If you’ve heard rumblings emanating from Maine and been caught by surprise, you're not alone. Nobody noticed when a new privacy law intended to protect teens from predatory marketers sailed through that state's legislature amidst a flurry of bills earlier this year. But now various groups and trade associations say the privacy law goes too far, and are working frantically to stop the measure before it goes into effect on September 12.
In a nutshell, the law, titled "An Act to Prevent Predatory Marketing Practices against Minors," states that teenagers can't give their personal or health information to marketers if they're under 18 without their parents' consent. It also bars marketers from selling or transferring the information if it individually identifies the minors, or will be used to market to them.
At first, it sounds like a great idea. We should definitely be protecting our children online. But this has created a huge uproar for a lot of reasons. First, the federal government has already enacted a law called the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), which addresses many of these concerns. But it only applies to children under age 13. The Maine legislation seeks to impose restrictions on the collection of personal information from teens up to age 18.
The new law also requires marketers to obtain verifiable parental consent before they can gather information from minors. But how do you stop a determined teen from faking parental approval? Nevertheless, marketers can be held liable for damages in the courts by both the state and by private individuals.
The law is being challenged in court by several groups on First Amendment, interstate commerce and other grounds. The measure is unconstitutional, the plaintiffs say, because it violates teens' rights to free speech and prevents them from registering and receiving information about beneficial health care products and services. A coalition of Internet companies including AOL and Yahoo are also challenging the measure. They contend that the restrictions are so onerous that teens may not even be allowed to register at their Web sites.
So, very interesting stuff. From my reading, it appears the law has implications and consequences far beyond its original intention of protecting teens. Even the Maine attorney general said last Friday that the law is so poorly designed that her office will not enforce it.
I think the bottom line is, as we move forward trying to protect ourselves and our children from the Wild, Wild West of the Internet, it's going to be a whole lot harder than any of us want to believe.
The first time I had heard this term, I thought it was some kind of new 3D technology. As you can see from the video below, this is nothing like the old 3D world of avatars and blocky graphics.
Augmented reality gives users a portal to view the world in the way they are already comfortable with but overlays it with computer-generated information. In the case of the video above, the iPhone shows you a live video of whatever is in front of you and then overlays information and directions on how to navigate the New York subway system. The effect is incredibly natural (it makes me think of heads-up displays used by fighter pilots) yet contains an incredible amount of accessible information.
Taking this one step further, you could take your iPhone to the mall and watch promotions and discounts get overlaid on the screen as you pan around. Or you could ask for a list of nearby restaurants, and it would flash up the descriptions, ratings and walking directions for each one as you pointed your iPhone in the direction you were headed. The possibilities are amazing.
Note: I think the next hot business plan, probably already being hatched in dozens of places around the world, will be to build a map of the entire world that contains directions, pictures, ratings, advertising opportunities and things we can't even imagine today--all navigable by augmented reality applications. The winning business will allow users and social networks to make real-time updates and comments on, well, everything. For what it's worth, my money is on Google for this, but Twitter and Facebook have showed us that Google's early lead doesn't always guarantee it will dominate as new ideas unfold.
"Mine" Offers Digital Personalization in Print Form
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.
In a completely new twist on the interactions between email and social media, email service provider, Campaign Monitor is using social media to try and pressure Microsoft to improve its HTML interoperability in Outlook. It's not quite like challenging the Iranian election results, but it has collected more than 20,000 Twitter comments to try and get its concerns on Microsoft's agenda.
The good news is that Microsoft took notice and responded. The bad news is that I don't think the response is what Campaign Monitor was looking for.
Apparently, Twitter is leaping us into the future today. No, it's not a new form of marketing (sorry, readers). It's not a new feature. And, no, it's not even a revolution in social communities. It's even more important... Yes, it's Robot Pick-Up Lines.
Today, the world of Twitter is overflowing with people sharing their favorite robot pick-up lines. Don’t take my word for it. Send your favorite lovelorn robot to this URL for thousands of ideas on how to find the love of its life.
My favorite so far: AFG85: RT @badastronomer your lips say 0 but your eyes say 1
Thanks to TechCrunch for alerting me to this amazing new innovation with 'bots and social networks <grin>. Have a great weekend.
Every once in a while you see something that’s really cool—that has the potential to shift your habits and thinking. That "something," more often than not these days, comes from Google.
Google's latest big idea, Google Wave, does not disappoint.
Its Wave is such a new and big idea, it''s difficult to describe. Akin to email meets Twitter, meets instant messaging, and shared documents, and so on, the magic, as far as I can tell from the video demo and in my reading, is that it actually comes together. And more like a Phoenix than a Frankenstein.
