Am I boring you yet?

I'm sitting at my desk under duress this morning, a head cold that is woollying my ability to absorb information and oddly adjusting my balance and depth perception…if you are present in my inbox today and want my attention, you are truly in need of a miracle.

Daily, I wade through the massive din of content/blogs/forums in by inbox, hitting "right-click-delete" at the speed with which I am taking in header and subject lines, today everything is a little blurry my mood is showing definite indifference to the uninspiring job that marketers are doing to capture my attention. And then, wouldn't you know it…a miracle…

Social Media has Ruined Marketing, author Robert Fleming, CEO/President of the global eMarketing Assoc.


First of all I am old. How old, let's just say I remember a time when Beatles music was not played in elevators. Therefore I remember fondly the “old days”. So I get a bit nostalgic thinking back on time when there was really just newspapers, TV, radio and direct mail as key advertising elements (ok billboards too). It was a great time here are 5 reasons why.

1. WE REALLY DIDN’T LISTEN TO CUSTOMERS - Ok we had focus groups, but we conducted a monolog with our customers. Not a dialog. Customers couldn’t moan and groan about our poor customer service, or faulty products to the whole world. We could crush small business with the strength of budgets, not the quality of service and products. WHY IS THIS IMPORTANT - Because now small business can compete on a more level playing field, and the strength of your marketing does not necessarily have to rest with the size of your budget.
2. WE COULD USE EXPENSIVE COMPELLING CREATIVE FOR MAGAZINES, DIRECT MAIL AND OTHER MEDIA - Ok, there are still magazines and newspapers, but unless you have been living in a cave you have seen them get smaller and smaller. Direct mail is down substantially from a decade ago and the USPS will be bankrupt by December, without a government bailout. magazines are on iPads. Now we have text ads (little things), tiny banners, or 140 character tweets, social groups, fans and likes. WHY IS THIS IMPORTANT - Because now we have to get even more creative than ever, in the way we present our company, on Twitter, Facebook, and Linkedin (and other Internet media). We have a smaller canvas on the Internet and therefore must get much better with our brushes.
3. WE COULD MEASURE - With Nielson, Arbitron, ABC, and so on we could get reliable numbers that had been proven for decades. Today we are bombarded with statistics, but how much is necessary to make marketing decisions. WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT - Now we need to reduce our metrics to actionable and relevant statistics, instead of just pouring over data dumps.
4. WE COULD KEEP OUR JOBS - In the old days, in order to make your numbers and keep your job, all you had to do, is what you did before. With social media looming, and new technologies and devices appearing out of thin air, we do not have the historical data to ensure success. So we have to take chances. WHY IS THIS IMPORTANT - Because marketing is no longer "safe" - and the risks are higher than ever, but so are the rewards.
5. WE COULD DRINK MARTINIS AT LUNCH - Doesn't seem like that’s being done much anymore. WHY IS THIS IMPORTANT - Because it was fun.

The headline was provocative and definitely developed with humour, however the responses did not reflect this at all. The post received a huge amount of attention, some people disputing the title, others correcting bad grammar, others offering praise for it's content and general pleasure in reading it, some found it humorous and others of a younger audience were delighted in the associated fear and resignation it implied.

The salient, although long winded point here, is that it generated response, a tremendous amount of two way conversation via Social channels and the device that triggered this response in this instance, was the subject header – Social Media has Ruined Marketing.

Some questions to ask when you are preparing your shareable content via any social channel -

• How well planned are your header or subject lines or are they often cobbled together as an afterthought?
• Are you invoking feedback or sales? How enticing or provocative is the header?
• Do your brand values prohibit you from creativity when developing this component of your communication?
• Are you doing any subject line testing or similar to test effectiveness?
• Are you asking yourself when you read the header/subject line – Am I boring you yet?

If the answer is yes…

~Amanda

Is your email marketing tool the right solution for your business?

After working in the email marketing industry (supplier side) for the past 8 years, I have noticed some interesting progressions and not surprisingly, some regressions.

I've had the good fortune to be involved in the industry from a global perspective over the past 18 months and believe that NZ needs some educating on what is now available. The breadth of email marketing deployment solutions now available to NZ businesses now surpasses anything of recent times.

As a nation, we tend to call the biggest agency representing our requirements, and book an appointment, this may be the result of a Google search, market representation, longevity in the space or a past relationship. All of these decision making processes are inclined to be innate, easy and possibly flawed.

