We work on a lot of different things and it’s easy to get yourself caught up in the "I want our business to offer everything". I overheard someone getting a quote from someone outside our company for something and I asked the person next to me "Why aren't we doing that internally? We've done it before and we easily could". The person then rattled off a bunch of high profile, very important projects and a reminder of our current staffing levels. And of course my reply was "yeah, but we could do that". And then the person said something, without any earlier mention to the context that came through loud and clear.

"Those aren't the Cool Ranch Tacos, that’s like the side of beans, focus on the Cool Ranch Tacos."

For those living under a rock, Taco Bell had a smashing success with the Doritos Locos Tacos, blowing their projected numbers out of the water, just crazy success levels, according to one report approximately 1M were sold per day since being introduced to the market. From a non-sales perspective, the menu addition added 15000 new jobs related due to the product alone. They then immediately followed up with the natural successor, the Cool Ranch Tacos. Everyone who likes a taco that I've talked to is super excited to try them, just the thought conjures up a tasty sensation for the pallet.

Then there's the beans, how could you possibly have a Taco Bell without beans? The answer is "you couldn't", they're obviously incredibly vital to Taco Bell.

But let’s face it, when's the last time that someone said "hey, have you heard about those beans at Taco Bell, they're awesome and we all need some." No, it’s just not going to happen despite us all agreeing that beans are a crucial staple to the Taco Bell experience.

I'm sure Taco Bell has big awards and kudos conventions like every company... and who's going to get all of the kudos and rewards this year: The guy focused on the Cool Ranch Tacos or the Beans?

And while in 5 years, the Doritos Taco product owner may have moved on to something new and great, the beans guy is probably still focusing on how to drive even lower costs on production line of a product that's been worked on and optimized already year-after-year-after-year.

Which brings me back to our business... when time and resources are a factor and you're working with people who are wowed by the latest and greatest, which then drives your follow-up projects: You can either focus on the Cool Ranch Tacos or the side of beans, and at this point in our businesses lifecycle the Cool Ranch Tacos seem like a lot more fun.

You’ve done the hard work, you’ve chosen the keywords, dialed in the targeting, and built the landing pages – Google & Bing are ready to serve your ad, and you’re ready for some new customers. But why should a user click on your ad as opposed to another, or even an organic result? Writing a PPC ad is like trying to get a date through a text message, you’ve got to be convincing, and you don’t have a lot of characters to spare. This is the art of SEM, and here are a three proven techniques that will help.

1.       In exact match ad groups, use keywords in ad headline

a.       Because you have spent the time to break down keywords into relevant ad groups, spent the time to make sure the ad copy is relevant. Not only will this increase your CTR, but it will increase your relevance, which will increase your Quality Score on Google & Bing.

2.       Use anxiety in your ad copy

a.       When testing ad copy on a high volume ad group, I tested the core message of that ad – one with anxiety, one without. Guess which worked better?

                                                               i.      “Don’t miss another customer”

                                                             ii.      “Reach millions of customers”

b.      “Don’t miss another customer” had a higher click through rate in all ad groups it was tested.

3.       Dynamic Ad Headlines with broad match ad groups

a.       If you have broad match ad groups, you recognize that your keywords are going to cover a large set of queries.

b.      To help increase CTR in these ad groups, use dynamic text. {KeyWord:PPC Advertising}

                                                               i.      Capitalize the “K” and “W” so that proper case is used when inserting the keyword.

                                                             ii.      Choose a relevant ad title in case keyword is greater than 25 characters. In this case, I used PPC Advertising as the ad title. Assuming that the keywords were relevant to that query.

Now it is time to test. Set both engines to even ad rotation [Google has “experiments” to aid with this], and watch the CTR and conversions. A key metric to understand the true effectiveness of an ad is Conversion Per Impression [CPI = Conversion/Impressions]. It is a true measure of your keyword choice, and ad copy, and landing page quality.

Keep in mind that testing is not a one-time event; it needs to be continually tested and optimized. Don’t be afraid to try something new or bold.  

Reading Kristina Halvorsen on my new Kindle Fire this morning, I came to the realization that I'd recently been shirking my strategic responsibilities as publisher of online content.  I've recently become team lead on an online outbound content program for a client's technical audience. My official title when I first came on the team over two years ago was "content strategist."  I managed curation and aggregation of the inbound content resources when evaluating products.  To the extent of my job scope, I absolutely fell into a content strategy role. 

As my experience and responsibilities expanded into more of a marketing communications role on the team, my oversight into content strategy was compressed into larger responsibilities around outbound marketing strategies for the experience.  The organization shifted, and thusly, content strategy was folded into everyone's ownership.

