Marketing Talk

I started my Twitter account round about November of last year. I didn’t do much with it because I wasn’t getting much out of it, and I didn’t understand why. Spam Bots had 20 times more followers than me and some of them even seemed to get retweeted. Meanwhile, I did 1-2 posts a day, posting my opinions about business stuff (it was that general) and posting links to some things that I thought were chock full of good information.

As far as how that plan worked, I seemed to get more followers during the phases when I wasn’t posting at all.

As time has gone on, I’ve settled into Twitter. I would not say I am even remotely close to learning everything I need to learn, but I’ve learned a lot. For example:

It’s okay to be informal sometimes: When I first started using Twitter as a professional tool, I thought, “Oh, well, I need to be button down all the time and only talk about business stuff. That’s what I’m using it for, that’s who I want to connect with, so there you go.” Although talking about your business, whatever it may be, is the primary way that you network, Twitter is a lot like real life. If you talk only in links to articles, people are going to start to assume you’re an automated link poster. I have discovered that it’s okay to ask someone how they liked a movie you’re thinking about seeing. It’s okay to pick on someone when they tell a funny story about themselves.  When you see all the talk about “being human” what it really means is “be yourself.”

Find mentors: One advantage I had when I joined Twitter is that I knew a lot of my role models were already there. In looking at some of those role models’ Twitter accounts, I also saw that my chance to see them build up their followers had come and gone a LONG time ago.

Most of the people whom I consider my mentors have hundreds of thousands of followers. However, the number of followers is not what made me consider them my mentors. Rather, it’s how they treat their followers, including me. It would be easy to forgive someone for never responding to your mention or to your post since they have 299,000 other people posting things to them and at them.

The amazing thing about my “mentors” is that they actually find ways to share their love quite a bit, and I think that’s pretty fantastic. No, they won’t respond to every single thing every single person posts, but I have been impressed at how many times I’ve been able to communicate with these folks through Twitter. It makes them and what they are saying seem accessible. Finding folks like that is really, really important.

Find chats: So I had nary an idea about chats when I first joined Twitter. I was checking out the latest tweets when I saw something called #blogchat popping up from a lot of the new people I was following. I decided to check it out. Best thing I’ve done on Twitter. No matter what your business is, chats on Twitter can be beneficial, and there’s one reason for that. Out of the millions and millions of people using Twitter, a chat divides out that people who are interested in chatting about something you all have in common. I’m aware of about 150 chats on Twitter as of now, and the topics range from parenthood to association news.

Even though a chat group can be a small piece of the Twitter pie, it can still move fast and it can be a little intimidating your first time. However, if you are legitimately interested in learning from other people and offering your insights as they come, I guarantee you will find it not only really rewarding but also really fun!

These are the first major things that come to mind when I think about what I’ve learned about using Twitter so far. There are tons of other little things. Being gracious is key, for example. Saying thank you is a really good idea. Posting to and about other folks more than yourself is better than just promoting yourself. Things like that.

Perhaps the most inspiring thing I’ve learned about Twitter is that sharing is the name of the game. When you learn something you share it. When you have some success, you pass it around. It’s for that reason that I’m hoping to start a chat called #Twit4Biz this Thursday. It’s not to say that I’m an expert and I’m now going to tell everyone how I figured everything out. What I’m hoping is that it will be an opportunity for people to talk about the delicate dance of using Twitter for professional reasons.

There are so many questions that I want to explore on a personal level. For example, if you’re really passionate about politics, let’s say, can you reveal that through your professional Twitter account? How personal is too personal for that kind of account? How do you balance responding to friends who might have found you, who will talk about things not related to business, with the folks you are connected with because of business? More than all of that, I would have truly found a resource like that beneficial when I first signed into Twitter. Maybe there are folks who are where I was 6 months ago, posting links and not getting any response. Maybe these chats will give them ideas and help them out.

Twitter is a weird animal. It seems so wide open, and there are so many people who have experienced success with it that when you embark on your journey you almost expect a “handicap” of 1,000 followers to drop in your lap. There are so many intricacies when using Twitter for business. It certainly is a game well beyond “that thing that teens use on their phones.”

What has your experience been with using Twitter for business? What have you learned? Do you have mentors like I do? I’d love to hear your stories!

Back in the day, there was a television campaign that has since been parodied to death. “Pork: The Other White Meat,” the ads drilled into our heads.

These days, using analytics to measure online marketing efforts is something on everyone’s minds. Even technophobes are starting to familiarize themselves with phrases like “exit rate” or “bounce rate.” Using analytics to measure web campaigns might be today’s marketing chicken.