I'd question, how often a Direct Communications Team/Marketing Team sit down and do a formal tender to market. Or, if there is a lack of internal resource, approach a consultant to prepare a needs analysis of a solution, develop an RFP and receive responses based upon actual business requirements.

I'd challenge all businesses with databases upwards of 30 to 40k to question whether the email channel is progressing and increasing in engagement levels or declining or ineffectual and static. To roughly assess whether or not your business may require some external assistance or added attention from within….

• Do you have a 6-12 month email marketing plan of activity to work to?

• Does this channel represent a fulfillment of allocated marketing budget OR actually deliver, following a clear brief that includes primary objectives, perhaps some database segmentation, some engaging creative and post campaign analysis?

• Is your email channel integrated with any of your site analytics, whether that be GA or something more enhanced, such as Omniture or similar?

• What does your email reporting suite tell you or what would you love it tell you?

• Does the tool include an API for real time customer gratification?

• Can you re-market easily to customers based upon their behavior within your site?

• Are you doing any of the basics…at one stage, this was considered to be a load and blast campaign, this is now a birthday email or something more appreciative than your day to day campaigning?

The number 8 wire, hire locally owned and operated, blah blah blah is all well and good and I'm all for supporting local business when it makes sound commercial sense, however laziness and familiarity means that potentially many NZ businesses are not getting the best bang for their buck in this channel at all. In essence, they are compromising great tools and analytics for support or familiarity.

What this discussion could look like -

• This channel has to deliver, we need assistance with email design or teaching our in-house designers to optimize the channel and coding,

• As a business we need to be relevant and engaging so delivering dynamic content is not negotiable,

• We need to be able to reward customers for just being customers so setting up automated emails in real time for Welcomes and birthdays etc will be necessary,

• We need to track the sales process and perhaps re-market to people that have left the website without converting,

• Due to our database set-up, we need an alternate solution than email address as the unique identifier, the tool we select will need to deliver on this as standard,

• We'll need to be able to throttle sends, recently our website has been timing out with too many hits.

This would be a remarkably different list for a B2B email requirement, but you get the picture.

From carrying out the needs/gap analysis, your solution requirements may end up looking something more like this -

We need to hire a professional in the space to assist with needs/gap analysis
We definitely need help when preparing an RFP
Preferably, we'll review responses from NZ/Australian support (2-3 hours is no biggy in email delivery) and see 3 of the best
Whilst we are finding a solution, we'll research some email/digital design agency's – this may be managed internally but not being done well
Contract a supplier that has an email tool that ticks all the boxes
Carry out quarterly reviews to ensure the channel is evolving and maintaining engagement and performance levels.

If any of this resonates with you…contact us via our website, or email me on amanda@skinnymarketing.com and we can continue the conversation.

~Amanda

The skinny on updating your details…

My challenge - I want to keep getting your emails, but I need to change my email address.

What does it mean to a business to provide a quick and easy process for a customer to "update their details' online? A great big chunk of people that unsubscribe do so because content in the email is irrelevant (roughly 49%), but outside of this, a common reason is quite simply that someone on your database moves job or swaps their free mail provider from one to another.

As part of my leaving CheetahMail and moving on to Skinny Marketing, I had to unsubscribe from over 40 email lists, from Just Jeans to Media Post and Click Z out of the States. Now admittedly, because I am in the industry, I am subscribed to an inordinate amount of email programs but for the purpose of this exercise, enough to provide me with an adequate sample to "test".

The result was that only 5 of over 40 gave me the option to update my email address in place of unsubscribe. Typically speaking, more often than not, I had to unsubscribe with no options and then set about finding the option to resubscribe, which proved impossible to those companies who only subscribe people who have actually converted following an online sale or full registration. The new version of SmartMail kindly offers me a survey to give a reason for my unsubscribe which includes (change of email address) but does not then provide me with a way with which to do it. Others like MailChimp reconfirm that I have been removed but ask me twice if I am absolutely positive of my opting out but again, does not offer an option to update my details or change my email address.

There is quite simply, nothing more useless than begging me to stay but not supplying me with a quick and easy method with which to do it.

This is a low cost solution that is easily able to be carried online, but as you can see, not many businesses offer it. When taking into account the cost of acquiring a new customer or subscriber, it may be advisable to carry out a quick experiment of how easy it is to offer your customers the ability to change their email address vs opting out and back in again, or similar. It may be one small thing that reduces your data churn rate and enhances your subscribers experience in this process. Either way, I guarantee, the outcome will be positive.

