After years of hearing about how great Rackspace is as a hosting provider, we finally bucked up and paid the big guns the big dollars for their “Fanatical Support”.

I mean, let’s be honest, how many brands accurately reflect who they SAY they are?

So in the early phases, they truly were fanatical & we liked working with them, then BOOM a major outage. After this recent outage at Rackspace, I saw a link to this page that explained a the incident that caused outages. It is still linked from their homepage and outlined what was happening, what they were doing to fix it, and what steps they were putting in place to keep it from happening again.
That prompted this blog post…

These guys put “fanatical support” on everything with their name, and you know what? They lived up to it. While no service business can ever say that they will never have a problem, it is how they REACT to those problems that separates one company that says…”hey we’re great” from their competitor who also says ….guess what… “we’re great too.”

I only hope that this transparency leads to MORE customers for rackspace, not less. Because at least they don’t hide their wounds, they not doing some spin, they took the mistakes on the chin and are looking to improve.
Problems and friction between customer and client are where the rubber meets the road. I come across this every day in our industry. Picking an SEO company is difficult, why? Because we all sound the same, well not all…but most. It is a hard business to differentiate yourself with bullet points and powerpoint slides.

It got me thinking further…about the Jetblue fiasco and how David Needleman reacted sure, there may have been a PR person whispering in his ear a bit, but the company is one of openness in its culture so this response doesn’t surprise me.

So what does all this have to do with SEER? At the end of the day, I want SEER to always be a company that:

• treats each other, our clients, vendors, partners, and friends well
• values and recognizes the contributions everyone makes to our clients successes
• is “fanatical” about ensuring that the budgets invested in us make solid returns for our clients
• does everything we can to help our clients achieve their goals
• has an impact on our community
• attracts great talented people who want to kick ass and make a difference

To steal a line from Rackspace:

Fanatical Support can’t be captured with bullet points or summed up with a simple graphic.
For every customer, it’s an experience that impacts their work and lives in very different and powerful ways.
So we’ll let them speak for themselves and for Fanatical Support.

For those of you who are selecting SEO companies, stop looking for the bullet points!! We SEO types all have access to the same information, we all read the same blogs, yet what makes ones better than the other?? I’ll be discussing that topic in my next post, stay tuned.

BTW - check out how yahoo has responded to an outage on Cyber Monday for its Yahoo! stores, leaving many merchants unable to transact on the busiest day of the online shopping year. how does it compare to Rackspace? As of today 24 hours later, they are not responding on their own blog…does that sound fanatical to you?

An industry is in revolt, the unrest is festering and the small waves are being made. Rupert Murdoch is saying it.  Newspaper revenue is drying up (not for their web sites).
The same week that IBM came out with a VERY interesting study titled The end of advertising as we know it.

While starting with the fluffy metric of “greater disruption for the advertising industry in the next  5 years than in the previous 50.” They back it up.  Many of you that read this blog spend money on marketing or performing  marketing in some way, shape, or form.  Most of you also use the web for marketing (or what are you doing HERE?).

A little history lesson to start, Goto.com - pioneered successful pay per action advertising on the internet for search (which is where the big boom is coming from) this could be debated, but humor me, ok?

I think what has attracted such a QUICK influx of marketing dollars to the search industry (projected to be in the $8 Billion dollar range), which hardly existed 10 years ago, is simple…accountability and ease.  I think you all know that tracking clicks, impressions, conversions, down to such granular levels as geography, keyword, etc helps remove some of the guesswork / fuzzy math of so many marketing channels, which leads to spend where you don’t know what 50% is wasted. now you do know what 50% is wasted, down to the keyword level if you so chose.

While a recent article on SEER in the Business Journal  renewed my belief in PR a bit (even though we don’t have a PR firm), I still feel like a lot of that stuff is hard to place real value on.  What is the value of a media mention?  A billboard?  Heck, out of my window I am looking up at a Heineken draught keg ad on a billboard as I write this…I see it 5-10 times a day, what is the value of it? It just seems somewhat harder to track.

Some interesting facts coming from the IBM study:
To survive in this new reality, broadcasters must change their mass audience mindset to cater to niche consumer segments, and distributors need to deliver targeted, interactive advertising for a range of multimedia devices.

Change YOUR MINDSET!!!  The scattergun approach to marketing has value, but you know what?  When large brands don’t rank well for what they do when people are typing in their exact terms in search engines, you can only imagine how much further we have to go as an industry.

Finding communities of people with like interests through blogs, forums, social networking, etc is going to be the hard work.

The billboard on the side of the road just doesn’t have the targeting or reporting that the web does, which means less accountability to REAL metrics. Putting a billboard up is easy, finding 100 small niche communities to get the word out is much harder especially when people are so fickle.  Identifying enthusiastic bloggers, facebookers, etc that can become brand advocates and spread the word is also NOT easy, some tools are helping to make this easier though.  The tool can identify the sites, but the value is in finding a way to approach these outlets in a way that doesn’t result in mass revolt. See how a PR effort backfired  for Microsoft?

All players must adapt to a world where advertising inventory is increasingly bought and sold in open exchanges vs. traditional channels.

