winning the web - december issue
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Winning the Web December 2009. Jet BlueTRANSCRIPT
T H E D I G I T A L B U S I N E S S M O N T H L Y
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Winning the WebA F F I L I AT E S U M M I T W E S T | T H E P R E M I E R A F F I L I AT E M A R K E T I N G C O N F E R E N C E
D E C 2 0 0 9
COVER STORY:
MICHAELSTROMERJETBLUE’SWEBCOMMANDER
e-Commerce AltitudeHOW JETBLUE STAYS NEW AND ON TOP OF THE WEB
A Gift for ReinventionA NEW AND SHINY YOU
IS GOING TO MAKE EVERYONE HAPPIER!
Hands Free DrivingORLANDO MAGIC’S PAT WILLIAMS ON LEADERSHIP GONE AWOL
W I N N I N G T H E W E B M A G . C O M
A p u b l i c a t i o n o f
Make-over Your Whole LifeTAKE IT ALL APART AND PUT IT
BACK TOGETHER AGAIN
S P E C I A L S E C T I O N : P E R S O N A L I N N O V A T I O N
INTERESTEDIN “WINNINGTHE WEB”?Contact Epic Advertising today to access our full suite of global online marketing solutions.
Advertisers and Agencies: [email protected]: [email protected] Relations: [email protected] Website: www.EpicAdvertising.comInquiries Outside of the US: [email protected]
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Winning This MonthT H E D I G I T A L B U S I N E S S M O N T H L Y F O R D E C E M B E R 2 0 0 9
Curly�’s Wrong Turn
6 What happens to a winning team when the leader goes missing? ! ey lose, of course.
By Pat Williams
The New You
18 It’s a lot like the old one, but new! Improved! And, best of all, successful. Your
friends and co-workers will think every day’s Christmas.By David W. Smith
Open Mike............................................................... 3Winning Trends..................................................... 4
Condender File................................................... 21Dark-Horse............................................................. 22Online Metrics..................................................... 22
The Art of the Re-Think
14 ! e perfect 2010 resolution? Clean up that mess you call a business, a
relationship, a life.By Robert Phelan
E D I T O R & P U B L I S H E R Michael Sprouse
M A N A G I N G E D I T O R Cherilyn Earl
C O N T R I B U T I N G E D I T O R S Bre" LofgrenRobert Sheasley
A R T D I R E C T O R Amy Ropp
C R E A T I V E D I R E C T O R Kim Hall
A D D I R E C T O R Alison Morse
C E O Adam Wi" yawi" [email protected]
C O O Gregg Stebben
E D I T O R I A L D I R E C T O R Denis Boyles
WINNING THE WEB: THE DIGITAL BUSINESS MONTHLYPublished by Epic Advertisingwinningthewebmag.com512 Seventh Avenue, 12th FloorNew York, NY 10018(212) [email protected]
WINNING THE WEB: THE DIGITAL BUSINESS MONTHLY. ISSUE NO. 4 DECEMBER 2009. © 2009 ADVANTAGE MEDIA GROUP. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
What you need to know... ........................... 23Ask Bre" .................................................................. 23What it takes... ..................................................... 24
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ADVANTAGE MEDIA GROUP
advantagefamily.com | 843.414.5600 ext.102
Publishers of Business, Motivation, and Self-Help Media
How JetBlue stays alo! on the Web. ! e Winning Q&A for December.
Digital Navigator How JetBlue’s Michael Stromer plots an e-commerce course.
By Robert Sheasley
SSP EC I A L SEC TI O N : PP E R SO N A L I N N OVATI OO NN
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Open MikeW I T H M I C H A E L S P R O U S E
I GET ASKED A LOT ABOUT ONLINE ADVERTISING—what makes it so great or so powerful or such a compelling ! eld in which to build one’s career. My answer inevitably comes back to my basic desire to be a leader and a forward-thinker, which mirrors much of the industry’s thinking as well. Or maybe it’s just a front to say that this industry is exciting and almost entirely rooted in innovation. "
Technology itself, as Mr. Jobs well knows, is the foundational component of innovation in so many industries these days. Whether you’re talking about aviation, travel, advertis-ing or a plethora of other industries, advances in technology are the glue that holds innova-tion together and are in fact the major driver of innovation today. "
Speaking purely about the online advertis-ing sector, it is energizing to live and work in a business that truly is constantly coming up with new ideas, new ways to execute an advertising campaign, new platforms and social networks to leverage, and ultimately harnessing greater creativity to bring to light for advertisers and publishers. "
Web-based businesses have a history of inno-vation and success. My very own company is a prime example of a successful advertising busi-ness that’s entirely online (well, until WINNING THE WEB came along). Go back even further to the mid-’90s and you’ll see that the Web has fundamentally altered the mindset of consumers, as well as changed their actual behaviors, day in and day out. What other medium has made the types of strides, as quickly, as the Web? There haven’t been any. Perhaps the most interesting case studies to follow are those of older, more traditional industries and companies and how they have harnessed the power of the Web to their advantage. Can you think of a few? I can name one in particular."
Enter the subject of this month’s cover story—JetBlue. We like JetBlue not only because it’s fun to # y and a good and well-known brand, but also because the company sits at the intersec-tion of what some deem to be an old industry (aviation): com-petes or cooperates within a highly competitive sector (travel as
a whole): and has taken an innovative approach to advertising and to harnessing the Web in particular. JetBlue uses a proactive
strategy in online advertising spending, lever-aging the power of its brand that has been built o$ ine and online. The airline is clearly on to something and is winning the Web. I think you’ll ! nd the article highly interesting and learn a thing or two about innovation."
In addition to our feature on JetBlue, we have stayed true to the theme of originality in our fourth issue of WINNING THE WEB. As we enter the heart of the holiday season, we all will undoubtedly take stock of what was in 2009 and look with hope to what will be in 2010. Perhaps there’s that crazy idea you had that hasn’t seen the light of day yet? Or, there’s that strategic initiative that you never seemed to have the time to focus on until now? What-ever that next innovation is, we hope this issue will give you the motivation to unearth it and execute it."
2009 was a big year for this publication. Our entirely Web-based company launched a print magazine with much success. It would not have been possible without our reader-ship (which is growing faster than we thought possible) or without the participation of our featured companies and content-producing team. Thank you."
Finally, I’d like to wish you all happy holidays and a prosper-ous 2010.""
Here’s to your own innovative and Epic victories,
"
M I C H A E L S P R O U S EEditor and [email protected]"
What’s New?
“Innovation distinguishes between a
leader and a follower.”
!—Steve Jobs !
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Winning TrendsW H A T P E O P L E A R E T H I N K I N G A N D T A L K I N G A B O U T T H I S M O N T H
You know you’ve seen them before. Three familiar faces—if not exactly as you expected to see them.
Electronic Arts
Buying happiness. Most everyone in the world knows Elec-tronic Arts, or played one of EA’s console games. In fact, it is
touted in many circles as the leader in console
games. The company has built a robust business over the years and in the process has built a formi-dable brand. However, one area that has been less of a focus to outsiders has been in online social gaming.
Last month, all that changed. EA announced its purchase of social gaming company Play! sh. We applaud this move on a number of levels. The latest trends show an explosion in casual gaming and online social gaming. Console games are still strong, but could see some turbulence in the future should the online gaming expe-rience become better.
EA was clearly ahead of this and is posi-tioned to see synergies between these two major areas of games in general. The company needed to make a move – the old “build or buy” syndrome. It chose the latter, and we think this will prove to be a winning combination over time.
Face.com
Playing Tag. You may not have heard of Israeli startup Face.com, but you’ve certainly heard of Facebook. So Face.com is another one we expect to gain steam as platforms like Facebook con-tinue their winning trends. The technol-ogy company specializes in Facebook applications. In March, it launched its ! rst product, called Photo Finder, which uses facial recognition technology to allow users to ! nd photos of them-selves that aren’t tagged or that the user may not know were posted.
