Archive for October, 2007
h1 Tags
October 5th, 2007
MatthewSo, is there the rule of one when it comes to using H1 in your content or doesn’t it matter how often you use it on a page?
I tend to use H1 for the main heading on the page, which typically equates to the page title. I wouldn’t use it for subsequent headings within the content of that page.
However, although the W3C is rather vague on this issue it does say that
Some people consider skipping heading levels to be bad practice. They accept H1 H2 H1 while they do not accept H1 H3 H1 since the heading level H2 is skipped.
Clearly this implies that you could use H1 more than once in an article. Unfortunately, I don’t really follow how you would implement this in a way that makes sense semantically — perhaps someone can advise me?
Interestingly, in the above quote the W3C seems to be impartial regarding the practice of skipping heading levels. I always thought it was a no-no. I guess it’s up to the individual.
Of Sidebars and H1s
When it comes to sidebars — for example, the lists of links in my right-hand sidebar — does it matter what level heading you start these with?
If you use an lower-level heading — say, an H2 — does it imply from a structural standpoint that this content is related to and subordinate to your main content?
Andy Budd seems to think so and I’m inclined to agree with him from a semantic standpoint. This is despite the fact that I haven’t followed this through in practice as my sidebar link lists start with H2s.
On the other hand, from an SEO perspective, do you want to use H1 for headings that are essentially unimportant.
Taking the SEO view, I should really be using H1 more in my content in order to apply more importance to certain headings (which I could then stuff with keywords optimize for search).
Of course, this raises the question of how many H1s you could have on a page before the Googlebot starts to think “hang on a minute…”?
H1 and Site Names
Many people (myself included for this site) use H1 for their site name. I’m not sure there’s anything wrong with that, but I would certainly disagree with the notion that this means you can’t use H1 in your content thereafter.
Using H1 solely for your site name seems like a waste of this important tag, both from a structural standpoint and an SEO one.
How a small winery found Internet fame
October 3rd, 2007
MatthewHow do you get your product noticed in a sea of look-alike competitors? If you’re South African winery Stormhoek, you go Web 2.0, with blogging, viral marketing, and crowdsourcing.
"A wine company shouldn’t be like a country club," says U.K. marketer and cartoonist Hugh MacLeod, who created a wildly successful word-of-blog campaign for Stormhoek wines. "It should have the same attitude as a small Web startup."
Two years ago the Wellington-based winery hired MacLeod to promote its products on his blog Gapingvoid.com, where he publishes advertising and technology commentaries and stream-of-consciousness cartoons.CEO Jason Korman had seen the blog and thought targeting MacLeod’s readers, many of them tech geeks, would be a natural: They shared the same single-minded passion as wine enthusiasts. As Stormhoek’s representative, MacLeod offered a free bottle to any blogger who asked — as long as he or she was of legal drinking age and had been blogging at least three months.
Recipients didn’t have to mention the wine, but many of them did; nearly 100 bloggers posted related items or comments in just six months. MacLeod then used his blog to organize more than 100 "geek dinners" in Britain, France, Spain, and the United States — gatherings of tech workers and influential bloggers who were plied with Stormhoek wine. A recent dinner in San Francisco, for instance, attracted local technorati like former Microsoft evangelist Robert Scoble (Scobleizer) and RSS pioneer Dave Winer (Scripting News). While the blogosphere’s reviews of Stormhoek have been mostly good ("drinkable" and "pleasant," with the odd "disappointment"), MacLeod’s results have been amazing. Stormhoek sales have jumped nearly sixfold, from 50,000 cases a year worldwide to almost 300,000. The winery expects to sell a million cases annually within three years.
"The online work has fundamentally changed our business," says Stormhoek’s Korman. "It gives us real-time feedback and lets us talk about things that are relevant to us, our industry, and our customers." The campaign has also been remarkably cheap. For about $40,000 over two years, the company has created the kind of buzz others spend millions to generate. The trade journal Ad Age named the Stormhoek strategy one of the top 50 marketing campaigns in 2006.
The buzz has spread beyond the tech community. Supermarkets and wine stores, including U.K. supermarket giant Tesco, are giving valuable shelf space to Stormhoek wines. That’s no small feat, with thousands of competing wineries hawking pretty good products for about $10.
"We walk in and have a different story," MacLeod says. "We’re doing cool stuff with Web 2.0 people. It got us above the clutter."
