Web Ink Now

ANALYSIS: Value of quote in the Wall Street Journal with a link to your blog and product

Many business people consider a "hit" in The Wall Street Journal as one of the best ways to get noticed. VC funded startups happily pay tens of thousands of dollars a month to public relations agencies to pitch them to reporters at the Journal and other important business publications like BusinessWeek and Fast Company. firms justify their fees when they secure a hit and show the press clips as proof of their skills when pitching new business.

For years I've been convinced that such exposure is overrated in terms of quantifiable measurements of success.

Now before I jump into an interesting analysis, I do want to say that there are many intangible benefits to being quoted in a major business publication or having your product talked about in them. You can put the information on your site and tell all your potential customers. It may convince an investor to jump in, an analyst firm to initiate coverage, or a potential employee to join the company. I am certainly not knocking the many benefits nor would I ever stop speaking with reporters when they call me. Coverage is important.

But what about the tangible results?

On Monday March 17, I was quoted in an article in the print edition of The Wall Street Journal. The article was titled "Attention, Bloggers: For small businesses that can't afford a lot of marketing, the blogosphere offers a cheaper alternative" and appeared on page R5 (the small business section of the paper). My full name (searching on it brings up only me) and my blog URL were both listed in the paper. The article was in my area of expertise and the things I write about in my books and this blog.

The article also appeared in the online Journal at WSJ.com (my blog URL was a hyperlink) together with a companion article called "Recommended Reading Small Business: Marketing With Social Media." In this piece, the WSJ asked Scott Monty for recommend a list of blogs and books for owners and managers at small companies looking to learn more about tapping social media to engage customers online. Scott mentioned my book The New Rules of Marketing & PR and said it is: "A must-read. Mr. Scott delves into strategies of how to reach consumers directly and how to get into the social-networking space." (Thank you Scott).

So what would you expect? Ten thousand extra links that day? More? A thousand books sold on Amazon that day? More? That's the sort of result that many people expect and why they spend so much on PR firms.

The reality is much more sobering.

Let's make a value of 100 as the baseline of the amount of blog traffic I got in an average day this month. On the day of the WSJ hit, I got a 95. That's right, on the day of my WSJ hit with my blog URL listed, I got fewer visitors to my blog than an average day in the month of March. My best day this month was March 5, the day after a post I wrote called "The new rules at universities – authors connecting with students." Lots of people shared that article and some wrote about it on their blogs. On March 5, I scored a 186 (almost twice my average traffic).

The best traffic driver to my blog this year was a result of the hundred or so bloggers who wrote about the publication of my latest ebook The New Rules of Viral Marketing. For several weeks after I published the ebook, my traffic was double the norm.

What about books sales? I'll use my Amazon ranking as a proxy for book sales. The Amazon rank, which updates every hour based on actual book sales, indicates what number your book is among all the millions of books that Amazon sells. Since its release in June 2007, The New Rules of Marketing & PR has consistently hovered in the 250 to 850 range. Early in the morning of the WSJ hit, the rank was about 600. It finished the day at about the same place (meaning that the relative sales rate for that day did not change as a result of the WSJ mention). As I write this on Thursday morning, the Amazon rank is 328, meaning that substantially more books are selling today than Monday when the article appeared. But during no day this week did my rank go above the typical range that it has been for the past nine months or so.

What can we learn from this?
> A hit in the WSJ and other big business publications is great—but not as great as you might think. If you get one, think about tangential benefits (like bragging rights), not actual sales. Think how you can leverage the notoriety, not just what will happen without your help to push it along. Use it to influence other media and analysts, don't just sit back and wait.
> There really isn't a holy grail of marketing & PR. The closest I've found is to create something yourself and publish it online to drive traffic. That blog post I put out had more success than the WSJ. The best thing I've ever done to drive traffic is write an ebook. The case examples I write about prove this theory.
> Lots of little hits are much better than one mega PR hit. Passionate bloggers drive traffic to my blog and help drive sales (thank you all!).
> Mega PR hits may drive some interest with what you do, but you should really think through if it will actually drive sales.
> Maybe, just maybe, WSJ readers buy books in physical bookstores instead of Amazon. Perhaps I'll see a sales bump at Barnes & Noble and other stores in March… But I doubt it.

