Let that sink in. After you’ve made it through several rounds of interviews (half of them evaluating your resume, the other half evaluating your cultural fit), they offer $2,000 to give you one last chance to jump ship. They’ll even pay the full salary of the five week training period if you quit before it ends.

The people who work at Zappos WANT to be there. The Zappos you see is the genuine Zappos.

Tony Hsieh, founder and CEO of Zappos, is more comfortable talking “culture” than “social media” (he doesn’t even like the term “social media”). In the online marketing world, we love Zappos because it’s a social media darling – one of a handful of firms to run a blockbuster social campaign. We look at them for clues on how to run our own successful campaigns. In fact, that’s the primary reason I attended the DMNews Marketer of the Month interview with Tony this past Monday.

But Tony wasn’t there to share his social media marketing wisdom. He didn’t specifically point to the answer and say, “This is why Zappos is able Tweet effectively…” but he gave us a big clue.

The clue is culture.

Tony’s top three priorities for the company are:
1. Culture
2. Customer Service
3. Clothing

The product, or “what it does,” is third on the list. Can you say that about your company? Should everyone be able to say that about their companies? Is it a good business model? Is it a better business model?
It’s a model that works well for social marketing.

I feel like it’s becoming cliché to say it, but social media isn’t what you do, it’s who you are. Your company is a profile in the online world. Nobody wants to be friends with a company. Nobody wants to be a fan of a company. People gravitate to personality. They want to associate themselves with people and things on the internet that reflect their own values.

You can have that kind of relationship with Zappos. The clue is culture. That might not be the explanation for every successful social media campaign, but it sure works for Zappos.

1. “Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer.” – Monitor your competition. What are they doing? Capitalize on their mistakes, and learn from their successes and failures. Find out how they position themselves. Can you meet their service levels or even offer something better?

2. “Round up the usual suspects.” – While odd problems do crop up, check the typical offenders, first. A decline in organic traffic? Ensure your content is fresh and visible to search engines. No activity through your PPC campaigns? Check your budget caps. Analytics package showing strange results? Make sure everything is tagged properly.

3. “My momma always said, life was like a box of chocolates, you never know what you’re gonna get.” – Just because our audience behaved a certain way last month doesn’t mean they’re still doing the same thing today. From creative tests, to landing page tests, to conversion optimization, as effective performance marketers, we must evolve. Compare the performance of “Sale on Widgets” to “Widgets on Sale.” Don’t assume you know the answer. Test, test, and test some more. Along those lines …

4. “You rush a miracle man, you get rotten miracles.” – Being able to draw accurate and actionable conclusions takes time. If you’re trying a landing page conversion test, don’t assume that Page A is better based on one day (or week, or month) of data. Be sure you have statistically relevant results before making sweeping decisions.

5. “You’re gonna need a bigger boat.” – or a bigger budget, or a better tool. Time and again, I’ve seen companies invest in a solution, program, or product, and stubbornly refuse to switch courses even in the face of compelling reasons to adjust their initial plans.

6. “You can’t handle the truth.” – As you test, be prepared to get surprised. Who knew that ad copy with text speak (like ‘LOL’ or ‘OMG’) could convert? Texting-happy teenagers!

7. “I’ll make him an offer he can’t refuse.” – Use demographics of existing customers to find new ones in creative places. Does a 43-year old woman fall within your target market? Perhaps you should consider advertising within or alongside a social game, specifically tailoring your creative message to speak to her. Even better, can you include an incentive to purchase, such as a FarmVille or Mafia Wars gift card?

8. “Elementary, my dear Watson.” – Progress is crucial; however, we must also keep a keen eye on the basic principles of marketing. Who is our customer? There may be a spiffy new pilot program but does it reach our target audience? What does our customer want? If they’re shopping for widgets but all of our materials try to drive them to sprockets, prospective shoppers are going to take their dollars elsewhere.

9. “What we’ve got here is a failure to communicate.” – Communication is vital in any relationship, including the one we have with our customers. From a consistent branding message, to clearly delineating our latest offering, we must communicate. When an ad says “Free Shipping” but in reality it’s free shipping only at a certain price point, consumers are justifiably disgruntled.

10. “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.” – There are so many great resources out there; bloggers sharing their experiences with testing in PPC campaigns, emerging social marketing techniques, and how algorithm changes impact search engine optimization. It impresses me, because they’re putting information out there for all of us to use – even competitors!

Did you recognize all the movie quotes? Bonus points if you did! Now I’m curious — Did your favorite movie teach you anything about search engine marketing? I’m off to see if I can structure a test to prove the worth of showing a movie every afternoon in the conference room. Don’t worry; “I’ll be back.“

The biggest impression I came away with was that online travel has become a game of inches. What I mean by that is that there was a ton of content around tactical ways to improve one’s business; everyone seemed to stay away from broad strategy talk. Naturally there were the typical big picture statistics and market shifts involved, but very little strategy. This tells me that everyone seems to be a little lost as to how to move the needle these days. It’s no secret that the travel industry online, at least over the past four years, has seen the most success, both from a growth and penetration standpoint. That’s starting to change as people travel less and become more focused on travel as a commodity.

