Chris
Gadomski on Internet Marketing--Making A Brand Breathe
Architect Magazine Delivers a Great Analysis Piece on www.som.com
As an adjunct professor teaching Internet Marketing, I have come to realize that it takes more than an entire semester to deliver all the tactical and strategic issues involved with successful internet marketing. That is why it was such a pleasure to read Jacob Ward's article som.com in the premier issue of Architect magazine.
som.com is the url for Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, a renowned global architectural firm. It is also a website that has recently been redesigned by Bruce Mau Design (BMD). It is not just Mau's redesign that prompted my attention, but rather how Ward has managed to synthesize in a three and a half page article many of the concepts that I stress in my graduate MBA Internet Marketing class at the Zicklin School of Business, Baruch College, CUNY.
The practice of Internet marketing itself grows more sophisticated with many new experts emerging every day in search engine optimization, design, pay-per-click, email marketing, contextual marketing, and web content development.
And every day it appears that something new does emerge that places a little bit of a different spin on what was accepted as gospel only yesterday. And I haven't yet mentioned the new, "new media" of video on demand (VOD) and .mobi applications.
So getting one's hands around the space is becoming increasingly difficult... yet increasingly important as advertising dollars are rushing headlong onto the Internet. Even though I try in my classes, inadvertently, a few key aspects of the discipline fall through the cracks, or at best, get touched on only briefly. That is especially true when one attempts to incorporate a "global business" dimension to the course as we do at Baruch.
In Ward's article I have gratefully a found a suitable parting shot for my students--an exclamation point for a course that pokes into many corners of the Internet.
Mau's new design of www.som.com, which will launch at the end of 2006, replaces a 1999 vintage flash site the design of which "made it nearly impossible to determine who was using the site and how."
Mau was lucky to have clients in Skidmore, Owings and Merrill who realized that "Internet ventures live and die by their ability to study the behavior of their customers" and Mau consequently spent a great deal of time, most of 2004 according to Ward, analyzing som.com's traffic. This analysis along with an immersion into the culture of the architect led to a design approach that allowed "users to sort, select, combine, collect and subscribe to what they need." Bang!
The article describes the many steps taken by Mau to reconceptualize the site, which is best related by simply reading the article yourself. What intrigued me the most about Mau's approach, however, was an identification of six hypothetical users of SOM's website based on "Internet traffic analysis and competitive research."
Traffic analysis and research is something we all do, or rather try to do given proper client consideration. Yet Ward's message came home to me abruptly as I first read his article shortly after a series of board room meetings with different clients. At those board meetings a similar conceptualization of the intended users of the site would have been tremendously useful in focusing our efforts and clarifying the discussion.
So simple and straight forward to address when we first approach the drawing board, so difficult and so expensive to do when the rush is on after failing to take the first steps properly.
Chris Gadomski develops business for his clients through strategic planning, focused marketing communications, and by managing interent content and search engine optimization strategies. He teaches Internet Marketing and Global Business at the Zicklin School of Business, Baruch College/CUNY.
Reprintable with permission citing source: www.SMIdirect.net.
Chris
Gadomski
Tel:
914.993.9060
Email:
info@SMIdirect.net