Genius, right? Well the encore is awesome. Photo Tagger is a tool that is capable of ! nding photos of people that were uploaded to Facebook albums, even if they remain untagged by users. After you install the app, you can select any public album (either your own or from friends). Photo Tagger then scans the photos, batches subjects into groups using its facial rec-ognition technology and suggests tags for faces it has identi! ed as such. Con-! rmed tags are then pushed directly onto Facebook, mirroring the social network’s privacy settings, and the result is a custom album made up of tagged photos.
Face.com claims faces can be recog-nized regardless of facial expressions or the lighting, quality, backgrounds, angle and focus of the pictures. It’s an impressive social search engine for
News, insights and analysis from the Digital Business Monthly.
Familiar facesfaces on Facebook, where millions of images are uploaded to albums every week. It also doubles as a handy noti! -cation tool, because it has a system in place dubbed Face Alerts that lets users know when pictures of them appear on Facebook, with or without tags.
Priceline
Beaming Bill. That cheerful William Shatner must really have known some-thing after all. Why? Because Priceline is on ! re. The company ! nancially con-tinues to grow and outpace analyst’s expectations, the most recent example being their 3rd Quarter earnings.
A couple factors are at play here, we think. First, the company’s focus is not solely on the domestic market, which is highly competitive; in fact, a major-ity of its pro! ts come internationally. Second, what’s the one thing people are looking for during a global reces-sion? Deals. Priceline certainly has deals. Ka-ching.
The company’s success and winning trends are all the more impressive given the competitive nature of the space. Orbitz and Expedia posted either declines or modest year-over-year growth in gross domestic bookings in the third quarter. Priceline? A 25 percent increase in bookings year over year. That’s winning.
www.AzoogleAds.comwe look forward to seeing you there.
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What the founding coach of the Green Bay Packers taught the founder of the Orlando Magic about leadership �– and what happens when you don�’t have it. B Y P A T W I L L I A M SW
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CURLY LAMBEAU WAS THE ORIGINAL Green Bay Packer. He was in the editorial o% ces of the Green Bay Press-Gazette on August 11, 1919, when the team was founded. He played halfback for the Packers from 1919 through 1929. As head coach, he led the Packers to six world championships.
Was he a leader? Absolutely. One incident from Lam-beau’s coaching career illustrates just how important a leader can be to a team of competitive professionals.
On December 11, 1938, the four-time world champion Packers had advanced to the NFL title game in New York. The ! rst half of the game between the Packers and the New York Giants was a close, hard-fought contest. When Lam-beau’s Packers went into the locker room at halftime, they trailed, 16 to 14. The team counted on Coach Lambeau to come up with a second-half game plan to give it an edge.
Unfortunately, Coach Lambeau never got to the locker room.
Unfamiliar with the layout of the Giants’ stadium, he took a wrong turn and walked through the wrong door. He realized his error as the door slammed shut behind him—and he was locked out of the stadium.
Lambeau pounded on the door, but no one heard him. He ran around to a public gate and told the security guard, “I’m Curly Lambeau of the Green Bay Packers! You’ve gotta let me in!”
“Forget it, bub,” said the guard. “No one gets in without a ticket.” “But I’m the coach!” said Lambeau. “Yeah, and I’m the king of England,” the guard sneered. “Beat it before I call the cops.”
Meanwhile, in the locker room, the Packers waited for their coach to show up. They needed some new X’s and O’s, some inspiration, some leadership! Where was Coach Lambeau?
Soon, halftime was over. The bewil-dered Packers returned to the ! eld and proceeded to play the second half, leaderless and directionless.
At the gate, Coach Lambeau got red in the face, yelling at the security guard. The commotion attracted a crowd, including some sports writers who recognized the coach. “Hey,” they said, “it’s Curly Lambeau! Let him in!”
By the time Lambeau made it to the sidelines, the third quarter was almost over, and the Giants had scored another touchdown. By the end of the game, the Packers had fumbled away the championship, 23-17. Football his-torians chalk up that loss to Curly Lambeau’s wrong turn.
Every team, company, club, organization, military unit, church, nation, and family needs leadership. Wherever even two or three people gather together around a task or a purpose, there must be leadership. If not, the task won’t get done and the people will fail. If you really want to learn
about leadership, just look at what happens when it’s not there.
Even nature shows us the importance of leadership. Nineteenth-century French naturalist Jean-Henri Fabre once conducted an experiment with a species called pro-cessionary caterpillars. These caterpillars get their name from the fact that they link to one another in a long pro-cession when they go looking for food. The one caterpillar in front, the leader, does all the searching, while the rest are hooked together like boxcars in a freight train.
This arrangement works just ! ne as long as there is a leader. But Fabre wondered what would happen if he elim-inated the leader from the procession. He placed the cat-erpillars inside the rim of a large dirt-! lled # ower pot. He arranged the caterpillars so that they were linked all the way around the pot in a continuous circle without a leader. In the center of the pot he placed the processionary cat-erpillar’s favorite food--a pile of pine needles. The caterpil-lars conga-danced their way around and around the pot, each one following the one ahead. For a full week they fol-lowed each other around the pot until they all died of star-vation. An abundance of food was just inches away, but they never found it. They had no leader.
Leadership is an absolute requirement in any organiza-tion, for any endeavor. Without good leadership, even the most dedicated, hard-working, and loyal team or organi-zation is doomed to fail. Another Green Bay great, Vince Lombardi, who coached the team to world championships in Super Bowls I and II, used to ask one question before every Thursday practice: “Who leads today?” He knew that the Packers consisted of squads within a team, and each squad needed a leader. His job, as he saw it, was to lead the leaders. The leaders would in turn lead the squads.
A visionary leader named Walt Disney envisioned glit-tering theme parks that put a fairyland castle, a starship,
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and a frontier fort all within walking distance. His vision is now a reality—and it keeps on expanding.
A business leader named Sam Walton envisioned a retail empire based on low prices, excellent service, enthu-siastic employees, and great customer care. Wal-Mart is now a reality, and it, too, keeps expanding.
A civil-rights leader named Martin Luther King Jr. foresaw a world of fairness, justice, economic opportu-nity, and racial harmony. Much has been accomplished in bringing his vision to pass—though there is still much to be done.
A spiritual leader named Billy Graham has preached a message of love and salvation to almost every corner of the world, to people of almost every ethnic and language group on the planet. Still, he never retired, he never relaxed, and his vision continued to exceed his accomplishments.
So what is winning? Winning is making visions come true.
Winning is increasing pro! ts, market share, return on investment, and shareholder value. And winning is also taking care of employee needs, creating more jobs, chang-ing lives, and making life better for families. Winning is transforming neighborhoods and transforming the world. Winning is spreading a message of hope, peace, tolerance, faith, and love.
Leadership is all about winning. And winning is about building a better world. This is true whether you are leading a business, a government, a church, a religious organiza-tion, a civic organization, a military unit, a family. It’s all about winning, and transforming the world for the better.
I once had a speaking engagement in Kansas City, Mis-souri. Every day, wherever I am, I run to stay in shape. So I left my hotel and ran down Main Street in Kansas City. At the corner of 40th and Main I noticed a park – a tiny, well-tended square of grass and shrubs with a huge stone marker. People tend to pass such things without looking, but I am always curious; stone markers always have a story behind them.
It was a memorial erected in honor of a Kansas City native and World War I hero, Major Murray Davis. Major Davis was killed at Exermont, France, on September 28,
1918. Inscribed on the monument were these words:“Seriously wounded, he refused to relinquish his
command until, mortally wounded, he fell, leading his comrades to victory. His last words were, “Take care of my men.”
