First it’s good to be back after my website went dark for about a week to address a change in hosts, and an extended bout of laziness that kept me away.

Microsoft, Google, Apple these are 3 of the largest tech companies in the world. They’re so similar and yet so very different.  These differences have really come out to the forefront lately with some of the choices in branding and marketing.

Apple

  I’ve been reviewing the new products Apple is releasing and how they talk about them to consumers. One thing is standing out, the use of the word “magical”, whether it’s the iPad or the new “magic trackpad” apple wants us to envision a world where their products bring to earth an almost imaginary experience. A new reality this is what Apple Brings.

Google

Their public facing brand has more to do with science fiction than technology. Their versions resemble confectionary delights rather than the operating systems they really are. Yes, Google has really embraced the fanciful in a way that inspires their customer base to jump in and get engaged.

Microsoft

Then there is Microsoft a juggernaut in the enterprise space but still very much an up and comer in the consumer space. They’ve got a few fanciful names like “bing, Azure, XBox, and Zune” but for the most part they are rooted in attaching to a brand that has been iconic in Redmond for over 20 years. Yes, everything is Windowized at the moment with: Windows Phone, Windows Mobile, Windows Azure, Windows Live Messenger, Windows Embedded, Windows Server, and a host of other products.

A once fanciful brand Windows has become a generic extended statement that tries to attach all these new markets to the desktop experience Microsoft dominates. Unfortunately, consumers aren’t getting excited by pushing the desktop experience into all these different categories. The message appears to come off as mundane and ordinary.

Fantasy in Marketing

There used to be a time when marketers were very cautious about making overly ambitious statements. Now making these bold fantastic, nowhere near reality statements have become the way to captivate an audience and cut through all the noise in the advertising space. Time will tell how long this trend lasts but it’s something that we’re seeing 3 major players handling a bit differently and it’s having meaningful results on performance.

The web browser is one of the most important applications that can be installed on a PC these days. Whereas the OS is the window to your device, the browser has become your window to the world. By its nature this application tends to be really difficult to move away from as familiarity, bundling, and shortcuts have made it all too easy to become captive to one browser or another. Or so I thought…..

The Background

I have used IE since back in the times of Netscape Navigator, I started using it because it was a free bundle and I normally look rather kindly on Microsoft products as they work the way I want them to. I was very happy with IE for quite a while, and then Firefox came out.

Now Firefox had some advantages, and about this time IE seemed to be suffering a little bit. Its performance for me, as well as its reliability to “just work” the way I wanted it to became a sore point. So I downloaded Firefox and started the trial run on it. What I found was a more disruptive experience, especially when there was ever a need for Flash installation or some other Applet. I couldn’t understand why I needed all these other downloads that just seemed to get taken care of on the backend with IE.

In the end I abandoned Firefox as the added complexity, inexplicable lack of it just working as I wanted it to, and minimal benefits drove me back to IE.

About 10 months ago I started using IE 8 on Windows 7. While I had felt IE 7 was a pretty solid product IE 8 seemed to turn back the clock and I noticed a huge drop-off in loading pages and performance, especially when I opened new tabs. The frustration to watch IE hang as I just went to check another tab was unbearable but somehow I tolerated it.

A Funny Thing Happened

Now without a company laptop, there came a need to go out and purchase a new machine as just having a desktop would not suffice. I purchased a new ASUS low-end notebook and have been very happy with it. Last night a friend who still works at Microsoft decided to help me setup some applications as he was horrified I hadn’t wiped all the preinstall garbage yet.

It was during his installation raid on my laptop that he took the opportunity to drop in Google’s Chrome browser. This was an option I had not even considered because as a consumer I’ve been frustrated in the past over Google’s business model being based around securing and selling my private information (aggregated or not).

The seeds were planted though; an invading product had made it to the shores of the once high walled castle that has held me as a captive audience and customer for at least 10 years.

Crossing the Moat

There were already cracks in the wall with my relationship with Internet Explorer. Performance was questionable, security some said laughable, but there had also been major fortifications in the IE 8 browser with some of its new features.

As it turns out though bridging the gap between the two products in my fickle heart was 1 small feature, one feature that’s so simple, that is so much a part of so many Microsoft products I cannot believe how it was ever overlooked.

And that feature, was a spell-checker in the browser.

Now just a few weeks ago I told a friend just how laughable Google Docs. was for the simple fact it didn’t even have the little squiggly line that appears under a misspelled word in my gmail account. How could they possibly compete when they can’t even tackle probably the most critical product in the Office Suite in Outlook?

