Market Creation & Influence Networks

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The Key To Effective PPC Advertising

In September's Blog we looked at the need to build consistency into your PPC advertising campaign. If you didn’t read it, you can read it here. This month we will look at how to write PPC copy that achieves the “consistency” goal. Before doing so though, let’s take another look at what we mean by consistency. 

First, PPC advertising’s goal is not to bring people to your web site. It’s goal is to bring people to your website only if they 1) match your ideal buyer profile, and 2) are ready to make a buying decision. Bringing non-qualified buyers to your website, or people who are not yet ready to make a buying decision, might be good for the PPC service company you hire, as it will make them tons of money, but it is useless for you, as few of those site visitors will buy anything.

From this standpoint it is easy to see that your PPC ad has to do more than just incent viewers to click on it. It must also contribute to the “buyer qualification process.” What’s a buyer qualification process you ask? It’s nothing more than that old aspect of selling that says that you are wasting your time making a sales pitch to someone who has no intention of buying. So, before you spend your time or your money trying to sell something to someone, perhaps you ought to take a few moments to qualify them and make sure they are shoppers 1) whose attributes meet your ideal customer profile, 2) who are ready to make a buying decision, 3) who can afford your product, and 4) who are the real decision maker when it comes to spending money

Your PPC ad campaigns must contribute to this process. If they don’t, then as successful as they may be in delivering people to your website, they will be doing little more than causing you to spend money to reach people who will never buy anything from you. The question then is: how do you write PPC copy that helps attain consistency in the selling process? The answer is simple: your PPC copy should reflect your selling process, not the goal of getting people to click on your PPC ad. 

  One of the unpleasant side effects of capturing customer data and using it on your websites to make it easier for your customers to interact with you is that if that data is available to drive customer interaction, it’s also available for hackers to steal. In our June Blog we talked about the government starting to ramp up billions in spending on cyber security. Now that they have decided to take over the healthcare industry, as they have done with the auto, banking and insurance industries,  it’s just a matter of time until Washington puts your private health information, and that of your family, in some database somewhere where it is accessible from the web. When seen from this perspective, making patient data—or, as in your case, customer data—more accessible creates a very real downside risk that it will fall into the wrong hands.

The government has allocated $29 billion (at the rate of $49,000 per doctor) to reimburse doctor offices, hospitals and others for the cost of tightening up cyber security, especially as it relates to patient records. What about your company? How much is in your budget to make sure your customer data doesn’t end up being hacked? Not much, right? Well, if that’s the case, I hope you have a great PR expert on your staff—someone expert in damage control; because with nearly every State now requiring that you publicly disclose any breaches of customer data, it’s likely your name, and that of your Company, is going to end up on the front page of the Wall Street Journal.

Face it, for every web related data base that stores customer names, addresses, a SSN, phone number, a credit card or two, an IP address, or any combination of these, there is a hacker somewhere trying to find and get into it. In May 2009 a hacker stole more than 500,000 customer records from a state-run database. The same month, the University of California ‘fessed up that another hacker stole about 160,000 patient records. Still not convinced that your company is at risk? Consider these few additional examples:

- August ‘09: National Finance Center – 27,000 records stolen

- July ‘09: Network Solutions – 573,000 records stolen

- July ‘09: Moores Cancer Center – 30,000 records stolen

- July ‘09: LexisNexis – 13,329 stolen

- May ‘09: Aetna – 65,000 stolen

According to privacyrights.org, between January 2005 and today some 263,247,398 customer records were stolen. It’s just a matter time until your company’s website is hacked too. 

What can you do about it? 

Surprisingly, the answer is really quite simple. What is needed is a corporate policy that addresses the issue.

More than just addressing the technical aspects of customer data protection, a key part of the policy must focus on getting the facts surrounding the problem, and the solution, and the seriousness of people adhering to a policy, out to each and every one of your employees. 

The best way to do this is by completing a three step process:

Step 1: Develop a Customer Data Protection and Cyber Security policy manual. Print it, give a copy to every employee, have them sign a document saying they received a copy, and file the statement with their personnel records.

Step 2: Have your attorney prepare a legally binding document that makes the employee attest that a) they have been briefed on the dangers and risks relating to the misuse, abuse, publication, or theft of customer data, b) that they understand that if they are found to be involved in and responsible for the loss or misuse of customer data they may be subject to criminal prosecution. Include in the document a list of what the company classifies as confidential data, and be specific and detailed about it. List things like customer names, first and last, customer addresses, and on, and on. File this too in each employee's personnel record.

Finally, Step 3: In addition to getting your staff to understand the seriousness of the issue, take the time to teach them what they can do to help keep customer and corporate data secure.

Provide a series of half hour seminars, and require that every employee attend. At the same time, make sure that your HR department provides this same briefing to each and every new employee. In the seminars, reinforce that each person is personally, legally, and, in some cases, financially responsible for how they manage corporate assets, including customer data.

Explain to your employees that when it comes to the laptop and p.c. they are given, they are just as responsible for the data that is stored on it as the device itself. Explain in detail what constitutes confidential information, as well as how hackers gain access to it, and what they do with it. Explain the risk of using thumb drives, eMail attachments, and more. Finally, explain to them that with certain types of customer data, not only are they responsible for protecting it, but if they give it to a third party, such as a vendor or supplier that you work with, they are also responsible for insuring that the third party knows that the data must be kept confidential and protected from misuse, abuse or theft. Yes… believe it. In some cases your, and your employees’, responsibility extends beyond your own company to those you deal with.

