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First of all, let me begin this post by telling you the worst way to create a product: making something up. That puts you in the position of being a market maker. In other words, you have to become an evangelist. Evangelists usually get stoned. Or spend all their time wandering around eating locusts or something.

Nope, you want to be where the action is. You want to know that there’s a niche available, and that you’re going to grab some portion of that niche with your own product.

The best way to do that? Assume that every other product out there sucks in some way. In fact, a really easy way to make a successful product is to take something away. If you can take a lot of things away, so much the better.

Take project management software, for instance. This niche is full of uber-complicated tools that only a PMP would love. Guess what? Most of us aren’t PMPs. We just want to track projects and tasks and be able to bill our hours. So along comes BaseCamp. The software is way stripped down. It is lean and mean and usable. And useful.

Take the Flip HD. It’s cheap, it has one giant RECORD button, it records one hour, and it has no cables, tapes, discs, or power cords to speak of. It fits in your pocket. You connect it to your Mac or PC via a flip-up USB connector. Boom, done! Flip now owns like 15% of the camcorder market.

Think about your little industry sector. There are no completely solved problems. What are your competitors doing? Can you do it better by stripping things down, simplifying, removing? I bet you can.

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Testing is one thing that marketers don’t do enough. In the old days, this was understandable–it took forever to cycle through all the possibilities in your direct mail pieces, and you had to be awfully patient. These days, you can do all kinds of interesting multi-variate tests on emails and landing pages…the question is, what do you test?

Well, here’s a list of 40+ things you can test on your next loyalty email (i.,e, e-newsletter):

1. Subject line (try featuring a headline from your newsletter vs. just a Volume/Issue number)
2. Length of subject line
3. From line (try “The X Marketing Team” versus just the name of your company)
4. Adding personalization (”Hi John!”) to subject line or body of email
5. Different versions of your lead paragraph
6. Different tone in your lead paragraph (humorous vs. corporate vs. jargony)
7. Different colors for headlines
8. Different styles for headlines
9. Different versions of offer or call to action
10. Different placements for offer or call to action (top vs. bottom vs. embedded)
11. Different number of times you make offer or call to action (once vs. twice vs. multiple times)
12. Different types of images used (related to product, unrelated to product, with people in them, no people, etc)
13. Different sizes of images
14. Number of images used
15. How soon you use an image in your email
16. Style of response buttons 
17. Use of call-to-action links or images vs. buttons
18. Day or time of day that email is sent
19. Experiment with different segmented lists (managers vs. individual contributors, by gender, by age group, by demographic or sociographic)
20. Use of coupons or promo codes with offer
21. Use of discounts and how they are presented ($10 off vs. 10% off)
22. Different colors used for links or backgrounds
23. Pricing (try three different prices to see which one works, don’t forget to experiment with the penny side of the equation: is $19.97 more effective than $19.88?)
24. Free trials
25. HTML vs. text only
26. Placement of unsubscribe widgets (or links)
27. Adding testimonial quotes or press mentions
28. How many testimonial quotes or press mentions
29. Placement of quotes/mentions
30. Phone numbers and their placement
31. Use of animations or rich media (like Flash)
32. Use of charts or other infographics
33. Use of strikeouts in text
34. Use of images for signatures
35. Use of P.S. blocks
36. Use of celebrity endorsements or images
37. Adding polls/survey mechanisms to your email
38. Use of sound files
39. Use of different templates or designs
40. Use of “refer to a friend” and placement of widgets on the email
41. Use of “IM or instant support” widgets or badges
42. Teasing blog posts or threads from discussion forums on your email
43. Listing latest tweets in your email

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By now you know that whatever text you put in a link is significant to Google. If 100 folks are linking to your web site with the link text “best marketing consultant ever” then that’s probably the key phrase you’re going to start owning if anyone cares to search for that.

