Is HitTail the Future of Marketing?

The history of HitTail goes back many years, as I began to understand the futility of traditional marketing when dealing with a company that has virtually no budget, a product no one has heard of in a market that hasn't quite developed yet.

That was the story of Scala Multimedia Software in 1998, the company that makes the sort of software that turns plasma and LCD TVs into Minority Report-style digital flatscreen signage. There was no trade-shows at the time, no trade-magazines, and not even a standardized name for the business! It was truly the wild west days of digital signage, where no deployment was over a few dozen screens, because they all had to be updated with landlines. And customers could (and did) come from anywhere in the world. And you had to pay attention to all these geographically dispersed prospects, because you had to aggregate all the customers in the world to turn digital signage into a viable market.

But how do you reach them in the first place?

What sort of marketing campaign could you mount to reach companies in the middle of Malaysia, South America, Africa, Canada, United Arab Emirates, Russia, Europe, Japan, United States, Australia, and even Greenland and New Zealand? It's true. Prospects came from all over the world, often getting their first clue from word-of-mouth referrals from Scala's very early days running cable TV "barker channels" on the Commodore Amiga computer platform in the late 80's.

Word of mouth only got you so far.

Enter the Internet, and a radically new update model where the signage could be updated by pulling their own content down from centralized servers. Flat panel technology was also improving, plasma screens becoming forever bigger, and LCDs starting to inch up in size. And the movies--oh the movies! Finaly, I could stop referring to the flying blimp in Blade Runner, and start talking about the ubiquitous electronic advertisements in Minority Report. There was a mainstream movie that allowed the stuff to be understood by the masses.

The time was ripe.

And the rate of people Googling on the subject-matter increased. Oh, there was no telling what people were going to call this emerging industry. A lot of folks felt is was going to be digital signage. But the head of Engineering at the company was betting on dynamic signage, as it was more descriptive. I withheld judgment, and instead wrote about the field is as many ways, and with as many likely word combinations as I could think of. Remember, this was 1999, and Blogger was barely even on the scene. I used my own homespun perfectly-optimized-for-search content management system to spit out page after page of what I at the time called "vignettes". At least one person who knew me back then to this day suggests that I virtually invented what today is called the landing page.

Stories of these landing pages are numerous and colorful. At least one of them directly resulted in hooking up with a major global distribution partner in a market that the company had been hoping to break into for years. It was all predicated by me thinking to roll out some content targeting "plasma display software". I targeted dozens, if not hundreds of different word combinations by this time. Were were all the ideas coming from? What did I know to try? Was it the GoTo keyword suggestion tool (later Overture)? No! It was the company's own log files, which I could view scroll by me in real time, filtering out everything but the highlighted search hits, thanks to my homespun tracking system.

Now, this was not HitTail at the time--far from it. I lacked the critical insights that subsequently went into re-inventing the tracking system for massive scaling (to the world), and automatic evaluation of the keywords, thereby alleviating the most time consuming part--figuring out which terms we STILL HAD TO optimize for.

My title was Webmaster, but really I was a Jack-of-all-trades, tending to almost every aspect of company operations, baring software development of the product itself. So in short, I was finding the prospects and forcing their progress along the sales pipeline in their journey to becoming customers, managed the system that handled taking and shipping orders. It wasn't easy convincing the salespeople at the time that there were real human beings behind these clicks. I developed a whole array of supporting systems that basically took away anyone and everyone's choice to NOT follow up on the sales leads I was generating. It was a brute-force bullying customer relationship management software, which to this day remains as a closely held secret tool of this company, which has withstood several politically motivated attempts to "turn it off".

I go into this level of detail regarding HitTail's history, and how a predecessor to HitTail virtually created an industry, and gathered contact info of all the world's customers in this market to a single company, to explain to you some of the next steps I'll be taking with HitTail feature development.

I'll be constructing a "Lab", a lot like Google Labs, where I'll be experimenting a bit more aggressively with new product features, forever zero'ing in on that "sweet spot" in which analytics software is not even necessary, because we'll keep compelling you to the next necessary action item to close your sales.

I'm a fan of Michael Bosworth's solution selling techniques, which were very necessary for long sales-cycle items such as 1000-screen digital signage deployments, and a fan of Dr. W. Edwards Deming's total quality management approach, which advocates rapid product improvement based on real-time feedback from your workers and customers. I'm a fan of Seth Godin's Purple Cow (among other books) that says you have to differentiate yourself by being radically and brilliantly different to even stand a chance in today's competitive marketplace, and Guy Kawasaki's pre-Internet/seldom discussed Selling the Dream, in which he plays off his experience launching the Macintosh to teach how to "evangelize" a product and use incredibly clear strategic thinking to do so.

