Know-How Exchange : E-Marketing

I think of the difference as push vs. pull.

Twitter, e-mail, phone are all push technologies: your audience receives a personal contact from you.

Blogs and websites are pull technologies: they wait until someone searches for you. RSS feeds allow pull technologies to act as push technologies (if someone subscribes to your feed, then they're notified when you post/update). Ditto Google Alerts.

Further blurring the line is the recent announcement that Google/Microsoft are trying to get the rights to access Twitter data. That'll make pushed information act as pulled information (since it'll be in a central search engine DB(https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/twitter/6281832/Twitter-in-talks-wit...)

To me, it comes down to urgency of information and longevity of content. If you have an offer or something "hot off the presses", you want to push it to tell everyone about it NOW. You attempt to amplify it using social media (Digg, Retweet, etc.). If you have "background information", then use pull technologies to allow people to find it when they're looking.

As for blog vs. website, I prefer blogsites (sites written around CMS), since you get the RSS feed plus you get a service such as Ping-o-Matic! to push the information to the various search engines quicker.

But the usual caveats apply: you need to test the effectiveness of your efforts. What builds short-term actions and long-term relationships better for your audience? Can you measure the ROI of your efforts? Can you automate any of your actions to leverage newer technologies?

could the best answer depend on the size of the organization, and on the relationship between sales and marketing?

In the not so distant past, it seems to me that marketing spoke to groups of people, and sales spoke to individuals. Now twitter allows marketing departments to move towards one-to-one relationships.

as technology empowers marketing, will this generate turf wars sales? Our sales people allowed to use new technology to build their own communities of interest, or is this and should this be now tightly controlled by marketing? Will sales be limited to last century technologies?

For a very small company, where a single person handles both marketing and sales functions, the question becomes one of ease-of-use and efficiency. But it seems to me that for large organizations with expensive and technically competent sales staff, may be the best answer depends on organizational dynamics. for example, several years ago I worked with the company and they want to send out Christmas cards, or holiday cards, or something similar. Marketing wanted to have a marketing person signed the cards, and sales people wanted to personally send cards to their best contacts. As I recall, the eventual solution was that sales sent and addressed cards to their best prospects and customers, while marketing mailed to a larger list of suspects.

If an organization wishes to attract and keep a professional sales force, and if that organization wants the salesforce to be as effective as possible, then it seems to me that marketing needs to empower (and oversee) efforts by the salesforce to use these technologies.

And so my conclusion is that for the larger organization, there is no one-size-fits-all approach.

As said above.
Know your market.
Boomers are still spending tons BUT are lagging behind the social networking curve.
I know "I R 1"

The internet will never mature. It is a technology that refuses to be tamed - which means the power structure is always changing - which is a good thing - because innovation is rewarded sometimes stolen, but for the most part this is the fairest system to come about.

Web 3.0 is about interactivity live video streaming - instant live feedback. Documenting live video through recording and publishing it will be the next content building revolution.

Responding to a message board is out. Responding to someone's text on Twitter or a blog is out. Live interactive events that are fully recordable is the future.

Dear Chris,

It’s a great question and one that, if business owners, marketers, and CEOs are wise, will be addressed if not now, then in the very near future.

My humble two cents’ worth is that YES, content ought to be segmented so that it’s available to skim readers, headline readers, and word for word readers. But, when it comes to relevance and creating overall higher degrees of significance and customer buy-in (for which read, “consumer control”) things need to go deeper than CEOs and the like simply thinking that it is, or will be, enough to put content on their blogs and on their static sites and that people will STILL visit them and buy. The days of banging content up and letting it sit there for months or even years (decades) on end are over, or very soon will be.

What this means for marketers is that they’ll find that they’ll need to engage prospects and customers, and that they’ll need to romance and seduce current clients and customers far more in order to make and retain an impression, and that they’ll have to become far more organized and on the ball about managing the content they put out.

This means that stories will become far more relevant, and it will mean marketers putting out more quality content that does not overtly sell.

Yes, you read that right. Content that does not overtly sell. Creating and managing relationships through quality content will, I believe, become far more important and therefore, it will play a far more valuable role in maintaining the relationship, and in courting brand evangelism by reinforcing the quality of the solution in direct proportion to the depth of the problem or pain it solves or salves.

