Internet Marketing Conference Round-Up

Corey Rollins and I live blogged the Internet Marketing Conference (September 11 and 12) for TechVibes. Links to our posts are below:

General Interest

IMC: Keynote Address by Eric T. Peterson.
Author Eric T. Peterson says that if it is worth doing, it is worth doing analytically. Why web analytics is important and what it means to your business.

IMC: Social Media Marketing Success Stories.
Capulet Communications on 5 social media tools.

IMC: Best Tips and Conference Summary.
A quick review of key points from the conference.

IMC: Shannon Ryan on Engagement Marketing.
A really short post with 5 tips for engagement marketing.

IMC: Enterprise 2.0 by Jon Husband Wirearchy Network.
Why hierarchy does not work in a wired world.

How-To

IMC: Usability Testing Without the Lab Coats by Andre Charland from Nitobi.
3 tips for usability testing.

IMC: Engage Community With Your Brand by William Azaroff of Vancity.
Excellent case study on how Vancity Credit Union used social media to create an online community.

IMC: Expert Panel Tips on Writing for the Web.
Monique and an expert panel talk about writing copy for landing pages, email newsletters, multilingual sites and more.

Search Marketing

IMC: HubSpot Website Grader.
A quick measurement of how well your website performs from a search and social media perspective. Test your own site.

IMC: Search Optimization Panel.
An expert panel on search optimization. What makes them tick and ticked about SEO practices.

IMC: Tool Demo on SEO Browser.
Really short post on SEO-Browser.com. Know what a search engine sees when it comes to your site.

Measuring Success

IMC: Website Monetization.
Why defining goals, assigning value and measuring is worthwhile.

IMC: Monitoring Website Performance by Anil Batra of Zero Dash 1.
A great presentation by Anil on why people waste their time tracking statistics that are interesting and what they should be measuring.

Guest Post on TechVibes: Is Pottermania Dead?

My guest post is live on TechVibes: “Is Pottermania Dead?”

July 10-13, 2008, I was invited to Portus 2008: A Harry Potter Symposium for academics, educators, students and fans. Dr. Henry Jenkins of MIT and I gave the two luncheon keynotes.

From TechVibes:

When it comes to Harry Potter, the big question among the media is whether Pottermania is dead. Among booksellers and publishers, the question is who will be the next JK Rowling? And will there be another series as popular as Harry Potter?

As the former internet marketing manager at Raincoast Books, the Canadian publisher of the Harry Potter series, and as a book reviewer at SoMisguided.com, I’m interested in the answer to those questions. In fact, they were two questions posed to me at Portus 2008 in Dallas, TX .

Sponsored by the Harry Potter Education Fanon, Portus 2008 (July 10-13) was the fifth gathering of Harry Potter scholars, students and fans. Over 700 people were in attendance, which answers the first question. Is Pottermania dead? No.

Read the full article on TechVibes ...

Social Media Marketing & Non-Profits

Marketing Nonprofit Causes on Chronicle of Philanthropy posted Tuesday, May 20, 2008:

Question from Ken D. Grunke, Pillars:
Hi Seth. Would you share your suggestions for how nonprofits should approach the social networking for the first time? I have heard you should be accessing multiple social networking sites and then I have heard that you should only be concentrating on one.

Seth Godin:
The networks are irrelevant. What’s relevant is the network. Who, not how many. Who, not where.

If your organization can only successfully focus on one thing at a time, then do that. But most urgently, make the relationships you build worthwhile. You don’t need 1000 shallow relationships, you don’t need a long list of friends. What you need is deep relationships, people willing to mortgage their house to support you, willing to host a party to support you, willing to devote a vacation to support you. That’s not about volume, nor is it about the site. It’s about how you build relationships that matter.

Seth goes on to talk about how the terms we use for marketing “miss the mark” (pun mine and intended). He says that “target audience” is not the right way to approach marketing, that it’s more about farming and cultivation.

His advice to all non-profits, and this applies to companies as well, is to do the basics: make big promises, deliver.