The implications for marketers are profound. B2B marketers will have a few years to get ready because most businesses run on Microsoft Office, and I doubt Microsoft will be embracing Wave (even though it's said to be open-source) anytime soon. B2C marketers, on the other hand, need to get ready—and fast. Their customers, especially the online-savvy ones, will be looking to use Google Wave with the same kind of tech lust that has been the sole domain of the iPhone.
Assuming Google Wave makes it easy to interact with regular email, it'll be easy for marketers to bridge into the new paradigm it represents. Once in the Wave world, marketers, particularly (maybe exclusively) permission marketers, will enjoy one of the richest mechanisms ever for holding high-quality, two-way conversations with customers. In fact, I might go so far as to say Google Wave represents a potentially game-changing platform for marketers seeking to truly engage with customers.
If Google Wave succeeds, here are a few of the interesting behavioral shifts it could drive and that might affect marketers:
We may see the first shift away from email as a paradigm since it was invented 40 years ago. This is a good thing because Google Wave appears to be so much more.
The richness and relevance of Wave's discussion model will open up vast new ways for businesses and their customers to build permission relationships. In particular, assuming marketers handle the privacy question appropriately, the instantaneous, real-time nature of Wave's dialogues will give marketers more information than ever about their customers' interests.
Advertisers may find it hard to enter into the dialogues of a Wave-dominated world; Wave's roots in instant messaging will make it harder to initiate uninvited conversations.
Google's Wave appears to be a truly innovative leap in how people communicate and collaborate. It's quite possible that it will have a much larger impact on marketing than social networking and, perhaps, even email itself. The future looks bright. Way to go Google.
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.
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.
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.
This doesn't really apply to what we all do, but I found this recent article appearing in The New York Times very interesting, and demonstrative of the fundamental shifts taking place in how people communicate.
According to the story, the once-indispensable tool for busy offices and households, voicemail, appears to be going the way of the dodo. Compared to text messaging, which has increased more than tenfold over the last three years, voice mail is slow and cumbersome. As a result, fewer people are using it, and when they do, they are taking longer to check their messages.
Because people generally read at least twice as quickly as they can speak, and text messages require no log-ins or waiting, it's estimated that text messaging is about 15-20 times faster than voice mail for recipients. Text messages also tend to be more efficient because the people sending them get to the point more quickly.
So, ultimately, text messaging does a better job of respecting people's time. Something to think about.
For an entertaining and enlightening review of how the world of marketing got to where it is today, this video by a German ad agency tells it all in three minutes.
Emailers Not Targeted in New FTC Report on Behavioral Advertising
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission just came out with an important new report outlining its recommendations on how advertisers who use behavioral targeting—the tracking of individual consumers’ online activities in order to deliver targeted advertising tailored to each person’s interests—should regulate their own activities so that the government doesn’t step in and do it for them.
After following this story and reading the report, my non-legal read is that it does not target email marketers directly or by intent. (I am not a lawyer, so be sure to confirm my impressions for yourself and/or with your own counsel.) In a nutshell, the FTC doesn't appear to be taking aim at email marketers because:
The FTC's guidelines don’t apply to "first-party" behavioral targeting. Most email marketers use first-party behavioral targeting—in which a Web site collects consumer information to deliver targeted advertising at its site, but does not share any of that information with third parties. The agency concluded that fewer privacy concerns are associated with first-party targeting than with other behavioral advertising, and that as a result, it is not necessary to include such advertising within the scope of its principles.
The FTC is more focused on providing privacy protections to people surfing the Web with a reasonable expectation of privacy. Advertisers contended that it is unnecessary to provide privacy protections for data that is not personally identifiable. But the FTC disagreed, stating that privacy protections should cover any data that reasonably can be associated with a particular consumer or computer or other device.
The report cited hypothetical situations where certain items of information are anonymous by themselves, but can become identifiable when combined and linked by common identifier. For example a consumer's Internet activity might reveal the restaurants in the neighborhood where she eats, the stores at which she shops, the property values of houses recently sold on her block, and the medical conditions and prescription drugs she is researching. When combined, such information would constitute a highly detailed and sensitive profile that is potentially traceable to the consumer. The storage of such data also creates the risk that it could fall into the wrong hands or be used later in combination with even richer, more sensitive data
In the world of relationship email, marketers gather relevant details within the context of a specific marketing relationship so that they can provide the kinds of messages a person will find the most engaging and useful. Subscribers generally understand what a marketer knows about them, and trust that the information will be used appropriately. In many cases, they can update their personal profile or email preferences, or ask to be removed from all marketing going forward. People are much more apt to feel comfortable about sharing details when they know they are in control, and they are explicitly choosing to trust the site/brand they are providing their information to.
The FTC's report offers four guidelines for industry self-regulation. Again, be sure to check out the report for yourself, or with your own counsel, but paraphrased, they are:
Transparency and consumer control. Web sites that collect data for behavioral advertising need to provide a clear, concise, consumer-friendly and prominent statement that behavioral data is being collected and that consumers can choose whether or not to have their information collected.
