martyweil.net

Significant New Web-based Marketing Consideration for B2B Brands Emerges

A development in web addressing that occurred last year hasn’t received a great amount of trade press coverage, but the implication for web-based marketing— B2B and B2C both— may be quite significant. A series of articles in the Washington Post have covered this well.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the organization that regulates the naming of Web addresses, has opened up the generic top level domain name string (gTLD)— what appears to the right of the dot in an URL (e.g., .com, .net, .edu)— to include hundreds of new endings which may relate directly to what a company does or brand represents.

ICANN has expanded domain names before, but, as Brian Winterfeldt (an attorney for Steptoe & Johnson in Washington, DC) notes in a Washington Post article by Catherine Ho, this is the first time there is a large-scale opportunity for companies to apply for whatever they wanted. (Winterfeldt has helped companies apply for gTLDs like .coach for the handbag manufacturer and .hbo for the cable channel.)

As the article notes:

Having exclusive control of a domain would give a company an edge over competitors by claiming a space to market products or services that their competitors cannot enter. If the parties can’t agree amongst themselves, it will go to an auction process before ICANN, and the highest bidder will win.

The proceeds of the auction go to ICANN, which has already made $350 million from the applications that cost $185,000 each to submit. According to Winterfeldt, who is also a member of ICANN’s Intellectual Property Constituency, a group within the organization that advocates for brand owners, there is no limit to how much a company can bid.

Fallout from the development is being seen on multiple fronts.

One area is in brand protection, where companies are moving to protect their brands as they new domain names become available. As Ho points out in a subsequent Post article: “The race to snap up a fresh batch of Internet addresses is spawning a new round of disputes as businesses scramble to secure exclusive rights to words that represent their brand — or at least prevent their competitors from doing so.”

A good example of this is Dish Network’s (Dish) attempt to claim .direct as a gTLD. DirectTV challenged that bid, claiming that its use by Dish would confuse consumers seeking their services. Their challenge was upheld by the Geneva-based World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), which rejected Dish’s attempt to claim the tag.

Among Internet industry officials, many are raising a red flag at this expansion of domains, contending that it could cause widespread disruptions. Craig Timberg has addressed this on the Post’s Technology section:

Particularly troubling is the possibility of widespread “name collisions” that could happen when domains used by internal corporate computer systems — such as “.corp” or “.home” — get assigned to the Web more broadly. This could cause systems to fail, blocking access to e-mail or other internal programs, and also could open sensitive information to theft, some experts say.

Timberg notes that ICANN and its supporters dispute this, saying that the potential problems have been long understood and will be resolved before new domains are approved. He quotes ICANN’s chief security officer, who says that as the new domains will be released gradually, over the course of months, there is ample time to manage problems if they arise.

For businesses of all sizes, it behooves consideration of what is coming. Web marketing continues to become increasingly strategic, and the possibility of promoting one’s brand— or having it attacked— via web domain will give many pause.

“What’s in a name?” The Bard would perhaps be astonished at how many dollars and hours are being thrown at that question in today’s digital age. Some are going to come out of this smelling sweet; others not so much.

How B2B Marketers Can Scan the Entire Internet in 44 Minutes

A recent post by Timothy B. Lee on the Washington Post’s The Switch blog details the new breakthrough by researchers at the University of Michigan which enables scanning of the Internet— yes, every address on the entire Internet— in just 44 minutes using an ordinary server. At the Usenix security conference in Washington, the research team announced ZMap, the new tool that enables this feat. (Previously, the process took two to three months.)

For a technical explanation of how ZMap does this, we suggest that you go to Lee’s post, but what caught our eye was some of things the Michigan team was able to glean from a scan. Lee cites four of these, two of which are below:

• The increasingly encrypted Web
  More and more Web sites are using the encrypted HTTPS version of the Web’s fundamental protocol. How quickly are organizations switching? In the past, getting even a single estimate was a slow and expensive process. But ZMap not only answers the question in under an hour, but through regular scanning it can track the growing popularity of HTTPS over time. Using ZMap, the Michigan researchers found that over the last year, HTTPS use by the top 1 million Web sites has increased by about 23 percent, and the number of HTTPS overall increased by almost 20 percent.
  
  
• How hurricanes damage the Internet
  When major natural disasters strike, they can force computers offline. That provides a clever way to measure the extent of damage. From Oct. 29-31 of last year, as Hurricane Sandy was pounding the East Coast of the United States, the researchers conducted Internet-wide scans every two hours. After linking IP addresses to geographic locations, they could observe which areas saw the most severe disruptions.
  
