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All too often I see businesses jump-into the marketing fray with strategies that leave me scratching my head and asking “huh?” It’s not just me; the puzzled looks span a variety of ages and demographics. The point of the marketing message was so unclear it had to be because a.) I am truly out of the loop and clueless, b.) the creative was waaay off-base, or c.) they didn’t really have a well thought out plan that addressed a consumer need and offered a clear path to a solution.

Let me suggest that “a” and “b” are often the stated reasons by the “suits.” It’s nearly unthinkable that a business in today’s environment will embark on something without a plan. And then I read this article in the New York Times: Why Twitter Turned Down Facebook.

Ignore the back-and-forth reasoning why Twitter and Facebook are not yet meant for the altar. What I find astounding are statistics like this (and I quote): “Twitter has raised $20 million from venture capitalists, but has brought in virtually no revenue, choosing growth over everything else. ” Does that sound familiar? Didn’t we go through something like this not even 10 years ago? How can you start something without the end in mind?

Yet, Ev Williams, the chief executive and co-founder of Twitter was quoted as saying: “So far, though, “we haven’t studied the business cases much.” “We literally have no business people in the company, so this isn’t an area we’re really focused on.”

Tell me, am I missing something? Please enlighten me. Unless Mr. Williams has a pile of cash and Twitter is his plaything, this does not make any sense. It reminds me of an old saying I had posted in my office: “Ready - Fire - Aim.”

So what can we learn from this? First and foremost, as I consult with companies looking to revamp their Web initiatives, I observe that they have not given one single thought to a business case. Not once have they articulated a “desired outcome,” a set of goals or even a key performance indicator. They see the Internet, or Web 2.0 as support means to a larger initiative; not as a marketing channel that can be infinitely measured, but also carries direct costs.

Without a plan (a business plan) these projects are usually the first to be cut when the company enters rough economic water. And that’s too bad, because rough times should call for greater marketing activity. But without a plan, a goal and proper measurement there is no way to justify the dollars and effort spent on a Web project.

I share a “needs assessment” process with new clients which forces them to tell me what they want their digitial initiative to do, what their calls-to-action are, what the desired outcomes need to be, and how they will measure it. Rather than thinking of the Web as just another marketing component, it makes them understand that it has to pay its own way and earn its keep. But without a business case, it’s like the old saying, “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there.”

Agree? Disagree? Have a success story? Have a question? Share it with me at: bob_chernet@viewmark.com

View a complete list of Bob’s Marketing Insights articles.

© 2008 Bob Chernet

Reproduction in any manner is unlawful, without the written permission of the author.

Behind the scenes of any good web site implementation is a solid marriage between Marketing and IT. There’s really no playbook here, every company seems to have a little different process for how the two departments should work together and it’s really interesting how the interactions between the two have a lot of similarities to a real world marriage.

Let’s not kid ourselves; every marriage has issues, the ones that last for a long time just figure out how to make the best out of the ups and downs. The ones that don’t, move on and start the process all over again. I actually got married when I was 19 and divorced at 24, we were just too young. I remarried when I was 40 and we are still going strong. Now my parents, they have been married for over fifty years.

I think the things that make a good marriage can be found in similar beliefs, goals and a genuine friendship for one another. Some people say that couples that last a long time have a lot in common, others say that opposites attract; in either case, there needs to be mutual respect from both parties in the relationship.

In business, vendors often work with only one side of their client’s house and it sometimes feels like there is a “don’t ask don’t tell” policy in affect. Many companies, as odd as it might sound, actually utilize vendor services because they can remain “under the radar” for some period of time.

The Marketing folks think that IT doesn’t understand their business goals and the IT folks think that Marketing doesn’t have any long-term technology vision. Well, I can tell you from personal experience that this can put the vendor in a rather precarious position.

