As I talk with people about online marketing, one question I often hear is, “What is the deal with Twitter?” Many people are completely stumped as to what the service is good for, especially in a business setting. Usually, if I walk them through some examples of why it’s useful, the light goes on and they get it. Just explaining it, though, out of context is difficult at best.

Claire Diaz-Ortiz took on the task of explaining how to use Twitter to promote nonprofit causes in her book Twitter for Good: Change the World One Tweet At A Time. She does a great job taking tweeting down to its basics and helps people build a strategy around activity on the service. To make it easy to remember, she uses the word “TWEET” as the guide for her main points:

• Target
• Write
• Engage
• Explore
• Track

The book takes each of these five pieces and breaks them down into smaller parts which are easy to digest and act on. It starts with working out why you want to be on the service and what you want to accomplish, all the way through measuring results to see if you were successful. While comprehensive, the book itself is easy to read with many great real-life examples of how these concepts are used.

While Claire wrote the book with charity work in mind, here’s the best part: The concepts she teaches apply to businesses, too. The five points she outlines and the methods she describes can work very well to help anyone who wants to incorporate a Twitter strategy into their marketing and customer service efforts.

I recommend this book to anyone who wants to learn about or sharpen their Twitter efforts to make them more effective and on target. I especially believe anyone who is involved in nonprofit or charity work will benefit tremendously from the lessons in it.

Twitter for Good: Change the World One Tweet At A Time by Claire Diaz-Ortiz (Amazon Affiliate link, as is the cover shot above) – great guide to Twitter strategy.

You can get more information by visiting the author’s web site: clairediazortiz.com or the book’s companion web site www.Twitter4Good.com.

Disclaimer: I received the ebook version of this work free during a promotion. This is my honest opinion of the work.

I have, sitting on my desk, four pieces of unsolicited bulk mail. All of these are from the same company. All of them offer to reduce my mortgage payments by going through their quick refinance service. I’m quite dubious to their claims and will shred them as soon as I finish writing this.

What caught my eye was that even though all the offers are identical, almost down to the exact wording, they all took different forms and had different appearances when still in their envelopes:

• One looked like a bank statement
• One looked like a check
• One looked like an appointment notice from the VA Medical Center
• One looked like “junk mail.”

Of course, it’s very easy to tell without opening that these are all junk. I open them so I can shred the parts on which my personal information is printed. What prompted me to comment was that they all had the same web site address and toll-free number printed on them.

You’d think a company who went through the trouble of creating four different forms for the same offer would have split-tested them. They could have a unique toll-free number and URL for each of the four formats. Then they could quickly learn which one generated the most calls or web traffic and then use it more than the others.

You might hear this practice called “A/B Testing.” Many e-commerce companies employ such methods to find out which versions of banner ads and landing pages produce the desired result. It works quite well in helping get a message to the right audience.

What is old is new again. Well, off to the shredder.

photo credit: StarsApart

I recently wrote a piece directed at marketers reminding them that it is important to keep their IT folks in the loop all the time. This is important so they can get the best advice, counsel and work the IT folks can offer. It’s a topic I talk and write about quite often.

As is usually the case, there is another side to the coin. The IT folks have to be willing to communicate as well.

As in any relationship, the one between Marketing and IT is a two-way street. Each side has to be willing to work with the other and offer the best they have to the relationship. Each side has abilities and strengths the other lacks. By combining skills, knowledge and efforts, the entire organization benefits.

It goes without saying that Marketing and IT have different missions within an organization. But, where those missions overlap, it is in each groups’ best interest to cooperate for the good of everyone. Sometimes this involves compromise and sacrifice. Isn’t that true in any relationship?

Here’s my challenge to my IT counterparts in 2012: Reach out to your Marketing colleagues and try to find meaningful ways you can help them succeed. Look at their business objectives and see if you can find ways to help meet them. Not only will you learn more and expand your horizons, you will help the whole business do better. And that, my friends, is what it’s all about.

What say you? Are you in a corporate IT group and have a good relationship with your Marketing counterparts? What kinds of things help the relationship? Please feel free to share any tips in the comments.

photo credit: mikecogh

Advertising for liquor stores is fairly new in the Texas town in which I live. It’s only been a little over a year since citizens voted to allow sales of spirits within the city limits. Now that there is a bit of competition for the locals’ alcohol dollars, advertising is becoming more and more common.