Marketers, businesses, companies, and corporations that miss this boat, or that muck it up will be left stranded, their market share will dry up, and they’ll eventually disappear from view. This then opens the channels for savvy marketers and for smarter businesses run by people who put the needs of their customers AHEAD of their bottom line. And because of this, those bottom lines will, I believe, swell.

What will this mean to marketers in terms of the content they’ll have to produce? They’ll need to offer content and messages in video, audio content, blog and static site format, and they’ll need to be aware that each segment needs to back up and reinforce every other piece through the use of social media such as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube (as the big three). But that the message will also need to be prepared and primed to go wider and deeper, so that its pegged in DIGG, Reddit, Wikipedia (for educational and editorial, non selling content), Flickr, StumbleUpon, Scribd, Kaboodle, Gather, EZineArticles, and so on.

Then, when you throw in aggregations sites such as Alltop, and Popurls—and whatever else might pop up within the next year (and people, 12 months is becoming an astonishingly narrow window in terms of application development)—things will become even wider in terms of their reach.

Then, when content becomes split—both by search engines, by user interaction, and by yet to be developed systems, as I believe it will (content scanning and directional segmentation to interested readers, feeders, and by need and opt in is not that far fetched, nor is a system of, as you said, prepare the content once and then seeing systems chop that content up into video for video sites, audio for audio feeds, and the written word for text-based outlets).

When this happens, and again, I see no reason why it could not happen—we’ll see far more appropriate content going to far more relevant (and discerning) outlets and audiences, the latter of whom have voluntarily put up their hands to indicate “I’ll take this feed, that source, and those messages, but I’ll leave those stories and this nonsense, and I’ll have none of THAT! Thank you very much!”. And for savvy marketers, there may well be subscription services that will manage the content audiences receive, and all for a modest monthly fee.

This will mean that far choosier (and far more affluent) readers will realize that rather than the content managing them, that they now manage the content and can pick and choose what they receive and what they block. But into this there may also bee streams that allow cross linking, opt ins, and opt outs to other source platforms so that the whole stream can inter link and give people the opportunity to give content viral status.

Pretty much the true digital river, but a river with many, many sluice gates to canals and locks, and a river with lots of fish ladders. And all created to direct the flow and convert its momentum.

Will it be QUITE like this? I have no idea. But if it’s NOT, then I believe it will be something pretty darn close.

I hope this helps.

P.S. According to a recent article in PRWeek, 37% of companies use NO social media.

Gary Bloomer
Wilmington, DE, USA
Follow me on www.twitter.com @GaryBloomer

It's a case-by-case scenario based upon a pre-determined strategy for the particular outcome desired. one client we work for (www.eldoradostone.com) knows their users and how they find info. It's either push / pull with sites, blogs, tweets, blasts (has anyone figured out a better word for that?) based upon knowledge gleaned from intel.

David Conover
www.studioconover.com

While there are definitely benefits to leveraging existing content across all channels in terms of manpower and corporate messaging, segmenting content by channel can give powerful insights into customer behavior. Where I see them working together best is creating profiles on social sites and using that to build your e-mail list.

Twitter and Facebook are great tools for getting information out to a group of people who are likely already highly-engaged with your brand, if they’ve gone to the trouble to follow you. However, it’s somewhat anonymous. Did it drive word of mouth, did it motivate them to purchase? If they are truly “fans” then they will probably sign up for your e-mail marketing if they know they’ll be getting exclusive offers or information.

It’s important to grow your e-mail list because e-mail works best to give you insight into individual behavior. You can track what content someone clicked on, if it drove traffic to your Web site and if they made a purchase based on that e-mail. And you can track this data over time and use it to create segments, which will further increase the relevance and performance of your e-mail marketing.

Hi Chris,

War story, of sorts: Client is a major retailer with multiple stores. Using PPC, organic, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube. Website and Landing Pages. Strong, time-limited calls-to-action. No email at this time for various reasons. No blog. Mobile marketing in the near future for store locating, sales and coupons. Client also uses offline traditional i.e. ads, radio & TV spots.

Everything online is measured with Google Analytics.