In a real world marriage, this sort of extracurricular relationship seems to begin in a similar way. You can easily imagine someone confiding with a friend on how their spouse doesn’t “understand their needs”. This innocent discussion could progress into a relationship when the acquaintance tries to help out their friend. Eventually, the outside faction is exposed and often made out to be a rogue charlatan.

To avoid this sort of situation in business, I guess the vendor could insist that their activities be fully disclosed to all other parties in their client’s company, but can this really up to the vendor? In many cases, to win the business the vendor needs to present assets not currently available from inside the prospective company and that might directly compete with other parties involved.

This brings me back to the marriage metaphor. My observation is that good chemistry between Marketing and IT is rare and the exception, not the rule; afterall, the relationship isn’t built upon the same underlying principles as a real world marriage. Still, it may be said that “Marketing is from Venus and IT is from Mars” or vice versa of course.

Obviously, it is important for Marketing and IT to have clear communication paths, but sometimes the biggest problems are solved by the most minute details. This morning I got up and ask my wife to be my Valentine and I can tell you that even with all life’s ups-and-downs this small gesture confirmed that we are in our marriage together.

With all the dependencies we are building to the Internet, I wondered if we should take a moment to address a potential point of failure. Could the management of the Domain Name System (DNS) be a loophole? There are conspiracy theories out there that say “yes”, but with simple Internet Protocol (IP) decoding schemes anyone can memorize their most important IP addresses.

In my lifetime, I’ve observed increased activity and usage of distributed protocols. The mentality of past governmental monarchies and corporate “tops-down” type organizations seem to be giving way to more prevalent use of progressive decentralization.

It’s easy to draw an analogy to Internet infrastructure and packet routing since data can reach its destination in a multitude of ways, but this phenomenon has been in practice for quite some time now. For example, President Eisenhower championed the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act of 1956. The highway system was built to provide different routes for military supplies and troop deployments in the event of an emergency, but it’s now routine for commercial truckers to use the system to modify their course based on traffic patterns.

This got me thinking about DNS servers and the inherent risk associated to the system overlay. At a high level, the purpose of DNS is to provide users of the world-wide-web with an easy to remember naming convention, but it is important to know that there is more to a domain name than meets the eye. Each name has an IP address (set of 4 numbers separated with dots) associated to it and the numbers are used by the mechanism routing the data you see.

For years we have used the phone book in much the same way and people often use this metaphor when describing DNS. Take a moment to imagine being in a situation where you weren’t able to access your electronic contact list or even a phone book. How many telephone numbers would you be able to remember?

Some conspiracy theories describe the government takeover of the DNS servers running the web. They point out the vulnerability of the system and show how an entire country could be removed from the web by merely deleting a suffix like (.de) from the name servers. So if the DNS servers or a subset of domain names were to disappear tomorrow what would you do? Could you remember any given IP to access your favorite news sites for emergency response instructions? If the answer is no, here’s an easy decoding scheme to use.

Have you ever used a vanity phone numbers like 1-800-got-milk? If you apply the same methodology you can sometimes come up with names that correlate to a specific IP address. Here’s an example:

The IP address for Viewmark is 216.38.205.162. This is not an easy number to remember, so let’s see what happens when we use the letters provided on a standard telephone to create a vanity name. We quickly realize that we’ll need to specify letters for the numbers 1 and 0, so let’s assume that (i=1) and (o=0) and all other numbers correspond as shown.

Here are two possible vanity names for the Viewmark IP. The first name is a yet to be invented fuel named Binduboline and I understand that it can be safely used as lip gloss, another idea is to generate a hypothetical video file structure for AOL called (aim.dv.aol.inc). I like the first name, but admit the latter contains the exact spacing of the IP address.

Now this article isn’t to say that we subscribe to any government conspiracy theories; however, in the event you ever find yourself offline because the DNS servers are not working properly, remember either Binduboline or bin.dv.aol.inc and you can be assured we’ll post links for you to relevant information on the internet using IP addresses.

