May 24, 2011
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Archive for the ‘email marketing’ Category
As psyched as readers of this blog may be about the benefits of integrating social media into marketing, PR and organizational communication, we’re still in the dark ages when it comes to appreciating how these channels are redefining information discovery and reputation management.Despite the wide spread adoption of social media on a global basis, most companies remain clueless about how digital technology is changing the way people communicate and share information.
How else do explain the ineptitude that spurred articles in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal about these events:
- Burson-Marsteller’s email smear campaign against Google for Facebook. Seriously? That’s the best they could do?
- A famous British soccer player’s lawsuit against Twitter to unmask his anonymous critics. You’re kidding, right? Does he think he’s going to gag Twitter?
- Comcast’s threat to cut funding to a nonprofit that criticized its hiring of a former FCC commissioner on Twitter. And they did so via email. Did they think that was maybe a little risky? <sarcasm>
- JC Penny and Overstock.com’s decision to employ black hat SEO tactics, resulting in their websites being manually demoted in the search rankings. Guess that’s what happens when senior management is clueless about organic search.
The cold, hard truth is that these lapses in judgment are so sophomoric, all you can do is chalk it up to digital illiteracy. And by the way, if the errors they made aren’t clear to you, you’re digitally illiterate too. But don’t feel bad. You’re not alone. And chances are, it’s even not your fault.
You’ve probably been to a few social media conferences where you learned just enough to be dangerous. Speakers took the stage and told you how well they did with social media to promote themselves and generate new business. They avoided the gory details. No one’s ever actually sat you down and explained how these channels really work, or how to master them. Why would they? They want you to hire them.
The fight against digital illiteracy will not be won through keynotes or panel sessions. What’s required is practical, applied knowledge. You need to know how to:
- Build a social media monitoring dashboard to find, listen and engage with your existing online community. You may not know it, but you’ve an online community already.
- Use white hat search engine optimization tactics to make it easier for your customers to find you via search. Coming up forst for the name of your company doesn’t count. Google gives you that one for free. It’s about coming up for early-stage, buyer-oriented keywords. Has anyone ever actually showed you how to find them? It’s not that tough.
- Or how to optimize a website or blog for social sharing. Can you install Facebook “Like” button, “Tweet” button and Linkedin “Share” button on your corporate website? And can you optimize your Facebook status updates from maximum engagement so you rank high in the social newsfeed?
Over the next few days I’ll be running a series of posts to help you stamp out digital illiteracy in the workplace. I’ll lay out specifically what you and your colleagues need to know, and how to teach it to those with only minimal exposure to social channels. And if you want to take a short cut, join me for my Social Media Marketing Workshop in Los Angeles June 30 – July 1, 2011.
Or just stay tuned to my blog. I’m going to share my recipe for bringing digital immigrants up to speed and for winning resources and buy-in from disengaged managers and clients.
If you’re a past attendee of one of my trainings, what did you learn? Was it valuable? And how, if at all, has what you learned helped you avoid a major mistep?
Categories: advanced new media workshop, communication skills, email marketing, Facebook, marketing, New Media, new media pr boot camp, socialmedia, socialmediabootcamp, socialnetworking, training courses0 CommentsMay 18, 2011
Company and industry events are a great way spark online community interaction.
Professionals with common interests and goals regularly invest time and money to attend B2B events where they can network with others in their trade.
They’re engaged.
They’re motivated.
And they’re all in the same place, listening to the same speakers and visiting the same exhibitors.
They’re all on the same page.
What better place to launch a digital initiative that extends the excitement and the knowledge shared via social media?
After the carpet’s rolled up, and the staging’s been struck, and the keynote speakers have all gone home, what do you have to show for your efforts but a stack of business cards? But if you could capture and archive what happened online, it could be discovered through search, shared on Facebook and Twitter and pay dividends in perpetuity.
Earlier this week, I conducted a B2B social media workshop for event planners at the Event Marketing Summit in Chicago (#emschi) organized by Dan Hanover. I showed plenty of examples of how B2B marketers can use social media to generate excitement before, during and after business-to-business events like trade shows, conferences and strategic corporate training events.
Here are some of the take-aways from my workshop:
Socialize Your Event Website – Make your hashtags easy to find. Include them in your logo, or in the banner of your event website. Don’t gang all of your sessions up on one page, or one page per day. Put each session at its own permalink, so people can tweet links to specific sessions. Include each speaker’s Twitter ID in their bio and make it clickable. Use Linkedin “Share” and Twitter “Tweet” buttons. Never mind that Facebook isn’t distinctly B2B. People spend time there, and there’s nothing more powerful the a personal recommendations from a friend. Install a Facebook “Like” button as well. And include an “add to calendar” widget that makes it easy to add sessions to your Outlook, iCal or Google Calendar with one click. Make sure the calendar item has all the pertinent info about the session including the Twitter IDs of the presenters and the hastag for the conference or session. For some ideas on event website best practices, check out the Event Bright and Cvent webpage templates.