Now I know the answer is that they didn’t include spell-check in any one of the programs because they included it at the browser level, so that it could be useful in many more areas than just the base application.

Is Spell-Checker a Game Changer?

There are many other features we could discuss, both positive and negative, for IE and Chrome; in the end I think this one feature is enough to really cause a shift in market-share.

People have become so used to the spell-check to cover for their laziness, poor education, haste, confusion, and absent mindedness that it is something no one can go without anymore. It is likely in the top 10 features used in Word, and Outlook.

What’s more, it has become a hassle now to have to write all of your text in Word or Outlook hit spell-check and copy it into the site you are using. Web 2.0 is where this feature is most sorely needed. Do you leave comments on a blog? Do you have Facebook, LinkedIn or any other number of social networking sites? Do you want your friends questioning your intelligence when you misspell simple words? Well guess what if you answered yes to the above questions, and no to the last question then you’re a Google Chrome customer period.

A Measured Response

Its amazing seeing the silo nature of a company work against it in this way. There needs to be an immediate response to add in the same functionality to IE 8 as is currently available in Office. Without this I don’t see how Microsoft can stay the dominate player in this space especially with the rise of social networking, and more of our lives and regular communications moving into the cloud.

Conclusion

It took 1 day of use, and 1 feature to convince me to abandon my previous browser of choice that had kept me captive for so long. Seeing this kind of innovation I am forced to rethink some of my positions on Google. For while their business model is abrasive to me, and while they haven’t shown much in the way of converting opportunities to dollars in businesses outside of their core model; they have shown me how to unseat a dominate player by just building a better product.

Introduction

I would like to take this time to introduce myself. My name is Gustav and I will also be contributing to the content on the website. You can read more about my accomplishments in the about section of the website. I have been in the background performing much of the marketing for the website.

This article will be one of several in a series devoted to Entry Level Blog Marketing. Much it will be advice of how to market your own blog through my own experiences.

There are two strategies that I undertook as part of an effort to market our blog as a useful resource for branding, marketing, and product management: Google Adwords and Web 2.0 social networking websites.

My Experience

I taught myself Google Adwords while I was a GM at a small single-owner operated pizzeria. I was extremely successfully in marketing our product in an incredibly competitive market (there were over two dozen pizzerias in just a 4 mile radius). In just over 3 months, with a budget of just $150/month, I was able to obtain a return on investment of 9:1. I was able to convince the owner that internet marketing is not only inexpensive but also extremely profitable.

Strategy A: Google Adwords

I applied the same strategy to our blog except the budget was significantly less ($50/month) and our blog was competing for ad space on a continent basis (North America was the geographic range) instead of a local basis with the pizzeria. While I was concerned, I decided to move forward because regardless of the outcome it would provide useful knowledge as our blog moves forward and garners attention.

The first setback occurred when many of the keywords that were relevant to our content were highly competitive and expensive. Words such as ‘branding,’ ‘marketing,’ ‘product management,’ ‘product branding,’ etc. had CPC(Cost-per-click) well over $1.00. Such a high CPC was unfeasible with our budget and made little sense when we have no current revenue stream. It wasn’t worth spending over $1.00 when it is highly unlikely each click will result in a conversion (conversion in our case was defined as an active reader of articles)

The second setback occurred when the keywords that were affordable (around $0.10 to $0.20 CPC) didn’t generate enough impressions to expose us to a large enough audience. With around 20 to 30 keywords per Ad Group we were only generating around 300 impressions in 2 weeks. That comes out to just over 20 impressions per day. When you don’t generate enough impressions, your CTR (Click-through-rate) won’t go up and as a result your quality score for those cheaper keywords will start going down resulting in a higher bid price in order to stay on the front page of results. This led me to believe that Google Adwords is not a good place to start for demand gen on a blog.

Strategy B: Web 2.0 Social Networking

Next, I decided to try the Web 2.0 market or social networking blogs that were frequently used around the world. The social networking blogs on my list included Digg, Reddit, Delicious, Mixx, Slashdot, Stumbleupon, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Sphinn. While all of these social networking blogs differ in the content offering, feature set, and business model, they all have one thing in common: users of any of these social networking sites have an opportunity to submit their own content and have it viewed or rated by other users. This sounded like a great opportunity to get some exposure at no cost.

After about 2 weeks of posting to the above aforementioned websites, we had over a 500% increase in traffic to our blog. This was impressive. With just about 15 minutes of work posting to each of the social networking blogs per day and an additional 15 minutes or so participating in other content and articles, we were obtaining some serious ROI.

