I bet you never thought you'd hear Twitter being compared unfavorably to voice mail … Think again.

SayNow, a free phone service that connects celebrities and their fans through voice mail, offers its customers something they say they don't get from Twitter—an experience that feels intimate and authentic.

You can read more in this New York Times article by reporter Brooks Barnes. In short, the service works by giving stars a personal phone number that they can publicize on their Web site, for example. SayNow's customers—mostly teenagers—can then call and listen to recorded messages of stars directly motivating or urging them to take an action. Callers can also leave voice messages of their own, which may be shared on the SayNow Web site. According to SayNow, the service is averaging about 10 million fan calls a month—double the number over this time last year.

Voice mail may seem old-fashioned compared to newer online social media. But once again, the key to great marketing is not the medium; it's the message.

Posted by Bill at 1:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The use of social media as a marketing tactic has shot up dramatically in the last two years, according to an online survey of B2C and B2B marketers. Moreover, marketers have shifted from using social media channels primarily for brand building and now use them as a tool for driving awareness and interest in their products and services.

This despite the fact that marketers also cite as a top concern an inability to prove ROI and having metrics to properly allocate the mix of traditional and digital media. And, interestingly, although roughly half said they are planning to spend less on marketing this year, a majority said they are actually planning to spend more on new media platforms.

The survey, which included 172 marketers and was conducted in June, is an update a survey conducted two years ago by BtoB magazine and the Association of National Advertisers. In the updated survey, 66 percent of the marketers said they were using social media, compared to 20 percent of respondents in 2007. Among B2B marketers, the number is 57 percent, up from just 15 percent in 2007.

Two years ago 65 percent of respondents said their main objective in using social media was to build brand. Today that percentage has dropped to 51 percent, while using social media to generate demand has increased from 10 percent to 30 percent overall. Among B2B marketers, the percentage is even higher at 47 percent.

So why are marketers flocking to new social media despite an uncertain economy, admitted concern over how to allocate and measure, and why is the use of social channels evolving so drastically?

I’m sure we could have some great discussions around it. But in a nutshell, smart marketers have realized that the ultimate goal of marketing is to drive someone toward measurable lifetime customer value. To do that, marketers must create relationships that benefit both the customers and the company. The rise of online social networking means that it's the buyers, not the marketers, who define their brands today. And social channels invite them to define the kinds of marketing they will receive. Successful marketers are evolving with their customers, going where they are, and providing them with opportunities to participate in dialogues and interact with their brands.

Posted by Bill at 10:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

For a while now, I've been a vocal proponent of marketers participating in social marketing, and clearly many others see the potential as well. In his July 30 ClickZ column, Bill McCloskey shares some great data that illustrate the enthusiasm with which marketers have embraced social networking.

Since 2007, Bill's firm, Email Data Source, has been tracking how often brands embed a link within their email marketing messages back to their social networking site. The data point to two interesting facts: 1) the number of email marketing campaigns that contain links to the two top sites, Facebook and Twitter, have dramatically increased, and 2) in 2009, No. 2 Twitter began closing in on No. 1 Facebook, and in April surpassed its rival as the top social networking site for email marketers.

In 2007, Email Data Source tracked 215 emails with Twitter links and 729 with Facebook links. By June of 2009, the number of campaigns with a link to a sender's Twitter account soared to 41,399 and 41,052 for Facebook. You can view the stats here.

I do find it interesting that Twitter has surpassed Facebook. While Facebook's user base towers over Twitter's, Twitter is clearly the king of micro-blogging (at least today). A lot of the content that gets shared socially is the kind that lends itself to the quick shares that Twitter has made famous, but I have to believe that some of this traffic spike is due to Twitter still being in its “novelty” phase.

Posted by Bill at 10:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

For print magazines struggling to stay relevant in an online world, one publisher may have found a way.

Major media house Time Inc. has created a print magazine in which the content and advertisements are tailored to each individual subscriber. In an experimental five-issue run, Mine magazine allows readers to select titles from eight Time Warner/American Express Co. magazines that are then combined into a personalized magazine. Lexus car ads, paid for by the magazine’s sole ad sponsor, Toyota Motor Corp., are also customizable, and are individually targeted based on subscribers' responses to an online survey when they sign up. You can read more about it here.

