If the candidate senses online is an afterthought [to the hiring company], then they are not going to work there. It’s essential the company sees ecommerce as a pie-enlarging value proposition, not just a pie-rearranging proposition. Because at the end of the day, “A” players want to go where they are going to matter.
— Harry Joiner

Harry Joiner runs a specialized recruiting firm which focuses on filling online marketing executive slots.

In this podcast, Harry shares his insights on hiring top-notch online talent, as well as how he uses online marketing techniques himself to grow his business.

Listen to podcast: http://www.rimmkaufman.com/content/Harry_Joiner_Interview.mp3

Alan Rimm-Kaufman: I’m honored to speaking with Harry Joiner of Marketing Headhunter.com. Can you tell me what you do, Harry?

Harry: Sure. I’m an e-commerce recruiter specializing in multi channel ecommerce and I have a blog at www.ecommercerecruiter.com and a job board at www.onlineretailjobs.com.

Alan: So you help e-commerce firms place senior executives, junior executives?

Harry: I do indeed. I handle VP level searches and director/manager level searches for a variety of reasons. But to use a baseball analogy, it’s kind of like the manager and director level searches are the singles and the doubles. And three or four times a year, there’s an opportunity to hit home runs there with VP level searches, so it’s a mixed bag.

Alan: I was reading some of your stuff online, and in 1997, you were trading frozen food. How did you move from trading in beef to helping people find jobs?

Harry: I am a glutton for punishment. I worked for my dad’s company. My dad owns a commodity trading company called AJC International in Atlanta, Georgia. And it’s not a small business. They’ve got half a dozen foreign offices and this year they’ll do $800 million in sales. It’s the tenth largest privately held company in the state of Georgia.

So after I graduated from business school, I went to work for my dad’s company for about seven years, and wound up working for their domestic distribution subsidiary in Chattanooga, Tennessee. While I was working up there, I had an opportunity to go into business as a marketing consultant, which appealed to me greatly.

Long story short, while I was engaged on a marketing consulting assignment for a local, interim CFO company that wanted to get into the staffing business, I discovered the recruiting and staffing business. I made them a bunch of money and had a moment of clarity about what I should be doing, so I just decided that I liked recruiting and the money was good and I would just stay doing it.

Alan: That’s interesting. You bring up your background in marketing. One of the things that I think is so cool about your recruiting practice is how heavily you use web marketing yourself. So you’re trying fill positions in web marketing, and you yourself are doing a tremendous amount of web marketing. Can you tell us how you use blogging and RSS and email, the social networks and so forth to grow your own practice?

Harry: Yes. That to me is actually like the luckiest break that I ever got, I think, in my entire career. The first search that I got when I went into business as a recruiter was for director of online retail for a company called Benchmark Brands in Atlanta.

Alan: Sure.

Harry: They run a website called Footsmart. It’s an Internet Retailer top 100 company, I think. So, I started calling around to Shop.org and DMA communities and networking with people. I knew how to speak the language of direct to consumer marketing and I think that was a little bit refreshing to them. We just started chatting about what do you do and how do you do it and do you postcard market, what’s the role of organic and paid search in the growth of your online business and all of these different things.

I just started cherry picking ideas that I thought were applicable for a recruiting business and bolting those tactics on to my own little marketing plan. For example, I’ve got a really good friend named So Young Park, who’s the Director of Online Marketing and CRM for Musician’s Friend up in Medford, Oregon.

My blog used to be called Proven Ways to Get New Customers. It was really essentially a throwback to my days as a marketing consultant. It was like a small business marketing blog. The content was good, but it wasn’t really germane to online retail. One day I was chatting with So Young and I said, “I’d really like to improve the traffic on my blog, you know. Do you have any ways that I could do that?” And she said, “Well, you could always change the name.” And I said, “To what?” And she said, “Well, what do you do?”

I said, “Well, I’m a marketing headhunter.” And she said, “Well, why don’t you just call it Marketing Headhunter?” And I said, “Well, that’s not really very exciting to me.” And she said, “Well, here’s the thing.” She said, “If you call your blog whatever it is you do and people back link to you as that thing, then when other people who need your services Google marketing headhunter and there are a bunch of sites on the internet that back link to you as that, then you become the nexus of all things marketing headhunter on the internet. Does that make sense?”

Alan: It does. So Young is a smart woman.

Harry: She is unbelievable. She said, do yourself a favor, right now, type marketing headhunter into a browser bar. And I did and I went to a website called Buy Domains.com and it was available. It was not cheap, but it was available. And she said, buy it. I said, it looks like it costs a lot of money. And she said, well, how much money do you make per search? And I said, 20% of somebody’s annual salary. And she said, the value that a domain like that will create for you over time, you know, what you would pay for it today is lost in the rounding of that number. So she said, just as a customer acquisition thing and as a branding thing, it will credibleize you in ways that you can’t possibly imagine. She said, you have got to go for it.

And I did and it worked like a charm. I talked to hundreds of really smart people, but based on that one little thing, I was able to take that concept and I bought Management Recruiter.com. I bought SEM Recruiter.com. I bought Search Engine Experts.com. I own Ecommerce Consulting.com.

