Influential Marketing Blog

Marketing In The Age Of Disposable Email

Some guy named Bob probably hates me. I don't know him and he doesn't know me ... but he's the unfortunate registrant of Bob.com and has used his first name for his email address. Yup, you guessed it - that makes his email address bob@bob.com. That also happens to be the email address that I have used for the past ten years to fill out forms that require an email address that I don't want to give. For more than a decade, Bob has been getting my junk email and to tell you a truth, I feel bad about it. That alone isn't the reason I've had to give up my use of Bob's email, though. The reason is that I can't pick up those confirmation emails that you need to click on in order to activate an account.

Recently, I came across a site called Mintemail that has found an interesting solution ... disposable email. This is essentially what it sounds like - an email address that is good for four hours, usually just long enough to use to register for a site, get a confirmation email and pick it up. The service has lots of smart features built in, such as automatically saving the email address to your clipboard so you're ready to paste it into a form. Every once in a while, there is a solution so simple you wonder why no one else has done it first. I love seeing things like that and this definitely qualifies. If you have a form that requires your audience to enter an email address they are not interested in giving you, it looks like you won't be able to rely on the confirmation email to get you a working email address anymore. In the age of disposable email, it looks like you're going to have to work harder to earn the right to ask for a user's email address. I suppose the upside is that now those bogus emails will bounce after four hours. I bet poor Bob wishes I found this site a lot earlier.

Link Credit: http://www.vqcdesigns.com/blog/

Influential Marketing Blog Featured in Wall Street Journal

Many of you may have already caught this yesterday, but this blog was cited in the Recommended Reading  section of the Wall Street Journal yesterday in an article by Keith Huang.  As Jay Berkowitz from Ten Golden Rules shares on his team blog, my blog was one of 60 resources that they recommended to the journalist as part of their reading list and was selected from that list as a recommended resource for companies looking to "optimize their online presence."  Here's the writeup:

Influential Marketing Blog, rohitbhargava.typepad.com
Rohit Bhargava's blog is intellectual and educational. In a recent post, he discusses the art of stamp collection and how, even today, many smaller countries use stamps as a key marketing tool. He writes, 'Next time you pass a post office in any country, pay attention to how they are using their philately to promote the country, cater to tourists, or commemorate moments of significance.'

It is a great media hit and to be selected from a list of what I am guessing were 60 stellar resources is flattering.  I'm in awe at being included among the other bloggers and authors mentioned in the article - including Seth Godin, Steve Rubel, Matt Cutts, John Battelle, Chris Anderson, Joseph Jaffe, and Danny Sullivan. Thanks to Jay for including me in this great list, and to Keith for selecting to include my blog!

A Recap of 2006 on Influential Interactive Marketing

Let's start with a warning ... this is the "clip show" post where I recycle a lot of old material so if that causes you extreme pain, please close this window now and come back tomorrow.  For all the rest of you, it's the holidays and a quick glance around the marketing blogosphere will show that these clip show posts are in right now.  With nearly 400 post on this blog already, there is lots of content to choose from ... allowing me the luxury to conveniently ignore those posts from the past year that are outdated or that I just don't like anymore.  Here is a sampling of the rest:

Concepts & Ideas:
This is a collection of concepts and ideas that were introduced or discussed on this blog and then travelled virally to other blogs and were discussed elsewhere in media.  A good collection of ideas, many of which I still hope to implement on a client campaign (but haven't yet).

• Soundbombs
• Virtual Hugs
• Placecasting
• Widget Marketing
• Text Messaging Customer Service
• Tagging with Domain Names
• Social Media Optimization
• Automated Blog Translation
• Photopedia
• Human Search Filters

Rules & Guides:
These are a group of "Guy Kawasaki style" posts written in list format as guides to various topics from SMO to viral marketing.  It's a format I have always liked and you will probably see many more posts in this format going into 2007.

• Avoiding the Dark Side of Social Media
• 5 Rules of Social Media Optimization
• Signs Your Viral Marketing May Flop
• 7 Tips on Pitching Bloggers
• Golden Rules of Blog Etiquette

Presentations & Published Work:
Links to presentations given at industry events as well as guest contributions to other blogs.  There is some good powerpoint link bait in here, useful for those who are interested in any of these topics but couldn't make it to the events referenced.

