Marketing today: marketing

Social Media Tools

Mon, 04 Feb 2008 05:22:26 GMT

This week I am giving a session at THE Conference on Marketing. The title of my session is Beyond the Banner; How Social Media will innovate your marketing campaigns. The focus of the session is how to use the social media tools available to brand marketers. There are several other sessions at this conference that highlight campaigns using Second Life and MySpace (virtual worlds and viral videos) so I'm not going to cover those, but I definitely agree those are Social Media tools to be considered for the right brand. Also, blogging is a social media tool. But that's a whole topic in and of itself.

The tools I am highlighting are ones we've used in Windows Live before, and a few we haven't. I'm focusing on using communication tools found in people's everyday life to communicate your brand message. The tools are:

Social networking sites - Facebook
Gadgets
Sponsored Spaces
Messenger Expressions
Micro-blogging

Facebook; Lot's of brands are trying stuff here so there is no shortage of test cases to study. Music and movies are being marketed by distributors and production companies. The amount of reach a marketer can get on Facebook for the cost is mind boggling. These activities mainly build brand awareness and affinity. Not a bad thing but the real power of Facebook is in the gadgets... leading to the next tool.

Gadgets: Light-weight applications that are hosted on many different platforms depending on where you want to post your message. Facebook, MySpace, Spaces all support gadget. More about those here.

Sponsored Spaces: Custom pages that brands can build on one of the social media platforms; Spaces, MySpace, Ning. They are microsites usually dedicated to a specific campaign or audience. We created a microsite on Spaces for the Spiderman 3 DVD release this fall. Easy and free to set up and can be linked to any existing brand website.

Messenger Expressions: 27 million people talking every month with an average contact list of 45 people. Creating custom emoticons and backgrounds gives your brand loyalists a way to express themselves with your brand to their family and friends. If I could get one of these with an UGG on it I would use it for sure!

Micro-blogging: communication tool that allows users to send quick updates to public or private networks. JetBlue and Carnival are using Twitter to send timely updates on schedule changes and last minute bargains to their most loyal customers.

My final thoughts slide;

•People don’t pay as much attention when brands are doing the talking. People listen to influencers.

•Social media builds long term relationship and dialog with your most devoted customers – quality over quantity.

•Engagement is the most important indicator of social media branding success.

•Measure engagement interaction including; 3rd party sites, brand favorability, purchase intent, send to a friend

•Explore how Social Media best fits into the Marketing mix for your brand over time – Remember the tortoise beat the hare!

If you still want more, or you attended the session and would like a copy of the deck it's here. Please remember all content is owned and copy write protected by Microsoft.

Technorati tags: The conference on marketing, marketing, social media, blogging

This is a good one - ElfYourself.com

Mon, 21 Jan 2008 17:52:15 GMT

I got 'elfed' at least five times that I can remember this holiday season. Did you? Being an obsessive marketer I kept asking myself 'is this campaign really driving sales for Office Max?" Results are in and while sales wasn't the goal of the campaign, it did in fact drive brand awareness. Here is an article that breaks down the results.

What I really like about the article is the mention of engagement as a form of metric, not just page views. The Office Max elf site had a ridiculous amount of page views. Good for them? Well, maybe. You can't take page views to the bank and deposit them. Page views don't show up on the shareholders report (at least they shouldn't if that's not the company's revenue stream). So page views alone for a retail business that only makes money if someone buys something isn't a good metric to use. However, the AdAge article addresses this concerns and calls out the goal for the campaign was brand awareness, not sales. They reported the increase in the search term Office Max for the month of December as a gage for increased brand awareness. I buy that. And as someone who got more than a few of these elf e-cards I have to say I was surprised at how well I could recall the brand behind it.

Technorati tags: ElfYourself.com, marketing, viral marketing

5 Worst sites according to Time

Sat, 19 Jan 2008 16:38:42 GMT

I like that Time didn't take the easy road out on this one. 'Worst' to them means meaningless or hard to use, not least popular. I agree with this approach.

eHarmony - bummer here. I have two friends that have found partners with this site. Unhappy to hear they don't allow gays.
Evite - This would be a great time to promote Windows Live Events
Meez - Never heard of it
MySpace - Definitely agree! This site is a mess (IMHO). The last thing I would do is put any kind of personal information up here.
Second Life - As I've been saying all along, don't get this site at all.

