American marketing agencies are soon going to find out that no matter how good their campaigns are, how many tests they do, or how much money they spend, a surprisingly high number of their performance driven campaigns in China are going to fail.

Why?

There is a lot of talk about China’s economic growth.  American companies are excited to have a Chinese presence.  But the truth is so many companies want to be there but don’t really know why.  There is a sense that something is about to erupt, and not being there equates to missing out.

But is China really that promising?  Sure, China has had double digit growth for years.  But it wasn’t the Chinese who were consuming.  So, before American companies rush over there to sell the Chinese products and services that were selling well elsewhere, let’s stop for a moment to recognize that the Chinese are not a consumer culture.

Stephen Roach, the chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia, called Americans, “the most over-extended consumer in world history.” And now that Americans are no longer buying so many Chinese exports, China will have to find another consumer base for its enormous production machine. And they know it won’t come from within.

As Thomas Friedman wrote:
“China has no real Social Security, health insurance or unemployment insurance. Without that social safety net, it’s hard to see how Chinese don’t end up saving most of their stimulus.”

In the SEM agency world, having a presence in China is important to prospective clients.  This presence represents the gateway to a huge, seemingly untapped market.

The problem, however, is that these agencys’ clients are going to realize that the Chinese will require, according to Fred Hu, chairman for Greater China for Goldman Sachs, a huge “cultural and structural” shift before they start consuming the largely unnecessary products that Americans love.

China will prove to be the largest market, but so frugal that some marketers will realize that it isn’t worth trying.  For example, Adobe Systems essentially ignores the market, recognize that pirating is out of control there, the Chinese government is not helping police the piracy, and that the Chinese consumer doesn’t have the money or mindset to pay for the software.

A wave of companies are about to discover what Adobe knew ten years ago.  China is more stingy than it is large.

I just managed a project to use WordPress as a CMS for an SEO campaign.

WP is getting a lot of attention for its ability to be a flexible CMS.  With nearly a half million plug-ins, it has the largest open source development community of any CMS.  Ironically, it was not meant to be a CMS.

But the development work done by the WP community has given WP the ability to function as a CMS.  When I spoke at OMMA in NYC last year, a fellow panelist was asked for a recommendation on an affordable SEO-friendly CMS.  He answered “WordPress” and I was thinking, “amen!”.

Out of the box, WP is very SEO friendly.  When we piloted our first enterprise launch of WP as a CMS, we encountered many obstacles, such as writing custom title tags and URL handling.  But every problem had a plug-in that was not only free, but very easy to install.

Our front end developer spent about 4 days converting PSD files into WordPress friendly CSS templates.  Once the templates were made, publishing pages was very easy because ANYONE CAN DO IT.

The success of WP has a lot to do with ease of use.  So you can give each business unit or manager their own section and just let them build out their pages when the templates are up.  (Afterwards, have a designer sweep through to make it look professional).

I’ve worked with a number of enterprises, from Adobe, Hearst, Sony, Warner Brothers, and American Express, and a number of small and mid-size companies.

WordPress can, but is very unlikely, to serve the needs to larger companies that need complex publishing rights and version control.  One can, however, recreate this functionality from plug-ins and your own custom scripts. (Note: creating plug-ins for WP is very easy, the code is clean with descriptive inline comments).

But let’s face it, WP is not meant to be an enterprise CMS.  Ford has used WordPress for a microsite, but we have yet to see WP used for websites that have a lot of stakeholders.

As marketers within large companies recognize the inertia they face creating an online presence for business-unit campaigns utilizing centralized resources, they look for inexpensive and easy publishing solutions.  Wordpress is filling that need, and I am excited to contribute as an SEO to continue evolving Wordpress.

Here’s a great piece of advice.

Treat people online the same way you would in person.

Think about it.

I have had to speak to large companies about SEO 101 for years.

The more I do, the more I realize enterprise SEO is more about version control than anything else.

Nearly every enterprise site I have worked on has had my SEO work undone - either entirely (complete obliteration) or partially.  These acts have never been intentional, but rather the result of a lack of process in web dev teams.

I have incorporated this message into my training classes.  But I haven’t enforced a policy, which is why teams overwrite SEO work.

