1. Lost opportunity; the nagging failure to grow a conference business
2. Lost sleep; anxiety and overwork associated with a conference or line of conferences
3. Lost dollars; events that cost more than they took in
4. Lost reputation; events that damaged the brand

Labels: conference business models, conference pain, SIPA, specialized information

Labels: groupme, hybrid events, linkedin ipo, narrow networks, next wave of social media, path, real networks, social media investing

1. How many fighters you have
2. Where and when their last action was
3. What the outcome of that action was

Labels: business science, MIT 150, problem solving, scientific revolution

Labels: conference business, event marketing, event trends, media trends, tablet computers, tradeshows

There are good lessons in mistakes and “natural experiments” in events and across the media business. The lessons pose both emotional and conceptual challenges. That’s why running the numbers right is highly instructive.

Mistakes in the moment in any live media generate tension – you run low on food, cues are missed, wiring is wrong, the award that was supposed to be at the front of the room was left in the back – whatever. Somebody miscalculated, didn’t practice, didn’t plan or didn’t execute the plan.

When you are in the hot seat, fixing the immediate problem, it’s hard not to get a little curt, and it’s easy to blame others. This complicates the after-action analysis. Specific detail and quantification makes it less personal.

Bigger mistakes usually manifest more slowly. Marketing deadlines get pushed back for what seem like good reasons. Key indicators are ignored, or erroneously interpreted; your product drifts off the intended focus or markets change and leave your media product positioned for yesterday. Numerical discipline helps you recognize slow but persistent change.

“Natural experiments” are often hidden in benign variation. Business is better in some regions then others. A marketing effort does a little better or worse than average. An audience responds more positively in one instance than another. Numbers reveal opportunity.

While the race is on, the best response may be counter intuitive. If you are spinning out of control, sometimes you have to “gas it” to recover. In any case you may not have time to think much. Training is necessary for times of deep crisis.

However, trusting the numbers during a crisis or when planning your next move is often the best way to guide yourself out and learn from the mistake or natural experiment.

Often mistakes involve not trusting the numbers out of fear or wishful thinking. The most common scenario is judgmental adjustments – a little padding here and there for safety or a gratuitous allowance for a shortfall. These judgments are often repeated and compounded, killing margins and driving actions off track.

Natural experiments are situations where inputs are varied unintentionally. They can go unnoticed if you always look at overall numbers and not the details. And variation is often misunderstood. Causation and correlation are easy to confuse. Human nature and human interest get involved, e.g. successful salespeople see themselves, not their assigned accounts as their source of success.

You can’t assume accuracy in your numbers. People code and count things differently. Performance numbers get “gamed.” Conversions and aggregations introduce error. Things get mislabeled. Time periods don’t match. It pays to test any numbers you use until you are sure what they mean and how reliable they are.

But, especially where things go wrong, or results vary, your best source of new tactics and strategies to prevent failure, replicate success, grow or maintain your business and make it more rewarding and less stressful is in creative, quantified analysis of the facts.

Labels: creative quantified analysis, learning from mistakes, media accounting, media data, media development, media management, media tracking, mistakes, natural experiments

Labels: content curation, content marketing, Eric Ly, event curation, events, face to face media, face2face media, going viral, mass media, MTO Summit, NPR, Pablo Boczkowski, talking knowledge, TSNN

“Eighty-five million people live in Egypt and less than 1,000 people died in this revolution,” said Wael Ghonim, according to Monday’s New York Times. Ghonim, a 31 year old Google executive, is credited with a key role in the on-line social media campaign that helped topple Hosni Mubarak last week.

Gauging the grief of 1000 families as good news is a legitimate political-economic calculation. But it underscores the seriousness of the business Ghonim and his colleagues have undertaken. More broadly the calculation underscores the seriousness of the business of belief which is at the heart of media in all forms.

The wave of change in North Africa and the Mideast is a story about media as well as about politics. As the story of mass protest in Tunisia broke in the U.S (a month after it Al Jazeera started covering it nightly), it was played as another Facebook story.  Your humble blogger has opined before about the value of viewing today’s shifts in media through political-economic lenses rather than peering at the phenomenon, one-eyed, through an economic monocle.

