Presentation: Centre for Chief Marketing Executives, Kelowna BC

I was in Kelowna, BC, May 22 and 23 for the Meeting of the Centre for Chief Marketing Executives.

My fellow presenters included:

• Mitch Joel, President, Twist Image
• Bryan Segal, Vice-President, Sales, comScore Inc.
• Jeanne Houweling, Vice-President, Advertising Services, NebuAd

We talked about the growing influence of social networking websites and the implications for Canadian Marketers.

In addition to participating in roundtable discussions, I presented on “Internet and Social Media: Strategies and Tactics”. For the most part, I showed the web sites in a browser window, hence no slides to share with you. But below are my key points.

Introduction
Boxcar Marketing: how can we help your business?

We’re called Boxcar Marketing because we think about online marketing tools as boxcars in a train: you can link together any combination of online marketing tools. When used together in combinations that are appropriate for your campaign, your business, your customer base, they create momentum for your other marketing activities.

One company’s online marketing strategy might include:
Search marketing + Blogging + Email marketing

Someone else might use:
Search marketing + Facebook + Twitter + Flickr

Any combination is possible. My challenge to marketers is to go beyond your current set of online marketing tools.

Most businesses are using:
Email marketing + Websites

Some are using
Search marketing + Email marketing + Websites + Blogs + Facebook + YouTube

But what about these top social media tools:

