The Stupid Filter and social media

This Wall Street Journal blog post discusses a gentleman named Gabriel Ortiz who has invented a "stupid filter" for online message boards:

Specifically, Mr. Ortiz wants Internet users to be able to block out stupid comments in much the same way they use spam filters to sift useless email from their inboxes.

After months of fine-tuning, Mr. Ortiz has begun sharing his software code with others and says he hopes to turn the idea into a business.

As social media becomes more important to marketers, and as marketers are increasingly trying to position themselves as content providers and experts, a technology like the Stupid Filter could come into play quite prominently. Many companies are successfully using forums, blogs, and other user-generated content elements to further their brands and even increase sales...and I suspect the trend will continue.

A cynical marketer might say, "If I applied this to my target audience and filtered out all the stupid people, I wouldn't have any customers left!"

But I think the question is: Will technologies like the Stupid Filter squelch the discussion in these social media vehicles, when people know their posts are being scrutinized by a filter? Here's an interesting thing to ask yourself: How many times would your posts need to be blocked before you stopped leaving comments in forums and on blogs? For me, that number would probably be pretty low.

One could argue this whole filtering process would naturally elevate the conversation and scare away the stupid people. But just like spam filters, the technology won't ever be perfect -- so how many "non-stupid" people will be discouraged from adding to conversations? Could the Stupid Filter be a stumbling block for social media -- or is it a saving grace, much the way spam filters have saved email from becoming a completely unusable morass of junk?

Smart quotes aren't that smart

If you're publishing an enewsletter, make sure smart quotes don't get you. Here's how to avoid the ugly results of "smart punctuation" gone bad.

First of all, "smart quotes" are those pretty quotation marks that are automatically substituted for normal quotation marks in Microsoft Word and some other programs. Some people call them curly quotes. Likewise, if you've ever put two dashes together in Word and then hit the space bar, you'll note that it automatically substitutes an em dash...which is a longer dash. Same goes for apostrophes -- those are often substituted as well.

So what's the problem? If any of those characters end up in your newsletter (or if you're advertising, your enewsletter ad), they'll give you yucky results. Quotation marks can turn into question marks, and em dashes might end up looking like this: â€". This happens because the special characters are non-ASCII characters...essentially they're not part of the normal character set that your enewsletter software uses. You'll see an example of a smart apostrophe gone bad in the image within this post...the smart apostrophe became a question mark.

So how do you keep this from happening to you?
1. If you're writing the text from scratch, use a plain text editor instead of Microsoft Word or a program that substitutes smart characters. Windows Notepad is a basic plain text editor. I like EditPad Lite because it has more features but still gives you plain text output.

2. If you're taking someone else's text and incorporating it into a newsletter, simply cutting and pasting it into a plain text editor will not solve the problem. It might appear that the smart characters are gone, but they might not be. A lot of people recommend going into the Word settings and turning off the smart quotes and other substitutions, but I still think this can lead to errors. To ensure bad characters are eliminated, here's the process we use at IndustryWeek:

• Paste the text into Microsoft Word
• Choose Save As... and go to the "Save As Type" dropdown menu below the filename. If you're using Word 2003 or earlier, you should be able to choose "MS-DOS text" from that menu. If you have Word 2007, choose "Plain Text". After you click Save, it'll pop open a dialog box where you choose MS-DOS.
• After you try to save, it should give you one or two warning boxes about how some characters will be lost when you save as text only. That's fine, so hit OK.
• Close Word. Now open the new text file you've created and make sure everything looks right. Sometimes, depending on the smart character and how you composed the message, you'll still find stray question marks in your plain text file. Look for them before you paste into your enewsletter sending interface.

Finally, test it! Before you send the final email to your full list, do a test deployment to yourself (and preferably someone else at your company too) and look for these nasty little buggers.

This process can be a pain, but it ensures you don't end up with embarrassing question marks or other strange characters in your newsletter.

Microsoft's (potentially) killer app for online advertising

If Microsoft is successful with one of its latest ventures into online ad tracking, it could end up revitalizing the entire world of brand advertising.

As Scott Karp wrote about in his Publishing 2.0 blog, Microsoft's experimental Engagement Mapping could help advertisers quantify the results of online branding ads -- what he calls the "holy grail of advertising."

Explanation via CNET:

Say a consumer sees an ad for a product in a video ad one day, and then clicks on a text ad to visit the retailer’s site the next day, and then eventually sees a banner ad that leads to a purchase. All of the monetary credit tends to go to the text link that was clicked on, says John Chandler, principal analyst for Microsoft’s Atlas ad serving division.

“Under our (Engagement Mapping) model, those will share the credit,” for example, with 40 percent each going to the video ad and the text ad and 20 percent going to the banner, he says.

Finally Microsoft might have a advertising technology that -- if it pans out -- puts the Redmond-based software giant on par with Google. What Google AdWords has done for direct response/lead generation advertising, Microsoft's Engagement Mapping could do for brand advertising.

