Mobile Effect

Driving the Evolution of Digital Advertising

What does puppy love have to do with mobile advertising, and why is it a distraction to those that seek to drive scalable results for brands and the agencies that represent them?  Clark Kokich, Chairman of Razorfish, addressed this subject as part of a broader discussion on mobile’s effect on digital advertising at a Marchex event at the Standard Hotel New York on Wednesday evening.  Clark didn’t highlight any hot, new mobile advertising products (“leave that to the experts”), instead speaking to three topics that he would advise marketers and agencies to focus on to create true scale in mobile. Drawing on his decade-long experience at Avenue A and Razorfish, I expected Clark to draw parallels between the early days of Internet marketing and what we’re witnessing now in mobile.  In a way he did.  Clark’s position was that “Mobile is not the Internet to go”.  In other words, the prevailing takeaway that mobile marketers should take from previous disruptions in advertising (newspapers, television, radio, PC) is that the most successful forms of advertising in a new medium will be entirely different than the previous one.  For example, it would be a “big mistake” to assume that just because your smartphone can surf the Internet that the same optimization techniques that work on the PC will work in mobile.
 

From a marketer’s perspective, the most obvious (and most often overlooked) difference between your PC and smartphone is that the latter is a device that consumers use to call businesses and make purchases over the phone.  This not only creates a frictionless buying environment for any business that takes orders or schedules appointments by phone, but it includes a level of “customer intimacy” and makes products like call analytics special.  Why?  Call data provides the marketing insights that can create transformational data for businesses at scale, from the unexpected products consumers are buying to their major objections to keywords or apps or mobile experiences that create repeat business.

Clark’s closing comments were around managing mobile advertising to scale.  For the Fortune 500 clients we all crave, the winner in mobile advertising is not the agency that can turn $1 million into $4 million dollars today, but the one that can turn $25 million into $100 million tomorrow.  This is where puppy love can be a distraction for mobile marketers.  The adorable puppy is the hot new mobile product, app, or optimization technique that dominates the headlines and the attention of too many marketers for a few months before fading away.  While great for experimentation, one’s core focus should be on those paths can provide actual sales (the “grease”, such as phone calls), long-term scale and transformational value. Clark’s speech is available in its entirety here

Local Search Ad Distribution: Three Strategic Adjustments for 2011

Keeping up with the swift and ever changing online advertising landscape can be a daunting task, especially when it comes to local search advertising distribution. Emerging technologies and new trends can have a major impact on advertising spend, campaign performance and expected return on investment. The changes that occurred in this space over the past year will transform the way the local search industry thinks about and manages online advertising distribution.

Marchex is one of the leading providers of local online advertising products and services, and we are constantly tracking and monitoring emerging trends in order to quickly respond to and adjust for market changes. Below are three trends we believe will have significant impacts on the local advertising industry, and we are forming new strategies and product enhancements for our resellers to be successful in 2011.

Yahoo! + Bing = Distribution Challenges … and Opportunities

In 2010, the much anticipated Yahoo! and Bing Search Alliance went live, converging two of the three largest search engines and ad platforms in the world. While the migration was executed relatively smoothly, many online marketing resellers and agencies in the search space faced some challenges. The end result for resellers, given the differences between Bing and Yahoo’s platforms, was reduced impressions and clicks. While this led to a short term challenge to make up for the loss in volume, it further forced agencies and resellers to get more aggressive about testing and ultimately enabling additional fulfillment sources for their local advertisers. The end result for Marchex and our reseller partners is a more diverse distribution mix across online, mobile search, mobile applications, online directories, call directories and other lead-focused distribution.

The Intelligent Bet: Smartphones

Another noteworthy transformation from the past year is the continued growth of smartphone adoption and mobile web browsing. According to comScore, smartphone penetration for 2010 was measured at a remarkable 25%, up from 14% in 2009. Among smartphone use in the United States, mobile web browsing increased 89% year over year. One of the key advantages of mobile advertising is that there are fewer steps on the path to a customer conversion. Features such as click-to-call allow smartphone users searching the web for local businesses to seamlessly connect with the simple touch of a finger. As the number of smartphone users continues to grow and this new user behavior is broadly adopted, it is critical for distribution sources to include a focus on mobile ad distribution.

Moving From Clicks to Calls

In recent months, there has been a significant shift from click-focused advertising to call-focused advertising, which has had a big impact on distribution strategy. The reason for the shift is due to the fact that calls convert roughly five times more than a click (according to Marchex performance data) and advertisers are increasingly tuned to performance. In fact, according to BIA/Kelsey, 65% of businesses currently rate calls as their highest quality lead source. So as the demand for mobile search, mobile directories, free directory assistance, click-to-call, PC-based call providers and other ad-supported “call” models continue to grow, so does the need for efficient management of this inventory for the advertiser. Enter call-focused sources like the Marchex Pay-for-Call Network that have now become a critical component of an advertiser’s distribution strategy. Therefore, as call advertising networks grow and become ubiquitous, it’s important to get ahead of the curve and start adding these sources to your distribution portfolio to deliver the source that advertisers are increasingly demanding.
 
What This All Means

All the events of 2010 should serve as a valuable lesson: advertisers—and those who represent advertisers—need to be mindful of emerging distribution trends like the Bing/Yahoo migration, expanded smartphone adoption and usage, and the emergence of call advertising networks in order to maintain a high standard of performance. And the general best practice to adopt is to maintain diversification across distribution sources from search engines to ad networks to mobile and everything in between. This will ultimately help mitigate potential risks and impacts from changes in the distribution ecosystem, as well as help maximize spend, drive revenue and increase click-through-rates—all of which provides the best possible outcome for the advertiser.

SMX West Up Close with Yelp Panel Takeaways

Why Mobile Marketers Need to Know that My iPhone ALSO Makes Calls

Listen Up, Small Businesses: Your Customers Are Telling You Something

Financial Services Firm Expands Sales Presence Using Marchex Call Analytics

Prototypes Are Not Future Products

Marchex Webinar Recording on Online Reputation Management for Small Businesses Now Available

Marchex recently delivered a webinar called How to Manage Your Company’s Online Reputation – and Protect Your Bottom Line. If you missed it, the recording is now available. Last night, I started watching the webinar recording to check the sound, etc., and ended up watching the whole thing again. It’s that good. The webinar primarily presents tips for online presence and reputation management for small businesses—but enterprises who work with small businesses will find the content equally rich and compelling.

Brooks McMahon, SVP of Small Business Marketing Products at Marchex, sets the table by outlining the challenges small businesses face with the increasing complexity of the digital world. For example, the things small businesses had to worry about just a few years ago are significantly different today (e.g., Facebook, directory listings, reviews, blogs, tweets, and so on). Ryan Fritzky, Senior Product Manager at Marchex, then presents practical advice and tactics for small businesses confronted with the difficulties of managing their online presence. Consumers now have more control than ever of the conversation which has a direct impact on a business’ bottom line. Ryan covers custom solutions as well as the technology emerging to help small businesses take control of an online environment in which the consumer clearly has the upper hand. He also demonstrates how to make this challenge a positive by turning your best customers into advocates online.

Watch the recorded webinar by clicking here.

Marchex White Paper Lays Out the Digital Product Vision for Small Business Marketing

Marchex recently published a white paper on the future of digital marketing products for small businesses called Three Things Small Businesses Really Need: Re-defining the Digital Marketing Product Set by Matthew Berk, EVP of Product Engineering at Marchex. An abstract is provided below and you can download the entire white paper.

Abstract: For small businesses encouraged to shift their marketing spend from older, offline channels (e.g., the phone book) to more efficient online channels (e.g., search marketing), product innovation has not followed at the same pace. The online acquisition marketing our industry sells to small businesses doesn’t begin to capture the full opportunity to take advantage of the tremendous shift in online consumer behavior.

Marchex is spearheading a revolution in the products available to small businesses to help them wring more leverage out of the Internet. That primarily means delivering leads in the form of phone calls because we know small businesses value calls more than any other lead source (along with actual in-person visits). But it also means delivering leads more efficiently with form submissions and emails in addition to just clicks to a website, as well as making it easier to communicate with customers and prospects or managing their complex digital footprint. Marchex’s belief is that small businesses will increasingly look to unified marketing products to help them grow and manage their businesses and customer relationships — with the primary intent being to have the phone ring with new customers. We invite you and our industry to join us as we take the small business product set back to the drawing board to rebuild it with an eye towards solving the broadest set of needs and tap into ever greater opportunity.

Download the entire white paper here.
 

New White Paper From Marchex Call Analytics

Call Mining - The Video!

Recently, Marchex Call Analytics launched Call Mining. The response we have received from those that have used it has been overwhelmingly positive. We are seeing agencies and advertisers use Call Mining to determine on-the-phone conversions without having to listen to calls, identify buzz words to help build optimized keyword lists, and assess which channels and campaigns are most effective at driving calls. They are using this information to improve their advertising performance and ultimately maximize their Return-On-Investment.

To give you a better understanding of how Call Mining can be used to improve advertising performance watch the demo video below:

 

GUEST POST - 7 Ways You Can Better Protect Your Reputation Online

We all know what it means to have a good reputation. This means that your friends, family, associates, colleagues and others in your circle of influence know, like and trust you. When you go to the corner store and forget your wallet that let you bring the money back later as they know you will pay it back.

Your reputation as a business person is very similar, except it’s about how your customers feel about you and of course your employees and business partners. In regard to your employees, it’s them wanting to shop from you, not because they HAVE TO, but because they want to. I love shopping in Home Depot.Why? Because the staff are so helpful and knowledgeable. I go to Radio Shack to have a similar experience. I use Enterprise quite a bit as their staff is so welcoming and friendly and accommodating. I like the Gap, because they have nice clothes, but also due to their every easy return policy.

For both of these scenarios, whether your family or businesses you shop from, they say good things about you to other people. If you do NOT have a good reputation, they also spread this to other people and bad news travels much farther and has more impact than good news.
Online reputation is very similar, but even more powerful than the personal or business to business experience in a retail store. Why?

With online reputation your customers, with a few keyboard strokes and the click of a mouse, can spread good things about you or very bad things about you (true or not) very far. A great comment they had in your e-store that sells leather goods can be Tweeted and re-Tweeted thousands of times. A bad experience they had using your hand lotion can be blogged about and posted to Facebook, read by thousands of your customers and prospective customers in seconds.

What can you do to better protect your reputation online?

1. Have great customer service and business practices. If you make a mistake or wrong a customer, quickly and effectively make it right.

2. Sell great products. If you’re selling crappy products, then you’re only going to hasten the negativity that is spread about you online.

3. Set up alerts that will periodically email you when something is posted about you or your business online. Google, Yahoo and Bing all enable you to easily monitor online communication. You can get these alerts via email or RSS feeds. Since alerts are keyword based they are not that accurate. For example, if you set up an alert for “Ackerman Law Firm” you’re likely to get several alerts that have nothing to do with your business.

4. Monitor social media networks, including Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. The above mentioned alerts will often catch the conversations going on in these social networks, but it’s also a good idea to proactively and directly do searches on keywords important to you, so you capture as much information as you can.

5. Rating services such as Yelp, TripAdvisor, eOpinions and others are platforms in which millions of customers are talking about their experiences, interacting with your product or services. It’s important that you are not only monitoring these services but also learning about how to more effectively use them for your business.

6. Of course these are just a few avenues that news and overall information or discussions about your company are online.

7. Monitoring social media is great, but time consuming. There are digital products emerging that simplify monitoring the online conversation. There are some free tools that aggregate online mentions and more powerful paid subscription tools that provide a much richer experience and more accurate, robust monitoring and analysis.

In addition to monitoring, it is important that you are prepared for responding to any news about your company that generates and unusual spike in sales or comments to your company that you need to respond to. For example, maybe a sale that you launched has done very well – are you ready to handle the rush of sales and user comments. Maybe a customer was displeased with your service and blogs about it, reaching the front page of Fox, CNN or some other national media. Are you ready to handle the emergency response needed to get YOUR message out to your customers and the general public, including the media?

