Tech Firms Tap Into the 'Green' Movement

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Published: July 4, 2007

Filed at 12:25 a.m. ET

NEW YORK (AP) -- Being ''green'' is all the rage with technology companies these days, but what's not clear is whether or not the environment-friendly approach is bringing in more greenbacks.

Tech buyers say they desire devices that are kind to the environment, but they haven't shown a strong predisposition to buy them -- except when it saves them money.

''There's high-level awareness and low-level activity,'' said Christopher Mines, an analyst at Forrester Research. ''The goal is to feed into it ... and try to take advantage of the growing concern.''

Among those able to successfully tap into those concerns are computer hardware companies like Santa Clara, Calif.-based Intel Corp., Palo Alto, Calif.-based Hewlett-Packard Co., Armonk, N.Y.-based International Business Machines Corp. and Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Advanced Micro Devices Inc., which have all been churning out servers or server components that require less power -- and thus less money to operate.

However, other green initiatives by technology companies, such as running environmentally oriented contests or planting trees, don't have a direct line to the pocketbooks of client companies' chief investment officers, making those initiatives ring a bit hollow.

''By and large, the vendors are, of course, trying to differentiate and trying to win goodwill to enhance their brand,'' Mines said. But, he added, ''there's real, legitimate hard-dollar cost-saving to be had.''

The hype surrounding being green has even spawned a new word -- greenwashing -- harkening back to the days when the buzzword was ''dot-com.'' Just like those days, the environment presents an opportunity for technology companies, either by selling into it or using it as a marketing tool.

The proselytizing seems to be resonating. Chief investment officers polled by Forrester said they were concerned about the impact their company was having on the environment, although few were doing much about it.

The machines with the most success so far have been ones that provide a clear return on the investment, such as energy-efficient servers.

With big data centers running out of space and burdened with big energy bills, servers that draw less power have been in demand. For example, Intel and H-P promise to save companies money with lower-powered servers while IBM can make sure everything works together thanks to its services arm.

H-P has seen a 120 percent increase worldwide in the number of inquiries connected to the environment since the last half of 2006. In 2005, the company saw $6 billion in requests for proposals that had some environmental element.

Pat Tiernan, vice president for corporate social environmental responsibility, said that number continues to climb. Most of the inquiries are about energy conservation, with recycling a close second, Tiernan said.

IBM launched its ''Project Big Green'' program in early May, committing $1 billion per year to increase the level of energy efficiency in the information technologies markets, and since then has been bombarded by customer request.

While most of the activity is happening on the corporate side, consumers are starting to become a driving force in the green push. So are shareholders of public companies who want to make sure environmental polices are in place. All of these different constituencies give technology companies an opportunity to sell products and services, experts said.

''Our consumer research shows that, on both coasts, 7 percent to 11 percent of Americans consider themselves to be green,'' said Richard Doherty, research director at Envisoneering Group. ''Of the consumers we've interviewed, they say one or more purchases is influenced by the more-green company.''

In recent months, most technology companies also have been crowing about their green initiatives. Round Rock, Texas-based Dell Inc. will plant trees for customers who buy a computer, while Sunnyvale-based Yahoo Corp. recently launched a contest to find the greenest city in America. (The winner: Hastings, Neb.)

While it's nice to plant a tree, is it a reason to run out and buy a company's products?

''If the computer is up to snuff and the price is about the same, it helps'' to be green, says Howard Anderson, a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Business, noting that technology companies seem to have different shades of green. ''If Nokia and Motorola are green, then why haven't they invented phones that use less battery-charging?''

What Advertisers Should Be Measuring

Nielsen, famous for their television measurement service, has announced they will change the way they try to measure audience size on the Internet. Previously, they were measuring websites by the number of pages visitors browsed or "page views." Their new chosen methodology of "time spent" is likely to prove disastrous.

Anybody who browses with several open tabs, or walked away from their computer knows how big a mistake it would be to assume that, just because the website is open, someone is actually paying attention.

Advertising dollars are often based on where Nielsen's numbers tell advertisers are the "prime" winning picks. If you're higher up in the ranking, you can charge more for your ad inventory; just like Super Bowl ads and American Idol's ads command a premium. The stock market analysis website Seeking Alpha asks:

What happens to ad dollars in this new environment? Who gets more and who gets less? Will this new approach chip away at Google's ability to drive prices higher for search advertising keywords? Will it allow Yahoo and AOL to boost revenue by charging more for placement of banner ads?

