Technology

Channel Surfing for Influencers, Part 1: Direct Mail

Which channel is most effective at finding, reaching, engaging and motivating influencers to spread the word about your product? In the next four posts, I’ll take a look at the pros and cons of the most widespread channels, beginning with direct mail – hope you’ll join me and share your thoughts.

When VCRs achieved mass-market success in the late 1970s and early 1980s, many pundits predicted the demise of the movie theatre. Who would want to drive to a cinema and sit with a bunch of strangers to watch a new movie when you could now do it in your own living room or bedroom? A lot of people, it turned out. VCRs, then DVD players and other home movie systems, didn’t kill off old school movie-going. They simply created a new channel for Hollywood to market its product. Both have lived together quite successfully ever since.

The same, it turns out, has happened with direct mail. Pioneered on a mass scale in the 1950s by Lester Wunderman and others, this way of reaching consumers and businesses caught on with marketers because, unlike traditional print, billboard and broadcast advertising, direct mail’s effectiveness could be tested, measured and improved on in subsequent campaigns. Despite the advent of email marketing in the 1990s and social marketing today, marketers still consider direct mail a viable and effective way to engage consumers in general and influencers in particular.

Why? Well, for starters, there continues to be a segment of the population that likes to receive things in the mail. While I’m selective about what I like and don’t like to find in my mailbox – I’m not big on grocery flyers, for instance – I do like when I get useful information about products or services that I can hold right in my hands.

I’m not alone and marketers know it. After all, with 90% of word-of-mouth happening face-to-face (Keller Fay Study, 2010), marketers understand the usefulness of offering influencers something tangible they can carry in their purse or pocket and pass along to the friends and family members they’re influencing – like a brochure, a catalogue, even a business card with a name, email address or url printed on it.

And direct mail is also still the king of easy and accurate personalization, in spite of digital marketing’s advances. Plus it continues to beat traditional media in its ability to target industries, regions, niche markets and other highly specific local audiences.

Finally, as effective as marketing via email, Facebook or mobile may be, none has (yet) managed to beam a sample or gift into consumers’ homes without using direct mail to get it there. The tactile surprise and delight factor that direct mail offers highly engaged consumers cannot be underestimated. You know they’ll open it immediately and pay particular attention to the contents from a brand they know and trust.

In part 2 of this series, I’ll focus on direct mail’s spry marketing cousin: email. It’s fast and inexpensive, but is it influencing influencers? Tune in next time when we discuss...

Gillian MacPhersen

Social Media: Don’t Mistake The Journey For The Destination

Over the past few years, you’ve probably heard stories about drivers so focused on their GPS directions, they end up in a river. Whether true or made-up, like the one about lemmings following each other en masse off a cliff, I wonder if – in response to social media’s red hot popularity -- marketers may be headed somewhere they don’t intend.

Don’t get me wrong. Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and other sites may be effective communication channels to help reach your marketing objectives. I just wonder whether marketers are treating social media as an objective – “quick let’s get a Facebook fan page up!” – rather than understanding its usefulness and role as a tool.

Put another way, it’s important not to think of social media as the destination itself, but rather a tool to get us to our destination – in this case achieving our objectives. And, as with any potentially powerful tool, we need to learn more about how social media works, who’s using it and why before we’ll really know if it can help us get where we want to go.

Take how social media relates to the work I’m doing on WOM. Some hypothesize that influencers – because they like to talk – may be more active in the social media space. In fact, the research doesn’t bare that out:

 Influencers don’t have more accounts than the regular Joe
 They don’t spend more time on Facebook, MySpace or Twitter
 They still prefer to share information – which they may gather from email or social media sites – the old fashioned way, face to face

Charlene Li, formally an analyst at Forrester, and the co-author of Groundswell offers some other learnings and insights into the minds of social media participants and how they actually differ, dividing them into the following segments:

 Creators: create or upload content
 Critics: respond to content from others
 Collectors: organize content for themselves, others
 Joiners: connect in social networks like Facebook
 Spectators: read, listen but do not participate
 Inactives: neither create nor consume

These two quick snapshots alone, I think, demonstrate that developing a successful social media presence first requires understanding who it works for and why. Then you can figure out how best to use the new medium to promote, engage and dialogue with consumers so you can meet your marketing objectives – without getting all wet.