No leader lives forever, but the words and deeds of servant leaders truly live on after they are gone. The great-est leader of all is not the boss, but the servant of all. It is a paradox and di% cult for us to understand why it is so. If anyone wants to be ! rst, he must be the very last and the servant for all.
And when he goes missing, everybody pays for the defeat. Just ask the ghost of Curly Lambeau. W
Pat Williams is cofounder and senior vice president of the NBA’s Orlando Magic. Over a 40-year professional sports career, he has written nearly 60 books on business, motiva-tion, and self-help. This is his ! rst article for WINNING THE WEB. For more visit patwilliamsmotivate.com.
CURLY WITH THEBALL
CURLY WITH CHALK
Leadership is all about winning. And winning is about building a better world.
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One of the most innovative airlines in the world is putting wings on the web to chart a new approach to
customer service and value-driven commerce. How did they get there? Here�’s the ight-plan.
JETBLUE AIRWAYS, the nation’s eighth-largest carrier, was born in 2000, priding itself on low fares and innovative creature comforts. It was a time of record-high fares in the industry when pilot strikes and slowdowns left many trav-elers disgruntled.
What the years since have wrought: The industry has felt the crushing blow of 9/11, wildly vacillating fuel prices, an economic downdraft that hardly encourages air travel. But even in such headwinds, JetBlue has made remarkable headway, propelled by its commitment to new ideas and it’s now-famous respect for its customers.
We asked Michael Stromer, the airline’s director of e-commerce and interactive marketing, about the role the ‘Internet has played in that success and how the company continues to strive to win the Web:
TELL US A LITTLE ABOUT JETBLUE’S DIGITAL EFFORTS TODAY VERSUS, SAY, A FEW YEARS AGO We break our digital e& orts into two core buckets: 1) e-commerce and 2) online marketing—and we ensure there is an integrated approach between these two areas.
From an e-commerce standpoint, our current state has hit a new level of maturity compared to a few years ago. For many years, we would think of ways to expand the business and swiftly focus on delivering a solution. This resulted in a very complex architecture with a lot of ine% ciencies.
This approach led us most recently to our decision to move to the Sabre platform, which we are excited to launch in the ! rst quarter of 2010. We have been able to build from scratch a front end that delivers what custom-ers have been asking for, while being tied to a much more robust and uniform back-end solution. We leveraged Web analytics, customer usability sessions, and experts like For-rester Research to assist us in our design approach.
Additionally, from an analytics standpoint we have also matured. From in-depth competitive and site tra% c anal-ysis to multivariate testing, we believe we are taking all the right steps. This has helped to drive a lot of change to jetblue.com and we’ve reaped the bene! ts in conversion optimization.
From an online marketing standpoint, we have made a multitude of changes. We launched with a search agency partner in 2007 and since then have outperformed our direct competitors when looking at relative market share to cost metrics. We also engaged with a third party to conduct a Search Engine Optimization audit of our site
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things,” he says of his company. “You have to love the brand you’re marketing.”
When he joined JetBlue, he says, he was surprised to see ! rst-hand just how competitive the industry was. “And to be com-petitive these days in this indus-try,” he observes, “you do need to have the better product, and that’s a lot about how you treat the customer.”
JetBlue, the nation’s eighth-largest carrier, has been dedi-cated to that customer relation-ship since its inception in 2000.
Starting out as a low-fare, nonunion airline, it continues to place a premium on providing the customer with value – free snacks and drinks, for one thing, and a rarity in modern air travel—increased leg room. Passengers give high marks to its seat-back satellite television system, and the company plans to inaugurate Wi-Fi services in more aircraft soon.
JetBlue long has emphasized domestic, Caribbean, and Mexico travel, adding # ights this year to Costa Rica and Colom-bia. Early last year, the German carrier Lufthansa bought a 19 percent stake for $300 million. Considering that crude was soon to top $100 a barrel, it was a good time to have cash on hand.
The Lufthansa deal is helping JetBlue position itself for the global travel market, with an infusion not only of money but of expertise. For example, since last year, JetBlue also has had a booking partnership with the Irish airline Aer Lingus, further extending its reach by connecting with customers from the Emerald Isle.
The airline this fall upgraded its TrueBlue frequent-# ier program. “Customer loyalty is so important,” says Stromer, “and a big part of it is rewarding customers coming back.” JetBlue even o& ers a rewards program for pets, called JetPaws.
JetBlue took o& with its unusual emphasis on civility and a& ordability. In the early years, the company grew 30 percent annually on the strength of customer loyalty and word-of-mouth, but the company took a major blow in 2007 with a well-publicized, ten-hour stuck-on-the-runway-in-a-storm ! asco, followed by massive # ight cancellations.
But within a week, the airline had drafted a “customer bill of rights.” It was the ! rst of its kind in the industry, letting pas-sengers know precisely what to expect and how they’d be compensated for any inconveniences in a variety of contin-gencies. JetBlue posted the bill of rights on its website and began a serious review of its operations, focusing on its long-established reputation for respect and value that passengers had come to expect. “The culture is so important in this busi-ness,” Stromer says. “We need to put ourselves in the custom-er’s shoes. A lot of it is about keeping an open dialogue with them.”
For Stromer, that means attending to the website, making sure it functions e% ciently, attracts passengers, and drives the business. To that end, he’s helping to lead a major e& ort to roll out a “rigorous” new site by early 2010. “A lot of small things will add up to major improvement,” he says.
WHEN IT COMES TO COMMERCE, THE INTERNET’S WHERE THE
WILD THINGS ARE. NO WONDER KEEPING A MA JOR AIRLINE’S
WEBSITE FLYING HIGH ABOVE THE TURBULENCE OF THE WEB TAKES
A STEADY HAND, A CLEAR MIND, A RESPECT FOR CUSTOMERS—AND AN
AFFECTION FOR MAURICE SENDAK.AS MICHAEL STROMER’S SURFING through the JetBlue Airways website, searching for ways to please the traveling customer, he thinks about why he got into such a hot-button industry, in which airfares among competitors can swing radically from hour to hour.
“I knew I needed my career to be creative,” says Stromer, 32, director of e-commerce and interactive marketing for the decade-old airline. Well before his college days at Bing-hamton University and Baruch’s Zicklin School of Business, where he earned his MBA, he was interested in the arts and design.
He admired, in particular, the art of illustration and anima-tion, which he collects – along with vintage toys (“and for me, vintage means from the ’70s and ’80s,” he says, almost apolo-getically). Recently he became a new dad – it’s a boy! – so he also has been collecting illustrations for children, such as Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are.
He should be an expert on that topic, since he’s made a career out of doing his part to tame the wild # uctuations of an industry that has seen plenty of stormy weather lately, endur-ing crises of national security and spiking fuel costs and an economy hit by wind shear. Airlines collectively have hardly been a Wall Street favorite lately, and JetBlue hasn’t been immune to the industry’s problems.
Stromer’s a& ection for the arts might seem to disqualify him from web marketing, where numbers rule. But, in fact, his creative bent is a plus. “Those who get into the e-commerce ! eld,” Stromer says, “tend to be one of two types. They’re either from a technical background and move toward business, or else they have a business background and take on the tech-nical role.”
He’s one of the latter, he says. But even as his conversation spins o& into the nitty-gritty of analytics and optimizations, it’s clear that his original passion for illustration and design still drives him. He enjoys the challenge of ! guring out the best way to attract customers to a website and making it a pleas-ing—and pro! table—experience.
Before joining JetBlue in the summer of 2007, Stromer had garnered experience at two other well-known companies. He started in 1998 as an account executive at Publishers Clearing House, then moved to 1-800-Flowers, where he was interac-tive marketing manager.