Reasonable security and limited data retention for consumer data. Companies that collect and / or store consumer data for behavioral advertising should provide reasonable security for that data, and retain data only as long as it is necessary to fulfill a legitimate business or law enforcement need.
Affirmative express consent for material changes to privacy promises. A company needs to keep its promises with respect to how it will handle or protect consumer data, even if it decides to change its policies at a later date. This means that before a company can use previously collected data in a manner that is different from the promises it made when it collected the data, it should obtain affirmative express consent from the affected consumers.
Affirmative express consent to (or prohibition against) using sensitive data for behavioral advertising. Companies should collect sensitive data for behavioral advertising only after they obtain affirmative express consent from the consumer to receive such advertising.
The FTC says the goal of its report is to balance the potential benefits of behavior advertising against the privacy concerns it raises, and to encourage privacy protections while maintaining a competitive marketplace. But advertisers also play a key role in their destiny.
"Industry needs to do a better job of meaningful, rigorous self-regulation, or it will certainly invite legislation by Congress and a more regulatory approach by our Commission," said FTC Commissioner Jon Leibowitz in a Feb. 12 statement.
"Put simply, this could be the last clear chance to show that self-regulation can—and will—effectively protect consumers’ privacy in a dynamic online marketplace."
I just got back from a fantastic week at my favorite conference, TED. One of the best parts of this conference is the way it reframes the standard view of the world and puts a much broader perspective on things.
As a marketer, I think it is invaluable to step outside my day-to-day view of the customers I serve and take broader look at how the world is changing outside the areas we focus on. I love the TED conference from this perspective and it's great news that so much of its content is now available online for free.
However, if you want to get a quick glimpse of how much the world we live in is changing around us every day, a colleague of mine sent along a quick, five-minute video that captures it extremely well. If you think you have an idea of what the United States and the rest of the world will be like in 10 or 20 years, I suggest you watch this video. You''ll probably realize that it is going to be a much different place than any of us can imagine today.
I don’t usually dabble in psychology in my blog, but a recent post in the New York Times blog “Bits” really caught my attention.
According to some recent research about people’s attitudes toward safeguarding their personal information, a person’s willingness to share information varies entirely by the context in which it’s asked. Paradoxically, the more “official” and formal a Web site, and the more it expounds on the confidentiality of a person’s information, the less likely people are to provide that information. The study’s authors summarize that reminding people about confidentiality provokes them to worry more about it.
I can’t seriously suggest that marketers go out and cavalierly offer no assurances on privacy as part of an opt-in strategy. But this post does make me wonder if there is more room for creativity than I had thought in terms of how we marketers build our opt-in and registration pages.
I'm blogging live here from the ad:tech conference in Singapore. My colleague, Will Schnabel, our vice president of international markets, and I are both speaking at the conference.
Kudos to the ad:tech team for putting on a great show. There are 600-plus registrants from countries across Asia. The choice of Singapore is excellent—it's an incredibly modern, spotless and safe city filled with multi-lingual residents and business people.
Email marketing is definitely one of the hot topics at the conference, with multiple sessions dedicated to it. Mobile marketing is also of great interest. But, despite the rumors that mobile is so dominant here in Asia, marketers here have yet to "crack the code" on how to market over this medium.
Mark Read, the CEO of WPP Digital, made a powerful point this morning on the topic. He said that Google reported that the majority of mobile searches are being done from the iPhone and that a huge amount of the overall mobile Web surfing is being done on that phone as well. His point was that the break-out of mobile Web and mobile marketing is less likely to come from WAP and SMS and more likely to be achieved by bringing the current Web and email world onto the mobile devices themselves.
Asia will remain a challenging region for marketers but it will offer tremendous rewards for those who execute well here. Like Europe, multiple languages and distinctly different cultures make any single marketing effort difficult. And, the geographic size, travel distances and varying political approaches perhaps make it harder to market here than anywhere else in the world.
For ad:tech's first conference in this part of Asia, I think the turnout and the topics suggest that the marketing maturity here is high and the opportunity is massive.
Despite the rise of Web 2.0 and other emerging communications methods, email remains stronger than ever, according to an April survey conducted by market researcher Ipsos for online reputation management firm Habeas.
In the study of consumer attitudes toward email and online interaction with businesses released in late May, nearly three-quarters of adult email users in North America said they use email every day, and two-thirds said they prefer email for communicating with businesses.
The report also found that consumers not only prefer email for communicating with businesses now, but they also expect to prefer it five years from now, despite the rise of online threats and the emergence of other communications channels and Web 2.0 applications.
“Far from being eclipsed by Web 2.0 and other emerging communications methods, consumer expectations suggest that email will be the workhorse channel around which future online communications will revolve, said Habeas CEO Des Cahill in Habeas’ announcement.
