Posts Tagged ‘nms08’
new marketing summit – recap
Posted by Anya in othersidenotes on October 16th, 2008
Thanks to everyone who has given great feedback on the live-blogging kate and I did for the New Marketing Summit this week. Just wanted to pull it all together with one final post – the below posts are all full versions of summit panels, interviews and talks over both days of the event. Kate and I split the task, so what you don’t find here, you’ll find over at our company blog. Please feel free to leave comments and follow us on twitter @anyawoods and @just_kate.
Thanks to Chris Brogan for a fabulous event, and it was great to meet all the movers and shakers in this industry!
new media summit – email marketing is alive and well
Posted by Anya in othersidenotes on October 15th, 2008
Greg Cangialosi – Blue Sky Factory, Inc.
Richard Evans – Silverpop
Pamela O’Hara – BathBlue Software
Chip Terry – ZoomInfo
Is email dead? Is it still going strong?
Bulk email is ok, unsolicited email is ok. How do you define spam, and how close can a marketer get before crossing the line?
Chip- There needs to be a clear opt out, needs to come from a real email address, must not be sent again to someone who has opted out. But the question is, how do we look at standards that go beyond what’s legal? You have to be very careful. Is bulk email sending 500 emails to a targeted audience or sending 10 million emails to anyone you can get an address for?
Pam – Really, spam is in the mind of your customer, and is different for each person. You’re trying to build a relationship. You’ve got to slowly walk in, give people tons of opportunities to say back off, and it’s an ongoing definition you’ll have to build on with each individual.
What happens to te companies that people learn are definitely spammers?
Richard – When a customer engages in spamming people, we address that and first and foremost work with them to understand that what they’re doing is a violation of law and horrible biz practice. We don’t see it that often, but do terminate contracts with those that abuse the system.
Greg – We’ve set up our network to break out each sender and measure the reputation of that sender. We can find out how many are complaining or hitting spam button when those emails come in. We run a strict policy, and three strikes you’re out
Richard – Relevance is a term that keeps coming up here, and is key. When you think about email and how it’s related to new media in facebook and myspace, if it becomes irrelevant then it’s spam. If i log onto twitter and all i see is corporate ad-related tweets, that becomes spam. There is alot that has been learned in the email industry that can be carried over into other communities.
Chip – email marketing is part of a marketing mix. It’s not send an email and hoping you get a response, its being on facebook, myspace, linked in, sending a postcard, going to an event, engaging with customers. All of that combined. Email has the benefit of being highly trackable, but I think that trackability has led to overuse of the medium. Find the right list, have a compelling offer, and that’s most of it.
Pam – You can send email but also see if people are talking about your brand on other networks so integrating these mediums is important. If someone is complaining about your product or advertisement you can take them off the list or engage with them personally.
Email marketing as an acquisition tool?
Greg – There is a big difference between list rental and list purchase. You can pay a lot for the list You have to have a clear call to action and a very catching message. Need to tread very lightly in this space.
Richard – Using email for acquisiton purpose is broken. You come off as spam, pay a lot, people end up on your list who are not engaged or interested to begin with. Better to use other methods (viral marketing, your website, social networks) to find targets. You can use emails sent to current customers and then seeing who they forward it on to and have relationships with so there is already a more relevant list.
How many emails is the right number, and then when is the best time?
Richard – It’s the time that the recipients are in the inbox. When an open or a click occurs, you should be able to see that time stamp. That’s a fairlyl good indicator of when you should send an email not just to that list or segment, but to that individual. Over time you can pinpoint when is best to send an email to every individual on your list.
Greg – We’ve found the same thing in terms of looking at the reporting and it comes down to the client. Some of our clients email quarterly, some daily. Also depends on the type of program you’re running. In terms of specific day and time, look at your data.
Email tracking is great for positive relevancy, how do you cull list and figure out when you are no longer relevant?
Chip – We go through and say if you haven’t opened in the last three months or six months, we’ll make that cutoff, send some final message, and then take you off the list.
Greg – It’s all in the data again. See when people have stopped responding. Different clients handle it differently.
Pam – Make sure whether its your CRM or email sources, you need to be able to figure out who is silent and not responding, its just as important as knowing who is converting.
Is there is one thing to help people improve their email marketing, what would it be?