Offer Social Sync on Your Website – How many times have you registered for a conference and wondered who you might know that’s attending? At SXSW 2011, Janrain built this feature into the SXSW website, so you could cross reference registered attendees list with your Linkedin, Facebook and Twitter contacts. This was an awesome feature, because it gave you the chance to schedule more meetings and network smarter.
Promote Your Call for Speakers - If you want to generate excitement before an event, promote your call for speakers harder than the event itself. Email market a call for speakers with a deadline and send two reminders as the date approaches. People are more responsive when there’s something in it for them. Blog your call for speakers as well. And share a link to your blog post on relevant Linkedin Groups and via Twitter.
Post Your Event to Linkedin and Facebook – Go to Linkedin > More > Events and select the “Add an Event” tab on Linkedin Events. Post your event and send out notifications to your Linkedin contacts who might genuinely be interested. You can also advertise your event on Linkedin, and the targeting options are very precise. Post the event to the Events area on your Facebook page. Ask an easy to answer question and rewrite your meta data to encourage engagement in the stream. The more “Likes” and comments you get, the higher the post will rank and the more people who will see it.
Post the Speaker PowerPoint Decks to SlideShare – Set up a channel and post the PowerPoint presentations directly following each session. Velocity here is key, because tyou want the session attendees to retweet the link, and they’ll be more inclined to do so right after the session, then a day of two later. Use your momentum wisely. Tweet out a link to the deck with the conference hashtag and the Twitter ID of the speaker and watch the ReTweets come in.
Register Your Event on Foursquare – Take the time register your event in advance, and ask your sponsors NOT to register the event themselves on Foursquare, so you don’t wind up with multiple registrations for the same event, which confuses attendees. If it’s an annual event, start the name of the event with the year, so people will be able to check in at the next event regardless of the location. If you can get your hashtag into the name that you register on Foursquare, all the better. And ask each speaker before the start of their session to remind everyone to check in on Foursquare.
Podcast Your Sessions - At this point, the cost to record the audio from your sessions and make it available after the fact is pretty much just the cost of labor. Bottle up the knowledge and insights your speakers share on stage and make them available immediately. Draft a search engine optimized transcript, give the final MP3 file name that’s search friendly, upload it your blog, park your RSS feed at iTunes, social media optimize your feed and count the downloads. If you have the dates and location for next year’s event, include a brief, soft-sell announcement at the beginning of each recording to generate excitement for next year’s event. Don’t worry about losing registered attendees because you’re giving away the session recordings for free. People go to events to network and press the flesh. You can’t do that on a podcast.
Offer a Branded Mobile App – DoubleDutch, a San Francisco start-up that recently secured VC-funding, offers a ready to go, skinnable mobile app with all the features you’d want at a B2B event. Users can create profiles, connect with other profiles, use social sync to find Twitter and Facebook friends, share status updates, photos and links to an activity stream, like and comment on items, publish out to Facebook and Twitter, check in on the app and on Foursquare, unlock badges and watch video. Cisco Events is using the app very effectively to sustain the buzz they generate at their corporate events. They’ve even built in QR Code reader right into the app, which can be used for check-ins. Now you can use incentives to drive foot traffic to exhibitors and sessions by offering unique QR codes at different destinations.
Event Marketing B2B Social Media Boot Camp Presentation
View more presentations from Eric Schwartzman.By the way, I recorded the audio for the workshop which I’ll be releasing at On the Record…Online, so head on over now and subscribe if you want to make sure you don’t miss it.
How do you use social media for B2B events? Share your best tips for applying social to B2B events here as well. And if you attended the session, what you think of it, and how are you applying social media to B2B event marketing?
Categories: #emschi, B2B, blogging, email marketing, location based, mobile, professional development, social media, social networks, training coursesMar 12, 2009
It seems Nielsen had their fingers crossed when they released a report yesterday that claims “Social networks/blogs now 4th
most popular online category – ahead of personal e-mail.”Adweek reporter Brian Morrissey ran with it in an article titled “Nielsen: Social Networking Overtakes E-mail in Popularity” which is how I found out about it.
But according to Trend Stream CEO Tom Smith, author of the popular Universal McCann study “When Did We Start Trusting Strangers [PDF]” – and featured guest in the next “On the Record…Online” podcast – the claim is misleading because the Nielsen study only measures webmail.
No desktop email or mobile email usage numbers are considered in the Nielsen numbers. Tom says he’s also skeptical of their definition of social networks, calling it “pretty broad.” You can download the Nielsen study and make up your own mind here [PDF].
“It’s not trendy but I still think email is the most important, immediate and utilized communication and influence tool particular in the developed web markets such as US and UK,” said Tom in an email. “That said long term social networks will become core communication platforms to rival email. I just ran some research in the US on video sharing and the number one way to share videos was email, way ahead of social network distribution.”
I recently blogged that for organizational communicators, email is more important than Facebook, basing my opinion on Tom’s research that 99% of all active internet users rely on email daily, making it most popular online communications channel. What do you think? Is email still the most important online communications channel? And will it hold that status through 2009?
