by Elaine Fogel

The Olympic flame has been temporarily extinguished, the athletes have gone home, and the sidewalks of Turin are quiet again. As we look back at the highs and lows of the winter games, there are three definitive business and marketing lessons to be learned

1. Don’t become overconfident

Lindsey Jacobellis’s wipeout in the snowboard cross finals, just before the finish line, is a prime example of how cockiness can take you from gold to silver in an instant.

Businesses and organizations that become overconfident as a result of success run the risk of losing direction or making errors. It’s always best to come from a place of hunger, no matter what the size of your business is. It helps keep you focused on serving your market segments with a competitive spirit.

1. Don’t put all your marketing weight into one vehicle

NBC paid over $600 million for the exclusive broadcast rights to the Olympics for the American market. Although NBC claims that its viewers totaled over 170 million, one can’t help wonder how many more would have tuned in had the programming not been delayed until prime time.

Years ago, before the advent of the Internet and satellites, the time difference wouldn’t have mattered. But now, so many of us are online or receiving RSS feeds for instant news, that it’s challenging for television to capture market share when event results and the names of the winners have already been plastered on Web sites across the globe.

Even when marketing budgets are small, it’s best to choose at least three marketing vehicles to promote your message. Relying on one medium alone reduces your chances of being visible.

Consumers and business-to-business clients have distinct preferences in how they prefer their communications. And when people are bombarded with over 3,000 messages daily, yours can easily get lost in a sea of messaging in a variety of channels.

1. Develop a plan

According to “Athletic Insight,” athletic performance has three parts: physical preparation, technical skill, and psychological readiness. However, it claims that psychological preparation is the component most often neglected by athletes and coaches.

Goal-setting is one element of mental preparedness for any Olympic sport, as it is for any business. Developing a solid business and marketing plan is essential to knowing where your business or organization is heading on the road to success. If there are no set goals, how will you know what you’ve achieved, or how to evaluate the return on investment for your marketing efforts?

Sports psychologist Dr. Colleen Hacker states in an article, “Once athletes (and coaches, for that matter) begin to set observable, measurable goals and specify the date for completion, it is not uncommon to experience increased motivation and excitement as goals are successfully accomplished.”

by Stephen Baker

I’ve given up on Google for travel. The results are too polluted with optimized sites that fail to give me the answers, phone numbers and addresses I need. So instead of exploring the whole wide world of travel options, I box myself into Orbitz. It gives me limited options, but it works.

Yesterday at the Search Meeting in Boston, Stephen Arnold was making the case that optimization is perverting search and displacing “relevance.” He warned of serious consequences for research, since many current students rely heavily on search engines and rarely visit a library. He also pointed to the dangers of an optimized/adsense-dominated search scene. Imagine parents whose child is having a severe allergic reaction. They rush to Google for answers, but instead of finding the answer–perhaps on an un-optimized government site–they encounter pages and pages of promotional sites from pharmaceutical companies.

Of course, search isn’t that bad for most subjects. But looking ahead, the market forces driving optimization are only going to grow. Is there a way for us, as we swim through oceans of data, to filter out the hawkers and hypesters and get the answers we want? Or will we find clarity only in enhanced fee-based services?

By Dean Rieck

The envelope is the Rodney Dangerfield of direct mail. It just doesn’t get any respect. After all, its purpose is not to position your product. Its job is not to entertain or amuse. It’s not chatty like a letter or impressive like a brochure. Aside from holding together the contents until delivered, an envelope’s job is to get ripped open. Here’s how. 

So, ironically, the lowly envelope is arguably the single most important part of any direct mail package because it absolutely must get opened. Otherwise, all those more respectable pieces are just so much wasted paper. So here are a few ideas to get your envelopes ripped to shreds:

• Follow headline rules to write teaser copy. You can generate interest with a provocative statement, provoke curiosity with a question or incomplete sentence, or state a problem on the envelope and suggest that the solution is inside. Teaser copy acts like a headline to draw people in.

• Use teaser copy to select your audience. It should be clear at a glance that your message is addressed specifically to your reader. Use key words that relate to your ideal prospect’s interests or identity, such as “Exclusive offer for golfers inside” or “For Serious Investors Only.”

• Refer to the contents of the envelope. Tell your reader there’s something free, valuable, new, or exclusive inside. If you’ve actually enclosed something, such as a sample, booklet, checklist, discount coupon, how-to guide, or newsletter, say so.

