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I teach a lot of online classes at various universities, constantly explaining the Do It Wrong Quickly (now being called agile marketing) approach to the digital marketing world. In one of my classes, on search marketing, a student lamented that my coaching to experiment, to try things, to take a guess and then see what happens before doing something else wouldn’t work at all in her organization. In fact, she told me point blank, “Taking a guess can get me fired!” First off, if guessing at Internet marketing can get you fired, you might be working for the wrong person. But assuming that you can actually reason with your boss, or that you can quit before he says “You’re Fired!” and go someplace else, here are the things you need to keep in mind as to why agile marketing is so important, especially for search marketing.

It is absolutely critical that you guess at search marketing because not doing so allows you to do some very bad things:

• Choose keywords that make no sense. Being forced to look at the right landing pages, rankings, and guessing at improvements caused you to realize that you have big problems to address, starting with the right keywords. The worst thing you can do in search marketing is to target the wrong keywords. If you are forced to tell people that you know what you are doing, then you are likely to stick with the wrong plan just to show that you weren’t an idiot without ever trying what is right.
• Stick with dumb paid search ads. Similar to keywords, if you decide to plan out what you are going to do and stick with it, you’ll never discover the best ad, because it is never the one that you try first. Only by experimenting can you figure out what to do.
• Assume things are OK when they are not. This is actually the worst of all of the problems, and it can happen in any kind of digital marketing, not just search. If you don’t take a guess at what improvement you will make, you have nothing to compare your actual results to, which prevents you from realizing that your improvements efforts might not be working.

The direct marketing principles underlying digital marketing are based on the idea that you project what you expect your results to be before doing anything, and then check to see whether it happened before deciding what to do next. Taking an educated guess is crucial to making the whole process work.

I know that it might feel that taking a guess is bad because you want to do something more accurate than taking a guess. Unfortunately, there isn’t anything more accurate. So, the real alternative to taking a guess is not to have any goal at all, which leads to the bad outcomes I outlined above.

I appreciate that guessing is uncomfortable, but it more comfortable than failing–really failing in your search marketing program. None of us wants to be wrong, but accepting that we mostly get things wrong will help us to eventually get them right. The right answer will only be found by actually doing the guessing for your sites, making changes, guessing again, and seeing how you do.

Think about it this way. When you first stepped up to a bowling alley, you had no idea how to hurl the bowling ball or where to aim it. You took a guess, probably a really bad one the first time. After a while, if you kept at it, you got better at it, until you felt as though you were doing more than just taking a guess–you had an idea of where to aim and where the ball was going. You could have taken all the online courses and read all the books in the world on bowling, but you were never going to succeed by just studying–you had to do it. And it probably wasn’t very comfortable to throw the first ball–you probably felt a bit embarrassed at how badly you did it–but it was the only way to really learn to bowl.

I am making you throw the ball in search marketing. And search marketing is even harder than bowling because the ball changes shape, you can’t see the pins, and they move. And you don’t know what a strike or a spare is, so you need to predict what you expect to happen ahead of time to see whether you are doing a good job or not.

It’s very uncomfortable and very difficult. But not doing it means you are guaranteed not to win and not to improve.

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I have been talking a lot about differentiation being critical for successful digital marketing. On Monday, I gave a differentiation example for large companies and on Wednesday I gave an example of a small company needing to differentiate. And differentiation online often requires specializing–not just extolling how your product is different and better, but actually choosing particular uses, particular market segments, and just plain smaller markets than you tried to serve with offline marketing. And that’s just plain scary.

Specializing makes everyone fraidy-scared–large companies, small companies and every kind of company in between.

Why? Because we all run a little scared in our businesses, at least sometimes. We all reach for revenue that isn’t exactly a fit for us. We all try to be all things to all people at times, because we need the money. Very few of us are running at capacity. Hardly any of us think that we are making enough money. The few of us that think we are OK at the moment would still like to be making more now because who knows whether it could all go south next week.

