Here's a simple analogy. Say you want to study the ocean. Do you go to a popular beach and draw all your conclusions from the scene there, or do you take the time to get a boat and some SCUBA gear and go searching for the big fish?

Look, I know you’re excited. Really, truly, I do.

But for the love of God, please stop trying to convince me that Twitter is the be-all, end-all of marketing.

I’ve been watching Twitter for awhile, and honestly, I think it’s pretty limited in what it can do. You marketers keep telling me it’s great because you can study trends on it. You love that you can see real-time reactions to entertainment media or to big news. You love how easy it is to click on the “trending” tools and see what the biggest topics of the day are.

But what you don’t seem to understand is that Twitter is a social network largely used by vapid, know-nothing attention whores who want to make every aspect of their lives known. Think about this for a moment. If you use Twitter, everything you post is available to anyone who wants to see it. Since you’re restricted to 140 characters, you can only really give the cursory details of your life. Twitter encourages stalking people by “following” them, and it discourages real communication by making it difficult to offer more than a surface reaction to the topic of the day.

I understand that many of you in the marketing world fall into this mold, so you don’t see anything wrong with it. But trust me. Twitter is the most superficial social network there is. It has its uses, but trying to draw any meaningful conclusions from it is ridiculous. It’s like going into a crowded room and trying to overhear how a bunch of people respond to the events of the hour. Sure, there are going to be common threads, but it’s all just a lot of noise.

Do you want to know how Twitter should be used for marketing? 21st century marketing is about having a relationship with your customers. If you want to use Twitter for your ad campaign or your customer retention strategy, you need to use it to encourage a dialogue. Twitter can be very useful as a portal to much deeper, more meaningful content and interactions. You can use it as a means to begin a conversation with people who just want a quick response to whatever their question or issue is.

But all this nonsense about building ad campaigns based on the views of the Twitterati, or testing product designs on Twitter, or any of the other nonsense I hear about every month in the various marketing publications I read? You guys are setting yourselves up for failure, and while you might seem trendy and cutting-edge now, you’re going to look like idiots when this whole Twitter thing gives way to some other trend.

I understand that you’re young and you’re bored and you want to do something exciting, but focus that energy on building a better marketing strategy that’s based on solid marketing research. It might not be glamorous, but it’s going to benefit you down the road when you want to manage a division instead of a bunch of mindless morons twittering banalities at you.

-SJJ

"The Space Merchants" by Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth

I love science fiction. I love marketing. So, I guess you could say The Space Merchants by Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth is pretty much one of my favorite books ever.

And you’d be right. This novel, written, in the early 1950s, envisioned a future where entertainment and advertising have become so entwined that ads are the dominant form of popular culture. Ad writers can become “Star class copysmiths” and be rich, famous and respected. Ad firms are like film studios, and ad executives are the most powerful people on the planet. One of these firms, Fowler-Shocken, is tasked with selling the public on the idea of colonizing Venus, despite the fact that it’s a terrible place where no one would ever want to live.

But in the midst of this consumer culture, a group of people called the “convervationists” is operating in secret. They’re sort of like environmentalists, believing in the preservation of natural things and renouncing the ideas of rampant consumerism waste.  It’s bad to be outed as a “consie”, especially if you work in an advertising firm. But unlike the secret so-called communists of the 1950s, the consies are actually intelligent and organized, with the plan to turn public opinion against Venus so they can take it themselves and turn it into a paradise.

The story itself is something of a fall and rise sort of adventure, where the main character, Mitch Courtenay, works his way to the top of Fowler-Schocken only to find himself framed by a rival and branded a consie. He moves to the evirons of society, discovers how he’s been framed, and outs the consie conspirators. There’s a nice twist to the ending that puts things in perspective, but the structure of the story is fairly standard stuff. Were I judging the book on the merits of its plot, I would probably consider it a readable, but mediocre title. (I certainly feel this way about the sequel, The Merchants’ War, which follows the pattern of the original while updating the book’s ideas for the 1980s.)

No, what makes this book so awesome is the world that Pohl and Kornbluth conceived. It’s frighteningly close to the world we live in today. Advertising is used not just as a means of persuading people to buy products, but to shape public opinion about real issues, like the scarcity of water and fuel, and to make people feel like their lives are better than they really are. Every piece of communication is persuasive; every idea has an agenda. Even the simplest slogan has been massaged by expert ad men. The world is a dark and frightening place, and yet society is kept under control by these resassuring messages that they should be happy because of the products they consume.

One of the most memorable and horrifying scenes in the book comes when Courtenay finds his way into the facility where “Chicken Little,” a processed chicken product, is packaged. What he finds is a giant, living mound of chicken tissue, where butchers come and cut pieces of flesh off to prepare for processing and packaging. The campaign around the product leads you to believe you’re eating normal chicken, but this genetically engineered, unthinking living blob of meat is all it is. The idea is that as long as people don’t know what they’re really eating, society will hold together.

