Stories

How Not To Be A Spammer....

Wed, 23 May 2012 03:56:00 GMT

....When Marketing Your Business
By Riva Richmond
First Published on entrepreneur.com

Email is the single most effective marketing tool for many businesses -- and being blocked as an email spammer can be their biggest headache. (Please note that this story emerges from the United States. New Zealand has its own very explicit anti-spam legislation)

It's getting more difficult to get into inboxes, as the battle between spammers and Internet service providers rages on. Nearly one in four commercial emails doesn't make it to the inbox and is either shunted to spam folders or blocked altogether, according to a March report by Return Path, a New York email deliverability monitoring firm. Six months earlier, that figure was one in five.

Small companies often run afoul of spam filters, even if they have opt-in email lists of supposedly willing recipients. Many who are new to email marketing start off on the wrong foot, says Dennis Dayman, chief security and privacy officer at Eloqua, a Vienna, Va., marketing software and services company. "They 'spray and pray' and hope that someone will click and buy," but are hit with angry complaints and find their emails blocked as spam, he says. Ironically, many companies send too few messages to have their way smoothed by Internet Service Providers (ISPs) as known commercial email senders.

But you can significantly improve your odds of reaching customers and prospects by taking the right steps. Here are some essentials to keep in mind:

Polish your reputation

Spam filters used to look closely at email content and punish spammy messages (i.e. Viagra! FREE!!). But experts say sender reputation is by far more important now.

In the same way a bad credit score can freeze you out of the lending market, a bad sender score for your domain name or IP addresses can keep your emails out of inboxes. ISPs, including Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo Mail, use a number of tools to determine sender reputation. Key among them is the number of user complaints, which are made by clicking a report spam button. If more than one in a thousand email recipients complain, your messages will be blocked altogether, says Tom Sather, senior director of email research at Return Path. Messages that fail to engage recipients can also hurt you.

Once you start being relegated to the spam folder, it can be difficult to get out. "People have to report that you're not spam," Sather says.

Your first task is to find out just how liked or disliked you are. Return Path offers a free online service, senderscore.org, where you can plug in your IP address, see your score and find out the underlying causes of a bad one so you know what to fix.

Use clean lists

ISPs punish senders with shoddy email lists. Avoid buying lists as they typically include spam traps, which are fake addresses used only to catch spam, and addresses of people who haven't given permission to receive marketing messages, Dayman says. These people are more likely to complain and less likely to buy anything.

It can be time consuming, but you're probably better off building a list of real customers and prospects who have agreed to receive email from you. When you ask customers for email addresses, have them specify the types of email they want to receive. If they agree to a newsletter but not marketing messages, honor the request -- or risk dinging your reputation. Also consider segmenting your list by type of customer to make it easier to send relevant messages.

Related: Email Marketing is Not Dead (Video)

Also, maintain good list hygiene by regularly removing addresses that bounce or opt-out. If necessary, thoroughly cull your list by sending a message asking for permission to continue sending email and keeping only the addresses that respond.

"It's not about having the biggest email list," Dayman says. "Move yourself over to a quality-over-quantity mentality."

Hone your content

Spammy content triggers spam filters only 17 percent of the time, Sather says. But if you are new to email marketing or too small to have built a reputation, that rate could be higher.

London-based fundraising website Go Get Funding had problems with email delivery when it was launched in December. "Our welcome email mentioned the words 'raise money.' We changed that to 'raise funds.' We removed exclamation marks when they probably weren't needed, and overall, toned down emails," says founder Sandip Singh. The delivery rate improved significantly.

Moreover, annoying and irrelevant messages can lead some recipients to click the "report spam" button. Avoid trouble by targeting messages, clearly identifying yourself in the "from" address, crafting an engaging subject line and making sure messages appear correctly on PCs and mobile devices.

Related: Six Tips for Maximizing Email Marketing Campaigns

Hire help

When it comes to sending commercial email, there's strength in numbers. Consistent volumes of 30,000 emails a month or more enable ISPs to recognize legitimate senders, Dayman says. If you don't send that much email, consider teaming up with other small and responsible senders by sharing servers or using a recognized emailing service such as Constant Contact, iContact, Mailchimp or VerticalResponse. Using marketing tools can boost your sender score and firms such as these can help you manage your lists and otherwise stay on the straight and narrow.

Plans are often free to start but can grow to hundreds of dollars a month, depending on email list size and volume.

Riva Richmond is a freelance journalist who has covered technology for more than 10 years. She writes regularly on electronic security and privacy for The New York Times and its Gadgetwise and Bits blogs. She has also written extensively about small business for The Wall Street Journal and was previously a technology reporter at Dow Jones Newswires.

Apple Top Brand in BrandZ Top 100

Tue, 22 May 2012 22:37:00 GMT

Apple remained the No. 1 brand in BrandZ's Top 100 Most Valuable Global Brands 2012” report, recently released by WPP.

The report, administered by Millward Brown, ranks brands using a proprietary methodology that assigns a brand value based on financial analysis and consumer preference for the brand.

The No. 2 brand was IBM, followed by Google, McDonald's and Microsoft. Rounding out the top 10 global brands, in order, were Coca-Cola, Marlboro, AT&T, Verizon and China Mobile. The total brand value of the Top 100 Global Brands increased by 0.4% to $2.4 trillion this year over last year.

CEOs Need Hard Data on Customer Loyalty

Tue, 22 May 2012 19:44:00 GMT

by Fred Reichheld
First Published on hbr.org

Three-quarters of the world's CEOs say more emphasis should be placed on measuring the value of non-financial assets such as intellectual capital and customer relationships.

This was the headline finding of a recent study (PDF) by the American Institute of CPAs and the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants. Considering the sponsors, it's sort of like the Army reporting that what we really need is more battleships. Unexpected, to say the least.