Mine appears to have been well received by subscribers. According to Slate writer Farhad Manjoo, the publishers still have some kinks to work out—there’s some lag between issues, some of articles are a few months old, and the ads can go overboard on the personalization—but overall the idea is a success. Readers enjoy the benefits of personalized content and the portability and durability of a real-life magazine.

Personalizing printed content is an idea that has been tried before, but Time has huge brand recognition and a lot of content to choose from. It’ll be interesting to see if the idea catches hold.

Posted by Bill at 9:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I recently read an interesting “Times Wire” column about a start-up company that focuses specifically on shopping cart abandonment. The company, SeeWhy, is releasing a new service that will alert subscribers when a visitor on their Web site abandons a shopping cart, and then immediately follow up with an email designed to encourage the person to go back and complete the transaction.

The writer, Randall Stross, questions whether this tactic could alienate site visitors by making them feel like they can’t even visit a Web site without being hounded to make a purchase. And indeed, to avoid seeming like they’re watching site visitors too closely, many permission marketers wait a day or more before sending an email or otherwise nudging visitors about items left in their carts. But SeeWhy says waiting is a mistake. The company says there is a way to ask nicely, and contends that immediate remarketing produces a follow-up sale three times as often as sending a reminder a day later.

But you don’t have to take anyone’s word for it. To find the best timing for your list, my recommendation as always is to test. In this case, you could maintain a control group, or random sample of your list that is excluded from the change you are testing. This enables you to compare the behavior of the test group vs. the control group to determine the precise effect of your change. The control group would get your usual cart abandonment follow-up, against which you would test your new follow-up tactic. To find out whether remarketing immediately would be profitable over the long-term, or whether it ultimately damages your customer relationships, you can compare the response of your test group vs. the control group over a period of months to get your answer.

Posted by Bill at 10:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

This recent blog post from Forrester shares some very interesting research conducted by the analyst firm on the widespread usage of social networking among business people. I've been a strong believer that social networking matters as much in business as it does in personal relationships, but seeing the numbers laid out so starkly really drove it home.

Among the findings: When it comes to making buying decisions overall, 91 percent of business people surveyed said they consume social content including blogs, user generated video, podcasts, forums or reviews—and 69 percent said they do so for business purposes.

Posted by Bill at 9:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

For marketers, the online world has changed everything. Unlike traditional media such as newspapers and television, which deliver the same message at the same time to everyone, digital media and engagement marketing technologies make it possible to deliver a truly unique message (or stream of messages) to each person, one at a time.

But despite the opportunity, most marketers still treat online marketing like a mass medium—mostly because it is simply too much work to manually create a unique dialogue with each person.

Marketing automation can address this need. By letting marketers set up sophisticated campaigns that automatically respond to customer/prospect past behaviors, profile information and other criteria, these automated campaigns take the load off marketers while still allowing each customer to experience a unique series of customized communications.

Although marketing automation may be available through their vendors, many email and lead management marketers don’t use it because the features are technical and can invite human error. Visual-design tools have always been a "holy grail" in developing campaign automation systems; but the technology is complex, especially when delivered over the Web, and few vendors have figured out how to do it well, if at all.

A few years ago, my colleagues and I decided that Silverpop would be among the first companies to do this right. It became a "Manhattan Project" of sorts. We looked at a range of approaches, consulted with experts and tested various concepts with customers and friends. In the end, I believe we have created a breakthrough approach that will open up true campaign automation to every marketer in the world.

In short, we took the best of the "Visio-like" flow diagrams and married it to the single-most-common graphical paradigm for editing complex flows: consumer video-editing software. The combination is visually intuitive—both during campaign creation, and for review and maintenance of existing campaigns. And, just to be clear, one of the coolest aspects of this capability is that it’s drag-and-drop for creating as well as reviewing.

