If you’re in marketing, or if your idea of a good time is following privacy issues beyond just those associated with Facebook and Instagram, you’ve certainly heard the phrase “remarketing” in 2012.  From a marketing perspective, remarketing is a dream.  It’s the web world’s automated equivalent of a salesperson getting the phone number of a prospect who visited the “store” in order to contact the person at a later date — except remarketing does not know anything about the person to whom the sales messages will be delivered, other than that the person had visited a coded website, and remarketing simply feeds ads to the prospects as they peruse various websites fed by Google ads.

In a nutshell, once someone visits your site, a code from your site is placed on the person’s browser that allows Google to feed your remarketing ads to the person at a schedule you create.  These can be pay-per-click ads, so it only cost you money if the person clicks on the ad.  Even better is that if, while on your site, the person does what you want him to do (ie purchases, signs up for a class, fills in a contact form, etc.), the remarketing code can be removed automatically.  The thought is, why spend money marketing to someone who just bought?  Then again, your remarketing dollars to that person can be spent on getting a testimonial from the buyer.  Pretty cool, huh?

Here’s Google’s webinar on remarketing.  It’s one hour long, but worth it if you want to understand how it works.

Okay, here’s what happened. An eblast was sent for our client, Sherman Health. One of the stories in the weekly newsletter teased a great gluten free recipe for chocolate puddle cookies. Sounds freaking nummers, right? It is. You should bake these cookies and I will eat them for you.

Anyway, here’s what the eblast teaser looked like.

The eblast was written, reviewed, and sent in a swift and effective manner. Only one problem this time: the link to the story pointed people to an old article for a pumpkin butter recipe.

Curses!

Now, when a mistake like this is found, most people would correct it and send a recall eblast. But because we had the mistake link under our control, we were able to come to a different solution. Here’s what we added to the incorrect landing page.

In a nutshell, eblast mistakes (or any internet marketing mistakes) hurt and are panic-inducing. But if you can find a way to correct the issue honestly and have fun while doing it, it just might be even more effective than it would have been had you gotten everything right in the first place.

With Google+ being launched on a field trial basis this past month, much commotion has been made among internet consumers and marketers alike. The Google+ project is said to take on the Facebook dynasty in new and innovative ways. The network is similar to Facebook but has many of its own unique qualities. Google+, already being labeled as a social network, will essentially utilize all Google products into its navigation bar for a more complete experience.

For marketers, Google+ should provide enormous opportunities. While Facebook marketers can gain some insight into their consumers based on likes and their history on the Facebook website, Google+ may have the ability to do much more than that…

Imagine a consumer searching the Google homepage, researching a new electronics product they wish to purchase. After clicking on an ad from Google Adwords they are transported to your website promoting and selling that product. They come close to purchase but never convert. This would be the end of tracking for a marketer without Google+. What if you could then follow the consumer to their Google+ account where they go to ask for recommendations from the people they trust? This is the place for “remarketing”, where you could utilize hyper-targeted ads for these on the fence buyers to offer them free shipping with their purchase of the electronic item. Boom – Conversion.

Google+ has yet to launch to the public, nor has it made any announcement about its plans for Google+ advertisement, however the potential is there. Personally, I believe that privacy issues will be the biggest concern for Google+ when ad and marketing development comes into play. It will be interesting to see in the future how Google+ pans out for marketers, consumers and just plain internet users in the future.

Note: The following story is completely true.

I love books. I don’t actually read them, but collecting them is righteous. Oh, how smart I appear! So imagine my elation when I discovered this email on a fateful January morning.

Naturally, I printed my mystery coupon and scooted to the nearby Barnes & Noble. I browsed around for a bit, then snagged a copy of a hardcover I’ve had my eye on for a while, The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee. $25 book, but I was going to save 50%, so it was a no brainer.

Alarmingly, my scanned coupon revealed just a 10% savings. I did NOT see that coming. So did I return the book? That would be a no. In fact, the B&N employee upsold a yearly membership to me. Hey, back off, it only cost $20!

So, to recap, here are the events that transpired after I printed my email coupon:

1. I bought a $25 hardcover and saved 10%, the lowest possible savings
2. I purchased a $20 annual membership
3. I have since purchased two additional hardcovers online to take advantage of free express shipping (membership perk, baby!)

So how did this happen? Quite simply, the natural allure that comes with rolling the dice did me in even before I printed the coupon. That slight adrenaline kick combined with my already-present love of books to hook me from the get-go.