The main conversion is to get people to walk into a store for which a time-limited sense of urgency is used, yet other conversions are measured for example in YouTube we measure views for both the current and archived videos which helps us plan for same time next year.

What have we learned? That everything works and converts (according to our internal definitions of "conversion"), with both "inbound" and "outbound" and that the resource of time needed to keep everything updated should not be underestimated, in fact, it is the most limiting constraint.

So, once again the marketers favorite term of "it depends" comes into play. As much as we would love to have the magic one-touch button, each one requires its own strategy and time.

This is going to be a continuous experiment as the number of social media adopters grows and mobile marketing becomes more prevalent in which case now we are talking adding WAP sites and landing pages to the mix and the whole process begins over again!

Dear Chris,

What a great question and what a lot of interest it has rasied :)

Some really good posts and advise above but I noted that nobody really tackled your question head on :).

The 'it depends' question is very important - but what it deopends upon is 'Ypour Busienss Model'. In other words; wherte exactly are you generating income? (for your clioents).

'Online display advertising ? Then of course you need traffic and 'Page Views'.

'Selling online digital content'?

Selling online services?

Selling offline hard goods?

Selling offline services?

Selling a mix of real world services with an online component?

In the end, you need to determoine, what kind of audience / leads you ant to bring to your ultimate destination be that a blog, a traditional web page or a facebook application or iPhone app or some other yet to be revealed :))

You mentioned that inetrnet is becoming an unruly teenager but twitter and facebook are only babies. For now everyone is rushing to be there and trying to figure out whjat they can do with them.

The way that users eventually use these tools will also change enormously over time as a). the fad wears off and b). they become more eduacated about what value or otherwise these tools can bring ointo their lives.

Here is a real life story of my teenage son.

he opened accounts on everrything :)

Facebook, freindster, multiply, twitter and, and and.

After some time, he started to understand which ones actually had value and which did not. He just stopped using most of the accounts and focussed on 1 or 2. (facebook of course ).

Additionally, he doid not play with any securoity settings in the beginnming, he let everyone access his content, then he got in toruble by making some crazy shout outs and forgot that the whole world could see them so he had a fight with his girlfriend :). Now he understands a little more the value of privacy and is starting to be moer conservative about who he adds and why :).

Anecdotal opf course but I feel that many users around the workld will be going through these same cycles. They opena Twitter because it si the cool thing to do but after a few months, they realise that nobody really cares if they tweet that they are goping to he toilet now and making a cup of coffeee later :)

So as marketers, we need to be very hard nosed and scientific in our approach to these technologies.
We need to understand, what value can these tools bring now and what value will they bring in the future?

OK, so for now they represent another place to put6 up links and get our brand or product out in front of more audience but the war is on and everyone is rushing to grab attention so within a short time, the playnig firld will be levelled again.

The real value going forward will be the abiloity to access more and more specific targetted data about our audiences. and to store and segment that in our own DB's.

Groups represent a great marketing toolas they always have.

With a groiup, we can immediately see the specifi interst level of participants. A group who loves biking for instance will be a great target for Bikes and accessories.

A group of pregnant mums in Idaho can be targetted by... Well you get the point.

The rules of sales and marketing have not changed, just the medium by which we get the message out.

Peronally, I believe that the time to embrace ALL these marketing channels is now, before it is too late. Even if we don't generate immediate income, we need to learn how to access - connect and communicate via all these channels. As each one grows and adds new functions and features, then we need to be there to learn and understand what is going on so that we can take advantage of it.

Within the next 4 or 5 years, the currently fuzzy picture, will start to get a little clearewr and we will then better understand how to monetise all of this activity so it behooves us all to be in the game and ready to go when the time is right.,

Just don't forget your marketing 101 4p's :)) Because at the end of the day, people are people are people. That part will never change.

Good luck.

Matthew

Some of this is self selecting. For example, Facebook can auto post an update when you post something on other sites, so you don't need to actually post it to there. And you pointed out that whenever you blog, you auto tweet. So you don't need to prioritize these.

Blogs and web site are almost becoming interchangeable. Once client of mine uses a blog as their web site, and it does help them connect to their customers well. So the focus is there, with the weekly email to clients connecting back to what is on the web/blog. Same with Facebook.