Practice what other people preach. I decided to get my hands dirty with SEO and so I wrote a blog post about romantic birthday gifts for her on the KnickerMail blog. (Thank you Jacqueline, Brigitte, Andra, Marge, Kadi, Gertrud, Suzu, Helen, Katja, Kersten, Kate and Kelly for replying!) Normally you’d want to create the content as quickly and cheaply as possible, but I wanted to go through the whole cycle from keyword research to submissions to article sites once to get really intimate with that area of SEO. Physical, even.

I wrote about attending DEMO and TechCrunch Disrupt conferences over at the Posterbee blog. If you’re interested, read it over there – just copying it below for archiving purposes. And if you plan to attend either of these events with your startup and want more tips and background information then more than happy to help.

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I always thought marketing was invented in the US about a hundred years ago or so. Little did I know that clever merchants from the East thousands of years earlier were much better in the art of making products desirable than yours truly and most of my colleagues.

Artificially limiting supplies to drive prices up was a good start. Coming up with outrageous legends about spices and the dangers that spice harvesters had to face was simply genius. Herodotus writes of Arabic merchants that claimed that the only way to get cinnamon was to pick a fight with some huge aggressive birds who made their nests from these aromatic sticks. If you wanted cinnamon you had to slaughter a cow, cut it to pieces and leave the meat on the bottom of the mountain where the birds lived (and of course hide very quickly). The gluttonous birds would then fetch all the meat they could carry back to their nests, which at some point would break under the weight of the meat and roll downhill to be picked up by the brave cinnamon harvesters. Or take frankincense that supposedly came from trees guarded by flying snakes (as if crawling snakes weren’t bad enough). The only way to get access to the precious incense was to first smoke another incense that the snakes didn’t like and then do the harvesting faster than lightning.
The legends worked rather well – back in the day the black pepper we carelessly add to our salads and fried eggs had a one-on-one exchange rate with gold. Or take the fact that Ramses II was buried with one peppercorn up each nostril (not gold or a marble chiseled credit card). More about spices in this episode of Planet Money podcast

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Hats to the clever men from the East for their marketing genius. People want stories (if not legends), not product features, newsletters or special offers. Will try to keep that in mind more often.

I went to Omniture Summit in Salt Lake City, UT last week. If you’re not into marketing and analytics you wouldn’t have had a very good time there (unless you’re a fan of The Killers which was the main act at the conference party) and you’ll definitely find this blog post very boring.

The main keynote speaker was a star only outshined by The Killers: Seth Godin presented nuggets of wisdom from his latest book called Linchpin. Citing Mr Godin: How can you market water better? By saying it’s wetter? He encouraged everyone to think of themselves as creative geniuses; but geniuses in a very pragmatic rather than the nutty professor kind of way (citing him again: Einstein gave this genius thing a bad name). His quest for innovating and making a difference is not novel but I must say he’s an excellent story teller and he does a good job of invigorating one. He did in my case, anyway. I’m half-way through Linchpin in audiobook which is the second best thing if you don’t have a chance to see him live.

Next up Wired founder John Battelle made an interesting point that e-commerce and online marketing wise we’re at “fish with feet” stage in evolution. The days of socially isolated purchases that are tied to desktop or good old shoppe on the corner are over (ie. we’re not relying on swimming only anymore) but we haven’t quite figured out what to do with mobile web, location data and people expressing their intentions in a social fashion. In 5-10 years we’ll do things differently, just that no-one knows how exactly.

Rest of the summit was much more practical and took place in specialized tracks (and this is where it gets really boring if you’re not in online marketing, and really interesting, if you do). So if you haven’t yet then stop reading now, what follows are mostly notes to self.

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Last week I had the opportunity to experience two very different no frills concepts. First was Riders Palace, a snow hotel in Laax, Switzerland. The owners obviously know what’s important for boarders who travel without kids – a bed, a good shower, proximity to ski lifts, a lobby bar. Period. There’s no real need for a telephone, 24H room service, minibar, TV or horrible kitsch art on the walls as you’ll anyway be sleeping the whole time you’re in your room. It cost less than 160 pounds for three night including a three-day ski pass. And it’s cool, using only concrete, wood and glass as materials. Brilliant, if not no-frills chic.

I also experienced a Ryanair flight to Friedrikschafen that cost less than a hundred pound on paper and 200 pounds when including luggage, payment fee and a 10-pound online check-in fee. The total price and first two extra items are reasonable but the last is tricky to categorize under “no frills” as you just can’t board a plane without checking in. Anyway, I had forgotten to check in and had to do it at the airport. My bad, and I kind of understand I had to pay 20 pounds extra to check in at the airport without being refunded the 10 pounds I had paid for online check-in. This is according to our terms and conditions as a lady trying to get a queue of people like me organized explained to me in a bored manner. But I also lost my right to check in online for the return leg and had to pay another 20 euros extra on the way back to London. Also brilliant, but in a very different way. In a way where you think: gosh, they must have a team of lawyers and extremely creative product managers to figure out more ways to fuck your wallet in the ass, no lube. (Mom, I only use this kind of language when talking about Ryanair, I promise). What’s next after charging for using toilets? Charging for life jackets under your seat and pilots that have had their eye-sight checked in the last 24 months? Despite loving low airfares (and 200 pounds for a 2-hour flight is not that cheap, is it?) I guess I have to say no to the thrills and chills of flying Ryanair in the future. If you ever fly them, make sure you don’t forget to check in beforehand.

Today I attended Marketing Tailormade, a seminar where you can choose your own program depending on your interests and needs. I love the idea and warmly recommend attending, despite one of the sessions being an absolute waste of time today (you can just pick another session if this happens, capisce?)

Random ideabytes aka notes to self:

Sta Travel: widgets such as Travel countdown clock, travel check list and weather widget are highly successful. Also, their RSS-feeds drive 10% of traffic to their website.

Ticketmaster: Content for their weekly newsletter is highly dynamic, their 6M subscribers may actually get 6M different creatives, past transaction history is the best basis for segmentation.

Argos: Reviews are one of the most powerful campaigns so far – users are encouraged to review a product about 10 days post purchase, information is used on site in different ways. (This ties very well with this article). Also, 80% of email revenues are coming from a relatively small number of email recipients. Does this call for email activity segmentation on top of normal segmentation?

John Lewis: Using RFM model for segmentation as does Ticketmaster. About to roll out programs for loyal users to reward desider behavious ie. premium shipping after purchase vs. industry norm of giving incentives to dormant users to become active again.

Follow-up program performing very well – sending an email to users that click through to a section on the site that don’t purchase immediately. For many categories consideration cycle is several days and one can’t expect same-session purchase.

Tests for skin cream category to send emails when a user has likely run out of product. Optimal follow-up time is 4 months. This is different by product and can easily be identified by testing.

Pure: Replies to newsletters are usually ignored if not neglected. However, this is a natural way for users to engage with email. Are marketers missing opportunities to get feedback as well as upsell?

Do I sound like a bloody marketer?