Also, by most accounts, interactive companies are thriving in this downgrading economy.  Certainly, there are exceptions, but for the most part, marketers are keeping budgets the same for next year or even increasing their spend on interactive projects.  The reason?  I think it has to do with the most important aspect of interactive marketing that has evolved over the past several years.

Interactive marketing is, when executed properly, measurable.  Just look at any Ecommerce site.  With sophisticated (and in the case of Google, free) analytics tools at every agency’s disposal, it’s becoming easier and easier for a marketing executive to plainly articulate the return on their marketing dollar.  It’s something that everyone can understand, “If I spend $10 here, I can on average get $30 back”.  That’s the kind of work that sells itself.  Of course, anyone in the industry knows that it takes the time, energy, and attention of some very talented people working under pressure to pull that off, but when you have the numbers on your side it’s any easy sell.

Finally, unlike the poor folks back in 1929, the access to information is so much greater.  We can get up-to-the-minute reports of exactly how screwed up the economy is at any given time.  We don’t have to wait for our neighbors to knock on our doors to tell us that there’s a run on the local savings and loan.

However, it never ceases to amaze me how, with all of the knowledge of our current world and of our history we have, people still behave quite predictably and ignorantly of the past.  Once again, Americans have overspent, over-borrowed, and lived it up now at the expense of the future, and Americans are hoping the government will bail us out.  I can’t help but wonder if a little more crisis wouldn’t help us all slow down a little and cause us to be thankful for what we have.

Just keep the dollars flowing to responsible interactive companies in the meantime.

Update from Fuse:

“This report just crossed my computer from Marketing Daily.  It indicates that internet ad spends were up 15.2% in the first half of 2008.  No doubt this is a part of a trend toward increased online spending and a steady move away from the more traditional advertising channels. With the economy in its current mode, customers will demand and desire the ROI metrics that their internet marketing spend can provide.”

I started this post a few weeks ago, and decided to finish it today while in the Atlanta airport.  I watched this great Google Tech Talk video in which Merlin Mann of 43 Folders fame talks about how to better manage your email.  The upside of me not blogging for a month is that I’ve had 30+ days to put these habits into practice, and let me tell you, it’s changed my digital lifestyle for the better.

The video is excellent, but it’s 60 minutes long.  If you’d like the highlights and my opinion, then read on.

Here are seven philosophical points about the “whys” of controlling your email, rather than letting your email control you.

1. Knowledge workers make money by turning knowledge and information into value.  You can’t effectively do this if your time is all tied up in pointless emails.
2. Where you decide to put your time and attention says a lot about who you are.
3. “Time and attention are finite, but demands on your time and attention are infinite”.  You have to filter out what gets attention and what gets ignored.
4. Never check your email without “processing to zero” - actually doing something with the email you receive rather than merely “checking it”. In sum, you have to look at every piece of email in your inbox whenever you check your email, and you have to decide what to do with it. Not necessarily respond to every piece, but you have to make a decision about each and every one.
5. Once you’ve gotten the info that you’ve needed to from the email, it’s useless to you. Get rid of it!
6. Make your system as simple as you can stand it.
7. If you’re not in customer service or some other extremely time-sensitive email situation, then turn off your email app and only check your email once an hour, or less if possible. As much as you can, try to reduce the number of times you check it.

Mann then asserts that there are most 5 options that you have for processing a given email:

1. Delete it! (or archive it if it’s really something worth saving).
2. Delegate it. If you tell someone else to do it, set a reminder to yourself to ensure that it in fact took place.
3. Respond to it. This is a tough one for me to follow, because I’m a writer. But email isn’t the place to debut my next philosophical tirade. Mr. Mann suggests placing a line in your footer that states, “I will not write any email longer than 5 sentences”. If nobody reads long blog posts anymore, certainly in a business context no one reads long emails anymore. If it’s that long of a response, then schedule a meeting.
4. Defer it (will need a response, but could take additional time). I don’t know if I like this one. At least in my world, I can respond to most emails fairly quickly.
5. Do it. If something requires action from you, just get it done. If you can’t do it right now, schedule a meeting or reminder for it, and then it’s taken care of.

This has truly helped me to tame my inbox and to stop using it as a reminder system.  I was very guilty of reading the emails when I didn’t have time to respond to them.