~Amanda

Moving information from Facebook to Google +

Now that Google + is (reportedly) about to hit 10 million users, maybe you have decided that you want to leave Facebook and move over or, more likely, try using both while we see who wins out. But after 3 years of posting photos and making/stalking friends, you don't want to lose your entire online life & start again. This blog will detail a couple of the ways you can move your information over.
Friends are why we go on to social networks, so it is important to be able to bring them over. This is really easy and only takes 10 minutes or so.

First of all you need a Yahoo email account, just like when you were 16. Once you have your Yahoo account open, click on "Add contacts" and then on "tools" and in the drop down choose "import...". From here you can import the email addresses of all of your Facebook buddies. Easy.

Next step is to export them to GMail. After your Facebook contacts have been added to your Yahoo account, click on "tools" again, and select "export..." and choose the option to export as a Yahoo! CSV file. This will download all of the email addresses onto your desktop somewhere. Now go and open up Gmail, go into "Contacts" and click on "More Actions", then "import". Find the CSV file (it will be called Yahoo_ab.csv or something like that) and double click it.

All of your contacts will now be synced/merged with the data from Facebook, and all of the new contacts will be visible when you go into G+, so you can add them to your circles and send them invites. Boom!

Next is the photos. To get these en masse, open up your Facebook and head into Account Settings. In there you will see an option "Download Your Information." A few self explanatory clicks later and a huge download will be coming your way. This takes a while, so go make a cup of tea. I recommend Sencha. Once it has finished, you will have a folder that is called whatever your profile name is, and will look like this:



Inspiring stuff. Open up the Photos folder and you will see all of your albums are conveniently stored in their own folder. You will need to create new albums in G+ one by one, but the photos can be uploaded in groups. And as an added bonus, the titles you gave your photos in Facebook are all saved as the file name, so you will not lose that - but you will lose comments, likes & tags.

So now we have all of our friends and all of our photos moved over. I am still playing round with getting old posts across, and I am waiting for G+ to integrate with Google Calendar so that I can import my FB events, but for now it is easy to get the most important stuff moved over.

Have fun :)

*Note: Google + does have a direct "import contacts from Yahoo" button, however this was not working for me, hence the extra step to import them into gmail.

Google +: Facebook killer?

Hopefully. After 1 week of playing with it, I am impressed. The ease of keeping your profile secure from certain people, being able to easily see exactly what information is displayed to who, as well as "Hang outs" and a few other features are great.

Using the exclusive invite-only style of marketing that was the halmark of Gmail's launch has seen the social media geeks (like me) feeling more special than we should about using it during the "test phase", and has helped ensure that we all trumpet on about how cool the network is and how everyone should be on there. Indeed, the system has been broken 2 or 3 times since launch due to oversubscription causing problems for their servers. This has meant that even people with invites could not access the system unless they were quick. This bodes well for the future of the network.

A social network is only as good as it's members. The analogy of being the first and only person to own a fax machine rings true. One of my first posts stated that I would only move completely over from Facebook if at least 50% of my ex-girlfriends, or my crush also moved over to Google +. In short, everyone will need a reason to move over, but the reason will be the same for everyone; the people they want to engage with. The fact that the the uptake of the network has surpassed even Google's expectations perhaps points equally to Google's burnt fingers over their previous attempts (Buzz was a fizzer, Wave washed out) as well as the enthusiasm that people have to a genuine competitor to Facebook.

So, what is it like? A person I follow on Twitter described it as "Facebook without it's clothes on", and from a layout point of view it does look very similar, albeit a stripped out version. You can stalk my public profile here to see for yourself, or go sign up here - if the sign up is working.

The two main advantages from my point of view (wearing my consumer hat now) is that it is very easy to control what content is displayed to who, via the "Circles". I have 6 circles set up at the moment: Friends, followers, workmates, colleagues, family & ex-girlfriends. Every time I post any content (text, photos etc) I have to choose which circles can view it. There are also options to post content to everyone on the web (public - like twitter), or "extended circles" (friends of friends). This makes it incredibly easy to make sure my ex-girlfriends only ever see my highlights reel, while my workmates only ever see me sober. Although Facebook does have the option to split your friends into groups with different security settings, it is a bit of a pain in butt to do this, and generally only the social media geeks get it sorted.