As I prepare an SEO training next week for a F1000, I am realizing that in the one hour I am scheduled to present, I should spend about 30 minutes on this issue.

What is an executive summary?

Battle plans communicated as your oxygen supply expires.

Fast. Survival. Tell me which weapon, where, how (not why), when.

Speak about objectives and goal before you tell me tactics.

The exec needs to know the objectives.  The General will manage the tactics.

This post is meant to give you a high level view of how to best use GA.  Subsequent posts will tell you how to implement.

What I love about GA are the profiles.  Unlike other analytics packages, you can create a profile and use filters - this removes the needless exercise of “drilling down” to a particular channel to explore KPI’s- which, far too often (with other analytics packages) have a dead end.

I recommend setting up profiles for:

• All of your website (”all in”, as I call it)
• Organic
• PPC
• Mobile (my next post will be SOOOOO cool for you analytics geeks.  Get prepared for some advanced regular expressions stuff)
• Brand terms - most SEM campaigns report on performance without recognizing that brand terms are a “given”.  Create a filter to see how brand terms perform - this profile will also give you insight into the performance of channels like display, radio, television (awareness) perform - if you see a spike in brand terms, this is likely due to another channel that is otherwise difficult to track.
• Non-brand - create a profile that filters out brand terms so you can track the performance of your marketing efforts without the noise from other channels.
• Affiliate / partner - did you sign a partnership and want to see its performance?  Set up a filter.  Easy to report on.
• International - does your company report by region or by country? Align your marketing reporting with your company’s financial ones.  You can do this by country, region, or language.

That list is just a sample.  Come back for more details on HOW to set these up (particulary mobile!)

One of the mistakes I see marketers make frequently is they have delusions about how much “passion” visitors should have on their site.

The experience of surfing the Internet is distant, cold, and removed.  The digital, satellite enabled transmission of data does not cater to emotional seduction.

People insult one another on message boards and through email because the reality of personal presence does not exist.   It’s far too easy to flame someone remotely than in person.  And it happens all the time.

Let me ask you a question.

How many websites can you name for which you feel a warm, personal, spiritual relationship with?  How many interactions have you had with websites that have left you breathless?

I know that right now, you are thinking hard.

Websites cannot give us what people can. Marketers too often forget this.  They want code base to connect with people the only way people can.

I can’t think of one website that has inspired me by way of aesthetics.  The most value I have experienced has been through the cold and clean interface of Craigslist, Wikipedia, and Google.

Websites deliver information.  I want that information quickly so I can go back into the world where my sense are more than virtually stimulated.

Just give information.

I get asked this question all the time, “is our bounce rate too high?”

Here is the reality of bounce rates: they don’t matter if you don’t analyze them against another performance indicator.

Here’s an example - the bounce rates on home pages tend to be lower than internal pages.

Why?

Because on a home page, visitors have to click a few things to get closer to the information they want.

So - yea!  You have a lower bounce rate on your homepage.

But your internal pages may have higher bounce rates.

So what.

If visitors found the internal page because that page gave them the information they wanted, you should be looking at time on site (TOS), or, if you have a direct marketing agenda, the response rates to your calls to action.

I’ll follow this post up with WHY bounce rates are even less meaningful than we think.

Musicians are no longer looking to the major labels as the silver-bullet they once were in order to launch careers.

Tonight I am on a panel discussing marketing for musicians, and I thought I’d put some of my ideas on this blog to centralize my thoughts.

