detail):

Google Search For "mike ciresi":

mikeciresi.org Masking Mike Ciresi's Wikipedia Entry:

HTML Source Of mikeciresi.org Pointing To Wikipedia Entry: