Adam Schultz

I set up this code a good while ago but recently realized that I needed to be sharing this information with the general public.

Basically, If you want to track an external link in Google Analytics as a goal or just to know what’s happening, here is some code to get it done.

Code for JS incude
function goNow(location, linkType){
urchinTracker("/aff-link/" + linkType);
//document.location = location;
window.open(location);
}

Code for your header in every page (remove spaces in open and closing script tags)
< script src="/javascripts/aff-track.js" type="text/javascript">< /script>

Code for your links(remove spaces in open and closing a tags)
< a href="javascript:void(0);" onClick="goNow(' http://www.site.com/affvar=AFFID','linkID');">Link Text< /a >


Use the linkID for whatever you want to show up to differentiate different link types.
It will show up in GA as a page load for www.site.com/aff-link/linkID

Once you get it working, you can set up www.site.com/aff-link/ as a goal page with a $$ value.

Good luck and happy tracking.

So after being invited by a couple of different people to the beta for Gooruze and then not joining, I finally caved last night and logged about 2 hours on the site.

The tech is solid, nothing too spectacular but good. It’s a scalable social media app that focuses on incentivising participation with an action based scoring system.

With about 3 total hours logged, I’m already #20! (Gooruze member standings)

Now as a social media marketer I have seen all of this before in a number of different verticals and I know that the most important aspects of a community are 3 fold.

In order to ensure success you need:

People with a shared passion (interest isn’t enough)
A clear UI
Participation Incentives

But what’s different about Gooruze that has me acting like Tyrone Biggums.

They are focused on MY passion. On-Line Marketing.
They targeted the right people in the industry to be a part of the founding community members to seed the site before even the beta launch.

That being said, I’m hooked.

I can’t not track my site wide ranking as I ask, comment, and write the time away. Now that I am up to # 20 though, who knows how long I will be able to keep it up as more and more brilliant online marketers join this new platform.

I am already talking to the founders about licensing options of this app for a couple of my clients who have a need for mobilizing a passion centric online community. I will keep you posted on some of the details as things move forward.

——————————————–
Ignore please - boldadam.gooruze.com

Dear Move-On.org,

I am writing to you as someone who just received a message from you to call my local representatives about upcoming energy legislation so that it won’t include subsidies to support the coal industry by subsidizing liquefied coal.

You made a well informed point about how it is being presented under the guise of doing something good for the environment while actually supporting higher greenhouse gas output. You ,furthermore, stated that it would be with money that should be and was not going to subsidize renewable energy.

Be that as it may, I felt more compelled to write this letter to you about your failure to get me to act than to actually make the calls to my representatives in the Senate.

“Why not?” You might be asking your self.

You made a greatly motivational case to get me angry, you even gave me a reason to act. I went so far as clicking on the link to make the calls to my Senators.

But, you didn’t close the deal for some reason.

Adam Schultz

So what happened? Why did I lose my urge to act?

I got to this page (above) and thought to myself,

OK, so I have to call these people and talk to them about the fact that I don’t agree with this thing that I just learned about.

But, I don’t know a whole lot about it.

I might have to talk to someone.

What do I say to them.

I can just leave a message about it.

Then, what if they call me back.

How long is this going to take.

Do I know enough to talk to a senator about this.

How long is this going to take.

I should be working.

What would I say anyway.

And then they lost me.

I started to think about how interesting the exchange I just had with myself was. Then I cared more about blogging this concept and exploring what went wrong than with taking the action.

How many other people were thinking the same thing I was?

What would it have taken for me (and and the rest of us) to act as requested rather than get distracted and not?

So what would it have taken?

I really don’t know. It’s the kind of thing that once you start to measure it or try to figure it out after the fact, you most likely get it wrong. You know, like Blink.

But that won’t stop me from trying.

The email worked. I felt like I needed to act. The button told me to “click here”, so I clicked. I think it was the landing page that failed them in this case. I think that if they would have assured me that the time commitment would be very low, given me a brief script and supplied me with some follow up links.

The crazy thing is that they have done all of that before and I did it, I acted, I made some phone calls and tracked my progress, the whole 9. Did they just get lazy or did they have a reason for doing it this way?

I’m sure that I am but a small part of their core action taking group and I would imagine that they have studied what works for maximum affect for the group as a whole.

But what if that is the problem? The whole group.

Another idea for consideration,

It would appear to me that they have 3 types of people on their mail list.

1. People who have never acted
2. People who have ever taken action
3. People who often take action

I haver never seen a change in the format of their emails since I first joined a couple of years ago. Even after my first click and call, I still get the same stuff.

It would make sense to me that people at different phases need different messaging.