Take the time now to put a cyber security policy in place. Assign someone outside of IT to be responsible for it. Tell them that you want: a policy, a set of legal documents to brief and hold staff responsible, a seminar that teaches people what to do and how to help, and while you are at it, tell them you want them to arrange for a competent outside third party to do a cyber security technical assessment of your data systems, IT network, and web presence. 

If we can help, let us know. That's what we are here for.

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The Issue of Cyber Security 

If, as I have, you’ve been watching Obama spending all of our money faster than a drunken sailor, then you can be forgiven for not looking too deeply into where the money is going, but instead, worrying yourself sick about who is going to pay for all of this. I’ve been telling people since Obama got elected, This is no normal tax and spend Democrat. This guy is a spend and tax one. Watch him, he’s spending now, but my bet is that once he’s finished he’ll be back to tax us to death to pay for his shopping spree.

Horrified as I am about a country whose dollar is weakening faster than Superman on kryptonite, today for the first time I heard of a spending program that I can actually embrace: Cyber Security. Finally, something that’s not an ear marked special interest project, but instead is based on addressing a growing national security issue.

Will wonders never cease? Me approving of an Obama spending initiative? Oh well. I guess life goes on.

For those of you not familiar with the subject of Cyber Security, if you’re running a company with any sort of Web presence, then it’s about time you spend a few hours brushing up on what it is, and why you should care. Ask your head of IT for a briefing on it. Ask him to include not just your internet presence, but also your intranet, WANs, LANs, and how the employees in your company use mobile and telephone service for business purposes. If your company uses IM, be sure to include that too. If it allows people to attach files to eMails, or retrieve them and save them on personal computers, ask that eMail data transfer security issues be included.

Ask what your company’s password policy is. Is it imposed and managed, or voluntary? Ask him to include your company’s sneaker-net… thumb drives and the like. And be sure to tell him you want a security report on not just the front office systems, but back-end stuff like your data systems, remote p.c.s, Blackberries, and the rest.

To make sure you know enough to ask relevant questions, spend a bit of time brushing up on Cyber Security. One of the best places to start is… dare I say this… on a government site that the Department of Homeland Security has set up. Check out http://www.us-cert.gov/cas/tips/ . It’s one of the best sites the Feds have ever put up. You’ll learn lots from it, so spend some decent time looking it over, require your department managers to do the same, and pass it on to your friends and lovers. Yeah, even your lovers. They’ll benefit by knowing how to stop from having their IMs to you discovered by your wife. 

As for Obama ‘s initiative on Cyber Security, I applaud it. I lived in China for 4 ½ years, and I know well that the Chinese government considers everything it posts on non-public government networks, intranets, and websites a State Secret. Disclose something found in one of those places to the public and you’ll spend the rest of your life herding Lamas in Inner Mongolia. Frankly, I think it’s about time the U.S. takes this approach too. It’s time to stop hanging our laundry out there for the world to poke through when they want. 

To me, Federal government, non-public networks are little more than another border between our country and the world. They’re no different than the one that separates us from Mexico, and, just like that one, they need to be firmly sealed so people can’t randomly come across when they want to... no matter how well meaning their intentions. 

Interestingly, in Obama’s announcement about spending money on improving the country’s Cyber Security, he said he was going to limit the effort to just the government sector. This too is good thinking. There is no need to put money into Cyber Security for use in private industry or by the public. After all, Security is a fungible commodity; once solutions have been designed for government use, enough of it will spill over into the private sector to meet our lowly needs.  

Think of it like the Global Positioning Satellite systems designed for military use. The government designed a GPS system with accuracy down to centimeters, something the military needed in order to put missiles through windows, or knock a Taliban off a horse without parting the horses mane. Once they had what they needed, they made it available to the general public, albeit with a little less accuracy… down to yards instead of inches. Now we all get to use it, which means you no longer have an excuse for getting lost on your way to Wal-Mart. 

My guess is that the same thing will happen with Cyber Security. Once the Feds can stop the Chinese from rummaging around State Department and Pentagon networks, they’ll let the technology bleed over into the public realm, but with a little less “security” built into it. After all, the Feds still need to sneak around your p.c. and cell phone when you’re not looking. 

As for statements made that the government intends to manage this project themselves, seeking expertise from outside contractors only as needed, that too is good thinking. Of all of the areas the government has ever tried to manage, this is one of the few where the government can be just as effective at managing, developing and implementing something as private companies.  

Best of all, if Obama is spending money on it, it might actually get done this time. Cyber Security is not something new, there have been three Cyber Czars since 2002. This is the first time that some goals, objectives, and money has been put behind the idea... maybe now it will actually get done.

By my judgment, the program gets a solid thumbs up. It’s time everyone start paying attention to digital privacy: the government, the public, and you… sitting there in your office… you too.

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More On Privacy 

This page on Wikipedia does an excellent job of covering just what Internet privacy is all about. Even the comment by Steve Rambam that on the Internet “Privacy is dead - get over it” was entertaining. All except for one thing… I don’t agree. Saying that we must cave in and accept that on the Internet everyone has a right to rip off our identity and strip us of privacy is like saying that it’s o.k. for the Democrats to run the country for the rest of mankind’s time on earth. I just don’t accept it as a necessary outcome from the sad state of present affairs.