Technorati tags: marketing, websites

Find your hole and plug it

Thu, 17 Jan 2008 17:38:02 GMT

There are several different high level marketing strategy's a company can engage in from top down. Knowing different strategies appeal to different parts of a business, how do you chose your true north? Here's what I think - FIRST; find your hole and plug the leak. In other words, build a kick-ass engagement or retention plan - whatever you want to call it. We all know the old additive 'it's cheaper to keep a customer then go find a new one.' But even I will admit sometimes we all stray. The new customer is exciting and, well, new. Quite frankly it feels more like marketing to report number of new customers. But let's play that out for a minute.

Say you build a rockin' awareness campaign that gets 15% new customers. Not bad. Pretty exciting. But what if at the same time 12% of your existing customers got bored or saw something new and sexy from your competitor and jumped ship. Your net new for the month then drops to 3%. How much did that awareness campaign cost you? Was it worth only 3% increase? What is your cost per customer acquisition then? Not so good.

But say you'd already done the hard work, you shored up your leak. Then the same acquisition campaign nets you the 15% new customers. How do you do that? Do exit interviews if you can. This is probably wishful thinking in most cases so do some research studies to understand why your customers are leaving. Does the product or service suck? If you are selling a commodity are your prices too high? [BTW, if you are a consulting business or some king of business that doesn't have regular repeat customers you could think of this as does your existing customer base refer you to other customers? I used to work at an architecture firm and know most customers only need a Master Plan about every 20 years. So we focused on how we could leverage the happy customers to get new business.]

Another great thing about having a strong engagement campaign is the viral payoff. If you invest the same amount you spent for the shiny new acquisition campaign into a great engagement campaign not only will you stop the churn so any new customers are net new, you will also find payoff in viral growth. Happy, engaged customers talk!

Technorati tags: marketing, viral marketing

It's not about You

Thu, 10 Jan 2008 05:50:56 GMT

One thing that was very clear to me this week as I have been inundated by two news stories, CES and the New Hampshire primary, is that the biggest chance anyone has for success whether they are selling a product or running for office is to find out what you can do for others. Does your marketing focus on the needs of your company or on the needs of others? It has been said that the recent serge in the polls by Obama is due to the fact that his campaign focuses on what he will do with people, putting the focus on others, not himself. As another famous politician said, "ask not what your country can do for you but what YOU can do for your country."

The same is with CES. I've been demoing Windows Live to people who stop by the Microsoft booth this week. There is a fair number of start-ups looking for partnerships, or possibly acquisition. I've had several people come by asking me questions, looking for the right person to pitch their product or service to. What's interesting is they spend a whole lot of time talking about what their service does or how their product works, but they spend little to no time talking about how their product will empower the customer to do more. Here's a bit of advice, could be worth the amount you paid for it but here goes. When pitching;

Focus on what you can do for others, how does your product or service empower others to be better or do better?
Understand how your product benefits my business. I had someone pitch me a service that would charge $0.03 per photo for storage. I explained to him we don't work on a subscription fee and would have to absorb that cost against our advertising revenue. Had he thought about that in his pitch? No.
Understand what my customer values. If you haven't done your research on my customer my ability to be dazzled in significantly decreased. Someone pitched me a concept that from all of our customer research I know my customer doesn't value enough to pay for.
Believe in your product 110%. I'll ask tough questions in order to see your passion. If you truly believe in your product your confidence won't falter.
Be willing to accept that your product doesn't meet the needs of everyone and that's okay. Whenever I'm at a show I get the obligatory guy (yes, it's always a guy) that comes up and tells me he's about to buy a Mac and he can't deal with Vista anymore. My response is "If your needs are met by a Mac better than a PC then you should definitely go with the one that works better for your needs." They never expect me to say this, they think I'm going to try and sell them on a PC but I have no interest or desire to sell someone a product that doesn't fit their needs. Chances are great they won't be happy, they will either return it or tell all their friends how unhappy they are. Not a good experience for anyone. Usually after I've said that the guy then says, "Well, show me what you've got. Maybe I'll change my mind." I'm not kidding, that really happens.