1. Put Google Analytics (GA) on your website.  It’s free, and it’s a great way of tracking how many people go to your website, how they got there, which pages engaged them, and a lot more.  Ask your webmaster to install it, and you can log into GA to view a fanastic world of information.
2. Make sure your website looks professional - if it looks bad, you appear lame.
3. Send your music to online distributors.  You can use Community Musician for this.
4. Send your CD to Pandora - they require a unique submission process.
5. Use social networking sites.  I’m not going to go into the details here, but I highly recommend reading The New Influencers by Paul Gillin.  You’ll learn a lot about how to work with bloggers and social networking sites.
6. Send out press releases.  You can do so for as little as $80 on PR Web.  PR Web has tutorials on successful press releases, but I also suggest researching the topic online or buying a book.  You will want to not only use PR Web, but also send releases directly to journalists.  Make sure you understand how to write a good press story (hence the research).
7. Make friends.  Whether these are other bands, journalists, club owners, or engineers - everyone you befriend becomes an asset.
8. Have a newsletter and use a real service.  I suggest Vertical Response.  Again, research email marketing so you leverage the power of email.
9. Hire a stylist.  Image is more important than it should be.
10. Consider raising money through your fan base.  Check out what we did for Spencer Day.  (Go to the homepage and look at the left column for two ways to fund Spencer).
11. Consider writing a song about a topic with high profile.  For example, my band wrote a song about Al Franken. I sent the CD to his radio show, and I saw hundreds of visits per day for weeks after he apparently played it on his radio show.
12. Use Wikipedia.  The bass player in my band has a famous grandfather (Arthur Hailey).  We edited that page to note the fact that Ryan is in a band in San Francisco.  We get traffic every day from that page. The more you associate yourself with topics that are searched for online, the more traffic you can siphen.
13. Use paid search to bid on names of bands that might share a common fan base with you.  If this sounds confusing, research it on Google AdWords.
14. Be honest with yourself.  Some musicians are destined to be obscure because of their esoteric music.  Ask people you trust for their honest opinion about your music so you can set your expectations.  Maybe you need voice lessons.  Make sure you have someone you trust giving you the brutal truth.  At the same time, believe in yourself.
15. Having money helps.  If you choose a low-paying job so that you have more time for music, you have less money to move forward.  A musician I know rented out a high-profile club for $6000 so he could play on a Saturday night.  He spent money on marketing and nearly broke even.  After the event, he realized it cost him about $1000 to play a high profile club in front of hundreds of people.  That might pay off in the long run, if it doesn’t he still doesn’t mind spending $1000 to play gigs other musicians dream of.

That’s all for now - I have more ideas but I just wanted to start off with a quick list of things you can do for your career.

Get to the point quickly. Imagine that you have 45 seconds to tell a CEO what has to happen to survive or succeed.

The CEO is less concerned with the tactics that he or she doesn’t understand (query strings or esoteric KPI’s), but more the goals, the reality of where they are now and what it means, the challenges, required resources, timeline, and whether you are the right person to handle the situation.

Every data point must have analysis. Even stating, “visits increased” doesn’t tell me by how much, or if I should be happy with that amount. Maybe a performance indicator increased by 5%, but we were expecting 12%. Every statement and observation on the executive summary must be given the context of good / bad / on course / off course. For each of these points, you must demonstrate that you understand them, have a plan, and are the right person for the job.

Do not simply place numbers or charts as though their meaning is self-evident. The first thing on an executive’s mind is “so what?”.

Make sure that you include all the major recommendations in the executive summary. I suggest you sweep through your document and create a list of the big ideas, and THEN write the executive summary.

Don’t regurgitate the obvious. Try to get the strategic plan across in 3 or 4 paragraphs.

1. Crystallize your thoughts.

Since the executive summary is the plan or report in miniature, it contains the document’s highlights, its key points. To write an executive summary, focus on the issues that are most important to your business’s success — past and future — and set aside those matters that are tangential.

2. Set priorities.

The most important thing at any given moment in life is subsistence. We’ve all heard the cliché, “moving deck chairs on the titanic.”

Priorities can be thought of in this order:

1. Subsistence (or necessity): Where are we? Are we in danger of dying? How alive are we? Are we healthy or sick? Do we have enough food and water? Are our resources threatened?

2. Defense: Is anything or anyone threatening us? If so, who and what can we do about it?

3. Conquest: How can we expand beyond our current status quo? Where can we go? What is out there for us? What is the opportunity size? Are we in a position to succeed? How long will it take?

Powerpoint

· Bulleted lists are best

· Read each sentence twice asking, “Which words are not needed?” Also ask, “do I need to think to understand the take-away?”

· Phrases are meant to be read easily, not to grow into prose

· Make sure it is easy to scan the slide and understand the points

Word

• Paragraphs are preferable, however a list within the executive summary can be used to highlight the most important take-aways