The problem all these audience metrics have, whether you're talking about an online web site's visitors, a magazine's circulations numbers, or a television program's gross rating points, is that none of them are actually reflective of how many people actually saw, listened to, or otherwise engaged with your ad.

By "engage" I'm not talking about ads people just love, or that win creative awards, but ads that, when run, consistently drive sales growth. But the people who sell ads love taking these very unscientific, inflated audience numbers and selling ads on a Cost-Per-Audience-size (often called " CPM") basis.

Just say "no" to fluffy metrics.

Advertisers have been plagued with the issue John Wanamaker so elegantly pointed out about a century ago: "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half." What Wanamaker was describing, even back then, was how this traditional broadcast model of advertising is inefficient and nearly impossible to accurately measure. Maybe these panel-based metrics Nielsen uses worked when we were a more homogeneous mass culture — but today, we consist of many niches within niches, and a small panel cannot be representative of our diverse interests.

Although it's easier to collect data online, individual websites have major issues trying to gather accurate metrics, so why would we fantasize that it is possible to measure anything accurately across the entire World Wide Web? The only metrics that can be measured accurately are how much the advertiser spends (expenses) and how much they make (revenue).

Advertisers have always been happy to spend money when they can see people react. It's why Google (GOOG) has made so much money charging advertisers on a Cost-Per-Click basis. They knew that in a world where advertisers were feeling the effects of customers ignoring their marketing, having a system where advertisers were only charged when people clicked would be best.

Google also understood that the only time people react to an ad is if it's relevant to them.

We know how hard Google works to continuously refine those results, keeping them as relevant as possible — even punishing publishers who try to manipulate the relevance of the system. They've even worked quite hard (not hard enough, in my opinion) to ensure their advertisers' ads are as relevant as possible.

So, what do media outlets and advertisers do next?

Last month, I had the pleasure of speaking at DART Adapt's first anniversary dinner, to a bunch of smart online media publishing outlets. I told them that if they don't change the way they think of advertisers, and work with them directly, they'll be tomorrow's TV stations, radio stations, and newspapers, struggling with shrinking audiences and puny ad budgets. Publishers can't keep following the rules of yesteryear if they want to continue to be relevant and demand prime ad dollars tomorrow. Einstein's definition of insanity is "Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." Such is today's process of advertising.

The responsibility to deal with these issues ultimately belongs to the media outlet. You can always find another advertiser, but history is full of publishers who've lost their audience.

Some of the issues these publishers must address…

1. They must continuously work with their audience to understand its needs and focus on providing relevant content and advertisements.
2. They must work with publishers to help them clearly define what they're trying to accomplish. They must define key performance metrics (e.g., the actions that will define their success).
3. Work with advertisers so that the ads they produce are contextually relevant to the content they are producing.
4. Make sure advertisers continuously optimize the ads to achieve better results.
5. Constantly be in discussions with the audience so the promises that marketers make are being met (e.g., not pissing off YOUR audience).

Focus on all of these things, then you can go through the same issue Google's advertisers are going through by trying to compete to get relevant ads in front of a relevant audience (see also: traffic cost inflation). If you're a publisher, wouldn't you like to have that problem?

If you're an advertiser, and aren't focused on maximizing the integrated experience from the ad (no matter what channel) to your website, then start by understanding what drives persuasive momentum.

Advertisers shouldn't depend on some easily defined, but fatally flawed, metric to decide where to place ads. For now, I recommend advertisers get their own Web metrics in order, and learn how to tie them to the only reports that matter: P&L, Balance Sheet & Cash Flow.

Technorati Tags: accountable marketing, advertising , Google, Metrics, Nielsen, Nielsen/NetRatings, Publishing, Relevance, seeking alpha

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Too Many Marketers Are Addicted to (Useless) Data

Posted in Web Analytics | ROI Marketing | Analytics | Metrics | Accountable Marketing

How many metrics are on you dashboard? 10? 30? 60? 100?

How many do you actually look at on a regular basis?

How do you use that information? If a metric goes up or down, how does that guide a specific action?

In other words, what actionable insight does this data provide? The main problem is, data's good at telling you what your customers are doing, but not WHY they're doing it.

A recent Ad Age article, Move From Metrics Overload to Actionable Insights (paid subscription required), takes a look at this problem:

According to a 2006 study by the Association of National Advertisers and Marketing Management Analytics, 58% of companies surveyed have formal marketing accountability programs, but only 28% report being satisfied with their ability to use ROI metrics to take action. Often, companies are swept up in the "metrics mania" without any way to tie insights to business results.