So, when someone approaches you with something that isn’t exactly your specialty, but you still think you could pull it off, you say yes. If someone wants to buy your product to solve a problem that isn’t quite what it was designed for, but you think it could work, you sell it. If a customer wants you to do some consulting on a subject that you have passing knowledge of, you often say yes. And none of that is bad. We can all do many things capably that are not in our sweet spots, and our products can be used in many ways that they aren’t exactly perfect for. Accepting these opportunities is not a problem.

Where it becomes a problem is when we broaden that to our marketing. When we market our products or services as if they actually are perfect across that wide range of opportunities that we’d accept, we actually do ourselves a disservice online.

Let me explain. In order to appear to do everything, it might start to appear that you specialize in nothing. Indulge me in a personal example. I could market myself as knowing how to do everything in digital marketing, and truthfully, I have taken on many projects and performed capably–clients have been pleased and have asked me back.

But if all I had on my Web site was that I do digital marketing, then when someone is looking for search marketing or social media marketing–my real sweet spots–they would not find me, even though those areas are certainly within digital marketing. So, when clients have more specialized needs they are looking for more specialized things, so I am much better off marketing myself as someone who specializes in those areas, rather than leaving the impression that I am equally adept at e-mail marketing, mobile marketing, and display advertising, which I am not.

Someday, even search and social might be too broad. There might be so many people in those spaces and the depth of knowledge required there might be so great that I need to specialize even more.

But it is scary. Even I feel it. I mean, I can certainly put together a good e-mail marketing strategy and I can explain how to set up your return on investment for mobile marketing–so why shouldn’t I put all that stuff on my Web site? After all, if I don’t, won’t I be losing those opportunities because people think I am too specialized? Why shouldn’t I list everything?

Because it muddies the waters, that’s why. The truth is that I am way better at search and social strategies and search and social ROI than at those other tasks, and if I just lay everything out there, my specialities don’t shine through. Even if I lose a few opportunities that I can capably handle, it’s not worth the risk of losing more opportunities that I am perfect for. And those opportunities that I am perfect for are much easier for me to actually win the jobs, not just win attention on my site and then later lose out to someone who seems more of a specialist in that area than I am. And, I am more likely to do a fantastic job when it is my specialty, which leads to happy customers who want more and who will refer me to others.

Don’t get trapped in trying to do everything. Focus your marketing to appear to be the specialist that you really are, for products or services. And don’t be afraid to specialize even more as time goes on. It’s actually the secret to attention on the Web.

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While I am usually preaching differentiation to large businesses, I have been working with a lot of small businesses lately in my workshops and online courses. Seems like 2012 is the year that a bunch of small businesses decided to get serious about digital. And some of them aren’t always happy about my advice, because their differentiation has always been about their location. If you own a retail store or a local service business, your marketing has probably been lame, but you’ve never had to pay for that before. With digital marketing, you must differentiate or die. Let me explain.

Recently, one of the students in my class came to me not understanding this concept. He has had a successful store that sells eyeglasses and other vision aids. And he wants to sell online. Great idea, except what does he have to offer?

When I asked him this question, he quickly rattled off his time-worn pitch. “We have great selection, great service, and low prices.” Well, OK. So, I asked him a few more questions:

• Do you have the best selection of any online provider? No, not even close.
• What service exactly do you provide for someone buying online. Gee, nothing, really.
• Do you have low prices compared to other online vendors. No, they are lower.

Problems for our heroes.

To compete on the Internet, you need to have something special. That hoary marketing pitch (selection, service, prices) worked just fine when you were competing against a couple of places a few miles from you. I bet you could beat them in all of those areas if you knew what you were doing.

But you can’t compete on price with mail-order contact lens shops. Or on selection either. And who is doing any service?

What should they do instead? They must find a way to differentiate, which usually involves specializing. So, I started asking questions about what they do that no one else does. Something they are really good at. And they told me that they have two very interesting areas that they do very well:

• Eyeglasses for the mentally challenged. Many people that need eyeglasses can’t handle them. They lose them, break them, refuse to wear them, and otherwise lose the value of the glasses. This shop knows what kinds of glasses can work very well for this population and they know how to explain what kinds of glasses work for what kinds of people. What they haven’t figured out is whether they can do this for people that don’t come into the store, because it is so individualized. But it is a least a start.
• Vision aids for athletes. They’ve noticed that in recent years more and more athletes come in with particular vision correction needs and they know which needs (and which sports) seem to correlate to which eyewear.  They think this one could be a bit easier to do online because it isn’t as personalized.