• 7 Rules for Getting into Search (Search Engine Strategies Conference)
• 7 Tips on Pitching Bloggers (White Paper)
• The Human Side of Search (Search Insider Summit)
• Guide to Blog Marketing (SixApart Seminar) 
• Finding your Personality in Personal Media (Guest Column on Strumpette)

That's it.  Look out tomorrow for an all new post about what I think the top ten marketing ideas to watch will be in 2007.

Why Lawyers Always Lose on The Apprentice

It's a Thursday afternoon and I'm stuck in legal limbo on an email marketing piece we are trying to release for a client which is going through yet another round of legal reviews.  It leads me to think of The Apprentice and the often adversarial relationship legal professionals have with marketing ones.  On the show, at least half of the professionals they cast are usually lawyers.  Why?  Because they make for great drama - never quite understanding branding, marketing, advertising or sales aspects of winning tasks -- but always offering the ability to deliver a cold shower upon any random flames of creativity.   

They keep the show interesting, providing the discord needed to prevent the boring outcome of everyone agreeing on a reasoned course of action and taking it.  No conflict = no compelling reality TV.  Maybe it's not fair to take this extreme example and blame it all on the lawyers - after all there are many professions outside of law where creativity may not be as necessary as in marketing and advertising.  But to quote Guy Kawasaki's view from his successful experience working on the first Macintosh launch ... "sometimes it's ok and even advantageous to ship crap."  You get it out there first and fix it later.  Successful startups know this - and sometimes rely on it to their detriment.  Risks bring rewards, and lawyers are trained to help companies avoid risk.  It seems to be a built-in adverse relationship, and one that marketers in every situation will continue to struggle with.   

FutureMe.org

It's late and I'm doing some last run throughs for a client presentation tomorrow morning and can't keep my mind from wandering a bit.  I was thinking about the future and how some of our conclusions to be presented tomorrow as part of a discussion of "new media" might seem archaic if I were to revisit them a year or even several months down the road.  The past often seems odd in light of the future ... but I wonder if looking back, I would ever be able to recall the thoughts or inspirations I had tonight in coming up with what seems (at least to these tired eyes) to be a well thought out piece of intellect sure to illustrate just how smart we really are about this blog stuff.

I came across a post today on the Daily Innovator blog about a site called FutureMe.org which might help.  The site offers the ability to write yourself (or someone else) an email to be delivered in the future.  Of course, scheduling content to go live or emails to be sent at set time is nothing new.  But here's the premise behind the site:

two fellas started this so that you could write yourself a letter to be delivered at a later date. we've all had to do them in high school and college. it's sorta cool to receive a letter from yourself about where you thought you'd be a year (two years? more?) later. FutureMe.org is based on the principle that memories are less accurate than emails. we strive for accuracy.

I have always loved the idea of a time capsule (as I hear the collective groan from my teammates who consider it - rightly - to be a totally cliche idea because of its overuse as a PR stunt).  Just the idea of sealing a message or a thought up for some period of time and waiting until some point in the future to dust it off, open the "cork" and taste the past ... it's exciting.  I'm going to write one to my 2010 self about today.  Not about blogs, but about my 1 year old son who pointed at my shoes this morning, looked up at me and proudly declared his first word (sort of) -- "yeesh?"  Yup, some moments are worth remembering.

Email Marketing Needs to Get Back to Basics

Yesterday I came across this box banner ad for the Room Store on the Washington Post homepage.  As a consumer, I went to the Room Store 2 weeks ago, and fell in love with a two piece brown leather sofa set.  Since the list price is more than $2000, I figured I would wait for a sale.  So along comes this banner ad, which I click on hoping to find the sale I was waiting for.  But the imagery on the landing page suggests that this particular sale is just for mattresses.  So I continue to the website hoping to find an email form where I might opt-in to receive marketing messages about future sales.  Here I am, a consumer - knowing what I want, that I want to buy it from Room Store, that it is (presumably) a high margin item for the store, and wanting to placed on their marketing list ... and I came away from the site anonymously.  They don't know who I am, or anything about my purchase intent.

As far as squandered opportunities go, this would seem fairly huge ... but certainly not common, right?  Wrong, according to a new article from Marketing Sherpa (article has free access until 10/23).  In their coverage of a survey released by SilverPop today, they state that 29% of the top 360 companies (as listed by Dun & Bradsteet rankings) don't offer an email opt-in form anywhere on their Web sites!  With all the backlash against spam and making opt-outs easy, are marketers forgetting about the opt-ins?  Right now the prevailing "glass half empty" view of email marketing makes it a risky proposition where companies often have more legal reviews that content reviews of outbound marketing messages.  The lesson here is that successful email marketing campaigns need to focus on getting back to the basics ... a customer gives us their email address, and we send him/her relevant messages that they will care about.  It doesn't get much simpler than that.

