Web Ink Now

Socrates: Best practices at work

Recently I stumbled upon a terrific site for "know-how solutions" called Socrates.  I think their innovative Web marketing techniques are worth studying by anyone who wants to cash in with Web content.

What these guys do is sell legal forms (contracts, wills, business agreements, real-estate transaction agreements, etc.) on the Internet. Many marketers at Web-based e-commerce sites would just sit back and say something like  "everyone needs what we have to offer" and use that thinking to justify a poorly designed site.

Not Socrates -- marketers at this e-commerce company employ best practices throughout this great site. 

Front and center on the homepage are appropriate self-select paths based on what kind of form you need: business, personal, real-estate, and contractor. In short, Socrates is organized the way visitors think rather than the way that Socrates happens to be managed.

To the right are "buy" links to immediately purchase and download "best seller" forms. In a clever move, all of the best sellers listed are at the low $9.95 price point. This "show, don't tell" technique makes people aware right on the homepage that the forms are affordable.  Near the bottom are featured products and the left navigation sports a listing of the types of forms available.

What I really like about this site is that you see it all right on the homepage. But the marketers at Socrates don't stop there. Once inside, each form's information page features well-written content describing what the form is and why it is useful. There's a nice "you may also need" link to related forms and documents ready for purchase.

I purchased a contract document I needed for my business and the transaction was quick and easy. I got my PDF document immediately and in a nice content marketing technique, I was offered a package of additional information to download for free. This is a great way to show customers what else is available to cultivate repeat business.

I spoke with several executives of the company and learned that they are doing extremely well. The site is responsible for selling a boatload of forms. Sales are going strong and a huge percentage of customers come back for additional forms. There's no doubt that the company's success comes from the site itself which employs best practices throughout.

Community Building

This weekend my family went into New York to experience Christo's latest work, The Gates. While it is not surprisingly receiving mixed reviews (it is art, after all)  it is getting a whole lot of people talking. Getting people talking about your work is one of marketing's holy grails and it remains a mysterious process that can't be tidily reduced to a marketing formula. Luckily, there are tools available to at least lubricate locution, and some people out there putting them to work well. In a column yesterday, Poynter Online covered an innovation by the Ventura County Star in which the assitant managing editor is using a blog to provide a peek into the paper's internal processes. This provides better-than-real-time feedback for the paper and helps build a sense of community and involvement that helps make relationships that last.

The Lincoln Fry Super Bowl ad Web tie in: Too oily for me

Like all marketing and advertising professionals, I eagerly await the big budget advertiser's Super Bowl ads: What will companies spend money on this year? In a particularly strange ad, McDonald's spoofed the Virgin Mary Toast that fetched $28,000 in a recent online auction. Did you notice the URL at the end of the McDonald's ad -- www.lincolnfry.com?  I did and I went to the site to see what was there.

It seems McDonald's is using the tie-in site to create viral marketing buzz abound the french fry that resembles Lincoln's head. Obviously there was a lot of big-budget ad agency work behind the online efforts. And Yahoo! clearly ponied up some of the costs because the site is hosted on Yahoo and the prop french fry is for sale on Yahoo! actions (363 bids, latest bid $21,600 from "Golden Palace Casino").

The Lincoln Fry site, which appears to be built in Flash, features downloads "Celebrate the Lincoln Fry phenomenon with these fine digital souvenirs, a Lincoln Fry blog (built in TypePad, just like Web Ink Now) and other stuff. The joke was kind of funny in the TV spot and the tie-in home page is OK, but when you enter the site the spoof just gets annoying.

In typical Madison Avenue style, the site is heavy on graphics and style but short on real content. Each time you leave the Lincoln Fry site a rediculous "Leaving McDonald's Web Site" message with corporate disclaimers appears and you're dropped into the Yahoo! home page requiring a needless search for the action itself. I would have dropped visitors right into the auction, but I guess that's Yahoo's marketing point -- you need to look through Yahoo! to find auctions and that helps consumers to see what Yahoo! has. But I think many people will become frustrated and click away, never to return.

I come away from this valiant effort feeling a little bit violated. I think a better approach would have been to tone down the hype and just create a simple spoof site. Rather than all the high-end graphics and ad agency sizzle, I would have created the site in a way that an individual who had found a Lincoln Fry would have -- basic, bare bones, and with lots of content describing it. With all the bells and whistles and tie-ins, this seems too corporate to catch on through viral effects. The blog is better -- it has a stripped down minimalist feel, but how many people will go there?

I read a bunch of articles from major media on the Super Bowl ads from The New York Times, Newsday, and The Washington Post but none mentioned the Lincoln Fry tie-in site. So much for big media helping the viral effect along.

I doubt millions spent on this effort will catch on in any meaningful way, but time will tell. Watch out for those Lincoln Fry t-shirts and if you see one, please let me know.

Boston Globe Sports: cashing in on the Web

Since this is Super Bowl weekend and a hometown team is once again battling it out to be the best in the world, I'm spending more time with The Boston Globe sports section.  But what I find to be fascinating is how the Globe has made use of interactive content on the Boston Globe sports section on the Web.

This is not the typical re-purposing of print content. Instead, Globe editors and sports reporters  provide visitors with tons of ways to interact, including hundreds of active message boards on detailed New England Patriots minutia, a Boston Globe sports blog, surveys to take, statistics to analyze and much more.

The site serves as a great vehicle to generate advertising and sponsorship opportunities for businesses that want to reach Boston's rabid sports fans. According to Ken Richieri, Vice President at the New York Times Company (which owns the Boston Globe) speaking at the SIIA Information Industry Summit this week in New York, The Globe's Boston.com generates 145 million page views per month and boasts 4 million unique visitors per month.

All print media companies can learn from the example of The Boston Globe and its Boston.com site: interactive content is a great way to cash in.

Cashing in with Content at the SIIA show

I’m at the SIIA Information Industry Summit in the awesome Gotham Hall. As this is a professional information industry show, I was curious to see what interesting ideas the presenters had for using content to drive action. After all this is a group of professional publishers. In a panel on balancing online revenue channels, Ken Richieri, Vice President at the New York Times mentioned a cool way to cash in with content.

At the NYT site, photos taken by staff photographers that aren’t used for the print paper are turned into interactive slideshows with audio. I found this great example in a story from today called "Where the Boys Are Is Where the Girls Should Be" covering a recent Paris fashion show. I like this because photos that would normally end up “on the cutting room floor” because they aren’t used in print are turned into content that drives interest (and generates ad dollars) online.

Good Viruses

Pass-along readership is something publishers take for granted, be it in print form--where I dog ear some pages and hand off a magazine to a colleague--or digitally-- via cutting and pasting at some sites and email this article to a friend links at more savvy sites. As with most things digital, this has taken on exponential significance online and transformed word of mouth marketing. Today I read about a Singapore based company called Purple Ace that provides digital content discovery solutions. That's right, all these guys do is facilitate discovery (and no, they aren't a search engine). The premise is that most potential users don't necessarily go looking for content, they rely on word of mouth (or short text message as the case may be). It's Ripple Discover product allows subscribers to pass on purchases to friends, in a copyright protected environment if applicable, resulting in "snowballing." Turns out the company recently used a viral marketing campaign of its own when it launched a ringtone "competition" which it actually hopes will set some sort of record for virally transmitted content. While it isn't surprising that the company currently focuses on the mobile content market--particularly hot in Asia--the theory and practice are worth taking a peak at.