1. del.icio.us
2. Flickr.com
3. LinkedIn.com
4. Ning.com
5. StumbleUpon.com
6. Twitter.com
7. Upcoming.org
8. Virtual worlds: SecondLife
9. Wikis: pbwiki

~~~ Monique Trottier on Social Media Marketing 101 ~~~

A) Introduction to Social Media Marketing
What is it? Why is it important to you, your business and your customers? What can you do?

Why is Social Media Marketing important?

Because the media landscape has changed. Because customers have changed.

Mass marketing is harder to do effectively because of the fragmentation of attention. Media is fragmented. There are more radio stations, more tv stations, more magazine titles, more books, millions of websites.

There is a proliferation of products, meaning customers have more things to choose from. We have more devices: video games, computers, dvd players, televisions, satellite radios, TiVo, cellphones and PDAs.

With those devices we email, instant message, Google, blog, create videos, podcast. We also Twitter, Facebook, StumbleUpon, Ning and Digg.

As businesses, we have to care about these things because interruptive marketing is harder and harder to do.

Customers are not listening. They are busy creating content. They are producers.

They are busy recommending and talking about their experiences with products and services. They are reviewers. They are marketers.

Customers are more demanding and have greater expectations about how businesses should interact with them.

It is harder to get customers to come to your site because they are busy doing other things online. We have to go to them.

No online community has ever sat around saying, you know what we need? More marketers.

We have to get better at connecting to our customers online. At joining the conversation. At being more collaborative. At being an active part of a community. At speaking with our human voice, not our marketing & PR voice.

B) A Few Social Media Marketing Tools At A Glance
What is it? What are successful business uses?

Brightkite: http://brightkite.com/

• Location-based social networking. See where your friends are and what they’re up to, in real time. Meet people around you.
• Good for guerrilla marketing, ARGs (artificial reality games), treasure hunts, location-based marketing.

Digg: http://digg.com/

• A place for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the web. Content moves to the top based on user voting.
• Add Digg this Article to your site.

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/
• A social utility that connects you with the people around you.
• Online book clubs. HarperCollins Canada has 855 members who actively discuss new books.

Note on Facebook:
As businesses we have to keep in mind the nature of the communities we are joining. Facebook is about personal networks. It became the phenomenon that it is because it’s simple, it’s fun, it has photos, it has spam-free email, there’s very little advertising. If you want to be active in Facebook, go beyond advertising. Create value-add appllications, like the TripAdvisor map. Create fun games or quizzes or tools that help users socialize.

Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/

• An online photo management and sharing application.
• Example: Nikon Stunning Gallery. Nikon contacted 16 bloggers who would use the new Nikon D80 and post photos to Flickr using the tag “nikonstunninggallery”. Other Flickr users were invited to also tag photos this way in order to be entered into a contest to win a free camera. This type of contest works because the product (a camera) is directly tied to the activities of the community (taking photos).

LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/

• An online network of more than 20 million experienced professionals from around the world, representing 150 industries.
• Connect to me on LinkedIn. See my network of connections. Do we know anyone in common? Do you have a question that you’d like me to pose to my network? Looking for an expert in something? Maybe I can link you up to someone in my network.

Ning: http://www.ning.com/

• Create, customize, and share your own Social Network for free in seconds.
• See if members of your industry have already started social networks on Ning. Then join.
• Example: HotelNetwork.Ning.com is a forum for hotel owners, operators, and industry folks. “A wide range of topics are covered from a macro level such as the state of the industry to the property level with development opportunities, best practices, etc.”

PRWeb: http://www.prweb.com/

• Online news and press release distribution service used by more than 40,000 organizations of all sizes to increase the visibility of their news, improve their search engine rankings and drive traffic to their Web site. Watch the CommonCraft video on how PRWeb works.
• Example: See how 3M uses PRWeb.

Twitter: http://twitter.com/
• A service for friends, family, and co-workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?

Note about Twitter: I love Twitter because it is real-time conversation, it’s easy, it’s mobile (I can send and receive Tweets from my computer and my phone), it’s business and personal. I think Twitter is the tool to watch. The integration, simplicity and mobility of this tool is key to its success.

Examples: Social bookmarketing site Ma.gnolia.com uses Twitter as a customer service and help desk. Instead of emailing the company when service is down or bugs are detected, you can follow the Twitter feed to see if they are aware of the problem and what the fix status is.

Upcoming: http://upcoming.yahoo.com

• A community for discovering and sharing events.
• Add your event. Check for networking events in your area or social media sessions or marketing events such as Case Camp.