Technorati tags: marketing, CES, Obama

Blockbuster, Jackass and MSFT

Wed, 19 Dec 2007 17:12:43 GMT

It's the holiday time, which means reruns, football games and family. You may be looking for some alternative tv viewing which will undoubtedly take you online to the video viewing site of your choice. If you are over 17 and like stupid human tricks check out www.blockbuster.jackassworld.com. Today Blockbuster will premiere the first full-length feature film, Jackass 2.5, directly to online audiences on Windows and Mac using Microsoft Silverlight. This is one of the largest projects in Blockbuster history, made possible using the rich media CDN from Limelight Networks and Silverlight. To view you will need to download Silverlight here. This marks a transformational shift in how users are choosing to consume their media today and in the near future, a trend that Microsoft is paying attention to and enabling with Silverlight.

What's interesting is a conversation going on internally at MSFT regarding the decision to co-brand with Jackass. Silverlight is an open developer platform so MSFT doesn't restrict use to anyone, regardless of brand. That much is completely understandable. The question that internal folks have is why we are promoting the partnership and is Jackass a brand MSFT wants to be associated with. Brand equity is a very valuable asset and not one that any company should regard carelessly. Does partnering with Jackass erode MSFT brand to our most loyal and trusted consumer base, families? My opinion, No. Not when you are talking about consumers. This is a developer story driving awareness of new technology to developers. Consumers will not pick up this story, particularly at the time of year it's being announced.

I would guess Jackass is more accepted brand among developers than families so the partnership is probably a good fit. It's a challenge when a company as big as MSFT has so many different audiences to consider when making partnership choices. Gamers, techies, mommies, COO's; it would be impossible to please all of them with one marketing message. The trick then becomes not alienating the masses and targeting your message so you don't hit the wrong audience with a message not intended for them.

Technorati tags: marketing, microsoft, blockbuster, silverlight

Road trip Campaign launches

Mon, 07 May 2007 15:45:48 GMT

I launched a new Spaces campaign on Friday that's been a lot of fun to work on. As part of the MSN's Live Earth campaign this summer Spaces will be running a few integrated campaigns. A week ago we launched the Live Earth Space and Friday we announced the Windows Live Spaces road trip. I'll be on the road next week attending the casting calls in Boston, NY, Chicago and LA and look forward to seeing everyone that comes out.

Technorati tags: Windows Live Spaces, MSN, Live earth, road trip

Buzz marketing - does it drive sales?

Fri, 06 Apr 2007 15:53:15 GMT

I went to a buzz marketing training session last week that was entertaining but not too revolutionary. The big thing right now is to talk about buzz marketing and consumer generated content. There are thousands of examples of these consumer generated content pieces, in fact I've identified a few in my blog, my favorite being here. But what I'm still missing is how this has moved the needle on brand equity, revenue, customer acquisition, etc. You get the picture.

Here is a great blog post from Sara Holoubek about measurements for next generation marketing (that's my term -- I made it up). She argues that we shouldn't be using old school metrics to determine the success for buzz marketing strategies like Second Life. I completely agree. Buzz marketing is a long term play when you are talking about building brand equity, I agree with that too. But I still have this voice in my head, really it's my finance prof's voice, saying "what do you have to show for it?" And I'm not saying these campaigns aren't the right way to go or that I don't love them. In fact I'm pitching one right now to the higher powers that be in my group. What I am saying is I don't hear anyone talking about success of the campaigns in terms of sales, or PV or whatever your metric is. I'm talking about long term effects, not instant click through's. But does your research actually show that a buzz campaign made your audience think you are cooler or are more likely to buy from you the next time they make a purchase?