I have got about 650 domains in my GoDaddy account and I get an extraordinary amount of traffic just as a result of the blogs that I have that are hosted on top of those keyword rich domains. So it works like a charm.

Alan: You mentioned domains, not to be confused with domaining, because you’re not trying to sell advertising, and so you’re actually using them to generate traffic for yourself, correct?

Harry: Yes. Some of the domains that I’ve had, worked better than others. The national domains that I’ve had worked great. For example, if you use the Aaron Wall’s SEO toolbar for Firefox, which is a lethal weapon for any of your listeners who may use that. It will tell you, I guess in connection with Google AdWords, what the keyword count is or what the search count is on a per diem basis.

So, for example, Management Recruiter, I think gets between 50 and 80 inquiries a day on Google, right? And so my blog, Management Recruiter.com is currently ranked second in the organics because of all the people that back link to it. So I mean the national domains, the ones that aren’t localized, like I own Executive Search Atlanta.com. That doesn’t work very well.

I own Executive Search Chicago, Executive Search New York, Executive Search, you know, a bunch of different cities. Those don’t work very well because of the way Google is presenting local search results. But the national ones, the way Google presents those results, the strategy works like a charm, which is lucky for me.

Alan: Can you share a little bit more about your blogging strategy?

Harry: Well, you know, here is the thing. Blogging is a means to an end. It’s not an end unto itself. So for me, blogging is not like a vanity thing. I don’t do it to express myself. I do it to get traction in search engines. And the thing of it is, when I blog at Marketing Headhunter.com. I have an editorial platform for that. I have a list, at least in my head, of things that I will blog about and things that I won’t blog about.

I won’t blog about my cat. I won’t blog about the weather, all those college football scores. But I will blog about ecommerce, about marketing, digital media, careers, and the slings and arrows of growing and developing a career in ecommerce. All that stuff I will write about.

According to, I think, Quadcast or Compete.com, 90% of my traffic right now is coming from search engines. So it’s what Quadcast calls passersby. So the trick with me is I don’t post that often, but what I do post is keyword rich, number one. I have what I hope is a teachable point of view on marketing and ecommerce and careers in those areas, and I produce stuff that people are gonna back link to. And because of that, I get a lot of traction in search engines.

Alan: Moving off the marketing and over to the recruiting, what are the positions, the level, the titles, the skillsets? What’s in the most demand today that you see?

Harry Joiner: I would say probably directors and managers, and the reason I would say that is this; It occurred to me about a year ago that there are 500 companies in the internet retailer top 500, right?

Alan: So 500 VP’s of ecommerce.

Harry: Yes. Some of those brands are so small that they don’t have a VP person there that’s a director, but for all intents and purposes, let’s just call it 500 VP’s of online retail that matter in the United States.

Alan: Sure.

Harry: And let’s say, I’m going to use round numbers that the average tenure as a VP of ecommerce is somewhere between two and three years, right? So you divide 500 by 2.5, and what you see there is that every year a certain number of chairs become available.

Alan: Sure.

Harry: And that’s not really enough to sustain the executive search activity for my industry, right? I’m just one recruiter out of hundreds out there that are trying to weasel into this space.

Alan: Yes.

Harry: So what it amounts to is that I probably get ten VP level searches a year, let’s be conservative, between eight and ten VP searches a year. Of those eight, I’ll probably close four. To pay the rest of the bills, I’ve gotta do manager and director level searches, and there’s a lot of satisfaction in those for me. And there’s a lot of demand in there for those as well.

Alan: What are the tips that you give to companies looking to hire ecommerce talent?

Harry: Well, I would say the first thing is understand that the best candidates are very business oriented. And they want to see the online channel as a means to an end, not an end unto itself, right? So the end that I’m talking about is greater customer intimacy.

So if the candidate gets a sense that the online channel is just an afterthought then they are not going to work there. Because at the end of the day “A” players want to go where they are going to matter.

So it’s essential that the online channel really matter to the company and that they embrace it, that internally everybody is onboard with online and that they completely embrace it and want to see it succeed; and sees ecommerce as potentially a pie enlarging value proposition for the company, not just a pie rearranging composition for the company. Does that make sense?

Alan: It does. It’s interesting to hear you say lead off with meaning and strategic importance rather than cash and personal advancement. I am assuming the comp and all that needs to be in line, but I find it very, very interesting that the first thing you cite is importance to the organization.

Harry: Well, the model that I use with every candidate is; think of your career in terms of the three F’s? Fun, future, and finance. Fun is a completely arbitrary and subjective thing. The financial piece is the only part of this that we can actually quantify, so now we got to really concentrate on the future orientation or the future attractiveness and relevance of the role.

And I encourage every candidate that I work with to really get their arms around that and understand whether or not the client that they are interviewing with is sincerely interested in being an online retailer or developing greater customer intimacy using the online channel to support its other channels and also as a standalone or whether or not they’re just talking about it. There’s a very high ‘full of crap’ factor among companies that are streaming into this space.

Alan: Great perspective. I’m sure you’ve seen a lot of companies intend to hire great people, but botch it. Besides what you just shared with us about the sincerity of their commitment to the channel, what should companies be certain not to do to be sure they don’t drive away good folks?

