eROI Days Email Agency

Here is my presentation to NACHA - National Automated Clearing House Association on “How Financial Institutions Can Use Social Media to their Advantage”

 Renny Gleeson, global digital evangelist for Wieden + Kennedy, led off the Inverge Conference, with a personal, philosophical discussion on how fast and far our lives have changed due to digital devices, mobile, and online social media.  It was an epiphany for Renny at 4am in a London hotel to realize he’d been screwing around on different social sites for over 12 straight hours. Talk about some high engagement metrics for those sites.  This speech was a month ago, but I feel it was still uber-relevant to get perspective on what has led up to this precipitous change.  Here are my notes from his speech:

With each tech advance, it takes a little while to connect emotionally with it and through it.
• 1876 – Telephone (killed body language), but made it easier to meet up
• 1844 – Telegraph – Morse tapped “What Hath God Wrought” “Crap, what have we done?”
• 1906 – Radio - > Broadcast

Use Technology to meet up, see one another

1971 @ Email (Ray Tomlinson: @ indicated a user was at some other host) -> Email medium can be the most misinterpreted (lose body language, voice inflection, most range to explain enough to get misinterpreted)

Email vs. Social Media
• Email – Very focused (1 to 1)
• Social Media – Distracted by so many other toys involved in it

– Crib Sheet – Visual cues for displaying emotion
– Dinosaurs in inappropriate places – Flickr Group
– Blip.fm: jam or music
(more…)

Alex Bogusky was on the cover of Inc. magazine a few months ago with the headline something like “Can this Hot Guy Make Microsoft Cool?” Well, Crispin Porter + Bogusky are off to a good start w/ the Jerry Seinfeld / Bill Gates commercials, and even better, the PC commercials. So, I pose the question - did Bogusky make the Inc. 5000 Conference cool? Having been to 2 consecutive years of conferences, I can clearly say that it was already very cool before he came along, but Bogusky did a really good job of speaking to more than just creativity but accomplishing business objectives in a creative way. Here are my notes:

CP & B: 900 employees, 900 freaks, early on, worked with a ton of underdogs. Very Scrappy.

The Truth Campaign- Anti-Smoking
Change the cultural perceptions around a product Brand around youth rebellion. Rebellion is great. This choice is not rebellion, it’s about being manipulated by a huge machine (tobacco campaigns).

Advertising must play into PR and web, social “Playing with your consumer”

Molson Beer- 200 different labels “I’m not wearing any underwear”

Creativity is just a way to leverage business goals

Burger King Whopper Freak out- people got really pissed off with no Whopper. Super funny.
• embrace the creative process – makes it fun
• “you know what you ought to do,” have someone fill in the answer

CP+B 1 Rule: NEVER LIE. NO FIBS. NO BS. (more…)

This is my second consecutive year in attending the Inc. 5000 Conference, and I’m absolutely honest when saying it is the best conference of the year for the following 6 reasons: entrepreneurial energy, dynamic and entertaining speakers, approachability and access to those speakers, strategic and contrarian content, networking with other entrepreneurs from around the country, and Inc. staff is very cool and real.

This blog post is all about who I met and why I’m so encouraged about the future of our country’s industry leaders and innovation. Optimism is the new cynicism and we can’t fixate on the nation’s financial industry woes when we have our own companies to grow, innovative products to build, and value creation waiting to happen.  Who I met:

1. Vance Patterson is a stud. I met him last year at this conference - he and I were garnering a bit of attention with our outfits at the Inc. 500 Awards, black-tie event - he was wearing a dapper top hat, tux, and a staff w/ crystal and blue LED light, and I had my late grandfather’s Buchanan-plaid (bright yellow, orange, red) vest and bow-tie on.  He and his wife, Mary Joe, carried themselves with cool confidence and engaged in great conversation throughout this year’s award dinner.  Of the 6-7 businesses he’s involved in, Vance spends most of his time running an industrial fan company called Patterson Fan Company.  We discussed what we love doing (he and Mary Joe ride their Harley Davidson on long trips), family business issues and my younger perspective on what his kids are probably thinking, employee recruiting and retention, politics, and the conference itself.

(more…)

Gonna be another great event this year…

Internet Strategy Forum Summit 2008
July 17-18, Governor Hotel, Portland

Internet Strategy Forum Summit attendees will gain actionable insight into smart enterprise Internet strategy as they engage with each other and with the VP and C-level keynote presenters from leading global companies such as eMarketer, Forrester Research, Disney, Nike, Intel, IBM, WebTrends and Fandango, who will share their experience and ideas on how to best leverage the Internet and integrate it into your overall business strategy.