I agree. This is something I have believed in and talked about for a while now. People love email for its ability to be highly personalized, relevant and timely. Marketers also love its immediacy and low cost in relation to other channels. And, as email marketing tools continue to evolve and become increasingly central to marketing execution, email truly will become the workhorse channel for marketers. It’s exciting to see this future unfolding.
But it’s important to remember that just because people like email doesn’t mean they will tolerate anything you want to send. More than 88 percent of survey respondents said they would like to be given more choices over the content and frequency of the emails they receive. And, a rising percentage expressed concern about being a victim of email fraud, and worry over spam and virus threats reaching them through their mobile devices.
Although email appears set to remain a favorite of consumers, email marketing as a percentage of overall online advertising spend will actually drop over the next five years from 2 percent to 1.5 percent, according to new figures from eMarketer. The research firm cites email’s low cost relative to other channels as reason for the drop, even though its figures predict that money spent on email marketing will hit $492 million this year and increase by 55 percent to $765 million in 2012.
Does anyone remember back in 2005 and 2006 when mobile marketing was supposed to redefine every aspect of the marketing world? SMS would be delivering all our marketing messages. WAP (mobile-specific pages) would bring interactivity to the wireless phone. We'd be redeeming coupons from in-store banners and swiping our cell phone screens at the cash register. Our phones were supposed to bleep at us when we walked by a store that wanted to hawk us some great sale or new product.
Well, a funny thing happened.
The mobile revolution went ahead and happened, but it apparently didn't pay any attention to all of us marketers predicting its future. Let's look at the revolution as it is playing out now.
SMS did take off. It's used so often now that I wonder how we lived without it. It's become the instant messaging solution for the mobile world, but it's barely budged the needle for marketing messages.
WAP is everywhere, but most people don't seem to care. Dramatically faster networks coupled with increasingly powerful mini-browsers have brought the full Web right onto our little phones. If you haven't tried surfing the Web on an iPhone or an iPod Touch, then you need to rush out and give it a try. WAP didn't change the world; long live the mobile Web browser.
And, while the carriers are trying to figure out how to appropriately make your location data available to marketers, along comes Google. Try downloading the latest Google Maps for your phone. (It works on tons of phones, but best on the iPhone.) Do a map-based search for, say, a sushi restaurant and it'll pop up a list of matching restaurants right near you--all without you even typing in your ZIP code or location. Did I mention Google Maps is free? This is permission-based (implicitly) and non-intrusive, and it completely bypasses the telcos. Who would have predicted that?
So, what has been the biggest impact of the mobile marketing revolution? It's not advertising. It's not even closed-loop, permission marketing. It's branding. Yes, the original stalwart of marketing has taken the early lead on transforming the marketing world onto our phones. Ring tones, wall papers, screen savers, branded games and other applications appear to be dominating the eyeballs and dollars on the mobile marketing front.
This is why I love technology revolutions. They do change everything, but no one (and I mean no one) can ever predict how. I guess that’s why they call them revolutions <grin>. The most exciting news of all is that the mobile revolution is barely underway and, while I have no idea how it will play out, I can absolutely guarantee the most exciting parts are yet to come.
Another guest posting that contemplates the future of email, from my colleague, Scott Voigt...
From Scott:
It dawned on me the other day, that I spend more time with my inbox than I do with... well... anything! Seriously, this is sad, but totally true. Staring at Outlook (or at least having it stare at me) for more hours than I spend with my wife and daughter, what's up with that? Even worse, given the inordinate amount of time that I allocate to the inbox, I still don't feel in control of it. Calgon, take me away!
Unfortunately, I suspect that too many of us suffer from the same symptoms of email overload. The good news is that help may be on the way. As I mentioned last week, there are a number of start-ups that are creatively using technology in an attempt to make life in the inbox more efficient. Of the many inbox tools that I've tried, Xobni (inbox spelled backwards) might be the most interesting thus far.
Xobni (which is pronounced Zahbnee despite the fact that its logo has a macron over the "o"), is an Outlook plug-in that non-intrusively embeds itself at the right side of Outlook and provides a number of nifty inbox productivity tools. (To name a few: email search, quick access to previously received attachments, and a nice view of previous threads that have transpired with specific contacts.) For me, however, one of the most interesting aspects of Xobni is its ability to provide insightful, metric-based views into my personal email habits. Xobni's user-friendly analytics tool let's me slice the data any way I see fit:
Who do I email the most?
Who emails me the most on Saturday? (A: Bill Nussey. (Take a weekend every now and then, Bill.))
When do I spend the most time catching up on email?
Do I send more than I receive? (A: Yes. I guess I'm part of the problem.)
With this data at my disposal, I've been able to identify ways to take regain a little control over the inbox. For example, I was able to see that one of the folks on my team sent me a steadily increasing stream of emails leading up to our weekly meeting on Friday. By adding a 15-minute check-in meeting on Tuesday, I was able to eliminate a large number of time-consuming back-and-forth email threads.