Harry: If I could give one solid tip is have a hiring process and keep the process moving. The analogies that I used is at the end of the day I’m an elephant hunter, right? And I know where the elephants hang out, I know the elephants, I love the elephants. The elephants are awesome. And elephants like to be shot dead or left alone.

Alan: And the elephant’s the candidate or the company?

Harry: Yes, the elephant is the candidate. And they like to be shot dead and bagged or left alone, right?

Alan: Got it, yes.

Harry: And what they would not abide, Alan, is 120 day hiring process that’s like a big budget movie with a plot that goes nowhere. They don’t have the time for it. It’s frustrating too because the other thing you got to consider is that every single executive search is a zero sum game.

So if I run an executive search for William Sonoma. William Sonoma is a big client of mine and I’ve helped them find a VP of ecommerce last year and have done some director level searches successfully for them in the interim.

It’s kind of like they’ve really got to have their act together and they have got to help the candidates maintain their dignity in the process because there’s only one VP role that they’re hiring for. And so let’s say I source four or five really great candidates for them. Well, they are only going to hire one and that means that everybody else goes home with a t-shirt.

Well, that’s a problem in my business because if the people go home with a t-shirt and a bad taste in their mouth, then they’re not going to like William Sonoma and they’re probably not going to like me. So it’s absolutely critical that I help people maintain their self-esteem and treat everybody with a tremendous amount of dignity because everybody’s got a lot to offer. Everybody could conceivably solve William Sonoma’s online problems in a variety of different ways.

It’s just a question of which candidate has the relevant skill set and the best chemistry and who can contribute something lasting and meaningful to William Sonoma’s existing management mix. And the candidates that can not quite do that this year need to be treated with dignity so that they can respectfully consider the company for future opportunities.

Alan: Good stuff. If a company can not make a hiring decision with internet speed, they may not be moving their business on the line, making online decisions with internet speed as well.

Harry: Yeah, that’s my opinion.

Alan: You see a lot of online retailing. You have a very interesting perspective having placed senior executives into some of the major firms in this space. And I think a lot of us would concur the economy is tough and might even be worsening before it gets better.

If you were asked to give your opinions to leaders of ecommerce companies, what are your suggestions for the rest of the year with the economic storm clouds brewing?

Harry: Well, I would say take a good hard look at your business and try and figure out at a high level, right, back of the envelope type stuff, whether or not your business is going to survive predicated on option A, cross-selling and upselling your current customers, or option B, acquiring new customers, right? So figure out, you know, it’s kind of a Sophie’s choice kind of deal there.

Pick one of those things to be awesome at and then try and staff around that and try and motivate and measure around those things because, you know, for instance, I prefer trying to figure out frankly how to cross-sell and upsell current customers just because customer acquisition in this space is getting to be all about search engines.

And I talk to a number of different VP’s of ecommerce and they all kind of say that Google is a really cruel mistress. You can’t control it. All you can do is just try and deal with it. And so my take on this is pick one of those strategies and try and bear down as hard as you can on that artifact and just be great at it.

Alan: Great stuff. Thank you so much for your time, Harry. If folks want to find you online, what’s the best way to reach you?

Harry: Sure. I’m on the internet at www.ecommercerecruiter, all one word, .com, and I also have a job board. It’s www.onlineretailjobs.com.

Listen to podcast: http://www.rimmkaufman.com/content/Harry_Joiner_Interview.mp3

Could do us a favor and take our quick Reader Survey? 30 seconds. 4 questions. 1 page. No scroll.

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We forgot that the majority of our readers follow this blog via RSS feeds or via email. Feedburner rendered the poll as a simple unordered HTML list, stripping the interactivity. We also used a smidge of CSS to hide the poll title auto-generated by Democracy. CSS doesn’t reach the feed, so that minor tweak was also lost.

Neither change mattered in this case, but the marketing takeaway is clear: RSS is about content, not presentation. Keep the markup in your feeds simple. Avoid embedded code. Make it easy for your content to fly free.

It is an important time for the affiliate industry. A lot of retailers are starting to question where affiliate marketing fits in their world. Four to five years ago, affiliate marketing was the “golden child.” Now, more multichannel marketers feel like their brands are being damaged by what is happening in the affiliate space.
– Larry Joseloff, Shop.org

Following up on all the interest in George Michie’s IR Affiliate talk, here’s the illustrious Larry Joseloff of Shop.org offering a balanced perspective on the affiliate game.

Fred Reichheld is author of The Ultimate Question: Driving Good Profits and True Growth, and a true customer loyalty expert. Much of his career has been devoted to understanding and questioning what makes successful businesses so successful? His findings don’t consist of strict “dollars and cents” accounting measures, but rather focus on the fundamentals of good business.

“The only way to grow your business long-term is through this process of turning your customers into your sales force.”
- Fred Reichheld

His Net Promoter Score (NPS) does just that. Measuring your advocacy ratings by comparing promoters to detractors can provide valuable insights into how you are viewed by your customers and what your business priorities should be.

Listen to the podcast: Fred Reichheld Interview

Fred Reichheld: Well, you know this issue of good and bad profits just comes out of my experience that most businesses, especially big businesses use accounting as their primary measurement system. It’s the only one that’s audited, the only one where people go to jail if they cheat. Or the only reliable one.