On our local talk station, I caught a piece on the way to work which really hit me. I don’t remember the exact wording, but here’s the gist of it:

Are you tired of holiday shopping already? Are you sick of trying to find the right gift for the right person – especially that hard-to-buy-for person on you list? Are you fed up with the crowds and the sales and all that? Well, all you need is to stop by <local liquor store> and get what you need to get you through the holiday season.

At this point, I started laughing so hard I almost had to pull over to avoid running off the road. The instant implication to me was that if you’re tired of holiday shopping, you should stop by one of their three convenient locations and buy some booze and tie one on to forget the whole mess.

Of course, I don’t think that was the intended message. Through my laughter, I think I caught something about getting a bottle of wine for someone and that gift cards are always a great gift. I didn’t quite get the rest of the message because I was still laughing at the image of crowds of people running to their store to get items to help them forget their problems for a while.

This is why it’s important to have lots of people test your ad. This isn’t the first ad spot to convey a mixed message, and it certainly won’t be the last. While I’m sure the message I received was not the one intended, I wonder how many others heard it the same way. While the small business owner may not have the time or money to organize a focus group, perhaps recording the copy and passing it around to friends online would suffice to catch unintended messages.

What say you? Have you heard any funny, mixed-message advertisements this year? Do you have any suggestions how smaller business owners can “focus group” their advertising while not spending tons of cash to do it? Please feel free to share in the comments.

photo credit: swanksalot

Dan Zarrella

I’ve been following Dan Zarrella, the “Social Media Scientist” for a few years now. I get a lot out of his writings and webinars because his studies go beyond the “feel good” or “unicorns and rainbows” (as he puts it) ideas which go around. He attempts to put some hard numbers behind what he recommends and this gives me some great starting points to do my own experimentation and measure how things work for me and those I work for.

Zarrella’s Hierarchy of Contagiousness is a compilation of many things Dan has already shared in various media, put together in a nice, easy-to-read format which can help anyone involved with web marketing get a great head start on working their own strategies.

The book is full of interesting statistics and studies of data showing:

• what may be the best time to share on Facebook and Twitter
• how timing affects email opening and click throughs
• how often one may wish to post on Facebook or Twitter
• what makes information shareable by others
• how to define goals and measure whether they were reached

All in all this is a very good work and well worth reading. If you’ve never heard Dan speak nor read any of his other work, you will find this quite interesting and full of ideas to get you thinking. If you’re already familiar with Dan’s work, this is a great reference where everything is in one place so you don’t have to hunt it down.

Zarrella’s Hierarchy of Contagiousness by Dan Zarrella

Note: all links to the book in this post are Amazon Affiliate links

I’ve been thinking a lot about online contests over the past several months. Moderating the “Engaging Your Community and Audience Through Contests” session at PubCon gave me some new idea as to how I might use contests at work.

Over the long weekend I entered two contests. Each was for a brand I like very much which offered prizes I would enjoy having. One was for Cracker Barrel, which I learned about from scanning a QR Code on a tabletop placard. The other was for the Zagg “iPad An Hour” Black Friday event, which I learned about when they sent me an email. Here are some observations I made of each:

Cracker Barrel’s

Pros

• It was fairly easy to enter
• Bonus entries were available
• It was sharable
• The prize was valuable enough to be an incentive to enter (a gift basket and a $250 Cracker Barrel gift card)

Cons

• The form required way too much information. For example, did they really need my phone number and postal address if I provide an email address? Also, why was it necessary to set up an account with a password just to enter a contest? To their credit, they did offer login through Facebook, which may have negated the need to fill out the form.
• Because I got to the form by scanning the QR Code on the tabletop card, it would have been nicer to have been sent to a mobile-friendly version of the form rather than the one designed for a computer browser. Also, while I understand the reason for CAPTCHA, it’s a pain to use on a mobile device (Auto-Correct, anyone?)