Pam – You should have a flexible, customizable solution that meets your specific needs. Embracing and understanding that the data is out there and knowing the tools.
Richard – We talked a lot about data and relevance. Think about the other channels that you operate in. Whether it’s media, networks or other mediums, the time that you spend understanding those mediums, take that time and go back and apply it to email. It used to be that you could just send out mass emails. So take time to look at the data, look at the content you’re sending out, and think about it as relationship marketing.
Greg – Fitting in with the theme of social marketing and this event, I go back to talking about email being the digital glue. I recommend that everyone try this with your email list. If you have presence on other networks, platforms, blogs, etc, use email to tie all those other assets together. It’s extraordinarily successful, spreading our message all around the social web. And be consistent. It’s just like blogging. Telling people what you’re going to send, what to do with it, and then following up.
Chip – recognize that email is part of overall marketing mix, marketing people have different sets of expertise than they used to, they are going to be data driven, processes are different, are going to look at microsegments of your audience, technologies used will be different, you’re going to be using different technologies, to have that you need the right people, right technology, right processes.
new marketing summit – community platforms panel
Posted by Anya in othersidenotes on October 15th, 2008
Aaron Strout – Head of Social Media at Mzinga
Karen Orton – Lithium Technologies
Alan Lepofsky – Socialtext
Scott Deutsch – Orbius
You don’t end up doing work with communities by accident, most of the leaders in this space really believe in its importance. How do you start turning that evangelism into real marketing value? How do you go from saying you understand community deeply and telling people and businesses how it can help them?
Aaron – We have a lot of folks in marketing that understand the value and then they go from there to try to educate others. We try to educate, have our employees read Groundswell and other important books. We also find that numbers don’t lie, if you can go in and talk hard talk not soft, show how the community can benefit the company, and talk goals and numbers, then we can get buy in from senior management. We can give names and examples of other big companies we’ve worked with as well to demonstrate how we can help in building a valuable community.
Alan – One of the things I’ve done to take the value of communities and spread that to customers is finding that one defined goal. We’ve had a lot of talk around reaching out to customers and defining a brand. But I like to start around business partners. You partners are integral to your success so starting with that audience and allowing employees to use communities to communicate with partners is a great and easy way for employess to start seeing value, finding a way that the people inside your company can see value in communities.
Karen – We believe that one of the first things to do is to research, see what peers are doing, if you don’t have an exact example in your space look to similar kinds of audiences. Communities are not new, many companies have been doing it for a really long time. There are tried and true ways of doing this, and we have seen a lot of these projects, so you need to think really carefully about what you can do. You need to have numbers. We believe you also have to have some scale and traffic to your website, otherwise you have to go back to driving traffic.
Scott – I hear about great successes of big brands, but how many of you have budgets of over a hundred thousand dollars to get started? Thats the problem in this industry. Social media has failed to reach the masses, and the first step is to make this affordable. There are a lot of marketing folks that would love to get involved, but they don’t have the budget for it. How does a biz to biz smal company move into this space pragmatically?
Cost is an issue, but many companies that help you create communities also help manage them. There is practice behind these tools. Let’s talk about services, how do you help people manage their communities?
Aaron – Some of the smartest people in the community space, Jeremiah Owyang for example, keep hitting on the idea that it’s not about the technology tools, it’s about community management, understanding technology in terms of what your goals are. We have people come and say they just want to buy our platform, but we’re big believers that you only get one shot with your partners, employees and customers and we’ve been doing this for many years, so we insist on measurement, value and management and help you figure out getting people engaged, senior management on board, get people in. This primarily requires good content, good programming, etc. We are big believers in the know-how behind the plagtform. One good tip – if you want people to give you content, you need a rewards system so people are recognized.
Alan – Seeding info in the community and then providing a goal or reason for people to go to the community is important. This info has to be useful within the flow of what people are already doing. Having the people, pics, tags etc all integrated together is key. One of the most successful things I’ve seen is not trying to get people to stop using email but creating a bridge instead. Wikis can have email addresses associated with them. Let people send an email to the wiki and it posts automatically. Scavenger hunt within the wiki, taught people how to use it, this becomes a training seminar without the boring training aspect.
Karen – Community management in itself is about rewards and recognition, you can give them a badge, but there are specific ways to reward members for diverse behaviors, not simply quantity of posts, but formulas of tagging, quality of content, ambassadors that are most trusted etc.
