Build Relationships: Master Email CRM

Customer relationship management (CRM) is a broadly recognised, widely-implemented strategy for managing and nurturing a company’s interactions with customers and sales prospects. The overall goals are to find, attract, and win new customers, nurture and retain those the company already has, entice former customers back into the fold, and reduce the costs of marketing and customer service.

According to Forrester Research, spending on customer relationship management is expected to top £9.7 billion annually by 2010 as enterprises seek to grow top-line revenues, improve the customer experience,and boost the productivity of customer-facing staff.

PROBLEM: How do I use email to build stronger client relationships?

• Start things off right with well-crafted welcome emails
  
  
• Learn from your subscribers what they really want from you
  
  
• Deliver the information they need to make the right business decisions
  
  
• Give them a voice by mixing email with social media
  
  
• Keep all of your sales reps on the cutting edge of CRM
  
  
• Use the best Social Media techniques to attract new customers
  
  

Identify search trends using Google Insights for search

As a website owner, the chances are that you’ve thought long and hard about how to drive traffic to your website from Google. You can do this through either Search Engine Optimisation or Pay per Click Advertising.

Where do I start?

Whichever you choose – and we recommend both – the first step on this journey is all about identifying the right keywords to use in your campaign. That’s where the Google Insights for Search tool can come in handy.

Once you’ve found a search term you think you want to use, type it into the Google Insights search box. The tool lets you know the number of searches for that term, looks at the data historically, and produces a graph to show how that search term has trended since 2004. You can also compare 2 or more search terms on the same graph, to see which is the most popular.

This gets interesting when you start to filter the search term data by industrial sector (called a ‘vertical’) and geographical area. A good example of this can be found by looking at the search term ‘blackberry’. Almost all searches including the word ‘blackberry’ will be related to the mobile phone. If you sell fruit online, you do not want your website to rank highly in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) for searches related to mobile phones! But you still need to know how many searches are relevant to ‘blackberry’ the fruit.

You can use Google Insights to filter results to just the Food & Drink category.

Let’s say you are based in Kent, you might only be able to deliver fruit to the South East.  You can use Google Insights to filter by Geography. What you’re left with are the search trends for those searches that are specifically relevant to selling blackberries (the fruit) in the South East.

If you sell a seasonal product, Google insights can also help you identify when demand will be high.

Searches for ‘buy Easter egg’ peaked this year on the 8th April, which was actually 4 days before Easter. If you sell Easter eggs online then you need to make sure that your Google AdWords account has excess of budget on this day, and that you are holding enough stock.

What else?

Google Insights can also help you find out whether it’s worth stocking a new product on your website, or removing others from your inventory. Before making any decisions, enter the product name into Google Insights to see whether searches for that product are going up or down. If the trend is rising fast then you might want to start featuring that product on your site. For falling graphs, maybe it’s not worth restocking that item.

Although all the graphs produced by Google represent an index rather than an actual figure, Google Insights is still a great tool to identify search trends relevant to your website. Have a go at using the tool to see what you can find.

Source: inside.123-reg.co.uk

How to get more when you Search on Twitter

When it comes to search engines in 2009, most of the buzz has been around ‘Twitter Search’.  Twitter allows you to search for what people are talking about in ‘real time’. Both Google and Bing have jumped on the ‘real-time’ bandwagon. To start with Google started featuring almost-real-time results from prominent bloggers, and Bing began to surface Tweets from a few well known Twitter accounts. Last week, both separately announced deals to deliver the full Twitter index on their Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).

But if you know where to look, Twitter Search can give you a lot more than just finding who is using particular keyword. The Twitter Advanced Search Interface lets you search for keywords used in very specific circumstances.

This is what it looks like:

So what can you find out using this form?

To start with, you can specify the context of the keyword that you’re searching with. Do you want to find all mentions of that keyword, or is it more useful to find out instances when it is being Tweeted in conjunction with other keywords?

This would be insightful if you run a B&B and you want to find if you can reach out to anyone on Twitter. There’s probably not much point in searching for ‘B&B’ on its own, since its going to be used so frequently in so many situations. But if you search for ‘B&B’ and your ‘local area’, you might able to identify those people who are looking for your service, and who would appreciate you getting in touch.