For me, they know I will act. I care less about the details of the issue at hand and more about doing something to help make change, anything to help make change. If they were able to target that, I would un-undoubtedly be more valuable to them.

How many people do they have on their list that they could get more value out of by being smarter about the way they ask and how they craft their message?

What do you think?

Did you get this email?

Did you act?

What would it have taken to get you to do so?

I received a MySpace message this morning that sent me on a side track. After writing that post, I found myself asking a bigger question.

I am constantly trying to ride the line in my head for my love of marketing and my hate of being marketed to.

So, where do we draw the line? At what point does grey become black?

Currently, If I feel like if I am adding actual value and I feel like there is a good chance that the people I am marketing to will find some real value in the offer we are giving them or the channel in which we are doing it, it’s not spam.

With pull marketing, most of your efforts are demand based - PPC, SEO, Banners and the like. They are all passively offering a thing or an answer based on a particular interest and require action on behalf of the user to go into play.

Knowing when you cross the line in this world is all about expectation. If you tell them they will get A by clicking here, don’t give them B, S or both when they show up to your url.

Push marketing, however, is a different beast all together. You are infiltrating the home, in-box, profile or community of prospective customers. So you still have the A - B thing to deal with but you are also un-invited.

When un-invited, how do you separate your message from spam.

Is it possible? Can you be intelligent enough about who, how and why you direct market to someone that you are not considered spam?

Can you send something meaty in a spammy way that’s not considered spam?

Does it matter?

Here is an email message I received in MySpace today from an Adult Dating Site that I will not privilege with a link. It was from a profile with the name Heather and no pic of who’s only friend was Tom. If you are in MySpace ever, you know the profile.

Hey Schultzie

How’s it goin? Im Heather and I just moved to the DURHAM area and I wanna meet a nice guy around here :-). I moved here to DURHAM a couple of weeks ago for work and now that I’m here I have nobody to hang out with! I read your profile… You’re cute and I liked what you had to say :-).

I’m just graduated college and I’m lookin for a guy who is a little bit older or more mature than me. You say you’re 28 and you’re cute so I guess you’re qualified

My friend Kim from back home suggested I tried using myspace to meet people in my area. I just signed up and my profile sux hehe. I do have a I put up a dating page at

My dating profile - more pictures (Link to sign up page on adult dating site)

… I have alot of photos and stuff up if you wanna see me. My user name is “summerfun2″. Its free to sign up.

I left you a personal msg on my homepage and I took a new pic for you today. Come check me out when you have a chance, k?

Lookin forward to seeyin ya,

Heather

So… I am impressed.

Not by her casual use of LOL, that she thinks I’m cute (though I am) or that she seems to be promiscuously bubbly with a screen name like “summerfun”. It’s the fact that whatever affiliate is running this latest spam campaign is actually using some smarts rather then just brute force that intrigues me.

First off, lets move past the fact that spam sucks and everyone hates it and try to focus on the marketing opportunity presented.

As far as MySpace spam goes, this was by far the most personal. They mined my readily available profile information to create a message that spoke to my age, name, and location. Now, they didn’t seem to care that I was married or that I had a kid. I guess on adult dating sites, all bets are off.

So why am I writing about spam. Mainly because in my opinion, the difference between using these tactics in a spammy way compared to using them to drive a targeted, community driven, value added social media campaign is fairly thin.

IMHO, If you can create a highly targeted, personalized and valuable message to the people in a community, you can go from spam to direct marketing fairly quickly.

For instance, if I had the tool being used above, and I had a poster website, I would scrape the top movies and top favorite bands on a profile and offer everyone who added my profile to their top friends a free (your fav movie or band here) poster when they spend $??.?? on my site or if they also sign up for my newsletter.

This could be especially successful for indie bands who may not have that much schtuff available in mainstream outlets.

Of course we would include their name and other creepily personal information.

Which brings me to another point.

Alanis Morisette just got more web cred than ever previously possible for a mainstream artist.

I already liked her, she was a cool artist, cut some good tunes that make me think of those wonderfully aquard years of my life where her anger was so much representative of my frustration with the world.

But now, now she has really gone and done something wonderful. She did it by publishing a cover of every cover published of My Humps on YouTube (Below). My Humps was already one of the most covered videos in YouTube by high school and college kids drunk in their rooms. Now, Alanis has gone and covered the coverers.
The video is friggin hilarious, not so much for the content, but the level of disbelief that you feel while you watch it. the whole time your like, “Is that really her, did she just do that, did she go there.” Well it is, she did, she did, and I love her for it. The video got 1.8M views on day one.

Keep your eyes peeled for covers of this cover of covers popping up all over the internet.