There will be 8 keynote-style presentations, a vendor panel, a lunch, a reception and other networking opportunities, all for registration fees starting at less than $249. Friends of eROI can receive a 15% discount on the registration fee by using Discount Code “REACHROI” at registration time.

Presenters and Topics include:

* Daniel Stickel, new CEO, WebTrends (formerly with Google)

* Geoffrey Ramsey, Co-founder & CEO, eMarketer
TOPIC: Mapping the Digital Landscape: A Strategic Guide

* Charlene Li, VP & Principal Analyst, Forrester Research
TOPIC: Creating A Social Strategy That Will Work

* Chris Shimojima, VP, Global Digital Commerce, Nike
TOPIC: Social Commerce: Innovate How We Connect

* David Placier, VP, Consumer Insights, Disney Online
TOPIC: The evolution of CRM: Enhancing Web Site Experiences

* Nancy Bhagat, VP of Sales and Marketing Group, Intel
TOPIC: End to End Marketing Online: A Fundamental Shift

* Mike Moran, Distinguished Engineer, IBM, author of Search Engine Marketing, Inc.
TOPIC: Internet Marketing by the Numbers

* Shane O’Neill, Chief Technology Officer, Fandango
TOPIC: Email Marketing: Beyond Newsletters and Confirmation

Internet Strategy Forum Summit
Thursday, July 17, 2008
8:00am - 5:00pm
Optional Internet strategist career path symposium Friday, July 18, 2008 Governor Hotel, Portland, Oregon http://www.internetstrategyforum.org/summit

An employee sent me an email with this link - fascinating!

Freedom, A Twitter Away For UC Berkeley Student Arrested In Egypt

“As surreal as it may sound, Twitter can get you out of jail! The catch…send the right message to as many people as possible as fast as you can and voila!

UC Berkeley journalism graduate student James Karl Buck (29), former Oakland Tribune multimedia intern, was arrested during a demonstration in Mahalla El-Kobra, an industrial city in the Nile Delta.

What the Egyptian authorities didn’t probably expect was the prompt reaction of a large circle of friends in the United States and the anti-government bloggers in Egypt, who were sent an instant text message from his cellular phone: “ARRESTED,” the San Jose Mercury News reports.

The micro-blogging service allows users to send text messages up to 140 characters long, and the message Buck sent had the desired outcome: his friends called the University, the American Embassy, as well as the Associated Press, the International Herald Tribune and other media.

The result: he was released the next day, although according to his affirmations, the Egyptian authorities told him just hours after his arrest, in the middle of the night, that he was a free man.”

eMarketing Summit @ InnoTech
April 16-17, Oregon Convention Center

www.emarketingsummit.com for information and registration
Use Discount Code EROI8EMS for the $129 price. Prices includes two day summit, both luncheons topics and Don Tapscott Featured Speaker breakfast on April 17.

The 4th annual eMarketing Summit meets in Portland, Oregon this year, and brings together marketers, business owners and internet professionals.
This two day Summit focuses on social media marketing, search engine optimization, email marketing and web 2.0 tools, including widgets and more. Guest speakers include Don Tapscott, Author of Wikinomics; Rohit Bhargava, Sr. VP, Digital Strategy, Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide, Kent Lewis, Anvil Media; with additional speakers from Northwest Airlines, Razorfish/Avenue A, Hill & Knowlton Digital, Jive Software, Kick Apps and many others.

4/16: 10:30am - 11:30am
What the Heck is a Widget?
Dylan Boyd, Vice President of Sales and Strategy, eROI, Inc.
Matt Bijur, Vice President, Business Development, KickApps
David White, VP of Business Development, FlightStats
Mike Berkley, CEO, SplashCast Media
Widgets are building blocks for social aggregators. Widgets can also quickly help your web site reach new audiences in web 2.0 including social media, blog, web site and more. This expert panel will discuss the roadmap to planning, designing, creating and distributing this innovative gadget.

4/17: 10:30am - 11:30pm
Bringing Sexy Back into Email Marketing
Ryan Buchanan, President, eROI, Inc.
Has your email marketing program gotten tired, neglected, and stuck in a rut? eROI CEO, Ryan Buchanan, will use several case studies from some sexy and unsexy businesses to show how marketers can breath life back into their email marketing program. More…

At the OMMA Hollywood event, finally, a true creative breathed inspiration into an event dominated by metrics, analytics, and agency and media organizational models.