It’s also possible to use the form to discover who is mentioning a particular keyword, and which people have this keyword in their @ Tweets. This can help you to monitor how competitors are making use of Twitter. Are they dealing with lots of support issues? Are they getting sales enquiries? Are they being asked prices? Can you learn how to improve your use of Twitter by seeing how they’re doing it?

The form also lets you specify the time frame of the Tweets. You could use this to find out how a news item affected your industry at a specific time. Let’s say that there is a news story about a particular manufacturer and you want to know if they get discussed the next day. This might help you decide whether or not to feature this manufacturer’s products on your homepage. You could also use this feature to find out how your competitors’ use of Twitter has changed over time.

Here’s where the form get interesting: you can search for tweets that have a certain ‘attitude’. Let’s say you wanted to look for all Tweets mentioning a competitor in a negative way. The results will display all Tweets using that keyword with common ‘frowns’  such as ‘:-(’ and other negative statements. This might show you Twitterers who were unhappy with your competitor, and would therefore be open to an approach from yourself.

Lastly, you can specify the location of Tweets, whether that’s in a particular place or in the surrounding area. At the moment Twitter uses the location given by each user profile; those on the move can include actual coordinates. If you retail from a bricks and mortar premises, you could use this to find out more about the geographic reach of your business. If you knew that people rarely mentioned you more than 50 miles away, you might conclude that your AdWords campaign should be set to only appear within this radius.

Public Relations skills for the FUTURE

Marketing and public relations are coming together. PR is growing as an industry while "traditional" advertising - what ever that is - remains flat. Still, we have taken no new ground in 'measurement' and articulating the tremendous ROI of PR.

13 Skills of the PR Pro of the Future

1. Create integrated marketing and communications strategy
2. Deploy live 'listening posts' online and offline
3. Design and deploy an advanced search engine optimisation program
4. Plan and run a new media relations program inclusive of head-of-the-tail and long tail "media"
5. Identify & engage with influencers online and offline
6. Manage communities
7. Integrate new technologies into their own lives
8. Model measurement and performance metrics including new "engagement" metrics
9. Run quick pilot programs  and evaluate on-the-fly
10. Train staff and clients continuously
11. Participate in conversations, not just 'messaging'
12. Create and execute content strategy including video programming (hifi and lowfi)
13. Use digital crisis management 

 Source: johnbell.typepad.com

The true role of public relations in branding

Public relations is better than advertising at building a brand, argued Laura and Al Ries in their prescient 2002 book, “The Fall of Advertising and the Rise of PR.” At the time they were right; advertising had indeed lost credibility while the media still had it. But in 2006, one can no longer be so sure: in an age when video news releases regularly substitute for real news, as the Centre for Media and Democracy reports, people have learned to be sceptical about the media’s objectivity

The media is constantly pressured to compromise its impartiality. For one thing, there is a constant need to produce news, sometimes 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. In addition, they are owned by mega-sized corporate entities who are in the business primarily to generate profit: the press survives by selling airtime and print space to advertisers.

These two factors together, in addition to any bias internal to the culture of the media entity itself (e.g. Fox News), leave the media vulnerable to press releases and other prepackaged content put together by private agencies hoping to get the word out about their clients, especially if those clients are willing to underwrite advertising time and space. People are not stupid. When a television segment on health is sponsored by the same entity that is featured in it, it causes the media producer that aired it to lose credibility.

If the media is compromised in terms of its trustworthiness, then Ries and Ries’ argument falls apart: no credibility = no brand.

Yet one can go much further than this. I would argue that the role of PR was never really to build a brand in the first place. Rather, it is to do no harm to it. PR is inherently a tool for building a great reputation, as PRinfluences.au writes in “A strong corporate reputation is increasingly a PR responsibility.”: “Image can….be generated through an advertising campaign or a corporate document or the look of an organization’s premises….[while] reputation is….built through developing relationships and what an organization does. It is largely what others say about you.” One implication is that PR grows the reputation to protect the brand.

Just to clarify: Reputation—which can loosely be defined as trustworthiness—is not brand. Brand is image, while reputation is reality. What this means is that everybody knows that brand is fake, or has elements of fakery, while reputation is closer to reality. Therefore, brand is best conveyed by a consistent sales/marketing/advertising “core message,” while reputation is best conveyed by transparency.