Do you agree marketers are jumping a little too quickly on the social media bandwagon?

EXTRA! EXTRA! We’ll be holding an information-packed webcast on May 19th to present key findings from our recent white paper on influencers, plus other research and case studies. Click to learn more or to register. You won’t want to miss it! P.S You can also follow us on Twitter - we'll be tweeting before, during and after the event - @icomwom - hope you can join us!

Search Engine Marketing for Beginners

In my current role at a home and auto insurance company, we sell our products exclusively through independent brokers. That said, we are keenly interested in providing value add services to our broker partners to ensure they are both growing and retaining the right customers.

Like many businesses today, brokerages know they need to have an online presence but often lack the technical know-how. As a result, our marketing department has put together a series of marketing best practices for our brokerages to help them get started. To compliment Jim Estill’s blog post here late last month, SEO - Search Engine Optimization Basics , I thought I would share one such piece that attempts to demystify Search Engine Marketing. In our Introduction to Search Engine Marketing we tried to simplify SEM and provide some tangible tips for businesses trying to get started in the SEM space.

What SEM strategies and tactics have worked for your business, and which have not?

Martha Turner, AVP Marketing Services and Campaign Management, Aviva Canada Inc.
& member of CMA’s Direct Marketing Council

The 3 Links of Selling

Sales is all about links.

In order to sell, it helps to get to know people. It helps to stay in touch with them. It helps to connect with them. People like to buy from friends. More friends - more sales.

In the old days, one of the ways to do this was by playing golf or hitting the links. So at one time (some people would still say that time has not passed and insist this is the only way even now) golf links were very important.

Then came the era of LinkedIn. LinkedIn is an awesome tool for staying in touch with people. Mostly because many people are increasingly changing jobs and it's tough to keep in touch with everybody. LinkedIn has your friends maintain their contact information rather than you having to keep current.

Essentially it allows you to stay in touch whenever you want to. LinkedIn also allows you to send updates, similar to Twitter of Facebook, which are a good, soft way of staying in touch with people.

LinkedIn is also a great tool for connecting to people whom you don't yet know because you can see who is connected to and ask for a warm introduction.

The third link is about links to your website and blog. Increasingly people are finding business partners and suppliers on the Internet and the most common way to do this is through Internet searching. In order to rank high on the Internet searches (you really want to be on the first page), you need to have what's called a high PageRank. PageRank is determined by the number of quality inbound links coming to your page.

As you can see, it's all about the links.

Inbound Marketing Automation: 5 Steps to Harnessing its Power

The last of a three-part series:

post one - introduced the idea that Outbound Marketing techniques are no longer cost-effective in reaching B2B buyers, and suggested that we use Inbound Marketing Automation to replace it.

post two - provided a brief overview of what Inbound Marketing Automation is, and then outlined the software techniques used to automate it.

And here, post three details the 5 steps to harness Inbound Marketing Automation's power.

STEP 1: Shift your Marketing from Outbound to Inbound

Turn your website into a prospect magnet, and stop interrupting people with Outbound messages.

• SEO (Search Engine Optimization): Start by developing your online brand identity: Your keyword strategy. Find those keyword phrases that you can compete on, and which will minimize “bounce” and maximize conversion. Optimize the content and structure of your website around those keyword phrases. And then, create meaningful external backlinks to your site, to boost your site’s credibility and its importance to search engines. Successful SEO is a marketing exercise and a technical one; so before the techies begin, make sure you have the marketing strategy defined well.
• PPC: If needed, use this same “keyword identity” to compliment your SEO strategy with PPC ads.
• Free Content: Show off your company’s knowledge leadership in your industry by creating the great content which inbound prospects want. Publish this content as whitepapers, videos, and webinars. Make it free and downloadable, provided prospects identify themselves and give you permission to communication with them 1:1. Map your content to your sales cycle, so that you can feed prospects with valuable information at each stage of the sales cycle.
• Integrate Outbound Campaigns with Inbound Marketing Automation: Some outbound campaigns – like tradeshows and direct contact programs – may still be delivering ROMI. (Return on Marketing Investment). By using customized landing pages on your website, you can bring those traditional outbound campaigns into the efficient inbound world of integrated analytics, CRM integration, and automated sales lead management.