Cracker Barrel Holiday Sweepstakes Entry Form

Zagg’s

Pros

• It was very easy to enter, just provide full name and email address
• Bonus entries were available
• It was very sharable (as this was the way to get bonus entries)
• The prize was valuable enough to be an incentive to enter (a new iPad2)

Con

• To be considered for each hour’s drawing everyone had to enter once every hour, which put a huge demand on Zagg’s servers. I had trouble getting the entry page to load early in the morning, though they had it under control and loading quickly in short order. The rest of the site loaded well during the short-lived slow time, so their commerce was, hopefully, not adversely affected.
• I didn’t win one. (Well, OK, perhaps that’s not really a ding on how the contest was implemented …)

Zagg iPad An Hour Giveaway Entry Form

 

Each of these contests had merit. Without knowing the goals of each, however, it’s hard to tell whether or not they were effective. Each had a good prize to offer and it was reasonably easy to enter both. From the consumer standpoint, however, I would say that Zagg had the better implementation given the very simple entry form. The one seeming mistake was that they didn’t anticipate the popularity of their giveaway and weren’t prepared for the onslaught; though they did recover quickly much to their credit.

Update: After I posted this, Scott Cowley at Zagg told me that from their point of view, the iPad An Hour contest was a huge success. He cited some stats on the results from Drew Conrad that look very good. Thanks Scott and Drew.

What say you? Did you participate in these or another contest over the “Black Friday” weekend? What did you think about them? Please feel free to share in the comments.

I had Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’” (Amazon affiliate link) as my ear worm today – the title of this post is inspired by it.

This past Thursday’s PubCon keynote was a panel discussion between Topher Konan (CNN.com’s SEO Coordinator), Jeff Preston (SEO Manager for Disney) and Alex Bennert (In-House SEO for the Wall Street Journal). It was quite a lively talk about different issues facing in-house SEOs in large organizations.

One stand out comment was Jeff’s mention that everyone involved in the web efforts need to be at every meeting. His comment was very well received by the people in attendance. I was certainly glad to hear him say it, as that idea is something very important to me. It’s something which I stressed during my In-House SEO presentation on Tuesday. In the context of my talk, it was about the importance of marketers being constantly in touch with their IT counterparts.

What I said was something  like …

“If you treat your IT folks as an afterthought, guess what? They’ll treat you as an afterthought.”

Constant and consistent communication is important for several reasons:

• It helps maintain lines of communication which can otherwise get lost
• It helps build those relationships needed for smooth cooperation
• Both sides of the team learn from each other
• Both sides of the team learn each other’s abilities, strengths and weaknesses
• It makes working life just that much more pleasant

Remember that web marketing success means success for the entire organization. Although you may not see the need to communicate across departments on a consistent basis, that need is there. Keep in contact, even when you don’t feel like it. Make time to talk to those who have a hand in all pieces of your web marketing strategy, no matter how small their role may be. In the long run, everyone wins when you do.

Oh, and this applies to outside contractors, too!

This session was moderated by Mark Knowles

Tom Critchlow, Head of Search, Distilled @tomcritchlow

• Data is a marketing asset. Not many companies are using data to their advantage. It’s more than just a research tool.
• Infographics can be useful for showing data in a meaningful way.
• It’s easy to get attracted to a bunch of cool tools. Find the metrics which you care about and apply to your business and watch those.
• Also measure things you can control. Find out what you’re doing which works and what doesn’t and make changes as approprite. You can’t change things you can’t control.
• Data is difficult to get information from without context. Make changes and test to learn what happens.
• Set up custom variables so you can track content on a page as well as the page itself or to measure how many Facebook users visit your site. This will give you actionable ideas.
• Don’t forget to include user feedback in your data.

Alan K’necht, Founding Partner, Digital Always Media @aknecht

• Instead of calling it “social media” we should call it social marketing, because we’re all marketers.
• Fires draw people together, since the days of the caveman. We want to start fires in a more modern way.
• You need 3 things to make a fire: Fuel, Heat and Oxygen. These items can be measured. Perhaps not perfectly, but they can be measured.
• Our big mistake: measuring head count. How many people follow or like us. Out of context, this is a meaningless number.
• Another measurement mistake: Volume of content creation. While more can be good, but is it quality content and are people viewing and engaging?
• ROI, engagement, and sharing are better tools to add to other measurements.
• Going back to the fire analogy:
  • The fuel is the number of fans, followers, etc. You can measure the quality of the fuel to a certain degree. These numbers can tell us how big a fish we are in the pond, and how big the pond is.
  • The oxygen consists of those brand advocates. They are influencers who help spread the flames.
  • The heat is the content. Don’t measure quantity, measure quality!
• Use URL shorteners and tag them with web analytics code so you can track them. This allows you to measure engagement and what gets shared and clicked on.
• Create a dashboard showing raw analytics data combined with the data from URL shorteners and other sources to show the big picture.
• See if you can correlate increases in sales or store traffic (with physical locations) with upticks in web traffic and buzz.
• Just because you have a bigger fire, it doesn’t necessarily mean increase in revenue. Remember how much people were talking about BP during the spill crisis?
• Measure attraction. Be careful not to compare you company with others, even competitors. You have to make your campaign work for you.