Now transparency, which is the real job of a public relations professional (though they may not be able to express it in practice), means to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth about the organization, and in so doing to portray the organization as trustworthy. Therefore PR is actually the antithesis of branding, which is to tell a very partial, even propagandistic, truth. Really, branding is pure selling, aimed at owning a single idea in the audience’s mind. No matter how they are written up in The Wall Street Journal or Fortune, the brands of Nike, Disney, Starbucks, and Coca-Cola have little to do with the real world inside their organizations, and much to do with the image they represent to the public. There is one exception, and that is where PR and transparency comes in. As mentioned above, PR uses transparency to build the reputation of a brand, to insulate its image against damaging attacks. So when Starbucks embarks on PR-driven corporate citizenship campaigns like “fair trade coffee beans,” the effect is not to build the brand but rather to enhance the company’s reputation. Let’s face it: Starbucks doesn’t get $2 per cup of coffee because of its coffee bean policy, but rather because it represents something completely different and special: “time out for myself.” And the Starbucks brand is primarily built by all the activities it undertakes to promote this image. One example would be its television commercials showing harried mothers taking time out for a Frappuccino, or a young worker in a rush to get to the office, but taking time out for a refrigerated Starbucks DoubleShot espresso.

To reiterate: The only reason for reputation-building activities, or PR, is to protect the brand against being damaged by scandal. Nike has not been skillful in this regard, and the “just do it” image suffers from the company’s association with sweatshop labor. One illustrative story is the MIT student who sought to personalize his Nike sneakers with the word “sweatshop” and was refused (see http://www.snopes.com/business/consumer/nike.asp). In my view, his challenge to the company’s reputation effectively damaged Nike’s brand because Nike hasn’t effectively defended its working conditions in the consumer’s mind. It may be that Nike working conditions aren’t as bad as people think, but as long as the PR doesn’t transparently show a safe, clean, fair working environment, the damage to Nike’s reputation will continue, even though it remains a superbrand.

Thus far, we have established that PR does not build the brand, but rather defends the brand’s reputation. But one can go even further than this. To go back to the initial discussion of the media’s tarnished objectivity: PR has a new hurdle to face in defending a company’s reputation, and that is to actually deliver transparency. It is no longer sufficient for PR to develop and disseminate “white propaganda” (the truth, delivered with a credible source, but emphasizing only the positive). Rather, to counter the perceived bias of the media, PR has to deliver objective information about an organization to the media, even when that information sounds negative. Otherwise, jaded viewers will know that the media has been corrupted by a PR message, and will simply tune out. And another step further: advertising should not be perceived as a blockage to building a brand. For branding is an image-building activity, and advertising is explicitly an image-building technique. The audience expects advertising to try and “sell” them. In addition to this, advertising clearly acknowledges its source and sponsor, whereas this does not necessarily happen in the media. So to come full circle, Ries and Ries may be incorrect when they say that advertising can’t build a brand because it lacks credibility: it may be that people trust advertising more than they do the media.

One final point: I think that people enjoy the brand-building activities that advertisers create. They like a good advertisement or television commercial, and they enjoy finding out about a product or service that is new and interesting. What they don’t like is to be tricked, fooled, or enticed to buy something from a company that is unethical or that doesn’t deliver on its promises. Steering consumers away from those particular dislikes is the job of a good PR specialist.

 Source: brandchannel.com

 Just for laughs

Pod-vertising, how to create effective adverts on podcasts

My daily 50-minute commute to work from Brooklyn to Grand Central station usually consists of reading the Daily News or more recently, listening to news podcasts on my iPod. It is especially entertaining during the times the conductor holds up the train because of “the red signal ahead of us.” It makes time tick faster and feels like we’re moving sooner than we actually are.

What moves me most about Podcasting is the convenience of portal media that allows me to download my favorite shows to my iPod and time-shift my listening to when it is best suitable for me, like on my way to work. Today, consumers of Podcasting demand better content and a better personalized experience when they want. The shift in control from marketers to consumers are altering the way we approach marketing.

