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The Spinbix Effect

Published August 23, 2006

There’s an established and long-standing process to developing and choosing names for new products. In fact, this is a business in and of itself, and it’s not unheard of for companies to pay tens of thousands of dollars to come up with the name for a new product.

Based on what my colleagues and I recently uncovered, I’d like to make the case for this money being spent on coming up with truly unique product names. Why do I believe this? It has to do with something that I’ve just named "The Spinbix Effect."

We’ve been working on a large and complex search engine optimization (SEO) project for a client that manufactures and markets lots of consumer widgets. For the purposes of this article, let’s pretend the client is "Acme." Each of Acme’s widgets has its own brand name. Some of the names are more generic and use words found in the dictionary, such as Acme Mosaic and Acme Hunter. Other brand names are completely unique words not found in the dictionary, such as Acme Spinbix and Acme Bunfob.

As part of our SEO project, we’ve been looking at inbound traffic to Acme’s Website from search engines. More particularly, we’ve been analyzing the keywords and phrases that are generating traffic for Acme. One of the most interesting patterns we observed was that products that have unique names (e.g., Acme Spinbix) generate higher search traffic (Website visitors) than products with generic names (e.g., Acme Mosaic).

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The Net Can Even Make Irritating Industries Exciting

Published July 31, 2006

I really love the transformative and disruptive qualities of the Internet. Again yesterday I was reminded of how significant the impacts of this creation will be when I met “a company”:http://www.icmgroupltd.com/ that is transforming the traditional and downright irritating industry of paper flyers.
Think about it. You come home every day to see your mailbox overflowing with flyers stuffed there haphazardly by the local flyer kid. Easily ninety percent of it is not relevant and even within the ten percent that may be, only half of that has any immediate actionable value. Then what? You cut them out and pin them up somewhere until you can go to the store in question. It all seems very inefficient and wasteful, an industry ripe for disruption.
Enter said new company, “ICM Group”:http://www.icmgroupltd.com/.
They are approaching all of these flyer producers and telling them that “their technology”:http://www.icmgroupltd.com/pages/services/service_con.htm will take the same print file that they would send to the print shop and break it down into data and graphic elements, create a data table, and then dynamically create a flyer website. Presto! With no extra work, the flyer company has the beginnings of an online strategy.
But wait, there’s more. Because said company has now turned the paper flyer into data, the consumer can now actually sort or search through what they want and act on the flyer offer by clicking on an item of interest to find out more or take action. Who knows, some people might even be willing to build a changeable profile of their interests which could be mapped to offers and alerts. Whammo! You have instant e-commerce.
But wait, we are not done yet.

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Making "Get A Mac" Viral

Published May 7, 2006

I get the whole “new marketing”:http://www.jaffejuice.com/ thing that “Joseph Jaffe”:http://www.getthejuice.com/ talks about in his “Life After The 30-Second Spot”:http://www.lifeafter30.com/. TV just isn’t what it used to be. But that doesn’t mean that _all_ TV ads are a waste of money.
If you are “Apple”:http://www.apple.com/ and you want to take another shot at convincing people to *Get A Mac* then TV might be the right place to do it.
Tell me the ads in the “Get A Mac”:http://www.apple.com/getamac campaign aren’t brilliant and compelling.

Still, Apple could have done a much better job of making the online part of Get A Mac more viral. Here are *seven things I would have done to make this spread faster:*
# Add them to “YouTube”:http://www.youtube.com and “Google Video”:http://video.google.com/. Who cares where people see the ads. Getting them on these highly viral networks in “official versions” (not the fan-uploaded ones you find now) would be a great step forward.
# Make each video linkable. Right now while there is a unique URL for each video at each resolution these don’t seem to be visible to the user. All the ads regardless of content or size seem to come from the same URL (http://www.apple.com/getamac/ads/?restarting_medium). This makes it hard to naturally link to something or to bookmark favourites.
# Make them easy to download. Yes you can download the .mov files if you know what you are doing, but adding a “download this ad” link wouldn’t hurt.
# Copy YouTube and GoogleVideo and make it *very* easy to share the video online by including a “Share this Ad” to e-mail a link, a “Link to this Ad” with a short URL to get to the specific ad, and an “Add this Ad to your Site” link to an embedded player (like the one I used above from YouTube).
# Create a feed people can subscribe to if they want to get new Apple ads sent directly to them via iTunes or a Feedreader. Apple’s ads are so entertaining that I’m sure many people – even non-Mac users would sign-up for amusement sake.
# Archive older ads so that people can always look back at how far we’ve come.
# Bribe people with “link love” by cribbing YouTube’s pseudo trackback for video plays. Called “links to this video”, the feature shows how many people have clicked through to the page from other sites (with live links to the URLs).

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