Help Customers Help You

I'm hearing much buzz recently about Dove's successful extension of their "Campaign for Real Beauty". Others have already enshrined this 75-second video called "Dove Evolution" as the most powerful use of Web 2.0 by a traditional advertiser ever, so I won't bore you with further adulation. Suffice it to say Dove will end up selling a lot more product for a lot of years as a result of this fairly modest effort.

Can you do something similar for your business?

• Can you get people saying nice things about your company and your products?
• Can you help people see your company as honest and open and transparent?
• Can you create ways for consumers to prefer your store because of how you give them a feeling of being in control?

Yes, of course you can.

• Reward customers with unexpected kindnesses. (we have some great ideas for this)
• Reward repeat customers even more lavishly
• Encourage customers to write testimonials, and let them know when theirs is published.
• Add product reviews to your website, then actively solicit customers to write reviews.
• Give your customers good information for free
• If customers consistently cancel orders because you gloss over some key fact in your store (like shipping times), then make that policy clear, even if you feel it puts you in a poor light.

Notice none of these involve posting video on YouTube. They do, however, encourage customers to like you and share their positive feelings with others. That's the whole point of successfully leveraging customer voices in your marketing.

New Yahoo! Sponsored Search Platform

After 8 years of using basically the same advertiser interface, Yahoo! is readying their roll-out of a comprehensively upgraded system (codename: Panama) for managing paid search advertising across the Yahoo! network.

8 years? That's an unbelievably long time in SEM. Well, better late than never, and the new features being introduced do in fact seem to be what we've been pleading with them to introduce for all these years.

These new features should make the Yahoo! Sponsord Search platform about as powerful and flexible as the Google AdWords system, which should earn them some more advertising dollars. Over the past couple of years I've moved most of my clients' Yahoo! ad spending to Google because I'd lost patience with Yahoo!'s terrible, clunky interface. The new system should make it much easier to optimize campaigns for better conversion.

Did Yahoo! do everything they could? Of course not. They can still amaze me with their cluelessness in marketing to advertisers. And did they build in features to make it easier for Yahoo! Merchant Solutions stores to manage their Yahoo! Sponsored Search campaigns? If they did, they aren't talking about it.

Beautiful CSS

I envy talented designers for their ability to create useful beauty and make it look easy. Anybody who's attempted to create (or adapt) a good website design knows I'm right. Most people have not tried, and so have no idea how elusive beautiful website design really is.

I've also developed an appreciation for minimalist html code. Elegant simplicity requires a certain genius, but it is always delightful. Oh, and it doesn't break nearly as much, it's easier for search engines to index, and it loads faster.

So, what's got me thinking about good visual web design and minimalist code? A site I came across that's devoted to promoting the adoption of cascading style sheets, or CSS. CSS lets you control every aspect of the appearance of your website from a single page of code. Want to change all the fonts on your 1,000-page site? 15 seconds to edit and save your CSS file and you're done.

Every CSS booster I've come across has been focused on the structural benefits of CSS, mainly the ability to abolish tables as the primary layout crutch of legions of website builders. No tables? I can hear the yawns from here. zzzzzz....

This site, called css Zen Garden: The Beauty in CSS Design, is devoted to showcasing what designers can really do with CSS. Some of it is quite breathtaking.