eROI Days Email Agency

This year’s theme for our company appreciation party was put to a vote.  After the votes were tallied the theme was shrouded in mystery until a team email was sent with the reveal in true eROI Rock star fashion.  This year it was fated to be… Summer White Party!  Using our new eROI Event system we created a totally themed event that the email linked to.  Check out the process for creating The eROI Summer White Party.

The finished product, see how it was done below.

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Alcoa presents (sorry, that’s the beginning of a TV commercial of “The Catch” in the 1982 NFL NFC Championship flashback when Dwight Clark levitated to grab a perfect pass from Joe Montana to lift the 49ers over the Cowboys). But, I digress. My mind faded to the dramatic music to Monday Night Football, but it’s now back on the prize - bragging rights to the Third Annual PAF Battle of the Bands at Someday Lounge in Old Town / Chinatown, Portland, Oregon where the creatives show their true colors after dark.  If you want to take a look at videos from prior year’s Battle of the Band, now is your time to really soak in some entertaining video for 2008.  It’s going to be almost impossible for eROI to win it for yet a third year in a row, but we’re going to bring our “A” Game.  Check it (this is PAF’s main event email and all the info is below):

BATTLE OF THE BANDS

DATE:
Wednesday June 17, 2009

TIME:
6:00 pm

PLACE:
Someday Lounge
224 NW 5th Avenue
Portland, OR

COST:
$300 per band

Register your Band!
Contact Mike Terry at mterry@magnetoworks.com

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Here is my twitter stream from this morning’s Portland Business Journal Power Breakfast event where Ziba Founder, Sohrab Vossoughi, inspired me from a creative and entrepreneurial standpoint.  Sorry for the upside down notes, but you’ve got to start at the bottom and read up:

1. Craft culture is mostly anti-Big which is why #portland has few fortune 500 companies here about 1 hour ago from TwitterBerry

2. Sohrab - branding portland - it has a craft culture. About the work, unpretentious, very real, natural about 1 hour ago from TwitterBerry

3. Tribal love - costco - amazing brand. costco members and employees love that brand. Costco does not care about wall st, but main st about 2 hours ago from TwitterBerry

4. Starbucks is trying to capture its dna that is there but they’ve lost their way. Now, more about efficiency and profit, not the experience about 2 hours ago from TwitterBerry

5. You need to create love with your consumers. All touchpoints need to fully connect with specific target market about 2 hours ago from TwitterBerry

6. Ziba has evolved from product design company to customer experience firm about 2 hours ago from TwitterBerry

7. Sohrab - design thinking is all about making the complex clear about 2 hours ago from TwitterBerry
   
   

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Kevin Tate, a buddy of mine, had an awesome analogy featured on the front page of the Oregonian today in the article “Tech entrepreneurs defy recession” by Mike Rogoway.  Here’s the excerpt from the article with Kevin’s quote that really got me thinking from a different mindset:

“Portland fosters the creation of small, furry mammals rather than dinosaurs — the really big things,” said Kevin Tate, 35, CEO of StepChange Group, a social media advertising and marketing specialist in the Pearl District. The “dinosaur” model of big corporate campuses and regimented software development (think Microsoft — or even Google) is going by the wayside, Tate said, in favor of more informal and collaborative arrangements. Portland’s current high-tech foment positions the state well to capitalize when the recession ends, provided its technology entrepreneurs have the appetite to take it on.  “What happens when things start coming back?” Tate asked. “Will the small, furry mammals evolve?”

Nearly 9 years ago, 7 mainly tech start-up entrepreneurs co-founded a group called Starve Ups.  We all survived the dot com implosion, but were influenced by really wanting to scale our companies for growth.  Some Starve Ups companies have grown a little faster than others, but many contain a desire to do something world-changing with our companies through software, social good, amazing company culture or all of the above.  I really like Kevin’s quote because it is accurate and represents a strong contingent in Portland’s software community, but I think we need to be honest with ourselves that our dream is to do something bigger and be more like a lion than a forgettable Chihuahua.  So, how do we get there? Lack of capital is usually at the top of the list, but our biggest limitation is our mindset. Let’s grow game-changing, sustainable software businesses in Portland and tout Portland’s livability and balance as a BONUS, not a detriment to growth.

Comment below with your ideas of a more representative furry mammal for Portland.

If you’ve got a couple hours to spare, then you should read this whole 176 page report.  If you only have 5 minutes, it’s worth skimming thru the online pages. Razorfish, one of the largest digital agencies in the world, did a phenomenal job with laying out the landscape of online for the first half of this year (I don’t think anyone can accurately predict what’s going to happen 6 months from now, but I am an optimist and think our industry will grow at a healthy clip in the second half).