  

For us, the story was one of technology catching up to technology, or perhaps of how zealous we humans are in searching out the unknown. Sometimes the Internet seems to be expanding at universe-like dimensions, but ZMap, like the Hubble telescope, shows our doggedness in devising means of understanding what at first apprehension seems almost unfathomable.

How to do B2B Content Marketing without Creating Content

In an interesting post on the Fast Company blog, Lisa Lacour calls out five ways to craft a killer content marketing strategy— without creating any content.

While she acknowledges that original content sets the tone for content marketing efforts, she points to two factors that mitigate the angst that often accompanies the idea of that creation: one, that the investment of time and money it takes to create great content doesn’t have to be a barrier to entry for businesses; and two, that the sheer amount of free content online makes activities like curation arguably more important than content creation itself. “The key is the way you distribute and supplement (original content) with other, lower touch tactics,” she says. Here are five she recommends as among the best:

1. Seek Professional Help
   While it’s important that at least one person in your organization is creating content, outsourcing some of the work is an easy way to supplement your overall output and incorporate new perspectives. Consider adding the skills of a professional writer to augment your internal resources.
   
   
2. Repurpose Earned Media
   If you’re already investing in PR or getting coverage in the press, you should absolutely be getting extra mileage out of media placements. An incredibly easy way to do this is by including coverage on your blog (check the original publication’s reposting guidelines first). Also, you can drive traffic to it through content recommendation tools that will link to placements on other relevant sites.
   
   
3. Curate, Curate, Curate
   The role of curation is becoming increasingly important as the sheer amount of information continues to proliferate. As a business, you’re in an ideal position to help your customers make sense of all the content on the web, particularly if you’re in a highly specialized market.
   
   
4. Partner Up
   The basic idea: get guaranteed eyeballs for your content by leveraging someone else’s audience. As more brands and businesses get involved in content marketing, a content ecosystem has developed that opens the door for creative partnerships among non-competitive businesses. Cross-promotion through social media and email marketing, content sharing, and exchanging of ad space are all examples of potential partnerships that can help expose your content to a new audience.
   
   
5. Crowdsource It
   Similar to earned media, you should be incorporating crowdsourcing into your content marketing strategy if you’re already investing in social media. Storify is a great tool for this purpose— it enables you to turn social interactions into beautifully designed content. So conversations with your Facebook or Twitter followers can easily be repackaged for another channel.

These are excellent ideas. Send us an email if you’d like some more from our experience and perspective.

Inbound Logistics Runs CDC Flu Vaccine Transport Case Study

My article about how the CDC transports temperature-sensitive flu vaccines to developing countries appeared in the August issue of Inbound Logistics. The case study discusses CDC's selection of UPS to ship the vaccines and the strong working relationship between Walgreens and UPS.

This is my fifth article for Inbound Logistics in 2013.

APICS Work Cited in Book on Lean Manufacturing

Two articles of mine where cited in Steve Bell's book, Lean Enterprise Systems: Using IT for Continuous Improvement (John Wiley & Sons).

Bell used content from articles I wrote for APICS, which appeared in the magazine in 2004 and 2005. Bell's book is part of Wiley's series on system engineering and management.

Where Do B2B Marketers Turn for Fresh Web Content?

If you are ignoring your Web site, then the Web is ignoring you. The hard fact of life in today's Web-driven B2B marketplace is content is king. Why? Fresh content not only establishes your company as an expert in your field, but it also garners attention from the search engines, which helps customer find you before they find your competitors.

From blog posts to Web site text to podcasts, we provide fresh content for a number of high-profile enterprise business solution providers. (Yes, that's how they keep posting day-after-day while you're busy chasing internal resources to submit their posts.)

We do our work without recognition--as ghost writers--which means you take all the credit as your site moves toward the top of search page results. It also means we can't divulge our clients' names, but, if we did, we're confident that you know and respect their brands.

Implications of Affective Computing for B2B Marketers

In a recent New York Times article, Jenna Wortham explores the emergence of affective computing, which is, basically, emotional artificial intelligence:

Artificial intelligence is creeping into our lives at a steady pace. Devices and apps can anticipate what we need, sometimes even before we realize it ourselves. So why shouldn’t they understand our feelings? If emotional reactions were measured, they could be valuable data points for better design and development. Emotional artificial intelligence, also called affective computing, may be on its way.

