Marketing and content trends, tools, and tips that are always one step ahead of leading edge

Today I got my cell phone bill and learned something else about Twitter . My addiction is costing me, but not enough to get me to stop.

My Sprint contract allows for 100 two-way text messages a month, for $5. But this month I logged 191 additional text messages, at 20 cents a message, for an additional $38.20. I follow fewer than 20 people—a small number, really—and track several topics that haven’t appeared in all that many tweets. Guess I’ll be visiting Sprint to change my service contract.

Twitter addiction is a growing trend, as you can read here . Have you ever thought about how much money people spend to stay connected (I’m thinking postage rates + broadband access + phone contracts + mobile data, etc.)? Or how much your customers are paying to follow your brand or get updates from your company? —Charlotte Ziems, VP, client engagement

On Wednesday this week, I attended the Online Community Unconference , which was a fascinating experience. If you’ve never been to an “unconference,” it’s an event in which the agenda is created on the fly, on the day of the event, by the attendees. During the first hour, *all* 250 attendees were asked to introduce themselves and then invited to come to the front of the room and suggest the discussion subjects or sessions that they wanted to lead. These were quick 30- to 60-second pitches for discussion topics, written on an 8 ½ by 11 inch sheet of paper, and then affixed to a huge paper grid with time slots down the right hand column and session locations across the top. At the end of the hour, the entire grid was filled with ideas and, of course, the agenda.

I proposed the topic about which I last blogged—Do Corporate Blogs Require a New Approach to Corporate Leadership? Blogging requires a level of authenticity that some corporate cultures might not support. We might have all had management training at some point in our careers, but that was before the advent of social media. In today’s connected world, do you lead your team differently than you did when Facebook and LinkedIn and YouTube and Google/Yahoo didn’t exist?

I was pleased when about 10 people showed up for the discussion. As was explained at the beginning of the day, if no one attends your session, it just means no one was interested in the topic, e.g., don’t take it personally. Yeah, right. I was equally pleased that everyone stayed for the whole hour. We didn’t focus solely on leadership for blogging, as you’ll see from these key take-aways:

Roles. Corporate blogging is best achieved when the company hires a community manager, a person with strong editorial, management, and communications skills who can work with internal employees to encourage their blogs and manage them against guidelines, plan content, edit blog posts as needed/requested, sometimes write blog posts and comments, etc. etc. One community manager in the group shared stories of the challenge of getting executives to blog on a regular basis.

Internal vs. External Blogging. Two of the people in my discussion manage internal blogs that are kept that way since their communities include developers or research scientists who are blogging about company trade secrets. But the internal blogs are also used as a training ground to identify employees who’d be especially effective blogging externally. Once they’ve identified potential external bloggers, the community managers work with the employees to make sure they understand that blogging to the world requires different content than blogging internally (for one, it can’t contain sensitive trade secrets). And the manager will moderate an external blog more stringently than an internal one.

Motivating the discussion. Some companies are starting blogs and don’t have a huge audience; others have the huge audience and just need the bloggers. Regardless of your audience size, the community is better galvanized if it includes feedback and incentives and positive reward. Use other employees to comment back on blogs; measure and publicize page views for blog posts; pick a “comment of the week” and promote it; post a blog that extracts text from comments to encourage more conversation. Being a community manager is a bit like being a party host—you have to seed the audience and encourage their attendance and provide a nice environment for their interaction.

Leadership. In the end, we did decide that blogging requires a different approach to management. Blogging doesn’t work in a highly controlled culture and necessitates a more inclusive leadership style that invites participation.

What’s your corporate blogging experience? Does your company employ a community manager or have an internal blog? How do you motivate and seed the discussion? —Charlotte Ziems, VP, client engagement

Today is my last day at Tendo. I’m taking a job at an ad agency.

It was a difficult decision to leave Tendo. Not just because the people here are great (they are) and the Tendo work is good (it is), but because I really believe that Tendo is on the cutting edge in terms of providing the type of marketing service that most companies really need…even if many don’t know it yet.

In some ways, it’s ironic that I’m going to work at an ad agency. During my years at Tendo, whenever I met somebody new and explained the type of work we do at Tendo, the person would inevitably look a little confused and say, “Oh…are you an ad agency?”

And I would usually say, “No…Tendo creates the thing that you want the customer to do after they see the ad.”

It’s not a perfect definition of the work of a “custom media agency,” but I still like it.

The marketing world has gotten jumbled up in the last couple of years. The Web didn’t completely obliterate the old models of marketing communication—we still want our customers to DO something—but media consumption is different and it has changed the way you engage an audience.

How are you engaging your audience? An advertisement by itself is not enough. What does the customer do after they see your television commercial? Where do they go after they click your banner ad? What is the experience they have in interacting with your company?