A Brooklyn kid who migrated to Long Beach, Long Island, as an adult, Stromer often had # own with JetBlue from its busiest hub at John F. Kennedy International Airport and had come to respect it. “It’s inventive. It’s willing to test and try new
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in 2008, and after implementing a number of the recom-mended changes, we have really reaped the bene! ts. SEO is not only important for content sites. The travel industry could bene! t from a more concerted SEO approach.
We have also moved a large portion of our o$ ine spend to the digital channel. This includes setting strict Cost Per Action targets and then ! nding the right media to hit those goals. We have dipped our toe into almost every platform to see what works. Behavioral targeting and smart media buying has allowed us to take a surgical approach to reaching the right customers online.
IN WHAT WAYS DO YOU FEEL THAT YOU’RE LEADING THE AIRLINE INDUSTRY, AT LEAST INSOFAR AS LEVERAGING THE ONLINE MEDIUM? In looking at our competitive analysis tools, we have one of the highest-converting websites among domestic air-lines. We also have a much higher percentage share of site direct tra% c. This allows us to be more aggressive with our media approach because we can turn tra% c into buyers and then into loyalists.
Our brand has also allowed us to be more successful in certain online mediums. For example, our social net-working e& ort, which has generally been very organic in approach, has allowed us to reach over one million fol-lowers of @JetBlue on Twitter. We believe this is because we don’t treat this channel the same way as others. We respect that customers want to have a dialogue and not always have an o& er thrown at them. We don’t believe that customers ! nd this same relationship with our com-petitors, who generally are seen as corporate entities with # awed customer service policies.
From an online standpoint, we tend to benchmark ourselves against other online channels rather than lim-iting ourselves to other airlines. Customers don’t make
a hard delineation between industries. They expect that our usability is as good as Amazon’s or Facebook’s or other channels where they spend their time.
THE AIRLINE INDUSTRY IS NOTORIOUSLY COMPETI"TIVE; WHAT TYPES OF THINGS HAVE YOU DONE ONLINE TO STAND OUT AND MAKE AN IMPACT? You are completely correct. Coming from an online retail background, I couldn’t believe how competitive this indus-try was when I joined. Literally, we change our prices and they are matched across the industry in minutes.
This has forced the need for “more.” We take a lot of pride in the experience we deliver to our customers. This
is about delivering more than the other guys in our core experience. It’s also about doing what is right and treating our customers with dignity and respect and always thank-ing them for making JetBlue what it is today.
We believe this carries a lot of weight in the purchase decision when sitting against our competitors sometimes at the same price. We have also completely redesigned our TrueBlue program, which relaunches today and which will provide our customers tons more value. This is an extra bene! t for jetting with us rather than the competition.
Besides articulating these bene! ts clearly in our online messaging, we also try to come up with promotional ideas that have impact. Our All You Can Jet for $599 promotion this summer was a runaway success. Our customers loved it, and it also allowed us to ! ll more seats during one of the slower travel periods of the year.
TELL US A LITTLE ABOUT HOW JETBLUE’S DIGITAL EFFORTS TIE IN WITH TRADITIONAL OR OFFLINE EFFORTS. Some companies make a hard delineation between brand and digital, and the two areas just don’t collaborate. At JetBlue, the brand drives everything, including our retail advertising. We see digital as just one of the mediums for serving up the brand, albeit a major channel. We realize that we will get more impressions and frequency with a customer on our website than on any billboard.
As mentioned earlier, we have also shifted a great deal of our spend to the digital channels. We make sure there is always consistency in our messages. In order to opti-mize our spend, we have targeted our geographically segmented media strategy across our online and o$ ine channels.
Over the past three years we have moved all our retail advertising from print to online channels and we are
reaping the bene! ts in reach and measure-ment. We focus our retail spend on sites and networks where people are looking at, researching or purchasing travel.
Recently, we’ve also started to test brand advertising online in our key markets as a way to highlight our product
and experience di& erences.In the social networking world, we also created a second
Twitter account called @JetBlueCheeps which, di& erently than our original @JetBlue account, focuses strictly on deals customers can ! nd online via Twitter every Monday. Separation of the customer service account versus the deals account gives the customer the power to opt in to one or both subjects that interest them.
WHAT DO YOU SEE AS YOUR BIGGEST CHALLENGES SHORT" AND LONG"TERM ON THE INTERNET? From a technology perspective, we need to be very nimble. Technology is changing customers’ expectations, and you
We have moved all our retail advertising from print to online channels and we are reaping
the bene ts in reach and measurement.
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Last fall, JetBlue proudly inaugurated its new Terminal 5 at JFK behind Eero Saarinen’s TWA masterpiece. With 26 gates and shopping and dining variety, the terminal now be! ts a rising star that has nearly 60 destinations, 151 aircraft in its # eet, 650 # ights a day from seven focus cities, and 12,000 employees. JetBlue contributed $80 million, a tenth of the cost to transform the terminal, with the Port Authority ! nanc-ing most of the remainder.
JetBlue is aiming for a home page that is just as beautifully uncluttered and easy for customers to navigate as its new ter-minal. Behind the screen, the company has decided to switch to the Sabre com-puter reservations system to ! nd # ights and plan trips through multiple airports. “They’re becoming a much more nimble and innovative company themselves,” Stromer says, “and we’re moving to be their ! rst custom built website.”
Customer feedback is a prominent theme in the JetBlue website redesign, and Stromer empha-sizes that better analytical support is crucial: “The only real way to get better as a website is to understand who you’re speaking to.” The OpinionLab feedback tool, he says, will collect and analyze the site’s usage, page by page, to gauge
visitors’ satisfaction. And the website should know enough about who’s viewing it that it won’t o& er, say, a JetBlue Card to a customer who already has one.
The company also has found that it can keep a pulse on its customers via the online social media. Twitter, in particular, has been a powerful promotional tool – the company is boasting a million followers. Through Twitter, for example, it became clear how many followers were eager for last-minute fare deals, so the airline started a second @JetBlueCheeps account.
Another promotional coup – one of “unparalleled success,” says Stromer – was the “$599 All-You-Can-Jet” deal. The one-month program ended in October, but it’s likely to get an encore: “People liter-ally quit their jobs to take a month o& to travel.”
That program was o& ered by telephone only – but it’s likely to be pitched on JetBlue’s new website if
it’s o& ered again, Stromer says. The Internet provides unique opportunities to drive sales, and the company has devoted increased resources to search marketing and search engine optimization. Keywords are key. - R.S.
can’t let the opportunities slip through your ! ngers. This means staying ahead of the curve and ensuring what we build can be morphed and is scalable. Mobile is a great example of this. We have a mobile site, and it is highly traf-! cked. However, customers understandably expect more than just a reformatted website. A mobile device requires mobile solutions.
The idea of commoditization always keeps me awake at night. Though you can deliver much richer experiences online than you can through a billboard, the Internet also makes it easier to stack products up against each other online with lack of regard to the brand. Thus, it is our chal-lenge to ! gure out how to at least get the core values in front of potentials and then turn those into trials. We know that once people jet with JetBlue, they become fans. Our acquisition strategies coupled with our loyalty e& orts are paramount to our success.
WHAT DO SEE AS THE MAJOR OPPORTUNITIES FOR JETBLUE INNOVATION ONLINE IN THE SHORT" AND LONG"TERM? Besides the more basic functional enhancements to jetblue.com, we are very interested in being able to apply more robust CRM strategies to the website. Everyone says they strive for one-to-one marketing, but very few compa-nies are using it in practice. We believe we can be much more targeted in our messaging and o& ers if we are able to utilize some data points about those customers. As a basic example, if we know a customer has our AMEX co-brand card, there is no point wasting that real estate to try and sell the card to them again. These are old-age marketing techniques that have not been completely integrated into website strategy on a broad scale.
I also believe more rigorous multivariate testing via our website and online media can pay dividends and presents a huge opportunity. When dealing with millions of visi-tors, small changes in response rate can make noticeable impacts.