But let's give our financial colleagues credit for acknowledging the fundamental imbalance that the CEOs are referring to. Companies spend countless hours tracking financials: assets, liabilities, revenue, expenses, and cash flow. Many devote almost no serious time to assessing the customer relationships that ultimately create economic value.

Perhaps that's the result of customer metrics long being seen as "soft" numbers with little clear connection to "hard" numbers like revenue or cash flow. Yet companies all over the world increasingly realize they need to correct this imbalance and that customer metrics also must become "hard." For example, many companies conduct frequent surveys asking customers how likely they are to recommend a product or company to friends or colleagues.

The surveys provide a steady stream of data on customer attitudes and probable behaviors. Company leaders track this data every week, just as all companies track financial results. And they use it the way other companies use financial reports — to inform operational and investment decisions. In short, it is their primary management system.

When Charles "Chuck" Schwab returned to the helm to turn around his troubled financial firm in 2004, for example, he installed such a system. Today, the firm no longer suffers from informational imbalance. Chuck Schwab and CEO Walt Bettinger regularly discuss customer metrics with securities analysts, including an economic analysis quantifying the value of promoters and detractors. The company's executive committee has embedded its scores in its Key Business Indicator reports.

At the fast-growing company Rackspace, CEO Lanham Napier makes a point of reading customer survey data first thing every day. Rackspace went public in 2008 — shortly before the financial markets went belly up. Regardless of financials, many companies, including Rackspace, saw their shares plummet. Rackspace's response was to double down on its commitment to what it calls "fanatical support" for customers and launched a broad set of customer-focused initiatives, including pricing changes, a reorganization of frontline phone reps into cross-functional teams, and a commitment to building a state-of-the-art process of gathering and acting on customer feedback.

The result? Customer-churn rates declined by more than one-third, the company continued its double-digit growth, and its stock price has increased tenfold over the past few years. At Rackspace, the board of directors compares the company's Net Promoter score with the scores of key competitors because it provides a much clearer (and more forward-looking) gauge of strategic success than the traditional financial metrics.

Global conglomerate Philips also found that it could rely on customer feedback scores as a reliable measure of growth. Studying individual accounts in its lighting business, the company found that revenue grew 69% for accounts where scores increased and just 6% for accounts where scores held steady. Accounts with declining scores saw revenue fall by 24%. Moreover, its business lines which enjoyed industry-leading scores outgrew those where Philips lagged the competition by 5 percentage points. Philips used this data along with profitability figures to develop the right investment strategy for each business line and each customer account.

These companies have demonstrated that it is possible to generate hard data on customer loyalty and use them in to inform strategic decisions. We think it's time that all those other CEOs got their wish: more information about nonfinancial assets. After all, can you really run a business without information about the asset — customers — that provides the source of all positive cash flow?

Fred Reichheld is a Fellow at Bain & Company and co-author, with Rob Markey, of the book: The Ultimate Question 2.0: How Net Promoter Companies Thrive in a Customer-Driven World, just published by HBR Press.

The Best Times To Post on Social Networks

Mon, 21 May 2012 20:04:00 GMT

By Jason Fell
First Published on entrepreneur.com

Managing social media for your business can be a tricky endeavour. Which pictures should you share on Facebook? What industry news should you tweet about on Twitter? What topic should you blog about on Tumblr?

And on top of knowing what to publish on which social network, another big question business owners struggle with is the best time to post. Publishing your content at peak times can help you reach the most people on those networks.

Turns out the best time depends which social network you're posting to, according to popular URL shortening service bitly. It tracks metrics on bitly links that are shared across networks. In particular, bitly has examined how the day and time something is posted affects how "viral" it might eventually become.

But each social network has its own "culture," bitly says, and users exhibit distinct behavior patterns. Here's a rundown of bitly's findings on the best times to post to Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr:

Facebook: For the best click-through rate, bitly suggests posting to Facebook between 1 p.m. and 4 p.m. EST. Wednesday at 3 p.m. EST is the peak time of the week to post. Traffic from Facebook fades after 4 p.m. Weekend posts often get less attention than weekdays.

Twitter: Your best chance of getting high click counts on Twitter is with tweets sent in the afternoon earlier in the week -- namely 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. EST, Monday through Thursday. Bitly suggests users avoid posting after 8 p.m. or after 3 p.m. on Fridays. As with Facebook, weekend tweets are less effective than those sent during the week.

Tumblr: This social network has a "drastically different pattern of usage" than Facebook or Twitter, bitly says. Tumblr traffic from bitly links peaks between 7 p.m. and 10 p.m. EST on Monday and Tuesday, with similar traffic on Sunday. Friday evening -- a time that's generally ineffective for other networks -- can be an optimal time to post on Tumblr. On average, content posted after 7 p.m. receives more clicks over 24 hours than mid-day posts during the week.

What tips do you have for posting content on social media sites? Let us know in the comments section below.

Jason Fell is technology editor of Entrepreneur.com

Why Successful Branding Still Happens Offline

Mon, 21 May 2012 19:55:00 GMT

By Ed Keller and Brad Fay
First Published on www.blogs.wsj.com

Does Facebook offer better branding opportunities than word-of-mouth and human interaction?

The Facebook IPO has both the financial and marketing communities abuzz, and with good reason. Facebook is the king of the social media hill, and its growth and ability to attract a loyal and highly networked audience is to be admired.

For brands, however, online social networks are far from the Holy Grail of marketing. The research is increasingly clear and compelling that for brands that want to be social and generate conversation, a far bigger and more powerful force is real world, face-to-face conversation.

It has been said that online social media is “word of mouth on steroids.” Key to that argument is a belief that online conversations will spread to hundreds or thousands of people (and maybe more) with the click of a mouse. But while that is theoretically possible, it is not the way online sharing usually works. Most links that are shared reach only 5-10 people. And the huge legions of Facebook fans, it turns out, are not so actively engaged with the brands they once “liked.” Fewer than 1% of brand fans on Facebook have any type of active involvement, bringing those huge numbers back down to earth.

