This morning brought me an example, which serves as an interesting illustration in the free- versus paid- content battle.

We begin with Charles Krauthammer's op-ed in the WaPo. He refers to a "brilliantly detached, coolly ironic" Michael Kelly piece on Hillary Clinton, from the NYT magazine in 1993.

Sounds good; Kelly was an angel with the pen. Let's Google it.

Not at the top, though I see excerpts from the piece.

Giving up too soon, I try the NYT in-house search, reverse-date-sort.

Not there at all! Did the NYT lose the rights to the piece? Did Sidney Blumenthal delete it from their database? This is interesting.

Through a grad student I have access to Factiva, the news aggregator. They only had an abstract of the piece. A search on Lexis-Nexis Academic turned up nothing.

There Must Be a Pony in This Internet*, I thought.

Back to Google. Not too far down the list, we see this. A solitary blogger, who has scanned or somehow scraped the full text of the article from Kelly's anthology.

Score one for the free web. (And copyright violation, I know.)

Postscript: Fusty old Dialog had the article.

* Reagan's favorite joke. The abridged version:
...Next the psychiatrist treated the optimist. Trying to dampen his outlook, the psychiatrist took him to a room piled to the ceiling with horse manure. But instead of wrinkling his nose in disgust, the optimist emitted just the yelp of delight the psychiatrist had been hoping to hear from his brother, the pessimist. Then he clambered to the top of the pile, dropped to his knees, and began gleefully digging out scoop after scoop with his bare hands. "What do you think you're doing?" the psychiatrist asked, just as baffled by the optimist as he had been by the pessimist. "With all this manure," the little boy replied, beaming, "there must be a pony in here somewhere!"

In general, free and open-source software isn't yet robust enough to stop the corporate dollars flowing to Redmond. Nor are shallow-pocketed companies likely to try, since the development effort to match feature for feature is just too much. Heck, most of these companies may be gone in a few years if they don't make the transition to an ad-supported or paid-tier model. Or get bought for their codebase and user list, like Writely.

But for now, it's a good time for entrepreneurs, consultants and startups. Here's one example why.

Zoho is a suite of free web-based productivity apps (like Google's Docs etc). They've been around for about a year, and in that time have built a remarkable array of services. The only one I've looked closely at is their desktop sharing product, called Meeting.

A WebEx Replacement?

Meeting had an immediate appeal to me. Hours after first learning about Zoho (in a TechCrunch comment), I had been telephone-training a couple of people how to operate Drupal, my pet web-based content management system.

Ted and Nina and I got through the training adequately, but since it was conference-call-based, there were the usual, "Er, what page are you looking at?" moments.

Desktop sharing services like WebEx and GoToMeeting are the preferred tool for this kind of remote demo and training. They work well. I would have no problem paying the $40/month (or WebEx's per/minute/attendee fee) if I had regular high-leverage webinars or demos to host.

But for a casual training session with Ted and Nina, can the free tool do the job just as well?

Road Test

The answer is "apparently, yes." It worked like a charm on the first swing.

The abridged process:

1) Presenter creates a free Zoho account.
2) Presenter installs a browser plugin, if it's his first time.
3) Presenter clicks to start a meeting, and enters email addresses of invitees.
4) Invitees get the email, click on a URL, and once on the Zoho site click on the Join button.

As for the blow-by-blow, I can't add much more than Matt at Paininthetech.com did during his runthrough, or TechCrunch on the Meeting beta a year ago.

Running a desktop sharing app for a meeting always introduces some complexity, but Zoho is worth a go for your next training session.

Plus, you can't beat free.