Our trade, in media, is moving minds. Political-economic exchange rates render all costs and benefits “fungible” or inter-changeable. Political-economics fundamentally concerns the interaction of destructive forces, productive forces and the motivating factor of belief. Thus media is central to political-economics.

In Egypt, a full spectrum of communications, from “eye catching posters” to Facebook groups, deployed by anti Mubarak forces and major news outlets, mobilized masses of Egyptians to create the experience and spectacle of protest events. This sudden recognition of the possibility of change was achieved with limited expenditures of productive or destructive force, and was critical in precipitating Mubarak’s ouster.

The works of Gene Sharp reportedly influenced the communication strategies of the leading anti-Mubarak groups according to the New York Times. Sharp, an advocate of non-violent strategies and tactics to promote freedom and democracy writes that “the means do exist for populations to free themselves” but that members of an oppressed population must first recognize of their own real power to contribute to collective action.

At our best, in media, we are empowering people with good information. Officially, “you can make money without doing evil” is proclaimed by Mr. Ghonim’s employer, Google, as one of Ten Things We Know. The unofficial “Do no evil” is more direct but still seems timid. "Do good" seems more to the point. That's why your humble blogger has always seriously endeavored to turn good information into good business.

Labels: business of belief, do no evil, Gene Sharp, good information into good business, integrated marketing

You know engagement sells.  That’s why you should take a look at a new analysis of customer engagement.  It is consumer-oriented but your humble blogger found lessons for B-to-B marketers about engagement elements, channels, and measurement in the report.

Labels: b-to-b marketing, engagement, engagement channels, engagement elements, engagement measurement, engagement ROI, event ROI, life-time value

Labels: Big Stories, Facebook, Media Economics, Political Economics of Information, The Social Network, Tunisia

Labels: 2011 trends, economic recovery, media trends, media utilitarians

“You can’t begin early too early and you can’t communicate too much,” admonished a savvy collaborator at a post-event debriefing. Your humble blogger had taken some lumps after running what he’d thought had been a good team effort. But the maxim to became a motto.

Event production is a test of group intelligence. Events of any size take a team to execute. And the effectiveness of the team is not simply a function of the individual intelligence of people on the team.

Collective intelligence can be measured and reliably associated with group performance according to a study recently covered in the Boson Globe. Collective intelligence “is not strongly correlated with the average or maximum individual intelligence of group members but is correlated with the average social sensitivity of group members, the equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking, and the proportion of females in the group,” according to the abstract of the study which was published in Science. The female factor fell away when controlled for social sensitivity.

Teams of individually intelligent players can be collectively weak-minded. When unexpected problems test the typical event team of specialists, too often the response is a collective deer-in-the-headlights standstill. In these situations somebody needs to step forward and focus the group on generating a solution.

Effective problem response may be counter intuitive. The study apparently found that “overbearing leaders” tended to reduce group intelligence. This is evident on event teams that hesitate to act on urgent problems while waiting for the leadership to "call the shots." But the coverage of the study did not mention socially sensitive leadership as a catalyst for problem solving.

The leadership factor in collective intelligence will emerge in further study, if your humble blogger’s observations of event teams are correct. A socially sensitive leader can raise the collective intelligence of the group simply by being part of the group and by example, influencing others.  But  leadership is also critical in guiding group processes to a conclusion.  A formal leader does not have to be the one leading the show, but leadership is a key on any event team, especially when the team faces a new or unexpected problem.

Labels: collective intelligence, crisis management, event managment, event planning, event teams, group intelligence, responding to crisis

1. Branding: Keep it Simple

2. Sell the steak, not the sizzle

3. Innovate Yourself

Labels: good information into good business, media management, media strategy, scott griffith, zip car, zip ideas

I  didn't get to see Harrison's last effort, H5, which is  housed in the Clockmakers Museum at Guildhall in  London


Two prototypes, dubbed H2 and H3 are remarkable contraptions.  Gears of wood and metal, bobbing brass weights, and levers and springs were crafted by Harrison to achieve unprecedented accuracy in marking time.  These clocks still work today.  But Harrison was not satisfied until he produced H4, barely bigger than a pocket watch, and accurate to within seconds over the length of a long sail voyage.

