authenticity, time, and keeping your edge

Jory muses about Rocky and how he got less authentic with each additional movie. That we could relate to the Rocky of the first film, the guy fighting for love, but that the other movies became less and less relevant to the audience.

Cory Doctorow wrote a book and talks about why he gives his book away online. His take is that he should be doing what he does best, writing, and that he is getting more readers overall by giving away his book. Most people who download the book would not have bought it anyways, and some people who would not have heard about the book decide to buy it because they downloaded it and liked it.

Leesa Barnes wrote about the Top 10 women in podcasting, who they are, what they are doing.

Right now, these podcasting women are pretty authentic, delivering good value. There has not been time for line extensions ad naseum where they forget why they are podcasting. Cory has almost one million downloads of his book because he focused on delivering value and being authentic.

Seth talks about the possible demise of sites like Digg because they become so valuable to marketers that we can’t keep our hands off, and figure out ways to game to system.

Internet marketing has been around for a while. Portent has been around for the whole time, since 1995. How can we or any internet marketing agency make sure we keep our edge and remain authentic?

First, we focus on measurable results. Whenever we can we measure, and whenever it makes sense we ask for compensation based on revenue. This keeps everyone paying attention to making clients more profitable. A common metric we use is ROI. Say a client is at 2:1 ROI right now, that a dollar spent on internet marketing is producing $2 of revenue. Get to 3:1 ROI, and we are measurably better.

We also keep our edge through the buzzword of the decade, thought leadership. CEO Ian keeps a blog as do I.

Lastly, we count on referrals, case studies, and search engine rankings in getting new clients. We have only posted 5 case studies, and we need to write more. Clients can look at what we have done and our results, and ask themselves, are these guys for real?

The most measurable and present of these three is search engine rankings. We claim we can get clients high rankings; search for phrases like ‘internet marketing agency’ and we prove that we can for the terms important to us.

Pay attention to what you do best and measure results. That’s how you stay authentic and keep your edge.

“world domination via collaboration”

I knew the BlogHer folks would get dangerous someday, and now Jory tells us they are actively trying to take over the world… in the nicest way possible, of course.

She and her co-founder Lisa are on a panel (Jory says she is just moderating- we’ll see how well she can keep her mouth shut!) (Just kidding Jory, relax, geeze, I am sure you’ll do fine) at the Web 2.0 Conference. We can only hope she will be posting copious notes on what they all have to say.

and your name was?…

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.

jory the connecter

I had great fun last night talking with Jory and crew from BlogHer, the women’s blogging network. They had a get-together after the first main day of the Blog Business Summit.

I got to meet Jory, Elisa, and Kristin, who is new to the team. I also got to meet various of the bloggers.

After drinks and hour d’oeuvres, we had dinner with a whole slew of folks there for the summit. I got to talk a fair amount with a bunch of interesting people. Mark (he is on the left in the picture) had great stories to tell of his 12 businesses he has built.

I didn’t get to here that much about what Anna does as Director of Marketing at GiveMeaning, but we need to get together so I can hear more. And, this tells you how on the ball she is, I got an email from her at 1:59am this morning. So after the last of us left the restaurant around 11:30, she must have went to her hotel and started contacting everyone she had met. As I said, I need to hear more.

I got to talk with Jim who runs an early stage venture capital fund.

I met others as well, and a few people had run out of business cards by the end of that day. I expect I will hear from many of them next week.

Here are the take-homes from this event:

a) Talking with people in other businesses about what they have been through and hearing advice on your own business is really really fun.

b) You don’t have to have a lot of years in business to tell a good story.

c) If you have not checked out BlogHer, then you are missing the boat. So go read about it. Right now.

d) Everyone should be blogging. Really. You don’t know how much it is hurting you that you are not blogging right now. Get started at Blogger.

e) It is fun to work for a company where people are impressed with the clients. I had not heard of our client AmericanStationery.com before I got this job, but everyone else has. And it means something to them.

f) Most of the BlogHer women are married. Tough.

g) I need to be at the BlogHer Business ‘07 in NYC, and probably so do you.

And to get back to the title, thank you to Jory for inviting all those who hang at BlogHer.org. A great night, more good contacts, and probably more than a few good new clients. Thanks!