I've kissed plenty of frogs:

• Topica. A hosted service for medium- and high-volume senders. For a test account, they mistakenly dinged my credit card $500 for four straight months. Although it did get resolved, it was not a pleasant process.
• iPost: A great service started a few years ago by some nice guys (Steve Webster and Greg Fox) who were very accessible on the phone. They eventually joined their rightful place among the higher-priced services like EmailLabs, CheetahMail, and YesMail.
• Campaigner. Inexpensive hosted service. If I remember correctly, their unsubscribe policy was awfully restrictive. If Joe Smith unsubscribed from one Campaigner-serviced newsletter, he was taken off all Campaigner-serviced newsletters... including your own.
• ConstantContact: Another inexpensive service. It's got good market traction these days, and I can't complain about the deliverability and the end product. But the back-end interface is kind of clunky, and the pages don't flow as you go from step to step. For example, the "send a test" function is in the Preview popup window, and the button doesn't stand out. It's difficult to delete a draft email. There are upsell links scattered through the first few pages. To be fair, ConstantContact is aimed at a non-technical audience. There are loads of templates, and the monthly pricing is predictable and cheap.
• eZineDirector. Cheap hosted service. Terrible and unintuitive interface. Delivery can be delayed for hours after you click Send. Major data loss event took place in 2006.
• DadaMail. An installed set of PHP scripts, written by an artist in Colorado. A nominally free package, but you have to pay to remove the DadaMail tagline. In 2007, the guy's website would regularly exceed its bandwidth cap, leaving you without support forums. Now I notice that he's selling links from his home page, a little bit of commercial sleaze which just confirms that artists often do sell out. And yes, the software was named after the surrealist.
• PHPList. Much-used free PHP script package, but it's apparently impossible to strip the "PHPList" tagline out of the email. Other customizations are difficult.
• Feedblitz. Not a true email broadcast service. Instead, it's a web app built to read RSS-formatted blog/CMS output and then send it out to your list via email. Like a complement to "traditional" RSS. Nearly all of my clients have websites built by some kind of blog/CMS application, so Feedblitz was worth a look. There is a rather bewildering array of features, which surely can be massaged into something useful for readers of a blog-centric company. Yet there's a little too much FeedBlitz identity built into the output, and it's more expensive than the cheap services. Not the best fit for my requirements, but one to keep experimenting with.

There are happy customers on all these services, but my search for the right blend of inexpensive/easy/fast/smart/brandable went on and on.

Until today.

Campaign Monitor is a hosted service run out of Australia. How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

1. Inexpensive enough, for monthly senders. Per email blast, it's $5 plus a penny per recipient. The simplicity of this a la carte model is very appealing, even if it's about 50% more than the cheapie email services. Weekly mailers with lists in the '000s won't save any money here, I must add.
2. Works Fast. It feels like the server is next door.
3. Fabulous user interface. Here is where they really shine. As you assemble an outbound email, the pages flow naturally together in a wonderfully linear way. How did they do this? Information is chunked together well, button colors chosen sensibly and applied consistently, labels are consistent, and there is white space to set the important material off. Really, there is so much goodness here I should write a separate post about the UI. Bottom line for the user, a solid UI means less chance of a mistake and less time spent building the email.
4. Focussed. Once you're logged in, you don't see pointers to other services the vendor offers. These just clutter the interface and take you off-task.
5. Brandable. As far as I can tell, there are only two things in an outbound email that you can't "own" with your corporate identity: the URL of the unsubscribe link, and the email headers. That's as unobtrusive as it gets for a hosted service, at least at this pricing level.

Hat tip to Komra for the referral.

I tell paying clients and friends alike that I'm not a web developer (unlike the pros at Design4Results and ImageCog), but more of a "prosumer" who can kick his way through a content management system to get something simple done.

In this case, Drupal. This is yet another open-source PHP-based program, with several things going for it.

• Easy Installation. Download, unzip, untar, upload, change permissions, run installer. Nice. Though, today I tried my had at SSH'ing into the server for part of that job... and hit a wall with file permissions.


• User Management. What attracted me first to Drupal was a "salesforce extranet" project in 2007. The client needed several layers of user permissions, from "go away" to "read content" to "read and comment" to "change anything". Users also had to be able to register themselves, but be allowed in only with an admin's approval. We also needed a forgot-password function. And it had to be dead simple to operate. Drupal had all that.


• Big User Community. Mostly for the sake of troubleshooting. The forums are active and easily searchable.


• Free.


• Fast.


• Good SEO.


• Handles Files Attachments Well. This was important for the extranet project.


• Built-in Keyword Search.