Of course, Stormhoek is only as good as its last bottle. No amount of conversational marketing will sell bad wine.
Two Buck Chuck takes a bite out of Napa
October 3rd, 2007
MatthewI came across this article in business 2.0 and had to post it.
There’s a war on bluster, and Fred Franzia is losing. Sure, the CEO of Bronco Wine, the nation’s fourth-largest wine company, tells me repeatedly that only a sucker would pay more than $10 for a bottle of wine - including his own $35 Domaine Napa. And that Napa’s and Bordeaux’s claims about their special soils are bogus: “We can grow on asphalt. Terroir don’t mean sh*t.” After relieving himself by the side of his Jeep, Franzia recounts a trip to Burgundy where, after an elaborate tasting, he told the winemaker at Château Haut-Brion, “You can bottle gasoline if you can sell that.”
Franzia, who rose to fame several years ago when he started selling a $2 bottle called Charles Shaw, calls winemakers “bozos in a glass.” He really goes off on wine critic Robert Parker, who, he says, likes tannic wines that make people gag. He mocks my college (”We buy wineries from guys from Stanford who go bankrupt. Some real dumb-asses from there”), my religion (”A Jew who eats ribs? You impress me”), and my job (”Business 2.0? Hell no, I’ve never heard of it”).
When I ask him about the community service he did after pleading guilty in 1993 to conspiracy to defraud (he sold 5,000 tons of cheap grapes by mislabeling them and sprinkling zinfandel leaves on top), he says of the mentoring of single mothers he was ordered to do: “I picked up on young girls.”
But Franzia gets soft real quick. As he drives his Jeep around the vineyards at Bronco’s headquarters in Ceres, Calif., a tiny Central Valley town outside Modesto, Franzia admits he’d much rather buy out of bankruptcy court than directly from my hurting fellow alumni, since “it’s less emotional.”
He keeps stopping the car to look at grape plants like a puttering gardener. He shows me the land where he plans to build his house, complete with a bowling alley for his granddaughter. Looking up at a hawk flying high over his fields, he wonders whether it doesn’t have a better life than we do. He tells me he has trouble sleeping. I find, on the passenger side of his Jeep, an Enya CD, which he claims one of his many girlfriends left there. I deeply consider giving him a hug.
But losing the war on bluster isn’t a big deal, since it’s only one of many wars Franzia is fighting. In fact, he’s waging war on everything: gophers, ants, competitors, restaurant chains, stores, the state, the Supreme Court. It’s not just his favorite phrase, it’s the way he thinks about business. He says it so much, to so many people, that when I talk to his ranch manager, Junior Robles, he starts telling me about the war on weeds.
There’s even a war against the guy who rents the portable potties for the field workers: When the guy raised his prices, Franzia went for his sword and shield; he’s buying his own portable johns now. “To you, that’s a sh*tter,” he says, pointing to a blue kiosk. “To me, it’s a profit center. It’s a sh*tter war. You got to have a war at all times.”
But Franzia’s main war - the one he’s kicking ass at - is against pretentiousness. Bronco, which he owns with his brother Joe and cousin John, has (including vineyard partnerships) 3,000 employees and does an estimated $250 million in annual sales of mostly low-cost wines such as Estrella, Forest Glen, ForestVille, Montpellier, and Silver Ridge. It also gets income from providing distribution, bottling, and juice to other wineries.
In 2002, Franzia persuaded Trader Joe’s to sell a low-end label called Charles Shaw (after the winemaker who sold the tony label to Franzia, and dubbed Two Buck Chuck by consumers) that waged war on domestic wines in the $4 to $10 range - and was named best chardonnay in a blind taste test at July’s California State Fair over far pricier competition. The label is one of America’s fastest-growing, selling 5 million cases per year, all through one chain of stores.
“There’s not a doubt in my mind that the two biggest things that have happened to the wine industry in the last 10 years are the movie Sideways and Two Buck Chuck,” says Gary Vaynerchuk, who reviews wines on his popular video blog, Winelibrarytv.com. “Has Two Buck Chuck hurt some $8 to $15 brands? Yes. But it’s helped the industry overall by bringing in new people. What Franzia is doing, more than creating outrageous quality, is exposing a lot of mediocre people. There are so many fools in the wine industry who are overpriced. Look at Franciscan, Simi, Kendall Jackson. Those guys are jokers.”