Forrester Research misleads CMOs by confusing advertising with marketing in new research report

UPDATE November 5, 2007

This afternoon I had a conversation with Shar Van Boskirk, the author of the Forrester US interactive marketing forecast report that I talk about below and Tracy Sullivan, Senior Public Relations Specialist at Forrester Research. They also sent me a copy of the report.

I want to thank them for reaching out to me. Clearly Forrester is monitoring blogs and engaging bloggers. Good for them. Very few companies that I talk about in this blog contact me.

Van Boskirk provided some additional information and clarification about the research which was designed as a way to do market sizing of social media. As she explained, in many cases (such as YouTube) the only way to measure how much marketing activity is going on is to measure advertising and use that as a proxy for total spend. After all, it’s not like companies have a YouTube budget that could be quantified. Forrester analysts also looked at things like agency fees and spending on technology.

I agree. It is difficult to measure marketing in many social media and advertising spend is a decent proxy for the interest in the area among marketers. However, I still believe marketing and advertising are very different and some aspects of the way the report was described in the news release and landing pages was misleading.

Sullivan said that the press release has been added to the media room pages.

+++++++++++++++++++

ORIGINAL POST

Last week Forrester Research "an independent technology and market research company that provides pragmatic and forward-thinking advice to global leaders in business and technology" released a report called US Interactive Marketing Forecast, 2007 To 2012, written by Shar VanBoskirk. I have not read the report, but have seen the news release about it as well as the summary of the report on the Forrester site.

Some of the highlights of the report include:
> "Interactive Spend Will Better Align With Consumers' Media Behavior"
> "Interactive Marketing Will Top $61 Billion By 2012"
> "Search Marketing Will Triple In Five Years"
> "Online Video Ads Perpetuate A Virtuous Cycle Of Growth"
> "Social Media Will Drive Emerging Channels To $10.6 Billion By 2012"

While this data is certainly interesting, I am dismayed that the statistics refer to interactive advertising spending. In my opinion, it is misleading for Forrester to use MARKETING when they really mean ADVERTISING.

As readers of this blog and The New Rules of Marketing & PR will recall:

OLD RULES -- buy your way in with advertising and beg your way in with the media
NEW RULES -- publish your way in on the Web for free

As far as I can tell, this report is about the old rules of marketing (buying your way in) but just applied to the web. As I've said many times, marketers have long-term ingrained habits. Many of us assume that we must spend money to play the game. We equate marketing with advertising (as Forrester has done).

However, as many successful marketers know, on the Web, marketing is not the same as advertising. Marketing is all about creating great content. For free. To be successful, you must unlearn what you have learned.

It's not about advertising on YouTube, it is about making a YouTube video. It's not about advertising on social media sites like Facebook, it is about participating by creating profiles, groups and events on Facebook.

I like Forrester's work. In my last corporate job as VP marketing for a technology company, I was a Forrester client. Some of the companies I work with are Forrester clients. I have found their research valuable.

There is something deeply troubling in VanBoskirk's quote at the end of the press release. "These changes will not only affect the budget structure of marketing organizations, but it will also give interactive marketing professionals a more legitimate seat at the marketing table," VanBoskirk continues. "In fact, with interactive marketing gaining executive visibility as much for its popularity with young consumers as for its measurability and cost effectiveness, we see a class of marketers emerging who will involve themselves with a few high-profile interactive experiments in order to catapult themselves into the CMO seat."

In my opinion, advertising people already had their chance in the CMO seat and they've screwed it up. We've already got CMOs who understand the 30-second TV spot and who are skilled at interruption techniques. That's not marketing. That's not what consumers want. That's why the average tenure as CMO is less than two years according to Spencer Stuart.

Businesses certainly don't need trade CMOs who know TV ads with those who know how to run banner ads on YouTube and Facebook.

Instead, we need CMOs who know how to resonate with potential customers. We need CMOs who are skilled at creating products and services that people want to buy. Instead of dreaming up "creative" ads to interrupt people and shout "buy my product," we need CMOs who are Tuned In to their marketplace. We need CMOs who connect with buyers by publishing great content on the Web.

Here's another interesting thing. When I was writing this blog post on October 15 (four days after the Forrester report had come out), I had wanted to point to the press release on the Forrester site to drive any traffic from this blog to them directly. But the Forrester press release is not on the Forrester site, so I am pointing to it on Yahoo.

I entered the phrase US Interactive Marketing Spending To Reach $61 Billion (the headline of the press release) into Google and (at least the time that I looked) none of the top 50 hits pointed to the Forrester site.