Chuck Porter talked about the power of a story that are sometimes bigger than life, like Burger King’s Subservient Chicken, which has become a cult following in Spain and Japan (long after the site had its heyday).

Also, it’s not always about a new medium. Porter’s agency took an age-old marketing medium in print magazines and placed ads in Cosmopolitan, Maxim with cheesy 80’s style male models with puppy dogs,and Molson Beer, then placed ads in male-targeted magazines about the psychographic effect of 100,000’s of women having a positive association of the male species due to these ads. The creative implementation of both real and faux ads and even made-up magazine covers placed on the back-cover of real magazines was all done brilliantly with a huge comedic and viral impact.

In Porter’s last anecdotal story about the difficulty of selling a risky idea into a brand, Chuck said that Burger King franchise owners wanted to kill Porter if he implemented an idea about killing their best selling product - The Whopper - with a campaign called the “BK Whopper Freakout.” The agency recommended trying it on Cable TV in a zip code for 1 restaurant in Las Vegas and it turned out to be wildly successful.

Takeaway for MediaPost - get more creatives as speakers and show the work - Porter rocked!

Here at the OMMA show in Hollywood, a gorgeous sunny break from Portland rain, it’s been great to connect with the Email Insiders crew, the EEC, KickApps, and others in the social networking / online video world here.

From a presentation standpoint, I was most impressed with Patrick Keane, CMO of CBS Interactive. He talked about trends in online media and marketing:
1. Engagement - advertisers don’t want vanilla users, they want engaged users who spend a lot of time on a media site like CBS or social platforms like Facebook, MySpace.
2. Cross-platform - advertisers want to buy across ALL mediums and channels.
3. Flexibility and Customization
4. Branding + Video - moving faster, demand video
5. Data - need better Audience Analytics

Most interesting, however, was Keane’s central theme of how the online medium is an incremental effect, not cannibalizing in any way. He used the show “Jericho” as an example - on TV, it had a 4.2 Nielsen rating, but online video views added another 0.9 points to it - 1.4 million video views of the current and past shows in the few days following each show.

TV, web, and mobile all work TOGETHER to have an incremental engagement effect. No cannibalization.

Another key takeaway: media sites like CBSSports.com appears like its all original content, but there are actually a significant portion of community features and user-generated content (e.g. Fantasy Leagues, etc.).

BTW - CBS is streaming all March Madness games this Thursday - I hope no one at eROI finds out about this.

We launched our new site at www.eroi.com. I am filled with pride in my team and in the end result - a beautiful, easily navigated website of an email and interactive agency that has done great work. So, we decided to party like it was 1999 (in the Bay Area) in the dot com heyday. Well, maybe not THAT much partying, but we did break out the champagne and orange juice (mimosas) as 10am today. Enjoy the pictures below, but more importantly, please comment on this blog posting of what you think of our site. I’m especially interested in what you think of our Portfolio section and Resources Center. Thanks. You don’t have to say nice things (even after knowing that it took over a year to concept the design and ultimately build the entire site). Here are the pics:

I just returned from the Inc. 500 Conference, and I must admit that I am a complete evangelist of Inc. Magazine, Inc. 500, and especially the Inc. 500 Conference. As an entrepreneur and leader of a scalable, high-growth company (eROI), there is nothing better than being around other entrepreneurs who are dynamic, innovative, and going through the same fight in the trenches as I’m in. President Clinton was the keynote and clearly impressed the audience by driving home the value of entrepreneurial mentoring, empowering entrepreneurs from a micro-lending perspective in the global marketplace, innovation in the areas of cleaner, greener, independent energy sources, health and wellness reform from a cultural perspective. I can’t tell you how refreshing it was to hear a U.S. President that could actually speak intelligently about issues that matter (to me).

While Clinton was the initial draw, there were 3 big reasons why this conference was better than any I’ve ever attended in my life:

1. Getting recognized in business happens rarely, and the whole conference made all 1,000 of us (Inc. 5000 was included in the conference which was a huge success) feel like Hollywood stars.

2. I connected almost instantly with 6 other entrepreneurs from all over the country who had so much to offer on a personal and business level, that we ended up talking and socializing until 4am a couple nights in a row.

3. The speakers were THAT GOOD. One highlight was a guy named Tom Szaky who dropped out of Princeton after visiting buddies from his hometown in Canada who were successfully growing very healthy marijuana plants using a liquified form of worm poop (yes, worm poop)! Tom created a conveyor belt system to take a huge amount of food waste and have worms eat it and poop it out into containers. His company, TerraCycle, makes all of its products and its packaging out of waste. It’s 100%, completely eco-friendly. Tom delighted the crowd with a charismatic presentation.