• Loads of Add-ons.The ones I reach for first are Google Analytics, Lightbox2, and DHTML menu.

The only quibble I have is that the themes (i.e. skins, templates) all start to look the same after a while. The one I used was Marinelli, for the record.

Perhaps it was my delivery.

Some weeks after, I saw how it should be done. The WSJ did a brief interview of a popup book designer, who scored 10/10 during his four minutes. I gave my observations on him over at the NYT SBSC blog.

Bottom line, if you're not clicking: Have passion for your business, convey personality, give short answers, and practice beforehand.

The NYT Small Business Summit Center is a microsite that supports an annual day-long event targeted at entrepreneurs.

We wanted to make a major upgrade to the content and stickiness of the site, to support 2008 event sales and sweeten the deal for advertisers.

Our hook is the Share Your Story concept, launched by AMEX -- a major NYT advertiser and a firm that is cultivating the entrepreneur market.

So this week we threw open the doors to Summit attendees, offering them the chance to get interviewed and profiled on the site. Entrepreneurs can also guest blog, and do a couple of other exposure-building activities that will go live in ten days.

See the profile and blog entry by the delightful E.B. Moss of Moss Appeal for a sample.

That's E.B on the right. Clearly happy with the free PR.

Naturally we are hoping to build a community and get comments etc.

The best hook is that the NYT mothership has committed some advertising inventory to the effort, to directly promote these stories. So if you go to the Business section, you'll see this ad:

(The ad was created by our partners at Acorn Design, who have an exquisite way with type and color.)

Plus, no money changes hands, no legal agreements to click through or sign.

For the entrepreneurs, it's a nice shot of free buzz marketing.

If any small business owners among my legions of blog readers are interested in getting featured on the site, give me a shout.

In September they had some problems with their clustered web hosting service, called the Grid service. Some latency, duplicate emails, and the resolution process lingered on a bit. The Grid has never seemed rock-solid, and so they're on a shorter leash with me.

But I write here not to bury MediaTemple, but praise them.

During the problems they sent out updates consistently, via trouble ticket, blog thread, and RSS.

Good for them. Hiding such obvious problems from well-networked buyers -- who are skilled searchers -- is asking for trouble.

And after the system got back to normal, they sent out a credit via email.

As per the last incident update on (mt) Media Temple's incident tracker system, 24 hours have passed and we have seen no further latency issues on (gs) Cluster.2

(mt) Media Temple is issuing 1 month's credit to customers affected by this issue (INC# 285). We would like to take this opportunity to once again apologize for the unexpected access problems. We understand that our customers run web dependent businesses on our systems and that slow or inaccessible websites or email are simply unacceptable. We would also like to convey once more that this incident has spawned numerous internal reviews, new monitoring points and new adjustments to our cluster growth formulas. The primary aim for (mt) Media Temple is for this to never happen again.

We thank you for patience and your continued business.

Regards,

Demian P. Sellfors
CEO
(mt) Media Temple, Inc.

The blog post reads a bit differently. Including the CEO's name in the email had a cooling effect.

Moving from the sublime to the ridiculous, I present the last communication from Web Wide Media. They are a Texas-based budget host I inherited for one of my pro bono projects.

In the highly probable event their service announcement disappears with their business, here is the relevant bit.

Topic: Ahoy! Like a modern day pirate, I am assuming command of an abandoned ship....

Let me introduce myself.
My name is [name redacted by Andrew]. I own and operate DoorCountyHosting.com, and previously DoorHost.net until it was sold in April of 2006. I've been working with WWM.net as a support tech, and a client, for almost a year. In recent events, I've had contact with the owners of WWM.net only on three occassions since June of 2007.

One of those times was a two way communication. The others were one sided quick notes from [name redacted by Andrew] , and nothing further.
I'm assuming WWM.net to be an abandoned company, and taking control of it in an effort to ensure the clients with the hosting services and support they have paid for.

Why is it assumed abandoned?
As you can see - the cPanel licenses have gone unpaid, as well as the servers. Neither myself, nor the data center have a reliable method of communication to the owners. Have any of you heard from anyone but me since June??

