Category: ABT Culture

Atlantic BT’s First Meetup
Imagine pulling out of Macy’s at Crabtree Valley Mall onto Creedmoor road. Looking up you see a distinctive blue marble with white stripes resting on top of a three story building across the street. “Atlantic BT,” you read mumbling slightly to an empty car as you turn, “wonder what they do.” It is easy to tell Atlantic BT’s story of dramatic growth in web development and Internet marketing, but better to show and share. Please join us for our first Internet Marketing Raleigh Meetup next Tuesday October 25.

Internet Marketing Meetup Event Details

JOIN and RSVP: Internet Marketing Relativity on Meetup.com

Where: Atlantic BT office, 3rd floor, 4509 Creedmor Road, Raleigh, NC 27612  PH: 919.518.0670 ext. 130

When: Tuesday, October 25 at 6:30 PM

Dinner? Yes Atlantic BT is buying pizza and drinks

Who Should Attend? Anyone interested in learning about Internet marketing, ecommerce, business to business online marketing, social network marketing, cause marketing and email marketing (along with other Internet marketing topics we want to discuss).

Meeting Structure: Short presentations followed by brainstorms, questions, sharing resources, ideas and networking. Meetings will last about two hours (give or take).

What If I don’t Know Much About Internet Marketing? Then you will know more after next Tuesday October 25. This isn’t a Master Class, but we will be asking experts to share their knowledge because we are smarter together than alone especially in such a swiftly moving business as Internet marketing.

First Meeting Topic: Infinite Inventory – Why Amazon Dominates Ecommerce
Our first meetup will include a 30 minute presentation by Martin Smith, Atlantic BT Director of Marketing, on a term he coined in 2008 to describe Amazon.com’s ecommerce dominance. Infinite inventory is why Amazon will be the first website with a billion pages in Google creating a powerful search engine marketing (SEM) engine tuned with algorithms and dominant in ecommerce. Amazon may be LARGE and IN CHARGE, but there are ideas and techniques any web site or Internet marketer can borrow, adapt and deploy to make more money, increase traffic and site engagement.

Host: Martin Smith
After starting my career with P&G and M&M/Mars I’ve worked in ecommerce and Internet marketing building my first B2B and B2C site in 1998. I’ve started four companies including the nonprofit Cure Cancer Store foundation (please LIKE on Facebook), a 501c3 scheduled to launch in January 2012. I write about startups for Technorati and know many Triangle Internet marketers from @ScentTrail and the ScentTrail Marketing blog. My email is Martin.Smith(at)AtlanticBT(dot)com.

Everyone at Atlantic BT looks forward to meeting you at an Internet Marketing Meeting in Raleigh soon.

If your immediate answer was “of course” maybe you are right.  The next Steve Jobs is out there. He might be unemployed or she might have cancer and not be real clear where her next break is going to come from. Still going to hire the next Steve Jobs?

Context is the irony of our lives. We live in a box of what is happening NOW. Steve Jobs understood NOW, but he wasn’t a resident. Steve lived in the future. In the future everything is always better. Wait a minute, you are thinking; Steve died how is that “better”. There are worse things than dying. Think about it. You were Steve Jobs. Through no fault of your own you got sick. Then you become so sick you can’t BE Steve Jobs. Living can be, for short periods, the final circle of Dante’s Hell. Not being Steve Jobs when you were Steve Jobs would be hellish.

It is easy to get stuck in our macro and micro NOWS. We only see white swans so we think white swans are the only swans. We forecast based on our white swan assumptions. We convince others there are only white swans. Then suddenly from out of some magic world a black swan majestically lands on the lake:

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Arthur C. Clarke

Recently I wrote about Internet Marketing Relativity trying to work not knowing what we don’t know into our web development and marketing thoughts. Certainty is becoming the hobgoblin of little minds and a real problem for anyone trying to understand the web well enough to sell something to someone. Steve Jobs lived a simple truth – the future is always better. Remember Steve’s lesson and have the courage to hire a cancer survivor as Atlantic BT did this week. Live comfortably in a rapidly changing world with Internet  Marketing’s Accelerating Returns are happening faster and faster and you get to be Steve Jobs or play with his magical toys and that is tantamount to the same thing :).