YouTube: http://youtube.com/

• Easily upload and share video clips across the Internet through websites, mobile devices, blogs, and email.
• Example: Nick Haley, student at University of Leeds, loved his new iPod Touch so much that he created a commercial for it. Apple saw it. Was impressed. Flew him out to New York to re-create the ad, which now plays on television. Watch Nick Haley’s original Apple iPod Touch ad.

Conclusion
Where are we going? What should we take away from this presentation?

1. We understand that the media landscape has changed.
• Newspaper readership is down.
• Direct mail success is down.
• TV viewership is down.

 

2. We understand that 80% of offline purchases are a direct result of online window shopping (JC Williams Group).

 

3. We know that the use of social networks, blogs, websites continues to hold steady or rise.

 

4. We are going to see more social media tools.

 

5. There will be greater integration of devices.

 

6. There will be more conversations online, definitely between customers (and hopefully between customers and companies).

 

7. There will be more collaboration online.

 

8. The changes in the media landscape will continue to fragment the market.

 

9. Smaller, more personal campaigns will have greater success and impact than larger, mass media campaigns.

 

10. Community, conversation and collaboration will continue to win over controlled, closed networks.

 

11. As businesses we need to remember to be human. Humans are tool users. Find the social media tools that are right for your campaigns.

About the Centre for Chief Marketing Executives
CCME is an exclusive network for Canada’s chief marketing executives that addresses marketing’s role at the corporate strategy level.

About Speaker Monique Trottier
Monique Trottier is President of Boxcar Marketing, a marketing and communications firm with expertise in online marketing, web design and search marketing. Monique is experienced at bridging social interactions on the web with offline conversation. She’s adept at helping companies understand and respond to how their products or services are represented online. Talk to Monique about in-house consultations, public speaking and presentations.

Drupal Meeting: Monique Presents on Email Newsletters

Join me Thursday for the Vancouver League of Drupalers April meeting on Email Newsletters.

I’m providing this month’s feature presentation:

Email Newsletters: What the F**K? with Monique Trottier from Boxcar Marketing (formerly Work Industries). Learn how email can complement your web strategy. Email, it’s not dead yet!

Date: Thursday April 17th, 6:30pm
Location: Raincity Studios, 1 Alexander Street, Suite 400 in Gastown.
Cost: There is no charge and all are welcome

See the full post.

Here’s what I promise to talk about:

Email Newsletters: What the F**K

So everything is running smoothly with your Drupal install. Multiple blogs, no problem. RSS, done. Tagging, check . . . Then the client nonchalantly mentions their newsletter. Email newsletters, WTF? Email? Who uses email?

Email newsletters may be off your radar but email is the most used of the online marketing tools and opt-in emails often have the highest ROI. Email’s effectiveness though, including subscription-based or opt-in email, is hampered by subscribers’ perceptions of Spam and inbox overload. Monique Trottier, author of the newsletter Underwire: Full Support for Non-Techies, gives us the secrets of writing a newsletter that not only stays out of the spam folder but is enjoyed by your audience!

* Learn how a well crafted newsletter gives you an advantage over your email shunning competition by reaching non-Web 2.0 audiences, creating word-of-mouth, and bringing people back to your website.

* Learn how your customers’ perception of Spam may affect your email open rates. Know what a good open rate is and why it’s important.

* Understand what eyetracking studies tell us about how people view content in newsletters, whether they are b2b, b2c, marketing-oriented or information-based, and how to create effective email layouts.

* Know what metrics you should track and what they mean.

Regardless of whether you are using email as a marketing tool, information tool or sales tool, there are best practices that work across industries. Monique’s talk about adding email newsletters to the mix will give you information to effectively build and sustain your online audience.

The presentation will also include a demonstration of Drupal’s Simplenews module.

Monique Trottier is a partner with Boxcar Marketing (formerly Work Industries—we’re in stealth mode at the moment, official launch April 7). Boxcar Marketing is an online marketing company with expertise in web strategy, online marketing, content development and online communities. And yes, we email. Monique writes a regular newsletter called Underwire: Full Support for Non-Techies.

UPDATE

Here are the articles and resources that I referred to in my presentation:

1. MailChimp.com article “Stupid HTML Email Design Mistakes”. Read ‘em and weep.

2. MailChimp Inbox Inspector.

3. Grokdotcom article by Bryan Eisenberg on Email Secrets of a Top Converting Website.

4. Campaign Monitor on how to ensure your emails are CAN-SPAM compliant.

5. Campaign Monitor’s html to inline style for email tool.

6. Campaign Monitor’s 2007 Guide to CSS Support in Email 2007 (pdf)

Canadian Housing and Renewal Association

Did you meet me at CHRA Annual Congress: Breaking New Ground, April 2-5?