While I completely advocate using the news release wires to send releases, they should also be published on a company's online media room. Maybe it was just an oversight on Forrester’s part.

The new rules of marketing and PR is about publishing interesting content that people want to consume and bringing them back to your own site where they can learn more.

SocialRank launches MarketingLens and PRVoices to rate top PR and Marketing posts

Digg and reddit are great ways of learning what's popular on the web. However when you're looking for what's popular in niche blogs, the services are much less helpful. Technorati is also a good place to see what blogs are popular, but not which individual posts.

What if you're only interested in PR blog posts, or stuff about knitting or motherhood or scrapbooking and you want to know what are the hottest posts?

SocialRank has developed an algorithm that does for blog posts what Google's Pagerank does for websites. It is a mathematical deduction of the days hottest posts. The SocialRank algorithm measures blog post's popularity by looking at things like comments and links, and conversations on and off each blog and ranks them based on all blogs in that category.

This week SocialRank launched with a bunch of niche sites (even one for knitting). Two that interest me are:

PRVoices – which tracks PR blogs. I recognize many of the blogs that appear here, so it would seem that the SocialRank team has chosen well. Note that you can nominate your own blog (or another) to be ranked.

MarketingLens – looks at marketing blogs.

I spoke with the founder of SocialRank, Vishen Lakhiani, who is a true internationalist. A Malaysian, he spoke to me from his home in Estonia. "I worked at Microsoft, than in Silicon Valley, but I got tired of my job," Vishen says. "I did some internet marketing and made a bunch of money that allowed us to create several web 2.0 companies. The idea behind SocialRank sites is to show the most popular posts but without regard to popularity of the blogger. For example, Seth Godin is a very popular blogger. Anything Seth writes about, even if he just wrote about his dog, would get links. So we try to dampen the effects of his popularity to find just the ones that are important. We then rank them based on what’s hot."

The team only launched these sites yesterday, and they are working out some kinks, but they are worth a bookmark. I like what Vishen is up to and I hope they succeed. The market needs this take on what's hot.

Vishen also shared some interesting ways the team is working with their algorithm engine that may lead to some cool new offerings. Stay tuned.

Advertising agency websites: Digital masturbation

One of the fundamental aspects of web marketing is that you need to understand your buyers before you create any content. Who are you trying to reach? What are the market problems of the buyer persona that you are targeting? What resonates with your buyer?

David Koopmans asks: "How good are agency websites?"

Well, I'm a representative of an ad agency buyer. When I was VP marketing at several NASDAQ traded companies I controlled a multi-million dollar budget and purchased services from agencies. Now, on the speaking circuit, I am often asked for agency recommendations by potential clients looking for someone to work with.

My answer to David is that most agency sites suck. As David suggests, part of the reason is the heavy use of flash and a focus on "cutting edge creative."

I would add that agency sites are very light on compelling content. Another observation is that many agency sites use the same tired and worn ways to show that they are "hip" – you know, cool introductions featuring a stylized version of their logo; fun, often black-and-white photos of the principles with funky stuff in the shots (fishing poles and Labrador retrievers are good for this purpose). When everyone does flash and everyone does logo gyrations and when everyone does funky photos it ceases to be hip.

I am drawing no conclusions on the ten sites below. However as a way to show a few examples, and to be as fair as possible, below are the top ten advertising agency brands in the United States as ranked by Advertising Age together with a link to each site.

You be the judge…
1. JWT
2. BBDO
2. McCann Erickson
4. Leo Burnett
5. Ogilvy & Mather
6. DDB
7. Y&R Advertising
8. Grey
9. Saatchi & Saatchi
10. DraftFCB

Based on what I see on the majority of advertising agency sites (I've checked out hundreds), which in my opinion is nothing more than digital masturbation, I advise people not to trust an advertising agency to build their site. While some advertising agencies may build great sites, the majority fail big time and their clients suffer as a result. To be fair, one exception is that an agency may be the best bet for certain purpose-built micro-sites focused on a particular campaign.

Here are two reasons why I tell people to avoid the agencies, together with details on why I feel companies should avoid these approaches.

Flaw # 1 > Ad agencies focus on aesthetics over information.

Advertising agencies try to convince clients to focus on the sizzle instead of the steak. Their advice is to pay more attention to colors and graphics than to the substance of the Web site: content. Often Ad agencies push distracting images or generic stock photos throughout a site and clunky Flash Video introductions or pop-ups on the homepage.