Martin

—
Martin Smith
Director of Marketing
Martin.Smith(at)AtlanticBT(dot)com
Atlantic BT
@Atlanticbt

What are the moments like immediately before Ray Kurzweil’s singularity? Kurzweil proposes a technological singularity, a greater-than-human intelligence created through technological means. This singularity isn’t a black hole or something you fall into never to be heard from again. This momentous human race pivot happens a little bit at a time until its creeping ubiquity will be inevitable and taken for granted.

The moments BEFORE a tipping point, usually only obvious on reflection, have telltale signs. Watching IBM’s Watson destroy Jeopardy contests that were sufficiently intimidating they beat all comers felt like something LARGE and IN CHARGE just happened. Mobile’s geotargeting and geomarketing creating “in the moment” relevance twitches the same nerve. If our contemporary version of Descartes, “I think, therefor I am” is I shop therefor I am then geomarketing is I’m thinking about you NOW so please recommend something special feels spooky close to Tom Cruise in Minority Report. Do you need to read retinas if customers lives live in a cloud database capable of tapping HTML5 to know a customer is standing in the cereal aisle where they usually buy Corn Flakes?

As web developers, mobile application developers, Internet marketers, content marketers, email marketers and social network marketers Atlantic BT knows one true thing. Everything is different all the time:

An analysis of the history of technology shows that technological change is exponential, contrary to the common-sense “intuitive linear” view. So we won’t experience 100 years of progress in the 21st century — it will be more like 20,000 years of progress (at today’s rate). The “returns,” such as chip speed and cost-effectiveness, also increase exponentially. There’s even exponential growth in the rate of exponential growth.
Kurzweil Essays

“There is exponential growth in the rate of exponential growth,” needs to be on a t-shirt. Positive virtual sustainable cycles is an often overlooked Internet marketing necessity. The web, like all “scale free” networks according to Notre Dame Professor and network researcher Albert-laszlo Barabasi in his excellent book Linked, creates hubs.

Think of hubs as a snow ball rolling downhill. Hubs displace the web’s space and time bending gravity. Hubs tip the table in their direction. Growth networks increase steepness of the hill, the angle of the table, rolling more and more stuff (links, traffic, money) in their direction faster and faster. The better you are at Internet marketing the better you get at Internet marketing to infinity.

Internet marketing in a content network world is about tipping the table. Imagine the longest, heaviest table. Try to tip that table alone. Your strength is over matched. Imagine climbing Everest alone with no map, guide or prior knowledge of the deadliest mountain on earth. Climbing Everest in such a foolhardy way is a negative virtual cycle the sure and sad outcome of all negative virtual cycles. Now enlist a hundred, a thousand or ten thousand strong friends or some of the most talented Sherpas. Together you lift the table climb Everest and create a positive virtual cycle.

What are the moments immediately before Kurzweil’s singularity? Watson beats the best Jeopardy players, a handful of creative geniuses  tip the web’s table so hundreds of millions join their table tipping parties and Adam Smith’s invisible hand reaches through your phone sharing a Corn Flakes coupon as you enter the cereal aisle.

Is an Internet marketing singularity near? What tipping points do you see? Are we already there? Has your Internet marketing ever benefited from a positive virtual cycle? Please share answers to these or any other questions in comments.

Martin

—
Martin Smith
Director of Marketing
Atlantic BT
@AtlanticBT

See how well you know our CEO Jon Jordan by answering the questions below.

1. Where was Jon born?

A. Charlotte, North Carolina
B. Johannesburg, South Africa
C. Montreal, Canada

2. True or False?

Atlantic BT was Jon’s first full-time job.

3. In 7th grade, what award did Jon win?

A. Spelling bee champion
B. Most likely to become an entrepreneur
C. Science fair winner

4. True or False?

When Jon was 9 he built a Go-Kart with turn signals, headlights, a smoke screen and bottle rocket launchers.