Labels: Bernie Goldhirsh. newmeetia, Human API, information business models, iPad apps, marketing automation, media business models, media platforms, mobile media, new product launches, SIPA, web analytics

Most people associate “curation” with the art of museum management. Some might mistake it for a method of meat preservation. But curation is now is the term de jour for the process of selecting organizing and presenting content in media and, more broadly, merchandise and even food. Lately it has been used to ennoble the process of making any set of choices that create an experience.

The term “curation” originally appealed to media mavens as a way to impart museum dignity to the process of aggregating online content. In the fashion trades, where your humble blogger suspects the modern usage originated, “curate” is used interchangeably with “edit” as a fancy way to say “select carefully” (see a humorous article about this by Alex Williams last year the NYT).

“Event curation” is worth thinking about even though it might sound a bit pretentious for show biz. After all, creating good events is a lot tougher than lining up a few links or arranging the soft goods “just so.” Whether your event content is entertainment, participation, or information, or some combination of the three, here are seven quick thoughts about event curation:

1. Content ain’t king. It’s a noble and necessary part of a winning event. However, the score of the game is rarely kept in content measures. Know how the score is kept and what your content is expected to accomplish.


2. Start early. Good content takes time to develop and the details cascade into countless other aspects of event execution, especially marketing. You are working to a fixed date. Rushing greatly increases risk.


3. Don’t proceed linearly. Not every avenue of content exploration will pan out. For instance, in an informational event, invite more than one speaker per slot simultaneously so you have options as the program develops.


4. Stay flexible. Take full advantage of the live, real-time nature of events. Build quick reaction into your curation process. Make room for hot developments around your content as well as for the usual problems.


5. Know and believe in your own content. Don’t be afraid to invest in learning. “Content farms” and “conference mills” operate on the theory that content is a low value commodity that is not worth deep consideration or appreciation – it shows in their products.


6. Be a media utilitarian. Incorporate whatever it takes to move minds (and hearts) effectively and make sure every media you use - print, live action, visual display, online, mobile, etc. - works together and really contributes. Don’t waste effort on conventional or wiz-bang stuff that isn’t clearly useful.


7. Focus on the experience. A great concert is tough to enjoy if the seats are uncomfortable or the room is too hot. You may not have control over all elements of an event experience but use your influence to integrate the content into the full experience.


Purposefully creating a full experience is the essence of event curation. Feel free to comment with your ideas and questions.

Labels: content curation, event curation, event marketing, event planning, event programming, event promotion, experiential marketing

Franchised computer stores spread rapidly in the late '70's

"The Dawn of a New Age, Second Encounter” was the promoted theme of the Second Annual Personal Computer Show held in Chicago, around this time, thirty-two years ago. Your humble blogger was reminded of that show as I wrote about the Inbound Marketing Summit recently. The online/smart phone media business keeps reminding me of the PC business in its early days. But I was surprised to find that my memory was WRONG in key respects. And I realized I owed a personal debt.

“Selling Computers like Hamburgers” was the editor’s title for the my account of that 1978 show. I was writing for a lowly rag but my writing caught the attention a recruiter and led to my first corporate job. The article’s title alluded to the franchise business model of Byte Industries, a young computer store dealer coop which had just been purchased and re-launched as a franchiser by Logical Machines Corporation. These names, like most of what I reported on then, are now in the footnotes of computer history but I still found lessons in the yellowed old piece, fished out of my memorabilia box.

The PC business was clearly red hot back in 1978 but very few knew just how to make money at it. I remembered that. The coming use of the personal computer as a business tool was the heart of my story. Hobbyists made up the bulk of the market at that time. I reported that swarms of small business owners were at the show, searching for ways to take advantage of the new technology, and were regarded by most vendors as the source of future growth in the market.

Few then seemed to appreciate how quickly the business use of computers was going to grow. I remembered that. Less than a year after incorporating, Apple Computer (now simply Apple) had the biggest and best display of the show. I interviewed Apple’s Director of Sales, Gene Carter, a computer industry veteran who went on to become a VP before leaving Apple in ’84 to join the team that developed Microsoft Works at Productivity Software. I remembered that contrary to others at the show Carter felt that there was little practical use for a PC. The PC, he felt, was a tool for learning “computer literacy,” That phrase became etched in my mind.