Lastly, we need to continue driving our social network-ing strategy. Customers get hundreds of e-mails from dif-ferent companies. They only invite a few to be part of their social world, and that is where you truly have an engaged customer who will respond. At the same time, we need to be careful with how we speak to these customers and not make the same industry mistakes as with e-mail market-ing. Customers are less forgiving and will de-friend you in a heartbeat.
DURING THE LAST YEAR OF GOING THROUGH A ROUGH ECONOMIC RECESSION, IS THERE ANY"THING IN PARTICULAR YOU’VE DONE DIFFERENTLY, MARKETING"WISE? During this tough economic environment, JetBlue has focused on brand di& erentiation, customer protection programs, stricter targeting criteria to reduce churn, and heavier analytics focus in making critical decisions.
From a marketing perspective, we’ve launched several timely and appreciated e& orts to pass savings on to cus-tomers in a down economy, including the launch of the JetBlue Promise Program in February of this year, giving customers the con! dence to book their travel with us with the promise that if they lose their job, we’ll refund their fare or their Getaways package for up to nine people on one reservation. W
�“We need to put our-selves in the custom-er�’s shoes. A lot of it is about keeping an open dialogue.�”
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C IF YOUR BUSINESS IS FLOPPING AROUND LIKE A TUNA ON THE DOCK AND YOUR BUDGET IS SHRINKING LIKE A CHEAP SWEATER, THINK AGAIN, BECAUSE THE THOUGHTS YOU HAD BEFORE AREN’T WORKING. LOOK AT THE PROBLEMS THAT SURROUND YOU. THINKING NEW THOUGHTS IS A MATTER OF SURVIVAL.
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Think
again.
Think
once.
Want to create something to give to the world? Take something that already exists and
make it better. In the holiday mood, the editors of Winning the Web want to give you
something you can pass along to your friends, family and coworkers. Something they
really will appreciate: An improved you. This two-part special section will show you that
innovation doesn�’t need 500 miles of R&D or enough cash to ll a decade. It can begin at
home, right there, right now. With you.
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sit on top of this wave and take a long ride with it into the future—or you can get swept away by it.
I believe you can become an expert innovator just by paying attention to what you do every day. As the manage-ment guru Peter F. Drucker said in his book Innovation and Entrepreneurship, innovation is rarely sparked by a “# ash of genius,” but is more often the product of “organized, sys-tematic, rational work.” For example, Ray Kroc, the founder of McDonalds, didn’t invent the hamburger, but he did see how the drive-in concept could be simpli! ed, standard-ized, and multiplied. Likewise, Howard Schultz, founder of Starbucks, didn’t invent the co& ee shop but saw an oppor-
tunity to make the co& ee shop experience special and he did it on a worldwide scale. Michael Dell didn’t invent the PC, but he decided to make every PC to order and sell directly to the customer without a middleman. He’s now worth $17.3 billion. Not a bad ROI for a modest innovation.
Here’s my simple three-step formula to help you think like a great innovator. I call it the “Model and Change” approach, in which you ! nd something and make it better.
1. Look through the lens of innovation. From now on, whatever you see or hear or experience, ask yourself how it’s di& erent from before and ! gure out what was changed. Two great examples today are the Amazon Kindle elec-tronic book reader and Barack Obama’s presidential cam-paign. The Kindle didn’t reinvent the book. It just puts the book in digital form. Amazon didn’t invent the digital book idea either. They “modeled and changed” what Sony had already invented. President Obama didn’t rely on big donors to fund his campaign. Instead he went to the Inter-net and used modern technology to acquire many smaller donors and set records in fund-raising. To become an inno-vator you need to think like an innovator, and the best way
�“We can�’t solve the world�’s prob-lems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.�”
�—Albert Einstein
SIGNS OF INNOVATION are like signs of life. They’re every-where—Wal-Mart, Facebook, WordPress, your local DMV.
What do you see when you walk the aisles of any retail store? What do you see when you visit the website Amazon.com? What do you see on the social networks and Internet and blogosphere? Everything is new. Not just new this year or new this week or new this month but in many cases new today or new this minute. Innovation is part of life, and every serious adult has to be engaged in it.
It’s easy to think of innovation as someone else’s problem, such as those who have it in their job description—the CEO or the new CTO or the people in the R&D department.
But even that’s not a very innovative way to look at innovation and who’s responsible for it. The short answer to that is simple: You are. Whether you are a solo entrepreneur, own a company, or work for someone else, you are the one who manages your own sense of newness, of innovation. If you are a peak performer and want to remain in that special class, your ! rst innovation has to be how you view the world.
Consider these statistics: Facebook has about 300 million active users. More than eight billion minutes—more than 15,000 years—are spent on Face-book each day. If Facebook were a country, its population would be the fourth largest in the world (ahead of Indo-nesia and just barely behind the United States). In July of 2008, Google hosted 235 million searches per day. Eight billion text messages are sent and received per day. The number of Internet devices in 1992 was one million. In 2008 it was one billion. It is estimated that about four exa-bytes (4.1 x 1018 bytes) of unique information were gen-erated in 2007. All words ever spoken by human beings could be stored in approximately ! ve exabytes of data. Before 2013 a supercomputer will be built that exceeds the computational capabilities of the human brain. By 2049, a $1000 computer will exceed the computational capabili-ties of the entire human species. The top ten in-demand jobs in 2010 didn’t even exist in 2004.
Amazing numbers. And the source of all this data? It was all compiled and presented on YouTube in a clip by Karl Fisch called “Did you know?” Did you know that in its various versions, Fisch’s clip has been seen by nearly 10 million people, with zero distribution costs?
The view from the top of that tsunami of data is worth a moment’s thought. You can make the choice today to
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to build this skill is through assiduous observation of what others are doing.
2. Model what you see. Take what you see and model it for your purposes. Here’s a business example. I sell prod-ucts and services to middle market companies. Looking through the lens of innovation, I began to notice that many cutting edge ideas launched by the companies selling my type of products and services to the Fortune 500 eventually migrated down-market in a simpli! ed form. Once I identi-! ed this trend, I changed my company mission statement to: “providing Fortune 500-type products and services to the middle market.” I then either created similar products and services, searched for companies that would bring those F500 ideas to the middle market, worked with them to adapt the ideas to the middle market, licensed the ideas and made them available to the middle market, or created joint ventures with partners who could bring a service to the middle market. It worked.
3. Change and improve. The next part of the formula is to tweak it in some way to make it better than the original. We see this in consumer products all the time with what the marketing folks call a line extension—i.e. Budweiser to Bud Light or Oreo cookies with the original ! lling to Oreos with twice the ! lling. The possibilities are endless. When you start to look through the lens of innovation, you wonder what took them so long to create these variations. I’ve learned the hard way that all change must be constant and never ending. Sometimes we think we have such a
great idea that no one can copy it. Wrong. It’s just a matter of how much better their version will be. As dominant a position as Microsoft occupies, Google is investing a big pile of cash to convert everyone to Web-hosted software as an alternative. And somewhere in California or Mumbai or Beijing, a young team of innovators is plotting the downfall of Google. It’s what economist Joseph Schum-peter described as the “creative destruction of capitalism.” Not even innovators are safe from innovation.
4. Bonus step. Master entrepreneur and business con-sultant Eben Pagan says that to e& ectively sell anything to anyone, you have to position the mind of the prospect, not position your product or service. When you are inno-vating, you want to do your best to get out of an exist-ing brain bucket. Think of how many car-rental companies you know. You can probably think of six or seven and that’s about all. Instead of tweaking the car rental model and becoming number eight—where you’ll either be forgot-ten or have no impact on the market—it’s better to create a whole new model for putting people in cars on a tempo-rary basis and be number one. In the car rental category, check out zipcar.com, for example. It is number one in a category where you can rent by the hour instead of by the day or the week. Google “hourly car rental” (without the quotes) and see what comes up ! rst. Let’s put it this way: Hertz isn’t number one.
