SIPA UK Blog

I think the second shot may have been a mistake

But this morning's bacon sandwich was a stroke of genius.

Last night's SIPA marketing networking group was a success on many fronts. It was still going strong at 11pm when I took an executive decision to leave the kids to it.

We had three excellent speakers on the night - who inspired me to take a close look at our email marketing. Any marketer who does not get stupidly excited about being able to see what your customers are doing, be it through open rates, click throughs or conversion to order, is in the wrong job.

Everyone who came along will get a full copy of the presentations, for everyone else - here are the best email marketing tips from Sean Hayes, Sara Baugh and Paul Crabtree of Incisive Media, Electric Word and Adestra.

What your reports tell you

• So you think you know people because they filled in a form? You don't. Track what people do, what they read, why they buy - not what they say they do
• Buying in 3rd party email lists is a false economy; if you have to use this method - never lease names as response declines faster than the level in Sean's pint

Email marketing as art and science

• Surprise your readers; a news alert that always comes from the brand pulled £35k when it was sent from the editor (with a chatty, informal holiday style)
• Test religiously. Electric Word do and they get 40% open rates. Enough said.
• Do your editors write your news alert subject lines? Think you can do better? Do an editorial vs marketing split subject line test - Electric Word did and guess who won. Yep. Marketing every time.
• A show of hands showed that we all do things we know we shouldn't - to make it clear, in B2B leading with FREE, SALE or any offer led copy will diminish response -whatever your market. Always. Without fail.
• Headlines maketh the email - don't stop at a great subject line. If you want some great examples, sign up for Electric Word's newlines and read.
• There is no such thing as too many testimonials, especially if you use them as a block - they can lift response (orders) by 18%+
• Send your customers short surveys asking for testimonials and use them everywhere!

Rip up the research. Watch your customers and competitors instead

• When should you send your emails? When your customers are naturally responsive - look at your web stats over 3 months and your customers will tell you when they are in information mode
• A classic publishing trick is to have your magazine land on people's desks before your competitor - do you do the same things with your news alerts
• Do you send your news alert the same time every week. And why is that? Check those web trends and find out if 4pm Friday really is when your customers are online and looking to be interrupted

Watch this space for details of the next networking group. We'll be meeting in August for more practical take-aways and I suspect more beers/shots/cocktails.

Everyone who attends gets the full presentations and a complimentary hangover - so don't miss out. Come along and better still volunteer to present the best things you have done this year. Even where we compete, we are all in this together and SIPA is all about raising standard across the industry.

Please email me or Karen Hindle at uksipa@btconnect.com join the group, speak and to suggest topics.

Louise

Virtual friends?

Right. I've had enough of this debate about how it's good to meet people face to face.

I agree.

It is.

But this is interesting & I plan on playing with the technology behind it - Ning.

Folio Media Pro

My name is Rory Brown and I am a geek.

When customers say thank you

"I flew all the way for this!"

With oil at $130 plus a barrel. Increased security checks. And corporate budgets under pressure. Traveling to business conferences just to hear a bunch of speakers read out bullet points from PowerPoint slides, when improved communication and social media mean you could have listened in from the comfort of your office...All this is really raising the bar for conference organizers. Or so says author of Permission Marketing, Seth Godin.

Anyone who's ever read his white paper on 'Death by Powerpoint': Really Bad Powerpoint will have looked back and cringed at their own slide decks crammed packed full of bullet points and dense text that has delegates' minds wandering or plain squinting at the screen.

The days of the traditional format conference are surely numbered. But from roundtables, to Q&A sessions, to interactive group discussions, to plain-old networking in the halls, there's no substitute for the shared learning experience conferences offer, when done well.

So imagine our delight when a delegate at Melcrum's recent Employee Engagement Summit in Sydney, Australia took it upon themselves to buy our very own Amy Lyons the most enormous bouquet of flowers with a card that referenced all the wonderful things Amy had done to make their conference experience second to none. (Customer service smug factor: 10/10).

It would seem that the value of attending conferences is alive and well, after all. And can social media and so-called 'virtual conferences' really replace the real thing? Virtual flowers, anyone?

By Robin Crumby, Managing Director, Melcrum

From the Undercover Marketer

30 May 2008

As a freelance marketer, I believe marketing lies at the centre of all business. Without a market, you don’t have a product. I therefore investigate any business I can learn from, whatever or wherever that is.

So in March, over I go to Arkansas USA to talk to one of Barack Obama’s election volunteers. He tells me how wonderful Obama is. Never mind all that – every Tom Dick and Harry can get that from newspapers and TV.

What marketing tricks is he pulling?