STEP 2: Automate to cope with the volume and need for speed

Use Inbound Marketing Automation technology to manage the routine repeatable tasks, like the generation and management of inbound sales leads, and data analysis. Free up marketing and sales for value-added, strategic activities and the closing of deals. Two important elements of Inbound Marketing Automation are:

• Reputation Management Analytics: New tools allow you to Join in and influence the online conversation, with minimal investments in time. See Step 4, below, for more.
• Sales Lead Management Automation: Employ a Demand Generation software solution to automate the generation and management of inbound sales leads. Working with Sales, automate best practices and set business rules to automatically grade, score, and nurture prospects. Together, have Marketing and Sales define the stage a prospect is ready to be handed to sales, (by setting Grade and Score targets). And when you have a hot lead, seamlessly feed the new prospect’s profile and “digital footprint” data into your CRM system.

STEP 3: Get Analytics on your side

Transform marketing from art to a science. Inbound Marketing Automation captures and processes massive amounts of information, enabling you to close the feedback loop from your market and individual prospects. Now you can get this all in real time.

• For a macro view of your market, you can use Google Analytics, a free program. This yields macro insight, but does not “put faces” on individual visitors.
• The real power of Inbound Marketing Automation analytics is in the ways it captures the profile and digital footprint of every prospect visiting your website. By implementing a Demand Generation solution integrated directly into your CRM system, you can obtain a 1:1 insight into your prospect’s preferences and needs.
• Multivariate testing allows the effectiveness of different marketing messages, landing pages, and campaigns to be compared in real time.

STEP 4: Participate in the Online Discussion

Another opportunity to accomplish McKenna’s closing the loop; is to join the conversation in relevant social media.

• Join-in on the Conversation: Find the key forums, communities, and, especially, the blogs in your industry. Listen to industry issues, trends, and concerns. You have a unique perspective - you are after all the expert - so give it a “Voice” and point others back to your valuable content and website. This allows you to build backlinks, boosting your site’s credibility with search engines.
• Create your own blog. But beware of the time commitment: the effort required to keep it meaningful is high. But blogging is also a great way to increase your SEO effectiveness by creating effective backlinks to your site.
• Give your market a way to express itself: Empower your prospects and customers by giving them a forum to discuss issues of relevance. Give them the tools to build their own content. Create a portal that functions as a “water cooler” for customers and prospects. To marketers schooled in Outbound techniques, this is a risky proposition, but to Inbound Marketers it’s an opportunity to show leadership, add value to the industry, and strengthen connections with your market.
• Hidden in the last point is a tremendous potential benefit to your company. You can use the feedback you get from the community to help you design and develop your next products!

STEP 5: Make it easy for your visitors and customers

This step may seem low-tech, but at the core, this is really what Inbound Marketing is all about.

• Consider the entire prospect and customer online experience. Trace it through the complete interaction lifecycle – from first contact, to training and after-sales support. Now remove any barriers or impediments to this cycle.
• Think Buying, not selling. Empower the Buyer by giving him or her all the information needed to make the decision. Make the purchase process itself as easy as it can be. Watch people interacting with your site and its software and fix any place where the person halts in confusion or goes back to try again.
• Remember, as a B2B marketer, your customers must buy. Many B2C purchases are discretionary, but B2B customers need your products and services to keep their own businesses running. It’s not just a want; it’s also a need. Often what determines whether they buy or not, is how easy you make it for them to do so.

In other words, make it easy for prospects to become customers, and then easy for them to remain one, and you’ll have a customer for life.

By implementing an Inbound Marketing Automation system, you, too, should see large increases in the volume and quality of sales leads, and triple digit increases in their sales conversion rates.

Please visit our website for more details, or to download white papers or tools to help you assess the opportunity.

Setting the Record Straight: Wireless in Canada

This opinion piece by Ken Engelhart, Senior Vice-President, Regulatory, Rogers was first published in the National Post on Thursday Nov 12 - we think it's worth sharing here.

Canadians in recent years have been reading about studies that claim our communications sector is slipping below world standards. The latest study to reach that conclusion was performed by no less an institution than Harvard University's Berkman Center. It is time for a rebuttal. I believe that Canada has great communications networks and internationally competitive prices.