However, there are many complications with this take over.
First, I've told [name redacted by Andrew] in an email, just moments ago, that I will give back the company if/when he wishes within the next 30 days. I am not out to hurt him, his income, or his company. If 30 days pass with no contact, the company will continue to be assumed abandoned. And any attempts to regain control will be denied without legal order to do so.

Second, I need to work out a time frame with the Data Center on how long I can keep these servers online before payment must be made. I will assume no responsibility for payments due before todays date. Whether that will be acceptable to the Data Center is unknown at this time.

Third, DO NOT EXPECT MIRACLES. I will need time to assess how many clients are left, and how to best organize the clients on the servers for minimal expenses and optimal server performance for the clients' web sites. This means that you should likely expect some of you to have IP changes and custom DNS name servers to need updating.

Feel free to post questions and comments in the general support forum. I will answer/update as soon as humanly possible.

Fourth, I've assumed control of the billing system. As of 12:20am CST (-6 UTC) all credit card processing, and PayPal payments are being handled by me. Any payments made before this time on 10/26/2007 are out of my control and refunds are impossible. There are a select few that appear to have already been set into a batch for processing, that I can not stop or access. So billing date for those will show up as after this date/time. If a refund is requested, and you fall into that category, you will be notified at time of refund request.

Lastly, THIS IS NOT SET IN STONE. Again, I need to consult with the Data Center and/or [name redacted by Andrew] may show up in the next 30 days. Think of this more as a letter of intent....

That is all for now. Expect things to turn around a get better in the near future.

Cordially,
[name redacted by Andrew]
WWM.net

The ensuing thread is a guilty pleasure -- but only because moving my site from WWM won't be a problem.

This was a rather loose end that needed tying.

I can think of three other subjects that a marketer ought to know cold, if they expect to have a say in corporate strategy.

Qualitative Market Knowledge. In other words, you’ve got to know who does the buying and what do we need to give them at each point in the process. Customer interviews form the backbone of this knowledge. Large-sample-size surveys provide hard data to back up the conclusions you gain from interviews.

Quantitative Market Research. How big is your current market? How big will it be in five years?

Prospect and User Metrics. What do people click on? Which ads motivate them? Who calls customer service the most, and the least? This data fills out your knowledge of the customer, both in how they buy and use your product.

Competitive Environment. The product manager, if he’s not in the marketing group, may own this piece. (He may own some of the metrics too.) Marketers can go beyond the typical who-has-what-product-feature by tracking competitor corporate strategy.

Note that these aren’t fungible skills like the ability to write ad copy, perform regression analysis, quote from business cases like an MBA, or do a slick Powerpoint. This is situation-specific data, which require regular monitoring.

Knowing these four subjects keeps marketers from being treated like an ad agency.

The main culprit is usually an overweening preoccupation with on-page keyword optimization, but link-building can hurt too.

This article is not about black-hat SEO practices, which are covered in plenty of detail elsewhere. Instead, we’ll look at “good” SEO practices when they’re overdone.

Let’s see what gets hurt.

Muddied Product Positioning
Pretend you sell software to corporate accountants. Corporate accounting software is obviously your #1 target phrase, but you naturally care about capturing related searches. So your SEO advisor says, “hey, let’s target some other key phrases too.” Next thing you know, they’ve added pages on your site titled Corporate Controller Software and Shareholder Accounting Softwareand Corporate Asset Management Software, in part since those are phrases that the keyword suggestion tools returned. And then the SEO advisor includes links to those pages within your left-hand navigation, because that helps the new pages rank higher. Your problem reveals itself when a prospect visits your site, and sees all those links. Prospect then thinks, “well, this company’s product does a whole lot of different things!” And that may not be the market positioning you want.

Underperforming Website Copy
There is an allegedly optimal level of “keyword density” that makes a given page rank well. For example, if you have “organic tea” occurring six times on the page, that’s better than two occurrences. Visitors read differently than search engine spiders, however, and they still respond to effective copy. Stuffing pages with key phrases, then, may reduce the conversion power of a page. So your tradeoff is higher traffic versus page effectiveness. Would you rather have a page that gets 100 natural search referrals and one conversion, or 30 referrals and two conversions? It’s possible to have both, but how are you going to get there? It’s much easier to test and change copy (and design) for improved conversion than to test keyword optimization. We think there is more upside with conversion-building efforts, and other SEO tactics. Landing pages for pay-per-click ads are a great place to test copy and design.