What I’d forgotten was the powerful vision behind the phrase “computer literacy.” Looking back, his vision far outweighs Carter’s timing error about business utility. “We are selling now to the leading edge of what will be a vast market for personal computers” Carter insisted. “These people are the innovators in their groups. What they are seeking is computer literacy. They will serve as advocates for the application of this technology.”

Something far more awesome than a business trend was evident. A new age was truly dawning. I’d forgotten the sense of awe I felt at that show. I’d forgotten about the significance of seeing ten year olds tickling terminal keys with ease or witnessing a boy remove the cover of a computer to explain to his father how it worked.

Today, there is too much talk about selling content like hamburgers, mass produced for online mass consumption. The concept is as appealing many of us as a Big Mac - satisfying in some ways, profitable perhaps, but not what we live for. However, providing people with vital information and tools to learn more is truly awesome.

A deep sense of wonder and the shared dream of a new mass literacy drive the dedication of many of us in the media business today. It is a great time to be in this business! And thanks, Gene Carter, for expressing your vision and for sitting through a cub-reporter interview, in Chicago, thirty-two years ago!

Labels: computer history, Computer Literacy, content marketing, Gene Carter, media industry trends

Last week your humble blogger shared some of the smartest things we heard and some of the fun we enjoyed at the Inbound Marketing Summit which we sponsored under our NewMeetia initiative. But I promised the Bad and the Ugly along with the Good.

It was weird to see so many attendees nose-down to their PC screens. Like students in college lecture halls, many seemed to be, as we charitably call it, "multi-tasking."

The dumbest thing I heard at the conference was “Scale and media buying power are no longer a decisive advantage.” The speaker was David Meerman Scott, Marketing Strategist, Freshspot Marketing, who, to his credit, was also the source of some smart commentary about "Real-Time Marketing" and some good fun, including the donning of a tie-dye t-shirt (under his sport coat) to flog a book he and Brian Halligan, CEO of Hubspot have put together about “Marketing Lessons of the Grateful Dead.” But the notion that new media negates scale is wishful thinking.

Size matters in media. The technology has changed but not the fundamental political economics of information. Scott’s illustration of how a David can slay Goliath with new media was the oft-repeated story of “United Breaks Guitars,” a video that went viral. What the story actually proves is that the secret to going viral is to get picked up by big media. Scale can fail but, everything else being equal, big is still a better bet. Venture firms have rushed money into selected low/no- revenue new media companies like Facebook and Twitter to gain the decisive advantages of scale. They fully expect a future payoff.

The second dumbest thing we heard is that one can “curate content” with an investment of only 20 minutes a day. The speaker was Pawan Deshpande, CEO of HiveFire. I may be misquoting because what he undoubtedly meant was 20 minutes a day with Curata, a HiveFire service designed to help organizations with content aggregation, production and distribution for marketing purposes (starting at around $1,500 a month).

No one can “curate” anything well without serious contemplation. While the Curata service is currently being used to produce surprisingly good looking online content, (sample here; testimonials on their home page) the implication that a reputation for content can be earned and sustained with a minimal time investment assumes that the “curator” doesn’t need to learn continuously but only needs to tweak search criteria once in a while. Its like bad journalism, automated.  And Deshpande’s concept of “curation” is based on the dubious assumption that people will keep originating and posting worthy content without some system of compensation from content marketers. Real thought leadership requires original thought and research. “Curation” may be the single subject of a future post.

The ugly part of the conference came from speakers who worked too hard to project an anti-establishment, spontaneous and outrageous persona. One’s material has to be good to make the pose work, especially in a business context. Scott Stratten, president of UnMarketing, carried it off most successfully with his harsh critique of conventional marketing. He garnered a lot of laughs and twitter traffic with comments such as “we suck at now, why worry about next?” At times however, some speakers seemed only course and tasteless. One speaker reported her mental reaction to a request for an honest appraisal of her product “I’m on salary, bitches!” Some thoughts are best left unsaid.  Another big name disappointed everyone sitting around me in one session with unprepared prattle and puerile humor from the podium.