I was recently asked to share my social media expertise as a speaker at the Canadian Housing and Renewal Association’s Breaking New Ground Conference in Vancouver. The conference focus was Canada’s social housing sector, with the purpose of questioning traditional approaches to housing issues and offering fresh perspectives. In my case we were looking at traditional media approaches and fresh perspectives on media, in particular how CHRA could use online media to get support for affordable housing issues.

Canadian Housing and Renewal Association was established in 1968 and is a national non-profit organization dedicated to supporting and strengthening the social housing sector.

My workshop was “Everything you wanted to know about blogging, Facebook, and independent daily online magazines but were afraid to ask…”

David Beers and Lisa Mansfield of The Tyee presented first and then I did a 10 Tools review, which I’ll post shortly.

Session description:
Everything you wanted to know about blogging, face book, and independent daily online magazines but were afraid to ask….
How to get your message out and achieve social awareness using the web media.
Friday April 4, 2008, 14:30 - 17:00

According to Alfred Hermida, assistant professor at the UBC School of Journalism, the start of this century has seen the advent of citizen media. Technologies such as the internet and cell phones have empowered people formerly known as the audience to share their views on the world, through blogs, comments, photos and video. The public is no longer a passive consumer of media, but an active producer of media.  Attend this workshop to find out how new technologies are changing ‘what’s news’, and making it possible for ordinary citizens to get their opinions heard. You will learn how to use the new media forums, attract people to your blog, and use face book, to get your story out.

Moderator: Bruce Pearce, St-Johns Community Advisory Committee on Homelessness

Speakers: David Beers, Editor, The Tyee; Lisa Manfield, Web 2.0 Outreach, The Tyee; Monique Trottier, Partner/Owner of Boxcar Marketing, Vancouver

Did you like my presentation? Offer Feedback.

UPDATE:
* See the Community Planning Examples Rachael pulled together.

Email marketing tips on the Lab with Leo

Work Industries’ second appearance on Lab with Leo showed up online and we’re glad to share it now.

In the 9-minute segment Monique shares with Leo her top tips for creating an effective email newsletter. And she knows what she’s talking about because she’s the force behind the Underwire newsletter: full support for non-techies.

Lab with Leo episode 132 — Monique Trottier explains her top 5 email marketing tips.

And if you liked that, you might also like Monique’s post on 10 email marketing tips.

How I learned that marketing is a practice of faith not reason

Tuesday night I presented at the first ever CaseCamp Vancouver. So what is CaseCamp?

Think of Bar Camp and shorten it and make it about marketing that uses technology, not just about technology. That’s Case Camp.

Presentations are 10-minute, rapid-fire case studies that tell a good story, in 10 minutes—tops!

The title of my presentation?

How I learned that marketing is a practice of faith not reason

or

The biggest thing I know so far about building marketing in a group

I’ve added my speaking notes below, which may or may make sense to you. If you were there, you have a distinct advantage. (Okay, I added a little explanatory information too for this web post.)

The speaking notes go with my CaseCamp presentation movie (464K, .mov quicktime file). Coordinating the two at once is up to you. Bonne chance!

slide 1
“Introduction to me and my idea: see title.”

slide 2
“I started to work with a company a few years ago and they told me that they were very analytics driven. They had specific key performance indicators (KPIs) they used organization-wide to make decisions. I thought that was a good thing.”

KPIs

• alright!
• analytics!
• the web rocks analytics!
• My brag: Google / Yahoo in 2000 / 2001 my team managed the largest ad spend in Canada

slide 3 and 4
“They used this chart to make their marketing and advertising decisions.”
(slide of cost per response (CPR) and (CPA))

“This was their holy grail, I was told. Their advertising decisions all hinged on these simple Key Performance Indicators (KPIs!).”

“Their brands are listed down the left-most column. The next two column, going left to right, show the web cost per response over the course of the year and at the end of the year, once you’d hired me and we’d optimized the campaigns. The second-from-the-right column shows your cost per response averages across all media - TV, print, outdoors and the web. The right column shows the difference.”

“I also mentioned the other factors the web had going for it as an advertising medium:

• superior scalability - we could be practically all the traffic we could handle until it cost too much to buy
• superior cash-flow - you get your placement, get your click throughs, have a chance to convert that traffic, then, 30 days later, get invoiced for the traffic that’s already been delivered and you’ve already (potentially converted into buyers).
• superior flexibility - you can ramp up and down your ad spend in seconds on an ongoing basis, you can roll your learnings from the campaign into the ongoing campaign as long as you want and as deeply as you want, you can stop the campaign
• superior tracking - every step of the customer acquisition process you can track to see where people are falling off, not converting, and address that issue
• pay for performance - you only pay for the people that click on the ads - those that see that ads but don’t click on them but still get your ‘brand message’ (ugh!) - you don’t pay for

I thought that made for a pretty self-explanatory case for an increased budget for the web marketing team. We could deliver more customers for cheaper.