Meanwhile, our research finds that 90% of word-of-mouth conversations about brands take place offline, primarily face-to-face, in people’s homes and offices, in restaurants and stores, really anywhere people congregate. These conversations bring with them greater credibility, a greater desire to share with others, and a great likelihood to purchase the products being discussed than conversations that take place online.

So if not via Facebook and other social networking sites, what can brands do to get conversations started? It is important to fight the urge to start your marketing strategy with a particular tool or approach. Instead, start a story that consumers will want to talk about. What are the messages about your brand and category that make you talkworthy?

Next, it’s important to tap the right talkers. Who are the consumer influencers in your category, and your brand advocates? When and where do they talk, about what, and why? Often the people who have credibility when they talk are not the target customer. And the places to reach these influencers will not flow naturally from your media optimization plan unless you’re clearly focused on word of mouth as a primary goal. Media with the largest concentrations of influencers will surprise you.

Once you have your message and target in mind, only then does it make sense to choose the channels through which to reach people and to encourage sharing. And it turns out, the biggest and most productive channel to spark conversation is not online social media, but paid advertising. Fully one-quarter of conversations about brands include an explicit reference to ads. In fact, television advertising is far and away the single biggest driver of consumer conversation. Far from being a dinosaur, as some pundits say, television and other traditional media play a key role in today’s social marketplace.

Today’s consumer marketplace is highly social, but not because of particular platforms or technologies. The businesses that will be the most successful in the future are the ones that embrace a model that puts people– rather than technology – at the center of products, campaigns and market strategies. Those who achieve the greatest success will recognize that there are many ways to tap the power of today’s social consumer.

The great social wave is an opportunity that no business can afford to ignore or look at myopically. It’s happening all around us – and to the continuing surprise of many, it’s mostly happening face-to-face.

Ed Keller and Brad Fay are co-authors of The Face-to-Face Book: Why Real Relationships Rule in a Digital Marketplace, to be published in May by Free Press. They are also principals of the Keller Fay Group, a market research and consulting firm.

HOW TO :: Strengthen Your Call To Action

Mon, 21 May 2012 00:13:00 GMT

by Leigh Dow
First Published on www.marketingprofs.com

Think of the elusive call to action as a lead-generation gateway. Creating a great call to action can be tricky, however. Clearly identifying what you offer and how you want to convey that offer requires thoughtful consideration and good timing.

Here are 12 tips for optimizing your calls to action to ensure they compel potential customers to act.

1. Create concise subject lines

Online readers are expert skimmers, so create short, effective email subject lines that contain clear benefit, and be sure to instantly answer the question, "What's in it for me?" Make the message personal, and speak in "human," not jargon.

The three most popular types of subject lines that get subscribers reading emails are those featuring discount offers, free product offers, and familiar brand names.

According to a study by Experian Marketing Services (PDF), the use of the words "you" and "your" in subject lines has increased 3.7% since 2008, appearing in 20.9% of email subject lines. The use of the word "free" has decreased, showing up in only 12.4% of email subject lines, compared with 16.9% in 2008.

2. Test the subject line

Experiment. Test which subject lines get click-throughs. Try new things. Are you subscribed to a company email list? What gets you clicking? Again, refer to your analytics to see what content is inspiring your subscribers.

3. Consider using buttons

Sometimes, you may want to use a button as part of your call to action. Choosing the right button is critical to getting visitors to click. The goal is to create a subtle, easy-to-use image. Experiment with button shapes. Contrast the colors of buttons to make them pop, and use clear and bold text. And keep it simple! The simplest calls to action are almost always the most successful.

Notice the design of Facebook and Twitter buttons. Each has only two colors and one letter. Overly complex buttons can be confusing and misleading. You can never go wrong if you keep your calls to action clean, simple, and to the point.

4. Get the language right

Your calls to action should tell readers exactly what's in it for them. Use confident language. Be bold and assertive, but don't stray from your brand's style and tone.

5. Make it urgent

Creating a sense of urgency will motivate the reader to click through to the page. Use words such as "today" and "now." Use wording that provides incentive to the reader to click right then and there. Urgent, action-oriented words are more successful than words such as "free" in inspiring your subscribers to take action.

6. Remove distractions

Keep your message clear. Do not litter your email with busy distracting designs, too many colors, or multiple fonts. Remember—keep the message in your calls to action simple and to the point.

7. Use numbers when possible

When people search online, they are looking for specifics. Numbers convey at least the impression of a clear, specific message. Therefore, find ways to incorporate statistics and other numbers to share based on the overall goal of your call to action. If your goal is to promote an event, for example, use numbers to show the specifics (e.g., dates, prices, attendees, specials).

8. Make it newsworthy

Research news pertaining to your industry, sign up for RSS feeds, and visit Google Alerts for daily ideas on spinning news into a creative call to action.

9. Ask questions

Asking a question is a great attention-grabbing tactic to motivate reader follow-through. Make questions compelling, personal, and irresistible.

10. Plan its design

Good tactics go into creating good calls to action. Getting the position of the call to action right largely depends on the design layout. Place your calls to action high up and centered on the page—right in the reader's main area of interest.

Another way to make your call to action really pop is to leave a significant amount of white space around it. On the other hand, using an alternative and interesting color palette would also effectively draw attention to your call to action. Make your calls to action big. The bigger... the more noticeable.

Using all those various ideas correctly will effectively lead the reader to your call to action.

11. Focus on creating good content

Although great design is key to a successful call to action, the words you use and the way you use them are the most important. Start the call to action with a verb, followed by a subject, such as "Ask an expert." Be bold and declarative.