The good news is that online social and content marketing are rapidly becoming main-stream. The flip side of becoming main-stream is a new level of accountability for clear thinking, respectful conduct and real results. So another piece of good news is that there is still room for improvement.

Labels: content marketing, curation, event marketing, Inbound marketing, new media, new meetia, real-time marketing, social media marketing, unmarketing

We wanted to share the smartest and the dumbest things we heard at the Inbound Marketing Summit last week – fortunately there was stiff competition for the former. We were one of the sponsors of the event under our newMeetia initiative and we found plenty of value for marketers at the two day event along with a little malarkey and lots of stuff that was just plain fun.


Good Fun: Steve Garfield Helps Us Set a Simultaneous Video World Record at the Inbound Marketing Summit  (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqrRjp_CJio)

Clearly, online social and content marketing is now main stream. While some speakers valiantly jousted against straw-man “old marketing” enemies the best presentations were about integrating new online marketing with the old, “inbound”(online-inquiry) with “outbound” and online media with offline. And the rants against self-discipline were more than offset by practical advice about how to measure and manage online marketing.

Mobile and online marketing fit naturally with marketing in other media according to Tim Hayden, Chief Strategy Officer and Partner, Blue Clover Studios. We should keep in mind that “ninety percent of Word of Mouth takes place offline,” he said, citing Keller Fay research based on continuous monitoring of the brand conversations of 36,000 survey participants. Experiences like live social events, tradeshows, sampling, stunts, tours, retail, and guerilla actions are highly influential according to Hayden. He also mentioned outdoor at least twice - your humble blogger noticed compelling outdoor while creeping through Boston on the way to the event (including a very distracting billboard flashing that IT IS NOW ILLEGAL TO TEXT WHILE DRIVING IN MASSACHUSETTS).

“We’ve been seduced by the illusion of accountability” in online media asserted Tom Webster, Vice President, Strategy of Edison Research. “Any given metric is meaningless until you prove it isn't” he insisted. “If you're only measuring the effect of your tweets on twitter, then you're measuring if you're good at twitter.” It is time, he stated to “stop measuring tweets and start measuring people” before, during, and after online media actions. Webster concluded that the hard work of relating online marketing to marketplace results is far from finished.

Effective B-to-B content marketing should non-promotional in tone, relevant, solution-oriented, well written, supportive of your business objectives, and provide factual proof according to Maria Pergolino, Director of Marketing at Marketo. She defined content marketing as the “creation and sharing of content for the purpose of promoting a product or service.” Proof is key to credibility in such content, she explained, because content consumers are justifiably skeptical. Pergolino provided a live example of how to manage, reuse and adapt content to new opportunities by explaining how she put her presentation together and by distributing a two-sided laminated Marketing Cheat Sheet that summarized her key points. Two attendees told your humble blogger that her presentation was "the best of the show."

Social marketing ROI is easily calculated using formulas provided by Paul Gillin, Principal of Paul Gillin Communications. He closed the event with a surprisingly well-attended and straight-forward tutorial on the topic. His simple math was based on lifetime value of a customer and conversion rates which have long been essential metrics of subscription and catalogue marketing.  Gillin's underlying assumption is that social media leads are similar to leads from other sources which has to be proven in any given instance.  But other presenters provided evidence that social media-sourced leads are in many cases more likely to convert and remain loyal so his assumption may understate the ROI.

Labels: event marketing, Inbound marketing, marketing roi, new media, new meetia, newmeetia, outbound marketing, social media marketing, word of mouth

Yves Matson, Senior Account Executive at Active Conversion, knew he had a big opportunity earlier this year. The Global Petroleum Show was coming to Calgary where he is based. From his experience as an exhibitor in a previous job, he knew his lead monitoring and demand generation system could serve some of the more than 1000 exhibitors. So how did he capture this opportunity in only nine simple steps?

The Global Petroleum Show Attracts Close to 50,000 Attendees

Matson is a practical guy. He understood the futility of trying to call on all 1300 plus exhibitors at this busy show attended by almost 50,000 people. His software as a service subscriptions are relatively low cost and must be sold efficiently. But he knew that face-to-face interaction with perhaps 12 to 24 of the best prospects could be highly productive if he could figure out a way to identify those prospects.