I asked that question to the presenters at the training session last week and they looked at me like I was speaking Japanese or something. Then I asked them what they thought of the Forrester report on ROI of blogging which I actually loved. It was the first and only real piece of data I had seen to show impact and ROI. They had no idea what I was talking about and took a note to go find that report when they got back to the office. Did I mention these people I just written a book about Buzz marketing and were on a book tour which is why I think they were teaching this workshop.

Right....

Technorati tags: buzz marketing, marketing

Starbucks and Music

Tue, 13 Mar 2007 17:45:09 GMT

Starbucks formed a record label this week. What's notable about this is a few things. First of all, I thought they already had one? The record label is called HEAR (which I think is a great name). But they have been selling HEAR CD's in their store for over a year now. What was that if it wasn't a record label? I guess this means they are actually going to start recording music as opposed to re-publishing it like they have been doing.

I'm one of those people who does spend $4 for a mocha and have bought several CD's at Starbucks before. But what I noticed last week when I was in my local Starbucks was the two music machines where people could burn their own CD's was gone. I wouldn't have noticed except my daughter loved to listen to the music while we drank our coffee (okay. she's a cocoa girl). So I asked my barista what happened to the music machines. He said they got taken out a few days ago because it wasn't making any money. In fact, it was losing money and taking up room from tables. We chatted a bit and he felt the reason it didn't work was because the music selection on the machines was for an older crowd but the type of people that would burn a CD was a younger crowd so it was a mismatch between product and audience. Clearly the barista has thought about this a bit and I think he's on to something. He also added he was glad the music machines were gone because he didn't like the music selection it offered and the store was forced to play what was in the selection. Now that the music machines are gone they can go back to playing what's particular to their taste.

Lovely chatting with my barista!

Technorati tags: Starbucks, music, marketing

Sony kills their brand

Thu, 08 Mar 2007 16:22:49 GMT

If only I had this kind of time and talent. I'm more than happy to pass on the love though. Take a listen....

Muse bot

Wed, 07 Mar 2007 16:43:47 GMT

Great article about the latest additions to Spaces. I'm a big fan of bots myself. I think they are a really strong way to make your site more sticky! Check out the Muse bot here.

Technorati tags: bots, marketing, Windows Live Spaces

Moving to Spaces!

Fri, 23 Feb 2007 18:38:55 GMT

I'm really excited to announce that starting on Monday I will be transferring over to the Live Spaces team! While I won't officially be an evangelist anymore (they will strip me of the title) I still feel like all of my marketing efforts are focused around evangelizing for MSFT. On my new team I will be responsible for marketing Spaces. I'm really excited by the challenge and expect to learn a lot about Social Networking. More to come on the new job but for now I say "DO YOU HAVE A SPACE?"

Technorati tags: social networking, marketing, blogging

What's in a Name?

Wed, 21 Feb 2007 17:22:28 GMT

I've named four things in my life, a dog, two kids and a website. I have to say I'm super happy with all my choices. But I didn't take naming any of those things lightly. Naming is hard whether it's a product, pet or person. You almost never get a chance to change your mind once it's out there. Of course we can think of examples of companies who have tried. Most recently Windows Live Mail announced it will return to Windows Live Hotmail. A subtle but dramatic attempt to maintain the brand equity built into the Hotmail name. But what about when you are naming something from the start. When I named Skyscrapr I used branding agency Siegel + Gale and I'm glad I did. There is another group here at MSFT that is planning to launch a new web site this spring and they have spent more time than you can imagine trying to come up with a catchy name. But does a name need to be catchy? How about just obvious, or memorable, or spellable! The one thing people give me crap about for Skyscrapr is that I dropped the 'e'. Every time you give someone the URL you have to say "Skyscrapr without the e". I did that for two reasons, 1. It made is a little different but more importantly 2. The URL wasn't available for Skyscraper. THAT'S the real reason.

If you haven't read Don't Make Me Think by Steve Krug you should. It's about web usability but the broader message is 'keep it simple'. Don't make your customers work to figure out what you mean.