And the big question: what does this mean for your email marketing campaigns? Well, if you have any kind of product that can be sold, you might consider holding a fun little Mystery Savings campaign. Your subscribers may love what you’re offering as much as I love books, and if that’s the case, they won’t even know what hit them.

I love basketball. The Chicago Bulls’ and Michael Jordan’s dynasty in the 1990s happened when I was young enough to understand it, but not old enough to fully appreciate it (Example: when John Paxson was hitting the series-clinching 3 against Phoenix in 1993, I was upstairs playing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on NES). By the time I understood just how special the team’s run was, it was disassembled and Jordan was long gone.

But it’s not all bad, for we still have his “Jumpman” logo and regularly-released shoes by Nike to promote the Jordan brand. One of the latest shoes to hit stores is the Jordan Melo M6, the 6th shoe released with Denver’s Carmelo Anthony as the spokesman and model. Tip: if you ever run into Melo, try to keep from calling him a model. He may not dig it.

What does this have to do with online marketing? Nothing yet. But when you visit the M6 website, you’ll be greeted with a series of auto-launching videos that offer behind-the-scenes looks at the shoe’s design, feedback from testers, and a couple of interviews with Anthony.

It’s an extremely slick and well-made experience that challenges the notion of what a landing page is supposed to be. Even after the series of videos concludes, you can read more about the benefits of playing with the shoe, the inspiration stitched into each pair (I particularly like the miniature Baltimore skyline), and the shoe’s many different color schemes to choose from.

Will I be getting a pair? Certainly not. But I’m past my prime, and never spent more than $100 on basketball shoes back in the day. If I were shopping for a new high-end shoe, creative video such as this might just have tipped it in.

Click here to visit the M6 website. Quick performance note: Since the videos auto-load, you could be at the mercy of your Internet connection. If it’s lagging, pause it to give your ISP some time to catch up.

According to the July, 2010 issue of Scientific American, online ratings sites are not exactly fair, with the writer even declaring that their “judgments are inaccurate at best, fraudulent at worst.”  Whoa, that’s a pretty hard slap in the face.

What drives this opinion is some pretty good research combined with some good old common sense.

Eric K. Clemons, Professor of Operations and Systems Management at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, says there are quite a few inherent biases in online ranking systems.  The first one is that people who rate a purchase already made the purchase so they already are slanted toward liking the product.  The best example of this is consumer reviews of books.  In general, people who buy a book when it’s first released already have some knowledge of the writer or subject.  They may even be a fan.  So the first consumer reviews to come out are normally positive.  These high ratings lead other people who may never have considered the book to give it a try.  If they end up hating the book, it may be because their expectations were too high.  But instead of leaving well enough alone, these dissatisfied readers might post a negative review just to balance out the positive ones.

Glenn Beck Book Review on Amazon -- Click to Enlarge

Then there’s the point that “people tend not to review things they find merely satisfactory.  They evangelize what they love and trash things they hate.”  That’s why most ratings are not in the middle, despite the fact that true opinions follow a bell curve, where “ratings cluster around three or four, with fewer scores of two and almost no ones and fives.”  So basically, those with the most emotional connectivity to a product tend to do the most reviewing.

But it gets worse.

In a 2009 study of more than 20,000 items on Amazon, researchers “found that a small percentage of users accounted for a huge majority of the reviews.”  They’re called “super reviewers” and they’re even given a “Top Reviewer” badge by Amazon and then pitted against one another to promote even more participation.  But who says this overly enthusiastic crowd is any good at what they are doing?  What credentials do they have, other than a lengthy list of products they reviewed?  And why do consumers see these reviewers’ badges and think they have some sound advice?  In general, 95% of Amazon reviewers have rated fewer than 8 products, yet consumers put less weight in what this majority says.

Fortunately, these “Top Reviewers” are not paid by the companies whose products they review — at least as far as any researchers can tell.  Plus, ratings sites in general use automated filters to search out and purge extremely positive or negative reviews, especially if the reviewer has little on his list of review.  So while the reviews shouldn’t be trusted, it’s not because anyone is tampering with the system.

But the story points out that there are fair review sites out there, it just depends on the products and the audience.  RateBeer.com has 3,000 members who have rated at least 100 beers each, with just about all beers being reviewed hundreds, if not thousands of times.  These reviewers are passionate about their beer, and so are the readers of the site.  In fact, the reviewers tend to post on all beers they try, rather than just those they love or hate.

