Today, like yesterday, I've been inspired by Mark Simms, Editor of Industrial Technology magazine. I was his predecessor there, and I think he's just passed my ten years in the hot seat, so we've seen a lot of changes between us.

Mark reckons that the immediacy and effectiveness of modern product advertising, coupled with a decline in brand advertising, could be detrimental to the quality of product design. If a component which will just "do the job" can be sourced quickly and cheaply, without any real advice from a knowledgeable supplier, he argues that buyers will find themselves with no more resources than are needed to do just that. What's more, with no brand marketing, they will feel less inclined to stick with the same manufacturer in the future (if they can even remember who it was). The cycle will be ever cheaper, less fit-for-purpose components, and poorer end products.

It's an intriguing argument. However, I think that it assumes that branding through advertising plays a larger part in customer loyalty than it does nowadays. What the irritatingly flippantly-named "social media" offers manufacturers is the opportunity to engage more closely than ever with their existing customers, and create levels of brand loyalty which advertising and sponsorship has never been able to manage. Of course I'd say this, because one of the things I do is to set up email newsletters, blogs and Twitter feeds for companies like yours. But these allow you to create real user communities for less than the cost of wasteful branding advertising, and reach far more customers than corporate golf days ever could.

Many companies I've done business with now ensure brilliantly that I never "get away", but in acceptable ways that make me want to do more business with them. I'm sure you can think of a few who've kept you on board you in the same way, such as banks, car dealerships and utilities companies. Is your engagement with your customers moving on to the next level?

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We seem to have a bit of a theme going on this week. Following my article on Monday about the problems being faced by trade magazines, I got into some interesting correspondence with my former colleague Mark Simms, Editor of Industrial Technology magazine, one of the few titles which is refusing to panic in the current market conditions. Mark has some fascinating theories about the trend away from brand advertising towards measurable response advertising, which I'll mention tomorrow. This sort of thoughtful analysis is why I'm sure that independent publishers such as the team at Industrial Technology will outlast most of the juggernauts of the trade publishing business.

However, in a week when we've brought up the question of how trade magazines can survive, there's been much discussion on the wider question of "free vs paid-for" media and where it's taking us, thanks to a critical analysis by "thinker" and author Malcolm Gladwell of a new book by another widely-read writer, Chris Anderson. There are powerful arguments about where things are heading, which is why Seth Godin points out in "Malcolm is wrong" that "For a long time, all the markets for attention-based goods are going to be messy". But as he says, "This means that there are going to be huge opportunities".

What's rarely mentioned is that trade magazines might have been ahead of the game on all this. While online publishers and media creators of all types run around wondering how they're going to make a living now that everyone expects everything to be free, trade magazines have been free for years. If anyone ought to have ideas on how to generate revenue from non-traditional sources, it ought to be the people who long ago took monetising their products from advertising to the limit.

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If you've got 3 minutes spare to watch a video, take a look at this one by Matt Cutts, one of the few public faces of Google's search team, talking about why some directories are great to be in, and others are considered "spam". I guess what we can take away from this is to avoid being in directories which clearly don't have any "editorial quality", and certainly never consider paying to be in them. I firmly believe that the only use for directories is in the value Google puts on the link they give you (after all, does anybody ever visit a directory now?), so if the link is of no value, why be there at all?

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Yesterday I mentioned Michael Jackson's untimely death last week, pointing out how – for once – the daily newspapers got a chance to be the place where many people first found out about the story. But did the web cover itself in glory on this one? Well, the story was broken on a website, it's true. But for most people, the web is the search engines (especially Google), and as Search Engine Journal illustrates in Microsoft Bing FAILS in Coverage, Twitter and Facebook Break News, the search engines were all but useless on the night. The first I heard about the story was on Twitter (the first time that's happened for me, and not the last, I'm sure), and I'd read dozens of people "tweeting" about it before even going to the web. Even then, I headed for a news website directly, rather than through a search engine, because I assumed there'd be nothing there (correctly, as we now see).