After some experimental interrogation sessions with this volunteer guy, he starts to tell me all about Obama’s web and viral marketing techniques. How far ahead of his rivals the Obama team is in SEO (Search Engine Optimisation), email marketing and website design. All of which are central to today’s publishing operation.

I decide to investigate further
Obama’s website has a really effective USP and a prominent ‘donate’ button. You can’t miss them. But Hillary Clinton’s messages are mixed and all over the home page. Her USP (‘I’m a woman. Make history’) is negated by Obama’s (‘I am black. Make a change’) Hillary’s donate button is found under a list of five other options.

Take a look here: MarketingObama.com

Inside Obama's Internet marketing team
I discover the inside story on the expert Internet marketing team Obama has assembled. (This is beginning to sound like Electric Word..)

The Clinton’s didn’t even bother to visit Silicon Valley when they were in California – whoops!

Now - how clever is this?!
We can all learn from how the Internet team was brought together. Obama doesn’t waste time going around interviewing dozens of Internet wizards (all of whom have probably arrived from the distant planet of Gobbledygook.)

No - Obama is far wiser than that; wiser even than the average publisher. Instead he recruits a partner in a San Francisco venture-capital firm, Mark Gorenberg. These VC guys invest in Internet entrepreneurs. So instead of loosing his sanity listening to fast gobbledygook from a long list of computer guys, each who will insist he can build the right fund-raising system at the right price, Obama gets this guy Gorenberg to do it.

(How to run a company, lesson one: if you know Jack about Internet marketing or indeed, not much about marketing at all – delegate the job to someone who does).

As a venture capitalist, Gorenberg spends all his days listening to and investing in computer people talking fast gobbledygook. So he has the experience to quickly spot what he wants. But Gorenberg, like Obama, is also a wise man - wise enough not to take on the task himself. He teams up with a friend whose job it is to recruit executives for tech firms. So she does all the listening and all the hiring.

(How to run a company, lesson two: that’s how ‘networking’ at the top works).

These tech-types think in terms of networks. That is why Obama has a hugely successful viral marketing email campaign and why he has pulled in much more money than anyone else – around 23% more than Hillary Clinton. That’s enough to give Obama market leadership.

Many of the donations are in recurring monthly payments by credit card – but that is another story, another lesson.

 

 

Twitter ye not?

Whenever I talk about Twitter my fellow committee members tend to laugh. I must admit that when I first came across the service about 6 months ago I was baffled and couldn't see the point. But now I am starting to..

For those who have not come across Twitter the basic concept is that it is a 'micro-blogging' platform. Users register accounts and then decide whose tweets they want to follow. The principle is very similar to instant messaging but instead of your messages being one-to-one they are one to how ever many people chose to follow you in return.

Now, this could all be viewed as a massive time suck. And it can be. But there are some interesting business applications - especially in the marketing and information sectors in which I currently work. I'll list a few of them:

1. Speaker recruitment. We have recently recruited several speakers for events as a result of pitching calls for papers on Twitter. They have either been recommended by people who have heard them speak in other places or pitched themselves.
2. Feedback. if hosting events you can set up a 'Twitter tag' where your delegates can post questions to the panel or give feedback on sessions via their laptops or mobile phones. It is also great for co-ordinating where the best parties are!
3. Reputation management. I guarantee that somewhere people are talking about your brands or competitors.Twitter posts don't currently show up in search engine results but you can search for posts by using specific search engines like Summize or Tweetscan.
4. The news finds you. My news consumption habits are changing. From reading a lot of magazines, to e-mail newsletters, to RSS feeds; my biggest source of information is now referred by my network. The people I trust and who have similar interests to me flag up things of interest and often people at the fringes of my networks prompt those slightly peripheral thoughts from other industries that develop into great ideas.
5. Driving traffic to websites. We now have Twitter channels for some of our major news sites - like ClickZ. Users of Twitter chose to follow the channel and  then get instant messages when new content is posted.
6. Product / supplier recommendations. I recently bought a new Asus eee pc laptop totally based on recommendations I received from people I trust on Twitter. The same principle applies when trying to source suppliers or products for your business.

I mentioned Twitter at SIPA's great "How to make money from online content" session last Thursday [if you weren't there you missed a great session & well done Lindsey Greig for organising], a quick poll showed that no-one in the audience was using it. That's a shame. While there will probably be a new fad along any moment I would urge all publishers to try these tools. You have to be operating in the new digital world if you want to really understand how everything fits together and how your business might need to adapt in the future.

www.twitter.com/rorybrown

New SIPA UK group set up on Facebook

Following an enthusiastic show of hands at the latest SIPA UK E-marketing conference a couple of weeks back, I have now set up a Facebook group for SIPA UK members.

This is the Facebook group for UK specialised information publishers, large and small, to discuss their challenges, share ideas and network with their peers.