Podvertising is great tool for forward-thinking advertisers who want to try their hands at alternative media. Podvertising allows marketers to target their niche audience and prevent ad avoidance at a small cost. Users are unlikely to fast-forward through your ad because they've already subscribed to the podcast and usually, do not mind listening to a 15-second ad. Also, with podcasting, small companies who could not afford to advertise on the big screen have the opportunity to reach their target audience.

How do you start advertising on Podcasts?

1. Sponsorships: sponsor a couple of target podcasts. For example: Gatorade sponsors Endurance Radio.

2. Offer giveaways and promotions: offer discounts and prizes in order to entice the listeners and prevent ad avoiders.

3. RSS feeds: You can time your podcast to be on your site at the same time as a new product launch. When people search for your info on your new product, your podcast will be in those results. If a user likes what he hears, he may decide to not only listen, but subscribe as well.

4. Produce Your Own: create your own podcast, featuring an audio informercial, video demo for new products, audio/video press releases about your product, etc. Consumer-packaged-goods companies may use podcasts to enhance consumers’ lives and to build a connection with them. For instance, IBM produces podcasts on key business and technology topics.

Don't underestimate the power of Podvertising! According to eMarketer, podcasting advertising will increase by 400% by 2011. There is a great video on Podvertising that I couldn't insert the video but click here to view it

Source: ana.blogs.com

Part 2: Social Media Marketing Tips That WORK!! From those in the driving seat of some of our best loved brands

What insights do you have for other large organizations, Fortune 500 at least, on things they should think about when looking at social media as something to invest in? Scott Monty - Head of Global Social Media at Ford

I think so much is made of social media, there’s a different tool nearly every day that’s being developed, but the bottom line is, it’s just online conversations. It’s learning how to speak to your customers again and getting into the channels where they are, whether it’s Twitter, Facebook, whatever. And when legal departments freak out as they normally do, I’d remind them that 15 years ago email was very much in the same cusp and look at how that’s worked out for us. Nobody has spilled the beans on some corporate IP secret, or at least very few people have.  It’s just another way of communicating.

Which drives which, technology or communications? Brian Solis – CEO Futureworks, blogger, speaking, author and PR/Social Media evangelist.

It’s a collision between technology and communications. If anything, it’s technology slamming into communications and we’re all trying to figure out what hit us. Conferences like SNCR and Web 2.0 Expo are the epitome of all the hottest, coolest, shiny objects, tools and networks from social media to enterprise 2.0. It affects us as communications professionals, as marketers and even as business professionals as the social graph has now been enhanced and streamlined through all of this stuff, at least it’s supposed to be.

What we’re seeing in terms of the collision between technology and communications is that technology is not just forcing communications but all of media, causing us to evolve in a way that’s making us better communications professionals because we’re actually communicating with people and not at them.

Can you share a few high level tips for companies that are in discovery mode when it comes to tasks such as deciding on social platforms and applications, internal management and success measurement?  Or should they take a less evaluative approach and just jump in?  Jessica Berlin – Social Media Manager, Cirque du Soleil

If you’re ready to count more failures than wins and if you can get honest admissions of fear – you’re almost ready to jump in. But first ask yourself “What kind of relationship do I (not We) want to have with myemployees or customers? Give yourself an honest answer. If it’s a purely transactional relationship that’s fine. If it’s something else, try to plot it on a line of intimacy somewhere between “Someone I see a couple days a week in the elevator” and “Soul mate.” Hopefully, for their sake, it’s somewhere in the middle. Then practice. Keep it small. Say hi. Get to know each other. Try things. Learn. If a jaded old ad guy like me can figure it out, the rest of you should be fine.

What are some of the common issues large organizations encounter when trying to evaluate and adopt social media technologies? Are you seeing more internal or external facing applications? (ex: building a private social network vs engaging in existing/public social networks). Jim Cuene  - Director of Interactive at General Mills

The only stuff I care about right now is consumer facing. I don’t care too much about Enterprise 2.0 (though I know that I need the same tools for internal communications that I’m seeing take off in the consumer space).

The phenomenon is just getting started, even though to those of us who are on Twitter and compulsively reload Tec meme it feels like it’s been around a while. It’s still so early in the game! Big companies that have been historically reliant on mass media are just now beginning to realize the extent to which their worlds will change as a result of social media.