Anyways, it’s good to be back.  I still have no idea why Google still refuses to index my blog, so I may go ahead and move it from a Wordpress platform to something else, or redesign it and see what happens.  At any rate, it’s not like I’m selling ads or anything, so I’ll keep writing for now.

For the record, this really isn’t fun.  I’ve had to take over two months off of writing regularly just to try and fix all of this stuff in my spare time.  On the other hand, I’ve learned a ton about internet security and the importance of taking some basic precautions when running an open sourced CMS, such as Wordpress. I’ve also learned quite a bit about the down-and-dirty world of Search Engine Optimization (something n-tara interactive has lots of experts on but until recently I was but a mere novice in understanding).

Special thanks to Nick Rice, who is always one step ahead of me.  I’ll try his suggestions on a couple of Wordpress plugins (Ask Apache and Peter’s Custom Anti-Spam) and manually checking my HTML source code, and I’ll report back soon.

1.  It’s fun to get friend invitations from both your current cadre of friends and from people you haven’t spoken to in years.

2.  99% of the communication I’ve received thus far has, in fact, confirmed my initial assertions about Facebook: fun, but not much more than interesting entertainment for now.

3.  I can absolutely understand the immense economic value of marketing on a network like Facebook.  The opportunity to use the data contained within posts, status updates, associtions, groups, etc., is like having the largest and most detailed marketing database available.  Oh, and did I mention that the majority of Facebook users fall within the most desirable demographic in terms of discretionary income?

4.  Every interactive agency should have a Facebook and Myspace strategy for their clients if their target audience’s demographics (and attitudes!) fall within the required parameters.

5.  Within a few days of joining, my Facebook page rocketed up to the #1 search result in Google for my name.  In addtion to the day-to-day banter being fun, it’s also another great way for potential clients to find me (although I wish this site would get re-indexed by Google a little faster).

I know these observations are probably pretty obvious to anyone who has already joined, but for professional folks who don’t find a lot of value in it at first, I can say it’s probably worth setting a page up and seeing what happens.

As an update, it turns out that my blog was, in fact, dropped from Google.  It hasn’t yet been reinstated, despite repeated attempts to contact Google and the filing of a formal complaint.  A good friend and former co-worker, Peter Cook, did a little digging for me and discovered that I was a victim of a “splog,” or a “spam blog,” that basically installed a Wordpress plugin that scours the web for recent blog posts with certain keywords and then downloads the post and automatically posts it on the splog.

Because this guy, who for ethical purposes will remain nameless as will his URL, was doing this with thousands of advertising and marketing blog posts per day, his traffic went through the roof, and it made it seem as if every blog from whom he stole content (because of my more modest traffic rankings) was stealing it from the splog!  Google’s algorithms know no mercy, and thus it looked like I was the thief from the more “established” site and that I was duplicating his content.  Not fun.  Or cool at all.

I’ve learned a lot from this experience, and I want to share some excellent resources with all of you in case you find yourself a victim of a splog, or of anyone who steals your content.  I want to give credit where credit is due, because without this specific online resource, I would have been lost.

If you suspect that someone has stolen your content, go to Lorelle’s blog on Wordpress.  It’s the most comprehensive, one-step-at-a-time approach to dealing with content theft I was able to find.  The cut-and-paste letters and forms really helped me as I escalated steps in order to get my content removed.

I’m still not entirely sure why I don’t have any post content showing up in Google, but I’m going to keep posting, do some reading on SEO for blogs, and hopefully everything will work itself out.

–

UPDATE: one or two of my blog posts have started resurfacing on Google, but I haven’t received a notice from them as to why.  I guess that’s pretty good though.  The really good news is that the splog has been vanquished!  The deceitful practice has been replaced with a simple site stating that the domain is for sale.  Ahh, vindication.

UPDATE AGAIN: Also, the guy posted my emails to him on his blog stating that it was a “one sided conversation” accusing him of content theft.  Lovely, eh?  He stole it, whether intentionally or through a plugin, and I’m glad he took it down.   And someone else bought the URL, so at least I don’t have to worry about that guy anymore.

Starting last month, I have suddenly gone from about 35%-40% of the traffic to this site coming from search engines to almost zero.  A complete flat-line starting in early May.