And one of the difficulties that that raises is that accounting can’t tell us the difference between good profits and bad. There are plenty of profits that are completely consistent with generally expected accounting principles, but they’re just completely bad because they’re inconsistent with Golden Rule behavior. They’re abusive, they’re misleading and they destroy growth and loyalty.

Matt Mierzejewski: Great. So getting away from the profitability, if, in your own words you could explain what the Net Promoter Score is.

Fred Reichheld: Net Promoter Score is our attempt at creating a universal system that is so simple and intuitive that eventually everyone will use it as their accounting system for customer and employee relationships. And as the need for that universal system is obvious, every single vendor in the satisfaction and market research space comes up with their own, unique ‘mine is better’ black box system, because that’s how you earn profits; buy my black box, my expertise. I think the only way we’re actually going to make progress is if we just settle on something that’s open source, everyone has access to it and it becomes an accounting system. And that, I think, should be a Net Promoter System.

Matt Mierzejewski: Makes sense. So let’s say we have our Net Promoter Score. How does one move upward or downward? Namely upward!

Fred Reichheld: It’s not so much focusing on the score. It’s focusing on the categorization process that the key to Net Promoter is I’ve go to categorize customers. Did I win their loyalty? Are they promoters? Did I fail miserably and they’re detractors? And sure, you want to keep track of did I fail just a little bit and they’re passive.

But it’s this focus of the categorization that helps you focus your management priorities and your decision-making throughout the organization so that the companies don’t forget this obvious truth that there’s just no way to grow profitably without earning the loyalty of your customers. And that’s a vague idea but it’s a very crisp idea to say I need more promoters and fewer detractors. And I can measure progress along those dimensions.

Matt Mierzejewski: And for many of our online retailers, any specific tips?

Fred Reichheld: Yeah, make the categorization crisp and straightforward. Make sure everyone in your chain, your front line employees, your vendors and suppliers understand it and start making the appropriate investment to improve. The only way to grow your business long-term is through this process of turning your customers into your sales force. And once again, that’s a really nice sounding but vague idea. But the power of a crisp measurement process, you can actually drive that through your business.

Matt Mierzejewski: What advice would you give to management in conveying this to kind of the front line employees and how important that is?

Fred Reichheld: I think one of the challenges for top management is convincing them this is not just a slight improvement on the dozen historic failed processes that sounded good but never delivered anything on satisfaction. This is a core, hard process just like an engineer would design for minimizing error rates or failure rates. And it has to be understood as a hard core business process, an operational process and not as a research program, nice to check on every quarter when we have time.

Matt Mierzejewski: Fred, we appreciate the time today and good luck in your further customer loyalty expertise and we’ll look forward to reading some more of your stuff.

Fred Reichheld: Well, The Ultimate Question is still awfully relevant and I’m beginning work on the follow-up to that. This idea of you’ve got to get more promoters and fewer detractors is spreading very quickly and I’m feeling very hopeful we’ll see great progress over the next few years.

Matt Mierzejewski: Well, we’re big believers as well. Thanks for your time.

Fred Reichheld: Bye-bye.

No longer.

If you’re not familiar with this issue, most blogging platforms automatically insert REL=”no follow” tags into links in comments posted by users to dissuade blog spammers.

On some blogging platforms, you can disable this feature. By providing inbound links to your commenters, you help them with their SEO rank, thus encouraging and rewarding comments. That is “do-follow”.

Why did we stop following?

We’re still fans of the do-follow movement, but the quantity and deviousness of the spam just got to be too annoying.

Yes, we run Akismet and other anti-spam plugins. The bad guys are too clever and persistent.

While the tingle of my first corollary is still fresh (Alan’s Corollary to Clarke’s Third Law), I’ll postulate another.

Anything that can be spammed, will.
–Alan’s Marketing Corollary to the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics

(That couldn’t be original, but I didn’t find the phrase on Google…)

Just as universe runs downhill towards increasing entropy and disorder, so do spammers destroy all free mass communication channels.

Email is the prime example, of course. CNet reports 95% of all email in 2007 was spam. Insane.

But also spam is also harming natural search. Blog comments. And increasingly, spammers are spreading their muck across the social web.

The only channels immune from devolving into the entropic gray goo of spam are those which require payment (for example, paid seach) and those which are “pull” media (for example, RSS).

Anyway, we’re no longer “following” on this blog. Sorry a few bad apples ruined it for everyone else.

Sigh.

– Chuck Teller, CatalogChoice

Chuck Teller is Executive Director of CatalogChoice.org , a rapidly growing catalog do-not-mail service. In this podcast, Chuck discusses his non-profit organization and how it impacts the catalog world.

Listen to podcast: Chuck_Teller_Interview.mp3

Alan Rimm-Kaufman: This is Alan Rimm-Kaufman and it’s great to be here with Chuck Teller of Catalog Choice.

Chuck Teller: Hi, Alan.

Alan: Hi Chuck. Can you tell me a little bit about Catalog Choice? Where do you come from, what are you doing?