When your company receives an inordinate amount of attention, especially, negative attention, it is critical to have a senior communication person who is savvy with social media, able to appropriately respond. Notice, you do not need a blogger or social media guru. You need a communication expert who is also an expert or very savvy with social media and online communication. If you are a small business owner that can’t afford to hire this person, then you should be prepared to delegate someone in your office to do this or do it yourself. Here is where automated online tools can help you (or the person you delegate) do this.

There are two easy ways to ensure your online reputation is “stellar:”

1. Ensure you have an online identity and that it is active. You should have a presence on all three major social networks and ensure your profile and related activities are up to date. Blog regularly and ensure you are active online. This not only helps your reputation but also helps to give you more visibility online. This is search engine optimization.

2. Give your customers a way to communicate with you through forums you manage and control. You can have customized discussion boards or start a group on LinkedIn and Facebook Page that you encourage your customers to use. Even if it’s a public area, you can better measure and monitor the discussion. Actively monitor your online reputation—either manually or even better, with the help of online products that simplify the process.

Ramon Ray is editor and technology evangelist for Smallbiztechnology a media company which educates growing businesses with information on how to strategically use technology as a tool to grow their businesses. Smallbiztechnology is currently presenting the Small Biz Tech Tour – an educational event for small businesses in cities around the country.
 

Notes from Monitoring Social Media San Francisco

Marchex recently participated in Monitoring Social Media San Francisco. About 100 people attended--primarily marketers, agencies, and PR professionals. The event is currently touring around the country and I highly recommend it. It’s one of the only, or the only, event of its kind with concentrated focus on social media monitoring. The organizers, Murray Newlands and his colleagues from Influence People in the UK, gave an unusual amount of focus to content which helped make this event extraordinary.  I didn’t get a chance to see all the presentations since Marchex was exhibiting, but here are my notes:

Marcel LeBrun from Radian6 presented on how to “Build a Better Listening Organization.” He spoke about how not only is social media transforming consumer culture, but also impacting every part of the enterprise.  Social media is bigger than TV, messages propagate faster and last longer, messages are more trusted because they move through a network of friends, everyone is a participant, and it is a multi-purpose medium. What this means for the enterprise is that a brand is now a sum of conversations about it. Therefore, it’s imperative that an enterprise learns how to listen to the conversations and manage with a coordinated strategy, process, and listening platform.

The same general concept applies to small businesses as well as the enterprise. However, I would argue that the conversations have a bigger and more immediate impact for a small business. For example, one bad review could ruin a restaurant—where as some negative comments about Microsoft, though important to watch and manage, will hardly sink the ship. Matt Greff from Marchex pointed this out in his presentation called “The Listening SMB: How Small Business is Reclaiming the Web.”  He showed how monitoring and managing a online presence is important—since the balance of power has shifted to the consumer—but it is also and important part of a larger three-prong digital strategy for small businesses. Given the SMB’s limited resources and time, a small organization needs to focus on the following three things to have a successful digital strategy:

1. Performance-driven lead generation (primarily leads that come in the form of a phone call)
2. Cultivating good customer relationships, primarily  through social media and email; and
3. Managing online presence (reviews, mentions, listings).

Marchex exhibited at the event and gave demos of Marchex Reputation Management, which we heard described a few times as the Radian6 for small businesses.

Giles Palmer from Brandwatch pointed out how social media monitoring is actually most effective for the enterprise when it is segmented by organization structure – PR, HR, retail, etc. And that social media success should be benchmarked according to industry.

Ebay presented a case study on how their organization is structured to manage social media. One of the presenters stated that “in many ways eBay is the original social network.” Ebay has never been overly promotional and has driven their business through community. At eBay, a team was established to tackle social media called the Social Media Center for Excellence, which comprises sub groups that focus on strategy, customer insights, and competitive monitoring. The group’s goal is to align internal social media roadmaps, plans, analytics and reporting so that no effort is done in a silo. Because eBay is a social site, their attention to social media is divided by internal monitoring of communities and external social sites.

Mark Schmulen from Constant Contact also presented on the challenges of social media for small businesses. He pointed out that social media is the new word of mouth and that the old marketing hierarchy for small business marketing has been inverted from the rank order of Find, Convert, Keep to Keep, Convert, Find—and that the critical pieces of the customer engagement cycle are social media marketing and email marketing, which are intertwined.

Timothy Jordan from Google spoke about their data fire hose that tracks real time Google Buzz data that is filtered for the subject of your choice. They offer share counts, related links, related people and geo-location. Google’s position is that you must first understand the data that’s available before you can choose the right tool.

Pierre Zarokian from Submit Express spoke about managing online presence and reputation from an SEO perspective. He pointed out the sites you want to be listed on and the ones you don’t want to be found on. Among the things to do to improve online presence and reputation include: asking customers to leave positive reviews, create new sites (e.g., external blogs), create many social media profiles (especially on top sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube) buy sponsored ads, distribute press releases, and write articles.

Other companies that presented included Klout, Meteor Solutions, NexBoom, RowFeeder, Lithium Technologies, and BlogTalkRadio. You can access all the slides from the event on SlideShare),

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

New and Improved Keyword Level Tracking

Keywords matter. To someone that lives and breathes search marketing, that is as obvious a statement as saying that the sun rises in the east or the Seattle Mariners will be a disappointment. For example, If you’re marketing a dentist’s office, you know that you’re going to get a different type of customer response from someone clicking on an ad for “emergency dental work” as opposed to “teeth whitening.”

What should also be obvious is that your keywords affect your phone call response rate as well. Depending on the keyword, you may receive calls from current customers, prospective customers, high-paying customers, or worst of all… you may not receive any calls at all. From the perspective of a call analytics company, the solution is pretty easy: track each keyword individually with a call tracking number. But what do you do if you have 25,000 keywords or 250,000 keywords? It’s probably not realistic or cost-effective for you to have 250,000 call tracking numbers.

Today Marchex Call Analytics announced a new and improved version of our Keyword-level Tracking feature for paid search accounts that handle thousands of keywords. It’s more efficient, cost-effective and easy-to-use as ever and will help you get a complete picture of what how your search campaigns truly impact your on-the-phone conversions.

Why Keyword Level Tracking Matters
It is widely known that search drives phone calls. According to ComScore, 46 percent of local online searchers called a business following their Web research. In my view, this statistic undervalues the impact of phone-calls to service-based businesses.

For example, Marchex’s Local Leads search marketing product reports that 90% of all search-marketing conversions occur on the phone. I imagine my chiropractor, auto repair shop, Home Depot kitchen consultant, local toy store owner and salon are all nodding right now.

For any business that relies on phone calls, if you are simply counting the clicks, you are not receiving a good understanding of what separates a buyer from a browser. If you are counting the calls, you want to make sure, by the keyword, what is getting your customers to actually pick up the phone and give you business.

How It Works
Marchex Call Analytics technology dynamically assigns a tracking number to your landing page based on the referring keywords, and does so in a way that uses a minimum of numbers (reducing your cost) while maintaining tracking by keyword (providing accurate visibility). That process is what our development team has been perfecting.

On the other hand, implementing Keyword-level Tracking for a business is easy. As an advertiser, you just make sure that your keyword and an ID are appended to the destination URL of your keyword and add a snippet of code to your landing page where you’d like the number displayed. That’s it; we provide the reporting and results from there.

If you’d like to learn more or have any questions about Keyword-Level Tracking, please feel free to email me at John (at) Marchex.com or call Marchex Call Analytics at 1.800.840.1012

Marchex College Recruiting

The college recruiting season is upon us! Wednesday, October 27th the Marchex Engineering team will have a booth at the University of Washington Science and Engineering Career fair, and Thursday, October 28th meeting with Computer Science Engineer students at the annual meeting for the UW Affiliates Program.

Breaking all the rules

The University of Washington Science and Engineering Career fair is an enormous, annual event where science and engineering students receive the velvet glove treatment in hiring. The whole paradigm of recruiting is flipped upside down, the defining quality of a booth is candidate experience, and literally, no expense is spared by many of the larger technology firms. It’s a spectacle not to be missed, complete with the coolest in trade-show booths, and gadgety, flashy giveaways. This year rumors are afoot of free Windows 7 mobile phones to be distributed, and I can reveal this now, Marchex will be offering an iPad as grand prize to a big coding contest. True story.

Here’s a secret, it’s a raucous good time for us, too. This is the first big exposure many of these science and engineering students have to the ‘real world’ and it truly delights me to observe them having a good time, gathering up their freebies, and comparing notes. I also love that we’ll be largely representing Marchex this year with a team of 8 Marchex software design engineers, development managers, and architects, all seeking the next left-brained equivalents of a rockstar. We booked twice the space and will have a faux lounge area in which to sit, chat casually with students. Our uniform will consist of a technology word cloud t-shirt proudly showing off the stuff all Marchex products are made of.

And, despite all the distractions of coding contests, giveaways, and cool lounge chairs, hopefully we’ll succeed in communicating some of the competitive advantages of a computer science graduate working at a mid-sized company like Marchex, such as our support and encouragement for engineers to present papers and attend open source conferences like OSCON and YAPC, and working in an environment where collaboration is the keystone of engineering success. Any interns or newly hired engineer will be surrounded by proven and highly accomplished colleagues who delight in sharing knowledge and experience.

We are on a mission to build a fantastic, high growth company and are looking for more great people to join our team and help take us to the next level.
Breaking the rules never felt better!

Know any engineers who want to Make History? - Recruiting (at) marchex (dot) com.


 

Identifying on-the-phone conversions

Your webinar questions answered

First of all, a big ‘thank you’ to everyone who attended the Marchex Call Analytics / Search Marketing Now Webinar last week. With a topic such as “how to identify on-the-phone conversions and improve advertising performance” you can bet we had a ton of great questions. As is often the case, time ran out on us before we got to every question, so here are a few more answers to some of the questions we did not have time for:

Can Call Mining be used as a standalone product or do you need to use a call tracking provider in conjunction with Call Mining?

Call Mining uses speech-to-text technology to sort and identify the words and phrases exchanged during phone conversations. To do this Call Mining requires access to call recordings. Call recording is typically a standard feature offered by most call tracking providers. So in short, you will need to work with a call tracking provider to use call mining.

Can Call Mining data integrate with my existing reporting, and do most providers offer an API?

Marchex Call Mining (not sure on other providers) offers an API that can be used to integrate call mining data with your existing reporting or dashboard. I would say this is an absolute must for any call mining provider you evaluate and select. It allows you to get the most out of your call data and makes it actionable so you can improve your advertising and maximize ROI.

What factors influence whether people convert on line or via phone?

There are a lot different factors that impact the way in which customers convert. But here are a few of the primary drivers.

1) The nature of the business: Obviously a business that sells goods directly over the internet will receive more online conversions that on-the-phone. Service based businesses that provided their service at the home of the customer lend themselves to phone based conversions given the amount of data points necessary to set up an appointment (problem, availability, cost, etc). Generally, high detail services (home services, law, finance, real estate) that require human interaction will typically convert more often on-the-phone.

2) Advertising channel: Advertising channels can also determine the extent to which conversions occur on-the-phone or online. No surprise, online advertising will have a higher frequency of online conversions than say radio or print. What is most interesting now is the convergence of the mobile phone with the internet, where conversions that would typically occur online are now starting to occur on-the-phone given the ease of just touching a screen to call. With the rapid growth of the mobile internet (predicted by Morgan Stanley to outstrip the desktop internet as soon as 2014) this is a trend that will almost certainly increase.

3) Advertising approach: The design of an advertisement will inevitably impact the type of conversion event. Ads featuring prominent forms or ‘Click Now’ buttons are clearly aimed at an online conversion, whereas focusing advertisement layout on a phone number with a strong call to action to “Call Now”, the type of conversion will be impacted in this case in favor of a phone call.