In my previous blog post, I reflected on my talk in New Orleans at the annual conference for the IABC on the importance of blogging and social networking. The following day after the speaking engagement, I flew back to spend a couple days with my parents and extended family on a quick vacation. I was telling my Dad about how well the whole event went and some of the key points I made in my speech.

One main point is the notion that: Customers Own Your Brand, NOT YOU (the marketer). The case study I showed was Kettle Foods People’s Choice Awards where the company allowed its customers to name the next flavor of potato chips (Doritos is now copying this campaign 2.5 years later). My Dad understood my point that customers have a huge influence on your brand, but vehemently denied that customers truly owned any consumer brands that were near and dear to their hearts. Those brands controlled their own strategic decisions and at the end of the day, legally and financially owned their own organizations.

Of all the people in the world that I hate to admit he may be right, it’s my Dad (I respect him so much that I’d rather the roles were reversed with me giving the counter-point to his argument). But, the truth is - I need to choose more specific words that don’t exagerate the concept that Customers Must Co-Create Your Brand with You (instead of being talked at).

So, how does that point work for you, Pops?

My colleague Kent Lewis and I spoke at the Annual conference for the International Association of Business Communicators.

Our topic: Building brands and community via e-marketing

Date: Monday, 25 June
Time: 10:30 - 11:45 a.m.
Track: Marketing & Brand

If you’re trying to get your head around terms like search engine marketing, blogosphere, podcasting, RSS and social media, this is the session for you. This presentation will provide an overview of effective e-marketing strategies and tactics as well as case studies and helpful resources you can use to develop and implement your own e-marketing program.

In this session, you will learn:
The definition and proper applications of e-marketing
Effective e-marketing strategies and tactics
How do develop your own e-marketing program

There were roughly 1,100 people at the overall event and 250-ish at our session. There was a lot of great dialogue between us (the speakers) and the audience on the importance of the blogosphere and social networking. Search marketing and email marketing were known entities as must-haves in any marketing mix.

The debate around whether or not a blog is worth the effort reminded me of a worldwide Intel conference for employees 10 years ago when then Intel CEO Andy Grove said that every company would be a “web company” (meaning every company would have a website) within 5 years. Guess what - he was right. I think the same thing will happen with corporate blogs in the next 5 years. It is not a question of “if” - it’s a question of when your company will support the 1 hour per week required for maintaining a good blog.

Here is our presentation if you didn’t get a chance to see it at the event: (the file is a bit big, so I need to upload it to the server when I talk to my tech guys at the office - sorry about that).

The theme of this year’s Innotech eMarketing Summit really hammered on Social Networking and Web 2.0 sites. While this seems to be over-played in the media, the content and speakers in this 2-day event of back-to-back seminars was truly AWESOME.

From brand new upstart Citizen Agency, I learned a dozen new social networking sites that I’d never heard of before that were incredibly niche, but fascinating. They drove home key points about building community online throughout their presentation such as: “these are my peops,” “they talk my language,” “they get me,” and build off of one another’s conversations. Sites I hadn’t heard about:
Dogster.com
Catster.com
Intuit JackRabbit community site
VIRB.com
Last.fm
BarCamp.org
Ma.gnolia
BareNakedApp

Also, you should know about some amazing Web 2.0 companies in our backyard in Portland:
Jive Software
Platial
Values of N
JanRain
MatchPoint

Lastly, for any of those who wanted to download my presentation on Building Community Online and Matchpoint Case Study, please download it here >>

Cheers.

If you haven’t seen this man speak, you are missing an opportunity to be inspired. Mohan is dynamic, bright, no-nonsense, and demands for all of us to take action and creative positive change in the world. At Portland’s InnoTech eMarketing Summit, Mohan talked about the ingredients for success in business, e-business, healthcare, and human nature on an individual level. In his current role as Chief Marketing Officer for $7.8 billion healthcare giant, the Regence Group, he has a surprising amount of passion (to be expected from a startup founder, not a healthcare juggernaut). Perhaps, it’s because he now has the platform to radically change the largest industry in the country and make it truly transparent.

Here are a few notes I took from his keynote speech this week:

Problem: We’ve become too oriented around Data Obesity but Knowledge Starved.

Solution: The key is at the core of the company’s philosophy, the concept, the mission, but ultimately it’s about the CAUSE!

(more…)