5. Which of the following occupations did Jon pretend to be in as a child?

A. Doctor
B. Fireman
C. Chef
D. Weatherman

Get the Answers!

1. Johannesburg, South Africa
2. True
3. Science fair winner
4. True
5. Weatherman

Last year, Atlantic BT held our first pumpkin carving competition to celebrate Halloween. With the help of an accidental typo, it has been dubbed the Pumpking Carving Competition. To see last year’s entries please visit www.atlanticbt.com/pumpking2009.

On Tuesday, we stayed after work and carved our pumpkins for this year’s contest. Like last year, we’ll be awarding the following prizes:

Instead of letting the pumpkins rot in the breakroom for a few days… we’ve decided to chunk them across the parking lot using a custom built trebuchet. If you’d like to see the pumpkin smashing, please join us this Friday at 5:00PM. We will begin the festivities with an awards ceremony to crown the Pumpking, then proceed to smash the pumpkins into oblivion.

We’ll be posting the winning pumpkins and photos of the event later this week, so stay tuned to our blog for more information.

Good “pay per click” management is difficult to find, and even more difficult to understand. So when should you make the investment into this new and potentially extremely profitable service?

What is “pay per click”?

“Pay per click” is an advertising service where you only pay for your advertisement if a customer clicks on the ad. The innovative “pay per click” service allows you to compete for customers in your target market on the Web. How much you are willing to put into your “pay per click” budget directly impacts how much your advertisements relate to your prospective customers. But, remember – while pay-per click advertisements may increase the number of customers clicking into your website, it does not guarantee sales.

When should I purchase “pay per click” services from a management team?

During my experiences as a part of Atlantic BT’s internet marketing team, I have identified three key questions to consider when considering pay per click as a marketing channel: 1) Are you investing for the long term? 2) Are the website designers flexible?, and 3) Are you familiar with basic pay per click terminology?

I will discuss the importance of each question below.

Question 1: Are you in it for the long haul?

Many companies think that online or web-based advertisements produce instantaneous results. (After all, the customers are just clicking a link!). While this may happen sometimes, in most pay per click advertising campaigns, this just doesn’t happen.

Even great “pay per click” management companies will only create truly effective advertisements after they figure out the following details about your firm:

• What are the goals with this businesses website?
• Are we tracking website user behavior with Web Analytics software?
• How can we track return on investment with their current website?
• What different products and services exist within the business?
• What keywords are important to these products and/or services?
• What advertisements sell these products and/or services best?
• What landing pages are important to these products and/or services?
• How much should we be spending per sale?

These questions cannot be answered instantaneously. The management team must adjust their actions according to the answers they discover through trial-and-error. In order to get things moving quickly, I recommend increasing your “pay per click” budget during the initial few months of working with a “pay per click” management team. With a higher pay per click budget, you are giving the pay per click company the ability to pull in larger sample sizes of data. This allows the team to use statistics and data analytical tools to make better choices regarding the type of advertisements, effective keywords, landing pages and products.

This initial process of collecting data may not generate a profit for you for a few months, but will help create more effective advertisements in the long term. So, if you’re in it for the long term – pay per click advertising may be more up your alley. But if you want short term results (say, for a promotion of a sale good), some other type of advertising might be more effective.

Question 2: Are the people in charge of the website open-minded, quick-moving team players?

When you invest into pay per click advertising, it is very likely that changes to the website will need to be made.

There are two types of relationships at work here: in the first type, you have a business that works with two separate companies for web development and internet marketing, and in the second type, you have a business that works with one company for both web development and internet marketing.
First type of relationship: Business works with both a Web Development company and pay per click company
In this type of relationship, I have found that marketing time and budget is wasted due to lost-in-translation, stubbornness and slow development changes. For this type of relationship, you the business owner needs to establish trust with both companies as well as establish trust between the two companies.