It is often argued erroneously that Canada has a poor take-up of wireless services. The statistic commonly referred to in support of this notion is the penetration rate for wireless services. This measurement takes the total number of wireless phone subscriptions in a country and divides it by the total population. According to this measurement, Canada trails most countries in the OECD.

About 66% of Canadians have a cell phone and we are badly behind countries like Greece where 200% of the population have a cell phone. The foolishness of this measurement should be apparent already. 200% of a population does not exist. What these figures indicate is that there are two phone subscriptions for every man, woman and baby in Greece. In Canada, and in most advanced countries, most adults and teenagers have a cell phone. In Greece however and in many European countries, many people have one cell phone and several subscriptions.

Because Europe is on the GSM system, people have multiple SIM cards that they put in and out of their phones, depending on where they are and what time of day it is, to get the best price or service. These multiple SIM cards are generally a sign that there is something wrong with the cell phone market in that country. They certainly are not a good measurement of the take-up of phone service in an economy.

The best measurement is minutes of use per capita. A report by Merrill Lynch on Sept. 28 showed Canada to be the eighth best in the world using this metric. It is sometimes noted that the U.S. has a much higher level of usage than Canada and this is true. However, the point I am trying to make is that we are well ahead of Britain, France, Germany, Spain and most other countries in terms of the usage of wireless phone service.

More confusion exists with respect to wireless pricing. Many of the studies that the press describes involve "basket" analysis. For example, a study might look at the price of a "basket" of services such as 300 minutes of voice calling and 200 text messages. The latest study of this kind was a recent OECD study. The OECD study showed that the U.S. has the highest prices in the world. Clearly this finding is absurd. The U.S. wireless market is the envy of the world and has the lowest prices. Something is clearly flawed in this OECD analysis.

The OECD uses very small baskets even for their "high" users. The average Canadian uses almost twice as many minutes per month as the OECD's "high" user. Since North American wireless packages are much larger than even the "high" OECD basket, the OECD study erroneously shows that Canadian and American prices are high.

The standard and correct way to compare prices among countries is to take total voice revenue and divide it by total voice minutes. On this statistic (called "average revenue per minute"), Canada has some of the lowest prices in the world. Canadians pay on average 8 cents per minute for phone service. The cost is 12 cents in the U.K., 14 cents in France, 15 cents in Italy, 16 cents in Germany and 24 cents in Japan. (It's just five cents in the U.S.) Canada has very low prices internationally. This is particularly impressive given that we have much more network capacity per customer than most countries including go the U.S.

Canada is in 10th place in the world and first in the G8 in the number of wireline broadband subscriptions per capita. That is pretty good for a country as geographically vast as Canada. However, individual people do not buy wireline broadband services; households do. So the best way to measure broadband is by looking at the number of subscriptions per household. Since Canada has larger households than most European countries, we do much better when looking at this metric. When subscriptions per household are used, Canada's ranking jumps to fifth, sixth or eighth best in the world, depending on the data source. This should be a source of pride for a country that does not have the population density that many of our trading partners have.

Canada's communications companies spend $8-billion to $10-billion each year to compete with each other, in the process making Canadian networks among the worlds' best. Rogers was among the first six carriers in the world to introduce a wireless broadband network operating at 21 Mbps. Our two main competitors, not wishing to be left behind, have followed suit. Canada now has three high-speed wireless networks while the U.S. has none. I think that is something to be proud of.

Confirmation Bias and Brand Loyalty

Our minds hate change. Several studies have shown that people are twice as likely to seek information that confirms their beliefs than they are to consider evidence that contradicts them. This "confirmation bias" can influence how consumers and marketers make decisions.

Henry Ford famously said, "If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they'd have asked for a faster horse." In other words, the road to true innovation is rarely illuminated by customers telling you what to do next; they may often not know what they want next or rely on a "confirmation bias" about their preferences.

Most innovative marketers say that fighting confirmation bias is a never-ending battle. But if you can't conquer this gremlin of your own mind, you don't stand a chance of outwitting your competitors.

We see this behaviour in all our decisions. A case in point is how retail investors hold on to stocks in a falling market, believing that the markets will rise, without any empirical evidence that this is likely to happen. Consumer confidence is a big driver of purchase behaviour. If consumers believe this recession will last a lot longer than it will because they recently lost their jobs, they are likely to scale back discretionary spending even after they find a new job because of a "confirmation bias".