“I wanted to talk to companies that were not too small and not too big,” Matson explained to your humble blogger recently. “And I wanted to talk to companies that are located not too far away. We sell to others but I wanted to get the most I could out of my face time.”

Step one was to buy a ticket to the show. Matson recognizes that trade shows concentrate opportunity for buyers and sellers alike.

Step two was to cross reference the exhibitor list posted on the show web site with data on company size, revenues and location obtained from Jigsaw an intelligence service integrated into his own product. Matson noted that he had an inexpensive contractor do this on a per company basis. “If I overspent on research the whole process would have been prohibitive,” he explained.

Step three was to isolate 300 suspect companies based on size and location.

Step four was to research each of the 300 companies. He tried to obtain the name and email address of a senior marketing person in each of the 300 suspects. This effort yielded a list of roughly 400 individuals who by their title seemed likely to have some interest exhibit ROI.

Step five was to send out a pair of emails to the identified individuals, using the email package integrated with the Active Conversion product. The pitch was simple; “You should know who is visiting your website after the show.” Matson cited research that a two time visitor to a b2b web site is seven times more likely to become a customer vs. a one-timer and posited that an exhibit visit plus a web visit puts a visitor into that “buy ready” category. Three people responded directly and asked him to stop by at their booths. He got about50 – 60 click throughs, 20 of whom showed signs of engagement online. He didn’t use a special landing page but could correlate the traffic with the click throughs using his own software.

Step six was to prioritize his day on the floor by ranking the roughly 60 interested companies by degree of engagement according to the parameters of his software. “I had a hands-on walking reference,” Matson explained. “I drew a line at the top 5 and at the top 20.”

Step seven was selling by walking around. “Of course the first prospects I stopped to see were the ones that asked to see me. Then I started working down the list. At each exhibit I’d ask for an individual by name. Half the time, the person I’d targeted was actually there or at least somewhere on the floor. But even if the person wasn’t there, my research still gave me instant credibility. It’s not a difficult sale to exhibitors. I ask them to think of their website as an online trade show and online traffic as floor traffic. Having been in their shoes as an exhibitor and knowing something about energy services helped a lot. Only two of my 20 top priorities were not interested so I was ‘nine-out-of-ten’ at that point.”

Step eight was making sure the 18 interested companies followed through with a trial which is the next stage in the Active Conversion sales process. “I had 3 trials going that day at the show,” said Matson “but there were the usual delays in converting most of positive interest to trials.”

Step nine was to help the prospects with their trials and converting these prospects to customers. As of this writing five have taken the leap. Not bad for a day at the show!

Matson’s story demonstrates the power of technology-enabled personal selling. It helped that he was using the technology he was selling. Your humble blogger has written before about the application of online tracking systems and other technology to trade shows. But is also a tale of old fashioned spade work and the inherent power of face-to-face events. And it is a tale with a happy ending: five sales for Matson and I suspect, five happy customers.

Disclosure: Your humble blogger is currently using Active Conversion on a trial basis along with other tracking programs from other vendors. You can contact me for details.

Labels: event technology, face to face media, lead qualification, lead tracking and conversion, salesmanship, tradeshows

If you are looking for action, the “junk web” is hot right now. Your humble blogger was stuck the other night, listening to Justin Levy, of New Marketing Labs (Chris Brogan et al.) at the similarities between the action-oriented online marketing practices Levy was advocating and the action-oriented direct-mail marketing practices in their heyday.

The Mail Table at Your Humble Blogger's Home


It’s not the media but human nature that shapes marketing principles. That’s why so much of the current web environment feels like  “junk mail,” a medium developed by tracking response.

“So what’s the difference between the ‘junk web’ and ‘junk mail’?” your humble blogger asked. “Junk,” in this context, your humble blogger had to explain, is a term of endearment. “Junk mail” was many a marketer’s dear friend for years and still works for quite a few products and services.