Here’s the Big Online Report - Enjoy!
http://digitaloutlook.razorfish.com/publication/?i=13617

Let’s review my online predictions for 2009.  OK, I admit it - the easy ones are not happening nearly as fast as I thought they would.  Let’s just look at the first 3 of 10:

10. My Dad will use Twitter for first time and get hooked What’s up Dad? You are addicted to your Crackberry just like President Obama, all you need to do is download a great app called Twitterberry and you’ll be using Twitter in no time. 10 weeks into the year and still hasn’t come true. Side note: my older sister is using twitter (@3greenmoms) in the past few days to talk about her new company, 3greenmoms.

9. My Mom will get on Facebook and get addicted to chatting non-stop with family and friends Mom, C’mon - you are a chatterbox - the most social woman I know. Facebook is perfect for you. I thought you and my wife would be sharing all of your secrets about how I have food on my face half the time and wear really bad clothes on the weekends. I guess you’re not there yet. When we see you and Dad in a month, we’ll need to do something about this - Facebook is so mainstream now because it’s painfully addictive.

8. Skype and other easy video-creation apps will take off in ‘09 Done. My entire family on my side and my wife’s family all got video cameras / microphones to totally Skype-enable their laptops. It makes for super fun Sat or Sun mornings to check out missing teeth on the kids and other fun things to visualize. Nicely done.

Okay, I admit it – I am still more of a Twitter lurker than anything so far. I do occasionally throw a thought or 2 up but find it still a little difficult since I’m usually caught between 6 different things at any given time. One moment I could be grooving to some great new music while scanning the plethora of fantastic news and info beamed to me via Google Reader. Meanwhile, I’m likely having a conversation with one of my super hero Account Execs about a particular client/project situation and also thinking about the email I was in the middle of replying to before I began to think about how much I like this one song…

So then I turn to Twitter and gag. Gee, any of this is really worth a tweet, right?  Then I get distracted by someone or something else that needs immediate attention. By the time I get back to Twitter the moment has passed and I’m on to 6 other things and the cycle starts all over again. Yikes! Therein lies my dilemma. I want to share these things but I don’t want to be one of the those folks suffering from “Twitterhea” either –you know who you are. Your constant blathering has to be a sign of some sort of neurosis.

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In case you missed them, here is one post with all 10 eROI Online Marketing Predictions for 2009:

10. My Dad will use Twitter for first time and get hooked

9. My Mom will get on Facebook and get addicted to chatting non-stop with family and friends

8. Skype and other easy video-creation apps will take off in ‘09

7. Open-source, powerful tools like WordPress and Magento will become more like social apps and promote UGC (User-Generated Content)

6. Email campaigns and customer life-cycle email triggers will integrate seamlessly into social networking sites and tools.

5. Email is a whole lot more mobile today, but the formatting is still crap. You’ll see this improve dramatically in ‘09.

4. Social TV on your computer will become more popular than Regular TV among core online users.

3. Advanced site search is becoming so natural and intuitive – marketers will prioritize this as an easy implementation with huge ROI for their site.

2. CRM and Email Automation

1. The Economy will grow in ’09! Optimism will Conquer Fear.

2. CRM and Email Automation
–- In challenging economic times, all companies will adapt to become more sales and service focused through email triggers on their sites from Resource Centers, Product Purchase, Lead Capture, etc.

1. The Economy will grow in ’09! Optimism will Conquer Fear.
– As I mentioned in a previous blog post, fear is so 2008 (actually, I said “fear is so Bush,” but let’s not split hairs here). One of my colleagues who runs a public relations firm told me that much of the media simply will NOT publish any optimistic, success stories - they don’t sell. So, there is the reality that 2008 was a slightly (and let me emphasize ’slightly’) down year overall for the economy. Then, the AMPLIFIER effect of the media has greatly exacerbated the depression perception on the financial markets, consumers, home-buyers, and businesses. After 4 months of doom and gloom reporting, real humanizing success stories will begin selling again. I’m not predicting that the economy will come roaring back, but it will steadily rise throughout ‘09.

When I was a financial analyst for Intel supporting their Sales and Marketing Group, the theme for one annual worldwide sales conference was “Believe it and Achieve it!” Yes, it is a cheesy theme, but there is merit to it. Believing in your success is so much more productive to build your company whereas fear is like acid and it eats away all productivity. The second ingredient to bringing the economy back is hard work. It’s doing more with less. In the recent past at eROI, as soon as we won several new projects, we would hire more employees. Now, we are putting more programs in place to retain and reward our rockstar employees and working with contractors in high-demand and high-growth times throughout the year. Since Labor Day, I am personally putting in 30% more hours (65 hrs/wk vs. 50 hrs/wk) in nearly every aspect of the job of CEO, CFO, strategic planning, sales, marketing, PR, blogging, client outreach, networking, high-level product development, and employee management. I’ve always prided myself on a work-life balance, but that will have to wait a bit until all signs show a strong recovery. While 2009 may not be a life balance year, I predict it will be a strong economic growth year overall for the U.S. economy, but especially in the online marketing industry.