= Why marketers should avoid this:

Visitors who actually want to learn something aren't satisfied and sales are lost. The best Web sites are designed by marketers who have learned to think more like successful publishers: It is important to make a book or magazine readable, but not at the expense of providing something good to read. The Ad agency focus on style over substance is flawed. Imagine if Pulitzer Prizes were only given for design, usability, and functionality but not the actual content?

Flaw # 2 > Ad agencies focus on the wrong part of the sales cycle.

Ad agencies often design sites that feature slick, TV-influenced, one-way broadcast messages that feel like advertising. Ad agencies create sites as if they need to grab the attention of visitors for the first time. Many sites designed by Ad agencies sport all kinds of in-your-face images and messages designed to get you to pay attention.

= Why marketers should avoid this:

When a visitor gets to a Web site, you don't need to grab their attention; you already have it! Advertising agencies' strong focus on grabbing attention is rooted in print and TV advertising models, not a Web content-marketing and publishing model. The ad model is flawed, because on the Web, the challenge has shifted from grabbing attention to informing and educating your visitors through content. People who visit Web sites are often further along in the sales process. But most advertising people don't understand this and create ineffective sites as a result. People aren't looking for TV commercials on the Web, they are looking for content that helps them in some way.

Smart Marketers are statistically improbable according to Amazon.com

Amazon recently turned on Search Inside for The New Rules of Marketing & PR.

I finished the manuscript for the book way back in December 2006 (about a decade in Internet time). As an author, some of the things that get surfaced by Search Inside jolt me. Did I write that? It’s like running into an old girlfriend after many years.

Search Inside takes every word of the book and runs it through a bunch of algorithms. Many authors and publishers don’t like search inside because they feel people can "steal" their work. Nonsense. Having my book appear in search results when someone enters a phrase that is used in the book is a terrific benefit. Search Inside also allows buyers to virtually flip through the book as they would in a bookstore. Being able to browse before a purchase is important for any Web site. Amazon lets publishers opt out of Search Inside, but I think those who do are making a mistake.

I'm particularly intrigued by the Amazon.com Statistically Improbable Phrases which are the most distinctive phrases in the text of books in the Search Inside program. To identify Statistically Improbable Phrases, Amazon indexes every word of every book in the Search Inside program. Phrases that occurs a large number of times in a particular book relative to all Search Inside books are considered Statistically Improbable Phrases. The idea here is if a consumer is looking for a book on a subject, the Amazon search engine surfaces the right books by analyzing the text inside the book, not just the title and subtitle.

Some of the Statistically Improbable Phrases for The New Rules of Marketing & PR include: buyer personas, online media room, news release content, persona research, news release strategy, persona profile, influential bloggers, news release program, search engine marketing, click fraud, landing page, social networking sites, blog posts, online news sites, smart marketers. What a great way to surface long tail content.

So if someone, such as Adele Revella for example, had entered buyer personas into the Amazon search engine, my book would pop up in the book search results page because that phrase is statistically improbable and it appears in my book a lot. How cool is that?

I think the list of Statistically Improbable Phrases that are surfaced for my book is a great one. My book is about those things!

But hey, why are "smart marketers" statistically improbable? What does that say about marketing people?

Gobbledygook in UK news releases

Melanie Surplice at Factiva has added to the Gobbledygook Manifesto analysis by providing some data for UK press releases sent during the same time period as the North America analysis I posted yesterday – January 2006 through September 2006.

While the phrases that are overused are similar, the relative number of uses are different. For example, the phrase "cutting edge" is more overused in the UK than in North America. (Click on the chart to see a larger image.

UK News Release Gobbledygook Analysis January 2006 to September 2006

The Gobbledygook Manifesto -- Cutting Edge! Mission Critical! An analysis of gobbledygook in over 388,000 press releases sent in 2006

Oh jeez, not another flexible, scalable, groundbreaking, industry-standard, cutting-edge product from a market-leading, well positioned company! Ugh. I think I'm gonna puke! Just like with a teenager's use of annoying catch phrases, I notice the same words cropping up again and again in Web sites and news releases—so much so that the gobbledygook grates against my nerves and many other people's, too. Well, duh. Like, companies just totally don't communicate very well, you know?