It is not uncommon, for example, to see organizations with more than 40 metrics on their dashboards. Addicted to metrics, these marketers create new metrics every time they initiate a program. Ask them why they are capturing these metrics, and they can't tell you. Not only that, but the metrics captured aren't even relevant to the business. And they can't be acted upon.

What metrics do you look at on a regular basis? What acitonable insight does this data give you? What if you only had one report? What would you choose?

P.S. This is one of Jeffrey's pet peeves. He says that if you can't determine what impact a metric has on one of the three financial statements, it's probably not worth measuring.

Technorati Tags: accountable marketing, Ad Age, analytics, Metrics, web analytics

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SEO as a Dirty Business

In real life, presidential election campaigns are run behind closed doors and their actors often play dirty tricks on each other; for "All's fair in love and war." The final purpose of the game is political supremacy. Power. In SEM... the top of Google's SERP.

From Graywolf's "How to Be a Dirty Digger" to Greenberg's "The Saboteurs of Search" we learn that online marketing and politics play on similar grounds.That the search engines can be manipulated is no secret, but most SEOs try a positive approach and define their strategies as ethical or "white-hat."

In Aaron Wall's dictionary, there is no such thing as ethical SEO because, no matter how you look at it, once you employ a technique (any) to manipulate the search engines, you "SPAM." The only question is what kind of spam is acceptable from a Google perspective?

Part of the answer comes from Google's Webmaster Guidelines (quality guidelines - specific guidelines), more comes from Bruce Clay's SEO code of ethics, and if that's not enough you could always rely on an answer from authority SEO professionals.

Now back to SEO as a dirty business.

Strangely enough in real life it is a lot easier to harm than to heal. Somehow supremacy and power are achieved faster through war than peaceful negotiations. No surprise here: negotiating peacefully takes time to find a compromise which, in many situations, is not what the parts involved hoped to achieve.

SEM is quite similar. For every winner, there's a loser, and many companies that rely on Google for traffic employ questionable SEO tactics to achieve good rankings for their most competitive keyword phrases.

But this is nothing compared to those that employ "political tricks" to harm their competitors. Forbes lists in "The Saboteurs of Search" two techniques (out of seven): Google bowling and Google insulation.

Google bowling is pure evil and it deals with how to frame a competitor's site as a spamming site to convince Google to drop its rankings. This type of negative SEO deals with links -- and many links at once. These links are generated automatically, over a short period of time, using special software. They'll mostly come from bad neighbors and they'll all have the same anchor text, to make the spam picture complete. Google is just a machine, so there's no real way for this machine to know who is behind the link spam. The "guilty" site might lose its position in the SERP or even get banned. Some sites never recover after a Google ban, others see their rankings vanishing and their pages landing into the supplemental results and they never learn why.

If something like this has happened to your site, all you can really do is to find out who hates you so much. Google bowling is not the only negative SEO technique that might hurt a competitor site.

Tattling, as correctly identified by Forbes, is something that even Google's Matt Cutts encourages, by asking people to report sites that buy links. I really wonder how Google verifies such complaints.

Basically anyone can assume that a contextual link in one of my blog entries is a paid link (what if I monetize my site with V7 contextual?).

There are many other questionable SEO strategies to demolish competition. I happen to consider them a waste of time and energy. The Forbes article quoted above contains a pretty interesting statement: "Matt Cutts, a senior software engineer for Google, says that piling links onto a competitor's site to reduce its search rank isn't impossible, but it's extremely difficult."

If negative SEO is difficult, we are prone to believe that it seldom happens. I think that, in some niches, it happens quite often. But these are simple theories. As long as I do not have the data to back them up, I prefer to keep my analysis to a minimum of delivering information.

There are simpler ways to harm competition. Scrapper sites harm writers by copying their content. And it is not that difficult to understand where the "harm" lies.

For example, when a scrapper copies the content of your site, your rankings are harmed, especially if the scrapper site happens to have more authority than yours. There is not much you can do to protect your rankings and your copyright. But if you decide to report the guilty site to the search engine (file a compliant) the search engine will remove the site from its index for 10 days, to give you (the copyright holder) the time to sue for infringement.

Many bloggers wake up one day to find their articles duplicated on obscure sites, MFA sites and so on. They are often frustrated and they ask in forums the classic: what can I do if someone copies my content. Well, now you have a possible answer: you don't need to go to court to punish a site for copyright infringement. It is enough to file a complaint at Google and you've got the guilty site out of the Google SERPs for at least 10 days.

Careful though, a fraudulent copyright complaint can get you in trouble, and not just with the search engines. So don't just go around filing complaints. The Google ban theoretically lasts for just 10 days, but the trust rank of the accused site will lower. Another similar complaint and the site's integrity will be seriously questioned. Just remember: what goes around, comes around.