Whether creating Web content, or interactive modules, or print publications, Tendo is all about helping a company deliver more value to a prospect or customer. As a result, that customer has a stronger relationship with the company, which increases sales, loyalty, etc.

More and more companies are realizing this and it’s one of the reasons that the agency landscape is in such flux—there is a great deal of convergence between the worlds of advertising, PR, interactive, and custom media.

Yes, it’s important to grab somebody’s attention. But what do you do with that attention once you have it? Are you providing a rich experience that allows them to learn more, to take the action they want, to interact? Don’t forget what happens with your customers after they see the ad. —John Kovacevich, VP, marketing services

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how an organization’s culture—or maybe “leadership style” is more accurate—can stimulate or hinder its employees from blogging. At Tendo, we help companies establish blogging programs and guidelines, but there’s more to motivating people to blog than giving them a set of rules. And many corporate blogging guidelines are geared toward the eager social media participant—the ones who need to be reminded of rules and legal implications and respectful behavior.

But what about the employees who are, well, shy? Afraid, even? Or who aren’t sure they have anything of value to add to the conversation? They may be smart and they may represent your company well and be perfectly social in face-to-face situations, but just aren’t as zealous on the Web. How does your leadership style encourage them to participate in your company’s online strategy?

My hunch is that two factors are critical in answering this question: trust (check out this post from Jeremiah Owyang, one of my favorite bloggers) and making sure employees feel they have permission—maybe “empowerment” is the right word.

I’ll post more about this in coming weeks, especially after attending the Online Community Unconference next week in Mountain View. In the meantime, send me your thoughts. Has your management style changed since your company instituted a blogging policy? Or do you manage people the same way whether they’re online or not? —Charlotte Ziems, VP, client engagement

In January 2008, we redesigned Tendo’s monthly email newsletter, The Tendo View.

If we developed a new email approach for a client, we’d certainly follow-up with some analysis on whether or not the redesign was successful and adjust our strategy accordingly. So, we’re doing the same for our internal effort and want to share the results with you.

(Some call this “eating your own dog food” but we think it’s just fair play. If we’re going to hold our clients accountable, we should do the same for ourselves.)

What Did We Do?

The Tendo View is an email newsletter that we send to approximately 1,000 recipients each month. Our audience includes past, present, and potential clients as well as freelancers and marketing professionals that are part of Tendo’s extended network.

Given our business, we have many marketers and Web-savvy folks on our list—the type of people who receive a LOT of email newsletters.

In 2007, our newsletter metrics were very respectable. We averaged a unique open rate of 20.71% and an average click-through rate of 12.21%.

We believed that the content we delivered was good. It provided value to our users and we had a nice mix of different content types, from feature pieces to site reviews to our popular “jargon watch” to blog entries.

But we wondered if the look and feel of the newsletter was inhibiting our ability to generate even more opens and better click-through rates. So we decided to make some tweaks to the design—not a wholesale redesign, just tweaking some elements—to see if we could improve our metrics.

Here’s what we found… (more…)

I’ve been playing with Twitter the past couple months, mainly out of curiosity from the buzz it’s been getting (see here and here and here ). I just couldn’t understand the value of a tool that enables 140-character text-message answers to the question, What are you doing? Who cares what I’m doing? Why should I care what others are doing—I mean, in 140-character chunks? And why use Twitter to find out?

As I’ve discovered, Twitter is a very tiny form of blogging. In case you aren’t familiar with it, here’s how it works. Many people “tweet” in between blogs—it’s a faster, easier way to stay connected. When you tweet, your comments are readable by any other Twitter user, but most people don’t read everything that every Twitter user is writing. Instead, you set up your account to follow specific users and track different issues as you wish. Twitter can compare your email contacts to its user registry and tell you who among your contacts is already a Twitter user, so you can follow people you know. Or you can look at all Twitter posts on the website and choose to follow those who seem interesting. Or you can go to http://whoshouldIfollow.com , type in your Twitter username, and receive all sorts of suggestions for who you should follow.

(more…)

Planning changes to your site? Give your web visitors a peek behind-the-the scenes. Use it as an opportunity to engage them in a conversation about what they want and then give them previews about what’s coming.

I check SFGate every day. They’ve been rolling out a new design of their site over the last few months. But instead of just popping up the new design, they’re doing a good job of previewing the changes and explaining WHY they’re being made .

Such an approach can improve adoption of new features and reinforces the value proposition of your site. —John Kovacevich, VP, marketing services

Everybody is buzzing about social media and what it can do for your company. With anything that’s “new” on the Web, there is always a lot of hype and hyperbole. So I was curious…how many people in the Tendo universe are actually using the big-name social networks?

I decided to conduct my own little experiment. I pulled all the email addresses from the Tendo contact database (approximately 1,320 addresses).

