Marketing Hipster

I am a big fan of the Foo Fighters and they have a new album coming out.  They just released their first video and song, it is a pretty cool video, so I thought I would share.

Has ever happened to you?  You were surfing the web or watching TV or driving or listening to the radio and you saw or heard something that caused you to grab your trusty computer and type in a URL. Fabulous! Guess what, us marketers love to hear you have done that because most of the time, it was some sort of marketing or advertising which grabbed your attention enough that you literally went to where we wanted you to go. Great news!

Now tell me if this has happened to you. When you got to the URL, before you can do what you went to do on the web page, you need to register and the registration form was longer than the Magna Carta? Yup, this has happened to me a number of times as well and I have been wondering just how many people stop right there and do not continue with the web site because either the web site was forcing a registration or that the registration page was just too long.

I understand the rationale involved with registration pages. Web site owners want to capture as much information as possible about their users and hopefully be able to use that information to market to their users better. Though I have been thinking that for a great many of these sites there is another reason.  Many of these web sites are not offering enough for a user to come back a second time, so this is the first and ONLY time they have to get as much information out of their users as possible.

Here’s an experiment I would like to do. Develop a web site that the initial registration is three questions; first name, email address and zip code. That’s it. With that information, I can contact this person again, I can personalize that next communication with his or her first name and I know what part of the country they live in. Now if I created a site that offers people something of value they will want to come back time and time again and as they come back again and again, I can ask them further questions about themselves. And I bet if they see the value in my web site as well as the reasons why I am asking, they will be that much more willing to share their information with me.

What are your thoughts? Do long registration pages turn you off and stop you from registering?

So my vacation plans ended very early unfortunately and I had to go out of town for the last week or so. It is a very long story and not worth getting into, but lets just say that instead of feeling refreshed and re-energized from a vacation, I am exhausted. Oh well what can you do, I am happy that I am back and back into the swing of things.

During my time away, one evening I was watching some TV and watched for the first time the ESPN original series The Bronx is Burning. If you are a baseball fan, I highly recommend it. John Turturo is truly amazing as Billy Martin. The series is being sponsored by Mastercard which means that during every commercial break, they of course played a Mastercard commercial. Mastercard had one of their “Priceless” commercials with a baseball theme.

What I found interesting at first and then incredibly annoying later is they played the exact same commercial every fricken time! Now it is not a bad commercial, but it gets bad rather quickly when you watch it over and over again. My question is why if Mastercard paid a great deal of money to be the sponsor of this show and they know they will have one of your commercials played at each break, wouldn’t they create more than just one commercial?

It was interesting the night I starting watching this show, ESPN was playing a marathon of all the shows so in a period of three hours I must of saw this damn Mastercard commercial 15 times or more. And I would say right around the eighth or ninth time, Mastercard and this commercial truly made me nauseous. Why or why would they not of created more than one commercial or even if it was a question of available budget, they have like sooooo many of these Priceless commercials why not put more than just the one in the rotation?

I truly learned what the word overexposed means by watching the same Mastercard commercial over and over again. I was so disgusted at Mastercard the next day I was in a store buying a few things when I reached into my wallet and was about to pull out my Mastercard when I decided I was going to have my own little protest and grabbed the Amex instead.

Caught up on a season of The Bronx is Burning – $30 dollar cable bill

Enjoying a few beers while I watched – $20

Wanting to vomit each time the same Mastercard commercial came on – Priceless

Technorati Tags: ESPN, The Bronx is Burning, Mastercard

Well folks, I am going to be taking a very welcome vacation next week. Most likely there will be no posts here for the week. I think taking a little time off to recharge the batteries will do me and the blog very well. I hope everyone has a great week next week and I promise the Hipsters will come back bigger and better when I return. Have a good one.