slide 5

“That’s not how it worked out. The feedback I received can basically be summed up in three tactics of response:”

Dispute

• I showed them this
• They didn’t believe it
• If this could be so much better, why hadn’t they discovered it
• ‘This is theoretical,’ they said. ‘Not real.’

Disparage

• No, these aren’t real numbers.
• We discussed the origin of the numbers
• They concluded the numbers were not accurate, for any channel
• The process they were gathered through was flawed
• All the numbers were flawed. How could they make decisions with flawed nubmers!

Misdirect

• Those people you say came from the web, they discovered our brand through other channels, through our TV ads, through our print ads
• We do way more TV advertising that web
• The web is coasting on the coattails of the TV ads
• When customers are searching how do you think they know what to search for?
• We told them in our TV ads!

slide 6

“I didn’t get it. What was I doing wrong? They must need more information.”

slide 7

“I showed them the Internet was exploding in popularity and global reach.”

slide 8

“I showed them that people loved to get involved in the Internet and contribute content, not just get information.”

slide 9

“E-commerce was experiencing immense year-over-year growth.”

slide 10

“Our industry was experience some of the strongest growth.”

“But nothing worked. Why?

slide 11

“People make emotional decisions and then justify them with reason.”

“Decisions get made way back in the emotional centre of the brain, in the places where fear and anger and hunger reside. They don’t get made in the reasoning, high-order functions areas. Those are just for window dressing and justifying the decisions of the emotions.”

slide 12

“So what did I learn from my spectacular failure to understand how decisions get made? Focus on these things.”

Me Lessons

1 - Trust

• Don’t try to convince people to do something
• show them what they could do
• earn their trust bit by bit
• seed trust through external sources of validation: articles, books, etc.

2 - Religion:
Religions have been around for as long as cultures. Use their tactics.

• spread the word, beat the drum
• give people a simple story to believe
• appeal to people’s fears and dreams
• prosthletize: watch Sunday morning religious TV to see how to do this - seriously

3 - Attraction:

• make your ideas other people’s ideas
• use proxies for your arguments
• depersonalize the decision
• sex up the proposal

4 - Quit:

• move on before you stop believing in yourself
• once you stop believing there’s no way you can make others believe
• you have to be able to eat fear

Questions…discussion.

slide 13

“This is a pretty good book at explaining the diverging forces in the world, how we’re stubbornly subject to the same flawed human belief systems and superstition at the same time as we’re reaching out technologically and technocratically: Jihad vs. McWorld by Benjamin Barber.

And guess which one will always trump the other?

Rediscovering the Shaman: my WESTAF presentation

What follows are my notes from a presentation to WESTAF I did this morning. They are point form for referral and may only be really understood by me and the handful of folks in the room on the 31st floor this morning. But here they are nonetheless for your perusal. Please let me know if you have any questions or would like me to go into greater detail on any of the sections below.

Rediscovering the Shaman

The changing role of the author as a storyteller and holder of secrets.

No one buys a book, they buy a story. The reason every author wants to get on talk shows is because then they can sell themselves, which means people will buy their book.

Stories are as old as humans. They are how we make sense of the world, they are integral to our social lives, from the campfire in the cave 100,000 years ago to the boardroom of the 31st story today.

Writers give readers access to stories that they hope will help them make sense of the world around them. Books just provide the current established way to do that.

1. How reading affects writers.

• Reading began for most people as exclusively a social activity (story of reading silently to self and commiting evil)
• In a hypersocial world we’re moving back to an oral storytelling mode, we’re moving away from only reading silently to ourselves.
• We now read and react and share all at once with our peers in a new kind of reading aloud.
• The double hook dilemma: the current binary forces that make the existing book publishing industry so different from the emerging networked, web publishing industry.
• Books / Web binary oppositions: macroformats / microformats, anti social / hypersocial, closed collaboration / open collaborative, rigidity / pasticity, locality and specificity / globalism, (McLuhan) cool media / hot media

2. The changing commercial bargain of the writer.

• Writers who make a living from their writing have learned to eat every part of the animal, to make each piece of work they do pay off to its full potential.
• In a world where Porche makes themoses, Peugeot makes pepper grinders and Paris Hilton has a pop music album, every writer and every one of their outputs can now be a mini franchise - book, merchandise, events, product placement, etc.
• The focus of the writer migrates from outputs of production (book) to transactions in ideas.
• Scarcity exists no longer in access to works but in quality of creative works and quality and amount of attention an audience has to devote.
• Audience members become even more risk averse as the value of their attention increases - how do they know what’s worth their attention?