Like the ads of yore, I am here to talk about something that is similar in a lot of ways to measuring online tactics. It’s just the “other” thing you can measure with analytics. Today’s marketing pork. That would be everything you do “offline.”

This concept was brought to my attention about a month ago when I watched a presentation by the incomparable Avinash Kaushik. Kaushik, if you have not encountered him yet, is a master of Google Analytics. He can make reading the program seem like “reading” Amelia Bedelia, and he can inspire you to measure anything and everything you do. In this particular presentation, Kaushik was preaching about the value of using Analytics programs to measure marketing tactics that are not happening in the online world.

A novel concept, to be sure, but the fact is that even though a lot of people are not talking about this as a key to success, programs like Google Analytics can measure the effectiveness of campaigns that go nowhere near a computer. Here are some examples of how offline marketing efforts can be measured using Google Analytics.

Print Advertising Campaign: There are two ways Google Analytics can be used to measure the success of a print advertising campaign.

For a general, impressionistic idea, take a benchmark of your stats at the beginning of a month, then look again after your ad hits. Keep an eye on your stats for the next week or so. Does your traffic spike? If so, then you are probably effectively engaging your customers with a strong call to action.

The other way to measure a print ad campaign’s success is to create specific landing pages on your site, knowing that any traffic to those pages will be from your ad campaign. In this latter scenario, you can not only track how much traffic comes to that page, but you can also find out if people are interested enough to visit other pages of your website or if they simply bounce out of your site entirely.

Trade Show: Google Analytics can be a really effective way to measure the impression a trade show has made on your prospects and customers. We recommend measuring at three different stages:

Leading up to the show. Are your promotion efforts working? Does your traffic spike after sending out a pre-show direct mail piece, for example?

During the show: Are people finding your booth and your sales materials, along with your message, interesting? Benchmark your statistics before you leave for the show, then take a look after the show. Did your efforts seem to pay off? Again, a landing page or a promotion can really put a fine point on your measuring in these cases.

Don’t forget about those post-show follow-ups. Scanning a person’s name tag does not a lead make. Send a nice folder stuffed with your finest literature pieces along with a link to your website. Does your traffic spike a few weeks after the show has ended?

News Release: In the case of a news release, take a look at your stats for specific pages that would be affected, namely anywhere the new product or feature is presented. Although you can look for a spike immediately after a news release is sent, that won’t really tell the whole story. It can sometimes take months for a news release to get published in a leading publication. When you find out that your story has been picked up, keep an eye on you analytics for 2-3 days after that. Does it move?

Direct Mail: Much like an ad, a direct mail piece can be developed so that it entices recipients to visit your website. A call to action or a promotion of some type is especially effective in these cases. Again, take a benchmark of your overall site, but a specific landing page can be a big help in tracking a direct mail campaign in the same way it can help to track a print ad’s success.

Google Analytics is not perfect, of course. A campaign should not be panned or made the one and only focus based on the rise and fall of the traffic graph. However, Google Analytics can give you a pretty good clue as to how offline and online campaigns are performing, and actionable items can follow.

Have you had experience measuring offline campaigns using Google Analytics? I’d love to hear about it!

Image by Anna Moderska. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/morderska

Today’s checklist: 25 Things to consider before launching that website!

1. Who will be hosting my website and why am I choosing that option?
2. What expectations have my competitors already established for websites in this industry?
3. What will my URL be, and should I purchase other domain names for protection?
4. What keywords do I need to incorporate into page titles, meta tags, and body copy?
5. Will the tone of my website be “you,” “us,” or “we”?
6. What are my calls to action going to be?
7. How will I drive traffic to this website once it launches?
8. What do I need to get across on the homepage?
9. How will I create internal links between pages?
10. How will I present my sales network?
11. How will I create an opportunity for interaction for visitors? Is that important to me?
12. What analytics system will I use to measure the success of my site?
13. What would I consider a successful launch of the website?
14. What functionality do I want visitors to notice when they visit the site?
15. What is my plan of attack if analytics shows a high bounce or exit range from certain pages?
16. Who will be responsible for maintenance, like adding news releases, trade shows, etc?
17. Whose contact information will be made available on the site? Is there corporate agreement about that?
18. Will the design of the site revolve around a corporate logo or a leading product?
19. Will there be e-commerce capabilities?
20. Will there be special programming needs like image galleries, forms, or videos?
21. How will the look and content of the new website be filtered through all channels of the organization?
22. How will the sales force be able to use the site as a selling tool?
23. Will there be a blog built into the site? Who will be the voice of that blog?
24. Is there room for the site to grow?
25. Should the site be translated into different languages for international visitors?

Believe it or not, this is just the beginning of what goes into the launch of a website, and these are the basics. If there are steps that are important that you do not see here, feel free to add them!