Offer the reader something valuable. Use incentives such as coupons and special offers to keep the subscriber reading. Tease your "special offer" at the beginning of the email—and close with a hard sell.

Feature images of your product, or, better yet, use video to send a message. A study by GetResponse (PDF) found that more than "80% of respondents [planned] to use video emails in 2010, while in 2009 only 15.7% of responders used video in their email campaigns."

Use alliteration, metaphor, and rhyme. Target your audience with dynamic content, and produce the dynamic content via list segmentation and the use of autoresponders. Find popular phrases and words related to your product or service, and use them in your copy to boost search engine optimization.

12. Choose an email service provider that offers simple email optimization features

For example, drag-and-drop email editors simplify content creation and allow you to send emails much faster and more effectively. Other software features that enhance your calls to action are flexible and intuitive navigation; the ability to move, copy, or delete content blocks; and easy graphic-editing tools (so you don't need to know HTML or CSS coding).

Plus, email personalization, social media integration, dynamic content, and RSS content capabilities will automate your campaigns, and make them more interactive.

Leigh Dow draws on her 15 years of Fortune 100 experience in e-commerce, CRM, and digital marketing to craft digital strategies for international company Mailigen, a leading Web-based email marketing platform for businesses and organizations of any size in the US, Asian markets, and now the CIS and European markets.

Stop Guesstimating Your Sales Forecasts

Mon, 21 May 2012 00:05:00 GMT

by Matthew Bellows
First Published on hbr.org

For anyone running a sales organization, the 48 hours before a pipeline presentation are the worst days of the month. The pipeline meeting is where you tell management your team's sales forecast for the next month, and no matter how good your numbers were last month, your work life is a mess.

In the days and weeks leading up to this point, you've had everyone send you their individual and team projections. You've told them, "Update me on the deals you've been working on, tell me about the new ones, estimate when they are going to close, and give me a percentage chance for each one."

You have been diligent in managing your people and in creating compensation plans that reward consistency and predictability. You have stayed on top of the major deals. You have put in place sales training and a market-leading, cloud-based CRM system. Everyone on your teams spends hours each week typing updates, but for those 48 hours, none of it seems to help much.

Basically, you're going into the pipeline meeting and giving your bosses your best guess, because you lack the tools to offer something more precise.

But how can forecasting sales data be such of a problem? The performance of the sales team has always been the most measurable in a company. At the end of every week, month, quarter and year, the result of sales activity is shown on the top line for all to see.

There are two reasons. First, the obvious: the higher you go in the organization, the less connected you are to the deals happening beneath you — and the more vulnerable you are to individual reps or teams, either purposely or subconsciously, altering their pipeline projections to suit their needs. This is no different from how people in non-sales functions push to create budgets and targets they know they can beat.

The second reason for the sales manager's pain is that when it comes to gathering data about upcoming sales possibilities, companies and CRM systems rarely measure anything real. For most kinds of business-to-business selling, your CRM database is an outdated collection of anecdotes and guesses. The fewer the deals, and the longer the sales cycle, the less your "data" matches reality. The stuff that does get accumulated in spreadsheets and CRM systems looks like data — there are dollar signs and probabilities next to prospect names — but it's not. It's really just the opinions, guesses, estimates and suppositions of your sales team.

Thus, the terrible two days. The number you present to your bosses will look definitive, and your reputation will be staked to it. You will have padded it, of course, and your boss will push back and demand that you raise it. You'll settle on a compromise, but you'll leave the room anxious, because you know that there's nothing firm and reliable to back it up.

Why is this the best we, as sales leaders, can do? Because for the most part we are collecting and summing opinions instead of data.

Some innovative sales organizations are starting to move away from the old ways. The growth of inside sales teams and the increasing emphasis on more-measurable sales channels like phone calls and emails is a start. And while CRM systems have their shortcomings, the central repository of information and leads at least gives the harried manager a single pile through which to dig.

But there will be no end to the stress, the chaos and the cognitive dissonance of the 48 hours before the pipeline meeting unless we change. We have to start caring more about sales activities, the specific actions that salespeople and sales teams perform to close more business. We need to know how many phone calls, emails, demos and visits it takes for our teams to close a deal. Then we need to measure the underlying data for each team member without requiring them to report on themselves.

(Full disclosure: Although my company does make an email product to support the sales function, it doesn't help with the problem of tracking sales activities.)

So this is a call to innovative sales leaders, sales operations people, technology and service providers, and the top companies of the CRM industry. Let's build the processes, the services and the tools we need to collect data instead of opinions. Let's learn to build forecasts based on what we do instead of what we say. And most importantly, let's help our salespeople succeed instead of weighing them down with processes that waste valuable time and money.

It's the only way to improve those awful 48 hours. And along the way, we'll find ways to make a whole lot more money.

Matthew Bellows is founder and CEO of Yesware.

Corporate Blogging

Wed, 16 May 2012 20:17:00 GMT

We've Got Good News & Bad News
By Becky Carroll
First Published on The CMO Site

Corporate blogging is on the decline, being replaced by tools such as Facebook and LinkedIn, according to a recent study. That's bad news, but it's not all bad.

The percentage of Inc. 500 CEOs and CMOs reporting that they are using corporate blogs as part of their social media portfolios decreased for the first time since the "The 2012 Inc. 500 Social Media Update" began in 2012. Only 37 percent of respondents had a corporate blog in 2011 as compared to 50 percent in 2010. This brings the use of blogging in Inc. 500 companies down to just below levels reported in 2008 (39 percent at the time). For comparison, Fortune 500 companies that are blogging have remained relatively steady over the past three years at around 23 percent.

The new study, by the Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, indicates that Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter are the top social media tools being used by these companies (at 74 percent, 73 percent, and 64 percent respectively).