If you didn’t get to participate in the webinar, you can find it archived here. If you have any other questions or want to learn more about any of Marchex’s Call Tracking and Analytics products, then please visit us here, or call us at 1.800.840.1012
 

The CORE of a performance culture

We are serious about our culture at Marchex. We know that all the products, customers, and partnerships in the world are just short-term advantages if every single team member isn’t fully engaged in what they’re doing. We know that we need a culture where every team member is thrilled to come to work, and where anyone would be excited to join the team.

Every Pay-For-Call team member recently signed a set of “Covenants” to each other. Our covenants are a reflection of our commitment to excellence in everything we do. And they represent the standard of conduct that all our team members are invited to expect. They are categorized in four areas that translate to the acronym, “CORE.” Thought I would share.

Character

• We never use information that someone volunteers against them. If someone admits a mistake, we don’t heap on the blame. If someone offers a suggestion, we reward his/her initiative.

• We speak about people when they are absent exactly as we speak when they are present. Even in confidential conversations about employee performance, we remember that we are speaking about our family.

• We value our individual perspectives and approaches. When someone differs from one of us on an issue, we first ask, “What do they understand that I am missing?”

Ownership

• We focus our debates around the best interest of the business, and nothing else. We do not tolerate personal agendas that harm the function of the team.

• We are quick to take blame, and quick to share credit. We are eager to say, “That was my fault” when appropriate, and to erase our mistakes. When one of us does something great, we celebrate without envy.

Respect

• We prioritize respect of individual over regard of position. A meeting called by a Campaign Manager should be attended on time as if it was scheduled by the EVP.

• We prioritize the harder truths in our communication, always with respect. If someone one the team needs difficult feedback, we provide it. If bad news needs to be communicated, we do it quickly.

• We always provide difficult feedback in person, and always without observers. When one of us has tough feedback for the other – regardless of our levels – we handle it directly, and in person.

• We respect one another’s work life balance. We strive to avoid overloading, over-taxing, or over-burdening each other so when we cross the finish line, we’re all still running.

Excellence

• We always disagree with counter-suggestions. If there is something that should be better, we make a suggestion. In cases where something is wrong and we have no suggestion, we apologize for that before pointing it out.

• We do what we say we will do. When one of us commits to doing something, we do it. We are quick to ask for help. We are quick to admit that we can’t accomplish something we’re asked to do. We are on time to meetings.

In putting these together, we debated their completeness, and we still wonder if we’ve missed anything. Would love to hear your thoughts.
 

eMetrics Optimization Summit in Review

Last week I attended the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit in Arlington, VA and came away impressed with the collective maturity, sophistication and intelligence in the attendees and speakers at the conference and with the Web Analytics space in general. However, as much as the space has grown from the early days of “hits” to current thinking around “search funnels” and “credibility chains”, I couldn’t help but notice the lack of emphasis on how one’s online experience impacts offline conversions in the form of calls or in-store visits.

Maybe it’s asking too much from a conference devoted to properly understanding, improving and profiting from its customers’ online experience to tackle problems that don’t fit neatly into a clickstream analysis. Social media and mobile, among numerous other topics, are not solved problems in the Web Analytics space and certainly require considerable additional discussion and research.

All of that said, a topic that did receive emphasis throughout the many keynotes and presentations I attended (and resonated throughout the discussions I had on the exhibit floor) was how to justify additional expenditures in Web Analytics and marketing optimization products and teams. What I heard as the answer most often cited was to show the complete revenue picture of a given experience (driven organically or by marketing) and to optimize for the experiences that generate the most return.

Given that calls are rated by most business as their highest valued lead source, wouldn’t including the additional value generated through on-the-phone purchases or in-store conversions provide the ammunition required to allocate additional expenses?

With that as context, here are a few themes that stuck with me on the flight to Seattle back from Arlington. Adam Greco, Director of Web Analytics at Salesforce.com, had a compelling keynote on Tuesday morning advocating that companies should proactively connect the dots between their Web Analytics and CRM solutions, because as he put it “they are like chocolate and peanut butter”. Using form fills as an example, Adam said that counting form fills as a conversion is not adequate because only a percentage of form fills lead to an actual purchase and different paths to a form fill may have dramatically different ROIs. Tying Web Analytics and CRM solutions together can upgrade optimization from a cost-per-form-fill to a cost-per-acquisition analysis.

In Marchex Call Analytics, we’ve undergone a similar transformation over the last year as we’ve invested and introduced tools including Call Mining, that tell a business not only how many calls were received, but which calls are better calls. As a simple example, let’s assume that a business only receives service calls from existing customers and sales calls from prospective customers. Knowing that prospective customers navigated your site or found your site in a different way than current customers would go a lot towards optimizing your marketing spend or focusing your site redesign.

Michele Hinojosa’s presentation on the “Publisher’s Perspective“ was a fascinating look at a sophisticated Web Analytics team and how, as Manager of Web Analytics at Kelley Blue Book, her team approaches topics such as revenue forecasting and user experience. Getting actionable data out of your systems painlessly seems to be a major focus for KBB and what she referred to as “visitation behavior”, or recognizing someone as a new or returning customer and understanding how their experience dictates future use of the site, is where Web Analytics and Call Analytics intersect. In other words, based on data about the 1,000 phone calls I received last month, which are the fifty that we should invest the sales team in following up with directly? Call Analytics with Call Mining used in consort with Web Analytics answers this question.

Ed Wu’s keynote on Wednesday morning was a look into how Dell manages Web Analytics. As Head of Online Analytics and Testing, Ed discussed how his team is seen as one of the most strategic at Dell and to me one of the biggest reasons is that the Web Analytics Group was embracing accountability. He shared with us some high-level metrics about how their investments in doubling team size and revamping the infrastructure of Dell.com are expected to significantly contribute to the bottom line and how his team is stepping up to the plate to be accountable for that. In my view, that theme sits well with the Call Analytics industry, as so much of what we are trying to help clients with is prove how their decisions impact on-the-phone conversions.
 

Applying design thinking to software development: Ideation (Part 3 of a series)

Following on my previous posts summarizing some thoughts about design thinking empathy and physical space, here's the third installment of the series on design thinking for software product management.

Ideation -- it's not just a bunch of guys sitting around a table.





It's easy to think brainstorming should just come naturally. How hard could it be? The reality is ideation goes well beyond a bunch of people throwing out ideas and it actually requires a lot of practice to ideate well. It's not hard to do at all, but it's incredibly hard to do at a world-class level and I suspect it’s something we'll never get perfectly.

Here are five things I've seen that separate good from great ideation.

1. Frameworks

We're all familiar with the scenario of a bare white board acting like a blank canvas and people shouting ideas out and someone writing it down in a neat column. While that's useful in many instances, providing frameworks to structure that conversation can really channel the creativity and energy and result in more productive and actionable ideas. Some frameworks I’ve found helpful include design thinking staples like empathy mapping, problem statement mad libs, and metaphors. It’s amazing how a little bit of structure can actually help increase the velocity of ideation.

2. Draw, don’t write

Next time, instead of writing ideas on a white board, draw icons. You’ll find the ideas pop a lot more and when you’re trying to identify the most promising ones by looking at doodles versus text. You'll also absorb and identify the best ideas much faster and think about them in a much more creative way. Below is a comparison of the same three product ideas on merging social media and DVR's. Which one stimulates you more?



    




3. Work alone

While a group of people makes for great brainstorming because you feed off of each other's energy, sometimes you need to disband briefly, work alone, and then regroup and share. This is especially effective if you’ve hit a wall as a group and there are ideas inside of people’s heads but they’re being too polite or they’re too shy. Forcing everyone to pitch their quick idea individually helps restore balance to the group discussion – especially if there’s one or two strong personalities that hog all the airtime.

4. Vote

We’re kind of programmed to debate. Maybe it’s so many years of watching talking heads on the cable news channels; mock trial club in high school, or the case method in business schools. For whatever reason, many of us in software product management are pretty comfortable duking it out on why Idea A is better than Idea B and 10X better than Idea C and D (not to mention the fact some of us are ignoring Idea G). While this is healthy, sometimes if becomes a huge rat hole or a battle over whose gut feel is stronger between the two most alpha members of the group. Taking a time out and asking everyone in the group to put a post it note by their favorite idea or putting a colored check mark next to it is a great way to get a temperature read and harness the wisdom of the group as well as quickly identify if there's a silent consensus.

5. Rinse and repeat

Nobody gets it right the first time. I’m pretty sure Steve Jobs didn’t dream up of the iPhone in one meeting all by himself. There were probably a lot of iterations and discussions and fits and starts over months, if not longer. Any product idea gets better as you get more customer input or internal feedback, revise, and do it again. The design thinking principle of a continuous cycle of flair and focus speaks to this process. Ultimately, a two-hour brainstorming session is one of many required cycles to get it right and even after you ship a product, it's never done.
 

Cox Media Selling Marchex Local Leads

I’m very excited about our new partnership with Cox Media that we recently announced. Cox Media is the advertising sales division of Cox Communications, the third largest cable entertainment and broadband services provider in the country who offers a suite of powerful and diverse marketing solutions for it's small business customers--including television, mobile, and online.

While it is still early days, the initial signs are very encouraging in terms of the excitement and activity of the Cox sales team. From the very beginning of our discussions, Cox Media has been very focused on doing the right things to give their sales team the greatest chance to successfully roll out the Marchex Local Leads product to their existing and new customer base - from detailed product and sales training to clear and aggressive (but achievable) sales goals. As with all of our partners, we are here to support them every step of the way!
 

Many Games in Town: The Rise of Vertical Review Sites

When you think of consumer review sites, Yelp and Citysearch are usually the first to pop in your mind. These are sites that compile reviews across a broad range of categories—from restaurants to home services to religious organizations and everything in between. And there are many similar sites like Dex Knows, Judy’s Book, and Kudzu who have been strong contributors to the review site category for years. And there’s no doubt about it, multi-category review sites have been the major players since Citysearch launched in 1999 followed by Yelp in 2004. However, an interesting trend has been emerging the last couple years: vertical review site popularity is on the rise.

Snapshot of an upward trend.

Based on data gathered from the Marchex Reputation Management database, we can see how this trend has unfolded over the last few years. For example, Zagat, a review site that features local restaurant consumer reviews has seen a surge of activity recently. From 2008 to 2009, the number of reviews increased 61% and is trending to increase by a further 80+% based on current run rate. DealerRater is an automotive site that features consumer reviews of car dealers as well as automobiles. The site has been around since 2002, and has had steady growth since, with the number of reviews recently growing 126% in 2009 and expected to grow another 159% this year. Other growing vertical consumer review players worth mentioning are Homethinking, a realtor review site that has dramatically increased review activity recently; Service Magic, a competitor of Angie’s List that is expanding into new categories as well as offering other marketing services like group buying; and Edmunds, another automotive player with four specialty online publications for auto enthusiasts.

Why is this happening?

So why is consumer interest and participation in vertical review sites growing, when category aggregators like Yelp are around? Well, Yelp and others like it aren’t going anywhere fast. Yelp continues to grow at a rapid clip and others like Citysearch remain tremendously popular. What is happening is that posting reviews is becoming mainstream behavior for consumers—and therefore the overall volume of reviews is steadily increasing and fragmenting across a variety of review sites. My view is that vertical sites are appealing because they play to consumers desire for detailed insight into certain categories (like automotive, contractors, and real estate) where, for example, the value of a planned purchase is high, and review sites are likely perceived to be more authoritative because of their focus. So this isn’t a matter of vertical consumer review sites stealing user share—at least not at this point--from the multi-category sites, but more that the consumer review universe is expanding and vertical sites are a logical extension that is apparently working.

What this means for small businesses.