In short, the human mind acts like a compulsive yes-man who echoes whatever you want to believe. Psychologists call this mental gremlin the "confirmation bias". A recent analysis of psychological studies with nearly 8,000 participants concluded that people are twice as likely to seek information that confirms what they already believe as they are to consider evidence that would challenge those beliefs.

Why is a mind-made-up so hard to penetrate?

Psychologists say its easier for consumers to repeat decisions than to take new ones. Whatever decisions consumers are inclined to make, are the decisions consumers are likely to go about justifying. It's simply easier to focus our attention on data that supports our preferences, rather than to seek out evidence that might disprove it. "Confirmation bias" is one of the biggest drivers and often under reported influencers of brand loyalty. It transcends the usual influencers such as product performance, emotional empathy and brand recognition.

It also is easier for people to rationalize than to be rational. Consumers and marketers are very good at cooking up post-hoc explanations of why our predictions didn't work or why we made some decisions. We tend to reinterpret our failures as near-misses.

The more you learn, the more certain you become that you are right. While gathering more data makes people more confident, it doesn't make their predictions much more accurate. Each new fact makes you more inclined to find another fact that resembles it, reducing the diversity and value of your information.

Confirmation bias contaminates the thinking of brand preferences of consumers. A lot of psychological traps can be combated with humility, but on this one, that doesn't help. For example, several North American auto companies missed the significant growth opportunity in fuel efficient cars because they clung to outdated strategies for gas guzzling SUVs and eroded brand value with carrots such as 'employee pricing'.

So how can marketers counteract confirmation bias?

A way to approach it is to imagine that you have looked into a crystal ball and have seen that your strategy has gone bust. Next, come up with the most compelling explanations you can find for the failure. This exercise, which some of the most innovative and successful marketers have integrated into their research process, can help you realize that your beliefs regarding why consumers might or might not prefer your brand might not be as solid as you thought.

Try estimating the odds that your analysis is wrong. Let us say that you reckon there is a 20% chance of an adverse outcome; that is like saying you will be proven wrong one in every five times. This way, if the investment does go awry, you will be less likely to dig in your analytical heels and desperately try to prove that you are still right. This procedure provides "psychological cover for admitting that you're wrong."

Show your ideas and strategies to another person you respect whose ego isn't already invested in the decision. Ask: If you didn't have to take this decision, would you still agree with it?

Run an imaginary strategy alongside your real one. There, you can change it at will, with no risk to your brand portfolio. On that blank slate, would you do more—or less—of your existing approach to strategy and consumer engagement? Some organizations require each team member to run a stress test of their brand portfolio and to justify any differences between their paper strategies and the company’s real-world plans. It helps senior executives know what people really think.

Before you decide on a marketing or business strategy in the first place, write down a statement of what would compel you to change your view of the strategy. If any of those influencers come to pass, the written record will make it harder for you to pretend nothing has changed or that you don't have to do anything in response.

Please email me if you would like to receive Arcus Consulting Group's series on "Better consumer engagement strategies".

Watch This...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIFYPQjYhv8

Are you in?

Traditional Marketing is Dead

In the early nineties there was a notion that the internet would alter the face of Direct Marketing. Unless you live in a cave, it has! But it is not just the Internet that has changed the way we market products or services, technology has also had a dramatic impact on how we conduct and market our businesses.

In fact, it is my position that technology has surpassed the marketer. There is a new breed of marketer that is emerging from our schools and universities. They understand the power of the web and know how to use it well. But in the world of clicks, unique clicks, soft bounces, downloads, hard bounces, followers, blogs and viewers, two basic fundamentals of marketing are slowly disappearing: accountability and measurability.

Unless the goal of an online marketing campaign is to raise awareness, business owners are solely interested in ROMI. Unfortunately, tracking mechanisms are often excluded from the Call to Action (sometimes there is no CTA) on many new initiatives and metrics such as those listed above do not demonstrate success (at least in a monetary fashion).

So what do we do?

Vish Ramkissoon, Partner FSA Datalytic, is a member of CMA’s Direct Marketing Council.

Twitter IDs are the New Domain Names

It's 2009, so I would hope by now that any marketer reading this article online understands the importance of securing your company's brands as domain names. In other words, Acme Furniture should own and control the domain name acmefurniture.com (and, if it's a Canadian company, acmefurniture.ca as well) even if you don't yet have a Web site.