• Use directive language. You can prompt your reader to open the envelope with simple copy such as “INSIDE,” “See inside,” or “Open immediately.” Combine this with a benefit to jumpstart your sales message. “FREE Recipes! Look inside …” or “How to pay $0 in taxes! See inside for details ….”

• Fully develop your envelope real estate. If you have a flashy, desirable product, you can crank up the excitement by using every square inch of your envelope, front and back. Show the product. Bullet point benefits. Starburst your special price. Hint at a special gift for immediate orders. This works best for consumer offers that are proven sellers needing little explanation, such as books, software upgrades, fact-packed newsletters, etc. But it can work with virtually anything.

• Use illustrations or photos. If you’re spilling your guts on the envelope, you might as well go all the way and show your product, premium, or gift. Simple pictures communicate instantly. A photo of a book with the word “FREE” next to it is better than lines and lines of clever copy.

• Consider involvement devices. Stickers, tokens, stamps, coins, scratch-offs, lift-up tabs, attached notes, seals, and other widgets can be used to good effect if you have the budget, if they can boost response enough to justify the added cost, and if they fit the feel of your message. 

Dean Rieck is president of Direct Creative, a full-service creative firm.

  Google, which runs the largest ad network on the Internet, is making millions of dollars a year by filling otherwise unused Web sites with ads. In many instances, these ad-filled pages appear when users mistype an Internet address, such as “BistBuy.com.”

This new form of advertising is turning into a booming business that some say is cluttering the Internet and could be violating trademark rules. It also triggered a speculative frenzy of investment in domain names, pushing the value of some beyond $1 million.

Google specifically bars Web addresses that infringe on trademarks from using its ad network, but a review of placeholder Web sites that result from misspelled domain names of well-known companies found many of the ads on those pages come directly from Google.

“It seems very hard to reconcile Google’s support of this activity with their ‘Do No Evil’ motto,” said Ben Edelman, a Harvard University researcher who has looked extensively into advertising on unused domains.

Google is defending its business practices, saying it removes participating sites from its ad network if a trademark owner complains those sites are confusingly similar.

“Unless it is confusing to somebody, trademark law doesn’t apply,” said Rose Hagan, Google’s chief trademark lawyer.

The Silicon Valley search giant is the largest but not the only ad network showing ads on placeholder Web pages. Yahoo! and Australian firm Dark Blue Sea run similar services.

This form of online advertising relies on “type-in traffic”: users who type the information they’re looking for into the Web browser’s address bar instead of using a search engine. Industry analysts estimate 15 percent of Web traffic originates this way.

That has created a demand for domain parking, which involves owners of a domain name “parking” that name with a firm that creates placeholder pages and then inviting Google or other Internet ad networks to fill them with ads.

When Web surfers arrive at those sites and click on those ads, Google and Yahoo! get paid by advertisers for that click and share their revenue with the owners of the domain names.       Opinion about these ad pages is divided. Some say they are frustrating junk pages. Others, including those who speculate on potential traffic of a specific domain name, say they help people find information related to what they’re looking for.

“We want those pages to function as alternatives to search engines,” said Matthew Bentley, chief strategy officer for Sedo, a parking service that manages more than 1 million unused addresses placed with the Google ad network.

The parked ad pages are mostly unattractive, but Sedo, Google and Yahoo! said they are working to improve them by adding more information. The parking service usually handles the creation of the ad sites.

“It’s such an easy process,” said Ron Jackson, publisher of DNJournal.com, an online publication that covers the industry. “In two minutes, I can set up a thousand domain names.”

The practice has sparked a speculative scramble to register unused names and test their ad potential. Because purchasers can change their minds within five days and avoid paying the $6 registration fee for the name, many investors enter the names in Google’s ad program for a quick test and quickly drop those that don’t yield enough clicks to cover the domain registration fee.

Of the 30 million dot-com names registered worldwide last month, more than 90 percent were dropped, according to domain name registrar GoDaddy.com. As a whole, the Internet has 54 million active .com and .net addresses, according to VeriSign.

Jackson said he has bought 6,600 domains and uses several ad services to earn revenue on them. “I know quite a few guys making over a million dollars a year from advertising on their domains,” he said. “It’s like a 24-hour money-printing machine.”

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