Microsoft Losing Marketing Battle for Email Users

Hotmail is dying.  As I noted several months ago, my Hotmail account was the direct casualty of the coming of Gmail. There were even online eulogies.  Despite every reason to keep using Hotmail (I use their messenger client, run windows at work, even have a complete address book set up at my Hotmail account) - I too made the switch last year and left Hotmail behind.  A recent Marketing Sherpa study release says the same thing.  People are leaving Hotmail.  But what is the primary reason for this mass defection?  In my previous post, I suggested that Hotmail was a victim of its own initial dominance in the webmail space.  People had their first email addresses at Hotmail, have held them the longest, and therefore now receive the most spam there as they signed up for offers, ordered products and distributed their Hotmail address widely across the Internet.

Looking deeper at their demise, I wonder if perhaps branding was a key part of their problem as well.  Google has Gmail, Yahoo has "Yahoo Mail" - both of which tie to their parent brands.  "Hotmail" was an anomaly.  Did this mean the brand of Hotmail didn't get the same marketing support as other Microsoft initatives?  Word, Excel, Powerpoint all started with the "MS" tag in front of them.  They are clearly Microsoft brands.  The MSN butterfly came onto the scene late.  Today Hotmail, Messenger and Passport all have the "MSN" tag in front of them - and perhaps for MSN Messenger or the Passport network this will work, because Microsoft was still establishing the brands.  But they are all based on the success of Hotmail, which hasn't turned out the way Microsoft envisioned.   As odd as it seems to find Microsoft on the losing end of a marketing strategy battle - in Hotmail it seems that's exactly where they are.   

Sent from my Blackberry Wireless ...

I read somewhere that Michael Jordan used to get $30,000 every time he sneezed. He wasn't getting paid to sneeze, of course, that's just how much he would make every microsecond of the day based on his annual dollars from salary and sponsorships. Much of it came from retail fashion (sports apparel) - an industry that has integrated "brand placement" into their products better than most. People wear clothes proudly displaying the makers brand logo or tagline all the time. What better way to advertise your product than to get people to wear it, and pay you for the privilege? 

Online, email has begun to offer similar placement opportunities.  My email address has a "@yahoo.com" tag at the end of it.  Every message also states "Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around" at the bottom. Blackberry has their tag line too, which is also becoming something of a subtle status symbol (ie - "I am too busy to respond to your email from an actual computer, but I'm important enough to have a Blackberry to respond").  At the launch of Gmail last year, it was instantly treated as a geek-status symbol. But if email has such potential for brand integration, why doesn't nike.com offer customers their own addresses?  Where are the big advertisers when it comes to offering their own branded email? 

One explanation for the absence of initiatives like this could be the overhead required to develop a service, set up mirrored servers, implement and update security patches or any other technical difficulties inherent in launching email services.  The same challenges exist for in-house search engines or keyword marketing.  The difference is that providers like Google and Microsoft offer the ability to syndicate and rebrand these services to roll out as an integrated part of a site.  What if email could become a commodity service like this?  Imagine if marketers could not only register users' email addresses, but provide the actual addresses in the first place. That could be the next big level of relationship marketing online.

One DM Firm that should Stay Offline

I recently got an email from a service called "Where Christians Meet" promising to help me find my soulmate.  Intrigued at how I made it onto this list (considering I am married and not Christian) I checked into it and found that the email had been sent by a company called Harrison Direct.  Apparently they are a DM firm that specializes in email marketing, though clearly not in accurate targeting.  Their website provides a description of their services:

Whether your objective is to acquire new customers, retain valued existing ones, build brand awareness or increase revenue, Harrison Direct will facilitate direct communications with the best target audience.

Huh?  The rest of the five page site offers similarly useless marketing gibberish to describe the company.  Didn't we leave these days of brochure-ware "internet presence" sites behind us?  It seems like the main call to action is the "Unsubscribe" page, which presumably gets so much use, they have included it on the main navigation.  The really interesting part is that their unsubscribe feature is protected by an "enter the graphics you see" feature to prevent fraud.  Their contact us form has the same thing.  As if large numbers of spammers where going to their site and entering fraudulent comments. 