Authoring content can be a labor of love or a laborious chore. Few people are gifted with the talent of successfully communicating their most refined ideas and perspectives the first time around. Have you ever wished you had the opportunity to respond to someone in a different way after the fact? Have you ever thought of something else to include in a correspondence after hitting the send button?

On the surface, there are some cases where modifying predated content makes sense; for example, let’s say you move your office, wouldn’t it be convenient to automatically replace your latest contact information in past eMail correspondences? Branded eMail application have “dynamic” content features so text in your eMail can actually be changed at a later date. This got me thinking and I have to admit that I have some reservations about possible abuse.

The overall topic reminded me of a friend I had when I was still single. Let’s just say he wasn’t the most politically correct individual on the planet. Back then, going out on Saturday night to meet new friends sometimes included dancing; unfortunately, neither of us were very handsome and it was always intimidating to make the first move.

We would blurt out something original like “Do you want to dance?” and I’d say 9 times out of 10 the response would be an apologetic “not really” or “not right now”. Well, in the event that this happened, he later told me that it helped his pride to say “I said you look fat in those pants”. I’m guessing he had some sort of inferiority complex, but he would probably explain it as “getting the last laugh”.

Most of the time, web site content is published in a well-defined manner. Many content management systems archive revisions through workflow processes and applications like Wikis provide a good history of content modifications. However, with the proliferation of authoring tools that don’t track and/or timestamp changes, I’m afraid the practice of altering predated content goes somewhat unnoticed.

What people say and when they say it (content and publishing) cannot be considered subjective. Next generation web applications can address this issue with the widespread acceptance of emerging metadata standards like Dublincore. Now, this brings me back to my friend and his callous remarks, I later told him that consoling his victims about his insensitivity and lack of honesty landed me on the dance floor on several occasions.

Consolidating analytic applications into a centralized corporate metrics initiative can make anyone feel “damned if you do, damned if you don’t”. Most organizations start the journey with an evaluation of the applications being utilized in the corporation and concentrate on a laundry list of features and requirements. The process generally consists of scoring each application’s strengths and weaknesses and when the process is complete, a winner is selected and the implementation begins.

Unfortunately, catering to the metrics needs of a diverse set of individuals and divisional requirements can be a challenge for any single reporting mechanism. Many metrics initiatives actually fail because the personnel they are intended to help can’t figure out how to get the data they need to make their business decisions from. Interestingly, the needs are usually a specific set of performance results not easily aligned with the corporation’s laundry list of application features.

The other night I was watching an old Peter Sellers movie and couldn’t help drawing an analogy. Clouseau was in the lobby of a hotel when a lady with a dog approached. He kneels down to pet the dog and politely asks, “Does your dog bite?”. The lady softly replies, “No, my dog doesn’t bite”. Suddenly, the dog digs into Clouseau’s hand and he quickly backs off. He exclaims, “I thought you said your dog doesn’t bite”, to which the lady explains, “This is not my dog”.

As I watched the scene it reminded me of how important it is to ask the right question and how easy it is to misinterpret the answer. Over the years, we have been involved with many corporate analytic implementations and there are two major headlines that have emerged for me. One: everyone wants something different, and two: the process has to be clear and simple for everyone.

Clearly, consolidating corporate metrics into a single application can remove ambiguities, streamline processes and reduce overall costs. Ironically, as the number of users increase, so does the inherent complexities of fulfilling the unique needs of each user in a single “one size fits all” application.

To institutionalize analytics and business intelligence applications more effort needs to be focused on the process of how individuals receive the information they need, instead of the actual features and usage of the metrics application. Today, most major metrics applications can answer the majority of questions we need to know, even some that are free. The challenge is to provide each individual with their unique answers in a consumable way for all.

Search engine crawls are kind of like meeting your cousin periodically. When you meet there is always a tendency to exaggerate your recent accomplishments in an attempt to impress them. Everyone likes positive information to propagate about them throughout their family. Unfortunately, search engines (like cousins) aren’t easily fooled and embellishments can sometimes work against you.