Cluttered Website Navigation
The left nav, footer, and site map page get heavy weight with search algorithms, since they are treated as pointers to a site’s most important pages. SEO advisors often will load the navigation with links to search-engine-friendly pages. This distracts people from your intended sales funnel. Excessive intrasite linking means people go in circles, and get frustrated. Repetition of keywords and phrases in links will lead to guesswork by the prospect: “Is the thing I want behind this link or that one?” Every site visitor has a finite number of clicks they’re willing to spend at your site – don’t make them click more than they have to.

Noise in Measurement
Your SEO scorecard should be visually simple, and focussing on the biggest business drivers. Don’t let it get cluttered with ranks of long-tail search terms in second-tier engines. Doing so obscures the high-value Google terms, which – like it or not – is where the money is. Track infrequent terms on a second worksheet if you must, and present an aggregate performance metric for the lot of them on the scorecard. Also, don’t track search terms which bring unqualified traffic.

Confusing Site Maintenance
This is a minor factor that can be avoided, but we’ll mention it anyway. Regular content changes to web pages is a healthy thing for SEO. For sites not built with a content management system, one byproduct of changing content is an accumulation of defunct and unlinked files on your webserver; the “retired” versions of live pages. You might even have new and old style sheets. Over time this can clutter up your webspace, to the point where it costs your webmaster time. You should have a system for saving old files (in case you need to revert back to them, or audit for troubleshooting purposes) that is clean and organized. Moving them to a hidden directory is one way. Giving them a unique extension like .defunct is another, since sorting by type gives the webmaster a method of visually ignoring the retired files.

Repetitive Blog Entry Titles
If you’ve got a business blog, resist the temptation to consistently pack your entry titles with keywords. Include keywords in the basenames instead, and save the keyphrases for your marquee blog content.

Meta Descriptions
Inside the top of your web page, there is usually a field for a description of the page. It looks like this:
<meta name="description" content="The leading purveyor of premium tea">
Google often uses the copy after content= as the blurb under your listing in a search engine results page. This is a marketing opportunity, a chance to help position your product effectively before the click. Enthusiastic SEO advisors may instead see the META description field as a chance to further pack your page with more keywords. Yet doing so may mean a less-well-performing blurb, which means poorer conversion from the search results page.

Blackened Wikipedia Reputation
Even though a link from Wikipedia to your site hasn’t counted in the search algorithms since 2005, it’s still a potential source of inbound traffic. Don’t go adding links to your site within Wikipedia content, however, unless your content has the right patina of independence. Wikipedia editors are quite mindful of commercially motivated edits, and squash them with a Puritan zeal.

• Regular calls from your marketing team to customers. This keeps your marketers focussed on customers.
• A series of 10-15 interviews, outsourced to a third party who can understand and speak knowledgably about your products and services. The interviewer works from a set of basic questions, but in a conversational manner – to get the customer to open up about their needs and experiences.

Let’s focus briefly on the outcomes from a series of interviews:

1. You get an understanding of the buying process. Who is involved, and at what stage. What each person cares about, and how it relates to their big challenges. What they think of your product, both good and bad. Once you know their buying process, you can adapt your messaging and support materials to meet their needs.
2. You’ll get a list of the words and phrases that customers use to describe their perfect solution. Knowing this improves the benefit statements in all your written material: web, email, print, advertising, PR. It also helps your SEO and PPC program.
3. Your positioning and messaging can be sharpened. Interviews with “model customers” in your target market reveal what closed the deal for them. Adapt your messaging accordingly and you’ll win more deals from that kind of customer.

If there is magic in customer interviews, it lies here: clear, generalizable themes emerge from about ten of these talks. Why? Given a large enough sample within a customer segment, the job descriptions of your buyers don’t differ greatly from each other. They are rewarded the same ways. They’ve looked at your competitors’ website, your own, and read the same magazines as each other. And more often not, they wind up using the same phrases to describe the experience of buying and using products in your space. It’s uncanny.

