Category: The Marketeer

Categories
The Marketeer

WebInno 25

After the server disaster last month I’ve been running behind and never had a chance to post my follow up from WebInno 25. The event has grown so fast that I’ve changed my strategy in attending. Instead of checking out the side companies after the main presentation, it’s much easier to do a little research the night before and cut my list down to a few companies so I can have some targeted conversations. It’s a little too busy to just meander around and see everyone, the crowd is huge.

There were two companies I found interesting, and I thought instead of just throwing out links I’d make some comments (i.e. unsolicited advice) to see if that would generate any conversation.  The first was Conversion Associates with their product Lytiks. Some very interesting stuff with provisioning VOIP lines so that you can generate phone numbers for your website and have that information integrated into your web analytics. There were two things that came to mind after talking with them, one was from a branding side, I’m not big on companies less than $20M having to grow both a company name and a product name, but that’s a minor point (which saves a lot of money in the long run).

The other was on the product marketing side – I think Salesforce.com integration is critical anyone making this type of software. There are three reasons why this is important:

  1. Having a second dashboard or tool to login to significantly reduces usefulness for the marketing team, and unless it can integrate into a screen for a sales rep it’s either useless or another set of reports for the marketing team to run every week.
  2. The AppExchange gives you access to a global market of people buying this kind of stuff all the time.
  3. If you are successful on the AppExchange it will be obvious and you won’t have to prove your case to suitors. (On that note – has anyone seen any data on SF.com acquisitions of partners?)

This is also one of those segments that’s very new and regardless how the product does the members of the team will learn a lot that can be applied in many ways. Congrats to them for cutting a new trail.

The other company was Homefield, that has a really cool product that allows sports teams to review video in a collaborative environment. Instead of getting everyone to the cafeteria one night a week to watch a DVD of last week’s game everyone can go online, watch and comment.

It looks like they are doing well at the collegiate level but one thought that I had was to swing at the fences. Picking off one college at a time via word of mouth is an excellent way to grow organically, but we do have a pro athlete notorious for pouring through video who is also in the startup scene (the case study is pretty fun if you are into baseball). I don’t know any of the details on back end infrastructure but it seems like it might be a lot more profitable to work with 2 or 3 MLB teams than a ton of colleges. That said, it’s a very cool product and (literally) a game changer.

Categories
Email Marketing

One to One Email Marketing vs. The Easter Bunny

David Meerman Scott wrote about his experience with an Email from American Airlines. Do check out that post first, but if you are too lazy to, the short version is he’s asking why he was sent an offer to buy 2,000 more miles to maybe use for a family trip when he has a quarter million in the bank and can already take them First Class anywhere in the world. He asked “What can we do about this?” and one of the comments mentioned one-to-one marketing.

I’m reminded of the  4 way street joke in Kevin Smith’s Chasing Amy (offensive and totally not safe for work) when I hear this kind of talk. To spare you the obscenity of the street joke, if you think you can pull one-to-one off, you probably are also waiting for it to get delivered to you by Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny on their day off.

The big buzz word is segmentation. The theory is that if you segment the audience, you’ll eventually deliver a uniquely tailored message to everyone. The simple counter to this is that the more you segment, the smaller the group getting the offer. As a business are you more concerned about a small group that may be offended for whatever reason, or the group that will take you up on the offer? (Hint: One group generates revenue, the other includes some legitimate complainers, people with lots of cats, senior citizens with nothing to do, and people wearing the John Wall Signature tin foil hat to protect them from the Government’s mind control rays).

But that’s just a question of how much risk you want to take. There’s also a mathematical reason why you can’t do it:

  1. Your audience can be segmented infinite ways
  2. Every time you cut a segment you increase the complexity of your system exponentially
  3. As most Marketing departments struggle to get out single messages it becomes impossible to generate enough content to support all the possibilities in 10 segments (even if they are yes/no, 10 segments gives you 100 possible message combinations).
  4. If you really want to get granular – i.e. Not just “Is David in the 100k+ group – Yes/No, but instead “Less than 20k in the past year gets A, 20k-100k gets B, 100k+ gets C” the math starts to get ugly real fast – like one of those tables showing how fast bacteria grows.
  5. If you are a hardcore database marketer you may still be saying – no problem, I’ve got the server space to track 20 variables on all 6 billion earthings, and you’d be right – but here’s the big FU: That only works for one campaign. Let that marinate for a minute. Fast forward six months – campaign 2 kicks off, even in our nursery school scenario of 10 yes/no segments who is going to make sure that nobody gets the same message the second time around? (Now that you have 1,000 possible message combinations). Although only linear, that number will still hit the millions in no time. And the numbers are irrelevant because:
  6. Even with tiny numbers a year’s worth of campaigns are too complex for the human mind to work through, and even if you had a team of “Rainman” people that could, eventually someone will quit and be replaced with someone who doesn’t know the whole history.