So what’s a business to do about review sites?  Take them seriously, regardless of how inaccurate they are, and treat review sites as an opportunity to engage readers in your brand.  Because while the system may have flaws, most readers do not know it; thus, they read the reviews and believe what they read.

So treat review sites like a dinner party where the conversation turns negative about your company or product, and respond professionally.

We’ve had a lot of fun on Charles Chat the past few years keeping you up to date on the latest marketing and advertising trends, writing about them, and receiving insightful comments and feedback from our community of readers. But as everybody knows, when you grow you need to upgrade too. That’s why we’re continuing the adventure here, at our newly redesigned blog/Internet magazine, The Spark Report.

Why “The Spark Report,” you may wonder? With social media and Internet marketing changing the advertising landscape every day, we’re constantly challenging ourselves, learning, adapting, and more importantly: innovating. We even have internal monthly new technology meetings where everyone comes together to share leading edge ideas. We’ve used all that knowledge to create and refine our own custom program that takes social media to a whole new trackable level. We call it Sparking because, well, we invented it and there wasn’t a word for it.

We’ve been running and refining Sparking since before most people even knew what a Tweet was. And our program has become kind of a big deal. Sparking really generates results — and we generate the proof. At the end of every month we provide detailed, quantifiable reports that would make any CFO sit back and smile. Want to learn more?

So while Charles is still our main man, with this many web marketing and advertising specialists on our team offering their knowledge and unique perspectives, we’ve expanded our format from a blog into something more like an online magazine. Hence, we’re changing the title to The Spark Report, a name more in line with what we’re about — sparking relationships through the use of traditional and social media and new technology.

Now we bid adieu to Charles Chat (although all of our past blogs have been imported), and we continue the adventure here at TheSparkReport.com. We look forward to your feedback!

My company spends a great deal of time searching the internet for good, bad and related information about our clients in order to make sure the “right” information is in the public domain. While bad reviews online are nothing new (and neither is backlash to them, disgruntled companies usually got nowhere when they tried to sue the forum themselves mainly because the Federal Communications Decency Act gives Web sites immunity in libel cases when the comments are posted by users.

Still, businesses can always sue users themselves, and some are starting to do so. One case making headlines here in early January was brought by Steven Biegel, a chiropractor in San Francisco, against a former patient who slammed Biegel on the review site Yelp in November 2007.

Biegel alleges in court papers that he was defamed by Christopher Norberg’s post, in which he complained about a billing dispute. According to the complaint, Norberg said in his post that he was charged more than he expected and that Biegel “couldn’t give me a straight answer as to why the jump in price.” At another point in the post, Norberg wrote that he later “found a much better, honest chiropractor.”

Offering negative opinions isn’t defamatory, but false statements of facts can be. Biegel says Norberg’s statements constitute libel because they suggest he was dishonest.

Biegel’s lawyer asked Norberg to remove the post or face suit. Norberg apparently took down the post, but then submitted a write-up about the threatened lawsuit. “Never in my life would I have imagined being taken to court for a Yelp review, especially for seeing someone for two visits that I felt were not adequate,” he wrote. He also offered to send the original post to anyone who requested it. Today, it can be seen in its entirety as an exhibit attached to Biegel’s lawsuit, posted at Norberg’s site StandForSpeech.com

It’s not clear whether a court will view Norberg’s post as actionable, but it’s certainly plausible that a judge will agree with Biegel that the post contained facts aimed at impugning his honesty. In that case, Norberg could potentially be on the hook for libel, unless he can show that the comments were true.

Certainly, Norberg seems to believe he acted in good faith — and it’s possible he will ultimately prevail. Nonetheless, in many ways, this incident highlights the risks users run when they post to review sites. Consider, if Norberg had made those identical statements to a newspaper reporter, it’s not likely that the paper would have published them without first attempting to verify them. Of course, many newspaper publishers are sophisticated about libel law and have lawyers on retainer who can assist with the hard calls.

But sites like Yelp are under no obligation to vet comments because the sites are immune from defamation suits based on users’ posts. In fact, review sites probably would go out of business if they had to decide whether to print comments in advance. Nonetheless, users themselves are still exposed — and, unlike professional publishers, those users aren’t familiar with the nuances of defamation.

The key here is that when writing reviews and posts, your information MUST be accurate. Not only is it just right, but it’s also the law. You will look extremely silly if your post is exposed as a fake, and the damage will be long term. So keep it straight.

Also, do not forget to put links in your posts that lead back to your site where someone can register for updates, RSS feeds, etc. It makes little sense to draw people in just to let them search around and leave without telling you who they are or why they’re interested in you.