But Facebook and Twitter are no replacement for blogs. Facebook and Twitter are great tools for reaching customers where they are present online, but both suffer from information overload. Updates get pushed down the page very quickly (if they aren't completely buried by Facebook's EdgeRank algorithms). So the opportunity for brands to provide thought leadership on Facebook is fleeting.

LinkedIn can be a very valuable tool, but most companies seem to be using it mainly for recruiting rather than for providing updates to and building relationships with connections. Additionally, brands that rely on social media will have trouble reaching customers; many companies block access to these tools in the workplace, making it difficult for customers, clients, and prospects to catch the latest updates when they are posted during the day.

It is a shame that companies don’t seem to understand how all of these tools should work together in a strategic approach. For example, Facebook and Twitter can help promote blog posts from the corporate site. As a blogger, I find that much of the conversation around my blog posts has moved to these two tools, yet they also provide most of the referrals to the blog itself.

In fact, blogging can be excellent for SEO and is especially beneficial for B2B companies. When blogs are part of a corporate Wwebsite, those sites get more visitors. According to a study conducted by HubSpot, Websites with blogs get 55 percent more visitors than those without blogs; those companies that actively manage their blogs (including more frequent posts that are relevant to potential readers) get 6.9 times more organic search traffic than those that simply have a blog.

Perhaps the Inc. 500 corporations that state they are no longer blogging haven’t taken the time to blog regularly or haven’t bothered to create content that truly builds thought leadership and strengthens relationships with customers. Blogs that only tout the newest product or brag about the latest industry award will most likely not produce many return readers. The best corporate blog authors write posts that educate on topics of interest to their readers and potential customers, as well as posts about the state of the industry, the accomplishments of their employees and customers, and even controversial topics that spark conversation.

Interestingly, the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth study also noted that blogs are among the most successful of the social media tools covered in the survey. 92 percent of those using blogs stated that they have been successful with blogs, the second highest success rate only to message boards. (96 percent of those using message boards felt they were successful.) Of the 13 tools highlighted in the study, Facebook ranked near the bottom with a success rate of 82 percent, just above podcasting (80 percent), Foursquare (68 percent), and MySpace (0 percent). Should corporations really abandon blogs for tools that are less effective?

So why am I excited about the results of this study? It's because those of us who do continue to blog will now have a stronger voice over our competitors.

What about you? Where do you see blogging in your corporate tool kit?

Becky Carroll is the author of The Hidden Power of Your Customers: Four Keys to Growing Your Business Through Existing Customers. She is the founder of Petra Consulting Group, a consultancy focused on social media and customer experience. Her client roster includes several Fortune 100 companies including Electronic Arts, HP, Fujitsu, and Ford. In her most recent role, she was the Community Program Manager and social media strategist for Verizon. In addition, Becky is the Social Media Contributor for NBC/TV San Diego. She teaches the "Marketing via New Media" class at UC San Diego and is the author of top customer service blog Customers Rock!. She also speaks internationally about social media, customer experience, and customer service and loyalty.

GM Pulls Ads From Facebook

Wed, 16 May 2012 02:25:00 GMT

General Motors plans to stop advertising on Facebook because it determined paid ads had little impact on consumers, the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday, citing people familiar with the matter.

The news comes at a bad time for Facebook, which is expected to launch an initial public stock offering Friday valuing the social networking site at around $100 billion.

GM's pullback comes as other marketers are questioning the value of paid ads on Facebook despite the vast amounts of time huge numbers of consumers spend on the site.

The US auto giant is the third largest advertiser in the United States with expenditures of $1.8 billion in 2011, according to Kantar Media.

It will continue to expand its use of unpaid marketing such as the creation and management of content on the Facebook pages of its brands and cars, the Journal reported.

GM had been spending about $10 million on paid advertising and $30 million on unpaid marketing on Facebook.

A spokesman for GM did not immediately return a request for comment.

While Facebook and Google both have broad reach, ads posted at the search giant's websites are 10 times more likely to be clicked than those at the social network, according to online marketing specialty company WordStream.

WordStream gave Google top grades for performance of its display ad network while it found Facebook in need of improvement.

"So far, Facebook's advertising platform hasn't kept pace with the explosive growth of its social network, and it remains to be seen if CEO Mark Zuckerberg even wants to focus on advertising as a source of revenue," said WordStream chief technical officer Larry Kim.

"In his 2,500-plus word letter to (prospective) shareholders this month, he mentioned advertising just once."

Google offers twice as many advertising formats as Facebook, including ads in videos and mobile games, according to WordStream.

"The comparison suggests that Google currently offers advertisers more value in terms of both options and results for advertisers, and that Facebook has a lot of catching up to do," WordStream said.

Facebook has yet to support advertising on smartphones or tablet computers that have become popular social networking tools, and has more limited ad targeting options than Google, the analysis concluded.

"As good as Facebook has been at evolving to serve consumers, that's how bad it's been at serving marketers," Forrester analysts Nate Elliott and Melissa Parrish said in a blog post.

"Somehow Facebook still hasn't stumbled upon a model that's proven consistently successful for marketers, or that brings in the massive revenues to match the site's massive user base."

Facebook shortcomings at making money appeared not to be dousing passion for owning the company's stock.

Facebook on Tuesday raised the price range of shares to $34 to $38 in a move that could value it at more than $100 billion when it starts trading on the Nasdaq exchange.

Secrets of Fabulous Businesses

Tue, 15 May 2012 03:17:00 GMT

By Brian H Meredith
From the NZBusiness"Marketing Maestro" Archive
First published January 2011

I am often asked what characterises a successful business versus an unsuccessful one. Despite the plethora of books on the subject, not to mention a gazillion blogs from self proclaimed guru’s, the reality is that there are as many different answers as there are people willing to offer them.