Well, that got me thinking (and this is always a pretty dangerous thing) about all those years where people just merrily went on their way creating links that said “click here.” And I wondered, who owned the “click here” space on Google? So I did a little search and the results were what I expected…the winner is Adobe Acrobat. Seems like Adobe’s campaign during the latter part of the 1990s to make Acrobat Reader ubiquitous bore some strange fruit indeed. Not that any of that is really their fault…but it makes you think.

What other silly key phrases are still out there?

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Before anyone gets the wrong impression, let me just say that I sincerely like social media. It’s where I keep up with an ever-growing list of interests, from politics and green energy to marketing and sci-fi and beyond. I blog a lot myself, and run a few wikis and social discussions about writing, movies, and sucky consumer products. I tweet a few times a day. I’m on Facebook and LinkedIn.

I give presentations on “Marketing 2.0″ and how the world of marketing is changing toward more conversations. I’ve recently penned a series of articles for IBM DeveloperWorks that explore different aspects of Twitter (like how ot build a Twitter-like tool for a PHP application, how to integrate with the Twitter API, and more).

Furthermore, I’m old enough to have used CompuServe, Prodigy, and Usenet. I’m old school, yeah, but I’ve always known that the Internet was about connecting people together, not just computers.

So, I get it, okay?

However, it’s time to talk turkey about social media and its effects on marketers. Marketers are more accustomed to a “fire and forget” type of framework in their daily work. You spend six weeks or six months putting together a brochure, birthing a white paper, or launching a microsite, and then you want to go out and have a martini afterward. Check! Next!

What this classic framework lacks is meaningful conversation and interaction. If someone loves your white paper, you hardly ever find out about it. You’ve already moved on. Guess what? That’s not going to fly if you launch a blog. If you’re good at what you do, and if you do it right, you’re going to end up with people leaving comments, blogging about you, whatever. See you want this, because the number one benefit you get from this is insight.

Marketers are going to need people to help respond to these inbound requests as part of the insight gathering. It’s not just polite, it’s critical.

Even more so, they’ll need people to figure out what they should be talking about, what others are already saying, and all that. If it sounds like you’re on 24/7, well, you kind of are. And because current social media channels are spread to hell and gone (monitoring Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, your own blog, your competitors’ blogs, and various “fan” social networks will make you pine for the days of public pay phones and no email) it means that you will need people who are adept at multitasking, a kind of social media ADHD. What we need are much easier ways to manage all of this.

Here’s something else that we’re all pretty much facing now. Take a look at your Twitter Follower list, your LinkedIn network, your FaceBook friends. Give me $10 for every person on there you don’t know or can’t remember. Or can’t stand to be around. No bet? Then join the Oversubscribed Club. I have a feeling that all kinds of people and brands are going to find a way to rethink the “We Must Expand Our Reach” model, make this thing more about intimate conversations, or at least, migrate to technologies that allow us to be more targeted in our conversations.

Some of this will be solved by our current economic reality. It seems that 99% of social media companies had a very simple business model: get lots of people to show up, then we’ll figure out something. Sounds familiar, right? Web 2.0 suffered from the same general malaise as Web 1.0 there at the end of the go-go 90s.

We’re already starting to hear the heart break as services shut down. Again, nothing new there, but this time around it has a different tone to it. It feels a lot more personal now. Maybe with Web 3.0 we’ll figure out the business model first, then roll stuff out to make people happy. Don’t count on it, though.

Of course, trimming the fat can cause heartburn. For a decade now, it’s been about page views, clicks, and referrer sources. Now its about followers, number of comments, votes up and down. Going out and actually cutting followers and such is tantamount to suicide. Many C-suite executives at B2B companies are still in “wait and see” mode when it comes to the old metrics (I mean, so what if we have all this traffic, can Marketing save its own neck by showing bottom-line value?), much less the new stuff. They see lots of press coverage on the subject (Will it Blend? Obama Girl! Yada, yada, yada), but they’re watching marketers try to integrate Twitter and Facebook and blogging with trade booths, white papers, and display ads.

And don’t kid yourself for one second that having a bunch of followers is as good as say, a fully optimized landing page that sells $10,000 worth of software product every day. Or 1000 channel partners that sell half-a-million in product and training every year. Or a monthly webinar series that leads to a million dollars worth of engagements each quarter. When social media can show us it can do that, well then, there’ll be some very excited C-suite executives out there.

