On Friday we launched P&G’s second big campaign for the Febreze Pet Odor Eliminator which got written up in Brandweek. The campaign is likely the farthest reaching social media campaign we’ve put together and I expect will be our most successful advertiser brand campaign yet. But, I’m even happier to see the Febreze’s team get the respect they are due for committing to advertising in social media the right way.

Anyone that produces a modern website considers the benefits of socially-focused advertising as obvious as XHTML, but for Madison Avenue it’s still an opportunity to get fired. (Remember the Chevy Tahoe video campaign?) And even for those deeply immersed in social networking it’s still very easy to bungle social advertising (remember Facebook’s Beacon?) So, after a successful product launch with us in April where 20,000 pet owners joined Febreze’s Dogster/Catster Groups, Febreze wanted to take it to the next level and it was critical to all parties to get it right.

Here’s what we orchestrated and why BrandWeek covered the campaign:

*) Febreze understands how important pet adoption and rescue is to our community, so they are now the sponsor of the popular Dogster.com Adoption Center

*) Continuing their commitment to adoption and rescue, Febreze is giving away thousands of gift packs to owners of adopted dogs and cats. Anyone who has adopted a pet is eligible!

*) Raising puppies and kittens right is also very important so they are the sponsors of the Dogster Puppy Answers and Catster Kitten Answer areas.

*) People want to have fun too. Febreze is sponsoring a free gift (seen to the right) in our virtual store. In the first 5 days over 100,000 member pages (~16% of all profiles!) have received one of the gift collars.

On top of this the Febreze Pet Odor Eliminator message will be strategically messaged on our homepage and in our newsletters. Meanwhile campaign banners will be run-of-site through the entire campaign

What’s also gratifying is that by getting this right, we’ve collectively created new engagements factor for members. They love giving the gifts and getting the gifts. They’ve devised games based around the gifts and are writing about it in their diaries and forums. Here’s a member doggie’s photo I stumbled upon over the weekend.

So kudos to Febreze and their ad team for putting in the development time and prep work to turn what could have been a same-old banner campaign into a top topic of conversation on our sites and a source of a lot of fun and engagement.

Marketing Sherpa shares the results of an eyeball tracking study of how viewers looked at ad banners in a new newsletter in the first, second and third issue.

The three images show the results:
* 80% of people scanned the ad areas when reading the first issue of a new newsletter.
* 40% scanned the ad area when they got the second issue.
* Only 20% looked at the ad area by the time they got the third issue. Ouch!

Here are great key takeaways Marketing Sherpa gives:

1. Change the landscape
2. Change the look and feel of ads
3. Increase ad rotation

However, our newsletters do great, even with long-term readers. We often get our advertisers click-thru rate ~8%-10%. (That’s clicks, not just eyeball looks ;)

Here’s how:

1. We ditched the ad banner format. You should too.
2. We integrate the advertiser message and imagery into the rest of the newsletter, and do not have fixed placement areas.
3. We theme the newsletter around the advertiser’s message as often as we can.
4. We do four newsletters a month, but only two of them have ads.
5. We custom-write the advertiser message so it’s most relevant to our readers’ interests.
6. We never run the same ad twice in a month.
7. To advertise in the newsletter the advertiser must also have a presence on the general site (such as banners, sub-section sponsorship, contest, giveaway, etc.) so the viewer is more likely to accept the ad’s message faster.

Here’s a recent newsletter with two paid positions. Can you spot them? (click to enlarge)

Can’t help but post this raceday animated gif a member made.

Those are headshots of employees pulling rickshaws of popular pets on the sites.

Be still our racing hearts…

… you gotta get creative.

Office parties are never quite the same when fellow team members live too far away to make them. We’ve got people in Southern CA, Texas and Australia.

So we made and sent them a video when we went to a Giants game the other day so they knew we were thinking about them.

Here’s a still:

It was great being able to take them on my phone and sending them to people that couldn’t make it right from there.

We made some jackets too:

Marshall Kirkpatrick alerted us to a Wall Street Journal article highlighting research done by Ed Moran, a Deloitte consultant that finds exactly what we’ve documented. Companies that launch online communities as a means to market their brand or products almost invariably fail. For online communities to work the number one purpose must be to nurture, build and enthrall passionate userbases. The majority of online users can smell insincerity from ten clicks away, and the rest recognize it soon enough by the complete absence of a meaningful and engaging experience.