Xobni has been in beta testing for a few weeks, and, like most beta products, still has a few kinks in the system. (It still doesn't seem to be counting all my incoming messages.) Regardless, if your life revolves around email, I'd recommend that you take it for a spin. Beyond productivity improvements, Xobni will give you a glimpse into factors that are going to play a huge role in the future of the inbox. Next week, I'll dig a little deeper into some of those factors and how they might eventually influence how a consumer views and interacts with messages in the inbox.
I've been inviting my colleague, Scott Voigt, our head of product marketing, to put together some guest blogs over the last few months. I am pleased to include his first blog entry below...
From Scott:
A few months ago, the Internet was abuzz with the meme of Inbox 2.0. A couple of articles in the Wall Street Journal (here and here) and a post in the Bits section of The New York Times, pointed to a future where the inbox would begin to take more proactive role in managing communications, acting as much like a social network as it does a hub for receiving good ol' SMTP messages. Leading the charge on this new frontier are a number of start-ups (Boxbe, ClearContext, and Xobni to name a few) that are, in essence, using technology to help consumers manage their overload of email. More recently, we've seen some of the big inbox providers indicate that changes were indeed on the horizon. To wit, at this year's CES, Yahoo's Chief, Jerry Yang demonstrated a future version of Yahoo! Mail that included a "simplify my inbox" button, which, once clicked, would reorder messages based on "people that are important to me."
My colleagues and I pay careful attention to anything that has to do with changes (perceived or real) that may impact the inbox. As such, a number of us have been testing these new inbox tools, talking to inbox providers and holding late-night bull sessions in an effort to intuit email's future and its impact on email marketers (all the better if we can devise new offerings to better serve them ). At the most recent Email Insider Summit, I shared some of our initial findings in a presentation that contemplated the factors present in a hypothetical "inbox algorithm" that inbox providers might use to categorize, prioritize and sort messages. Bill has been kind enough to lend me some real estate in his blog to expand on this topic. So, over the next few weeks, I'll try to contribute some additional commentary on the future of the inbox. (I just can't bring myself to call it Inbox 2.0.)
Welcome back! I hope everyone had a great holiday and that you are all off to a wonderful New Year.
It's been a while since I've posted, but a colleague sent me an interesting article from MediaPost that seemed like a stimulating and provocative way to kick off 2008. The story is about social networks and the future of email. The writer, Max Kalehoff, defends email’s role in the much-hyped world of social networks. He notes that email is the engine behind many social networks, and that as young people mature, email may well replace social networks as their core communication tool.
To me, it’s more about the difference between business-to-business and consumer-to-consumer communications. In BtoB, the variety of traffic, the need for people to be able to contact you uninvited (e.g., “Hi, I’d love to buy your product”) and the age-old manage-your-life-via-email-folders make a strong case for email’s continued prevalence in business. For purely interpersonal email, however, social networks can provide a powerful alternative: no spam, better tracking of threads, control over who can contact you, deep context with the individuals you’re communicating with and so on. I don’t think everyone necessarily will use two email addresses for personal and business communications, nor will those who do necessarily use social networks exclusively. However, I do think we’ll continue to see a rise in social networks underlying our daily CtoC communications.
Either way, this line of thinking misses what may be the most interesting question of the day--what about business-to-consumer (BtoC) email? After all, this is how many of us make our living.
As a consumer, how will I want the companies that serve me as a consumer to communicate with me? Frankly, it seems like I’m going to want them to come through whichever channel I use for CtoC communications. This could seem threatening to our business but I believe it also represents a huge benefit. The fact is that consumer channels are diverging. In addition to social networks and email, there’s an increasing use of RSS and chat not to mention the explosively growing mobile channel. I believe that our industry is uniquely well-suited to provide the universal marketing dashboard/tool suite that enables marketers to reach their permission-based audience regardless of channel.
And, as some of you are well aware, many companies in our industry, including my company, Silverpop, are already well on their way. Speaking for the industry, I hope that 2008 will be looked back on as the year where email marketing took the next step.
A colleague recently sent me this post by New York Times reporter Saul Hansell to the Times' technology blog, Bits, about a new concept called “Inbox 2.0.” Hansell explores the idea that your inbox may no longer be ranked purely by when messages are received, but by the relevance of the sender. Needless to say, this could have a big impact on legitimate commercial email not to mention spam.
In many ways, I like this idea even though this kind of change can feel very threatening. Anything that helps recipients make sense of all their inbound communications is a good thing in the long run. For instance, a message from your boss, your spouse or your project leader might climb right to the top of your inbox, whereas messages offering college degrees (that your spam filter misses) would live down at the bottom. As a consumer, I find the idea somewhat compelling.
