Marketing with Technology and More

Are you getting too Personal?

About ten years ago I came across a very useful formula that has worked very well in most situations when SubscriberMail clients building forms to gather data as part of their email campaigns.  I do not remembe r the original source of this formula (and it may even come from traditional direct response world).  However, if you follow it, it will serve you well.

Many marketers who come to the world of email  start building data collection forms and easily fall into the trap of turning the form into a marketing survey.  The result, a reduced number of subscribers, subscriber irritation, and potentially negative brand impression.  The key questions to ask is how are you going to use the data you collect in an email  interaction.  If you can't explain how you are going to use it to segment or personalize the message in someway, don't ask for it. 

But still, you may have the urge to ask those questions, so here is the Personalization Index to empirically determine are you asking for too much.  Take the number of data items you use in a customer interactions and divide them by the total number of data elements you are gathering.  If the total is .3 or less, you are gathering too much information.  A "PI" of .3 means that for every 3 elements you gather, you are only using one (which is still probably a bit on the high side, but you may have planned uses for the others in the future).

Good to the last drop

Seth Godin had a post today about marketing that delivers exactly the message marketers (and salespeople for that matter) need to hear as the economy gets tougher.  Now is the time to stick to your marketing progams.  Only he says it in a way that it almost sounds like poetry.

More Juice for your Iphone

I love my Iphone, but some times the battery life leaves a bit to be desired.  I just heard about a new  device called Juice Pack.  It is an add on pack that weighs about a pound.  You can see the details at their site .  The only downside right now is it appears that it only works with First Generation IPhones.  

The Question still is why doesn't Apple make the battery in the Iphone swappable?

Mini Vanity URL's a Real Plus in The Social Networking World

You know how terrible long url’s can be to type or transmit.  This becomes even a bigger issue if you are in a trying to create a message using a mobile device or on a social networking site like Twitter where you are limited to a short number of characters. 

For some time, services like tinyurl have been available that basically translate a long url into a short one that uses the tinyurl services domain and then redirects the user to the original url.  The problem was that the urls were randomly generated, so you would end up with something like f03m as the extension on the domain.

Now, at least one of these services has added the ability to create custom mini urls, think of them as vanity urls.  The service is budurl, and if you go to www.budurl.com/createaurl you can set up a free account and see how the service works.  What is unique about the url that you can click on above to get there is that I created it.  I can also now track the click traffic on it.  This is extremely useful if the url is used on a social networking site such as twitter. 

Budurl, provides a top level dashboard view, as well as a more detailed clickstream view (see sample report in image a right).  This is a tool that is definitely worth checking out.  I would also strongly suggest that you sign up for your own company’s domain and a personal one (for example, www.budurl.com/emailblog will bring you to this page in the future).

Marketing Prof's Digital Mixer - A perfect mix

 

Just returned from Phoenix after attending Marketing Prof’s Digital Mixer.  It was an outstanding event.  I have been to their events in the past, but this one was the best by far.  In trying to put my finger on what made this event great,  I thought back to other events I have attended that had a similar feel. 

The first, was a conference organized by Peter Senge in the early 90’s at Bretton Woods.  The second was a gathering Tom Peters organized in 2002 and invited a few of his “cool friends” to (I had the honor of joining that list after the publication of my first book, Aha) along with some major corporate leaders.  The third happens every year when I attend the TED Conference. 

The feeling at each of these events comes from the participants, not from the content.  Sure the content is important, most of us would never go if the content did not draw us in (or we were not invited to deliver some of it).  The people and the dialogue that go on in the halls, at dinner (or in this case in the casino) are where new connections are made and ideas launched.  At each of these events in the past, there were incredible individuals that I connected with, some who have become life-long friends, others mere acquaintances, but none-the-less, the conversations were life changing for me and many of the participants. 

At Bretton Woods, I met many of the influential leaders of the then very hot Learning Organization community.  I formed a loose partnership with one of them, and we worked together for several years in a variety of interesting ways that led me to the publication of my creativity book, and built a great management development business. 

In Vermont, I connected with many influentials of the digital world who were starting to change the way we viewed the web.  Seth Godin, Dan Pink, Marti Barletta, Robyn Waters, David Weinberger and many more.  I had started SubscriberMail at that time, and the ideas and feedback that came out of that gathering helped shape the vision for our organization.

TED every year is simply TED.  It defies description beyond the fact that it is the single event that I attend that requires I take a vacation afterwards to process the input.  You can certainly read more about TED on this blog, but you can experience some of the content at the TED website.

Now I come to this event, which I have fondly just started to refer to as #mpdm .  For those of you who Twitter, you will understand the reference, the rest of you, will soon.  From my perspective, this event fell into the same basket with the ones I have named above because of the participants.  There were many of the people I know from the email world, along with some of the SEO world.  The catalyst at this event however were the Social Media participants.   They verified for me that this is indeed and exciting marketing element, and in my mind they were the “who’s who” of this new space. 

I am sure that many of the participants formed relationships that are going to fuel new business ventures, create great new concepts and build new marketing ideas.  Many of the connections I made are people I plan to stay connected with and hope to get to know better in the years to come.  I think we will all be on this new marketing road together, and boy does it look cool.  Sure the economy is glum, but with opportunity like this, why worry?  As one of the keynote speakers Gary Vaynerchuk (future owner of the NY Jets) stated so eloquently, in the down economy, the first thing big companies will drop is their funding and focus on new marketing initiatives (like social media).   This creates fantastic opportunities for everyone currently in the space and willing to invest work, time and money.