Ad Age tells about how, for the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty, a youtube video beat out the superbowl for ROI.

Welcome to the internet age.

If you too want to join this whole “internet” thing, even though it probably is just a fad, come talk to us over at Portent. I know “internet marketing” is not going to last, but for these companies we seem to have done a decent job.

Thanks to Digital Agency for the Dove link.

here, though I forgot which blog I read about it on, shame on me.

Sounds like Richard gets it.

Even when we get the names down, the personal data (did they grow up in New Hampshire or Maine?) can be elusive. Linda commented on my post about connecting with people in business asking how I keep track of all the tidbits.

My answer is to pay attention to a very few people. Which is not really an answer, but an explanation that I do not deal with so many people just yet that I have to have a real system. If I do, I will start posting such data in our project tracking tool, within our company forum. That way anyone talking with the client (not that anyone else should be) will know that so-and-so has a newborn.

The problem with this is, maybe the information I learn about should be kept, not private, but not public. Jory calls it Stalk Marketing when someone you don’t know finds out a lot about you in order to sell you stuff.

Key point, know who you are dealing with and how they feel about their personal information. And err on the safe side.

Yeah, I know Kristen at BlogHer because of our business relationship- I want to place ads, she does that, so I know her.

And that is enough for a basic level of caring and trust. Yes, I want her to be happy so she places my ads right.

But it is having met her in person at the Blog Business Summit reception, knowing that she is new in her job as am I, knowing her baby’s name and getting to recommend baby books- this is why I care about her.

Every chance you get, turn your clients into people. Turn your vendors into people. Find out what is going on in their life. Ask them about the weather.

It is so much more fun to do business with people I care about than with clients or vendors I don’t know.

Wondering about my blog title, All For You? Here you go- when I know you and care about you, I can say that I will do whatever I can to make you happy. Everything I do- it’s all for you.

Go to crayon’s homepage, and click on ‘people’ in the upper right corner. They end their pitch for new people to join up with “consider yourself essentially hired on the spot. How’s that for a job interview?”

They list the things they want- what is important to them. You need to have been blogging about marketing, and/or podcasting.

Because they base themselves on an island in Second Life, they can say “if you’re right for crayon, you’re right” and don’t worry about that relocation hassle.

I wish every page we built qualified this well for who we want to buy things from our clients. Simple, clear, with a pretty obvious Contact button (call to action).

Contrast this with, oh, say, the GM careers site. First, they call it careers, just like everyone else.

Now go to that page- what are you supposed to do? No clear call to action, and an overwhelming number of choices. Now, GM is huge, but that is no excuse.

I hate to be typical, but compare it to Apple’s career page. Apple says: here are 4 choices. Click one.

Look in the New Grads section (which has the button ’start your career’). It tells you the 3 things that happen next.

So crayon says ‘if you are this kind of person, we want you.’ GM says, well, nothing, because they shove so much information at you that you pass out and die. And Apple says ‘here are the 4 ways you can get in to the company.’

Now apply this to your homepage. Is it easy to buy, easy to know where to go?

Check out the homepage of BlogHer, the women’s blogging community. I am on their case to add three buttons right below the nav bar: Join BlogHer, Find a Blog, and Advertise. Because right now, there is too much information for me to know what to do right away. (Disclosure- we advertise with BlogHer, and we like them, so you should to.)

Check out our client Dessy. The homepage gives you 6 choices in the upper left (where the eye travels to first).

Check out Linda Keith CPA for a speaking business. Do you want to sign up for a class, or sign up for the newsletter? There are more choices on the left nav bar, but these 2 stand out.

In addition to my mutterings, check out Godin’s book The Big Red Fez which basically tells you to make sites really easy where it is super obvious where to click.

If you are not sure that your site does this, and you are not sure how to make it do this, comment here and I will take a glance.

Go here, and you are at a Google Finance page for a company. So what? Check out the lower right, where it says Blog Posts.

The first post is mine, where I listed this company (along with 99 others) on the hundred fastest growing companies in Washington State.

Do I know anything about Applied Precision, Inc? No. But because I am the only voice in the blogosphere (of late), I am the authority.

So get off your butt and start blogging, or someone like me, with no real understanding of what you do, will be considered the authority on your business.

I just lied to someone, I stand to benefit if they believe me, and I am not sorry.

One company I know has a web address that is a .org. The .com would of course be better- I still accidentally type in .com half the time.

The .com site is owned by someone else and is just a placeholder, making money (don’t know how much) through ads.

The aboveboard way to go about this would be to have me in my official capacity or the firm that wants the domain to contact whoever currently owns the name, and ask the price. The results would be in the many thousands if not tens of thousands of dollars, because the seller would be able to determine (correctly) that we could afford that kind of price if we wanted to.

Instead, I pretended to still be in college and working on a class project. To hopefully get a price that is less than $1k.

There is no question that, applied to daily business, this is totally unethical. Lying to get a good deal is wrong, wrong, wrong.

So why do I feel so differently about this that I am posting it, opening myself up for criticism?

In short, I believe there is some kind of property right in domain names. The courts agree- we could force the current owner to give up the domain to us, unless it happened to be their name or their business name, both very unlikely. So instead of the direct, confrontational approach, I opt for the quick and dirty approach, that gets us what we want, which we would have gotten through a legal challenge anyways, but still gives the current owner something.

Note that they would not get anything if we were able to get it through a legal challenge.

So, I am basically trading a lot of time and psychic energy, and my ability to say that I never lie in business, in order to get the domain to the people who have a right to it, while rewarding those who were smart enough to claim it in the first place.

Discuss.

Also, what if it was your domain, you could make a legal challenge for $3k and get it because it is your name, but you can misrepresent yourself (lie) and get it for $500 and far less time. Or you could buy it outright for $10k (this is not a made up number- if the seller knows who you are, and you have cash, this could be a reasonable price). What would you do?

Today at Service Untitled they are talking about how to say thank you.

One tack we are going to work on is getting company postcards, so after a client meeting, we can go that little bit further in saying thanks.

How can you thank you clients in a way unusual for your industry?

The IE 7 team sent a cake to the Firefox folks on the launch day of Firefox 2.0.

Now that’s class.

Fear and lack of imagination. Read Seth for yourself.

Where else does his logic apply?