Now the lead on our team, my interest in content strategy is rekindled and three-fold:

1. Exceeding client needs around technical guidance for its leads and existing customers (measured by satisfaction with the program)
2. Our client draws a lot of web traffic and this can make it easy to approach marketing from a "drag-and-drop perspective," focusing on checking off channels rather than finding and converting influential customers. In some ways, channels are more productive for meeting goals and easier to measure, but I've seen this approach backfire in vendor relationships - your value is discounted, devalued in favor of the very channels you've cultivated. But how do we find those influentials, convert them to advocates, and measure this?
3. Having launched its website back in CY11 Q3, Exsilio - now ready with beautiful actionable data for more than a quarter - is ready to optimize the site.  There's an opportunity to combine analytics with a content strategy audit and build a strong case for specific tweaks to improve our lead acquisition and nurture our current client base. 
4. These very analytics are also converting me to the idea that blogging and inbound content strategy overall can drive a very targeted lead to your door, long-tail style. (Yes, I know I'm late to this party.) 

The result here is that I'm spending the next twenty business days proving the practice of what I preach - blogging on these four topics to create a forcing function for my yearly goals. I'd love your feedback and helpful encouragement.

Search has dominated content discovery and research for the last 10 years. However, the advertising and traffic dominance leveraged by Google’s search algorithm excellence has slowly been subsumed in the last 5 years by Facebook and a rise in social signals to drive traffic around the web. In 2009, Google reacted to this trend with a “personalization campaign,” a shotgun approach to algorithmically providing Search Engine Results Page (SERP) relevance by 57 signals around the user’s identity, rather than simply semantic language queries. There is no “standard Google” any more. Eli Pariser’s recent work indicts this trend, and suggests problems with information retrieval in an algorithmically-personalized filter bubble. There are implications for search engines, for users, and for brands; but I want to focus on the implications for anyone who creates and curates content for online distribution. Journalists, editors, and content strategists.

For those of us that create and curate content, search is something we recognize as a foundational commodity. Our job is generally cultivating a long-term relationship with the customers/audiences, punctuated by elements of transactional marketing. The process as I’ve generally participated in it involves SEO as an integral part of the planning process, but deprioritized in favor of clickstream and referral data as the pages mature. This is an “exploratory search” perspective, so it’s helpful to provide some historical context before talking about the impact of some of the recent social shifts in search results.

There are a couple of different ways to talk about search as it’s evolved over the years. These are really organized by task and query depth. The task is really “what do you want to know?” In the early days of the web, the type of answer you wanted determined not just the type of query but also the engine. “Exploratory search” really answers the “what do you want to know” question with “I don’t know – just give me everything on this topic.” This is generally unstructured data (lists of results organized only by relevance) in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).

Faceted search, is a more recent entry into the online search space. Rather than offering the black box experience of a Google or Bing front page, users can filter and pivot the query, personalizing the relevance. A good example is Yelp, which focuses its search results around user-queried local business. There are filters for business types, rating, neighborhood-specific proximity. Parallel to this rise is the growth of folksonomies, do-it-yourself classification strategies that are multi-topical and not necessarily hierarchical. Witness the power of Delicious – a social bookmarking site – that allows you to discover other user’s relevant bookmarks through culturally common “tags.” Click on one of those tags in my tag cloud, and then look at the tags in the right nav that are related to that tag. This can be a method for both filtering and discovery of new topics around a given concept.

In the examples of faceted search above there’s a heavy leveraging of social media, which is mostly unstructured data. But faceted search can also be a wizard-oriented approach to structured data. The rise of mobile and its virtualized search box without regard for the computer desk has resulted in narrowly focused task- and location-based faceted querying. Queries are action-oriented and one answer in scope. An example is “Seattle Weather.” You don’t need 15 pages of results, simply 1 page of authoritative sites with accurate forecasts. Bing’s marketing campaign for the last year or so has attempted to differentiate its results offering as a “Decision Engine.” Another example is CNet’s Cell Phone Finder.

What’s the important editorial takeaway for this differentiation? Search intention is different than it was 5 years ago, and information architects need to bear in mind the importance and implications of search as a foundational commodity. We once only wanted to discover. Now we also want to accomplish. What intention does your content surface? Is your content transactional and static? If so, traffic will be from well-defined sources (company home page, exploratory search, etc.), and keyword strategy becomes key. For content that’s technically deep, relying on multiple pivots to slice and dice particular topics, faceted searches become a lot more important to discovery, and social media along with strategic linking strategies will prove more impactful to customers. In the next part of this series, I’ll focus a little more on influentials and curation as a new signal for search engines (and enterprise search) to incorporate.

As a sort of addendum to Jason Bennet's post about client expectations from cloud services, I wanted to mention the PlayStation Network. PSN has been down for six days now, the last update mentioning only that Sony doesn't "have an update or timeframe to share at this point in time."

There are differences between Amazon Web Services and PSN, of course, the primary being that AWS is a paid service. However, the initial MSRP of the PlayStation 3 was $600, an extremely high price for a console. One of the features on the box, and a feature that continues to be noted on the home page of the PlayStation, is access to the PlayStation Network. So regardless of the lack of subsciption fee for PlayStation Network, there is a client expectation that they have paid a premium for the physical product with the understanding of 24/7/365 access to the free service.

