Marketer's Lab

iCentera 5.0 Release - Fine-Tuning Roles

I've posted on iCentera previously, they provide a great dynamic portal solution.  Today they announced the release of iCentera 5.0, which amongst a host of new features, focuses on supporting multiple roles and views.  As a quick refresher, iCentera allows users to create custom portals which can be used for internal or external audiences, can be set up for specific sales interactions or as more marketing-centric resource center type applications.  The ability to fine-tune who sees what is pretty important and this new release is clearly aimed at providing users better capabilities in that area.  You can read the full release here or if you really want a deep dive, access the release notes here.  Portals for Mortals (a great tag line BTW) continues to get better and better. 

Don't Forget about UI

The primary reason I blog about marketing technology and have a passion for this space is I see it as essential to being a great marketer.   As big a fan as I am of understanding the newest tools of the marketing trade, I'll be the first to say not all emerging marketing gadgetry is deserving of our time and attention. It's easy to get swept away with technology for technologies sake. 

This post from SEOmoz titled 8 Innovative Design & UI Elements That Make Sites Better hits on a handful of important points we as marketers seem to occasionally drift away from. The post features examples of marketers doing interesting and engaging things, which stirred these additional thoughts:

- Interface/Design trumps technology infrastructure - To head off those of you who are more tech-oriented, I'll disclaim that obviously the optimal situation is where you have effective, hand-in-glove synchronization of UI and infrastructure, but for my money if users can't figure out what to do or easily intuit how to achieve their objectives, it makes no difference how good your technology infrastructure might be.

- Making the complex simple - Many companies, especially technology companies of any kind, are notorious for complicated web sites that make it tough to understand what they do.  The Logistetica example is a great study in how to distill key messages and provide a beautiful visual experience.

- Great ideas inspire great design - Most of the examples in the post are well executed designs around strong ideas and concepts.  Whether its contests, conversion-funnel based navigation or the feature of a "multi-hero" piece, they are all propelled by cogent ideas.

Check out the SEOmoz post, soak in the nice ideas highlighted there and be sure to stay focused on UI throughout the marketing process.

Social Media is For Closers

In the movie Glengarry Glen Ross, you might remember the scene where Alec Baldwin, the sleazy sales boss, tells his struggling sales team that the highly coveted Glengarry sales leads are only "for closers".  His character (Blake) is by most measures pretty ruthless, focused on closing deals at any cost.  While his approach is extreme, he touches on a principle most marketers are missing in our approach to social media impact. 

The kinds of social media measurements we tend to focus on are similar to what one might measure if managing the activity of a salesperson.  How many calls are made?  How many meetings are set up?  How many opportunities are in their pipeline?  Are they establishing rapport with the prospect?  Are they maintaining the relationship with the prospect?  All totally legitimate questions, but if you had a salesperson who was doing all those things well for a long period of time and never made a sale, would you consider them successful?  Probably not.

We tend to talk about performance measurement in terms we're familiar with; impressions, CPC, CPA,  click-thru, visits, conversions, etc.  We also talk about things like engagement, influence and authority as indicators of social media success.  At what point do we ask people to actually buy something?  Asking for the sale (via marketing) is not some shameful task only left to salespeople, its an organic element of the sales process that seems more awkward to omit than include.  So much of the current social media approach feels to me like rewarding the salesperson for building rapport, but never closing the sale.

Flashback to the dot-com days when sites were all about "eyeballs" as the measure of success, but most had a hard time paying the bills with eyeballs.  A great deal of the discussion and thinking around social media feels eerily similar to me but replace eyeballs with "influence", "conversation", "dialogue", "community", (insert social media buzzword of choice here).

Sales results are truly the ultimate ROI measurement for marketing, so ask yourself if you want the Cadillac, the steak knives or the other alternative? (This will make absolutely no sense to you if you aren't familiar with the movie, so watch the trailer link for this piece). 

 

Bubble Guru

(Vendor Speed Date - Bubble Guru)... Bubble Guru offers a solution to quickly and easily create little video "bubbles" which can be used for a variety of web applications.  They of course sprinkle examples liberally throughout their own site and feature a handful of testimonials as well.  The process looks very simple, either using a web-cam application they provide or uploading video you may have captured on your own.  They offer a free 14 day trial and have packages that range from a whopping $2.95 per month up to the advanced package for $14.95 per month. 

Not familiar with anything quite like Bubble Guru, it looks like an easy way to provide a richer web experience and if used creatively could add a lot of value to any site.      

Your Blog is Talking

First official vendor speed date post here... The vendor is Odiogo.  They provide a service that automatically creates podcasts from text on blogs or other sites.  I've posted previously on the fact podcasts are here to stay as part of the marketing mix so this technology seems like a super easy way to leverage existing web content to tap into the podcast crowd.  Odiogo has a nice demo which provides an overview of how their service works.  Prior to this post I've not tried the service myself, but am intrigued enough to explore a little more.  The automated voice is of course a little stilted and awkward, but honestly not terrible as automated voice bots go.  They look to be easily compatible with all the major blog platforms and actually offer the service for free to bloggers.  Ads (sold by Odiogo) are inserted into each podcast, but they do offer a revenue share model for bloggers at a certain traffic level.  If you have web content that you think might transition well to podcasts, certainly worth checking out Odiogo.

