Timberline Interactive

The slew of phony emails, purporting to come from Google AdWords, continues unabated. The emails, with subjects lines like "Re-activate your account", claim there was a problem processing a credit card payment and urging recipients to click to log into their account and update the credit card info (see my earlier post).

Responding opens unsuspecting victims to a double-whammy: The phishing site (mimicking the look of AdWords, or framing the site) can capture both the login email/password, and -- if the user proceeds to update it -- their credit card number as well.

To crack down on the scam, Google has established an email account phishing@google.com, to which they encourage you to send examples of any such phishing emails you receive.

I'm just back from yesterday's seminar, Big-Picture Marketing in a Multichannel World, and I wanted to give a big thank-you to the other speakers, Sarah Fletcher and Dwight Sholes. Sarah's very comfortable, engaging, and witty style had everybody laughing at the same time they were madly scribbling valuable catalog design and brand-strategy tips Sarah has learned from a career designing for LL Bean, and then with her successful design and copywriting studio Catalog Design Studios, serving clients from Gorton's Fresh Seafood, Junonia, Mrs. Beasley's, Wyeth, Harrington's of Vermont, and more. Ace catalog writer Jeff Ryan offered up some great Bean-catalog copywriting experiences from the audience. 

Dwight gave a rapidfire and jam-packed presentation on the best and worst practices he's seen in a long career in email marketing, including best (and worst) practices for email sign-up and unsubscribe, smart strategies for email personalization, and how to do smarter and more virally-effective marketing by emailing less, not more. Dwight was director of travel marketing at Away.com, and founder/president of Quotient Marketing, which he recently sold to Fishbowl. He now owns and runs the online marketing consultancy Route 2.0.

Thanks too to the participants, who hailed from New England companies like Classic Designs, Annalee Dolls, Lollipop Tree, Fifth Food Group, Perfecta Camera and Perfecta Wine Company. They offered as many insights, and posed as many important questions, as anyone on the podium. Manchester, New Hampshire's Highlander Inn provided a great, comfortable venue and kept the coffee and Danishes flowing at breakfast. Then the Highlander kitchen staff then helped us wrap up the day with a delicious lunch in their sunny dining room. Over lunch, our lively discussion ranged from business war stories and reminiscences of the dot-com bubble, to through-hiking the Appalachian Trail, growing up in India, the pitfalls of renovating an old Victorian, and more.

Hats off to Angela Drexel, Timberline office manager, who made the event happen and ensured everything ran smoothly!

The event was a welcome chance to hear top-flight marketing advice, in a New England business landscape that too often feels isolated from these kinds of conversations and industry networking opportunities. Other regional groups, like NEMOA, SEMNE, and the Vermont/New Hampshire Direct Marketing Group are also doing a terrific job of offering great marketing events right here in New England.

• Be sure to add to your calendar the next Big Picture Marketing Seminar in Boston!
  The event will be Thursday, September 25 at the Boston Marriott Newton. 
  Register online by August 15th and SAVE $25 per person. (Use Coupon Code 373 at checkout).

Amazon.com has been serving up a nice, fat "Http/1.1 Service Unavailable" error today -- evidence that even the big guys, with top-flight software, massive server infrastructure and an army of techies aren't immune to ecommerce meltdowns.

The difference here is that when Amazon grosses about $4 billion a quarter, every minute of downtime costs them something like $92,000 of sales!

Marketwatch reported: "Amazon.com's Web site was unavailable on Friday. Amazon's homepage returned the message "Http/1.1 Service Unavailable" against a blank white screen. No reason for the service interruption was listed, and company representatives were not available for immediate comment. Shares of Amazon were down 2.7% to $82.25 in early afternoon trading."

My first book is coming out in late November from Greenwood Publishers. It's entitled Web 2.0 and Beyond: Understanding the New Online Business Models, Trends, and Technologies (yeah, it just rolls off the tongue, doesn't it?).

The idea was to look at Web 2.0 trends--like social networking, rich media, viral marketing--and sort out the hype from the real opportunities for online businesses. I tried to cover the high-profile players, like Google, Facebook, Second Life, etc., but I also made a point to include a lot of small and medium-sized companies that many marketers and businesspeople can relate to.