To be innovative in your business, you need to be inno-vative in yourself. You can’t be a source of change unless you change who you are. What is the skill set of the people
in the space where you want to be a peak performer? What is their knowl-edge? Who are your friends and asso-ciates? Are they innovators or are they hanging on to the models of the past? Who are in your social networks? Are you and your company at the bleeding edge or the dying edge?
Read and study. Study and read. Peak performers are insatiable learners. Our digital world makes learning easy. You can download over 190,000 titles to an Amazon Kindle in less than a minute and carry them with you wherever you go. Every course imaginable is available via home study, CD, DVD, online, podcast or other digital media.
Innovators learn and pay attention to everything. Then, when they time is right, they have a moment of inspira-tion and change the world for all of us. Be an innovator and change the world forever. W
Robert Phelan is chairman and CEO of Connecticut-based Litch! eld Insurance Group, a specialized insurance broker-age and risk management company, focusing exclusively on the middle market. In January 2005, after conducting a nationwide search, the National Alliance Research Academy recognized Phelan as one of “The 25 Most Innovative Agents in America.” For more visit constructionriskadvisors.com.
The next part of the formula is to tweak it in
some way to make it better than the original.
(i.e. DoubleStuf Oreos)
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W W W . O N L I N E I N T E L . C O M
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Want to invent something nobody�’s ever thought of before? Reinvent yourself, this time as the success you should always have been. How? Follow this golfer�’s advice and try going against the grain.
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PART OF THE PROBLEM with a life-in-ruts is that you’re always surrounded by the same-old everything. Same old family and friends, same old job, same old cubicle landscape, same old perceptions, same old limitations.
Keep your family and friends, but toss out everything else. It’s a high-risk, high-reward strategy that can produce interesting results. Take, for example, Robert Downey, Jr. The great actor with a massive drug problem decided to reinvent himself as a great actor without a drug problem. He faced doubt, ridicule, despair, but he never stopped trying. Result? He became an even greater actor.
But if you’re stuck in that rut leading to a dead end, instead of on the super-highway to success, you need a new plan. And it starts with you and what you can do to reinvent yourself as somebody better, more successful, happier than you are now.
Make the choice to succeed. Seems so simple, but the truth is, you don’t have to continue down that familiar path to nowhere. Take a turn to the right, go down another road. Try the thing that you always wanted to try but, for whatever reason, didn’t. Follow Nike’s message and decide to just do it. As Downey told Oprah Winfrey, “It’s not that di% cult to overcome these seemingly ghastly problems.... What’s hard is to decide to actually do it.”
Become a rebel. Perhaps the most daunting task you will face along the way to success is breaking away from the crowd. Breaking away from your associates and coworkers is not an easy thing to do, obviously. After all, you feel so comfortable, you feel so secure in your thinking. This is your comfort zone. The people at work all seem like nice folks who like you just the way you are. Surely, you say, they are looking out for my best interest.
But in many cases, nothing could be further from the truth. I don’t mean they do it on purpose. They do like you. It’s just that they’re conditioned to think of you as you’ve always been.
They don’t expect you to do better. Not only are their thoughts keeping you from what you could be, but their actions as well. They don’t want you to get hurt. They don’t wish you to be a failure, exactly. They just don’t know how to see you as a success.
Many people will try to talk you out of your vision. They will tell you that it can’t be done. There will be those who will laugh at you and try to bring you down to their level, as Downey must have discovered. But you face a dilemma. If you aren’t succeeding, something has to change. Maybe it’s you.
Have faith. Start with the simple act of believing in yourself. When no one else will, you have to step up to the plate and believe in yourself beyond everything else you know. You must free yourself from doubt by learning to trust your persistency, persever-ance, and determination. Be con! -dent in yourself; nurture an attitude that will not settle for anything short of complete victory.
Choose your company. As Harvey Penick once said to Ben Crenshaw, “Don’t go to dinner with bad putters.”
It’s not that they’re sloppy eaters or bad tippers. It’s just that if you want to be a good putter, you should hang out with good putters. If you want to be successful in life, hang out with successful people.
There is nothing more destructive than pessimistic, negative thinking people. Those defeated thoughts are far more contagious than any # u virus. Do yourself a big favor and seek out positive, energetic, upbeat people. These people will contribute more to any success you achieve with their “can do” attitude than any amount of money they may lend you. Attitudes are infectious—good or bad. It’s your choice!
Don’t surrender to injustice. The third hole at Crabshack Golf Club is aptly named “Crabs in a Bucket.” By appearances, it seems so benign;
there is nothing about the third hole that is intimidating. It’s surely not the yardage: only 173 yards. No water to carry, no deep yawning bunkers. Just a pretty, bowl-shaped green.
The only problem is that the pin position is up the left side of the green. In other words, it’s almost impossible to hit it close. It is borderline legal and perched on a shelf overlooking a slip-pery slope back to the middle of the bowl. Once you manage to get the ball there, you face a most daunting decision. If you decide to hit the putt hard enough to make sure you get out of the bowl and up to the cup, the green runs away down a false front, and you risk running your putt right o& the green. If on the other hand, you second guess yourself while stroking the putt, the ball will return to your feet and the process begins all over again. In order to negotiate the ! rst part of this putt, you must remember to strike it with considerably more force than you would normally think. Not only is the slope against you but also the grain of the grass is lying against you waiting to eat your ball up.
It is never easy going against the grain, in life or on Crabshack’s third hole. But it can be done, and you can do it. Play a con! dent, assured stroke, and you’re in.
Actually golf has more than one lesson to o& er about what you can do to reinvent yourself—including learn-ing a little about your expectations and how to adjust them to reality. Even Downey’s simple decision to succeed has to rest on realities.
Know your limits. For example, I am more experienced in tournaments than my family and friends. I have quali! ed and played in USGA Champi-onships before: USGA Juniors Cham-pionship, USGA Mid-Amateur Cham-pionship, and USGA Amateur Cham-pionship. I have won over ! fty pro-fessional and amateur tournaments including three Florida State Amateur Titles. I played college golf, played in the Metropolitan Section of the PGA, played on the PGA Tour and some on
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the Champions Tour. I have had some of the ! nest golf instructors in golf history. (Buck White, Harvey Penick, Bob Toski, and David Leadbetter). I have not one excuse I can o& er up for not being a more successful golfer.
I decided it was time to qualify and hopefully play in the USGA Senior
Open. It would be a great thrill for me. The smartest thing I did was ask my son, Aaron, to caddie for me. Together we made a good team and I was fortu-nate enough to win medalist honors in the qualifying in Fort Myers, Florida.
But playing in the tournament is a whole other matter altogether. This year’s Open was held at the Salem Country Club in Salem, Massachu-setts, a Donald Ross masterpiece. There is something very neat about rubbing shoulders with Palmer, Nick-laus, Player, Kite, Watson and the like.
Even practice rounds with the even-tual winner, Bruce Fleisher, and former U.S. Open Champion David Graham didn’t bother me. But I could feel a little uneasiness down in my stomach the closer we got to the start of the tournament. A slight pause to re# ect on how far I had come.
All those friendly, unconscious informalities quickly become con-scious formality as the dawn rises on tournament day. Your fellow competi-tors o& er up unsolicited praise, but deep down inside the truth awakens to reveal itself on game day.
Surprisingly the ! rst day of the tournament gets o& to a calm start. No apparent signs of alarm to disrupt the # ow of play—until. On hole six, a par 3, I chipped in to go one under. A glance at the leader board as I was walking o& the green con! rmed I was tied for the lead.
