Category: Marketing

WordPress.com Increases Free Storage 6,000 Percent

As TechCrunch notes, my free blogging platform of choice, WordPress.com, has increased the amount of free storage it provides its users from 50 Mb to 3 Gb. Here’s what I see when I upload graphics or other documents to my blog:

wordpress.com free storage

Note that a few days ago that 3GB figure in the lower left was only 50 MB. I formerly used Flickr as a storage space for my photos and other graphics (since it offered 100 MB a month vs. 50 MB a year with WordPress.com) and just pulled the graphics from Flickr into my blog posts, but now it seems I should be able to upload graphics indiscriminately without even coming close to exceeding my WordPress limits. Especially if I’m uploading mostly 72 dpi screen captures.

As Erick Schonfeld says, this is a huge advance that puts significant pressure on competing platforms. WordPress.com has had the advantage of Akismet protection against comment spam (which has saved me over 34,000 spam comments.) By offering triple the free storage of Blogger, WordPress.com takes another big leap.

When I started this blog, I made it my goal to never spend a penny on any of the services. My purpose was  more than miserliness; I wanted to encourage others (particularly those in the PR field) that they can have blogs without spending  any money and without support from their IT department. As I say in my “It’s All Free” section, if you see something on my blog that you like, you can rest assured that it was completely free.

Why is free such a big deal? Because it helps to drive home the ridiculousness of spending several hundred to a few thousand dollars to attend a communications conference in which you learn about social media if you fail to take the next step and actually get hands-on experience. And it’s why I developed my 12-step Social Media Program.

Barriers to entry in blogging and other social media aren’t just low. They are non-existent.  Zero. Get started with your WordPress.com blog today. When you do, please leave a comment below to let me know how it’s working for you. You also can subscribe to the RSS feed for this blog, which will provide you with regular updates and pointers on issues you may find interesting and helpful. (If you don’t know what RSS is, see steps 4 and 5 in my 12-step program.)

You really should check out Facebook, too. It’s also free. Friend me if you’d like to stay in touch and learn more about social media.

If your work involves any communications, or marketing, or sales, or management responsibilities you owe it to yourself to begin to understand social media. And if you paid anything for college, or attend any career enrichment seminars for which you or your company pay admission fees, you’re seriously missing out on a great educational value if you don’t take advantage of the free hands-on education you can get through WordPress.com, Facebook, Twitter (you can follow me here), Flickr, YouTube and related services.

What’s holding you back?

Frost & Sullivan SEO Vital Viewpoints

Panelists for this session were:

It’s important to buy PPC to supplement your natural search. If you have a natural ranking, advertise there too. People are more likely to click the natural result, and you can double your natural clicks just by being there in the paid rankings, too.

H-P suggests writing for the web first instead of adapting print materials.

Val says you need to integrate end-to-end, and make sure your landing page matches the keyword you are buying in PPC. This is a science with a little bit of art. Testing is critical. Creative, keywords and landing page all need to relate.

Protect your real estate. Buy competitor names and buy your own name too. Put defensive money into the game.

Val’s don’ts:

  • Don’t think about search as a standalone strategy. It’s part of your mix. Have a single design team with cohesive campaigns.
  • Remember that there are other search engines besides Google and Yahoo. Some search engines are targeted to particular subject areas. Buy keywords in French in the Canadian market.
  • Test, test, test. Don’t set it and forget it. You need to check on this every day.

Yahoo Site Explorer and Google Webmaster Tools were recommended.

Advanced Email Strategies to Boost Response Rates

John Harrison from Yesmail led this discussion. Among the measures the experienced email marketers in this group look at are Open rate, click-through, opt-in rates, channels they came through, time spent of site, net gain or loss of subscribers, what do the campaigns do to opt-out rate of a contact stream.

Conversion metrics typically used include new registrations, downloading a PDF, or whatever the objective of the campaign was. It all depends on the goal. Another organization has used inferred means, such as purchases over time. People who have more interaction with their email have been shown to have higher value.

Some have used email to test messaging for direct mail marketing. Intuit, for example, matches customer registrations (about 70 percent of purchasers register) against their email and direct mail history, to see whether people have gone online to purchase or purchased in a store.