Vendor Speed Dating

Looking for love?  Searching high and low for your marketing technology soul-mate?  I can help.  This post marks the beginning of a new ongoing series under the "Vendor Speed Dating" category.  I've mentioned in previous posts some of the work I am doing in preparation for the launch of Upshot Institute.  Much of that work has involved talking with a LOT of marketing technology vendors and being on the receiving end of plenty of dog-n-ponies.  Upshot Institute will feature a vendor directory that includes over 1,000 of these vendors, but rather than keep everyone waiting I thought it might be nice to showcase a handful of these providers.  In the spirit of speed dating I'll keep it quick and simple, basically who they are, what they do and why it has potential value to you as a marketer.  You'll need to contact the vendors on your own to learn if they like long walks on the beach, cats, NASCAR, skydiving or are searching for that special someone.    

Calling All Marketing Tech Vendors

As part of the preparation for the upcoming launch of Upshot Institute, we've been compiling a huge database of marketing technology providers.  Currently the database features over 1,000 providers and is still growing.  To help navigate this massive universe of vendors, we are launching the Upshot50, a list of the leading marketing technology providers nominated and selected by you, the marketing professional.  Right now we're actively seeking nominations of marketing technology vendors who are doing fantastic and interesting things.  Please nominate any vendors you think are deserving at this link.  Once we have all the nominations we'll open up the voting  with plans to then announce winners this September.  So don't delay, help your favorite marketing technology vendor claim their fifteen minutes of fame!

The Carbon Footprint of a Blog Rant

"What's the carbon footprint of a banner ad?" I don't know, what's the carbon footprint of a stupid question? The banner ad question is from Don Carli of the Institute for Sustainable Communication (ISC) featured on a 3 Minute AdAge segment (segments I typically think are great BTW) taped at the AdAge Green Conference.  As part of Mr. Carli's comments, he highlighted the Institute had gone as far as engaging a team of gurus to build a tool which measures the carbon footprint of all of our horrific, disgusting, resource-sucking online marketing (my words, not his). Of the many ways we marketers consume resources, seems to me there are plenty of examples of resource consumption much more deserving of our immediate attention than online marketing.

To be clear, I'm a big fan, although not a militant activist, of greater environmental stewardship and improving our responsible use of resources.  What prompted my little rant here is seeing how those worthy green ideals are creating rather odd areas of focus. Would the effort that went into building the online tool have been better spent figuring out how to dramatically modify the direct mail industry or shining a light on other marketing areas which are more egregious consumers of resources?

Not to beat up on the direct mail folks but come on, physically moving pieces made from trees, dyes and other chemicals (via oil-powered vehicles) to people who didn't ask to get it in the first place hardly seems like a resource-friendly proposition.  We should be hammering on the whole direct mail industry to go beyond just "going green" by using recycled paper. 

I do believe organizations like the ISC and others in the industry are well-intentioned and have the right basic idea around a concerted effort to reduce the environmental impact of all marketing.  I have spent some time on the ISC site and it does look like they have some good work underway to address the problem, it just feels like a waste of time to dive into something like on-line marketing when there are so many serious offenders and better opportunities to make a meaningful impact on the environment.

Memes and "Temes"

A little bit of a departure here, but  this video from the TED Conference by Susan Blackmore is extremely interesting.  If you are familiar with "memes" and the implications for marketing, this talk takes the meme thing to a whole new level. 

Killing A Fly With A Shotgun

I was inspired by this piece on AdAge.com written by Greg Andersen to challenge some of the thinking about the use of marketing technology and the various new communications platforms.  Greg's piece leads with an example of his young niece questioning his foray as a 40-year-old into the world of Facebook.  He goes on to explore how from a branding and media standpoint it's important to consider why "because all the cool kids are doing it" isn't always a good excuse for running non-traditional media.  I really like Greg's style, it's a thought-provoking piece I encourage you to read.

The cool marketers are...well, doing something to leverage the latest, greatest marketing technologies.  It seems like we all want to "be cool" and plugged in using the newest social media tools, the super-whiz-bang integrated marketing platforms or the sophisticated behavioral targeting solutions.  I'm obviously a huge fan of all the emerging marketing technology, (hence the creation of this blog to focus on such things), but I think its important to be mindful of how much technology we employ.  I've seen plenty of examples of marketers "killing a fly with a shotgun" taking on the expense and complexity of big marketing technology solutions only to use a small fraction of the features and capabilities.

"The right tool for the job" strikes me as one of those timeless expressions that lends itself well to our current day and age.  My parting suggestion would be to become absolutely passionate about understanding the new marketing tools out there, but be selective in how, and if, they make sense for your situation.   

It's Aliiiiive!

Email marketing is alive and kicking.  In this eMarketer piece, email is clearly still going strong as a viable way to reach adult Internet users.  The problem with email is it just doesn't have the sizzle that things like social media, mobile marketing and web video have these days, but the chart below illustrates email is still a great medium for communication.  Another interesting little tidbit in this piece is there doesn't appear to be a drop off in the preference for email over the next five years, so email seems poised to continue to be an effective element in your communications strategy.  The caveat on email effectiveness is that its done using the right opt-in practices and the right mix of behavioral and personalization features.  Continue to invest in improving your email marketing programs since it would appear email will still be a meaningful piece of the marketing pie in the years to come.