All of this is great news for the consumer. It means more information to help make more informed purchase decisions—as well as the opportunity to be powerful participants and influencers in the whole process. For the active consumer, this is also a lot of fun. For the small business that has to deal with the expanding power of the consumer it’s not so much fun and presents a two-fold challenge: 1. a small business must monitor consumer opinions across multiple sources in order to understand how the influencers may be impacting the bottom line; 2. small businesses must actively participate in and manage this environment. This means responding to the conversations, acting on good advice from consumers (and letting them know you listen), and ultimately leveling the lopsided playing field to be more favorable and fair for small businesses. As I pointed out in a previous post, the consumer review environment has dramatically changed how small businesses market. It’s no longer enough to only focus on getting new customers and then getting their repeat business with traditional campaigns. It’s now imperative that small businesses actively engage best customers to help manage and elevate online reputations, as well as taking advantage of the wealth of consumer feedback that is now available to the small business.
 

How Friendly Is Your Business?

  Think about the last hundred phone calls your business received. If you were able to ask each one of the callers to rate the level of friendliness your business showed over the phone, what would they say?

Using our proprietary Call Mining product, as part of our efforts to help our customers analyze and improve services provided over the phone, we recently studied a set of fourteen thousand phone calls placed to all different kinds of businesses to get a sense for the state of friendliness in American businesses today, and came to the conclusion that friendliness is all over the map.

To start with, our data review analyzed the number of phone calls where the agent (the person at the business answering the phone) said the words “hello”, “hi”, “thanks” or “thank you”. I was pleased to see that this happens more than 90% of the time. You might wonder who wouldn’t say one of these terms during a conversation. How often have you called a business to hear the person answering the phone, “Acme Widgets, this is Steve?".

The data was then parsed to see how often businesses displayed a real sense of friendliness, empathy or service as defined by the words they said. Keep in mind that most of the businesses being called are offering a service that a customer either intends to buy or is highly curious about.

I looked at a broad set of words, including:
“definitely”
“surely”
“absolutely”
“certainly”
“assured”
“glad”
“happy”
“assist”
“understand”
“completely”
“suggest”
“soon”
“help”
“answer”

These words should show up for a variety of familiar phrases, such as “I’d be happy to help you with that.” or “I completely understand, let me assist you.” How often did agents utter one of these friendly phrases during a conversation? - just 59% of the time. Across the set of calls there were marked differences across businesses with several hundred calls (as high as 98% and as low as 34%).

I mentioned at the top of this post that friendliness was all over the map. Although we don’t always know in which state the agent is located when he or she picks up the phone, our call mining product generally knows in which state the customer is calling from, so conclusions can be drawn from the data to see which states received the friendliest service.

Leaving out states with fewer than 100 of the 14,000 calls, the states receiving the friendliest service were:
1. North Carolina
2. Louisiana
3. Washington
4. Illinois
5. South Carolina

To give some sense for the disparity across state, North Carolina callers received friendly service more than twice as often as the state receiving the least friendly service (also in the Eastern Time Zone). If you’d care to hazard a guess as to which state receives the “crabbiest” service, or you’d like to see a demo of Call Mining, feel free to send me an e-mail at johnb(at)marchex(dot)com. Also, check out my initial set of insights from Call Mining.

All I Really Need to Know About Product Management…

With apologies to Robert Fulghum, I won’t say that a Kindergarten education is sufficient training to be a product manager, but spending any time at all around kids between the ages of three to six can provide training that trumps a host of industry conferences or training seminars on the latest conjoint analysis methods.

While we can’t revert to a four-year old state (that would put me in a pair of corduroy pants with a bowl cut, so let’s not go there), being around mini-humans helps reset some ingrained (and frequently unproductive) habits. And it largely comes down to one question – why?

Why?

Spend time with a toddler (or maybe just my kids), and after about two minutes you’ll likely never want to hear the word “Why?” again for the next week. It’s understandable when your mind is largely a blank slate, but kids will press this question on you again and again, no matter what the topic. It can lead to some relatively amazing insights from the most innocuous question. I recently got into a seemingly simple discussion with my five year old son about why I go to work that ultimately covered the nature of work, the concept of money, and some deeper aspects of why our society is organized in its current state – the only thing he said throughout was “Why?”

I’ll go with the assumption that they’re not trying to drive us insane; instead they are genuinely digging for a root answer that addresses a core gap in their understanding.

In product management we fight a constant battle against assumptions, our own and those of the people we interact with. We’ve seen it all, so the thinking goes, and tried and true approaches have worked in the past. That’s when it’s time to hit the brakes and be four years old again. If you haven’t put yourself in a place where you’re minimizing your assumptions and asking ‘WHY?’ at least four or five times, you’re going to miss something.

Most kids are explorers; their relative lack of worldly experience puts them in a place where even the trivial is fascinating. How does a pen work? How does money work? Where do babies come from (maybe we’ll put that one off, I know I am)? It’s borne from the genuine novelty of these things to someone who’s never experienced them, or anything like them. Too often those of us with a few more years behind us try to shoehorn anything that looks like “X” into the “X” bucket, with the result being either a surface-level or completely inaccurate picture of how something truly works.

And in product management we face a constant challenge of balancing between co-workers and customers in different roles, whose mode of understanding and working are vastly different. Smoothly segueing from a development discussion to a client meeting requires good communication to be sure, but it also necessitates a view into the HOW that spans multiple groups and disciplines. How do you effectively translate and distill a technical discussion into a narrative that’s applicable and accessible to a non-technical audience? How do you translate strategy and business-side decisions into guidance and stories for your engineering peers?

Going after that problem with the perspective of a kid trying to understand all of the angles is a good place to start.

So maybe I didn’t learn everything I need to know about product management in kindergarten, but embracing that inner child and stripping away assumptions can open up a ton of insights that would otherwise get buried under the pesky filters that experience can bring.
 

Notes from BIA/Kelsey Directional Media Strategies 2010

This three-day conference in Dallas featured everything you would expect from an industry in transition and then some. With topics ranging from Yellow Pages distribution challenges in the new recycled paper conservatism of the green movement, to how the iPad will be a major game changer, there was no lack of controversial questions. Several key themes prevailed throughout the conference that are worth talking about in more detail.

1. Directories need to become media companies - Not only are they caught in the innovators dilemma, but they have to cross into new territory around search, social, and mobile where competition from new media upstarts is fierce. Traditionally, the Directories have been great at selling a local business an annual print ad for placement and distributing that book to almost everyone in a local area. Where the innovators dilemma comes in, is that if they start putting those listings online and in mobile, not only do they have to build out a whole new infrastructure of servers and search engines, instead of printers and delivery engines (with actual cars and vans), but they'd likely have to give up much of that legacy business in the process as consumers ditch the print book for the always up-to-date mobile app. Online the rules of the game are also different, and many placements and listings are ephemeral - meaning they're there one minute, and gone the next. How do you explain that to a local business?

2. Local Businesses must cross the digital divide - As much as there's opportunity for these new media directories to bundle and attract dollars online, local businesses face a major learning curve as well and frankly speaking, they don't have the time, patience, or even control (in terms of social and online reviews). BIA/Kelsey themselves released research showing adoptions rates of print vs. online by age of the business themselves, and interestingly there's a significant gap between younger businesses using more online and social media tools compared to the businesses 10+ years old which are sticking mostly to print. Will these older businesses stay agile enough to understand their customers rapidly evolving needs?

3. Media bundling and packaging is coming full circle – and becoming more transparent. It was cited a number of times how print placements were originally sold on a fixed cost basis and with no guarantee of performance. Then, as online placements became available, some would pay a rate based on performance - as in $1.00 per click, or $10.00 per conversion. Now as Directories are bundling print, online listings and other ad formats, such as pay-for-call, some advertisers are more sensitive to unexpected spikes in demand, and more willing to buy on a fixed cost if it means guaranteed performance. Sure they want clicks, but results are the key. Fixed cost packages are also an easier sell for local sales reps, so this is a win all around.

Overall there was a tremendous amount of interest and excitement about where technology is heading, and the possibilities it brings with it. Not only has Marchex developed many of these technologies, like our award-winning Local Leads product, but we are continuing to innovate in new areas such as our Presence Management product for local businesses, not to mention our Pay-For-Call Exchange.

The Power of Online Video for Small Businesses

There’s no denying the power of online video. This year marked the fifth anniversary of YouTube, which hit the 2 billion-views-a-day mark making it the second largest search engine following its parent Google. Pew Internet recently reported that nearly 70% of all adult Internet users have used the Internet to watch or download video—that’s 52% of all adults in the US. Notably, educational videos viewed by adult Internet users have increased from 22% to 38% in the last year. Plus, online video advertising is exploding, with spend expected to hit $5.2 billion this year.

Why should small businesses care?

So what does the surge in popularity of online video mean for small businesses? To start, it’s a quick, easy, and effective way for a small business to add depth and credibility to its online pitch. A simple company branding video, product demonstration, tutorial on area of expertise, interview with the owner or employee, or customer testimonial will add personality to a business’s website and build trust with potential customers—which will ultimately boost conversions to leads or sales. Marchex added video functionality to Local Leads landing pages in 2009 to meet growing demand and optimize lead page performance. And partners and small business advertisers have found this functionality gives a boost to online campaigns.
Here is an example:

And you can see this in the context of a business landing page here.

Video is proven to help get leads, conversions, and traffic.

There are countless examples of video success stories. For example, Zappos introduced videos of product demonstrations given by employees that increased sales up to 30%. Digital Media Communications, Inc.—a company that has specialized in creating affordable outsourced videos for businesses--reports their videos have click through rates up to 29%, and video banner ads have CTRs of 15%-30%. Compare these stats to 1% CTR for a standard banner and the impact is clear. Industry statistics have shown that video can increase user action (clicks, calls, etc.) on a page 4 to 7 times. Video can also increase traffic and exposure for a business’ site. For example, simply adding a video to YouTube instantly gets a business indexed by Google. But also employing basic video SEO techniques, such as submitting the video to search engines and using appropriate titles and title tags, will help boost rankings.

Online video is easy and accessible.

One of the most appealing things about online videos as a marketing tactic for small businesses is its low barrier to entry. Anyone with a Flip or other basic video camera can create and upload a video in minutes. However, video requirements vary from business to business—from production value to SEO to marketing sophistication. And for many businesses the “DIY” (“do it yourself”) video is not a viable option. For example, not everyone is comfortable with being in front or behind the camera, and many businesses simply don’t have time to invest. For these businesses, there are video outsourcing companies like Digital Media Communications, Inc., who create videos in the studio or do custom shoots on site. Once your video is created, it takes only a few simple steps to upload it to YouTube, a blog, website, or landing page. So there are many easy options for small businesses to take advantage of online video performance—but ignoring online video is not an option.

Marchex has recently partnered with Digital Media Communications, Inc. who will be a private label reseller of the Local Leads online advertising product for small businesses. Digital Media Communications, Inc is a privately owned video production, sales and marketing business that specializes in serving online and print publishers with videos that drive revenue.
 

Future of Mobile Discussed, Partially Revealed

The heavyweights of the mobile world descended on Seattle's waterfront recently to discuss all things mobile at the Mobile Future Forward Executive Summit 2010. C-levels and VPs from Google, Facebook, Intel, AT&T, CNN, Nokia, Motorola and more participated in lively discussions that touched on the future of devices, privacy, gaming, targeting and Barbie metaphors. Fortunately, no one predicted THIS would be the year for mobile, but there is no refuting the swelling market size and need for companies to shift their focus toward mobile.

"In India, there are more mobile phones than toilets," said Pankaj Kedia, Head of Mobile Ecosystems. According to Takayuki Hoshuyama, CEO of D2Communications, in Japan the term “mobile” is out of date because it is assumed. Four out of five people in China think owning a mobile phone is their birthright.

Global adoption of mobile devices is relentless, and we're still just scratching the surface of mobile's impact on advertising, monetization and social networking. As brands and agencies strive to reach mobile users, they need help from the rest of the community to realize the full potential of mobile advertising.

The advertising and monetization models on applications, games and content sites are underwhelming and advertisers and local business marketers want to know when mobile advertising will be viable for something other than ring tones and wallpapers (Side note: If I was under the age of 16, the acceptable age limit to have a ring tone, my top three choices would be: the Mad Men theme song, the Monday Night Football jingle and Tik Tok by Ke$ha).