Of course, what will most likely happen is the reverse. Every company will sooner or later have that awful moment tailor-made for social media rescue. It’s the same as with other communications channel. No one ever thinks of the PR person until the CEO is caught laundering money for the Triads or something.

Personal brands are on the rise, too, and they’re starting to compete with corporate brands. What if your employee who handles social media for you from 9 to 5 also has 5,000 followers on Twitter and a bangin’ blog (or network of blogs)? What happens when that employee can’t handle the restrictions of your top-down corporate culture, or the product roadmap takes a left turn down a hard road, yeah, that left turn down that road, the one he keeps warning you not to go down? What if you come in to work one day to find that something this guy has said on Twitter has been retweeted and blogged 700 times and made it to the top of Digg and Mixx and Reddit?

Which brand wins in that case? I’m willing to bet the guy gets Dooced, and you’re now back to trying to find good people who can engage in conversations, instead of just picking up a megaphone and shouting at everyone.

At the end of the day, social media tools are extremely effective when it comes to interacting with a particular niche, and I’m pretty optimistic about its role in the future of marketing. However, before we get to that happy land, we’re going to see quite a few detours, bumps, and breakdowns during 2009.

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In today’s hyper-competitive sales culture (whether B2C or B2B) the folks who are doing the research on whatever-it-is and have stumbled on your product or service want just one thing: engagement.

And by engagement, I mean “engagement with someone interesting.” People who aren’t interesting: anyone who has sales, marketing, or PR in their job title or anywhere on their business card.

That’s right. They want to engage with the company’s founder. Or the product designer. Or someone who has a human voice. Not a communications professional, a shill, a flack, or anyone who appears to have a commission on the line.

This is hard to take, I know, but if you go to all the trouble of researching a niche, discovering what the niche wants, creating a product for that niche, and delivering that product, why set yourself up for failure at the last moment? Why rip failure from the jaws of victory? Why pull the football away from Charlie Brown? (I could go on and on, but I don’t have the heart.)

Blogging isn’t just good for you out there in Search Engine Land. Blogs also provide an easy way for you to create fresh content frequently, which means you get indexed more often. Creating great content means you get more inbound links. More shared bookmarks on Delicious. More Diggs. More chatter, word-of-mouth, water-cooler talk.

And that means more people walking up to your booth at conferences. “I read your blog. It’s great. I really like your take on XYZ.” And then suddenly, the magic happens: they want to know more. They engage with you. They’re not just customers anymore, they’re turning into fans and followers. People don’t tell their friends and colleagues about products they’re a customer of. They do it only if they’re a fan of it.

I know that blogging is pretty scary (or at least, there seem to be a thousand experts out there who want to make you think its a scary thing). You really only need 3 things to keep yourself on track while blogging:

1. A tight focus. Niche, anyone? Yes, you’re allowed to meander a bit, but stay within a certain topic area, won’t you? If you’re in the recreational shipbuilding business or vintage clothing business or the home defense business their’s bound to be some latitude as to what you can get away with, but don’t push your luck. If your blog is about yachting, don’t start talking women’s fashions (unless of course you’re talking about bikinis that can be worn on board. Bikinis = good.)
2. Enough things to say. This is a deadly problem, and you’re not alone in suffering it. People run out of things to say. The trick is to pick a topic narrow enough to have some focus but wide enough to contain lots of opportunities for content creation. Don’t worry, though, because anyone can figure out how to stretch out a content space–just imagine the five W’s and one H in action (How do I do this? Why should I do this? Who does this? Where is it done? When is it done? What are people doing with it?)
3. An authentic voice. Be yourself, only cooler and more relaxed. Let your passion come through–for your products, for your industry, for the customer. Engage them in conversation, and this includes all the comments, good and bad. Anytime you feel you’re on the wrong path, just show your blog post to your corporate attorney. If she likes it, then rewrite it from the ground up!

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