Much like the Australian powerhouse Yellowtail, Franzia built Two Buck Chuck by buying extensive vineyard property in a cheap area - in his case, the San Joaquin Valley. He bought 35,000 acres stretching from Sacramento to Santa Barbara, the largest acreage of any wine company in the state, to which he’s adding three square miles each year. Then he added staggering amounts of bulk wine he scooped up nearly free from other vineyards during the glut that followed the wine boom of the late 1990s.
Once the surplus dried up, everyone thought Charles Shaw would follow. But Franzia has turned it into a sustainable brand, and one that - like Yellowtail or Budweiser - tastes the same every year. That’s partly due to his partner and cousin, John, who blends the wine, and partly due to the huge palette of flavors he gets by trading grapes and growing so many of his own. The vintage year printed on the label, Franzia admits, is irrelevant.
Though Franzia is stymied in his next plan to massively change the wine world - by getting restaurants to reduce their enormous markup - he thinks he’s on the verge of pushing prices down everywhere else. He’s close to getting Wal-Mart to sell one of his labels for $2 a bottle, and he’s just started selling a $6 cabernet with grapes from Sonoma’s Alexander Valley that he claims he bought from a winery that sells its bottles for $75.
He has four vintages and enough wine for more than 100,000 cases of the brand, which he’s calling Alexander & Fitch. He hopes people will see “Alexander Valley” on his label and wonder why they have to pay $20 for other wines from the region. And while he refuses to say this brand is any better than Charles Shaw, when he hands me the bottle, he pauses and says, “Don’t just smoke cigars and drink it. Drink it at a great location.”
Hating pretentiousness isn’t just a business plan. It’s Franzia’s entire identity. His office is a wood-paneled trailer with carpet holes repaired with duct tape that looks like it might house the night manager of a troubled dude ranch. He uses his cell phone only in his car, and he has no computer; his assistant prints out his e-mail messages in the morning, and he handwrites his responses on them.
He’s worked in the wine industry his entire life, but he calls the grapes “varieties” instead of “varietals.” For a while, he has me convinced that he’s planted some weird grape I’ve never heard of called “moh-ver-dee,” until I realize he’s talking about the Rhône varietal mourvêdre. Driving by a guy selling fruit along the side of the road in the hot sun might fill some with pity, but Franzia looks on with pride. He pokes me with a thick finger and says, “That’s a real businessman.”
Before Mail-Order try online
October 2nd, 2007
adminStarting a catalog business is not a project for the faint of heart, says Mark Lee, a veteran catalog marketer who recently began consulting. In his experience, most successful catalog startups are offshoots of established retail or Internet businesses. “At the moment, I am working with a true, from-scratch startup client, but I believe they will have spent more than $1 million by the time their first catalogs arrive in homes. The principals have years of experience in the catalog and Internet industries and have solid capital behind them,” says Lee, of Mark Lee Group, based in Charlottesville, Va
Free phone service from google
October 2nd, 2007
adminImagine your cell phone as a mini marketing machine. As you head into your car after dinner, a text alert pops onto the screen of your handset announcing the 9 p.m. lineup at a nearby cineplex. You choose the Jodi Foster flick “The Brave One,” and a promo video for the next Warner Bros. release, a George Clooney movie, starts running. Afterward, more text appears, prompting you to launch the phone’s Web browser so that you can click through to buy the movie’s ring tones and wallpaper.
That kind of 24/7 advertising engagement — on a phone, no less — may sound like a nightmare. But what if you could determine the kinds of products you get pitched? Or when your flight gets canceled in a faraway airport, text messages pop up for the best hotel deals in town? No random insurance ads or airline deals for trips to places you never visit.
Best of all: Watch or read the custom ads, and your phone minutes are free.
For big cell carriers, that’s the real nightmare. And it may be coming in the form of a Google phone.
Wireless-industry consultants and marketing executives with knowledge of Google’s plans say it has been showing prototypes of a new phone to handset manufacturers and network operators for a couple of months.
Its plans have been kept top-secret, but Google (GOOG, news, msgs) is expected to tap a company on the Pacific Rim that specializes in mobile design and manufacturing to build a handset to its specs. Google could then apply its expertise in operating software and user applications, says Paul Catalano, a partner at consultancy RelevantC Business.
Google officials won’t talk about phones, and industry sources don’t expect one before the second half of 2008.