I see this as a potentially huge development in the online ad space -- one that could help move many companies' advertising budgets back toward branding ads. During the dot-com boom, brand advertising was in fashion (remember the 600-page issues of Industry Standard and Red Herring magazines?). But after the bust and subsequent advertising recession in 2001, branding fell out of favor at many companies, replaced by lead-generation advertising that enabled easy ROI calculations. Since then, marketers have been addicted to leads because leads have been much easier to quantify than the impact of branding ads. But Microsoft's technology could change that.

Will it actually work? I have no clue. But if it does, be prepared for the next revolution in online advertising.

Keys to a successful campaign

As a media provider, my team is often asked to answer marketers' questions like, "What's your average click-through rate on [X web ad placement]?" and "How many leads do you think we'll get if we run an ad in [Y newsletter]?" When I put myself in these marketers' shoes, I completely understand what they're trying to find out. These are good questions to ask.

But probably like many other media providers, we don't answer these questions with exact numbers. Sure, we're happy to provide a range so the marketer can get a feel for how well their ad might perform. But usually we'll present it in the context of "the best ads get X percent" (or X number of conversions) and "the worst ads get Y percent" (or Y number of conversions).

The reason we offer a high/low range is simple. In most situations, either the marketer or agency is controlling the creative message for the ads. During the buying process, when they're asking these types of questions, we have no idea how good (or bad) the creative will be. Well-designed, well-written, and well-thought-out campaigns will get much better results -- independent of the medium.

Even though it covers a lot of points all of us have heard before, this article by Harry Gold of ClickZ does a good job of reminding us of the keys to a successful creative execution. Start with the message and offer, then think about the landing page, and follow through to the post-action phase like confirmation pages and confirmation emails. Every step matters. Good ad creative can't overcome a bad landing page. A good landing page is useless if the creative message is wrong. And if a strong follow-up isn't in place, you're throwing away perfectly good opportunities.

One thing I'd like to add to Harry's article: Don't forget about what comes after these steps too. How will you nurture these leads? What's your sales team's approach for following up, taking the prospect through the sales cycle, and closing the sale? Often these tasks are not our job as marketers -- since this responsibility is passed along to sales in many companies. But if there's not a seamless plan in place, you know what happens. Leads and opportunities are lost, even if you did your job developing a successful advertising or marketing campaign.

Google Analytics offering benchmarking data

About two weeks ago, Google announced that its popular Google Analytics service will now offer web stat benchmarks. According to this post in the Google Analytics blog, the benchmarking tool "enables customers to see how their site data compares to sites in any available industry vertical." So you'll be able to compare your web traffic patterns against others in your broad industry grouping.

Of course no site-identifiable information will be shared, and the minimum benchmarking pool will be 100 sites. You won't be able to view info on a particular competitor, but rather an aggregate group of 100+ comparable sites. In addition, Google will group sites based on their relative size (small, medium, or large), so you won't be comparing Mom & Pop Inc. with Microsoft, even if both are software companies.

This is a great idea, and something I'm not surprised to see Google offering. They have the data, so why not provide it to their users? In the long term, helping sites optimize their web traffic can only benefit Google. Presumably a site that's watching traffic patterns more closely and optimizing its performance will be a better Google AdWords customer when buying pay-per-click ads, so this seems like the next natural progression.

Benchmarking data is likely to be a double-edged sword for webmasters and web marketing managers. While it's great to compare yourself against an industry average when you're doing well, with these new benchmarks I have a feeling a lot of web pros will find themselves explaining sub-par performance to senior management more frequently. It used to be a lot easier to say "we're doing well" when the monthly stats report is passed around the company or department, when there was no data to benchmark your performance!

But the smart marketer will welcome this information. As the old adage goes, you can't improve what you don't measure.

A much easier way to get to the top of search results

Here's an excellent post on the Fathom SEO blog about how marketers should be thinking ahead to how search will change when Google’s Universal Search arrives. YouTube isn’t just for funny or useless stuff anymore!

Let's replace the term "open rate"

Many people have discussed the problems inherent in the "open rate" statistic you might see in your email marketing reports. Not to get into the details again, but basically it's a highly misleading number -- it doesn't truly give you a good count on the number of messages that are open for a variety of reasons. With Outlook 2007, Gmail, Yahoo Mail, and others blocking images by default, chances are good you've seen your "open rate" stat drop a lot in the past year or so.

As an industry, let's rename "open rate" to something that implies the inherent problem in the numbers. The metric really doesn't measure the number of people who opened your message -- it measures the number of people *we can track* who opened it. There are probably lots more who actually opened your email that aren't accounted for in this number.

I propose "counted open rate" as the new name for this number, because that is really what the metric tells us. It shows us the number of people *we were able to count* who opened your message.

A subtle difference? Perhaps. But I believe the word "counted" at the front of the metric may remind marketers this isn't a perfect number. It might lead senior execs who don't understand the nuts and bolts of digital marketing to ask, "What does 'counted' mean, and who are the uncounted opens?", which of course sets up the discussion about the metric's inherent flaws.