It should be noted, however, that social networking sites should not be exclusively used for your own personal gain. The whole purpose of them is to develop an active community of members that post content from a wide variety of sources. If you choose to market your blog through these sites, then make sure you return the chance at free advertising by actively contributing to other articles and posting links to other domains. Many of them also implement auto spambots that detect and flag users who use their service exclusively for personal gain so it would be wise to follow my advice. Also make sure the quality of your content is high. People won’t vote up what you submit or visit your blog if they believe there isn’t content there worth looking at. We at MGMT Now strongly believe the business content and analysis we provide will help others make insightful business decisions.

Conclusion

When deciding between Google Adwords and social networking websites for initial blog marketing the answer is simple: Go the no cost way of Web 2.0 social networking. However, once you have a revenue stream and can increase your monthly budget on Adwords to a competitive level, Adwords will prove to be very helpful. Adsense is a great way to generate advertising revenue, but I will leave that to another part of this series.

Being my first attempt at marketing a blog, it is very exciting to see the strategies that work and the strategies that don’t work from my own personal experiences. I take the time to write these articles because I want my readers to benefit much in the same way I have. I believe that everyone with an entrepreneurial spirit has a right to learn how to make a successful presence on the internet.

I’m both an equal opportunity appreciator and hater on Apple’s iBranding and Steve Jobs as you can see from my past articles. It’s been such an iconic brand and has moved an entire market in a different direction. That’s why it’s so awesome seeing a company come out guns blazing with a commercial devoted to turning said brand into a farce.

You can see the amazingly popular video (860,000+ plays) embedded below:
[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]

Couple of really interesting facts about the Droid campaign.

• It wasn’t Google, it was actually Verizon behind this ad.
• At no point did it attack AT&T whose network performance has been one of the biggest pain points that iPhone users have complained about.
• Verizon had to license the trademark for the term Droid from George Lucas…. Star Wars is still paying dividends
• The ad felt more like a movie preview from Michael Bay than your usual commercial fair.
• The words Apple or iPhone were never mentioned in the ad.

Apple Created the Target
It’s pretty easy to target Apple as they have a singular vision of a device and expect users to move to it or skip the product entirely. The focus on high margins, crisp user experience, and the Apple vision has always driven Apple’s Product Development.

Why is Verizon Targeting Apple?
This, at first glance, doesn’t make a lot of sense; just a month back there was a lot of speculation about Apple abandoning the AT&T exclusivity to make a deal with Verizon.

The problem here is that it’s extremely unlikely Apple would ever transition to the Verizon as the carrier utilizes CDMA technology which is most common in the US. Not including a keyboard in the iPhone wasn’t just an aesthetics decision, but it also meant Apple could sell 1 device in every country by just changing some software. While CDMA has its advantages, it would mean Apple building 2 different devices 1 on GSM and 1 on CDMA then add in the additional hardware cost CDMA has over GSM and it becomes clear Apple would have to go against their usual mold to do a deal.

Why Not AT&T
Customers often are not savy enough to tell the device failures from the service providers. While the iPhone has impeccable loyalty, AT&T doesn’t. By targeting Apple, Verizon is focusing on the largest threat: customer loyalty for the iPhone.

Conclusion
Verizon’s execution on this commercial was spotless. Best of all, they never gave any awareness back to Apple. Giving a competitor air time is always a dangerous move. Can you send a message strong enough to displace the added brand recognition you are giving them? By focusing on the iBranding, Verizon could set the tone of the commercial while not bolstering Apple’s brand further.

The verdict is still out on Android’s ability to move past Apple in this market, but the commercial is a stroke of genius for Verizon and a big win for Google. Turning the ubiquitous definition of what a phone is that Apple has created in their thought leadership into a negative is the right move. I, for one, am eager to see what further commercials Verizon can come up with.

As always when we enter into these sorts of conversations its important to note I’m not a lawyer. Any expertise you place in me is on you, this information should be used for enlightening purposes only and you all should consult lawyers. Keep in mind outside of costing a ton of money, lawyers are generally quite useful.

So having gone through an Intellectual Property Management certification, and being a zealot for copyright holders I feel quite confident I can give an interesting look into the world of copyrights.

What is a copyright?

According to our friends over at the USPTO (who you may remember from our trademark discussion):

“Copyright is a form of protection provided by U.S. law to the authors of “original works of authorship” fixed in any tangible medium of expression.  The manner and medium of fixation are virtually unlimited.  Creative expression may be captured in words, numbers, notes, sounds, pictures, or any other graphic or symbolic media. The subject matter of copyright is extremely broad, including literary, dramatic, musical, artistic, audiovisual, and architectural works.  Copyright protection is available to both published and unpublished works.”