Customer interviews are massively helpful for a small- or medium-sized company with a moderately complex sales cycle. We use an interview program as the foundation for every substantial client engagement.

Lastly, customer analysis is one of our four standard ingredients in developing a overall marketing strategy. Thes others are Corporate Strategy, Competitive Positioning, and Product Benefits.

I have to add a disclaimer. Much of what I think about customer interviews is based on Kristin Zhivago’s “Reality Check” program. Her excellent guide to interviewing is in the appendix of her book. Like me, she’s a marketing consultant, but our services differ somewhat. Call either of us and we’ll tell you how.

See our article on interviewing customers for the primary reasons why you should.

We can think of nine “secondary reasons” why customer interviews are useful. These are in no particular order, since their net benefit depends on your own situation.

Let’s call one of your customers Joe.

1. Makes the Customer Feel Good. This has three parts. Joe speaks his mind (which is therapeutic on its own); Joe thinks complaints will get addressed and praise passed along (which appeals to his sense of fairness); Joe thinks your product is more likely to meet his future needs. Of course, you have to follow up on the last two things, but if you’re not committed to that anyhow you should have a long think about your business.
2. It’s Cheaper Than You Think. If you delegate it to someone in-house, the incremental financial cost per interview is about $35, for a transcriber’s time. There are some fixed time costs associated with an interview program: generating the list itself, reviewing it for outliers, giving your callers some basic background about each account, and the phone tag typically involved with arranging a 30-minute conversation. If you outsource it to a freelancer or consultant, expect to pay $150 per interview, including transcription. This might be part of a larger package of interviews.
3. Discover Hidden Opinions. (I’m cheating a little here, since this is usually possible only if you outsource the interviews.) With interviewee anonymity, you’ll learn things your customers won’t ordinarily tell you or your sales rep. Why? Under a promise of anonymity, people will open up to third parties (providing the interviewers know enough about your company and your products to sound credible). Joe is more likely to comment on personal interactions, e.g. the support staff didn’t want me on the phone any longer, the sales rep didn’t tell me when the maintenance fee kicks in. The point of gathering this kind of information isn’t to find tattletales and bust your employee for a single event, but to uncover consistent breakdowns. Joe is also more likely to comment truthfully on price to a third party interviewee, since he’s mentally out of the cat-and-mouse pricing game with your sales rep.
4. Seeds for Case Studies. An interview with a happy Joe can be converted into a case study rather easily.
5. Testimonials. Once you have a nice quote actually leave Joe’s lips (instead of your writing it for them, which is the way it usually goes), it’s easier to get customer approval. Even if the customer’s CorpComm department refuses permission to publish the testimonial, you can anonymize it. Anonymized testimonials are worthwhile only if the quote is specific to a product feature.
6. Helps Your SEO Program. If you can take Joe’s interview (anonymous or not) and put it online, you’ll get a marginal boost with the search engines. While it’s unlikely that you’ll get a good inbound link into an interview, the addition of fresh content containing good keywords will help.
7. Internal Use. Share all or part of the interview with colleagues. This is especially useful in big companies with an intranet.
8. Counterbalance Salesperson Anecdotes. This may not seem as “nice” as the above reasons, but marketers can’t ignore this. In the B2B world, the salesperson is often the only one talking with customers. They pass customer comments up the ladder, especially when those comments relate to lost sales or a greater chance at account growth and retention. All good so far! However, the aggregate of all those sales “touches” gives Sales disproportionate authority on What The Customer Wants. A marketing team that aims to go beyond simple product marketing and marcomms — into marketing strategy — has to be an equal or better authority on What The Customer Wants, in the CEO’s eyes. Customer interviews give you some of that authority.
9. Get New Ideas. Interviews “get your head out of the building” and make you think of new promotional/selling/content ideas. Although there are always more ideas than time or money, you’re always better off with a greater pool of ideas. So put your free thinkers on the interview team. Make them stick to the basic script, but encourage them to follow the flow of the talk and ask their own followup questions. Make them do calls offsite.