Chuck: Sure. I’ll just start with the history of how it started. The concept for Catalog Choice came out of the Overbrook Foundation, a family foundation that provides grants in various areas of environmental aspects. The sustainable production and consumption group within Overbrook had been funding areas around sustainable wood and paper production and consumption.

One of the board members came up with the notion: what if we looked at the beginning of the “pipe”, around reduction, rather than simply the end of the pipe around recycling and look at the area actually about catalogs and specifically unwanted catalogs.

So they went and did some research about just trying to understand if I was a consumer, you know, how straightforward is it for me to request that I no longer receive a catalog in the mail and part of that research, they found that it really was not very straightforward.

We rarely found options on merchants’ Web sites to facilitate this communication and so, you know, they reached out to some resources and said, you know, “How can we make this work?”

We actually also looked around in the marketplace and we found that there was a couple of companies who were offering the service for a fee to consumers, that they would go through the process of facilitating the opt-out request and we thought that it really should be free.

You don’t pay to get on a list, so why should you pay $20.00 or something to get off of the list?

Alan: Sure.

Chuck: So that was the the start of the project in ’06, early “07. We did a lot of research in ’07, put together a team of skilled software developers, looked at the business process around the whole merge-purge and built a software application that is unique in the aspect that it’s for consumers, that allows consumers to come in and in a straightforward way kind of set forward this request.

But I also decided that you really need to build something for the merchant community for the industry so it’s straightforward for them to accept those requests and to feed it into this merge-purge process, so we built a free service for consumers as well as a free service for merchants to facilitate this communication.

Alan: How many consumers have opted out of one or more catalogs with you?

Chuck: We actually publish that statistic on the front page of our site. Today there are 683,000 registered users at this moment. Those users have made 8.9 million opt-out requests to date.

We launched this October 9 of 2007. Here we are in late March. What we’ve seen is that there really is a pretty significant pent up demand for this type of service.

Alan: Gaining two-thirds of a million names in five months is dramatic growth.

Chuck: Yes, and we don’t do any advertising. We basically put the service out there. The blogosphere, in fact, has been a tremendous areas for the promotion for the service.

Yahoo! has this service that will let you look back at how many links come to your site. The last time I looked a couple of weeks ago, there were over 32,000 backlinks to Catalog Choice.

We’re seeing the bloggers on a regular basis, once they discover the site, write about it ’cause they think it’s a great thing.

Alan: There’s a parallel to the Do Not Call list, which was quickly adopted because it met a need in the population.

Chuck: Let me just comment on that because it’s really important. I think that this is much more complicated. There was a kind of viral growth around that. One thing that I just want to stress is that we built the service around the whole notion of unwanted catalogs.

For my household, your household and many throughout America, there are many catalogs that people want to receive and continue to receive. We’ve heard from users over and over again that they specifically are just making these requests for those catalogs that they don’t want. The ones that they do want, they leave alone.

Alan: Two weeks ago at the NEMOA conference, most of the folks in the room were catalogers. One of your colleagues was there representing you guys. There was a little bit of Q&A with a speaker from Williams-Sonoma which got a bit heated.

The room wasn’t receptive. How would you describe Catalog Choice’s relationship with the catalog industry?

Chuck: Catalog Choice is striving to have a collaborative relationship with the industry. We work hard every day reaching out and having discussions with merchants.

There are over 150 merchants who have actually signed up for the service, who are accepting the names, working it into their overall process. We have active conversations with many, many other merchants. So, on one side, it’s positive.

On the other side, there are some merchants who, for various reasons, don’t like the service that we’re providing and are really kind of voiceful about that.

What we hope that the tension, if you could say, is a byproduct of a lack of understanding and a lack of knowledge and we’re trying our best to truly communicate on a daily basis what our mission is, what our objectives are, what our priorities are.

To the degree that merchants come up with ideas or have comments about how we can improve the service, we rapidly push those into our product. We put new releases of this product out every week.

A couple weeks ago, we updated a whole bunch of the copy on the site. We rolled out a service this past week that allows you to upload a PDF or a link to a rich media component of your catalog.

So I think that with time we’d hope that more and more merchants will understand that we provide a way for the merchant community to really communicate with the consumer community and to meet the consumers at the spot where they want to be met, which is many consumers do not want to receive a paper catalog in the mail. We provide them a way to kind of set forth that request.

Alan: I recently moved. Using my old address as a test, I opted out of some catalogs that I may or may not have been receiving at my old address. Does CatalogChoice follow these requests through NCOA?

Chuck: To the degree that you fill out an NCOA request, that will be taken care of.

Alan: So you are running list hygiene against your list? By opting out at my old address, I might have opted out at my new address?

Chuck: Let me be clear. We don’t have access to the NCOA list. We provide the name and address as you enter it in to the merchants and the merchant. To the degree that the merchant takes your name and address and run it through NCOA and find that you’ve moved, then they can make that request.

Alan: But CatalogChoice doesn’t NCOA.

Chuck: Right. We look to the merchants. We provide the request to the merchants and then the list flows into NCOA.

Alan: As I opted out of these catalogs, I did see there was a space for a key code or a customer number. That’s reassuring. If I have that catalog in front of my with a key code, it’s pretty clear I received it.