However, over the years I have come to realise that, whatever the number or complexity of the variables that are at play in any business, there are some pretty sure fire ways to increase the likelihood of a business being successful.

I thought I would share 7 of those characteristics with you. These are not the 7 secrets of fabulous businesses – they are just 7 of the secrets, of which the total number is, well, goodness knows how many.

A compelling & meaningful Vision – If a business does not have a Vision, it does not have a dream. Any venture, from a business to an assault on Everest needs a dream to provide direction, to keep it alive, to motivate those involved through the tough bits.

Go lie in the bath, stick your toe up the tap and think BIG thoughts about your business, what you dream about it becoming, what you dream about it doing for its customers, what you dream about it contributing to the future of its stakeholders. And when you’ve cracked that one, set about making it come alive in everything that you think, say and do in, around, for and to your business.

A market orientation –. If there is only one place that the money comes from (and there is – it comes from customers) then it makes a certain irrefutable sense to orientate everything that a business is toward the market ‘cos that’s where the customer is. A market oriented business is designed from the customer up. A market oriented business makes what it can sell (others sell what they can make – that’s a production orientation). A market oriented business thinks, breathes and acts with its radar firmly pointed toward the market which it allows to be the primary (not the only) driving force.

A sound marketing plan – No real mystery here and no MBA required. A sound marketing plan is nothing more than a navigational plan that is prepared under three broad headings – Where am I now? Where do I want to be? What do I have to do to get there?

As a business becomes more complex then the navigation gets a bit more complex but the core structure of the Plan doesn’t change. Frankly, a single sheet of loo roll that addresses these three broad headings properly will constitute a better Plan than either the non-existent ones or the overly complex ones you will find in many business that should know better.

An instrument panel – Imagine what navigating a ship or an aircraft would be like if, despite the existence of a navigational plan, there were no instruments to tell you where you were, what course you were on, how high you were above the ground, what your speed was and how much fuel you had left. Got that mental picture? Then you now know pretty much.

Nurture your baby – Your baby is your Brand and even “Bill Smith Plumbing” is a brand. Your Brand is where the relationship exists with customers and potential customers and it needs to be meticulously managed, nurtured & nourished. Decide how you want the market to perceive your brand and set about ensuring that you deliver that in every tiny detail of everything your business does.

Understand Added Value – Offer a better hamburger and the guy across the street will match it in an instant. Find some way of adding real value for a customer and you will build sustainable competitive advantage. Take the trouble to research the concept of added value and work hard to find ways to apply the concept in a manner appropriate to your business and your customers.

Only hire fabulous people – Your business is to important for you to hire ordinary staff - to do so increases the risk of failure, exponentially. Make sure that every member of your staff, irrespective of their role, is a microcosm of your brand.

Apply the three non-negotiables of hiring fabulous people – they must be mature (not necessarily a chronological measure!), they must exhibit social skills (i.e. the ability to interact well with other human beings) and they must have a tolerance for contact with other human beings. You can tell if these characteristics are present in about 5 minutes (or less!) Anything less will not do – don’t bother with a second interview!

I can’t promise that if you do all of these things outstandingly well that your business will survive and thrive but I can and will say that the chances of that happening will go through the roof.

Go do it. And good luck!

Baby Boomers & The Marketing Revolution

Tue, 15 May 2012 02:27:00 GMT

By Clark Kokich
First Published on inc.com

There’s a new generation gap brewing. Today there are over 77 million baby boomers, the largest demographic cohort in the U.S. (now age 47-66). Not far behind comes Generation Y, the echo boomers, with more than 60 million members (now age 18-32).

The baby boomers have been driving the economy since the '80s. Now we’re all getting old. We’re retiring, or we’re planning to retire, so we’re finally getting smart and starting to save more than we spend. In either case, we’re leaving our peak spending years behind (hopefully to be replaced by our peak fun years).

Over the next decade, Generation Y will take over as the big economic engine in the U.S. Soon they’ll be giving up their carefree lifestyle to start buying houses, cars, furniture, travel, etc. Plus of course all the stuff it takes to raise their children. Despite the lessons they should have learned over the past three years, they’ll probably be spending more than they earn, just to keep up.

This is a big problem for brands. Baby boomers run the agencies, the media, and the client organizations. We’ve all spent the last 25 years getting really good at marketing to ourselves. Those skills are becoming less useful. In 10 years, they’ll be completely irrelevant. The only brands that survive will be the ones that are successful marketing to Generation-Y.

And Generation Y doesn’t look anything like us boomers. They’re digital natives who have grown up in a world of nonstop connectivity, hyper-social behavior, user-generated content, and extreme multitasking. They’re smart, idealistic, and passionate about technology. They don’t trust our institutions (including your brand), and believe very little of what we tell them in advertising. All they want is the truth, and they expect to get it from their peers, not from you.

Have we responded appropriately? No. There’s too much hand-wringing. Too much nay-saying. And too much argument about whether these changes are “real” (not an atypical reaction of an older generation that’s clinging to the past). There’s also too much fear. After all, who can be comfortable when they realize their future will soon be in the hands of their children?

If you’re a baby boomer, here’s what you need to do right now:

First, accept that while you may still run the show, the future of your brand depends on adapting to sweeping change. You need to throw out a good chunk of the expertise it took you a lifetime to accumulate. Second, dig in and start listening. Stop complaining, and instead start paying attention to what’s really going on (starting with your own kids). Third, start experimenting, trying and failing as you learn what really works with this emerging consumer. And fourth, do it with a sense of joy. You won’t be successful if they have to drag you kicking and screaming into the future.

It’s ironic, isn’t it? When we boomers we’re young, we complained our parents didn’t “understand our generation.” Now we’re all complaining that we “don’t understand our children’s generation.” Our kids complain that we “just don’t get it.”
We better get it soon, or our businesses will suffer. Or as some have already learned, will cease to exist.