This is very hard for some people to grasp, but letting the advertiser decide the price they find worth it for advertising is NOT how this industry works, if you are thinking…ebay or Google for advertising you got it!  Sure you can fight it…but how long will your clients wait?  For those of us on the web, buying paid search ads for years, we’re just used to it, but now this marketplace for advertising is creeping into online display advertising and TV as I showed above.  Will it be successful? I doubt it will be the first time.  But lets remember peapod and webvan those online grocers…while they didn’t succeed, ACME, Krogers, and many others are doing online.  It just took some years to work out the system, but accountable marketing is coming.

Advertisers are DEMANDING higher levels of accountability from their marketing partners, eyeballs are great, but what about conversions, new customers, web site engagement, etc? 

Advertisers and marketers are demanding more and more accountability, and while they don’t know HOW to get the numbers all the time, they know that SOMEONE can get them the data they need to make good decisions about advertising when on the web.  They want to make more data-driven decisions, with hard numbers to determine effect, and the Internet delivers that VERY well so far.  Are there gaps?  SURE there are, but there are a lot less revenue gaps between banners / search engines / online video than many other traditional mediums.
Impressions and eyeballs are bull when compared to impact metrics.
Let me ask you this…
If you gave someone $1,000 dollars to advertise for you, would you want a bunch of people to SEE an ad, possibly take NO ACTION and deplete your budget?  Or would you want to at least make sure that someone took SOME ACTION with the ad to deplete the budget?
Not every buy can be done like this, but when possible, you better believe that companies are moving in this direction with at least a PART of their budget.

If you still judge the success of your campaigns, by how many people SEE and AD, or just watch a video without tying that into some level of an ACCOUNTABLE metric, be VERY afraid, times are a changin’! and Thank GOD!!
According to the study
“Two-thirds of advertising experts surveyed by IBM expect 20% of advertising revenue to move from impression-based to impact-based formats within three years:”

This one is simple, the market will be shifting more dollars to efforts that can be tracked easily and are based on action and impact, not just eyeballs.
The last thing I read in the study which was huge:
Amateurs and semi-professionals are increasingly creating low-cost advertising content that threatens to bypass creative agencies, while publishers and broadcasters are broadening their own creative roles.

Have you heard of OpenAd.net?  If not go there.  Big ideas, don’t need to come from big agencies anymore.  Companies are putting the development of big ideas and big creative into a marketplace.  While we all thought that free-agents would change the world, and that e-lance and the like would change the world as we know it, it has NOT, but it has made a dent.  Openads has a shot to make a dent too, even big agencies could use openads to help develop additional pitches to clients for low cost.
So as marketers, do you feel the squeeze around you daily?  The accountability crunch?  If you are going to be held accountable to more and more real numbers, do you expect to shift your dollars to more channels where impact can be tracked?
What is your percentage of highly accountable marketing vs. Eyeballs marketing?  Have you been shifting more budget to the channels that provide more accountable metrics?
Would love to hear…

As search algorithms get better (or worse per your perspective), not just anyone can get top rankings for competitive terms. Google Universal is putting more rich content on page one and Wikipedia is dominating generic terms.

What does this mean for you?
There’s an old saying I repeat to others often:

“Locks are not to keep criminals out, but to keep honest people honest.”

Let’s relate this to search.
If a site has no business ranking well for “b2b lead generation” - i.e., no one is talking about this site, no one is linking to them, other sites are better candidates, and they’re obviously not a “leader in the industry” - then Google’s going to keep you honest by keeping the site out of the results.

So you’re not appearing in Google everywhere you’d like to be…
If you deserve to be in front of those visitors then ensure you’re focused. Your business will grow if you’re a good businessperson and hard worker. To stand out online one needs to innovate now more than ever. So this means some businesses will do better online, and some will do poorly. The laws of competition say those who fail in a business area will try something else. And that’s okay too, everyone’s good at something. Let’s not fool ourselves into imagining we can rank well for everything that is high volume and remotely related to the business. If we want traffic as site owners, we need to argue with ourselves as to why we deserve it!

The algorithms are getting pretty good in my opinion. I hope they can help to keep us honest (at least online) about what we claim to do as business people.

While researching some technical information online last night that ultimately resided in a text book, I discovered a pleasant surprise when visiting the book’s homepage. A good portion of the book’s critical information was available directly on the site.

After leaving the site –having learned what I needed– I contemplated the business implications of taking portions or all of a resource and making it available freely on the web.

Old thinking:
Giving away critical information for free will make customers less likely to purchase. Freely available information creates less demand for information that otherwise must be purchased.

1980’s - The home stereo double cassette deck will destroy the music industry!
1990’s – The CD burner and peer to peer programs will destroy the music and film industries!

New thinking:
People expect a certain amount of resources to be free in our age. Forget right and wrong when it comes to piracy and millions of internet users for a moment; it is time to trust that the market will balance itself.

Did double cassette decks slow music sales considerably? If sales were not affected negatively they were unchanged or even increased. Previewing is a great way to entice interest. Many people still wanted original quality cassette tapes rather than a dubbed copy. Yesterday people still wanted to own an official DVD (which includes a non-violated FBI warning.) Today I believe the same is true for books and printed materials – there is a considerable body of consumers that still want to hold the product.

Think about your business model and if sharing information is an applicable idea. Let down your guard and look at your own usage experience when you exercise demand for information.

Truthfully, I do still plan on purchasing the book that the author gracefully let me preview.