If you’d like to discuss this subject directly with Tom, he’s going present his latest social media research at the upcoming Digital Impact Conference in NYC April 30-May 1, which I’m co-chairing with Elizabeth Albrycht.
Categories: email marketing, social networks
Mar 04, 2009
I recently posted that I believe online newsrooms, search engine optimized press releases and email newsletters are more important to organizational communicators than Twitter and Facebook. Not that I believe Twitter and Facebook are unimportant. The Advance Guard just released a white paper on how organizations can leverage Facebook’s new fan page upgrades, and Twitter is emerging as a powerful discovery channel.
But if you look at the adoption rates — and you have the ability to create content that is genuinely compelling to your key publics — email still dwarfs other channels, particularly for business-to-business communications. With 99% of internet users citing daily use according to recent research [PDF], email is by far the most popular online delivery channel available.
In this post, I’ll drill down on best practices for email newsletter campaigns, which can be used to notify recipients about updates to an organization’s online newsroom, and to solidify relationships that may have been created in the physical world in the online space.
I’ve been researching marketing campaigns that rely on the online newsletter as a delivery vehicle. Most of the quantitative research I found was on MarketingSherpa.com, and excellent online resource, and to which I owe a huge debt of gratitude for this post.
There’s a good deal of free research available, but I have a paid account, which gives me access to premium research. After reviewing a series of research reports and case studies on what works and what doesn’t, here are my topline summary of my findings:
Good Content is Goal Number One – While many of the underlying design tenants can add incremental increases to the effectiveness of your email newsletter efforts, if the quality of the content isn’t truly useful to your key publics, best design practices alone won’t help you. “Article quality is far and away the biggest factor – good relevant stuff gets 100x the click through of marginal stuff, and weak stuff will be ignored,” says email marketing guru John Wall, host of Marketing Over Coffee.
Promos Don’t Always Work - Special offers aren’t always the answer. In fact, research shows that no offer campaigns often outperform sweepstakes and give-aways. Could it be that hard sales tactics are ineffective in world where people filter and consume only the information they want, anytime, any place, any where?
Be Careful with HTML - Content featured entirely in HTML gets blocked, especially by at work recipients. So use text-only promotional content including a spelled out, clickable URL instead of just HTML.
Viewing Occurs in the Preview Pane - Design for email client preview panes because 80% of at-work users decide what to open and what to delete through their Outlook preview panes. The same is true with 70% of consumers.
Design for the Upper Left-Hand Corner - When designing for the preview pane, keep in mind that the left hand column as always included, while the right hand column may be out of view. The challenge is that while left hand columns will be visible in the preview pane, heat map studies show that people tend to click on the upper right hand portion of the screen, so design your newsletter email template to make use of both.
Optimal Email Subject Line Length - There are three schools of thought on email subject line length. The first prefers subject lines under 45 words, since Hotmail and Gmail truncate anything longer. The second group says open rates increase with 50-80 character subject lines, as long it doesn’t fall in the 60-70 character range. The third, and in my opinion most reasonable school of thought is that the subject line length should be tailored to the campaign. If it’s promoting a specific call to action, keep it short. If it’s a newsletter, make it longer and tease the contents.
Design for Multiple Systems and Clients - Design your email newsletter templates to look good in a range of email systems. Set up test accounts in AOL, Gmail, Hotmail, Roadrunner and Yahoo. And pull it down to a range of clients like Entourage, Outlook Express and Outlook 2003-2007. Tweak your email newsletter template as needed to make it look good in as many systems and clients as possible.
Design for the Mobile User - To help the mobile community derive value from email newsletters, feature a series of content related links above the banner so that Blackberry and other mobile users have something to click on with excessive scrolling.
Designing for Outlook 2007 – Here’s a list of email marketing design limitations that would very useful to any email newsletter template designer looking to build something that looks good in Outlook 2007. Bit a good rule of thumb is to keep your email template simple, and treat it as stepping stone to a landing page where you do they fancier coding.
Admin Links Below the Fold – The objective is not to make it difficult for recipients to opt out, white list or forward the email newsletter, but rather to invest the critical top left corner of the screen that is visible in the preview pane into teasing the content specific being sent.
Opt-in Form Design is Critical - If your newsletter is designed to generate leads, the formatting of your opt-in form is much more important than the creative, and single column forms work best. Also, keep in mind that phone number fields in opt-in forms always *crush* reply rates.
Of course, if you want all the details, you need to get yourself a MarketingSherpa.com premium access account, which is well worth every penny.
If you’re a public relations practitioner seeking an easy-to-use platform for managing your own, custom online newsroom with search engine optimization wizards and integrated email newsletter capabilities built in, tweet @chrisbechtel, email us at info@ipressroom.com or call +1-310-499-0544 ext 504 to schedule a live demo of the iPressroom online newsroom PR software package.
Categories: email marketing, online newsrooms