Paul Palmieri, CEO of Millennial Media sees "a wave coming" where the ad platform will be as important as the development platform. According to Palmieri, brands and application developers need to take advantage of what is unique to mobile: targeting and reach. Rob Glaser, Chairman of REAL, adds "Advertisers don’t want to advertise in a silo." They want rich media ads to work across all platforms and will reject device or carrier verticalization.   

To take the next step in serving the mobile advertising demand to meet the enormous supply, the industry believes advertisers, agencies and marketers need several things to happen.

1. Application developers must consider alternatives to the $.99 download at the app store, such as incorporating location based ad serving platforms into their apps (where users can see deals and coupons in real-time from local advertisers) and get paid on the user engagement (i.e. a phone call or lead form fill).

2. The industry needs to promote and support the open source platforms that allow app developers to fix apps, make enhancements, update business listings and creatives instantly without waiting through long manual review periods in app store purgatory. Alex Tokman, CEO of Microvision reminded that "Apple is Barbie and everybody is building accessories for Barbie." Apple's iOS is hardly flexible, although they are just starting to open up a bit http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2010/09/apple-relaxes-restrictions-on-ios-app-code-iad-analytics.ars.

3. Social companies like Facebook and Twitter must launch their mobile advertising strategies. Erick Tseng, VP of Mobile at Facebook readily admits that their strategy is to build user engagement and monetize later. Advertisers and local marketers are chomping at the bit waiting to serve those massive user bases with relevant, timely messages.

4. The government bodies and standards boards need to educate users that using consumer data to deliver relevant messages isn’t a big brother scheme; that users receiving targeted messages helps build a lasting relationship with brands. Brands will know their customers better and can serve them better as a result.

At Marchex, we are looking at ways to reach people with relevant, desirable offers that they actually want to get. That could look like deal-of-the-day type promotions or sending people a coupon for a 50% off a pizza as you walk by a pizza joint. Reach is still king and the reach and targeting on mobile is unprecedented in the advertising world. When we see the industry shifts above take place, local marketers, businesses and consumers alike will see richer mobile experiences that increase engagement, cut down on spam and foster better relationships between people and brands.

Then again, we could all just download Justin Bieber wallpapers and call it good.

Digital Marketing for Small Businesses - Back to the Drawing Board

Seven years ago, when I founded Open List, one of the first local search engines, the “local” online space was a radically different world: no Yelp, no Yahoo Local, and no Google Maps; very few consumer reviews of businesses; and very little consumer adoption of the Internet to make decisions about where to spend money locally. Today, with the explosion of online consumer reviews and social dialogue about local businesses, and with the establishment of local search as a chronic online behavior (> 20% of all Web searches according to many), the equation has shifted: consumers are firmly in control of the flow of information, and can leverage that to decide where and how to spend with local businesses. But for small businesses encouraged to shift their marketing spend from older, offline channels (e.g., the phone book) to more efficient online channels (e.g., search marketing), product innovation has not followed at the same pace. The online acquisition marketing our industry sells to small businesses doesn’t begin to capture the full opportunity to take advantage of the tremendous shift in online consumer behavior.

My four-year tenure at Marchex is based on a shared, deeply held belief that when products are based on the real needs of customers, they create powerful changes in behavior. By putting consumers in control of highly fragmented local content, products like online directories and search engines have transformed the consumer landscape; and by putting small businesses in control of their own digital world, we can create a revolution that unlocks the promise of the “local” space. Most in the industry agree on the scope of the opportunity: capturing a broader slice of SMB marketing spend is valued in the range of tens of billions of dollars; even more dramatically, influencing offline consumer spending (the bulk of which is local in nature), approaches single-digit percentages of the US GDP.

Marchex is spearheading a revolution in the products available to local businesses to help them wring more leverage out of the Internet, whether that involves acquiring leads more efficiently (e.g., phone calls, form submissions, and emails in addition to just website clicks), making it easier to communicate with customers and prospects, or managing their complex digital footprint. We invite you and our industry to join us as we take the small business product set back to the drawing board, the better to rebuild it with an eye towards solving the broadest set of needs, and tapping into ever greater opportunity.

I’ll continue this discussion in a free webinar on Weds, September 15th at 1:00PM EDT. Produced in conjunction with the Enterprise Council On Small Business, the webinar will outline the unique digital marketing problems faced by small businesses, and present a product vision that meets those needs.. See you there!

Design Thinking for Software: Space Matters (Part 2 of a series)

Following on my initial post summarizing some thoughts about applying design thinking to software development, let’s look at another takeaway I brought back to Seattle after attending Stanford’s d-school boot camp: the physicality of innovative thinking.  This may initially come across as a bit touchy feely but let’s be honest: humans are not entirely data driven beings and ambient things like sound, temperature, posture, light, color, etc. fundamentally change how we think and interact.  Ask any restaurateur, spa owner, or retail store how much they think about the “vibe.”

So if you assume that open mindedness, creativity, collaboration, and productivity are important for shipping great software, what are some things you can do to increase the likelihood of that happening on your teams?

The best way to think about this is to set some context is to consider some non-work physical environments that we all know change how we interact with other people and how we process information, communicate, and collaborate.

The Daycare Center.
Have you ever visited a daycare center or pre-school and just felt optimistic, whimsical, and energized?  That had something to do with the energetic kids and teachers but a lot to do with the physical environment.  You’ve probably seen pre-schools with lots of bright natural light, bold colors on the walls, big open spaces, and tons of trinkets, toys, illustrations, and toy furniture.  You can’t help but feel more alive, optimistic, and creative in those environments.  I’ve actually recently started to import some of that into my own office and people often comment on the presence of children’s toys (e.g., I have a set of colored magnets on my coffee table that people seem to love) and how much they like to do brainstorming sessions and team discussions in that office instead of one of our more serious conference rooms (usually a bunch of large black leather chairs encircling a giant dark wood conference table).  Whimsy, brightness, and open spaces work for kids because their voracious brains develop well in that environment (OK, I have no scientific proof of this but I think it’s a fair guess).  Would you want your toddler to learn the alphabet in a corporate conference room?

Cube Farm.
A sea of neutral colored, high-walled, cubicles bathed on fluorescent light.  Yeah, not too fun, not too easy to have an unscheduled conversation, and often organized by functional group (and not core team) creating office balkanization.  You walk in and you don’t feel stimulated and you might even feel like you’re not encouraged to think more creatively.  We’ve all seen variations of this strategy and most of us work within some version of it today.  The reality is cube farms happen to be one of the most affordable set ups and to be fair, some people just don’t want to talk to other people and appreciate their walls.  If you want to try to de-farm your office, some investment in wall lowering, better lighting, and brighter colors can make a huge difference.  (We’re actually doing just that since the whole multi-million dollar design studio renovation might take some time to get through the finance department.)

Suggestions.
So outside of hiring an interior designer to create the next Frog Design studio, what can a practical (and resource constrained) software company do?  Here’s some food for thought:

1. Color: this doesn’t require demolition or Herman Miller furniture but can have an immediate impact.  Whip out the paint cans and go bold or go home.  Try an accent wall for starters.  We’ve just painted my office with whiteboard paint so we can draw on all the walls.
 
2. Variety: Sometimes just mixing things up will cause enough discomfort to jog your mind as well.  If you’re in a team meeting, don’t sit in your usual spot at the conference table.  Better yet, don’t even sit at all (and don’t stand in the same spot every meeting either).  Also, try moving people’s desks and assigned office spots around from time to time; you shouldn’t have to go to an off-site to bring some fresh vibe to your work area.

3. Props:  Adding tons of whiteboards, flip charts, exercise balls, for people to doodle, brainstorm, and draw blueprints can make a world of difference for the office vibe.  Think of these as creativity chum.

4. Make meetings active: Try to avoid passive meetings.  The worst ones are probably a bunch of people around a conference table staring at a projection screen in a dimly lit room with the presenter talking most of the time and the rest of folks checking email.  Ask questions, draw on white boards, and make sure no one person is talking more than 20% of the time.  Instead of projecting a PowerPoint, write on the whiteboard and draw visual depictions of the concepts you’re discussing.  Instead of just verbally discussing, get people out of their chairs and vote with colored post it notes on a summary of each of the options under consideration.

5. Remove stuff: taking stuff away should be a bit easier than adding stuff.  Try moving people into team rooms instead of partitioning them in a cube farm or at least try dropping the wall height on those cubes (or removing the walls altogether).  Do you see lots of sitting chairs, pedestals, or have a three-piece desk?  Try getting rid of it.  Removing something can sometimes make the biggest impact of all.  A bare room with some colorful exercise balls and some white board space might be all you need to bring a taste of studio mojo to your office environment.

So – these are just some of my suggestions. What do you think? What have you done to make your environment more conducive to design thinking?

Development - 'Extreme' Style!

This spring, we won a significant piece of business for our Small Business Marketing Product group. Game changing for Marchex, but one that presented the Engineering team with a clear and significant challenge; how could we take a relatively new (and growing) development group and deliver against a list of over fifty features (with fluid requirements) in a compressed time frame?

Time to adopt a new paradigm

What’s great about working at Marchex is the culture of innovation and the openness of the management team to try new ideas, and it was in this spirit that the idea of moving our development approach to ‘XP’ was born. Some of us in the group had prior experience working within an XP framework, and we were confident that not only could we deliver the required feature set, but that we could do so quickly, and improve our development quality. Armed with a set of 4 x 6 note cards and corkboards we set about to revolutionize how we translate product strategy into development excellence – bringing great products to market, quickly.

So what is XP?

At its core, XP (Extreme Programming) is a discipline of development that places communication and constant feedback at the center of the development cycle. Development is done by paired programmers who first write code to test the code they will write for the feature or story. This is TDD (test-driven development), which enables refactoring with the safety net of good test coverage to be sure nothing is broken by the changes.
In XP, the customer and the customer’s needs are always in the forefront of everything we do.

Pilgrim’s Progress

We are currently at 20 weeks and the process continues to gather momentum despite some bumps along the way. The team has delivered 5 major releases and 7 weekly maintenance releases during those 20 weeks with each release being easier and higher quality than any that came before.

‘Getting it right’ takes time and patience. As the team makes its way into uncharted territory the mantra of ‘crawl before you run’ has helped remind us that we are not ‘there’ yet and probably won’t be ‘there’ for some time to come.

Big Challenges

How do QA and UX Design fit into the XP process?

We were stumped at first on how to create an iterative process with incremental delivery that can incorporate QA and major UX work both of which need clear milestones and firmer timelines.

There is scant documentation or even chat from forums on how to roll QA and UX into a highly agile XP team so the answer to this question has been ongoing and challenging.

The specifics will be covered in a future post but the core answer is not surprising --- once the team consciously focused on better communication and expectation setting between all stakeholders, working across the disciplines became much easier and more productive. The key has been to understand how each stakeholder communicates and what their needs are.

When are we ‘done’?

As obvious as this might seem, we really didn’t have a clear idea of what ‘done’ meant.

For those of us using XP at a former company, we did not have a QA team and thus considered a task completed once the final code was written. As developer velocity (or ability to move through work) accelerated, QA became bogged down especially as new projects were started in development while older ones were still moving through the testing cycle.

Developers were focused on the new project and at times couldn’t even remember specifics about code they had written a month before.

There was great frustration on all sides as QA felt stuck and Development felt torn between the old and new priorities. Each group was context-switched between the old and new projects leading to even more churn and frustration.

The first part of the solution was incorporating a lesson from Kanban, another highly Agile discipline, which teaches “reduce Work In Process (WIP)”. Reducing the number of active projects helped the entire team to re-focus and work on the most important priorities first.

The second part of the solution centered on communication (as mentioned above) as well as holding the team to the stated tenet that no code is complete until it is successfully in production.

