Not to just give away stuff.

Spotted this sign at my local freshii as I was picking up an (excellent) asian vegetable soup (extra chicken). I was heading there anyway so this deal didn’t drive me to the store. It did however get me some free cranberries when I looked up http://twitter.com/freshii
Use your online marketing to create demand for your product or service; don’t just intercept it and erode your margins.

But on the other hand… Use your marketing to delight and reward your customers. If I’m happily blogging about it, does that mean it’s worked?

Ed Lee
Managing Director, com.motion
416 725-8107

The Anderson/Gladwell debate on Free rages on. Seth adds his thoughts (and a Squidoo lens) while Mark Cuban weighs in and there are a tonne of others, including my friend Mitch Joel who has an excellent recap, adding their thoughts to this fascinating debate.

I was chatting with my father-in-law this morning and we both came to the same conclusion. In our experience, people place value on things based on how much they paid for them.

• If you pay a high price for something, you place a higher value on it.
• If you get something for free, you place less value on it.

Ergo, the more you charge, the more value the buyer places on it. Want to add more value (in the eyes of the purchaser) to your product? Charge more. Not less.

Take Seth Godin. We get the same knowledge from his blog as his books, which as he acknowledges are *just* curated versions of his blog posts. But what do you place more value on? The $26.99 book or the free blog post that pops up in your RSS reader? I know what I value more.

Free may be the future but if you can’t charge nothing, charge a lot and add value.

This debate will go on for years. There are so many ironies and paradoxes in play that it will take a long long time to come out in the wash. I think that this shows we are diverging away from middle. Your products will either be free (and supported by some complementary business model) or they will be very expensive. This recession is showing that there is a race to the bottom in some industries, while others are doing very well by charging a premium. It is the middle, the mediocre, that is suffering, not the edges.

As an Internet user, I see free all around me while as a consultant, I want to provide fair value to our clients – so it feels as if I am playing both sides.

Reading Malcolm Gladwell’s excellent (and acerbic) review of Chris Anderson’s Free in the New Yorker (Anderson’s response here), I was brought back to a thought I’ve had many times but have yet to fully commit to a blog post.

The quote that got the synapses firing was:

Companies ought to be able to make huge amounts of money “around” the thing being given away—as Google gives away its search and e-mail and makes its money on advertising.

For my money, the idea that Google gives away so many services for “free” because it makes its money from advertising is a little…simplistic.

If you start with the assumptions that Google has the best search engine, and despite the innovation in the space, we have to presume that it is, you start to see why Google is so committed to free services.

• The more content that is online, the more a search engine is needed. [Blogger; YouTube]
• The more search results that are returned, the more people will be willing to pay to be on top of those results. [AdWords]
• The more people that embrace the Web, the more people will start to consider to create more content. [Gmail]
• The more Web site owners understand about their users and traffic, the more they will consider purchasing traffic through AdWords. [Google Analytics]

As I said on Mathew Ingram’s blog, when discussing Google’s “Google Trends for Web sites” as a free service:

If I’m an e-commerce Web site owner, and I sign up for free analytics, I can put a price on my traffic, based on conversions. When my traffic has a price, I’m now more likely to try to buy traffic using AdWords.

The more blogs there are in the world (blogger.com), the more content needs to be indexed and the more competition there is around key words. Now as a marketer, in order to ensure I’m top of the pile when it comes to people searching for my key terms, I buy them.

Similarly, the more marketers know about the Web, and its metric driven effectiveness, the more they will spend on AdWords to attract new users and new customers.

For Google, free is not a business model, it is a strategy designed to feed into a business model based on scale and market leadership.

I am delighted to be able to announce that com.motion and Veritas are both growing with the hiring of Sean McDonald as an Account Manager. I had heard nothing but great things about Sean over the last couple of years from various people in the agency world so it was a real pleasure to meet him and get to know him.

Clearly we liked what we saw and, despite my best efforts to soak him in beer (a long story), so did Sean. He will be starting in the next couple of weeks – exact date is still TBD as he puts the finishing touches on his Masters work, but take it from me, it can’t come soon enough.

I’ve said before that working at com.motion has been a great experience for me, and I hope the team. We are privileged to have some great clients who are willing to do interesting and thought provoking things in the online/social media space and for that I continue to be grateful.

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers (and sisters!) are doing some great work on some very cool campaigns and I will try and share them with you as appropriate.