If you are already a Facebook member, you can find the group at: SIPA UK Facebook group

Alternatively, you can join the rest of the world's population on Facebook by signing up now.

Although, I would be first to admit that take-up amongst Melcrum staff has been slow. Why? Because, a lot of people see Facebook as a place for friends. But those divides between work and play are tumbling down. After all, is work a place you go to each day, or something you do?

With more of us working remotely, social media brings colleagues and friends closer together.

But what do you think? Is Facebook a tool for business too?

Robin

Blogs & Social Media Forum

Yesterday the newly acquired VNU division of Incisive Media hosted our 2nd Blogs & Social Media Forum. It was a fantastic event which, unfortunately, I only managed to stay for the morning of.

Some of the key takeaways for me were:

1) The use of blogging and social media technology within all of our businesses is no longer a 'nice to have' or a whizzy geeky add on. Blogs are mainstream communication channels and when used properly can generate significant marketing and search exposure.

2) The prevalence and reach of blogs will continue to put pressure on paid content. One of my colleagues in the US always uses the phrase that content 'wants to be free'. The new waves of citizen journalism and efficient distribution mechanisms mean that it is increasingly hard to compete on (and charge for) news.

3) Embracing blogs, social media and user generated content means giving up large elements of control. This is a very uncomfortable things for larger corporates to do - especially when they are public companies. The view of the panelists was that you had to accept mistakes will be made and content will be posted that you'd prefer wasn't.

4) The software to implement some of this technology is cheap. The Economist were using a service called Pluck. It was the same service that USA Today had implemented in a fundamental revamp of how their news was displayed. Look at the way in which they embed personalisation, recommendation and feedback into every element of their new site.

One final point made by Ben Edwards, the Publisher of Economist.com was that in order to get momentum behind blogs an element of compulsion was important. He set minimum posting guidelines for everyone on the team who contributed - maybe a lesson for us here at SIPA UK?

Rory Brown, Incisive Media.

Miss it - miss out

So having made bold claims about writing 'live' from the conference, I failed miserably. Too busy scribbling down ideas to share them. And oh-so quick, I am now home again after a whirlwind tour.

There were a pitiful number of Brits in attendance. Less than 5, compared to more than 35 from Germany and VNR, courtesy of Helmut Graf's hard work. The consensus is that the June 27 UK SIPA event is too close to the Washington International conference, forcing people to choose on both sides of the Atlantic.

The key themes of the event and the challenges rearing their ugly heads were:

1. What does user-generated content mean for the paid content model? How do you mesh them together and make money from social networks, blogs and podcasts?
2. Google: great presentation from their head of content partnerships showcasing how specialised publishers can get better visibility for their content and better results.
3. Online training: going beyond audio conferences and webinars to deliver certified training programmes.

I will write up my stuff and share some of the highlights at the SIPA London event on June 27th. See you there.

Robin.

Time to SEO yourself

I suspected it was only a matter of time...

2 weeks ago I had a conversation with an old friend from university. He was expecting his third child and was struggling with names. He'd been through all this before but now was viewing the process differently. After naming his first daughter with what he thought was a really unique and quirky name he turned up on the first day of her nursery class to discover that four other sets of parents had thought the same thing. How could he have been so common and unoriginal?

We discussed a few of the truly ridiculous names that some parents give and he said he was leaning down this route because "at least in the future when someone searched for her in Google she would stand out" (the family had a top-10 surname as well).

This is the first instance I know of someone naming a child with a search engine at the forefront of their mind but I'm sure it won't be the last. Big brands spend millions on managing their identity, image and ranking online because, increasingly, a search engine box is their first touchpoint with the consumer.

But take a moment to think about your own personal brand. When you do an ego search online what information comes up? Thousands of other John Smiths (including the beer)? A MySpace entry from your friends about a wild night out in Magaluf? A YouTube video? Think about the impression that this gives of 'brand me' because I guarantee you that employers and headhunters are starting to look online as part of the recruitment process.

Time to optimise youself online

So, what lessons should we learn from the search engine optimisation industry? What gets you higher up the rankings and gives you a higher profile? The two most important factors are:

1. Content - post information about yourself online but manage it carefully. Set up accounts with chosen social networking site. Services like LinkedIn, Facebook or MySpace. Think about keywords you want to be found for and make sure they are included.
2. Links - join your industry's trade associations. Participate in meetings. Speak at conferences. Write on discussion boards, blogs and journals for your industry. Give quotes in your company press releases. Network. And provide somewhere to link back to your own personal website, your blog or a LinkedIn page.

It is time to spend some time controlling your personal profile online.

Alternatively, you could choose to change your name by deedpoll and hope that 1,000 other Louise White's have more to hide than you do...

Rory Brown, Incisive Media