PJA Blog: The Complex Brand

In partnership with ITToolbox, We just released the second wave of our social media survey. I won’t bury the lead: the most interesting finding was that online networks were rated as the most important influence on the later stages of the technology purchase decision. And the related point that IT decision-makers are beginning to view online communities as credible extensions of their personal networks.

The first wave revealed the overall importance of social media as a technology purchase influence. We suspected going in that social media would serve an important role (after all, we were talking to members of an online community), but we were surprised at just how influential social media had become. Not only did respondents spend more time with social media than traditional editorial brands, they also trusted them more when it came to important purchase decisions.

In the second Wave, we saw a similar engagement level with social media vis a vis traditional media. Though for full disclosure, traditional media as represented by brands such as CNN and CIO fared better this time. More reinforcement, perhaps, for my colleague’s comment about the relative value of print advertising these days. The real purpose of Wave 2 was to take a deeper dive into the distinct stages of the purchase process.

Search, as is true in any purchase process research I’ve ever seen, is most important for early stage awareness. Topic based communities (such as discussion groups and blogs) were rated as the most important information sources during consideration and final evaluation. Personal networks (such as LinkedIn and ITToolbox Professional Networking) were also rated as influential. Next to topic based communities, they were the most important source during final evaluation.

In a way, these findings are not surprising at all. People have always turned to trust colleagues when they want a gut check on an important purchase. What is interesting is the implication that the notion of peer has become more elastic in the read/write world.

You’ll find the press release, access to data tables, and a highlights deck here. Let us know your thoughts.

Behavioral banner advertising is all the rage. The Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and bloggers everywhere have cottoned on to it, and clearly the US Federal Trade Commission is interested. If the federal government takes notice, you know we’ve crossed the chasm.

I can’t help thinking, though, about a piece I ghost-wrote two years ago for a pharmaceutical chemist, who decried the trend toward putting all scientific exploration into a niche and discouraging forays into fields outside one’s specific therapeutic area. The memory of writing that article makes me wonder: Whatever happened to Renaissance Men and Women who branched out and weren’t defined purely on the basis of their clickpaths? Several years down the road, Amazon’s “Customers who bought this item also bought” function continues to elicit a shrug from me. Once in perhaps 1,000 times I see something of interest. Everything else is based on a generic picture of who I am. If you looked at my book or music collection you’d wonder whether I was hopelessly schizophrenic instead of interested in everything. Except NASCAR.

In the end, I suppose the net is that behavioral ads will win the day, thousands of coders in China will design hundreds of versions of the same message for 50 cents an hour, online vendors will sell more long-tail page placements (the equivalent of 4:15 AM Sunday air time), and companies will profit from the fragmentation. To look at what else in the world might inspire us beyond our click paths, we’ll just have to take it offline.

The Wall St. Journal reports today on a number of new search technologies that promise to customize your search activity based on previous activity. If, for example, you have searched on Burgundy the place more often than Burgundy the wine, Google would return search results more travel-focused than oenophile-focused. Search personalization will soon extend to the ads you see as well. Sites to check out in this vein include collarity.com, which offers its own ‘relevance engine’ with a setting slider bar (purportedly, since it doesn’t appear on my browser) as well as third-party tools for sale, and Prefound.com, a profile-based search site that looked promising (but sent me an antispam failure message that will surely have our IT guy’s dander up). (more…)

One of the fine folks from Avenue A/Razorfish dropped this bon mot in a recent presentation to a client we share, and it got me thinking that a disconnect still exists between many BtoB companies and how much they should be devoting to search. As a client put it to her own eMarketing team, “We still get people saying they want to do a Web project or a microsite and that they have a $100,000 budget. Well, they don’t have a $100,000 budget, because I know they haven’t thought for a second about the ratio of what it will cost versus what it will cost to promote. I’m sorry, but ‘If you build it, they will click’ does not work as a promotional strategy.” (more…)

Last year we redesigned the PJA web site. The primary driver was to update the site to reflect our more recent work. Another high priority reason to redesign the site was to improve our search rankings. Our site was contained entirely within Flash and none of its content was visible to the search engines. Back then a search for “PJA” would have a user believe that we didn’t exist.

We decided that one requirement for the site was to improve the visibility of our content at a number of levels. 1) Content: Move the text-based content out of flash and into HTML. 2) Infrastructure: Use search-engine friendly coding best-practices. and 3) Linking: Monitor and improve the quality of our inbound links. We also launched a modest Google AdWords campaign to supplement our search visibility while the organic search results improved.

It’s been about 10 months since we launched the redesigned site and a Google search on “PJA” puts us on the first page of the organic search results. A number of additional factors contributed to the improved search ranking. Links from the Complex Brands blog and the BtoB agency of the year award seemed to really help us. Surprisingly, links from LinkedIn appear to factor into the improvements as well.

One of the lessons we’ve learned over the years is that a top-ten search ranking is the result of ongoing efforts that takes place on many fronts. The primary front is content - analyzing our stats suggests that a combination of timeliness, quality, and focus drive a lot of the traffic that improves a site’s search rankings. It’s something to remember as 2007 gets going and marketers try to decide where to put their efforts.

Incidentally we’re getting ready to relaunch an improved version of our site. We use Flash throughout the site, but all our content continues to be visible to the search engines.