Many of the thousands of Web sites I've analyzed over the years and the hundred or so news releases I receive each week are laden with these meaningless gobbledygook adjectives. So I wanted to see exactly how many of these words are being used and created an analysis to do so.

AN ANALYSIS OF GOBBLEDYGOOK

First, I selected words and phrases that are overused in news releases by polling select PR people and journalists to get a list of gobbledygook phrases. Then I turned to Factiva, a Dow Jones & Reuters Company, for help with my analysis. The folks at the Factiva Reputation Lab used text mining tools to analyze news releases sent by companies in North America. Factiva analyzed each release in its database that had been sent to one of the North American news release wires it distributes for the period from January 1, 2006, to September 30, 2006. The news release wires included in the analysis were Business Wire, Canada NewsWire, CCNMatthews, Commweb.com, Market Wire, Moody’s, PR Newswire, and Primezone Media Network. Thanks to David Hamm, Glenn Fannick and Melanie Surplice at Factiva for their help.

The results were staggering. (Click on the chart to load a larger image). The news release wires collectively distributed just over 388,000 news releases in the nine-month period, and just over 74,000 of them mentioned at least one of the Gobbledygook phrases. The winner was "next generation," with 9,895 uses. There were over 5,000 uses of each of the following words and phrases: "flexible," "robust," "world class," "scalable," and "easy to use." Other notably overused phrases with between 2,000 and 5,000 uses included "cutting edge," "mission critical," "market leading," "industry standard," "turnkey," and "groundbreaking." Oh and don't forget "interoperable," "best of breed," and "user friendly," each with over 1,000 uses in news releases.

WRITE FOR YOUR BUYERS

Your buyers (and the media that cover your company) want to know what specific problems your product solves, and they want proof that it works—in plain language. Your marketing and PR is meant to be the beginning of a relationship with buyers and to drive action (such as generating sales leads), which requires a focus on buyer problems. Your buyers want to hear this in their own words. Every time you write—yes, even in news releases—you have an opportunity to communicate. At each stage of the sales process, well written materials will help your buyers understand how you, specifically, will help them.

Whenever you set out to write something, you should be writing specifically for one or more of the buyer personas that you want to reach. You should avoid jargon-laden phrases that are over-used in your industry. In the technology business, words like "groundbreaking," "industry-standard," and "cutting-edge" are what I call gobbledygook. The worst gobbledygook offenders seem to be business-to-business technology companies. For some reason, marketing people at technology companies have a particularly tough time explaining how products solve customer problems. Because these writers don’t understand how their products solve customer problems, or are too lazy to write for buyers, they cover by explaining myriad nuances of how the product works and pepper this blather with industry jargon that sounds vaguely impressive. What ends up in marketing materials and news releases is a bunch of talk about "industry-leading" solutions that purport to help companies "streamline business process," "achieve business objectives," or "conserve organizational resources." Huh?

HOW DID WE GET HERE?

When I see words like "flexible," "scalable," "groundbreaking," "industry standard," or "cutting-edge," my eyes glaze over. What, I ask myself, is this supposed to mean? Just saying your widget is "industry standard" means nothing unless some aspect of that standardization is important to your buyers. In the next sentence, I want to know what you mean by "industry standard," and I also want you to tell my why that standard matters and give me some proof that what you say is indeed true.

People often say to me, "Everyone in my industry writes this way. Why?"

Here's how the usual dysfunctional process works and why these phrases are so overused: Marketers don't understand buyers, the problems buyers face, or how their product helps solve these problems. That's where the gobbledygook happens. First the marketing person bugs the product managers and others in the organization to provide a set of the product's features. Then the marketing person reverse-engineers the language that they think the buyer wants to hear based not on buyer input but on what the product does. A favorite trick these ineffective marketers use is to take the language that the product manager provides, go into Microsoft Word's find-and-replace mode, substitute the word "solution" for "product," and then slather the whole thing with superlative-laden, jargon-sprinkled hype. By just decreeing, through an electronic word substitution, that "our product" is "your solution," these companies effectively deprive themselves of the opportunity to convince people that this is the case.

Another major drawback of the generic gobbledygook approach is that it doesn't make your company stand out from the crowd. Here's a test: Take the language that the marketers at your company dreamed up and substitute the name of a competitor and the competitor’s product for your own. Does it still make sense to you? Marketing language that can be substituted for another company's isn't effective in explaining to a buyer why your company is the right choice.