As a developer, part of writing the code is to support QA while they test it. As QA, part of testing is clearly asking for developer support if and when it is needed. Reducing the WIP meant developers would pitch in, however, it was productive to get the project complete (in production) so development on new features could begin.

Lessons Learned

• A core principle of XP was shown again to be vital: the Retrospective is the agent of change. The “Retro” with the entire team (Dev, QA, Ops, PgM) figures out what does and doesn’t work. The team owns the process and has the power and responsibility to make changes in it to improve constantly.
• Fail early and often – when a process/idea doesn’t work for the team have courage to discard it and try something different.
• Include QA and Ops from the beginning of a project.
• Start the development project with tasks to set the QA process up for success.
• Lack of TDD = Abundance of bugs.
• The most important part of any project is the communication between all of the stakeholders.
• Co-location matters - communication is easier and more effective when everyone is in immediate proximity.


On the Horizon

The ‘experiment’ phase is for the most part behind us now. As we go forward, we will be continuously improving and tinkering with process to make it better serve the team and our customers.

Areas on the radar:
• Integrate more tightly with IT/Ops using the model we have created for development/QA.
• Support the IT/Ops organization in using the XP model.
• Actively expand the XP process to other teams within Marchex (assuming it’s appropriate for their product and there is interest).


Final Thoughts

How specifically does XP benefit our customers ….. are they *really* seeing differences in the end products created using XP?

We believe so. Our weekly release rhythm for routine requests and ability to push out high-quality features on aggressive timelines are providing our customers the ‘proof in the pudding’ and we look forward to even more velocity as the team reaches the next level of experience with our systems.

• Quick turn-around on requests:
   o Even non-emergency requests can be coded/tested and released in two iterations (roughly 2 weeks) or less.
   o ‘Hot’ issues or requests can be turned around ASAP.

• Ability to respond to market changes in a timely fashion:
   o XP embraces change and can move quickly to keep our business on the cutting edge.

• Customer is King – NOT technology:
   o What the customer needs always comes ahead of ‘cool’ technology instead of the other way around.

We would love to hear about your experience (or questions) about XP! Email me!

Call Mining: Insights and Lessons Learned

Recently, my colleague Matthew Berk posted about the marketing benefits of being able to move beyond call transcription to a more meaningful level of customer insight provided by a deeper and scalable understanding of advertiser – consumer conversations.

Today we are announcing the availability of Call Mining, a technology-based speech analytics product designed to capture the most useful call data for advertisers that we are currently rolling out in beta to Marchex Call Analytics customers. I’ve been deeply involved with developing the product and on-boarding customers, and I wanted to share some trends and early insights that Call Mining is showing us.

The first conversation with an advertiser that leads them to become a customer of Marchex Call Analytics often starts like this: “I know that my search and display campaigns are generating phone calls. I just don’t know how many.” These conversations often beg deeper questions, such as “Where are my customers calling from?” or “How many of these phone calls are longer than a couple of minutes?” Marchex Call Analytics effectively answers these questions for millions of conversations each month.

Over the past year, though, questions from advertisers have increasingly been about the contents of the actual conversation between callers and agents (the person answering the phone). “Are callers booking appointments? What features are they asking about? Why aren’t they buying?”

When we set out to build Call Mining, these were the types of questions we wanted to answer, and the product allows advertisers to understand the types of conversations that their customers are having with their business. Coincident with our announcement, I wanted to share a few insights and surprises that came up as we started to trial this product with customers.

Our product data suggests that longer calls aren’t necessarily better calls.
One of the questions we had as we were developing Call Mining was whether or not there would be a strong correlation between the duration of a phone call and the likelihood of a purchase or conversion. In other words, is knowing the average duration of a call “good enough”?

In most cases, the answer is “no”. Generally, when a call is “very short” or “shortish” it indicates that a conversion probably didn’t happen and the call can be chalked up to a wrong number, unqualified lead or a simple question about directions or store hours. However, “longish” or “very long” calls do not indicate a likeliness to convert. Let’s say that you’re calling an insurance company. You provide information about yourself, your driving record and your insurance needs. The price is quoted at the end of the call - which may be the single biggest factor in whether or not you decide to buy!

For most customers, it seems that a longer call means a reservation or appointment or purchase may have happened, but the duration of a call is not a reliable enough indicator upon which an advertiser can base ROAS calculations.

Calls Are Not the Same Across Media Channels.
If a consumer sees your advertisement in the newspaper, on their PC, or on their mobile device it can be for very different reasons. Take this customer, who received the following number of calls from two different online marketing sources.

Source #1: 281 Calls
Source #2: 202 Calls

This data allowed us to calculate an effective cost per call for each source. However, these calls also generate additional useful data for this customer. Of particular importance to the customer are the calls where the customer specifically referenced one of several different problems or objections:

Source #1: 91 Calls (32%)
Source #2: 18 Calls (9%)

Our conclusion? For source #1, a much greater percentage of the calls were from existing customers reporting a problem and much less important to a marketer held accountable for new customer sign-ups.

The Magic Word for Payment?
My favorite part of Call Mining is building topics of conversation to understand about a set of calls. Call Mining provides suggestions on topics to build, based on the set of calls and what we know generally about conversations, and each time I use the feature I discover something new.

For example, many phrases can indicate the potential of a purchase over the phone. “Credit card” and “American Express” are two good examples. If you’re evaluating car rentals or reservations at your B&B, “confirmation number” is an important phrase to look for.

In most cases, though, there is one word that I’ve found that is a virtual lock to indicate a telephone purchase. The word is “expiration”. In almost every conversation where someone discusses a credit card purchase, the agent asks the caller for the expiration date on his or her card. There is almost no other term or expression that refers to expiration, and there is almost no other context where people frequently use the term expiration in a conversation.

Further Insights.
In the process of building our Call Mining technology, I’ve arrived at the conclusion that conversations between your business and your customer provide the richest and deepest clues into your business, and I expect to be following up with further insights as more customers begin to extract the qualitative conversion data they are looking for. If phone calls are an important part of your business, and you’d like to know more about how your customers are interacting on the phone, please reach out to me at johnb(at)marchex(dot)com.

Applying Design Thinking to Software Development (Part 1 of a Series)

I recently attended an executive education program at the Stanford d.school called “design thinking boot camp.”  If you’re not familiar with the term, design thinking is a continuous process rooted in deep customer empathy, interdisciplinary ideation, rapid prototyping, and frequent user testing.  While these things aren’t entirely new concepts in software (especially SAAS), there were some nuggets that caused me to think about how I’ve shipped product in the past.  

Before we dive in, here are three caveats.  (1) This stuff may not be appropriate for every software development effort.  (2) I have imparted my own interpretation of “design thinking” and do not purport to be an expert, just an informed observer.  (3) We’re just starting to implement design thinking at Marchex so I can’t say it will work for sure and probably won’t know for 6-12 months.  I can tell you design thinking is a big deal at places like Intuit, Jet Blue, Pulse, and Audi and it’s basically the underlying process for all of the projects at Ideo (arguably, the world’s leading design innovation firm).

Below are five design thinking principles that weren’t obvious to me:


1. The #1 job of customer research is not product validation (nor is it asking what products users want).
2. Space can be a game changer.
3. Ideation isn’t just smart people brainstorming.
4. Prototypes aren’t future products.
5. Research isn’t a waterfall process.

I’ll elaborate on each one over the next couple of months and start with customer research today.  

Customer Empathy! = Customer Research

This was probably the biggest aha! moment for me.  I tend to think Marchex is a customer centered place and my previous products at Google and Microsoft involved major investments in customer research.  Over the years, I’ve probably run, participated in, or consumed the results of tens of thousands of customer touch points through quant surveys, usability studies, customer visits, persona boards, conjoint studies, and analyst reports.  Design thinking argues all of that doesn’t matter without empathy. 

Aside from the dictionary definition, empathy is about getting non-obvious insights about your users well beyond their interactions with your product.  In fact, it’s essential to glean a ton of it before you even first envision your product or feature idea.  You can gain empathy through in-depth interviews and anthropological observation.  In-depth interviews are open ended discussions with customers where the researcher really internalizes experiences that matter to the customer.  Then they debrief and  unpack the customers’ feelings, motivations, values, priorities, biases, etc.  It’s sitting down with a real human, face to face in their place of business, home, or favorite café (not a research lab with a big mirror) and learning about what makes them tick.  Ultimately, empathy is discovering the unexpected things about customers you would never learn by reading a quant study, looking at demographic pie charts, or even using a traditional focus group. 

As an example, a recent design thinking project looked at parents of children going to college as a user group.  The obvious need is a way to stay in touch and keep track of their kids’ lives in college.  However, the much deeper, richer, and more interesting insight divined through a series of in-depth interviews found that the parents more primal and core need was to be invited into their kids’ new lives.  It wasn’t just hearing about what classes they were taking or who they were dating but an invitation to bring mom and dad into their lives in a way that presumably showed recognition, validated relevance, and love.  That’s some pretty rich stuff and could give rise to a whole new vein of product, feature, design, and positioning ideas that something more sterile like “help parents stay in touch with kids in college” would likely miss.

A half joking litmus test for an in-depth interview is whether your research participant ends up crying.  If the entire interview is dry, staccato, and doesn’t tap in to emotions , uncover tensions, or highlight rich stories about previous experiences, you’re not getting deep enough.  You want quotes like “I hate it when….because…”  “ Last year, this happened to me and I did this because…”   It frustrates me that…. because…..”  “I love …. because ….”  You should ask “why?” and “tell me about a time when…”   five to ten times over the course of the interview.  One great tool for gaining empathy is building a post-interview “empathy map.”  An empathy map is a way for your interview team to unpack the customer’s words, actions, thoughts, and feelings.  It’s super cool and you can learn more about that tool here http://bit.ly/azzWOR  .

Another point about customer empathy is the argument that six in-depth interviews may drive more insights and unlock more innovative opportunities than a series of quant surveys.  If you don’t really understand the personas and motivations of your users, you might not be asking the right questions in your quant surveys to begin with.  In hindsight, this makes a lot of sense since I’ve always found that the free text responses to open ended questions in online surveys tend to be much more interesting than the structured answers. 

Lastly, you’ll notice there isn’t a lot of talk about market size and industry structure or customer segmentation.  That’s because an underlying belief about design thinking is it’s better to build a product that extreme groups of users love and taps into a deep emotional pull versus a product that is targeted at a large group of middle-of-the-road users but doesn’t really nail it for any of them.  Obviously, there’s a balance to strike here but the focus on the user and not the market was kind of refreshing.  As an example, OXO kitchen tools were originally designed to meet the needs of arthritic users and that passion for those users’ needs led to a winning mainstream product.  It’s very possible those OXO handles might not have gotten there had the products’ designers focused on the home cooking market in general from the outset.

Happy empathizing.

Tom 

Beyond Call Transcription

Call Analytics, which for Marchex represents a fundamental technical must- have for advertisers dependent on call-based leads, has the potential to go very deep: unlike clicks, which merely beget more clicks, a consumer connecting with an advertiser over the phone is engaged in an active, live, relationship-building conversation. And hearing the richness of these connections, as I now know very intimately, is an education in what really happens when marketing turns to sales and leads become customers....

To maximize the learning potential of call analytics, it's an incredibly valuable (albeit technically very challenging) half step to reach beyond the who-what-where-why-when's of tracking phone calls to start making sense of actual human conversation. This kind of insight can tell you things website and other kinds of marketing analytics can only guess at: how the call center and agents are behaving, the emotional state of the caller, what specific product or service attributes are critical to the customer, what their real pain points are, whether they are price sensitive, whether competitors are a threat, and much, much more.

So in a move that's ripped straight from the pages of the engineering/business disconnect handbook, I've lately heard a ton of noise about the value of transcription, long considered one of the choicest problems in software engineering. So, faced with tens of thousands of hours of otherwise opaque but insanely valuable audio, the marketer, who wants insight, correlation, and proof of ROI, has asked the engineer what the options are; the answer, not surprisingly, is to pick the most relevant engineering challenge, speech-to-text transcription.