A lot of science fiction looks to the future and sees exploration, space ships, aliens, and evolution. These things exist in a world where there is a single government, and poverty has been extinguished, and anyone can be an adventurer. That is not the case in The Space Merchants, where society is, instead, a glittering sea of false promises established to keep people from understanding how bad things really are. Happiness is not rooted in simple pleasures and natural living, but in consuming products and listening to advertising messages. Achievement is not rooted in social benefit, but in manipulation and half-truths. The ad executives have all the real power; public officials (even including the President of the United States!) are an anachronism. In many ways, The Space Merchants is more realistic than most of the science fiction you’ll find from the 1950s… or in the entire genre.

If you don’t want to read the book, CBS once produced a condensed radio version of it. It misses pretty much the entire point of the novel, but it does cover the plot.

I want to comment on one more thing, and that’s the style of this book. 50s sci-fi really has a certain feel to it — an idea of progress towards simplicity, an idea of buying shiny new things and discarding old ones. The future is a place much like the 1950s, where everything seems exciting and safe, and there’s no pain or suffering. More modern books have played with this theme and shown the rotten supports below this sort of lifestyle. The Space Merchants fits into this paradigm, and it was clearly far ahead of its time in its ideas. I fully expect this genre of “nostalgia punk” sci-fi to show up again down the road. I may even write some myself.

"The Merchants' War" by Frederik Pohl

Ironically enough, I’d place the 1984 sequel, The Merchants’ War, much closer in tone to the futuro noir style of Blade Runner than this nostaglic tone I’m referring to. I felt like The Merchants’ War was a lot closer to cyberpunk in tone, though it lacked the foresight to see the impact computers were having on the world. Pohl seemed a lot more concerned with critiquing collectible items and the cola wars than he was about returning to the themes of the original book, and it’s a shame. As I said, it’s not that the sequel is bad… just that it’s not nearly as groundbreaking or memorable as the original.

Sean’s recommendation: Track down a copy of The Space Merchants, read it, and enjoy it. It’s a fantastic book that was really forward-thinking 50 years ago, and which still has a lot of relevance today. The Merchants’ War isn’t too bad, either, if you’re craving more when you’re done.

You can get both in one edition if you’re really interested.

I’ve been a regular Internet user for over a decade now, though I had the fortune of using other online services like AOL, Compuserve, Prodigy and local BBS networks before that. In my senior year of high school, I took over a video game review website called eXscape and helped it to become a good niche PC gaming site when it was still possible to make money doing that. (Don’t look for the site now; it’s long gone, as are many of the other sites I worked with at the time!) During that two-year endeavor, I learned all sorts of things about content design: how readers process information, how other sites pick up news, how search engines pick up websites, and so forth. I also learned that knowing some basic HTML (and eventually, CSS) is vital, no matter how good your automated tools are.

Over the years, as I’ve graduated from content creator to a marketing guy and publisher, I’ve been able to use those skills to do all sorts of fun things (including this page!), and while I loathe tinkering with templates and reverse-engineering code to make my blogging software do what I want, I’m glad I know how to do it so I don’t have to rely on someone else to do it for me. I’m also glad that when it comes to creating my page for Army Ant Publishing and related products, I won’t have to hire a web design firm to set up the page for me; I’ll simply need to contract artists to help me design the graphics.

I’m glad I’m ahead of the curve here, because many small publishers aren’t very good at using the Internet to promote their product. I’ve seen publishers who have launched their company websites through Geocities, with pages that crash browsers and that fail to load properly due to poor placement of javascripts. I’ve seen publishers who have used sites that have been so reliant on Flash that they contain no useful information; just a bunch of slow-loading animations. And worst of all, I’ve seen websites that have contained out-of-date information (and sometimes, even tentative covers and titles!) for books that have been out for some time. Often, there is no ordering information or link to a place to buy the book, either.

It’s obvious that these publishers aren’t considering that the world wide web is where 75% of the population turns for information, and that the design of their website will speak volumes about their products. There’s no excuse for a poor website, either; they’re not hard to set up, and there are tons of people out there (especially students) who are willing to design basic websites for next to nothing. Basic hosting can be found for $5-10 per month, and most of these hosts will offer everything a small publisher really needs. And domain names (like http://www.armyantpublishing.com) are incredibly cheap these days; I register mine through Godaddy for a piddling $9.95 per domain name. A Yahoo merchant account is only $75, and it allows a company to set up a store and take credit cards. All in all, a competent website can be easily set up for well under $500, and in many cases, for less than $200 if the publisher has access to artists and copywriters.

If you’re a small publisher and planning to have any presence on the web (and I’d suggest you do!), you probably want to remember the following tips before you settle than a less-than-adequate website.

Buy as many variations of your domain name as you can think of. If you’re setting up “Doggone Publishing,” you will want to try to register “doggone.com,” “doggonebooks.com”, “doggonepublishing.com” and so forth. You might want to register “doggonepublishing.net” as well, but I wouldn’t worry about domain extensions like “doggone.biz” or “doggone.us” — .com and .net are really the only two most people use. It’s also not necessary to get any extra services or register them for multiple years; you can do all that stuff later, if needed. Do make sure your webhost will allow you to auto-renew, though; there are companies that prey on others by picking up expiring domain names and trying to sell them back for exorbitant costs.