Mihaela Lica is online marketing expert at Red Dog Communications Luxembourg, the ideal company for white hat SEO campaigns that work.

Affordable Solutions For Internet Marketing

Do you have a website that is getting very little or no traffic at all? Well, there are ways that you can change that even on a small marketing budget. We will review each of the strategies you can use to promote your website, and then we will try to assimilate them into a single, uniform strategy that is both highly effective and affordable.

First of all, TV commercials, radio ads, and print advertising are very expensive. This is undoubtedly the best way to launch a business, but the costs are prohibitive. A full page ad in a prominent magazine or other publication can run as high as $50,000 per ad. TV commercials can run just as high; if the commercial runs during a popular television show or sporting event, the cost will be enormous.

So, if you do not have enough money in the coffers for traditional advertising, you will likely have to use online marketing. This is not a bad thing. Offline advertising (i.e. radio, TV, print ads) is sometimes not effective. Marketing on the internet is cheaper, and if done correctly, can give you much more bang for your buck.

Obviously, the cornerstone of internet marketing is search engine submission and optimization. There are hundreds of different search engines and directories on the internet where you can submit your web site for a listing. This is fairly easy to do. Simply sign up for a monthly submission plan with a credible search engine submission service. There are literally hundreds of these submission services on the internet; you can find them by performing a search on Google.

However, be wary of submitters that claim to be able to submit your site to 75,000 search engines. Such services are scams, and they will submit your web page to FFA pages and bogus link pages that can actually get you banned from the search engines. You should only do business with submission services that submit to the major search engines and directories.

Now that we have covered submission, we need to talk about search engine optimization (SEO), which is even more important. To optimize a site, you need to maximize keyword density and optimize the positioning for the words or phrases that best characterize the subject matter of your site, and you need to use proper Meta tags so that the search engines can interpret your web pages.

If you do not know how to optimize your web site, you should search for an optimization professional on Google. Steer clear of SEO experts who want to charge $1,000 per month or more. Their goal is to bleed you dry before you figure out that they really can not help you get to the top of the rankings. Stick to providers who will optimize your site for a one-time fee.

More important than SEO is link popularity. Link popularity is the number of web sites that currently link to your site. The more inbound links you acquire, the higher your search engine ranking will be. There are more than a few ways to acquire links, but I have a certain strategy that worked well for me.

My advice to you is to write articles and press releases and submit them to article directories and press release distribution services who will then distribute your articles and press releases to other websites who will publish them and in return link back to you. Also, you can submit your site to bloggers through a popular service called Blogitive (Blogitive will get blogs to post one-way anchor text links to your site in their blog, which will greatly enhance your search engine ranking).

If you are not patient enough to wait for your search engine ranking to improve, you can attract visitors to your web site instantly by using pay-per-click advertising (PPC). With PPC, you pay a certain cost per click to have an ad for your web page run at or near the top of the search engine listings for certain keywords. This can be extremely costly and ineffective. It is not uncommon for webmasters to blow thousands of dollars on PPC advertising and make only a few sales.

The best way to promote your site, if you are actually selling something, is through an affiliate program. You need to provide an affiliate code to other online merchants so that they will place your banner on their site; every time you make a sale that resulted from an affiliate referral, the affiliate gets a commission. Some internet companies have thousands of affiliates, and get all the business they would ever need or want this way; and it costs you nothing.

To recruit affiliates, you should submit your affiliate program to as many directories as possible (there are directories where you can list your affiliate program for free). The best way to find affiliates is by listing your program on forums or message boards visited by webmasters who are looking to generate additional revenue for their online business. You will have to consult with an experienced programmer who can set up the affiliate program so that the codes used to track sales for each affiliate will work properly.

So, to summarize, you should first optimize your website and submit it to search engines. You should then begin submitting articles and press releases to article directories and press release distribution services. You should also submit your site to Blogitive so that bloggers will write a review of your site and link to it, further boosting your link popularity. You might want to join a link exchange, but trading links often proves fruitless. Also, you should set up an affiliate program. And finally, you should budget a small amount of money to spend each week on pay-per-click.

If you are persistent and use all of these methods, you will continually increase your traffic over a period of time. It will probably take approximately 3 years of performing each of the tasks outlined in this article, on a daily basis, to get where you want to be. Just stick with it and your efforts will be rewarded in the long run.

Jim Pretin is the owner of http://www.forms4free.com, a service that helps programmers make an HTML form.