All these principles have gone into HitTail. It's a synthesis of marketing guru books, put together in what I hope is the sort of elegant simplicity, with actual underlying complexity akin to Apple Computer's designs (maybe not in our graphics--yet). But no book has colored our product quite so much as Chris Anderson's The Long Tail, in which he gave a name to the radically simple and effective methodology that was already by this time driving the algorithm behind Connors Communications' proprietary tracking system being used for its public relations customers.

And we saw that the time was right.

Just as with the movie Minority Report made the time right for Scala with digital signage by providing the common cultural awareness (if not the precise language) for this emerging market, Chris' book The Long Tail gave us a way to make HitTail accessible and understandable to the masses.

HitTail's seeming simplicity belies what's actually going on, and we can not count the number of times some know-it-all sysadmin goes "Oh, that's all in your log files" or "It's the same thing as AwStats". What they forget is that we're not providing just another list of top-10 keywords, statistical bullshit. We're skipping over all that keyword research nonsense, and simply telling you what to do next--a huge time saver and advantage in the forever-more-competitive landscape of fighting for first-access to customers online. We're throwing paralysis through analysis in the gutter where it belongs, and looking right at the edge of where you nearly have it going on. Then we tell you how to change your act, ever-so-slightly so you step into the reliable flow of keyword search traffic that you're just around the bend from anyway.

HitTail is not analytics. It's an approach to online marketing pulled right from the minds of some of the best marketing and busines gurus of our time.

But it's the first act.

And after a little time away from HitTail to ensure that the first act is everything we promised (and it is), I'm stepping back onto the scene to plan Act 2.

Stay tuned.

Seth & Joel's Best In The World Club

I'm really enjoying Seth Godin's book, Purple Cow. Its one of those marketing books that reinforces those things you already know intuitively, but a book puts in fresh perspective--much in the vein of the grandaddy of all such books, The Art of War. It's about winning.

The point he makes is that with all the choice consumers have in almost every aspect of life, you have to be really extraordinay (the purple cow) to set yourself apart. I read it on the tail of Joel Spolsky on Software, another righteous read which among other things gives a rating system for software shops and employee interview screening practices.

And these two reads back-to-back, Wow! I feel like creating super-elite, got-their-act-together club, and hoping I got the right stuff to join. There's a lot of edging around the concept of being the best in the world.

Remembering the role that being extraordinary, and thinking of yourself that way, plays in every day life motivates this post. You need to be pretty darn sharp to be hired as a software developer at Foggy Creek Software--or even be hired as an intern. Similarly, to break through with a new product, you have to be remarkably better or different, and ALSO have that difference easily communicated by your fan-base (that must exist) to even have a chance. Word of mouth (or Internet) advocacy is critical. You must design a product that can win the early adopters and also motivate your base. Success is built in at the product design phase, an won by releasing its potential, virally.

And I approriately come to that realization reading a Seth Godin Marketing book on the New York subway, tapping out an article one-handed on my iPhonel, and posting by email to Blogger, knowing its going to get the top position in Google on the topic I target, because of HitTail (Update: no HitTail suggestion was a perfect headline for this article, so I just used a headline I wrote--I'll save the HitTail effectiveness demo for the next post).

Kaizen Marketing through Analytics

Why is HitTail the perfect complement to whatever analytics system you use today? Some folks will say real-time analytics isn't important, but I'm telling you that it IS important by how it immerses you into the actual pulse of your site. For example, if your site hits the homepage of Yahoo, you know it in seconds, rather than the next day, after your servers have already been taken down. Now not everybody lands the homepage of Yahoo, but the same principle applies to if you get a single link from a single site--wouldn't you like to reach out to them moments after they've established the link?

Another benefit of real-time data is just sitting there watching your search hits scroll by as they occur tunes you directly into the minds of your audience--in a way next-day statistical reports simply can't. You are directly plugged into the minds of dozens, hundreds or even thousands of web travelers RIGHT AS they're doing their thing. The image that comes to mind is The Matrix, watching all the green code scroll by, and seeing the woman in red amongst it all. But the difference here is that the people scrolling by are REAL searchers, and you can voyeuristically watch them do their thing. This EXISTS TODAY, and is sort of a Zen marketing state that HitTailers know well--contemplating the black river of keywords.