“Tell stories people want to hear. Create a service worth talking about. Make it easy for others to spread the word. Get permission from people to follow up and then repeat! The basics are what most organizations are missing. Obsessing about this is far more effective than managing the latest fad.”

See Seth Godin’s post on charity auctions and ways to raise awareness and raise money.

Boostrapper’s Bible is free. It’s written by Seth and available at squidoo.com/seth

Seth gives examples of charities that are successfully using marketing techniques:
1. kiva.org: loans that change lives
2. roomtoread.org
3. the fellows program at acumenfund.org

Seth gives some specifics on why Kiva is remarkable:
1. Kiva grows by connecting people in a way that online folks find remarkable. So they blog about it and talk about it and bring in others.
2. Meanwhile, those benefiting from Kiva’s connection also talk about it. So they bring in new benefactors.
3. Since all Kiva does is connect the two, they scale and scale and scale.

The great question that comes out of this question/answer period with Seth is “if someone talks about you, what do they say?”

Are you remarkable? Are you connecting to people 1-to-1 so that they can go and talk 1-to-many?

Back to my presentation in Kelowna to the Chief Marketing Executives: none of these social media marketing tools work unless you’re doing the basics.

Great conversation. Check out: Marketing Nonprofit Causes on Chronicle of Philanthropy

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.

The Return on Investment (ROI) of Online Communities

I’m often in the position of being an advocate of online communities. I think that when they’re well conceived and executed they work incredibly well to connect people across roles and organizational constraints. But it can be a hard slog to prove it.

(Not that I really believe in proving things with numbers. I believe marketing is practice of faith, not reason. Yet I have to be able to discuss numbers with some familiarity, and report on progress and results.)

Then today, via the Will Pate experience, I discovered a great post from Bill Johnson on the ROI of Online Communities, with numbers to boot!

Bill and Joe Cothrel presented the following numbers at the Online Community Business Forum.

• Community users remain customers 50% longer than non-community users (AT&T, 2002).
• 43% of support forums visits are in lieu of opening up a support case. (Cisco, 2004).
• Community users spend 54% more than non-community users (EBay, 2006).
• In customer support, live interaction costs 87% more per transaction on average than forums and other web self-service options (ASP, 2002).
• Cost per interaction in customers support averages $12 via the contact center versus $0.25 via self-service options (Forrester, 2006).
• Community users visit nine times more often than non-community users (McKInsey, 2000).
• Community users have four times as many page views as non-community users (McKInsey, 2000).
• 56% percent of online community members log in once a day or more (Annenberg, 2007).
• Customers report good experiences in forums more than twice as often as they do via calls or mail (Jupiter, 2006).

There’s also an accompanying ROI of Communities powerpoint presentation (PDF). So now there are some good numbers to talk about when we talk about how to quantify the ROI of online communities.

Now the nubmers aren’t perfect. In fact, to me they’re more valuable for their consistency with each other and with my experience of conceiving and executing online communities, than as standalone factoids. Basically, people involved in online communities are more engaged in every behaviour you want to foster on your website and for your organization.

What more can I say? Connect with your people and you’ll discover in practice what makes communities so special. But don’t expect a flood. Online communities work more like drip irrigation than a fire hose—small, discreet interactions that accumulate in effect and momentum over time.

The Death of TV in 3 parts

One of the ongoing conversations I often have with clients, friends and colleagues surrounds the current volatile media climate. We’re swimming in more and more mediated information, communications and creative work than ever before, yet the overall landscape is shifting under our feet. Everything seems to be in flux.

The Internet is touted to kill all other media, yet this has never happened before with new media and hasn’t happen now. The usual grand pronouncement that overstate the new in the near term and understate the new in the long term abound. We are awash in people telling us what’s happening, yet there seems less clarity than ever.

Here are a few other salient characteristics of the current discussion.

