Paul Revere: The Original Key Influencer

June 2, 2010January 5, 2017Leave a comment

I caught an interesting documentary the other day suggesting that one of the key factors of success for the American Revolution was our networking ability. One thing the British hadn’t counted on: America’s ability to move information through the colonies at astonishing speed.

America, it seems, has been deeply networked since day one. Even with our colonial wings of communal will radically clipped living under British law, Americans consistently, methodically, routinely organize in groups. Powerless groups, really, who have little authority over anything—not British law, not taxes. Yet convene they do. To discuss “the concerns of the day”. To communicate, to network.

Since the first Representative Assembly in 1619 Jamestown to the first Committee of Safety in 1774 Massachusetts, America grew in tight networks—local committees who elect regional representatives who attend colonial assemblies. Veritably powerless under British law, but here, there and everywhere. Hugely connected.

Also importantly, colonial literacy was very high—the north especially enjoying nearly full literacy. Even in the less literate South, oratory and word of mouth communication was alive and fast. News of the Boston Tea party was printed, dispatched and common knowledge in every one of the thirteen colonies within days.

Contrary to popular folklore, when the British finally did arrive, what Paul Revere didn’t do was ride about shouting incessantly, “The British are coming!” What he did do was act as a key influencer. He used an existing network to tell the right people the right thing at the right time and very importantly, asked them them to tell more people. And, thanks to the Sons of Liberty, the network was already in place before the message was pushed through—a key ingredient of successful viral marketing. By the early morning, 40 or more riders were scattered across Middlesex County carrying news of the British invasion. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Google and Business: Best Frenemies

May 23, 2010January 5, 2017Leave a comment

google_nyt_article Those of us making a living in search marketing have long been aware of the pitfalls of doing business with Google which were outlined in a comprehensive look at the search behemoth in this morning’s NYT: Sure, It’s Big. But Is That Bad? Blatant self-interest, sudden unannounced changes in search algorithms and volatile ad rates have kept us on our toes, constantly having to keep up with whichever way the Google wind blows.

But we don’t take our business elsewhere. Most of us easily hand 80% of our paid search budget right over. When Google pulls another fast one – which it inevitably will, we adapt. Competitive behavior in a complex, networked economy is a slippery fish. Networks work because they are large. Networked economies (the Internet) benefit from scale (Google). We Internet marketers, although mostly irked by Google, accept that its very scale works to our benefit.

This morning’s Times article properly asks, “Can there really be monopolies online when the competition is only a click away?” We can move our paid search business away from Google and give it to Yahoo! or Bing at a moments notice. But we don’t.

And why not? Because, for now, Google is where the consumers are. Doing business with Google as advertiser has always been annoying and has certainly always felt unfair, but has it really been unfair? With all the pressure we now see to derive quantifyable ROI from every dollar we spend, we prove time and again that what we spend on Google is worth it no matter how annoying or unfair.

But all is transient – especially in the world of Internet marketing. When it becomes bad business to do business with Google, we’ll stop.

Cloud Marketing – Bring it On!

May 18, 2010January 5, 2017Leave a comment

cloud_marketing1 I’ve long been interested in ideas about the future workplace and how it will one day look dramatically different than what we’ve known. Those of us making a living in digital services and technologies may already be experiencing it. Our work teams can easily be made up of half employees, half contractors and consultants and nearly always include at least one party who we’ve only met on conference calls because he lives in Idaho.

Having made my living as a freelancing contractor for the better part (and the worst part) of the past four years, I can only attest to its many, many benefits for both the employer and the employed alike and express a fervent hope that it truly becomes more common. It saves time, energy and money (no transportation costs! no commute!) and in my experience, contributes to a more agile marketing practice and helps companies stay nimble.

The Economist says freelance and contract work is on the rise. Whether the new pool of freelancers is simply fed up with seeking full-time employment in today’s economy, or wants to move toward the more flexible (albeit less secure) lifestyle that freelancing affords is unclear. What is clear, is that many of those who do take the leap into independence are experiencing higher quality of life, increased productivity, and even more lucrative professional lives.

Agile Marketing Must Haves

May 16, 2010January 5, 2017Leave a comment

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It’s difficult to find a development team that hasn’t embraced the agile method—an iterative approach to software design focused on smaller projects, shorter cycle times and lots of testing and learning. The fundamental assumption of the agile method is that project requirements change on a daily basis so being nimble matters. The old waterfall method of gathering requirements, designing, writing code, testing and releasing looks cumbersome, slow, and outdated by comparison. Not to mention more expensive and less effective.

Yet time and again, when technology-driven companies go to market, they often fail to translate their highly effective agile mindset to their marketing practice. Oddly enough, when it comes to marketing, they tend to over-think. As if they have one chance and one chance only to get it right. Their marketing practice becomes slow and cumbersome, more expensive than they’d like, and the results disappoint.