I have been real remiss of late that I had not mentioned a brand new buzz network that has launched by a frequent commentor here and a friend, Antman.. The Ant has put together a real interesting network that has a wide range of categories and interests that is totally focused on creating and developing buzz for you and the areas that you are interested in. I was lucky enough to be allowed as a beta tester and where this could go has endless opportunities.

The site is still in Beta, but the Antman has allowed the beta testers to invite more people to come and play and see what you think. I have taken the initiative to invite the people who regularly comment here to give Cre8Buzz a try. Many of you should of already received invites from me. If you did not receive an invite and would like one, just add a comment to this post that you want one and I will send you out one immediately.

One of the things that I always do both in my professional as well as my personal life is think about a conversation I had and wonder what I could of said differently. What I could of said that was better, smarter and sometimes funnier. I found this clip that has writer/director Kevin Smith addressing what looks to be a large crowd at the Comicon convention. During the Q&A, a guy fron the audience thought he would get cute and try to take on James. Big mistake. James came back on him with some absolutely classic and great retorts. I thought I would share.

WARNING: LANGUAGE USED IS NOT SAFE FOR WORK.

CEO of Google Eric Schmidt was recently asked at the Seoul Digital Forum what his thoughts were on Web 2.0 and now Web 3.0… Wow, we are already getting into Web 3.0? I didn’t think we were even close to finishing with Web 2.0. His answer is interesting, he compares Web 2.0 to Ajax and likens Web 3.0 to small apps interconnecting with each through multiple mediums and the data is in the “clouds”.

It was a pretty good answer, but if I could throw my two cents in. I think what Web 2.0 has not completed yet and what Web 3.0 should take to a whole new stratosphere is all about the level of control.

The limitless control that users will have on how and what they do on the web. To me that is what this all about. It is me being able to shop the way I want to shop and not how some web developer thinks I want to shop. It is being able to read news, watch videos, communicate with others when and how I want to do it. It is about officially slamming the door on companies and web sites that make assumptions on what their clients and customers want instead of just actually asking them and even more importantly, listening to their answers.

What do you think? What’s Web 2.0 and 3.0 to you? If you want to watch Eric Schmidt’s answer, the video is below.

Technorati Tags: Google, Eric Schmidt, Web 2.0, Web 3.0, Ajax, control

I began shopping online about a month ago for my fiance’s birthday and have run into so many problems with some etailers that I felt it necessary to post my experiences. I began like most of us do when shopping online by doing some searches in Google. I found some etailers that I knew and began surfing around. My first stop was Bluefly.com

BlueFly.com – I think their site is pretty well done. It is easy to navigate and you can break your searches down by not only a product but by size as well. I found several things I thought Leigh would like so I ordered them. When I added the 4-5 items to my cart, they were all listed as “In Stock” and according to Bluefly’s web site, all packages are shipped out 3-5 days from ordering. No problem, I was ordering a whole month in advance. Order placed, my job was done.

Three weeks go buy and I get or hear nothing from Bluefly. I submit a question about my order through their online form, I get no response. Finally I decide to call them and the nice operator tells me that they have recently moved warehouses and all orders are backed up. I respond, “Well, why didn’t you tell me that when I ordered online?” Yea, she did not have an answer for me. I told her these were presents and I needed them. She told me she would put a rush on my order and get it shipped out. Nice operator, thank you. I then get an email from Bluefly two days later telling me that my ENTIRE order is out of stock!! Bluefly may you rot in fashion hell forever! You will never get another dime from me!

I now have to move on and find something else. So my next stop is Newport News.

Newport News – The site is again pretty well done, finding things are easy and once again I find several items that I think Leigh will like. I once again place the order, but before I click submit I want to find out their shipping information to make sure I have enough time to get it delivered or do I need to pay for quicker shipping. This is what is written on their site.

Standard Delivery. An order that is in stock and placed online by 5 PM Eastern Time will usually be on its way to you the next business day. Most items should arrive in 3 to 7 business days.