You see, search engines (like cousins) have the ability to quickly verify your claims and tell you “who says what” through their links and contacts. This makes the whole experience a bit uncomfortable since your comments are not necessarily what you say you know, but whom you know and what they say you know.

This reminded me of a story someone told me about a famous celebrity they met and how the encounter changed their perception within their family, ultimately making them a legend. It was a monthly reunion of sorts; the individual was having dinner with his cousin. The conversation consisted of repetitive anecdotes on recent events when my friend excused himself for a quick biology break.

While in the restroom, my friend ran into a famous celebrity. He pleaded his case and asked the celebrity if they would mind acting like they knew him and saying something nice to his cousin. The celebrity thought it might be fun and reluctantly agreed. My friend went back to his table and continued to converse with his cousin, suddenly her eyes got as big as oranges when she recognized the celebrity approaching.

The celebrity put his hand on my friend’s shoulder and said “How are you, I haven’t seen you in a long time, is this the wonderful cousin you’re always talking about?” My friend turned to the celebrity and abruptly told them “Get lost, can’t you see I’m in the middle of something!” Now at first glance this might seem incredibly rude, but in terms of impressing his cousin it was remarkable.

This brings me back to search engines and how they seem to work in a similar way. You see, a link and recommendation from a highly ranked “celebrity” type site is more valuable when the link is not reciprocal. Of course, now my friend has become a legend, if not in his own mind, ours.

This year I turn 50! Quite a milestone when you think about it. I can tell you a number of things go through your mind when this event occurs and I’m guessing everyone goes through some sort of “right of passage“. Having been a tennis player most of my life, I decided that 50 was my opportunity to join the 50-and-over tennis tournament circuit. I imagined filling my trophy case with hardware from my triumphs.

In my first tournament, the draw had me play a first round match late in the evening, followed with a meeting with the number 2 seed early the next morning. This didn’t seem fair, but as a newcomer I didn’t feel it was my place to complain. Well, the good news was that I won my first match, but the bad news was that I resembled a pretzel the next morning. Needless to say, I went down in defeat, but on my drive home I had a bit of an epiphany on tournament draws and search linking algorithms.

What I realized was that search algorithms actually use a similar process. You see, as an unknown, the tennis tournament directors could not credibly seed me; similarly, search engines don’t rank newly found URLs very high in their listings. Now, if I would have won my match against the number 2 seed, I’m sure the Colorado Tennis Association would gladly seed me in the next tournament. Likewise, search engines start recognizing URLs when other prominent (seeded) sites point to you.

The lesson here is that “talk is cheap” in both sports and web search. I plan to continue my quest for Colorado tennis stardom, but in the meantime we’ll plan to get as many valuable links (from seeded websites) to Viewmark as possible.

This is the first official post on Viewmark’s NEW blog. We actually started looking and using blogs back in 2004 when blogging was just getting started. Several of us participated in a session at a Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose with the creator of Blogger. I vaguely remember him announcing the Google acquisition.

We were intriqued enough to secure several blogs for Viewmark back then. Recently, we’ve added several new client blogs and are integrating the technology with our tools. Blogs are just one of the many marketing tools our customers are using to communicate with their customers.

As President of Viewmark, I am in charge of the overall vision and direction of the company. I think my first entry on our NEW blog will be to officially announce our commitment to use this channel to discuss, share, and explore relevant news, topics, technology and methods related to using the internet to enhance business.

I find blog integration with RSS feeds particularly interesting. We are now living in an “on-demand” world. Consuming content based on our personal preferences is becoming more and more the norm. News readers and the the many personalized myPages that support XML feeds through RSS and Atom are an eyeopener for sure.

In the late 90s, I was lucky enough to attend an awards ceromony in which Tim Bernes-Lee was discussing his book “Weaving the Web”. In the later chapters of the book, he describes the Semantic Web. Are we now starting to embrace and support his vision? Stay tuned!

I hope you you will sign up to our blog and join in on the discussion.