4. Social TV on your computer will become more popular than Regular TV among core online users.
One example of this is a partnership between two startups - SplashCast Media and Hulu.com. The two companies are innovating and creating a whole new experience of Social TV for re-runs of my favorite shows - 30 Rock, The Office, and others shown below. Tech entrepreneurs have been espousing the advent of Interactive TV for 15 years, but Social TV is so much cooler - it feels like hundreds of your friends are watching the same TV show at the same time, commenting on it, IMing, and doing so in text, voice, or video comments.

3. Advanced site search is becoming so natural and intuitive – marketers will prioritize this as an easy implementation with huge ROI for their site.
Search applies to more than just Google. In the business world, we want to be as productive as humanly possible and find a needle in a haystack within milliseconds - this is becoming possible within your own website or web applications with intuitive site search.

6. Email campaigns and customer life-cycle email triggers will integrate seamlessly into social networking sites and tools.
–Yes, this functionality has already started to happen within a few Email Service Providers (ESP), but it will become much more prevalent. We have started to see the easy use of ShareThis or AddThis type of technology in some ESPs but we will start to see true use of the integration into Facebook, Twitter and other micro-blogging systems as the year progresses. What will make any of this impactful to your email campaigns will be IF the consumer adopts using it. It is the new FTF (Forward to Friend) of the social age and may be seen as less intrusive as a medium than forwarding an email to someone. The benefit of this: 1. It will permeate more than just 1 person and can be seen by others following or “Friends” of that person you send it to in their update stream. 2. It has some SEO lift with content being placed into the social media stream of consciousness that sticks past the inbox and gets deeper into the web. This means that you should be more cognizant of the terms, links and key words you are using in your copy as this can only help you organically. And yet at the same time it can also attach content like Google AdWords and other keyword relevant ad servers against your content.

5. Email is a whole lot more mobile today, but the formatting is still crap. You’ll see this improve dramatically in ‘09.
–10% of social network users are already using mobile as the main way that they are accessing and updating content. This ties into the email use as well on mobile devices. They go hand in hand in uptick. And we are also seeing data plans for mobile web going to unlimited status of use in plans while mobile carriers are still sticking to the old notion of minutes of airtime as a billing method. To me this means that more people will use the mobile web more than voice as a way to control costs.

8. Skype and other easy video-creation apps will take off in ‘09
– I know Skype has been around a little while and it has been incredibly easy and cheap for people with MacBooks or other laptops with built-in cameras and microphones to video conference with their families or business colleagues for a couple years, but Macs only have a tiny market share and PCs are finally getting the picture with affordable add-ons to older machines or built-in cameras/mics in new machines. The Logitech laptop camera was the most popular gift for Christmas among my wife’s extended family this year.

Ok - so this prediction is pretty predictable. Video sites like Hulu.com have won awards and gained massive popularity in 2008, but new applications like Ontier, SplashCast, and others will take video sites to the next level. Hardware has also become so much more affordable to produce decent quality video - besides video being built into most digital cameras, the big game-changer in ‘08 was the Flip camera which will become even more prevalent in ‘09 and drive even more user-generated video and social video.

7. Open-source, powerful tools like WordPress and Magento will become more like social apps and promote UGC (User-Generated Content)
– Last year’s predictions mentioned white-label collaboration software platforms like KickApps, Clearspace, and Ning. Each of these apps gained significant traction in ‘08, but open-source platforms like WordPress’s BuddyPress will gain market share in ‘09. WordPress has already become the standard for blog software and is being used by more web developers as a solid content management system for websites. It only makes sense to extend WordPress into the social networking realm as BuddyPress will do when it launches in ‘09. Additionally, one open-source e-commerce application called Magento which has risen to the top for its stability, feature-set, and ability to customize each interface. Magento already has social networking capabilities like UGC customer reviews, but they will have more developments in integration of social platforms including e-commerce widgets, etc.