But call transcription by itself merely shifts the locus of opacity from audio to text. Tens of thousands of hours of recorded audio are exchanged for millions of pages of text. Handing the marketer transcripts only works at tiny, tiny scale, and only if the marketer has the time and wherewithal to actually read the transcripts. That's why transcription is a necessary, but by itself insufficient, first step in the process of extracting fruit from a consumer/advertiser dialogue. Think of transcription alone as having a Web without a search engine....

Transcription by itself may provide a product, but it doesn't grasp the solution and its opportunity: making sense of live conversation to provide insight and leverage for the marketer.

At Marchex, we've been hard at work on the subsequent steps required to tap
into the opportunity we see in the storm of audio data. We call it Call Mining, and will lay out our vision for it in subsequent posts! Stay tuned....

3 Reasons Why Call Advertising is Marchex's Big Bet

We believe we are in the very early stages of a transformation in performance advertising, which we term Call Advertising. We believe that the shift to Call Advertising will be as meaningful to advertisers as the shift from Display Advertising to Search Marketing, delivering increased transparency, performance, and a new (high growth) customer acquisition channel.

For more than a year now, we've highlighted that our company's entire energy is concentrated on two key beliefs: First, that performance-based call advertising products will become ubiquitous; and second, that small businesses will increasingly look to unified marketing products to help them grow and manage their business and customer relationships, with the primary intent being to have their phone ring with new customers. The common bond between all of our products is simple: customer-to-business conversation in the form of a phone call. Nearly everything we do, in some form, relates back to this theme for three key reasons:

1. Consumer behavior is changing, creating explosive growth of new advertising inventory based on phone calls. A few stats: the first billion Internet connected devices were PCs; the advent of peer-to-peer architecture turned PCs into two-way communications devices - Skype the clear leader here with nearly 600 million registered users who leverage the PC to make calls. We also share the belief with industry analysts that the mobile Internet is ramping faster than the desktop internet did and that the various forms of mobile devices will sell 10 billion units (or a 10x the number of PCs) in the next several years. There are a few takeaways from this:

• First, consumers are now Call Ready – given the utility and ease of use of these relatively new devices and mediums, we see people consuming information and interacting in a very different manner than they did even a few years ago;


• Second, whether advertisers like it or not, more people will be making phone calls from connected devices, and advertisers need to know how they can take advantage of this very large, rapidly growing new source of inventory;


• Third, publishers of Call Distribution -- such as mobile advertising networks, carriers, Skype, and other publishers who are part of the "phone call ecosystem" – are out there looking for an effective way to monetize their inventory, and pre-existing ad formats may not perform as well for advertisers, which will mean low yield for these publishers.

2. In today’s marketplace, Calls are driving superior advertiser returns. As Tony Hsieh, Zappos CEO puts it, "Every phone call is a branding opportunity."

It's not hard to understand why person-to-person conversations drive better conversion than other forms of digital advertising: customer intent is clear; there is more commitment to engage; real-time interaction between the customer and business allows for quick Q&A; and the ability to pivot sales pitches is infinitely more dynamic and accurate than a Web page change. While the early years of search advertising created a windfall for advertiser ROI, with years of continually rising pay-per-click rates and the eventual maturity of the market, cost-effective, high performance online marketing really is no longer a given. By comparison, the conversion rates of inbound phone calls, which can be five to ten times that of search-driven clicks, is beginning to generate real advertiser attention, particularly with per-Call prices in many categories being largely equal to per-Click prices, implying a much higher ROI with Pay-For-Call. For example, in many categories, pay-per-click rates are substantial – insurance, mortgage, online education, loans, home financing, home services, and professional services terms can range from $6.00 to $42.00 per-click. And many of these categories are focused on using search clicks to in turn drive a phone call, which can take 5-10 clicks (if not more).

3. Advertiser demand for qualified phone calls is massive. We believe that tens of billions of dollars are spent annually in the U.S. alone across multiple media channels, including Yellow Pages, DRTV, and Radio, with the specific intent to drive consumer phone calls to businesses. Today, the vast majority of those advertisers are paying by subscription or impression, but not based on performance. We believe it’s time to give advertisers what they want, which is to pay only for qualified phone calls, and for those calls to be as transparent, tracked, and readily available as other forms of advertising media.

Additionally, there has also been an advertiser behavioral shift. Using digital media to establish closer relationships isn’t just for consumers. While digital advertising began with efficiencies in mind, we have now moved to a phase where that efficiency is known and advertisers want to connect and establish relationships with their customers. Nothing better than a phone call (direct conversation) to accomplish this, which also has the benefit of increasing the likelihood of a conversion.

Marchex is investing heavily to help drive the Call Advertising opportunity: from building core intellectual property, to executing exclusive strategic relationships with unique distribution partners like Skype, to driving the performance advertising programs for the largest "Local" advertising companies in the world, such as AT&T. Nearly everything we do, in some form, relates back to this thesis.

Small Business Marketing: A Dose of Reality from the Frontlines

As a Product Manager for Marchex Small Business Marketing products, I spend a lot of time with small business owners, learning how Marchex can help them grow their business.

Here are four underlying themes from my most recent trip to the frontlines:

1.  If you think Times Square is busy, try spending a half hour with a small business owner.

While discussing their business and marketing efforts, I usually find myself in a constant crossfire between incoming phone calls, emails, walk-in customers, the sudden urge to count inventory, employee questions, and even goldfish feeding time (no joke!).  These people are busy.

2.  Business owners don’t have their own VP of Marketing.

Business owners know their stuff when it comes to running their business.  When it comes to online marketing, they don’t spend their spare time thinking about mobile advertising, reading Search Engine Land, A/B testing landing pages, creating a social media plan, or even tuning their SEO strategy.  Many of them aren’t even in front of a computer for the majority of the day.

3.  Word of mouth isn’t just a cool marketing term.

8 out of 10 times ‘word of mouth’ is the response to:  What’s your primary source of new business?

Despite the belief in the ‘word of mouth’ phenomenon, very few businesses have a formal strategy to promote ‘word of mouth’, or reward referrals.
 

4.  Facebook adoption is growing.  However, its contribution to the bottom-line is relatively unknown.

Many businesses have a Facebook fan page, or use a personal account to drum up new business via their friend network.  Businesses that aren’t on Facebook feel they should be since their grandparents and competitors are on it.  Plus, it’s free to have a profile. 

An overwhelming amount of businesses don’t know if Facebook is contributing to their bottom-line.  And they don’t track their return-on-investment outside of how many people ‘Like’ their fan page.  This is interesting given the time commitment a lot of businesses make to keep their profiles dynamic with new posts.  In many cases, employees you see at the cash register are posting updates at lunch time or before their shift.  It definitely doesn’t feel sustainable long-term.

A really creative use of Facebook I found was from an auto dealer in Dothan, Alabama. 

After every sale, they take a picture of the customer in front of their new car.  That picture is posted on Facebook and with the customer’s permission, tagged with their name.  This photo now shows up in the News Feed for the customer’s entire friend list to see.  It’s word of mouth at its finest.  Genius.  Business owners take note (and check it out here).

While only a sample of our learnings, these insights are paramount to unlocking the future of small business marketing products.  I look forward to sharing more from the frontlines in future posts.

 

How Many More Leads Do I Need?

For a small business, answering this question may seem as daunting as trying to figure out how many licks it takes to get to the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie Pop.

Many self-proclaimed SEM experts will walk into your business and give you an answer to this question – just like Mister Owl. However, if you just take their word for it, you will likely end up feeling like that little boy in the commercial – unsatisfied!

The reality is that the answer to this question is going to be different for everyone. It will depend on a lot of different factors that are specific to YOUR business. However, just jumping straight to answering the question of “how many” may mean that you’re missing out on a lot of other important details. What do I mean by that? Let me explain…

First, what is your primary objective of launching an online campaign? Are you hoping that it will help to fuel growth for your business, or are you just hoping to fill some excess capacity that you might already have on hand? If you’re hoping to use this as a growth engine, are you prepared to grow? How quickly can you scale up your operations to meet this new demand?  If you're a general contractor or a plumber, you can probably hire a few new people pretty easily.  On the flipside, let's say you own a small restaurant...in this case you're probably not looking to increase your size, but rather just hoping to fill some open tables at lunch or dinner.  Oh - and if that isn't the case, and you do want to expand, don't you think it would be important to know prior to building your campaign?

A second point to evaluate is what you’re actually hoping these “leads” to do – your call to action. For example, are you just hoping that they’ll come visit your website and learn about your brand/company? Do you want them to request some information from you so that they will consider you for some future need?  How about actually giving you a call to make a purchase?  Going back to our restaurant example, you probably want them to call to make a reservation or to print out a coupon.  If you're an insurance agent, you might want them to fill out a form so that you can work up a quote for the prospective customer and get back to them with your best deal.

Third – and often overlooked – is determining what the online landscape for your business looks like. Are customers looking for your products and services online? Are they looking for your specific business? There is a good chance that some customers are already talking about you online – are they saying good things? Do you know what your competition is doing? Are they online already? Are you sure that you know who your competition is? If you can’t answer these questions, how do you know that your online campaign is going to be effective?  Let's pretend you are a small bookstore in Seattle that specializes in rare books - are you competing against Amazon.com?  Maybe your competition is a bookstore in New York City that is offering free shipping to readers in your area?  Would knowing the answer to this question influence your approach to attracting new customers?

While there are many more topics that you should consider as you look to launch your online campaign, the last point I’ll make it this: What QUALITY of leads are you hoping to get? I feel fairly confident that most of you would answer something like “The Best”. Assuming that's the case, how will you know if your campaign is driving you those high quality leads?  Thinking back to our plumber...if the only phone calls you're getting are from areas that you don't service, then those calls aren't really going to help you meet your business objectives.

Now that I’ve likely scared you out of even considering that SEM campaign, I do have some good news!

We here at Marchex have been thinking about all of the challenges that you’re going to face as you create – and hopefully grow – your online presence. Together with our partners, we have the tools – and the people – in place to help you find the answers these questions. Once you’re ready to go, we will build the right campaign to fit your business objectives – and we’ll provide all the information you’ll need to help you know if it's working.  More importantly, we also know what to do to get things back on track if it isn't! You can find out more at Marchex.com/small business

So, at the end of the day, will the answer end up being 3?

Unlikely.  But if it is, you will hopefully have the satisfaction of knowing that 3 is the right answer for you.

Just like figuring out for yourself how many licks it takes to get to the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie Pop!

A view from the sharp end of reputation management for small businesses

When Marchex first started building our reputation management product, one of the first people we turned to for a business owner’s perspective was Steve Rosen, co-founder of Blue C Sushi here in Seattle.

Managing a chain of restaurants (perhaps the most reviewed of all business categories) has given Steve a unique perspective on the value of online reputation management, not only from the point of view of aggregating and organizing the vast array of available data, but also using that information to make informed operational decisions and respond in real time to feedback from his customer base.

As we were moving our reputation management product out of beta and into general availability, and looking for someone to star in our product video, it seemed only natural to go back and talk to Steve and get his insight on the product, the importance of managing his online reputation and what advantages it has given him in running his business.

See what you think – and a word of caution – watching this video might make you hungry.

You can find out more about Marchex and Reputation Management by clicking here. 


Note: Marchex CEO Russell C. Horowitz is a life-long friend of Mr. Rosen and is also one of the owners of Blue C Sushi.

 

The iPhone 4 Death Grip - Not About the iPhone

Many of us at Marchex are die-hard Apple product addicts; we just love the way Jobs has built a culture of product excellence. And when it comes to Apple products, any glitch that's discovered receives an almost hyperbolic level of scrutiny. But the iPhone 4 antenna problems reported of late, in which phone reception degrades when a rogue finger bridges the two external antennas, are emblematic of a much broader problem.