You may be thinking: "What's all this got to do with us, Chris?" Well, it's another step on the trend which has moved us from waiting to be told the news (print), to going to find it out ourselves (web), and now to telling each other. You might think "social media" is of no help to your attempts to sell blue widgets, and it probably isn't. But increasingly I'm thinking it will be. Do you wish you'd set up a customer email newsletter in 1994 (even if there were only a few readers out there), so that you had your own 50,000 circulation, fifteen years on? Maybe those 10 people following your company's blog on Twitter are the 2009 equivalent.

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Late on Thursday evening, the most famous pop star in the world died. I wouldn't have liked to have been working on a daily newspaper that night (talk about "clear the front page!" chaos) but the timing was extraordinarily fortuitous for the UK papers: a massive story which broke after most people had gone to bed, but just in time for it to be splashed on their front pages. There's about a one-hour slot each day when that can happen. But it doesn't happen often enough, which is one reason why newspapers are closing all over the world.

Will the trends in the newspaper industry be reflected in the printed media we use in industry – the "trade mags" and other journals? I believe they face two insurmountable problems. The first is the "I've read about it already" problem which the newspapers are failing to cope with. Despite having had years to plan for a changing market, most trade mags are still publishing as much "product news" as they did ten or twenty years ago, desite the fact that nowadays, a far higher proportion of their readers will already have read the news in more frequent online newsletters – or, increasingly, directly from you. The only way for these titles to remain relevant is for them to concentrate on analysis. Unfortunately, that's much more expensive than reprinting press releases, which brings us onto the second of their problems.

Microsoft's Steve Ballmer recently made the prediction that advertising in traditional media will never come out of this recession. He said that it has been "permanently reset" and that as the economy recovers, the gains will largely go to more flexible media. This could be a financial disaster for a lot of print media owners. Many trade mags are now running at a serious loss, and are banking on a pickup sooner rather than later to bail them out. It may never come. Is it true in your sector? Here's a quick exercise for you. Find the latest issue of a trade mag you read. You know the real cost of a page advert, so you can work out in 2 minutes how much revenue that issue has made. Now look at the list of staff. One of the three trade mags I have on my desk has about 20 pages of advertising at – what – £1000 per page? It apparently operates on an efficient-looking staff of about 6 people. Would £20,000 even pay their salaries? And we haven't even got on to the more substantial costs of printing and posting 15,000 magazines yet.

This does not look good to me. Very few people will benefit if the traditional trade magazine dies. I have a few ideas how to save it, and I know some people working hard in that sector who have some too. I just hope their publishers and advertisers listen to them.

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I've let the first anniversary of this blog slip past without any acknowledgement, so belated happy birthday, blog. I'll download you a new plug-in or something. Anyway, although I'm delighted to have over 500 of you getting this by email every day, as well as a decent number of RSS readers and of course all the casual web traffic, we need to push on. So I'm just wondering, if I ask very nicely, if you'd do me a favour and recommend this to a colleague or two. Or perhaps you're part of a business organisation or an email newsgroup, and could recommend this to other members? Here's something you can copy and paste for them!

Thank you.

I thought I'd pass this on because it may be of interest: Chris Rand, of a consultancy called Business Marketing Online, writes a short daily article aimed at marketing managers in the industrial sector. It gives some useful tips for business-to-business web and email marketing, and is available free by email every morning. You can add your name to the circulation at
http://www.bmon.co.uk/leadgeneration/get-new-articles-by-email/

Recent well-read articles include "What you need to put in your email signature" – http://www.bmon.co.uk/leadgeneration/2009/02/what-you-need-to-put-in-your-email-signature – and "10 reasons to do AdWords for your own company name" – http://www.bmon.co.uk/leadgeneration/2009/02/10-reasons-to-do-adwords-for-your-own-company-name/

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Naming product ranges, or even individual products, is more important than ever. While consumer electronics companies still think it makes sense to present the public with full engineering part numbers (despite nobody ever saying "Have you seen the new KDL46W4000U at Currys?"), they are at least investing in the ranges' brand names nowadays. In the technical sector, however, some manufacturers still seem to think it's almost an admission of weakness to give products a brand, or an image of any sort. And this despite the fact that both sales teams and customers have always had to make up a name otherwise, just to be able to discuss the product ("The pressure sensor you want is our AZ-Series; yes, I know there's no reference to that in the catalogue, it's just what we call the series whose part numbers start in AZ…").