Wow that’s a lot to take in. The first sentence really is the most important one in that blurb though, as it identifies protected works as being original works, fixed in any tangible medium of expression. So we’ve seen how broad and powerful this protection is but why is it so important?

The Vision Behind Copyrights

This may not come up on a citizenship test, or have been a huge component of your US History class, but copyrights were a Congressional granted power via Article 1 Section 8 of the US Constitution.

“To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries”

The key our forefathers settled on for how to best further arts and science was by granting property rights to intellectual property. This was a very new concept, and has pretty much been the backbone for much of the innovation found in this country. By securing ownership rights, this enabled authors and inventors to more freely share their collected works without concern of being cheated.

What Are All the Rights granted by Copyright?

Reproduce: This right grants the copyright holder the right to reproduce or authorize another party to reproduce the work.

Adapt:This one is a little more problematic for me (think I need to look it up) basically modify, adjust format etc. Think adapting a book to a movie etc. 

Distribute: Grants the right to distribute the work through some medium. think television, movies, the internet.

Publicly Perform: A Public performance of the work, think a play or a concert.

Publicly Display: This allows a work to be displayed in a public setting. Think art, or a landmark.

Publicly Perform by means of Digital audio transmissions: Think performed via radio. this one is always cracks me up but will make sense later.

When Do 6 Rights Make a Wrong

You may be wondering right now why do we need 6 separate categories for copyrights, why not just group it together throw a heck of a lot of commas at it, have a run-on sentence (like this one), and call it a day? Because the genius of copyrights are that you can pick and choose which rights you want to grant to interested parties. One of the best examples are artists that do public works projects for free, granting the city the right to only publicly display the work; while continuing to assert their rights to the copyrighted image.

Think about this for one second, you go to Seattle and see the Space Needle for example (note I’m not entirely clear on the actual rights ownership, and privalages for this landmark so its being used as an example only). You take a photo of the landmark, and decide to reproduce it on a t-shirt as it looks amazing. If the group behind the Space Needle had only granted certain rights such as public display, and restricted others such as reproduction then you’re now infringing on their rights. 

Conclusion

While this is a massive post, its just touching the surface of copyright law, and how it impacts businesses. The reason for this article was a discussion on the last blog post surrounding Google’s side wiki. Side wiki is interesting in that it does create some tension by undermining the ability of the copyright holders to enforce the rights given under our current copyright laws.

Google enabled graffiti is coming to the web. What does this mean for your web based business? Photo by Clav

What is sidewiki?

Sidewiki is a service offered by Google that is included in their Google Toolbar product. It’s positioned as a service that enables users to “contribute helpful information on any web page. How side wiki works is insert a layer on top of the website where users can drop in comments.

It’s not graffiti though is it?

Graffiti is typically defined as any images, lettering that is scratched, painted, or marked in any manner on property; with the implication that it is property that is owned by another party.

What Google is doing is enabling all of its users to create digital graffiti that changes the way everyone with this service enabled experience on the website. This really isn’t that much different than spray painting the side of a building except that users have to opt-in to see it.

photo provided by lorelei

Business Implications

I would expect most any site that doesn’t derive its revenue/traffic from user based activities to be a little nervous. This includes anyone who has an eCommerce portal, any corporate websites, and bloggers.

While there are a lot of positives to enabling your audience to play a bigger role in advocating your product, unfortunately we’ve all seen internet flame wars. The scary thing here is its Google not the site owner that determines the relevance of comments, as well as if a comment should be taken down.

Steps businesses can take

First off shore up your branding, make sure you’re speaking to your core audience and building trust, and a bond that will put them on your side. By doing this you can eliminate a majority of the exposure to negative public commentary.

Enable your own controlled feedback loop, be innovative. It could be adding a comments section, or creating a direct pipeline between the audience and a site admin/public relations person. Having a brand presence in the form of an evangelist or community activist goes a long way towards taking charge of the discussion and keeping it on point.

In addition to these steps you can also join the side wiki fray.  You can find steps to do this here.

Conclusion

As a site owner myself, I find what Google is doing to be very intrusive, it’s not unexpected though as we’ve seen things like YouTube and or Google News aggregator which directly attacked the value a content owner held. Google pushes the envelope on ownership of content because their business model makes money off of free information.

I really wonder how far side wiki will go. Can Google insert advertising into it? If so we may see a time where bloggers and other advertising based websites may run into significant pain with their current business model as it bumps up against Google’s.