If HitTail wasn't the and must-have second piece of tracking code based on it's real-time feedback alone, then the way it provides actionable data without the chart fuss that cause paralysis through analysis should cinch the deal. HitTail is the paralysis cure, because you simply move left-to-right across 4 tabs and follow a recommended, proven, route (indeed, nearly mindless) process to improve your site. The process is scientifically built on William Edwards Deming's principles of total quality management (TQM) and the Japanese concept of Kaizen, wherein you take HitTail's writing suggestions and engage in the website content release/feedback/release/feedback cycle immediately. It also works with PPC.

HitTail fills the desperately needed gap in marketing for a tool that dispenses with nonsense reports and jumps right to the bottom-line of what you should be doing to improve your site from a content-standpoint. It quite literally turns your entire website into a giant suggestion box that your audience unwittingly uses every time they visit you via search. The suggestions can be immediately plowed into either new website content in (usually) blogging software for the organic or natural search engine optimization (SEO) approach, or into long tail AdWords campaigns, that result in remarkably low cost-per-click (CPC), high click-through-ration (CTR) and a large number of total clicks. The snowball effect should ensue. None but a few marketing gurus in the PPC industry gurus ever noticed this effect.

Bottom line--no matter what your primary analytics package may be, be it Omniture SiteCatalyst, Google Analytics, WebTrends, Yahoo's IndexTools, Microsoft's Gatineau, or whatever--the must-have second piece of tracking code that should go on your site is HitTail, due to the benefits of real-time data and immediately actionable writing suggestions and super-charged keywords for AdWords campaigns.

Marketing Gurus Video Promotion

So, you wanna be a marketing guru? Well, we're giving our HitTail users a chance to promote themselves right in the user-interface of our site. We're putting the talking-head video into our site. I did the first one on the search hits tab. If you'd like to be on the HitTail site, just:

1. Shoot some video for YouTube where you narrate the purpose of the particular page you're choosing. Openings include:

Homepage (the big prize!)
The "My HitTail" tab.
The Keywords tab.
The Suggestions tab.
The To Do tab.
Anywhere else on the site you see the "Coming Soon: YOU!" graphic.

If you do the Suggestions tab better than I did, you can even replace me.

You get to introduce yourself at the beginning, and state your website domain. Keep it brief.

2. Briefly describe the purpose of the page, and how you use it. Don't go into detail.

3. Upload your video to YouTube, and forward us the URL to hittail at connors dot com.

We'll select the winners and feature them on our site for awhile. If you're plugging a book or something, you can throw it in when you state the domain name, but keep it brief if you want to be selected.

Great, that's all. Looking forward to promoting you!

Marketing Gurus

This post is about sex and the city, small worlds, marketing gurus, and a new book promotion technique. Lately, I've noticed a trend of book authors referring to us prolific pontificators of marketing-speak in posts that are mostly about promoting new books. Bravo to David Meerman Scott of Web Ink Now with his brilliant book announcement that credits us contributors to the New Rules of Marketing & PR who now can't resist linking to him at every opportunity. It's nice that the PR firm and creators of HitTail, Connors Communications, are acknowledged leaders in writing the new rules.

But that's not what this post is about. It's about another book: Book Yourself Solid by Michael Port.

The latest book shows us that if actors can segue into politics, then they can also segue into marketing. Where better to tap a little bit of celebrity? But I didn't know this, until I got this email from a co-worker (published with permission):

What a small world. Michael Port used to be the manager at the Reebok Club and actually hired me there. When I met him he was an actor who had just been on a Sex and the City episode – the one where Mr. Big takes Carrie to the small, out of the way Chinese restaurant and she thinks it’s because he doesn’t want to be seen with her. Anyway – he then went to open the gym Clay on 14th Street (that Jackie belongs to) and now – marketing guru. Who knew!! Here’s his imdb page if you’re interested.

But even more interesting than the circumstances of this guy's marketing career is what he is saying. I'd love to pull a specific quote and show you. But his description of why HitTail is important, and "way better than anything like Overture or Wordtracker" is built up in a series of paragraphs that must be read in continuous context. As all HitTailers already know, and mainstream marketers are beginning to discover, it's not the keywords that give you bragging rights that matter. It's the conglomeration of "everything else" that counts. And lurking beneath the surface of "everything else" are tons of under utilized, most promising keywords that have the real potential of leading potential customers, clients and new audience to your site.

By the way, Michael Port's book is about sales lead generation, a topic dear to my heart, and the fire in which HitTail was actually forged. It is very possible to do exactly what Michael Port suggests--generate more sales leads than you know what do do with (or can handle). After I first used long tail keyword marketing techniques at a previous employer, I generated so many sales leads per day, that the "old school" marketing guys disbelieved that they were really potentially qualified leads, and tried to disqualify them on the grounds that they came in through the Web. They are no longer with the company.