Generic rental lists of email addresses typically have bad response rates. If companies have advertised with a magazine, however, renting that subscription list may be better. It’s important to scrub against your house list to be sure you’re not spamming. The key is to create a value proposition that causes them to register to become part of your house list. If it costs $200 per customer to acquire a customer through other marketing channels (e.g. TV or direct mail), a list rental may be cost-effective. It will never match the performance of your house list.

Email Strategies – John listed several subject areas to consider. We didn’t get to all of them, but if people have ideas to add in the comments, I know others would be glad to hear them.

Contact/Frequency — Ranges may be 3-5 times per month at max. Companies centralize management of the list to prevent various marketing groups from contacting the same people. For people who have requested a specific category of updates, they can get more than the basic rule would allow. Others are once per 30 days unless they have opted in.

Segmentation/Targeting —

Personalization —

Subject Lines — From address and Subject Line are overlooked elements, and should be user-friendly and tied to your brand. Purpose of the From address is brand and recognition. If you do that right you can have more flexibility with the subject line. The only purpose of the subject line is to get someone to open the message.

Creative — Gerber, for instance, does a series of Baby Center emails based on pregnancy phase, sending emails during each week letting expectant moms know what to expect. Petsmart created a Pet-of-the-Month contest to integrate into its email messages.

Conversion —

Welcome —

Emerging Media — Widgets branded for Desktop, RSS, SMS, Mobile delivery, social networks. Adoption of RSS is slow, limited mainly to geeks. Email is a glue that holds other channels together. It’s one thing that everyone “gets.” Even the social network sites have email notification options. That’s one reason they work well, because those who aren’t constantly living in Facebook get alerts through email or by text message.

Time to market/getting an email out the door — Political campaigns are great at timeliness, whereas some businesses can take weeks to take advantage of a timely opportunity.

Frost & Sullivan Keynote II: Martyn Etherington, Tektronix

Martyn presented on “Maximizing & Measuring Your Return on Consumer and Marketing Investment: How to avoid Marketing’s Growing Relevancy Crisis.”

A recent Journal of Marketing study of 167 companies found that “CMOs don’t have any measurable effect on a company’s financial performance.”

Why do marketers spend such a large percentage of their time justifying their position and their budgets? They lack relevancy in three constituencies: The customer, the channel, the business.

Martyn told his personal story with Tektronix, a 60-year old company from Portland, Ore. and how he’s been transforming the marketing function.

What problems were they trying to solve? When he came in, Marketing was spread across the organization, with over 100 “strategic objectives” and 4,000 activities that weren’t well linked. Couldn’t measure anything except dollars spent. No success criteria and no accountability. Marketers had no idea of the business situation, order targets. Little or no discussion about the customer, and a wall between Sales & Marketing.

Martyn’s Get Well Plan

  • Strategy Alignment – distilling 100+ objectives to 20, and defined success criteria
  • Organization Alignment – Centralized organization and responsibility – “One throat to choke”
  • Operational Alignment – Measurement & accountability became a mantra

Changing Philosophy to think like a customer. Begin with an understanding of how people buy, and their decision stages. When does it switch from a Marketing conversation to a Sales conversation?

Changed from Activity Based to Outcome Based marketing, based on four questions:

  1. What outcome are you trying to achieve?
  2. What strategic objective does it support?
  3. How will you know when you’ve achieved it?
  4. How can you make it better?

Sales Alignment Challenge: “What will it take for us to get an A on our year-end report card?”

How many leads should marketing provide? Assumed business source ration of sales:marketing is 80:20, which implies about 5 leads per account manager per month

How much should a marketing lead cost? Set a target of $400 cost per lead. Changed marketing mix to reach that target.

Results:

  • Marketing costs have declined both in absolute and relative terms
  • Productivity has increased
    • 50 percent more efficient and effective
    • Now responsible for repositioning/segmentation
    • Now started to track customer SOW (share of wallet) and NPS (net promoter score) – growth metrics
  • Measure their business contribution

Lessons learned:

  • Building an accountable marketing function frequires a philosphical change, not jsut a tool set
  • Change is hard and will take time. Two-thirds of the employees who were there at the outset have been replaced.
  • What you measure gets better; don’t measure it if it isn’t actionable
  • Fact-based decision makeing empowers people
  • Always focus on wher eyou are going, you can never go back
  • Review and adjust

Audience Q&A

Q: Did they measure lead quality as well as lead volume?