So what can be done? Two things – you can use your CRM system to track your customer’s entire history but the important thing is not to chase a marketing fantasy but to use it so that sales can create a one-to-one experience. You can also have a list of customer traits short enough for the human mind to comprehend (are they in the 100k club, have they been pissed off in the past year, are they influential in winning us more customers) and segment on that.

Repeat, similar, and irrelevant offers are impossible to stamp out just because of volume and the infinite variation in our situations and the criteria (which may be rational) that we use to determine what is relevant for us. For everyone with 250k miles in the bank there’s one corner case of the guy about to fly all his buddies to SXSW for free, he’s only 1,200 miles short, and is so psyched he got that email (improbable yes, definitely not impossible).

Don’t waste your time fighting it, reap the reward from the happy customers who take you up on your great offer and apologize with a tip of the tin foil hat to anyone you happen to offend.

Update: Photo from hyperion327, thanks for using the CC license

Categories
Marketing IT Dept. The Marketeer

Lazarus Protocol

Ronin Marketeer lives! After a week of not existing at all, and another 3 days with the equivalent of a circa 1996 “Under Construction” page, most of the blog is back. You can check out the previous post to hear about the crash with the fire supression system kicking off in the server room.

So what happened next? The good news is I did have my backup drive, so I had all the data even though I didn’t have access to the MySQL install anymore. I have an older laptop I use for crazy projects with my Tivo and GPS, and I installed XAMPP and WordPress so I could run the blog from that machine as it’s own web server. From there I was able to dump the database into an export file and then import that up on to the new server. I had to zero out all the tables for the import to work, but that was the only glitch there, it was about as smooth as I hoped it could be.

There are still a few broken things, mainly plugins that may or may not be active, if you see anything odd please give me a yell. Thanks also to the Marketing Over Coffee fans that stepped up to offer help, I really appreciate that.

Categories
Marketing IT Dept.

When Even a Backup is Not Enough

Update: Eureka! I’ve fixed it, the blog Lives! If you want to know what went down…

As you can see, everything is all f’d up here.

Over a week ago disaster struck at my hosting company, during a fire alarm test the suppression system was triggered, hosing all the servers. This blog was dead for a full week.

We were offered to move our hosting from the version 3 infrastructure to v4, and I took up the offer since it got my domain back 2 days earlier. Unfortunately the new environment is not the same – even though I have a full backup of my Database that supports this blog, the new system does not allow you access to the directory where that data is kept.

I’m no expert in MySQL, but it looks like I’ve gone from having my own instance to sharing one on the server with everyone else.

The end result is that all my archives are gone for now and my Google juice vanishing as there’s no access to any of my archives. It looks like my only path is to install WP and MySQL on a box of my own, then do a wordpress export so I can then import it back in. I cannot believe that having the actual files is not enough for me to do a restore, that is complete crap. If anyone has any better attack plans I’d love to hear them. Please DM me @johnjwall I’m closing comments on this post b/c if all goes well this domain will resolve to the real site soon.

Categories
Swipe File

The Formulaic Nature of TV News

Just in case you didn’t take the bait in the last post, this is too good for me to not post…

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtGSXMuWMR4[/youtube]

Categories
Daily Life Email Marketing

Finally

Things have been a bit slow here at the blog, that’s because all the work lately has been behind the scenes. Finally the time has come, a lot of stuff is shipping this week. In fact all 3 of the major projects from the past 3 months have all come down to Tuesday.

At work we had a major product launch, that’s been eating up a ton of time, and just for fun let’s throw in the company kickoff and a bunch of powerpoint decks.

Marketing Over Coffee also had two big projects – for the past month I’ve been sitting on the secret of the next big interview – on Monday I finally dropped a half hour conversation with Seth Godin on his new book Linchpin.

A big chunk of Q4 last year was finishing an eBook an email marketing strategies. Right now the sponsor has exclusive rights to it but if you go over to Seth’s Squidoo page and vote up the Marketing Over Coffee interview and then tell me, I will see what I can do about getting you a copy.

Categories
Geek Stuff Great Marketing Podcasting Productivity Booster

How to Record a Phone Interview

Even though I said I was taking November off, I’m back again. A friend asked me about recording a phone interview and I wrote so much that I thought it would be a shame not to get a post out of it too.

The Phone Tree Option in Order of Sound Quality:

Best – Skype to Skype
Still good – Skype to regular phone (Skype Out) A lot of people use this if your interview subject can’t handle skype (doesn’t have the bandwidth, or the technical skill).
Last Option – Phone to Phone

For skype to skype or skype to skype out, use one computer for skype and another, or a digital recorder to record, do not skype and record on the same machine (yes, I know, lots of people do skype and record on one machine, remember that you’ve only listened to their successes, you haven’t heard the files that were lost or ruined). Another benefit of this method is that you get full studio sound on your side.