Unfortunately, Sony's handling of this disaster has only exacerbated the problem. On April 20th, Sony took down the PlayStation Network. Their initial statement said, in toto, "We’re aware certain functions of PlayStation Network are down. We will report back here as soon as we can with more information.  Thank you for your patience." The next day they said they were "investigating the cause of the Network outage." The day after that they mentioned an "external intrusion," and said they took down the network themselves, back on the 20th. Many of their customers and game journalists understood "external intrusion" to mean the hacker group "Anonymous" who had recently gone after Sony. After the hacker group vehemently denied responsibility, Sony didn't mention it again. Officials at Sony have said they don't know if customer account data, including credit card numbers, have been compromised. Their blog includes only 3-4 line updates once a day, where they mention things like "Our efforts to resolve this matter involve re-building our system" with no estimated date or time for when something that sounds so monumental might be finished. There has been no explanation as to why this is happening. Rumors have swirled, none of which Sony has directly addressed. Games that depend on PSN for full functionality aren't getting sold. Products available for sale ONLY through PSN are obviously not getting sold either. Many of these titles are the lifeblood of indie game companies.

Compare this to XBox Live troubles 2 years ago after Christmas - Microsoft's Major Nelson stated the exact nature of the cause (Christmas rush led to a huge usage spike), possible work-arounds, estimates, and at the end of it, customers got a free XBox Live Arcade game and 1 month of free service. The whole busines was soon forgotten.

It's highly unlikely that will be the case with Sony. In all, their network disaster has turned into a credibility disaster, and the repercussions are bound to affect not just Sony, but many companies in the PlayStation environment. Sony has blogs, twitter feeds, facebook pages, and none of those are being used to communicate anything meaningful to their customers. The lesson here is a simple one - don't just have a plan for disaster prevention, have a plan for disaster recovery that includes customer communication and marketing. Because day six of the outage of your 24/7/365 network is too late to come up with a plan.

Update: Since I posted this initially, Sony has admitted that user accounts were compromised. Again, this is six days after the initial breach. User IDs, passwords, and credit card information are all at risk.

photo by Origamidon on Flickr

Early yesterday, Amazon's cloud offering, Web Services (AWS) had widespread failures and latency issues, effectively blocking Amazon's clients from serving up online services. This effectively blocked companies like Reddit and Hootsuite users from their main services.  Hootsuite was completely shuttered for the day, and Reddit blocked logins to the site.  With this reminder of the risks associated with heavy investment in the cloud, it's worth surfacing a couple of terms to think about when considering a cloud offering.

High Availability.  This is the idea that moves beyond mere uptime for all of your servers, and focuses resources to make sure high-business-impact components are not just up, but have multiple systems of redundancy. No failure allowed.

Points of failure. Again, server uptime isn't sufficient for discussing problems that arrive 1 or 2 hops away from your customers. Diagramming the network points between your services and your customers can identify weak links that won't surface in mere platform uptime analysis.

The irony in Microsoft's recent "all in" cloud messaging is that the for businesses focusing on online services, supplying "brick and mortar" customer service argues the vice versa of traditional disaster recovery. The message is still the same - hedge your bets on platform and network, investing in solutions that deliver 24-7 global services that customers demand.

Most project execution delays and failures are the result of poor communication. Email, while enabling a broader communication footprint with large groups of business stakeholders, is not a substitute for deeper and more productive verbal conversation. To alleviate directional uncertainty, there is no substitute to the phone call or face to face meeting.

Marsha Egan, CEO of The Egan Group, Inc. is the author of Inbox Detox and the Habit of E-mail Excellence, a book that helps employees and executives examine and improve their email habits to save time and increase productivity. “Email is a very effective communication tool upon which businesses rely heavily,” says Egan. “However, we have developed a dependency on email that saps productivity. Many people can’t keep up with their inbox and simply declare email bankruptcy.”

According to Egan, the average email interruption consumes four minutes of work time.  “If a worker receives an average of 15 email interruptions per day, one hour of time is lost to email interruptions. If that worker is part of a 20-person department, 20 hours of work time are lost per day. Then, if the employees average $20 USD per hour, the company loses $2000 USD per week due to a loss of worker productivity.”
 
To increase email productivity, Egan recommends to:

1) Keep emails short and concise
2) Send less email (as emails will lead to more and more emails).

More on increasing email productivity can be found on Egan’s blog, www.inboxdetox.com

For my current role as a business management consultant, I follow some core personal preferences for communication:

I prefer sending email when I would like to:

1. Communicate workflow to a broad audience
2. Start a thread amongst a group of people to gather opinions
3. Build consensus
4. Summarize a meeeting

I prefer  picking up the phone or visiting someone's desk, for one on one communication (pending location and time zone constraints), and suggest a meeting to go deep with an individual or group.