But that shot, which should have pumped me up for the next hole, de# ated me. One thing led to another and before you know it, I was on a plane back to Orlando with only my USGA name tag. It wasn’t the game I was playing. It was the unexpected pressure. I had to confess I was in over my head with such little preparation. I hadn’t gotten one foot inside the door of my home, still sick to my stomach, tail between my legs like a whipped puppy, longing for familiar surround-ings, when my wife reminded me that the garbage needed to go out. If ever there was a reality check, that was it.
Go with what you know. But at least I have the happiness of knowing I’m a better golfer than Charles Barkley. The 11-time NBA All-Star and Hall of Famer recently decided to reinvent himself as a golfer—on national tele-vision. Barkley, who has a swing like a defensive ping-pong player, went on the Golf Channel’s “Haney Project.” Hank Haney, arguably the best active golf coach in the world, stood Barkley up in front of the nation and tried to teach him how to play like a pro. Not a pro basketball player—or even a pro table-tennis master. Like a pro golfer.
Barkley took it manfully for a few weeks, until last October, when he told late-night TV host David Letter-man that he was going back to watch-ing hoops on TV. How bad was he? Put it this way: His replacement on the show is Ray Romano.
The lesson here is a simple one. Remember that high-risk, high-reward strategy? Well, cheat. If you’re a medi-ocre stock broker, don’t try to reinvent yourself as a rocket scientist until you know you can pass a physics course. If you’re a middling insurance sales-man, don’t walk the high wire across the Yangtze without a net.
In other words, learn from the pro: If you’re not sure you’ll be able to rein-vent yourself as a success, don’t try it in prime time. W
David W. Smith is the author of Can’t Take It.
If you want to be a good putter,, yyoouu sshhhoouulldd hang out
with goodd pppuutters.
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Contender FileT H E N E X T W I N N I N G I D E A ’ S O N T H E R A D A R
Here’s looking at you
MAGNIFY.NET MAY HAVE AN IDEA THAT’S LARGER'THAN'LIFE
HERE’S AN IDEA: Make every website a spectator event. Adding video to video to create engaging content – without break-ing the bank – is this month’s contend-ing idea. For those who need more and better video, magnify.net might just be magni! cent.
Here’s the ! le, straight from magnify.net’s Steve Rosenbaum:
1. WHAT’S THE BIG IDEA?Video is rapidly moving from an “extra” for websites to something visitors expect." The good news is that it provides visi-tors with engagement,"a reason to return often,"and new advertising options. "The challenge is that video costs money to make, so it can get you an upside-down ROI pretty quickly."
Magni! ed Video changes all that.Magnify mixes multi-source video on
your site, bringing lower-cost content to bulk up your o& ering and lower your costs.
So, with Magnify you have three sources of video:" First, the video" you make – high quality, and with real costs. Now add" video discovered by Magnify search (and aggregated and curated by you). Then add the video that your visitors submit (also curated by you) and you have more video that meets your site’s needs at signi! cantly lower costs."
Multi-source video gives site owners control and" leverages two things they haven’t leveraged in the past – knowl-edge of video quality and their visitors’ video creation skills. "
2. WHEN WERE YOU FOUNDED AND WHERE ARE YOU BASED?Magnify.net was founded in January of 2006, and we’re based in New York City. Back then, New York wasn’t much of a tech center, and most of the innovation was coming out of the Bay Area. "When we attended the New York Tech meet-up back then,"there were 12 members. "Now there are over 3,000 members and 750 attendees each month."
3. HOW MANY PEOPLE WORK THERE?Our full-time sta& is 12.
And I’m surprised at how fast devices are becoming video-centric, from the iPhone to other mobile devices. The Kindle is next."
6. WHAT’S YOUR BIGGEST CHAL"LENGE, PAST, PRESENT OR FUTURE?The biggest challenge is overcoming fear. Folks need to embrace video, and put it to work. "Use it to sell, to share, to educate,"to evangelize. But there’s always a fear of new things, and fear of change. I just don’t get that. Change is our friend. It’s innova-tion. "It’s exploration. "I can’t imagine why anyone wouldn’t want to embrace that.
7. ANY NUMBERS THAT CAN TELL US WHERE YOU STARTED? WHERE YOU ARE NOW? WHERE YOU THINK YOU’LL BE IN A YEAR? FIVE?We started with $150,000 that I invested of my own money. Then we raised a million. "And now we have about 3 million in, all told. " We’ve got 63,000 sites who use our service, " and we’re growing fast, so I expect that we’ll break the $1 million revenue number in the next six months, and be at cash-# ow break-even. From there, we can grow organically or grow with venture capital, but we’ve got our foot on the gas pedal.
8. HOW WILL YOU KNOW WHEN YOU’VE REACHED YOUR GOAL?Goal!?" That’s a good one. We set goals every day," every week. We meet them, blow past them, and set new ones. In video, the sky is the limit."
4. WHOSE IDEA WAS THIS?As the founder and CEO, I’ve been involved in a number of enterprises that are focused on user-generated video and the management and creation of con-textual video channels. In 1994," I created and launched MTV UN! ltered, a series that invited viewers of the groundbreak-ing music video channel to call an 800 number," pitch a story, and then have a mini-DV camcorder FedEx’d to them so they could record it. " The series was a hit, and I became convinced that UGV – user-generated video – was the future of media," and that networks like MTV, that had in the past been creators of content, would in the future evolve into becoming curators and ! lters of content. The irony of course is that the series was called “UN! l-tered,”"but it was in fact very much about ! ltration. "Today, we call that “curation” and it’s rapidly becoming the gold standard of Web video."
5. WHAT HAVE YOU DISCOVERED SINCE LAUNCHING THAT SURPRISED YOU?Lots of things. "I continue to be surprised at the broad and diverse uses for video. It’s far more than entertainment and infor-mation today. It powers communities like Native American Tube; it powers cooking sites like Taste of Home; it powers hobbi-est sites with antique cars and boats, like Hagerty. Overall, video is far more ubiqui-tous than I ever imagined – and it contin-ues to spread. Also, I’m surprised at how fearful media companies and some of the more traditional ad agencies are of this change, given the likelihood that it will improve their businesses signi! cantly.
M A G N I F Y . N E T
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Dark-HorseT H E O N E T H A T C A M E O U T O F N O W H E R E
Online MetricsT H E M O N T H I N N U M B E R S
EVERY YEAR, ESPECIALLY DURING THE HOLIDAYS, we’re faced with that awful task of thinking of the “perfect” gift for family and friends." But there are only so many ties and scarves you can get for dad and mom, and let’s face it, that sweater you got for your husband last year is now buried deep in the closet with the tags still on it."
This month’s Dark Horse is the savior of gift ! nding: Gifts.com." It’s an absolute genius website whose “Gift Gurus” ! nd you hun-dreds of unique gift choices based on the recipient’s personality criteria." You’ll quickly become known as the best gift-giver in the
The Winning Index for December 2009: -.60%July 09 August 09 +/-
Total Unique Visitors (000) 195,538 197,311 +0.91%
Total Minutes (MM) 348,768 352,649 +1.11%
Total Pages Viewed (MM) 476,502 475,205 -0.27%
Total Visits (000) 11,894,153 12,149,568 +2.15%
WIN: gi! s.com
PLACE: " ndgi# .com
SHOW: gi# ideashop.net
The Gift Horsefamily and your grab-bag gifts will be the ! rst to be grabbed."
The site’s easy to navigate, and with just a few clicks you can ! nd hundreds of perfect Christmas gifts for your 28-year-old female, pet-loving baby-sitter or a birthday gift for your geeky 17-year-old “music”-loving cousin.