Successful web marketing, however, has made it almost compulsory to give products names. People search, and you need to give them something to search for. So how do you go about dreaming up names? There's no doubt that if you can say a name out loud without embarrassment and write it down easily without worrying about the spelling, you're off to a flying start. I'm such a nerd, I applied the same principles to naming my son: not only did I not want him ever to get laughed at for having a daft name, I also didn't want him to have to spend his life telling people how to spell it ("that's Steven with a 'v', by the way…").

What you also need now is something which is rare, or even unique, on the web. Calling your next product the "Chelsea" range might sound nice, but you're not exactly going to appear on the first page of Google. If you want a unique domain name for that product (and you do), then your options are going to be rather limited.

In the search for a name which is memorable, not used in more everyday market sectors, and easily-spelled, a good brainstorming session down the pub is one approach. Another is to play around with one of the online name generators which have sprung up. These are primarily designed to find available website domain names, so they have the benefit of giving you that information too. Try namecombo.com, for example.

I assume you're not going to be spending thousands of pounds on getting some agency to do it. If you are, give me a few minutes, I'm off to start up a new consultancy…

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A short post – Conversion Rate Exercise: Why Should I Do Business With You? – on the Marketing Optimization Blog puts forward a couple of good ideas inspired by social media which might help you clarify what your company's unique selling propositions are. The majority of businesses we come across in any walk of life seem to find it hard to focus on what they're offering that others aren't – and consequently give you the impression that they have no better reason why you should buy from them other than, er, they're them. Have you also lost your way a bit in that respect?

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Another great post from Smashing Magazine – Informative And Usable Footers In Web Design – looks at what to put in this small and neglected but important part of your website. What do people expect when they scroll to the very bottom of the page? It would appear they want "About" and "Contact" information, some sort of link to an index or site map, and (on long pages) a "Back to the Top" link. Obvious really, but does your site have these in place? I run about 20 websites, and I'm quite sure not all of mine do, but it's information which could be added easily, and should be.

There are some lovely examples of good footer design too, which make all of our sites look tatty.

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The Marketing Optimization Blog is amongst a number of blogs in the field of SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) which has been making uneasy noises about the subject recently. In Will Google Judge You Guilty of SEO? it hints that a dramatic Google update might be coming (there's no real evidence for this) and that sites which have been manipulating Google results might be caught out. Now, I've been to some search engine optimisation conferences, and although many of the people working in the area are very smart indeed, I've never met a group of people who are more totally wrapped up in their little world. They are obsessive about being well-known "names", and getting one over on their fellow experts (terms like "SEO superstars" are regularly thrown around), and one of the results is that their blogs will be full of predictions, so they'll always be able to show how clever they are when they get one right. So don't panic about an impending search engine optipocalypse destroying your Google traffic overnight just because a blog or two says it might.

That said, the article above makes some good points, including the obvious observation that Google views SEO as dangerous. I guess that depends on what you mean by "SEO". If it's genuinely manipulating the search engine results, it's definitely risky. As I've said before, run for your lives if you're approached by one of those consultancies which says it can improve your Google rankings for a monthly fee, but tells you that you'll need to maintain the contract if you want to maintain the results. I hate to think what they're doing. On the other hand, if you understand "SEO" to be putting all the basics in place on your site, and ensuring you've got links from sites which ought to give you links, there's nothing wrong with that and never will be. When people ask us to quote for SEO work, they're often surprised that it's only a few hundred pounds a month, not a few thousand, but that's because what we do is the basic stuff which Google actively encourages.

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