I’ve used Webmaster Tools to diagnose things, and everything appears to be running fine.  I’ve submitted my XML sitemap, recently (within the past 3 days) simplified my permalink structure to be more search engine friendly, and disabled the “All in One SEO Pack” for wordpress in case Google thought I was spamming them.  I know that updating my permalink structure after being online for well over a year was a bit silly, but I don’t have a good deal of links that are to specific posts at this point; most of my referrals are right to andydidyk.com, so it shouldn’t affect but a handful of old links.

I’ve also done some basic keyword analysis and my site doesn’t show up in Google search results at all, even when typing in “Andy Didyk”, which some of you readers may recall was on of my reasons for starting this site.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!  And thanks to everyone who keeps accessing the site directly; I’ll get this issue fixed soon and let you know when I figure out a cause.

To:

May 22nd has been a deadline that has been staring me in the face for the last 7 weeks, starting with the signing of a proposal I wrote. Today is the launch of the “reskinned” HunterFan.com. It has been an ambitious journey, reskinning an entire site, plus completely designing and building 3 micro-sites for the same customer, all in less than 2 months! I’m proud of the work our excellent creative team has done, and I truly get fulfilled watching a project go from conception to completion. It was also cool to witness some hardcore legerdemain (YES! I used that word in real life!) by our programming staff to resolve server-side issues I won’t even pretend to comprehend.

The new homepage is much, much cleaner than the old version, and it has a variety of ways that a customer can navigate to the same information. As you can see, our client is really making a move to embrace the new green color, which I think works very well on the live site.

All we had time to do in this phase is redesign the homepage, add a few features, and add a new look and feel to the interior pages - still a huge improvement over the previous site. Of course, now comes the real work: Phase 2. Phase 2 will bring this site up to a new standard. Stay tuned!

While research is certainly important to our business, I’m not quite sure why anyone had any doubts about this issue. Ask anyone involved in sales at any level, and they’ll tell you: it’s much easier to sell to someone you’ve already sold to then to try to sell to someone new.

“But what about getting new prospects?” one may ask. Surely there is some value in the scattered, “shotgun” approach to buying online media, but it is much more valuable to create brand evangelists that are absolutely in love with your product or service. They’ll do the best job of creating new customers for you.

1. Valuation of Social Media users - how can you determine their worth to an organization?
2. Engagement - how can you ensure online audiences are genuinely engaged with the brand, both on- and offline?
3. Analytics - eMarketing is unique in that with the proper analytics one can easily measure true ROI on a campaign, rather than nebulous “impressions”
4. Permission-based mobile marketing - mobile marketing is great, but without gaining the permission of the users, it’s just expensive spam and an ineffective marketing tool.
5. Convergence - no, not the buzzword of the late 1990’s, but the idea that people’s lives and technology are becoming increasingly inseparable and in some cases, wholly integrated. A marketer can take advantage of this by facilitating conversations and interactions the user is already interested in.

to:

“Show me that smile…” I know that is the song that anyone born before 1980 undoubtedly had playing in their heads when they read the title of this post. Although I’d love to have some witty commentary on one of the legendary episodes from the early 80’s sitcom, I’m afraid that my title is alluding to something much less nostalgic (and notably lacking Kirk Cameron or Tracy Gold).

The agency I work for, now named n-tara Interactive, is growing by leaps and bounds. It’s very exciting to be working in an environment that is aggressively growing, because you always end up with something new to do, and limits are often tested. Our marketing department is working like crazy to crank out our new ID set and other materials, but the new logo and materials are just a small part of how our agency is growing. We’re adding more people, capabilities, and expertise, and running out of room in our building.

Where that affects me is that we’re obviously adding more clients with bigger budgets and more strategic objectives. It’s certainly kept me hopping and my blogging activity to a minimum, which in turn does not represent very well what I’m actually learning and experiencing on a daily basis. New trends in analytics, guided-selling, and the value of social media are all at the top of my mind, as well as the old favorites of agency project management and the proper way to manage client expectations (one in the same, to some degree). It’s become comical to me how much being a successful agency involves balancing bleeding-edge creative and technology with the basic principles of listening, managing expectations, doing your homework, and respecting those you work with.