A: 80 percent of all leads go untouched by sales. That’s a national figure, and it was roughly the same for Tektronix. He had to work with sales leadership to get sales follow-up.

Q: Why did you have to replace 85 percent of team? Skill set mismatch or attitudes?

A: Both. Some “cancers” needed to be removed, and Marketing had been a “dumping ground” for people who didn’t measure up in other parts of the business. Others voluntarily left because they didn’t like the new accountability culture.

Observation: Not having worked in the for-profit sector, it’s interesting that there seems to be a hierarchy in many companies:

  • Operations
  • Sales
  • Marketing
  • PR

I’m sure that’s not a revelation to many, but it just struck me anew listening to Martyn. PR typically doesn’t get respect from Marketing, Sales blames Marketing for poor-quality leads, Operations blames Sales for not making targets. It’s much healthier if the groups are working together as a team to meet organizational goals. It seems it really does come down to numbers, and if you can prove contribution you get more respect. Thus, Katie Paine’s work on measurement for social media as well as PR is important.

I still think the social media ROI won’t be hard to show, particularly because the “I” is so ridiculously low. It also will provide valuable customer insights, hearing exactly what they are thinking about your company. This whole presentation and discussion does emphasize for me, though, that we need to look at ways to track social media benefits. If you can document that the benefit is at least x, and that x is significantly greater than the investment, then you can make a good argument that the real value is much higher.

For example, one idea I got from a fellow attendee yesterday was on how to measure podcast listenership. When you subscribe to a podcast, those episodes are automatically pushed out to the subscribers. But you don’t know whether the segments actually got played on the iPods or computers. Did the subscribers really listen?

The suggestion from Douglas White of MindComet is to have a “highlights” list as a PDF that accompanies each segment. When people go to the sited to download that take-away, that tells you a rock-bottom minimum number of people who actually listened, because they took that next step. And if you have links within that PDF to the ordering function on your site, you can prove contribution to sales or lead generation.

Doug asked me last night to serve on his panel on user-generated content, which will be later this morning. I’m also on a panel about blogging this afternoon. Should be a busy and fun day. I’ll be blogging about both sessions.

Update: Kevin’s notes on Martyn’s keynote are here.

Frost & Sullivan Breakout: Online Marketing

In an era in which overall marketing spend is projected to be flat, this Peer Counseling breakout session moderated by Kevin Hoffberg gave us a chance to share ideas on how online marketing will claim an increasing share of that slowly growing pie.

Here are my notes from the session. I’d welcome others who participated in the conversation to jump in with additional clarifications or comments.

Rick Short mentioned CIC Data as a way to monitor and measure word-of-mouth in China.

Intuit uses Bazaar Voice to see what customers are out there saying about their products, and incorporating that user-generated content into the Intuit site.

Cara Shockley from HP.com says linking to support groups (supporting the support groups) has been an important strategy. User communities can be a huge marketing advantage. Jim from Eloqua calls it a source of strength. You’re not just buying a product, you’re joining a community. This is Wikinomics…letting people who are your users add value.

Financial services company have had a fear of transparency because they are worried about getting flamed. There’s a big difference between an official corporate blog and understanding what people are already saying about you. The conversation is happening, so you need to at least monitor. The representative from Union Bank says they are informally getting into commenting on some other blogs, but not ready to jump in yet. Advanta, another financial services company, has started a social site called ideablob.

For a software company, half the revenue is from support. So having communities could cut revenue. They don’t want to aid these non-paying communities. Why not create an on-line knowledge base by subscription? If you don’t support customers with an online community, those communities will spring up, and your support team will lose. This is a lack of vision that could lead to a Wikipedia-esque alternative replacing the software company’s World Book.

Check out Quicken online , and their Facebook page.

One of the keys in blogging and liability for companies is that if you don’t moderate comments, you don’t bear the responsibility for what’s posted.

Jumpup.com is a QuickBooks product, and now they went with a free version of their entry level QuickBooks product. They developed a Just Start contest for would-be entrepreneurs encouraging people to quit their jobs and start small businesses. This could have tie-ins for financial services companies, so making some of those connections could build.

Peter from Intuit mentioned Genesis measurement services as a possible integrated service.

Please do add your comments, and continue the great conversation we had this morning. Feel free to add links to helpful resources in your comments, and particularly any case studies of things your organization is doing.