The WSJ sums their mistake up succinctly

One of the hot investments for businesses these days is online communities that help customers feel connected to a brand. But most of these efforts produce fancy Web sites that few people ever visit. The problem: Businesses are focusing on the value an online community can provide to themselves, not the community.

Moran studied 100 businesses that deployed online communities, and found:

• » 606% spent $1 million or more.
• » Only 25% attracted more than 1,000 registrants.
• » 35% failed to even get 100 registrants.

This means there’s a good chance some companies are paying $10,000 to acquire a single prospective customer email. (The WSJ article was wrong. Only 6% are spending more than $1 million.)

We’ve seen the cycle of launch, promote, ignore and fail happen with dozens of communities attempting to market a product or brand simply because we follow it all so closely. There have easily been 20 we’ve witnessed in the pet sector. Petsmart just brought pets.com back to market their brand.

If you are in the pet industry and would like to make sure you get it right, give us a call, we’ll help you get it exactly right.

Heather Champ, Director of Community at Flickr posted an oh-so-true presentation slide regarding passionate online communities. If you do it differently, you’re only creating more work for yourself. Being a community manager is never about you, the community manager or the company you work for. It’s always about the community member or site user, who we like to call the customer.

Nice one Heather!

If this slide doesn’t sit well with you, it’s important you get comfortable with it, or never get into the service business. The only exception is if you treat your customers like dirt, which has also been shown to lead to dedicated followings.

Recently a single text file was inappropriately moved from a test environment to our live servers and it killed almost 40% of our search-driven traffic for 3 weeks. Trust me, it sucked.

Now that it’s over and my heart rate is back to normal and search traffic is back better than ever, I thought it would be a good item to share.

Any techie will quickly guess that the text file that farked our search traffic is the robots.txt file. Robots.txt is a web-root-level file which tells respectful search engine spiders which files and folders they should not index. It’s a great way to ensure that cache files, admin areas, archived content, test files, etc. do not get indexed. It’s also very handy to place on beta testing servers so no beta URLs will ever appear in search results. A while back we found that a better way to block outside access was to password protect all non-production servers. However, we didn’t remove the robots.txt file form those servers and they sat there like a ticking time bomb.

So this lessons isn’t about being vigilant about your robots.txt file, it’s about being vigilant in keeping a holistic view of your whole web app and keeping it as small and efficient as possible even as your project gets more and more complex. Inevitably, a series of events unfolds where the unthinkable manages to occur due to unrelated decisions happening over a period of time.

Our search Traffic from 5/26 - 6/15

We allowed the bomb to detonate during a recent upgrade to our code deployment system which inadvertently moved the useless-but-still-there robots.txt file from a staging server to our production web servers which immediately began rejecting all requests by search engine spiders to index our site. At first it just blocked new pages from being indexed, but after about a couple weeks, it started down ranking and removing all our pages from their search results. This was when we first realized something was up.

I’ll be honest and admit even when I isolated our reduced traffic to reduced search traffic, I didn’t prioritize researching the problem. If I hadn’t let myself believe a national heatwave might be causing a reduction in search engine queries, I might have taken the time to look at the robots.txt file. If I had immediately gone to Google Webmaster Tools, I would have seen a warning that our SiteMap.xml file was inaccessible. But we ended up letting a couple too many days go by before putting out the red alert and when we found the robots.txt file had been overwritten we fixed it in about 8 seconds. Yet just as it took a while for search engines to start down ranking and removing our pages from their indexes, it took a couple weeks for them to revert all pages to being indexed and highly ranked.

The result is that our numbers for May were down and June is a complete anomaly. Fortunately, this mistake was not too costly from a long term revenue or usage perspective. The affect was limited to reduced unique visitors and to a lesser degree overall page serves. We lost some momentum with new user growth and had to sustain a heart attack or two until we knew the traffic was on it’s way back. In fact, this past week marks our highest level of search traffic ever =)

For laughs, here’s a chart of our weekly search traffic that shows the aftermath. The affect is also clearly visible in our Compete’s numbers which I won’t look at again until July’s number shows us entirely back on track. (which our daily stats indicate we are ;)

* Starting around May 28th search traffic starts dropping off
* For three weeks we averaged about 60% of our normal search traffic
* Traffic didn’t fully resume until early July
* Ouch

Greatest American Dog premiered last night on CBS (Thursdays at 8pm ;) and it was a huge hit. Another huge hit is Dogster’s partnership with the show.