There is a marketing lesson here:

Pay attention to your customers, interact with their communities, get down on their level and play by their rules. If you can do all of this in a way that adds value to the community, you will be rewarded greatly.

PS. Does anyone know who directed it? I’m thinking Kevin Smith.

If you have a website and are looking to build links to your site so you can get better rankings in search engines here is an example of what not to do. (Or in this case, what not to pay a company to do for you)

Hello,

I would like to propose a link exchange between your site www.adamschultz.com and RandomIndustrialSupplyCompany.com. RandomIndustrialSupplyCompany.com supplies (random material) used in jewelry, sports equipment, automotive performance parts, aerospace and much more.

Please consider adding our link to a page on your site:

Title: Random Industrial Supply

Description: Random Industrial Supply Inc, supplies metal mill products to the metal finishing industries including aerospace, architectural, automotive, biomedical, chemical processing, industrial, marine, oil, and others. We are a stocking distributor, and full service source of metal mill products

URL: http://www.RandomIndustrialSupplyCompany.com

Let us know when our link is placed and we will post your link in the proper category of our resources page listed here: http://www.RandomIndustrialSupplyCompany.com/linkpage/index.html

Your link will be posted within hours, however, in some rare cases it could take up to one business day. Please be sure to include your desired title and description.

Thank you for your consideration.

Tool
Tool@TotalCyberMarketingTool.com

I have been getting alot more of these lately. The funny thing about reciprocal linking is that not only has Google specifically identified it as a non-valuable tactic, any company willing to link share with you isn’t worth link sharing with. Reciprocal linking adds no value to the linked and no value to the linker.

Part of me wants to call the represented company personally and tell them to stop wasting their money on the CyberMarketingTools that are running their link building campaign.

They could be much better off actually spending their money on creating value for their customers. through blog marketing, forum participation, site improvement, contests, sponsorships or any other tactic that would bring both long and short term value without spamming the in boxes of bloggers who have absolutely to do with Industrial Metal Supply.

Brand

I define it in the experiential sense as: The perception of your company in the minds of the individuals of your market place.

The simple yet power full distinction I learned a few years back is that your Brand is not what you say it is, it’s what they say it is. They being the consumers.

When most small businesses try to define their brand and communicate it to their market the 2 questions they often answer first are:

1. Who are we?
2. What do we do?

While those are great fun and make for semantically interesting white boarding sessions, the real meat of a brand come from these 2 questions.

1. What do we want you to do?
2. Why should you do it?

I have seen site after site that don’t even have phone numbers on them let alone clear calls to action and strong incentive. After all, who you are and what you do amount to jack - s–t if I don’t know how that applies to me or why I should care.

I would argue that the latter set are actually the most important questions to ask. If you don’t tell your market place what you expect of them and why they want to take that action, how can you possibly fathom that they will know what to do when presented with your company or your products. This is even more important in the online space where interaction is the name of the game and you have a very short period of time to identify need and provide solutions.

Those 2 questions should be infused into the very essence of your company. They should be the driving force and top message in all of your marketing across all channels. They are more important than even your name and your logo. If you can figure out those 2 questions first and build a brand around them, the rest will fall into place.

To illustrate my point, answer in your head the following question about the American Red Cross.

What does The American Red Cross want me to do? Why do they want me to do it?

If you thought to your self - give blood or money so you can help them to help people in need - you are the product of truly effective, action centric brand communication.

So, the next time you sit down for a srtategy session for your or your client’s business, be sure to ask the following questions of your target audience:

What do we want you to do?

Why should you do it?

My friend and partner Garrett French recently wrote this post about lessons learned form recent visits to Hard Knocks University over at the Search Marketing Standard Blog. He mentions and links to a story about a post in which he was getting flamed for flagrant marketing during some recent forum participation on behalf of a client of ours.

Well, that story was informative, but the real story was how we earned our forum participation stripes when we first introduced ourselves to that same wonderful group of fellas.

At the time, the site we were working on was still in development, we had some static pages all linking to amazon and didn’t even have a blog. Furthermore, we weren’t even completely up to speed on how all of the free shipping, price match guarantees and other value ads worked.

Everything we were doing was exploratory into a space we as of yet knew little about.

My goals for the forum participation campaign were as follows: (Garrett’s goals may vary slightly)

• Gain access to smart people who can help us answer tough questions from our users and customers.
• Bring enough value back to those communities so that we will be seen as members of the community rather than outsiders trying to exploit it.
• Use our interactions with the community to fuel and inform valuable content for us to blog about and to bring additional value back to the forums.
• Work all of this into the rest of our marketing with high quality links and traffic.

In the beginning:

We had a nice honeymoon in one particular forum that boasts about 17,000 members. Not a small fish by any means. We had asked about 4 different questions on behalf of site users and gotten great feedback and fantastic input to take back to our users.