Scott – Watching the success and failure of other companies shows us what many community creators have done wrong. Community success is driven by value. Adults are in it for value, and they are not in it for reward. If you start by creating value, you will be able to create a strong community.
How are people using these tools in a way that is not ‘gee i love x product’?
Aaron – For example Dell. They’ve turned this into an innovation engine. Community knows what it does and does not like about their machines, so tapping into this base allows Dell to get feedback. Tap into that pent up desire in their customers to give feedback and then make it actionable.
Alan – Your internal communities are very important. If you don’t build a culture internally to help your employees become ambassadors to the community, you won’t be able to build a strong external community.
Karen – Gives the example of Future Shop (like BestBuy) Some people don’t want to jump into a community conversation. They created a little video avatar. You can ask the avatar a question, and it will go back and search the community and bring back answers. He will also ask question anonymously in the community and e-mail user the answer.
Scott – trust in the environment is key. Adults in the wider community are very nervous about this environment and do not feel protected.
Alan – Security has always been a big thing, and it extends beyond our online IDs and onto our devices. The problem is everyone wants to own the data so they’re not willing to give extended data portability.
Karen – Most companies allow you to reveal as much or as little as you want. You should have control where you are and your identity within that community.
Scott- If I can get 200 people who love my brand that join my community and talk about my brand to their wider community, that’s perfect. You don’t need tens of thousands of members, and you should bring value to those who are there.
pr 2.0 – public relations in the new world
Posted by Anya in othersidenotes on October 15th, 2008
Christine Perkett – PerkettPR
Tony Sapienza – Topaz Partners
Bobbie Carlton – Beacon Street Girls
How are companies evaluating mainstream media vs. new media?
Christine: a lot of companies are still seeing the traditional media as the holy grail, but they are starting to see online media and bloggers as important. Gives an example of media hit on CNBC which seems amazing, but traffic spike indicated that online hits have been more valuable.
Tony: Depends on the client. Some audiences are more online than others, so for example developers are pretty much only online, so a client in that field can move totally online and have much more success than traditional media. Others, for example small business, are still picking up the local paper.
Is this a tough sell?
Tony: It’s not as difficult to sell today. It’s sinking in, new marketing and social media is really starting to take off. A few years ago it was really hard to get people on board, now they’re starting to request social media from the start.
Christine: I agree with Tony that it depends on the audience. I think traditional media is still just as important, but social media is incredibly important as well. The fundamentals are still there and that’s the most important thing I would stress today.
What’s different about pitching blogs from traditional media like Time?
Bobbie: It’s not all that different, I do have to have big press people with print and traditional as well as blogs on our side.
Tony: We use mainstream media hits differently. We got a hit in the Washington Post and that day we launched a campaign in the blogs to make bloggers aware of the write up in the post. Drove more traffic and generated more views to the company Web site. So we leveraged both kinds of media for better success overall.
How do you measure it?
Bobbie: traffic.
Tony: It used to be clip books, and it was hard to connect those clips to biz success. But today we can watch traffic and buzz closely, which we can track in real time. This can be a curse because it forces us into acute accountability.
How do you look at the co-dependence between old and new media?
Christine: New media has offered a lot of opportunities and opened a world to have real relationships with reporters and bloggers, sharing knowledge and building bonds with reporters. Engaging in conversations.
Are there patterns here in the back and forth between new media and traditional media?
Tony: I don’t think there are any specific orders that these things move in. Probably more social media taking the lead and traditional media following in general these days. Stories have started in twitter and then moved into mainstream pubs with more frequency lately.
Have you dealt with crises in a social media world?
All: yes
Tony: There are crises and preparing is important, we’ve done a lot of dealing with companies that need to do reputation management online and are facing criticism. We’re looking at an entirely new way of dealing with crisis management.
What do you do when someone is saying something that is just wrong?
Bobbie: We get that, and we like to have others defend us as much as possible, but there are times we have to go out there and defend ourselves, and we have to just present the facts and leave it at that.
How do you allocate resources when you need to address 5 times more people than before?
Tony: Try to point out that reaching out to bloggers and working in social media can be a natural extension of what we already do. B-roll can be a shared video, case study can be a blog post etc. We do have a far greater audience, and you do need to keep that in mind.