My favorite new product name is Bebo. I have no idea what this means and I can never remember if it's Bepo or Bebo. But I'm sure the URL was available and it's in an industry where different and funky are required. I don't think P&G will be naming toothpaste anything like Bebo anytime soon.

What's in a name? A LOT.

Push vs. Pull Marketing

Fri, 16 Feb 2007 23:27:30 GMT

About Me

Wed, 14 Feb 2007 19:40:51 GMT

What I do

Tue, 13 Feb 2007 16:41:43 GMT

Executing on Value Propositions

Mon, 05 Feb 2007 20:54:18 GMT

Value propositions are a basic tool in marketing that is key to determining how a company is going to bring a product to market. A strong value proposition should move the product in the direction of the companies strength. Where a company goes wrong is following in the direction of the competitor. Don't get into a pattern of chasing competitors. Become customer centric with all value props. Focus on what value you offer your customer and this will sustain an offering longer than simply making a competitor play. It also weakens a value prop to focus on features alone. Someone can always come along and be bigger, smaller, faster, better. It's not a strong differentiator when it's easily duplicated by competitors.

According to Dipak Jain from Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University there are three types of value based segmentation; economic, functional and emotional. Economic focuses on savings. What is the best deal? Price is the main driver. Functional focuses on applications. Features are the main driver. Emotional is the highest and most difficult to reach. Emotional focuses on peace of mind, it's winning customers hearts. It's when a person trusts a brand and feels emotionally connected to it. A strong value proposition will excel at one of these. The functional and economic segmentations are the easier ones to deliver but emotional is the one everyone wants. Win their hearts and you've got a customer for life. You won't win hearts by focusing on competitors.

Microsoft love?

Fri, 02 Feb 2007 20:40:17 GMT

There is a really interesting blog post from Parislemon about the lack of love for Vista to go along with the splashy launch this week. I think this blogger is spot on about MSFT's lack of enthusiast customers. It's important to note that MSFST does 80% of its business B to B and only 20% is consumer. We get a lot of love from developers and business customers that consumers never see. But having said that it's also important to be aware that everyone is a consumer. And brands live and die in the courtroom of public opinion. So MSFT has to realize that regardless of what our business customers think the consumer response is what will affect public perceptions.

One possible reason it's so hard to find MSFT love is that it's become a hobby over the years of taking down the guy at the top. It's much easier to pick on someone when you know they can take it. But MSFT hasn't made the game any easier for ourselves. We occasionally do stupid things and say things that get misinterpreted. We need to be better about seeing our actions through the consumers eyes.

I would challenge everyone who is in marketing, Microsoft or not, to think of the customer first. If you always use the customer first mantra as a gage for your decision making it should make the decision pretty easy to make. For example, what if Microsoft had taken the millions it spent on the launch activities and instead created a program where customers could bring their PC's in to a store and a trained technician would install Vista on their machine for free. The customer would buy Vista and MSFT would install it. We are keenly aware that a major pain point for customers is not being able to manage the upgrade process. So logically speaking you want to do whatever you can to remove that pain point. It's what e-commerce stores have had to do with shipping charges. They found that customers again and again drop out of the purchase process after the shipping and tax is revealed. So now some sites have gotten smart. They either offer free shipping (my personal favorite) or they show a calculator that instantly shows your total with shipping and tax as you go. There is no big shocker at the end of the shopping experience that causes customers to bail out.

Image the positive customer satisfaction MSFT would have gotten if we'd offered to install Vista for them. Now there's an interesting proposition...

