Metrics continue to be a real hot spot for publishers and marketers alike. It’s become so much of an issue that I am collaborating with a friend of mine to write a strategic report called “Online Metrics Demystified: What Marketers and Publishers Need to Know to Buy and Sell Online Media” … or something like that. Be on the lookout for it next month. In the meantime, I thought I’d share a conversation that I recently had with someone trying to make sense of email newsletter metrics. They asked me for the definition of several email-related metrics. Hope this helps! What...

NOTE: I wrote this article for the June 2007 issue of Folio. Here is the complete, unedited version… Just when you thought you had the hang of SEO and SEM to drive traffic to your publication’s web site, along comes another acronym for you to master: SMO. Social Media Optimization (SMO), was coined by Rohit Bhargava of Ogilvy Public Relations in 2006 and is a set of tactics to get more exposure for your site in social media (blogs, forums, social bookmarking sites, etc.). The goal of SMO is to make it as easy as possible for others to link to your content and thus get as many...

I had the honor of being on the “smaller publishers” panel discussing social networking at the ABM Spring Meeting in Naples, FL earlier this week. It was a great session with excellent questions and a great group of panelists. One of my fellow panelists was Steve MacMinn, CTO of Globalspec, an internet-based information company focused on engineering and industrial markets. Back in April 2005, they launched their version of a social network called CR4 (which stands for Conference Room 4, BTW). I enjoyed being on the panel with Steve as it was very obvious he knew what he was doing and had...

(NOTE TO SELF: This is a terrible headline for SEO purposes, but I don’t care) I cannot tell you how tired I am about hearing “Web 2.0 this” and “Web 2.0 that.” I don’t want to get into a diatribe on this post about what Web 2.0 is … you can read it directly from one of the guys who originally coined the term, Tim O’Reilly. The point I do want to make is that Web 2.0 is just the latest buzzword to come along that technology providers, publishers, marketers, and event producers use to make themselves sound like they are on the cutting...

There’s an interesting debate going on in my last blog entry about Ziff’s use of IntelliTXT over whether in-article hyperlink ads are ethical or not. I’m surprised that I haven’t heard much about it, but Google also quietly launched their own version of IntelliTXT in late March as part of their new pay-per-action beta test for AdWords. Here’s a quote straight from the official “Inside AdWords” blog at Google on March 20, 2007 (emphasis mine). “You can create text ads, image ads, or our new text link ad format in your pay-per-action campaign. Text...

I have the utmost respect for Paul Conley and think he is one of the true class acts in media. It is well-known, however, that he and I disagree on the use of in-text ads … particularly Vibrant Media’s IntelliTXT product. Paul believes that there is no place for these kinds of ads on any reputable web site and his latest post takes Ziff to task because they reinstated in-text ads. He calls for the ABM and ASBPE to cut ties with Ziff and for the editors to, in essence, go on strike in protest. To be sure, Paul has a couple good points. First, it really is ridiculous that Ziff would...