Additionally, we made sure to let the users know where we got the answers, urged them to join the assisting forum and made sure to let the forum know that we had done so.

Remember, we didn’t have a blog yet to show them how we were using their feedback.

The lovers quarrel.

Then one day, on post 4, the trolls showed up.

It started with someone posting about how we were just using them for customer service. After some more back and forth one of the forum members went on to our site and ripped it limb from limb with a series of harsh-but-true criticisms.

Reading it, I felt like I was looking into one of those magnifying mirrors women use to see into their pores. It was not a pretty sight by any stretch of the imagination.

Denial - Anger - Bargaining

All three of these stages went by pretty quickly as we realized how true of a text lashing we had just received. We knew what was on the line and how important these forums were to us. We also knew that we would face these problems in every forum we were breaking into.

We thought about ignoring them, giving the forum time to cool off, telling them the site was still young, we would try to change it later and all kinds of other wrong moves. We even considered pulling out of the forums all together like dogs with our tails between our legs until the new site was launched and we had something to show for our effort.

Depression

For the rest of that day G an I were beaten. We didn’t know what to do. Our cred was slashed and our next move had to be the right one. In order to address all of their criticisms I would have to make a couple of days worth of edits to the site as we couldn’t find references to some of the advertised features on Amazon we were being ripped into over.

Additionally, this was not the only forum we were beginning to get push back in.

We slept on it.

Acceptance

That previous evening, we were both up all night and somewhere in there, time gave us back our motivation. The next morning we researched all of the feedback and made a list of way to handle or remedy each blow dealt to us.

For the rest of that day, I made site and messaging changes, added pages and made other alterations to shore up our defenses from further attack.

During this time, Garrett crafted our response to be firm, slightly apologetic but mostly to say “You were right. Look, we fixed it.”.

In retrospect, that was the only wining response we could have come back with and our response informed and helped us smooth over the push back we were getting in other communities.

Victory

Our reply was well received, the site changes and apology/site response worked. We showed this community that we wanted to belong, we were willing to change, we are open and responsive to criticism and that we were serious about this relationship.

If this is beginning to sound like your marriage, it should.

The path forward

Sense then, we have tweaked our approaches, launched the new site and started blogging like gang busters. Because of our relationships with forums, we have had a steady supply of great ideas and feedback to inform useful blog posts and some killer link bait.

The site is breaking traffic records every week and Google alone is now responsible for 35% of our site traffic up from 10% 4 weeks ago. In that same 4 week span, forum traffic as become our is our biggest referral source and before the Google organic results hit a couple of days ago, referral traffic had made it’s way up to 50% of our total site traffic for an entire week after publishing some great linkbait.

Mind you that the linkbait was informed and written with the input of the forum relationship we had saved through an open and honest response to harsh-but-true criticism.

Follow Up

If you would like to learn more about forum participation and how to become part of the conversation in your marketplace, check out the great articles Garrett has written recently.

The Community Correspondent - A Guide To Creating Link Worthy Content Through Forum Participation

Lessons In Branded Content Creation Through Community Participation

Still want more?

Give us a call or email us to see how we can help you become part of the conversation in your marketplace.

919-451-8983
adam@boldinteractive.com

So, if you know my brother Mike, you know 2 things.

He loves sports and he is friggin hilarious.

A few months ago, he and a friend, we will call him Jamie, submited a pilot episode of a sports radio show they called Slim Mikey and The Jamer for a contest with ESPN Radio on XM. Well, they went pretty far but didn’t win the contest and they are still trying to get something going on local radio in Jacksonville. The problem there is that it costs $$$ for airtime and studio time and the acceptable margin of error is slim.

So, I thought it would be a good idea to just bootstrap the thing with a super low budget and see if he can create an audience online first. Chances are, online, he can reach more people and muster a more loyal following with the same content. That’s the hope anyway.

There are so many web 2.0 tools out there I figured it would be easy enough to get it going at little or no cost. Boy was I right.

In my research, I stumbled upon podOmatic.com. What a great site for bootstrapping the creation and simplifying the distribution of podcasts.

Inside 1 hour I was able to get the MikeInTheBox chanel completely set up including a call in line for audio comments.

There aren’t any shows posted yet but the infracture is all set. I did all of this in less than an hour and all completly free of charge. We are planning the first weekly installment later this month.

You can check in out here - MikeInTheBox.podOmatic.com, email Questions or comments for his first show here MikeInTheBox@podOmatic.com and leave audio comments and questions by calling 1-206-337-1768.

Go there, email, call in, ask questions, tell your friends about it, and scream it from the mountain tops and let’s make Mike “Internet Famous”.