A couple key issues:

• Efficiency is elusive/It’s hard to execute social media efficiently- Large companies have made a science out of finding efficiencies in media, and have been pretty successful squeezing most of the fat out of production budgets. But, social media, in a lot of ways, is the exact opposite of mass: Labor intensive, highly involved, non-standardized.

• Who to Turn to – Big companies are critically dependent on their agencies as a way to run lean internally. But 90% of ad agencies are still trying to figure out how to deal with display and SEM. Social media is going to be a total mind- f*** for them. And a lot of the “social media agencies” are making it up everyday, as they go along. No one has this figured out, and big companies aren’t really staffed right to figure it out themselves.

• Evaluating success – What’s a good result? We all know home runs when we see them in other media, but what does a a successful social media campaign look like? How big does that success have to be to drive the business?

• Velocity -By it’s nature, social media is slower than Mass. The Blendtec guys were at it for a while, before “Will it Blend” went big. Viral hits like “elf-yourself” don’t just happen overnight in most cases, even if it seems like it to us. Tv-centric companies are used to turning on the ad (or dropping the FSI, or starting the promotion) and seeing the results immediately. For companies that are used to the velocity of impact that comes from “mass” media, the slow, steady approach may be frustrating

Can you share a few high level tips for companies that are in discovery mode when it comes to tasks such as deciding on social platforms and applications, internal management and success measurement?  Or should they take a less evaluative approach and just jump in? Gary Koelling - Senior Manager, Social Technology at Best Buy and co-creator of Blue Shirt Nation

If you’re ready to count more failures than wins and if you can get honest admissions of fear – you’re almost ready to jump in. But first ask yourself “What kind of relationship do I (not We) want to have with my employees or customers? Give yourself an honest answer. If it’s a purely transactional relationship that’s fine. If it’s something else, try to plot it on a line of intimacy somewhere between “Someone I see a couple days a week in the elevator” and “Soul mate.” Hopefully, for their sake, it’s somewhere in the middle. Then practice. Keep it small. Say hi. Get to know each other. Try things. Learn. If a jaded old ad guy like me can figure it out, the rest of you should be fine.

Do You outsource any social media work and if so, do  you have tips other company social media marketers for finding managing consultants? Tim Collins – Senior Vice President of Experiential Marketing Wells Fargo

Most of our work is done internally.  But on the small portion that is external, the same rules apply to other media:
• Get referrals from people you trust
• Check their work with other clients
• Set clear expectations and hold them accountable

Can you share an example of how you’ve successfully employed a social media effort (large scale or a specific tactic)  and how you measured success? (marketing, ORM, branding, etc) URLs to examples are very much appreciated. Dave Evans – Social Media Strategist at Digital Voodoo and Author, “Social Media Marketing An Hour a Day”

Three come to mind immediately, as all are fundamentally different in their goals.

First, Meredith Publishing and its communities like Parents/American Baby and Better Homes and Gardens. Working with Meredith’s Community Manager we developed a strategic roadmap guiding their use of the Pluck community platform. The objective was stronger engagement between individual print and online subscribers via the content discussions in which they were engaged. In this case, we gauged success in terms of page views–the base line indicator for publishers–and the size of the community as it grew over time.

Next is Premiere Global, a provider of scalable electronic messaging services. Premiere’s platform powers many of the financial trade transaction confirmations that people receive, hurricane evacuation notices, and similar. Premiere developed an API around its platform, and then invited developers to build monetized application using these tools. Working with Austin’s FG SQUARED, we developed a support and learning community built on the Jive Software platform for application developers to facilitate the spread of tips and knowledge in order to build more and better application based on PGI’s underlying API and service platform. We are measuring the number of applications developed, and the revenue associate with them. This is essential a direct measure of ROI.

Finally, working again with FG SQUARED and its client, University Federal Credit Union, we implemented Techrigy’s SM2 social media monitoring platform to engage the credit unions marketing and operations units with conversations of interest. This is the first step in what will be a larger social media based implementation, and is a great example of the ways in which innovators within organizations can take initial steps into social media. Measurement in this case is related to the conversations uncovered, and their value in terms of intelligence to the firm.

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