The idea faces some definite hurdles. For instance, while I absolutely want to see my e-boarding pass from Delta the moment it comes in, the latest promotion from Delta may not be as urgent. It’s not clear to me how an inbox provider could distinguish between these two extremes. Additionally, older ideas like challenge/response have never been widely adopted, even though they offer a more robust solution to managing the inbox.
Only time will tell whether this is the beginning of a paradigm shift or just another good idea to add to the “never reached critical mass” heap.
One of my favorite speakers at the recent Silverpop customer conference in London was Michael Nutley, editor-in-chief of New Media Age, the U.K. weekly news magazine. Ignoring the standard PowerPoint and visual aids, Michael got up and did something unusual--he just spoke.
He gave a terrific presentation, and I filled pages with notes on his provocative ideas. I won't take you through them all, but here are a few things he said that really stood out for me:
PVRs (personal video recorders like TiVo) are the rejection of interruption advertising.
The hegemony of TV and TV advertising is breaking down because people no longer live scheduled lives.
Communities are no longer limited by geography--they can now be based on shared interests regardless of where members live.
All roads lead to interactivity--all media is moving toward a dialogue.
Quoting G. M. O'Connell, founder of Modem Media, on the overuse of interruption-based advertising, Michael said, "You can't annoy people into liking you." This is a sobering point for marketers of otherwise well-respected brands when they ask, "How often can I send to my email list?"
In the social media space, you don't buy media--you earn it. This is one of my favorites.
Brands are no longer what we as marketers tell people they are--brands are what people's friends tell them they are.
Marketers should aspire to the condition of service. In other words, view your marketing as a service to your customers.
Each new medium spawns a brand new form of advertising. For the Web, it was search. The question is, what will the ideal advertising form be for mobile? It's definitely not search, Michael said. My own thought is that it's not likely to be any form of interruptive marketing because mobile devices are simply too personal and too awkward to manage a stream of incoming messages.
Michael, thanks for coming out and doing such a great job.
In my previous post on using email for the lead paint recalls, I glossed over how such an email might work. The problem for retailers is that many customers will have purchased several products that are affected by the recalls. The trouble of creating a separate email for each possible product (as well as for related products that aren't being recalled) is matched by the risk that customers will get frustrated with receiving a stream of messages when only a single message is needed.
It turns out that there is an evolving feature set available in a few leading email marketing tools that makes a single email possible--it's called relational tables. Actually, relational tables have been around for a while, but use among marketers has been pretty limited. I suspect that some of this is due to the fact that set-up of campaigns that utilize multiple tables can be pretty complex--sometimes even requiring marketing teams to have someone on staff who can create and maintain SQL statements. As such, through most of its history, email marketing has been about flat lists--each recipient has a single set of attributes like email address, name, age or gender. In relational tables, each recipient can have multiple attributes of the same kind.
In the case of our product recall message, retailers could use their existing customer email list, but link it to a product purchase table that contains all the products purchased by all their customers. The simplest use of relational tables would be to send one message per product, but benefit from only having to set up a single target/segment definition. An even more interesting approach would be to use a feature like Silverpop's multi-match dynamic content. MMDC takes advantage of Silverpop's ability to handle relational data but it allows every matching product record to be put inside a single message. So, if customer A bought one affected product, that person's message would contain only that single product. However, if customer B bought eight affected products, that person's message would list eight products. This is an entirely new level of personalization and something that both marketers and consumers will be seeing more and more in 2008 and beyond.
For anyone who thinks online BtoB marketers lead a less exciting life than their BtoC counterparts, think again. I recently read a great post about BtoB new media marketing on Valeria Maltoni’s blog Conversation Agent that may just change your mind.
Quoting the results of a June online survey of more than 300 marketers by research company, Guideline, Valeria reports that BtoB companies overall embrace more new media platforms sooner, and are much more likely to allocate a higher percentage of their media budgets to online marketing channels than their BtoC counterparts.
BtoB marketers also take a more bottom line approach. They concentrate on lead generation, and have more experience with proven platforms such as email, online ads, search engine optimization and Webinars. BtoC marketers on the other hand tend to focus on brand building through emerging channels. Although BtoC marketers have more experience with viral video, social networking and mobile marketing platforms, BtoB marketers also use emerging channels for brand building, and have more experience with blogs and wikis.
I was recently on a great discussion thread about the future of email--how important is email to the future of interactive marketing? Here was my contribution to that discussion:
The ability to communicate online is evolving at an unprecedented pace. Social networking, mobile, UGC, chat, virtual worlds, etc., all provide incredible new ways for people (and marketers) to reach out and influence each other. These new technologies are darned interesting, and I haven't met a marketing executive who believes they don't matter. To many marketers, and particularly those focused on Gen Y, I can see why TV, direct mail and even email would seem uninteresting by comparison.