I'll admit that the gobbledygook phrases I chose are mainly use by technology companies operating in the business-to-business space. If you are writing for a company that sells different kinds of products (shoes, perhaps), then you would probably not be tempted to use many of the above phrases. The same thing is true for nonprofits, churches, rock bands, and other organizations—you're also unlikely to use these sorts of phrases. But the lessons are the same. Avoid the insular jargon of your company and your industry. Instead, write for your buyers.

"Hold on," you might say. "The technology industry may be dysfunctional, but I don't write that way!" The fact is that there is equivalent nonsense going on in all industries. Here's an example from the world of local government. "The sustainability group has convened a task force to study the cause of energy inefficiency and to develop a plan to encourage local businesses to apply renewable-energy and energy-efficient technologies which will go a long way toward encouraging community buy-in to potential behavioral changes." Hmm... What the heck is that? Or consider this example from the first paragraph of a well-known company's corporate overview page. "…[Company X] has remained faithful in its commitment to producing unparalleled entertainment experiences based on its rich legacy of quality creative content and exceptional storytelling. Today, [Company X] is divided into four major business segments… Each segment consists of integrated, well-connected businesses that operate in concert to maximize exposure and growth worldwide." Can you guess the company? Answer here.

EFFECTIVE WRITING FOR MARKETING AND PR

Your marketing and PR is meant to be the beginning of a relationship with buyers (and journalists). This begins when you work at understanding your target audience and figure out how they should be sliced into distinct buying segments or buyer personas. Once this exercise is complete, identify the situations each target audience may find themselves in. What are their problems? Business issues? Needs? Only then are you ready to communicate your expertise to the market. Here's the rule: when you write, start with your buyers, not with your product.

Your online and offline marketing content is meant to drive action (such as generating sales leads), which requires a focus on buyer problems. Your buyers want this in their own words, and then they want proof. Every time you write, you have an opportunity to communicate and to convince. At each stage of the sales process, well written materials combined with effective marketing programs will lead your buyers to understand how your company can help them. Good marketing is rare indeed, but a focus on doing it right will most certainly pay off with increased sales, higher retention rates, and more ink from journalists.

I'll be writing a lot more about this in my upcoming book The New Rules of Marketing and PR which will be published by Wiley in mid 2007.

Do you have favorite gobbledygook phrases? Comment on this post or on your blog with a trackback and let me know. Larry Schwartz at Newstex has offered "anything 2,0" as in Web 2.0 and PR 2.0 as his nomination. What about you?

Marketing to Boomfluentials

This morning I had the pleasure of presenting "The New Rules of Marketing and PR" to a group of 100 senior marketing leaders who attended Hanley Wood's American Housing Conference in Chicago. The professionals attending the full conference include Building Product Manufacturers, Home Builders, Full-Service Remodelers, Architects, Dealers, and Distributors.

Hanley Wood commissioned a study of baby boomers for the conference, and I found the data fascinating for any organization that needs to reach baby boomers and sell them anything related to housing. Frank Anton, CEO of Hanley Wood kicked off the demographics study of what Hanley-Wood has dubbed "Boomfluentials" (note – with this real-time blog post written during the study results session of the conference, I win for using this newly coined term first in cyberspace).

Here are my notes from the boomfluentials housing demographic study:

There are 80 million baby boomers, and the first are turning 60 this year. Every 8 seconds somebody turns 60. These people will continue to be the primary driver of housing trends as they have been since the 1960s. Every important trend in the housing market has been triggered by the baby boom. (Boomers needed apartment rentals in the 60s, starter homes in 70s, a move up house in 80s, a luxury home in 90s, and a vacation home and smaller luxury home boom in 2000s.) These demographics drive the housing business.

The Boomfluentials demographics for study = $100K plus income / current homeowner / 50-60 years old now. (This represents 8% of boomers – leading boomers influence others who are less wealthy and younger.) Full reseach available here.

Important trends for this demographic:
"Complete rejection of the status quo."
"Make it new. Make it different. Make it mine."
"65 isn’t old anymore."
"We don’t want to become old and just do nothing."

80 percent of this group will move homes. People are planning to age where they are living now. Boomers want things to be easy – no grass cutting, no painting, easy parking.
Health conscious.

When they move:
51% want to live in American Southeast
14 percent want to live in cities
14 percent in mountains
Small cities, college towns & suburbs are popular

"It’s all about me."
"Because I've earned it."
"I want it all."
"I’m moving forward, not backward."
"Cleaner more contemporary design"
Old people have homes that look old
Vintage = "project" = "work" = no good
"Downsized but upscale" is popular (like their preference in cars).