It pays to know that running a cutting edge marketing practice has an enormous amount in common with running a cutting edge development shop. Marketing, too, works better on the agile method—small projects, short cycles and lots of iteration.

Especially if you are ready to start optimizing conversion (ie: you have traffic and customers) porting your stellar agile development culture over to your marketing operation is a must.

Just like your agile development practice, your new agile marketing practice needs but a few key elements to keep it humming on all cylinders:

1. An Agile Delivery System. Today’s marketers need to make changes on a dime. Without total control over marketing web pages through a content management system that they own, they will forever spend their time requirements gathering, designing and producing ideas rather than introducing ideas to the marketplace so they can listen and adapt. Just like your agile development team needs to make frequent, pointed updates to code, your marketers need to add blog posts, change links, add and edit web copy and even full pages with pointed frequency.

2. Integrated Input. No doubt, our marketing requirements have gotten ten fold more complex in the last ten years. With multiple modalities, an explosion of technologies, fragmented communication channels and more touch points to manage everyday, it’s more important than ever to ensure that our marketing efforts are integrated—not only in the eyes of the customer, but with the fundamental workings of the organization. Integration of the sales and marketing functions has been a no-brainer for decades. Now it’s time to integrate our marketing efforts with customer service, product development and public relations, informing and coordinating our efforts, building and taking advantage of interdependencies.

3. An Iterative, Hypothesis-driven Project Schedule. Like agile software developers, agile marketers need to iterate—toss an idea into the mix, see what happens, learn, change, nip, tuck, adapt. Like developers turn stories into tasks, marketers turn hypotheses into campaigns. Like developers write and release code, marketers write and release messaging and promotions. Smaller projects, shorter cycles, iterative learning. It works very well for both.

4. Measurement. Business has long demanded accountability for the value of their software investments and your marketing efforts should be no different. As long as online marketing technology keeps innovating, marketing ROI will always be a moving target. It depends on a large number of complex inputs that will only continue to grow. That said, the same measurement principles you use in your agile development process (another complex, constantly emerging task) are also good for measuring your marketing efforts:

• Measure outcome, not output.
• Follow trends, not numbers.
• Make data easy to collect.
• Pay attention to what reveals, not what conceals.
• Collect feedback on a frequent and regular basis.
• Encourage a “good-enough” mentality and move on.

Lastly, like a development house works best when one key metric drives the business, a marketing practice works best under a single shared goal. That metric will most certainly change as your business grows. While you start out needing to drive web traffic, you’ll certainly move into the need to drive conversion and hopefully (if you’re very, very lucky) wind up faced with the need to maximize customer life time value.

5 Key Ingredients for Your Facebook Page

May 4, 2010January 5, 2017Leave a comment

Most marketers agree that a social media presence is a must have in today’s online marketplace, but they still struggle with how to define social media ROI. We continue to ask what a Facebook presence can do for the organization and, more importantly, our customers.

Social media marketing still is—and may perhaps be for some time yet—an emerging discipline. Yet our customers are only spending more and more time on Facebook and Twitter. Even if we haven’t got our arms around the social media landscape, it’s becoming increasingly important to be there now, today—reaching out to our customers through the social networks they care about and trust.

How to begin? What assets are needed to build a living Facebook fan page? What content should be flowed through Twitter? How often must I update, who should I follow and friend, and most importantly, what is it all for?

A good place to start is to ask yourself what your customers might want from your Facebook page. As always, your customers are your customers and you best know what they want and need. That said, there has emerged a fairly common set of ingredients that most Facebook fan, group and community pages do include and customers who spend a lot of time in social media are starting to expect.

Building a Facebook page with the following simple ingredients is a great place to start—but remember, your social media presence is a presence—a living, breathing thing that interacts, reacts and adapts over time. Launch your page with these fundamentals, tune in often, listen, interact and adapt the page over time as you start to better understand what your customers want and need from you on Facebook.

1. Customers. Social networking sites are all about building community. Customers first and foremost would like to see and hear from their fellow customers and group members on fan or community pages.

2. Employees. Facebook is a place for informal relationships to spark between your customers and employees. Rather than channeling customers through operational hierarchies like a customer service center, social media lets them interact freely and informally to exchange information and solve problems together. Your company employees—especially customer facing—should be a part of your Facebook presence.

3. Links. Here is the opportunity to declare the environs in which you operate—your, industry, your category and your niche. The links you post to your Facebook page should not only help define who you are to your customers, but also be useful to them. Link to your suppliers, major news stories affecting your industry, influential bloggers in your niche, your own web pages declaring your green practices.

4. Relevant, meaningful content. As social media is all about “the conversation”, alas, there are precious little pixels on Facebook pages devoted to permanent content. Posts you make to the Wall scroll away into oblivion before you know it—the bigger and more active the community, the faster it happens. Community platform provider Lithium will soon announce a light integration that allows you to store, organize and curate Facebook page content. It’s a great way to give your customers quick access to product information, FAQs and community-based customer support right inside your fan page.