In light of these exciting new technologies, it's understandable that some marketers might be tempted to bypass email altogether. But ignoring email would be no different than ignoring Web sites—both are necessary and critical pieces of the Internet world. Anyone who downplays these foundational elements is disconnecting themselves from the very pulse of the online experience.
The real question about email is whether it's the buggy whip or the wheel. Is it an accessory to an approach that is quickly fading away, or is it a foundational piece of a very long evolutionary cycle?
Steve Smith recently wrote an article for MediaPost's Mobile Insider citing recent Nielsen study findings that video makes up less than 1 percent of iPod usage. Wow. That got me thinking. Is video really going to catch on in handheld players and phones, or is it a pipe dream?
As those of us from the email world know, embedded video in email enjoyed a short renaissance back in the late 1990s until Microsoft decided that Java and other plug-ins were deemed too scary. Microsoft disabled those features in email by default and pretty much ended the video email momentum.
But the PC is a different story. Back in Sept. 2000, Microsoft released Windows ME (Media Edition) with the promise that computers would be great platforms for listening to music and watching television. Of course, Microsoft was WAY ahead of its time, but its vision is proving out six years later. More and more Web sites have animation, and even feature video ads all over them. I watch nearly all my TV on my Microsoft Media Center PC attached to my TV at home. And, of course, there is this little site called YouTube...
So what can we take away from this?
Video works.
Of course, not all video works in all situations, but I believe video has no equal when it comes to engaging people. Short-form video seems to be the "killer video app" on computers, at least for the early 21st century. My friends and I were trading our favorite humorous commercials over email before YouTube made it one-click easy. People use computers in an active way and expect fast results. Short videos seem to fit that to a T.
Looping back to the original question: will video on mobile phones, iPods and other tiny screens, truly become a reality? My view (pun intended) is that video will find a way. Short-form video will help bridge the gap (see the Verizon and YouTube deal), but I suspect we'll see entirely new forms of video and video devices emerging as the world's most engaging medium finds its way to the insatiable eyes and ears of consumers.
P.S. I'm headed off for two great weeks of intensive email discussions. This week is the Email Insider Summit in Deer Valley, Utah. And next week is my regular gathering of the top emailers in the country. This second gathering will feature top-notch speakers on social sites, mobile marketing and user generated content. I should definitely have more to talk about on the subject of mobile video after I listen to these folks.
What is SaaS, you ask? It's an acronym for "software as a service." SaaS is beginning to replace terms like ASP (application service provider), hosted software, etc., that describe software made available over the Web.
So why do I love it?
Reason #1--It's what we do.
The first reason I love SaaS is that it's what we do at Silverpop. We manage the servers, the software and the network as one complete solution for our clients. I've been running or funding companies involved with creating and selling software for almost 25 years, and I can tell you that SaaS is going to change the world of technology.
Reason #2--SaaS is REALLY useful for marketers.
The relationship between marketers and IT is often strained or worse. IT departments thrive on long-term planning, predictable requirements and relatively static software solutions. Marketing, on the other hand, is all about change. If a competitor makes a move, marketers are expected to respond--immediately. If a critical campaign isn't getting the response it needs, marketers must be able to drop everything, change the campaign and re-launch. IT cycles and marketing needs just don't align in most situations.
To put it another way, if an IT solution works well at Coke, then Pepsi would be interested in looking at it, too. But the idea of Coke or Pepsi ever doing anything similar in the marketing departments is so hard to imagine that people use the two companies as an aphorism of competition.
SaaS changes everything for marketers. All of sudden, marketers get an IT solution custom-built for their needs. And, even more important, the support and maintenance of that solution are designed around the cycles and planning needs unique to marketing. Few internal IT departments could afford the kind of minute-to-minute support that marketers crave. Yet when a SaaS company like Silverpop provides a similar solution across hundreds of marketers, the economics start to make a lot of sense.
SaaS isn't going to put IT out of business. Not by a stretch. It will, however, move some (and maybe most) of the software used by marketers out of the corporate data center and into the hands of purpose-built companies that specialize in the service models that marketers demand.
We've all seen interactive marketing statistics in one form or another, but The New York Times has just published a good article on click fraud that condenses these stats nicely (Marketers Demanding Better Count of Clicks, Oct. 30). Among them:
Internet marketing has grown 30 percent a year for the last few years.
Of the $267 billion spent by advertisers in 2005, only 4.7 percent or $12.5 billion went to interactive ads, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau.
The top 50 advertisers spent just 3.8 percent of their budgets on online ads--excluding search--in the first half of 2006, according to data from TNS Media Intelligence.
Proctor & Gamble, the nation’s biggest advertiser last year, spent less than 1 percent of its $4.6 billion ad budget on online ads in 2005. And General Motors, the second-biggest advertiser, spent just 2.5 percent of its $4.35 billion budget online, according to TNS, which does not include search ads in its figures.