• The most effective allocators of attention are people trusted by the audience, the writer themselves.
• The relationship of the storyteller and audience increases in transparency and becomes a transaction of trust.
• Each of us have a personal long tail graph of attention and receptiveness to stories. At the head are stories were are very receptive to - from a writer we know and love, from a musician we’ve heard great things about from sources we trust.
• With an increase in interaction between storyteller and audience the relationship becomes more transparent and intimate. The audience begins to see the collaborative, iterative nature of storytelling. (We are all standing on the shoulders of giants.)
• The value chain of the publishing industry is also fragmented as the means of production become transparent and technical tools allow cheap coordination of labour (designers, typesetters, editors, marketers).
• If I can do it all myself what does the publisher offer?

3. Everyone is a storyteller.

• We are witnessing the convergence of creative media and the hypercompetition for attention.
• Warhol was wrong. Everyone no longer has 15 minutes of fame, everyone is now famous to 15 people.
• So what become the most effective attention allocators?
• Relationship of storyteller to audience becomes the keystone of value creation (social value, cultural value, economic value).
• Value becomes a more human criteria incorporating the social and the cultural, not just the economic.
• With huge influx of stories there is a deflationary pressure on commercial stories.
• We are witnessing a mass devaluation of what used to be commercial artistic works at the same time as we are witnessing the incredible inflation of trusted storytellers.
• Reinvigorated role of the local and the specifically familiar at the same time as we have access to the global and foreign.
• The rish is that we lose the best stories in favour of adaptable ones that fit many media.
• Many capable storytellers will resist the opening of storytelling to the masses because they are practitioners of a specific craft and don’t want to have to learn another / don’t want others to learn their craft.
• How can writers tap the hypersocial?

===

Thank you to Umair Haque of BubbleGeneration for ways to express many of the forces changing the world of stories and media and the CBC Archives for a quick refresher on McLuhan.

SFU Summer New Media Workshops

(Cross posted from my Up in Ontario blog.)

Thanks to the lovely and smart Monique I now know a little more about the SFU Summer New Media Workshops that are coming up this summer, July 31 to August 2. I’ll also ‘fess up and tell you that I’ll be speaking on Day 4: Getting the Money to Flow, though my bio has appeared yet.

Now that you know I’m biased, I’ll press on.

I know a number of the other presenters at the workshops, and if you’re looking for some great sessions to learn about new media, the web and what’s going on in this crazy networked world, the workshops will be a great chance to learn and participate. The folks leading the sessions live and breathe the web and will be great resources. Some of them presented at the recent Northern Voice conference and a number of others attended as partcipants. I know, I paid to be there to watch the whole thing go down.

So if you’re looking for an opportunity to hang out and learn with some of the leading webby geeks in Vancouver, I recommend the SFU Summer New Media Workshops. And if you or the company you represent have a budget for education / career development, I can’t think of a better opportunity to turn those allocated dollars into excellent learnings. The days are structured so you can concentrate on a particular area of expertise, or attend for the duration to get the grand sweep of the web.

• Day 1: The Future and the Now: The death of the desktop paradigm seems finally to be at hand. In its place is a networked computing environment with unprecedented reach. How are today’s enterprises using this environment? Learn from the experts about the different ways you can reach your audience, navigate standards and trends, create online community and get involved in social networking, understand the new world of digital identity, and explore the web as an emerging application platform.

• Day 2: What Counts as Content Anymore?: Questions around digital content run the gamut from traditional publication concerns of writing, editing and graphic design to live data, multipart conversations, anycasting, and personal identity management. How do creators deal with a world beyond the page? What are the skills and concepts you need to effectively create, manage, and deliver content online today?

• Day 3: Exploring New Formats: Blogs, wikis, podcasts, social networks, and aggregators present a host of new opportunities for bringing content and audiences together in different ways. This workshop gives you the opportunity to find out how these emerging formats and genres can work in your context, and what you need to be doing to make them work. Who has a successful online presence and what are they doing?

• Day 4: Getting the Money to Flow: Money has indeed returned to the online world, but it’s not the nineties anymore; there are new rules in play. The three mainstays of revenue generation are online retail, advertising, and subscription, but how are these shifting in the light of software-as-a-service, blog- and search-based branding, and ad networks? We look at the numbers, evaluate the strategies, and help you figure out how to make revenues flow your way.

If you have any questions about the workshops, let me know either in the comments of this post or by email and I’ll see what I can do to get them answered. Hope to see you there!