Christine: You need to see it as an extension of what you’re already doing. You can’t expect people to just come to you, now you need to go where they are, interact and bring that content you’re aready developing with you. On the agency side, I think agency heads have to embrace it from the top down, explain that its an importnant use of time. Takes more time, and requires a restructure of billing because your way of thinking and way of billing around it has to change.
Bobbie: Let go, and let other people help you. I do everything from marketing to SEO to PR, so I can’t do it all. But one of the things i’ve learned is i can create partnerships with other people that will leverage our brand name. You need to prepare and have your messages prepared in advance.
monitoring your brand in social media
Posted by Anya in othersidenotes on October 14th, 2008
Afternoon panel at New Marketing Summit: Listening in a Blizzard – Social Media Monitoring and the Future
How do you retrofit a company that needs to learn how to listen?
Mike: We see a lot of agencies helping companies aggregate information, put together a strategic process by which this info comes into the organization and how it gets used by different ppl, marketers, researchers, ads, business leaders etc.
Todd: We see a lot of business listening going on. If I’m looking to build brand awareness or measure my reputation I’m going to have a different focus of how I listen and who I listen to. We’re seeing a great need for this kind of personalized monitoring function.
Candace: There are going to be 30,000 blogs written while we sit here. Not all about us, but that many altogether. So there is way too much volume. We don’t feel like we need to convince companies to monitor these days, we have to change the WAY they monitor. They have some person in the next room trying to read all this stuff and that just doesn’t work
Tony: Where is your customer? Is your customer in social media, in communities, what do you need to know in order to understand that conversation. How do you figure out how you fit in to this, and then you can take a look at how to fit in to this community and how to approach.
David: Companies want to listen, they all listen in a different way but they are seeing the value. It’s what they do with this listening.
What is one thing that is characteristic of the payloads you can get from listening?
Mike: Listening is non-strategic for biz. CMOs will listen and all that. But if they can’t take that data and then quantify it and identify trends and useful stats, they’re not going to go to product developers etc to change the business or product without hard data. In 2008 social media data became important data. Consumer insights have been on the web for a long time, but ony recently have marketers really started using this data to see what they can do to make a difference in how they sell.
Todd: Recognize the influencers who are credible on a topic and people are paying attention to them. Our output is simply a list of who is behind important blogs and other social media in certain instances.
Candace: We focus on characterizing the haystack of opinion rather than individual influencers. We go beyond sentiment, we summarize what people are saying. Identify a problem or sentiment and then provide a look at why this is happening. We alllow users to determine what they want to track and how to track it.
Tony: We measure tone and impact for traditional and social media and how they interact.
The panel is now giving examples of how to use their monitoring products to measure the community, get customer feedback, monitor blogs and other social media forums and how to use this data to make business decisions that will help the company create products that cater to their target audiences.
Candace has actually seen people use these monitoring tools as a money saving option, putting marketing dollars to better use than one person spending all day monitoring manually.
what’s next in social media??
Posted by Anya in othersidenotes on October 14th, 2008
new marketing summit
Posted by Anya in othersidenotes on October 14th, 2008
Links to live blogging for opening talk from Michael Lewis at the Business Marketing Association of Boston, and panel of speakers Adam Broitman, Bobbie Carlton and Stacy DeBroff.
new marketing summit
Posted by Anya in othersidenotes on October 14th, 2008
Live blogging today from the new marketing summit…
We’re listening right now to David Meerman Scott as he talks about “world wide rave”. Talks about unlearning what you have learned. Marketing isn’t about communications, media relations or advertising… it’s about publishing in YOUR way and unique ways online. Think like a publisher and get people to tell your stories for you.
There is a lot of push back from different kinds of businesses that say they can’t market in this way, that it won’t work for them.
On the web, you are what you publish.
Rules of the rave:
Nobody cares about your products (except you)
No coercion is required. (Don’t get sucked into gimmicks. It’s not about viral marketing.
Lose control. (For so long marketing has been based on sales leads and press clip books. You can measure how your ideas spread, how many people are exposed to your information and how many people download your information. Allow people to use your content, share it, shape it and spread it. Lose control of your content. Make your information free and open.
Put down roots. (Be a part of the community.
Create triggers that encourage people to share.
Point the world to your virtual doorstep.
What do you have to lose?