It’s that time of the year again.  If you want to see what my predictions were last year, check them out here.  One of the topics that is dominating the hearts and minds of most of us over the past 3 months is the economy. I wanted to think outside of the context of a stilted economy and talk about all the things that could be possible in the online marketing world based on emerging trends and technology.  So here goes:

10. My Dad will use Twitter for first time and get hooked
— Most of us in the online marketing industry have been using Twitter for a year or more, but it hasn’t been commonly used outside the technical demographic. That will change in ‘09. Twitter has reached the tipping point where this new communication channel is promoted and used throughout traditional and online media. Twitter is being promoted as another channel on NPR, NY Times, and hundreds of other media companies. Thousands of Corporations have set up corporate twitter profiles and manage them daily (automatically through RSS feeds like the eROI Twitter profile or manually through Twitter.com).

But, let’s talk about my Dad for a second. He’s turning 66 in two weeks. Like many 60-something business execs, he is pretty addicted to his Blackberry. True to the culture of his age group, I’ll often get 1000 word manifesto emails that he typed out with his thumbs over the course of an hour on his Blackberry. However, I see less and less long emails sent from his Blackberry and my Dad is adopting a quicker version of things on his Blackberry. I think some of his younger partners or employees will introduce him to TwitterBerry and he will enjoy the benefit of keeping updates on close business colleagues and friends. Then, he’ll start to use TweetDeck on his laptop and soon he’ll be hooked. Maybe, he’ll turn into a Binge Tweeter like me.

9. My Mom will get on Facebook and get addicted to chatting non-stop with family and friends
— Facebook is becoming the essential social web app for all demographics. Over the holiday break, I’ve been lounging online (something I never have time to really do in the productivity of the work week) - playing around with Facebook and it’s amazing how much social value it has as more and more friends join your network. My wife created her profile on Facebook a month ago and is already far surpassing me with her use of it - chatting with her girlfriends, uploading and sharing photos, videos, commenting on other photos. She hasn’t gotten into a lot of Facebook apps, but that will happen next week, I’m sure. Men, let’s face it. Women are far better communicators than we are. Case in point - play Taboo, Cranium, or any communication-based board game where it is women vs. men and women will win every single time. Therefore, women like my wife and my Mom thrive in the Facebook environment. In fact, I predict that my wife introduces my Mom into Facebook and then there will be no more secrets. Game over.

My business associate and friend Jerry Ketel, partner at Leopold & Ketel Partners, sent this email to several Portland agency owners to help prove to clients that marketing has been proven to grow a brand and its sales, profit, and market share during a recession (notice how I didn’t use this “r” word in the blog title - I’m not comfortable using it yet).  Here was Jerry’s email to me (I added the image after searching on Google “marketing in recession” - it’s actually quite informative):

“There have been a number of studies over the years proving that marketing during a recession is a good investment in the long run. ‘In a recession, dare to invest aggressively in marketing, innovation and customer quality’, is the clear message to be drawn from PIMS (Profit Impact of Market Strategy) research into which business strategies aid success during and after a market downturn lasting several years. Author: Keith Roberts, Journal: Strategy & Leadership, 2003. 
http://tinyurl.com/4sqx8j
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Businesses Must Support Their Local Community or they will suffer (PR backlash, customer and vendor pressure). Local is the new Organic, but for businesses, not just consumers. There is such truth to the expression - the more you give, the more you get. It applies to giving of your time and money to charity causes and even non-profit professional associations. On the surface, it appears to be a major expense and unproductive distraction to give a significant amount of executive time, employee resources, and company money to local charities like Friends of the Children, Start Making a Reader Today, Zenger Farm, or the Boys and Girls Club. The same logic applies to professional organizations like Oregon Entrepreneurs Network, Starve Ups, Portland Advertising Federation, Software Association of Oregon, American Marketing Association, and a handful of others. Examples of companies who focus on giving back to their communities (click on each company name to go directly to their community involvement webpage) include Kettle Foods, Jive Software, and eROI.

However, it is flawed logic to look at giving back to the community as an expense. Here’s why:

• Gain awareness to large groups of prospective clients. Customer acquisition costs are much lower when a business and its customer have a shared connection and shared values.
• Community involvement creates a halo effect of positive association to an altruistic organization with shared values.
• Employee involvement in non-profit organizations deepens the emotional connection and loyalty between the employee and the company.
• Employee recruiting is a whole lot easier with greater local awareness and the positive association with your business doing the right thing (especially in the younger generation of recent college grads).
• Serving on non-profit committees and Board of Directors gives you access to some of the smartest local business execs that can give valuable entrepreneurial business advice you can’t get anywhere else.
• Public relations and marketing is a lot easier locally when people are genuinely routing for you.
• Finally, doing the right thing for your community is the whole point of being in business in the first place.

If you don’t run a company built on a socially-conscious business model, the least you can do is get involved in your community and I guarantee you will have a huge return on investment for that effort.