5. Openness. It’s difficult to overstate the importance of relinquishing control of the conversation when connecting with customers through social media. If they sense they are being manipulated, marketed to or corralled in any way, you will lose them. Although the social media landscape remains slightly murky, one thing we can say with confidence is that those companies who embrace it as a place to listen and learn fare much better than those who try to use it to control and convert. And those that do listen and learn are proclaiming that the value of connecting with customers through social media goes far beyond increased conversion.

The Darker Side of Data Mining? Ask Your Doctor

January 5, 2010July 26, 2017Leave a comment

A little something of my own published in CMS Wire. Read the full article here.

Startup Marketing Dos and Don’ts

October 23, 2009January 5, 2017Leave a comment

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Across all startup categories, there are common mistakes and missed opportunities from marketing to unqualified customers to misunderstanding customer needs to under-estimating the competition. Here are two great documents on the Venture Beat website with cogent arguments for what startup marketers ought to keep in mind: Five Key Marketing Priorities for a Startup and Five Marketing Time Wasters. Unfortunately, their links are no longer live, but here’s what I read that’s worth repeating:

Establish a web marketing presence. Of course, this is what Site was created to help you do, so we’re glad to see some other smart people think it’s a good idea.
Track key marketing metrics. Another part of what we do and something we think terribly important. Startup marketers especially need to stay nimble, stay on top of what’s working and what’s not. Metrics-driven marketing optimization is a very smart thing for startups to invest in.

The articles drive home another critical point that’s right in line with what we’ve seen over the years. Don’t invest heavily in product planning, marketing or lead gen until you’ve validated your value proposition and your pricing directly with key customers. Maintain an agile marketing practice.

Of course we want you all to invest heavily in marketing (especially SEO, SEM and email marketing), but we want you to be smart and focused about it by remembering that your goal is to not just to find customers, but ideal customers.

Newsletters: Too Old School?

October 22, 2009January 5, 2017Leave a comment

Newsletters remain a tidy little marketing tool for a number of reasons. The most obvious of course is the touchpoint opportunity—a chance to hit prospects with persuasive content. And although this is a darn good reason, it’s not the only one.

Many Site clients are wary of publishing an e-newsletter because they worry that they just can’t find enough to say in order to publish something worth reading. Yes, we want our prospects and customers to engage with our content, but we also want our e-newsletter to accomplish a number of other very valuable things:

Newsletters bring site traffic. Each time a newsletter recipient opens the email that contains the e-newsletter, if the email is designed right, it counts as a site visit—whether they click through to read the articles or not. Driving traffic to your site is essential, especially in the early going for a startup or small business. The ability to capture and grow traffic is an essential part of search engine optimization (SEO). Getting search engines like Google and Bing to index your site and bump it up in search rankings means showing them your site is attractive and growing. A newsletter is the perfect mechanism for that.
Newsletters build keyword-driven content. Another part of SEO strategy is to ensure that you regularly update your site with keyword-driven content—the more the better. Again, the newsletter is the perfect vehicle for this. Even if you can only produce 3 articles per month, if they are peppered with keywords and sent out as a newsletter, you’re ahead of the game.
Newsletters are good viral mechanisms. Emails are about the easiest way for people to share information online and are still the most preferred. According to MarketingSerpa’s 2010 Email Marketing Benchmark Report, 78% of folks still say that email is their number one way to share information online. Newsletter articles are easily primed for sharing with forwarding features built in.
Newsletter registrations build opt-in marketing lists. It’s great when traffic comes to your site. But if these visitors bounce off again without ever letting you know who they are, their value is greatly diminished. Offering site visitors a free newsletter, if nothing else, is a way of capturing email addresses for future marketing. Much preferred to list purchase, the marketing database you build by capturing emails for a newsletter will be fully opt-in.

Marketing and Uncle Siggy

October 5, 2009January 5, 2017Leave a comment

imgres From hidden desires to public relations, from subliminal advertising to lifestyle marketing, from consumerism to politics this BBC documentary is a must-see for all marketers. The Century of Self is a four-part examination of how Freudian-informed strategies adopted by marketers and politicians have for the better part of a century manipulated mass consumer and voting behavior by appealing to our unconscious hopes and fears.

Are we a people slavishly ensnared in libidinous forces of aggression and the desire for power? Does democracy only work within a culture of “happiness machines”, a docile, satisfied population who demand emotional fulfillment as consumers and expect it as citizens? Do we really even want the responsibility of rational thought when making our purchase decisions or casting our votes?

The Century of Self is a frank examination of 20th Century marketing and its role in the birth of individualism. And if nothing else, it’s a provocative retrospective of our trade. Covering the rise of all things marketing from focus group testing to polling to market segmentation, we see the evolution of our craft over time from its antecedents in WWI propaganda through its embrace of EST principles in the 1970s.