The difference according to Levy, boils down to cost, although he resisted your blogger’s use of the term “junk web.” “Nothing I ever put up on the web was junk,” he protested. Nothing your humble blogger ever mailed was junk either (some lists were junk). But once we cleared the “junk” hurdle, Levy focused on the low cost, especially of social media.

“Social media is not free,” he explained, “but it is sweat equity. You're investing time, not postage and production expense.” You might argue that there is always an “opportunity cost.” And obviously when you are paying somebody for any form of marketing activity there is an out-of-pocket actual cost. But you can’t argue with the cost advantages of distributing action-stimulus electronically vs. print on paper.

The other big advantage online is on the response side – it is technically more feasible through the online medium to isolate and offer value to people most likely to react favorably. Inquiries (“inbound”) can be stimulated by the right kinds of web and social media presence. Interaction can be automatically and almost instantly simulated at low cost. Recency, frequency, interest, buying capacity and other well known response factors can be tracked at the individual level and grouped at will.

The result is a low cost-per-action. Response rates can be very low, Levy explained, and still be worth the effort, when the cost of soliciting the action is minimal. Using his own Inbound Marketing Summit promotion as an example, he described how a single registration from a particular marketing effort seemed to pay-off. As your humble blogger has reported in a prior post, event registration numbers attributed to social media have gotten to a significant level in some markets.

Low costs also allow you to push for “the close” more gently. You are less likely to turn-off potential future prospects. People are still hungry to be sold, but you can afford more action steps before a sale in an online marketing environment.

Bottom line: The “junk web” is winning marketing dollars because it is often cheaper, online, to get the actions that lead to sales. But hurry, because the best opportunities will be available for a limited time only.

Call us today at (866) 271-9450 if you want to MAKE GOOD INFORMATION INTO GOOD BUSINESS!

Labels: Cost Per Action, direct marketing, Inbound marketing. action stimulus, Junk Mail, Junk Web, social media marketing

Myths about going viral are part of the regular fare offered by new marketing gurus. “You create great content, and show it to ten friends who show it to ten friends and pretty soon it goes viral and a million people are looking at it.” Too bad the real world doesn’t work this way. So, what are the true secrets?

It is no secret that viral math is sexy. In the idealized scenario of each friend showing ten friends your content  and every friend showing it in turn to ten unduplicated friends, over a a million people have viewed your content in only six iterations!

But in the real world, you don’t get 100 percent response to anything.  If only one in ten of your friends show your not-so-great content to ten of their friends who behave in the same fashion, only ten people are exposed in each iteration and it will take 100,000 iterations to hit 1 million views. If the response is less than one in ten, your viewing audience dwindles to fractions in a few iterations.

The first big secret of going viral is to show your content to more than ten friends – the more the better. If only two out of ten friends who see your content then pass it on but you start with 17,500 “friends,” you’ll match the idealized 100 percent pass-along scenario and get over 1 million views in only six iterations.

Getting picked up in mass media is the next best thing to having lots of friends and a lot cheaper than buying them. Your humble blogger observes that mass media has a big role in most cases of content going viral.  How to make that happen is a subject for another blog, but for a hint see the first big secret above.

The second big secret is to use the proven techniques of direct marketing and merchandizing in your great content to attract attention and encourage response (see the tacky headline above). There infinite degrees of subtlety in doing this but even clumsy (see the tacky headline above) execution tends to work better than ignoring the experience of generations of practitioners. Ask yourself how you came to this sentence, NOW.

The third big secret is that going viral isn’t all it is cracked up to be. Great content that moves minds and results in big-ticket BtoB sales is often best delivered in person to a live audience. Events hold attention and allow substantive communication. And events greatly increase the response to the content. Your humble blogger admits that this point may seem self-serving (because it is). But ask yourself, if this assertion is not the case, why are so many marketing gurus so eager for speaking gigs and why are so many purveyors of the latest marketing technology using events to tell their stories?

So if you see new utility in these old marketing ideas: reaching big numbers, employing proven direct marketing and merchandizing techniques, and using events – pass a link along to at least ten of your friends. And if you want to prove me wrong, pass a link to absolutely all your friends – if this blog goes viral without any mass media boost, your humble blogger will confess his errors in a future blog.

Labels: direct marketing, event marketing, going viral, marketing tactics