Vista Launch

Wed, 31 Jan 2007 22:47:41 GMT

It's no secret Microsoft launched it's latest version of the Windows operating system this week to the consumer market. There has been much debate about how long it took to get the product out and how many times the engineers had to start over. But I'm not going to talk about the product, I use it now and love it and I'll let the public determine what they think about it in the weeks and months to come. What I do want to mention is the amazing marketing campaign the Vista team created for launch. This is no small feat and I think probably most of us have no idea what goes into launching a product of this size. In fact there isn't another product on the planet that has the reach and influence Windows does on people's lives. That to me is fascinating. What's more interesting is that Microsoft doesn't spend nearly the amount of money people think we do on marketing a product like this. I don't know the actual dollar amount the Vista team spent but it's no where near what a car manufacturer or soft drink company would spend. Another challenge unique to Vista is the product appeal must span B to B and B to C customers. The value proposition to a CEO is going to be much different from the value prop you would lead with to a working mom or grandma but all of them are a core audience. And the CEO is not only an enterprise customer but also a consumer customer. How do you not confuse him in the marketing messages being sent?

Seth Godin posted a dig on his blog yesterday about the on stage presense at the NY launch and I get where he is coming from. But in good conscious that portion the NY Times chose to show was just one tiny piece of the launch experience. Here are a few things that I think the Vista team did very well;

1. They involved the customer during product planning. While Vista was in beta testing Microsoft worked with over 80 families from around the world to get feedback and recommendations on the product. Those recommendations made it into the final release and several of those families were featured at the launch event yesterday.

2. A little something for everyone. Vistas worked with Demetri Martin to build credibility with the influencial online community and they developed a website (clearification.com) that builds on that connection. There is no sell for Vista on the website or in Demetri Martin ad's. The strategy is to keep the message very low key for this particular audience that is ultra sensitive to marketing messages but at the same time draw an affiliation between Martin and Microsoft.

3. Something for the traditional Microsoft devs and bloggers. This is a core audience for Microsoft and while the launch has added elements that appeal to lots of different customer segments the techie is still where Microsoft gets it's love. John Mullinax does a great job of explaining the Vanishing Point game.

4. Messenging driven from a local level. While a products positioning statement is global the messenging should be done on a regional level. An example of something cool the Microsoft Austria sub did was get the most popular Austrian newspaper to run their home page demonstrating Vista. Pretty imaginative!

There are many more examples of the Vista launch in local markets. If you've seen any cool Vista marketing be sure and post a comment. I'd love to see it.

Blogger strategy - Step 1

Tue, 30 Jan 2007 20:55:00 GMT

I did an interesting interview with Jon Udell yeserday. He has started a new podcast series called Microsoft Conversations (podcast feed here). The interview may appear as part of that series, but if it doesn't I'll be sure and post it on this blog. I'm working on a blogger strategy and to date I haven't seen a company really nail this. I originally contacted him because he brings an interesting perspective about blogging. He is new to Microsoft and comes from the influencial blogger community, the exact audience I want to target. My main question for him was what does he think is the most effective way for marketers to use the blogosphere? How do bloggers want to be contacted and what is an appropriate way to get your message out to the blogosphere while still being respectful of that community. His advice was simple. Rather than sending press release type announcements and asking bloggers to post the news Jon suggested to first make sure someone is blogging the news on a company or personal blog. Once the news is posted on a blog it is acceptable to send an email to an influencial blogger that you may think is interested in your announcement. Send them ONE email with a link to the blog and a short description of why the blog would be interesting to them. Then leave it at that. You'll know through your blog tracking whether or not they click through the link and more importantly if they sign up for the RSS feed. The tricky part is to have the influencer network set up BEFORE you want to announce a new offering. That's what I'm working on right now, setting up an influencer network that would spread word of mouth to my targeted audience. By developing the relationships before you want something from them the influencers are able to see your offering and how it benefits them without hanging a bunch of marketing flare on the message.