How do you know that the person’s actually the person – that I’m not unsubscribing my neighbor or some such thing?

Chuck: Well, I think there’s two questions there.

Many consumers are using the site with the catalog in hand.

That’s the way we actually encourage everybody to use the site. Some are going in and making the requests, like as you just did, for catalogs that you believe that you’ve received, you’re being honest about your request there and you may not want to get it.

So when we send the list on to Catalog X and you’ve actually made this opt-out request, if you haven’t received it, simply you’re saying to them that as a prospect you do not want to receive this. We do not facilitate a blanket opt-out request.

We actually encourage you to go over to the DMA and put your name on the mail preference service that they run if that’s what you want, if you do not want to be mailed ever as a prospect. What we’re focused on is a title-by-title approach.

Alan: But to the case of where I am opting out a neighbor…

Chuck: Right. So let me answer your second question. It’s one thing for you to go in and say, “I used to live at this address and it’s my name and I want to make an opt-out request.”

The second question I think you’re saying is: what about the condition about Alan coming into the service and entering Chuck Teller’s name and my mailing address and making this opt-out request? That’s against our terms of service and that kind of activity is not tolerated.

To the degree that that type of activity is identified, we have the right to delete the account, the user who’s doing that type of stuff. We could block their IP address in all sorts of ways so they cannot engage in fraud. That’s illegal. We do our best to track these kinds of things.

To the degree that users have multiple names and multiple addresses inside their account, we do monitor those to some degree looking for these kinds of conditions.

It is difficult to identify at its surface, so we look to the merchants to assist us in identifying what might be patterns that are unusual.

I think the real area that people have a concern about is not if you make an opt-out request for me and something that I don’t receive.

What I’ve heard is a situation where a merchant is concerned that a competitor would come in and make these requests on behalf of the competitor’s best customers assuming that the competitor’s best customers may be good customers of a given catalog. Is that the scenario that people are focused on here?

Alan: That concern was raised at NEMOA.

Chuck: Clearly, Alan, that’s fraud to do that and it’s against our terms of service. We do monitor IP addresses looking for these kinds of things. To the degree that these kinds of practices are identified, we can easily reverse the request inside of our service and move forward.

One things is to recognize is that in order for a request to be forwarded from our service on to the merchant, the user needs to complete a round-trip email verification. You sign up for the service. We send you an email to your given email address and you need to click back through and verify that you are who you are and you’re accepting the whole terms of service.

To the degree that people would go in create fake email addresses to do this, they are breaking the terms of service. That’s against the law.

That’s the approach we take. We would hope that an industry would not kind of go back and forth against each other in that way, because I don’t see – we don’t have any indications that consumers are doing this in spite to their neighbors.

Alan: What’s your relationship with the list co-ops and the list management houses?

Chuck: That’s a good question. We actually have had limited interaction with the list co-ops. Prior to the launch of Catalog Choice, we did some interviews with some of them and talked about the service we were designing and they were intrigued by the service.

We don’t have any formal relationships with them. We are focused at this point in time that the mail preference decision is really between the consumer and merchant and – but to the degree that the relationships mature within the industry, we think that we can have some really positive relationships with list co-ops.

Alan: You should. You should be talking to the co-ops.

Chuck: We have reached out to them in some degree. It really starts with the merchant. They’re service providers to the merchant, so we really need to come to them with merchants in hand. We are building those relationships vis-à-vis the merchant relationship.

Alan: I’m really glad you guys capture key code. I’ve spoken to several mailers who have worked with you guys, who have received files from you guys, and processed those files. When you provide a name, address and key code, it’s pretty clear that the opt-outs is someone’s intent.

Some mailers I spoke with, round numbers, half of the Catalog Choice inbound file to the merchant matched to acquisition names, non-housefile names.

That made sense, as these particular mailers were mailing about 50 percent prospects. These are consumers saying, “Retailer X, you sent me a book and I’m not interested in that.”

The really interesting thing from my point of view is when you had 12-month house file names, active house-file names, of people that the catalog would consider active, loyal, best buyers and these folks with a key code in hand (so it’s 99 percent probably they legitimate), and these consumers are saying, “Don’t send me the book,”.

Catalogers will say, “We don’t want to mail folks who don’t want our book.”

And I think what they really mean is “we don’t want to mail people who won’t order from our book”.

There’s this huge, huge fascinating issue of people who respond to catalogs, are profitable for the catalogers, respond at a 1 or 2 percent response rate, but yet they don’t want the book.

Can you comment on the implications to catalogers when a six-month active buyer tells the mailer they want to opt out, using your service?

Chuck: I think you framed that correctly. There’s a mix of users, many are prospects, someone who has high recency, frequency and monetary value gets a lot of prospecting, right?

Alan: If they have recency, they’re on the house-file.

Chuck: Well, you know, right. People get a lot of prospect catalogs and they’re coming and using the site on a regular basis to opt out of those.

To get to the point of your question is “What about the active buyer?”

We’ve focused on the desires of the consumers to set forth their interests. We’re only promoting the notion of opting out of unwanted catalogs.

We actually promote a series of paperless shopping approaches –whether it is a link to the merchant’s site, or the uploading of a PDF version of a catalog pointing to your rich media version of the catalog.

