“It’s hard to know where to spend your money.” This is a quote from Mat Zucker at Agency.com, an Omnicom Shop from Adweek.

I circled that quote three times over because it optimized the confusion and quandary most agencies have today. They really don’t know. They are not sure whether they should ethically advise their clients to shift major budget to the web or protect their existing bread and butter in print and TV. They don’t know whether to build a microsite, re-build the existing corporate site or build landing pages within social networks like Facebook. They simply are more confused, conflicted and truthfully unable to make good strategic recommendations going forward. So, they guess and pontificate and recommend using old school “push” methods and creative mentality that does not work on the web, costing corporations billions in lost marketing dollars.

There is no reason for confusion. It just takes a little guts to do something new for your client, or if you are the client, new for your company. Find out what your target audience does, where they go, what they like and then use those channels and information to market to them.

Aaron Kahlow is managing partner of BusinessOnLine and chairman of the Online Marketing Summit. He is a regular columnist for Electronic Retailer magazine.

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I have this little theory that social media (e.g., blogs, forums and social networks) open up a whole new behavioral change where it’s acceptable to be a little personal, a little less professional and more “off the cuff” with thoughts, comments and ideas. Facebook is the “great experiment” in which we are all now trying to figure out how much of our personal lives to share with who we allow to be friends.

It comes back to the transparency element of social networking in that you must be transparent and real about your level of communications. If too contrived or too rigid, it just does not work.

So, my conclusion is: it’s about time! We all have enough stress in our lives and really do not need any more when it comes to communicating amongst peers. So, let’s be ourselves, be comfortable with that, recognize every once in a while that we’ll have friends post things that are less than appropriate and all accept it for what it’s worth.

Do you agree? 

Aaron Kahlow is managing partner of BusinessOnLine and chairman of the Online Marketing Summit. He is a regular columnist for Electronic Retailer magazine.

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  After a beer and some calamari with a new marketing friend from Motorola, a conversation about the overuse of numbers in making marketing decisions came up. The premise was numbers made us feel safe and secure about our decisions, thus leading to good marketing work. And, this good marketing work based on analytics proved the age old “Good is the biggest obstacle to Great” theory. Instead of focusing on the reliance of analytic data to prove ourselves as marketers, I’d rather talk about the BIGGEST misconception in the online/website marketing world today: Analytics vs. Usability.

First and foremost, we need to define the two. Web analytics is the practice of measuring “what” is happening on your website through software solutions (usually tagging or log file). In the most basic form its visitors, uniques, length of stay, page views and more advanced analytics would be conversion funnels or other “key performance indicators.” Website usability is the cognitive science of understanding “why” people do what they do on your website. Common forms of usability are lab testing, remote online testing and heuristics. After 15 years of commercial use of the web, there are reams of data about best practices when it comes to how best to serve your user and so simple audits against said best practices are also a common entry-level usability engagement. (more…)

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