My question for you today is, "Have you done the same for Twitter?"

Twitter is a micro-blogging platform that is growing in popularity at an astonishing rate. The purpose of this article is not to explain or promote the benefits of Twitter; that topic has been covered by others: you can read all of the various articles about Twitter on the CMA blog here.

What I want you to understand today is that Twitter IDs (or "user names" or "handles") are the equivalent of domain names.

For instance, the Twitter ID for my personal brand, Bill Sweetman, is @billsweetman (which corresponds with the URL http://www.twitter.com/billsweetman) and for my corporate brand, YummyNames, it is @yummynames.

Even if you don't understand Twitter or don't think it has a role to play in your company's marketing efforts today, I strongly urge you to still secure your Twitter ID now.

In my case, I do all my Tweeting (as its called) as @billsweetman but I made sure that I registered all my other professional brands as Twitter IDs so that when and if I want to use Twitter for those other brands I already have the most intuitive Twitter ID.

I predict that over the next few years, millions of dollars will be spent by companies buying, selling, and fighting over Twitter IDs. I have already seen a number of nasty legal spats develop, and I have personally brokered the sale of several Twitter IDs already. And this is only the very beginning...

If you are Acme Furniture, you should make sure you get your hands on @acmefurniture right away. Since there is no fee to register a Twitter ID, you have no excuse not to do this. Simply head on over to http://www.twitter.com and sign up for a free account.

Don't be the person who in a year or two is having to explain to their company President why you didn't secure the company name as a Twitter ID. Take two minutes and do it today.

One final tip: Twitter will eventually suspend an account if it has not been used for six months, so make sure you post something once a month just to keep your account active and not risk losing your valuable Twitter ID.

The other side of I AM PC

With everything going on, I thought you would enjoy having a look at a vision Microsoft has for the future featuring electronic newspapers, transparent walls, real time translators, floor displays, digital shopping, electronic boarding cards, tactile displays....

This is a montage:
<a href="http://video.msn.com/?mkt=en-GB&playlist=videoByUuids:uuids:a517b260-bb6b-48b9-87ac-8e2743a28ec5&showPlaylist=true&from=shared" target="_new" title="Future Vision Montage">Video: Future Vision Montage</a>

A retail perspective:
<a href="http://video.msn.com/?mkt=en-GB&playlist=videoByUuids:uuids:8d7a2ef7-84cf-4daf-9a4d-2531c273f756&showPlaylist=true&from=shared" target="_new" title="Retail Future Vision">Video: Retail Future Vision</a>

these clips come via istartedsomething.com;
where you will find a longer 5 minute video clip

Puts a new perspective on Microsoft's I Am PC strategy doesn't it?
Personally I'm a little disappointed that we don't have more speech recognition enhancements come down the pipe. Fascinating none the less.

cheers

Dell looks for next $1 million on Twitter with Canada channel

Earlier this month I had the opportunity to talk to Richard Binhammer, who acts as the social media face for Dell, on how the computer manufacturer has used Twitter to generate over $1 million in sales. You can read more about that story at One Degree.

During that conversation I learned that Dell Canada had recently followed in the footsteps of their US counterpart, launching a Twitter channel @DellHomeSalesCA. I was curious to learn more – examples of American companies using Twitter are prevalent, but I hadn’t come across many Canadian case studies. So I thought I would dig in and find out how Dell Canada was using and growing their new Twitter channel.

@DellHomeSalesCA officially launched on Monday, February 9. Its official Twitter bio: Discounts and Deals from Dell Canada Home & Home Office.

There have been 29 updates to date, with 18 pushing Twitter Exclusive promotions. Some of the most recent offers include “no interest for six months on all XPS systems” and “New Inspirion 15 @ $649 w/ coupon.”

@DellHomeSalesCA has already gathered more than 140 followers. Each of those tweeters has their own followers, which in turn are potential followers for Dell’s latest Twitter venture. The potential? @DellOutlet has won more than 30,000 followers since June 2007.

Polling for Success

One of the strategies Dell has used to keep a pulse on the Twitter community is polls. @DellHomeSalesCA recently launched a Twitter poll to determine what kinds of offers and information its followers are most interested in. Dell launched its survey through twtpoll, a free service from twtapps.