Now, this company is still a long way from being a digital marketing powerhouse. It is not simple for them to sell online. Frames are one thing, but contact lenses and lenses require explanations for customers for getting exact measurements that aren’t always on the prescription. And they have to ship things and manage returns and…it isn’t a breeze.

But expecting to sell whatever they have in the store with nothing but a catalog is even more unrealistic. By thinking through the first steps of differentiation, at least they have a fighting chance. What differentiation do you need for your business?

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Most of you know that a great deal of my consulting is for large businesses, and–especially if you work for a small business–you might think that large businesses don’t need to specialize. If they’ve got all that money and they can produce whatever amounts they can sell, why would they need to specialize. After considering it for a moment, you might say to yourself that maybe large businesses would need to specialize only when they were up against other large companies. But you’d be wrong.

I wish that I could tell you the company–it would make the story a lot better–but all I can say is that it is a health care product, one you’ve probably heard of. And the manufacturer has done all the right things–advertising, distribution, shelf space, you name it. But with all of those techniques, you can only say so much. And this product has been positioned as much as it can be against its competitors–some large and some small.

And they’ve had no success with digital marketing. It’s not an e-Commerce product, so it will never be sold online. But the manufacturer has always done a good job of distributing coupons that are redeemable in store so that they can count how effective their digital marketing is. And the news is bleak. Very few people are coming to their Web site and even fewer are printing coupons. Fewer yet redeem them.

What to do?

I asked  a few pointed questions. Are there a few conditions for which this product is head and shoulders better than its competitors? Is there a kind of person who would much rather use this product than others? Are there places that it would work better than others?

They all said, “Oh yes. Doctors constantly tell us about how…and customers recommends us for…and we always hear about people using it at…” And then I asked, do you talk about this on your Web site? Or in your marketing. They don’t.

They never even thought of it because traditional marketing affords no way to do it. You can’t get into marketing messages that detailed and that specialized and that targeted in traditional marketing. But on the Web, that’s what works best.

I can’t guarantee that this approach will jump-start their sales, but it has a much better chance than what they’ve been doing.

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Sometimes I am making a speech and I realize that I am meeting a lot of traditional marketers–people my age (or even I admit, a little younger) who are trying to make the adjustment to digital. And as I am speaking, and explaining concepts, and exhorting people to take a chance and make a change, I realize something. The people that are sitting in front of me are going to be fine. It’s the folks that don’t want to listen that are screwed. It happened to me again last week in Princeton at the executive breakfast for the Greater Philadelphia Senior Executives Group (GPSEG) (slides here). The people in the audience asked great questions. They paid attention. They came in already knowing a lot. But there are many, many others that are trying to slide by–telling themselves that they can retire in five years so they don’t really have to learn this stuff. Those people are wrong–they don’t have five years.

The pace of change is accelerating and technology is driving it. Many areas of life are affected, but marketing is the one I like to talk about most. Think about how much different the world is from five years ago. In 2007, no one was marketing on Facebook. Or Twitter. Or YouTube. Even B2B companies had not heard of LinkedIn. Few companies did anything significant in mobile. Fast forward five years and there are few companies that aren’t doing at least one of these–most have two or more. If you go five years further, who can even imagine what we will be doing then?

But it isn’t the particular tactics or venues that matter. It’s the philosophy. Don’t worry about whether you should be spending on paid search with Google or whether YouTube search grows even faster or whether Facebook does its own search. Just focus on being attractive to searchers wherever they are.

Don’t fixate on which social network is important this month. Instead, focus on creating content that people want to share. They figure out how they want to share it.

Every time you start to feel overwhelmed at the thought of keeping up with a million different tactics, stop. No one can do that, anyway, so why drive yourself nuts? Instead, go back to the core principles. Good content attracts. Good content gets shared. If you focus there, it matters a lot less why it attracted them or how they shared it. Just make sure that you can count everything so you know what is working and what isn’t. Then let ‘er rip.