We’re making these options available, so to the degree that you’ve got someone who for whatever reason that consumer is making, they don’t want to have this mailed to them, they now have an account. The relationship remains and they can come and make their choice.

They never really had those options before and in fact if they went to the merchant’s site or called the customer support line and said, “Please don’t send me a catalog,” the relationship is actually kind of totally broken.

Here, at least, there remains a connection with that relationship. We let you take notes about a given catalog. We’re considering a whole bunch of other features that will help you organize those catalogs that you actually like to buy from.

Alan: Fast forward five years. Is the catalog industry as we know it today dead?

Chuck: I don’t think that it’s a black and white situation, but my answer to that would be no. There are many people who like getting a catalog and our site continues to support the notion of people choosing the ones that they want to get.

In fact, we will be very shortly adding the ability to opt in to a catalog should you want it.

At the same time, there are many people who don’t want to receive them.

What we’re about is really supporting choice and respecting the consumer’s right to say, “This is what I want to receive in the mail and this is what I don’t want.”

So we’re really focused only on unwanted catalogs and if you look at this and I mean you know better than I about the size of the mailings of some of these organizations. You know, I believe some of them are, you know, mailing millions of catalogs…

Alan: Tens of millions.

Chuck: …tens of millions for any given merchant that we have in our service. We’re talking about, you know, for the vast majority of merchants, you know, a couple of 1,000, 10,000, 20,000 names. That is a high number for many of these merchants of consumer who have requested to please not send me this catalog.

Some of these opt-outs are deceased. Some of them are receiving more than one catalog. Some of them are saying, “I only want to shop online with you.” Some of them are saying, “I don’t like your products.” And some of them are saying, “I’m making a choice as a consumer that I don’t want to receive this catalog because of my environmental ethics.”

And each and every one of those options are truly legitimate and we believe that they should be respected.

So to answer the question, no, cataloging is not dead, but choice is alive. We see choice all over the world.

Alan: Choice is alive. I like that. It truly is.

Chuck: It is. Choice is alive It’s alive in the way you watch television today. You don’t have to sit there and wait for the TV Guide to find out exactly when the show shows up. You could put it on TiVo if you have that service.

Alan: Choice is alive and advertising is dead. You can TiVo out the marketing.

Chuck: That’s one, but even more importantly where advertising is truly alive is on the Internet where you watch TV.

You can go to YouTube or you can go to various video channels throughout the Internet where advertising is alive as it could be but where consumers can decide when they want to watch something and what they want to watch.

And it really is about choice and it’s really about a choice that can drive respect from the consumer standpoint, efficiency into the marketplace, so I think if we understand and embrace choice, this can be a good thing for everybody.

Alan: Something discussed at NEMOA was some concept of a Catalog Choice widget that retailers might be able to put on their site to have that third-party opt-out. Is that something that’s under consideration?

Chuck: Yeah, very good question, so one of the pushbacks – and we heard this specifically from Williams-Sonoma and so very early on in my discussions with Pat Connolly – that they, the merchant, wants to be where the communication is going on between the consumer and the merchant, that the opt-out request is occurring in the context of the merchant’s site.

So what we have done is done the work to white label or provide a hosted service of the mail preference request, so we can publish the various fields that are in our mail preference service but wrap it with your branding, your navigation, your header and your footer.

So the consumer comes to your site. There’d be a link on the bottom in your footer that’s next to the one that says “request a catalog.” There’d be another one that says “mail preference.” You can click that.

You could come in and walk through a wizard much like what we’ve already built in our site that says, “Tell me your name, your address, your customer number and what is your mail preference request. Do you not want it? Do you only want email?”

To the degree that we can get to a notion of frequency, we would love to get there too. We understand frequency is quite complicated, but let all that entire transaction occur in the context of the merchant’s site.

Our backend engine will go and deliver the roundtrip email confirmation and take care of registering this request. It all happens in your context.

Alan: Having been in the catalog industry, I know so many books are mailed, and sometimes a small number of mistakes are made on the margin. There will always be cases where people will say, “I opted out and I didn’t – you didn’t honor me.”

I’m wondering if you folks have considered that if a retailer using your service if they could come into some kind of a white hat or white list notion where you would go to bat for them if someone felt that their request wasn’t being honored.

I’m envisioning some sort of “Catalog Choice-certified, good guy merchant seal” such that if someone says, “Hey, I tried to opt out of Sonoma and they didn’t listen to me,” Catalog Choice could defend the mailer, and say “Well, actually, they do listen and maybe it’s a maiden name, maybe the catalog wasn’t to you but was to your daughter,” yada, yada, yada.

Would you ever consider a service where you would go-to-bat for catalogers that are playing by your rules?

Chuck: Sure. We have a whole process in place where we can facilitate the investigation of subsequent mailings. The consumer can come to us – that’s what’s actually so kind of beautiful about the site that we’ve built.

We focused on design and usability and recording each of these requests, so we can tell you exactly what day under what name, address pair you made this request. What happens often is they get a new catalog. The name, address pair doesn’t match. Then they could come in and make a new request.