Dell Canada’s twtpoll offers six options users can select to express their desires for information: (1) news about product launches, (2) Twitter only offers, (3) Hot offers on desktops and laptops, (4) Hot offers on electronics and accessories, (5) Tips and tricks, and (6) Heads up on upcoming offers.

Not surprisingly, “Twitter only offers” was the winner with 37 percent of participants selecting this option. “Hot offers on desktops and laptops” came in a close second with 30 percent of the votes. Seventeen percent of respondents voted for “Heads up on upcoming offers.” None of the respondents are following @DellHomeSalesCA for news about product launches or tips and tricks, at least not yet.

Growing its Followers

The results are telling, and they help Dell determine what types of information to push though its tweets. By offering the types of information followers are looking for, Dell figures it will grow its follower base more quickly. It’s a customer service-focused approach to marketing on Twitter.

Dell Canada isn’t content with 140-plus followers. It wants to replicate the success of @DellOutlet with its tens of thousands. That’s why Dell Canada is also promoting the Twitter channel through its website and e-mail marketing campaigns and has set up a Twitter Landing page for “Twitter Only offers.”

As it works to build a long list of loyal followers, Dell Canada is also looking to keep the followers it has. It does that by using Twitter as a customer service forum. Dell Canada actively responds to follower questions and comments through Direct Response and @Replies, two Twitter features that keep the conversation going between tweets.

Dell is also actively tracking the links it posts for special offers on Twitter. Although Dell Canada sees Twitter first and foremost as a customer service tool, tracking the links is vital to determining the effectiveness of its Twitter only exclusives.

Dell Canada measures conversion rates and RUM metrics so it can be sure to tell the world when it reaches the $1 million revenue bar @DellOutlet set for Twitter ROI in just 18 months.

The Kindle. Yawn?

I’m still catching up on my year-end reading. You know, all those magazines that come out with their Year In Review issues. They’re stacked on my nightstand like so many left over holiday cards, begging to be read or recycled.

The best of the bunch is the Newsweek with Obama on the cover. It had a brief mention of something that caught my eye -- Jeff Bezos’ brainchild, The Kindle. It’s described on Wikipedia as “… an e-book reader, an embedded system for reading electronic books (e-books), launched in the United States by prominent online bookseller Amazon.com in November 2007.”

Most reviews are glowing. You can carry a whole library around in your briefcase. Amazing. Apparently, it’s even been endorsed by the big “O” (Oprah, not Obama), making it to her Favourtie Things List of ’08.

You can’t get it in Canada yet. But when I asked several of my U.S. friends how the Kindle has captured the imagination of our neighbours to the south, the response was something close to a tree falling in a forest.

So here are the tough questions: With a nod to Malcolm Gladwell, why hasn’t it tipped? Why isn’t it, according to my U.S. friends, dotting subway cars and park benches and restaurants like ubiquitous iPhones, iPods, and dare I say it, real books? Where are the cool commercials with U2 or Feist singing its praises? Why aren’t there spoofs about it on YouTube? Why aren’t the “Millennials” snapping them up? And will Canadians be a better market for the Kindle when it does arrive on our shores?

Perhaps the secret is revealed in Newsweek’s backhanded compliment… “Amazon’s electronic reader is awesome, but the early adopters skew old, while kids opt for point-and-click.”

That excerpt is interesting for two reasons. Early adopters? The Kindle has been available since 2007. Would the iPhone be considered a success if it took this long to capture the imagination of its intended audience? I'm not talking about just dollars and cents here. There was the day before the iPhone launched in Canada. And there was the day after, when it seemed everyone on the TTC had one or was looking over the shoulder of the person next to them who had one. Can an e-book reader capture the imagination in the same way as an “e-music player”? There's a very specific difference today between capturing the collective imagination and selling units. Arguably, the former is much harder to do and predict than the latter.

And ‘skews old’? I guess Oprah viewers don’t influence the zeitgeist anymore the way some think they do.

The day will come when Canadians will be able to get their hands on a Kindle. The question is, will the “right” target audience (Millennials?) want one?

So from a business perspective, can Amazon continue making and selling them if they remain the technological equivalent of a television series like “NCIS”? It’s there, and by some measure successful, but does anyone care?