In any case, I'm now happily unsubscribed, and waiting for their next campaign where I will probably have to do it all again.  If only there weren't so much security on the unsubscribe feature ... maybe a malicious hacker would take my email account and unsubscribe me from multiple emails without my knowledge.  I should be so lucky.

ADDENDUM (07/10) - Check out some other experiences with Harrison Direct

Digital Influence in Two Letters

Recently we have been asked by a number of clients to explain the concept of digital influence.  How are people influenced through digital communications media to purchase, believe, or become involved in something?  We always say it's a combination of blogs, search engines, online (and offline) media, and yes, even advertising.  But it all sounds too complicated.  What about boiling it down to a simpler concept?  Digital influence in two letters ... FW.

Forwarded emails are a good analogy for digital influence.  At work, when I see those two letters in the subject line, I am likely to assume that the email comes from a trusted source, and that it has been filtered by the sender for relevance.  From the point of view of the sender, it requires low involvement.  If I find an email that communicates a position or has information that is valuable, forwarding it to a friend or colleague is often the best way to share that knowledge.  In my work inbox, I am likely to trust and be influenced by emails that have FW in the subject line. And most importantly, I tend to read them more often.

Online Moms and Travel Booking Online

On my way to a meeting in New York yesterday for a client in the travel industry, I started to consider the convergence of research reports that I have seen recently on both moms and travel booking online.  A Disney-commissioned audience segmentation I read some time ago noted the following key segments of moms:

• "Tech Nesters" (32%) - Web-saavy stay at home moms who feel the Internet has brought their family closer together, and visit websites with their kids (though they are also protective of what their kids do online).
• "Mrs. Net Skeptic" (31%) - Stay at home mom who is skeptical of the Internet and very protective of her kids going online and does not allow a lot of freedom.  Likely to focus on family activities and feels rules and disciple are important.
• "The Yes Mom" (15%) - Married or divorced moms that are also working, particularly in executive or managerial roles.  Likely to grant kids a lot of freedom when it comes to the Internet and does not know what she would do without the Internet. 
• "Passive Under Pressure Mom" (22%) - Likely to be divorced or single and stretched far too thin regarding responsibilities at home and at work.  Protective of kids use of the Internet, but more likely to be preoccupied with other things to be too concerned about the Internet all together.

Further conclusions drawn from this analysis can be read in the transcript of an Ad-Tech interview with Ken Goldstein, EVP and Managing Director of Disney Online.

For our clients in the travel and other industries looking to target moms, we have already started to take the next step beyond this segmentation of moms by attitudes to the Internet and focus more on Moms as influencers.  Word of mouth marketing has huge applications for this audience ... a fact that companies like BuzzAgent can attest to based on the composition of their members (BuzzAgent is more than 70% female and more than 50% are married with kids). 

The recent phenomenon of targeting these "Alpha Moms" even has support through a new TV network that focuses on providing content for moms that are described on the site as "mavens of mommyhood."  Coupled with the strong growth of online use among moms, as well as the recent reports about email's potency as a way to reach moms ... identifying the right influencers in online communities could be the strongest single tactic for connecting with moms that are in the midst of making their families travel plans for the next big vacation.

Do you Gmail? Why Hotmail is failing ...

I have a Gmail address.  In fact, most people in the web industry that I know are now using Gmail for their defacto personal email addresses.  About a year ago at this time, it was the ultimate cool factor.  A badge of honor among the techno-elite, Google's invitation only viral strategy was driving people to bid as much as $200 on ebay for their desired email address.  But now some say that the coolness is dying down.  Ok, so my mom has a Gmail address too ... that doesn't make it uncool, does it?  Well, maybe it does. 

The one thing that is clear, though, is that for most of us who use a Gmail address, we abandoned another email provider in order to do it.  In my case, that was Hotmail.  My hotmail account was definitely the direct causalty of the arrival of Gmail, but it was also the first web-based email account I had.  As a result, I have signed up for the most things from that account, and now get the most junk mail there.  Are they paying for that initial victory?  Since then, they have been perennial "me too" innovators after Gmail and Yahoo.  They upped their storage limits last, added new features last, and today they announced the new MSN personal homepage which has features which duplicate those already available from competitors. 