Great, I am two weeks away, no problem. I placed the order after 5 pm on Wednesday Aug. 1st. Today is the 6th and I still had not gotten an email letting me know my stuff has shipped. So once again, I went to their customer service section to try to find the status of my order, but because I did not have a customer number I could not find that online, so I called. The nice operator told me my order shipped out today except one item that will not be delivered to Aug. 23. I asked why if the item was out of stock hadn’t the web site told me that before I ordered? Once again, she had no answer. I asked when will my order arrive, she said Aug. 15th. The 15th!!!! Fine, Newport News, you got a stupid name and now I am not ordering from you again!

I have several more stores to talk about, but this is already too long so I am going to end with this. If etailers would start putting more money into customer service and delivery, they would not have to spend so much money on PPC and advertising to keep getting new customers. How much money does it cost to get a new customer compared to keeping an existing one?

Technorati Tags: etailers, shopping online, Google, Bluefly.com, Newport News

If you are not familiar, there is a big conference every year called Defcon. This is a conference of hackers, security experts, etc. A NBC Dateline producer named Michelle Madigan tried to sneak into the conference as a programmer and had a hidden camera where she wanted to film hackers hacking I guess. Anyhow, Ms. Madigan was discovered and the conference organizers asked her if she would like a press pass which she declined. I don’t know what she was thinking, but she was outed in the middle of the conference and then literally chased out of the convention. You can see the whole video below. Wouldn’t you like to be a fly on the wall when Ms. Madigan meets with her boss on Monday?

Technorati Tags: Defcon, NBC, Dateline, Michelle Madigan

I apologize folks for the lack of postings this week. I have had a couple of campaigns launch this week and just have been underwater with work. Though I did have a story that I really wanted to talk about.

In a previous post, I discussed my unhappiness with LinkedIn and their lack of customer support. Very soon after I wrote that post, I was contacted by Mario Sundar, LinkedIn’s Community Evangelist, as well as a blogger I have always respected and he and a LinkedIn customer support representative, helped me with the issues I was having.

Several weeks ago, I was meeting with one of my clients and we were discussing a new program they were rolling out and they wanted my thoughts on how we could market this program online. Based on the target market they were going after, we discussed a number of possibilities including doing some advertising on LinkedIn. I believed that advertising on LinkedIn was one of several ways that we could get my client the attention they were looking from their target market.

So several weeks ago, I logged onto LinkedIn and clicked on the link on the bottom of their site that clearly reads, “Advertise with Us“. That took me to a couple of pages describing the kind of advertising they offered and based on the amount of money my client was looking to spend, I was taken to a contact form where I filled out my contact information. The form said I would be contacted in 1-4 days. Groovy.

And then I waited.

A week went by, no contact from LinkedIn. So I went back to the contact form and filled it out again.

And then I waited.

Another week went by and you guessed it, no contact from LinkedIn. I then thought maybe I need to think “outside the box” to get someone from LinkedIn to talk to me. So what did I do? I logged into LinkedIn and did a search for sales people who WORK for LinkedIn. I found many and sent them all emails using crazy enough – LinkedIn!

And then I waited. Once again, no contact.

From the first time I filled out the contact form, it has now been over five weeks and I still have not heard from anyone. I finally thought as a last ditch effort, I would post a personal letter here to anyone at LinkedIn who might have an interest in taking some of my clients marketing dollars.

Here it goes:

Dear LinkedIn,

I work with a Fortune 100 company that would be very interested in advertising on LinkedIn.com if someone, anyone would actually be willing to pick up the phone and call me. As I stated each time I filled out your contact form, our ad budget for the rest of this quarter is right around $100K and call me crazy, but I kinda thought you guys might want some of that money? If I am not totally off base, could you possibly when you have a chance give me a ring? If it is a big deal call me collect, I will accept the charges or at the moment, I might even settle for an email. What do you think? I long to hear your voice.

Best,

Cord Silverstein

csilverstein AT capstrat.com

Technorati Tags: Mario Sundar, LinkedIn