This week feels like a checklist kind of week, so I thought I would ride the wave. Every day this week, I will post a checklist of things to consider as you approach different marketing tactics or strategies. If I missed something, feel free to add to it!

Today’s checklist: 25 Things To Consider Before Blogging

1. Am I blogging as an individual or will the blog be a team effort?
2. If a team, how will I choose my co-bloggers?
3. Is this blog going to be personal or work-related?
4. What am I hoping to accomplish with this blog?
5. Who is my audience?
6. If business related, does this blog fall within the parameters of my business/company/corporation?
7. What platform am I going to use, and why?
8. What voice am I going to use? Will I be professional and “button-down”? Casual?
9. How often do I want to post a blog?
10. Is my answer for #9 feasible?
11. What are keywords that I want to emphasize in my blog?
12. What will I say in my profile?
13. What will I use for my user picture?
14. What will the name of my blog be?
15. How will I promote my blog?
16. What would I define as a successful blog?
17. How will I measure the success of my blog?
18. Will I include a “blogroll” on my blog?
19. Will I include a “search” function on my blog?
20. Will my blog be monetized?
21. Will I import my blog into LinkedIn or Facebook (or both?)
22. What will I do if I get negative or little reaction to my blog or post?
23. If a team blog, how will the dynamics work? Will the posts attributed to individual writers?
24. Will you include video blogging or podcasting on your blog site?
25. How will you control and encourage comments and commenters?

Anything I missed? Let me know and I’ll add to it!

Image credit: http://www.sxc.hu/profile/Fanginhoon

 As you may have heard, Fast Company has begun a little experiment on Twitter called The Influence Project. The concept is pretty simple on paper. You sign up on the Fast Company site and you see how many people you can motivate to click a link that you post. The more clicks you receive, the more influential you appear. The folks at Fast Company have promised that the most influential people will have their pictures shown on the cover of the November 2010 issue (Go ahead and check out Fast Company’s definition if you’re interested).

Not surprisingly, the reactions to this project have been all over the board. Experts like Alltop’s Guy Kawasaki and Facebook Queen Mari Smith are for it. Lots of other folks are furious at Fast Company for creating a project that seems to give spam the green light. I don’t know where you stand, but me? I can see both sides of the argument.

The question at hand: what is influence?

Whether or not it’s the intended objective, all of the noise about this project has made me ponder what influence truly is. It also makes me wonder if influence can be made tangible by people clicking on some links. My gut instinct is to say that if influence is something that can be measured in clicks to a website from Twitter, there are going to be a lot of disappointed and confused people out there.

So what is influence, really?  If you go to dictionary.com, you’ll find this as definition one:  

“The capacity or power of persons or things to be a compelling force on or produce effects on the actions, behavior, opinions, etc., of others.”

I guess that’s a serviceable definition. You can’t really argue with it. And by this definition, The Influence Project is not a misnomer. You’re compelling people to click on a link, and the number of people who do that are metrics for your influence. Fine.  But doesn’t that sound kind of hollow? Even in the world of Web 2.0, which is kind of seeming like the flower child when compared to advertising, making people just click a button does not an influential person make. And by the way, you could post till the cows come home that people should click a link, but if you post a tweet and you have no followers, is there really a chance to be influential?


Satire or Science


There are some who say that The Influence Project is in part meant to be a sort of satire or parody of what the online world is like. It’s meant to show how easy it is to get people to click things, how easy it is to game the system. The problem is that it’s also kind of presented as a science project or a rational scientific experiment. In the case of the latter, there are a few flaws that I’d like to point out.


1. As already mentioned, you already have to have some influence in order to show how influential you are. If you have 500,000 followers and you post a link, statistically speaking you’re going to have a better chance at being “influential” than a person who has 30 followers. 


2. If you are already influential (if you measure influence in number of followers, which is a really bad idea), you have probably built up a lot of credibility (or you’re really durned famous). In either case, you can afford to be 100% straightforward. “Hey guys, please click this link and vote for me to be influential. I’ve got a book coming out in October and the extra PR exposure would be GREAT! Love and kisses!” On the other hand, if you’ve got a kind of shaky base or not a lot of followers, this would be hinging on a breach of trust. That’s a big no no. 


3. In the Social Media world, it’s easy enough to get people to click things. Heck, a person with minimal HTML knowledge can mask a link to the influence page under an H-Ref tag and no one would be the wiser. Real influence is what you do with those clicks. In the marketing world, influence would be how many people ask for a quote after clicking. In the Social Media world, maybe you see how many people donate to a charitable cause after clicking, or how many people download your e-book. Getting folks to click a link, openly or not, is not really the strongest measure of influence.