Examples from the marketplace: Affectiva, a start-up spun out of the M.I.T. Media Lab, are working on software that trains computers to recognize human emotions based on their facial expressions and physiological responses. Beyond Verbal is working on a software tool that can analyze speech and, based on the tone of a person’s voice, determine whether it indicates qualities like arrogance or annoyance, or both.

Wortham notes how the technology is planning to be used by game developers, to give designers insight into how people feel when their games are played. Another potential use: healthcare. Cited in the article, Printa Gupta, chief product officer at Smule, contends that healthcare may be revolutionized by emotionally aware technology, particularly as devices increasingly interact with one another.

“Tracking how our bodies are responding throughout the day could allow you to tailor your life according to what’s happening to your body throughout the day,” she says. This could allow nutritionists to precisely build meal plans for clients, or for doctors to come up with more efficient medical treatments.

For B2B marketers obsessed with customer satisfaction, the idea of tooling a sales force with affective computing tools may seem intriguing. Is there a day coming soon when we won’t have to rely on customer surveys or focus groups to see how a product or brand elicits a response? Simply dial up the customer on a smart device and see how his face or voice tells the story when a product or brand is named.

While this may seem far-fetched, the continuing advance of technology makes it seem less so over time.

Driving B2B Sales with Content Marketing

 A recent post on Digiday by Mauria Finley, founder and CEO of Citrus Lane, reinforces what we have been saying for some time: that content marketing can be a significant driver of sales. Notes Finley:

The line between editorial content and marketing has never been thinner. Brands are telling their stories through content – creating and distributing articles, posts, photos and videos across social sites and via native ad placements. Or they’re going even further to become all-out publishers, in the way that Johnson & Johnson runs BabyCenter.com, for example. 

Importantly, this holds for the business-to-business sector as well as business-to-consumer, something we’ve experienced as writers for a number of major industrial concerns who publish their own media assets on a regular basis. In fact, the emergence of editorial-focused corporate media, either independently or through established publishers, is something that is becoming rather a trend.

This shouldn’t be surprising. Today’s business consumers are as skeptical as their general brothers and sisters in encountering content that smells strongly of advertising bias. The key is provision of relevant content, informed content, and useful content— with an objective orientation that the consumer will read with more interest and less skepticism.

Achieving the balance necessary is not a simple task, and why we believe that organizations are wise to turn to experienced business journalists to produce such work.

This is what we do, and if you’d like to know more about how this approach to content can benefit your communications, we’d love to talk to you about it.

 

Supply Chain Visibility Case Study Appears in Inbound Logistics

My case study about how Classic Alaska Trading Company tamed the wilds of its inventory and fulfillment operations appears in the July issue of Inbound Logistics. The article details how a Web-based shipping tool helped the retailer meet the challenges of its multi-channel fulfillment processes.

Two more case studies under my byline will appear in Inbound Logstics later this year.

 

 

B2B Marketers Guide to 3D Printing

With the profusion of praise and anticipation attending three-dimensional printing, a recent post on business2community.com gives us all a chance to get a grip on things. Notes tech blogger Robert Rabe:

"Additive manufacturing", the not-so-sexy name for 3D Printing, is hyped to be the biggest paradigm shift in manufacturing since the steam engine over 100 years ago. If the evangelists are right, it will redefine just-in-time manufacturing as it will make real factories, warehouses and inventories a thing of the past… However, people have a pretty wrong perception of this miraculous technology. Many expect it to print ready-made lamps and maybe even computers. This is of course far from realistic.

Rabe points to a list of issues with the technology recently published by Gizmodo, calling out the top three:

1. You can only print one material at once, or material with very similar melting temperatures.
2. One of the praised aspects of 3D printing is making mass customization affordable. However most single-material products rely on economies of scale— an effect additive manufacturing doesn’t benefit from.
3. The objects are printed layer-by-layer, and you can often tell by looking at the result.

Nonetheless, as the post notes, there are opportunities the technology presents, particularly for simple, personalized objects. An excellent example— 10,000,000 printed hearing aids are used worldwide, showing the power of 3D printing for products in need of customization.

A key will be the usability of CAD software, as 3D printers use CAD files as their information source. As Rabe notes, “Today, CAD-software faces serious usability issues and is a pretty tough nut to crack left to professionals. But so were making movies or photo editing 20 years ago, and today they are mass phenomenon thanks to liberalizing software. The same is likely to happen to manufacturing.”

When that will happen is the question. Chances are, we believe, that this will take a little longer than the buzz about the technology might indicate. There’s no doubt 3D printing is coming, but it’s down the road a bit, not just around the corner.