Clearly, we will be happy to a group that would help facilitate this conversation and investigate these issues to the degree that they need to be figured out, be a way for the merchant to kind of pass a note back to the consumer and inquire about, you know, are there really two of these people at this household or not.

So there’s a whole kinda communication notion that can go on. We’re happy to be a site that helps facilitate that, all towards the mission of improving efficiency and reducing unwanted catalogs.

Alan: On your Catalog Choice for Merchants’ page where merchants can sign up, there’s a little piece of copy that suggests Catalog Choice can be used to acquire customers, a little bit of marketing language there.

Do you guys see yourself as an environmental organization?

Or is there a business angle where you end up helping catalogers acquire names?

Chuck: Well, so our mission is very clear. We’re about reducing unwanted catalogs and improving efficiency in the process.

If improving efficiency means that someone makes a request for a catalog so that they can get it mailed to them and they can make a purchase and that’s the most efficient, environmentally conscious way to make that purchase, that’s all within our mission.

We started our focus as an environmental organization because we wanted to help reduce the waste of unwanted catalogs.

As we’ve moved forward in the several months, we’ve also seen ourselves really as a consumer rights organization where we’re trying represent the rights of consumers to make these requests and have these requests fulfilled.

We don’t see ourselves as a marketing organization.

But to the degree that a consumer or a merchant can come together and form a relationship through our site, that’s where we’re wide open to having that happen.

Alan: As an entity, are you a for-profit corporation or a not-for-profit?

Chuck: We are a not for profit, 501(c)(3).

Catalog Choice is a sponsored project of the Ecology Center. The Ecology Center is a 30‑year‑old, nonprofit organization based in Berkeley, California that’s focused on direct services.

The Ecology Center runs the curbside recycling program in the city of Berkeley and surrounding communities. We have trucks that go around every day picking up recycling.

We would much rather reduce the amount of waste that enters the cycle by letting consumers kind of make these requests.

Alan: That’s 501(c)(3) is comforting.

Looking at other people in the space, for example, ProQuo, they’re a venture-backed entity. If you go to their job pages and look at the type of folks they’re hiring, you can see they’re much headed into profiling, data compilation, very different direction, taking a for-profit marketing angle.

Nothing wrong with a marketing angle. That’s the industry I’m in, but it seems that if a company had those two missions at once, that there’s kind of a split personality going on. It’s pleasant to hear that you guys are a not-for-profit entity.

Chuck: Right. We are a not-for-profit entity. We’ve been funded by a series of foundations. To make it clear, we do have an imperative to have the site be, you know, self sustaining over time.

So we’re looking at ways where we can supplement the foundation revenue we get with other forms of revenue that clearly meet our mission of reducing unwanted catalogs.

Alan: But there’s no VC money floating around? No sister for-profit company that’s operating with the team? Again, you are really an environmentally organization at the root.

Chuck: Yes. The way it is right now is we have a series of foundations who have funded us to get it to this point. Our mission is clear. Our mission is straightforward. It hasn’t changed and it won’t change going forward.

Alan: Giving you the last word, Chuck, if consumers or merchants want to learn more, what should they do next?

Chuck: So if they want to learn more, go the site, catalogchoice.org. Take a look at it.

If merchants want to learn more, you can contact us at merchantservice@catalogchoice.org or you can contact April Smith, who is our project manager from a merchant perspective. April can be contacted at 802‑496‑5547.

Our goal is to work in collaboration with the merchant community so that together we can make this work for the merchants and for the consumers. It’s in our interest that together we use kind of a market-based approach to do this rather than other approaches.

We think that this will be the best approach for the industry and for the consumers in the long run so that consumers can set their mail preferences and receive the catalogs that they do want and not receive the ones that they don’t want.

Listen to podcast: Chuck_Teller_Interview.mp3

Here’s the video:

video link

Here’s the page of links mentioned in the video: rimmkaufman.com/nemoa2008

This talk does not have any grand unifying theme. Rather, it is a random grab-bag of Marketing 2.0 ideas related to online retailing that I find cool. The intended audience was catalogers, so some of the topics or suggestions may be less novel to folks hanging out on the cutting edge of the blogosphere.

I recorded the talk and optimized the Camtasia recordings for Youtube. Boof — some sections were just a smidgen longer than YouTube’s 10 minute rule. So instead I put them on Yahoo’s JumpCut. That’s why the video looks like five sections spliced, and why the image quality isn’t great — it seems optimizing production for YouTube is less optimal for JumpCut.

• Kevin Hillstrom: I received an e-mail from a conference attendee saying your talk was good … times are changing when catalogers are sending me e-mails while you talk!! Yep.
• Chuck Teller from CatalogChoice checked in to give his side of the story. I’ll follow up and would like to interview him on this blog, if he’s willing.
• Mark Lee tossed up the end of Steve Spangler’s presentation on YouTube, caught on a cell phone. Sadly, Mark only captured the final few minutes, so Steve’s real marketing content isn’t there, just the triple egg stunt with Terry Monahan.

One of the themes at the NEMOA conference has been, hat-tipping to ClueTrain, that markets are conversations. We as marketers must not forget we’re real people, speaking with and listening to and responding to real people, not just spam-blasting (possibly unwanted) emails and catalogs and messaging outward at the world.

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