Unless you feel a domain name is a must have, DO NOT pay large sums of money for it. Domain names are important, but they’re becoming less important as people use search engines and link engines for their web browsing. The people out there paying thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of dollars for domain names are idiots.

Once you purchase your domain names, you can have them all direct to the index page of your website. Your webhost can help you figure out how to do this.

You should also plan to register domain names for your various products, if possible. Never announce a product before you register a product name; there are people out there who search for product announcements and who try to snatch up related domains in the hopes that they’ll be able to sell them to you. Beat them to the punch and save yourself the trouble.

Make your index page simple, but not too simple. The index page, for those who don’t know, is the main page that people will see when they visit your website. It should provide an easy portal for people to explore your site without having to search too hard for whatever it is they’re looking for. Think of it as the entrance to your booth in an endless bazaar of merchants — people who are visiting need to be able to see all the neat things you have to offer or they’ll move on.

Do not — and let me repeat this again: do not!– make your index page a picture of your logo with a “click here to enter” link. Likewise, do not make your index page a flash animation or a video. To continue my analogy, putting up an index page with a logo, flash animation or video is like setting up a closed booth with no windows and a heavy wooden door. People won’t see what’s inside, and unless they feel like venturing in, they won’t bother to find out. And if you force them to watch an orientation video every time they walk in the door, they probably won’t come back.

A functional index page should include your logo, links to your various departments, a brief summary of what your company does, and — don’t forget this — copyright information along the bottom. Keep it simple, and make sure it’s easy to navigate.

Many companies like to make their index page the “news” page, and that’s fine, because it serves the needs of visitors wanting to find out about the latest buzz. If you’re going to set your page up like that, make sure you include a sidebar explaining who you are. You’ll also want a menu, either along the top or along the side, that will allow readers to quickly find their way to your products if they aren’t interested in wading through your news. And as a reminder, any time you mention your products in your news section, you need to remember to include a link to their respective pages on your site. Many web surfers will enter your site through your news articles, and it’s important to give them quick access to your product pages.

For a publisher that’s just starting out and that won’t have much news to share, I’d actually suggest making your index page a simple introduction to your company with graphical links to other sections of the website. You won’t want to open with news because anything you post will stay up there for awhile and make it look like not much is happening with your company. Instead, just offer a nice introduction to your company and prominent links to your products.

Your site needs to be organized. Don’t just lump everything together; divide it into sections. Create a section for news, a section for products, a section for corporate information, a section for your message boards (if you’re including them) and a section for your store. If you want to crosslink sections, that’s fine; for example, you can (and should!) link your products to their entries in your store, just as you should link news about your products to your products. But keep everything organized so that readers don’t get lost.

One trick I always recommend is to make your logo (which generally runs across the top of the page) always link back to your index page so that readers can quickly escape back to your index if they get lost.

Meta tag descriptions are important on your most visited pages. These are descriptions that you write into the code of each page on your website that tell search engines what your website is about. Most websites use these when they return hits; they can be the first impression a potential reader receives about your site. If your software doesn’t offer you an easy way to insert them, visit this page for a tutorial.

You don’t need to generate meta tag descriptions for every page on your site, but you should set one up for your index page explaining what your site offers. Keep the description under 200 words, though; search engines will reject them if they’re too long. I recommend writing descriptions for your product pages and your index page, at the bare minimum.

Don’t worry about meta tag keywords; they used to serve a purpose, but now, search engines almost always ignore them.

Don’t forget to include vital information about your products. Every product page should, as a minimum, include a sharp picture of the book’s cover, a 1-3 paragraph summary of its contents, links to previews of the book, the ISBN, the cover price, and information on where it can be purchased. If you’re feeling ambitious, you might want to list other information too, like the publication date, the number of pages, the number of printings, and so forth.

Always link to Amazon.com’s entry for your book, even if you’re selling it in your own store. Amazon often carries reviews and other information that’s useful to your potential customers, and many will come back to your site if you:

1) Any time you like to another site, including Amazon, include Target=”_blank” in your anchor tag. It will open the link in a new tab or window for the user. That way, the reader can get back to your site easily. And don’t worry; it won’t be stopped by a popup blocker since it’s a link the user clicks to activate instead of being launched automatically by your site.

2) Offer something Amazon can’t, like a signed copy of the book for the regular cover price. Readers are more likely to buy from you if they know they’re getting something special!

You should always include a page with information about your company, but do not link your email address directly from the page. There are tons of nasty little programs out there called “spam harvesters” that scour the web day and night for email addresses, which they compile into a database that’s used to send spam. You’ll spend more time deleting mail than reading it, and it will waste a lot of your webserver’s time, too.

There are ways to defeat these programs, and this site has some techniques to help you do it. If you don’t want to go hi-tech, you can list your email address like so:

Contact me at sean AT sean-jordan DOT com

It’s not elegant, but it gets the job done!