I was fortunate to get a lot of great interviews from web and ecommerce notables like Seth Godin and Lauren Freedman. The book also offers case studies and anecdotes from Yarn.com, Motherwear, Cabela's, Lake Champlain Chocolates, eHobbies and more.

I plan post excerpts and other developments here as the publishing date grows nearer. For now, thanks to all the generous people who participated and helped make the project a reality!

The Secrets to Delivering a Singular Brand Experience

In today's multi-channel world, consumers are in the driver's seat. They choose how and when they will do business with your company. And how your consumers get information is getting more and more fractured: TV, advertising, radio, print, direct mail, e-mail, web sites, RSS, blogs, SMS — the list keeps growing.

This proliferation has often outpaced most marketers' abilities to master, and understand, all of the channels their customers are using. The result is a series of isolated marketing efforts. This can have crippling results on your sales because your customers are probably seeing your brand as "the flavor of the month" rather than as a powerful and cohesive whole.

Our executive-level seminar will show you the strategic view and also give you the actionable tips and ideas you need to create a singular brand experience for your company. Packed with valuable information and led by industry experts.

Cost is only $150 person.

Register NOW for Manchester, NH: June 19th 
Register NOW for Boston, MA: September 25 

Or you can call me, Angela, to register for date/location of interest: 866-388-8377, ext. 211

Now we've hit the big time. We've claimed our blog on Technorati and are burning it on Feedburner.

Technorati Profile  

Yahoo! announced it was buying web analytics business IndexTools, setting the stage for Yahoo to offer an answer to Google Analytics.

Google bought the Urchin business in 2005, and set the web analytics industry on its ear by rebranding it as Google Analytics and giving it away free. Google Analytics is now used by hundreds of thousands of businesses and organizations -- including, says Google, scores of Fortune 500 companies.

Critics note that the software may be "free," but that Google Analytics users give Google something of significant value: data about merchants' traffic, paid search conversion rates, average order values, and more. All that data tells the ad-selling side of Google's business a great deal about how much higher click prices can go before they become uncompetitive with other direct-response advertising media.

Google silenced its critics (see my earlier post below) and delivered yet another quarter of surging earnings growth in the face of speculation that the company's paid search revenues were withering along with a recession-bound US economy.

In the earnings conference call, Google CEO Eric Schmidt -- speaking softly but carrying a big stick -- made a few, clear points:

• "Paid click growth is much higher than has been speculated by outside parties."
• "We are showing fewer but even better ads."
• "We're well positioned for 2008 and beyond -- regardless of the business environment that we find ourselves surrounded by."

In other words? In your face!

Google shares soared 18%, past the $500 level for the first time in months.

This should be a thrill to investors and soap-opera lovers alike! Google's Q1 2008 earnings call webcast will be streaming across the internet today at 1:30 pm Pacific time (4:30 pm Eastern time; you midwestern and mountain folks can do the math).

Why, if we don't own GOOG, should we care? Because it raises the curtain on a big question: Where is the online ad market going?

After quarter after quarter of torrid growth -- and a fourth quarter 2007 surge of 25% -- Google reportedly slowed to a crawl early this year. ComScore has been tracking anemic 2% to 3% growth in paid ad clicks, and although the firm took heat for the accuracy of their numbers, given the abruptness of the turnaround, many analysts have come around to the view that the numbers are real, and that they point to 1) the slowdown in the overall economy, and 2) normal post-holiday seasonality to which, up till now, Google has been immune.

While more experts accept the notion that fewer people are clicking ads, the other unanswered question is about ad quality. Google and Yahoo have been retooling their ad-serving algorithms to focus on higher-quality ads and higher-quality clicks (the latter by weeding out fraudulent and accidental clicks, better policing the quality of the content networks, etc.). If Google is, as a result of higher click quality, attracting a higher cost-per-click, the earnings machine may still be operating at full tilt. We'll know the answer this afternoon!

* (CNN Money sums up the story nicely.)