MSN's strategy of dominance in personal communications through the Passport network and features like IM has, in part, been based on the initial popularity of Hotmail as an email service.  Unfortunately, it seems that people have been surprisingly willing to change email addresses - punching a hole in that strategy.  Email addresses are not like a surname - held by individuals for a lifetime.  They are more like a home.  We love them while we use them ... but when a better situation comes along, and the time is right, we're not afraid to move. 

Does time of day really matter?

A new report from eMarketer offers some new data in answering one of the most often asked questions in our industry: does time of day really matter for email marketing?  The report notes:

• 41% of Americans check email first thing in the morning
• 18% check email right after dinner
• 14% check email right when they get back from work
• 14% check email right before they go to bed
• 40% of email users have checked their email in the middle of the night

Oddly, the most popular place to check email is in bed (23%) -- followed by in class (12%).  At least I can understand not having better things to do in class ...

But anyway, the point is that email is unique as an online marketing medium in that you can effectively time stamp when your message gets delivered, though not necessarily when your recipient is interested in reading it.  Television and radio both offer those advantages, but less so these days with the timeshifting of TV (and now radio as well with a growing number of programs actively podcasting).  What of online advertising, though?  What if we could time stamp the delivery of online banners?

Apple had an interesting online execution I saw the other day on Yahoo! promoting the new Dashboard Widgets available for OS X.  The ad, which I happened to see in the morning while checking my email (I guess I'm part of that 41%), makes the link between their product and the relatively common morning routine of checking the weather online.  A revelant message at a relevant time - and it connected with me, a home mac user running OS X.  Time of day was a core component of the ad's relevance and presumably its effectiveness.  I would have been far less likely to click if I saw this ad in the afternoon or evening.  Was this a random timing, the subject of chance - or were these banners time stamped for morning delivery?  And if they were, perhaps it should indicate to publishers that this could be a premium worth charging for.  Forgetting the potential billing nightmare that would be, I know more than a few advertisers that would gladly pay for the privelege of delivering their message at a more opportune moment - if it was possible.

Blogs and the Marketer's Quest for Brevity

This past weekend I went out to a local antique market to find a gentleman selling hundreds of old advertisements from magazines over the last 60 years, framed and mounted.  I bought one for a Hartmann Wardrobe Trunk ... a great illustrated ad with more than a paragraph of descriptive copy.  In fact, all the old ads had lots of descriptive copy.  Contrast this with the recent Webby Awards, where each winner had to give a five word acceptance speech.  I don't discount this element (and media hook) that makes the Webby Awards such a unique experience - but what does this say about the average consumer today?

Is it even possible to get a target audience to read more than a few words of marketing copy?  Email subject lines (typically 8 words or less) can determine whether an email is read or discarded immediately.  The basic fact is, people scan more than they read online -- a fact noted many times by Jacob Nielson in his guidelines to writing on the web.  In our culture, time is at a premium so no one has time to read anymore.  To get messages through, marketers have to be invasive.  It's the situation that Seth Godin points to for the rise of "interruption marketing."

But then, there are blogs.  They are on screen, nonlinear, use creative grammar, and can be of varying length (ok, most are pretty short).  They are being read, subscribed to, and actively searched.  People spend hours of their valuable time each day reading them.  Blogs are not usually soundbites, but can offer some of the most compelling marketing messages out there.  On a print ad or Canon's website, I may not take the time to read a long description of their latest digital camera.  But on a blog or RSS feed from a credible site like http://www.dpreview.com/news, I'd read (and print) a full 10 page review. 

Brevity is not the soul of blogs as it has become for other communications mediums.  A blog that is credible and relevant will make it through online information filters and connect with a target user, irrespective of length.  And that certainly reverses the trend in marketing copy over the past 50 years.

Orbitz is down - CRM opportunity?

Orbitz.com is down - an extremely rare event for large ecommerce sites these days.  I'm sure there will be articles in the coming days about the real cost of this outage for Orbitz.  And at this point it's still down with only their admission that "We are aware of the problem and are working to correct it."  Chances are they will have it up very shortly.  But when the site is finally back up, they will have significant credibility issues to deal with.  Classic online crisis management. 

But this outage could also be an opportunity for the site to reconnect with dormant or past customers. What if they sent a letter to all customers with an apology and incentive to return to the site?  Apology emails have a way of travelling among customers ... which could be a good thing if an incentive were part of the message.  A built in setup for a viral message - where the good is sent with the bad.