Clark Kokich is the chairman of Razorfish.

"No Excuses"....

Tue, 15 May 2012 02:06:00 GMT

....For Being Unable to Measure Social Media ROI
First Published on www.mycustomer.com

Nearly half of marketers are concerned about demonstrating the value of social media to the c-suite, with nine out of ten admitting that their ability to measure ROI isn’t up to scratch.

Lithium and MarketingProfs conducted a survey of marketer attitudes around social media and while 35% reported that social media marketing helps to meet primary business objectives better than most other channels, there are still widespread concerns.

The study reveals that 74% of marketers say creating a community around their brand is a social media business objective - but only 18% of them say their company has an online community.

Elsewhere, 86% say they actively use Facebook in their marketing efforts – but only 2.8% report that when fans “like” their brand on Facebook, it results in better quality interactions.

42% also admit that they are very concerned about demonstrating the value of social media to executive management - but only 4% say their ability to measure the overall impact of social media is excellent.

Nonetheless, the finds suggest that while social media marketing ROI remain s elusive for the majority, businesses are best able to realise the potential of social media and deliver demonstrable ROI if they combine the following two assets:

Leading-edge technology - listening to social customers who want to be heard, building online communities to deepen social customer engagement.

A mature, strategic approach to measurement - tying social media objectives to real business outcomes like increasing revenue and driving awareness.

Katy Keim, Lithium CMO, believes there is “a clear disconnect between the value of social media and marketers’ ability to demonstrate and act on that value”. But she adds that “there is no excuse” due to the “the simplicity and sophistication with which marketers can monitor social customer experiences, engage and build communities around the brand, and clearly measure business value” using tools that are on the market.

A Sad Lesson in Collaborative Innovation

Sun, 13 May 2012 20:16:00 GMT

by Ron Adner
First Published on hbr.org

The innovator's quest has been to find the win-win proposition: a great new product that can create differentiated value for consumers while supporting differentiated profits for the producer.

But the focus on win-win can blind us to the needs of critical partners. When success depends on others — suppliers, complementors, distributors, retailers — satisfying end consumers is not enough. The innovator's job is now to create wins across the board. Win-lose-win is a recipe for failure.

Nokia's transformation from undisputed leader in mobile telephony to struggling me-too player offers a sad but instructive lesson in the new dynamics of collaborative innovation.

Through the first half of the last decade, a foundation of Nokia's competitive advantage was its unmatched ability to customize a wide variety of phones for operators. Mixing and matching features, components, and sizes enabled the Finnish telecommunications giant to offer a vast array of choices to win over operators and, through them, consumers.

A crucial element of its strategy to win over consumers to its advanced smartphones was to persuade third-party developers to create a vast array of apps for its phones. It helped to establish the Symbian operating system in 1998 and spent a fortune trying to attract developers to the platform.

But its strategy of customizing hardware for telcos had the unintended effect of imposing high customization costs on would-be developers (i.e., they had to develop different versions of the same app for the customized versions of Nokia phones). It was a win-lose-win situation, and Nokia's effort floundered.

Apple learned from Nokia's mistake. In sharp contrast to Nokia's approach, Apple offered developers a uniform development environment and a direct path to market. By shifting the "smart" in smartphone from the handset hardware to the software apps, Apple upended the customization game. Customization was no longer tied to hardware and supply chains; it became the purview of users and developers. Apple crafted a win-win-win.

As the Nokia vs. Apple story illustrates, succeeding in a world of interdependence entails looking beyond your core competences, competitors, and end customers to your whole ecosystem and carefully considering how you will proactively manage it. This involves the following:

Crafting a proposition that appeals to each of your key partners.
Focus on your adoption chain as actively as you focus on your end customers. The design of your offer must secure the buy-in of critical partners (like Nokia's developers) if it is to have a chance with end customers. Sometimes this may entail shifting value from consumers to partners (as Amazon did by launching the Kindle e-reader as an extremely closed device, reducing value for end users but safeguarding the participation of publishers, whose fear of the threat of piracy was the deal breaker in every prior e-reader effort).

Ensuring your collaborators are ready before you launch your product.
Beyond overcoming your own innovation challenge, you must manage your co-innovation risk: the extent to which the successful commercialization of your innovation depends on the successful commercialization of other innovations. Rushing your innovation to market before your co-innovators are ready can result in a costly delay at the starting line. (Think about early HDTV manufacturers that launched their products before HDTV programming arrived).

Revisiting the way in which your bring partners on board.
Taking the lead in driving collaboration means convincing partners to take a followership role. Absent a convincing answer to why they should give up the rewards of leadership (e.g., Microsoft's subsidies and Apple's tightly controlled customer base), partners will head in separate directions and undermine the coherence of the value proposition. Therefore, in selecting partners you must consider not only their capabilities but also how to sustain their cooperation over time.

When innovation depends on collaboration, pursuing strategies that play to your strengths but undermine your partners is a recipe for failure. Doing a great job on your piece of the puzzle won't matter unless and until the other pieces come together, too.

Ron Adner is a strategy professor at Dartmouth College's Tuck School of Business, where he studies the root causes of innovation success and failure. His new book on ecosystem strategy is The Wide Lens: A New Strategy for Innovation. Follow him on twitter @ronadner.

How To Find Your Next Great Idea

Sun, 13 May 2012 20:02:00 GMT

By Erik Sherman
First Published on inc.com

Sometimes it's smarter to ditch the dream of finding something brand new. Try riding someone else's wave instead.

You've probably heard of Foursquare, the location check-in app that manages to get a lot of interested users but not much money. But you might not be familiar with FearSquare.