Then I fed those email addresses into the contact finder on LinkedIn and the friend finder on Facebook. (I would have done the same on my MySpace account, but MySpace doesn’t allow you to scan an uploaded list, and my own informal traffic monitoring shows that MySpace is on the decline.)

Both have a feature where they compare your address book to the addresses of active members and let you know if a member is in their network. (Don’t worry if you’re on the Tendo mailing list but don’t want your information circulated in either the LinkedIn or Facebook networks. Your information was not saved in either location; it was simply a one-time scan of the list.)

Here’s what I found: 50 percent of our contacts were members on LinkedIn and 18 percent were on Facebook.

Obviously, the Tendo list is not a “representative sample” of the whole world; given our business, we have many marketers and Web-savvy folks on our list. And LinkedIn is especially popular here in the Bay Area as a professional networking tool; the majority of our addresses are from the Bay Area.

But it’s interesting to me that nearly 20 percent of our list is on Facebook—a more purely “social” network and one that was not even open to non-college students a year ago.

Again, this is just a snapshot in time and we probably can’t make any grand conclusion based on these two numbers, but it’s fair to say that the number of people using social networks is on the rise. The basic functionality of these sites is going to become more and more standard in a variety of applications—perhaps even for your company’s network. So you may want to get yourself registered and start poking around. —John Kovacevich, VP, marketing services

Ad Tech ‘08 took place in San Francisco last week and I managed to make a few sessions and wander the exhibition hall. Ad Tech is a digital marketing conference for media, publishing, marketing, and technology professionals. Basically, anyone who’s interested in the tools, strategy, and opportunities of online marketing. Here are some observations and data points that may help inform your customer engagement efforts.

Session: “Social media marketing—the value proposition”

Panel featuring MySpace, Target, Electronic Arts
• eMarketer magazine reported that $1.6b will be spent on social media marketing this year, and $2.4b by 2010
• MySpace had 73 million unique visitors in March, an increase of 7%
• Facebook saw 35 million unique visitors in March, an increase of 9%
• EA and Target say they’re beyond the experimental phase and plan bigger social media marketing investments (details on Target’s successful ‘07 Facebook back to school campaign can be found in my April Tendo View article)

My take:
• The early adopter marketers have learned “what works”
• Social media audiences will embrace a campaign, if it’s done right
• Social media networks are growing in size and audience demographics
• Companies should investigate social media

Session: “Marketing with downloadable media” (podcasts)

Panel featuring Jim Louderback, former editor of PC magazine, now CEO of Revision3; Kin Robles, a producer at National Podcasting System; Mark McCrery of Podtrac, a podcast ad-serving network; and Roxanne Darling, host of “Beachwalks with Rox,” a popular daily podcast in which she ruminates on anything and everything while walking her black Labrador on the beaches of Hawaii.

My take on podcasts:
• The time is right to investigate
• They can help you engage a hard-to-reach, highly desirable audience
• They present a low-cost way to reach a broad audience with viral content
• Their popularity reflects the rise in user-controlled “on demand” media

Here are some stats from a recently released Edison Media research report, “The Podcast Consumer Revealed: An Exclusive Early Look at the Growing Podcast Audience.”

• Podcast listeners are generally more affluent, well-educated, and spend more money online
• Podcast listeners represent a 50/50 split among men and women and demonstrate high levels of avoidance behavior—they know how to evade marketing
• 40% increase in consumption of audio podcasts between ’07 and ‘08
• 21% of Americans (54 million) have watched or listened to downloadable media
• Ad recall rates from podcasts are 47% higher than traditional ad spots—a highly engaged audience!
• 75% of podcasts are accessed through iTunes
• The most viewed/listened to iTunes shows get between 160,000 and 250,000 views/listens per episode

—Bill Golden, managing editor

You probably have a digital camera in your pocket or your handbag right now.

Seriously, they’re everywhere. Try finding a cell phone without one. And this means we can all see our embarrassing photos of that Friday night float around to all our friends before we’ve hit the warm embrace of our bed that a.m.

But is that all they’re for? Just passive recorders? Hardly. Imagine if your camera phone could tell you something. How about the date of your favorite band’s next gig? Give you discounts on that new DVD? Take you to the website of the company you saw that cool ad for in the subway?

Well that’s the concept behind 2D bar codes. You’ve probably seen them before on a UPS package, and there are several types. But the ones you’ll see most of are QR codes. These little pixelated squares can contain a surprising amount of information. They’ve been huge in Japan for years now, and they’ve spread across Europe over the last two years (most notably in the ad campaign for 28 Weeks Later), but for some reason the United States has been holding out.

Not anymore.

The communications benefits are huge, be it advertising, viral marketing, or even just a neat way to put information on your business card. Almost any phone can read them with free software. That’s up to 230 million people.

So the question isn’t why use it. The question is this: How can you use it, and why aren’t you already?