The three items that I commonly see happen in this type of relationship:

Lost-in-translation

If you plan on working with two distinct companies for these two services, allow both parties to discuss strategy with one another. You do not want to find yourself in the position of playing, “he said” – “she said” about topics which you may not be comfortable re-explaining. Think back to grade school with the “the telephone game”. Instead of whispering one sentence, you are whispering an online marketing strategy. Mistakes will be made, and budgets will be wasted.
Stubbornness

A web development company will have made suggestions and recommendations during the website creation phase which they may not wish to retract. Sometimes a web development company will try to refute a change, as a good web development company will be proud of what they have already done for your website. This hesitancy to implement a change can lead to wasted marketing time and therefore wasted money. You need to review the evidence that your internet marketing company has provided and weigh that against the cost / time frame for the web development change. You are only collecting cost / time frame from the web development company and the strategy / research from the internet marketing company. It is generally a bad idea to let either party dabble with the other’s expertise.
Slow development

It is understandable that a web development company cannot work exclusively with your business. So, in most cases the developers at the company have other business websites to work on and not just yours. However, if you find yourself waiting a month or two for changes that the internet marketing company recommended do realize that this directly affects the strategy that the internet marketing company has set out for you.

Second type of relationship: Business works with one all-in-one company such as AtlanticBT

Here at Atlantic BT, we have the luxury of having web development, internet marketing (pay per click management as well), web hosting and web design all under one roof so our clients need only to speak with one company about the different services. In this case, “lost in translation”, stubbornness and slow development are less of an issue. These types of relationships generally work better, because things are done quicker due to the departments trusting one another and knowing their capabilities.
For this type of relationship, it is important that you, the business owner, trust this business’s strategy as well as its web development capabilities and design work.

Question 3: Are you familiar with basic pay per click terms?

The last thing you want is to be nodding your head at something you do not understand. Now, you should be in the position to freely ask your pay per click management company questions. However, most of these relationships are hourly – make sure that you don’t a question which you can answer yourself with a simple Google search.

Here is a crash course on some important acronyms and pay per click lingo: (my personal definitions)

• Ad Campaign- An overarching category that contains multiple ad groups.
• Ad Group- Contains multiple keywords and advertisements within a group. Advertisements will only display for keyword that are found within the Ad group.
• Keyword- The search query or phrase that the marketing team anticipates your potential customers will type.

• Text Ad- Multiple text ads can be placed at the Ad Group level and displays when keywords within the Ad Group are typed.

• Impressions-The number of times the search network has displayed your advertisement. This metric can be seen at the keyword, advertisement, ad group, ad campaign and account level.
• Clicks- The number of times consumers have clicked on your advertisement. This metric can be seen at the keyword, advertisement, ad group, ad campaign and account level.
• CTR- Click-through-rate is a percentage derived from clicks on a specific advertisement divided by the amount of impressions which the advertisement had. This metric can be seen at the keyword, advertisement, ad group, ad campaign and account levels.
• CPC- Cost-per-click is the rate which is paid for a click on a specific keyword.
• CPM- Cost-per-thousand-impressions is a less common payment model. It is the rate which is paid for every thousand impressions for a specific keyword.
• Avg. CPC- The average cost-per-click across an arbitrary time period. This metric can be seen at the keyword, advertisement, ad group, ad campaign and account level.
• Avg. CPM- The average cost-per-impression across an arbitrary time period. This metric can be seen at the keyword, advertisement, ad group, ad campaign and account level.
• Conversion Rate- A metric that is tracked only if your pay per click management company implements conversion code on a page that is considered a successful transaction. A successful transaction can be defined as a newsletter sign up, blog sign up, purchase on the site, etc. This percentage is derived from number of conversions divided by number of clicks. This metric can be seen at the keyword, advertisement, ad group, ad campaign and account levels.
• Cost per Conversion- The rate which you are paying for each conversion. This dollar value is determined by cost divided by number of conversions. This metric can be seen at the keyword, advertisement, ad group, ad campaign and account levels.

Now that you have a taste of what you are getting into, do you have any questions for us? If you do, feel free to post a comment. If it is a more sensitive topic, feel free to contact us privately.