Zune Opportunity

Tue, 23 Jan 2007 22:22:52 GMT

Here's an interesting story. There's a music sharing site in Canada called Zunior.com. They have been in business since 2004. It seems some folks think Zunior.com may have some trademark issues with Zune, Microsoft's MP3 player. This is one of those situations where a company has a decision to make. Do they take the opportunity to embrace a community and build great buzz alongside that community OR do they stay true to traditional business legal wrangling and try and protect the brand by suing or something corporate like that? To be clear, no one is insinuating that Microsoft has any plans to get Zunior.com to change their name. But this is a great example of an opportunity to let the community enhance the brand. Much has been written about how marketing has moved from a push (tell them who you are, what your brand means) to a pull (consumers decided what they want to see and how they will use it). Zunior.com has presented Zune with a great opportunity to network and build word of mouth through an established community. What if Zune featured an artist from Zunior.com once a month on their music sharing site. Or maybe they offer to distribute all Zunior.com music through Zune.net. Or there is featured content on Zune.net from the best music sharing sites on the web and they start by featuring Zunior.com. The possibilities are endless, but this is the golden opportunity that marketers should be looking for to build word of mouth and brand awareness with their audience. What better fit for Zune that Zunior.com!

Christopher Carfi published a very interesting Social Consumer Manifesto that I think would apply to this scenario – particularly the last bullet. It reads;

I want to have a say.
I don't want to do business with idiots.
I want to know when something is wrong, and what you're going to do to fix it.
I want to help shape things that I'll find useful.
I want to connect with others who are working on similar problems.
I don't want to be called by another salesperson. Ever. (Unless they have something useful. Then I want it yesterday.)
I want to buy things on my schedule, not yours. I don't care if it's the end of your quarter.
I want to know your selling process.
I want to tell you when you're screwing up. Conversely, I'm happy to tell you the things that you are doing well. I may even tell you what your competitors are doing.
I want to do business with companies that act in a transparent and ethical manner.
I want to know what's next. We're in partnership…where should we go?

Don't ask your customers to choose between traditional 'hit you over the head' marketing and community driven, peer recommended viral marketing. I'll guarantee you what will win.

An experience less than ideal had me wondering...

Wed, 17 Jan 2007 01:42:27 GMT

Welcome to my first blog post. I'm pretty excited to get some of the marketing speak that swims around in my head out in the open. I read lots of blogs and have a great deal of respect for people who share their experiences and knowledge with the masses. I thought it might be time for me to start giving back a bit.

I just finished the book World Wide Web Marketing by Jim Sterne. The book was okay, mostly targeted to people with little to no background in online marketing which wasn’t an ideal fit for me. But I did gleam a few tidbits from it so I consider it time well spent. One point the book makes that I think often falls short in marketing campaigns is follow through of your message across tactics. How many times have you seen a URL in a magazine or tv ad only to go to the website advertised and not be able to find the thing in the ad that drew you there in the first place? That makes the customer experience less than ideal to say the least. It can make the customer feel as if they have been baited in from the ad only to be dropped into never-never land without a clue how to get what they were originally drawn to. To my surprise I had this happen to me just today from a company that was marketing a marketing webinar of all things!

There was an ad on a newsletter I subscribe to called MarketingProfs that was advertising a free webinar. It sounded pretty interesting and let’s face it, it’s free! So I clicked on the link and signed up for the seminar. The thank you page told me I would be getting an email to confirm the details of the webinar. Makes sense. So I wait for the email and to my surprise two emails show up. Unfortunately I read them in order of most recent so the one I opened first was from a company called Perseus, which I had never heard of. It was from what I can only assume to be a sales rep. The introductory line says “Marty – here is some of the information you had requested. Please feel free to look over the website for more information.” Then it went on from there with more sales speak. I hadn’t the foggiest idea what this person was talking about or why this company is telling me I requested information. Then I read my next email that is in fact the confirmation email for the webinar I signed up for. I recognize the companies to be the same and realize that by signing up for the webinar my contact information had been given to the company running the webinar and they contacted me directly to sell their services. This definitely felt like the switcheroo on me. I was baited in by signing up for a free webinar and now I’m getting spam that says I requested info. Is this really the type of experience a marketing campaign wants a customer to have? Since the webinar is about marketing and I had just had a ‘not so good’ customer experience signing up for their webinar I had to ask myself, ‘do I want to take marketing advice from someone that thinks spam is an acceptable form of marketing??’

Why are people not thinking through the WHOLE customer experience? Not just the banner ad, or the thank you page, or even the confirmation email; the whole experience from beginning to end. Here is one customer that is less than satisfied and telling people about it. Need I say more?