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I am a retired IBM Distinguished Engineer. (My wife says that makes me an Extinguished Engineer.) So, you might guess that I am fairly comfortable with the technical side of social media, but there’s one thing I don’t like, which is that technical people like to make up new fancy words to describe what they make, even if no one knows what they mean. One of my biggest pet peeves is in Web Analytics, where we’ve got names for page views, impressions, e-mail opens, and who knows what else, when they all answer the question, “Did someone see what I did?” We make it really complicated to get that simple answer. My latest favorite term is the social graph.

The social graph is the latest techie term for the labyrinth of connections in a social network. If you think about how social networks operate, you realize that you have a network of Facebook friends, and each of your friends has his or her own network, too. If you tried to map those connections, you’d realize that you are connected to everyone else in the network eventually, as long as you are willing to take enough hops. In LinkedIn, they make this explicit, showing you that you are a second- or third-level connection with someone else and they let you introduce yourself through your first level connections.

Facebook has the most extensive social graph, and marketers can use it to advertise in the streams of their fans, for example. The Bing search engine even shows you search results for products your friends “liked.” But one of the biggest limitations of the Facebook social graph is that it is proprietary.

Social graph theory is actually a term of social science term that talks about the relationships that people have with each other.  People. Not Facebook friends.

And that’s the big limitation of any of these social networks. People don’t own their own relationships. Facebook does. But people have a little joke that they pull on Facebook–they have relationships outside of Facebook. They have relationships through LinkedIn or Google+ or Twitter or e-mail or (God forbid) real life.

It is yet to be seen how the Facebook social graph differs from the actual social graph. Sometimes the social networks try to compensate for this. A few months ago, Facebook asked to mine my e-mail contacts to get me new LinkedIn connections. It did it really badly and ended up spamming a boatload of people that might have sent me an e-mail but that I really didn’t know.

What was really funny is that a lot of those distant relationships actually accepted my connection request.

And I realized that I don’t use any of these social networks the way most people do, because I accept every blessed request that comes way way, figuring that someone read my book or saw me speak or saw me on YouTube or was sent a link to this very blog post. Why should I refuse their request?

But what does that mean when it comes to my social graph?

Well, it likely makes the recommendations of my “friends” on Bing rather pointless. (It’s possible that it is pointless anyway, because just because a fellow social media speaker recommends a gas grill doesn’t mean I would like it.) It also means that the ad streams that run through my Facebook experience miss the mark far more than they hit it.

But would that be true if people got control of their own data and then allowed select advertisers to see the real social graph. No it wouldn’t (yet) show in-person interactions, but suppose you could combine all the social activity across all the online venues. And suppose I could sell acces to my full social graph for a price to advertisers?

It might sound like science fiction but it is not that difficult a technical problem. It’s just a question as to whether consumers or governments will force the proprietary social graphs to share, and to put people in charge of their own information. I expect it to happen. Will you as marketers be ready to bargain with consumers for access to their data, or are you depending on buying access from Facebook?

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Aaron Kim had a great post yesterday on our expectations of what social media tools will do for us. That got me  thinking about how social media wasn’t the first tool that we have such outsized expectations for. For some reason, we expect that tools will help us impose the self-control around our days–maybe even our lives–that we fail to impose on our own. Aaron made several comparisons to e-mail in his post, which brought to mind my own love-hate relationship with e-mail over the years.

I have been using e-mail longer than most people. Granted, I am old, but even for people my age, it was unusual to be using e-mail in the ’70s. But I was a computer geek and we send e-mail to each other. I was even sending Internet e-mail in 1985, although I don’t remember us calling it the Internet at the time.

At first, e-mail was pure productivity. I only sent and received a few each day and they were relatively important, just as the snail mail letters that they replaced where important. But, over time, a funny thing happened. As the volume of e-mail increased. more and more e-mails were confusing communication or a downright waste of time.

And they began to pile up. And up. And up.

Eventually I had thousands of e-mails in my inbox on a regular basis, and could never find anything and was losing to-dos left and right. Then I started handling e-mails when I got them, clearing them out to do later by storing them in a place I went back to on a regular basis-a to-do list. Gee, now I am getting more done.