We directed a ton of viewers by promoting the show all over our site and a ton of show viewers came to our site too. Once on Dogster, viewers could meet the dog contestants and chat it up with other fans.

An important lesson we’ve learned in our four years is that TV promotion of a website in and of itself does not drive traffic to that site. In 2006 when we were an on-air sponsor of the National Dog Show with a viewership of 20 million, we experienced almost no traffic bump. This is because there was no actionable reason that a show viewer should move over to their computer and go to our site. (This is the same reason Bud Light or Pizza Hat air 10 ads in a single football game - it’s the only way to get in your head). It’s important to note this is not a TV phenomena. When we’ve had similar brand-only placements in newspaper inserts, radio shows and in-store promotions, they performed at the same low rates. Without a call-to-action for something the potential customer actually wants, you may as well not do at all.

Therefore, we made sure the call-out in this partnership was not primarily about Dogster.com, it was about offering show enthusiasts the ability to engage even deeper in the show. The message we conveyed was: “Meet the dogs! Talk with other Fans! … on dogster.com”

Here’s a low-res clip of one of the shout-outs. It was only 5 seconds, and during the credits, but by making sure there was a call to action that resonated with the viewership, it generated the highest concurrent web users we’ve served in a long time and tons of participation on the site.

Here’s the clip that worked.

[Click through if you do not see the video above]

Today marks the start of an exemplary relationship between old and new media that I expect we’ll see a lot more of in the future.

CBS and Dogster, Inc. have partnered to add a whole new level of participation and engagement in their TV programming.

Tonight at 8pm CBS will premiere their big prime time summer program, Greatest American Dog. However, this is a reality show you will not only watch. Thanks to the CBS / Dogster relationship, viewers will be able to meet the contestants, talk with each other, meet in the fan club and root for their favorites all on Dogster.com.

CBS smartly realized that though they could add some forums and community features to their show website, it would be an uphill battle for deep, passionate participation to occur there. Traditional media companies are great at releasing highly-produced programming that millions of people tune in to. They also have made strong gains in using the web to expand that presence by offering more viewing opportunities as well as using the web as another advertising channel. But the radical changes and benefits of “Web2.0″ functionality (i.e. web design that aims to enhance creativity, information sharing, and collaboration) are currently very difficult to harness for large corporate properties.

Conversely, online properties such as ours have learned how to provide entertainment to millions using web technologies, but have neither the resources nor abilities to produce great television programming.

That’s exactly why old and new media are the new hot couple. The “old” provides the great quality and massive distribution via traditional entertainment mediums and the “new” provides a deeper experience in terms of extra, supporting content, entertainment and human-to-human connections that has been so profoundly missing from from the living room experience.

The last ten years are littered with the failures of web properties trying to become TV broadcasters and TV broadcasters trying to make great web services. But together, these cross-media extravaganzas can be done very easily.

We term this type of relationship “In Stream/Out Stream.” In this case CBS provides the “in stream” of visitors to Dogster, and we provide an “out stream” of viewers to CBS. Of course the converse is true from CBS’ perspective and what happens is we create a cycle of audience augmentation.

We have been doing “In Stream/Out Stream” for years now. Many of our advertisers get huge ROIs from this. Disney (in, out), 3M (in, out), Febreze (1, 2, 9Lives have all found that directing customers to dedicated areas on Dogster and Catster leaves a far more profound impression on their customers then if they tried to provide the same service on their own websites. This is because we always ensure the customers get a deeper, more meaningful experience than they would anywhere else.

We’ve also got a similar “In Stream/Out Stream” relationship in the works with Lifetime TV. They found 70% of their viewers have a dog or cat and pet-related content on their websites was always a hit. Lifetime Media, as expected, is great at producing high-quality TV content, not online pet content. So they came to us and together we are producing a webisodie, “The Pet Report”. They provide the state of the art studio and high production quality and we provide the super-fun passionate pet content.

We’ll keep writing updates on this, but tune into Greatest American Dog at 8pm on CBS to see it in action.

Wallstrip gets my nod as one of the best interviews ever. It’s hard to know as much was edited down, but they really did their homework and asked a lot of good question based upon research they did in advance.

Note my tips of growing a business:

• » Start something when most people think it’s a bad time to start something.
• » Sell advertising directly.
• » Spend as little money as possible until you know how you are going to make it.
• » Business first, technology second