Cross posted from the com.motion blog.

I’ve tried this RSS analogy thing a few times now, mainly because the concept of RSS is pretty integral to the new social Web. While my “lake and river” analogy got some good pick up, I still didn’t think it was all the way there so I’ve continued to think about it. Yesterday I tried out a new analogy on a client and thankfully it went down well so I’m repeating it here.

RSS and its use is a lot like the old telephone exchange. You tell the operator (your RSS reader) who or what you want to connect to and the people behind the scenes at the telephone exchange (the RSS) physically connect you.

As I’ve said before, the technology doesn’t matter. I don’t need to know what goes into a BlackBerry or even a laptop in order to use it. I just need to know how to use the BlackBerry/lap top. In fact, ignorance is bliss. It is easier to not know about a stupid sounding acronym and just use the technology than the other way round.

So just as we now just pick up a phone, dial and the telephone exchange works invisibly in the background, RSS does the same thing. For example, on the two most en vogue social networks, Facebook and Twitter, I connect with someone and RSS works invisibly in the background to continuously bring their information into my news stream.

Bit of a break from the normal social media guff to look back to U.K. politics.

I’m no media trainer, but after finding these two videos absolutely terrifying, I do not envy any politician who is interviewed by Jeremy Paxman, of Newsnight fame.

First, from 1997, former Home Secretary Michael Howard dodges the same question 12 times. Howard comes off looking like a bit of an idiot while Paxman’s legend grows.

More recently, William Hague (another former leader of the opposition and current shadow foreign secretary) gets the Paxman treatment, avoiding the question 14 times.

Update: crappy quality video but you get the idea.

Like I said, I’m no media trainer but when faced with a bulldog like Paxman who just won’t give up the bone, what time do you change tack? Or do you do a basic cost benefit analysis and decide that looking like a bit of an idiot is better than saying something that is tantamount to political suicide?

On a side note, it’s interesting to see how much Hague has aged since he was a fresh faced 16 year old, making his first appearance at the Conservative party conference back in 1977.

As Ben Elton would say  "Oooh! Little bit of politics there".

Michael O’Connor Clarke is starting a series on the five myths of search engine optimization (SEO) that promises to be an excellent and thought provoking body of work. Like Michael, I am no expert in SEO (or, indeed, SEM) but I like to think I know enough to make me dangerous.

Today’s myth is the “meta tag” and how it is totally superfluous to modern day SEO. I agree, to an extent. The meta tag is no longer of relevance but…

1. Just the act of thinking about what meta tags to use gives you a structure to base your content around. Knowing what words to use optimize is one (of three) of the pillars of SEO. Having this foundation to start from gets you off on the right foot. Incidentally, I see Michael’s next post is on “key word stuffing” so I’m not sure if he will agree with me…

Secondly:

2. While the meta TAG doesn’t play any huge role in the SEO-ification of a page/site, the meta DESCRIPTION does. You know that excerpt that search engines return with their results? That is typically the meta description. So while the meta description may not matter from an SEO perspective, it has a huge role to play in the user experience when viewing the search results and deciding whether or not to actually click through on your link or not.

Looking forward to seeing more of Michael’s PR Flack take on this interesting topic for the industry.

“Drive up the street and we’re just before the giant <<competitor’s store>> “

That’s no way to give directions. But it is exactly the way you want your competitors to give directions.

Similarly, saying “we do work like <<market leader>> ” immediately instills curiousity as to why I should work with you and not the market leader.

Become the milestone. Don’t become the vaguely amorphous thing near the milestone.

This is a test of the new post by email feature WordPress.com just announced.

Fingers crossed it works out!

Ed Lee
Managing Director, com.motion

In my new position at com.motion, I’m placing much more emphasis on the art of selling. Selling com.motion, selling social media and then selling our programmes to clients. It’s not a natural act for me – I am way more comfortable as a trusted advisor than as a salesperson so I’m learning more about the process and more about the art. Two great pieces of inspiration for me are these videos on the importance of selling.

First up, the classic Alec Baldwin speech from Glengarry Glen Ross.

ABC. Always Be Closing.

AIDA. Attention. Interest. Decision. Action

Second, Ben Affleck being a complete ass in Boiler Room.

Either you sell him or he sells you.

Motion creates emotion.

Warning, both contain some rather NSFW language.