What's really at stake is the disparity between the increasingly amazing capabilities of our "smart" phones and their relatively primitive, almost anachronistic capabilities as actual telephones. In the past decade, we've seen startling advances in mobile technology, but from the standpoint of supporting even basic quality phone calls, it's almost as if we've gone backwards. The ubiquitous landline Dial Tone never made it to cellular.

I was reminded of this fantastic disparity at the recent D8 conference. In the auditorium, the sessions were abuzz with fantasies of mobile devices with screen resolutions similar to widescreen TVs that could handle live gaming, allow consumers to enjoy any kind of media at any time and for free, with HD video capabilities and memory and processors that rivaled the workstations we give to software engineers. But between the sessions, out in the corridors, attendees were cursing cell reception and overloaded networks, and echoes of "hello? hello? did I lose you?" were everywhere. Not surprisingly, I, and a number of other attendees got so fed up that we turned to Skype clients, over WiFi, to dial out reliably.

The iPhone 4 death grip is a harsh reminder that our smartest mobile devices are telephones, but with ever less reliability and quality. And our tendency to ignore that fact is tincturing another important trend: mobile advertising. Whether you read the analyst reports or consider the features of Apple's new iAd program, the fact remains that we're projecting a model of online advertising (display and interactive display, built on the backs of CPC and CPM pricing) onto devices that are fundamentally used to connect people by voice.

For mobile advertising to be all we hope it can be as a driver of advertising revenue and innovation, it needs to turn the Achilles heel of the ubiquitous smart phone into its greatest opportunity: a chance to connect consumers and advertisers by phone, in a world where, as we're learning, calls are several times as likely to convert as even the most well-targeted and expensive of clicks.

Back to the death grip: our ability to make phone calls, many of which should be the focus of monetization, is what's at stake.

This is why it's more than poignant that one of the recommended fixes really says a great deal about the state of our telephone infrastructure today: as Informationweek puts it, "slap some duct tape on the section of the phone in question. This prevents your skin from touching the antenna and solves the problem. If duct tape can't fix it, nothing can!"

When it comes to leveraging the power of the telephone, we'd argue that it's time for far more than duct tape....

What Makes A Great Product Manager?

I’ve been in software product management for just about ten years. That’s long enough to have made plenty of mistakes and snag a few wins, but not so long that I’m wedded to one way of doing it. I’ve been a PM at a couple of venture-backed startups, Microsoft, Google, and now Marchex. One thing I’m very sure of is that it’s really, really hard to find great product managers that offer the full enchilada. I think I know of two people over the course of my career that have mastered product management and those are the folks after whom I try to model myself. 

FWIW, I thought I’d share a few personal observations about hard-to-find skills in product managers (and things that I struggle with myself).

•        Leadership Mojo
•        Bi-focal Vision
•        Ambidextrous Toolkit
•        Entrepreneurial Drive
  

At first glance, these may appear to be motherhood and apple pie. In reality, even when I worked at places that had the best PM’s in the world banging on the door for an entry level job, it was still hard to find all of those qualities in one package. I think out of every 100 PM’s I’ve interviewed, studied with, or worked with, 20 had solid foundations in two out of those four characteristics and maybe 2-3 were expert in all of them. 

Below is some more detail on each of the four must-have elements.  To be sure, there’s a lot more making a great product manager but I tend to believe these four are the hardest to find.  Whether you want to work at the multi-billion dollar market leader, a mid-sized high-growth company, or hot start up, I believe this combination of capabilities will maximize your chances of getting that offer, clinching that promotion, or hitting that milestone.  

Leadership Mojo

A big part of leadership is diplomacy. Some people describe diplomacy as the art of getting people to do things without asking. I’m not sure you need to be that good but you have to be able to convince people to accept a personal loss in the interest of an often more aspirational and even less likely. Making the smart decision with incomplete information in your own mind is super challenging but necessary and not sufficient.  Getting everyone to buy in and own the plan is as important as the plan itself. One litmus test is how often you escalate disagreements to your manager.  If you feel like you need to do that a lot or you often go along with plans you don’t agree with, you’re probably being more of a Rumsfeld or a Powell than an Obama.
    

Speaking of Obama, great PM’s also have a fair dose of charisma.  Do they have a presence that commands the attention of a room full of skeptical customers, engineers, other product managers, executives, board members, and even investors?  Can they build a network of partners who will trust, depend on, and help them achieve their goals?

Bi-Focal Vision

Great PM’s need to have a clear, crisp, and compelling vision for how the product should look 5 years from now as well as 5 months from now.  Being able to have a long-term view and translating that into short-term priorities is a must have.  In fact, the best short-term changes are those one or two simple yet powerful moves that lay the foundation for the overarching stuff down the road.  I’ve met lots of people who are great at incremental changes and others who do a great job seeing 10 steps ahead.  The incrementalists miss the next big thing and lulled into a cadence of successful, yet not winning point releases.  The big thinkers risk being known for lots of thought provoking talk but ultimately have trouble delivering results.

Ambidextrous Toolkit

If you don’t have a CS degree and haven’t written any code before, you’re gonna be handicapped to some extent.  Great PM’s need to be able to speak to senior business execs about business model, market trends, valuations, and corporate strategy.   However, they also need to be able to follow along and ideally contribute to technical conversations with developers and at the very least, not ask for things that are impossible, stupid, or dangerous from an engineering point of view.  The canonical ambidextrous profile is the former MIT developer who went and got a Stanford MBA.

If you decided to study history and economics (as I did) instead of computer science, you’re definitely not out of the running.  In fact, many of the top product management leaders I admire didn’t do CS undergrad or have a MBA.  Just be aware that you’re gonna have to really spend time understanding how the technology works, what engineers do, how things get done, and the SDLC process intimately to at show you’re not an empty suit who’s only good for ppt.  Similarly, you need to understand how to figure out how an industry is structured, think about limitations of different business models, do some basic valuations, etc. to show you’re not a pure gear head.

Entrepreneurial Drive

This is a tired term but it’s accurate.  Great PM’s need to think like startup co-founders.  They tend to have a lot of passion to win, therefore, do whatever it takes for the product to be successful.  If that means data entry, moving furniture, horse-trading at board meetings, or cold calling prospects, the PM needs to feel like the roadmap, biz plan, specs, KPI’s, OKR’s, and core team meetings aren’t enough.   It’s all of that plus whatever it takes where “whatever it takes” is usually painful, unfamiliar, and something that in a perfect world should have been done by someone else.  These are the folks who, almost above all else, have a huge reservoir of internal motivation to win.   

The Plug

Hope this was interesting to read.  It was fun to write.  By the way, if you have many of these qualities, please email me here and I’ll buy you a bowl of Pho in hopes that you’ll decide to work with me and help us make a little history at Marchex.

Marchex introduces 'Clean Call'

Anyone who has a home telephone understands the distraction unwanted telemarketer phone calls can create.  Luckily we were given the National Do Not Call Registry to reduce telemarketing activities aimed at consumers.  Unfortunately, businesses are not protected by the Registry and have become a target for telemarketers, creating unwanted phone calls that can get in the way of dealing with real customers and cloud the data used to measure phone calls and ROI from advertising campaigns.

 

Over time, the number of telemarketer calls has been increasing, making the existing management techniques – particularly blacklists, less and less effective. 

 

In response to this need, I came up with an algorithm-based approach for automatically blocking unwanted telemarketing calls with high accuracy and extremely fast response time.  Using patent- pending technology we are now able detect and block known telemarketers before they reach our customers.  We call this technology ‘Clean Call’ and it is now actively in use with Marchex Call Analytics. 

 

The results to date have exceeded our expectations.  Our initial deployment of Clean Call showed a 99%+ success rate and gained a big sigh of relief from our customers. We have actually noticed that by blocking spam phone calls our overall system use has increased as fewer real callers are getting the busy signal and are now able to connect with businesses more easily.

 

Marchex and eNom announce a new partnership in search marketing

Today we announced an exciting new partnership with one of the largest global domain registrars, eNom®, who joins the likes of AT&T, NBC Local, Dow Jones and others selling Marchex’s Small Business Marketing products to their customer base—specifically our online advertising product, Marchex Local Leads.  

Increasingly many small businesses are adopting a digital approach to traditional marketing challenges, such as lead generation and customer retention, as well as taking advantage of emerging opportunities such as online reputation management. As local advertising dollars continue to shift from offline to online, there is logically an increasing number of companies across many different industries that are interested in offering performance marketing products to their small business customers. eNom is a natural fit because they are already helping small businesses by offering a domain name and a website, and now Marchex is helping them with the next step – getting qualified leads.
 
Read the full press release here, and find out more information about Marchex’s Small Business Marketing products here.

 

Marchex - This isn't your father's Oldsmobile

 

 

 

Top 10 Signs of a Well Managed Software Product Release

One of the top responsibilities (if not the top one) of a product manager is to ship great software. Invariably, after a release ships, there’s a lot of high fiving and congratulatory threads over email. But we all know there are release and there are releases. I thought I’d jot down some ideas on what I think separates the good from great product managed software product releases.

1. It works
(and continues to work). This is an obvious one but the stuff you put out there shouldn’t crash and more importantly, it should help the user accomplish the key goal of the feature. Of course, having the button do what it says it does isn’t enough. It ought to succeed at saving the user time, giving the user new insights, or helping the user do more stuff.

2. The people use it.
Sometimes you ship something and it works but it just doesn’t get the users nearly as excited as you were when you thought of the idea. Picking great features is a bit like a record producer signing new bands. This is a very big art and science challenge. At some point, you can only do so many surveys, usability studies, and focus groups. Great product managers can pick the needle moving features more often than not.

3. Everyone had fun.
So much of a great release is about making sure the entire team comes together and accomplishes something as a unit. People should feel like what they’re doing is fun, they’re enjoying each other’s company, they trust each other enough to kid around every now and then, they’re shipping something useful, and they are tapping into what makes them tick (e.g. building something cool, trying a new idea, hitting goals, being valued member of a team, etc.)

4. There were no surprises.
Surprises generally mean the PM didn’t act as the communications hub she should have been. Either she sat on critical info early in the game or even worse, didn’t know essential info that others ought to have known along the way. Concise, broad, and relevant communication is like water in a product manager’s diet, you almost can’t have too much of it.

5. It gets noticed.
I can’t say how many times people internally have gotten fired up by a concept, shipped it, and while it may have gotten some usage, it doesn’t get the buzz you thought it would. Great releases not only delight users but put your product and company on the map with analysts, journalists, bloggers, and other influentials.

6. It creates opportunities for complementary features.
A great release sets the stage for the next release. In a perfect world, everyone loves your release and just when your competition catches up, you ship something that takes that concept to a whole new level. In the world of software transportation, building cul-de-sacs is not nearly as good as building new superhighways.

7. It doesn’t have a lot of technical debt.
Sometimes in order to ship something, you scope the vision down, you push out the date, or you take some shortcuts (which you say you’ll fix after launch). This last option can create technical debt that results in more hacky workarounds or a major pause in new feature development to undue the hacks from pre-launch. Generally, these things are like little time bombs.

8. It wasn’t in lieu of more obvious problems.
This one goes to the heart of product planning. Did you ship something only to realize there were a lot more obvious user problems or latent needs that ought to have been addressed? When you announce your release, people should say, “yes, they nailed the biggest complaints or delivered the highest potential use case.” They should not say “Did they fix that problem yet?”

9. It matched the project’s original vision.
This one is the inverse of shipping on time. Often times, to hit a date, we end up cutting so many features or implementing them in whatever way the engineer happened to want to do it that what ends up shipping bears little resemblance to the high ROI, high impact innovation that the team originally had in mind. As bad as this sounds, I actually think shipping something is better than shipping nothing so if all the other elements are hit, this is probably the least important.

10. It wasn’t too late.
This used to be titled “it was on time” but c’mon, this is software we’re talking about. Suffice it to say that hitting your date is awesome, slipping a little is ok, but you don’t want to slip so much that the project gets a reputation for not getting anything done or always playing catch up with the competition.