In other words, marketers can now create incredibly complex automated campaigns by dragging and dropping boxes and decision points into a timeline-based, visual layout tool. Most people probably don't get as excited as I do about technology, but this stuff is incredibly cool and worth taking a look:

Our new "Got GUI?" video on YouTube shares our thoughts on traditional flow diagrams vs. Silverpop's hybrid timeline approach, and actually shows off the new capability to some very cool music written by one of the execs who oversaw this project.

This technology is now on our Engage B2B platform. We initially released it to our Client Summit attendees in May and are releasing it to all our B2B customers as I write this.

This project has been underway for a long time, and I am incredibly excited to see it come to fruition. Kudos to all my colleagues who have worked on this during the last year.

Posted by Bill at 9:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A graduate student recently contacted me to ask some questions for his dissertation on engagement marketing. I enjoyed the opportunity to reflect on the origin of the term here at Silverpop, as well as its evolution in the world of marketing. I thought you might find some of the excerpts from our dialogue worthwhile as well.

For us at Silverpop, "engagement marketing" is a term that was born about 15 months ago as we tried to define the essence of what we are truly passionate about. It’s not really synonymous with anything that exists today. It has a lot in common with relationship marketing because it’s hard to engage with customers and prospects if you don’t already have a relationship of some sort. However, relationship marketing implies "existing customers" more than I believe engagement marketing does.

The need for a new term in the world of marketing stems mostly from the dramatic shift that is taking place as both consumer and business buyers gain increasing knowledge and power in the buying cycle. Fifty years ago, marketers could run a series of ads and an audience would literally make purchases as a result.

While this tight loop still exists in some forms today, it has been largely replaced by a more involved, two-way, learning-centric buying process. For example, when was the last time you or anyone you know visited a restaurant without first checking it out, reading about it online and/or asking some friends—let alone buying a house or a car? In the new world, the old way of marketing has merit, but it can only hope to initiate the buying cycle—it cannot influence it to complete.

In the new world, marketers have a much larger and more involved role to play than just introducing themselves. They can truly influence customers in the journey toward a buying decision. This new world is what we call engagement marketing, and it is slowly changing how we as marketers will do everything.

Posted by Bill at 9:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Google recently announced a new service called Latitude, which zeroes in on the geographic location of mobile phones to let your friends know where you are, and vice-versa. (You can read more about it here.) Other companies like BrightKite and Loopt have been doing this for a while, but Google's entrance into the arena shines a new spotlight on the functionality and the privacy issues it raises.

One big question on the minds of privacy advocates is whether consumers will be comfortable having their locations tracked as they go about their daily lives.

I cannot imagine any consumer being comfortable with the major mobile providers like Verizon or AT&T selling their location to the highest bidder. However, applications like Latitude allow location tracking to be done in a *somewhat* more benign way. Privacy advocates will still want to know how Google and others plan to treat geographic tracking information they collect—and ensure that consumers understand how their information is being utilized. But moving forward, my bet is that the social networking track-your-friend applications will be the initial platform for location-based marketing.

You heard it here first, but the idea that really excites me is combining location-based tracking with the Facebook-like idea of "friending" a company you like to create a privacy-acceptable location-based marketing solution.

Imagine you love McDonald’s (and McDonalds loves you). So you "friend" them in Latitude or a similar application. Whenever you turn on the application, it alerts your friends to your location, and—assuming you’ve provided permission—it also tells McDonald’s. McDonald’s can determine whether you’re nearby any of its restaurants and offer you promotions and specials that suit your tastes. Or, even more interesting, it may have made a few more Quarter Pounders than it needs, so it can offer a discount of that specific product to customers in the area and sell down the inventory before it goes bad. The marketing (and privacy) implications are staggering.

This may well be the ultimate in engagement marketing.

Posted by Bill at 9:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

With the rise of Web 2.0 and online social networking, an exciting new age in marketing has arrived in which interacting and building relationships with customers is key to delivering unprecedented return on investment. For a brief introduction, and advice on adjusting your marketing approach in this new era of engagement, check out my recent article appearing in iMedia Connection. It features a brief introduction to concept of engagement marketing, the benefits of a two-way dialogue with customers, and a look at what it will take for marketers to be successful going forward.

Posted by Bill at 3:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)