It’ll be very interesting to see how travel evolves coming out of this economic recession. One thing’s certain, there needs to be an evolution sooner rather than later. At the rate online travel suppliers are losing business and loyal customers, there’s a huge opportunity for older more traditional channels to see a resurgence – namely old-school travel agents. Gone are the days when everyone shops on an OTA and books supplier direct. Things are changing, and it’s time to adjust.

Whatever the reason, I’m not a fan. Perhaps I should don Pee-wee Herman sized sunglasses and change my attitude. Is this one of the key items they discussed at the investor webcast?

http://www.reuters.com/article/technologyNews/idUSTRE58873U20090910

1. comScore has now decided to charge for its State of the Union findings. If you’re not familiar with these, they are webinars hosted by co-founder Gian Fulgoni which walk you through the previous quarter. You glean such things as, ‘people are scared’ or ‘rich people aren’t spending as much’ or ‘people really like coupons now’ or ‘lower income brackets are concerned about their jobs’. You also get some really great insights into how eCommerce is tracking against the rest of the economy. Really the gist is people are poor and scared. So good call comScore! Twist the knife a little will with a $199 ticket for an hour of your smooth jazz.
2. My cell phone provider AT&T just called me and asked if they could lower my bill. Um, yeah, sure. Wait. WHAT? Turns out the texting tween got a little carried away and $90 dollars later I have a new best friend who moonlights as a customer service rep. Good job AT&T! Consider me a loyal customer until I forget about the kind gesture in approximately two months.
3. Speaking of AT&T my office mate suggested they start offering a ‘Buy Back Blackberry’ program so that us late adopters could get on this dang app bandwagon. Then they could garner additional goodwill by creating a secondary program to give away the unloved BlackBerry’s and entitle this one, punnily enough, as ‘Handouts for the Phoneless.

This Wednesday I hereby declare AT&T the winner of my own personal thoughts.

Don’t get me wrong, I love paid search. It’s my specialty. It’s logical, predictable, and organized, which appeals to my OCD nature. Social media and mobile may be the next “big things,” but from my vantage point, they’re still very nebulous and unorganized. Give me a basic paid search campaign any day, and I’ll sculpt it into something that will make you some money.

That being said, I can’t help but feel paid search as a whole is getting a little stale. The past several years have seen lots of new ideas and innovations—improved targeting, more control, the capability for real-time changes—the list is actually kind of long. However, recently it seems like every time I hear about a new paid search feature from any of the major engines I get a strange feeling of déjà vu.

Take Yahoo’s recent inclusion of favicons in paid search ads. For those that don’t know, favicons are the snazzy little icons that appear in your address bar next to the http when you visit a website. Taking your site’s favicon and putting it next to the display URL really makes your paid search ad stand out on the page, and helps reinforce your brand:

Neiman Marcus Search Ad

This is a great idea for improving paid search—just like it was when Google tested the exact same thing six months ago.

As another example, take a look at the brand new ad format Google is current beta testing, “Ads Sitelinks.” This feature allows you to add four quicklinks below your paid search ad to let users navigate deeper into the site with a single click:

Ebay.com Search Ad

This is a fantastic idea for segmenting traffic and increasing conversion rate by taking a searcher whose query was very generic and allowing them to choose what portion of your site they’re most interested in. But I can’t help thinking it’s somewhat familiar….where could I have seen something like that before….a Yahoo SSP listing, perhaps?

Ebay.com Sitelinks in the Google SERPs

Yes, you saw it here first. Google is now officially stealing ideas from Yahoo. Sure, both Google and Yahoo offer quicklinks in their natural listings, but until now, Yahoo was the only one to offer them in a CPC ad format. A good idea is a good idea, but I get a little worried when Google’s exciting new feature is something Yahoo has been offering for the past two years.

Yahoo unveils paid search Geo-targeting…..which Google has been doing for years. Microsoft adCenter releases a program that allows you to download campaigns and upload changes from your desktop….just like AdWords. Microsoft’s new Bing features “search within search”….which Google tested last year (granted, Microsoft’s version is much better than Google’s).

I’m not complaining about each engine’s learning from its competitors and “borrowing” ideas that work. I just can’t help but wonder where the new ideas are. What’s the next big thing for paid search? In the past six months I’ve seen massive improvements in content networks, media networks that can target to hit any metric, and social media finally start to come of age. Paid search had a head start on all of these programs, but does that mean its feature set has already peaked?

Interactive marketing is projected to encompass 21% of all marketing spend by 2014….but by then, what percentage of that spend will be for paid search?

Maybe I should get busy learning how to run a social media campaign.

Whether he approves of it or not, I think Paolo Nutini’s “New Shoes” (the song from which I stole the title of this article), should be retail’s theme song right now. For the past 9 months, we have had nothing but bad news, predictions of unmitigated doom and gloom about the end of retail as we know it (I even wrote a little rant about it here). True, times have not been good, but we are beginning to see a few shoots of green (as Chairman of the Fed Ben Bernanke likes to say) in the retail market – and no matter how small, I think they are worth celebrating.