As you can see, the future looks bright for interactive marketing (the truly "accountable advertising"), and we've only just scratched the surface of its long-term potential.
This makes me think of the old movie, The Graduate, with Dustin Hoffman, and the scene where a seasoned businessman goes up to Hoffman's character and says, "I want to say one word to you. Just one word... Plastics." I think we should all go to our aspiring young friends and say, "Two words, just two words... Internet marketing" <grin>.
Reader Dean Collins posted a comment on my recent entry about why email marketers love the "unsubscribe button." He wonders if perhaps too much is being made of the unsubscribe button, and asks why marketers view it as an improvement over an unsubscribe link in a message. Thanks for your comment, Dean. A few thoughts:
The unsub button is always visible and is the same for every mailing, regardless of sender -- no more searching around to find the link at the bottom of the message.
The unsub action will be a single click -- much easier than the clicking to open a Web page, confirming you really want to unsubscribe and then hitting submit. Some opt-outs are even more complex than this.
The unsub button will only appear if the sender has a good reputation. ISPs will not endorse the old spammer trick of using an opt-out request to confirm the existence of a "live body" on the other end -- only authenticated senders with good reputations will be able to have this link activated. For end users, this means that the link will always work.
So, at a purely technical level, the unsub button isn't that much different than the unsub link in a message. However, I believe the button will result in a lot of positive change and benefit for recipients, and will be very successful for everyone involved.
Try wrapping your brain around this: short-term permission.
As marketers, we are so anxious to build our lists that we grab every opt-in we can and hold onto it forever. But what if we tried something new? Some products clearly have short-term buying cycles. Think about mortgages, car buying, or insurance. You usually only buy these once every few years. Why do marketers force opt-ins that last forever?
What would happen if the car site's opt-in clearly stated that it would only last for three months? I would love to see whether the opt-in rate would rise -- I'm betting it would. First, prospects wouldn't have to endure mailings long after they've made a purchase. Second, the mere fact of saying that it's short term is likely to add a huge degree of credibility and show customer-centric thinking. I suspect many people would opt-in just to see what would happen.
Some well-designed control group testing should show whether this would work. If any of you have ever tried this, or decide to give this a try, please let me know how it works out.
P.S. For good measure, add in the opportunity for a permanent opt-in on your last few messages to see if you can capture those buyers who have a longer-term interest.
It's surprising to me how often the low consumer awareness of RSS is used to suggest that RSS isn't being used. Most consumers have no idea what SMTP, HTTP and SSL are but that doesn't stop them from using email, surfing the web or buying things online. The fact is awareness does not equal adoption. We've all read last October's Yahoo!/Ipsos study (PDF) . Even though it's a bit out date now, it highlights the fact that consumers' adoption of RSS is well beyond their awareness.
A more upbeat view of RSS comes from Rebecca Lieb's recent Sept. 8 column in ClickZ. She cites a wide range of innovative uses of RSS. Her list blew me away in terms of the diversity and innovation of some of these applications. Without a doubt, RSS is a key component of a lot of innovation that is going on across the country. As consumers adopt RSS (even if they don't know they are doing so because they use Yahoo! or Google or Outlook) to get at these innovative feeds, their ability to be marketed to through those feeds and others will only increase.
Did I get your attention? Okay, so demographic targeting will never die any more than the Web will kill TV or RSS will kill email. But a recent article in Fortune magazine did get me thinking about this.
The part that really got me thinking is Linton's quote, "... trying to market to demographics is less important than trying to market to purchase patterns or behavior." He goes on to explain that consumers don't necessarily want to be grouped in by their age or income levels any more. He says that marketers are far better off marketing to people based on what they do rather than who they are.
For decades, marketers have had little, if any, real behavioral data to work with. Marketing was brand driven. Purchase information was lost in the downstream retailers and distributors. Pre-purchase behavior was all but impossible to track. For all these reasons and more, marketers have developed a great deal of expertise around grouping their buyers by the only information they had available -- their demographics like age, gender, income and ZIP code. This approach led to the movement of the data companies like Axciom, Experian and Equifax into the marketing world. By matching customers' names with the demographics these companies gleaned through their credit businesses, marketers were able to get new insights into segmenting and analyzing their customers.
The Internet is changing all this.
For the first time in the history of marketing, not only is it possible to easily link purchase information to marketing databases, but the even more elusive behavioral data is now readily available. I think Mr. Linton's quote will be seen as visionary as we look back in the years to come.
Ask yourself, if you want to find the 10,000 people most likely to respond to zero-percent financing on a new car, would you rather know their age and ZIP code, or which people recently clicked on your newsletter looking for more information on financing options? For the new generation of marketers, the answer is easy.
I don't think demographic targeting is ever going away. But mark my words, the rise of behavioral targeting is now officially underway.