What makes it stand out from all the other gift sites is the huge selection of search criteria: personality, occasion, interests, category, age, gender, relationship, etc." You can also check out the “gift of the day,” which is usually a great sale item, or you can shop by price– or even by brand, for those really picky friends. One of our favorite features is the Gift Box where you can save dates of special occasions and set yourself reminders so you’ll never have to buy a belated birthday card again.
So here’s Winning’s gift to you: Before you waste an entire Sunday just thinking of gift ideas, “Gift it Right” with Gifts.com.
— C H E R I L Y N E A R L
STATS: The Winning Index is a general guideline showing an average of major, overall trends happening on the Inter-net from month to month.
Our reporting data is from last summer. The index is slightly down, a re# ection of seasonal conditions and a general tendency in the summer months to spend more time outside. Although our index lags because of reporting methods, look for similar trends for data covering July and August.
* Source: http://www.iab.net/media/! le/IAB-Ad-Revenue-Six-month-2009.pdf
The Winning Index is a general guideline showing an average of major, overall trends happening on the Internet from month to month. Fluctuations in the index can occur based on a variety of factors including but not limited to seasonality, advertising spending, and tra% c and content changes.
Internet Ad Revenues by
Advertising Format�—2009 First Six
Months Results
Classif ieds10%
Sponsorship2%
Display /BannerAds22%
Digital Video4%
Rich Media7%
Lead Generation7%
E-mail1%
Search47%
Total �– $10.9 Billion
% of 2009 First Six Months Revenues
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What You Need to KnowD E T A I L S T H A T M A T T E R
WHAT REALLY IS SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING? There are many components, tactics and techniques implicit in what is referred to as Search Engine Marketing (SEM). At its core, though, SEM really has two buckets: paid search and natural search.
WE LIKE IT BECAUSE:SEM has many qualities that we like, but three in particular:
It’s e! ective because people use the Internet to search for information on a variety of topics, and so good marketers can put their message in front of relevant searches. It’s easy because Google, Yahoo and Bing have made the interfaces to set up marketing campaigns virtually dummy-proof. It’s highly measurable because at any given point in a paid search campaign, the marketer knows exactly how much has been spent and what the ROI on that spend is.
WHY IS THIS AN IMPORTANT ECONOMIC CHANNEL FOR MARKETERS?The growth of SEM has mirrored the growth in overall Internet usage, and has been one of the only advertising platforms, both online and o$ ine, that has grown over the past 18 months.
BACKGROUND:There was a time when Search Engine Market-ing was a niche or a specialty for some adver-tisers. Then, it became a “nice to have” in every budget. For the last few years, SEM has been a “need to have.” It isn’t just because of Google’s meteoric rise, either. It is because of users’ inher-ent need to use the Net to seek information and the opportunity that presents for advertisers.
Google and Yahoo and Bing provide a service to users by helping them ! nd informa-tion faster and easier through search engines. As a marketer, the opportunity to place your brand or message in the real estate in which people are searching for information related to your brand or message is powerful, to say the least. If I’m a brand manager for Pampers, and a Google user searches for “disposable diapers,” I would make darn sure that the Pampers brand came up in the search results or near the search results. How?
The ! rst way is natural search and the second is paid search. On a SERP (Search Engine Results Page, or the page that loads after you type in a query), the listings on the left side of the page are normally the natural search listings; the listings on the top and right of the page are usually the sponsored or paid listings.
Advertisers, as in the example above, can pay to be listed on the top or right of a SERP for search queries they deem most relevant to their product or service. Similarly, the major search engines naturally crawl the Internet looking for relevancy to users’ search queries. Advertisers who know something about SEO (Search Engine Optimization) perform better in these natural listings than those who don’t. There is no cost to an advertiser to show up in natural listings, however it does take time and investment to optimize the advertiser’s site to get picked up by the search engines and ranked highly.
Ask BrettBudget Mixology
...doesn�’t mean cheap drinks.Dear Brett,I’m the head of marketing for a consumer product goods company. I get asked a lot about the optimal advertising “mix” in an online advertising budget. What do you think should be a part of every mar-keter’s budgets (without getting into speci! c ratios - just the elements)?
— ChaseChase- Considering your industry, I assume you have two goals: support the brand and increase sales through engagement/action. " Running a Mar-keting Department is similar to operating a res-taurant, where changing up the ingredients and understanding the customer is essential: Who are they? What do they purchase? How do they evolve? What is their lifetime value?
When de! ning the optimal mix for online advertising, you also need to take the o$ ine e& orts into consideration: TV, Radio and Print."All of these media drive online activity and the message needs to be consistent. Clearly, the online component has become the most dynamic and will provide powerful reach and frequency, but diversi! cation is critical. "
Typically a large portion of the mix will be dedicated to covering traditional search-and-display channels, but allocate a signi" cant per-centage to networks and emerging sources of tra# c. " With display and search, sophisti-cated ad networks can support branding cam-paigns while focusing on new customer genera-tion. "Through thousands of niche sites, they can become a cost-e& ective option that provides signi! cant scale. "
Lastly, online advertising is all about inno-vation, so allocate a sizeable portion of your budget to testing new initiatives. "These tests will provide you with the new ingredients to re! ne your future strategy.
— Brett Brett Lofgren is Epic’s senior vice president of global sales
Got a problem? Send a note to Brett at [email protected]
As a marketer, the opportunity to place your brand or message in the real estate in which people are searching for information related to your brand or message is powerful, to say the least.
...about Search Engine MarketingThe nuts and bolts in every marketer’s workshop
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What It Takes.... . . T O W I N T H E W E B
Searches, High and Low
Google.com is clutter-free: The ! rst thing a user notices on the home page is the lack of a traditional home page—no content, no advertisements, just a page with a search box. The search engine is highly e& ective in this way because it recognizes that it’s a search engine, not necessarily a content provider or anything else. No clutter translates into ease of use, and better yet, purpose of use.
KISS, or Keep It Simple Stupid! The biggest thing Googlers got right was their understanding that people use search engines to ! nd things or ! nd information. So what’s the simplest way to allow people to do that? Give them a box and let them type. Don’t distract them. Just let people enter queries for things they’re looking for and then deliver relevant results.
Build on successes, don’t cannibalize: As a search engine in the early 2000s, the site’s popularity was well-known. Google realized that it couldn’t solely be a search engine all its life, but it also realized that its search engine was attracting more users than any other Web property on the planet. What to do with those millions of users? Create other related services to o& er them. E-mail? Check. Maps? Check. Advertising services? Um, yeah.
About those advertising services: Since its start, Google has provided valuable, free services to its users, but the company does operate for pro! t. The pro! ts come in the form of advertising. Every time a user searches on something, a SERP (Search Engine Results Page) loads with results from the search query. Many of these results, or listings, are paid listings by advertisers wanting their piece of Google’s massive audience.
Relevancy and Value: These two qualities more than any other, in our opinion, keep Google on top of the Web. Only the folks inside the Googleplex know the science and algorithms that are constantly being tweaked to provide users with relevancy for their search queries. In this case, though, relevancy is the thing that creates the value in user’s minds. Put more simply: If it didn’t work, there wouldn’t be any value to the user.
It seems a little crazy to heap more praise on Google than what’s already been heaped on it. The fact is that no other Internet company has done as much for users and online advertisers around the world as Google has. The list above probably could have extended beyond ! ve key characteristics, but we tried to pick our favorites. At the end of the day, we felt Google deserved a tip of the cap, Winning-the-Web-style.
I KNOW, I KNOW. This column wins the “no-brainer” of the year award. Beyond being the most popular search engine in the world, Google has grown their business outward in a winning fashion with email, online mapping, video, and numerous other products. But exactly why has Google been so successful, what are some characteristics that have made their meteoric rise possible? Here’s just a few:
IN AN IDEAL WORLD, YOU’D GOOGLE “GOOD IDEA” AND GOOGLE WOULD TURN UP FIRST.