Make 'em Buy or Make 'em Miserable! by Mike Banks Valentine This weekend I watched a program on television called - I kid you not - "Buyology". This show is about marketing and sales of products in the free world. I found the show utterly and completely fascinating -- not because I'm a web marketer, but because it seemed entirely like science fiction, or just plain fiction. It seems there are people out there who spend their workdays studying "consumer behavior" and how to influence that behavior without our conscious participation and knowledge! As a search engine optimizer, my job is to make small business web sites rank well in search results at the major search engines. The goal of that activity is to attract online buyers of my clients' products to their web site. Fortunately, that's where my job ends and the web site takes over. I generate traffic and the site supposedly generates sales. In the real world though, there are people dedicating their professional lives to making certain that consumers not only purchase specific brands, but fall in love with those brands, entice them to buy those brands next time, and indeed to feel they can't survive without those products! The program showed a "marketing anthropologist" following a woman through the grocery store observing her buying habits and asking questions about the purchases made. This woman bought Cascade dishwashing detergent exclusively in a specific size package. When she discovered that size of the product missing from the shelf in the supermarket, she couldn't bring herself to buy the larger box, or -- GASP! -- to switch brands so she could get that same size box! Asked why, she said, "I've always bought that brand in that size, I grew up with it!" This is the ultimate customer as long as Cascade doesn't change the size of that box or alter their packaging. Maybe it's a guy thing, but I honestly don't get it! SudsyDish liquid works too. Now I'll be the first to recommend changes to a web site if I believe it unlikely to sell products once I generate sufficient traffic for a client because the "buy now" button is misplaced or because the site seems unprofessional. Thank goodness though that I don't find myself studying consumer behavior to determine brand awareness or loyalty! I admit that server log files and traffic analysis software serve similar purposes online and can be used to determine visitor paths through the site and tell how they searched keywords to make their way to a client web site. CRM software makes similar attempts to categorize and study consumer behavior but I find it creepy that there are consumer spies viewing my shopping behavior in the department store via security cameras as the Buyology TV program showed me. Session cookies do the same thing online but I can tell my browser not to accept them. My favorite online humor site is called futurefeedforward and they offered a wonderful column this week, "Wal-mart Tags Shoppers with Subcutaneous Cookies" from the year 2009. View the story at http://futurefeedforward.com There's another article, "Ad Pox Cured by Branded Products" at FutureFeedForward that suggests a solution for branded product loyalty guarantees. Consumers will become ill if they can't get their beloved brands and are rapidly cured once the product is purchased again. In other words, "Make Them Buy It or Make Them Miserable!" This comes to us in the year 2064. Gaining search engine visibility for small business web sites seems so much nobler, (ahem!) than selling cigarettes to teens with cartoony camels and determining consumer behavior while spying on them with video cameras in the isles of supermarkets. I think we actually enjoy far more privacy online than we do in the real world. My job is to get people to visit client web sites. I'll leave it to the consumer anthropologists to figure out how to make them buy once they get there. Sheesh! -------------------------------------------------------- Mike Valentine does Search Engine Placement for the Small Business http://website101.com/Search_Engine_Positioning WebSite101 "Reading List" Weekly Netrepreneur Tip Sheet Weekly Ezine emphasizing small business on the Internet http://website101.com/arch/ --------------------------------------------------------
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Buy and Sell your text link ad space for FREE. Why pay a company a percentage of your income every month when you can sell it here for FREE? Text link marketing is here to stay and we are proud to offer this service for no charge to you. What is the catch? Read on... Email Don't Get No Respect! (Apologies to Rodney Dangerfield) by Mike Banks Valentine Is there any doubt that ecommerce and a presence on the web has become de rigueur for every business, large or small? I submit that there is no longer any doubt that clients and customers expect that every legitimate business must have, at the very least, a "business-card" web site listing contact information, business location and a simple "about us" page, along with a contact email link or web form. I don't think anyone can argue any longer that only certain types of businesses belong on the web. Only two years ago, it was still being actively debated whether that were true. No longer can the burger joint be without a menu and operating hours posted online. No longer does any corporation believe it needn't have an intranet for suppliers and employees. No longer can even the self-employed claim they can't benefit from a place to post their resume. Even families have sites to keep the relatives and friends informed and stay in touch. Now many will claim that their web presence does little toward helping them to profit in their business. That is an entirely different issue and I'll go even further and call profit irrelevant to having a web site. Just as profit is unrelated to whether that business has a phone, fax machine, computer, desks, chairs and indoor plumbing. Those are expected, no, required, to a business in order to operate AS a business. So too is the web presence, a domain name, email address and an employee (even if that's you) to handle and respond to email, answer the phone, empty the trash and clean the bathroom. Your business is expected to have a web presence, period. End of discussion. Now to responsibilities related to that web presence. I've been discussing building a site for an attorney friend for two years. She hates email and doesn't want to be responsible for answering it or dealing with anyone electronically. Her legal secretary uses the web daily to research and communicate with clients but knows not to discuss that with the attorney and has told me in confidence that her boss despises email and will have nothing to do with the web. I may as well give it up. I'm going to suggest that this kind of phobia will need to come to an end for all those who expect to get on in the wired world. Get over it, get a web site and answer your email! Grow up! You needn't carry a web-enabled personal digital assistant cell phone (yet) to maintain your appointment calendar and can still scribble notes on scraps of paper if you like. You needn't do your business banking online or own a Blackberry wireless but get a web site and answer your email! I'm unwilling to leave it there. Now let us address those who have web sites and ignore them by allowing old outdated stuff to remain online when it takes only seconds to change it. How about those, such as my favorite newspaper, who post email addresses at the end of every story written by staff reporters to enable readers to contact them and then routinely ignore, and let go unanswered, reader email comments. Not so much as an autoresponder suggesting they can't respond to all emails! Shall we consider things such as corporations soliciting email applications from job seekers - Then not responding to let those potential employees know the resume, application and cover letter were received? Shall they expect to hear back from that HR department by email or snail mail? Fagetaboutit. Not gonna happen. There seems to be a universal disdain and/or fear of emailed communication. I wrote last week of a lack of response from my senator and congressman to email queries to their offices about bills being considered related to privacy and cc'd the president on the note. I'll allow small credit for those autoresponder generated messages sent within seconds back to my emailbox. But this week I saw a story in the San Francisco Chronicle that suggested "Lawmakers Lament Lack of Letters From Constituents". The reporter, Washington correspondent Carl Nolte, even wrote, "Feinstein, for one, has encouraged constituents to send email, since her regular mail has been cut off." Sheesh! This after I got back my note from her last week stating, "Currently IÕve received approximately 30,000 letters and emails which, because of the closure of the Senate office buildings, my staff and I have been unable toand process." Today the autoresponder failed to return that same (or any) response. What does that mean? I emailed a response to that reporter and don't expect an answer. They just don't respond (or autorespond). Feinsteings office has gone back to the normal position of ignoring email. It is time to take a serious look at whether we will accept email as legitimate and deserving of responses, or if it will remain entirely the realm of spammers, scammers and hoax-spreading-urban-myth-generating-pass-this-on-silly blathering goofiness. We should just disable the "Forward" function of email and rid ourselves of those annoyances. I suggest that either email deserves legitimacy, respect and ANSWERS, or that we abandon it entirely. -------------------------------------------------------- Mike Valentine does Search Engine Placement for the Small Business http://website101.com/Search_Engine_Positioning WebSite101 "Reading List" Weekly Netrepreneur Tip Sheet Weekly Ezine emphasizing small business on the Internet http://website101.com/arch/ --------------------------------------------------------
 
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