Did you like this article? If you're not already a subscriber, please sign up for free updates to The Crossing of Marketing and IT via email or RSS reader.

]]> http://www.crossingmarketingandit.com/marketing-2/web-marketing/pubcon-vegas-2011-day-3-convergence-of-online-marketing-and-analytics/feed/ 0 http://www.crossingmarketingandit.com/marketing-2/web-marketing/one-week-until-pubcon/ http://www.crossingmarketingandit.com/marketing-2/web-marketing/one-week-until-pubcon/#comments Tue, 01 Nov 2011 11:20:50 +0000 Elmer Boutin http://www.crossingmarketingandit.com/?p=2890
Did you like this article? If you're not already a subscriber, please sign up for free updates to The Crossing of Marketing and IT via email or RSS reader.

]]>



Once again, PubCon is upon us. This time next week I and two of my colleague will be winging our way to Las Vegas for this excellent web marketing event. It’s going to be a busy time of learning and exchanging ideas.

If you’re a Crossing reader and will be at PubCon, I would love to meet you. If you see me wandering the hallways or in a session, please stop and introduce yourself. Here’s my partial tentative agenda:

Monday

• I’ll be at the kickoff event at 5:30pm. This is a great time to meet new people in a social setting.

Tuesday

• I will be presenting as part of the In-House Team Building and Training session at 2:55 in Salon D. This will be a great panel with some luminaries in this area: Tony Adam, Peter Leshaw and Josh Gampel.
• In the evening I’ll be playing in the Raven Tools poker tournament. Thankfully this is just for “funsies” because I am not that great of a poker player

Wednesday

• After all the day’s festivities, I’ll be participating in the Epic Dinner organized by Alan Bleiweiss.

Thursday

• From 2pm until 3pm I’ll be sitting in on PubCon Labs. This is a new feature of PubCon which I think will be a huge hit. Session speakers will be at a table and will sit down with you and answer your questions. Reservations are going fast. I’m scheduled to cover Beginning SEO, but I don’t think anyone would mind if you wanted to talk about In-House issues or anything else web marketing.
• From my Labs session, I’ll be rushing over to Salon G to moderate a session entitled Engaging Your Community and Audience Through Contests with Matt Craine and Lisa Buyer
• Fest Call! At 7pm we’ll be having an informal and unofficial meetup at the Hofbrauhaus. Anyone is welcome to attend, but I’d especially like to invite Veterans of the Armed Services to come out and tell lies and talk web marketing.

Instead of posting a long summary of the sessions I attend at the end of the day, I’m going to try posting summaries of each session individually. I think this will be more efficient for me and easier to read for you.

What say you? Are you headed to PubCon next week? What do you hope to learn? Please feel free to share in the comments.



Did you like this article? If you're not already a subscriber, please sign up for free updates to The Crossing of Marketing and IT via email or RSS reader.

]]> http://www.crossingmarketingandit.com/marketing-2/web-marketing/one-week-until-pubcon/feed/ 0 http://www.crossingmarketingandit.com/book-review/zmot/ http://www.crossingmarketingandit.com/book-review/zmot/#comments Tue, 18 Oct 2011 11:42:03 +0000 Elmer Boutin http://www.crossingmarketingandit.com/?p=2835
Did you like this article? If you're not already a subscriber, please sign up for free updates to The Crossing of Marketing and IT via email or RSS reader.

]]>

Back in the day (and not to long ago, either) we were taught that the sales process (or purchase process, depending on which side of the transaction you were on) went through a process shaped like a funnel. It was more or less a linear process. It may not have actually been so, but it was a nice model and likely fit many transaction processes.