And I was using the same e-mail program the whole time. It wasn’t the tool that needed to organize my communication (although perhaps a better tool would have helped me think differently about e-mail). I needed to organize my communication and use e-mail effectively.

I am not sure that we should expect more out of social media. We might need someone to explain how to organize social media just as someone needed to explain how to organize e-mail to me. I’m not sure that the tools will do it for us. I can always find a way to waste time with any tool.

It’s not the social media tool. It’s what you do with the tool.

Yesterday’s monthly Biznology® Webinar was called “Global Search Marketing.” I talked for 30 minutes about how to optimize your Web site for a global audience.   Lots of companies have products that can be sold outside their home country, but search marketing makes it easier than ever. Focus on what customers want, what content you need to persuade them, and how they can find it—those three keys will give you search marketing success in any country. If you’ve been unsure of whether you have what it takes to market globally, don’t miss this chance to find out.

In this Webinar, you’ll find out how to use social media to listen to your customers and gain insights into their interests.  I show you how to segment and target your international markets by using different keywords for each country and each language.  I discuss how to test to see if your marketing is working, and how to optimize your Web site so that you can be found by customers worldwide.  In this free 30-minute Biznology® Webinar, learn how to listen to your international customers, determine their needs and choose keywords for each market segment.  I show you how to work with translators and use proper coding so that your Web site can be found by search engines globally.

Global Search Marketing from Mike Moran on Vimeo.

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I spend a lot of time speaking and consulting on agile marketing–what I wrote about a lot in Do It Wrong Quickly–and I often use the example of television commercials as the very antithesis of agile marketing, the epitome of old media. Agile marketing is all about experimentation, feedback, testing, data–just about the opposite of anything you can do with TV commercials. While you certainly can run tests for commercials and you can get some data, it is very expensive and very late in the process. But all that is changing.

More and more, TV commercials are being viewed online as much or more than on TV, meaning that the feedback process available for agile marketing is now possible for TV commercials, too. The hottest ad of this year’s Super Bowl, from Volkswagen, has garnered over 50 million views on YouTube, which is almost half of the number of viewers who watched the game.  Chipotle premiered a commercial on YouTube that has gotten six million views–and it is over two minutes long. I am not sure it has been shown on TV in any form.

So, what’s happening here?

Yes, the viewing numbers still seem relatively small, compared to TV, but remember, the price is zero–a lot less than buying TV ad time. But something else is at work here.

Viral videos are the new badge of honor among ad agencies. It’s one thing to pay to have an ad aired and rack up big viewership numbers. It’s another thing to have viewers voluntarily watch your commercial on their own, with no TV show surrounding it that really catches their attention.

So, if even TV advertisers are moving online and watching their ads grow in popularity one happy viewer at a time, perhaps billboards are next…

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Social media marketing should be integrated within cross-country markets. From country to country , the popular social networks differ, as do languages  and cultures. But there are other challenge for large global organizations. Such organizations can market different products in different countries, some of which could potentially complete with each other. In offline marketing it was a lesser issue. Advertisements were country specific. Now when advertisements are in social media, they can be accessed across borders. How do marketers respond?

First, this isn’t purely a social media issue–it crops up for search marketing, e-mail marketing, and lots of other online marketing activities. But what’s the answer?

In some venues (Facebook, for example), you can target ads to people within certain countries, so you can continue to approach this problem country market by country market, as you have in offline advertising. When you can’t do that (Twitter, YouTube), you can sometimes segregate by language (if you post something in Norwegian, it’s likely no one in Costa Rica will look at it).

But you might have situations where you have the competing products in different countries with the same language. For that situation, what you do might depend on your business. If it’s a product business and you can actually bill in any country and ship the product, you might just let it all play out. If someone in country A wants to buy the product from country B and you can profitably do that, go ahead.

But if you are selling a product or service that can’t be so easily provided to the “wrong” country, then you might change the experience so that you ask people what country they are in and tell them that you don’t offer that product or service in that country, but here is a similar offering from our company designed for your market. It might sound lame, but customers are much more sophisticated about marketing than they once were. If you answer them honestly, they will understand.

But if you can actually sell that product in the “wrong” country, that’s a lot better.