It's an app that lets Foursquare users know if they're in danger by checking the UK crime statistics for their current locations.
This isn't a money-making venture. It's actually part of a study being conducted by the Lincoln Social Computing Research Centre, part of the University of Lincoln's computer science department. But it offers a good lesson to entrepreneurs: Sometimes it's smarter not to focus on finding the next blockbuster idea; instead, look at an existing blockbuster idea and figure out what it should do that it currently does not.

Plug the gaps

Finding the holes left by the groundbreaker is related to looking for and exploiting a market gap.

The Foursquare/FearSquare pairing offers a simple and great example of this dynamic. Announcing your location carries the potential of announcing your vulnerability. And yet, Foursquare doesn't address that. Maybe that is because you are supposed to be "friends" with the people who can see your location. Social networks can mask physical anonymity with the appearance of having a connection to someone.

Combine the characteristics of social networks and checking in from locations with the fact that many people have become more fearful about potential danger in life and you have a small market gap. Some portion of people will be either uncomfortable as they use Foursquare or will abstain from it because of security concerns. If you can realistically allay those fears, you've bridged the gap and offer something of value to that group of people.

Looking for market gaps in the trail of successful concepts isn't new. In the 1990s, many small software companies did well by supplementing weaknesses in Microsoft operating systems. For years, specialty auto parts companies have sold higher performance components like more effective windshield wipers because of limitations in what the car manufacturers provided. Next time you get a "green" coffee filter for your favourite brewer, remember that you're seeing the same process in action.

Why it's OK to ride coattails

There are several reasons this approach works:

Someone else making a big splash helps identify potential customers.

The giant helps create brand awareness that you can ride.

Exploiting a market gap on something hot is less of a gamble than trying to do something completely new.

You will likely need fewer resources to launch a market gap plug than a fully new concept.

There are drawbacks. You aren't going to become bigger than the business whose coattails you ride. If your product or service does become very popular, the company might decide to incorporate something similar and cut you out of the game. Also, you only succeed so long as the original company does.

That said, you don't have to pledge your life to one idea and business. Maybe it's something you will ride for a while and sell off, or even close down if it comes to the end of its useful lifetime. After all, you're an entrepreneur. You can take what you gained and learned and start the next great project.

Erik Sherman's work has appeared in such publications as the Wall Street Journal, New York Times Magazine, and Fortune. He is a blogger for CBS MoneyWatch and InsideInvestorRelations.com. @ErikSherman

HOW TO ... Make Inbound Marketing Effective

Fri, 11 May 2012 01:20:00 GMT

By Geoffrey James
First Published on www.inc.com

With inbound marketing, the customer comes to you, but you still have to move the opportunity forward.

Unless you've been living under a rock, you've probably heard of "inbound marketing"–the concept that you should attract prospective customers by offering useful (on a website, for instance).

Inbound marketing is contrasted with outbound (or traditional) marketing, in which you "buy, beg, or bug your way in" via paid advertisements, press releases, and cold calling. While inbound marketing can be more effective than outbound marketing, most companies implement it in a way that it doesn't work well.

The biggest issue: bad timing.

Problem 1: Waiting Too Long to Call

Unless your product can be purchased over the Web (like consumer electronics, for example), you'll need to follow up on any leads generated on your website. That's why you offer "white papers" and so forth–to get the contact info for follow-up.

Unfortunately, it turns out that most companies are really, really bad at this, and let way too much time lapse before calling the leads back. In fact, I was recently pointed at a Harvard Business Review study indicating that the average response time to a sales lead is 42 hours.

If you're waiting that long, you're probably wasting your time.

About five years ago, Dr. James Oldroyd, a professor at the Sung Kyun Kwan Graduate School of Business who was then at MIT, worked with the sales technology company InsideSales.com to analyze three years of cold calling data, including 15,000 leads and more than 100,000 call attempts.

The purpose of this study (available online here) was to answer the question:

When should companies call Web-generated leads for optimal contact and qualification ratios?

The answer: Inbound marketing leads have an extremely short useful life.

It turns out that the best time to call is within five minutes of the time that that person was viewing your website. In fact, you are four times more likely to successfully qualify a lead and move the opportunity forward if you call within five minutes than if you call between five and 10 minutes.

You are 21 times more likely to qualify a lead and move the opportunity forward if you call within five minutes than if you wait for 30 minutes.

And after 30 minutes, most inbound marketing leads are pretty much dead.

Problem 2: Calling at the Wrong Time

There's plenty of "lore" floating around about the best time to call. Conventional wisdom says that you're most likely to reach somebody by calling during regular working hours, especially right after lunch, when the customer will be relaxed.

Turns out that conventional wisdom is dead wrong.

Oldroyd's study revealed that the best times to call are between 8 a.m. and 9 a.m., and from 4 p.m. to 5 p.m. By contrast, the worst time to call is from 1 p.m. to 2 p.m. In fact, a call placed between 8 a.m. and 9 a.m. is 164 percent better than calling between 1 and 2 p.m.

Conventional wisdom also says that the best day to call is Friday, since that's when customers are already winding down for the weekend and thus have some free time to take a call. Wrong again.

Statistically speaking, the best day to call is Thursday and the worst day to call is Friday, with Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday somewhere in the middle.

According to a conversation that I had with Dr. Oldroyd, there are some exceptions for some industries, but in most cases, inbound marketing doesn't work very well (or at all) because the company receiving the leads are dropping the ball by calling back too late or calling at the wrong time.

The Takeaways

The lessons are clear:

If you're going to do inbound marketing, jump on your leads the very minute they come in.

And, if you can't do that, try to call on a Thursday between 4 p.m. and 5 p.m.

That way you'll be increasing your likelihood of success, and making your inbound marketing more effective.

Geoffrey James writes the "Sales Source" column on Inc.com, the world's most-visited sales-oriented blog. His newly published book is Business to Business Selling: Power Words and Strategies From the World's Top Sales Experts. @Sales_Source