Now, with the internet and all of the information resources it makes available to consumers, the sales process is no longer linear at all. Often, by the time a customer walks into a store, he has researched features, brands, prices, warranties, and any other information available and knows exactly what he wants. If research wasn’t done ahead of time, it can be done in the store with a smart device. The world, literally, is in each customer’s hand.

This is where the idea of the “Zero Moment of Truth” (ZMOT) comes in. It’s no longer easy to predict where or when a customer will make her purchase decision. It could be any where at any time. The information which goes into her decision process can come to here from traditional advertisements to banner ads, reviews, videos from other customers on YouTube. Many times another customer’s “Second Moment of Truth” (experience with a product or service) can very well become another person’s ZMOT. If you can find a way to get the right information to a person at the critical time, you can win at ZMOT.

Here are some quotes from the work which got me thinking:

Kim Kadlec, Worldwide Vice President, Global Marketing Group, Johnson & Johnson describes the change in mental models this way: “We’re entering an era of reciprocity. We now have to engage people in a way that’s useful or helpful to their lives. The consumer is looking to satisfy their needs, and we have to be there to help them with that. To put it another way: How can we exchange value instead of just sending a message?

Companies who are winning in this area are already on their way to becoming information resources. Rather like Santa Claus in “Miracle on 34th Street,” they are becoming helpful to their customers, sometimes even at the expense of their immediate bottom line. They are looking to invest in the long-term success of their customers. Last year I wrote about Gun Dog Supply and how they turned themselves into an information resource for those interested training hunting dogs. By doing this, they made themselves an invaluable resource which helped their sales in a huge way.

How can you help your company do this?

Let me make another point about ratings and reviews online: They’re a tremendous resource for customers, but they’re also a tremendous resource for businesses.

“A focus group is artificial. People are paid to be there. They know that there are agency people behind the glass watching them … . The only thing that’s pure and authentic in terms of what’s actually happening in the marketplace is how people talk to each other.”

Think about this: You have a great opportunity to learn what you’re doing well and where you need to improve. This is a tremendous asset to the business person who realizes it’s there and takes advantage of the knowledge available to make positive changes to their product or service.

Beth Comstock, the Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer of General Electric … says:

“Maybe if you make locomotives, or the software that automates production lines, you think: Why should I have videos or web content out there, who’s going to use that?

But one day at our marketing council we did YouTube searches for just those kinds of things. And you know what? Up came hundreds of videos, including videos from our competitors on things like intelligent thinking for product line automation. It was a great eye-opener.”

This really can apply to any product or service. People want to know what’s out there, what’s available and what might best solve their problems. If you can build out content (and not just videos) you can really hit a home run when it comes to attracting good attention. National Instruments has an excellent community full of content on how to use their products. I’m willing to bet all that great content gives them a big advantage over their competitors.

If I’m having this conversation privately with a CMO, this is the first question I ask: “Who’s in charge of ZMOT for you?”

Because if it’s nobody’s job, it’s not going to get done. If I ask you, “Who runs your TV department” or “Who’s in charge of your in-store marketing for FMOT?” or “Who makes sure your green beans reach the shelf on time?”, you’ll give me one person’s name. You should also be able to give me one person’s name for ZMOT.

And that’s because of no one owns it, it won’t get taken care of. I wrote about this regarding web marketing in a guest post on the PubCon Speakers blog. If you’re going to take ZMOT (or anything else) seriously, someone has to own it.

If you’re a marketer, I hope you’re encouraging your customers to make videos about your product that others can find at that Zero Moment of Truth. Never forget that your customers are ahead of you, and that’re ready to contribute right back to ZMOT in real time.

I sometimes get into conversations about creating content. Here’s an idea: if you can’t make enough content, crowdsource it. If people are delighted with your product or service, they’ll likely be happy to share that knowledge with their friends. Sometimes all they need is a little encouragement.

Check out Winning The Zero Moment of Truth by Jim Lecinski. The Kindle version is free. It’s a quick read filled with great information including quite a bit from Google’s research. It only took me a little over an hour to read it and watch the videos; very well worth the time.

You can also get more information by visiting the web site: www.zeromomentoftruth.com



Did you like this article? If you're not already a subscriber, please sign up for free updates to The Crossing of Marketing and IT via email or RSS reader.

]]> http://www.crossingmarketingandit.com/book-review/zmot/feed/ 0