• A tremendous confusion exists between communications delivery mechanisms (over-air TV and radio signals, wireless Internet, wired TV and telephone lines), presentations modes (audio, video, text) and content created for a specific transmission mechanism


• on TV: sitcoms, dramas, policiers
• on radio: documentaries, radio plays and call-in shows
• on the web: short videos, blogs, podcasts and video podcasts
• Content and services are become divorced from delivery mechanisms. We can watch TV on the web, talk on the phone on the web, watch radio call-in shows on TV, listen to podcasts on radios, watch web videos on our TV.
• Content is become unbuckled from a schedule, shifting to being available on-demand for users to draw it rather than being sent out at a specific time only. Subscriptions are oriented to the content and not the carrier technology or channel.
• Copyright legalities are challenged by the practices of new technologies that make perfect replication simple, cheap and necessary.
• I hear or read people prognosticating on media everyday and often I wonder if they’ve ever tried the thing that they’re supposed to be an expert on. MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, P2P networks, blogging and whatever else comes along have to be practiced to be appreciated. In a kind of return to the 4-H motto: Learn To Do By Doing.

Into this conversation I was lucky enough this week to find a presentation by Gary Carter called The Death of TV. Here is Part 2 and here is Part 3. His point about communication devices moving through stages of domestication is lucid and wonderful. His clarity once he arrives at digital transmission and storage technologies makes me wish I’d written some of his speech. To whit:

This is the world of digital television, digital networks, digital everything. Power, in this environment, is certainly not a push, but it’s probably not, in fact, a pull: it is distributed equally, in all parts of the system, acting in all directions simultaneously. In fact, power is a peer-to-peer distributed network. The audience, having been first the recipient of the camera’s gaze, and then its subject, took control first of the means of production, and now, finally, of the means of distribution.

Media has become totally personalised, in all its aspects. It has moved into ‘my space’. The artist formerly known as the audience has become—to use MacLuhan’s prediction from the early ‘70s—the prosumer. To quote Andy Warhol just before his death: “My prediction from the Sixties finally came true. In the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes. I’m bored with that line. I never use it anymore. My new line is, in fifteen minutes everybody will be famous.”

Or, everyone will be famous to 15 people.

So go, read that full text of Carter’s speech if you’re at all interested in the conversation on our current mediated communications. And if you’re reading this, you already are.

Thanks to MIT Advertising Lab for formatting and posting the text of the speech.

Strangely, the 4-H Club motto seems to have changed over time and now seems to be the odd, vague, Orwellian To Make the Best Better.

Zee Germans of Web 2.0: Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft

On and off for the last few weeks I’ve been thinking about two big German words that I used to know for a short time in university, forgot, then recently rediscovered: Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft. Longer definitions than this are advised if you want to be able to use the terms in cocktail conversation, but here’s what they mean to me right now and why they’ve been on my mind.

Both words try to describe the way humans work in a social setting. Both are unreal in that they describe an idealized situation that has never and (likely) will never exist. But they’re useful for understanding many common traits, approaches and responses to online communities.

In short, the differences:

Gemeinschaft

• individuals oriented to their group interests more than their self interests
• common mores of accepted behaviour among the group
• based on shared beliefs and values
• strength of the group derived from the strength of agreement of beliefs and values
• controlled mostly by internal agreement with minimal enforcement

Gesellschaft

• individual self interest trumps shared interest
• no common mores of accepted behaviour
• groups that serve individual self interest thrive
• groups can be fragmented and aligned against each other
• controlled mostly by external pressures and necessary enforcement

In the differences we can find many of the common discussion points we see today in online communities. What’s good for the community? How to create and enforce rules? How to reward behaviour? What behaviour to reward?

I like thinking about this tall-forehead stuff because it lets me see the roots of the different approaches to communities - more communal, group-oriented, internally enforced policies or more individual-oriented, top-down policies - and their sociological lineage. Many folks are taking about the unbundling of the corporation, the migration on value outside the company, and Gesellschaft is the German word for company.

I don’t really have a point to all of this, other than to see a continuity to the discussions we’re having. We’re not tackling new problems, we’re just seeing new ways of expressing the existing conflicts of humans in groups.

And I guess that is my point. This whole Web 2.0 handle is describing a time when the technology has gotten easy enough that it’s not longer the thing we’re talking about. Now we’re on to the human problems, the human concerns.