Want to entertain friends and family, but don't want kids and grandkids people living with them.

They want a house of the best quality materials
They are quality conscious, but not brand aware.

No This Old House.
No Martha Stewart.

Many people don't care about re-sale potential – they want what works for them now.

Lead generation for the complex sale

According to analyst firm SiriusDecisions, during the last five years; the average sales cycle has gotten 22 percent longer. There's no doubt that it is more difficult for B2B companies, particularly those with complex sales cycles, to make the numbers. Into this environment comes Brian Carroll's new book Lead Generation for the Complex Sale: Boost the quantity and quality of leads and increase your ROI.

This is a great book for any organization struggling with getting more and importantly, better leads. The book lays out the fundamentals and explores the varied traditional options such as Web, tradeshows, phone, and direct mail. But there are also some of the newer techniques too such as blogging and podcasting.

I particularly liked that Brian focuses on how marketing and sales can (and should) work together. Too often in B2B companies, marketing and sales are their own islands and the only time that the two departments come together is to point fingers: "We got tons of leads," says the marketing team. "The leads all suck," retorts salespeople (and sales management too).

I'm impressed that Brian's book ideas were originally written on his blog, which focuses on B2B lead generation, sales leads, and marketing for the complex sale. His blog provided interested publishers with direct evidence of his marketability, subject matter, and writing style.

Brian's experience is a terrific example of the power of online content to sell a concept, a product, even a book idea. Today, authors become well-known online first, and then build a book proposal that puts them in a great position with publishers. Blogs are a powerful way for individuals to harness new media to great success.

The Long Tail: LIVE

Here at the SIIA Content Forum (where I'm speaking this afternoon), Chris Anderson, Editor-in-Chief of Wired Magazine and author of the upcoming book "The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More" is presenting the luncheon keynote. My friend Ken Doctor is blogging next to me but the damn wireless here keeps crapping out on us so we may not be able to post till later in the day.

"The Long Tail" is a phrase that’s gotten huge viral juice since it was first used in a Wired Magazine article by Anderson in October 2004. He's now finishing up a book with the same title to be published in July 2006. It's cool to hear about this buzz term from the buzz agent himself.

"I have a background in physics and economics, so I came at this analysis through data," Anderson says. Companies like ebay, Google, Netflix and many others has vast amounts of data of consumer behavior. "Drawing from the data, the bell curve was the twentieth century and the powerlaw curve is the twenty-first." (A powerlaw curve is downward sloping to the right.)

What Anderson is saying for markets is that the old way of reaching the middle market is not the only way to make money now. Reaching the people who have specific demand for the less popular things way to the right of the powerlaw curve is good business. For example, Netflix rents many movies to people out at the long end of the tail of the curve. There are more movies online at Netflix delivered via the post office than a retailer (even Wal-Mart could possible stock in their shore). According to Anderson, "the average Blockbuster is 3,000 DVD titles while Netflix is 60,000 titles."

"The market for niches is anything but," Anderson says. Niche markets are big business. Getting it right will produce great companies and re-value archives of content. "Today’s hit is tomorrows niche."

Infofilter.net is a site for looking at data from companies that provide them via APIs (such as Amazon sales data). Amazon is great to analyze because Amazon has shown the power of findability. Amazon helps us to find, based on our express interest.

Anderson says Netflix buys less of the newer releases than customers would normally demand because they know that demand will drop quickly. So they tend to buy based on demand for some time into the future. Netflix pushes their older titles because demand is more steady and evidence shows that people like the older titles better than taking a chance on new ones.

Anderson says "Google is the classic long tail play." Google has finely sliced keywords to reach the long tail of demand. But Google also allows companies at the long tail to advertise when they could never afford to advertise before.

This is an interesting analysis that has implications for how marketers interact on the Web. Anderson's book sounds great. I would love to get an advance copy.

Interestingly, Anderson is a blogger who works for mega-publisher Conde Nast. His book on niches is being published by Disney. "I'm conflicted," he says. "I believe strongly in the peer production model through blogging. I've given away a bunch of data and given away chapters of the book for peer review. I'm a big believer of the open source book production model. I have more than 2,000 people who have given me free and extremely valuable contributions that has made the book better."