4. Pulling on someone else’s influence: Let’s imagine the following scenario. I sign up for The Influence Project and I post to Twitter saying, “Oh, such and such expert or celebrity just posted a great blog. Click here!” You click the link and end up at my Influence Project page. Now, did you click because I posted the link or did you click because you wanted to hear what that OTHER person had to say? I won’t be offended. It’s
hypothetical 🙂 But this is a problem. Is the Influence Project truly measuring everyone’s influence? It’s an easy way to cheat, right?


5. And speaking of cheating, it’s really easy to load the game to win. Now Brogan and Smith might say that like any game, the rules are made to be adapted, but I worry that this is kind of setting a dangerous precedent. “Oh, I see, so getting people to click to MY website would REALLY show how influential I am. So how about if I mask my links with misleading information. “Here’s a breaking news story.” “Here’s a quote from LeBron James saying that he has changed his mind.” Click click click. Away goes your credibility. Is it worth it?


Who Wins?


In the end, Fast Company is the ultimate winner in the Influence Project, not the people whose pictures get into the November issue, not even Guy Kawasaki. The publication is being discussed all over the place, as is the project. I’ve driven traffic to their website, and everyone who is participating is doing the same thing. There is build-up for a November issue, which as we media types know can be a tough month for magazines. 


As for the people who might be the most “influential” based on this project, will they really be winners? The assumption of a lot of people will be that they either spammed their friends or otherwise ruthlessly gamed the system. It will be a means for the rich to get richer in terms of followers and Twitter influence. And I’m not really sure a lot of people will look at these folks, once the whole project is explained, and say, “Oh Okay. I need to follow all of them right away.”


In the end, those winners will just have proven that they got lots of people to click. I tend to unfollow those types of people pretty quickly myself. 


What do you think of The Influence Project? Do you have pros for my cons? Are you participating? Let me know!

There was a TREMENDOUS conversation in which I got to participate last evening on Twitter. Marsha Collier runs a weekly chat on customer service (#custserv for you Twitter users). Last night the topic was basically the relationship between marketing and customer service. The conversation, for me, solidified a thought that had just been ranging around my brain before. To wit: customer service and marketing need each other to succeed.

This also made me realize something new. “Integrated Marketing” may officially be an out-of-date term. It’s not just about integrating your marketing channels anymore, is it? Now, on a corporate level, marketing must be integrated with customer service. The one can enhance the other, and if not planned carefully, one can easily detract from the other as well.

How can a company weave together strands of customer service with strands of marketing to make a fully functional tapestry? Here are some ideas.

1. Build on testimonials: The easiest relationship to identify between marketing and customer service is a positive reaction from a customer. A testimonial, essentially, is a customer singing a company’s praises. Marketing can spread the word about this happiness, build credibility, and show that the company really does walk the walk rather than just talking the talk. It’s tangible proof of strong customer service.

2. Make customer service a pillar of your marketing campaign: If the customer service folk have really been kicking it into gear, don’t be afraid to capitalize on that strength. Market it, in other words. Talking about strong customer service is great for booth graphics at a show, a company profile, and more. Market your strengths.

3. From the fertilizer of a customer service mistake, make marketing flowers bloom: Everyone by now has probably heard the story of Comcast Cares. A company notorious for poor customer service used Social Media to become responsive, attentive, and the poster child of modern-day communication. If a mistake can be fixed, if an unhappy customer can become an “evangelizer” for your company or product, your marketing team can have a veritable field day. If that person is willing to be quoted in an ad, a press release, or serve as an ambassador for your company at a trade show or event, how credible will that person AND you seem? This company isn’t perfect and I wasn’t always happy, but look at how happy I am now!

4. Marketing should keep existing customers in mind: Research shows that people like to think that someone is listening. Even with all of these ways to share content, feedback is what people are really after. If customer service gets several similar complaints about a feature and that feature is changed or updated, make sure marketing knows about it. “We listened and our product is better thanks to you.” Domino’s Pizza recently carried this kind of campaign out using television commercials tied to a Social Media campaign. Keep everyone in the loop!

5. Customer Service should keep marketing in mind: One thing we always try to tell people we work with is that it is essential to find out how people find out about you. If someone calls or emails or visits your website and expresses an interest in your product, don’t be shy about asking how they heard about you. Marketers don’t get a whole lot of gold stickers, but a delivered lead is pure gold indeed. Keep track of what people say and let your marketing team know what’s going on. The marketing plan can be shifted to emphasize what is performing well.

Are there other ways in which customer service and marketing are or could be intertwined? Let me know!

Image by Glenn Pebley. http://www.sxc.hu/profile/GlennPeb