Looking at retail results as a whole, the numbers are still down. In May, retail sales dropped about 4% (excluding Wal-Mart who has stopped giving monthly data – but has the ability to greatly shift the actual percentage). Of the top 30 retailers included, 22 showed more year-over-year drops. The last time we saw retail sales grow was in August. For some retailers, May marks 12+ months of consecutive losses. Abercrombie is down for 13 months in a row, Nordstrom for 12 months and Saks for 11 months. Sigh.
Luckily, there are a few rays of sunshine piercing the darkness.

For example:

• Gap is showing its best month in the last year and a half (I like to think it is because Range handles search for the GAP brands, but I digress)
• In the teen market, Aeropostale and Buckle are showing growth north of 10%
• Consumer confidence levels are overall on the rise

While the trend is clear that the retailers that are doing well are doing so on an economical side, remember there was a time not too long ago when even the discounters were losing ground (Ross was down September, October, November and January, but posted a 4% gain in May).

We are nowhere near being out of the woods just yet, but I am beginning to think of it this way: if we all just did what Paolo Nutini said, we would be in the clear… “put some new shoes on and suddenly everything is right.”

Online celebrity culture and I have a real love/hate relationship. I love that it is quickly updated and always there to provide a brief reprieve from more important tasks, but I loathe its vapidity and the shame I feel for looking Reminiscently like I felt after my older brother and sister let me watch Porky’s in a hotel room at the tender age of 5.

Love it or hate it, online celebrity culture isn’t going anywhere, and in fact, its assimilation of your eyeballs, time and brain is even more ingrained. Consider MSN’s latest venture, Celebrifeed. Celebrifeed is a central repository for your favorite icon’s tweets and blog entries—if you want to know exactly how boring celebrities actually are, you can find out when they tell you about what they ate for lunch. Of course, running alongside will be supplemental material from reputable titles such as Us Weekly and Parade Magazine.

I’m going to do my best to stay far away from the likes of this. I already feel dumber and this might just push me over some sort of brink. Hats off though to you MSN for granting yet another destination, slightly rearranged, which will allow a few seconds shaved off a life.

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Google Trends data - Somali Pirates

Not surprisingly, Facebook has gone on the account with pirate talk, recently deciding to update their language platform with version 2 of English (Pirate).

To get on board, go to the bottom of the Facebook page and under the language settings choose “English (Pirate )” from the drop down menu. Facebook English (Pirate) changes everything on your profile – being poked becomes “Arrr! Ye have been skewered by…,” login becomes “set sail,” your mail inbox becomes “Bottle o’ Messages ,” your friends become your “crewmates,” and sponsored advertisements are slapped with titles like “Hawkins” or “Gold diggin’ swine.”

If you want to have fun, I highly recommend switching your language setting so English (Pirate) and give Facebook a try. Make sure you join the “Yarrrr! Pirate English should be the default language on Facebook” and “Pirate English Is the Way Forward.” It should give you enough practice before September 19th, international talk like a pirate day.

Fairwinds!

Talk Like a Pirate Day - September 19

Here’s what I mean. If you lose your job, there are tons of promotions that will give you money back if you spend with the company in question and then get the axe. Some seem rather strange and some seem spot-on. For instance, my favorite is that the Minnesota Timberwolves will refund season tickets for games not played if you lose your job. This would be, to me, an example of something not quite necessary. If you are worried about losing your job, why are you investing in season tickets to a mediocre basketball team who just finished a season at 24-58. But I digress. Something that might make more sense? JetBlue will refund your plane tickets, Virgin Mobile will waive charges for a 3 months. Though all of it raises the question, should you even be making this purchase in the first place?

The term most recently being used is “recession proof”. This makes me a little concerned. Marketers calling things recession-proof? And car companies providing “assurance”? Scary. Car dealerships aren’t typically known for being trustworthy. But what do I know? It seems like these promotions are actually working. It’s not drawing people out of the woodwork, but it is causing a bit of an uptick in large ticket purchases like vehicles. Terms like sympathy and compassion are being tossed about quite often as well. From car dealers. Possibly even with straight faces.

The concern? It’s just another guarantee that probably won’t provide long-term success. And just as soon as someone tries to return a car that her eight cats, two dogs and a football team drove around in for a year, we’re going to have a little PR nightmare on our hands.

Be a smart marketer and stick with what you know. Provide more detail and more clarity into your fine print. Give people more options for payment. People are looking to save money by making smart buying decisions. This new phase of recession-proofing purchases is just cluttering the conversation.

I’m confused, that’s for sure. I’m beginning to think that getting fired doesn’t look so bad. Maybe I will fly to Minnesota for the season opener of the Timberwolves and buy a car while I am there, drive it back to Texas and do some shopping at every outlet mall between here and there.

They’ll take it all back right? And just wipe my slate clean? Right???