John Carrier

Wow. I thought only record companies had the gall to alienate their best customers with legalistic bullying. I was wrong.

Ford is now claiming ownership (in the sense of intellectual property) of all images of Ford vehicles, including photographs that Ford car owners take of their own cars. When a group of product enthusiasts called the Black Mustang Club tried to publish a calendar of their own cars on CafePress, Ford cease-and-desisted their behinds by releasing the legal hounds on CafePress.

Makes me want to use my best Bugs Bunny voice (all respects and posthumous royalties due to Mel Blanc): What a maroon.

This is not a rant against intellectual property rights. It’s a rant against bad marketing by companies grown-up enough to know better.

For the sake of “protecting” your brand, Ford, you have just alienated a group of people (at least twelve of them) who were likely to buy and actively promote your products for the rest of their lives.

In taking this action you’ve spread a little anti-marketing among many more people than every would have even heard of the BMC 2008 calendar otherwise.

Good show, Ford.

If you really need to pad the to-do list of your legal department so it appears they do something other than dig for loopholes in labor and pension laws, don’t you think your time could be better spent on a less desirable ideavirus?

Come to think of it, that white decal would stand out pretty well on a black Mustang.

Your turn:  How does your company (past, present, or future) treat its biggest fans?  On the flip side, what kind of treatment have you gotten by being a fan?

Someone wrote to me last week to ask how search engine marketing could help improve his business online. He sells stuff via a website with lots of navigation buttons; to borrow from Seth Godin’s lexicon, bananas everywhere…which is, unfortunately, industry standard web design.

Here’s how I responded, with the hope that it can help you with your online pursuits as well.

I’d caution you not to focus your strategy on search engine optimization. It’s one tool in the toolbox, and a blunt and expensive tool at that.

If your goal is to increase traffic, then we can research the most popular and most effective keywords used by prospective buyers of [your product] and [your category], then help rewrite the text on your site to optimize the frequency of those keywords, while still making it readable. Finally, I’d work with a network of bloggers and other site owners (or develop my own sites) to link to your site, which will raise your position in Google and other search engine results, possibly bringing you more traffic. Over time. Probably.

If your goal is to increase SALES, then I would recommend a few other changes to your site before investing in higher traffic.

First, you give your visitors a lot of choices in your site navigation, and experienced advertisers will tell you that the more choice you give someone before the sale, the higher the chance he will walk away before making up his mind and handing you money.

Second, you have a great opportunity to develop what [Seth Godin and] I call a “permission asset”, or a collection of contact information from your site visitors along with explicit permission to communicate with them again in the future. This is substantially different from buying/renting mailing lists and sending spam. This is important because if you don’t have the means and permission to follow up with a visitor, it is probable that if they don’t buy from you on their first visit, you will never see them again.

Once those changes are in place, you should employ a combination of pay-per-click search engine advertising (for immediate increase in traffic) and search engine optimization for the slow, long-term climb in Google ranking. Both will cost you, if you want results, but with the proper measurement, you can maintain a positive ROI on both, and they will be a sound investment rather than a draining expense.

That’s how I would approach it. If you need help implementing it, let me know. If you’d prefer to implement it yourself, let me know that, and I can recommend some good books.

Warmest regards,

John Carrier

That goes for you, too.

What are your biggest frustrations when it comes to online marketing?