Another cool feature of Google + is "Hangouts". This is video chat for multiple people. It can also be used as a means of broadcasting events like conferences, concerts, your stupid dog singing along to Bernard Fanning...whatever, all with the added interactivity of being able to talk back & get involved. The coolness of this feature has already been countered by the addition of Skype video calling to the Facebook chat function, however the quick roll out of this shows how seriously Facebook is taking the Google + threat.

Although I have an iPhone, I have been told that the way Google + can be used with an Android powered phone is fantastic, particularly in regards to photo uploading. I can't wait to see how an iPhone app will work.

Currently Google + is only set up for regular consumers (not business), but they have worked with several companies (Ford, Mashable etc) to build a few test company profiles which will be rolled out in the next two weeks, and they have received several thousand applications from companies to be included in further testing. However in an earlier release google recommended that companies hold off until full support is offered in the "next few months". It will be interesting to see how these company pages can integrate the suite of other Google services, including AdWords, Adsense, maps, YouTube etc. But the scope from a marketing point of view is huge. When you consider the vast information available to marketers currently using Google, the mouth waters at what this platform will allow (marketers hat on now).

So, is it a Facebook killer? I hope so, as I am someone who values being able to control who sees what information about me. However, it will require a quick uptake from the cool kids to see a major shift from what is currently the largest social networking site in the world.

But the future looks promising. This blog post speculates that as of July 10, there were already over 6 million users on Google +. This kind of growth (if accurate) in just over a week is fantastic, but it will need to be sustained before we can start calling Google + a Facebook killer. Until then, I will keep my fingers crossed, keep posting about issues, and trying my hardest to break it during the test period.

Good luck Google!

Have you tried Google +? Would you move from Facebook?

Social media principles - free to a good home

This is a synopsis of the advice I give all of my clients during our initial meeting, and some of what I talk about when giving my painful lectures/presentations. It is the slow, patient, credible, organic way of maximizing your results from social media. I have found these principles to be pretty solid over the 4 years I have been involved in this industry, but please know this is more about the day-to-day running of your presences.

This is deliberately vague and will require patience to see results. It is not an (A + B) x C = Retirement/fire-the-ad-agency in 6 months kind of plan.

• Social media is social. Think about what kind of social event your company would host. The same rules of engagement & conversation apply. My personal style of social event would be a bbq. I would let people swear a bit (ok, a lot), but not be (overly) offensive to other guests. I would occasionally talk about the fun things I had done lately at work, or interesting things in the industry. I would not hand out business cards or openly solicit new business. Think about what social event you would have with your clients/providers/friends etc. Dinner party? Golf day? High tea? Whatever suits your brand's personality. Think about what kind of conversations you would have at this event. Replicate this same style of engagement on your social media platforms.

• Build a vocabulary of words to use more frequently in your social media/blog posts. Make these words representative of the way you want your company to be perceived. They will give your brand a controlled personality that will show you in a desired light, and help potential customers (and future employees) align themselves with your brand. This is my personal brand on Twitter as a tweet cloud. The bigger the word, the more frequently I use it: http://tweetcloud.com/search/from/antsgardiner

• Be consistent with the timing & content. If you use your twitter account to tell jokes, do not suddenly change to a marketing push and vice versa. And by timing I mean do not forget about twitter for 3 weeks then suddenly send 20 tweets in a day (or FB updates, or blog posts etc). A content plan can help with this. When I ran SM for the military I had 3-6 months of content planned in advance, but I was always flexible with that and would talk about other content as it became topical.

• Social media is two way. Do not think about what message you want to shout, think about what conversation you want to have, and who you want to talk with. Social media, and in particular Twitter, should be viewed more as a customer service channel, NOT a marketing channel. If you publicly treat your audience well with these channels, they will do your marketing for you in a word of mouth way that is more powerful than any message you could push out yourself.

• Facebook tabs can do anything these days. ANYTHING. Here is one I built that broadcasts live TV while also displaying a twitter feed of related comments and allowing people to discuss what is happening via Facebook comments: http://www.facebook.com/skinnymarketing?sk=app_104908912928390 You can build a tab that does anything you want, and use these to give your audience a reason to stick around, and a reason to talk about you.

• Use your Facebook insights page to learn about your main audience segments. Use other statistical information and sites like www.klout.com to identify the mass influencers within your audience and target ads (above the line, plus sm ad campaigns like FB ads or Twitter promotions) directly to this group to get the best bang for your buck.
  

Anyhoo, these are some pretty solid techniques which, if followed, will eventually help you to organically build a credible following/fanbase of engaged people, all of whom will run to the shops and buy whatever self-diagnosis DNA testing kit you are selling.