Ways to do phone to phone: like most tech stuff, the trade offs are that cheap and/or easy are at the expense of sound quality.

One thing to test is cell vs. land line. Cell can be clearer, but if reception is an issue go to land line.

Another important factor – headsets are best, handset next, Polycom conference phone is rough, speakerphones are terrible.

Cheapest and easiest: Many conference call services, such as the good folks of TelSpan can record your conference call (I am a customer of theirs). Give your subject the number, tell the service in advance that you want this one recorded, and download an mp3 when you are done. This is as low a quality can go, but it does work.

Next, if you already have recording gear, put the subject on a polycom and record the room. You get studio sound on one side and this method is a good compromise on price / sound quality. The setup we use for Marketing Over Coffee (this link goes to a page with the full gear listing) is great for that, it’s about $600 but is NPR quality sound and durability. You can go cheaper, but the question is: “How screwed would you be if you lost an interview?” for some it’s no big deal, for others it may be once in a lifetime opportunity.

Most expensive – a device that operates as a phone but pulls the caller into your mixer and pushes your mic back down the line. I don’t know many people that go this route since skyping out is cheaper and better sound quality. But, it should be noted that JK Audio has a full assortment of devices that do this (as well as some other devices that are great if you want to do your own webinars – again, I am a customer and vouch for them).

It will also depend on if you are doing it once or if it’s an ongoing project, for one time call in some favors, rent gear, or pay a pro. If it’s a regular thing, get some decent gear.

Another big tip – when you are done, run it through the Levelator, it’s a free software tool that balances out the volume levels.

Have fun, and Happy Thanksgiving!

Categories
Great Marketing

Bootstrapping PR – Live from WebInno 23

At WebInno tonight there’s a panel on bootstrapping PR. You can get the bios of the panelists and an overview of the event here. Some overall pointers on how to get attention. Quotes are direct, stuff without quotes are my summaries.

Bob Brown:
“CEOs need personality”
Journalists are becoming cognizant of page views.

Peter Kafka:
“Get a referral from someone I trust”
Entrepreneurs are better off without a PR firm, you can tell your story better than a 3rd party.
“Use your blog to put out your view of the world”
Know when to adapt if the reporter is not interested in your one talking point – staying on message will not always work
“Embargos are dead” he tweeted an embargoed release today

Scott Kirsner:
“Meet in person, don’t get introduced by your PR guy”
Dealing with multi-channel reporters – talk to them about where it will be published – online, print, is any of it off the record?
This is retail not wholesale
Exclusives are worthwhile

Wade Roush:
“Don’t write stories and send them to reporters”
Pick the reporters that are relevant to your space and start a relationship with them
Blogging helps complete the picture of the entrepreneur and can be useful to reporters
Only 4 Real hooks for him – Raised money, Change in leadership, change in direction, new product
Keep in mind that exclusives are shafting everyone else

Mike Troiano
“Treat reporters like people”
Mike was busy moderating so he didn’t spend any real time commenting.

There was one question from the crowd asking why PR firms were not represented. David said it was because they wanted a panel of first person accounts from the reporters. I think a key point on whether or not you need a PR firm is your ability to tell your story effectively. You either want a PR firm that has existing relationships with the specific publications or channels you need to get into, or to help you craft your message if you are not a passionate and effective storyteller.

Congrats David on a great event with a huge crowd.

p.s. – Plug for my own stuff for webinno attendees – If you are interested in marketing and PR tips check out Marketing Over Coffee

Categories
Daily Life Email Marketing

It’s about the email

I have been writing for the past two weeks, it’s just that none of it has made it here. I’ve got about 20 pages of email best practices that’s coming together for an eBook.

That and getting a roof fixed, and continuing my pledge to work on actual projects including a top secret photo project and music too!

Here’s to being busy, I hope all is well with you.

Categories
Graphic Design Great Marketing

Rebirth of the Cool

While in Traverse City, Michigan over vacation (“Up North”) for those in the know, I came across a store called M-22. They had casual clothing with the M-22 logo on it, a highway that runs along the coastline and is travelled by kiteboarders. You can read their story here and check out their stuff.

In the store you can see that the merchandising was done with the brand in mind – it’s not just “How much crap can we put our logo on, and how cheap can we get it”, but rather going a higher quality route. Between having a higher quality product, and the hip Tribes-style appeal of the kiteboarding community you’ve got a great brand that will attract all the cool kids… at least for a couple of years until enough middle-age bozos like myself start wearing the stuff regularly.

Amid a whole street of “Traverse City” T-Shirts, and lots of cherry or fudge related tourist bait, M-22 takes the higher ground. What’s your edge?