Red Herring Season

At the time of writing I have just left a meeting with Sandy Weill (of Citibank fame), where he told me we are entering into the deepest recession any of us has seen in many, many years. Of course, he was talking about the US. But let’s say, hypothetically, that Canada does not miss this bullet (in spite of our government’s solid, stay the course plan) and we too enter into a recession. What then?

Unemployment climbs, demand for consumer good drops, the economy shrinks, inventories shrink, profits disappear, and so on. Most importantly, though, none of this is our fault at a micro-economic level. It is all the fault of the economy; a comforting thought to many Canadian business leaders who love nothing more than to find a convenient external source to blame for whatever happens to their business (high taxes, the liberal government tax and spend policies, the free market conservative policies, the dollar, 9/11, SARS, Listeria, and so on).

Don’t blame these poor souls. They are suffering from RHD, Red Herring Disorder, a viral disease native to the Canadian Urban Regions.

RHD starts, as do all worthwhile disease, with flue like symptoms. Subsequently the patient slumps into a lumpish, self-sympathetic pose, often muttering: “But there’s nothing we can do,” over and over again. RHD victims generally cut budgets and cancel activities, mostly to avoid being responsible for anything, but also, in most cases, to reduce their workload in order to spend more time bemoaning their fate. RHD is probably caused by an airborne pathogen as it is easily transmitted from person to person (and, in an odd, metaphysical way, from organization to organization).

As RHD progresses it takes control of the autonomous nervous system, causing the patient to become increasing boring and repetitive. A compulsive need to stifle any external stimuli and repeat the “cut the budget” mantra is the reason this disease is often mistaken for an obsessive-compulsive mood disorder. Practitioners now believe this not to be the case, as RHD is often accompanied by a contradictory psycho-neurotic behavioural symptom: pathological self-preservation syndrome. The precise relationship between RHD and PSPS is not clear, but the fact that they so often occur in parallel has opened an entirely new path of study for experts in these diseases.

RHD is often incurable and, in the worst cases, ultimately results in the sufferer being separated from the organization organism at such time as the economy improves. Unfortunately for the organization organism and the world in general, this occurs far too late to be of any use.

In the US, a vaccination has been tested and shown somewhat successful. At the very first intimation of the virus, test subjects are given massive doses of courage and creativity. Early test show that the resulting hard work, positive outlook and immediate business success appear to be effective in fighting off the disease.

If not caught in time, the disease cannot be effectively treated.

Under no circumstances, should sufferers be exposed to competitors who have taken advantage of the difficult economic climate to rethink their fundamental mission and vision, and develop innovative, effective, and hard-hitting strategies.

Social Capital Value Add ChangeThis Manifesto & eBook

This is a follow up to my June 13th post about ChangeThis and Social Capital Value Add (SCVA).

Due in part to your response to that post, a Canadian was among the authors published this week in ChangeThis’ 50th issue. SCVA was released along with ideas from Seth Godin, John Kotter, Jonathan Salem Baskin, Vince Procente and Andrew Abela. You can check out the ideas and authors at www.changethis.com.

Michael Cayley, the author of SCVA has also released an eBook that expands on the highlights introduced with the ChangeThis piece. Like any theory of corporate valuation, the reading gets complex but Michael has tried to keep things moving with a Wizard of Oz metaphor.

As a marketer, I found the idea of memetic brand the most interesting. Here is an excerpt on that …

… “The marketing/communications mix is completely different than it was before 2004. Broadcast’s monopoly on attention is dead. The symbolic brand, which has been the fastest growing source of corporate value for the last quarter century has reached its pinnacle. It is being absorbed and replaced by memetic brand. Technologies have evolved and mapped so tightly to the way humans transact, form relationships and create self-identity that it is time for business management to link the pioneering academic studies of social capital and social network analysis (SNA) to value based management and the priorities of marketers.” …

Even if you find yourself challenging the ideas, the eBook may prove useful to your team and clients just because it is a good overview of the technology and trends at work in the current market (you might insert Fig. 1 attached). A lot of the material is familiar, but SCVA connects it into a useful framework and anytime I came across something that I wanted to dig into further, it was easy to take a little side trip into more depth through a few of the eBook’s more than 200 hyperlinks.

Enjoy!