If patience is not your virtue, there is always the option of running a big flashy promotion. Just make sure you follow the rules....

Put anything in a Facebook tab

Forgive me. I have not blogged in almost a year. I have had an internal debate about whether or not social media marketing was the new telemarketing.

Anyhoo, recently Facebook has changed what they will allow you to do in a Facebook tab. Previously you had to use Facebook Mark up Language (FBML) which although breakable, was a real P.o.S to work with. These days you can put anything you want into a tab. If you can dream it you can build it, and by and large it is not very hard. I mean I can do it, and I am hungover. Surely you could do it even better.

I thought I had better share some of the new possibilities. Not enough people have both the social media knowledge and the coding ability to implement cool stuff. This post will contain an example of what you can now do with your Facebook page, along with the code & step by step to get it working on your site. The code stuff may look crazy, but it is pretty simple. Your social media consultant/geek should be able to sort it out & change it round.

Anyone with even as limited coding knowledge as me (1 year learning) can build cool stuff into their pages.

Example: Recently I built a test tab for a TV station which allowed them to show their lunchtime news bulletin live on one of their Facebook tabs. It also displayed a live Twitter feed of hashtagged comments, and had a Facebook livestream function on the same tab - allowing people to gossip about whatever was on TV.

Interactive TV inside your Facebook tab anyone?

Here is the tab, with the NZ TV channel taken out & replaced with live CBS from a uStream feed. (note: I also set up and ran a test of this using a live uStream feed from my phone - you really can do anything with it)

http://www.facebook.com/skinnymarketing?sk=app_104908912928390

And here is the entire code you need to build it:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
<title>CBS test</title>
</head>

<body>

<table width="500" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0">
<tr>
<td width="360" valign="top"><center><object classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000" width="360" height="246" id="utv800336"><param name="flashvars" value="autoplay=false&amp;brand=embed&amp;cid=522594&amp;v3=1"/><param name="allowfullscreen" value="true"/><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"/><param name="movie" value="http://www.ustream.tv/flash/viewer.swf"/><embed flashvars="autoplay=false&amp;brand=embed&amp;cid=522594&amp;v3=1" width="360" height="246" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" id="utv800336" name="utv_n_836313" src="http://www.ustream.tv/flash/viewer.swf" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" /></object><br /><br />
<div id="fb-root"></div><script src="http://connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js#appId=104908912928390&amp;xfbml=1"></script><fb:live-stream event_app_id="104908912928390" width="360" height="300" xid="" always_post_to_friends="false"></fb:live-stream></td>
<td width="120"><script src="http://widgets.twimg.com/j/2/widget.js"></script>
<script>
new TWTR.Widget({
version: 2,
type: 'search',
search: '#CBS',
interval: 6000,
title: 'Tweets with #CBS',
subject: '',
width: 120,
height: 500,
theme: {
shell: {
background: '#8ec1da',
color: '#ffffff'
},
tweets: {
background: '#ffffff',
color: '#444444',
links: '#1985b5'
}
},
features: {
scrollbar: true,
loop: true,
live: true,
hashtags: true,
timestamp: true,
avatars: true,
toptweets: true,
behavior: 'default'
}
}).render().start();
</script></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td colspan="2"></td>
</tr>

</table>
</body>
</html>

That is it! 55 lines of code and we are there. To plug it into your Facebook page, copy & paste it, save it as a .aspx Facebook iFrame support does not like .html much), and stick it up on your server somewhere.

Next we have to set up the app in Facebook, in 4 steps:

1) Go to http://www.facebook.com/developers/ and click on " + set up a new app". Give it a name & agree to the terms and conditions.

2) In the canvas URL box enter the address to the folder on your server where you hid the code - make sure you put the forward slash at the end of the folder address!!

3) In the Page URL box, enter the full address for the code you uploaded to your server:

4) Save it, go to "Application Profile Page" then click on "Add to my Page"

That is it. You are all done. Now if this makes no sense to you, don't worry. Give it to your geek and they will suss it out.

As bung/geeky as this code may look, it is three really simple bits of code that anyone can find on the internet, all glued together in a table 520 pixels wide (maximum width of a FB tab) and with 20 spare pixels for scroll bars to appear without breaking it. You can embed anything you want in your Facebook tab - YouTube, chat, google analytics, your office/factory/restaurant/bar's webcam, radio stream....anything you want.

Now if you will forgive me, I am going for a beer.